TERMS STARTING WITH
art {algorithmic art}
arta ::: [one of the four classes of devotees]: the distressed, who turn to the divine help in the sorrow and suffering of existence. [Gita 7.16]
artemia ::: n. --> A genus of phyllopod Crustacea found in salt lakes and brines; the brine shrimp. See Brine shrimp.
artemisia ::: n. --> A genus of plants including the plants called mugwort, southernwood, and wormwood. Of these A. absinthium, or common wormwood, is well known, and A. tridentata is the sage brush of the Rocky Mountain region.
arteriac ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the windpipe.
arterial ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to an artery, or the arteries; as, arterial action; the arterial system.
Of or pertaining to a main channel (resembling an artery), as a river, canal, or railroad.
arterialization ::: n. --> The process of converting venous blood into arterial blood during its passage through the lungs, oxygen being absorbed and carbonic acid evolved; -- called also aeration and hematosis.
arterialized ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Arterialize
arterialize ::: v. t. --> To transform, as the venous blood, into arterial blood by exposure to oxygen in the lungs; to make arterial.
arterializing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Arterialize
arteries ::: pl. --> of Artery
arteriography ::: n. --> A systematic description of the arteries.
arteriole ::: n. --> A small artery.
arteriology ::: n. --> That part of anatomy which treats of arteries.
arteriotomy ::: n. --> The opening of an artery, esp. for bloodletting.
That part of anatomy which treats of the dissection of the arteries.
arteritis ::: n. --> Inflammation of an artery or arteries.
artery ::: n. --> The trachea or windpipe.
One of the vessels or tubes which carry either venous or arterial blood from the heart. They have tricker and more muscular walls than veins, and are connected with them by capillaries.
Hence: Any continuous or ramified channel of communication; as, arteries of trade or commerce.
artesian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Artois (anciently called Artesium), in France.
artful ::: a. --> Performed with, or characterized by, art or skill.
Artificial; imitative.
Using or exhibiting much art, skill, or contrivance; dexterous; skillful.
Cunning; disposed to cunning indirectness of dealing; crafty; as, an artful boy. [The usual sense.]
artfully ::: adv. --> In an artful manner; with art or cunning; skillfully; dexterously; craftily.
artfulness ::: n. --> The quality of being artful; art; cunning; craft.
artha ::: 1. [one of the four human interests]: interest; material, economic and other aims and needs of the mind and body. ::: 2. object, thing. ::: 3. meaning, significance [of a word]. ::: 4. arthan [accusative plural]
arthabodha (arthabodha; artha-bodha) ::: perception of the meaning.
arthabodha ::: correct perception.
arthabodha ::: incorrect perception.B
arthacaryā
arthacaryA. (S). See SAMGRAHAVASTU.
arthakriyā
arthakriyA. (T. don byed nus pa; C. liyi; J. riyaku; K. iik 利益). In Sanskrit, "efficiency" or "capable of functioning"; a term used to describe the capacity of impermanent phenomena to produce effects. ArthakriyA as "actions that bring spiritual benefit to others," is also sometimes listed as one of the four means of conversion (SAMGRAHAVASTU), in place of the more typical arthacaryA (actions that benefit others, i.e., helpfulness). The term is also important in YOGACARA and MADHYAMAKA philosophy in describing conventional truths (SAMVṚTISATYA), which, although empty of intrinsic nature (NIḤSVABHAVA), are nonetheless able to perform a function. Thus, for example, although the water in a mirage and the water in a glass are both empty of intrinsic nature, the water in a glass is nonetheless conventionally existent because it can perform the function of slaking thirst.
artha ::: meaning.
artha. (P. attha/attha; T. don; C. yi; J. gi; K. ŭi 義). In Sanskrit, "meaning" or "object"; a polysemous term of wide import in Buddhist materials. In perhaps its most common usage, artha refers to the meaning or denotation of a term (and is always spelled attha in PAli in this meaning), and, as the first of the four reliances (PRATISARAnA), suggests that adepts should rely on the real meaning (artha) of words rather than their mere "letter" (vyaNjana). In other contexts, however, artha may also be contrasted with DHARMA to refer to the principal denotation of a word rather than its interpreted connotations, implying the "literal meaning" of a term rather than its imputed "true spirit." Artha, as extensive understanding of meaning, is also listed as one of the four discriminating insights (PRATISAMVID), along with knowledge of reasons or causal interconnections (DHARMA), explanation (NIRUKTI), and eloquence (PRATIBHANA). In other contexts, artha also can mean a sensory object; an event, matter, or aim; and welfare, benefit, profit, or even wealth. Thus, the bodhisattva seeks the welfare (artha) of others.
artharthi ::: [one of the four classes of devotees]: the seeker of personal objects, one who seeks the Divine for fulfilment of desire. [Gita 7.16]
artharthi. ::: one who desires material gain
arthasastra (Arthashastra) ::: [(a book treating of) the science of political economy or political science].
artha
artha. ::: the acquisition of wealth; pursuit of prosperity
artha vada. ::: explanatory argument given to suit a particular purpose
arthen ::: a. --> Same as
arthika. ::: true substance of a thing; real
arthritic ::: a. --> Alt. of Arthritical
arthritical ::: a. --> Pertaining to the joints.
Of or pertaining to arthritis; gouty.
arthritis ::: n. --> Any inflammation of the joints, particularly the gout.
arthroderm ::: n. --> The external covering of an Arthropod.
arthrodial ::: a. --> Alt. of Arthrodic
arthrodia ::: n. --> A form of diarthrodial articulation in which the articular surfaces are nearly flat, so that they form only an imperfect ball and socket.
arthrodic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to arthrodia.
arthrodynia ::: n. --> An affection characterized by pain in or about a joint, not dependent upon structural disease.
arthrodynic ::: a. --> Pertaining to arthrodynia, or pain in the joints; rheumatic.
arthrogastra ::: n. pl. --> A division of the Arachnida, having the abdomen annulated, including the scorpions, harvestmen, etc.; pedipalpi.
arthrography ::: n. --> The description of joints.
arthrology ::: n. --> That part of anatomy which treats of joints.
arthromere ::: n. --> One of the body segments of Arthropods. See Arthrostraca.
arthropleura ::: n. --> The side or limb-bearing portion of an arthromere.
arthropoda ::: n. pl. --> A large division of Articulata, embracing all those that have jointed legs. It includes Insects, Arachnida, Pychnogonida, and Crustacea.
arthropod ::: n. --> One of the Arthropoda.
arthropomata ::: n. pl. --> One of the orders of Branchiopoda. See Branchiopoda.
arthrosis ::: n. --> Articulation.
arthrostraca ::: n. pl. --> One of the larger divisions of Crustacea, so called because the thorax and abdomen are both segmented; Tetradecapoda. It includes the Amphipoda and Isopoda.
arthrozoic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the Articulata; articulate.
artiad ::: a. --> Even; not odd; -- said of elementary substances and of radicals the valence of which is divisible by two without a remainder.
artichoke ::: n. --> The Cynara scolymus, a plant somewhat resembling a thistle, with a dilated, imbricated, and prickly involucre. The head (to which the name is also applied) is composed of numerous oval scales, inclosing the florets, sitting on a broad receptacle, which, with the fleshy base of the scales, is much esteemed as an article of food.
See Jerusalem artichoke.
article by the compiler of this Dictionary.) Israfel
article “Demons and Spirits” speaks of the earliest
articled ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Article ::: a. --> Bound by articles; apprenticed; as, an articled clerk.
article ::: n. --> A distinct portion of an instrument, discourse, literary work, or any other writing, consisting of two or more particulars, or treating of various topics; as, an article in the Constitution. Hence: A clause in a contract, system of regulations, treaty, or the like; a term, condition, or stipulation in a contract; a concise statement; as, articles of agreement.
A literary composition, forming an independent portion of a magazine, newspaper, or cyclopedia.
articling ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Article
articularly ::: adv. --> In an articular or an articulate manner.
articular ::: n. --> Of or pertaining to the joints; as, an articular disease; an articular process.
Alt. of Articulary
articulary ::: n. --> A bone in the base of the lower jaw of many birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes.
articulata ::: v. --> One of the four subkingdoms in the classification of Cuvier. It has been much modified by later writers.
One of the subdivisions of the Brachiopoda, including those that have the shells united by a hinge.
A subdivision of the Crinoidea.
articulate ::: a. --> Expressed in articles or in separate items or particulars.
Jointed; formed with joints; consisting of segments united by joints; as, articulate animals or plants.
Distinctly uttered; spoken so as to be intelligible; characterized by division into words and syllables; as, articulate speech, sounds, words.
articulated ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Articulate ::: a. --> United by, or provided with, articulations; jointed; as, an articulated skeleton.
Produced, as a letter, syllable, or word, by the organs of speech; pronounced.
articulately ::: adv. --> After the manner, or in the form, of a joint.
Article by article; in distinct particulars; in detail; definitely.
With distinct utterance of the separate sounds.
articulateness ::: n. --> Quality of being articulate.
articulate thought ::: same as vaṅmaya thought.
articulating ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Articulate
articulation ::: n. --> A joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton.
The connection of the parts of a plant by joints, as in pods.
One of the nodes or joints, as in cane and maize.
One of the parts intercepted between the joints; also, a subdivision into parts at regular or irregular intervals as a result of serial intermission in growth, as in the cane, grasses, etc.
The act of putting together with a joint or joints;
articulative ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to articulation.
articulator ::: n. --> One who, or that which, articulates; as: (a) One who enunciates distinctly. (b) One who prepares and mounts skeletons. (c) An instrument to cure stammering.
articuli ::: pl. --> of Articulus
articulus ::: n. --> A joint of the cirri of the Crinoidea; a joint or segment of an arthropod appendage.
artifact ::: Any product made by an individual or social holon. A bird's nest, an anthill, an automobile, a house, a piece of clothing, an airplane, the internet—these are all artifacts. An artifact's defining pattern does not come from itself, but rather is imposed or imprinted on it by an individual or social holon.
artifice ::: 1530s,”workmanship,” from M.Fr. artifice”skill, cunning” (14c.), from L. artificium”making by art, craft,” from artifex(gen.artificis)”craftsman,artist,” from ars”art” (see art (n.)) + facere”do” (see factitious). Meaning”device, trick” (theusualmodernsense)isfrom1650s.
artifice ::: 1. An artful or crafty expedient; a stratagem. 2. Cleverness or skill; ingenuity; inventiveness.
artifice ::: n. --> A handicraft; a trade; art of making.
Workmanship; a skillfully contrived work.
Artful or skillful contrivance.
Crafty device; an artful, ingenious, or elaborate trick. [Now the usual meaning.]
artificer ::: 1. One who is skilful or clever in devising ways of making things; inventor. 2. A skilful or artistic worker; craftsperson. artificers.
artificer ::: n. --> An artistic worker; a mechanic or manufacturer; one whose occupation requires skill or knowledge of a particular kind, as a silversmith.
One who makes or contrives; a deviser, inventor, or framer.
A cunning or artful fellow.
A military mechanic, as a blacksmith, carpenter, etc.; also, one who prepares the shells, fuses, grenades, etc., in a military
artificial ::: a. --> Made or contrived by art; produced or modified by human skill and labor, in opposition to natural; as, artificial heat or light, gems, salts, minerals, fountains, flowers.
Feigned; fictitious; assumed; affected; not genuine.
Artful; cunning; crafty.
Cultivated; not indigenous; not of spontaneous growth; as, artificial grasses.
artificial general intelligence (AGI)
artificial immune system (AIS) ::: A class of computationally intelligent, rule-based machine learning systems inspired by the principles and processes of the vertebrate immune system. The algorithms are typically modeled after the immune system's characteristics of learning and memory for use in problem-solving.
artificial intelligence (AI): in computer science, the attempt to build machines which can function intelligently, and the use of such machines to test our understanding of human intelligence.
artificial intelligence (AI)
artificial intelligence ::: (artificial intelligence) (AI) The subfield of computer science concerned with the concepts and methods of symbolic inference by computer and symbolic faster. The term was coined by Stanford Professor John McCarthy, a leading AI researcher.Examples of AI problems are computer vision (building a system that can understand images as well as a human) and natural language processing (building have foundered on the amount of context information and intelligence they seem to require.The term is often used as a selling point, e.g. to describe programming that drives the behaviour of computer characters in a game. This is often no more intelligent than Kill any humans you see; keep walking; avoid solid objects; duck if a human with a gun can see you.See also AI-complete, neats vs. scruffies, neural network, genetic programming, fuzzy computing, artificial life. CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository .(2002-01-19)
artificial intelligence "artificial intelligence" (AI) The subfield of computer science concerned with the concepts and methods of {symbolic inference} by computer and symbolic {knowledge representation} for use in making inferences. AI can be seen as an attempt to model aspects of human thought on computers. It is also sometimes defined as trying to solve by computer any problem that a human can solve faster. The term was coined by Stanford Professor {John McCarthy}, a leading AI researcher. Examples of AI problems are {computer vision} (building a system that can understand images as well as a human) and {natural language processing} (building a system that can understand and speak a human language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1993) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and "intelligence" they seem to require. The term is often used as a selling point, e.g. to describe programming that drives the behaviour of computer characters in a game. This is often no more intelligent than "Kill any humans you see; keep walking; avoid solid objects; duck if a human with a gun can see you". See also {AI-complete}, {neats vs. scruffies}, {neural network}, {genetic programming}, {fuzzy computing}, {artificial life}. {ACM SIGART (http://sigart.acm.org/)}. {U Cal Davis (http://phobos.cs.ucdavis.edu:8001)}. {CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository (http://cs.cmu.edu/Web/Groups/AI/html/repository.html)}. (2002-01-19)
artificiality ::: n. --> The quality or appearance of being artificial; that which is artificial.
artificialize ::: v. t. --> To render artificial.
artificially ::: adv. --> In an artificial manner; by art, or skill and contrivance, not by nature.
Ingeniously; skillfully.
Craftily; artfully.
artificialness ::: n. --> The quality of being artificial.
artificial neural network (ANN)
artificial neural network ::: (artificial intelligence) (ANN, commonly just neural network or neural net) A network of many very simple processors (units or neurons), each opposed to symbolic) data. The units operate only on their local data and on the inputs they receive via the connections.A neural network is a processing device, either an algorithm, or actual hardware, whose design was inspired by the design and functioning of animal brains and components thereof.Most neural networks have some sort of training rule whereby the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of presented patterns. In other words, dogs from examples of dogs, and exhibit some structural capability for generalisation.Neurons are often elementary non-linear signal processors (in the limit they are simple threshold discriminators). Another feature of NNs which distinguishes data and programs, but rather each neuron is pre-programmed and continuously active.The term neural net should logically, but in common usage never does, also include biological neural networks, whose elementary structures are far more complicated than the mathematical models used for ANNs.See Aspirin, Hopfield network, McCulloch-Pitts neuron.Usenet newsgroup: comp.ai.neural-nets. (1997-10-13)
artificial neural network "artificial intelligence" (ANN, commonly just "neural network" or "neural net") A network of many very simple processors ("units" or "neurons"), each possibly having a (small amount of) local memory. The units are connected by unidirectional communication channels ("connections"), which carry numeric (as opposed to symbolic) data. The units operate only on their local data and on the inputs they receive via the connections. A neural network is a processing device, either an {algorithm}, or actual hardware, whose design was inspired by the design and functioning of animal brains and components thereof. Most neural networks have some sort of "training" rule whereby the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of presented patterns. In other words, neural networks "learn" from examples, just like children learn to recognise dogs from examples of dogs, and exhibit some structural capability for generalisation. Neurons are often elementary non-linear signal processors (in the limit they are simple threshold discriminators). Another feature of NNs which distinguishes them from other computing devices is a high degree of interconnection which allows a high degree of parallelism. Further, there is no idle memory containing data and programs, but rather each neuron is pre-programmed and continuously active. The term "neural net" should logically, but in common usage never does, also include biological neural networks, whose elementary structures are far more complicated than the mathematical models used for ANNs. See {Aspirin}, {Hopfield network}, {McCulloch-Pitts neuron}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.ai.neural-nets}. (1997-10-13)
artificious ::: a. --> Artificial.
artilize ::: v. t. --> To make resemble.
artillerist ::: n. --> A person skilled in artillery or gunnery; a gunner; an artilleryman.
artilleryman ::: n. --> A man who manages, or assists in managing, a large gun in firing.
artillery ::: n. --> Munitions of war; implements for warfare, as slings, bows, and arrows.
Cannon; great guns; ordnance, including guns, mortars, howitzers, etc., with their equipment of carriages, balls, bombs, and shot of all kinds.
The men and officers of that branch of the army to which the care and management of artillery are confided.
The science of artillery or gunnery.
artiodactyla ::: n. pl. --> One of the divisions of the ungulate animals. The functional toes of the hind foot are even in number, and the third digit of each foot (corresponding to the middle finger in man) is asymmetrical and paired with the fourth digit, as in the hog, the sheep, and the ox; -- opposed to Perissodactyla.
artiodactyle ::: n. --> One of the Artiodactyla.
artiodactylous ::: a. --> Even-toed.
artisan ::: n. --> One who professes and practices some liberal art; an artist.
One trained to manual dexterity in some mechanic art or trade; and handicraftsman; a mechanic.
artisan ::: one skilled in an applied art; craftsperson. artisans.
artist ::: 1. One who practises the creative arts; one who seeks to express the beautiful in visible form. 2. A follower of a manual art; an artificer, mechanic, craftsman, artisan. artists. (Sri Aurobindo often employs the word as an adj.)
artiste ::: n. --> One peculiarly dexterous and tasteful in almost any employment, as an opera dancer, a hairdresser, a cook.
artistic ::: a. --> Alt. of Artistical
artistical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to art or to artists; made in the manner of an artist; conformable to art; characterized by art; showing taste or skill.
artist ::: n. --> One who practices some mechanic art or craft; an artisan.
One who professes and practices an art in which science and taste preside over the manual execution.
One who shows trained skill or rare taste in any manual art or occupation.
An artful person; a schemer.
artistry ::: artistic workmanship, effect, or quality.
artistry ::: n. --> Works of art collectively.
Artistic effect or quality.
Artistic pursuits; artistic ability.
artist :::
artist ("s).
ART "language" A {real-time} {functional language} developed by M. Broy in 1983. It timestamps each data value when it is created. ["Applicative Real-Time Programming", M. Broy, PROC IFIP 1983, N-H]. (1996-01-15)
ART ::: (language) A real-time functional language. It timestamps each data value when it was created.[Applicative Real-Time Programming, M. Broy, PROC IFIP 1983, N-H]. (1996-01-15)
artless ::: a. --> Wanting art, knowledge, or skill; ignorant; unskillful.
Contrived without skill or art; inartistic.
Free from guile, art, craft, or stratagem; characterized by simplicity and sincerity; sincere; guileless; ingenuous; honest; as, an artless mind; an artless tale.
artlessly ::: adv. --> In an artless manner; without art, skill, or guile; unaffectedly.
artlessness ::: n. --> The quality of being artless, or void of art or guile; simplicity; sincerity.
artly ::: adv. --> With art or skill.
artocarpeous ::: a. --> Alt. of Artocarpous
artocarpous ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the breadfruit, or to the genus Artocarpus.
artotype ::: n. --> A kind of autotype.
artotyrite ::: n. --> One of a sect in the primitive church, who celebrated the Lord&
artow ::: --> A contraction of art thou.
artsman ::: n. --> A man skilled in an art or in arts.
ARTSPEAK "language" An early simple language for {plotter} graphics. ["The Art of Programming, ARTSPEAK", Henry Mullish, Courant Inst (Nov 1974)]. (1995-02-21)
ARTSPEAK ::: (language) An early simple language for plotter graphics.[The Art of Programming, ARTSPEAK, Henry Mullish, Courant Inst (Nov 1974)]. (1995-02-21)
art ::: “The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the doors of the spirit.” The Human Cycle etc.
art ::: --> The second person singular, indicative mode, present tense, of the substantive verb Be; but formed after the analogy of the plural are, with the ending -t, as in thou shalt, wilt, orig. an ending of the second person sing. pret. Cf. Be. Now used only in solemn or poetical style. ::: n.
art union ::: --> An association for promoting art (esp. the arts of design), and giving encouragement to artists.
art ::: v. archaic** A second person singular present indicative of be, now only poet., not in modern usage. All other references are to art as the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. Also, the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria. art"s, arts, art-parades.
Artakifa—an archangel mentioned in Enoch
Art, Arts, the: Common term for magick; also used as a synonym for Sphere (eg. the Art of Forces).
Art Bulletin, December 1961.
Artemis (Greek) Greek divinity, commonly identified with the Roman Diana, daughter of Leto and Zeus, twin of Apollo. Goddess of chastity and protectress of youths and maidens against the wiles of Aphrodite, she is celebrated in Arcadian rites and legends which are older than those of Homer. These show her to be a nature goddess, patroness of fields and forests, goddess of life-giving waters, marshes, rivers, and springs. As goddess of agriculture, she brings increase to the fields, drives away mice and pests, and is the friend of the sower and reaper. The legend of the Calydonian boar shows her to have been worshiped as a harvest goddess. She was also called the tamer, the goddess of the chase, and the healer. She is the protector of the beasts, rather than their persecutor in the chase.
Artemis microkernel "operating system" A {microkernel} currently under development by Dave Hudson "dave@humbug.demon.co.uk", scheduled for release under {GPL} in May 1995. It is targeted at {embedded} applications on {Intel 80386}, {Intel 486} and {Pentium} based systems. (1995-03-29)
Artemis microkernel ::: (operating system) A microkernel currently under development by Dave Hudson , scheduled for release under GPL in May 1995. It is targeted at embedded applications on Intel 80386, Intel 486 and Pentium based systems. (1995-03-29)
Artemis was also the protectress of mankind and was specially active in regard to the education of the child and youth. Boys and girls were consecrated to her in the temples. She was goddess of marriage and presided over births. Her chief festival, that of Ephesia or Artemisia, was held in the spring.
Artesian (Flowing) Aquifer ::: Aquifer in which water is held under pressure by confining layers, forcing water to rise in wells above the top of the aquifer.
Artes. See ARETIA
Art: (Gr. techne) (See Aesthetics) In Aristotle the science or knowledge of the principles involved in the production of beautiful or useful objects. As a branch of knowledge art is distinguished both from theoretical science and from practical wisdom; as a process of production it is contrasted with nature. -- G.R.M.
Artha: Meaning; sense; purpose; object; object of perception; an object of desire; wealth.
Arthapatti: Presumption; one of the proofs of knowledge.
Arthartha: Longing for wealth.
Artharthi: One who longs for wealth.
Arthavada: Glorifying passage; persuasive expression; texts which contain censure or praise in an exaggerated manner; exaggerated glorifying with the definite purpose of inducing man to follow a certain line of action.
Arthavargīya. See AttHAKAVAGGA
Arthur Buttrick. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury
Arthurian legend: Semi-historical narratives of a King named Arthur and theKnights of the Round Table.
Arthur, King (Welsh) A dual figure: historical ruler who held up for forty years or so the Saxon incursions; said to have passed (not died) at or after the Battle of Camlan (540 AD). The mythological Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon, or Uthr Ben, the Wonderful Head. In Prydwen, his Ship of Glass, he made an expedition into Annwn (the underworld) to obtain the Pair Dadeni, or cauldron of reincarnation, the symbol of initiation. As the king that was and shall be, he appears in the Welsh version of the coming of the Kalki-avatara, which will come to pass at the end of the present yuga. After Camlan he was taken to Ynys Afallen (Apple-tree Island), to be healed of his wounds and to await his return. But the apple tree of the island, as we see in the 6th-century poem “Afallenan” by Myrddin Gwyllt, is the Tree of Wisdom. The poem tells how the tree had to be hidden and guarded, but the time would come when it should be known again: then Arthur would return, and Cadwalaor, and then “shall Wales rejoice; bright shall be her dragon (leader). The horns of joy shall sound the Song of Peace and serenity. Before the Child of the Sun, bold in his courses, evil shall be rooted out. Bards shall triumph.”
Articles of incorporation - The primary legal document of a corporation; they serve as a corporation's constitution. The articles contain basic information on the corporation as required by law.
Artifex "programming, tool" A {CASE} environment from {ARTIS} of Turin for the development of large {event-driven} distributed systems. It has code-generation and rapid prototyping features. (1996-01-24)
Artifex ::: (programming, tool) A CASE environment from ARTIS of Turin for the development of large event-driven distributed systems. It has code-generation and rapid prototyping features. (1996-01-24)
Artifical Spirit ::: An entity, usually, purposefully constructed and constrained by the practitioner's imagination and will. This is often done in order to accomplish some specific goal or objective.
Artifice and Artificer
Artificer of Ideal and Idea,
Artificial Elemental ::: Depending on the paradigm and tradition this can take on different meanings. Generally refers to an entity purposefully constructed by the practitioner's imagination and will, but in some traditions there is a distinction between this and an artificial spirit where an artificial elemental is loaded with particular combinations of elemental energy and patterned for a specific purpose. See also Artificial Spirit.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) - the intelligence of a (hypothetical) machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of artificial intelligence research and an important topic for science fiction writers and futurists. See /r/agi
Artificial_intelligence ::: (AI:) is a term for simulated intelligence in machines. These machines are programmed to "think" like a human and mimic the way a person acts. The ideal characteristic of artificial intelligence is its ability to rationalize and take actions that have the best chance of achieving a specific goal, although the term can be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind, such as learning and solving problems. :::BREAKING DOWN 'Artificial Intelligence - AI' Artificial intelligence is based around the idea that human intelligence can be defined in such exact terms that a machine can mimic it. The goals of artificial intelligence include learning, reasoning and perception, and machines are wired using a cross-disciplinary approach based in mathematics, computer science, linguistics, psychology and more. As technology advances, previous benchmarks that defined artificial intelligence become outdated. For example, machines that calculate basic functions or recognize text through methods such as optimal character recognition are no longer said to have artificial intelligence, since this function is now taken for granted as an inherent computer function. Some examples of machines with artificial intelligence include computers that play chess, which have been around for years, and self-driving cars, which are a relatively new development. Each of these machines must weigh the consequences of any action they take, as each action will impact the end result. In chess, this end result is winning the game. For self-driving cars, the computer system must take into account all external data and compute it to act in a way that prevents collision
Artificial intelligence (AI) - the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. See /r/artificial
Artificial Intelligence Lab {MIT AI Lab}
Artificial Intelligence Markup Language ::: An XML dialect for creating natural language software agents.
Artificial Life ::: (algorithm, application) (a-life) The study of synthetic systems which behave like natural living systems in some way. Artificial Life complements the applications in environmental and financial modelling and network communications.There are some interesting implementations of artificial life using strangely shaped blocks. A video, probably by the company Artificial Creatures who build insect-like robots in Cambridge, MA (USA), has several mechanical implementations of artificial life forms.See also evolutionary computing, Life.[Christopher G. Langton (Ed.), Artificial Life, Proceedings Volume VI, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Addison-Wesley, 1989]. . . . (1995-02-21)
Artificial Life "algorithm, application" (a-life) The study of synthetic systems which behave like natural living systems in some way. Artificial Life complements the traditional biological sciences concerned with the analysis of living organisms by attempting to create lifelike behaviours within computers and other artificial media. Artificial Life can contribute to theoretical biology by modelling forms of life other than those which exist in nature. It has applications in environmental and financial modelling and network communications. There are some interesting implementations of artificial life using strangely shaped blocks. A video, probably by the company Artificial Creatures who build insect-like robots in Cambridge, MA (USA), has several mechanical implementations of artificial life forms. See also {evolutionary computing}, {Life}. [Christopher G. Langton (Ed.), "Artificial Life", Proceedings Volume VI, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Addison-Wesley, 1989]. {Yahoo! (http://yahoo.com/Science/Artificial_Life/)}. {Santa Fe Institute (http://alife.santafe.edu/)}. {The Avida Group (http://krl.caltech.edu/avida/Avida.html)}. (1995-02-21)
Artificial life - the production or action of computer programs or computerized systems that simulate the behavior, population dynamics, or other characteristics of living organisms.
Artificial_Neural_Networks ::: (ANN:) are the pieces of a computing system designed to simulate the way the human brain analyzes and processes information. They are the foundations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and solve problems that would prove impossible or difficult by human or statistical standards. ANN have self-learning capabilities that enable them to produce better results as more data become available.
Artificial omen: A sign of future events which will or may happen as an act of human doing or will.
Artificial womb - (or artificial uterus) is a device that would allow for extracorporeal pregnancy or extrauterine fetal incubation (EUFI) by growing an embryo or fetus outside of the body of an organism that would normally internally carry the embryo or fetus to term.
Art impulse: A term to account for the origin of all matter falling under the consideration of aesthetics by describing it as due to non-intellectualistic, psychical urges, thoroughly dynamic in nature, such as desire to imitate, proneness to please, exhibitionism, play, utilization of surplus vital energy, emotional expression, or compensation. -- K.F.L.
Artisoft, Inc. "company, networking" A company, known for the {LANtastic} range of networking products. Originally providers of proprietary, {peer-to-peer} network hardware and software for small installations, Artisoft now also sells {Ethernet} and {Novell}-compatible hardware and software. {(http://artisoft.com/)}. Telephone: +1 (800) 809 1257. Address: Tucson, Arizona, USA; Phoenix, Arizona, USA. (1995-04-24)
Artisoft, Inc. ::: (company, networking) A company, known for the LANtastic range of networking products. Originally providers of proprietary, peer-to-peer network hardware and software for small installations, Artisoft now also sells Ethernet and Novell-compatible hardware and software. .Telephone: +1 (800) 809 1257.Address: Tucson, Arizona, USA; Phoenix, Arizona, USA. (1995-04-24)
Artistic license "legal" The {open source license} applicable to {Perl}. (1999-12-29)
Artistic license ::: (legal) The open source license applicable to Perl. (1999-12-29)
Artnaziel (Armisael?)—a gnostic entity men¬
Art. New York, 1912. Thesis (Ph.D.), Columbia
Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.
Art of her wisdom, artifice of her lore.
Arts, Boston.
Art, to dialectical materialism, is an activity of human beings which embodies a reflection of the reality surrounding them, a reflection which may be conscious, unconscious, reconstructive or deliberately fantastic, and which possesses positive aesthetic value in terms of rhythm, figure, color, image and the like. Art is good to the extent that it is a faithful and aesthetic reflection of the reality dealt with. Accordingly, proletarian or socialist realism (q.v.) is not photographic, static, but dialectical, conscious that any given period or subject is moving into its future, that class society is becoming classless society. This realism is optimistic, involving a "revolutionary romanticism". Marx, Engels, Lenin, Soviet philosophy, also, separate entries for detailed definitions of specific terms.
Artufas, Estufas Initiation caves or the underground secret temples of the Central American Indians, called kivas by the Indians of the southwestern United States.
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. A loose pliable covering for the head and neck, often attached to a robe or jacket. 2. Something resembling this in shape or use. 3. In animals, a conformation of parts (as in the cobra and the hooded seal), or arrangement of colour about the head or neck, resembling or suggesting a hood. hoods.
1. Anything whatever; any part. 2. A cypher, zero. Aught.
1. A physical likeness or representation of a person, animal, or thing, photographed, painted, sculptured, or otherwise made visible. 2. A mental representation; idea; conception. 3. Form; appearance; semblance. 4. A type; embodiment. 5. An idol or representation of a deity. 6. A person or thing that resembles another closely; counterpart, double or copy. 7. A concrete representation, as in art, literature, or music, that is expressive or evocative of something else. images, image-face.
1.* Fig. The deepest feelings of love, affection or compassion. *heart-strings".
1. Having horns (often used in combination). 2. Having a crescent-shaped part or form.
1. Makes by assembling parts or sections. 2. ‘Makes up", devises or invents (a legend, lie, etc.).
1. Reduced to fragments. 2. Existing or functioning as though broken into separate parts; disorganized; disunified.
1. Specified or set apart for a religious purpose; consecrated. 2. Saintly; godly; pious; devout. holier.
1. The apparent intersection of the earth and sky as seen by an observer. 2. The range or limit of scope, interest, knowledge, etc. horizon"s, horizons.
1. The face of a building, especially the principal face. 2. An artificial or deceptive front.
"1. ‘The Golden Embryo" in Hindu cosmology; the name given to the golden-hued Egg which floated on the surface of the primeval waters. In time the egg divided into two parts, the golden top half of the shell becoming the heavens and the silver lower half the earth. 2. ‘God imaginative and therefore creative"; the ‘Spirit in the middle or Dream State"; Lord of Dream-Life who takes from the ocean of subconsciously intelligent spiritual being the conscious psychic forces which He materializes or encases in various forms of gross living matter. (Enc. Br.; A)” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.
1. The spirit of God. 2. The presence of God as part of a person"s religious experience; also called Holy Spirit. 3. The third person of the Christian Trinity.
1. To be inadequate or insufficient; fall short. 2. To fall short of success or achievement in something expected, attempted, desired, or approved. 3. To dwindle, pass, or die away. 4. To decline, as in strength or effectiveness; fig. of the heart. 5. Of some expected or usual resource: To prove of no use or help to. 6. Of a material thing: To break down under strain or pressure. fails, failed, failed.
1. To put or bring together so as to make continuous or form a unit. 2. To bring together in a particular relation or for a specific purpose, action, etc.; unite. 3. To become united, associated, or combined; associate or ally oneself (with). 4. Be or become joined or united or linked. 5. To take part with others. 6. To enlist in one of the armed forces. joins, joined, joining.
1. Touchstone; a very smooth, fine-grained, black or dark-coloured variety of quartz or jasper (also called basanite), used for testing the quality of gold and silver alloys by the colour of the streak produced by rubbing them upon it; a piece of such stone used for this purpose. 2. *fig.* That which serves to test or try the genuineness or value of anything; a test, criterion.
"A basis can be created for a subjective illusion-consciousness which is yet part of Being, if we accept in the sense of an illusory subjective world-awareness the account of sleep and dream creation given to us in the Upanishads. For the affirmation there is that Brahman as Self is fourfold; the Self is Brahman and all that is is the Brahman, but all that is is the Self seen by the Self in four states of its being. In the pure self-status neither consciousness nor unconsciousness as we conceive it can be affirmed about Brahman; it is a state of superconscience absorbed in its self-existence, in a self-silence or a self-ecstasy, or else it is the status of a free Superconscient containing or basing everything but involved in nothing. But there is also a luminous status of sleep-self, a massed consciousness which is the origin of cosmic existence; this state of deep sleep in which yet there is the presence of an omnipotent Intelligence is the seed state or causal condition from which emerges the cosmos; — this and the dream-self which is the continent of all subtle, subjective or supraphysical experience, and the self of waking which is the support of all physical experience, can be taken as the whole field of Maya.” The Life Divine
A being of the lower vital planes who has assumed the discarded vital sheath of a departed human being or a fragment of his vital personality and appears and acts in the form and perhaps with the surface thoughts and memories of that person.
abroad ::: 1. Broadly, widely, at large, over a broad or wide surface; widely apart, with the parts or limbs wide spread. 2. At large; freely moving about.
absorbed ::: 1. Engrossed or entirely occupied; preoccupied. 2. Swallowed up, or comprised, so as no longer to exist apart.
abstract ::: adj. 1. Withdrawn or separated from matter, from material embodiment, from practice, or from particular examples; theoretical. 2. In the fine arts, characterized by lack of or freedom from representational qualities. n. 3. Something that concentrates in itself the essential qualities of anything more extensive or more general, or of several things; essence.
abyss ::: 1. The great deep, the primal chaos; the ‘bowels of the earth", the supposed cavity of the lower world; the ‘infernal pit". 2. A bottomless gulf; any unfathomable or apparently unfathomable cavity or void space; a profound gulf, chasm, or void extending beneath. Abyss, abyss"s, abysses.
accomplice ::: an associate in guilt, a partner in crime, often as a subordinate. accomplices.
account ::: n. 1. A record of debts and credits, applied to other things than money or trade. 2. A particular statement or narrative of an event or thing; a relation, report, or description. v. 3. To render an account or reckoning of; to give a satisfactory reason for, to give an explanation.
"A cosmos or universe is always a harmony, otherwise it could not exist, it would fly to pieces. But as there are musical harmonies which are built out of discords partly or even predominantly, so this universe (the material) is disharmonious in its separate elements — the individual elements are at discord with each other to a large extent; it is only owing to the sustaining Divine Will behind that the whole is still a harmony to those who look at it with the cosmic vision. But it is a harmony in evolution in progress — that is, all is combined to strive towards a goal which is not yet reached, and the object of our yoga is to hasten the arrival to this goal. When it is reached, there will be a harmony of harmonies substituted for the present harmony built up on discords. This is the explanation of the present appearance of things.” Letters on Yoga
adj. Parting; final.
"Adjustment for practical purposes of rival courses of action, systems, or theories, conflicting opinions or principles, by the sacrifice or surrender of a part of each. . . .” Essays Divine and Human*
adventure ::: n. 1. Any novel or unexpected event in which one shares; an exciting or remarkable incident befalling any one. 2. The encountering of risks or participation in novel and exciting events; bold or daring activity, enterprise. adventure"s, world-adventure, world-adventure"s. *v. 3. To take the chance of; to commit to fortune; to undertake a thing of doubtful issue; to try, to chance, to venture into or upon. 4. To risk or hazard; stake. *adventuring.
adytum ::: the innermost part of a temple; the secret shrine whence oracles were delivered; a most sacred or reserved part of any place of worship; hence, fig. a private or inner chamber, a sanctum.
"Aesthesis therefore is of the very essence of poetry, as it is of all art. But it is not the sole element and aesthesis too is not confined to a reception of poetry and art; it extends to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think or in any way experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious being. Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things also. It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things.” Letters on Savitri
aesthete ::: a person who has or professes to have refined sensitivity toward the beauties of art or nature.
"A fabulous tribe of wild, beastlike monsters, having the upper part of a human being and the lower part of a horse. They live in the woods or mountains of Elis, Arcadia, and Thessaly. They are representative of wild life, animal desires and barbarism. (M.I.) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.*
afflatus ::: the miraculous communication of supernatural knowledge; hence also, the imparting of an over-mastering impulse, poetic or otherwise; inspiration. A creative inspiration, as that of a poet; a divine imparting of knowledge, thus it is often called divine afflatus.
age ::: n. **1. A great period or stage of the history of the Earth. 2. Hist. Any great period or portion of human history distinguished by certain characters real or mythical, as the Golden Age, the Patriarchal Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of the Reformation, the Middle Ages, the Prehistoric Age. 3. A generation or a series of generations. 4. Advanced years; old age. age"s, ages, ages". v. 5.** To grow old; to become aged.
Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.” *The Secret of the Veda
agreement ::: a contract or other document delineating an arrangement that is accepted by all parties to a transaction. (Sri Aurobindo capitalizes the word.)
air ::: 1. The transparent, invisible, inodorous, and tasteless gaseous substance which envelopes the earth. 2. *Fig. With reference to its unsubstantial or impalpable nature. 3. Outward appearance, apparent character, manner, look, style: esp. in phrases like ‘an air of absurdity"; less commonly of a thing tangible, as ‘the air of a mansion". 4. Mien or gesture (expressive of a personal quality or emotion). *air"s.
ajar ::: neither entirely open nor entirely shut; partly open.
allotted ::: 1. Divided or distributed by share or portion; apportioned. 2. Assigned as a portion, set apart, dedicated.
aloof ::: 1. At a distance; distant; hence, detached, unsympathetic. 2. Away at some distance (from), with a clear space intervening, apart. aloofness.
already ::: 1. Core Meaning: an adverb indicating that something has happened before now. 2. Happened in the past before a particular time, or will have happened by or before a particular time in the future. 3. Unexpectedly early.
ambience ::: 1. The mood, character, quality, tone, atmosphere, etc., particularly of an environment or milieu. 2. That which surrounds or encompasses.
A mental formation stamped by the thoughts and feelings of a departed human being on the atmosphere of a place or locality, wandering about there or repeating itself, till that formation either exhausts itself or is dissolved by one means or another. This is the explanation of such phenomena as the haunted house in which the scenes attending or surrounding or preceding a murder are repeated over and over again and many other similar phenomena.
amethyst ::: a purple or violet quartz; having the clear colour as of the precious stone. Sri Aurobindo uses the word as an adj."for Amethyst (the Mother)she has revealed that it has a power of protection” Huta
an artificially induced trance state resembling sleep, characterised by heightened susceptibility to suggestion.
::: "And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also self-existent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.” The Synthesis of Yoga —**cosmic forces.**
**Angel of the Way *Sri Aurobindo: "Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. ‘By Bhakti" says the Lord in the Gita ‘shall a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the principles of my being, then he enters into Me." Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one"s love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, [work, knowledge, love] the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover"s being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
antechambers ::: 1. Chambers or rooms that serve as waiting rooms and entrances to larger rooms or apartments; anterooms. 2. Any areas that are entrances to other areas.
"A philosophy of change?(1) But what is change? In ordinary parlance change means passage from one condition to another and that would seem to imply passage from one status to another status. The shoot changes into a tree, passes from the status of shoot to the status of tree and there it stops; man passes from the status of young man to the status of old man and the only farther change possible to him is death or dissolution of his status. So it would seem that change is not something isolated which is the sole original and eternal reality, but it is something dependent on status, and if status were non-existent, change also could not exist. For we have to ask, when you speak of change as alone real, change of what, from what, to what? Without this ‘what" change could not be. ::: —Change is evidently the change of some form or state of existence from one condition to another condition.” Essays Divine and Human
a piece of plate armour partially or completely covering the front of the torso.
apsaras ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean, robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking a form in the marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsara. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnoupurana.
a punctuation mark ( - ) used between the parts of a compound word or name or between the syllables of a word, especially when divided at the end of a line of text or the parts of a word divided for any purpose. Hence, fig. A joining or connecting link.
arabesques ::: 1. Any ornaments or ornamental objects such as rugs or mosaics, in which flowers, foliage, fruits, vases, animals, and figures are represented in a fancifully combined pattern. 2. *Fine Arts.* A sinuous, spiraling, undulating, or serpentine line or linear motif.
arc ::: 1. Any unbroken part of the circumference of a circle or other curved line. 2. A luminous bridge formed in a gap between two electrodes. arcs.
arch ::: 1. An upwardly curved construction, for spanning an opening, consisting of a number of wedgelike stones, bricks, or the like, set with the narrower side toward the opening in such a way that forces on the arch are transmitted as vertical or oblique stresses on either side of the opening, either capable of bearing weight or merely ornamental; 2. Something bowed or curved; any bowlike part: the arch of the foot. 3. An arched roof, door; gateway; vault; fig. the heavens. arches.
architecture ::: 1. The profession of designing buildings and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. 2. The character or style of building. 3. Construction or structure generally. architectures.
arise ::: 1. To get up from sleep or rest; to awaken; wake up. 2. To go up, come up, ascend on high, mount. Now only poet. **3. To come into being, action, or notice; originate; appear; spring up. 4. Of circumstances viewed as results: To spring, originate, or result from. 5. To rise from inaction, from the peaceful, quiet, or ordinary course of life. 6. To rise in violence or agitation, as the sea, the wind; to boil up as a fermenting fluid, the blood; so of the heart, wrath, etc. Now poet. 7. Of sounds: To come up aloud, or so as to be audible, to be heard aloud. arises, arising, arose, arisen. *(Sri Aurobindo also employs arisen as an adj.*)
arm ::: power; might; strength. (All other references are to arm(s) as a part of the body.) arm"s, arms.
::: articles
artifice ::: 1. An artful or crafty expedient; a stratagem. 2. Cleverness or skill; ingenuity; inventiveness.
artificer ::: 1. One who is skilful or clever in devising ways of making things; inventor. 2. A skilful or artistic worker; craftsperson. artificers.
artisan ::: one skilled in an applied art; craftsperson. artisans.
artist ::: 1. One who practises the creative arts; one who seeks to express the beautiful in visible form. 2. A follower of a manual art; an artificer, mechanic, craftsman, artisan. artists. (Sri Aurobindo often employs the word as an adj.)
artistry ::: artistic workmanship, effect, or quality.
artist ("s).
art ::: v. archaic** A second person singular present indicative of be, now only poet., not in modern usage. All other references are to art as the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. Also, the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria. art"s, arts, art-parades.
::: "As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body, — for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.” Letters on Yoga
aside ::: 1. On or to one"s side; to or at a short distance apart; away from some position or direction. 2. To or toward the side. 3. Out of one"s thoughts or mind. 4. In reserve; in a separate place, as for safekeeping; apart; away.
aspect ::: 1. Appearance to the eye or mind; look. 2. Nature; quality, character. 3. A way in which a thing may be viewed or regarded; interpretation; view. 4. Part; feature; phase. aspects.
assembly ::: a group of people gathered together usually for a particular purpose. assemblies.
associates ::: partners, comrades, companions, colleagues.
a star so distant from Earth that its position in relation to other stars appears not to change.
a stream of a liquid, gas, or small solid particles forcefully shooting forth from a nozzle, orifice, etc. Also fig.
athwart ::: 1. Across from side to side; crosswise or transversely; contrary to the proper or expected course; against; crosswise. 2. Of motion; from side to side.
atom ::: 1. A unit of matter, the smallest unit of an element, having all the characteristics of that element and consisting of a dense, central, positively charged nucleus surrounded by a system of electrons. 2. The smallest component of an element having the chemical properties of the element. 3. An extremely small part, quantity, or amount. The smallest conceivable unit of an element or of anything. atom"s, atoms, atomic.
::: "A transcendent Bliss, unimaginable and inexpressible by the mind and speech, is the nature of the Ineffable. That broods immanent and secret in the whole universe and in everything in the universe. Its presence is described as a secret ether of the bliss of being, of which the Scripture says that, if this were not, none could for a moment breathe or live. And this spiritual bliss is here also in our hearts.” The Synthesis of Yoga
At times he calls himself the ‘Lord of Nations." It is he who sets all wars in motion and only by thwarting his plans could the last war be won . . . This one does not want to be converted, not at all. He wants neither the physical transformation not the supramental world, for that would spell his end. The Mother"s talk of 26 March 1959.
a vaguely defined deity symbolizing maternity, the fertility of the earth, and femininity in general; the central figure in the religions of ancient Anatolia, the Near East, and the eastern Mediterranean, later sometimes taking the form of a specific goddess.
a very small part or segment of anything; minute portion. fractions.
babel ::: "The reference is to the mythological story of the construction of the Tower of Babel, which appears to be an attempt to explain the diversity of human languages. According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and tower ‘with its top in the heavens". God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The tower was never completed and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works Sri Aurobindo: "The legend of the Tower of Babel speaks of the diversity of tongues as a curse laid on the race; but whatever its disadvantages, and they tend more and more to be minimised by the growth of civilisation and increasing intercourse, it has been rather a blessing than a curse, a gift to mankind rather than a disability laid upon it. The purposeless exaggeration of anything is always an evil, and an excessive pullulation of varying tongues that serve no purpose in the expression of a real diversity of spirit and culture is certainly a stumbling-block rather than a help: but this excess, though it existed in the past, is hardly a possibility of the future. The tendency is rather in the opposite direction. In former times diversity of language helped to create a barrier to knowledge and sympathy, was often made the pretext even of an actual antipathy and tended to a too rigid division. The lack of sufficient interpenetration kept up both a passive want of understanding and a fruitful crop of active misunderstandings. But this was an inevitable evil of a particular stage of growth, an exaggeration of the necessity that then existed for the vigorous development of strongly individualised group-souls in the human race. These disadvantages have not yet been abolished, but with closer intercourse and the growing desire of men and nations for the knowledge of each other"s thought and spirit and personality, they have diminished and tend to diminish more and more and there is no reason why in the end they should not become inoperative.” The Human Cycle
baffled ::: 1. Confused, bewildered, or perplexed. 2. Frustrated or confounded; thwarted. baffles, baffling.
balance ::: n. **1. A state of equilibrium or equipoise; mental, psychological or emotional. 2. A weighing device, especially one consisting of a rigid beam horizontally suspended by a low-friction support at its center, with identical weighing pans hung at either end, one of which holds an unknown weight while the effective weight in the other is increased by known amounts until the beam is level and motionless. 3. An undecided or uncertain state in which issues are unresolved. v. 4. To have an equality or equivalence in weight, parts, etc.; be in equilibrium. adj. 5. Being in harmonious or proper arrangement or adjustment, proportion. 6. Mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behaviour, judgement. balanced, balancing.**
bank ::: 1. The slope of land adjoining a body of water, especially adjoining a river, lake, or channel. 2. A slope, as of a hill. 3. A long raised mass, esp. of earth. 4. A piled-up mass, as of snow or clouds. banks, cloud-bank.
bargain ::: an agreement between parties fixing obligations, etc. that each promises to carry out.
barge ::: a large, open pleasure boat used for parties, pageants, or formal ceremonies.
barrage ::: an overwhelming quantity or explosion as of artillery fire, words, blows, or criticisms.
"Art is a living harmony and beauty that must be expressed in all the movements of existence. This manifestation of beauty and harmony is part of the Divine realisation upon earth, perhaps even its greatest part.” Questions and Answers, MCW Vol. 3.
barter ::: to trade goods or services without the exchange of money. bartered.
battalion ::: 1. An army unit typically consisting of a headquarters and two or more companies, batteries, or similar subunits. 2. A large body of organized troops in battle gear. 3. A large indefinite number of persons or things.
baulked ::: checked, foiled, hindered, thwarted; disappointed.
bays ::: bodies of water partially enclosed by land but with a wide mouth, affording access to the sea.
beating ::: n. 1. A throbbing or pulsation, as of the heart. beatings. adj. 2. Throbbings, pulsations.
beat ::: n. 1. A stroke or blow. 2. A regular sound or stroke. 3. The rhythmic contraction and expansion of the arteries with each beat of the heart. 4. A pulsating sound. 5. A forceful flapping of wings. beats, nerve-beat, hammer-beats, heart-beats, heart-beats", moment-beats, rhyme-beats. v. 6. To strike or pound with repeated blows. 7. To shape or break by repeated blows, as metal. 8. To sound in pulsations. 9. To throb rhythmically; pulsate, as the heart. 10. To flap, especially wings. 11. To strike with or as if with a series of violent blows, dash or pound repeatedly against, as waves, wind, etc. beats, beaten, beating. *adj. *sun-beat.
beauty ::: the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, colour, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else, (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest). Beauty, beauty"s, Beauty"s, beauty-drenched, earth-beauty"s.
bed ::: 1. A piece or part forming a foundation or base; a stratum. 2. The grave. 3. A sleeping-place generally; any extemporized resting place. 4. A piece or area of ground in a garden or lawn in which plants are grown. beds.
being ::: 1. The state or quality of having existence. 2. The totality of all things that exist. 3. One"s basic or essential nature; self. 4. All the qualities constituting one that exists; the essence. 5. A person; human being. 6. The Divine, the Supreme; God. Being, being"s, Being"s, beings, Beings, beings", earth-being"s, earth-beings, fragment-being, non-being, non-being"s, Non-Being, Non-Being"s, world-being"s.
Sri Aurobindo: "Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence.” *The Life Divine :::
"The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming. The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome of its immutable formless essence.” *The Life Divine
"What is original and eternal for ever in the Divine is the Being, what is developed in consciousness, conditions, forces, forms, etc., by the Divine Power is the Becoming. The eternal Divine is the Being; the universe in Time and all that is apparent in it is a Becoming.” Letters on Yoga
"Being and Becoming, One and Many are both true and are both the same thing: Being is one, Becomings are many; but this simply means that all Becomings are one Being who places Himself variously in the phenomenal movement of His consciousness.” The Upanishads :::
"Our whole apparent life has only a symbolic value & is good & necessary as a becoming; but all becoming has being for its goal & fulfilment & God is the only being.” *Essays Divine and Human
"Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
belong ::: 1. To be a part of or adjunct. 2. To be the property, attribute, or possession of. belongs.
bend ::: 1. To assume a curved, crooked, or angular form or direction, esp. to bend the body; stoop. 2. Fig. To bow, esp. in reverence. 3. To turn or incline in a particular direction; be directed. bends.
benumbed ::: made (any part of the body) insensible, torpid, or powerless; made numb, deprived of sensation; stupefied or stunned, as by a blow or shock; now mostly used for the effects of cold.
blade ::: the flat cutting part of a sharpened weapon or tool. blade"s.
blur ::: a smudge or smear that partially obscures; indistinctness.
body ::: 1. The entire material or physical structure of an organism, especially of a human or animal as differentiated from the soul. 2. The entire physical structure of a human being. 3. A mass of matter that is distinct from other masses. 4. Substance. 5. An agent or entity. 6. The mass of a thing. 7. A mass of matter that is distinct from other masses. 8. The largest or main part of anything; the foundation; central part. body"s, bodies.
"Body is the outward sign and lowest basis of the apparent division which Nature plunging into ignorance and self-nescience makes the starting-point for the recovery of unity by the individual soul, unity even in the midst of the most exaggerated forms of her multiple consciousness.” The Life Divine
booths ::: partly enclosed compartments or partitioned areas.
border ::: n. 1. A part that forms the outer edge of something. 2. The line or frontier area separating political divisions or geographic regions; a boundary. 3. A strip of ground, as that at the edge of a garden or walk, an edging. borders. v. 4. To form the boundary of; be contiguous to. fig. To confine. 5. To lie adjacent to another. bordered.
bosom ::: 1. The breast. 2. Something likened to the human breast, such as the bosom of the earth, the sea. 2. The breast, conceived of as the centre of feelings or emotions. 3. Centre of; heart of. bosom"s, bosoms, bosomed, white-bosomed.
bound and –bound ::: 1. Pp. and pt. of bind. *adj. 2. Being under a legal or moral obligation. 3. Circumscribed; kept within bounds. * close-bound, death-bound, earth-bound, fate-bound, form-bound, heart-bound, self-bound, sleep-bound, steel-bound, stone-bound, time-bound, trance-bound.
bound ::: n. 1. A boundary; a limit. bounds, earth-bounds. *v. *2. To constitute the limit of; contain; enclose. bounds.
braggart ::: loudly boastful.
break down ::: of things fig; To break something into parts.
breaking ::: 1. Smashing, splitting, or dividing into parts violently; reducing to pieces or fragments. 2. Dawning upon; coming upon. 3. An opening made by breaking out from. breakings.
breaks up. ::: 1. Breaks into many parts; divides or become divided into pieces. 2. Dissolves, disbands, puts an end to, gives up; breaks up a house, household, etc.
break ::: v. 1. To destroy by or as if by shattering or crushing. 2. To force or make a way through (a barrier, etc.). 3. To vary or disrupt the uniformity or continuity of. 4. To overcome or put an end to. 5. To destroy or interrupt a regularity, uniformity, continuity, or arrangement of; interrupt. 6. To intrude upon; interrupt a conversation, etc. 7. To discontinue or sever an association, an agreement, or a relationship. **8. To overcome or wear down the spirit, strength, or resistance of. 9. (usually followed by in, into or out). 10. To filter or penetrate as sunlight into a room. 11. To come forth suddenly. 12. To utter suddenly; to express or start to express an emotion, mood, etc. 13. Said of waves, etc. when they dash against an obstacle, or topple over and become surf or broken water in the shallows. 14. To part the surface of water, as a ship or a jumping fish. breaks, broke, broken, breaking.* *n. 15.** An interruption or a disruption in continuity or regularity.
breathe ::: 1. To be alive; live. 2. To take air, oxygen, etc., into the lungs and expel it; inhale and exhale; respire. Also fig. 3. To control the outgoing breath in producing voice and speech sounds. 4. To utter, especially quietly. 5. To make apparent or manifest; express; suggest. 6. To exhale (something); emit. 7. To impart as if by breathing; instil. 8. To move gently or blow lightly, as air. breathes, breathed, breathing. ::: To breathe upon fig. To taint; corrupt.
bride ::: 1. A woman who is about to be married or has recently been married. Also fig. 2. The divine creatrix. Bride, brides, earth-bride.
broken hearts
brow ::: 1. The part of the face from the eyes to the hairline. forehead. 2. The expression of the face; countenance. 3. The eyebrow. pl. **brows.**
built ::: pt. and pp. of build. dream-built, high-built, low-built, mind-built, new-built. *adj. *built in. Constructed or included as an integral part of. adj. built-up. Built by the fastening together of several parts or enlarged by the addition of layers.
bulge ::: a rounded projection, bend or protruding part; protuberance; hump.
buried ::: v. 1. Deposited or hid under ground; covered up with earth or other material. Also fig. **2. Plunged or sunk deep in, so as to be covered from view; put out of sight. adj. 3. Put in the ground or in a tomb; interred. 4. Consigned to a position of obscurity, inaccessibility, or inaction. 5.* Fig.* Consigned to oblivion, put out of the way, abandoned and forgotten.
burst ::: 1. Exploded, flew apart with sudden violence. 2. Came forth suddenly and powerfully as if by pressure or internal force. 3. To emerge, come forth, or arrive suddenly. bursting.
"But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of things, which is always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the mere reason, the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and process but of their spirit.” The Human Cycle etc.
"By Force I mean not mental or vital energy but the Divine Force from above — as peace comes from above and wideness also, so does this Force (Shakti). Nothing, not even thinking or meditating can be done without some action of Force. The Force I speak of is a Force for illumination, transformation, purification, all that has to be done in the yoga, for removal of hostile forces and the wrong movements — it is also of course for external work, whether great or small in appearance does not matter — if that is part of the Divine Will. I do not mean any personal force egoistic or rajasic.” Letters on Yoga
"By individual we mean normally something that separates itself from everything else and stands apart, though in reality there is no such thing anywhere in existence; it is a figment of our mental conceptions useful and necessary to express a partial and practical truth. But the difficulty is that the mind gets dominated by its words and forgets that the partial and practical truth becomes true truth only by its relation to others which seem to the reason to contradict it, and that taken by itself it contains a constant element of falsity. Thus when we speak of an individual we mean ordinarily an individualisation of mental, vital, physical being separate from all other beings, incapable of unity with them by its very individuality. If we go beyond these three terms of mind, life and body, and speak of the soul or individual self, we still think of an individualised being separate from all others, incapable of unity and inclusive mutuality, capable at most of a spiritual contact and soul-sympathy. It is therefore necessary to insist that by the true individual we mean nothing of the kind, but a conscious power of being of the Eternal, always existing by unity, always capable of mutuality. It is that being which by self-knowledge enjoys liberation and immortality.” The Life Divine
bystander ::: one who is present at an event without participating in it; onlooker; spectator.
calligraphy ::: 1. The art of fine handwriting. 2. An artistic and highly decorative form of handwriting, as with a great many flourishes.
call ::: Sri Aurobindo: "All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner being. No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger spiritual existence. The soul that is called to this deep and vast inward change, may arrive in different ways to the initial departure. It may come to it by its own natural development which has been leading it unconsciously towards the awakening; it may reach it through the influence of a religion or the attraction of a philosophy; it may approach it by a slow illumination or leap to it by a sudden touch or shock; it may be pushed or led to it by the pressure of outward circumstances or by an inward necessity, by a single word that breaks the seals of the mind or by long reflection, by the distant example of one who has trod the path or by contact and daily influence. According to the nature and the circumstances the call will come.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
calyx ::: the outermost group of floral parts enclosing the bud and surrounding the base of a flower; the sepals.
camp ::: n. 1. A place where tents, huts, or other temporary shelters are set up, as by soldiers, nomads, or travelers. 2. The people using such shelters. 3. Temporary living quarters for soldiers or prisoners. v. 4. To make or set up a camp. or to live temporarily in or as if in a camp or outdoors. 5. To settle down securely and comfortably; become ensconced. camps, camped.
candid ::: 1. Characterized by openness and sincerity of expression; unreservedly straightforward. 2. Free from prejudice; impartial. 3. Clear or pure 4. Not posed or rehearsed.
candidate ::: a person or thing regarded as suitable or likely for a particular fate or position.
cap ::: a special head covering worn to indicate rank, occupation, or membership in a particular group.
car ::: an ornate, splendid chariot, carriage, or cart.
cart ::: a two-wheeled vehicle drawn by an animal and used in farm work and for transporting goods.
cast ::: v. 1. To throw with force; hurl. 2. To form (liquid metal, for example) into a particular shape by pouring into a mould. Also fig. 3. To cause to fall upon something or in a certain direction; send forth. 4. To throw on the ground, as in wrestling. 5. To put or place, esp. hastily or forcibly. 6. To direct (the eye, a glance, etc.) 7. To throw (something) forth or off. 8. To bestow; confer. casts, casting.
cave ::: 1. A hollow or natural passage under or into the earth, especially one with an opening to the surface. 2. A hollow in the side of a hill or cliff, or underground of any kind; a cavity. Cave, caves, death-cave, deep-caved, cave-heart.
"Certainly, ideals are not the ultimate Reality, for that is too high and vast for any ideal to envisage; they are aspects of it thrown out in the world-consciousness as a basis for the workings of the world-power. But they are primary, the actual workings secondary. They are nearer to the Reality and therefore always more real, forcible and complete than the facts which are their partial reflection.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Certainly, ideals are not the ultimate Reality, for that is too high and vast for any ideal to envisage; they are aspects of it thrown out in the world-consciousness as a basis for the workings of the world-power. But they are primary, the actual workings secondary. They are nearer to the Reality and therefore always more real, forcible and complete than the facts which are their partial reflection. Reflections themselves of the Real, they again are reflected in the more concrete workings of our existence. The Supramental Manifestation
chain-work ::: handiwork in which parts are looped or woven together like the links of a chain.
chamber ::: 1. Archaic or poetic: A room in a private house, esp. a bedroom. 2. An enclosed space; compartment. chamber"s, chambers, work-chamber.
charm ::: 1. An action or formula thought to have magical power. 2. A particular quality that attracts; a delight. charms.
charts ::: visual displays of information, as maps, graphs, tables, or sheets of information in the form of a diagram delineating a particular subject.
chasm ::: 1. A deep, steep-sided opening in the earth"s surface; an abyss or gorge. 2. A void or gap. chasms.
chiaroscuro ::: 1. The arrangement of light and dark elements in a pictorial work of art. 2. *Poetic*: Contrasting sense as in, darkness and light, ‘joy and gloom", ‘praise and blame," etc.
child ::: 1. A person between birth and full growth. 2. A baby or infant. 3. A person who has not attained maturity. 4. One who is childish or immature. 5. An individual regarded as strongly affected by another or by a specified time, place, or circumstance. 6. Any person or thing regarded as the product or result of particular agencies, influences, etc. Child, child"s, children, Children, children"s, child-god, Child-Godhead, child-heart, child-heart"s, child-laughter, child-soul, child-sovereign, child-thought, flame-child, foster-child, God-child, King-children.
chrysoprase ::: a brittle, translucent, semiprecious chalcedony (q.v.), a variety of the silica mineral quartz. It owes its bright apple-green colour to colloidally dispersed hydrated nickel silicate. Valued in ancient times as it shone in the dark.
circuit ::: 1. The act of following a curved or circular route or one that lies around an object. 2. A complete route or course, esp. one that is curved or circular and begins and ends at the point of departure. 3. The boundary line encompassing an area or object. 4. A regular or accustomed course from place to place. circuits.
circumstance ::: 1. A condition, fact or detail attending an event and having some bearing on it; a determining or modifying factor. 2. A particular incident or occurrence. Circumstance.
clause ::: a distinct article, stipulation, or provision, in a document.
clauses, items, points, or particulars in a contract, treaty, or other formal agreement; conditions or stipulations in a contract.
clay ::: 1. A natural earthy material that is plastic when wet, consisting essentially of hydrated silicates of aluminium: used for making bricks, pottery, etc. 2. The material which is said to form the human body. 3. The human body, esp. as opposed to the spirit. clay-kin.
clod ::: a lump or mass that adheres together; esp. of earth or clay.
clothe ::: 1. To cover as if with clothing. 2. To present in a specific form. 3. To furnish or invest with power or authority or endue or endow attributes, qualities. 4. To cover or envelop (something) so as to change its appearance, as the face of the earth. clothes, clothed.
cloud ::: 1. A visible collection of particles of water or ice suspended in the air, usually at an elevation above the earth"s surface. 2. Any similar mass, esp. of smoke or dust. 3. Something fleeting or unsubstantial. 4. Anything that obscures or darkens something, or causes gloom, trouble, suspicion, disgrace, etc. clouds, clouds", cloud-veils.
coarse ::: 1. Composed of relatively large parts or particles. 2. Lacking in fineness or delicacy of texture, structure, etc. Not refined or delicate, rough.
coilas ::: (Most often spelled Kailas.) "One of the highest and most rugged mountains of the Himalayan range, located in the southwestern part of China. It is an important holy site both to the Hindus, who identify it with the paradise of Shiva and also regard it as the abode of Kubera, and to the Tibetan Buddhists, who identify it with Mount Sumeru, cosmic centre of the universe.” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
cold-hearted ::: lacking sympathy or feeling; indifferent; unkind, unfeeling.
comet ::: a celestial body that travels around the sun, usually in a highly elliptical orbit: thought to consist of a solid frozen nucleus part of which vaporizes on approaching the sun to form a gaseous luminous coma and a long luminous tail.
commenced ::: began; started.
communicant ::: a person who communicates, informs or imparts.
communicated ::: 1. Had an interchange, as of ideas. 2. Conveyed information about; imparted knowledge of; made known. communicates, communicating.
complete ::: adj. 1. Having all necessary or normal parts, components, or steps; entire. 2. Thorough; consummate; fully realised. n. completeness. *v. *3. To bring to a finish or an end.
compose ::: to make or create by putting together parts or elements.
conceive ::: 1. To form or hold an idea. 2. To begin, originate, or found (something) in a particular way (usually used in the passive). 3. To apprehend mentally; understand. 4. To be created or formed in the womb; to be engendered; begotten. conceives, conceived, self-conceived.
concept ::: 1. An idea, esp. an abstract idea or notion. 2. An idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct. 3. A directly conceived or intuited object of thought. concept"s, concept-maps.
concrete ::: 1. Formed by the coalescence of separate particles or parts into one mass; solid. 2. Made real, tangible, or particular as opposed to abstract.
conjunction ::: 1. The state of being joined. 2. Astronomy: The position of two celestial bodies on the celestial sphere when they have the same celestial longitude, especially a configuration in which a planet or the Moon lies on a straight line from Earth to or through the Sun.
conscience ::: that part of one"s mind which holds one"s knowledge or sense of right and wrong; inner knowledge. half-conscience.
*consciousforce. ::: Sri Aurobindo: "In actual fact Mind measures Time by event and Space by Matter; but it is possible in pure mentality to disregard the movement of event and the disposition of substance and realise the pure movement of Conscious-Force which constitutes Space and Time; these two are then merely two aspects of the universal force of Consciousness which in their intertwined interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon itself. And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space, but containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer itself as a subjective and indivisible extension, — no less subjective than Time.” The Life Divine
consecrated ::: solemnly dedicated to or set apart for a high purpose.
consecration ::: a sanctification of something by setting it apart as dedicated to God.
consistency ::: agreement or harmony between parts of something complex; compatibility.
consisting of small, disconnected parts.
consonant ::: a speech sound produced by a partial or complete obstruction of the air stream by any of various constrictions of the speech organs, such as (p), (f), (r), (w), and (h).
consort ::: n. 1. A companion or partner. consort"s. *v. 2. To keep company; associate. *consorts.
constellations ::: any of the 88 groups of stars as seen from the earth and the solar system, many of which were named by the ancient Greeks after animals, objects, or mythological persons.
constituent ::: serving as part of a whole; component.
constructed ::: formed by assembling or combining parts; built. constructing.
context ::: 1. The part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning. 2. The set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc.
continues ::: goes on with a particular action or in a particular condition; persists. continuing.
contract ::: an agreement between two or more parties, especially one that is written and enforceable by law.
convey ::: 1. To take or carry from one place to another; transport. 2. To communicate or make known; impart. conveys, conveyed.
cord ::: 1. An influence, feeling, or force that binds or restrains; a bond or tie. 2. Fig. Like a thin rope made of several strands woven together to hold the parts of anything. cords, heart-cords.
core ::: the central, innermost, or most essential part of something.
corner ::: 1. The position at which two lines, surfaces, or edges meet and form an angle. 2. The area enclosed or bounded by an angle formed in this manner. 3. A region, part, quarter. 4. A remote, secluded, or secret place. corners, corner-Mind.
corridor ::: a hallway or passage connecting parts of a building. corridors.
cosmic mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes, — towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.” *The Life Divine
"If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, — not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine
"There is one cosmic Mind, one cosmic Life, one cosmic Body. All the attempt of man to arrive at universal sympathy, universal love and the understanding and knowledge of the inner soul of other existences is an attempt to beat thin, breach and eventually break down by the power of the enlarging mind and heart the walls of the ego and arrive nearer to a cosmic oneness.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"[The results of the opening to the cosmic Mind:] One is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one"s mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one"s own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power. There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one.” Letters on Yoga
"The cosmic consciousness has many levels — the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live in the Intuition plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.” Letters on Yoga*
cosmic ::: of or pertaining to the cosmos and characteristic of its phenomena as forming a part of the material universe; infinite.
cosmogonic ::: relating to a theory or story of the origin and development of the universe, the solar system, or the earth-moon system.
costume ::: n. A style of dress, including garments, accessories, and hairstyle, especially as characteristic of a particular country, period, or people. costumes. *v. 2. To furnish with a mode of attire, set of garments; dress. *costuming.
counterpart ::: one of two parts that fit and complete each another. counterparts.
course ::: 1. A direction or route taken or to be taken. 2. The path, route, or channel along which anything moves. 3. Advance or progression in a particular direction; forward or onward movement. 4. The continuous passage or progress through time or a succession of stages. chariot-course.
court ::: 1. An extent of open ground partially or completely enclosed by walls or buildings; a courtyard. 2. The place of residence of a sovereign or dignitary; a royal mansion or palace. courts, courtyard, courtyard"s.
crack ::: 1. To break without complete separation of parts; fissure. 2. To break with a sharp snapping sound. doom-crack.
cracks ::: breaks apart; breaks into pieces, collapses.
craft ::: 1. An art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, esp. manual skill. 2. Skill; dexterity. 3. Skill or ability used for bad purposes; cunning; deceit; guile; fraud; evasion or deception. crafts.
craftsman ::: a person who practices or is highly skilled in a craft; artisan. (Here in reference to the Divine). craftsman** **(in general).
create ::: 1. To cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes. 2. To evolve from one"s own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention. 3. To cause to happen; to bring about; arrange, as by intention or design. creates, created, creating, all-creating, self-creating, world-creating, new-create.
creation ::: 1. The act or process of creating, esp. the universe as thus brought into being by God. 2. Something that has been brought into existence or created, esp. a product of human intelligence or imagination, as a work of art, music, etc. creation"s, creations, half-creations, **self-creation.
Creatrix, the Eternal"s artist Bride,” *Savitri*
crescent ::: the figure of the moon in its first or last quarter, resembling a segment of a ring tapering to points at the ends.
cross ::: 1. A structure consisting essentially of an upright and a transverse piece, upon which persons were formerly put to a cruel and ignominious death by being nailed or otherwise fastened to it by their extremities. 2. A representation or delineation of a cross on any surface, varying in elaborateness from two lines crossing each other to an ornamental design painted, embroidered, carved, etc.; used as a sacred mark, symbol, badge, or the like. 3. A trouble, vexation, annoyance; misfortune, adversity; sometimes anything that thwarts or crosses. v. 4. To go or extend across; pass from one side of to the other: pass over. 5. To extend or pass through or over; intersect. 6. To encounter in passing. crosses, crossed, crossing.
cross ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns it into a stake of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
crumble ::: 1. To fall into small pieces; break or part into small fragments. 2. To decay or disintegrate gradually. crumbles, crumbling.
crust ::: 1. The exterior portion of the earth. 2. Fig. Any hard or stiff outer covering or surface.
crystal ::: 1. A mineral, especially a transparent form of quartz, having a crystalline structure, often characterized by external planar faces. 2. Resembling crystal; transparent as water or a liquid. 3. Fig. Sometimes used to describe the eyes.
cue ::: 1. A hint or suggestion. 2. The part a person is to play; a prescribed or necessary course of action.
culture ("s) ::: the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.
cunning ::: 1. Skill or adeptness in execution or performance; dexterity. 2. Artfully subtle or shrewd. 3. Cunning implies a shrewd, often instinctive skill in concealing or disguising the real purposes of one"s actions. cunningly.
current ::: 1. (esp. of water or air) A steady usually natural flow in a particular direction. 2. A flow of electric charge through a conductor. current"s, currents.
daemon ::: 1. A guardian spirit. 2. *Mythology: A mythological being that is part-god and part-human. *3. A demigod.
dams ::: 1. Barriers to obstruct the flow of water, esp. one of earth, masonry, etc., built across a stream or river. 2. Any barriers resembling dams.
dark ::: adj. 1. Lacking or having very little light. 2. Concealed or secret; mysterious. 3. Difficult to understand; obscure. 4. Characterized by gloom; dismal. 5. Fig. Sinister; evil; absent moral or spiritual values. 6. (used of color) Having a dark hue; almost black. 7. Showing a brooding ill humor. 8. Having a complexion that is not fair; swarthy. darker, darkest, dark-browed, dark-robed.* n. 9. Absence of light; dark state or condition; darkness, esp. that of night. 10. A dark place: a place of darkness. 11. The condition of being hidden from view, obscure, or unknown; obscurity. *in the dark: in concealment or secrecy.
darting ::: an act of darting; a sudden swift movement.
dart ::: n. 1. A small, slender missile that is pointed at one end and usually feathered at the other and is propelled by hand, as in the game of darts, or by a blowgun when used as a weapon. 2. Something similar in function to such a missile, as the stinging member of an insect. *v. 2. To thrust or move suddenly or rapidly.* darts.
date ::: 1. A particular month, day, and year at which some event happened or will happen. 2. The time or period to which any event or thing belongs; period in general. 3. The time during which something lasts; duration. dates
deaf ::: 1. Partially or wholly lacking, or deprived of the sense of hearing. 2. Refusing to listen, heed, or be persuaded.
dear ::: 1. Precious in one"s regard; cherished. 2. Loved and cherished: Highly esteemed or regarded. 3. Heartfelt; earnest. dearer, dearest.
death ::: Sri Aurobindo: "For the spiritual seeker death is only a passage from one form of life to another, and none is dead but only departed.” *Letters on Yoga
decayed ::: broke down into component parts; gradually deteriorated to an inferior state: declined in health, etc.
deception ::: something that deceives or is intended to deceive; fraud; artifice.
deck ::: a floorlike surface extending from side to side of a ship or part of a ship.
dedicate ::: to set apart for a deity or for religious purposes; consecrate. dedicated.
deeply bound or linked to the heart.
deep ::: n. 1. A vast extent, as of space or time; an abyss. 2. Fig. Difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; as an unfathomable thought, idea, esp. poetic. Deep, deep"s, deeps. adj. 3. Extending far downward below a surface. 4. Having great spatial extension or penetration downward or inward from an outer surface or backward or laterally or outward from a center; sometimes used in combination. 5. Coming from or penetrating to a great depth. 6. Situated far down, in, or back. 7. Lying below the surface; not superficial; profound. 8. Of great intensity; as extreme deep happiness, deep trouble. 9. Absorbing; engrossing. 10. Grave or serious. 11. Profoundly or intensely. 12. Mysterious; obscure; difficult to penetrate or understand. 13. Low in pitch or tone. 14. Profoundly cunning, crafty or artful. 15. The central and most intense or profound part; "in the deep of night”; "in the deep of winter”. deeper, deepest, deep-browed, deep-caved, deep-concealed, deep-etched, deep-fraught, deep-guarded, deep-hid, deep-honied, deep-pooled, deep-thoughted. *adv. *16. to a great depth psychologically or profoundly.
demigod ::: a mythological being who is partly divine and partly human; an inferior deity. demigod"s, demigods.
dense ::: 1. Having the component parts closely compacted together; crowded or compact. 2. Relatively opaque; transmitting little light. 3. Intense; extreme. 4. Impenetrable. denser, dense-maned. (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as a n.)
depart ::: 1. To go away; leave. 2. To leave this world; die. departed.
departed ::: adj. Deceased, dead, bygone, past.
departing ::: adj. Going away, vanishing.
departure ::: 1. The act of leaving. 2. A project, course of action, venture, etc. departure"s.
dependencies ::: subject territories that are not an integral part of the ruling country.
design ::: n. 1. Purpose, aim, intention, especially with reference to a Divine Creator. 2. Plan or scheme. 3. A combination of details or features; pattern or motif. design"s, designs. *v. 4. To work out the structure or form of (something). 5. To plan and make (something) artistically or skilfully. *designed, designing.
destiny ::: 1. Something that is to happen or has happened to a particular person or thing; lot or fortune. 2. The predetermined, usually inevitable or irresistible, course of events. 3. The power or agency that determines the course of events. 4. *(Cap.) This power personified or represented as a goddess. *Destiny, destinies, world-destiny.
"Destruction is always a simultaneous or alternate element which keeps pace with creation and it is by destroying and renewing that the Master of Life does his long work of preservation. More, destruction is the first condition of progress. Inwardly, the man who does not destroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater existence. Outwardly also, the nation or community or race which shrinks too long from destroying and replacing its past forms of life, is itself destroyed, rots and perishes and out of its debris other nations, communities and races are formed. By destruction of the old giant occupants man made himself a place upon earth. By destruction of the Titans the gods maintain the continuity of the divine Law in the cosmos. Whoever prematurely attempts to get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainly against the greater will of the World-Spirit.” Essays on the Gita
detached ::: 1. Impartial or objective; disinterested; unbiased. 2. Not involved or concerned; aloof. ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Detachment means that one stands back from [imperfections and weakness of the nature, etc.] , does not identify oneself with them or get upset or troubled because they are there, but rather looks on them as something foreign to one"s true consciousness and true self, rejects them and calls in the Mother"s Force into these movements to eliminate them and bring the true consciousness and its movements there.” Letters on Yoga
detail ::: 1. A minor or an inconsequential item or aspect; a minutia. 2. An individual part or item; a particular. details.
detailed ::: bounding in details; minute; particular; complex.
device ::: 1. Something devised or framed by art or inventive power; an invention, contrivance for some particular purpose. 2. A plan or scheme, especially a malign one. 3. Something elaborately or fancifully designed. devices.
diagram ::: a drawing intended to explain how something works; a drawing showing the relation between the parts. diagrams.
dim ::: 1. Obscure to the mind or the senses. 2. Not clearly seen; indistinct; faint. 3. Having weak or indistinct vision. 4. Faintly outlined; indistinct. 5. Lacking in brightness. v. 1. To cause to seem less bright, as by comparison. 2. Make dim or lusterless. dimly, dim-eyed, dim-heart, dim-hearted, dim-masked, dim-souled.
dips ::: 1. Plunges briefly into water or another liquid and removes quickly. 2. Sinks or drops down, or below a particular level, as if dipping into water; goes down, sinks, sets. 3. Has a downward inclination; inclines or slopes downwards; is inclined to the horizon. dipped, dipping.
disclose ::: 1. To make known; reveal or uncover. 2. To cause to appear; allow to be seen; lay open to view. discloses, disclosed, disclosing , heart-disclosing.
discouraged ::: 1. Deprived of courage, hope, or confidence; disheartened; dispirited. 2. Obstructed by opposition or difficulty; hindered. discouraging.
disintegrating ::: reducing to components, fragments, or particles. self-disintegrating.
dislodge ::: to remove or force out of a particular place.
disrupt ::: 1. To cause disorder or turmoil in. 2. To destroy, usually temporarily, the normal continuance or unity of; interrupt. 3. To break apart. disrupted.
dissects ::: examines minutely part by part, to analyze.
dissolution ("s) ::: decomposition into fragments or parts; disintegration.
distance ::: 1. The extent of space between two objects or the fact or condition of being apart in space; remoteness. 2. The interval between two points of time; an extent of time. 3. Separation or remoteness in relationship; disparity. distances.
distant ::: 1. Far away or apart in space or time. 2. Apart in relevance, association, or relationship.
disturbing ::: n. 1. A disturbance. adj. 2. Upsetting or disquieting; dismaying. heart-disturbing.**
divergent ::: drawing apart from a common point; diverging.
divine Comedy ::: a stage-play of a light and amusing character, with a happy conclusion to its plot. Its mediaeval use for a narrative poem with an agreeable ending. (Probably taken from Italian; cf. the Divine Comedy, the great tripartite poem of Dante, called by its author La Commedia, because in the conclusion, it is prosperous, pleasant, and desirable.)
"Divine Love is of two kinds — the divine Love for the creation and the souls that are part of itself, and the love of the seeker and love for the Divine Beloved; it has both a personal and impersonal element, but the personal is free here from all lower elements or bondage to the vital and physical instincts.” Letters on Yoga
".. . Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; . . . . ” The Synthesis of Yoga
divine Reality ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Divine Reality is infinite in its being; in this infinite being, we find limited being everywhere, — that is the apparent fact from which our existence here seems to start and to which our own narrow ego and its ego-centric activities bear constant witness. But, in reality, when we come to an integral self-knowledge, we find that we are not limited, for we also are infinite.” *The Life Divine
::: "Divinisation itself does not mean the destruction of the human elements; it means taking them up, showing them the way to their own perfection, raising them by purification and perfection to their full power and Ananda and that means the raising of the whole of earthly life to its full power and Ananda.” Letters on Yoga
djinn ::: (Islam) an invisible spirit mentioned in the Koran and believed by Muslims to inhabit the earth and influence mankind by appearing in the form of humans or animals. djinns .
docketed ::: labelled, tagged, ticketed as with a list of contents and statement of particulars.
dogmas ::: prescribed doctrines proclaimed as unquestionably true by a particular group and authoritatively laid down.
dormitories ::: rooms containing a number of beds and serving as communal sleeping quarters.
double ::: 1. Composed of two like or unlike parts. 2. Twofold in character or meaning, dual.
dragon of the dark foundation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother, Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, Master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, — Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.” The Secret of the Veda
draw ::: 1. To cause to move in a given direction or to a given position, as by leading. 2. To bring towards oneself or itself, as by inherent force or influence; attract. 3. To cause to come by attracting; attract. 4. To cause to move in a particular direction by or as by a pulling force; pull; drag. 5. To get, take or obtain as from a source; to derive. 6. To bring, take, or pull out, as from a receptacle or source. 7. To draw a (or the) line (fig.) to determine or define the limit between two things or groups; in modern colloquial use (esp. with at), to lay down a definite limit of action beyond which one refuses to go. 8. To make, sketch (a picture or representation of someone or something) in lines or words; to design, trace out, delineate; depict; also, to mould, model. 9. To mark or lay out; trace. 10. To compose or write out in legal format. 11. To write out (a bill of exchange or promissory note). 12. To disembowel. 13. To move or pull so as to cover or uncover something. 14. To suck or take in (air, for example); inhale. 15. To extend, lengthen, prolong, protract. 16. To cause to move after or toward one by applying continuous force; drag. draws, drew, drawn, drawing, wide-drawn.
drawers ::: sliding, lidless horizontal compartments as in a piece of furniture, that may be drawn out horizontally in order to get access to them.
dual ::: 1. Composed of two usually like or complementary parts; double. 2. Having a two-fold, or double, character or nature. dual"s.
duality ::: the state or quality of being two or in two parts; dichotomy.
dumbly ::: in an inarticulate manner; mutely.
dusk ::: n. **1. The state or period of partial darkness between day and night; the dark part of twilight. 2. Partial darkness; shade; gloom. Dusk. adj. 3. Poetic. shady; gloomy. dusky.**
dweller ::: one who lives as a resident or inhabits a particular place.
"Each person follows in the world his own line of destiny which is determined by his own nature and actions — the meaning and necessity of what happens in a particular life cannot be understood except in the light of the whole course of many lives. But this can be seen by those who can get beyond the ordinary mind and feelings and see things as a whole, that even errors, misfortunes, calamities are steps in the journey, — the soul gathering experience as it passes through and beyond them until it is ripe for the transition which will carry it beyond these things to a higher consciousness and higher life.” Letters on Yoga*
earth ::: 1. The realm of mortal existence; the temporal world. 2. The softer, friable part of land; soil, especially productive soil. **Earth, earth"s, earth-beauty"s, earth-being"s, earth-beings, earth-bounds, earth-bride, earth-fact, earth-force, Earth-Goddess, earth-hearts, earth-habit"s, earth-heart, earth-instruments, earth-kind, earth-life, earth-light, earth-made, earth-matter"s, earth-mind, earth-mind"s, earth-myth, earth-nature, earth-nature"s, Earth-Nature"s, earth-nursed, earth-pain, Earth-plasm, earth-poise, earth-scene, earth-scene"s, earth-seat, earth-shapes, earth-stage, earth-stuff, earth-time, earth-time"s, earth-use, earth-vision, earth-ways, summer-earth.
earth-born ::: born on or sprung from the earth; of earthly origin; mortal, human.
earth-bound ::: limited to the earth or its surface.
earthen ::: worldly.
earthiness ::: fig. Grossly material, coarse, dull, unrefined.
earthly ::: 1. Terrestrial; not heavenly or divine. 2. Worldly. earthliness.
earthly life ::: Sri Aurobindo: "This earthly life need not be necessarily and for ever a wheel of half-joyous half-anguished effort; attainment may also be intended and the glory and joy of God made manifest upon earth.” The Life Divine
earth-Mother ::: 1. A female spirit or deity serving as a symbol of earth or of life and fertility. 2. The earth conceived of as the female principle of fertility and the source of all life. earth-mother"s.
earthward ::: towards the earth.
earthy ::: 1. Of, consisting of, or resembling earth. 2. Worldly; material; pertaining to the earth.
element ::: 1. A component or constituent of a whole. 2. One of the substances, usually earth, water, air, and fire, formerly regarded as constituting the material universe. 3. A natural habitat, sphere of activity, environment, etc. elements.
elements ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The first ripple or vibration in causal matter creates a new and exceedingly fine and pervasive condition of matter called Akasha or Ether; more complex motion evolves out of Ether a somewhat intenser condition which is called Vayu, Air; and so by ever more complex motion with increasing intensity of condition for result, yet three other matter-states are successively developed, Agni or Fire, Apah or Water and Prithvi or Earth.” *Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library
enact ::: to represent on or as on the stage; act the part of. enacts, enacted.
encyclopaedia ::: a book or set of books containing articles on various topics, usually in alphabetical arrangement, covering all branches of knowledge or, less commonly, all aspects of one subject.
enginery ::: skilful or artful contrivance.
enlighten ::: to give intellectual or spiritual light to; instruct; impart knowledge to. enlightened, enlightening, enlightenment.
ensemble ::: all the parts of something considered together and in relation to the whole.
entire ::: having no part excluded or left out; whole.
equal ::: adj. 1. As great as; the same as (often followed by to or with). 2. Having the same quantity, value, or measure as another. 3. Evenly proportioned or balanced. 4. Tranquil; equable; undisturbed. 5. Impartial; just; equitable. n. 6. One who is equal to another in any specified quality. v. **7. To become equal or level with. equalled.**
ether ::: 1. The regions of space beyond the earth"s atmosphere; the heavens. 2. The element believed in ancient and medieval civilizations to fill all space above the sphere of the moon and to compose the stars and planets. 3. A hypothetical medium formerly believed to permeate all space, and through which light and other electromagnetic radiation were thought to move. ether"s.
eudaemonised ::: made happy. In ethics, the view that the ultimate justification of virtuous activity is happiness. Virtuous activity may be conceived as a means to happiness, or well-being, or as partly constitutive of it.
::: "Even Science believes that one day death may be conquered by physical means and its reasonings are perfectly sound. There is no reason why the supramental Force should not do it. Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that there is no reason why they should not last.” Letters on Yoga
event ::: 1. Something that happens, or is regarded as happening; an occurrence, esp. one of some importance. 2. Something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time. Event, event"s, events, shape-events. ::: Event, divine
"Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence.” The Life Divine ::: "Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"Evolution is the one eternal dynamic law and hidden process of the earth-nature.” Essays Divine and Human
"Evolution takes place on the earth and therefore the earth is the proper field for progression. The beings of the other worlds do not progress from one world to another. They remain fixed to their own type.” Letters on Yoga
expert ::: adj. 1. Skilled through training or practice. n. 2. A person who has extensive skill or knowledge in a particular field. experts.
extremity ::: 1. The farthest or outermost region, point or section. 2. The greatest or most intense degree. extremities.
**"Faith in the heart is the obscure & often distorted reflection of a hidden knowledge.” Essays Divine and Human
farther
feature ::: a prominent or conspicuous part or characteristic.
fig. Hearts filled with despair; disillusionment; devastating sorrow, especially from disappointment or tragedy in love.
"Find the Guide secret within you or housed in an earthly body, hearken to his voice and follow always the way that he points. At the end is the Light that fails not, the Truth that deceives not, the Power that neither strays nor stumbles, the wide freedom, the ineffable Beatitude.” Essays Divine and Human
fine ::: 1. Of superior quality, skill, or appearance. 2. Superior or consummate in quality. 3. Exhibiting careful and delicate artistry. 4. Characterized by refinement or elegance. 5. Subtle or precise; refined. finer, fine-curved, fine-linked.
fissured ::: split open or apart; cleaved; separated, divided.
fitting ::: 1. Appropriate or proper; suitable. 2. Used with prefixed adverbs to denote an appropriate or inappropriate fit. 3. Of a manufactured article: Of the right measure or size; made to fit, accurate in fit, well or close-fitting. close-fitting, ill-fitting.
flank ::: a lateral part or side.
flash-images ::: photographic images produced by the bright artificial light thrown briefly upon a subject by a flashbulb. ::: thunder-flash. A thunderbolt.
flit ::: 1. To move lightly and swiftly; fly, dart, or skim along. 2. To flutter, as a bird. 3. To pass quickly, as time. flitting.
flutter ::: 1. To flap the wings rapidly or fly with flapping movements. 2. To move quickly in a nervous, restless, or excited fashion; flit. 3. Generally of the heart: to beat abnormally rapidly, esp. in a regular rhythm. 4. To wave, flap or toss about. 5. To move (a thing) in quick irregular motions. flutters, fluttered, fluttering, flutterest.
flux ::: 1. Constant or frequent change; fluctuation; movement. 2. A flowing or flow: Also used with reference to other forms of matter and energy that can be regarded as flowing, such as radiant energy, particles, etc.
fold (s) ::: v. 1. To envelope or clasp; enfold. 2. To bring (the wings) close to the body, as a bird on alighting. folding. *n. 3. The doubling of any flexible substance, as cloth; one part turned or bent and laid on another. Also fig. *4. A coil of a serpent, string, etc.
forced marches ::: marches that are longer than troops are accustomed to and maintained at a faster pace than usual, generally undertaken for a particular objective under emergency conditions.
force ::: n. 1. Strength; energy; power; intensity. 2. Fig. An agency, influence, or source of power likened to a physical force. Force, force"s, forces, Force-compelled, Conscious-Force, earth-force, God-Force, lion-forces, Mother-Force, Nature-force, Nature-Force, serpent-force, soul-force, Soul-Forces, world-force, World-Force, world-forces. *v. 3. To compel or cause (a person, group, etc.) to do something through effort, superior strength, etc.; coerce. 4. To propel or drive despite resistance. 5. To break open (a gate, door, etc.) *forces, forced, forcing.
"For each birth is a new start; it develops indeed from the past, but is not its mechanical continuation: rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the machinery of an evolutionary process.” The Life Divine
forefront ::: 1. The foremost part or area; or place; position of greatest importance or prominence. Also fig.
forego ::: to abstain from, go without, deny to oneself; to let go or pass, omit to take or use; to give up, part with, relinquish, renounce, resign. foregone.
forge ::: n. 1. A special fireplace, hearth, or furnace in which metal is heated before shaping. v. 2. To form (metal, for example) by heating in a forge and beating or hammering into shape. 3. To form or make, esp. by concentrated effort or energy; shape, fabricate, fashion, mould. 4. To imitate (handwriting, a signature, etc.) fraudulently; to counterfeit; to commit forgery. forged.
"For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is. We cannot, then, bid her the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. 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.” The Life Divine
"Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that there is no reason why they should not last.” Letters on Yoga
::: "For the inner knowledge comes from within and above (whether from the Divine in the heart or from the Self above) and for it to come, the pride of the mind and vital in the surface mental ideas and their insistence on them must go. One must know that one is ignorant before one can begin to know.” Letters on Yoga
"For the main business of the heart, its true function is love. It is our destined instrument of complete union and oneness; for to see oneness in the world by the understanding is not enough unless we also feel it with the heart and in the psychic being, and this means a delight in the One and in all existences in the world in him, a love of God and all beings. The heart"s faith and will in good are founded on a perception of the one Divine immanent in all things and leading the world.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
fortify ::: to impart physical strength or endurance to; invigorate. fortifying.
fountain ::: 1. The source or origin of anything. 2. A jet or stream of water made by artificial means to spout or rise from an opening or structure, as to afford water for use, to cool the air, or to serve for ornament. fountain"s, fountains.
fourfold ::: composed of four parts; comprising four parts or members.
free-love ::: the practice of sexual relationships without fidelity to a single partner or without formal obligations or legal ties.
frieze ::: the upper part of the wall of a room, below the cornice, esp. one that is decorated. friezes.
front ::: n. 1. That part or side that is forward, prominent, or most often seen or used. 2. Outward aspect or bearing as when dealing with a situation. 3. Demeanour or bearing, especially in the presence of danger or difficulty. 4. At a position before, in advance of, facing, or confronting; at the head of. 5. The most forward line of a combat force. 6. A position of leadership in a particular endeavour or field. front"s, fronts. v. 7. To look out on; face. 8. To meet face to face; in opposition; confront. fronts, fronted, fronting.
fruit ::: 1. The part of a plant that produces the seed, especially when eaten as food. 2. The result or consequence of an action or effort. 3. Result; outcome. fruits.
frustrate ::: prevent from accomplishing a purpose or fulfilling a desire; thwart. frustrated.
function ::: the action for which a person or thing is particularly equipped, fitted or employed.
fury ::: one of the avenging deities, dread goddesses with snakes twined in their hair, sent from Tartarus to avenge wrong and punish crime: in later accounts, three in number (Tisiphone, Megaera, Alecto). Hence, an avenging or tormenting infernal spirit. Fury"s.
galleries ::: long narrow passages sometimes serving as a means of access to other parts of a house; corridors.
gloom ::: total or partial darkness; dimness often used to describe depression or melancholy. gloom"s, glooms, gloomy.
glossary ::: a list of terms in a special subject, field, or area of usage, with accompanying definitions; a partial dictionary.
goddess ::: a female god or deity. Goddess, goddess", goddesses, Goddesses, Earth-Goddess, wind-goddess.
godhead ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . the Godhead is all that is universe and all that is in the universe and all that is more than the universe. The Gita lays stress first on his supracosmic existence. For otherwise the mind would miss its highest goal and remain turned towards the cosmic only or else attached to some partial experience of the Divine in the cosmos. It lays stress next on his universal existence in which all moves and acts. For that is the justification of the cosmic effort and that is the vast spiritual self-awareness in which the Godhead self-seen as the Time-Spirit does his universal works. Next it insists with a certain austere emphasis on the acceptance of the Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body. For he is the Immanent in all existences, and if the indwelling divinity is not recognised, not only will the divine meaning of individual existence be missed, the urge to our supreme spiritual possibilities deprived of its greatest force, but the relations of soul with soul in humanity will be left petty, limited and egoistic. Finally, it insists at great length on the divine manifestation in all things in the universe and affirms the derivation of all that is from the nature, power and light of the one Godhead.” *Essays on the Gita
"God speaks to the heart when the brain cannot understand him.” *Essays Divine and Human
good ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Below [the ethical] hides that secret of good in all things which the human being approaches and tries to deliver partially through ethical instinct and ethical idea; above is hidden the eternal Good which exceeds our partial and fragmentary ethical conceptions.” *Social and Political Thought
grammared ::: classified, as the different parts of speech in a language.
grammar ::: the study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences.
grapple ::: n. **1. A struggle or contest in which the participants attempt to clutch or grip each other. v. 2. To try to deal with a problem, etc. grappled.**
grave ::: 1. An excavation made in the earth in which to bury a dead body. 2. Any place that becomes the receptacle of what is dead, lost, or past.
gravitation ::: the force of attraction between all masses in the universe; especially the attraction of the earth"s mass for bodies near its surface.
ground ::: 1. Base; foundation. 2. Earth or soil. 3. Any material surface, lit. and fig. 4. Background. 5. An area of land designated for a particular purpose, lit. and fig. **6. The foundation for an argument, a belief, or an action; a basis. soul-ground.**
growl ::: 1. (of animals, esp. when hostile) to utter (sounds) in a low inarticulate manner. 2. To make a deep rough sound, as of thunder. growls, growled.
guarantee ::: something that assures a particular outcome or condition.
gulf ::: 1. A portion of an ocean or sea partly enclosed by land. 2. A deep, wide chasm; an abyss. 3. Any wide separation. gulfs.
habit ::: 1. A recurrent, often unconscious pattern of behaviour that is acquired through frequent repetition. 2. A dominant or regular disposition or tendency; prevailing character or quality. habit"s, habits, earth-habit"s, Nature-habit"s.
half-cuts ::: partial or incomplete acts to shorten, lessen, curtail, or reduce by, or as by cutting.
handle ::: n. 1. A part that is designed to be held or operated with the hand. v. 2. To deal with or have responsibility for; conduct.
hard-hearted ::: unsympathetic; inexorable; cruel; pitiless.
harnessed ::: brought under conditions for effective use; gained control over for a particular end.
having a specified kind of heart, lit. and fig. (now used only in combination). dim-hearted, Rich-hearted, sensuous-hearted, swift-hearted. See also hard-hearted, iron-hearted, stone-hearted.
haze ::: 1. An aggregation in the atmosphere of very fine, widely dispersed, solid or liquid particles, or both, giving the air an opalescent appearance that subdues colours. 2. Reduced visibility in the air as a result of condensed water vapour, dust, etc., in the atmosphere. 3. Vagueness of obscurity, as of the mind or perception; confused or vague thoughts, feelings, etc.
headquarters ::: a centre of operations.
::: heart-beats
heart-bound
heart-cords, heart-close, heart-disclosing, heart-disturbing, heart-plan, heart-pulse, heart-seeking, cave-heart, child-heart, child-heart"s, dim-heart, earth-heart, earth-hearts, fire-heart"s, lotus-heart, sea-heart, world-heart.
-hearted
hearth-stone ::: a stone forming a hearth.
hearth ::: the floor of a fireplace, usually extending into a room and paved with brick, flagstone, or cement.
Heart-lotus — emotional centre. The psychic is behind it.
heart ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The heart in Vedic psychology is not restricted to the seat of the emotions; it includes all that large tract of spontaneous mentality, nearest to the subconscient in us, out of which rise the sensations, emotions, instincts, impulses and all those intuitions and inspirations that travel through these agencies before they arrive at form in the intelligence.” *The Secret of the Veda
heart-strings
heart-throb ::: 1. A rapid beat or pulsation of the heart. **2. **Fig. Passionate or sentimental emotion.
heaven ::: 1. Any of the places in or beyond the sky conceived of as domains of divine beings in various religions. 2. The sky or universe as seen from the earth; the firmament. 3.* Fig. A condition or place of great happiness, delight, or pleasure. *Heaven, heaven"s, Heaven"s, heavens, heaven-air, heaven-bare, heaven-bliss, heaven-born, heaven-bound, heaven-fire, heaven-hints, heaven-leap, Heaven-light, heaven-lights, Heaven-nature"s, heaven-nymphs, heaven-pillaring, heaven-pleased, heaven-rapture"s, heaven-sent, heaven-sentience, heaven-surrounded, heaven-truth, heaven-use, heaven-worlds.
hieroglyph ::: designating or pertaining to a pictographic script, particularly that of the ancient Egyptians, in which many of the symbols are conventionalized, recognizable pictures of the things represented. hieroglyphs.
hinge ::: a jointed or flexible device that allows the turning or pivoting of a part, such as a door or lid, on a stationary frame that allows the turning or pivoting of a part, such as a door or lid, on a stationary frame.
ignorance ::: the state or fact of being ignorant; lack of knowledge, learning, information. Ignorance, ignorance"s, Ignorance"s, ignorance", world-ignorance, World-Ignorance.
Sri Aurobindo: "Ignorance is the absence of the divine eye of perception which gives us the sight of the supramental Truth; it is the non-perceiving principle in our consciousness as opposed to the truth-perceiving conscious vision and knowledge.” *The Life Divine
"Ignorance is the consciousness of being in the successions of Time, divided in its knowledge by dwelling in the moment, divided in its conception of self-being by dwelling in the divisions of Space and the relations of circumstance, self-prisoned in the multiple working of the unity. It is called the Ignorance because it has put behind it the knowledge of unity and by that very fact is unable to know truly or completely either itself or the world, either the transcendent or the universal reality.” The Life Divine
"Ignorance means Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the Supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth, — truth of being, truth of divine consciousness, truth of force and action, truth of Ananda. As a result, instead of a world of integral truth and divine harmony created in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a world founded on the part truths of an inferior cosmic Intelligence in which all is half-truth, half-error. . . . All in the consciousness of this creation is either limited or else perverted by separation from the integral Light; even the Truth it perceives is only a half-knowledge. Therefore it is called the Ignorance.” The Mother
". . . all ignorance is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledge . . . .”The Life Divine
"This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence of the supreme Truth is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts infallibly and the steps of the Ignorance itself are guided even when they seem to stumble; for what we call the Ignorance is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"Knowledge is no doubt the knowledge of the One, the realisation of the Being; Ignorance is a self-oblivion of Being, the experience of separateness in the multiplicity and a dwelling or circling in the ill-understood maze of becomings: . . . .” The Life Divine*
"I have started writing about doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the ‘doubt" whether any amount of writing or of anything else can ever persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. In the first place, to write adequately would mean anything from 60 to 600 pages, but not even 6000 convincing pages would convince doubt. For doubt exists for its own sake; its very function is to doubt always and, even when convinced, to go on doubting still; it is only to persuade its entertainer to give it board and lodging that it pretends to be an honest truth-seeker. This is a lesson I have learnt from the experience both of my own mind and of the minds of others; the only way to get rid of doubt is to take discrimination as one"s detector of truth and falsehood and under its guard to open the door freely and courageously to experience.” Letters on Yoga
impartial ::: not partial or biased; unprejudiced; fair. impartially.
impart ::: to grant a share of; bestow. imparts, imparting.
impress ::: a distinctive character or effect imparted.
inarticulate ::: 1. Lacking the ability to express oneself, esp. in clear and effective speech. 2. Not articulate; not uttered or emitted with expressive or intelligible modulations.
included ::: being part of the whole; contained; covered.
inconscient ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come in collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass.” *Letters on Savitri
". . . in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in Itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient — the Inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this universe — or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat.” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it — ‘an inert Soul with a somnambulist Force".” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient is the last resort of the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga
"The body, we have said, is a creation of the Inconscient and itself inconscient or at least subconscient in parts of itself and much of its hidden action; but what we call the Inconscient is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga :::
"The Inconscient is a sleep or a prison, the conscient a round of strivings without ultimate issue or the wanderings of a dream: we must wake into the superconscious where all darkness of night and half-lights cease in the self-luminous bliss of the Eternal.” The Life Divine
"Men have not learnt yet to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built, or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built; they think that these words are only abstract metaphysical jargon flung about by the philosophers in their clouds or laboured out in long and wearisome books like The Life Divine. Letters on Savitri :::
"Is it really a fact that even the ordinary reader would not be able to see any difference between the Inconscient and Ignorance unless the difference is expressly explained to him? This is not a matter of philosophical terminology but of common sense and the understood meaning of English words. One would say ‘even the inconscient stone" but one would not say, as one might of a child, ‘the ignorant stone". One must first be conscious before one can be ignorant. What is true is that the ordinary reader might not be familiar with the philosophical content of the word Inconscient and might not be familiar with the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. But I don"t see how I can acquaint him with these things in a single line, even with the most. illuminating image or symbol. He might wonder, if he were Johnsonianly minded, how an Inconscient could be teased or how it could wake Ignorance. I am afraid, in the absence of a miracle of inspired poetical exegesis flashing through my mind, he will have to be left wondering.” Letters on Savitri
**inconscient, Inconscient"s.**
indifference ::: absence of feeling, interest or concern; apathy; impartiality. world-indifference.
indifferent ::: 1. Having no marked feeling for or against. 2. Without interest or feeling in regard to something; unbiased, impartial, neutral; fair; unconcerned, unmoved, apathetic. 3. Being neither good nor bad; neutral.
indivisible ::: not separable into parts; unable to be divided. Indivisible.
indoctrinated ::: instructed in a doctrine, principle, ideology, etc., esp. imbued with a specific partisan or biased belief or point of view.
"In every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter there lives hidden and works unknown all the omniscience of the Eternal and all the omnipotence of the Infinite.” Essays Divine and Human*
inform ::: to give form or character to; impart; imbue with a quality or an essence.
inmost ::: 1. Farthest within; innermost. 2. Most intimate or secret.
inner ::: 1. Of or pertaining to the mind or spirit; mental; spiritual. 2. Situated within or farther within; interior. 3. Not obvious; hidden or obscure.
"Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can only be directly experienced (apart from its vrttis in the surface mind such as philosophy, poetry, idealism, etc.) by sadhana, by breaking down the habit of being on the surface and by going deeper within.” Letters on Yoga
inquisition ::: an official investigation, esp. one of a political or religious nature, characterised by a lack of regard for individual rights, prejudice on the part of the examiners, and recklessly cruel punishments.
inseparable ::: 1. Incapable of being separated or divided. 2. Impossible to separate or part.
instant ::: n. 1. A particular moment or point in time. 2. An infinitesimal or very short space of time; a moment. adj. 3. Succeeding without any interval of time; prompt; immediate. instant"s.
institutes ::: societies or organizations for carrying on a particular work.
institutions ::: organizations, establishments, foundations, societies, or the like, devoted to the promotion of a particular cause or program.
instrument ::: 1. A means by which something is affected or done; agency. 2. A person used by an agency for a particular purpose. instruments, instruments", instrument-personality.
::: "Intellect is part of Mind and an instrument of half-truth like the rest of the Mind.” Letters on Yoga
"Intellectual activities are not part of the inner being — the intellect is the outer mind.” Letters on Yoga
". . . in the Veda, Lord of the hosts of delight; in later mythology, the Gandharvas are musicians of heaven, ‘beautiful, brave and melodious beings, the artists, musicians, poets and shining warriors of heaven". . . .” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works ::: *Gandharvas.
intimate ::: n. 1. A close friend or confidant. intimates. adj. 2. Marked by close acquaintance, association, or familiarity. 3. Of or relating to the essential part or nature of something; intrinsic. 4. Very private; closely personal. 5. Familiarly associated. adv. intimately.
intricate ::: 1. Having many interrelated parts or facets; entangled or involved. 2. Complex; complicated; hard to understand, work, or make. intricacy.
intuition ::: direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process. intuition"s, intuitions, half-intuition.
Sri Aurobindo: "Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity, not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude.” *The Life Divine
"Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind-substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of ``stable lightnings"". When this original or native Intuition begins to descend into us in answer to an ascension of our consciousness to its level or as a result of our finding of a clear way of communication with it, it may continue to come as a play of lightning-flashes, isolated or in constant action; but at this stage the judgment of reason becomes quite inapplicable, it can only act as an observer or registrar understanding or recording the more luminous intimations, judgments and discriminations of the higher power. To complete or verify an isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its application, its limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another completing intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of putting all in place. For once the process of the change has begun, a complete transmutation of the stuff and activities of the mind into the substance, form and power of Intuition is imperative; until then, so long as the process of consciousness depends upon the lower intelligence serving or helping out or using the intuition, the result can only be a survival of the mixed Knowledge-Ignorance uplifted or relieved by a higher light and force acting in its parts of Knowledge.” *The Life Divine
"I use the word ‘intuition" for want of a better. In truth, it is a makeshift and inadequate to the connotation demanded of it. The same has to be said of the word ‘consciousness" and many others which our poverty compels us to extend illegitimately in their significance.” *The Life Divine - Sri Aurobindo"s footnote.
"For intuition is an edge of light thrust out by the secret Supermind. . . .” The Life Divine
". . . intuition is born of a direct awareness while intellect is an indirect action of a knowledge which constructs itself with difficulty out of the unknown from signs and indications and gathered data.” The Life Divine
"Intuition is above illumined Mind which is simply higher Mind raised to a great luminosity and more open to modified forms of intuition and inspiration.” Letters on Yoga
"Intuition sees the truth of things by a direct inner contact, not like the ordinary mental intelligence by seeking and reaching out for indirect contacts through the senses etc. But the limitation of the Intuition as compared with the supermind is that it sees things by flashes, point by point, not as a whole. Also in coming into the mind it gets mixed with the mental movement and forms a kind of intuitive mind activity which is not the pure truth, but something in between the higher Truth and the mental seeking. It can lead the consciousness through a sort of transitional stage and that is practically its function.” Letters on Yoga
investigate ::: to search out and examine the particulars of in an attempt to learn the facts about something hidden, unique, or complex.
iron-hearted ::: cruel; heartless; unfeeling.
"It [death] has no separate existence by itself, it is only a result of the principle of decay in the body and that principle is there already — it is part of the physical nature. At the same time it is not inevitable; if one could have the necessary consciousness and force, decay and death is not inevitable. But to bring that consciousness and force into the whole of the material nature is the most difficult thing of all — at any rate, in such a way as to annul the decay principle.” Letters on Yoga
"It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine.” On Himself
::: **"It is therefore necessary from the beginning to understand and accept the arduous difficulty of the path and to feel the need of a faith which to the intellect may seem blind, but yet is wiser than our reasoning intelligence. For this faith is a support from above; it is the brilliant shadow thrown by a secret light that exceeds the intellect and its data; it is the heart of a hidden knowledge that is not at the mercy of immediate appearances.” The Synthesis of Yoga
jar ::: a wide-mouthed container that is usually cylindrical, made of glass or earthenware, and without handles. Also fig. **jars.**
::: "Kali, the Mother of all and destroyer of all, is the Shakti that works in secret in the heart of humanity. . . .” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
keyed ::: adj. **1. Secured, fastened, or fitted with a key or something compared to a key, with its power of locking or unlocking; opening up or closing, the way to something. v. 2.** Regulated or adjusted (actions, thoughts, speech, etc.) to a particular state or activity; brought into conformity.
kind ::: 1. A class or group of individual objects, people, animals, etc., of the same nature or character, or classified together because they have traits in common; category. 2. Nature or character as determining likeness or difference between things. 3. One"s family, clan, kin, or kinsfolk. earth-kind, god-kind, self-kind.
kindle ::: 1. To start (a fire); cause (a flame, blaze, etc.) to begin burning; often fig. 2. To light up, illuminate, or make bright. 3. To arouse or be aroused; call forth (emotions, feelings, and responses); 4. To begin to burn as combustible matter, a light, fire, or flame. kindles, kindled, kindling.
king ::: 1. A male sovereign. 2. One that is supreme or preeminent in a particular group, category, or sphere. 3. Fig. One who or that which is preeminent in a particular category or group or field. king"s, kings, Kings, king-children, king-sages.
"Krishna as a godhead is the Lord of Ananda, Love and Bhakti; as an incarnation, he manifests the union of wisdom (Jnana) and works and leads the earth-evolution through this towards union with the Divine by Ananda, Love and Bhakti.” Letters on Yoga
lacuna ::: an empty space or a missing part; a gap.
launched ::: started (a person, project, etc.) off on a course.
::: "Law is nothing but a mode or rule of action; it is called in our philosophy not Law but Dharma, holding together, it is that by which the action of the universe, the action of its parts, the action of the individual is held together.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
leap ::: n. 1. An abrupt transition. leaps. v. 2. To spring or bound suddenly upward from or as if from the ground; jump. Also fig. 3. Trans. To spring over; to pass from one side to the other by leaping. Also in phr. to leap bounds (lit. and fig.). 4*.* Fig. To move or pass quickly or abruptly from one condition or subject to another. 5. To beat rapidly as the heart. leaps, leaped, leapt, leaping, arrow-leaps, foam-leap, heaven-leap, lightning-leaps.**
leave ::: 1. To go away from, depart from permanently, quit (a place, person, or thing). 2. To let remain or have remaining behind after going, disappearing, ceasing, etc. 3. To go without taking. 4. To permit, allow. 5. To let (someone) remain in a position to do something without interference. 6. To give in charge; entrust. 7. Have as a result or residue. leaves. (All other references to leaves are as pl. of leaf.)
lend ::: 1. To give, grant or add (a quality) to. 2. To contribute or impart. 3. To give temporarily; let have for a limited time. lends, lent, lending.
lilt ::: articulate in a very careful and rhythmic way, lit.
limb ::: 1. One of the jointed appendages of an animal, such as an arm, leg, wing, etc. 2. A branch or part. Also fig. limbs.
lodge ::: 1. To take up residence in. 2. To bring or send into a particular place or position. 3. To house or contain. 4. To be fixed; implanted. lodged.
lore ::: 1. The body of knowledge, esp. of a traditional, anecdotal, or popular nature, on a particular subject. 2. Knowledge acquired through education or experience.
lotus ::: any aquatic plant of the genus Nelumbo, of the water lily family, having shieldlike leaves and showy, solitary flowers usually projecting above the water. lotuses, lotus-bud, lotus-cup, lotus-heart, lotus-leaf, lotus-pools, lotus-throne.
lotus (as chakra) ::: Sri Aurobindo: "This arrangement of the psychic body is reproduced in the physical with the spinal column as a rod and the ganglionic centres as the chakras which rise up from the bottom of the column, where the lowest is attached, to the brain and find their summit in the brahmarandhra at the top of the skull. These chakras or lotuses, however, are in physical man closed or only partly open, with the consequence that only such powers and only so much of them are active in him as are sufficient for his ordinary physical life, and so much mind and soul only is at play as will accord with its need. This is the real reason, looked at from the mechanical point of view, why the embodied soul seems so dependent on the bodily and nervous life, — though the dependence is neither so complete nor so real as it seems. The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and slumbering like a snake, — therefore it is called the kundalinî sakti, — in the lowest of the chakras, in the mûlâdhâra.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
lovely ::: 1. Having a beauty that appeals to the heart or mind as well as to the eye; charmingly or exquisitely beautiful. 2. Of a great spiritual beauty. lovelier, loveliness.
magic ::: n. 1. The art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature. 2. Any extraordinary or mystical influence, charm, power, etc. magic"s. adj. 3. Of, pertaining to, or due to magic. magical, magically.
n. **1. A rigid structure formed of relatively slender pieces, joined as to surround sizeable empty spaces. 2. Form, constitution, or structure in general; system; order. 3. Applied to the heaven, earth, etc. regarded as a structure. 4. A body, esp. the human body; physique. 5. A border or case for enclosing a picture, mirror, etc. ::: frames, world-frame. v. 6. To contrive, devise, or compose, as a plan, law, or poem. 7. To fashion or shape. 8. To shape or adapt to a particular purpose. framed, framing, self-framed.**
n. 1. A small part broken off or detached from any larger whole. 2. An incomplete and unfinished piece; portion. 3. An incomplete or isolated portion; a bit. fragments, fragment-being, fragment-mirrorings. *v. 4. To break or separate (something) into fragments. *fragmented.
n. 1. The body or outward appearance of a person or an animal considered separately from the face or head; figure. 2. An object, person, or part of the human body or the appearance of any of these, esp. as seen in nature. 3. The mode in which a thing exists, acts, or manifests itself; kind. 4. The structure, pattern, organization or essential nature of anything. Form, form"s, forms, Forms, form-bound, form-discoveries, form-maker, form-smitten, thought-forms. v. 5. To give form to; shape. 6.* *To take or assume form; to be formed or produced. forms, formed, many-formed, sense-formed. ::: re-form.** To form a second time, form over again.
n. 1. The horizontal line or plane in which anything is situated, with regard to its elevation. 2. A plane or position in a graded scale; position in a hierarchy. 3. On the same plane, on an equality (with). levels. *adj. 4.** *Having a surface without slope, tilt in which no part is higher or lower than another. 5. Height, position, strength, rank, plane, etc. Also fig. v. 6. Fig. To bring persons or things to an equal level; equalize. levelled, all-levelling.**
n. 1. The lower interior part of a ship or airplane where cargo is stored. 2. The act or a means of grasping. v. 3. To have or keep in the hand; keep fast; grasp. 4. To bear, sustain, or support, as with the hands or arms, or by any other means. 5. To contain or be capable of containing. 6. To keep from departing or getting away. 7. To withstand stress, pressure, or opposition; to maintain occupation of by force or coercion. 8. To have in its power, possess, affect, occupy. 9. To engage in; preside over; carry on. 10. To have or keep in the mind; think or believe. 11. To regard or consider. 12. To keep or maintain a grasp on something. 13. To maintain one"s position against opposition; continue in resistance. 14. To agree or side (usually followed by with). holds, holding. ::: hold back. 15. a. To retain possession of; keep back. b. To refrain from revealing; withhold. c. To refrain from participating or engaging in some activity.
n. 1. The make or form of anything. 2. Manner or mode; way. 3. A kind; sort. fashions. *v. 3. To give a particular shape or form to; make. fashions, *fashioned, fashioning, new-fashions.
n. 1. The point, axis, or pivot about which a body rotates. 2. A point, area, or part that is approximately in the middle of a larger area or volume. 3. A person or thing that is a focus of interest or attention. 4. A point of origin. centre"s, centres. v. 5. To focus or bring together. 6. To move towards, mark, put, or be concentrated at or as at a centre. 7. centred. Brought together to a centre, concentrated.
"Ordinarily we mean by it [consciousness] our first obvious idea of a mental waking consciousness such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of his bodily existence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived of his physical and superficial methods of sensation. In this sense it is plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it. But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our physical being. Not only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights and profundities which no man has yet measured or fathomed.” Letters on Yoga
::: "Our incapacity does not matter — there is no human being who is not in his parts of nature incapable — but the Divine Force also is there. If one puts one"s trust in that, incapacity will be changed into capacity. Difficulty and struggle themselves then become a means towards the achievement.” Letters on Yoga
"Over each grade of our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations, desires, external life-activities of our vital nature, a physical being, a being of the body which expresses something of itself in the instincts, habits, formulated activities of our physical nature. These beings or part selves of the self in us are powers of the Spirit and therefore not limited by their temporary expression, for what is thus formulated is only a fragment of its possibilities; but the expression creates a temporary mental, vital or physical personality which grows and develops even as the psychic being or soul-personality grows and develops within us.” The Life Divine
"Perishable and transitory delight is always the symbol of the eternal Ananda, revealed and rapidly concealed, which seeks by increasing recurrence to attach itself to some typal form of experience in material consciousness. When the particular form has been perfected to express God in the type, its delight will no longer be perishable but an eternally recurrent possession of mental beings in matter manifest in their periods & often in their moments of felicity.” Essays Divine and Human*
pulsations of the heart. Fig. Emotions or feelings. heart-beats".
something that actually exists; reality; truth. facts, dream-fact, earth-fact, world-fact.
*(Sri Aurobindo: "And finally all is lifted up and taken into the supermind and made a part of the infinitely luminous consciousness, knowledge and experience of the supramental being, the Vijnana Purusha.” The Synthesis of Yoga*) ::: Angel of the House. The guardian spirit of the home.
Sri Aurobindo: "Beauty is the special divine Manifestation in the physical as Truth is in the Mind, Love in the heart, Power in the vital.” *The Future Poetry
Sri Aurobindo: " . . . Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. The Synthesis of Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "Emotion itself is not a bad thing; it is a necessary part of the nature, and psychic emotion is one of the most powerful helps to the sadhana. Psychic emotion, bringing tears of love for the Divine or tears of Ananda, ought not to be suppressed: . . . .” Letters on Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "Experience is a word that covers almost all the happenings in yoga; only when something gets settled, then it is no longer an experience but part of the siddhi; e.g. peace when it comes and goes is an experience — when it is settled and goes no more it is a siddhi.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions. We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming forward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations, partial ideas. We talk of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, collectivism and individualism, imperialism and nationalism, the State and the commune, capitalism and labour; we advance hasty generalisations and make absolute systems which are positively announced today only to be abandoned perforce tomorrow; we espouse causes and ardent enthusiasms whose triumph turns to an early disillusionment and then forsake them for others, perhaps for those that we have taken so much trouble to destroy. For a whole century mankind thirsts and battles after liberty and earns it with a bitter expense of toil, tears and blood; the century that enjoys without having fought for it turns away as from a puerile illusion and is ready to renounce the depreciated gain as the price of some new good. And all this happens because our whole thought and action with regard to our collective life is shallow and empirical; it does not seek for, it does not base itself on a firm, profound and complete knowledge. The moral is not the vanity of human life, of its ardours and enthusiasms and of the ideals it pursues, but the necessity of a wiser, larger, more patient search after its true law and aim.” *The Human Cycle etc.
Sri Aurobindo: "Intellectual activities are not part of the inner being – the intellect is the outer mind.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "It could be affirmed as a consequence that there is one all-pervading Life or dynamic energy — the material aspect being only its outermost movement — that creates all these forms of the physical universe, Life imperishable and eternal which, even if the whole figure of the universe were quite abolished, would itself still go on existing and be capable of producing a new universe in its place, must indeed, unless it be held back in a state of rest by some higher Power or hold itself back, inevitably go on creating. In that case Life is nothing else than the Force that builds and maintains and destroys forms in the world; it is Life that manifests itself in the form of the earth as much as in the plant that grows upon the earth and the animals that support their existence by devouring the life-force of the plant or of each other. All existence here is a universal Life that takes form of Matter. It might for that purpose hide life-process in physical process before it emerges as submental sensitivity and mentalised vitality, but still it would be throughout the same creative Life-principle.” *The Life Divine
"Sri Aurobindo: "It has been held that ecstasy is a lower and transient passage, the peace of the Supreme is the supreme realisation, the consummate abiding experience. This may be true on the spiritual-mind plane: there the first ecstasy felt is indeed a spiritual rapture, but it can be and is very usually mingled with a supreme happiness of the vital parts taken up by the Spirit; there is an exaltation, exultation, excitement, a highest intensity of the joy of the heart and the pure inner soul-sensation that can be a splendid passage or an uplifting force but is not the ultimate permanent foundation. But in the highest ascents of the spiritual bliss there is not this vehement exaltation and excitement; there is instead an illimitable intensity of participation in an eternal ecstasy which is founded on the eternal Existence and therefore on a beatific tranquillity of eternal peace. Peace and ecstasy cease to be different and become one. The Supermind, reconciling and fusing all differences as well as all contradictions, brings out this unity; a wide calm and a deep delight of all-existence are among its first steps of self-realisation, but this calm and this delight rise together, as one state, into an increasing intensity and culminate in the eternal ecstasy, the bliss that is the Infinite.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Life itself here [on earth] is Being at labour in Matter to express itself in terms of conscious force; human life is the human being at labour to impress himself on the material world with the greatest possible force and intensity and extension.” *Social and Political Thought
Sri Aurobindo: "Matter, body is only a massed motion of force of conscious being employed as a starting-point for the variable relations of consciousness working through its power of sense.” *Essays on the Gita
*Sri Aurobindo: "Pleasure, joy and delight, as man uses the words, are limited and occasional movements which depend on certain habitual causes and emerge, like their opposites pain and grief which are equally limited and occasional movements, from a background other than themselves. Delight of being is universal, illimitable and self-existent, not dependent on particular causes, the background of all backgrounds, from which pleasure, pain and other more neutral experiences emerge. When delight of being seeks to realise itself as delight of becoming, it moves in the movement of force and itself takes different forms of movement of which pleasure and pain are positive and negative currents.” The Life Divine*
::: Sri Aurobindo: "Spiritual force has its own concreteness; it can take a form (like a stream, for instance) of which one is aware and can send it quite concretely on whatever object one chooses. This is a statement of fact about the power inherent in spiritual consciousness. But there is also such a thing as a willed use of any subtle force — it may be spiritual, mental or vital — to secure a particular result at some point in the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind-waves, thought-currents, waves of emotion, — for example, anger, sorrow, etc., — which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all, they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can feel them coming and invading him.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "the black dragon of the Inconscience sustains with its vast wings and its back of darkness the whole structure of the material universe; its energies unroll the flux of things, its obscure intimations seem to be the starting-point of consciousness itself and the source of all life-impulse.” The Life Divine ::: **Unused, guarded beneath Night"s dragon paws,**
Sri Aurobindo: "The cosmic consciousness is that of the universe, of the cosmic spirit and cosmic Nature with all the beings and forces within it. All that is as much conscious as a whole as the individual separately is, though in a different way. The consciousness of the individual is part of this, but a part feeling itself as a separate being. Yet all the time most of what he is comes into him from the cosmic consciousness. But there is a wall of separative ignorance between. Once it breaks down he becomes aware of the cosmic Self, of the consciousness of the cosmic Nature, of the forces playing in it, etc. He feels all that as he now feels physical things and impacts. He finds it all to be one with his larger or universal self.” *Letters on Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "The earth is a material field of evolution. Mind and life, supermind, Sachchidananda are in principle involved there in the earth-consciousness; but only Matter is at first organized; then life descends from the life plane and gives shape and organization and activity to the life principle in Matter, creates the plant and animal; then mind descends from the mind plane, creating man. Now supermind is to descend so as to create a supramental race.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "The first is the discovery of the soul, not the outer soul of thought and emotion and desire, but the secret psychic entity, the divine element within us. When that becomes dominant over the nature, when we are consciously the soul and when mind, life and body take their true place as its instruments, we are aware of a guide within that knows the truth, the good, the true delight and beauty of existence, controls heart and intellect by its luminous law and leads our life and being towards spiritual completeness.” *The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the doors of the spirit.” The Human Cycle etc.*
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no ignorance that is not part of the Cosmic Ignorance, only in the individual it becomes a limited formation and movement, while the Cosmic Ignorance is the whole movement of world consciousness separated from the supreme Truth and acting in an inferior motion in which the Truth is perverted, diminished, mixed and clouded with falsehood and error.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Yet all the time the universal forces are pouring into him without his knowing it. He is aware only of thoughts, feelings, etc., that rise to the surface and these he takes for his own. Really they come from outside in mind waves, vital waves, waves of feeling and sensation, etc., which take particular form in him and rise to the surface after they have got inside. But they do not get into his body at once. He carries about with him an environmental consciousness (called by the Theosophists the Aura) into which they first enter. If you can become conscious of this environmental self of yours, then you can catch the thought, passion, suggestion or force of illness and prevent it from entering into you. If things in you are thrown out, they often do not go altogether but take refuge in this environmental atmosphere and from there they try to get in again. Or they go to a distance outside but linger on the outskirts or even perhaps far off, waiting till they get an opportunity to attempt entrance.” *Letters on Yoga
::: *"Stevenson has a striking passage in "Kidnapped” where the hero notes that his fear is felt primarily not in the heart but the stomach.” Letters on Yoga
Temporary possession of people by vital beings who sometimes pretend to be departed relatives, etc.
The Apsaras then are the divine Hetairae of Paradise, beautiful singers and actresses whose beauty and art relieve the arduous and world-long struggle of the Gods against the forces that tend towards disruption by the Titans who would restore Matter to its original atomic condition or of dissolution by the sages and hermits who would make phenomena dissolve prematurely into the One who is above phenomena. They rose from the Ocean, says Valmiki, seeking who should choose them as brides, but neither the Gods nor the Titans accepted them, therefore are they said to be common or universal. The Harmony of Virtue
"The Avatar does not come as a thaumaturgic magician, but as the divine leader of humanity and the exemplar of a divine humanity. Even human sorrow and physical suffering he must assume and use so as to show, first, how that suffering may be a means of redemption, — as did Christ, — secondly, to show how, having been assumed by the divine soul in the human nature, it can also be overcome in the same nature, — as did Buddha. The rationalist who would have cried to Christ, ‘If thou art the Son of God, come down from the cross," or points out sagely that the Avatar was not divine because he died and died too by disease, — as a dog dieth, — knows not what he is saying: for he has missed the root of the whole matter. Even, the Avatar of sorrow and suffering must come before there can be the Avatar of divine joy; the human limitation must be assumed in order to show how it can be overcome; and the way and the extent of the overcoming, whether internal only or external also, depends upon the stage of the human advance; it must not be done by a non-human miracle.” Essays on the Gita
"The body is not only the necessary outer instrument of the physical part of action, but for the purposes of this life a base or pedestal also for all inner action.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"The child (when it does not mean the psychic being) is usually the symbol of something new-born in some part of the consciousness.” Letters on Yoga
"The colours of the lotuses and the numbers of petals are respectively, from bottom to top: — (1) the Muladhara or physical consciousness centre, four petals, red; (2) the abdominal centre, six petals, deep purple red; (3) the navel centre, ten petals, violet; (4) the heart centre, twelve petals, golden pink; (5) the throat centre, sixteen petals, grey; (6) the forehead centre between the eye-brows, two petals, white; (7) the thousand-petalled lotus above the head, blue with gold light around. The functions are, according to our yoga, — (1) commanding the physical consciousness and the subconscient; (2) commanding the small vital movements, the little greeds, lusts, desires, the small sense-movements; (3) commanding the larger life-forces and the passions and larger desire-movements; (4) commanding the higher emotional being with the psychic deep behind it; (5) commanding expression and all externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces; (6) commanding thought, will, vision; (7) commanding the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and opening upwards to the intuition and overmind. The seventh is sometimes or by some identified with the brain, but that is an error — the brain is only a channel of communication situated between the thousand-petalled and the forehead centre. The former is sometimes called the void centre, sunya , either because it is not in the body, but in the apparent void above or because rising above the head one enters first into the silence of the self or spiritual being.” Letters on Yoga*
"The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one"s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one"s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one"s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces — for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness — and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in ::: —the nature.” Letters on Yoga*
::: "The Divine is always in the inner heart and does not leave it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The earth is a conscious being and the world is only the form it takes to manifest.” Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume 1*
"The elementary state of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and expansion, some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects. Material Force modifying its first ethereal status assumes a second, called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is contact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces. A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided by a third self-modification of the primitive Force of which the principle of light, electricity, fire and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by diffusion and a first medium of permanent attractions and repulsions, termed picturesquely water or the liquid state, and a fifth of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements.” The Life Divine*
"The heart is the centre of the being and commands the rest, as the psychic being or caitya purusa is there. It is only in that sense that all flows from it, for it is the psychic being who each time creates a new mind, vital and body for himself.” *Letters on Yoga
::: "The heart is the centre of the emotional being and the emotions are vital movements. When the heart is purified, the vital emotions change into psychic feelings or else psychicised vital movements.” Letters on Yoga
". . . the heart of man is nearer to the Truth than his intelligence.” *The Renaissance in India
::: "The heart spoken of by the Upanishads corresponds with the physical cardiac centre; it is the hrdpadma of the Tantriks. As a subtle centre, cakra , it is supposed to have its apex on the spine and to broaden out in front. Exactly where in this area one or another feels it does not matter much; to feel it there and be guided by it is the main thing.” *Letters on Yoga
the horny sheath covering the toes or lower part of the foot of a mammal, such as a horse, ox, or deer. hoof-mark.
"The Idea is not a reflection of the external fact which it so much exceeds; rather the fact is only a partial reflection of the Idea which has created it.” The Supramental Manifestation
::: "The idea is only a partial expression of the spirit.” The Renaissance in India
"The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances, becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The Mother : "An Avatar is an emanation of the Supreme Lord who assumes a human body on earth.” Works of the Mother, "On Thoughts and Aphorisms” Vol.10
The Mother: "The Avatar: the supreme Divine manifested in an earthly form — generally a human form — for a definite purpose.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15.*
The Mother: ‘There are four Asuras. Two have already been converted, and the other two, the Lord of Death and the Lord of Falsehood, made an attempt at conversion by taking on a physical body – they have been intimately associated with my life. The story of these Asuras would be very interesting to recount. . . the Lord of Death disappeared; he lost his physical body, and I don"t know what has become of him. As for the other, the Lord of Falsehood, the one who now rules over this earth, he tried hard to be converted but he found it disgusting!
::: The Mother: "True art means the expression of beauty in the material world. In a world wholly converted, that is to say, expressing integrally the divine reality, art must serve as the revealer and teacher of this divine beauty in life.” On Education, MCW Vol. 12.
"The other parts of our natural composition are not only mutable but perishable; but the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame.” *The Life Divine
"The physical heart is in the left side, but the heart centre of yoga is in the middle of the chest — the cardiac centre.” *Letters on Yoga
"There is always the personal and the impersonal side of the Divine and the Truth and it is a mistake to think the impersonal alone to be true or important, for that leads to a void incompleteness in part of the being, while only one side is given satisfaction. Impersonality belongs to the intellectual mind and the static self, personality to the soul and heart and dynamic being. Those who disregard the personal Divine ignore something which is profound and essential.” Letters on Yoga ::: Impersonal"s.
the state, quality, or ideal of being just, impartial, and fair.
"The sunlit path can be followed by those who are able to practise surrender, first a central surrender and afterwards a more complete self-giving in all the parts of the being. If they can achieve and preserve the attitude of the central surrender, if they can rely wholly on the Divine and accept cheerfully whatever comes to them from the Divine, then their path becomes sunlit and may even be straightforward and easy.” Letters on Yoga*
"The view I am presenting goes farther in idealism; it sees the creative Idea as Real-Idea, that is to say, a power of Conscious Force expressive of real being, born out of real being and partaking of its nature and neither a child of the Void nor a weaver of fictions. It is conscious Reality throwing itself into mutable forms of its own imperishable and immutable substance. The world is therefore not a figment of conception in the universal Mind, but a conscious birth of that which is beyond Mind into forms of itself.” The Life Divine
"This Self is fourfold, — the Self of Waking who has the outer intelligence and enjoys external things, is its first part; the Self of Dream who has the inner intelligence and enjoys things subtle, is its second part; the Self of Sleep, unified, a massed intelligence, blissful and enjoying bliss, is the third part… the lord of all, the omniscient, the inner Control. That which is unseen, indefinable, self-evident in its one selfhood, is the fourth part: this is the Self, this is that which has to be known.” Mandukya Upanishad. (5) The Life Divine*
"This universal aesthesis of beauty and delight does not ignore or fail to understand the differences and oppositions, the gradations, the harmony and disharmony obvious to the ordinary consciousness; but, first of all, it draws a Rasa from them and with that comes the enjoyment, Bhoga. and the touch or the mass of the Ananda. It sees that all things have their meaning, their value, their deeper or total significance which the mind does not see, for the mind is only concerned with a surface vision, surface contacts and its own surface reactions. When something expresses perfectly what it was meant to express, the completeness brings with it a sense of harmony, a sense of artistic perfection; it gives even to what is discordant a place in a system of cosmic concordances and the discords become part of a vast harmony, and wherever there is harmony, there is a sense of beauty. ” Letters on Savitri*
"Vamana, the Dwarf, in Hindu mythology, one of the ten incarnations of Vishnu, born as a son of Kashyapa and Aditi. The titan King Bali had by his austerities acquired dominion of all the three worlds. To remedy this, Vishnu came to him in the form of a dwarf and begged of him as much land as he could step over in three paces. Bali complied. In two strides the dwarf covered heaven and earth, and with the third step, on Bali"s head, pushed him down to Patala, the infernal regions.” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
"We arrive then necessarily at this conclusion that human birth is a term at which the soul must arrive in a long succession of rebirths and that it has had for its previous and preparatory terms in the succession the lower forms of life upon earth; it has passed through the whole chain that life has strung in the physical universe on the basis of the body, the physical principle.” The Life Divine
"When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates the inner mind centres, then into the heart centre and liberates fully the psychic and emotional being, then into the navel and other vital centres and liberates the inner vital, then into the Muladhara and below and liberates the inner physical being. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation; it takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created. It integrates, harmonises, establishes a new rhythm in the nature. It can bring down too a higher and yet higher force and range of the higher nature until, if that be the aim of the sadhana, it becomes possible to bring down the supramental force and existence. All this is prepared, assisted, farthered by the work of the psychic being in the heart centre; the more it is open, in front, active, the quicker, safer, easier the working of the Force can be. The more love and bhakti and surrender grow in the heart, the more rapid and perfect becomes the evolution of the sadhana. For the descent and transformation imply at the same time an increasing contact and union with the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
"When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates the inner mind centres, then into the heart centre and liberates fully the psychic and emotional being, then into the navel and other vital centres and liberates the inner vital, then into the Muladhara and below and liberates the inner physical being. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation; it takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created.” Letters on Yoga
"When we study this Life as it manifests itself upon earth with Matter as its basis, we observe that essentially it is a form of the one cosmic Energy, a dynamic movement or current of it positive and negative, a constant act or play of the Force which builds up forms, energises them by a continual stream of stimulation and maintains them by an unceasing process of disintegration and renewal of their substance. This would tend to show that the natural opposition we make between death and life is an error of our mentality, one of those false oppositions — false to inner truth though valid in surface practical experience — which, deceived by appearances, it is constantly bringing into the universal unity.” The Life Divine ::: *life"s, life-born, life-curve, life-delight"s, life-drift, life-foam, life-giving, life-impulse, life-impulse"s, life-motives, life-nature"s, life-pain, life-plan, life-power, life-room, life-scene, life-self, life-thought, life-wants, all-life, sense-life.
"Within us, there are two centres of the Purusha, the inner Soul through which he touches us to our awakening; there is the Purusha in the lotus of the heart which opens upward all our powers and the Purusha in the thousand-petalled lotus whence descend through the thought and will, opening the third eye in us, the lightnings of vision and the fire of the divine energy. The bliss existence may come to us through either one of these centres. When the lotus of the heart breaks open, we feel a divine joy, love and peace expanding in us like a flower of light which irradiates the whole being.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "Within us, there are two centres of the Purusha, the inner Soul through which he touches us to our awakening; there is the Purusha in the lotus of the heart which opens upward all our powers and the Purusha in the thousand-petalled lotus whence descend through the thought and will, opening the third eye in us, the lightnings of vision and the fire of the divine energy.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "Yet the highest power and manifestation is only a very partial revelation of the Infinite; even the whole universe is informed by only one degree of his greatness, illumined by one ray of his splendour, glorious with a faint hint of his delight and beauty.” *Essays on the Gita
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1 Ibn Arabi
1 Homer
1 Confucius
1 Abu Bakr
1 ?
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
56 Arthur Conan Doyle
28 Ally Carter
24 Anonymous
20 Jean Paul Sartre
19 Donna Tartt
19 Dolly Parton
16 Martin Luther
14 Eckhart Tolle
13 Yann Martel
13 Rumi
13 Arthur C Clarke
12 Liane Moriarty
11 Martin Luther King Jr
11 Martial
10 Kevin Hart
10 E Lockhart
10 Arthur Rimbaud
9 Arthur Miller
8 Napoleon Bonaparte
8 Jose Marti
1:Nature is the art of God. ~ Dante Alighieri, #KEYS
2:Art is a revolt against fate. ~ André Malraux, #KEYS
3:Become acquainted with every art. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
4:A good half of the art of living is resilience." ~ Alain de Botton, #KEYS
5:Art is to console those who are broken by life. ~ Vincent van Gogh, #KEYS
6:We have art in order not to die of the truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
7:Zen is not an art; it's not a religion. It's a realization." ~ Gene Clark, #KEYS
8:The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself. ~ GG, #KEYS
9:Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. ~ Cesar A Cruz, #KEYS
10:The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself. ~ Gurdjieff, #KEYS
11:The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. ~ Pablo Picasso, #KEYS
12:Thou art. ~ Delphic Inscription, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
13:Become what thou art. ~ Orphic Precept, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
14:Art is never finished, only abandoned.
~ Leonardo da Vinci,#KEYS
15:All Art is interpretation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, Art, #KEYS
16:You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #KEYS
17:You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~ Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing, #KEYS
18:The art of programming is the skill of controlling complexity.
~ Marijn Haverbeke, Eloquent JavaScript,#KEYS
19:I should have looked elsewhere." ~ Red Hawk, (R. Moore, b. 1943) American poet. "The Art of Dying,", (1994), #KEYS
20:Magick is the art of causing changes in consciousness to occur in accordance with the will.
~ Dion Fortune,#KEYS
21:Thou who art I beyond all I am... ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber 15, The Gnostic Mass, #KEYS
22:Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. ~ Brian Eno, #KEYS
23:Dust thou art and unto dust shall thou return. ~ Genesis III.19, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
24:Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. ~ C S Lewis, #KEYS
25:Thou art the sovereign treasure of this universe. ~ Bhagavad Gita, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
26:By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound. ~ Angelus Silesius, #KEYS
27:Thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead. ~ Revelations III. 1, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
28:Thou art my sister", and call understanding thy kinswoman. ~ Proverbs, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
29:Nothing in this world is created, all is manifested. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, Art, #KEYS
30:A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #KEYS
31:e will see with the divine eyes the mysteries of the eternal art. ~ Baha-ullah, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
32:Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. ~ Alfred North Whitehead #KEYS
33:Then, absorbed in 'Thou art This,' I found the place of Wine. There all the jars are filled but no one is left to drink." ~ Lal Ded, #KEYS
34:We think according to what we are. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, #KEYS
35:Dost thou not know that thou hast become God and art the son of the One? ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
36:Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty." ~ Saint Augustine, #KEYS
37:Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom." ~ D.T. Suzuki, #KEYS
38:The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ~ Aristotle, #KEYS
39:It is vision that sees Truth, not logic. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, #KEYS
40:'My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover, and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored.'" ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, (1882 - 1927) Sufi., #KEYS
41:To copy on earth's copies is his art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #KEYS
42:All virtues are comprised injustice; if thou art just, thou art a man of virtue. ~ Theegris, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
43:All education is the art of making men ethical (sittlich), of transforming the old Adam into the new Adam. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [T5], #KEYS
44:Art thou real, Earth? Am I? In whose dream do we exist ..." ~ Neville Goddard, (1905-1972) teacher, author, "The Complete Reader,", (2013). See:, #KEYS
45:One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Propylaea, Introduction, #KEYS
46:The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart, and head, and hands." ~ Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), #KEYS
47:By contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Threefold Life, #KEYS
48:The condition of freedom is the search for truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The Revival of Indian Art, #KEYS
49:The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there." ~ Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), #KEYS
50:Surrender is complete only when you reach the stage 'Thou art all' and 'Thy will be done'. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
51:Reason is science, it is conscious art, it is invention. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Reason as Governor of Life, #KEYS
52:Sheer objectivity brings us down from art to photography. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Poetic Vision and the Mantra, #KEYS
53:Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious." ~ D.T. Suzuki, #KEYS
54:And all grows beautiful because Thou art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing, #KEYS
55:Nature must flower into art
And science, or else wherefore are we men? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
56:When thou art enfranchised from all hate and desire, then shalt thou win thy liberation. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
57:Thou art thyself the author of thy pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #KEYS
58:Seek to make your work a prayer, your believing an act, your living an art. It is then the object of your faith will be made visible to you." ~ Ernest Holmes, #KEYS
59:A dry and strong or even austere logic is not a key to Truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, #KEYS
60:Music deepens the emotions and harmonises them with each other. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
61:Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick,#KEYS
62:Logic can serve any turn proposed to it by the mind's preferences. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, #KEYS
63:When I am blessed, Lord Rama, with Tattva-Jnana, true knowledge -- I see, I realize that "I am Thou and Thou art I." ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
64:If you have art and science, you have religion; if you have neither art nor science, then have religion. ~ Goethe, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
65:Thou art the Truth, and by the Truth is Truth affirmed. Thou art the Truth, and to Truth doth Truth return, and by Truth is Truth heard. ~ Abu Yazid, Mi'raj, 1, 132-6 #KEYS
66:He who wants to find God, finds God. Go and verify it in your own life! Try for three days and thou art sure to succeed. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
67: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],#KEYS
68:They say: Thou art become mad with love for thy beloved. I reply: The savour of life is for madmen." ~ Abd Allāh ibn Asʻad al-Yafi'i, (1299-1367) chronicler from Yemen., #KEYS
69: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, #KEYS
70:A mistake must always be acknowledged and corrected. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem, #KEYS
71:So long as thou art not dead to all things, one by one, thou canst not set thy feet in this portico. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
72:Thou art man thou art a citizen of the world, thou art the son of God, thou art the brother of all men. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
73:A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
74:Has thy need for taking food passed away? Let not the thought of thy Benefactor pass away too. As thou art putting on thy tunic, thank the Giver of it. ~ Saint Basil the Great, #KEYS
75:One must first be conscious before one can be ignorant. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem, #KEYS
76:It is the true more than the new that the poet is after. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem, #KEYS
77:Lord, I am the yantra, thou art the yantri. I am the room and thou art the tenant. I am the chariot and thou art the charioteer. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
78:If thou art weary of suffering and affliction, do no longer any transgression, neither openly nor in secret. ~ Buddhist Texts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
79:To Develop a Mind:
Study the science of art;
Study the art of science.
Learn how to see.
Realize that everything connects
to everything else." - Leonardo da Vinci,#KEYS
80:When thy soils shall have vanished and thou art free of defect, thou shalt no more be subject to decay and death. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
81:The regulating and beautiful arrangement of character and action is the art of life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
82:A cultivated eye without a cultivated spirit makes by no means the highest type of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
83:When thou art purified of thy omissions and thy pollutions, thou shalt come by that which is beyond age and death. ~ Buddhist Texts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
84:Art's brilliant gleam is a pastime for his eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.05, #KEYS
85:Even when the thieves of the five senses break upon me, art Thou not still in my Heart, Oh Arunachala? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Akshara Mana Malai, 11, #KEYS
86:Poetry and art are born mediators between the immaterial and the concrete, the spirit and life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Ideal Spirit of Poetry, #KEYS
87:Turn not thy head from this path till thou art led to its end; keep ever near to this door till it is opened. Let not thy eyes be shut; seek well and thou shalt find. ~ Attar of Nishapur, #KEYS
88:God as beauty, Srikrishna in Brindavan, Shyamasundara, is not only Beauty, He is also Love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
89:The object of existence is not the practice of virtue for its own sake but ānanda, delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
90:Evolution proceeds relentlessly in its course trampling to pieces all that it no longer needs. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
91:Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze
And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,#KEYS
92:The nature of art is to strive after a nobler beauty and more sustained perfection than life can give. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Recent English Poetry - I, #KEYS
93:The Self is the essence of this universe, the essence of all souls; He is the essence of your own life, nay, 'Thou art That'. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. I. 374), #KEYS
94:Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #KEYS
95:I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them. ~ Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Dying, #KEYS
96:Mankind is apt to bind itself by attachment to the means of its past progress forgetful of the aim. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
97:[The Lord] teaches us to make prayer in common for all our brethren. For he did not say my Father who art in heaven, but our Father, offering petitions for the common body. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #KEYS
98:Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises." ~ Samuel Butler, (1835-1902), the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon, (1872), Wikipedia, #KEYS
99:The expression of the spiritual through the aesthetic sense is the constant sense of Indian art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty, #KEYS
100:Time voyages with Thee upon its prow,—
And all the future's passionate hope is Thou. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,#KEYS
101:Earth's eyes half-see, her forces half-create;
Her rarest works are copies of heaven's art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter,#KEYS
102:The art of healing and the doctor are causes of health, but the art is prior and the doctor is posterior ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (On the Principles of Nature, c. 5)., #KEYS
103:O Death, thou too art God and yet not He,
But only his own black shadow on his path ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
104:If to-day when thou art with thy self, thou knowest nothing, what wilt thou know tomorrow when thou shalt have passed out of this self? ~ Omar Khayyam, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
105:O obscurity of obscurity, O soul of the soul, Thou art more than all and before all. All is seen in Thee and Thou art seen in all. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
106:The sense of pleasure and delight in the emotional aspects of life and action, this is the poetry of life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
107:it can only find itself in changing forms." ~ Rabindranath Tagore, (1861-1941), a Bengali poet & musician, reshaped Bengali literature & music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
108:Keep quiet and turn your energies within; you'll find the source of the inexhaustible power and learn the art of keeping it under control. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
109:All things here secretly are right; all's wrong
In God's appearances. World, thou art wisely led
In a divine confusion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act II,#KEYS
110:A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem, #KEYS
111:Mysticism is the art of union with Reality." ~ Evelyn Underhill, (1875 -1941) English Anglo-Catholic author of numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism, Wikipedia., #KEYS
112:The attempt to express in form and limit something of that which is formless and illimitable is the attempt of Indian art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, The Awakening Soul of India, #KEYS
113:Thou shalt invest thyself with her as with a raiment of glory and thou shalt put her on thy head as a crown of joy. Say unto wisdom, ... "Thou art my sister", and call understanding thy kinswoman. ~ Proverbs, #KEYS
114:When thou takest cognizance of what thine "I" is, then art thou delivered from egoism and shalt know that thou art not other than God. ~ Mohyddin-ibn-Arabi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
115:Without perfect love there cannot be perfect beauty, and without perfect beauty there cannot be perfect delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
116:Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom...and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that's always. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #KEYS
117:That which has helped man upward, must be preserved in order that he may not sink below the level he has attained. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
118:Magic of percept joined with concept's art
And lent to each object an interpreting name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind,#KEYS
119:You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge." ~ Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), #KEYS
120:By whatever path you go, you will have to lose yourself in the one. Surrender is complete only when you reach the stage `Thou art all' and `Thy will be done'. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
121:Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power...Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art. ~ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, #KEYS
122:Silence, the nurse of the Almighty's power,
The omnipotent hush, womb of the immortal Word. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, General Comments on some Criticisms of the Poem,#KEYS
123:Hail to Thee, to Thee, Spirit of the Supreme Spirit, Soul of souls, to Thee, the visible and invisible, who art one with Time and with the elements. ~ Vishnu Purana, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
124:Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you." ~ - Chuck Klosterman, (born 1972) American author and essayist, author of eleven books, including two novels, Wikipedia., #KEYS
125:If thou givest thyself up to the least pride, thou art no longer master of thyself, thou losest thy understanding as if thou wert drunk with wine. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
126:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
127: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,#KEYS
128:Oh thou! who art free of notion, imagination, and duality, We are all bellows in the ocean of eternity." ~ Binavali, a sufi of the 17th century. From "The Religion of the Sufis : From The Dabistan of Mohsin Fani,", (1979), #KEYS
129:Realistic art does not and cannot give us a scientifically accurate presentation of life, because Art is not and cannot be Science. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Poetic Vision and the Mantra, #KEYS
130:Thou who art the soul of all things, Thy universal diffusion witnesses to Thy power and goodness. It is in thee, in others, in all creatures, in all worlds. ~ Vishnu Purana, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
131:The One is attained when man arrives at ripeness in one of these three states of his spirit, "All is myself, All is thou," "Thou art the Master, I the servant." ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
132:Thou art the sun, the stars, the planets, the entire world, all that is without form or endowed with form, all that is visible or invisible, Thou art all these. ~ Vishnu Purana, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
133:Some virtues direct the active life of man and deal with actions rather than passions: for example, truth, justice, libera-lity, magnificence, prudence, and art ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 1.93)., #KEYS
134:Whither shall I go from Thy spirit or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there. ~ Psalms, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
135:Just as you practice much in order to sing, dance, and play on instruments, so one should practice the art of fixing the mind on God. One should practice regularly such disciplines as worship, japa, and meditation. ~ Sri Ramakrishnan, #KEYS
136:I judged not myself to know anything among you but Jesus Christ and him crucified" ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (1 Cor 2:2). For in the Cross is the perfection of all law and the whole art of living well., #KEYS
137:Spirituality is a single word expressive of three lines of human aspiration towards divine knowledge, divine love and joy, divine strength. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
138:Do not interpret all things you read according to the literal sense, for philosophers when they write anything too excellent for the vulgar to know, expressed it enigmatically that the sons of Art only might understand it. ~ John French, #KEYS
139:Turn not thy head from this path till thou art led to its end; keep ever near to this door till it is opened. Let not thy eyes be shut; seek well and thou shalt find. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
140:Man becomes God, and all human activity reaches its highest and noblest when it succeeds in bringing body, heart and mind into touch with spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
141:Man! renounce all that thou mayst be happy, that thou mayst be free, that thou mayst have thy soul large and great. Carry high thy head,...and thou art delivered from servitude. ~ Epictetus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
142:We have known thee, O most great Light who art perceived only by the intelligence I We have known thee, O Plenitude matrix of all Nature! We have known thee, O eternal Permanence ! ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
143:Thou art his spur to greatness in his works,
The whip to his yearning for eternal bliss,
His poignant need of immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
144:A gift of priceless value from Time's gods
Lost or mislaid in an uncaring world,
Life is a marvel missed, an art gone wry. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
145:Thou art also in the trees and the plants; the earth bears Thee in its flanks and gives birth to Thee as its nursling, Thee, the Lord of beings, Thee, the essence of all that exists. ~ Harivansa, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
146:Thou art all that I can be, Thou art all that I can do, Thou art all that I can say; for Thou art all and there is nothing that Thou art not. Thou art all that is and all that yet is not. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
147:A life in which the supernatural truths would be read in every kind of work, in every active labour, in all festivals, and all hierarchical and social relations, in all art, in all science, in all philosophy. ~ Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks 173, #KEYS
148:Progress consists not in rejecting beauty and delight, but in rising from the lower to the higher, the less complete to the more complete beauty and delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
149:Poetry raises the emotions and gives each its separate delight. Art stills the emotions and teaches them the delight of a restrained and limited satisfaction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
150:Thou seekest after Paradise and thou longest to arrive where thou shalt be free from all sorrow and disunion; appease thy heart and make it white and pure, then art thou even here in Paradise. ~ Angelus Silesius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
151:We do not ordinarily recognise how largely our sense of virtue is a sense of the beautiful in conduct and our sense of sin a sense of ugliness and deformity in conduct. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
152:Shakti, Force, pouring through the universe supports its boundless activities, the frail and tremulous life of the rose no less than the flaming motions of sun and star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
153:Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. ~ Henry James, The Art of Fiction, #KEYS
154:In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice
Styled infamies of the body's concupiscence
And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,
Turned lust into a decorative art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,#KEYS
155:If humans do not understand a proof, then it doesn't count as maths, says Voevodsky. 'The future of mathematics is more a spiritual discipline than an applied art. One of the important functions of mathematics is the development of the human mind.'
~ Vladimir Voevodsky,#KEYS
156: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,#KEYS
157:Thou canst live without constraint in profoundest peace of heart, even if all men clamoured against thee what they will, even if wild beasts tore the members of this nature in which thou art enveloped. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
158:Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power...Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art." ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, (1907-1972) a Polish-born American rabbi and mystic. Wikipedia., #KEYS
159:A new aesthesis of Inferno's art
That trained the mind to love what the soul hates,
Imposed allegiance on the quivering nerves
And forced the unwilling body to vibrate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,#KEYS
160:In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
161:The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls." ~ Pablo Picasso, (1881 - 1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer, spent most of his adult life in France, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Wikipedia., #KEYS
162:The moment that this mystery has been unveiled to thy eyes that thou art no other than Allah, thou shalt know that thou a it thine own end and aim and that thou hast never ceased and canst never cease to be. ~ Mohyddin-ibu-arabi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
163:Without Art we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science we should always worship false gods." ~ W. H. Auden, (1907 - 1973) English-American poet; poetry noted for its stylistic and technical achievement; its engagement with politics, morals, love, & religion, Wikipedia, #KEYS
164:Writer's block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows. ~ Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, #KEYS
165:Our Father who art in heaven is rightly understood to mean that God is in the hearts of the just, as in his holy temple. At the same time, it means that those who pray should desire the one they invoke to dwell in them. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
166:Science tears out Nature's occult powers,
Enormous djinns who serve a dwarf's small needs,
Exposes the sealed minutiae of her art
And conquers her by her own captive force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,#KEYS
167:Truth is wider, greater than her forms.
A thousand icons they have made of her
And find her in the idols they adore;
But she remains herself and infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem,#KEYS
168:Who art thou in the heart comrade of man who sitst
August, watching his works, watching his joys and griefs,
Unmoved, careless of pain, careless of death and fate? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,#KEYS
169:The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts are given, the emotion is immediately evoked ~ T S Eliot, #KEYS
170:We utter the name of the Lord superficially, too superficially. We say, 'I am Thy servant; Thou art my Master; Thou art my Lord; I have renounced all for Thee; I call Thee, Lord, come unto me.' But we harbor withal all sorts of evil thoughts in the mind. This won't do ~ Swami Saradananda, #KEYS
171:Thou hast lost thyself in the search for the mystery of life and death; but seek out thy path before thy life be taken from thee. If living thou find it not, hopest thou to reach this great mystery when thou art dead? ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
172:All psychotherapy is ultimately something of an art. There is always an irrational element in psychotherapy. The doctor's artistic intuition and sensitivity is of considerable importance. The patient, too, brings an irrational element into the relationship: his individuality. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #KEYS
173:The Fallacy that Christian Art Generally Portrays Christ as a Northern European man — The Way of.. ~ A 4th-century Coptic icon of Christ painted in Egypt ~ at a time when Western Europe was a cultural and political backwater) shows him as a light-skinned, bearded man. A 17th-century icon of Christ..., #KEYS
174:Proving your proficiency in a skill is far more valuable to an employer than simply stating the number of years you've spent doing it.
~ Marcus Tomlinson, How to become an Expert Software Engineer (and Get any Job you want): A programmers guide to the secret art of free and open source software development,#KEYS
175:Be patient, as one who fears no check and does not court success. Fix the gaze of thy soul on the star of which thou art the ray, the flaming star which burns in the obscure depths of the eternal, in the limitless fields of the unknown. ~ Book of Golden Precepts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
176:May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art ~ write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. ~ Neil Gaiman, #KEYS
177:May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art - write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
~ Neil Gaiman,#KEYS
178:I found the spot where truth echoes and know each beauty mark by heart.
But I just can't keep her still enough to render perfect art.
'Cause the truth is ever changing and although she loves my touch,
I've had my way, but I when I pray, she kisses back too much. ~ Saul Williams, Surrender (A Second to Think),#KEYS
179:ehold thou hast instructed many and thou hast streng thened the weak hands, thy words have upholden him that was falling and thou hast streng thened the feeble knees; but now it is come upon thee and thou faintest, it toucheth thee and thou art troubled. ~ Job. IV. 3, 4, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
180: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,#KEYS
181:The majority of mankind do not think, they have only thought-sensations; a large minority think confusedly, mixing up desires, predilections, passions, prejudgments, old associations and prejudices with pure and disinterested thought. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
182:You O Lord art good and merciful, and Your right hand had respect unto the profoundness of my death, and removed from the bottom of my heart that abyss of corruption. And this was the result, that I willed not to do what I willed, and willed to do what you willed. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
183:Music is sweet; to rule the heart's rich chords
Of human lyres much sweeter. Art's sublime
But to combine great ends more sovereign still,
Accepting danger and difficulty to break
Through proud and violent opposites to our will.
Song is divine, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act III,#KEYS
184:Magic is but a science, a profound knowledge of the Occult forces in Nature, and of the laws governing the visible or the invisible world. Spiritualism in the hands of an adept becomes Magic, for he is learned in the art of blending together the laws of the Universe, without breaking any of them and thereby violating Nature. ~ H P Blavatsky, #KEYS
185:The sons of Adam are the members of one body, for in the creation they are made of one single nature. When fortune casts one member into suffering, there is no rest for the others. O thou who art without care for the pain of another, it is not fitting that one should give thee the name of man. ~ Sadi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
186:The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself. ~ Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, #KEYS
187: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,#KEYS
188:If thou remain in isolation, thou shalt never be able to travel the path of the spirit; a guide is needed. Go not alone by thyself, enter not as a blind man into that ocean...Since thou art utterly ignorant what thou shouldst do to issue out of the pit of this world, how shalt thou dispense with a sure guide? ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
189:1. Do not think dishonestly. 2. The Way is in training. 3. Become acquainted with every art. 4. Know the Ways of all professions. 5. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters. 6. Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything. 7. Perceive those things which cannot be seen. 8. Pay attention even to trifles. 9. Do nothing which is of no use. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
190:The architect of the visible world,
At once the art and artist of his works,
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
Expressed himself with Matter for his ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day, The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation,#KEYS
191: 11. O Divine Fire, thou art Aditi, the indivisible Mother to the giver of the sacrifice; thou art Bharati, voice of the offering, and thou growest by the word. Thou art Ila of the hundred winters wise to discern; O Master of the Treasure, thou art Saraswati who slays the python adversary. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, 1.03 - Hymns_of_Gritsamada, #KEYS
192:It is a great error to be superior to others....It is such pride as this that makes a man appear a fool, makes him abused by others, and invites disaster. A man who is truly versed in any art will of his own accord be clearly aware of his own deficiency; and therefore, his ambition being never satisfied, he ends by never being proud.
~ Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko,#KEYS
193:541 - Canst thou see God in thy torturer and slayer even in thy moment of death or thy hours of torture? Canst thou see Him in that which thou art slaying, see and love even while thou slayest? Thou hast thy hand on the supreme knowledge. How shall he attain to Krishna who has never worshipped Kali?
All is the Divine and the Divine alone exists.
~ The Mother, On Thoughts And Aphorisms,#KEYS
194:A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #KEYS
195:You exist in time, but you belong to eternity. You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time. You are deathless, living in a body of death. Your consciousness knows no death, no birth, it is only your body that is born and dies, but you are not aware of your consciousness. You are not conscious of your consciousness, and that is the whole art of meditation; becoming conscious of consciousness itself. ~ Osho, #KEYS
196:Remember that the Mother is always with you.
Address Her as follows and She will pull you out of all difficulties:
"O Mother, Thou art the light of my intelligence, the purity of my soul,
the quiet strength of my vital, the endurance of my body.
I rely on Thee alone and want to be entirely Thine.
Make me surmount all obstacles on the way."
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III, [T1],#KEYS
197:The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. . . . They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; - cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
198:Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought #KEYS
199: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,#KEYS
200:Errors have become stepping-stones, the blind gropings conquests. Thy glory transforms defeats into victories of eternity, and all the shadows have fled before Thy radiant light.
It is Thou who wert the motive and the goal; Thou art the worker and the work.
The personal existence is a canticle, perpetually renewed, which the universe offers up to Thy inconceivable Splendour.
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
201:Apotheosis (from Greek ἀποθέωσις from ἀποθεοῦν, apotheoun to deify; in Latin deificatio making divine; also called divinization and deification) is the glorification of a subject to divine level. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre. this seems particularily important relative to define, which seems to be attempt at the highest potential of the word.
~ Wikipedia,#KEYS
202:As thou thyself art a complement of the organism of the city, let thy action likewise he a complement of the life of the city. If each of thy actions has not a relation direct or remote to the common end, it breaks the social life, it no longer allows it to be one, it is factious like the citizen who amid the people separates himself as much as it is in him from the common accord. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
203:When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
204:There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. ~ Plato, #KEYS
205:Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity~my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm. ~ Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Joan Marler for the Yoga Journal (1987), #KEYS
206:Paul Brunton in his book A Search in Secret Egypt repeatedly speaks of Atlantis. I always thought that belief in Atlantis was only an imagination of the Theosophists. Is there any truth in the belief?
Atlantis is not an imagination. Plato heard of this submerged continent from Egyptian sources and geologists are also agreed that such a submersion was one of the great facts of earth history. 22 June 1936 ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art,#KEYS
207:All we have acquired soon loses worth,
An old disvalued credit in Time's bank,
Imperfection's cheque drawn on the Inconscient. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness
Time's bank
Though Time is immortal,
Mortal his works are and ways and the anguish ends like the rapture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Hexameters, Alcaics, Sapphics,#KEYS
208:Raise thyself above every height, descend below every depth, assemble in thyself all the sensations of created things, of water, of fire, of the dry, of the moist; suppose that thou art at once everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the heavens, that thou wast never born, that thou art still in the womb, that thou art young, old, dead, beyond death; comprehend all at once, times, spaces, things, qualities, and thou shalt comprehend God. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
209:And Thou, O Lord, who art all this made one and much more, O sovereign Master, extreme limit of our thought, who standest for us at the threshold of the Unknown, make rise from that Unthinkable some new splendour, some possibility of a loftier and more integral realisation, that Thy work may be accomplished and the universe take one step farther towards the sublime Identity, the supreme Manifestation.
And now my pen falls mute and I adore Thee in silence.*
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations, 270,#KEYS
210:O Thou who art the sole reality of our being, O sublime Master of love, Redeemer of life, let me have no longer any other consciousness than of Thee at every instant and in each being. When I do not live solely with Thy life, I agonise, I sink slowly towards extinction; for Thou art my only reason for existence, my one goal, my single support. I am like a timid bird not yet sure of its wings and hesitating to take its flight; let me soar to reach definitive identity with Thee.
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
211:Don't appeal to mercy to God the Father up in the sky, little man, because he's not at home and never was at home, and couldn't care less. What you do with yourself, whether you are happy or unhappy-- live or die-- is strictly your business and the universe doesn't care. In fact you may be the universe and the only cause of all your troubles. But, at best, the most you can hope for is comradeship with comrades no more divine (or just as divine) as you are. So quit sniveling and face up to it-- 'Thou art God!'
~ Robert Heinlein, Oct. 21, 1960.,#KEYS
212:I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere. One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment ~ Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, #KEYS
213:When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician ~ make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor ~ make good art. IRS on your trail ~ make good art. Cat exploded ~ make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before ~ make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn't even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too., #KEYS
214:Everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty. ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
215:There are not many, those who have no secret garden of the mind. For this garden alone can give refreshment when life is barren of peace or sustenance or satisfactory answer. Such sanctuaries may be reached by a certain philosophy or faith, by the guidance of a beloved author or an understanding friend, by way of the temples of music and art, or by groping after truth through the vast kingdoms of knowledge. They encompass almost always truth and beauty, and are radiant with the light that never was on sea or land. - Clare Cameron, Green Fields of England ~ Israel Regardie, A Garden Of Pomegranates, #KEYS
216:[...] Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries. ~ Rene Guenon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times #KEYS
217:The poet-philosopher or the philosopher-poet, whichever way we may put it, is a new formation of the human consciousness that is coming upon us. A wide and rationalising (not rationalistic) intelligence deploying and marshalling out a deep intuitive and direct Knowledge that is the pattern of human mind developing in the new age. Bergson's was a harbinger, a definite landmark on the way. Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine arrives and opens the very portals of the marvellous temple city of a dynamic integral knowledge. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art, #KEYS
218:The word is a sound expressive of the idea. In the supra-physical plane when an idea has to be realised, one can by repeating the word-expression of it, produce vibrations which prepare the mind for the realisation of the idea. That is the principle of the Mantra and of japa. One repeats the name of the Divine and the vibrations created in the consciousness prepare the realisation of the Divine. It is the same idea that is expressed in The Bible, God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light. It is creation by the Word. 6 May 1933 ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art, 1.1.1.02 - Creation by the Word / 2.3.02 - Mantra and Japa, #KEYS
219:What art Thou then, my God? what, but the Lord God? For who is Lord but the Lord? or who is God save our God? Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent; most merciful, yet most just; most hidden, yet most present; most beautiful, yet most strong; stable, yet incomprehensible; unchangeable, yet all-changing; never new, never old; all-renewing, and bringing age upon the proud, and they know it not; ever working, ever at rest; still gathering, yet nothing lacking; supporting, filling, and overspreading; creating, nourishing, and maturing; seeking, yet having all things. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
220:Working of Magick Art the changed aspect of the world whose culmination is the keeping of the oath "I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul" was present with me. This aspect is difficult to describe; one is indifferent to everything and yet interested in it. The meaning of things is lost, pending the inception of their Spiritual Meaning; just as, on putting one's eye to the microscope, the drop of water on the slide is gone, and a world of life discovered, though the real import of that world is not apprehended, until one's knowledge becomes far greater than a single glance can make it. ~ Aleister Crowley, #KEYS
221:The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form-all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon, #KEYS
222:Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,#KEYS
223:The glory he had glimpsed must be his home. ||19.2||
A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume
This dusk room with its dark internal stair,
The infant soul in its small nursery school
Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned
Outgrow its early grammar of intellect
And its imitation of Earth-Nature’s art,
Its earthly dialect to God-language change,
In living symbols study Reality
And learn the logic of the Infinite. ||19.3||
The Ideal must be Nature’s common truth,
The body illumined with the indwelling God,
The heart and mind feel one with all that is,
A conscious soul live in a conscious world. ||19.4|| ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 1:5, || 19.2 - 19.4 ||,#KEYS
224:The Golden Light :::
Thy golden Light came down into my brain
And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became
A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane,
A calm illumination and a flame.
Thy golden Light came down into my throat,
And all my speech is now a tune divine,
A paean-song of Thee my single note;
My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.
Thy golden Light came down into my heart
Smiting my life with Thy eternity;
Now has it grown a temple where Thou art
And all its passions point towards only Thee.
Thy golden Light came down into my feet,
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
225:It is not a question of making a few changes in individual lines, that is a very minor problem; the real finality only comes when all is felt as a perfect whole, no line jarring with or falling away from the level of the whole though some may rise above it and also all the parts in their proper place making the right harmony. It is an inner feeling that has to decide that and my inner feeling is not as satisfied in that respect with parts of the third section as it is with the first two. Unfortunately the mind can't arrange these things, one has to wait till the absolutely right thing comes in a sort of receptive self-opening and calling-down condition. Hence the months. 20 November 1936 ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art, #KEYS
226:Magic is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. The will can only become magically effective when the mind is focused and not interfering with the will The mind must first discipline itself to focus its entire attention on some meaningless phenomenon. If an attempt is made to focus on some form of desire, the effect is short circuited by lust of result. Egotistical identification, fear of failure, and the reciprocal desire not to achieve desire, arising from our dual nature, destroy the result.
Therefore, when selecting topics for concentration, choose subjects of no spiritual, egotistical, intellectual, emotional, or useful significance - meaningless things.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null, Liber MMM, The Magical Trances [15],#KEYS
227:For primitive man the world is full of demons and mysterious powers which he fears; the whole of Nature is animated by these forces, which are nothing but man's own inner powers projected into the outside world. Christianity and modern science have de-demonized Nature, which means that the European has consistently taken back the demonic powers out of the world into himself, and has steadily loaded his unconscious with them. Out of man himself the demonic powers rise up in revolt against the supposed spiritual constraints of Christianity. The demons begin to break out in Baroque art: the columns writhe, the furniture sprouts satyr's feet. Man is slowly transformed into a uroboros, the "tail-eater" who devours himself, from ancient times a symbol of the demon-ridden man. ~ Carl Jung, #KEYS
228:Because Thou Art :::
Because Thou art All-beauty and All-bliss,
My soul blind and enamoured yearns for Thee;
It bears thy mystic touch in all that is
And thrills with the burden of that ecstasy.
Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze
And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune:
Thy sweetness haunts my heart through Nature's ways
Nowhere it beats now from Thy snare immune.
It loves Thy body in all living things;
Thy joy is there in every leaf and stone:
The moments bring thee on their fiery wings;
Sight's endless artistry is Thou alone.
Time voyages with Thee upon its prow
And all the futures passionate hope is Thou.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
229:The art of using it consists principally in referring all our ideas to it, discovering thus the common nature of certain things and the essential differences between others, so that ultimately one obtains a simple view of the incalculably vast complexity of the Universe.
The whole subject must be studied in the Book 777, and the main attributions committed to memory: then when by constant use the system is at last understood—as opposed to being merely memorised—the student will find fresh light break in on him at every turn as he continues to measure every item of new knowledge that he attains by this Standard. For to him the Universe will then begin to appear as a coherent and a necessary Whole. ~ Aleister Crowley, Little Essays Towards Truth, "Man",#KEYS
230:You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith. ~ Anais Nin, #KEYS
231:I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual [consciousness] where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although highly spiritual in its essential substance; and its instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight-not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art, [9:342],#KEYS
232:The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery ~ even if mixed with fear ~ that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence ~ as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature., #KEYS
233:The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality. ~ James George Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, Part 1, #KEYS
234:The Seven Da Vincian Principles are:
Curiosità - An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.
Dimostrazione - A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
Sensazione - The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.
Sfumato (literally "Going up in Smoke") - A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.
Arte/Scienza - The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. "Whole-brain" thinking.
Corporalità - The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.
Connessione - A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.
~ Michael J. Gelb, How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day,#KEYS
235:Spirit comes from the Latin word to breathe. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word spiritual that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
236:Therefore, we can attain the overmental consciousness in many different ways: through religious passion, through poetic, intellectual, artistic, or heroic zeal, or through anything that helps man to exceed himself. - Sri Aurobindo assigned a special place to art, which he considered one of the major means of spiritual progress. Unfortunately, artists and creators too often have a considerable ego standing in the way, which is their main difficulty. The religious man, who has worked to dissolve his ego, finds it easier, but he rarely attains universality through his own individual efforts, leaping instead beyond the individual without bothering to develop all the intermediate rungs of the personal consciousness, and when he reaches the top he no longer has a ladder to come down, or he does not want to come down, or there is no individual self left to express what he sees, or else his old individual self tries its best to express his new consciousness, provided he feels the need to express anything at all.
~ Satprem,#KEYS
237:This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the self-transcending element in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the harmony of the spheres, the origin of life, the equations of a unified field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power, the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first led to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are today, by wonder.' Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the grass, looking at the sun, and wondering'. Einstein struck the same chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, 'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life'.
This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common denominator and emotional bond. ~ Arthur Koestler,#KEYS
238:January 1, 1914
To Thee, supreme Dispenser of all boons,
to Thee who givest life its justification, by making it pure, beautiful and good,
to Thee, Master of our destinies and goal of all our aspirations, was consecrated the first minute of this new year.
May it be completely glorified by this consecration; may those who hope for Thee, seek Thee in the right path; may those who seek Thee find Thee, and those who suffer, not knowing where the remedy lies, feel Thy life gradually piercing the hard crust of their obscure consciousness.
I bow down in deep devotion and in boundless gratitude before Thy beneficent splendour; in name of the earth I give Thee thanks for manifesting Thyself; in its name I implore Thee to manifest Thyself ever more fully, in an uninterrupted growth of Light and Love.
Be the sovereign Master of our thoughts, our feelings, our actions.
Thou art our reality, the only Reality.
Without Thee all is falsehood and illusion, all is dismol obscurity.
In Thee are life and light and joy.
In Thee is supreme Peace.
~ The Mother, Prayers and Meditation,#KEYS
239:Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. In a way it is like having death under control. One begins with the lowest levels: social circumstances, customs and habits; physical surroundings, the posture and the breathing of the body, the senses, their sensation s and perceptions; the mind, its thoughts and feelings; until the entire mechanism of personality is grasped and firmly held. The final stage of meditation is reached when the sense of identity goes beyond the 'I-am-so-and-so', beyond 'so-l-am', beyond 'I-am-the-witness-only', beyond 'there-is', beyond all ideas into the impersonally personal pure being. But you must be energetic when you take to meditation. It is definitely not a part-time occupation. Limit your interests and activities to what is needed for you and your dependents' barest needs.
Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,#KEYS
240:I have loved in life and I have been loved.
I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar,
and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow.
My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it.
My heart has been rent and joined again;
My heart has been broken and again made whole;
My heart has been wounded and healed again;
A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet.
I went through hell and saw there love's raging fire,
and I entered heaven illumined with the light of love.
I wept in love and made all weep with me;
I mourned in love and pierced the hearts of men;
And when my fiery glance fell on the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes.
The whole world sank in the flood caused by my one tear;
With my deep sigh the earth trembled, and when I cried aloud the name of my beloved,
I shook the throne of God in heaven.
I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love,
"Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret."
She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth, and spoke softly in my ear,
"My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover,
and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan,#KEYS
241:Who does not understand should either learn, or be silent."
"Perspective is an Art Mathematical which demonstrates the manner and properties of all radiations direct, broken and reflected."
"Neither the circle without the line, nor the line without the point, can be artificially produced. It is, therefore, by virtue of the point and the Monad that all things commence to emerge in principle. That which is affected at the periphery, however large it may be, cannot in any way lack the support of the central point."
"Therefore, the central point which we see in the centre of the hieroglyphic Monad produces the Earth , round which the Sun , the Moon , and the other planets follow their respective paths. The Sun has the supreme dignity , and we represent him by a circle having a visible centre."
There is (gentle reader) nothing (the works of God only set apart) which so much beautifies and adorns the soul and mind of man as does knowledge of the good arts and sciences . Many arts there are which beautify the mind of man; but of all none do more garnish and beautify it than those arts which are called mathematical , unto the knowledge of which no man can attain, without perfect knowledge and instruction of the principles, grounds, and Elements of Geometry." ~ Dr. John Dee, The Hieroglyphic Monad,#KEYS
242:About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn't help writing the screen-play, but I think it's an interesting insight into the genre. And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people's imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn't, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling. I think also that the ingeniousness of a story like this is something which the audience ultimately enjoys; they obviously wonder as the story goes on what's going to happen, and there's a great satisfaction when it's all over not having been able to have anticipated the major development of the story, and yet at the end not to feel that you have been fooled or swindled. ~ Stanley Kubrick, #KEYS
243:Art is the human language of the nervous plane, intended to express and communicate the Divine, who in the domain of sensation manifests as beauty.
The purpose of art is therefore to give those for whom it is meant a freer and more perfect communion with the Supreme Reality. The first contact with this Supreme Reality expresses itself in our consciousness by a flowering of the being in a plenitude of vast and peaceful delight. Each time that art can give the spectator this contact with the infinite, however fleetingly, it fulfils its aim; it has shown itself worthy of its mission. Thus no art which has for many centuries moved and delighted a people can be dismissed, since it has at least partially fulfilled its mission - to be the powerful and more or less perfect utterance of that which is to be expressed. What makes it difficult for the sensibility of a nation to enjoy the delight that another nation finds in one art or another is the habitual limitation of the nervous being which, even more than the mental being, is naturally exclusive in its ability to perceive the Divine and which, when it has entered into relation with Him through certain forms, feels an almost irresistible reluctance to recognise Him through other forms of sensation. ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, 122,#KEYS
244:Recommended Reading
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
DH Lawrence - The Rainbow
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle
Virginia Woolf - To The Lighthouse
Ben Lerner - The Topeka School
Sally Rooney - Conversations With Friends
Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper
Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment
Jack Kerouac - Dharma Bums
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
Michael Murphy - Golf in the Kingdom
Barbara Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer
Albertine Sarrazin - Astragal
Rebecca Solnit - The Faraway Nearby
Michael Paterniti - Love and Other Ways of Dying
Rainer Maria Rilke - Book of Hours
James Baldwin - Another Country
Roberto Calasso - Ka
Translation by S. Radhakrishan - Principle Upanisads
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Translation by Georg Feuerstein - Yoga Sutra
Richard Freeman - The Mirror of Yoga
Translation by S. Radhakrishan - The Bhagavad Gita
Shrunyu Suzuki - Zen Mind Beginner's Mind
Heinrich Zimmer - Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization
Sogyal Rinpoche - The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Joseph Campbell - Myths of Light
Joseph Campbell - The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Sri Aurobindo - Savitri
Thomas Meyers - Anatomy Trains
Wendy Doniger - The Hindus ~ Jason Bowman, http://www.jasonbowmanyoga.com/recommended-reading,#KEYS
245:A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much as my book, are friends of lento. It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, A TEACHER OF SLOW READING:- in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste - a malicious taste, perhaps? - no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is 'in a hurry'. For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow - it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the WORD which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But precisely for this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of 'work', that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to 'get everything done' at once, including every old or new book:- this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read WELL, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers...My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: LEARN to read me well! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
246:The Supreme Mind
'O God! we acknowledge Thee to be the Supreme Mind
Who hast disposed and ordered the Universe;
Who gave it life and motion at the first,
And still continuest to guide and regulate it.
From Thee was its primal impulsion;
Thou didst bestow on thine Emanated Spirit of Light,
Divine wisdom and various power
To stablish and enforce its transcendent orbits.
Thou art the Inconceivable Energy
Which in the beginning didst cause all things;
Of whom shall no created being ever know
A millionth part of thy divine properties.
But the Spirit was the Spirit of the Universe-
Sacred, Holy, Generating Nature;
Which, obedient unto thy will,
Preserves and reproduces all that is in the Kosmos.
Nothing is superior to the Spirit
But Thou, alone, O God! who art the Creator and Lord;
Thou madest the Spirit to be thy servitor,
But this thy Spirit transcends all other creatures;
This is the Spirit which is in the highest heavens;
Whose influence permeates all that lives;
As a beautiful Flower diffuses fragrances
But is not diminished in aught thereby.
For all divine essences are the same,
Differing only in their degree and power and beauty;
But in no wise differing in their principle,
Which is the fiery essence of God himself.
Such is the animating flame of every existence
Being in God, purely perfect;
But in all other living things
Only capable of being made perfect.' ~ Dr E.V. Kenealy, The Book of Fo.
The Supreme Mind. from path of regeneration,#KEYS
247:1st row Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki
2nd row Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Virgil, Milton
3rd row Goethe
...
I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universe - it was the front bench or benches you asked for. By others I meant poets like Lucretius, Euripides, Calderon, Corneille, Hugo. Euripides (Medea, Bacchae and other plays) is a greater poet than Racine whom you want to put in the first ranks. 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. The rest, if you like, you can send into the third row with Goethe, but it is something of a promotion about which one can feel some qualms. Spenser too, if you like; it is difficult to draw a line.
Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth have not been brought into consideration although their best work is as fine poetry as any written, but they have written nothing on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest creators. If Keats had finished Hyperion (without spoiling it), if Shelley had lived, or if Wordsworth had not petered out like a motor car with insufficient petrol, it might be different, but we have to take things as they are. As it is, all began magnificently, but none of them finished, and what work they did, except a few lyrics, sonnets, short pieces and narratives, is often flawed and unequal. If they had to be admitted, what about at least fifty others in Europe and Asia? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art,#KEYS
248:AHA!"
There are seven keys to the great gate,
Being eight in one and one in eight.
First, let the body of thee be still,
Bound by the cerements of will,
Corpse-rigid; thus thou mayst abort
The fidget-babes that tense the thought.
Next, let the breath-rhythm be low,
Easy, regular, and slow;
So that thy being be in tune
With the great sea's Pacific swoon.
Third, let thy life be pure and calm
Swayed softly as a windless palm.
Fourth, let the will-to-live be bound
To the one love of the Profound.
Fifth, let the thought, divinely free
From sense, observe its entity.
Watch every thought that springs; enhance
Hour after hour thy vigilance!
Intense and keen, turned inward, miss
No atom of analysis!
Sixth, on one thought securely pinned
Still every whisper of the wind!
So like a flame straight and unstirred
Burn up thy being in one word!
Next, still that ecstasy, prolong
Thy meditation steep and strong,
Slaying even God, should He distract
Thy attention from the chosen act!
Last, all these things in one o'erpowered,
Time that the midnight blossom flowered!
The oneness is. Yet even in this,
My son, thou shalt not do amiss
If thou restrain the expression, shoot
Thy glance to rapture's darkling root,
Discarding name, form, sight, and stress
Even of this high consciousness;
Pierce to the heart! I leave thee here:
Thou art the Master. I revere
Thy radiance that rolls afar,
O Brother of the Silver Star! ~ Aleister Crowley,#KEYS
249:THE PSYCHOLOGY OF YOGA
Initial Definitions and Descriptions
Yoga has four powers and objects, purity, liberty, beatitude and perfection. Whosoever has consummated these four mightinesses in the being of the transcendental, universal, lilamaya and individual God is the complete and absolute Yogin.
All manifestations of God are manifestations of the absolute Parabrahman.
The Absolute Parabrahman is unknowable to us, not because It is the nothingness of all that we are, for rather whatever we are in truth or in seeming is nothing but Parabrahman, but because It is pre-existent & supra-existent to even the highest & purest methods and the most potent & illimitable instruments of which soul in the body is capable.
In Parabrahman knowledge ceases to be knowledge and becomes an inexpressible identity. Become Parabrahman, if thou wilt and if That will suffer thee, but strive not to know It; for thou shalt not succeed with these instruments and in this body.
In reality thou art Parabrahman already and ever wast and ever will be. To become Parabrahman in any other sense, thou must depart utterly out of world manifestation and out even of world transcendence.
Why shouldst thou hunger after departure from manifestation as if the world were an evil? Has not That manifested itself in thee & in the world and art thou wiser & purer & better than the Absolute, O mind-deceived soul in the mortal? When That withdraws thee, then thy going hence is inevitable; until Its force is laid on thee, thy going is impossible, cry thy mind never so fiercely & wailingly for departure. Therefore neither desire nor shun the world, but seek the bliss & purity & freedom & greatness of God in whatsoever state or experience or environment.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#KEYS
250:There is the one door in us that sometimes swings open upon the splendour of a truth beyond and, before it shuts again, allows a ray to touch us, - a luminous intimation which, if we have the strength and firmness, we may hold to in our faith and make a starting-point for another play of consciousness than that of the sense-mind, for the play of Intuition. For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher. Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest. Intuition gives us that idea of something behind and beyond all that we know and seem to be which pursues man always in contradiction of his lower reason and all his normal experience and impels him to formulate that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God, Immortality, Heaven and the rest by which we strive to express it to the mind. For Intuition is as strong as Nature herself from whose very soul it has sprung and cares nothing for the contradictions of reason or the denials of experience. It knows what is because it is, because itself it is of that and has come from that, and will not yield it to the judgment of what merely becomes and appears. What the Intuition tells us of, is not so much Existence as the Existent, for it proceeds from that one point of light in us which gives it its advantage, that sometimes opened door in our own self-awareness. Ancient Vedanta seized this message of the Intuition and formulated it in the three great declarations of the Upanishads, I am He, Thou art That, O Swetaketu, All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge,#KEYS
251:Shastra is the knowledge and teaching laid down by intuition, experience and wisdom, the science and art and ethic of life, the best standards available to the race. The half-awakened man who leaves the observance of its rule to follow the guidance of his instincts and desires, can get pleasure but not happiness; for the inner happiness can only come by right living. He cannot move to perfection, cannot acquire the highest spiritual status. The law of instinct and desire seems to come first in the animal world, but the manhood of man grows by the pursuit of truth and religion and knowledge and a right life. The Shastra, the recognised Right that he has set up to govern his lower members by his reason and intelligent will, must therefore first be observed and made the authority for conduct and works and for what should or should not be done, till the instinctive desire nature is schooled and abated and put down by the habit of self-control and man is ready first for a freer intelligent self-guidance and then for the highest supreme law and supreme liberty of the spiritual nature.
For the Shastra in its ordinary aspect is not that spiritual law, although at its loftiest point, when it becomes a science and art of spiritual living, Adhyatma-shastra, - the Gita itself describes its own teaching as the highest and most secret Shastra, - it formulates a rule of the self-transcendence of the sattwic nature and develops the discipline which leads to spiritual transmutation. Yet all Shastra is built on a number of preparatory conditions, dharmas; it is a means, not an end. The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit when abandoning all dharmas the soul turns to God for its sole law of action, acts straight from the divine will and lives in the freedom of the divine nature, not in the Law, but in the Spirit. This is the development of the teaching which is prepared by the next question of Arjuna. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays On The Gita,#KEYS
252:One thing is needful. -- To "give style" to one's character-- a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed -- both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.
Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits -- and they may be of the first rank -- are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves. For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, mod trans. Walter Kaufmann,#KEYS
253:And for the same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is in the end that which we are seeking through religion, the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels, - for it is suprasensuous, - nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel, - for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual, - but to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, 144, #KEYS
254:reading :::
Self-Help Reading List:
James Allen As a Man Thinketh (1904)
Marcus Aurelius Meditations (2nd Century)
The Bhagavad-Gita
The Bible
Robert Bly Iron John (1990)
Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy (6thC)
Alain de Botton How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)
William Bridges Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (1980)
David Brooks The Road to Character (2015)
Brené Brown Daring Greatly (2012)
David D Burns The New Mood Therapy (1980)
Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth (1988)
Richard Carlson Don't Sweat The Small Stuff (1997)
Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
Deepak Chopra The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1994)
Clayton Christensen How Will You Measure Your Life? (2012)
Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (1988)
Stephen Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991)
The Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler The Art of Happiness (1999)
The Dhammapada (Buddha's teachings)
Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit (2011)
Wayne Dyer Real Magic (1992)
Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance (1841)
Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run With The Wolves (1996)
Viktor Frankl Man's Search For Meaning (1959)
Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (1790)
Shakti Gawain Creative Visualization (1982)
Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence (1995)
John Gray Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (1992)
Louise Hay You Can Heal Your Life (1984)
James Hillman The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996)
Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway (1987)
Richard Koch The 80/20 Principle (1998)
Marie Kondo The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014)
Ellen Langer Mindfulness: Choice and Control in Everyday Life (1989)
Lao-Tzu Tao-te Ching (The Way of Power)
Maxwell Maltz Psycho-Cybernetics (1960)
Abraham Maslow Motivation and Personality (1954)
Thomas Moore Care of the Soul (1992)
Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963)
Norman Vincent Peale The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
M Scott Peck The Road Less Traveled (1990)
Anthony Robbins Awaken The Giant Within (1991)
Florence Scovell-Shinn The Game of Life and How To Play It (1923)
Martin Seligman Learned Optimism (1991)
Samuel Smiles Self-Help (1859)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man (1955)
Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)
Marianne Williamson A Return To Love (1993)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help,#KEYS
255:reading :::
50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:
Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)
St Augustine - Confessions (400)
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)
Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)
Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)
GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)
Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)
Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)
Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)
Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)
Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)
GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)
Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)
Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)
Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)
William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)
J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)
CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)
Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)
Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)
W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)
Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)
John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)
Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)
Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)
Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)
Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)
Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)
Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)
Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)
Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)
Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)
Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)
Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)
Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)
Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)
Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)
Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),#KEYS
256:Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing be cause they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing-mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common : mystery. Goldmund continued his thought: It is mystery I love and pursue. Several times I have seen it beginning to take shape; as an artist, I would like to capture and express it. Some day, perhaps, I'll be able to. The figure of the universal mother, the great birthgiver, for example. Unlike other fi gures, her mystery does not consist of this or that detail, of a particular voluptuousness or sparseness, coarseness or delicacy, power or gracefulness. It consists of a fusion of the greatest contrasts of the world, those that cannot otherwise be combined, that have made peace only in this figure. They live in it together: birth and death, tenderness and cruelty, life and destruction. If I only imagined this fi gure, and were she merely the play of my thoughts, it would not matter about her, I could dismiss her as a mistake and forget about her. But the universal mother is not an idea of mine; I did not think her up, I saw her! She lives inside me. I've met her again and again. She appeared to me one winter night in a village when I was asked to hold a light over the bed of a peasant woman giving birth: that's when the image came to life within me. I often lose it; for long periods it re mains remote; but suddenly it Hashes clear again, as it did today. The image of my own mother, whom I loved most of all, has transformed itself into this new image, and lies encased within the new one like the pit in the cherry.
As his present situation became clear to him, Goldmund was afraid to make a decision. It was as difficult as when he had said farewell to Narcissus and to the cloister. Once more he was on an impor tant road : the road to his mother. Would this mother-image one day take shape, a work of his hands, and become visible to all? Perhaps that was his goal, the hidden meaning of his life. Perhaps; he didn't know. But one thing he did know : it was good to travel toward his mother, to be drawn and called by her. He felt alive. Perhaps he'd never be able to shape her image, perhaps she'd always remain a dream, an intuition, a golden shimmer, a sacred mystery. At any rate, he had to follow her and submit his fate to her. She was his star.
And now the decision was at his fingertips; everything had become clear. Art was a beautiful thing, but it was no goddess, no goal-not for him. He was not to follow art, but only the call of his mother.
~ Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund,#KEYS
257:Mother of Dreams :::
Goddess supreme, Mother of Dream, by thy ivory doors when thou standest,
Who are they then that come down unto men in thy visions that troop, group upon group, down the path of the shadows slanting?
Dream after dream, they flash and they gleam with the flame of the stars still around them;
Shadows at thy side in a darkness ride where the wild fires dance, stars glow and glance and the random meteor glistens;
There are voices that cry to their kin who reply; voices sweet, at the heart they beat and ravish the soul as it listens.
What then are these lands and these golden sands and these seas more radiant than earth can imagine?
Who are those that pace by the purple waves that race to the cliff-bound floor of thy jasper shore under skies in which mystery muses,
Lapped in moonlight not of our night or plunged in sunshine that is not diurnal?
Who are they coming thy Oceans roaming with sails whose strands are not made by hands, an unearthly wind advances?
Why do they join in a mystic line with those on the sands linking hands in strange and stately dances?
Thou in the air, with a flame in thy hair, the whirl of thy wonders watching,
Holdest the night in thy ancient right, Mother divine, hyacinthine, with a girdle of beauty defended.
Sworded with fire, attracting desire, thy tenebrous kingdom thou keepest,
Starry-sweet, with the moon at thy feet, now hidden now seen the clouds between in the gloom and the drift of thy tresses.
Only to those whom thy fancy chose, O thou heart-free, is it given to see thy witchcraft and feel thy caresses.
Open the gate where thy children wait in their world of a beauty undarkened.
High-throned on a cloud, victorious, proud I have espied Maghavan ride when the armies of wind are behind him;
Food has been given for my tasting from heaven and fruit of immortal sweetness;
I have drunk wine of the kingdoms divine and have healed the change of music strange from a lyre which our hands cannot master,
Doors have swung wide in the chambers of pride where the Gods reside and the Apsaras dance in their circles faster and faster.
For thou art she whom we first can see when we pass the bounds of the mortal;
There at the gates of the heavenly states thou hast planted thy wand enchanted over the head of the Yogin waving.
From thee are the dream and the shadows that seem and the fugitive lights that delude us;
Thine is the shade in which visions are made; sped by thy hands from celestial lands come the souls that rejoice for ever.
Into thy dream-worlds we pass or look in thy magic glass, then beyond thee we climb out of Space and Time to the peak of divine endeavour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
258:To Know How To Suffer
IF AT any time a deep sorrow, a searing doubt or an intense pain overwhelms you and drives you to despair, there is an infallible way to regain calm and peace.
In the depths of our being there shines a light whose brilliance is equalled only by its purity; a light, a living and conscious portion of a universal godhead who animates and nourishes and illumines Matter, a powerful and unfailing guide for those who are willing to heed his law, a helper full of solace and loving forbearance towards all who aspire to see and hear and obey him. No sincere and lasting aspiration towards him can be in vain; no strong and respectful trust can be disappointed, no expectation ever deceived.
My heart has suffered and lamented, almost breaking beneath a sorrow too heavy, almost sinking beneath a pain too strong.... But I have called to thee, O divine comforter, I have prayed ardently to thee, and the splendour of thy dazzling light has appeared to me and revived me.
As the rays of thy glory penetrated and illumined all my being, I clearly perceived the path to follow, the use that can be made of suffering; I understood that the sorrow that held me in its grip was but a pale reflection of the sorrow of the earth, of this abysm of suffering and anguish.
Only those who have suffered can understand the suffering of others; understand it, commune with it and relieve it. And I understood, O divine comforter, sublime Holocaust, that in order to sustain us in all our troubles, to soothe all our pangs, thou must have known and felt all the sufferings of earth and man, all without exception.
How is it that among those who claim to be thy worshippers, some regard thee as a cruel torturer, as an inexorable judge witnessing the torments that are tolerated by thee or even created by thy own will?
No, I now perceive that these sufferings come from the very imperfection of Matter which, in its disorder and crudeness, is unfit to manifest thee; and thou art the very first to suffer from it, to bewail it, thou art the first to toil and strive in thy ardent desire to change disorder into order, suffering into happiness, discord into harmony.
Suffering is not something inevitable or even desirable, but when it comes to us, how helpful it can be!
Each time we feel that our heart is breaking, a deeper door opens within us, revealing new horizons, ever richer in hidden treasures, whose golden influx brings once more a new and intenser life to the organism on the brink of destruction.
And when, by these successive descents, we reach the veil that reveals thee as it is lifted, O Lord, who can describe the intensity of Life that penetrates the whole being, the radiance of the Light that floods it, the sublimity of the Love that transforms it for ever! ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, To Know How To Suffer, 1910,#KEYS
259:O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world
Assailed by thee and of its road unsure,
Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,
And sayest God is not and all is vain.
How shall the child already be the man?
Because he is infant, shall he never grow?
Because he is ignorant, shall he never learn?
In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks,
In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut;
A little element in a little sperm,
It grows and is a conqueror and a sage.
Then wilt thou spew out, Death, God's mystic truth,
Deny the occult spiritual miracle?
Still wilt thou say there is no spirit, no God?
A mute material Nature wakes and sees;
She has invented speech, unveiled a will.
Something there waits beyond towards which she strives,
Something surrounds her into which she grows:
To uncover the spirit, to change back into God,
To exceed herself is her transcendent task.
In God concealed the world began to be,
Tardily it travels towards manifest God:
Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:
The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
Time travels towards revealed eternity.
A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,
A scripture written out in cryptic signs,
An occult document of the All-Wonderful's art.
All here bears witness to his secret might,
In all we feel his presence and his power.
A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,
A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
A glory is his dream of purple sky.
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
The blue sea's chant, the rivulet's wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal's harp.
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.
His ways challenge our reason and our sense;
By blind brute movements of an ignorant Force,
By means we slight as small, obscure or base,
A greatness founded upon little things,
He has built a world in the unknowing Void.
His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;
His marvels are built from insignificant things.
If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,
If brutal masks are there and evil acts,
They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,
His great and dangerous drama's needed steps;
He makes with these and all his passion-play,
A play and yet no play but the deep scheme
Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways
To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:
Above her is the vigil of the stars;
Watched by a solitary Infinitude
She embodies in dumb Matter the Divine,
In symbol minds and lives the Absolute.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,#KEYS
260:- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expression, - all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
For all must be done as a sacrifice, all activities must have the One Divine for their object and the heart of their meaning. The Yogin's aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in man and creatures and things and forces, her creative significances, her execution of the mysteries, the symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin's aim in the practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but, seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning of its own works, to express that One Divine in ideal forms, the One Divine in principles and forces, the One Divine in gods and men and creatures and objects. The theory that sees an intimate connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but we must substitute for the mixed and doubtful religious motive a spiritual aspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For the wider and more comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself the sense of the hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a superficial religiosity into the spiritual life, the more luminous, flexible, deep and powerful will the Art be that springs from that high motive. The Yogin's distinction from other men is this that he lives in a higher and vaster spiritual consciousness; all his work of knowledge or creation must then spring from there: it must not be made in the mind, - for it is a greater truth and vision than mental man's that he has to express or rather that presses to express itself through him and mould his works, not for his personal satisfaction, but for a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 142 [T4],#KEYS
261:The modern distinction is that the poet appeals to the imagination and not to the intellect. But there are many kinds of imagination; the objective imagination which visualises strongly the outward aspects of life and things; the subjective imagination which visualises strongly the mental and emotional impressions they have the power to start in the mind; the imagination which deals in the play of mental fictions and to which we give the name of poetic fancy; the aesthetic imagination which delights in the beauty of words and images for their own sake and sees no farther. All these have their place in poetry, but they only give the poet his materials, they are only the first instruments in the creation of poetic style. The essential poetic imagination does not stop short with even the most subtle reproductions of things external or internal, with the richest or delicatest play of fancy or with the most beautiful colouring of word or image. It is creative, not of either the actual or the fictitious, but of the more and the most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, - of this truth too there are many gradations, - which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point. The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us, not on one but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal.
This is the true, because the highest and essential aim of poetry; but the human mind arrives at it only by a succession of steps, the first of which seems far enough from its object. It begins by stringing its most obvious and external ideas, feelings and sensations of things on a thread of verse in a sufficient language of no very high quality. But even when it gets to a greater adequacy and effectiveness, it is often no more than a vital, an emotional or an intellectual adequacy and effectiveness. There is a strong vital poetry which powerfully appeals to our sensations and our sense of life, like much of Byron or the less inspired mass of the Elizabethan drama; a strong emotional poetry which stirs our feelings and gives us the sense and active image of the passions; a strong intellectual poetry which satisfies our curiosity about life and its mechanism, or deals with its psychological and other "problems", or shapes for us our thoughts in an effective, striking and often quite resistlessly quotable fashion. All this has its pleasures for the mind and the surface soul in us, and it is certainly quite legitimate to enjoy them and to enjoy them strongly and vividly on our way upward; but if we rest content with these only, we shall never get very high up the hill of the Muses.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,#KEYS
262:EVOCATION
Evocation is the art of dealing with magical beings or entities by various acts which create or contact them and allow one to conjure and command them with pacts and exorcism. These beings have a legion of names drawn from the demonology of many cultures: elementals, familiars, incubi, succubi, bud-wills, demons, automata, atavisms, wraiths, spirits, and so on. Entities may be bound to talismans, places, animals, objects, persons, incense smoke, or be mobile in the aether. It is not the case that such entities are limited to obsessions and complexes in the human mind. Although such beings customarily have their origin in the mind, they may be budded off and attached to objects and places in the form of ghosts, spirits, or "vibrations," or may exert action at a distance in the form of fetishes, familiars, or poltergeists. These beings consist of a portion of Kia or the life force attached to some aetheric matter, the whole of which may or may not be attached to ordinary matter.
Evocation may be further defined as the summoning or creation of such partial beings to accomplish some purpose. They may be used to cause change in oneself, change in others, or change in the universe. The advantages of using a semi-independent being rather than trying to effect a transformation directly by will are several: the entity will continue to fulfill its function independently of the magician until its life force dissipates. Being semi-sentient, it can adapt itself to a task in that a non-conscious simple spell cannot. During moments of the possession by certain entities the magician may be the recipient of inspirations, abilities, and knowledge not normally accessible to him.
Entities may be drawn from three sources - those which are discovered clairvoyantly, those whose characteristics are given in grimoires of spirits and demons, and those which the magician may wish to create himself.
In all cases establishing a relationship with the spirit follows a similar process of evocation. Firstly the attributes of the entity, its type, scope, name, appearance and characteristics must be placed in the mind or made known to the mind. Automatic drawing or writing, where a stylus is allowed to move under inspiration across a surface, may help to uncover the nature of a clairvoyantly discovered being. In the case of a created being the following procedure is used: the magician assembles the ingredients of a composite sigil of the being's desired attributes. For example, to create an elemental to assist him with divination, the appropriate symbols might be chosen and made into a sigil such as the one shown in figure 4.
A name and an image, and if desired, a characteristic number can also be selected for the elemental.
Secondly, the will and perception are focused as intently as possible (by some gnostic method) on the elemental's sigils or characteristics so that these take on a portion of the magician's life force and begin autonomous existence. In the case of preexisting beings, this operation serves to bind the entity to the magician's will.
This is customarily followed by some form of self-banishing, or even exorcism, to restore the magician's consciousness to normal before he goes forth.
An entity of a low order with little more than a singular task to perform can be left to fulfill its destiny with no further interference from its master. If at any time it is necessary to terminate it, its sigil or material basis should be destroyed and its mental image destroyed or reabsorbed by visualization. For more powerful and independent beings, the conjuration and exorcism must be in proportion to the power of the ritual which originally evoked them. To control such beings, the magicians may have to re-enter the gnostic state to the same depth as before in order to draw their power. ~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
263:The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly all the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands the tremendous vision. "I see" he cries "all the gods in thy body, O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creating lord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divine Serpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces, I see thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not thy end nor thy middle nor thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form universal. I see thee crowned and with thy mace and thy discus, hard to discern because thou art a luminous mass of energy on all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-bright Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou art the sempiternal soul of existence."
But in the greatness of this vision there is too the terrific image of the Destroyer. This Immeasurable without end or middle or beginning is he in whom all things begin and exist and end.
This Godhead who embraces the worlds with his numberless arms and destroys with his million hands, whose eyes are suns and moons, has a face of blazing fire and is ever burning up the whole universe with the flame of his energy. The form of him is fierce and marvellous and alone it fills all the regions and occupies the whole space between earth and heaven. The companies of the gods enter it, afraid, adoring; the Rishis and the Siddhas crying "May there be peace and weal" praise it with many praises; the eyes of Gods and Titans and Giants are fixed on it in amazement. It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction; it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings and the captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battle are hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws and some are seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teeth of power; the nations are rushing to destruction with helpless speed into its mouths of flame like many rivers hurrying in their course towards the ocean or like moths that cast themselves on a kindled fire. With those burning mouths the Form of Dread is licking all the regions around; the whole world is full of his burning energies and baked in the fierceness of his lustres. The world and its nations are shaken and in anguish with the terror of destruction and Arjuna shares in the trouble and panic around him; troubled and in pain is the soul within him and he finds no peace or gladness. He cries to the dreadful Godhead, "Declare to me who thou art that wearest this form of fierceness. Salutation to thee, O thou great Godhead, turn thy heart to grace. I would know who thou art who wast from the beginning, for I know not the will of thy workings." ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays On The Gita, 2.10_-_The_Vision_of_the_World-Spirit_-_Time_the_Destroyer,#KEYS
264:64 Arts
1. Geet vidya: art of singing.
2. Vadya vidya: art of playing on musical instruments.
3. Nritya vidya: art of dancing.
4. Natya vidya: art of theatricals.
5. Alekhya vidya: art of painting.
6. Viseshakacchedya vidya: art of painting the face and body with color
7. Tandulakusumabalivikara: art of preparing offerings from rice and flowers.
8. Pushpastarana: art of making a covering of flowers for a bed.
9. Dasanavasanangaraga: art of applying preparations for cleansing the teeth, cloths and painting the body.
10. Manibhumikakarma: art of making the groundwork of jewels.
11. Aayyaracana: art of covering the bed.
12. Udakavadya: art of playing on music in water.
13. Udakaghata: art of splashing with water.
14. Citrayoga: art of practically applying an admixture of colors.
15. Malyagrathanavikalpa: art of designing a preparation of wreaths.
16. Sekharapidayojana: art of practically setting the coronet on the head.
17. Nepathyayoga: art of practically dressing in the tiring room.
18. Karnapatrabhanga: art of decorating the tragus of the ear.
19. Sugandhayukti: art of practical application of aromatics.
20. Bhushanayojana: art of applying or setting ornaments.
21. Aindrajala: art of juggling.
22. Kaucumara: a kind of art.
23. Hastalaghava: art of sleight of hand.
24. Citrasakapupabhakshyavikarakriya: art of preparing varieties of delicious food.
25. Panakarasaragasavayojana: art of practically preparing palatable drinks and tinging draughts with red color.
26. Sucivayakarma: art of needleworks and weaving.
27. Sutrakrida: art of playing with thread.
28. Vinadamurakavadya: art of playing on lute and small drum.
29. Prahelika: art of making and solving riddles.
30. Durvacakayoga: art of practicing language difficult to be answered by others.
31. Pustakavacana: art of reciting books.
32. Natikakhyayikadarsana: art of enacting short plays and anecdotes.
33. Kavyasamasyapurana: art of solving enigmatic verses.
34. Pattikavetrabanavikalpa: art of designing preparation of shield, cane and arrows.
35. Tarkukarma: art of spinning by spindle.
36. Takshana: art of carpentry.
37. Vastuvidya: art of engineering.
38. Raupyaratnapariksha: art of testing silver and jewels.
39. Dhatuvada: art of metallurgy.
40. Maniraga jnana: art of tinging jewels.
41. Akara jnana: art of mineralogy.
42. Vrikshayurvedayoga: art of practicing medicine or medical treatment, by herbs.
43. Meshakukkutalavakayuddhavidhi: art of knowing the mode of fighting of lambs, cocks and birds.
44. Sukasarikapralapana: art of maintaining or knowing conversation between male and female cockatoos.
45. Utsadana: art of healing or cleaning a person with perfumes.
46. Kesamarjanakausala: art of combing hair.
47. Aksharamushtikakathana: art of talking with fingers.
48. Dharanamatrika: art of the use of amulets.
49. Desabhashajnana: art of knowing provincial dialects.
50. Nirmitijnana: art of knowing prediction by heavenly voice.
51. Yantramatrika: art of mechanics.
52. Mlecchitakutarkavikalpa: art of fabricating barbarous or foreign sophistry.
53. Samvacya: art of conversation.
54. Manasi kavyakriya: art of composing verse
55. Kriyavikalpa: art of designing a literary work or a medical remedy.
56. Chalitakayoga: art of practicing as a builder of shrines called after him.
57. Abhidhanakoshacchandojnana: art of the use of lexicography and meters.
58. Vastragopana: art of concealment of cloths.
59. Dyutavisesha: art of knowing specific gambling.
60. Akarshakrida: art of playing with dice or magnet.
61. Balakakridanaka: art of using children's toys.
62. Vainayiki vidya: art of enforcing discipline.
63. Vaijayiki vidya: art of gaining victory.
64. Vaitaliki vidya: art of awakening master with music at dawn.
~ Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger, Sexual Secrets,#KEYS
265:A God's Labour
I have gathered my dreams in a silver air
Between the gold and the blue
And wrapped them softly and left them there,
My jewelled dreams of you.
I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge
Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
The moods of infinity.
But too bright were our heavens, too far away,
Too frail their ethereal stuff;
Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay;
The roots were not deep enough.
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
Coercing my godhead I have come down
Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
Twixt the gates of death and birth.
I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river's song,
A home for the deathless fire.
I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began.
For man's mind is the dupe of his animal self;
Hoping its lusts to win,
He harbours within him a grisly Elf
Enamoured of sorrow and sin.
The grey Elf shudders from heaven's flame
And from all things glad and pure;
Only by pleasure and passion and pain
His drama can endure.
All around is darkness and strife;
For the lamps that men call suns
Are but halfway gleams on this stumbling life
Cast by the Undying Ones.
Man lights his little torches of hope
That lead to a failing edge;
A fragment of Truth is his widest scope,
An inn his pilgrimage.
The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose.
All that was found must again be sought,
Each enemy slain revives,
Each battle for ever is fought and refought
Through vistas of fruitless lives.
My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
And the Titan kings assail,
But I dare not rest till my task is done
And wrought the eternal will.
How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!
"Thy hope is Chimera's head
Painting the sky with its fiery stain;
Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead.
"Who art thou that babblest of heavenly ease
And joy and golden room
To us who are waifs on inconscient seas
And bound to life's iron doom?
"This earth is ours, a field of Night
For our petty flickering fires.
How shall it brook the sacred Light
Or suffer a god's desires?
"Come, let us slay him and end his course!
Then shall our hearts have release
From the burden and call of his glory and force
And the curb of his wide white peace."
But the god is there in my mortal breast
Who wrestles with error and fate
And tramples a road through mire and waste
For the nameless Immaculate.
A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate."
I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
At the very root of things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep
On the Dragon's outspread wings.
I left the surface gauds of mind
And life's unsatisfied seas
And plunged through the body's alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.
I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart
And heard her black mass' bell.
I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell.
Above me the dragon murmurs moan
And the goblin voices flit;
I have pierced the Void where Thought was born,
I have walked in the bottomless pit.
On a desperate stair my feet have trod
Armoured with boundless peace,
Bringing the fires of the splendour of God
Into the human abyss.
He who I am was with me still;
All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow.
The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
And the golden waters pour
Down the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridged
And glimmer from shore to shore.
Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth
And the undying suns here burn;
Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth
The incarnate spirits yearn
Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
Down a gold-red stairway wend
The radiant children of Paradise
Clarioning darkness' end.
A little more and the new life's doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In a great world bare and bright.
I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,
For in a raiment of gold and blue
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
The living truth of you.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour, 534,#KEYS
266:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #KEYS
267:Education
THE EDUCATION of a human being should begin at birth and continue throughout his life.
Indeed, if we want this education to have its maximum result, it should begin even before birth; in this case it is the mother herself who proceeds with this education by means of a twofold action: first, upon herself for her own improvement, and secondly, upon the child whom she is forming physically. For it is certain that the nature of the child to be born depends very much upon the mother who forms it, upon her aspiration and will as well as upon the material surroundings in which she lives. To see that her thoughts are always beautiful and pure, her feelings always noble and fine, her material surroundings as harmonious as possible and full of a great simplicity - this is the part of education which should apply to the mother herself. And if she has in addition a conscious and definite will to form the child according to the highest ideal she can conceive, then the very best conditions will be realised so that the child can come into the world with his utmost potentialities. How many difficult efforts and useless complications would be avoided in this way!
Education to be complete must have five principal aspects corresponding to the five principal activities of the human being: the physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and the spiritual. Usually, these phases of education follow chronologically the growth of the individual; this, however, does not mean that one of them should replace another, but that all must continue, completing one another until the end of his life.
We propose to study these five aspects of education one by one and also their interrelationships. But before we enter into the details of the subject, I wish to make a recommendation to parents. Most parents, for various reasons, give very little thought to the true education which should be imparted to children. When they have brought a child into the world, provided him with food, satisfied his various material needs and looked after his health more or less carefully, they think they have fully discharged their duty. Later on, they will send him to school and hand over to the teachers the responsibility for his education.
There are other parents who know that their children must be educated and who try to do what they can. But very few, even among those who are most serious and sincere, know that the first thing to do, in order to be able to educate a child, is to educate oneself, to become conscious and master of oneself so that one never sets a bad example to one's child. For it is above all through example that education becomes effective. To speak good words and to give wise advice to a child has very little effect if one does not oneself give him an example of what one teaches. Sincerity, honesty, straightforwardness, courage, disinterestedness, unselfishness, patience, endurance, perseverance, peace, calm, self-control are all things that are taught infinitely better by example than by beautiful speeches. Parents, have a high ideal and always act in accordance with it and you will see that little by little your child will reflect this ideal in himself and spontaneously manifest the qualities you would like to see expressed in his nature. Quite naturally a child has respect and admiration for his parents; unless they are quite unworthy, they will always appear to their child as demigods whom he will try to imitate as best he can.
With very few exceptions, parents are not aware of the disastrous influence that their own defects, impulses, weaknesses and lack of self-control have on their children. If you wish to be respected by a child, have respect for yourself and be worthy of respect at every moment. Never be authoritarian, despotic, impatient or ill-tempered. When your child asks you a question, do not give him a stupid or silly answer under the pretext that he cannot understand you. You can always make yourself understood if you take enough trouble; and in spite of the popular saying that it is not always good to tell the truth, I affirm that it is always good to tell the truth, but that the art consists in telling it in such a way as to make it accessible to the mind of the hearer. In early life, until he is twelve or fourteen, the child's mind is hardly open to abstract notions and general ideas. And yet you can train it to understand these things by using concrete images, symbols or parables. Up to quite an advanced age and for some who mentally always remain children, a narrative, a story, a tale well told teach much more than any number of theoretical explanations.
Another pitfall to avoid: do not scold your child without good reason and only when it is quite indispensable. A child who is too often scolded gets hardened to rebuke and no longer attaches much importance to words or severity of tone. And above all, take good care never to scold him for a fault which you yourself commit. Children are very keen and clear-sighted observers; they soon find out your weaknesses and note them without pity.
When a child has done something wrong, see that he confesses it to you spontaneously and frankly; and when he has confessed, with kindness and affection make him understand what was wrong in his movement so that he will not repeat it, but never scold him; a fault confessed must always be forgiven. You should not allow any fear to come between you and your child; fear is a pernicious means of education: it invariably gives birth to deceit and lying. Only a discerning affection that is firm yet gentle and an adequate practical knowledge will create the bonds of trust that are indispensable for you to be able to educate your child effectively. And do not forget that you have to control yourself constantly in order to be equal to your task and truly fulfil the duty which you owe your child by the mere fact of having brought him into the world.
Bulletin, February 1951
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
268:Mental Education
OF ALL lines of education, mental education is the most widely known and practised, yet except in a few rare cases there are gaps which make it something very incomplete and in the end quite insufficient.
Generally speaking, schooling is considered to be all the mental education that is necessary. And when a child has been made to undergo, for a number of years, a methodical training which is more like cramming than true schooling, it is considered that whatever is necessary for his mental development has been done. Nothing of the kind. Even conceding that the training is given with due measure and discrimination and does not permanently damage the brain, it cannot impart to the human mind the faculties it needs to become a good and useful instrument. The schooling that is usually given can, at the most, serve as a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain. From this standpoint, each branch of human learning represents a special kind of mental gymnastics, and the verbal formulations given to these various branches each constitute a special and well-defined language.
A true mental education, which will prepare man for a higher life, has five principal phases. Normally these phases follow one after another, but in exceptional individuals they may alternate or even proceed simultaneously. These five phases, in brief, are:
(1) Development of the power of concentration, the capacity of attention.
(2) Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness.
(3) Organisation of one's ideas around a central idea, a higher ideal or a supremely luminous idea that will serve as a guide in life.
(4) Thought-control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, to become able to think only what one wants and when one wants.
(5) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.
It is not possible to give here all the details concerning the methods to be employed in the application of these five phases of education to different individuals. Still, a few explanations on points of detail can be given.
Undeniably, what most impedes mental progress in children is the constant dispersion of their thoughts. Their thoughts flutter hither and thither like butterflies and they have to make a great effort to fix them. Yet this capacity is latent in them, for when you succeed in arousing their interest, they are capable of a good deal of attention. By his ingenuity, therefore, the educator will gradually help the child to become capable of a sustained effort of attention and a faculty of more and more complete absorption in the work in hand. All methods that can develop this faculty of attention from games to rewards are good and can all be utilised according to the need and the circumstances. But it is the psychological action that is most important and the sovereign method is to arouse in the child an interest in what you want to teach him, a liking for work, a will to progress. To love to learn is the most precious gift that one can give to a child: to love to learn always and everywhere, so that all circumstances, all happenings in life may be constantly renewed opportunities for learning more and always more.
For that, to attention and concentration should be added observation, precise recording and faithfulness of memory. This faculty of observation can be developed by varied and spontaneous exercises, making use of every opportunity that presents itself to keep the child's thought wakeful, alert and prompt. The growth of the understanding should be stressed much more than that of memory. One knows well only what one has understood. Things learnt by heart, mechanically, fade away little by little and finally disappear; what is understood is never forgotten. Moreover, you must never refuse to explain to a child the how and the why of things. If you cannot do it yourself, you must direct the child to those who are qualified to answer or point out to him some books that deal with the question. In this way you will progressively awaken in the child the taste for true study and the habit of making a persistent effort to know.
This will bring us quite naturally to the second phase of development in which the mind should be widened and enriched.
You will gradually show the child that everything can become an interesting subject for study if it is approached in the right way. The life of every day, of every moment, is the best school of all, varied, complex, full of unexpected experiences, problems to be solved, clear and striking examples and obvious consequences. It is so easy to arouse healthy curiosity in children, if you answer with intelligence and clarity the numerous questions they ask. An interesting reply to one readily brings others in its train and so the attentive child learns without effort much more than he usually does in the classroom. By a choice made with care and insight, you should also teach him to enjoy good reading-matter which is both instructive and attractive. Do not be afraid of anything that awakens and pleases his imagination; imagination develops the creative mental faculty and through it study becomes living and the mind develops in joy.
In order to increase the suppleness and comprehensiveness of his mind, one should see not only that he studies many varied topics, but above all that a single subject is approached in various ways, so that the child understands in a practical manner that there are many ways of facing the same intellectual problem, of considering it and solving it. This will remove all rigidity from his brain and at the same time it will make his thinking richer and more supple and prepare it for a more complex and comprehensive synthesis. In this way also the child will be imbued with the sense of the extreme relativity of mental learning and, little by little, an aspiration for a truer source of knowledge will awaken in him.
Indeed, as the child grows older and progresses in his studies, his mind too ripens and becomes more and more capable of forming general ideas, and with them almost always comes a need for certitude, for a knowledge that is stable enough to form the basis of a mental construction which will permit all the diverse and scattered and often contradictory ideas accumulated in his brain to be organised and put in order. This ordering is indeed very necessary if one is to avoid chaos in one's thoughts. All contradictions can be transformed into complements, but for that one must discover the higher idea that will have the power to bring them harmoniously together. It is always good to consider every problem from all possible standpoints so as to avoid partiality and exclusiveness; but if the thought is to be active and creative, it must, in every case, be the natural and logical synthesis of all the points of view adopted. And if you want to make the totality of your thoughts into a dynamic and constructive force, you must also take great care as to the choice of the central idea of your mental synthesis; for upon that will depend the value of this synthesis. The higher and larger the central idea and the more universal it is, rising above time and space, the more numerous and the more complex will be the ideas, notions and thoughts which it will be able to organise and harmonise.
It goes without saying that this work of organisation cannot be done once and for all. The mind, if it is to keep its vigour and youth, must progress constantly, revise its notions in the light of new knowledge, enlarge its frame-work to include fresh notions and constantly reclassify and reorganise its thoughts, so that each of them may find its true place in relation to the others and the whole remain harmonious and orderly.
All that has just been said concerns the speculative mind, the mind that learns. But learning is only one aspect of mental activity; the other, which is at least equally important, is the constructive faculty, the capacity to form and thus prepare action. This very important part of mental activity has rarely been the subject of any special study or discipline. Only those who want, for some reason, to exercise a strict control over their mental activities think of observing and disciplining this faculty of formation; and as soon as they try it, they have to face difficulties so great that they appear almost insurmountable.
And yet control over this formative activity of the mind is one of the most important aspects of self-education; one can say that without it no mental mastery is possible. As far as study is concerned, all ideas are acceptable and should be included in the synthesis, whose very function is to become more and more rich and complex; but where action is concerned, it is just the opposite. The ideas that are accepted for translation into action should be strictly controlled and only those that agree with the general trend of the central idea forming the basis of the mental synthesis should be permitted to express themselves in action. This means that every thought entering the mental consciousness should be set before the central idea; if it finds a logical place among the thoughts already grouped, it will be admitted into the synthesis; if not, it will be rejected so that it can have no influence on the action. This work of mental purification should be done very regularly in order to secure a complete control over one's actions.
For this purpose, it is good to set apart some time every day when one can quietly go over one's thoughts and put one's synthesis in order. Once the habit is acquired, you can maintain control over your thoughts even during work and action, allowing only those which are useful for what you are doing to come to the surface. Particularly, if you have continued to cultivate the power of concentration and attention, only the thoughts that are needed will be allowed to enter the active external consciousness and they then become all the more dynamic and effective. And if, in the intensity of concentration, it becomes necessary not to think at all, all mental vibration can be stilled and an almost total silence secured. In this silence one can gradually open to the higher regions of the mind and learn to record the inspirations that come from there.
But even before reaching this point, silence in itself is supremely useful, because in most people who have a somewhat developed and active mind, the mind is never at rest. During the day, its activity is kept under a certain control, but at night, during the sleep of the body, the control of the waking state is almost completely removed and the mind indulges in activities which are sometimes excessive and often incoherent. This creates a great stress which leads to fatigue and the diminution of the intellectual faculties.
The fact is that like all the other parts of the human being, the mind too needs rest and it will not have this rest unless we know how to provide it. The art of resting one's mind is something to be acquired. Changing one's mental activity is certainly one way of resting; but the greatest possible rest is silence. And as far as the mental faculties are concerned a few minutes passed in the calm of silence are a more effective rest than hours of sleep.
When one has learned to silence the mind at will and to concentrate it in receptive silence, then there will be no problem that cannot be solved, no mental difficulty whose solution cannot be found. When it is agitated, thought becomes confused and impotent; in an attentive tranquillity, the light can manifest itself and open up new horizons to man's capacity. Bulletin, November 1951
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
269:The Supreme Discovery
IF WE want to progress integrally, we must build within our conscious being a strong and pure mental synthesis which can serve us as a protection against temptations from outside, as a landmark to prevent us from going astray, as a beacon to light our way across the moving ocean of life.
Each individual should build up this mental synthesis according to his own tendencies and affinities and aspirations. But if we want it to be truly living and luminous, it must be centred on the idea that is the intellectual representation symbolising That which is at the centre of our being, That which is our life and our light.
This idea, expressed in sublime words, has been taught in various forms by all the great Instructors in all lands and all ages.
The Self of each one and the great universal Self are one. Since all that is exists from all eternity in its essence and principle, why make a distinction between the being and its origin, between ourselves and what we place at the beginning?
The ancient traditions rightly said:
"Our origin and ourselves, our God and ourselves are one."
And this oneness should not be understood merely as a more or less close and intimate relationship of union, but as a true identity.
Thus, when a man who seeks the Divine attempts to reascend by degrees towards the inaccessible, he forgets that all his knowledge and all his intuition cannot take him one step forward in this infinite; neither does he know that what he wants to attain, what he believes to be so far from him, is within him.
For how could he know anything of the origin until he becomes conscious of this origin in himself?
It is by understanding himself, by learning to know himself, that he can make the supreme discovery and cry out in wonder like the patriarch in the Bible, "The house of God is here and I knew it not."
That is why we must express that sublime thought, creatrix of the material worlds, and make known to all the word that fills the heavens and the earth, "I am in all things and all beings."When all shall know this, the promised day of great transfigurations will be at hand. When in each atom of Matter men shall recognise the indwelling thought of God, when in each living creature they shall perceive some hint of a gesture of God, when each man can see God in his brother, then dawn will break, dispelling the darkness, the falsehood, the ignorance, the error and suffering that weigh upon all Nature. For, "all Nature suffers and laments as she awaits the revelation of the Sons of God."
This indeed is the central thought epitomising all others, the thought which should be ever present to our remembrance as the sun that illumines all life.
That is why I remind you of it today. For if we follow our path bearing this thought in our hearts like the rarest jewel, the most precious treasure, if we allow it to do its work of illumination and transfiguration within us, we shall know that it lives in the centre of all beings and all things, and in it we shall feel the marvellous oneness of the universe.
Then we shall understand the vanity and childishness of our meagre satisfactions, our foolish quarrels, our petty passions, our blind indignations. We shall see the dissolution of our little faults, the crumbling of the last entrenchments of our limited personality and our obtuse egoism. We shall feel ourselves being swept along by this sublime current of true spirituality which will deliver us from our narrow limits and bounds.
The individual Self and the universal Self are one; in every world, in every being, in every thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man's mission is to manifest it.
In order to do that, he must become conscious of this Divine Presence within him. Some individuals must undergo a real apprenticeship in order to achieve this: their egoistic being is too all-absorbing, too rigid, too conservative, and their struggles against it are long and painful. Others, on the contrary, who are more impersonal, more plastic, more spiritualised, come easily into contact with the inexhaustible divine source of their being.But let us not forget that they too should devote themselves daily, constantly, to a methodical effort of adaptation and transformation, so that nothing within them may ever again obscure the radiance of that pure light.
But how greatly the standpoint changes once we attain this deeper consciousness! How understanding widens, how compassion grows!
On this a sage has said:
"I would like each one of us to come to the point where he perceives the inner God who dwells even in the vilest of human beings; instead of condemning him we would say, 'Arise, O resplendent Being, thou who art ever pure, who knowest neither birth nor death; arise, Almighty One, and manifest thy nature.'"
Let us live by this beautiful utterance and we shall see everything around us transformed as if by miracle.
This is the attitude of true, conscious and discerning love, the love which knows how to see behind appearances, understand in spite of words, and which, amid all obstacles, is in constant communion with the depths.
What value have our impulses and our desires, our anguish and our violence, our sufferings and our struggles, all these inner vicissitudes unduly dramatised by our unruly imagination - what value do they have before this great, this sublime and divine love bending over us from the innermost depths of our being, bearing with our weaknesses, rectifying our errors, healing our wounds, bathing our whole being with its regenerating streams?
For the inner Godhead never imposes herself, she neither demands nor threatens; she offers and gives herself, conceals and forgets herself in the heart of all beings and things; she never accuses, she neither judges nor curses nor condemns, but works unceasingly to perfect without constraint, to mend without reproach, to encourage without impatience, to enrich each one with all the wealth he can receive; she is the mother whose love bears fruit and nourishes, guards and protects, counsels and consoles; because she understands everything, she can endure everything, excuse and pardon everything, hope and prepare for everything; bearing everything within herself, she owns nothing that does not belong to all, and because she reigns over all, she is the servant of all; that is why all, great and small, who want to be kings with her and gods in her, become, like her, not despots but servitors among their brethren.
How beautiful is this humble role of servant, the role of all who have been revealers and heralds of the God who is within all, of the Divine Love that animates all things....
And until we can follow their example and become true servants even as they, let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love; let us offer Him, without reserve, this marvellous instrument, our physical organism. He shall make it yield its utmost on every plane of activity.
To achieve this total self-consecration, all means are good, all methods have their value. The one thing needful is to persevere in our will to attain this goal. For then everything we study, every action we perform, every human being we meet, all come to bring us an indication, a help, a light to guide us on the path.
Before I close, I shall add a few pages for those who have already made apparently fruitless efforts, for those who have encountered the pitfalls on the way and seen the measure of their weakness, for those who are in danger of losing their self-confidence and courage. These pages, intended to rekindle hope in the hearts of those who suffer, were written by a spiritual worker at a time when ordeals of every kind were sweeping down on him like purifying flames.
You who are weary, downcast and bruised, you who fall, who think perhaps that you are defeated, hear the voice of a friend. He knows your sorrows, he has shared them, he has suffered like you from the ills of the earth; like you he has crossed many deserts under the burden of the day, he has known thirst and hunger, solitude and abandonment, and the cruellest of all wants, the destitution of the heart. Alas! he has known too the hours of doubt, the errors, the faults, the failings, every weakness.
But he tells you: Courage! Hearken to the lesson that the rising sun brings to the earth with its first rays each morning. It is a lesson of hope, a message of solace.
You who weep, who suffer and tremble, who dare not expect an end to your ills, an issue to your pangs, behold: there is no night without dawn and the day is about to break when darkness is thickest; there is no mist that the sun does not dispel, no cloud that it does not gild, no tear that it will not dry one day, no storm that is not followed by its shining triumphant bow; there is no snow that it does not melt, nor winter that it does not change into radiant spring.
And for you too, there is no affliction which does not bring its measure of glory, no distress which cannot be transformed into joy, nor defeat into victory, nor downfall into higher ascension, nor solitude into radiating centre of life, nor discord into harmony - sometimes it is a misunderstanding between two minds that compels two hearts to open to mutual communion; lastly, there is no infinite weakness that cannot be changed into strength. And it is even in supreme weakness that almightiness chooses to reveal itself!
Listen, my little child, you who today feel so broken, so fallen perhaps, who have nothing left, nothing to cover your misery and foster your pride: never before have you been so great! How close to the summits is he who awakens in the depths, for the deeper the abyss, the more the heights reveal themselves!
Do you not know this, that the most sublime forces of the vasts seek to array themselves in the most opaque veils of Matter? Oh, the sublime nuptials of sovereign love with the obscurest plasticities, of the shadow's yearning with the most royal light!
If ordeal or fault has cast you down, if you have sunk into the nether depths of suffering, do not grieve - for there indeed the divine love and the supreme blessing can reach you! Because you have passed through the crucible of purifying sorrows, the glorious ascents are yours.
You are in the wilderness: then listen to the voices of the silence. The clamour of flattering words and outer applause has gladdened your ears, but the voices of the silence will gladden your soul and awaken within you the echo of the depths, the chant of divine harmonies!
You are walking in the depths of night: then gather the priceless treasures of the night. In bright sunshine, the ways of intelligence are lit, but in the white luminosities of the night lie the hidden paths of perfection, the secret of spiritual riches.
You are being stripped of everything: that is the way towards plenitude. When you have nothing left, everything will be given to you. Because for those who are sincere and true, from the worst always comes the best.
Every grain that is sown in the earth produces a thousand. Every wing-beat of sorrow can be a soaring towards glory.
And when the adversary pursues man relentlessly, everything he does to destroy him only makes him greater.
Hear the story of the worlds, look: the great enemy seems to triumph. He casts the beings of light into the night, and the night is filled with stars. He rages against the cosmic working, he assails the integrity of the empire of the sphere, shatters its harmony, divides and subdivides it, scatters its dust to the four winds of infinity, and lo! the dust is changed into a golden seed, fertilising the infinite and peopling it with worlds which now gravitate around their eternal centre in the larger orbit of space - so that even division creates a richer and deeper unity, and by multiplying the surfaces of the material universe, enlarges the empire that it set out to destroy.
Beautiful indeed was the song of the primordial sphere cradled in the bosom of immensity, but how much more beautiful and triumphant is the symphony of the constellations, the music of the spheres, the immense choir that fills the heavens with an eternal hymn of victory!
Hear again: no state was ever more precarious than that of man when he was separated on earth from his divine origin. Above him stretched the hostile borders of the usurper, and at his horizon's gates watched jailers armed with flaming swords. Then, since he could climb no more to the source of life, the source arose within him; since he could no more receive the light from above, the light shone forth at the very centre of his being; since he could commune no more with the transcendent love, that love offered itself in a holocaust and chose each terrestrial being, each human self as its dwelling-place and sanctuary.
That is how, in this despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as man, neither is any as divine as he!
In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory! 28 April 1912 ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, The Supreme Discovery,#KEYS
270:One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, was drawn by 'Miss Alice Havers.' I did not state this on the title-page, since it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful pictures, that his name should stand there alone.
The descriptions, of Sunday as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.
The Chapters, headed 'Fairy Sylvie' and 'Bruno's Revenge,' are a reprint, with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty, for 'Aunt Judy's Magazine,' which she was then editing.
It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story.
As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me--who knows how?--with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought--as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the 'flint' of one's own mind by the 'steel' of a friend's chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a propos of nothing --specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, 'an effect without a cause.' Such, for example, was the last line of 'The Hunting of the Snark,' which came into my head (as I have already related in 'The Theatre' for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams, and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book--one, my Lady's remark, 'it often runs in families, just as a love for pastry does', the other, Eric Lindon's badinage about having been in domestic service.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of litterature--if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling --which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word 'chaos': and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents, not the incidents out of the story I am telling all this, in no spirit of egoism, but because I really believe that some of my readers will be interested in these details of the 'genesis' of a book, which looks so simple and straight-forward a matter, when completed, that they might suppose it to have been written straight off, page by page, as one would write a letter, beginning at the beginning; and ending at the end.
It is, no doubt, possible to write a story in that way: and, if it be not vanity to say so, I believe that I could, myself,--if I were in the unfortunate position (for I do hold it to be a real misfortune) of being obliged to produce a given amount of fiction in a given time,--that I could 'fulfil my task,' and produce my 'tale of bricks,' as other slaves have done. One thing, at any rate, I could guarantee as to the story so produced--that it should be utterly commonplace, should contain no new ideas whatever, and should be very very weary reading!
This species of literature has received the very appropriate name of 'padding' which might fitly be defined as 'that which all can write and none can read.' That the present volume contains no such writing I dare not avow: sometimes, in order to bring a picture into its proper place, it has been necessary to eke out a page with two or three extra lines : but I can honestly say I have put in no more than I was absolutely compelled to do.
My readers may perhaps like to amuse themselves by trying to detect, in a given passage, the one piece of 'padding' it contains. While arranging the 'slips' into pages, I found that the passage was 3 lines too short. I supplied the deficiency, not by interpolating a word here and a word there, but by writing in 3 consecutive lines. Now can my readers guess which they are?
A harder puzzle if a harder be desired would be to determine, as to the Gardener's Song, in which cases (if any) the stanza was adapted to the surrounding text, and in which (if any) the text was adapted to the stanza.
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature--at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it come's is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story--I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it--but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen storybooks have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'--is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.
Hence it is that, in 'Sylvie and Bruno,' I have striven with I know not what success to strike out yet another new path: be it bad or good, it is the best I can do. It is written, not for money, and not for fame, but in the hope of supplying, for the children whom I love, some thoughts that may suit those hours of innocent merriment which are the very life of Childhood; and also in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others, some thoughts that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.
If I have not already exhausted the patience of my readers, I would like to seize this opportunity perhaps the last I shall have of addressing so many friends at once of putting on record some ideas that have occurred to me, as to books desirable to be written--which I should much like to attempt, but may not ever have the time or power to carry through--in the hope that, if I should fail (and the years are gliding away very fast) to finish the task I have set myself, other hands may take it up.
First, a Child's Bible. The only real essentials of this would be, carefully selected passages, suitable for a child's reading, and pictures. One principle of selection, which I would adopt, would be that Religion should be put before a child as a revelation of love--no need to pain and puzzle the young mind with the history of crime and punishment. (On such a principle I should, for example, omit the history of the Flood.) The supplying of the pictures would involve no great difficulty: no new ones would be needed : hundreds of excellent pictures already exist, the copyright of which has long ago expired, and which simply need photo-zincography, or some similar process, for their successful reproduction. The book should be handy in size with a pretty attractive looking cover--in a clear legible type--and, above all, with abundance of pictures, pictures, pictures!
Secondly, a book of pieces selected from the Bible--not single texts, but passages of from 10 to 20 verses each--to be committed to memory. Such passages would be found useful, to repeat to one's self and to ponder over, on many occasions when reading is difficult, if not impossible: for instance, when lying awake at night--on a railway-journey --when taking a solitary walk-in old age, when eyesight is failing or wholly lost--and, best of all, when illness, while incapacitating us for reading or any other occupation, condemns us to lie awake through many weary silent hours: at such a time how keenly one may realise the truth of David's rapturous cry "O how sweet are thy words unto my throat: yea, sweeter than honey unto my mouth!"
I have said 'passages,' rather than single texts, because we have no means of recalling single texts: memory needs links, and here are none: one may have a hundred texts stored in the memory, and not be able to recall, at will, more than half-a-dozen--and those by mere chance: whereas, once get hold of any portion of a chapter that has been committed to memory, and the whole can be recovered: all hangs together.
Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages--enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.
These two books of sacred, and secular, passages for memory--will serve other good purposes besides merely occupying vacant hours: they will help to keep at bay many anxious thoughts, worrying thoughts, uncharitable thoughts, unholy thoughts. Let me say this, in better words than my own, by copying a passage from that most interesting book, Robertson's Lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, Lecture XLIX. "If a man finds himself haunted by evil desires and unholy images, which will generally be at periodical hours, let him commit to memory passages of Scripture, or passages from the best writers in verse or prose. Let him store his mind with these, as safeguards to repeat when he lies awake in some restless night, or when despairing imaginations, or gloomy, suicidal thoughts, beset him. Let these be to him the sword, turning everywhere to keep the way of the Garden of Life from the intrusion of profaner footsteps."
Fourthly, a "Shakespeare" for girls: that is, an edition in which everything, not suitable for the perusal of girls of (say) from 10 to 17, should be omitted. Few children under 10 would be likely to understand or enjoy the greatest of poets: and those, who have passed out of girlhood, may safely be left to read Shakespeare, in any edition, 'expurgated' or not, that they may prefer: but it seems a pity that so many children, in the intermediate stage, should be debarred from a great pleasure for want of an edition suitable to them. Neither Bowdler's, Chambers's, Brandram's, nor Cundell's 'Boudoir' Shakespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently 'expurgated.' Bowdler's is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of wonder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out! Besides relentlessly erasing all that is unsuitable on the score of reverence or decency, I should be inclined to omit also all that seems too difficult, or not likely to interest young readers. The resulting book might be slightly fragmentary: but it would be a real treasure to all British maidens who have any taste for poetry.
If it be needful to apologize to any one for the new departure I have taken in this story--by introducing, along with what will, I hope, prove to be acceptable nonsense for children, some of the graver thoughts of human life--it must be to one who has learned the Art of keeping such thoughts wholly at a distance in hours of mirth and careless ease. To him such a mixture will seem, no doubt, ill-judged and repulsive. And that such an Art exists I do not dispute: with youth, good health, and sufficient money, it seems quite possible to lead, for years together, a life of unmixed gaiety--with the exception of one solemn fact, with which we are liable to be confronted at any moment, even in the midst of the most brilliant company or the most sparkling entertainment. A man may fix his own times for admitting serious thought, for attending public worship, for prayer, for reading the Bible: all such matters he can defer to that 'convenient season', which is so apt never to occur at all: but he cannot defer, for one single moment, the necessity of attending to a message, which may come before he has finished reading this page,' this night shalt thy soul be required of thee.'
The ever-present sense of this grim possibility has been, in all ages, 1 an incubus that men have striven to shake off. Few more interesting subjects of enquiry could be found, by a student of history, than the various weapons that have been used against this shadowy foe. Saddest of all must have been the thoughts of those who saw indeed an existence beyond the grave, but an existence far more terrible than annihilation--an existence as filmy, impalpable, all but invisible spectres, drifting about, through endless ages, in a world of shadows, with nothing to do, nothing to hope for, nothing to love! In the midst of the gay verses of that genial 'bon vivant' Horace, there stands one dreary word whose utter sadness goes to one's heart. It is the word 'exilium' in the well-known passage
Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium
Versatur urna serius ocius
Sors exitura et nos in aeternum
Exilium impositura cymbae.
Yes, to him this present life--spite of all its weariness and all its sorrow--was the only life worth having: all else was 'exile'! Does it not seem almost incredible that one, holding such a creed, should ever have smiled?
And many in this day, I fear, even though believing in an existence beyond the grave far more real than Horace ever dreamed of, yet regard it as a sort of 'exile' from all the joys of life, and so adopt Horace's theory, and say 'let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'
We go to entertainments, such as the theatre--I say 'we', for I also go to the play, whenever I get a chance of seeing a really good one and keep at arm's length, if possible, the thought that we may not return alive. Yet how do you know--dear friend, whose patience has carried you through this garrulous preface that it may not be your lot, when mirth is fastest and most furious, to feel the sharp pang, or the deadly faintness, which heralds the final crisis--to see, with vague wonder, anxious friends bending over you to hear their troubled whispers perhaps yourself to shape the question, with trembling lips, "Is it serious?", and to be told "Yes: the end is near" (and oh, how different all Life will look when those words are said!)--how do you know, I say, that all this may not happen to you, this night?
And dare you, knowing this, say to yourself "Well, perhaps it is an immoral play: perhaps the situations are a little too 'risky', the dialogue a little too strong, the 'business' a little too suggestive.
I don't say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I'll begin a stricter life to-morrow." To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow!
"Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says,
'Sorrow for sin God's judgement stays!'
Against God's Spirit he lies; quite stops Mercy with insult; dares, and drops,
Like a scorch'd fly, that spins in vain
Upon the axis of its pain,
Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and forgot, from fall to fall."
Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death--if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life--that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds'--but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man--and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
One other matter may perhaps seem to call for apology--that I should have treated with such entire want of sympathy the British passion for 'Sport', which no doubt has been in by-gone days, and is still, in some forms of it, an excellent school for hardihood and for coolness in moments of danger.
But I am not entirely without sympathy for genuine 'Sport': I can heartily admire the courage of the man who, with severe bodily toil, and at the risk of his life, hunts down some 'man-eating' tiger: and I can heartily sympathize with him when he exults in the glorious excitement of the chase and the hand-to-hand struggle with the monster brought to bay. But I can but look with deep wonder and sorrow on the hunter who, at his ease and in safety, can find pleasure in what involves, for some defenceless creature, wild terror and a death of agony: deeper, if the hunter be one who has pledged himself to preach to men the Religion of universal Love: deepest of all, if it be one of those 'tender and delicate' beings, whose very name serves as a symbol of Love--'thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women'--whose mission here is surely to help and comfort all that are in pain or sorrow!
'Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.' ~ Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:All art is erotic. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 2:Art lies in concealing art. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 3:Art lies by its own artifice. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 4:All art is propaganda. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 5:All art is quite useless. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 6:Art is a delayed echo. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 7:Drawing is the true test of art. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 8:Past art is subject to change. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 9:I never intended to make art. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove 10:Philosophy is the art of living. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 11:Art is a leap into the dark. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 12:Art is most effective when concealed. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 13:If the art is concealed, it succeeds. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 14:The Art of War is self-explanatory ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 15:Art should be a place of hope. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 16:divine art of subtlety and secrecy! ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 17:Intimacy is a difficult art. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 18:You can't make love without art. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 19:Art is an escape from reality. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 20:Art is a personal act of courage. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 21:Art is far feebler than necessity. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 22:art is the pulse of a nation. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 23:Art needs no spur beyond itself. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 24:It's a divine art to be cheerful. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 25:Art is the escape from personality. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 26:Necessity is stronger far than art. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 27:The purpose of art is to stop time. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 28:Where thou art, that is home. ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 29:You don't make art, you find it. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 30:Art degraded, Imagination denied. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 31:Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 32:Art never comes from happiness. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 33:History develops, art stands still. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 34:Art: to nudge truth along a little. ~ jules-renard, @wisdomtrove 35:As thou thinkest, so art thou. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 36:Drawing is the honesty of the art. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 37:Time is the great art of man. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 38:When your art fails, make better art. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 39:Art is a jealous mistress. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 40:At the heart of art is learning to see ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 41:True art awakens the Extraordinary Ovation. ~ hafez, @wisdomtrove 42:We by art unteach what Nature taught. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 43:Art is an attempt to escape from life. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 44:Art is a shadow of Divine perfection. ~ michelangelo, @wisdomtrove 45:Art moves. Hence its civilizing power. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 46:No art comes from the conscious mind. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 47:Where there's liberty, art succeeds. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 48:Art is a never-ending dance of illusions. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 49:Art is to look at not to criticize. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 50:Great art is horseshit, buy tacos. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 51:Where there is money there is no art. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 52:Art is the clothing of a revelation. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 53:Art is what we do when we're truly alive. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 54:Art never expresses anything but itself. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 55:Economy is essential to all good art. ~ jerry-seinfeld, @wisdomtrove 56:For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 57:It is art to conceal art. -Ars est celare artem ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 58:Learning is as much an art as teaching ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 59:Peace is first of all the art of being. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 60:Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 61:Art too is a just a way of living. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 62:My art and profession is to live. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 63:Resolve and thou art free. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 64:Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 65:There is but one art, to omit. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 66:All art worthy of the name is religious. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 67:Art is the act of navigating without a map. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 68:Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 69:Art is right reason in the doing of work. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 70:I think the idea of art kills creativity. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 71:Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 72:Sculpture is the art of the intelligence. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 73:The mocker of Art is the mocker of Jesus. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 74:Art is never finished, only abandoned. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 75:Art is right reason in the doing of work. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 76:The excellence of every Art is its intensity. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 77:This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 78:Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 79:Art is much, but love is more. ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 80:Either one fails in one's art or in one's life. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 81:Instead of pleasing, learn the art of happiness. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 82:Living well is an art that can be developed. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 83:Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 84:The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 85:Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 86:Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 87:If the world were clear, art would not exist. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 88:In art, practice always comes before theory. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 89:Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 90:The art of being a slave is to rule one's master. ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 91:To most women art is a form of scandal. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 92:I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove 93:In art, the best is good enough. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 94:Irregularity is the basis of all art. ~ pierre-auguste-renoir, @wisdomtrove 95:Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 96:The art of love-giving and taking become one. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 97:Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 98:Any work of art must first of all tell a story. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 99:Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 100:Art is what we're doing when we do our best work. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 101:Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 102:Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 103:No art is possible without a dance with death. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 104:Thou art a cat, and a rat, and a coward. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 105:To make living itself an art, that is the goal. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 106:All art has this characteristic-it unites people. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 107:All works of art should begin... at the end. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 108:Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 109:Art is long, and Time is fleeting. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 110:Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 111:The art of reading is to skip judiciously. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 112:This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 113:What has reason to do with the art of painting? ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 114:But of works of art little can be said. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 115:In morals, always do as others do; in art, never. ~ jules-renard, @wisdomtrove 116:Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 117:Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 118:The highest art is no art. The best form is no form. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 119:The true art of memory is the art of attention. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 120:To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 121:Valuing a business is part art and part science. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 122:Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 123:A good half of the art of living is resilience. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 124:It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 125:Morality like art means a drawing a line someplace. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 126:The great art of writing is knowing when to stop. ~ josh-billings, @wisdomtrove 127:To create art means to be crazy alone forever. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 128:Art always has something of the unconscious about it. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove 129:Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 130:Art isn't everything. It's just about everything. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 131:I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove 132:I am an artist at living – my work of art is my life. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove 133:In art, & 134:In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 135:In the domain of art there is no light without heat. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 136:Music and art are the guiding lights of the world. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 137:Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 138:Sightseeing is the art of disappointment. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 139:The writer's only responsibility is to his art. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 140:Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 141:It is not easy to recover an art when once lost. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 142:Life isn't long enough for love and art. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 143:Patience is the art of finding something else to do. ~ groucho-marx, @wisdomtrove 144:The art of governing mankind by deceiving them. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 145:When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 146:Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 147:Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 148:The art of living well and the art of dying well are one. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 149:Whisky making is the art of making poison pleasant. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 150:Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat. ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove 151:Am not IA fly like thee?Or art not thouA man like me? ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 152:Art is a mystery. A mystery is something immeasurable. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 153:Experimentation is the key to & 154:Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes. ~ steve-jobs, @wisdomtrove 155:I wouldn't give five cents for all the art in the world. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 156:Lifestyle is the art of discovering ways to live uniquely. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 157:Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 158:Thank God, men that art greatly guilty are never wise. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 159:The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 160:Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 161:A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 162:Christianity is art and not money. Money is its curse. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 163:First thought is best in Art, second in other matters. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 164:In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 165:Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 166:The art of government is not to let me grow stale. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 167:The beauty of a great idea lies in the art of using it. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 168:Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 169:Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 170:The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 171:The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 172:Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 173:Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 174:A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 175:I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 176:It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 177:Magic: (n) The art of converting superstition into coin. ~ ambrose-bierce, @wisdomtrove 178:Personality is everything in art and poetry. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 179:Practice the art of patience for nature never acts in haste. ~ og-mandino, @wisdomtrove 180:The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 181:Where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 182:A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 183:Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 184:No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 185:Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 186:Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 187:Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater. ~ bette-davis, @wisdomtrove 188:If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 189:My style? You can call it the art of fighting without fighting. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 190:The essence of fighting is the art of moving at the right time. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 191:The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 192:Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man. ~ michelangelo, @wisdomtrove 193:Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 194:Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 195:Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 196:Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 197:In art, interest must be centred on the principal theme. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 198:The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 199:The people who make art their business are mostly imposters. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 200:Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 201:To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 202:What matters in art is not thinking but making. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 203:Diplomacy, n.: The patriotic art of lying for one's country. ~ ambrose-bierce, @wisdomtrove 204:It is the greatest of crimes to depress true art and science. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 205:Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 206:The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 207:The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 208:The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. ~ michelangelo, @wisdomtrove 209:Thou art a man God is no more Thy own humanity Learn to adore ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 210:To sell is above all to master the art and science of listening. ~ tom-peters, @wisdomtrove 211:We will make love an art and we will love like artists. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 212:Yoga is a way of life; it is an art, a science, a philosophy. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 213:All art is autobiographical. You can only create what you are. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 214:Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 215:Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 216:If you're making art, you are not separate from your brand. ~ danielle-laporte, @wisdomtrove 217:Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 218:The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 219:Death, O Beyond, Thou art sweet, thou art strange! ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 220:Happiness is the art of learning how to get joy from your substance. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 221:“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove 222:The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 223:The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 224:Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 225:Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 226:I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music. ~ amsel-adams, @wisdomtrove 227:Remember to be submissive, thou art analien, a fugitive, and in need. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 228:The combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 229:There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 230:The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 231:Art is bad when ‘you see the intent and get put off.’ ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 232:Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 233:I am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky! How beautiful thou art! ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 234:You don't do art for any other reason than to help your soul grow. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 235:A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 236:Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 237:It is the end of art to inoculate men with the love of nature. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 238:Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 239:So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 240:The art of war is to gain time when your strength is inferior. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 241:The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 242:Yoga is the art work of awareness on the canvas of body, mind, and soul. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 243:All art is propaganda; on the other hand, not all propaganda is art. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 244:Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 245:Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 246:Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 247:God help us - for art is long, and life so short. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 248:I do not think there is any question of photography being an art form! ~ amsel-adams, @wisdomtrove 249:It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 250:Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 251:Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 252:The art of teaching is tolerance. Humbleness is the art of learning. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 253:Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! ~ groucho-marx, @wisdomtrove 254:Wisdom is the art of being courageous and generous with the unknown. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 255:Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 256:Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 257:Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 258:I love artists, because through art one can express oneself beautifully. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 259:Medicine is the art of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. ~ voltaire, @wisdomtrove 260:Poetry is the art of putting into words the inexpressible. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 261:The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 262:Yoga is the art work of awareness on the canvas of mind,body and the soul. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 263:Any kiddie in school can love like a fool, But Hating, my boy, is an Art. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 264:Entrepreneurship is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 265:Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 266:Memento mori and obey the Lord. Art and religion love the somber chord. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 267:Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 268:Art is not in the ... eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 269:The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 270:You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 271:Any kiddies in school can love like a fool,/ But hating, my boy, is an art. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 272:It is a great art to be superior to others without letting them know it. ~ josh-billings, @wisdomtrove 273:It is while practicing yoga asanas that you learn the art of adjustment. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 274:The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove 275:The more perfect the approximation to truth, the more perfect is art. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 276:The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 277:Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 278:Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 279:Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 280:Tell me what company thou keepest and I'll tell thee what thou art. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 281:The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 282:Their & 283:The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 284:The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 285:War is the art of destroying men, and politics is the art of deceiving them. ~ parmenides, @wisdomtrove 286:All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 287:Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 288:Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 289:Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 290:Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 291:It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 292:All great art contains at its centre contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 293:Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 294:As much as I loved the art and discipline of the dance, it didn't love me! ~ audrey-hepburn, @wisdomtrove 295:Diplomacy is the art of saying & 296:Harmony of colouring is destructive of art? it is like the smile of a fool. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 297:Nothing is more difficult than the art of maneuvering for advantageous positions. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 298:To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 299:True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 300:Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 301:High achievements in art, music, etc., are the results of concentration. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 302:In war there is but one favorable moment; the great art is to seize it! ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 303:Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 304:Learning the art of expressing gratitude will force you to focus on the positive. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 305:No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 306:The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 307:Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. ~ george-bernard-shaw, @wisdomtrove 308:Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying. ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove 309:Art is only a means to life, the life more abundant. It merely points the way. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 310:Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 311:Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 312:The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 313:The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 314:Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art. ~ don-miguel-ruiz, @wisdomtrove 315:From dust thou art to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 316:Happy art thou, as if every day thou hadst picked up a horseshoe. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 317:In free society art is not a weapon... Artists are not engineers of the soul. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 318:Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 319:Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird? ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 320:If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius. ~ michelangelo, @wisdomtrove 321:Producing perfection from imperfection is, after all, the highest of art forms. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 322:The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure no slight pleasure. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 323:The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 324:To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 325:Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 326:In Europe public men do resign. But here it's a lost art. You have to impeach 'em. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 327:Music is the highest art and to those who understand, is the highest worship ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 328:No artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his own personality. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 329:Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 330:There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 331:The Secret of All Art by James Altucher, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 3, 2015. ~ steven-wright, @wisdomtrove 332:You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 333:Beauty is at once the ultimate principle and the highest aim of art. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 334:It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 335:I've been sitting down studying the Art of Love. I think it will fit me like a glove. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 336:Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 337:Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 338:Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 339:The art of angling, the cruelest, the coldest and the stupidest of pretended sports. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 340:What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 341:Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 342:By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 343:Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 344:I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don't normally get to go. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 345:The presence of excessive wealth puts an unnatural spin on the appreciation of art. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 346:We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 347:Alltami (n.) The ancient art of being able to balance the hot and cold shower taps. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 348:Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 349:Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art. ~ george-bernard-shaw, @wisdomtrove 350:Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 351:Everyone is desirous of his own pursuits, and loves To spend his time in his accustomed art. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 352:If you trusted that your art was going to support your life, how would you live? ~ danielle-laporte, @wisdomtrove 353:The great art of governing consists in not letting men grow old in their jobs. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 354:The ignorant Insults of Individuals will not hinder me from doing my duty to my Art ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 355:There will be as much deceit and criminality in the world as there is lack of art. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 356:A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 357:And when thou art weary I'll find thee a bed, Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 358:Art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 359:Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 360:Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 361:Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 362:Nature is a haunted house& 363:Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 364:We now know that Art is not the truth... but rather a way of approaching the truth. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 365:What I mean by art is the human act of doing something that connects us to someone else ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 366:Art lives where absolute freedom is, because where it is not, there can be no creativity. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 367:As soon as you are willing to say & 368:Love needs two things: it has to be rooted in freedom and it has to know the art of trust. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 369:Martial arts, like any art, is an unrestricted athletic expression of an individual soul. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 370:The art of winning in business is in working hard - not taking things too seriously. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 371:The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 372:What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 373:For his heart was in his work, and the heart giveth grace unto every art. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 374:It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 375:I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 376:Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 377:Prayer is an art which only the Spirit can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 378:Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 379:Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 380:Each good thought that you have encouraged and nourished is your life's true work of art. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 381:To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 382:To me more dear, congenial to my heart, One native charm, than all the gloss of art. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 383:By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid, art, makes mighty things from small beginnings grow. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 384:Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 385:Happiness is an art that one has to learn. It has nothing to do with your doing or not doing. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 386:I saw more truth and sensitivity in art than I did in many of the people in this world. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 387:I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 388:The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 389:The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 390:there is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 391:Undertake not to teach your equal in the art himself professes; it savors arrogancy. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 392:Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 393:In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 394:Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. ~ amsel-adams, @wisdomtrove 395:The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 396:There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. ~ charlie-chaplan, @wisdomtrove 397:The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men. ~ reinhold-niebuhr, @wisdomtrove 398:Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 399:Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 400:Be kind to others, so that you may learn the secret art of being kind to yourself. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 401:Chess is too difficult to be a game and not serious enough to be a science or an art. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 402:Don't flail against the world, use it. Flexibility is the operative principle in the art of war. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 403:I already have a wife who is too much for me.. she is my art, and my works are my children. ~ michelangelo, @wisdomtrove 404:It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 405:Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 406:There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 407:You gotta know when to be lazy. Done correctly, it's an art form that benefits everyone. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 408:Your whole being should be symmetrical. Yoga is symmetry. That is why yoga is a basic art. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 409:All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 410:Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 411:Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 412:Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 413:As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 414:Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 415:Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 416:The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 417:What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 418:You don't make art after you become an artist. You become an artist by ceaselessly making art. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 419:Art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 420:Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 421:Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 422:If it [dabbling in art] didn't amuse me, I beg you to believe that I wouldn't do it. ~ pierre-auguste-renoir, @wisdomtrove 423:The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 424:To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 425:You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 426:Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story. ~ don-miguel-ruiz, @wisdomtrove 427:The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 428:We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 429:Writing is an art; and artists are human beings. As a human being stands, so a human being is. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 430:All martial art is simply an honest expression of one's body — with a lot of deception in between. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 431:Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 432:A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 433:Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 434:Fate wings, with every wish, the afflictive dart, Each gift of nature, and each grace of art. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 435:My art is capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the & 436:The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 437:The art of being sometimes audacious and sometimes very prudent is the secret of success. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 438:The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 439:Any action done with beauty and purity, and in complete harmony of body, mind and soul, is Art. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 440:Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 441:Art when inspired with love leads to higher realms, and that art will open for you the inner life. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 442:Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 443:Fluidity is the way to an empty mind. You must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 444:In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove 445:It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 446:Once you learn the art of relaxation, everything happens spontaneously and effortlessly. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 447:Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 448:The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove 449:True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 450:Without Unceasing Practice nothing can be done. Practice is Art. If you leave off you are lost. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 451:A lie is profanity. A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth. ~ richard-pryor, @wisdomtrove 452:Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 453:If it's work, we try to figure out how to do less, If it's art, we try to figure out how to do more ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 454:Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 455:The art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, and every year adds to its potency. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 456:The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 457:The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 458:Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 459:Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 460:Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 461:I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings... Boy With Pail... Kitten On Fire. ~ steven-wright, @wisdomtrove 462:It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 463:Nature is what we know - Yet have not art to say - So impotent our wisdom is To her simplicity. ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 464:Nature meant me a wife, a silly harmless household Dove, fond without art; and kind without deceit. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 465:The art of giving orders is not to try to rectify the minor blunders and not be swayed by petty doubts. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 466:Tis not always in a physician's power to cure the sick; at times the disease is stronger than trained art. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 467:When comparing works of art, it is important that the art itself, and not the artists, be considered. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 468:And its object is Art not power, sub-creation not domination and tyrannous re-forming of Creation. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 469:Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 470:Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 471:Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. That in art is highest which aims at this. ~ michelangelo, @wisdomtrove 472:Books work as an art form (and an economic one) because they are primarily the work of an individual. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 473:Marketing is the art of seeing (and then creating) what might be interesting to more than our friends ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 474:The art of medicine in the season lies: Wine given in season oft will benefit, Which out of season injures. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 475:The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person. ~ abraham-lincoln, @wisdomtrove 476:You get to keep making art as long as you are willing to make the choices that let you make your art. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 477:Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote - evolved from within consciousness itself. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 478:In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 479:Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 480:Art can compel people freely, gladly, and spontaneously to sacrifice themselves in the service of man. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 481:Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 482:A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 483:I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 484:Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic. ~ ambrose-bierce, @wisdomtrove 485:Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. ~ nathaniel-hawthorne, @wisdomtrove 486:Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 487:Life is a mystery- mystery of beauty, bliss and divinity. Meditation is the art of unfolding that mystery. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 488:Nature meant for me a wife, a silly harmless household Dove, fond without art; and kind without deceit. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 489:Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 490:Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself and dies of all others. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 491:A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 492:From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 493:I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 494:Life is a mystery - mystery of beauty, bliss and divinity. Meditation is the art of unfolding that mystery. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 495:Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 496:The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 497:Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 498:A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art – perfection. ~ michelangelo, @wisdomtrove 499:Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove 500:Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Art is everything. ~ Ksenia Anske, #NFDB
2:Can't rush art. ~ Victoria Schwab, #NFDB
3:Ingen är normal. ~ Art Spiegelman, #NFDB
4:The Art of Animation ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
5:Thou art God. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
6:All art is erotic. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
7:Art for art's sake. ~ Howard Dietz, #NFDB
8:Art lies in concealing art. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
9:Art pries us open. ~ Amanda Palmer, #NFDB
10:Art should stimulate. ~ Ala Bashir, #NFDB
11:Laugh, if thou art wise. ~ Martial, #NFDB
12:Now life is imitating art. ~ Rakim, #NFDB
13:The Art of Asking, ~ Carmine Gallo, #NFDB
14:The Art of Discarding ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
15:Art is rooted in joy. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
16:I'm confident in my art. ~ Kid Cudi, #NFDB
17:Pop culture was in art ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
18:Thou art a peanut. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
19:Your life is your art. ~ Keri Smith, #NFDB
20:Art is a way of survival. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
21:Art is for everybody. ~ Keith Haring, #NFDB
22:Art is stronger than Nature ~ Titian, #NFDB
23:Art lies by its own artifice. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
24:Life is short, art is long. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
25:Art destroys the life. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
26:Art is affirmation. ~ N Scott Momaday, #NFDB
27:Art is a serious matter ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
28:Art is really a battle. ~ Edgar Degas, #NFDB
29:Comedy is a noble art. ~ Margaret Cho, #NFDB
30:Disaster is my muse. ~ Art Spiegelman, #NFDB
31:R2-D2, where art thou? ~ Ian Doescher, #NFDB
32:All art is propaganda. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
33:All art is subversive. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
34:All great art is praise. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
35:Art is childhood. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
36:Art is magic. ~ Carrie Viscome Skinner, #NFDB
37:Art needs an operation ~ Tristan Tzara, #NFDB
38:Become what thou art. ~ Orphic Precept, #NFDB
39:great is the art ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
40:Minimal art went nowhere. ~ Sol LeWitt, #NFDB
41:Pop art is for everyone. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
42:The only crime is art. ~ Gerald Weaver, #NFDB
43:Use your art to fight. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
44:All art is quite useless. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
45:All good art is abstract. ~ John Newman, #NFDB
46:Art destroys silence. ~ Alicia Ostriker, #NFDB
47:Art is born of humiliation. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
48:Art must not serve might. ~ Karel Capek, #NFDB
49:Art? That's a man's name. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
50:Great is the art, ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
51:I can concentrate on my art. ~ Lou Reed, #NFDB
52:Le But De L'Art
~ André van Hasselt,#NFDB
53:Only art means anything. ~ Edward Gorey, #NFDB
54:Thou art a woman, ~ Philip James Bailey, #NFDB
55:Well, art has to be sexy. ~ Wade Guyton, #NFDB
56:We're here to have a ball. ~ Art Blakey, #NFDB
57:All great art is abstract. ~ Jean Renoir, #NFDB
58:An art machine is a system ~ David Antin, #NFDB
59:Art for me is like breathing. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
60:Art is a creed, not a craft. ~ Tom Wolfe, #NFDB
61:Art is an explosion. ~ Masashi Kishimoto, #NFDB
62:Art is a sense of magic. ~ Stan Brakhage, #NFDB
63:Art is as useful as bread. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
64:Art is not a sack race. ~ Charles Baxter, #NFDB
65:I grew up in the art world. ~ Cary Elwes, #NFDB
66:Loneliness is an art form ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
67:The end of art is peace. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
68:You hung up Genos like modern art! ~ ONE, #NFDB
69:All art is exploitation. ~ Sherman Alexie, #NFDB
70:Art is 110 percent sweat. ~ Robert Riskin, #NFDB
71:Art is a delayed echo. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
72:Art is amoral; so is life. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
73:Art is born in attention. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
74:Art is communication. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
75:Art is not disposable. ~ Jennifer Nettles, #NFDB
76:Art is science made clear. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
77:Art is science made flesh. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
78:Art is significant deformity. ~ Roger Fry, #NFDB
79:Art is the absence of fear. ~ Erykah Badu, #NFDB
80:Art is theft.” —Pablo Picasso ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
81:Asking questions is an art. ~ Nina George, #NFDB
82:Contemporary art hates you. ~ John Waters, #NFDB
83:Drawing is the true test of art. ~ Horace, #NFDB
84:Each body has its art. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks, #NFDB
85:Life is short, art is long. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
86:Make friendship a fine art. ~ John Wooden, #NFDB
87:Never apologize for your art. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
88:People don't buy lady art. ~ Walter Keane, #NFDB
89:Timing has a lot to with art. ~ LL Cool J, #NFDB
90:Art doesn’t explain itself. ~ Greil Marcus, #NFDB
91:Art is seduction, not rape. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
92:Art should be waged like war. ~ Mark Boyle, #NFDB
93:Art should never be popular. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
94:Art takes nature as its model. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
95:Everybody's an art critic. ~ Judith Martin, #NFDB
96:Land really is the best art. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
97:Life is short, the art long. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
98:Nature is the art of God ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
99:Nothing is bigger than art. ~ Kenya Wright, #NFDB
100:oraz art. 299 Kodeksu karnego, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
101:Past art is subject to change. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
102:The art of using troops is this: ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
103:There is no art without Eros. ~ Max Frisch, #NFDB
104:The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss? ~ Susan Wiggs, #NFDB
105:THOU ART A VERY RAGGED WART! ~ Lenore Look, #NFDB
106:Yes! Art is a conversation! ~ Ani DiFranco, #NFDB
107:You too are a work of art. ~ Bernie Siegel, #NFDB
108:Art chooses its constraints. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
109:Art helped give me confidence. ~ Jeff Koons, #NFDB
110:Art in any form is powerful. ~ Sejal Badani, #NFDB
111:Art is man added to Nature. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
112:Art is science in the flesh. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
113:Art is what you get away with ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
114:Art Nouveau was coil-envy. ~ China Mi ville, #NFDB
115:Art to be art must soothe. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
116:But real life is not art. ~ Eleanor Cameron, #NFDB
117:Capitalism is an art form. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
118:Don't think about making art. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
119:Each body has its art... ~ Gwendolyn Brooks, #NFDB
120:Hunger is the piston of art. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
121:If it sells, it's art. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
122:If nothing else, believe in art ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
123:I had had no art training. ~ Dorothy Malone, #NFDB
124:I just wanna be a rock star! ~ Art Alexakis, #NFDB
125:I love art. It is uplifting. ~ Damien Hirst, #NFDB
126:I never intended to make art. ~ Walt Disney, #NFDB
127:It's not art, it's science. ~ Billy Sheehan, #NFDB
128:It's ugly, but is it art? ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
129:Less art, more matter ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
130:Nature is the art of God. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
131:No art should be fashionable. ~ Ngaio Marsh, #NFDB
132:Philosophy is the art of living. ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
133:Sleep is no mean art. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
134:Teaching is performance art. ~ Kate Clinton, #NFDB
135:The divine art is the story. ~ Isak Dinesen, #NFDB
136:The secret of life is in art. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
137:All art is self-portraiture. ~ Kehinde Wiley, #NFDB
138:Art and accident are one. ~ Frederick Sommer, #NFDB
139:Art can make chaos seductive. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
140:Art does not tolerate reason. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
141:Art is a big question mark. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
142:Art is a form of catharsis. ~ Dorothy Parker, #NFDB
143:Art is a leap into the dark. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
144:Art is an emotional experience ~ Tony Curtis, #NFDB
145:art is
a mode of stalking ~ Ron Silliman,#NFDB
146:Art is most effective when concealed. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
147:Art is nothing; it's a way. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
148:Art is sanctioned pornography ~ Stewart Home, #NFDB
149:Art-speech is the only truth. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
150:Every shift is a work of art. ~ Herta M ller, #NFDB
151:For the love of his art ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
152:Hip-hop is the last true folk art. ~ Mos Def, #NFDB
153:His art is a temper tantrum. He’s ~ A S King, #NFDB
154:I don't like hype cluttering art. ~ Skrillex, #NFDB
155:If the art is concealed, it succeeds. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
156:Is revenge a science, or an art? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
157:Nature is the art of God. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
158:No, you're a work of art. ~ Courtney Summers, #NFDB
159:Pain, thou art not an evil ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
160:So. Lie there, my art. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
161:Surprise is key in all art. ~ Oscar Niemeyer, #NFDB
162:The art is long, life is short ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
163:The Art of War is self-explanatory ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
164:Thou art the Sun of other days. ~ John Keble, #NFDB
165:All art is made from anger. ~ Lawrence Weiner, #NFDB
166:All of nature is God's art. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
167:Andy Warhol defined Pop Art. ~ Jeffrey Deitch, #NFDB
168:Art accepts what it finds. ~ Frederick Sommer, #NFDB
169:Art is a subset of creativity. ~ Chase Jarvis, #NFDB
170:Art is fire plus algebra. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
171:Art is 'I'; science is 'we'. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
172:Art is long, life is short. ~ Whoopi Goldberg, #NFDB
173:Art is my life and my life is art. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
174:Art is the signature of man. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
175:Art is the soul of a people. ~ Romare Bearden, #NFDB
176:Art is the triumph over chaos. ~ John Cheever, #NFDB
177:Art needs to stand for something. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
178:Art should be a place of hope. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
179:Art supercedes what’s personal. ~ Chris Kraus, #NFDB
180:Art thou a friend to Roderick? ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
181:A work of art is a confession. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
182:Competition is the death of art. ~ Dana Gould, #NFDB
183:Design is art that people use. ~ Ellen Lupton, #NFDB
184:Fashion is more art than art is ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
185:If it has a use it isn't art. ~ Paterson Ewen, #NFDB
186:I'm not interested in pop art. ~ Billy Corgan, #NFDB
187:Intimacy is a difficult art. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
188:It's clever, but is it Art? ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
189:It's clever, but is it art? ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
190:Life is serious but art is fun! ~ John Irving, #NFDB
191:Life is short and the art long. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
192:Nature constantly imitates art. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
193:Observation is a dying art. ~ Stanley Kubrick, #NFDB
194:Oh, God of irony, thou art great. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
195:Pain, thou art not an evil. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
196:Pop art is about liking things. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
197:Repetition is the death of art. ~ Robin Green, #NFDB
198:Tell the story behind your art. ~ Paul Jarvis, #NFDB
199:the art of creating power ~ Lawrence Freedman, #NFDB
200:There is no progress in art. ~ Ilya Ehrenburg, #NFDB
201:We'll always have art, darling. ~ Ruth Wilson, #NFDB
202:You can't make love without art. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
203:All art is autobiographical ~ Federico Fellini, #NFDB
204:All truly great art is propaganda. ~ Ann Petry, #NFDB
205:Art has an obligation to offend ~ Edward Albee, #NFDB
206:Art has no end but its own perfection. ~ Plato, #NFDB
207:Art is a car, kitsch is a horse. ~ Odd Nerdrum, #NFDB
208:Art is a fairy tale for the eye. ~ Sarah McCoy, #NFDB
209:Art is a form of consciousness. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
210:Art is all in the details. ~ Christian Marclay, #NFDB
211:Art is always an energy exchange. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
212:Art is an escape from reality. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
213:Art is a personal act of courage. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
214:Art is a protest against death. ~ Audrey Flack, #NFDB
215:Art is far feebler than necessity. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
216:Art is literacy of the heart ~ Elliot W Eisner, #NFDB
217:Art is man's refuge from adversity. ~ Menander, #NFDB
218:Art is not only about angst. ~ John Corigliano, #NFDB
219:Art is pain. And so is life. ~ Robyn Schneider, #NFDB
220:Art is the god you have not seen. ~ Mary Butts, #NFDB
221:art is the pulse of a nation. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
222:Art needs no spur beyond itself. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
223:Art's for art. Money's for pizza. ~ Tim McGraw, #NFDB
224:Art should create an experience. ~ Eric Fischl, #NFDB
225:Art to me is a question mark. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
226:Art upsets, science reasures. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
227:A work of art is an exaggeration. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
228:Fuck Art, let's Dance! ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, #NFDB
229:If it's good art, it's good. ~ Kenneth Branagh, #NFDB
230:In art economy is always beauty. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
231:In art, the obvious is a sin. ~ Edward Dmytryk, #NFDB
232:It's a divine art to be cheerful. ~ Meher Baba, #NFDB
233:Life imitates art -- but badly. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
234:Life is greater than all art. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
235:Making art is an act of faith. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
236:Money and art are far apart. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
237:My body is a gradual work of art ~ Rick Genest, #NFDB
238:Photographing a cake can be art. ~ Irving Penn, #NFDB
239:Poetry is the scholar's art. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
240:The art of medicine in the season lies: ~ Ovid, #NFDB
241:The joy of dressing is an art. ~ John Galliano, #NFDB
242:The purpose of art is mystery. ~ Rene Magritte, #NFDB
243:The secret of art is love. ~ Antoine Bourdelle, #NFDB
244:All art is autobiographical. ~ Federico Fellini, #NFDB
245:All art is based on non-conformity. ~ Ben Shahn, #NFDB
246:All I owe the world is my art. ~ Sherman Alexie, #NFDB
247:Art can only be taught by artists. ~ Ruth Asawa, #NFDB
248:Art is life's dream interpretation. ~ Otto Rank, #NFDB
249:Art is nothing without form. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
250:Art is not in some far-off place. ~ Lydia Davis, #NFDB
251:Art is the escape from personality. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
252:Art is the lie that reveals the truth ~ Unknown, #NFDB
253:Art is the lie that tells the truth ~ Cris Beam, #NFDB
254:Art opens the fishiest eye . . . ~ Sheridan Hay, #NFDB
255:Be nothing which thou art not ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
256:Cars for me are like a piece of art. ~ Afrojack, #NFDB
257:Change art to include yourself. ~ Joseph Kosuth, #NFDB
258:Design has to work. Art does not. ~ Donald Judd, #NFDB
259:Fashion is not art. Never. ~ Jean Paul Gaultier, #NFDB
260:first model, the art academy, ~ Otto F Kernberg, #NFDB
261:Life doesn't last, art doesn't last ~ Eva Hesse, #NFDB
262:Music is the perfect type of art. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
263:Necessity is stronger far than art. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
264:Normal people do not create art. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
265:O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
266:O Life! thou art a galling load, ~ Robert Burns, #NFDB
267:Science and art are not opposed. ~ Samuel Morse, #NFDB
268:Sex and art are the same thing. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
269:Some write. Others Code. I art...!! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
270:Teaching is a performance art. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
271:Technology adds nothing to art. ~ Penn Jillette, #NFDB
272:The art of art... is simplicity. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
273:The only enemy of art is taste. ~ Thomas Hoving, #NFDB
274:The purpose of art is to stop time. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
275:Thou art all the comfort, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
276:What is art? Prostitution. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
277:What thou art, that thou art. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #NFDB
278:Where thou art, that is home. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
279:Without art there is no hope. ~ Rosie O Donnell, #NFDB
280:Without freedom there is no art. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
281:You don't make art, you find it ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
282:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
283:Above all, art should be fun. ~ Alexander Calder, #NFDB
284:All art is a kind of confession. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
285:All art is knowing when to stop. ~ Toni Morrison, #NFDB
286:All great art is a form of complaint ~ John Cage, #NFDB
287:Any work of art dignifies life. ~ James Ponsoldt, #NFDB
288:Art can contradict Science. ~ Austin Osman Spare, #NFDB
289:Art is about paying attention. ~ Laurie Anderson, #NFDB
290:Art is a guarantee of sanity. ~ Louise Bourgeois, #NFDB
291:Art is a jealous mistress. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
292:Art is lies that tell the truth. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
293:Art is what you can get away with. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
294:Art, like Nature, has her monsters ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
295:Art never comes from happiness ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
296:Art-school girls are very nice. ~ Anthony Mackie, #NFDB
297:Art without life is a poor affair. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
298:Art? You just do it. MARTIN RITT ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
299:Certain art hungers for context. ~ Amanda Palmer, #NFDB
300:Fine art is in the last consequence, ~ Max Bill, #NFDB
301:Formal art is essentially rational. ~ Sol LeWitt, #NFDB
302:Here, we turn everything into art. ~ Carole Maso, #NFDB
303:...if I can do it, it's not art. ~ Rudy Giuliani, #NFDB
304:If I don't understand it, it must be art. ~ Bono, #NFDB
305:If that's art, I'm a Hottentot! ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
306:It's not Art. And Art is not Design. ~ Chip Kidd, #NFDB
307:Kids do say the darndest things ~ Art Linkletter, #NFDB
308:life is earnest, art is gay ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
309:Machines are braver than art. ~ Donald Barthelme, #NFDB
310:More matter with less art. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
311:Pain is not a conduit to art or joy ~ Jay Maisel, #NFDB
312:Patience is the art of hoping. ~ Luc de Clapiers, #NFDB
313:Pop art is a way of liking things. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
314:Satire is the disease of art. ~ Nicolas Chamfort, #NFDB
315:Science disembodies; art embodies. ~ John Fowles, #NFDB
316:sex is but the ancilla of art ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
317:Space is the breath of art. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
318:The job of art is to chase ugliness away. ~ Bono, #NFDB
319:There is no best anything in art. ~ Jeff Daniels, #NFDB
320:There is no color line in art. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
321:Thou art relieved of thy duties! ~ Vince McMahon, #NFDB
322:Thou, sun, art half as happy as we. ~ John Donne, #NFDB
323:To make art you need to be inspired. ~ Greg Lake, #NFDB
324:Translation is the art of failure. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
325:When nature fails, we turn to art. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
326:Wherefore art thou, Romeo? ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
327:Writing is a craft not an art. ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
328:All art is infested by other art. ~ Leo Steinberg, #NFDB
329:Any form of art is a form of power. ~ Ossie Davis, #NFDB
330:Art degraded, Imagination denied. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
331:Art disturbs, science reassures. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
332:Art has got nothing to do with taste. ~ Max Ernst, #NFDB
333:Art hath an enemy call'd ignorance . ~ Ben Jonson, #NFDB
334:Art is alive because it is mortal. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
335:Art is all just perfectly imperfect. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
336:Art is an elastic sort of love. ~ Josephine Baker, #NFDB
337:Art is a way of possessing destiny. ~ Marvin Gaye, #NFDB
338:Art is despair with dignity. ~ Elizabeth Mckenzie, #NFDB
339:Art is despait with dignity. ~ Elizabeth Mckenzie, #NFDB
340:Art is long and life is short. ~ Christopher Bram, #NFDB
341:Art is not a mirror but a hammer. ~ John Grierson, #NFDB
342:Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
343:Art is the accomplice of love. ~ Remy de Gourmont, #NFDB
344:Art is the accomplice of love. ~ R my de Gourmont, #NFDB
345:Art never comes from happiness. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
346:Art seduces, but does not exploit. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
347:Art theft gave a guy an appetite. ~ Gordon Korman, #NFDB
348:Chess is the art of analysis. ~ Mikhail Botvinnik, #NFDB
349:Common Lisp is politics, not art. ~ Scott Fahlman, #NFDB
350:Cultivate the art of renunciation. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
351:Directing is a tremendous art. ~ Steve Guttenberg, #NFDB
352:Film really is a collaborative art. ~ Cleve Jones, #NFDB
353:For me, I see filmmaking as art. ~ Emily Browning, #NFDB
354:Good swiping is an art in itself. ~ Jules Feiffer, #NFDB
355:History develops, art stands still. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
356:I'd mortgage any house for art. ~ Garrett Hedlund, #NFDB
357:If someone says it's art, it's art. ~ Donald Judd, #NFDB
358:Im not trying to do conceptual art. ~ Peter Sotos, #NFDB
359:I think your life informs your art. ~ Sheryl Crow, #NFDB
360:I want to be a living work of art. ~ Luisa Casati, #NFDB
361:leadership is the enabling art. ~ L David Marquet, #NFDB
362:Life is earnest, art is gay. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
363:Live your Art. Don't think about it. ~ Bill Viola, #NFDB
364:Made poetry a mere mechanic art. ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
365:Mind is shapely, Art is shapely. ~ Allen Ginsberg, #NFDB
366:O woman, thou art my imperfection! ~ Pawan Mishra, #NFDB
367:Speak, what trade art thou? ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
368:The aim of art is to create space. ~ Frank Stella, #NFDB
369:The art of life is to show your hand. ~ E V Lucas, #NFDB
370:The art of war is the art of deception. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
371:The big art is our life. ~ Mary Caroline Richards, #NFDB
372:there is no politically neutral art. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
373:You are the artist and the art. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
374:All art is a kind of confession. ~ James A Baldwin, #NFDB
375:Art, and sadness, which last forever. ~ Sara Baume, #NFDB
376:Art has absolutely changed my life. ~ Peter Weller, #NFDB
377:Art has always been my salvation. ~ Maurice Sendak, #NFDB
378:Art has to address eternal issues. ~ Duane Michals, #NFDB
379:Art is a line around your thoughts. ~ Gustav Klimt, #NFDB
380:Art is a wound turned into light. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
381:Art is but imitation of nature. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
382:Art is the highest form of hope. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
383:Art is too important not to share. ~ Romero Britto, #NFDB
384:Art is whatever you can get away with. ~ John Cage, #NFDB
385:Art is when things appear rounded. ~ Maurice Denis, #NFDB
386:Art should never try to be popular. ~ Edward Albee, #NFDB
387:Art, to me, was a research laboratory, ~ Supervert, #NFDB
388:As thou thinkest, so art thou. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
389:But O, Photography! as no art is, ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
390:Drawing is the honesty of the art. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
391:Every human being is a work of art. ~ Wolf Vostell, #NFDB
392:famous modern art gallery in Hobart. ~ Helen Brown, #NFDB
393:grievance does not make for great art. ~ Eva Figes, #NFDB
394:I don't see art as entertainment. ~ Georg Baselitz, #NFDB
395:I, in the end, make art for myself. ~ Anish Kapoor, #NFDB
396:I know
I am menaced
by art. ~ Melissa Broder,#NFDB
397:[In art], less is more. ~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, #NFDB
398:In art the Present is the eternal. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
399:In the art world, Monet means money. ~ Fiona Bruce, #NFDB
400:I see thou art implacable, more deaf ~ John Milton, #NFDB
401:I think art can reflect tragedy. ~ John Corigliano, #NFDB
402:Legislation is the art of compromise. ~ Harry Reid, #NFDB
403:Life too near paralyses art. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
404:Look within, thou art the Buddha. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
405:Making art is different for everyone. ~ China Chow, #NFDB
406:More matter with less art.60 ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
407:My trade and art is to live. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
408:Reveal art; conceal the artist. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
409:Sometimes life is stranger than art. ~ H P Mallory, #NFDB
410:Teach the art of living well. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
411:The earth without art is just eh. ~ Demetri Martin, #NFDB
412:The personality is a work of art. ~ Diana Vreeland, #NFDB
413:Thou art a very ragged Wart. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
414:Time is the great art of man. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
415:When your art fails, make better art. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
416:Where thou art Gaius, I am Gaia, ~ Phyllis T Smith, #NFDB
417:Where Thou art - that - is Home. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
418:Where thou art - that - is Home. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
419:A book is a work of art. (Again, ~ Mortimer J Adler, #NFDB
420:All creation is in the art of seeing. ~ John Berger, #NFDB
421:All you have to do is be able to feel. ~ Art Blakey, #NFDB
422:Architecture is art, nothing else. ~ Philip Johnson, #NFDB
423:ART (aka Asshole Research Transport) ~ Martha Wells, #NFDB
424:Art is basically entertainment. ~ Yasumasa Morimura, #NFDB
425:Art is elimination of the unnecessary. ~ Waldo Salt, #NFDB
426:Art is like ham-it nourishes people. ~ Diego Rivera, #NFDB
427:Art is never without consequences. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
428:Art is not some fun add-on to life. ~ Grayson Perry, #NFDB
429:Art is only a way of expressing pain. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
430:Art is the signature of man. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
431:Art is what everyone knows it is. ~ Benedetto Croce, #NFDB
432:Art like life is an open secret. ~ Lawrence Durrell, #NFDB
433:Art only begins where Imitation ends. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
434:Art tells gorgeous lies that come true. ~ Hakim Bey, #NFDB
435:At the heart of art is learning to see ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
436:A work of art is like living people. ~ Muriel Spark, #NFDB
437:Criticizing is easy, art is difficult. ~ Bill Cosby, #NFDB
438:Happiness is the art of relaxation. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
439:I don't want to be in an art bubble. ~ Diane Paulus, #NFDB
440:It is a great art to saunter. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
441:Language is a social art. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine, #NFDB
442:Layer by layer art strips life bare. ~ Robert Musil, #NFDB
443:Life doesn't imitate art...it is art! ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
444:Life is art's rival and vice versa. ~ Wyndham Lewis, #NFDB
445:Life is short and art is long. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
446:No work of art can compare to a city. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
447:Patience is the art of caring slowly. ~ John Ciardi, #NFDB
448:Perhaps art is an eye problem… ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
449:Posing is a performing art. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
450:Science is the art of the solvable. ~ Peter Medawar, #NFDB
451:The art is in the idea, not the object. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
452:The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore ~ Rumi, #NFDB
453:The art of knowing is knowing who to ignore. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
454:The Art of Peace begins with you. ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
455:The art of publicity is a black art. ~ Learned Hand, #NFDB
456:There is no art without intention. ~ Duke Ellington, #NFDB
457:There's no art where there's no fee. ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
458:war, the human antithesis of art ~ Campbell McGrath, #NFDB
459:We by art unteach what Nature taught. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
460:With age, art and life become one. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
461:Without mathematics there is no art. ~ Luca Pacioli, #NFDB
462:Words don't heal. Art heals! ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky, #NFDB
463:Yoga is the art and science of living. ~ Indra Devi, #NFDB
464:A good piece of art raises questions. ~ Rebecca Hall, #NFDB
465:All art is at once surface and symbol. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
466:Aren't maids the ultimate art critics? ~ John Waters, #NFDB
467:Art = a mad search for individualism. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
468:Art demands constant observation. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
469:Art for me is the science of freedom. ~ Joseph Beuys, #NFDB
470:Art hath an enemy called ignorance. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
471:Art is a business, like any other. ~ Catherine Stock, #NFDB
472:Art is a delivery system for worldviews. ~ Alex Grey, #NFDB
473:Art is a journey of discovery. ~ John Paul Caponigro, #NFDB
474:Art is a lie that reveals the truth. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
475:Art is a shadow of Divine perfection. ~ Michelangelo, #NFDB
476:Art is more engaging that propaganda. ~ Larry Norman, #NFDB
477:Art is the communication of ecstasy. ~ P D Ouspensky, #NFDB
478:Art is the daughter of freedom. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
479:(Art is) the residue of vision. ~ Alberto Giacometti, #NFDB
480:Art, it seems to me, should simplify. ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
481:Art moves. Hence its civilizing power. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
482:Art must take reality by surprise. ~ Fran oise Sagan, #NFDB
483:Art persists, it timelessly continues. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
484:Art stands on the shoulders of craft, ~ Ann Patchett, #NFDB
485:Art will always be art. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
486:Become acquainted with every art. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB
487:Buying art is not understanding art. ~ Anselm Kiefer, #NFDB
488:Everything an artist spits is art. ~ Kurt Schwitters, #NFDB
489:Genius is the art of taking pains ~ Claude C Hopkins, #NFDB
490:Genocide is as human as art or prayer. ~ John N Gray, #NFDB
491:Great art picks up where nature ends. ~ Marc Chagall, #NFDB
492:I do so love the art of severing boundaries ~ Poppet, #NFDB
493:industry without art is brutality”. ~ Simon Garfield, #NFDB
494:In short, he must be loyal only to his art. ~ Ha Jin, #NFDB
495:It is a great art to saunter ! ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
496:Leadership is the art of the future. ~ Leonard Sweet, #NFDB
497:Magick is the Art of Life itself. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
498:No art comes from the conscious mind. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
499:No art goes unmediated by other art. ~ Robert Hughes, #NFDB
500:No art has ever really changed anything. ~ Ali Smith, #NFDB
501:Rule of art: Cant kills creativity! ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
502:Solve problems, make art, think deeply. ~ Susan Cain, #NFDB
503:So vast is art, so narrow human wit ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
504:The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
505:The purpose of art is delectation. ~ Nicolas Poussin, #NFDB
506:What is art? Nature concentrated. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
507:Where there's liberty, art succeeds. ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
508:All art is an imitation of nature. ~ Seneca the Elder, #NFDB
509:All art is in revolution of tyranny. ~ Atticus Poetry, #NFDB
510:All good art is an indiscretion. ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
511:All great art is born of the metropolis. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
512:Art attests to what is inhuman in man. ~ Alain Badiou, #NFDB
513:Art is a harmony parallel with nature. ~ Paul Cezanne, #NFDB
514:Art is a never-ending dance of illusions. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
515:Art is either revolution or plagiarism ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
516:Art is eternal, but life is short. ~ Evelyn De Morgan, #NFDB
517:Art is not a career - it's a life. ~ Andy Goldsworthy, #NFDB
518:Art is not a pastime but a priesthood. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
519:Art is nothing but humanized science. ~ Gino Severini, #NFDB
520:Art is purposiveness without purpose. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
521:Art is the clothing of a revelation ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
522:Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary. ~ Carl Andre, #NFDB
523:Art is the proper task of life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
524:Art is the right hand of Nature. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
525:Art is the window to man's soul. ~ Lady Bird Johnson, #NFDB
526:Art is to look at not to criticize. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
527:art, n. This word has no definition. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
528:Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit. ~ Mark Rothko, #NFDB
529:Art too is just a way of living. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
530:Become acquainted with every art. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB
531:California is an Italy without its art. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
532:Fine art is knowledge made visible. ~ Gustave Courbet, #NFDB
533:For some players, luck itself is an art ~ Paul Newman, #NFDB
534:Geography is the art of the mappable. ~ Peter Haggett, #NFDB
535:GRATE ART IS HORSESHIT, BUY TACOS. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
536:Great art is horseshit, buy tacos. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
537:I'm not sure sports writing is an art. ~ Bobby Knight, #NFDB
538:I personally always hated Pop art. ~ Peggy Guggenheim, #NFDB
539:I primarily buy art to show it off. ~ Charles Saatchi, #NFDB
540:I try to conceal art with art. ~ Jean Philippe Rameau, #NFDB
541:I view art as an inspirational tool. ~ Thomas Kinkade, #NFDB
542:I will not make anymore boring art. ~ John Baldessari, #NFDB
543:Making our art, we make artful lives. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
544:My art has gained some high value. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto, #NFDB
545:No great work of art is ever finished. ~ Michelangelo, #NFDB
546:No person learned the art of archery from me, ~ Saadi, #NFDB
547:Painting is more important than art. ~ Wayne Thiebaud, #NFDB
548:So vast is art, so narrow human wit. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
549:The art of illusion is grace itself. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
550:The perfection of art is to conceal art. ~ Quintilian, #NFDB
551:There are absolutely no rules in art ~ Jane Davenport, #NFDB
552:There is no art without contemplation. ~ Robert Henri, #NFDB
553:Thou art my life, my love, my heart, ~ Robert Herrick, #NFDB
554:Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
555:Thou Shalt Not Poop on the Head of Art ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
556:What I dream of is an art of balance. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
557:When things get tough... Make good art. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
558:Where does contagion end and art begin? ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
559:Where there is money there is no art. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
560:Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
561:Works of art are landscapes of the mind. ~ Ted Godwin, #NFDB
562:You could say science also is an art. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
563:All art is about appealing to emotion. ~ Michael Moore, #NFDB
564:All art of the past must be destroyed. ~ Pierre Boulez, #NFDB
565:An art book is a museum without walls. ~ Andre Malraux, #NFDB
566:Art critics are like every other critic. ~ Marc Jacobs, #NFDB
567:Art depends on luck and talent. ~ Francis Ford Coppola, #NFDB
568:Art has to be reflective of our society. ~ David Zayas, #NFDB
569:Art history is always changing too. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi, #NFDB
570:Art is a lie that tells the truth ~ Jean Claude Ellena, #NFDB
571:[Art is] an attempt to escape from life. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
572:Art is either plagiarism or revolution. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
573:Art is in love with luck, and luck with art. ~ Agathon, #NFDB
574:Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
575:Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
576:Art isn't a product. It's an experience ~ Lori Lansens, #NFDB
577:Art is what we do when we're truly alive. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
578:Art never expresses anything but itself. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
579:Art should be born from the materials. ~ Jean Dubuffet, #NFDB
580:Art should be on the side of humanity. ~ Chinua Achebe, #NFDB
581:Art should stimulate the mind and soul ~ Rich DiSilvio, #NFDB
582:Astrology is not an art, it is a disease. ~ Maimonides, #NFDB
583:Being cryptic is an art unto itself. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
584:Didacticism is the death of art. ~ Alice Dunbar Nelson, #NFDB
585:Economy is essential to all good art. ~ Jerry Seinfeld, #NFDB
586:Everything is art. Everything is politics. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
587:Fashion is above all an art of change. ~ John Galliano, #NFDB
588:For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
589:Great things only come with great effort. ~ Art Briles, #NFDB
590:It is art to conceal art. -Ars est celare artem ~ Ovid, #NFDB
591:I was good at art - always good at art. ~ Robert Barry, #NFDB
592:Japanimation is a whole different art form. ~ Lucy Liu, #NFDB
593:Learning is as much an art as teaching ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
594:Let each man exercise the art he knows. ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
595:Man, there's no boundary line to art! ~ Charlie Parker, #NFDB
596:Mathematics is the art of explanation. ~ Paul Lockhart, #NFDB
597:Memory is the art of forgetting. ~ L szl Krasznahorkai, #NFDB
598:My paintings are only the ashes of my art ~ Yves Klein, #NFDB
599:One does not marry art. One ravishes it. ~ Edgar Degas, #NFDB
600:Peace is first of all the art of being. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
601:Pitching is the art of instilling fear. ~ Sandy Koufax, #NFDB
602:Science is our century's art. ~ Horace Freeland Judson, #NFDB
603:Selfless giving is the art of living. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
604:Serious art is born from serious play. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
605:Stage performing is a dying art form. ~ Ronnie Spector, #NFDB
606:The best art always comes unbidden. ~ Christopher Pike, #NFDB
607:The human body is the best work of art. ~ Jess C Scott, #NFDB
608:The object of art is to give life a shape, ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
609:There is only good art and mediocre art. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
610:There's no 'Safety First' in Art. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
611:The war brought out all the art in me. ~ Horace Pippin, #NFDB
612:The work of art is a stuffed crocodile. ~ Alfred Jarry, #NFDB
613:Thou art a votary to fond desire ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
614:To be great, art has to point somewhere. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
615:Trash has given us an appetite for art. ~ Pauline Kael, #NFDB
616:True art is reverent imitation of God. ~ Tryon Edwards, #NFDB
617:What-e're thou art, Act well thy part. ~ David O McKay, #NFDB
618:All art is an abstraction to some degree. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
619:All art is a revolt against man's fate. ~ Andre Malraux, #NFDB
620:All nature is but art unknown to thee. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
621:And when all else is gone, Art remains. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
622:Art does not imitate, but interpret. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini, #NFDB
623:Art gives people a reason to be alive. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
624:Art has never been a popularity contest. ~ James Levine, #NFDB
625:Art, indeed, began with abstraction. ~ Sigfried Giedion, #NFDB
626:Art indeed is long, but life is short. ~ Andrew Marvell, #NFDB
627:Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
628:Art is a profession, not a shrine. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick, #NFDB
629:Art is a way of recognizing oneself. ~ Louise Bourgeois, #NFDB
630:Art is hard for a puritan to understand. ~ Gunter Grass, #NFDB
631:Art is made by the alone for the alone. ~ Luis Barragan, #NFDB
632:Art is not democratic. Art is sublime. ~ Minae Mizumura, #NFDB
633:Art is really whispering, not shouting. ~ Duane Michals, #NFDB
634:art is the objectification of feeling ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
635:Art means to dare - and to have been right. ~ Ned Rorem, #NFDB
636:Blest be the art that can immortalize. ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
637:Charm is simply the art of being pleasing. ~ Patti Page, #NFDB
638:Comics are a gateway drug to literacy. ~ Art Spiegelman, #NFDB
639:Everything is fair in love and art. ~ Christos Tsiolkas, #NFDB
640:For me, art is always a kind of theater. ~ Damien Hirst, #NFDB
641:In art as in love, instinct is enough. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
642:In love as in art, good technique helps. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
643:I've loved art for more than 30 years. ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
644:Little people can be empowered through art. ~ Shaun Tan, #NFDB
645:Living is an art, not a science. ~ Benjamin Alire S enz, #NFDB
646:Managing bottom-up change is its own art. ~ Kevin Kelly, #NFDB
647:My art and profession is to live. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
648:Poor England! thou art a devoted deer, ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
649:Resolve and thou art free. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
650:Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men. ~ Plato, #NFDB
651:the Christian art of secluded Ravenna. ~ Lynn Thorndike, #NFDB
652:The most important thing in art is taste. ~ Sean Lennon, #NFDB
653:The object of art is to give life shape. ~ Jean Anouilh, #NFDB
654:There is but one art, to omit. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
655:There is no patriotic art. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
656:There is nothing that art cannot express. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
657:Thou art a Castilian King urinal! ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
658:Thou art the Mars of malcontents. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
659:To me, art supplies are always okay to buy. ~ Louis C K, #NFDB
660:Tragedy is the highest form of art. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
661:True art lies in a reality that is felt. ~ Odilon Redon, #NFDB
662:We do have to be a witness to our art. ~ David Koechner, #NFDB
663:We have art in order not to die of life. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
664:Why art thou but a nest of gloom ~ William Dean Howells, #NFDB
665:You know it's ART, when the check clears. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
666:Advertising is the art of persuasion. ~ William Bernbach, #NFDB
667:All art is but imitation of nature. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
668:All art is concerned with coming into being. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
669:All art worthy of the name is religious. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
670:All good art is abstract in its structure. ~ Paul Strand, #NFDB
671:All nature is but art, unknown to thee. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
672:Art cannot be limited by temporal aberations ~ Brian Cox, #NFDB
673:Art doesn't sell itself, it has to be sold. ~ Jack White, #NFDB
674:Art exists because life is not enough. ~ Ferreira Gullar, #NFDB
675:Art is a luxury but also a necessity. ~ Edwidge Danticat, #NFDB
676:Art is an experience, not an object. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
677:Art is an intersection of many human needs. ~ Carl Andre, #NFDB
678:Art is difficult. Its not entertainment. ~ Anselm Kiefer, #NFDB
679:Art is doing. Art deals directly with life. ~ Ruth Asawa, #NFDB
680:Art is doing something you really believe in. ~ Ray Toro, #NFDB
681:Art is either a complaint or appeasement. ~ Jasper Johns, #NFDB
682:Art isn't supposed to change the world, but it can. ~ JR, #NFDB
683:Art is the act of navigating without a map. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
684:Art is the child of Nature. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
685:Art is the closest thing I have to faith. ~ Abigail Boyd, #NFDB
686:Art is the great stimulus to life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
687:Art is the objectification of feeling. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
688:Art made tongue-tied by authority. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
689:Art still has truth. Take refuge there. ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
690:Being a creation of Man, art re-creates Man. ~ Naum Gabo, #NFDB
691:Comfort rarely produces great art. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
692:Everything is there: the love of Art. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
693:For art to be art it has to cure. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky, #NFDB
694:Good art is in the wallet of the beholder. ~ Kathy Lette, #NFDB
695:Hitting is an art, but not an exact science. ~ Rod Carew, #NFDB
696:How do we fight back? By creating art. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
697:I love art, I collect mostly modern art. ~ Alan Patricof, #NFDB
698:Industry without art is brutality. ~ Ananda Coomaraswamy, #NFDB
699:I think all good art is outsider art. ~ Scott McClanahan, #NFDB
700:I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
701:It is difficult to make political art work. ~ Thom Yorke, #NFDB
702:Life imitates art but art intimidates life. ~ Dana Gould, #NFDB
703:No decent art ever came out of self-pity. ~ Rene Steinke, #NFDB
704:Of all lies, art is the least untrue. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
705:Only in art can empires cheat oblivion,.. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
706:Photography is Art and Art is Photography. ~ Martin Parr, #NFDB
707:Resolve, and thou art free. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
708:Selfies and the art of staying within limits ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
709:serious art came from . . . . out there! ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
710:Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
711:Tea...is a religion of the art of life. ~ Okakura Kakuzo, #NFDB
712:The art of love is who you share it with. ~ Neil Diamond, #NFDB
713:The art of victory is learned in defeat. ~ Simon Bolivar, #NFDB
714:The message of great art is to disturb. ~ Elayne Boosler, #NFDB
715:The purpose of art is the fight for freedom. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
716:There is no art without a poetic aim. ~ Edouard Vuillard, #NFDB
717:The saved moment is the true art of love. ~ Richard Ford, #NFDB
718:When life sucks, throw yourself into art. ~ Monica Drake, #NFDB
719:When you create art, the world has to wait. ~ Will Smith, #NFDB
720:Wine pricing is an art - like painting. ~ Joe Bastianich, #NFDB
721:Yet, for I know thou art religious ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
722:All art is bad, but modern art is the worst. ~ Joyce Cary, #NFDB
723:An art thief is a man who takes pictures. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
724:Anything is art if an artist says it is. ~ Marcel Duchamp, #NFDB
725:Art and music are the vehicle for the zeitgeist. ~ Hozier, #NFDB
726:Art consists of the persistence of memory. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
727:art intensifies the presence of the world. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
728:Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
729:Art is an attempt to integrate evil. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
730:Art is anything people do with distinction. ~ Louis Dudek, #NFDB
731:Art is anything you can get away with. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
732:Art is art, and journalism is journalism. ~ Lance Reddick, #NFDB
733:Art is inside of you; express yourself. ~ Christofer Drew, #NFDB
734:art is never finished, only abandoned ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
735:art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
736:Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic. ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
737:Art is not living. It is the use of living. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
738:Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
739:Art is the only beauty that never dies. ~ Sylvain Reynard, #NFDB
740:Art is to make our lives richer and fuller. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
741:Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it. ~ Edgar Degas, #NFDB
742:Art is whatever you can get away with. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
743:Art is what separates us from the animals. ~ Iimani David, #NFDB
744:Extreme complication is contrary to art. ~ Claude Debussy, #NFDB
745:Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream. ~ Charles Baxter, #NFDB
746:History is not a science, it's an art. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
747:I believe that art has incredible power. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
748:I discovered that living is the original art. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
749:I don't take art as seriously as politics. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
750:If you come from art, you'll always be art. ~ David Bowie, #NFDB
751:If you have science and art, ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
752:I perfected the art of being uninteresting. ~ Abbi Glines, #NFDB
753:It could be a work of art among vendettas ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
754:I think the idea of art kills creativity. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
755:I went to art school when I was little. ~ Amanda Seyfried, #NFDB
756:Jazz washes away the dust of every day life. ~ Art Blakey, #NFDB
757:Life is the art of being well deceived. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
758:Martial art has always been my first love. ~ Akshay Kumar, #NFDB
759:Music is a savage art, a measured madness. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
760:Nothing else exists when art does. ~ Michael Patrick King, #NFDB
761:Persuasion is not a science but an art ~ William Bernbach, #NFDB
762:Philosophy is nothing but a failed art. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
763:Reproducing nature slavishly is not art. ~ Susan Vreeland, #NFDB
764:Sculpture is the art of the intelligence. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
765:Songwriting is an art distinct from poetry. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
766:Take your broken heart, make it into art. ~ Carrie Fisher, #NFDB
767:Tea ... is a religion of the art of life. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
768:That which takes effect by chance is not an art. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
769:The basis of art is change in the universe. ~ Robert Hass, #NFDB
770:The interpretation of dreams is a great art. ~ Paracelsus, #NFDB
771:The isms go, the ist dies, art remains ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
772:There was very little art in my childhood. ~ Jasper Johns, #NFDB
773:the works of Nature are to those of Art. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
774:Thou art beaten that thou mayest be better. ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
775:Thou art to me a delicious torment. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
776:true apothecary thy drugs art quick ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
777:We're all works of art in progress. ~ Carmen Dell Orefice, #NFDB
778:What is bad for the heart is good for art. ~ Jandy Nelson, #NFDB
779:Where art thou, beloved To-morrow? ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
780:Without electricity, there can be no art. ~ Nam June Paik, #NFDB
781:you cannot teach art—you cannot make a soul ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
782:You don't make stupid jokes in art. ~ Martin Kippenberger, #NFDB
783:AI is a bridge between art and science. ~ Pamela McCorduck, #NFDB
784:A life lived for art, is never a life wasted. ~ Macklemore, #NFDB
785:All art critics are useless or harmful. ~ Umberto Boccioni, #NFDB
786:All great art comes from a sense of outrage. ~ Glenn Close, #NFDB
787:An amateur at LIFE is an amateur at ART. ~ Laurence Gartel, #NFDB
788:Any idealism is a proper subject for art. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
789:Art and sex, the two things bound together. ~ Olivia Laing, #NFDB
790:Art is a hot soup in this cold world! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
791:Art is a house that tries to be haunted. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
792:Art is never finished, only abandoned. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
793:Art is order, made out of the chaos of life. ~ Saul Bellow, #NFDB
794:Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
795:Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV. ~ Ani DiFranco, #NFDB
796:Art thou deaf when friends are banned as foes? ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
797:Beautiful old people are works of art. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
798:Chatter about art is almost always useless. ~ Paul Cezanne, #NFDB
799:DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS A MIDGET MUST GO! ~ Art Spiegelman, #NFDB
800:Every work of art changes its predecessors. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
801:Feeling sorry for myself was an art. I think a ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
802:Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art. ~ Peter Shaffer, #NFDB
803:I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art. ~ Madonna, #NFDB
804:I cry out for order and find it only in art. ~ Helen Hayes, #NFDB
805:I don't wish power, only art -art and passion. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
806:If design isn't profitable, then it's art. ~ Henrik Fisker, #NFDB
807:if u are true to ur art it will always be art. ~ Jomny Sun, #NFDB
808:I guess art is in the eye of the beholder. ~ Kehinde Wiley, #NFDB
809:In art one idea is as good as another. ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
810:In every Art it is good to have a master. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
811:In my inner soul art and life are inseparable. ~ Eva Hesse, #NFDB
812:Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging. ~ Tim Ferriss, #NFDB
813:Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
814:Like all great art, it defies the tyrant Time. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
815:Mighty is geometry joined with art resistless. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
816:Mindfulness is the art of cosmic collaboration. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
817:Peace is first of all the art of being. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
818:Rules and models destroy genius and art. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
819:Self-deception is nature; hypocrisy is art. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
820:The art of losing isn't hard to master. ~ Elizabeth Bishop, #NFDB
821:Theatre is the art of looking at ourselves. ~ Augusto Boal, #NFDB
822:The basis of art is change in the universe. ~ Matsuo Basho, #NFDB
823:The excellence of every Art is its intensity. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
824:The mocker of Art is the mocker of Jesus. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
825:There is no depth to education without art. ~ Amiri Baraka, #NFDB
826:There is no gap between art and politics. ~ Bruce Cockburn, #NFDB
827:There is nothing new in art except talent. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
828:The supreme morality of art is to endure. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
829:This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
830:This looks state-of-the-art,” Jake remarked. ~ Jude Watson, #NFDB
831:thou art the best o' the cut-throats ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
832:To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. ~ Joseph Beuys, #NFDB
833:Wearing hats has become like fine art for me. ~ Tina Brown, #NFDB
834:Wherever art appears, life disappears. ~ Robert Motherwell, #NFDB
835:You cannot play for safety and make art. ~ Lucille Clifton, #NFDB
836:You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry. ~ E A Bucchianeri, #NFDB
837:All art is but dirtying the paper delicately. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
838:All bad art is the result of good intentions. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
839:All the best art comes from the broken places, ~ Megan Hart, #NFDB
840:A nation's art is the expression of its soul. ~ Marvin Bell, #NFDB
841:Art cannot save anybody from anything. ~ Gilbert Sorrentino, #NFDB
842:Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
843:Art comes from life, not from the studio ~ Marina Abramovic, #NFDB
844:Art does not copy nature - it suggests it. ~ Ernst Gombrich, #NFDB
845:Art is art when it is appreciated by someone. ~ Isao Tomita, #NFDB
846:Art is coming face to face with yourself. ~ Jackson Pollock, #NFDB
847:Art is much, but love is more. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #NFDB
848:Art is never completed, only abandoned. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
849:Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. ~ Benedetto Croce, #NFDB
850:Art is the only answer to chaos and the void. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
851:Art is whatever makes you proud to be human. ~ Amiri Baraka, #NFDB
852:Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom. ~ Michelangelo, #NFDB
853:Art's supposed to build logic structures. ~ Lawrence Weiner, #NFDB
854:Art was born as a desire, not as a demand. ~ Eliel Saarinen, #NFDB
855:Brothers in Art: a friendship so complete ~ Alfred Tennyson, #NFDB
856:Chess is an art and not a spectator sport. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
857:Color will play no part in the art of future. ~ Gunter Brus, #NFDB
858:Coquetry is the art of successful deception. ~ Louise Colet, #NFDB
859:David Seabury’s book The Art of Selfishness, ~ Esther Hicks, #NFDB
860:Design provides solutions, art asks questions. ~ John Maeda, #NFDB
861:Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
862:Each of our five senses contains an art. ~ Lawrence Durrell, #NFDB
863:Either one fails in one's art or in one's life. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
864:Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
865:Feeling sorry for myself was an art. ~ Benjamin Alire S enz, #NFDB
866:Ferraris are art, but they love being driven. ~ Chris Evans, #NFDB
867:Folk art is gumbo soup for the soul. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen, #NFDB
868:Great is the art of beginning. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
869:I declare peace as the greatest work of art. ~ Wolf Vostell, #NFDB
870:I'm really into California art from the '60s. ~ Barry McGee, #NFDB
871:Instead of pleasing, learn the art of happiness. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
872:It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz. ~ Art Blakey, #NFDB
873:I've always loved movies, art and clothes. ~ Colleen Atwood, #NFDB
874:I view my hair and clothes as functional art. ~ Erykah Badu, #NFDB
875:L'art est long, et le temps est court. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
876:Living well is an art that can be developed. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
877:Make life an art rather than art from life. ~ David Gilmour, #NFDB
878:Making reality real is art's responsibility. ~ Eudora Welty, #NFDB
879:Making reality real is art’s responsibility. ~ Eudora Welty, #NFDB
880:Management is not a science, it is an art. ~ Michael Eisner, #NFDB
881:Memoir is the art of inventing the truth. ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
882:My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes ~ Mark Rothko, #NFDB
883:My father who art in hell, Lestat be your name. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
884:Politics is not a science...but an art. ~ Otto von Bismarck, #NFDB
885:Propaganda rarely makes good art. ~ Susan Sutherland Isaacs, #NFDB
886:Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
887:Sex is biological. Kissing is art. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson, #NFDB
888:Silence is one great art of conversation. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
889:Some poems are art because of their passion. ~ Gerald Stern, #NFDB
890:The art of conversation lies in listening. ~ Malcolm Forbes, #NFDB
891:The art of drawing is the art of omission. ~ Max Liebermann, #NFDB
892:The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. ~ Sol LeWitt, #NFDB
893:The job of art is to chase ugliness away. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
894:The man, the art, the work--it is all one. ~ Eugen Herrigel, #NFDB
895:The noblest art is that of making others happy ~ P T Barnum, #NFDB
896:the pleasure of being touched by great art’. ~ Sally Rooney, #NFDB
897:The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
898:The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
899:The work of art is a scream of freedom. ~ Christopher Lasch, #NFDB
900:This listening is the art of meditation, ~ Joel S Goldsmith, #NFDB
901:Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
902:When we separate music from life we get is art. ~ John Cage, #NFDB
903:Where did your art go while you were tweeting? ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
904:Why do humans make art? It's how we evolved. ~ Denis Dutton, #NFDB
905:Actors have no color. That's the art form. ~ Whoopi Goldberg, #NFDB
906:An artist must either give up art or develop. ~ Pauline Kael, #NFDB
907:art as the spirit wanes the form appears. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
908:Art class was my thing, but not any other class. ~ Dan Colen, #NFDB
909:Art is all about doing what you shouldn't. ~ Nobuyoshi Araki, #NFDB
910:Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are. ~ Georgia O Keeffe, #NFDB
911:Art is born out of an ill-designed world. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
912:Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
~ Marcel Duchamp,#NFDB
913:Art is manipulation without intervention. ~ Louise Bourgeois, #NFDB
914:Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
915:Art is not to throw light but to be light. ~ Kenneth Patchen, #NFDB
916:Art is that which science has not yet explained, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
917:Art is the most beautiful deception of all! ~ Claude Debussy, #NFDB
918:Art should not have to be a certain way. ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
919:Art sweeps the everyday dust from your soul. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
920:Art thrives in times of uncertainty. ~ Karen Thompson Walker, #NFDB
921:Avant-garde art is yoga for the mind. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen, #NFDB
922:Baltasar Gracian’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom, ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
923:Business Art is the step that comes after Art. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
924:Connoisseurs think the art is already done. ~ John Constable, #NFDB
925:Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
926:Diplomacy: the art of restraining power. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
927:Economy is the art of making the most of life. ~ Gary Becker, #NFDB
928:Entertainment and art are not isolated ~ Martin Kippenberger, #NFDB
929:Existence is a Fact, Living is an Art ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
930:Great art can only be created out of love. ~ James A Baldwin, #NFDB
931:I don't need the money, dear. I work for art. ~ Maria Callas, #NFDB
932:If the world were clear, art would not exist. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
933:I love art almost as much as I love books. ~ Erika L S nchez, #NFDB
934:In art, 'good enough' is not good enough. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
935:In art, practice always comes before theory. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
936:In life beauty perishes, but not in art. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
937:In oratory the greatest art is to hide art. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
938:know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
939:leadership is really more art than science. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
940:Magic is the art of manipulating the unseen forces of nature, #NFDB
941:Mathematics is really an art, not a science. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
942:Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
943:One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch. ~ John Bayley, #NFDB
944:Painting is the art of hollowing a surface. ~ Georges Seurat, #NFDB
945:Poetry is a totally different art than film. ~ Stan Brakhage, #NFDB
946:Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
947:Real art must always involve some witchcraft. ~ Isak Dinesen, #NFDB
948:Ronald Reagan: a triumph of the embalmer's art. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
949:Rule of art: let half-blind purpose lead you. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
950:Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art. ~ George Perkins Marsh, #NFDB
951:Talent is an art of gaining admiration! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
952:The art of being a slave is to rule one's master. ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
953:The art of life is to live in the present moment ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
954:The art of medicine has its roots in the heart. ~ Paracelsus, #NFDB
955:The beauty of art is the art of beauty! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
956:The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
957:Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
958:Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
959:Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
960:Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God ~ Frank Viola, #NFDB
961:Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
962:To most women art is a form of scandal. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
963:We have truth in order not to die of art.
~ Steve Aylett,#NFDB
964:Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art? ~ John Baldessari, #NFDB
965:What e'er thou art, act well thy part. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
966:You can create art and beauty with a computer. ~ Steven Levy, #NFDB
967:You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth. ~ Gary Busey, #NFDB
968:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ~ Natalie Goldberg, #NFDB
969:America knows nothing of food, love, or art. ~ Isadora Duncan, #NFDB
970:Art and politics have many things in common. ~ Tania Bruguera, #NFDB
971:Art brings out the grand lines of nature. ~ Antoine Bourdelle, #NFDB
972:Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
973:Art has no purpose. It exists for its own sake. ~ Paula Scher, #NFDB
974:Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. ~ Ellen Hopkins, #NFDB
975:Art is a step in the known toward the unknown ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
976:Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionist. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
977:Art is first a seeing and then a revealing ~ Sheldon Vanauken, #NFDB
978:Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life. ~ Jean Paul, #NFDB
979:Art is never finished, only abandoned.
~ Leonardo da Vinci,#NFDB
980:Art is the body's pronunciation of the soul. ~ Michael Gungor, #NFDB
981:Art is the daughter of pleasure. ~ Johann Joachim Winckelmann, #NFDB
982:Art is the stored honey of the human soul. ~ Theodore Dreiser, #NFDB
983:Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it. ~ Edgar Degas, #NFDB
984:Art raises its head where creeds relax. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
985:Art still followed where Rome's eagles flew. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
986:A work of art is a renewable source of energy. ~ Brice Marden, #NFDB
987:Blest is that government where no art thrives. ~ Thomas Nashe, #NFDB
988:Cerebration is the enemy of originality in art. ~ Martin Ritt, #NFDB
989:Cinema is always a political art, at the end. ~ Pablo Larrain, #NFDB
990:Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good. ~ Sol LeWitt, #NFDB
991:Does art imitate life, or does life imitate TV? ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
992:Don't think about making art, just get it done. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
993:Every art fights the noose of verbal description. ~ Alex Ross, #NFDB
994:For in a dearth of comforts, we art taught ~ William Davenant, #NFDB
995:Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
996:Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
997:How can art make a difference in the world? ~ Sandra Cisneros, #NFDB
998:How like art is what's left over after life. ~ William H Gass, #NFDB
999:I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it. ~ Walt Disney, #NFDB
1000:I like a work of art for what it means to me. ~ Victoria Holt, #NFDB
1001:I'm a commercial artist, both in music and art. ~ Grace Slick, #NFDB
1002:I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1003:In art, the best is good enough. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1004:I was a real art freak when I was a teenager. ~ Helen McCrory, #NFDB
1005:Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms. ~ Keith Jarrett, #NFDB
1006:Jazz is part folk art, part progressive art. ~ Mulgrew Miller, #NFDB
1007:Life isn't long enough for love and art. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
1008:Life is short, but art lives forever. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
1009:Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge. ~ Stendhal, #NFDB
1010:Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
1011:No art ever came out of not risking your neck. ~ Eudora Welty, #NFDB
1012:No art is possible without a dance with death ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1013:Poetry and art are the breath of life to her. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
1014:Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1015:Simplicity is the greatest adornment of art. ~ Albrecht Durer, #NFDB
1016:Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
1017:The art of love-giving and taking become one. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1018:The art of war is of vital importance to the State. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
1019:The beauty of art is that it comes from the heart. ~ T A Uner, #NFDB
1020:The fact is that even art is subject to fashion. ~ Hugo Pratt, #NFDB
1021:the littleness of life that art exaggerates”? ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1022:The morality of art is in its very beauty. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
1023:There was an art to the male posterior. ~ Sarah Addison Allen, #NFDB
1024:They're not dogs [poodles], they're art. ~ Rachael Leigh Cook, #NFDB
1025:Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1026:Thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return. ~ Paul Hoffman, #NFDB
1027:We're all a work of art for someone who loves us. ~ S E Lynes, #NFDB
1028:When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard. ~ O Henry, #NFDB
1029:Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1030:You don’t make art out of good intentions. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
1031:You'll need to suffer to make any real art. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
1032:You need the art in order to love the life. ~ Nicholson Baker, #NFDB
1033:A city full of art is a city full of wit! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1034:All I know is this: art is art, or it's shit ~ Eduardo Galeano, #NFDB
1035:All works of art should begin... at the end. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
1036:Any genuine work of art generates new work. ~ Donald Barthelme, #NFDB
1037:Any work of art must first of all tell a story. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
1038:Art always demands of us something new. ~ Ludwig van Beethoven, #NFDB
1039:Art and revolt will die only with the last man. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1040:Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
1041:Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms. ~ Roy Lichtenstein, #NFDB
1042:Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1043:Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1044:Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT. ~ Josef Albers, #NFDB
1045:Art is made to trouble but science reassures. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
1046:Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
1047:Art is to beauty what honor is to honesty. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
1048:Artists must be sacrificed to their art. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1049:Art is what we're doing when we do our best work. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
1050:Art makes something a lot more visible or audible. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
1051:Art should never be an answer but a question. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
1052:A work of art doesn't have to be explained. ~ Louise Bourgeois, #NFDB
1053:Chess is everything: art, science, and sport. ~ Anatoly Karpov, #NFDB
1054:Choice and chance structure art and nature. ~ Frederick Sommer, #NFDB
1055:Christian art, like obscene art, is surface level. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1056:Disability is an art - an ingenious way to live. ~ Neil Marcus, #NFDB
1057:Drag the kids to the art museum in the morning, ~ Mindy Klasky, #NFDB
1058:Drawing is the honesty of art. ~ Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, #NFDB
1059:for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1060:for dust thou art,and unto dust shalt thou return. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1061:I am an artist, art has no color and no sex. ~ Whoopi Goldberg, #NFDB
1062:I buy some art but I don't like to talk about it. ~ China Chow, #NFDB
1063:I didn't have any interest in traditional art. ~ Cindy Sherman, #NFDB
1064:I don't believe in art. I believe in artists. ~ Marcel Duchamp, #NFDB
1065:I love putting the music together. It's like art ~ Erykah Badu, #NFDB
1066:I think comedy is the hardest art form there is. ~ John Popper, #NFDB
1067:I think hope is key, in life and in art. ~ Francesca Gregorini, #NFDB
1068:It is in its pure form that an art hits hard. ~ Robert Bresson, #NFDB
1069:It is ultimately character that underwrites art. ~ Anne Truitt, #NFDB
1070:LEIA Ah! Gov’nor Tarkin, scurvy knave art thou. ~ Ian Doescher, #NFDB
1071:Life and art are not two different things. ~ Felix Mendelssohn, #NFDB
1072:Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. ~ John W Gardner, #NFDB
1073:Logic is the art of making truth prevail. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
1074:Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art. ~ Mae West, #NFDB
1075:My knowledge of art ended at impressionism. ~ Peggy Guggenheim, #NFDB
1076:Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
1077:Never judge a work of art by its defects. ~ Washington Allston, #NFDB
1078:No art is possible without a dance with death. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
1079:No art is possible without a dance with death, ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1080:No art is possible without a dance with death. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1081:Our art is an adventure. It is a dream come true. ~ Jack White, #NFDB
1082:Perfume is the art that makes memory speak ~ Francis Kurkdjian, #NFDB
1083:Picture-taking is an ensemble art-like theater. ~ Ansel Elgort, #NFDB
1084:Purity of life is the highest and truest art. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1085:Ronald Reagan is a triumph of the embalmer's art. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
1086:Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump. ~ Auguste Rodin, #NFDB
1087:Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it? ~ Criss Angel, #NFDB
1088:Thank you for the tragedy. I need it for my art. ~ Kurt Cobain, #NFDB
1089:The art of deep seeing makes gratitude possible. ~ Ann Voskamp, #NFDB
1090:The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore. ~ Timber Hawkeye, #NFDB
1091:the art of life, mostly, the art of avoiding pain ~ Henri Cole, #NFDB
1092:The art of pleasing is the art of deception. ~ Luc de Clapiers, #NFDB
1093:The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
1094:The only thing that is not art is inattention ~ Marcel Duchamp, #NFDB
1095:The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. ~ Jerzy Kosinski, #NFDB
1096:There is an art to the building up of suspense. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
1097:There's an audience for all kinds of great art. ~ Robin Thicke, #NFDB
1098:There should be something revelatory about art. ~ Tracey Emin, #NFDB
1099:This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. ~ Salvador Dal, #NFDB
1100:Thou art a cat, and a rat, and a coward. ~ Miguel de Cervantes, #NFDB
1101:Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself. ~ John Keats,#NFDB
1102:Thus art is not an object, it is an experience. ~ Josef Albers, #NFDB
1103:To be a fool at the right time is also an art. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
1104:Toil of science swells the wealth of art. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
1105:To make living itself an art, that is the goal. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1106:Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
1107:Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
1108:Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
1109:Ah, March! we know thou art Kind-hearted, ~ Helen Hunt Jackson, #NFDB
1110:All art has this characteristic-it unites people. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1111:All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point? ~ Jess Walter, #NFDB
1112:All I know is this: art is art, or it's shit. ~ Eduardo Galeano, #NFDB
1113:A people’s art is the genesis of their freedom. ~ Claudia Jones, #NFDB
1114:Architecture is the art of how to waste space. ~ Philip Johnson, #NFDB
1115:[A]rt can never give the rules that make an art. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1116:Art challenges technology, technology inspires art. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1117:Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1118:Art is difficult, transient is her reward. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
1119:Art is for stimulation, excitement, adventure. ~ Doris Humphrey, #NFDB
1120:art is long and critics are the insects of a day. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1121:Art is long, and Time is fleeting. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
1122:Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
1123:Art is visceral and vulgar - it's an eruption. ~ Georg Baselitz, #NFDB
1124:Art problems are problems of human relationship. ~ Josef Albers, #NFDB
1125:Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. ~ Marc Chagall, #NFDB
1126:Art should become as one with its surroundings. ~ Isamu Noguchi, #NFDB
1127:Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1128:But art should require no instrument but memory. ~ Paul Theroux, #NFDB
1129:Creativity is the art of concealing your sources. ~ Coco Chanel, #NFDB
1130:discuss the art of war.”3 It seems likely, then, that ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
1131:Dust thou art and unto dust shall thou return. ~ Genesis III.19, #NFDB
1132:Errors are not in the art but in the artificers. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
1133:Everything in art is but a copy of nature. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
1134:Experimentation is the key to 'lively up' the art. ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
1135:For me, art is supposed to be a question mark. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
1136:God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that. ~ Robert Browning, #NFDB
1137:Great art is cathartic; it is always moral. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
1138:I don't really see art as structured by logic. ~ Rachel Kushner, #NFDB
1139:If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. ~ Art Blakey, #NFDB
1140:If you want to live, it's good to be friendly. ~ Art Spiegelman, #NFDB
1141:It's a new art form, showing people how little we care. ~ Lorde, #NFDB
1142:Kenneth Hari's art work shall influence mankind. ~ Pablo Casals, #NFDB
1143:Like all great art, it defies the tyrant Time. ~ Edwin A Abbott, #NFDB
1144:Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence. ~ Morris Kline, #NFDB
1145:Many would argue that alpinism is art, not sport. ~ Steve House, #NFDB
1146:Most people in America think Art is a man's name. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
1147:Movies are a collective art. Art by proxy. ~ Sylvester Stallone, #NFDB
1148:Music, art, theater. I'm just a big fan of beauty. ~ Jerry Hall, #NFDB
1149:My cousin's a fool, and thou art another. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1150:My goal is to make my kids as happy as possible. ~ Art Alexakis, #NFDB
1151:Mystery is the basic element of all works of art. ~ Luis Bunuel, #NFDB
1152:Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art. ~ Walter Savage Landor, #NFDB
1153:Nothing is art if it does not come from nature. ~ Antonio Gaudi, #NFDB
1154:Of course, in the art class, I was the model. ~ Suzanne Farrell, #NFDB
1155:Patience may be a virtue, but quitting is an art. ~ Evan Harris, #NFDB
1156:Photography is art when it's used by an artist. ~ Ruth Bernhard, #NFDB
1157:Rap is still an art, and no-one's from the Old School ~ KRS One, #NFDB
1158:Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1159:Rock isn't art, it's the way ordinary people talk. ~ Billy Idol, #NFDB
1160:Si le monde était clair, l’art n'existerait pas. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1161:Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art. ~ Peter F Drucker, #NFDB
1162:Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1163:The art of creation is older than the art of killing. ~ Ed Koch, #NFDB
1164:The art of dressing is the art we all practice ~ Anne Hollander, #NFDB
1165:The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1166:The art of living is the art of compromise. We ~ George Gissing, #NFDB
1167:The art of reading is to skip judiciously. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
1168:The art of sex is the art of controlled abandon. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1169:The Baron told her that only art meant anything. ~ Edward Gorey, #NFDB
1170:The role of art in society differs for every artist. ~ Maya Lin, #NFDB
1171:the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
1172:This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
1173:Today's art has been cancelled due to police activity. ~ Banksy, #NFDB
1174:What has reason to do with the art of painting? ~ William Blake, #NFDB
1175:Where art thou that thou art not here. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
1176:Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
1177:Your work speaks for you. Your art defines you. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
1178:Art—and it is art you’ll be doing—is subjective. ~ Sherryl Woods, #NFDB
1179:Art is a conduit toward human needs and perception. ~ John Maeda, #NFDB
1180:Art is an artificial organization of experience. ~ Sara Maitland, #NFDB
1181:Art is man's expression of his joy in labor. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
1182:Art is not democratic. It is not for the people. ~ Richard Serra, #NFDB
1183:Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be. ~ Edward Albee, #NFDB
1184:Art is right reason in the doing of work. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
1185:Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word. ~ Eric Gill, #NFDB
1186:Art is such an important part of our culture. ~ Rosanna Arquette, #NFDB
1187:Art is the expression of an enormous preference. ~ Wyndham Lewis, #NFDB
1188:Art is the most frenzied orgy man is capable of. ~ Jean Dubuffet, #NFDB
1189:Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp. ~ John Donne, #NFDB
1190:Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses. ~ Kenneth Rexroth, #NFDB
1191:Art must be a slow and normal evolution. ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski, #NFDB
1192:Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
1193:Art should be created for life, not for the museum ~ Jean Nouvel, #NFDB
1194:Art that only comes from the head isn't any good. ~ Austin Kleon, #NFDB
1195:Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1196:Art will never be able to exist without nature. ~ Pierre Bonnard, #NFDB
1197:But of works of art little can be said. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
1198:But only art and music have the power to bring peace. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
1199:Civility is the art and act of caring for others. ~ Deborah King, #NFDB
1200:Dissembling harlot, thou art false in all! ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1201:Don't think of it as art, think of it as work. ~ Paddy Chayefsky, #NFDB
1202:Don’t whine. Art harder." --Delilah S. Dawson ~ Delilah S Dawson, #NFDB
1203:Everything worth doing starts with being scared. ~ Art Garfunkel, #NFDB
1204:For where thou art, there is the world itself. ~ Deanna Raybourn, #NFDB
1205:friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1206:God made thee good as thou art beautiful. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
1207:I have a healthy view of what one can do with art. ~ Neil LaBute, #NFDB
1208:I have found my voice again and the art of using it... ~ Colette, #NFDB
1209:In the world of Art there are no wrong choices. ~ Herbie Hancock, #NFDB
1210:I reflect that all art, all beauty, is reflection. ~ Adam Begley, #NFDB
1211:It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art. ~ Ivan Turgenev, #NFDB
1212:It’s art. If you’re looking at it, it’s working. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
1213:Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1214:Mathematics is an art of human understanding. ~ William Thurston, #NFDB
1215:MORALITY, LIKE ART, MEANS DRAWING A LINE SOME PLACE ~ Kate Locke, #NFDB
1216:Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1217:No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1218:patience is the art of courting the future. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
1219:Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1220:Politics is the art of making civilization work. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
1221:She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1222:Shut the F--- up and create your f---ing art. ~ Garrett Robinson, #NFDB
1223:Sometimes I don't feel like a functioning adult ~ Art Spiegelman, #NFDB
1224:The art is not one of forgetting but letting go ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1225:The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb. ~ Andre Breton, #NFDB
1226:The art of pleasing consists in being pleased. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
1227:The art of politics is knowing what to do next. ~ James P Cannon, #NFDB
1228:The art of survival is a story that never ends. ~ Christian Bale, #NFDB
1229:The creation of art requires descent into the dark. ~ Doug Dorst, #NFDB
1230:The greatest danger in art is too much knowledge. ~ Andre Derain, #NFDB
1231:The highest art is no art. The best form is no form. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
1232:The object of Art is to give life a shape. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1233:The proper school to learn art is not life but art ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1234:There is no must in art because art is free. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
1235:There is no work of art that is without short cuts. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
1236:The science is in knowing; the art in perceiving. ~ Robert Fripp, #NFDB
1237:the temple was to be filled with art work. ~ Francis A Schaeffer, #NFDB
1238:The true art of memory is the art of attention. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1239:The true art of memory, is the art of attention ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1240:Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1241:Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1242:To begin with the wine jar in learning the potter's art. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1243:To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
1244:To tryly hate is ab art one learns with time ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
1245:Western art has a certain relationship to nature. ~ Brice Marden, #NFDB
1246:What's when you rap and don't appreciate the art? ~ Lord Finesse, #NFDB
1247:When Art becomes a Science it is no longer an Art. ~ Kevin James, #NFDB
1248:Works of art are never finished, just stopped. ~ Peter Greenaway, #NFDB
1249:Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
1250:You can create art that makes people feel better. ~ John Seagall, #NFDB
1251:Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
1252:Against an oath; the truth thou art unsure. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1253:A good half of the art of living is resilience. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1254:All art is political, all art is a martial one. ~ William C Brown, #NFDB
1255:All great art and literature is propaganda. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
1256:Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32) ~ Milan Kundera, #NFDB
1257:Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal. ~ Egon Schiele, #NFDB
1258:Art depends upon the inexactitude of sight. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1259:Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
1260:Art informs life in so many ways, and vice versa. ~ Jenna Coleman, #NFDB
1261:Art is about the dynamics of the human experience. ~ Danny Glover, #NFDB
1262:art is always intense when it’s transformative. ~ Aline Ohanesian, #NFDB
1263:Art is a man's nature; nature is God's art. ~ Philip James Bailey, #NFDB
1264:Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down. ~ Malcolm De Chazal, #NFDB
1265:Art is our defense against hysteria and death. ~ Theodore Roethke, #NFDB
1266:Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1267:Art is the path of the creator to his work. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1268:Art takes whatever - and as long as - it takes. ~ Spider Robinson, #NFDB
1269:Art Tatum -- he was a genius. And Einstein, not me. ~ Ray Charles, #NFDB
1270:Art without color would lose much of its purpose. ~ Andrew Loomis, #NFDB
1271:Bodybuilding is not only a sport but first an ART. ~ Serge Nubret, #NFDB
1272:Can one make works which are not works of 'art'? ~ Marcel Duchamp, #NFDB
1273:Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1274:I don't believe in art. I believe in the artist. ~ Marcel Duchamp, #NFDB
1275:I feel that all good art is powerful and simple. ~ Aulis Sallinen, #NFDB
1276:If only art were as rare as good taste. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney, #NFDB
1277:If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1278:I'm an artist. I'm interested in how art gets made. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
1279:I'm sure that the camera is part of European art. ~ David Hockney, #NFDB
1280:In all history, art has been the food of the poor, ~ Cameron Jace, #NFDB
1281:In art as in life, some things need no translation. ~ Paula Vogel, #NFDB
1282:In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1283:I sang in art school, just to get money to smoke. ~ Joni Mitchell, #NFDB
1284:It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
1285:Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
1286:Making art in America is about saving one's soul. ~ Charles Simic, #NFDB
1287:Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1288:No art is possible without a dance
with death ~ Kurt Vonnegut,#NFDB
1289:Nobody needs an Artist, but everyone needs ART. ~ Laurence Gartel, #NFDB
1290:Organized perception is what art is all about. ~ Roy Lichtenstein, #NFDB
1291:Patience is the art of concealing your impatience. ~ Guy Kawasaki, #NFDB
1292:Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art. ~ Philip Roth, #NFDB
1293:Self-preservation is an art and I a masterpiece. ~ Sonya Vatomsky, #NFDB
1294:So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art. ~ Louise Erdrich, #NFDB
1295:Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art. ~ Jay McInerney, #NFDB
1296:The art of love is largely the art of persistence. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
1297:The art of the quoter is to know when to stop. ~ Robertson Davies, #NFDB
1298:The goal of art-making in general is communication. ~ Will Cotton, #NFDB
1299:The job of art is to chase ugliness away.” Bono ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1300:The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1301:The purpose of art is to bring people into presence. ~ Jim Carrey, #NFDB
1302:The roots of art and play lie very close together. ~ Angus Wilson, #NFDB
1303:Thou art a slave, whom fortune's tender arm ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1304:Thou art the sovereign treasure of this universe. ~ Bhagavad Gita, #NFDB
1305:Through art we discover that we are not alone. ~ Arnold Weinstein, #NFDB
1306:To appreciate art you’ve got to work at it a bit. ~ Grayson Perry, #NFDB
1307:To create art means to be crazy alone forever. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1308:To know how to live is my trade and my art. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
1309:To truly hate is an art one learns with time. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
1310:To truly hate is an art one learns with time. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon, #NFDB
1311:Unlike art and sex, money always arouses interest. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
1312:Valuing a business is part art and part science. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
1313:We possess art lest we perish of the truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1314:Whatever in a work of art is not used, is doing harm. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1315:What the work of art looks like isn't too important. ~ Sol LeWitt, #NFDB
1316:Winner gave me my bread and Russell gave me my art. ~ Oliver Reed, #NFDB
1317:You are both a work of art and an artist at work. ~ Erwin McManus, #NFDB
1318:Adds are the cave art of the twentieth century. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
1319:All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache. ~ Alfred Stieglitz, #NFDB
1320:A piece of art is a compact form of the universe. ~ Thomas Kinkade, #NFDB
1321:Art always has something of the unconscious about it. ~ D T Suzuki, #NFDB
1322:Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain. ~ Edvard Munch, #NFDB
1323:Art compares to nature like wine to the grape. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
1324:Art feeds off art...and artists feed off artists. ~ Robert Mangold, #NFDB
1325:Art is a game. Too bad for him who makes a duty of it. ~ Max Jacob, #NFDB
1326:Art is a mediator of the unspeakable. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1327:Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1328:Art is evidence of our most creative moment. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1329:Art is Knowledge at the service of emotion. ~ Jose Clemente Orozco, #NFDB
1330:Art is not what you see but what you make others see ~ Edgar Degas, #NFDB
1331:Art isn't everything. It's just about everything. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
1332:Art is only art if it is synonymous with living ~ Alexander Girard, #NFDB
1333:art is the link between appearance and reality. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
1334:Art is the most effective form of communication. ~ Jennifer Echols, #NFDB
1335:Art is the one place we all turn to for solace. ~ Carrie Mae Weems, #NFDB
1336:Art is to console those who are broken by life. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
1337:Art is to console those who are broken by life. ~ Vincent van Gogh, #NFDB
1338:Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing. ~ Marc Chagall, #NFDB
1339:Art would be useless if the world were perfect. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
1340:Attack is only one half of the art of boxing. ~ Georges Carpentier, #NFDB
1341:A work of art comes only from inside a human being. ~ Edvard Munch, #NFDB
1342:But here God didn't come. We were all on our own. ~ Art Spiegelman, #NFDB
1343:Cricket is battle and service and sport and art. ~ Douglas Jardine, #NFDB
1344:Destroying art is practice for destroying people. ~ Alexander Chee, #NFDB
1345:Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
1346:Excellence is not an art. It is the habit of practice. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1347:Fine art is the only teacher except torture. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
1348:For the most part, I don't like people who soapbox. ~ Art Alexakis, #NFDB
1349:Human requirements are the inspiration for art. ~ Stephen Gardiner, #NFDB
1350:I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life. ~ D T Suzuki, #NFDB
1351:I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art. ~ G H Hardy, #NFDB
1352:I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art. ~ Madonna Ciccone, #NFDB
1353:If your heart is broken, make art with the pieces. ~ Shane Koyczan, #NFDB
1354:I love an art-school girl. I mean dont we all? ~ Theophilus London, #NFDB
1355:In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
1356:In the domain of art there is no light without heat. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1357:It's all in the art. You get no credit for living. ~ V S Pritchett, #NFDB
1358:Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art ~ Dan Rather, #NFDB
1359:Keep to yourself the final touches of your art. ~ Baltasar Gracian, #NFDB
1360:Know thy enemy, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War. ~ Greer Hendricks, #NFDB
1361:L'art lave notre âme de la poussière du quotidien. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1362:Life is like art - it is all about interpretation. ~ Robert Holden, #NFDB
1363:Logic is the art of convincing us some truth. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
1364:Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will. ~ Dion Fortune, #NFDB
1365:might not know art but they knew what they liked, ~ William Gaddis, #NFDB
1366:Music and art are the guiding lights of the world. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1367:Music is the only art that actually lives. ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski, #NFDB
1368:My art was not an answer - it was a question. ~ Gottfried Helnwein, #NFDB
1369:People regard art too highly, and history not enough ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1370:Perfect typography is more a science than an art. ~ Jan Tschichold, #NFDB
1371:Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1372:Science and art are the handmaids of religion. ~ Francois Delsarte, #NFDB
1373:Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis. ~ Karl Kraus, #NFDB
1374:Sightseeing is the art of disappointment. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
1375:So art becomes not communication but mystification. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1376:Stand-up is probably the most solo performance in art. ~ Louis C K, #NFDB
1377:Storytelling is a gift, but writing is a learned art. ~ Beem Weeks, #NFDB
1378:The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook. ~ William James, #NFDB
1379:The Art of Possibility, de Rosamund Stone Zander ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1380:The highest condition of art is artlessness. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1381:The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1382:The purpose of art is to provide what life does not. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1383:There is no God, and conversation is a dying art. ~ Raymond Carver, #NFDB
1384:The writer's only responsibility is to his art. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
1385:Thou art god, I am god. All that groks is god. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
1386:Thou art mine, Dilys Merimydion. Mine and no other’s. ~ C L Wilson, #NFDB
1387:Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1388:To eat is a necessity; to eat intelligently is an art. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1389:To finish a work of art is to be exiled from it. ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
1390:War is the highest form of modern art. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, #NFDB
1391:Why dont they stick to murder and leave art to us? ~ Jacob Epstein, #NFDB
1392:Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama. ~ Mark Rothko, #NFDB
1393:(You could've made that) + (but you didn't) = Modern Art ~ Unknown, #NFDB
1394:A joy-filled home is like your own personal art museum ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1395:An education not founded on Art will never succeed. ~ Margaret Mead, #NFDB
1396:Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
1397:Art dealing is when you're doing it as a business. ~ Jeffrey Deitch, #NFDB
1398:Art is messy, art is chaos - so you need a system. ~ Andrew Stanton, #NFDB
1399:Art is not what you see, but what you make others see ~ Edgar Degas, #NFDB
1400:Art isn't a matter of 'what' but of 'how'. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
1401:Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over. ~ Jeff Koons, #NFDB
1402:Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1403:Art is the lesser sister to medicine. It aims to heal. ~ Andrew Lam, #NFDB
1404:Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. ~ Twyla Tharp, #NFDB
1405:Art is to console those who are broken by life. ~ Vincent van Gogh, #NFDB
1406:Art must be nourished by faith, the faith of an equal. ~ May Sarton, #NFDB
1407:Art teaches nothing except the significance of life. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1408:Before the art of medicine comes the art of belief. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1409:Be kind to everybody. Make art. Fight the power. ~ Colson Whitehead, #NFDB
1410:Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
1411:Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. ~ Henry Louis Gates, #NFDB
1412:Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
1413:Dance is one of the most revealing art forms. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov, #NFDB
1414:Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
1415:Doggedness in art is no substitute for inspiration. ~ Benjamin Wood, #NFDB
1416:Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation. ~ Paul Cezanne, #NFDB
1417:Flight from boredom is the mother of all art. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1418:Great writing can be done in biography, history, art. ~ V S Naipaul, #NFDB
1419:i am a museum full of art
but you had your eyes shut ~ Rupi Kaur,#NFDB
1420:I am interested in the art. I'm a professional woman ~ Claire Bloom, #NFDB
1421:I believe that treating other people well is a lost art. ~ Tim Gunn, #NFDB
1422:I communicate my innermost perceptions through art. ~ Arshile Gorky, #NFDB
1423:I could always live in my art but never in my life ~ Ingmar Bergman, #NFDB
1424:If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. ~ Arne Jacobsen, #NFDB
1425:If you want to work on your art, work on your life. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1426:I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1427:Il n’y a pas d’art pessimiste… L’art affirme. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1428:Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
1429:I make clothes people can wear; I don't make art. ~ Dries van Noten, #NFDB
1430:In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity. ~ Kazimir Malevich, #NFDB
1431:I need to be creative, make art every day for my own sanity. ~ Soko, #NFDB
1432:Insanity is a legal term. Crazy is an art form. ~ Hunter S Thompson, #NFDB
1433:Interviewing is in some ways the art of memory. ~ Francisco Goldman, #NFDB
1434:I teach the art of turning anguish into delight. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
1435:I think art, at best, holds up a mirror to humanity. ~ John Spencer, #NFDB
1436:It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art. ~ James Elkins, #NFDB
1437:It is not easy to recover an art when once lost. ~ Oliver Goldsmith, #NFDB
1438:It's art that's taught me to think and to write. ~ Andy Goldsworthy, #NFDB
1439:It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap. ~ Marcel Duchamp, #NFDB
1440:Karate is a defensive art from beginning to end. ~ Gichin Funakoshi, #NFDB
1441:LIFE
IS THE ART
OF FAILING
MAGNIFICENTLY. ~ Atticus Poetry,#NFDB
1442:Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
1443:Love is the art of hearts, and heart or arts. ~ Philip James Bailey, #NFDB
1444:Making art is like humour - very moment dependent. ~ Michael Denton, #NFDB
1445:Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.” —TWYLA THARP ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
1446:Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn’t. ~ Austin Kleon, #NFDB
1447:Most people master the art of wasting a life. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
1448:Patience is the art of finding something else to do. ~ Groucho Marx, #NFDB
1449:Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable. ~ Leonard Baskin, #NFDB
1450:Posterity is the patriotic name for grandchildren. ~ Art Linkletter, #NFDB
1451:She is well practiced in the art of losing herself. ~ Veronica Roth, #NFDB
1452:Tactics is the art of using troops in battle; ~ Carl von Clausewitz, #NFDB
1453:That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1454:The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet, #NFDB
1455:The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
1456:The art of governing mankind by deceiving them. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
1457:The art of losing isn't hard to master. I,ve done it ~ Ava Dellaira, #NFDB
1458:The end-purpose of all art is enjoyment! ~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, #NFDB
1459:The real art of conducting consists in transitions. ~ Gustav Mahler, #NFDB
1460:The touch of chaos in the order - art required that. ~ Melissa Marr, #NFDB
1461:To create a work of art is to create the world. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
1462:To me, art is the glorification of the human spirit. ~ Hans Hofmann, #NFDB
1463:We have art in order not to die of the truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1464:When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome. ~ Miguel de Cervantes, #NFDB
1465:Whisky making is the art of making poison pleasant ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1466:Who was that supervisor?” “That was Art Donovan. ~ Michael Connelly, #NFDB
1467:You do in your art what you cannot do in your life. ~ Josh Schwartz, #NFDB
1468:Young people want mirrors. Older people want art. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
1469:You’re an enemy of art and I pity your ignorance, ~ William Goldman, #NFDB
1470:You were born an original work of art. Stay original. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1471:A life well lived is the most exquisite work of art. ~ Erwin McManus, #NFDB
1472:All good art is about something deeper than it admits. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
1473:All profoundly original art looks ugly at first. ~ Clement Greenberg, #NFDB
1474:Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy. ~ Robert Henri, #NFDB
1475:Art has to offer something other than stylized despair. ~ Ben Lerner, #NFDB
1476:Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament. ~ Emile Zola, #NFDB
1477:Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament. ~ mile Zola, #NFDB
1478:Art is a tool that isnt used enough to effect change. ~ Mattias Klum, #NFDB
1479:Art is, from any point of view, the greatest of risks. ~ Jean Helion, #NFDB
1480:Art is here taken to mean knowledge realized in action. ~ Ren Daumal, #NFDB
1481:Art is kind of the lens through which I think about God. ~ Dan Colen, #NFDB
1482:Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day. ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
1483:Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
1484:Art is making something out of nothing and selling it. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
1485:Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. ~ Edgar Degas, #NFDB
1486:Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance. ~ Shirin Neshat, #NFDB
1487:Art is the colors and textures of your imagination. ~ Meghan Trainor, #NFDB
1488:Art is the experience of what you’ve felt inside. ~ Abbas Kiarostami, #NFDB
1489:Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1490:Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. ~ Angela Carter, #NFDB
1491:Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1492:Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
1493:But of works of art little can be said.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson,#NFDB
1494:But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1495:Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1496:Fatherland before everything, art afterward. ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski, #NFDB
1497:Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
1498:Food can be expressive and therefore food can be art. ~ Grant Achatz, #NFDB
1499:Frame everything and some of it will become art. ~ Benny Bellamacina, #NFDB
1500:Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
786 Integral Yoga
601 Poetry
160 Occultism
152 Fiction
119 Philosophy
104 Christianity
77 Yoga
67 Psychology
31 Mysticism
28 Philsophy
20 Mythology
18 Hinduism
17 Science
12 Education
10 Integral Theory
7 Sufism
6 Baha i Faith
5 Buddhism
4 Theosophy
4 Cybernetics
1 Thelema
1 Kabbalah
1 Alchemy
406 The Mother
362 Sri Aurobindo
195 Satprem
166 Nolini Kanta Gupta
104 William Wordsworth
85 Percy Bysshe Shelley
77 H P Lovecraft
64 Carl Jung
57 Aleister Crowley
54 Sri Ramakrishna
46 Walt Whitman
46 James George Frazer
42 John Keats
36 Robert Browning
33 Saint Augustine of Hippo
33 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
32 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
31 Friedrich Schiller
28 Ralph Waldo Emerson
23 Plotinus
22 Friedrich Nietzsche
20 Jorge Luis Borges
20 Aldous Huxley
20 A B Purani
18 William Butler Yeats
15 Vyasa
15 Lucretius
14 Rabindranath Tagore
13 Ovid
13 Aristotle
13 Anonymous
12 Swami Krishnananda
11 Plato
10 Swami Vivekananda
10 Saint Teresa of Avila
10 Rudolf Steiner
10 George Van Vrekhem
10 Edgar Allan Poe
7 Nirodbaran
7 Joseph Campbell
6 Peter J Carroll
6 Hafiz
6 Franz Bardon
6 Baha u llah
6 Al-Ghazali
5 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
5 Sri Ramana Maharshi
5 Jordan Peterson
5 Jakushitsu
4 Solomon ibn Gabirol
4 Saint John of Climacus
4 Norbert Wiener
4 Henry David Thoreau
4 Bokar Rinpoche
3 Thubten Chodron
3 R Buckminster Fuller
3 Omar Khayyam
3 Jalaluddin Rumi
2 William Blake
2 Ramprasad
2 Paul Richard
2 Namdev
2 Michael Maier
2 Mechthild of Magdeburg
2 Mahendranath Gupta
2 Li Bai
2 Ken Wilber
2 Kabir
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 Jean Gebser
2 Italo Calvino
2 Dadu Dayal
2 Boethius
2 Allama Muhammad Iqbal
2 Alfred Tennyson
104 Wordsworth - Poems
89 Prayers And Meditations
85 Shelley - Poems
77 Lovecraft - Poems
53 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
48 Letters On Poetry And Art
46 Whitman - Poems
46 The Synthesis Of Yoga
46 The Golden Bough
42 Keats - Poems
37 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
36 Record of Yoga
36 Browning - Poems
33 Savitri
33 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
31 Schiller - Poems
31 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
31 Magick Without Tears
30 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
28 Emerson - Poems
27 The Divine Comedy
27 Mysterium Coniunctionis
26 The Life Divine
24 Collected Poems
23 Liber ABA
22 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
21 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
21 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
21 City of God
21 Agenda Vol 01
20 The Perennial Philosophy
20 The Human Cycle
20 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
20 Agenda Vol 08
19 Faust
19 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
18 Yeats - Poems
18 Agenda Vol 02
17 The Practice of Psycho therapy
17 Agenda Vol 03
16 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
16 Labyrinths
16 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
15 Words Of Long Ago
15 Vishnu Purana
15 The Bible
15 Of The Nature Of Things
15 Agenda Vol 10
14 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
14 Agenda Vol 11
13 The Future of Man
13 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
13 Questions And Answers 1956
13 Questions And Answers 1955
13 Poetics
13 Metamorphoses
13 Goethe - Poems
13 Agenda Vol 07
12 The Study and Practice of Yoga
12 Tagore - Poems
12 Questions And Answers 1954
12 On Education
12 Essays Divine And Human
12 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
12 Agenda Vol 12
12 Agenda Vol 06
11 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
11 On the Way to Supermanhood
11 Letters On Yoga IV
11 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
10 The Phenomenon of Man
10 Questions And Answers 1953
10 Preparing for the Miraculous
10 Essays On The Gita
10 Agenda Vol 05
9 Poe - Poems
9 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
9 Aion
8 Vedic and Philological Studies
8 Twilight of the Idols
8 Talks
8 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
8 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
8 5.1.01 - Ilion
7 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
7 The Way of Perfection
7 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
7 Some Answers From The Mother
7 Letters On Yoga II
7 Letters On Yoga I
7 Agenda Vol 09
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Alchemy of Happiness
6 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
6 Liber Null
6 Kena and Other Upanishads
6 Hymn of the Universe
6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
5 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
5 Maps of Meaning
5 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
5 Hafiz - Poems
5 Crowley - Poems
5 Agenda Vol 13
4 Walden
4 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
4 Tara - The Feminine Divine
4 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
4 Let Me Explain
4 Cybernetics
4 Bhakti-Yoga
4 Anonymous - Poems
4 Agenda Vol 04
3 Words Of The Mother III
3 The Secret Of The Veda
3 The Red Book Liber Novus
3 The Practice of Magical Evocation
3 Theosophy
3 The Interior Castle or The Mansions
3 The Book of Certitude
3 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
3 Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
3 Raja-Yoga
3 Isha Upanishad
3 Initiation Into Hermetics
3 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
3 Borges - Poems
3 Amrita Gita
2 Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit
2 The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 The Integral Yoga
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 The Essentials of Education
2 The Castle of Crossed Destinies
2 Sex Ecology Spirituality
2 Selected Fictions
2 Rumi - Poems
2 Li Bai - Poems
2 Letters On Yoga III
2 God Exists
2 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E
00.00 - Publishers Note A, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A Yoga of the Art of Life
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Publishers Note
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A Yoga of the Art of Life
0 0.01 - Introduction, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To be a man after rediscovering a million years was mysteriously like being something still other than man, a strange, unfinished possibility that could also be all kinds of other things. It was not in the dictionary, it was fluid and boundless - it had become a man through habit, but in truth, it was formidably virgin, as if all the old laws belonged to laggard barbarians. Then other moons began whirring through the skies to the cry of macaws at sunset, another rhythm was born that was strangely in tune with the rhythm of all, making one single flow of the world, and there we went, lightly, as if the body had never had any weight other than that of our human thought; and the stars were so near, even the giant airplanes roaring overhead seemed vain Artifices beneath smiling galaxies. A man was the overwhelming Possible. He was even the great discoverer of the Possible.
Never had this precarious invention had any other aim through millions of species than to discover that which surpassed his own species, perhaps the means to change his species - a light and lawless species. After rediscovering a million years in the great, rhythmic night, a man was still something to be invented. It was the invention of himself, where all was not yet said and done.
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mysticism is not only a science but also, and in a greater degree, an Art. To approach it merely as a science, as the modern mind attempts to do, is to move towards futility, if not to land in positive disaster. Sufficient stress is not laid on this aspect of the matter, although the very crux of the situation lies here. The mystic domain has to be apprehended not merely by the true mind and understanding but by the right temperament and character. Mysticism is not merely an object of knowledge, a problem for inquiry and solution, it is an end, an ideal that has to be achieved, a life that has to be lived. The mystics themselves have declared long ago with no uncertain or faltering voice: this cannot be attained by intelligence or much learning, it can be seized only by a purified and clear temperament.
The warning seems to have fallen, in the modern age, on unheeding ears. For the modern mind, being pre-eminently and uncompromisingly scientific, can entertain no doubt as to the perfect competency of science and the scientific method to seize and unveil any secret of Nature. If, it is argued, mysticism is a secret, if there is at all a truth and reality in it, then it is and must be amenable to the rules and regulations of science; for science is the revealer of Nature's secrecies.
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Air is Mind, the world of thought, of conscious formation; it is where life-movements are taken up and given a shape or Articulate formula for an organised expression. The forms here have not, however, the concrete rigidity of Matter, but are pliant and variable and fluidin fact, they are more in the nature of possibilities, rather than actualities. The Vedic Maruts are thought-gods, and lndra (the Luminous Mind), their king, is called the Fashioner of perfect forms.
Ether or Space is the infinitude of the Spirit, the limitless Presence that dwells in and yet transcends the body, the life the he Art and the mind.
00.04 - The Beautiful in the Upanishads, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And what else is the true character, the soul of beauty than light and delight? "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." And a thing of joy is a thing of light. Joy is the radiance rippling over a thing of beauty. Beauty is always radiant: the charm, the loveliness of an object is but the glow of light that it emanates. And it would not be a very incorrect mensuration to measure the degree of beauty by the degree of light radiated. The diamond is not only a thing of value, but a thing of beauty also, because of the concentrated and undimmed light that it enshrines within itself. A dark, dull and dismal thing, devoid of interest and attraction becomes aesthetically precious and significant as soon as the Artist presents it in terms of the values of light. The entire Art of painting is nothing but the expression of beauty, in and through the modalities of light.
And where there is light, there is cheer and joy. Rasamaya and jyotirmayaare thus the two conjoint characteristics fundamental to the nature of the ultimate reality. Sometimes these two are named as the 'solar and the lunar aspect. The solar aspect refers obviously to the Light, that is to say, to the Truth; the lunar aspect refers to the rasa (Soma), to Immortality, to Beauty proper,
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Art at its highest tends to become also the simplest and the most unconventional; and it is then the highest Art, precisely because it does not aim at being Artistic. The aesthetic motive is totally absent in the Upanishads; the sense of beauty is there, but it is attendant upon and involved in a deeper strand of consciousness. That consciousness seeks consciousness itself, the fullness of consciousness, the awareness and possession of the Truth and Reality,the one thing which, if known, gives the knowledge of all else. And this consciousness of the Truth is also Delight, the perfect Bliss, the Immortality where the whole universe resolves itself into its original state of rasa, that is to say, of essential and inalienable harmony and beauty.
***
00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
'Kavi' is an invariable epithet of the gods. The Vedas mean by this attribute to bring out a most fundamental character, an inalienable dharma of the heavenly host. All the gods are poets; and a human being can become a poet only in so far as he attains to the nature and status of a god. Who is then a kavi? The Poet is he who by his poetic power raises forms of beauty in heavenkavi kavitv divi rpam sajat.1Thus the essence of poetic power is to fashion divine Beauty, to reveal heavenly forms. What is this Heaven whose forms the Poet discovers and embodies? HeavenDyaushas a very definite connotation in the Veda. It means the luminous or divine Mind 2the mind purified of its obscurity and limitations, due to subjection to the external senses, thus opening to the higher Light, receiving and recording faithfully the deeper and vaster movements and vibrations of the Truth, giving them a form, a perfect body of the right thought and the right word. Indra is the lord of this world and he can be approached only with an enkindled intelligence, ddhay man,3a faultless understanding, sumedh. He is the supreme Artisan of the poetic power,Tash, the maker of perfect forms, surpa ktnum.4 All the gods turn towards Indra and become gods and poets, attain their Great Names of Supreme Beauty.5 Indra is also the master of the senses, indriyas, who are his hosts. It is through this mind and the senses that the poetic creation has to be manifested. The mind spreads out wide the Poet's weaving;6 the poet is the priest who calls down and works out the right thinking in the sacrificial labour of creation.7 But that creation is made in and through the inner mind and the inner senses that are alive to the subtle formation of a vaster knowledge.8 The poet envisages the golden forms fashioned out of the very profundity of the consciousness.9 For the substance, the material on which the Poet works, is Truth. The seat of the Truth the poets guard, they uphold the supreme secret Names.10 The poet has the expressive utterance, the creative word; the poet is a poet by his poetic creation-the shape faultlessly wrought out that unveils and holds the Truth.11The form of beauty is the body of the Truth.
The poet is a trinity in himself. A triune consciousness forms his personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara. He has the direct vision, the luminous intelligence, the immediate perception.12 A subtle and profound and penetrating consciousness is his,nigam, pracetas; his is the eye of the Sun,srya caku.13 He secures an increased being through his effulgent understanding.14 In the second place, the Poet is not only Seer but Doer; he is knower as well as creator. He has a dynamic knowledge and his vision itself is power, ncak;15 he is the Seer-Will,kavikratu.16 He has the blazing radiance of the Sun and is supremely potent in his self-Iuminousness.17 The Sun is the light and the energy of the Truth. Even like the Sun the Poet gives birth to the Truth, srya satyasava, satyya satyaprasavya. But the Poet as Power is not only the revealer or creator,savit, he is also the builder or fashioner,ta, and he is the organiser,vedh is personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara, of the Truth.18 As Savita he manifests the Truth, as Tashta he gives a perfected body and form to the Truth, and as Vedha he maintains the Truth in its dynamic working. The effective marshalling and organisation of the Truth is what is called Ritam, the Right; it is also called Dharma,19 the Law or the Rhythm, the ordered movement and invincible execution of the Truth. The Poet pursues the Path of the Right;20 it is he who lays out the Path for the march of the Truth, the progress of the Sacrifice.21 He is like a fast steed well-yoked, pressing forward;22 he is the charger that moves straight and unswerving and carries us beyond 23into the world of felicity.
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The Vedic Poet is doubtless the poet of Life, the architect of Divinity in man, of Heaven upon e Arth. But what is true of Life is fundamentally true of Art tooat least true of the Art as it was conceived by the ancient seers and as it found expression at their hands.32
Rig Veda, X. 124. 7
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
But the Qabalah is more. It also lays the foundation on which rests another archaic science- Magic. Not to be confused with the conjurer's sleight-of-hand, Magic has been defined by Aleister Crowley as "the science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with will." Dion Fortune qualifies this nicely with an added clause, "changes in consciousness."
The Qabalah reveals the nature of certain physical and psychological phenomena. Once these are apprehended, understood and correlated, the student can use the principles of Magic to exercise control over life's conditions and circumstances not otherwise possible. In short. Magic provides the practical application of the theories supplied by the Qabalah.
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I felt this a long time ago, as I still do, but even more so. The only way to explain the p Artisan Jewish attitude demonstrated in some small sections of the book can readily be explained. I had been reading some writings of Arthur Edward Waite, and some of his pomposity and turgidity stuck to my mantle. I disliked his patronising Christian attitude, and so swung all the way over to the other side of the pendulum. Actually, neither faith is p Articularly important in this day and age. I must be careful never to read Waite again before embarking upon literary work of my own.
Much knowledge obtained by the ancients through the use of the Qabalah has been supported by discoveries of modern scientists- anthropologists, astronomers, psychiatrists, et al. Learned Qabalists for hundreds of years have been aware of what the psychiatrist has only discovered in the last few decades-that man's concept of himself, his deities and the Universe is a constantly evolving process, changing as man himself evolves on a higher spiral. But the roots of his concepts are buried in a race-consciousness that antedated Neanderthal man by uncounted aeons of time.
000 - Humans in Universe, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
000.103 When the archaeologists' Artifact-proven history of mathematics opens
4,000 years ago in Babylon and Mesopotamia, it is already a very sophisticated
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Indochina, as it is an Art and science that has traveled consistently westward. Over
3,000 years ago the Greeks made further magnificent contributions to geometry,
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mechanical and leverage calculation capabilities of Leonardo; and in the Art of shipdesign the cipher gave birth to structural and mechanical engineering, which made
possible the intertensioning and compressioning calculations of the ribbed structural
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
About his parents Sri Ramakrishna once said: "My mother was the personification of rectitude and gentleness. She did not know much about the ways of the world; innocent of the Art of concealment, she would say what was in her mind. People loved her for her open-he Artedness. My father, an orthodox brahmin, never accepted gifts from the sudras. He spent much of his time in worship and meditation, and in repeating God's name and chanting His glories. Whenever in his daily prayers he invoked the Goddess Gayatri, his chest flushed and tears rolled down his cheeks. He spent his leisure hours making garlands for the Family Deity, Raghuvir."
Khudiram Chattopadhyaya and Chandra Devi, the parents of Sri Ramakrishna, were married in 1799. At that time Khudiram was living in his ancestral village of Dereypore, not far from Kamarpukur. Their first son, Ramkumar, was born in 1805, and their first daughter, Katyayani, in 1810. In 1814 Khudiram was ordered by his landlord to bear false witness in court against a neighbour. When he refused to do so, the landlord brought a false case against him and deprived him of his ancestral property. Thus dispossessed, he arrived, at the invitation of another landlord, in the quiet village of Kamarpukur, where he was given a dwelling and about an acre of fertile land. The crops from this little property were enough to meet his family's simple needs. Here he lived in simplicity, dignity, and contentment.
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Gadadhar grew up into a healthy and restless boy, full of fun and sweet mischief. He was intelligent and precocious and endowed with a prodigious memory. On his father's lap he learnt by he Art the names of his ancestors and the hymns to the gods and goddesses, and at the village school he was taught to read and write. But his greatest delight was to listen to recitations of stories from Hindu mythology and the epics. These he would afterwards recount from memory, to the great joy of the villagers. Painting he enjoyed; the Art of moulding images of the gods and goddesses he learnt from the potters. But arithmetic was his great aversion.
At the age of six or seven Gadadhar had his first experience of spiritual ecstasy. One day in June or July, when he was walking along a narrow path between paddy-fields, eating the puffed rice that he carried in a basket, he looked up at the sky and saw a beautiful, dark thunder-cloud. As it spread, rapidly enveloping the whole sky, a flight of snow-white cranes passed in front of it. The beauty of the contrast overwhelmed the boy. He fell to the ground, unconscious, and the puffed rice went in all directions. Some villagers found him and carried him home in their arms. Gadadhar said later that in that state he had experienced an indescribable joy.
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In the twelve Siva temples are installed the emblems of the Great God of renunciation in His various aspects, worshipped daily with proper rites. Siva requires few Articles of worship. White flowers and bel-leaves and a little Ganges water offered with devotion are enough to satisfy the benign Deity and win from Him the boon of liberation.
--- RADHAKANTA
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Born in an orthodox brahmin family, Sri Ramakrishna knew the formalities of worship, its rites and rituals. The innumerable gods and goddesses of the Hindu religion are the human aspects of the indescribable and incomprehensible Spirit, as conceived by the finite human mind. They understand and appreciate human love and emotion, help men to realize their secular and spiritual ideals, and ultimately enable men to attain liberation from the miseries of phenomenal life. The Source of light, intelligence, wisdom, and strength is the One alone from whom comes the fulfilment of desire. Yet, as long as a man is bound by his human limitations, he cannot but worship God through human forms. He must use human symbols. Therefore Hinduism asks the devotees to look on God as the ideal father, the ideal mother, the ideal husband, the ideal son, or the ideal friend. But the name ultimately leads to the Nameless, the form to the Formless, the word to the Silence, the emotion to the serene realization of Peace in Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. The gods gradually merge in the one God. But until that realization is achieved, the devotee cannot dissociate human factors from his worship. Therefore the Deity is bathed and clothed and decked with ornaments. He is fed and put to sleep. He is propitiated with hymns, songs, and prayers. And there are appropriate rites connected with all these functions. For instance, to secure for himself external purity, the priest bathes himself in holy water and puts on a holy cloth. He purifies the mind and the sense-organs by appropriate meditations. He fortifies the place of worship against evil forces by drawing around it circles of fire and water. He awakens the different spiritual centres of the body and invokes the Supreme Spirit in his he Art. Then he transfers the Supreme Spirit to the image before him and worships the image, regarding it no longer as clay or stone, but as the embodiment of Spirit, throbbing with Life and Consciousness. After the worship the Supreme Spirit is recalled from the image to Its true sanctuary, the he Art of the priest. The real devotee knows the absurdity of worshipping the Transcendental Reality with material Articles — clothing That which pervades the whole universe and the beyond, putting on a pedestal That which cannot be limited by space, feeding That which is disembodied and incorporeal, singing before That whose glory the music of the spheres tries vainly to proclaim. But through these rites the devotee aspires to go ultimately beyond rites and rituals, forms and names, words and praise, and to realize God as the All-pervading Consciousness.
Hindu priests are thoroughly acquainted with the rites of worship, but few of them are aware of their underlying significance. They move their hands and limbs mechanically, in obedience to the letter of the scriptures, and repeat the holy mantras like parrots. But from the very beginning the inner meaning of these rites was revealed to Sri Ramakrishna. As he sat facing the image, a strange transformation came over his mind. While going through the prescribed ceremonies, he would actually find himself encircled by a wall of fire protecting him and the place of worship from unspiritual vibrations, or he would feel the rising of the mystic Kundalini through the different centres of the body. The glow on his face, his deep absorption, and the intense atmosphere of the temple impressed everyone who saw him worship the Deity.
--
As his love for God deepened, he began either to forget or to drop the formalities of worship. Sitting before the image, he would spend hours singing the devotional songs of great devotees of the Mother, such as Kamalakanta and Ramprasad. Those rhapsodical songs, describing the direct vision of God, only intensified Sri Ramakrishna's longing. He felt the pangs of a child separated from its mother. Sometimes, in agony, he would rub his face against the ground and weep so bitterly that people, thinking he had lost his e Arthly mother, would sympathize with him in his grief. Sometimes, in moments of scepticism, he would cry: " Art Thou true, Mother, or is it all fiction — mere poetry without any reality? If Thou dost exist, why do I not see Thee? Is religion a mere fantasy and Art Thou only a figment of man's imagination?" Sometimes he would sit on the prayer carpet for two hours like an inert object. He began to behave in an abnormal manner
, most of the time unconscious of the world. He almost gave up food; and sleep left him altogether.
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Naturally the temple officials took him for an insane person. His worldly well-wishers brought him to skilled physicians; but no-medicine could cure his malady. Many a time he doubted his sanity himself. For he had been sailing across an unch Arted sea, with no e Arthly guide to direct him. His only haven of security was the Divine Mother Herself. To Her he would pray: "I do not know what these things are. I am ignorant of mantras and the scriptures. Teach me, Mother, how to realize Thee. Who else can help me? Art Thou not my only refuge and guide?" And the sustaining presence of the Mother never failed him in his distress or doubt. Even those who criticized his conduct were greatly impressed with his purity, guilelessness, truthfulness, integrity, and holiness. They felt an uplifting influence in his presence.
It is said that samadhi, or trance, no more than opens the portal of the spiritual realm. Sri Ramakrishna felt an unquenchable desire to enjoy God in various ways. For his meditation he built a place in the northern wooded section of the temple garden. With Hriday's help he planted there five sacred trees. The spot, known as the Panchavati, became the scene of many of his visions.
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To develop the devotee's love for God, Vaishnavism humanizes God. God is to be regarded as the devotee's Parent, Master, Friend, Child, Husband, or Sweethe Art, each succeeding relationship representing an intensification of love. These bhavas, or attitudes toward God, are known as santa, dasya, sakhya, vatsalya, and madhur. The rishis of the Vedas, Hanuman, the cow-herd boys of Vrindavan, Rama's mother Kausalya, and Radhika, Krishna's sweethe Art, exhibited, respectively, the most perfect examples of these forms. In the ascending scale the-glories of God are gradually forgotten and the devotee realizes more and more the intimacy of divine communion. Finally he regards himself as the mistress of his Beloved, and no Artificial barrier remains to separate him from his Ideal. No social or moral obligation can bind to the e Arth his soaring spirit. He experiences perfect union with the Godhead. Unlike the Vedantist, who strives to transcend all varieties of the subject-object relationship, a devotee of the Vaishnava path wishes to retain both his own individuality and the personality of God. To him God is not an intangible Absolute, but the Purushottama, the Supreme Person.
While practising the discipline of the madhur bhava, the male devotee often regards himself as a woman, in order to develop the most intense form of love for Sri Krishna, the only purusha, or man, in the universe. This assumption of the attitude of the opposite sex has a deep psychological significance. It is a matter of common experience that an idea may be cultivated to such an intense degree that every idea alien to it is driven from the mind. This peculiarity of the mind may be utilized for the subjugation of the lower desires and the development of the spiritual nature. Now, the idea which is the basis of all desires and passions in a man is the conviction of his indissoluble association with a male body. If he can inoculate himself thoroughly with the idea that he is a woman, he can get rid of the desires peculiar to his male body. Again, the idea that he is a woman may in turn be made to give way to another higher idea, namely, that he is neither man nor woman, but the Impersonal Spirit. The Impersonal Spirit alone can enjoy real communion with the Impersonal God. Hence the highest est realization of the Vaishnava draws close to the transcendental experience of the Vedantist.
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In 1867 Sri Ramakrishna returned to Kamarpukur to recuperate from the effect of his austerities. The peaceful countryside, the simple and Artless companions of his boyhood, and the pure air did him much good. The villagers were happy to get back their playful, frank, witty, kind-he Arted, and truthful Gadadhar, though they did not fail to notice the great change that had come over him during his years in Calcutta. His wife, Sarada Devi, now fourteen years old, soon arrived at Kamarpukur. Her spiritual development was much beyond her age and she was able to understand immediately her husband's state of mind. She became eager to learn from him about God and to live with him as his attendant. The Master accepted her cheerfully both as his disciple and as his spiritual companion. Referring to the experiences of these few days, she once said: "I used to feel always as if a pitcher full of bliss were placed in my he Art. The joy was indescribable."
--- PILGRIMAGE
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Totapuri, coming to know of the Master's marriage, had once remarked: "What does it matter? He alone is firmly established in the Knowledge of Brahman who can adhere to his spirit of discrimination and renunciation even while living with his wife. He alone has attained the supreme illumination who can look on man and woman alike as Brahman. A man with the idea of sex may be a good aspirant, but he is still far from the goal." Sri Ramakrishna and his wife lived together at Dakshineswar, but their minds always soared above the worldly plane. A few months after Sarada Devi's arrival Sri Ramakrishna arranged, on an auspicious day, a special worship of Kali, the Divine Mother. Instead of an image of the Deity, he placed on the seat the living image, Sarada Devi herself. The worshipper and the worshipped went into deep samadhi and in the transcendental plane their souls were united. After several hours Sri Ramakrishna came down again to the relative plane, sang a hymn to the Great Goddess, and surrendered, at the feet of the living image, himself, his rosary, and the fruit of his life-long sadhana. This is known in Tantra as the Shorasi Puja, the "Adoration of Woman". Sri Ramakrishna realized the significance of the great statement of the Upanishad: "O Lord, Thou Art the woman. Thou Art the man; Thou Art the boy. Thou Art the girl; Thou Art the old, tottering on their crutches. Thou pervadest the universe in its multiple forms."
By his marriage Sri Ramakrishna admitted the great value of marriage in man's spiritual evolution, and by adhering to his monastic vows he demonstrated the imperative necessity of self-control, purity, and continence, in the realization of God. By this unique spiritual relationship with his wife he proved that husband and wife can live together as spiritual companions. Thus his life is a synthesis of the ways of life of the householder and the monk.
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Keshab Chandra Sen and Sri Ramakrishna met for the first time in the garden house of Jaygopal Sen at Belgharia, a few miles from Dakshineswar, where the great Brahmo leader was staying with some of his disciples. In many respects the two were poles ap Art, though an irresistible inner attraction was to make them intimate friends. The Master had realized God as Pure Spirit and Consciousness, but he believed in the various forms of God as well. Keshab, on the other hand, regarded image worship as idolatry and gave allegorical explanations of the Hindu deities. Keshab was an orator and a writer of books and magazine Articles; Sri Ramakrishna had a horror of lecturing and hardly knew how to write his own name, Keshab's fame spread far and wide, even reaching the distant shores of England; the Master still led a secluded life in the village of Dakshineswar. Keshab emphasized social reforms for India's regeneration; to Sri Ramakrishna God-realization was the only goal of life. Keshab considered himself a disciple of Christ and accepted in a diluted form the Christian sacraments and Trinity; Sri Ramakrishna was the simple child of Kali, the Divine Mother, though he too, in a different way, acknowledged Christ's divinity. Keshab was a householder holder and took a real interest in the welfare of his children, whereas Sri Ramakrishna was a paramahamsa and completely indifferent to the life of the world. Yet, as their acquaintance ripened into friendship, Sri Ramakrishna and Keshab held each other in great love and respect. Years later, at the news of Keshab's death, the Master felt as if half his body had become paralyzed. Keshab's concepts of the harmony of religions and the Motherhood of God were deepened and enriched by his contact with Sri Ramakrishna.
Sri Ramakrishna, dressed in a red-bordered dhoti, one end of which was carelessly thrown over his left shoulder, came to Jaygopal's garden house accompanied by Hriday. No one took notice of the unostentatious visitor. Finally the Master said to Keshab, "People tell me you have seen God; so I have come to hear from you about God." A magnificent conversation followed. The Master sang a thrilling song about Kali and forthwith went into samadhi. When Hriday uttered the sacred "Om" in his ears, he gradually came back to consciousness of the world, his face still radiating a divine brilliance. Keshab and his followers were amazed. The contrast between Sri Ramakrishna and the Brahmo devotees was very interesting. There sat this small man, thin and extremely delicate. His eyes were illumined with an inner light. Good humour gleamed in his eyes and lurked in the corners of his mouth. His speech was Bengali of a homely kind with a slight, delightful stammer, and his words held men enthralled by their wealth of spiritual experience, their inexhaustible store of simile and metaphor, their power of observation, their bright and subtle humour, their wonderful catholicity, their ceaseless flow of wisdom. And around him now were the sophisticated men of Bengal, the best products of Western education, with Keshab, the idol of young Bengal, as their leader.
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Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, the right-hand man of Keshab and an accomplished Brahmo preacher in Europe and America, bitterly criticized Sri Ramakrishna's use of uncultured language and also his austere attitude toward his wife. But he could not escape the spell of the Master's personality. In the course of an Article about Sri Ramakrishna, Pratap wrote in the "Theistic Qu Arterly Review": "What is there in common between him and me? I, a Europeanized, civilized, self-centred, semi-sceptical, so-called educated reasoner, and he, a poor, illiterate, unpolished, half-idolatrous, friendless Hindu devotee? Why should I sit long hours to attend to him, I, who have listened to Disraeli and Fawcett, Stanley and Max Muller, and a whole host of European scholars and divines? . . . And it is not I only, but dozens like me, who do the same. . . . He worships Siva, he worships Kali, he worships Rama, he worships Krishna, and is a confirmed advocate of Vedantic doctrines. . . . He is an idolater, yet is a faithful and most devoted meditator on the perfections of the One Formless, Absolute, Infinite Deity. . . . His religion is ecstasy, his worship means transcendental insight, his whole nature burns day and night with a permanent fire and fever of a strange faith and feeling. . . . So long as he is spared to us, gladly shall we sit at his feet to learn from him the sublime precepts of purity, unworldliness, spirituality, and inebriation in the love of God. . . . He, by his childlike bhakti, by his strong conceptions of an ever-ready Motherhood, helped to unfold it [God as our Mother] in our minds wonderfully. . . . By associating with him we learnt to realize better the divine attributes as scattered over the three hundred and thirty millions of deities of mythological India, the gods of the Puranas."
The Brahmo leaders received much inspiration from their contact with Sri Ramakrishna. It broadened their religious views and kindled in their he Arts the yearning for God-realization; it made them understand and appreciate the rituals and symbols of Hindu religion, convinced them of the manifestation of God in diverse forms, and deepened their thoughts about the harmony of religions. The Master, too, was impressed by the sincerity of many of the Brahmo devotees. He told them about his own realizations and explained to them the essence of his teachings, such as the necessity of renunciation, sincerity in the pursuit of one's own course of discipline, faith in God, the performance of one's duties without thought of results, and discrimination between the Real and the unreal.
--
In the year 1879 occasional writings about Sri Ramakrishna by the Brahmos, in the Brahmo magazines, began to attract his future disciples from the educated middle-class Bengalis, and they continued to come till 1884. But others, too, came, feeling the subtle power of his attraction. They were an ever shifting crowd of people of all castes and creeds: Hindus and Brahmos, Vaishnavas and Saktas, the educated with university degrees and the illiterate, old and young, maharajas and beggars, journalists and Artists, pundits and devotees, philosophers and the worldly-minded, jnanis and yogis, men of action and men of faith, virtuous women and prostitutes, office-holders and vagabonds, philanthropists and self-seekers, dramatists and drunkards, builders-up and pullers-down. He gave to them all, without stint, from his illimitable store of realization. No one went away empty-handed. He taught them the lofty .knowledge of the Vedanta and the soul
-melting love of the Purana. Twenty hours out of twenty-four he would speak without out rest or respite. He gave to all his sympathy and enlightenment, and he touched them with that strange power of the soul which could not but melt even the most hardened. And people understood him according to their powers of comprehension.
--
It was noticed at this time that some of the devotees were making an unbridled display of their emotions. A number of them, p Articularly among the householders, began to cultivate, though at first unconsciously, the Art of shedding tears, shaking the body, contorting the face, and going into trances, attempting thereby to imitate the Master. They began openly to declare Sri Ramakrishna a Divine Incarnation and to regard themselves as his chosen people, who could neglect religious disciplines with impunity. Narendra's penetrating eye soon sized up the situation. He found out that some of these external manifestations were being carefully practised at home, while some were the outcome of malnutrition, mental weakness, or nervous debility. He mercilessly exposed the devotees who were pretending to have visions, and asked all to develop a healthy religious spirit. Narendra sang inspiring songs for the younger devotees, read with them the Imitation of Christ and the Gita, and held before them the positive ideals of spirituality.
--- LAST DAYS AT COSSIPORE
--
Narendra, consumed with a terrific fever for realization, complained to the Master that all the others had attained peace and that he alone was dissatisfied. The Master asked what he wanted. Narendra begged for samadhi, so that he might altogether forget the world for three or four days at a time. "You are a fool", the Master rebuked him. "There is a state even higher than that. Isn't it you who sing, 'All that exists Art Thou'? First of all settle your family affairs and then come to me. You will experience a state even higher than samadhi."
The Master did not hide the fact that he wished to make Narendra his spiritual heir. Narendra was to continue the work after Sri Ramakrishna's passing. Sri Ramakrishna said to him: "I leave these young men in your charge. See that they develop their spirituality and do not return home." One day he asked the boys, in preparation for a monastic life, to beg their food from door to door without thought of caste. They hailed the Master's order and went out with begging-bowls. A few days later he gave the ochre cloth of the sannyasi to each of them, including Girish, who was now second to none in his spirit of renunciation. Thus the Master himself laid the foundation of the future Ramakrishna Order of monks.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I cannot attach much importance to Artificial
mysteries. Again, though the secret itself is of such
--
just as the Artist, seeing an object, does not worship it,
but breeds a masterpiece from it. This process is
--
The Article also marketh Division; but the Inter-
jeciton is the sound that endeth in the Silence.
--
Thus Art thou lured along That Path, whose fascina-
tion else had driven thee far away.
--
Let this go free, even as It will; thou Art not its
master, but the vehicle of It.
--
Then thou Art not lost in love; speak not of love.
Love Alway Yieldeth: Love Alway Hardeneth.
--
Love, I love you! Night, night, cover us! Thou Art
night, O my love; and there are no stars but thine
--
But thyself Ex-tinguish: HIMOG Art thou, and
HIMOG shalt thou be.
--
their Art is the cause, result, or concomitant of their
private peculiarities.
--
sublimity, in the supreme Art, in the intensity of the
passion and ecstasy which it brings forth. (Note that
--
And lo! thou Art past through the Abyss.
[166]
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
IN THE HISTORY of the Arts, genius is a thing of very rare occurrence. Rarer still, however, are the competent reporters and recorders of that genius. The world has had many hundreds of admirable poets and philosophers; but of these hundreds only a very few have had the fortune to attract a Boswell or an Eckermann.
When we leave the field of Art for that of spiritual religion, the scarcity of competent reporters becomes even more strongly marked. Of the day-to-day life of the great theocentric saints and contemplatives we know, in the great majority of cases, nothing whatever. Many, it is true, have recorded their doctrines in writing, and a few, such as St. Augustine, Suso and St. Teresa, have left us autobiographies of the greatest value.
But, all doctrinal writing is in some measure formal and impersonal, while the autobiographer tends to omit what he regards as trifling matters and suffers from the further disadvantage of being unable to say how he strikes other people and in what way he affects their lives. Moreover, most saints have left neither writings nor self-portraits, and for knowledge of their lives, their characters and their teachings, we are forced to rely upon the records made by their disciples who, in most cases, have proved themselves singularly incompetent as reporters and biographers. Hence the special interest attaching to this enormously detailed account of the daily life and conversations of Sri Ramakrishna.
--
In the Introduction I have drawn much material from the Life of Sri Ramakrishna, published by the Advaita Ashrama, Myvati, India. I have also consulted the excellent Article on Sri Ramakrishna by Swami Nirvednanda, in the second volume of the Cultural Heritage of India.
The book contains many songs sung either by the Master or by the devotees. These form an important feature of the spiritual tradition of Bengal and were for the most p Art written by men of mystical experience. For giving the songs their present form I am grateful to Mr. John Moffitt, Jr.
--
Though his children received proper attention from him, his real family, both during the Master's lifetime and after, consisted of saints, devotees, Sannysins and spiritual aspirants. His life exemplifies the Master's teaching that an ideal householder must be like a good maidservant of a family, loving and caring properly for the children of the house, but knowing always that her real home and children are elsewhere. During the Master's lifetime he spent all his Sundays and other holidays with him and his devotees, and besides listening to the holy talks and devotional music, practised meditation both on the Personal and the Impersonal aspects of God under the direct guidance of the Master. In the pages of the Gospel the reader gets a picture of M.'s spiritual relationship with the Master how from a hazy belief in the Impersonal God of the Brahmos, he was step by step brought to accept both Personality and Impersonality as the two aspects of the same Non-dual Being, how he was convinced of the manifestation of that Being as Gods, Goddesses and as Incarnations, and how he was established in a life that was both of a Jnni and of a Bhakta. This Jnni-Bhakta outlook and way of living became so dominant a feature of his life that Swami Raghavananda, who was very closely associated with him during his last six years, remarks: "Among those who lived with M. in latter days, some felt that he always lived in this constant and conscious union with God even with open eyes (i.e., even in waking consciousness)." (Swami Raghavananda's Article on M. in Prabuddha Bharata vol. XXXVII. P. 442.)
Besides undergoing spiritual disciplines at the feet of the Master, M. used to go to holy places during the Master's lifetime itself and afterwards too as a p Art of his Sdhan.
--
The life of Sdhan and holy association that he st Arted on at the feet of the Master, he continued all through his life. He has for this reason been most appropriately described as a Grihastha-Sannysi (householder-Sannysin). Though he was forbidden by the Master to become a Sannysin, his reverence for the Sannysa ideal was whole-he Arted and was without any reservation. So after Sri Ramakrishna's passing away, while several of the Master's householder devotees considered the young Sannysin disciples of the Master as inexperienced and inconsequential, M. stood by them with the firm faith that the Master's life and message were going to be perpetuated only through them. Swami Vivekananda wrote from America in a letter to the inmates of the Math: "When Sri Thkur (Master) left the body, every one gave us up as a few unripe urchins. But M. and a few others did not leave us in the lurch. We cannot repay our debt to them." (Swami Raghavananda's Article on M. in Prabuddha Bharata vol. XXX P. 442.)
M. spent his weekends and holidays with the monastic brethren who, after the Master's demise, had formed themselves into an Order with a Math at Baranagore, and p Articipated in the intense life of devotion and meditation that they followed. At other times he would retire to Dakshineswar or some garden in the city and spend several days in spiritual practice taking simple self-cooked food. In order to feel that he was one with all mankind he often used to go out of his home at dead of night, and like a wandering Sannysin, sleep with the waifs on some open verandah or footpath on the road.
0.00 - The Wellspring of Reality, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
It is synergetically reasonable to assume that relativistic evaluation of any of the separate drives of Art, science, education, economics, and ideology, and their complexedly interacting trends within our own times, may be had only through the most comprehensive historical sweep of which we are capable.
There could be produced a synergetic understanding of humanity's cosmic functioning, which, until now, had been both undiscovered and unpredictable due to our deliberate and exclusive preoccupation only with the separate statistics of separate events. As a typical consequence of the latter, we observe our society's persistent increase of educational and employment specialization despite the already mentioned, well-documented scientific disclosure that the extinctions of biological species are always occasioned by overspecialization. Specialization's preoccupation with p Arts deliberately forfeits the opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by synergy.
0.01 - Letters from the Mother to Her Son, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Written in connection with a newspaper Article in which it was stated that the Mother
had not slept for several months.
--
I have also received the Grande Revue3 and I read the Article you
mention. I found it rather dull, but ap Art from that not too bad.
0.01 - Life and Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But as in physical knowledge the multiplication of scientific processes has its disadvantages, as that tends, for instance, to develop a victorious Artificiality which overwhelms our natural human life under a load of machinery and to purchase certain forms of freedom and mastery at the price of an increased servitude, so the preoccupation with Yogic processes and their exceptional results may have its disadvantages and losses. The
The Conditions of the Synthesis
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
it mean? All these things - all the Arts, the beautiful
The Mother's name for a light golden-orange Hibiscus.
--
them as carefully as one keeps works of Art, and that is why I
do not wear them very often.
--
It is a work of Art. It is simply splendid. I feel as if I were dressed
in light.
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman,1 is ever a dreamer. A dream of perfect beauty, perfect conduct, perfect Truth, whether seeking new forms of the Eternal or revitalising the old, is the very soul of pure mentality. But it knows not how to deal with the resistance of Matter. There it is hampered and inefficient, works by bungling experiments and has either to withdraw from the struggle or submit to the grey actuality. Or else, by studying the material life and accepting the conditions of the contest, it may succeed, but only in imposing temporarily some Artificial system which infinite Nature either rends and casts aside or disfigures out of recognition or by withdrawing her assent leaves as the corpse of a dead ideal. Few and far between have been those realisations of the dreamer in Man which the world has gladly accepted, looks back to with a fond memory and seeks, in its elements, to cherish.
1 Who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of abstractions, the Brilliant.
--
When the gulf between actual life and the temperament of the thinker is too great, we see as the result a sort of withdrawing of the Mind from life in order to act with a greater freedom in its own sphere. The poet living among his brilliant visions, the Artist absorbed in his Art, the philosopher thinking out the problems of the intellect in his solitary chamber, the scientist, the scholar caring only for their studies and their experiments, were often in former days, are even now not unoften the Sannyasins of the intellect. To the work they have done for humanity, all its past bears record.
But such seclusion is justified only by some special activity.
Mind finds fully its force and action only when it casts itself upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances as the means of a greater self-perfection. In the struggle with the difficulties of the material world the ethical development of the individual is firmly shaped and the great schools of conduct are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality, Thought assures its abstractions, the generalisations of the philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation of science and experience.
This mixing with life may, however, be pursued for the sake of the individual mind and with an entire indifference to the forms of the material existence or the uplifting of the race. This indifference is seen at its highest in the Epicurean discipline and is not entirely absent from the Stoic; and even altruism does the works of compassion more often for its own sake than for the sake of the world it helps. But this too is a limited fulfilment. The progressive mind is seen at its noblest when it strives to elevate the whole race to its own level whether by sowing broadcast the image of its own thought and fulfilment or by changing the material life of the race into fresh forms, religious, intellectual, social or political, intended to represent more nearly that ideal of truth, beauty, justice, righteousness with which the man's own soul is illumined. Failure in such a field matters little; for the mere attempt is dynamic and creative. The struggle of Mind to elevate life is the promise and condition of the conquest of life by that which is higher even than Mind.
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the "plane" from which they come, it is surely the subtle physical, where the memory of all the conceptions and works of Art
realised on e Arth is stored.
--
For you I want consciousness, knowledge, Artistic capacity, selfmastery in peace and perfect equality, and the happiness that is
the result of spiritual realisation. Is this too grand and vast a
--
was that to develop your Artistic faculties you are much better
off here than anywhere else. I added that only if you wanted to
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive experience we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the more or less distorted or imperfect figure of some element or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of the human forefa thers fashioning the gods as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in
01.01 - A Yoga of the Art of Life, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.01 - A Yoga of the Art of Life
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta P Art OneA Yoga of the Art of Life
A Yoga of the Art of Life
When Sri Aurobindo said, Our Yoga is not for ourselves but for humanity, many heaved a sigh of relief and thought that the great soul was after all not entirely lost to the world, his was not one more name added to the long list of Sannyasins that India has been producing age after age without much profit either to herself or to the human society (or even perhaps to their own selves). People understood his Yoga to be a modern one, dedicated to the service of humanity. If service to humanity was not the very sum and substance of his spirituality, it was, at least, the fruitful end and consummation. His Yoga was a sort of Art to explore and harness certain unseen powers that can better and ameliorate human life in a more successful way than mere rational scientific methods can hope to do.
Sri Aurobindo saw that the very core of his teaching was being missed by this common interpretation of his saying. So he changed his words and said, Our Yoga is not for humanity but for the Divine. But I am afraid this change of front, this volte-face, as it seemed, was not welcomed in many qu Arters; for thereby all hope of having him back for the work of the country or the world appeared to be totally lost and he came to be looked upon again as an irrevocable metaphysical dreamer, aloof from physical things and barren, even like the Immutable Brahman.
--
I have a word to add finally in justification of the title of this essay. For, it may be asked, how can spirituality be considered as one of the Arts or given an honourable place in their domain?
From a certain point of view, from the point of view of essentials and inner realities, it would appear that spirituality is, at least, the basis of the Arts, if not the highest Art. If Art is meant to express the soul of things, and since the true soul of things is the divine element in them, then certainly spirituality, the discipline of coming in conscious contact with the Spirit, the Divine, must be accorded the regal seat in the hierarchy of the Arts. Also, spirituality is the greatest and the most difficult of the Arts; for it is the Art of life. To make of life a perfect work of beauty, pure in its lines, faultless in its rhythm, replete with strength, iridescent: with light, vibrant with delightan embodiment of the Divine, in a wordis the highest ideal of spirituality; viewed the spirituality that Sri Aurobindo practisesis the ne plus ultra of Artistic creation
The Gita, II. 40
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Although we may not know it, the New Man the divine race of humanity is already among us. It may be in our next neighbour, in our nearest brother, even in myself. Only a thin veil covers it. It marches just behind the line. It waits for an occasion to throw off the veil and place itself in the forefront. We are living in strenuous times in which age-long institutions are going down and new-forces rearing their heads, old habits are being cast off and new impulsions acquired. In every sphere of life, we see the urgent demand for a recasting, a fresh valuation of things. From the base to the summit, from the economic and political life to the Artistic and spiritual, humanity is being shaken to bring out a new expression and Articulation. There is the hidden surge of a Power, the secret stress of a Spirit that can no longer suffer to remain in the shade and behind the mask, but wills to come out in the broad daylight and be recognised in its plenary virtues.
That Power, that Spirit has been growing and gathering its strength during all the millenniums that humanity has lived through. On the momentous day when man appeared on e Arth, the Higher Man also took his birth. Since the hour the Spirit refused to be imprisoned in its animal sheath and came out as man, it approached by that very uplift a greater freedom and a vaster movement. It was the crest of that underground wave which peered over the surface from age to age, from clime to clime through the experiences of poets and prophets and sages the Head of the Sacrificial Horse galloping towards the Dawn.
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A Yoga of the Art of Life Sri Aurobindo and his School
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta P Art OneNatures Own Yoga
--
For, till now Mind has been the last term of the evolutionary consciousness Mind as developed in man is the highest instrument built up and organised by Nature through which the self-conscious being can express itself. That is why the Buddha said: Mind is the first of all principles, Mind is the highest of all principles: indeed Mind is the constituent of all principlesmana puvvangam dhamm1. The consciousness beyond mind has not yet been made a patent and dynamic element in the life upon e Arth; it has been glimpsed or entered into in varying degrees and modes by saints and seers; it has cast its derivative illuminations in the creative activities of poets and Artists, in the finer and nobler urges of heroes and great men of action. But the utmost that has been achieved, the summit reached in that direction, as exampled in spiritual disciplines, involves a withdrawal from the evolutionary cycle, a merging and an absorption into the static status that is altogether beyond it, that lies, as it were, at the other extreme the Spirit in itself, Atman, Brahman, Sachchidananda, Nirvana, the One without a second, the Zero without a first.
The first contact that one has with this static supra-reality is through the higher ranges of the mind: a direct and closer communion is established through a plane which is just above the mind the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it. The Overmind dissolves or transcends the ego-consciousness which limits the being to its individualised formation bounded by an outward and narrow frame or sheath of mind, life and body; it reveals the universal Self and Spirit, the cosmic godhead and its myriad forces throwing up myriad forms; the world-existence there appears as a play of ever-shifting veils upon the face of one ineffable reality, as a mysterious cycle of perpetual creation and destructionit is the overwhelming vision given by Sri Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita. At the same time, the initial and most intense experience which this cosmic consciousness brings is the extreme relativity, contingency and transitoriness of the whole flux, and a necessity seems logically and psychologically imperative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness.
--
A Yoga of the Art of Life Sri Aurobindo and his School
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Greek sings of the humanity of man, the Indian the divinity of man. It is the Hellenic spirit that has very largely moulded our taste and we have forgotten that an equally poetic world exists in the domain of spiritual life, even in its very severity, as in that of e Arthly life and its sweetness. And as we are passionate about the e Arthly life, even so Sri Aurobindo has made a passion of the spiritual life. Poetry after all has a mission; the phrase " Art for Art's sake" may be made to mean anything. Poetry is not merely what is pleasing, not even what is merely touching and moving but what is at the same time, inspiring, invigorating, elevating. Truth is indeed beauty but it is not always the beauty that captivates the eye or the mere aesthetic sense.
And because our Vedic poets always looked beyond humanity, beyond e Arth, therefore could they make divine poetry of humanity and what is of e Arth. Therefore it was that they were pervadingly so grandiose and sublime and puissant. The heroic, the epic was their natural element and they could not but express themselves in the grand manner Sri Aurobindo has the same outlook and it is why we find in him the ring of the old-world manner.
--
Who Art thou, warrior armed gloriously
Like the sun?
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is not merely by addressing the beloved as your goddess that you can attain this mysticism; the Elizabethan did that in merry abundance,ad nauseam.A finer temper, a more delicate touch, a more subtle sensitiveness and a kind of Artistic wizardry are necessary to tune the body into a rhythm of the spirit. The other line of mysticism is common enough, viz., to express the spirit in terms and rhythms of the flesh. Tagore did that liberally, the Vaishnava poets did nothing but that, the Song of Solomon is an exquisite example of that procedure. There is here, however, a difference in degrees which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the e Arthly and the sensuous are meant as the name and form, as the body to render concrete, living and vibrant, near and intimate what otherwise would perhaps be vague and abstract, afar, aloof. But this mundane or human appearance has a value in so far as it is a support, a pointer or symbol of the spiritual import. And the mysticism lies precisely in the play of the two, a hide-and-seek between them. On the other hand, as I said, the greater portion of Vaishnava poetry, like a precious and beautiful casket, no doubt, hides the spiritual import: not the pure significance but the sign and symbol are luxuriously elaborated, they are placed in the foreground in all magnificence: as if it was their very purpose to conceal the real meaning. When the Vaishnava poet says,
O love, what more shall I, shall Radha speak,
--
Heaven is, dear Lord! where'er Thou Art,
O never then from me dep Art !11
--
But first let us go to the fans et origo, be acquainted with the very genuine Article in its purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. I do not know of any other ideal exemplar than the Upanishad. Thus,
There the sun shines not and the moon has no
--
The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imaginationremember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps p Articularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisationsof whatever order or world they may beexpressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistencea definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear Articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the submental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that Art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his Art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
The philosophical trend in poetry has an interesting history with a significant role: it has acted as a force of purification, of sublimation, of katharsis. As man has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into an increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and Artistic creation too: the thinker, the philosopher remains in the background at the outset, he looks out; peers through chinks and holes from time to time; later he comes to the forefront, assumes a major role in man's creative activity.
Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his Artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mentalwhich is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activitiesserves as the Paraclete, the Intercessor; it takes up the lower functionings of the consciousness, which are intense in their own way, but narrow and turbid, and gives, by purifying and enlarging, a wider frame, a more luminous pattern, a more subtly Articulated , form for the higher, vaster and deeper realities, truths and harmonies to express and manifest. In the old-world spiritual and mystic poets, this intervening medium was overlooked for evident reasons, for human reason or even intelligence is a double-edged instrument, it can make as well as mar, it has a light that most often and naturally shuts off other higher lights beyond it. So it was bypassed, some kind of direct and immediate contact was sought to be established between the normal and the transcendental. The result was, as I have pointed out, a pure spiritual poetry, on the one hand, as in the Upanishads, or, on the other, religious poetry of various grades and denominations that spoke of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides. But all these were very simple beginnings. The moderns go in for something more radical and totalitarian. The rationalising element instead of being an additional or subordinate or contri buting factor, must itself give its norm and form, its own substance and manner to the creative activity. Such is the present-day demand.
The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he referred all that to the other world, thought of gods and goddesses, of after-death and other where. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.
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Poetry, actually however, has been, by and large, a profane and mundane affair: for it expresses the normal man's perceptions and feelings and experiences, human loves and hates and desires and ambitions. True. And yet there has also always been an attempt, a tendency to deal with them in such a way as can bring calm and puritykatharsisnot trouble and confusion. That has been the purpose of all Art from the ancient days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses., man is gradually growing into the mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the Artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of transformation. The first and original transformation happened with religious poetry. The religious, one may say, is the profane inside out; that is to say, the religious man has almost the same tone and temper, the same urges and passions, only turned Godward. Religious poetry too marks a new turn and development of human speech, in taking the name of God human tongue acquires a new plasticity and flavour that transform or give a new modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in another class of poetic creation, viz., the allegory. Allegory or parable is the stage when the higher and inner realities are expressed wholly in the modes and manner, in the form and character of the normal and external, when moral, religious or spiritual truths are expressed in the terms and figures of the profane life. The higher or the inner ideal is like a loose clothing upon the ordinary consciousness, it does not fit closely or fuse. In the religious, however, the first step is taken for a mingling and fusion. The mystic is the beginning of a real fusion and a considerable ascension of the lower into the higher. The philosopher poet follows another line for the same katharsisinstead of uplifting emotions and sensibility, he proceeds by thought-power, by the ideas and principles that lie behind all movements and give a pattern to all things existing. The mystic can be of either type, the religious mystic or the philosopher mystic, although often the two are welded together and cannot be very well separated. Let us illustrate a little:
The spacious firmament on high,
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Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou Art now
Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother;
01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Of which all Nature's process is the Art,
The cosmic Worker set his secret hand
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His force could work with a new luminous Art
On the crude material from which all is made
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And the realism of its illusive Art,
Its logic of infinite intelligence,
01.03 - Yoga and the Ordinary Life, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I must say in view of something you seem to have said to your father that it is not the object of the one to be a great man or the object of the other to be a great Yogin. The ideal of human life is to establish over the whole being the control of a clear, strong and rational mind and a right and rational will, to master the emotional, vital and physical being, create a harmony of the whole and develop the capacities whatever they are and fulfil them in life. In the terms of Hindu thought, it is to enthrone the rule of the purified and sattwic buddhi, follow the dharma, fulfilling one's own svadharma and doing the work proper to one's capacities, and satisfy kama and Artha under the control of the buddhi and the dharma. The object of the divine life, on the other hand, is to realise one's highest self or to realise
God and to put the whole being into harmony with the truth of the highest self or the law of the divine nature, to find one's own divine capacities great or small and fulfil them in life as a sacrifice to the highest or as a true instrument of the divine
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, what is the intuition that lies behind the movements of the new age? What is the intimate realisation, the underlying view-point which is guiding and modelling all our efforts and achievementsour science and Art, our poetry and philosophy, our religion and society? For, there is such a common and fundamental note which is being voiced forth by the human spirit through all the multitude of its present-day activities.
A new impulse is there, no one can deny, and it has vast possibilities before it, that also one need not hesitate to accept. But in order that we may best fructuate what has been spontaneously sown, we must first recognise it, be luminously conscious of it and develop it along its proper line of growth. For, also certain it is that this new impulse or intuition, however true and strong in itself, is still groping and erring and miscarrying; it is still wasting much of its energy in tentative things, in mere experiments, in even clear failures. The fact is that the intuition has not yet become an enlightened one, it is still moving, as we shall presently explain, in the dark vital regions of man. And vitalism is naturally and closely affianced to pragmatism, that is to say, the mere vital impulse seeks immediately to execute itself, it looks for external effects, for changes in the form, in the machinery only. Thus it is that we see in Art and literature discussions centred upon the scheme of composition, as whether the new poetry should be lyrical or dramatic, popular or aristocratic, metrical or free of metre, and in practical life we talk of remodelling the state by new methods of representation and governance, of purging society by bills and legislation, of reforming humanity by a business pact.
All this may be good and necessary, but there is the danger of leaving altogether out of account the one thing needful. We must then pause and turn back, look behind the apparent impulsion that effectuates to the Will that drives, behind the ideas and ideals of the mind to the soul that informs and inspires; we must carry ourselves up the stream and concentrate upon the original source, the creative intuition that lies hidden somewhere. And then only all the new stirrings that we feel in our he Artour urges and ideals and visions will attain an effective clarity, an unshaken purpose and an inevitable achievement.
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But although Reason has been and is useful for the practical, we may say almost, the manual aspect of life, life itself it leaves unexplained and uncomprehended. For life is mobility, a continuous flow that has nowhere any gap or stop and things have in reality no isolated or separate existence, they merge and mingle into one another and form an indissoluble whole. Therefore the forms and categories that Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and progresses with discoveries and inventionsdevices for Artfully manipulating naturehas been essentially and pre-eminently mechanical in its structure and outlook. It has become more and more efficient perhaps, but less and less soul-inspired, less and less-endowed with the free-flowing sap of organic growth and vitality.
So instead of the rational principle, the new age wants the principle of Nature or Life. Even as regards knowledge Reason is not the only, nor the best instrument. For animals have properly no reason; the nature-principle of knowledge in the animal is Instinct the faculty that acts so faultlessly, so marvellously where Reason can only pause and be perplexed. This is not to say that man is to or can go back to this primitive and animal function; but certainly he can replace it by something akin which is as natural and yet purified and self-consciousillumined instinct, we may say or Intuition, as Bergson terms it. And Nietzsche's definition of the Superman has also a similar orientation and significance; for, according to him, the Superman is man who has outgrown his Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions determined by Reason for a special purpose. The Superman is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "human, all too human"who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom.
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This is the truth that is trying to dawn upon the new age. Not matter but that which forms the substance of matter, not intellect but a vaster consciousness that informs the intellect, not man as he is, an aberration in the cosmic order, but as he may and shall be the embodiment and fulfilment of that orderthis is the secret Intuition which, as yet dimly envisaged, nevertheless secretly inspires all the human activities of today. Only, the truth is being interpreted, as we have said, in terms of vital life. The intellectual and physical man gave us one aspect of the reality, but neither is the vital and psychical man the complete reality. The one acquisition of this shifting of the viewpoint has been that we are now in touch with the natural and deeper movement of humanity and not as before merely with its Artificial scaffolding. The Alexandrine civilisation of humanity, in Nietzsche's phrase, was a sort of divagation from nature, it was following a loop away from the direct path of natural evolution. And the new Renaissance of today has precisely corrected this aberration of humanity and brought it again in a line with the natural cosmic order.
Certainly this does not go far enough into the motive of the change. The cosmic order does not mean mentalised vitalism which is also in its turn a section of the integral reality. It means the order of the spirit, it means the transfiguration of the physical, the vital and the intellectual into the supernal Substance, Power and Light of that Spirit. The real transcendence of humanity is not the transcendence of one or other of its levels but the total transcendence to an altogether different status and the transmutation of humanity in the mould of that statusnot a Nietzschean Titan nor a Bergsonian Dionysus but the tranquil vision and delight and dynamism of the Spirit the incarnation of a god-head.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Is the Artist the supreme Artist, when he is a genius, that is to sayconscious in his creation or is he unconscious? Two quite opposite views have been taken of the problem by the best of intelligences. On the one hand, it is said that genius is genius precisely because it acts unconsciously, and on the other it is asserted with equal emphasis that genius is the capacity of taking infinite pains, which means it is absolutely a self conscious activity.
We take a third view of the matter and say that genius is neither unconscious or conscious but superconscious. And when one is superconscious, one can be in appearance either conscious or unconscious. Let us at the outset try to explain a little this psychological riddle.
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I said that the supreme Artist is superconscious: his consciousness withdraws from the normal mental consciousness and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the Artist's mentalityhis ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions, in other words, his normal psychological make-upserves as a channel, an instrument, a medium for transcription. Now, there are two stages, or rather two lines of activity in the processus, for they may be overlapping and practically simultaneous. First, there is the withdrawal and the in-gathering of consciousness and then its reappearance into expression. The consciousness retires into a secret or subtle worldWords-worth's "recollected in tranquillity"and comes back with the riches gathered or transmuted there. But the purity of the gold thus garnered and stalled in the Artistry of words and sounds or lines and colours depends altogether upon the purity of the channel through which it has to pass. The mental vehicle receives and records and it can do so to perfection if it is perfectly in tune with what it has to receive and record; otherwise the transcription becomes mixed and blurred, a faint or confused echo, a poor show. The supreme creators are precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording mentality, suffuses it with its own glow and puissance, indeed resolves it into its own substance, as it were. And the difference between the two, the secret norm and the recording form, determines the scale of the Artist's creative value. It happens often that the obstruction of a too critically observant and self-conscious brain-mind successfully blocks up the flow of something supremely beautiful that wanted to come down and waited for an opportunity.
Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their inspiration: they look upon themselves more or less as mere instruments of something or some Power that is beyond them, beyond their normal consciousness attached to the brain-mind, that controls them and which they cannot control. This perception has been given shape in myths and legends. Goddess Saraswati or the Muses are, however, for them not a mere metaphor but concrete realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrumentnothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plateis illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubla Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines, the rest having gone completely out of his memory; in other words, the poem was ready-composed somewhere else, but the transmitting or recording instrument was faulty and failed him. Indeed, it is a common experience to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory.
Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the intermediary is relative, and there are infinite grades of it. Even when the larger waves that play in it in the normal waking state are quieted down, smaller ripples of unconscious or half-conscious habitual formations are thrown up and they are sufficient to cause the scattering and dispersal of the pure light from above.
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But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless channel? Conscious Artistry, as we have said, means to be conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general experience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the Artist dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not conscious at allhe does not know how he has created, the sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poetsShakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes and limits the original impulsion. The Art here becomes consciously Artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go f Arther down and land in the domain of versificationalthough here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry.
The three or four major orders I speak of in reference to conscious Artistry are exampled characteristically in the history of the evolution of Greek poetry. It must be remembered, however, at the very outset that the Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and self-controlled and pregnant with a reasoned thought-content clothed in polished phrasing. We feel here that the Artist knew what he was about and was exercising a conscious control over his instruments and materials, unlike his predecessor who seemed to be completely carried away by the onrush of the poetic enthousiasmos. Sophocles, in spite of his Artistic perfection or perhaps because of it, appears to be just a little, one remove, away from the purity of the central inspiration there is a veil, although a thin transparent veil, yet a veil between which intervenes. With the third of the Brotherhood, Euripides, we slide lower downwe arrive at a predominantly mental transcription of an experience or inner conception; but something of the major breath continues, an aura, a rhythm that maintains the inner contact and thus saves the poetry. In a subsequent age, in Theocritus, for example, poetry became truly very much 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', so much of virtuosity and precocity entered into it; in other words, the poet then was an excessively self-conscious Artist. That seems to be the general trend of all literature.
But should there be an inherent incompatibility between spontaneous creation and self-consciousness? As we have seen, a harmony and fusion can and do happen of the superconscious and the normally conscious in the Yogi. Likewise, an Artist also can be wakeful and transparent enough so that he is conscious on both the levels simultaneouslyabove, he is conscious of the source and origin of his inspiration, and on the level plain he is conscious of the working of the instrument, how the vehicle transcribes and embodies what comes from elsewhere. The poet's consciousness becomes then divalent as it werethere is a sense of absolute passivity in respect of the receiving apparatus and coupled and immisced with it there is also the sense of dynamism, of conscious agency as in his secret being he is the master of his apparatus and one with the Inspirerin other words, the poet is both a seer (kavih) and a creator or doer (poits).
Not only so, the future development of the poetic consciousness seems inevitably to lead to such a consummation in which the creative and the critical faculties will not be separate but form p Art of one and indivisible movement. Historically, human consciousness has grown from unconsciousness to consciousness and from consciousness to self-consciousness; man's creative and Artistic genius too has moved pari passu in the same direction. The earliest and primitive poets were mostly unconscious, that is to say, they wrote or said things as they came to them spontaneously, without effort, without reflection, they do not seem to know the whence and wherefore and whither of it all, they know only that the wind bloweth as it listeth. That was when man had not yet eaten the fruit of knowledge, was still in the innocence of childhood. But as he grew up and progressed, he became more and more conscious, capable of exerting and exercising a deliberate will and initiating a purposive action, not only in the external practical field but also in the psychological domain. If the earlier group is called "primitives", the later one, that of conscious Artists, usually goes by the name of "classicists." Modern creators have gone one step f Arther in the direction of self-consciousness, a return upon oneself, an inlook of full awareness and a free and alert activity of the critical faculties. An unconscious Artist in the sense of the "primitives" is almost an impossible phenomenon in the modern world. All are scientists: an Artist cannot but be consciously critical, deliberate, purposive in what he creates and how he creates. Evidently, this has cost something of the old-world spontaneity and supremacy of utterance; but it cannot be helped, we cannot comm and the tide to roll back, Canute-like. The feature has to be accepted and a remedy and new orientation discovered.
The modern critical self-consciousness in the Artist originated with the Romantics. The very essence of Romanticism is curiosity the scientist's pleasure in analysing, observing, experimenting, changing the conditions of our reactions, mental or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarm and constitutes almost the whole of Valry's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled Artistry, conscious and deliberate and willed at every step and turn.
The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness in fact, of all Artistic consciousness has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at he Art an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Natureagainst God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the triflingtins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sicklehe is still a prophet, a violent one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his he Art's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon e Arth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the Artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and fundamental qualitiessuch as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it beautifully and powerfully; but the modus operandi was not such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.
Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of Homo Faber, has been a necessity; it has to serve a purpose and it has done admirably its work. Only we have to put it in its proper place. The salvation of an extremely self-conscious age lies in an exceeding and not in a further enhancement or an exclusive concentration of the self-consciousness, nor, of course, in a falling back into the original unconsciousness. It is this shift in the poise of consciousness that has been presaged and prepared by the conscious, the scientific Artists of today. Their task is to forge an instrument for a type of poetic or Artistic creation completely new, unfamiliar, almost revolutionary which the older mould would find it impossible to render adequately. The yearning of the human consciousness was not to rest satisfied with the familiar and the ordinary, the pressure was for the discovery of other strands, secret stores of truth and reality and beauty. The first discovery was that of the great Unconscious, the dark and mysterious and all-powerful subconscient. Many of our poets and Artists have been influenced by this power, some even sought to enter into that region and become its denizens. But Artistic inspiration is an emanation of Light; whatever may be the field of its play, it can have its origin only in the higher spheres, if it is to be truly beautiful and not merely curious and scientific.
That is what is wanted at present in the Artistic world the true inspiration, the breath from higher altitudes. And here comes the role of the mystic, the Yogi. The sense of evolution, the march of human consciousness demands and prophesies that the future poet has to be a mysticin him will be fulfilled the travail of man's conscious working. The self-conscious craftsman, the tireless experimenter with his adventurous analytic mind has sharpened his instrument, made it supple and elastic, tempered, refined and enriched it; that is comparable to what we call the aspiration or call from below. Now the Grace must descend and fulfil. And when one rises into this higher consciousness beyond the brain and mind, when one lives there habitually, one knows the why and the how of things, one becomes a perfectly conscious operator and still retains all spontaneity and freshness and wonder and magic that are usually associated with inconscience and irreflection. As there is a spontaneity of instinct, there is likewise also a spontaneity of vision: a child is spontaneous in its movements, even so a seer. Not only so, the higher spontaneity is more spontaneous, for the higher consciousness means not only awareness but the free and untrammelled activity and expression of the truth and reality it is.
Genius had to be generally more or less unconscious in the past, because the instrument was not ready, was clogged as it were with its own lower grade movements; the higher inspiration had very often to bypass it, or rob it of its serviceable materials without its knowledge, in an almost clandestine way. Wherever it was awake and vigilant, we have seen it causing a diminution in the poetic potential. And yet even so, it was being prepared for a greater role, a higher destiny it is to fulfil in the future. A conscious and full p Articipation of a refined and transparent and enriched instrument in the delivery of superconscious truth and beauty will surely mean not only a new but the very acme of aesthetic creation. We thus foresee the age of spiritual Art in which the sense of creative beauty in man will find its culmination. Such an Art was only an exception, something secondary or even tertiary, kept in the background, suggested here and there as a novel strain, called "mystic" to express its unfamiliar nature-unless, of course, it was openly and obviously scriptural and religious.
I have spoken of the source of inspiration as essentially and originally being a super-consciousness or over-consciousness. But to be more precise and accurate I should add another source, an inner consciousness. As the super-consciousness is imaged as lying above the normal consciousness, so the inner consciousness may be described as lying behind or within it. The movement of the inner consciousness has found expression more often and more largely than that of over-consciousness in the Artistic creation of the past : and that was in keeping with the nature of the old-world inspiration, for the inspiration that comes from the inner consciousness, which can be considered as the lyrical inspiration, tends to be naturally more "spontaneous", less conscious, since it does not at all go by the path of the head, it evades that as much as possible and goes by the path of the he Art.
But the evolutionary urge, as I have said, has always been to bring down or instil more and more light and self-consciousness into the depths of the he Art too: and the first result has been an intellectualisation, a rationalisation of the consciousness, a movement of scientific observation and criticism which very naturally leads to a desiccation of the poetic enthusiasm and fervour. But a period of transcendence is in gestation. All efforts of modern poets and craftsmen, even those that seem apparently queer, bizarre and futile, are at bottom a travail for this transcendence, including those that seem contradictory to it.
Whether the original and true source of the poet's inspiration lies deep within or high above, all depends upon the mediating instrument the mind (in its most general sense) and speech for a successful transcription. Man's ever-growing consciousness demanded also a conscious development and remoulding of these two factors. A growth, a heightening and deepening of the consciousness meant inevitably a movement towards the spiritual element in things. And that means, we have said, a twofold change in the future poet's make-up. First as regards the substance. The revolutionary shift that we notice in modern poets towards a completely new domain of subject-matter is a signpost that more is meant than what is expressed. The superficialities and futilities that are dealt with do not in their outward form give the real trend of things. In and through all these major and constant preoccupation of our poets is "the pain of the present and the passion for the future": they are, as already stated, more prophets than poets, but prophets for the moment crying in the wildernessalthough some have chosen the path of denial and revolt. They are all looking ahead or beyond or deep down, always yearning for another truth and reality which will explain, justify and transmute the present calvary of human living. Such an acute tension of consciousness has necessitated an overhauling of the vehicle of expression too, the creation of a mode of expressing the inexpressible. For that is indeed what human consciousness and craft are aiming at in the present stage of man's evolution. For everything, almost everything that can be normally expressed has been expressed and in a variety of ways as much as is possible: that is the history of man's aesthetic creativity. Now the eye probes into the unexpressed world; for the Artist too the Upanishadic problem has cropped up:
By whom impelled does the mind fall to its target, what is the agent that is behind the eye and sees through the eyes, what is the hearing and what the speech that their respective sense organs do not and cannot convey and record adequately or at all?
Like the modern scientist the Artist or craftsman too of today has become a philosopher, even a mystic philosopher. The subtler and higher ranges of consciousness are now the object of inquiry and investigation and expression and revelation for the scientist as well as for the Artist. The external sense-objects, the phenomenal movements are symbols and signposts, graphs and pointer-readings of facts and realities that lie hidden, behind or beyond. The Artist and the scientist are occult alchemists. What to make of this, for example:
Beyond the shapes of empire, the capes of Carbonek, over
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In other words, the tension in the human consciousness has been raised to the nth power, the heat of a brooding consciousness is about to lead it to an outburst of new creationsah tapastaptva. Human self-consciousness, the turning of oneself upon oneself, the probing and projecting of oneself into oneselfself-consciousness raised so often to the degree of self-torture, marks the acute travail of the spirit. The thousand "isms" and "logies" that pullulate in all fields of life, from the political to the Artistic or even the religious and the spiritual indicate how the human laboratory is working at white heat. They are breaches in the circuit of the consciousness, volcanic eruptions from below or cosmic-ray irruptions from above, tearing open the normal limit and boundaryBaudelaire's couvercle or the "golden lid" of the Upanishads-disclosing and bringing into the light of common day realities beyond and unseen till now.
Ifso long the poet was more or less a passive, a half-conscious or unconscious intermediary between the higher and the lower lights and delights, his role in the future will be better fulfilled when he becomes fully aware of it and consciously moulds and directs his creative energies. The poet is and has to be the harbinger and minstrel of unheard-of melodies: he is the fashioner of the creative word that brings down and embodies the deepest aspirations and experiences of the human consciousness. The poet is a missionary: he is missioned by Divine Beauty to radiate upon e Arth something of her charm and wizardry. The fullness of his role he can only play up when he is fully conscious for it is under that condition that all obstructing and obscuring elements lying across the path of inspiration can be completely and wholly eradicated: the instrument purified and tempered and transmuted can hold and express golden truths and beauties and puissances that otherwise escape the too human mould.
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He is whatever her Artist will can make.
Although she drives him on her fancy's roads,
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And open markets for life's opulent Arts,
Rich bales, carved statuettes, hued canvases,
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And its imitation of E Arth-Nature's Art,
Its e Arthly dialectto God-language change,
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And the weird technique of her tremendous Art.
This bizarre kingdom passed into his charge.
01.08 - A Theory of Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Secondly, there is the line of Substitution. Here the mind does not stand in an antagonistic and protestant mood to combat and repress the impulse, but seeks to divert it into other channels, use it to other purposes which do not demand equal sacrifice, may even, on the other hand, be considered by the conscious mind as worthy of human pursuit. Thus the energy that normally would seek sexual gratification might find its outlet in the cultivation of Art and literature. It is a common thing in novels to find the heroine disappointed in love taking finally to works of charity and beneficence and thus forgetting her disappointment. Another variety of this is what is known as "drowning one's sorrow in drinking."
Thirdly, there is the line of Sublimationit is when the natural impulse is neither repressed nor diverted but lifted up into a higher modality. The thing is given a new sense and a new value which serve to remove the stigma usually attached to it and thus allow its free indulgence. Instances of carnal love sublimated into spiritual union, of passion transmuted into devotion (Bhakti) are common enough to illustrate the point.
--
Yet even here the process of control and transformation does not end. And we now come to the Fifth Line, the real and intimate path of yoga. Conscious control gives us a natural mastery over the instinctive impulses which are relieved of their dark tamas and attain a purified rhythm. We do not seek to hide or repress or combat them, but surpass them and play with them as the Artist does with his material. Something of this katharsis, this aestheticism of the primitive impulses was achieved by the ancient Greeks. Even then the primitive impulses remain primitive all the same; they fulfil, no doubt, a real and healthy function in the scheme of life, but still in their fundamental nature they continue the animal in man. And even when Conscious Control means the utter elimination and annihilation of the primal instinctswhich, however, does not seem to be a probable eventualityeven then, we say, the basic problem remains unsolved; for the urge of nature towards the release and a transformation of the instincts does not find satisfaction, the question is merely put aside.
Yoga, then, comes at this stage and offers the solution in its power of what we may call Transubstantiation. That is to say, here the mere form is not changed, nor the functions restrained, regulated and purified, but the very substance of the instincts is transmuted. The power of conscious control is a power of the human will, i.e. of an individual personal will and therefore necessarily limited both in intent and extent. It is a power complementary to the power of Nature, it may guide and fashion the latter according to a new pattern, but cannot change the basic substance, the stuff of Nature. To that end yoga seeks a power that transcends the human will, brings into play the supernal puissance of a Divine Will.
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If you are told you are still full of sins and you are not worthy to follow the path, that you must go and work out your sins first, here is your answer: "Go shrive thee better: trow not this saying, for it is false, for thou Art shriven. Trust securely that thou Art on the way, and thee needeth no ransacking of shrift for that that is passed, hold forth thy way and think on Jerusalem." That is to say, do not be too busy with the difficulties of the moment, but look ahead, as far as possible, fix your attention upon the goal, the intermediate steps will become easy. Jerusalem is another name of the Love of Jesus or the Bliss in Heaven. Grow in this love, your sins will fade away of themselves. "Though thou be thrust in an house with thy body, nevertheless in thine he Art, where the stead of love is, thou shouldst be able to have p Art of that love... " What exquisite utterance, what a deep truth!
Indeed, there are one or two points, notes for the guidance of the aspirant, which I would like to mention here for their striking appositeness and simple "soothfastness." First of all with regard to the restless enthusiasm and eagerness of a novice, here is the advice given: "The fervour is so mickle in outward showing, is not only for mickleness of love that they have; but it is for littleness and weakness of their souls, that they may not bear a little touching of God.. afterward when love hath boiled out all the uncleanliness, then is the love clear and standeth still, and then is both the body and the soul mickle more in peace, and yet hath the self soul mickle more love than it had before, though it shew less outward." And again: "without any fervour outward shewed, and the less it thinketh that it loveth or seeth God, the nearer it nigheth" ('it' naturally refers to the soul). The statement is beautifully self-luminous, no explanation is required. Another hurdle that an aspirant has to face often in the passage through the Dark Night is that you are left all alone, that you are deserted by your God, that the Grace no longer favours you. Here is however the truth of the matter; "when I fall down to my frailty, then Grace withdraweth: for my falling is cause there-of, and not his fleeing." In fact, the Grace never withdraws, it is we who withdraw and think otherwise. One more difficulty that troubles the beginner especially is with regard to the false light. The being of darkness comes in the form of the angel of light, imitates the tone of the still small voice; how to recognise, how to distinguish the two? The false light, the "feigned sun" is always found "atwixt two black rainy clouds" : they are "highing" of oneself and "lowing" of others. When you feel flattered and elated, beware it is the siren voice tempting you. The true light brings you soothing peace and meekness: the other light brings always a trail of darknessf you are soothfast and sincere you will discover it if not near you, somewhere at a distance lurking.
01.09 - The Parting of the Way, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So, in man also, especially of that order which forms the crown of humanityin poets and Artists and seers and great men of actioncan be observed a certain characteristic form of consciousness, which is something other than, greater than the consciousness of the mere self. It is difficult as yet to characterise definitely what that thing is. It is the awakening of the self to something which is beyond itselfit is the cosmic self, the oversoul, the universal being; it is God, it is Turiya, it is sachchidanandain so many ways the thing has been sought to be envisaged and expressed. The consciousness of that level has also a great variety of names given to it Intuition, Revelation, cosmic consciousness, God-consciousness. It is to be noted here, however, that the thing we are referring to, is not the Absolute, the Infinite, the One without a second. It is not, that is to say, the supreme Reality the Brahmanin its static being, in its undivided and indivisible unity; it is the dynamic Brahman, that status of the supreme Reality where creation, the diversity of Becoming takes rise, it is the Truth-worldRitam the domain of typal realities. The distinction is necessary, as there does seem to be such a level of consciousness intermediary, again, between man and the Absolute, between self-consciousness and the supreme consciousness. The simplest thing would be to give that intermediate level of consciousness a negative namesince being as yet human we cannot foresee exactly its composition and function the super-consciousness.
The inflatus of something vast and transcendent, something which escapes all our familiar schemes of cognisance and yet is insistent with a translucent reality of its own, we do feel sometimes within us invading and enveloping our individuality, lifting up our sense of self and transmuting our personality into a reality which can hardly be called merely human. All this life of ego-bound rationality then melts away and opens out the passage for a life of vision and power. Thus it is the poet has felt when he says, "there is this incalculable element in human life influencing us from the mystery which envelops our being, and when reason is satisfied, there is something deeper than Reason which makes us still uncertain of truth. Above the human reason there is a transcendental sphere to which the spirit of men sometimes rises, and the will may be forged there at a lordly smithy and made the unbreakable pivot."(A.E.)
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
creator, a pure Artist, a poet par excellence! So I tell myself that my judgments, my appreciations are influenced
by my devotion for the Master - and not everyone is
01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This latest work of Aldous Huxley is a collection of sayings of sages and saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The sayings are arranged under several heads such as "That Art Thou", "The Nature of the Ground", "Divine Incarnation", "Self-Knowledge", "Silence", "Faith" etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents and also of the "Neo-Brahmin's" own personal preoccupation. There is also a running commentary, rather a note on each saying, meant to elucidate and explain, naturally from the compiler's standpoint, what is obviously addressed to the initiate.
A similar compilation was published in the Arya, called The Eternal Wisdom (Les Paroles ternelles, in French) a portion of which appeared later on in book-form: that was more elaborate, the contents were arranged in such a way that no comments were needed, they were self-explanatory, divided as they were in chapters and sections and subsections with proper headings, the whole thing put in a logical and organised sequence. Huxley's compilation begins under the title of the Upanishadic text "That Art Thou" with this saying of Eckh Art: "The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without". It will be interesting to note that the Arya compilation too st Arts with the same idea under the title "The God of All; the God who is in All", the first quotation being from Philolaus, "The Universe is a Unity".The Eternal Wisdom has an introduction called "The Song of Wisdom" which begins with this saying from the Book of Wisdom: "We fight to win sublime Wisdom; therefore men call us warriors".
Huxley gives only one quotation from Sri Aurobindo under the heading "God in the World". Here it is:
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
However, coming to historical times, we see wave after wave of the most heterogeneous and disparate elementsSakas and Huns and Greeks, each bringing its quota of exotic materialenter into the oceanic Indian life and culture, lose their separate foreign identity and become p Art and parcel of the common whole. Even so,a single unitary body was formed out of such varied and shifting materialsnot in the political, but in a socio-religious sense. For a catholic religious spirit, not being solely doctrinal and personal, admitted and embraced in its supple and wide texture almost an infinite variety of approaches to the Divine, of forms and norms of apprehending the Beyond. It has been called Hinduism: it is a vast synthesis of multiple affiliations. It expresses the characteristic genius of India and hence Hinduism and Indianism came to be looked upon as synonymous terms. And the same could be defined also as Vedic religion and culture, for its invariable basis the bed-rock on which it stood firm and erectwas the Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages. But there had already risen a voice of dissidence and discord that of Buddha, not so much, perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a vital schism. The denial of the Vedas by itself, perhaps, would not be serious, but it became so, as it was symptomatic of a deeper divergence. Denying the Vedas, the Buddhistic spirit denied life. It was quite a new thing in the Indian consciousness and spiritual discipline. And it left such a stamp there that even today it stands as the dominant character of the Indian outlook. However, India's synthetic genius rose to the occasion and knew how to bridge the chasm, close up the fissure, and present again a body whole and entire. Buddha became one of the Avataras: the discipline of Nirvana and Maya was reserved as the last duty to be performed at the end of life, as the culmination of a full-length span of action and achievement; the way to Moksha lay through Dharma and Artha and Kama, Sannyasa had to be built upon Brahmacharya and Garhasthya. The integral ideal was epitomized by Kalidasa in his famous lines about the character of the Raghus:
They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in youth they pursued the objects of life; when old they took to spiritual austerities, and in the end they died united with the higher consciousness.
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The dance along the Artery
The circulation of the lymph
01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, Roerich considers the Himalayas as the very abode, the tabernacle itself thesanctum sanctorumof the Spirit, the Light Divine. Many of Roerich's paintings have mountain ranges, especially snow-bound mountain ranges, as their theme. There is a strange kinship between this yearning Artistic soul, which seems solitary in spite of its ardent humanism, and the silent heights, rising white tier upon tier reflecting prism like the fiery glowing colours, the vast horizons, the wide vistas vanishing beyond.
Roerich is one of the prophets and seers who have ever been acclaiming and preparing the Golden Age, the dream that humanity has been dreaming continuously since its very childhood, that is to say, when there will be peace and harmony on e Arth, when racial, cultural or ideological egoism will no longer divide man and mana thing that seems today a chimera and a hallucinationwhen there will be one culture, one civilisation, one spiritual life welding all humanity into a single unit of life luminous and beautiful. Roerich believes that such a consummation can arrive only or chiefly through the growth of the sense of beauty, of the aesthetic temperament, of creative labour leading to a wider and higher consciousness. Beauty, Harmony, Light, Knowledge, Culture, Love, Delight are cardinal terms in his vision of the deeper and higher life of the future.
The stress of the inner urge to the heights and depths of spiritual values and realities found special and significant expression in his paintings. It is a difficult problem, a problem which Artists and poets are tackling today with all their skill and talent. Man's consciousness is no longer satisfied with the customary and the ordinary actions and reactions of life (or thought), with the old-world and time-worn modes and manners. It is no more turned to the apparent and the obvious, to the surface forms and movements of things. It yearns to look behind and beyond, for the secret mechanism, the hidden agency that really drives things. Poets and Artists are the vanguards of the age to come, prophets and pioneers preparing the way for the Lord.
Roerich discovered and elaborated his own technique to reveal that which is secret, express that which is not expressed or expressible. First of all, he is symbolical and allegorical: secondly, the choice of his symbols and allegories is hieratic, that is to say, the subject-matter refers to objects and events connected with saints and legends, shrines and enchanted places, hidden treasures, spirits and angels, etc. etc.; thirdly, the manner or style of execution is what we may term pantomimic, in other words, concrete, graphic, dramatic, even melodramatic. He has a special predilection for geometrical patterns the Artistic effect of whichbalance, regularity, fixity, soliditywas greatly utilised by the French painter Czanne and poet Mallarm who seem to have influenced Roerich to a considerable degree. But this Northerner had not the reticence, the suavity, the tonic unity of the classicist, nor the normality and clarity of the Latin temperament. The prophet, the priest in him was the stronger element and made use of the Artist as the rites andceremoniesmudras and chakrasof his vocation demanded. Indeed, he stands as the hierophant of a new cultural religion and his paintings and utterances are, as it were, gestures that accompany a holy ceremonial.
A Russian Artist (Monsieur Benois) has stressed upon the primitivealmost aboriginalelement in Roerich and was not happy over it. Well, as has been pointed out by other prophets and thinkers, man today happens to be so sophisticated, Artificial, material, cerebral that a [all-back seems to be necessary for him to take a new leap forward on to a higher ground. The pure aesthete is a closed system, with a consciousness immured in an ivory tower; but man is something more. A curious paradox. Man can reach the highest, realise the integral truth when he takes his leap, not from the relatively higher levels of his consciousness his intellectual and aesthetic and even moral status but when he can do so from his lower levels, when the physico-vital element in him serves as the springing-board. The decent and the beautiful the classic grace and aristocracyform one aspect of man, the aspect of "light"; but the aspect of energy and power lies precisely in him where the aboriginal and the barbarian find also a lodging. Man as a mental being is naturally sattwic, but prone to passivity and weakness; his physico-vital reactions, on the other hand, are obscure and crude, simple and vehement, but they have life and energy and creative power, they are there to be trained and transfigured, made effective instruments of a higher illumination.
All elemental personalities have something of the unconventional and irrational in them. And Roerich is one such in his own way. The truths and realities that he envisages and seeks to realise on e Arth are elemental and fundamental, although apparently simple and commonplace.
0.12 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Energy, strength, enthusiasm, Artistic taste, boldness, forcefulness are there too, if we know how to use them in the true way.
A vital converted and consecrated to the Divine Will becomes a bold and forceful instrument that can overcome all
0.13 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the scenes have any Artistic value.
In the first case you are a "good audience", in the second
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When the body has learned the Art of constantly progressing
towards an increasing perfection, we shall be well on the way to
0 1955-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
An American Artist, an old friend of D.H. Lawrence, and Satprem's friend.
***
0 1956-07-29, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
O Thou who Art always therepresent in all I do, all I amnot for repose do I aspire, but for THY INTEGRAL VICTORY.
***
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Yet it is one of the most common types of human collectivityto group together, band together, unite around a common ideal, a common action, a common realization but in an absolutely Artificial way. In contrast to this, Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true communitywhat he terms a gnostic or supramental communitycan be based only upon the INNER REALIZATION of each one of its members, each realizing his real, concrete oneness and identity with all the other members of the community; that is, each one should not feel himself a member connected to all the others in an arbitrary way, but that all are one within himself. For each one, the others should be as much himself as his own bodynot in a mental and Artificial way, but through a fact of consciousness, by an inner realization.
(silence)
0 1958-02-03b - The Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The nature of objects on this ship was not that which we know upon e Arth; for example, the clothes were not made of cloth, and this thing that resembled cloth was not manufacturedit was a p Art of the body, made of the same substance that took on different forms. It had a kind of plasticity. When a change had to be made, it was done not by Artificial and outer means but by an inner working, by a working of the consciousness that gave the substance its form or appearance. Life created its own forms. There was ONE SINGLE substance in all things; it changed the nature of its vibration according to the needs or uses.
Those who were sent back for more training were not of a uniform color; their bodies seemed to have patches of a grayish opacity, a substance resembling the e Arth substance. They were dull, as though they had not been wholly permeated by the light or wholly transformed. They were not like this all over, but in places.
--
When I came back, along with the memory of the experience, I knew that the supramental world was permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and that only a missing link is needed to allow the consciousness and the substance to connectand it is this link that is being built. At that time, my impression (an impression which remained rather long, almost the whole day) was of an extreme relativityno, not exactly that, but an impression that the relationship between this world and the other completely changes the criterion by which things are to be evaluated or judged. This criterion had nothing mental about it, and it gave the strange inner feeling that so many things we consider good or bad are not really so. It was very clear that everything depended upon the capacity of things and upon their ability to express the supramental world or be in relationship with it. It was so completely different, at times even so opposite to our ordinary way of looking at things! I recall one little thing that we usually consider bad actually how funny it was to see that it is something excellent! And other things that we consider important were really quite unimportant there! Whether it was like this or like that made no difference. What is very obvious is that our appreciation of what is divine or not divine is incorrect. I even laughed at certain things Our usual feeling about what is anti-divine seems Artificial, based upon something untrue, unliving (besides, what we call life here appeared lifeless in comparison with that world); in any event, this feeling should be based upon our relationship between the two worlds and according to whether things make this relationship easier or more difficult. This would thus completely change our evaluation of what brings us nearer to the Divine or what takes us away from Him. With people, too, I saw that what helps them or prevents them from becoming supramental is very different from what our ordinary moral notions imagine. I felt just how ridiculous we are.
(Then Mother speaks to the children)
--
But one thing and I wish to stress this point to youwhich now seems to me to be the most essential difference between our world and the supramental world (and it is only after having gone there consciously, with the consciousness that ordinarily works here, that this difference appeared to me in what might be called its enormity): everything here, except for what happens within and at a very deep level, seemed absolutely Artificial to me. Not one of the values of ordinary physical life is based upon truth. Just as we have to buy cloth, sew it together, then put it on our backs in order to dress ourselves, likewise we have to take things from outside and then put them inside our bodies in order to feed ourselves. For everything, our life is Artificial.
A true, sincere, spontaneous life, as in the supramental world, is a springing forth of things through the fact of conscious will, a power over substance that shapes this substance according to what we decide it should be. And he who has this power and this knowledge can obtain whatever he wants, whereas he who does not has no Artificial means of getting what he desires.
In ordinary life, EVERYTHING is Artificial. Depending upon the chance of your birth or circumstances, you have a more or less high position or a more or less comfortable life, not because it is the spontaneous, natural and sincere expression of your way of being and of your inner need, but because the fortuity of lifes circumstances has placed you in contact with these things. An absolutely worthless man may be in a very high position, and a man who might have marvelous capacities of creation and organization may find himself toiling in a quite limited and inferior position, whereas he would be a wholly useful individual if the world were sincere.
It is this Artificiality, this insincerity, this complete lack of truth that appeared so shocking to me that one wonders how, in a world as false as this one, we can arrive at any truthful evaluation of things.
But instead of feeling grieved, morose, rebellious, discontent, I had rather the feeling of what I spoke of at the end: of such a ridiculous absurdity that for several days I was seized with an uncontrollable laughter whenever I saw things and people! Such a tremendous laughter, so absolutely inexplicable (except to me), because of the ridiculousness of these situations.
0 1958-07-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
When I was young, I was as poor as a turkey, as poor as could be! As an Artist, I sometimes had to go out in society (as Artists are forced to do). I had lacquered boots that were cracked and I painted them so it wouldnt show! This is to tell you the state I was inpoor as a turkey. So one day, in a shop window, I saw a very pretty petticoat much in fashion then, with lace, ribbons, etc. (It was the fashion in those days to have long skirts which trailed on the floor, and I didnt have a petticoat which could go with such things I didnt care, it didnt matter to me in the least, but since Nature had told me I would always have everything I needed, I wanted to make an experiment.) So I said, Well, I would very much like to have a petticoat to go with those skirts. I got five of them! They came from every direction!
And it is always like that. I never ask for anything, but if by chance I say to myself, Hmm, wouldnt it be nice to have that, mountains of them pour in! So last year, I made an experiment, I told Nature, Listen, my little one, you say that you will collaborate, you told me I would never lack anything. Well then, to put it on a level of feelings, it would really be fun, it would give me joy (in the style of Krishnas joy), to have A LOT of money to do everything I feel like doing. Its not that I want to increase things for myself, no; you give me more than I need. But to have some fun, to be able to give freely, to do things freely, to spend freely I am asking you to give me a crore of rupees1 for my birthday!
0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And the third is addressed to Sri Aurobindo: Thou Art my refuge.
Shriaravindah sharanam mama.
0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The other day, for example, though I no longer recall exactly when (I forget everything on purpose)but it was in the last p Art of the night I had a rather long activity concerning the whole realization of the Ashram, notably in the fields of education and Art. I was apparently inspecting this area to see how things were there, so naturally I saw a certain number of people, their work and their inner states. Some saw me and, at that moment, had a vision of me. It is likely that many were asleep and didnt notice anything, but some actually saw me. The next morning, for example, someone who works at the theater told me that she had had a splendid vision of me in which I had spoken to her, blessed her, etc. This was her way of receiving the work I had done. And this kind of thing is happening more and more, in that my action is awakening the consciousness in others more and more strongly.
Naturally, the reception is always incomplete or p Artially modified; when it passes through the individuality, it becomes narrowed, a personal thing. It seems impossible for each one to have a consciousness vast enough to see the thing in its entirety.
--
Money is not meant to generate money; money should generate an increase in production, an improvement in the conditions of life and a progress in human consciousness. This is its true use. What I call an improvement in consciousness, a progress in consciousness, is everything that education in all its forms can providenot as its generally understood, but as we understand it here: education in Art, education in from the education of the body, from the most material progress, to the spiritual education and progress through yoga; the whole spectrum, everything that leads humanity towards its future realization. Money should serve to augment that and to augment the material base for the e Arths progress, the best use of what the e Arth can giveits intelligent utilization, not the utilization that wastes and loses energies. The use that allows energies to be replenished.
In the universe there is an inexhaustible source of energy that asks only to be replenished; if you know how to go about it, it is replenished. Instead of draining life and the energies of our e Arth and making of it something parched and inert, we must know the practical exercise for replenishing the energy constantly. And these are not just words; I know how its to be done, and science is in the process of thoroughly finding outit has found out most admirably. But instead of using it to satisfy human passions, instead of using what science has found so that men may destroy each other more effectively than they are presently doing, it must be used to enrich the e Arth: to enrich the e Arth, to make the e Arth richer and richer, more active, generous, productive and to make all life grow towards its maximum efficiency. This is the true use of money. And if its not used like that, its a vicea short circuit and a vice.
0 1958-10-25 - to go out of your body, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I had a Danish friend, an Artist, to whom this happened. He wanted me to teach him how to go out of his body. He had interesting dreams so he thought it might be worthwhile to go there consciously. I helped him to go out but it was frightful! When he dreamed, a p Art of his mind indeed remained conscious, active, and a kind of link remained between this active p Art and his outer being, so he remembered some of his dreams, but it was only a very p Artial phenomenon. To go out of your body means that you must gradually pass through ALL the states of being, if you are to do it systematically. But already in the subtle physical it was almost non-individualized, and as soon as he went a bit further, there was no longer anything! It was unformed, nonexistent.
So they sit down (they are told to interiorize, to go within themselves), and they panic!Naturally they feel that they that they are disappearing: there is nothing! There is no consciousness!
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But as soon as you want to express it, it escapes like water running through your fingers; all the fluidity is lost, it evaporates. A rather vague, poetic or Artistic expression is much truer, much nearer to the truth something hazy, nebulous, undefined. Something not concretized like a rigid mental expressionthis rigidity that the mind has introduced right down into the Inconscient.
This vision of the Inconscient (Mother remains gazing for a moment) it was the MENTAL Inconscient. Because the st Arting point was mental. A special Inconscientrigid, hard, resistantwith all that the mind has brought into our consciousness. But it was far worse, far worse than a purely material Inconscient! A mentalized Inconscient, as it were. All this rigidity, this hardness, this narrowness, this fixitya FIXITYcomes from the presence of the mind in creation. When the mind was not manifested, the Inconscient was not like that! It was formless and had the plasticity of something that is formless the plasticity has gone.
0 1958-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And each time, you have the feeling of having lived on the surface of things. Its a feeling that is repeated over and over again. With each new conquest, you feel that until then you had lived only on the surface of thingson the surface of the realization, on the surface of surrender, on the surface of power. It was only the surface of things, the surface of the experience. Behind the surface, there is a depth, and only when one enters into this depth does one touch the True Thing. And it is the same experience each time: what seemed a depth becomes the surface. A surface, with all that it entails of inaccuracy, yes, of Artificiality Artificialan Artificial transcription. It feels like something not really alive, a copy, an imitation: its an image, a reflection, but not THE Thing itself. You step into another zone and you feel you have uncovered the Source and the Power and the Truth of things; then this source and power and truth in turn become an appearance, an imitation, a mere transcription in comparison to something concrete: the new realization.
(silence)
0 1959-01-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The pain on the left side has not entirely gone and there have been some complications which have delayed things. But I feel much better. In fact, I am rebuilding my health, and I am in no hurry to resume the exhausting days as before. It is quiet upstairs for working, and I am going to take advantage of this to prepare the Bulletin1 at leisure. As I had not read over the pages on the message that we had prepared for the 31st, I have revised and transformed them into an Article. It will be the first one in the February issue. I am now going to choose the others. I will tell you which ones I have chosen and in what order I will put them.
Satprem, my child, I am truly with you and I love you.
0 1959-01-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I am taking advantage of this situation to work. I have chosen the Articles for the Bulletin. They are as follows: 1) Message. 2) To keep silent. 3) Can there be intermediary states between man and super-man? 4) The Anti-Divine. 5) What is the role of the spirit? 6) Karma (I have touched this one up to make it less personal). 7) The Worship of the Supreme in Matter. Now I would like to prepare the first twelve Aphorisms3 for printing. But as you have not yet revised the last two, I am sending them to you. Could you do them when you have finished what you are doing for the Bulletin? It is not urgent, take your time. Do not disturb your real work for this in any way. For, in my eyes, this work of inner liberation is much more important.
You will find in this letter a little money. I thought you might need it for your stamps, etc.
0 1959-06-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Regarding me, this is more or less what he said: First of all, I want an agreement from you so that under any circumstances you never leave the Ashram. Whatever happens, even if Yama1 comes to dance at your door, you should never leave the Ashram. At the critical moment, when the attack is the strongest, you should throw everything into His hands, then and then only the thing can be removed (I no longer know whether he said removed or destroyed ). It is the only way. SARVAM MAMA BRAHMAN [Thou Art my sole refuge]. Here in Rameswaram, we are going to meditate together for 45 days, and the Asuric-Shakti may come with full strength to attack, and I shall try my best not only to protect but to destroy, but for that, I need your determination. It is only by your own determination that I can get strength. If the force comes to make suggestions: lack of adventure, lack of Nature, lack of love, then think that I am the forest, think that I am the sea, think that I am the wife (!!) Meanwhile, X has nearly doubled the number of repetitions of the mantra that I have to say every day (it is the same mantra he gave me in Pondicherry). X repeated to me again and again that I am not merely a disciple to him, like the others, but as if his son.
This was a first, hasty conversation, and we did not discuss things at length. I said nothing. I have no confidence in my reactions when I am in the midst of my crises of complete negation. And truly speaking, at the time of my last crisis in Pondicherry, I do not know if it was really Xs occult working that set things right, for personally (but perhaps it is an ignorant impression), I felt that it was thanks to Sujata and her childlike simplicity that I was able to get out of it.
0 1960-03-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Publisher and friend are here one in telling you that LOrpailleur is a beautiful book whose richness and force have struck me even more this time than before when I read the first version. I cannot tell you how much your Job is my brotherin his darkness as in his light. The joy, the wild, irrepressible joy that furtively yearns and at times bursts forth, embracing all, this joy at the he Art of the book burns the reader for a few, in any case, who are prepared to be inflamed. In the end, I cant say if LOrpailleur will or will not be noticed, if the critics will or will not bestow an Article, a comment, an echo upon it, if bookstores will or will not sell it (poor orpailleur!). But what I know is that for a few readers2, 3, 10 perhapsyour book will be the cry that will rip them from their sleep forever. To your song, another song in themselves will respond. Where, how shall this concert finish? Who knowsanything is possible!
My words are a bit disjointed but Im not in the mood to give an Articulate discourse. Which is a way of saying, once again, how happy I amand grateful.
With my warmest regards,
0 1960-06-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo said that the true or yogic reason for sleep is to put the consciousness back into contact with Sat-Chit-Ananda (I used to do this without knowing it). For some people the contact is established immediately, while for others it takes eight, nine, ten hours to do it. But really, normally you should not wake up till the contact has been established, and thats why its very bad to wake up in an Artificial way (with an alarm clock, for example), because then the night is wasted.
As for me, my night is now organized. I go to bed at 8 oclock and get up at 4, which makes for a very long night, and its sliced into three p Arts. And I get up punctually at 4 in the morning. But Im always awake ten or fifteen minutes beforehand, and I review all that has happened during the night, the dreams, the various activities, etc., so that when I get up, I am fully active.
0 1960-06-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It gives me the impression of something like Yes, thats it, like a cavemanOh (Mother speaks mockingly), surely one of the cave Artists or poets or writers! The intellectual life of the caves, I mean! But the cave happens to be low and when youre in it, you are like this (Mother stoops over), but the whole time you want to stand up straight. That makes you furious. Thats exactly the feeling it gives menot a cave meant for a man standing on his two feet; its a cave for a lion or for for any four-legged animal.
Its symbolic. Im speaking symbolically.
0 1960-08-10 - questions from center of Education - reading Sri Aurobindo, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(Pavitra:) It has everythinghow to play bridge, how to play tennis, the Art of carving a chicken
Fine.
0 1960-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Sanskrit is better. Sanskrit is a much fuller and subtler language, so its probably much better. But these modern languages are so Artificial (by this, I mean superficial, intellectual); they cut things up into little pieces and remove the light behind.
I also read On the Veda where Sri Aurobindo speaks of the difference between the modern mind and the ancient mind; and its quite obvious, especially from the linguistic point of view. Sanskrit was certainly much more fluid, a better instrument for a more global, more comprehensive light, a light containing more things within itself.
0 1960-10-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
She was a small woman, fat, almost flabbyshe gave you the feeling that if you leaned against her, it would melt! Once, I remember I was there in Tlemcen with Andres father, who had come to join usa painter, an Artist. Theon was wearing a dark purple robe. Theon said to him, This robe is purple. No, its not purple, the other answered, its violet. Theon went rigid: When I say purple, its purple! And they st Arted arguing over this foolishness. Suddenly there flashed from my head, No, this is too ridiculous!I didnt say a word, but it went out from my head (I even saw the flash), and then Madame Theon got up and came over to me, stood behind me (neither of us uttered a word the other two were staring at each other like two angry cocks), then she laid my head against her breastabsolutely the feeling of sinking into eiderdown!
And never in my life, never, had I felt such peaceit was absolutely luminous and soft a peace, such a soft, tender, luminous peace. After a moment, she bent down and whispered in my ear, One must never question ones master! It wasnt I who was questioning!
--
And I see it all the time now. If someone is speaking or if Im doing something, I see the two things at the same time I see the physical thing, his words or my action, and then this colored, luminous transcription at the same time. The two things are superimposed. For example, when someone speaks to me, it gets translated into some kind of picture, a play of light or color (which is not always so luminous!)this is why most of the time, in fact, I dont even know what has been said to me. I recall the first time this phenomenon happened, I said to myself, Ah, so thats what these modern Artists see! Only, as they themselves arent very coherent, what they see is not very coherent either!
And thats how it worksit is translated by patches and moving forms, which is how it gets registered in the e Arths memory. So when things from this realm enter into peoples active consciousness, they get translated into each ones language and the words and thoughts that each one is accustomed tobecause that doesnt belong to any language or to any idea: it is the exact IMPRINT of what is happening.
--
Yesterday, I suddenly saw a huge living head of blue lightthis blue light which is the force, the powerful force in material Nature (this is the light the tantrics use). The head was made entirely of this light, and it wore a sort of tiaraa big head, so big (Mother indicates the length of her forearm); its eyes werent closed, but rather lowered, like this. The immobility of eternity, absolutely the repose, the immobility of eternity. A magnificent head, quite similar to the way the gods here are represented, but even better; something between certain heads of the Buddha and (these heads most probably come to the Artists). Everything else was lost in a kind of cloud.
I felt that this kind of yes, immobility came from there: everything stops, absolutely everything stops. Silence, immobility truly, you enter into eternity.I told him it wasnt time!
0 1960-10-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(No sooner had Mother finished telling this story than, by a curious coincidence, someone brought her a portrait drawn by P.K., one of the Ashram Artists. Several days earlier, at about two in the morning during an uncommonly violent lightning storm, P.K. had suddenly SEEN amidst the flashes of lightning in the sky a rather terrible, demoniacal head in front of his very eyes. Having nothing else available, he hastily drew his vision in chalk on a schoolchilds slate, which is the portrait Mother speaks of here:)
Well, well! So P.K. is clairvoyant! Its him, for surethis is the being behind those people. Thats why they had so much power. And he came here because of tha the was furious. Quite a demon!
--
Oh, its terrifying! I dont know who had the stupid idea of showing this to the child, but after he saw it he had a fever for three days, with terrible chills. And I believe the Artist too was sick after finishing his sketch.
***
0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
He lives in a region which is largely a kind of vital vibration which penetrates the mind and makes use of the imagination (essentially its the same region most so-called cultured men live in). I dont mean to be severe or critical, but its a world that likes to play to itself. Its not really what we could call histrionics, not thatits rather a need to dramatize to oneself. So it can be an heroic drama, it can be a musical drama, it can be a tragic drama, or quite simply a poetic drama and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, its a romantic drama. And then, these soul states (!) come replete with certain spoken expressions (laughing) Im holding myself back from saying certain things!You know, its like a theatricals store where you rent scenery and costumes. Its all ready and waitinga little call, and there it comes, ready-made. For a p Articular occasion, they say, Youre the woman of my life (to be repeated as often as necessary), and for another they say Its a whole world, a whole mode of human life which I suddenly felt I was holding in my arms. Yes, like a decoration, an ornament, a nicetyan ornament of existence, to keep it from being flat and dull and the best means the human mind has found to get out of its tamas. Its a kind of Artifice.
So for persons who are severe and grave (there are two such examples here, but its not necessary to name them) There are beings who are grave, so serious, so sincere, who find it hypocritical; and when it borders on certain (how shall I put it?) vital excesses, they call it vice. There are others who have lived their entire lives in a yogic or religious discipline, and they see this as an obstacle, illusion, dirtyness (Mother makes a gesture of rejecting with disgust), but above all, its this terrible illusion that prevents you from nearing the Divine. And when I saw the way these two people here reacted, in fact, I said to myself, but you see, I FELT So strongly that this too is the Divine, it too is a way of getting out of something that has had its place in evolution, and still has a place, individually, for certain individuals. Naturally, if you remain there, you keep turning in circles; it will always be (not eternally, but indefinitely) the woman of my life, to take that as a symbol. But once youre out of it, you see that this had its place, its utilityit made you emerge from a kind of very animal-like wisdom and quietude that of the herd or of the being who sees no further than his daily round. It was necessary. We mustnt condemn it, we mustnt use harsh words.
--
All this came to me yesterday. I kept Z with me for more than half an hour, nearly 45 minutes. He told me some very interesting things. What he said was quite good and I encouraged him a great dealsome action on the right lines which will be quite useful, and then a book unfortunately mixed with an influence from that Artificial world (but actually, even that can be used as a link to attract people). He must have spoken to you about this. He wants to write a kind of dialogue to introduce Sri Aurobindos ideasits a good idealike the conversations in Les Hommes de Bonne Volont by Jules Romain. He wants to do it, and I told him it was an excellent idea. And not only one typehe should take all types of people who for the moment are closed to this vision of life, from the Catholic, the fervent believer, right to the utmost materialist, men of science, etc. It could be very interesting.
This is what you see in life, its all like thateach thing has its place and its necessity. This has made me see a whole current of life I was very, very involved with people from this milieu during a whole period of my existence and in fact, its the first approach to Beauty. But it gets mixed.
--
What I saw is this world, this realm where people are like that, they live that, for its necessary to get out from below and this is a wayits a way, the only way. It was the only way for the vital formation and the vital creation to enter into the material world, into inert matter. An intellectualized vital, a vital of ideas, an Artist; it even fringes upon or has the first drops of Poetrythis Poetry which upon its peaks goes beyond the mind and becomes an expression of the Spirit. Well, when these first drops fall on e Arth, it stirs up mud.
And I wondered why people are so rigid and severe, why they condemn others (but one day Ill understand this as well). I say this because very often I run into these two states of mind in my activities (the grave and serious mind which sees hypocrisy and vice, and the religious and yogic mind which sees the illusion that prevents you from nearing the Divine)and without being openly criticized, Im criticized Ill tell you about this one day
0 1961-01-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Saraswati represents the universal Mother's aspect of Knowledge and Artistic creativity. On this occasion, Mother would go down to the Meditation Hall and the disciples would silently pass in front of her to receive a message. This year they would receive a folder containing five photographs of Mother.
Savitri, Vol. 29, XI.I.702.
0 1961-01-22, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I saw it last night oof! It was a kind of Artificial hurricane created by semi-human beings (that is, they have human forms but they arent men). They created the storm to cut me off from my home. But everything and everyone was disruptedit must have been going on for a rather long time. Finally last night it became quite amusing: I kept attempting to get to my home which was up above, but each time I tried to find a way everything was blocked by try to imagine, Artificial, mechanical and electric thunderstorms, and then things made to cave in. All of it was Artificial, nothing real, and yet terribly dangerous.
At last I found myself in a big place down below where there was a row of houses, all kinds of things, and it was absolutely essential that I go back upwhen suddenly a somewhat indistinct form (rather dark, unluminous) came to me and said, Oh, dont go there, its very bad, very dangerous! Theyve set it all up in a terrifying way: none can withstand it! You mustnt go there, wait a bit. And if you need something, do come, you know I have everything you need! (Mother laughs) its a little old and dusty but youll manage! Then she led me into a huge room filled with objects piled one on top of another, and in one corner she showed me a bathtubmy child, it was a marvel! A splendid pink marble bathtub! But it was unused, dusty and old. Well just wipe it off, she said, and youll be able to use it! She showed me other areas for washing and dressing, there was everything one could possibly need. You can use it all. Dont go up there! I looked at her closely. She struck me as having a tiny face, it was oddit wasnt a form, it was it was a form and yet it wasnt! As imprecise as that. Then I clasped her in my arms and cried out, Mother, you are nice! (Mother laughs) I knew then that she was material Mother Nature.
--
But they are furious! There is evidently a whole alignment of forces (they must be vital forces) between here and my domain. Theyre furious! They set up explosions, demolitions. And I could see all the settings they were quite Artificial, nothing real, but dangerous nonetheless.
All in all, it was rather amusing.
--
Yes, I am disrupting their work I know perfectly well that I am disrupting their domination of the world! All these vital beings have taken possession of the whole of Matter (Mother touches her body)life and action and have made it their domain, this is evident. But they are beings of the lower vital, for they seemed Artificial they didnt express any higher form, but an entire range of Artificial mechanisms, Artificial will, Artificial organization, all deriving from their own imagination and not at all from a higher inspiration.1 The symbol was very clear.
And I saw my own domain through them and through it all; I saw my domain: I can see it!, I said. But no sooner would I st Art on my way than the path would be lost, I no longer saw it, I couldnt see anymore where I was going. It became almost impossible to get my bearings there: hundreds and thousands of people, thingsutter confusion. An incoherent immensity and violent, what violence!
--
Each time I set out to leave her domain and ascend above, it triggered a hurricane. I would pass this way and the storm st Arted up, pass that way, unleash a gale. Finally she approached me and said very gently, very sweetly, in a most unassuming way, No, dont go there, dont go! Dont try to return to your home. They have set up a dreadful hurricane! And Artificial: there were explosions like bombs everywhere, and even worse, like thunderbolts. One could see the Artificial tricks and electrical effects they were using to create their thunder, but it was on a tremendous scale!
It isnt over.
0 1961-01-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Vedic or pre-Vedic experience of the Artificial hurricane and the pink marble bathtub.
Balcony-darshan: up to 1962, Mother appeared every morning on the first-floor balcony to be seen by the disciples assembled on the street below.
0 1961-01-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Experience of January 22 (the Artificial hurricane).
***
0 1961-02-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Others turn to Art, others to science; some choose a social or a political life, etc., etc.
But here also, all depends on the sincerity and the endurance with which the chosen path is followed. Because here also, there are difficulties and obstacles to surmount.
0 1961-02-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, the other day I had some zinnias (Endurance)literally works of Art, as though each petal had been painted, and all together so harmonious and so varied at the same time. Oh, Nature is wonderful! In the end, we are just copycats, and clumsy ones at that.
(after a moment of silence)
0 1961-03-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
56When, O eager disputant, thou hast prevailed in a debate, then Art thou greatly to be pitied; for thou hast lost a chance of widening knowledge.
How fine! Many things could be said.
0 1961-04-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The other story dates f Arther back. I was living in another house (we had the whole fifth floor), and once a week I used to hold meetings there with people interested in occultism they came to have me demonstrate or tell them about occult practices. There was a Swedish Artist, a French lady and a young French boy, a student and a poet. His parents were decent country people who bled themselves white to pay for his life in Paris. This boy was very intelligent and a true Artist, but he was depraved. (We knew about it, but it was his private life and none of our business.) One evening, when four or five of us were to meet, this boy didnt turn up, although he had said he would. We had our meeting anyway and didnt think much about itwe thought he must have been busy elsewhere. Around midnight, when the people were leaving, I open the door. A big black cat was sitting in the doorway and, in a single bound, it jumps on me, just like that, all curled up in a ball. So I calm it down, I look at itAh, the eyes! They were this boys eyes. (I no longer recall his name.) Right away (at the time we were all involved in occultism), we knew something had happened; he had been unable to come and the cat had incarnated his vital force.
The next day, all the newspapers were full of a vile murder: a pimp had murdered this boyit was disgusting! Something utterly vile. And it had happened at the very moment he should have come the concierge had seen him going into the house with this pimp. What happened? Was it just for money or for something elsevice? Or what?
0 1961-04-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I remember a good-he Arted priest in Pau [Southern France] who was an Artist and wanted to have his church decorateda tiny cathedral. He consulted a local anarchist (a great Artist) about it. The anarchist was acquainted with Andrs father and me. He told the priest, I recommend these people to do the paintings they are true Artists. He was doing the mural decorationsome eight panels in all, I believe. So I set to work on one of the panels. (The church was dedicated to San Juan de Compostello, a hero of Spanish history; he had appeared in a battle between the Christians and the Moors and his apparition vanquished the Moors. And he was magnificent! He appeared in golden light on a white horse, almost like Kalki.6) All the slaughtered and struggling Moors were depicted at the bottom of the painting, and it was I who painted them; it was too hard for me to climb high up on a ladder to paint, so I did the things at the bottom! But anyway, it all went quite well. Then, naturally, the priest received us and invited us to dinner with the anarchist. And he was so nicereally a kind-he Arted man! I was already a vegetarian and didnt drink, so he scolded me very gently, saying, But its Our Lord who gives us all this, so why shouldnt you take it? I found him charming. And when he looked at the paintings, he tapped Morisset on the shoulder (Morisset was an unbeliever), and said, with the accent of Southern France, Say what you like, but you know Our Lord; otherwise you could never have painted like that!
Well.
0 1961-06-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thou Art the sure friend who never fails,
the Power, the Support, the Guide. Thou Art
the Light which scatters darkness,
--
because Thou Art its source!
O Supreme and only Friend, Thou who acceptest,
--
since always Thou Art there
ready to our call and never wilt Thou fail us!
0 1961-07-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the Chinese are also great Artists.
Yes. When I read that book (it was very well written), I understood the problem, and my understanding was confirmed when I went to Japan. Many Japanese also have a blunted sensibility (blunted in the sense that to feel anything they need extremely violent stimuli). Perhaps an explanation could be found along these lines.
0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Sri Aurobindo's terminology, the 'Overmind' represents the highest level of the mind, the world of the gods and origin of all the revelations and highest Artistic creations the world that has ruled mental man till now. in his gradations of the worlds, Sri Aurobindo speaks of two hemispheres, the upper hemisphere and the lower. The Overmind is the line between these two hemispheres, 'This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, but in receiving it divides, distributes, breaks up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds.' In the words of the Upanishad, 'The face of the Truth is covered by a golden lid.'
Mother is referring to the book Satprem will write on Sri Aurobindo, which prompted the questions posed in this conversation.
0 1961-08-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I remember once (I must have been ten or twelve years old at the time), there was a luncheon at my parents house for a dozen or so people, all decked out in their Sunday bestthey were family but all the same it was a luncheon and there was a certain protocol; in short, one had to behave properly. I was at one end of the table next to a first-cousin of mine who later became director of the Louvre for a while (he had an Artistic intelligence, a rather capable young man). So there we were, and I remember I was observing something rather interesting in his atmosphere (mind you, although the faculties were already there, I knew nothing about occult things; if someone had spoken to me of auras and all that. I knew nothing). I was observing a kind of sensation I had felt in his atmosphere and then, just as I was putting the fork into my mouth, I took off! What a scolding I got! I was told that if I didnt know how to behave, I shouldnt come to the table! (Mother goes into peals of laughter)
It was during this period that I used to go out of my body every night and do the work Ive spoken of in Prayers and Meditations (I only mentioned it in passing).8 Every night at the same hour, when the whole house was very quiet, I would go out of my body and have all kinds of experiences. And then my body gradually became a sleepwalker (that is, the consciousness of the form became more and more conscious, while the link remained very solidly established). I got into the habit of getting up but not like an ordinary sleepwalker: I would get up, open my desk, take out a piece of paper and write poems. Yes, poems I, who had nothing of the poet in me! I would jot things down, then very consciously put everything back into the drawer, lock everything up again very carefully and go back to bed. One night, for some reason or other, I forgot and left it open. My mother came in (in France the windows are covered with heavy curtains and in the morning my mother would come in and violently throw open the curtains, waking me up, brrm!, without any warning; but I was used to it and would already be prepared to wake upotherwise it would have been most unpleasant!). Anyway, my mother came in, calling me with unquestionable authority, and then she found the open desk and the piece of paper: Whats that?! She grabbed it. What have you been up to? I dont know what I replied, but she went to the doctor: My daughter has become a sleepwalker! You have to give her a drug.
--
Did I tell you what happened to my brother? No? My brother was a terribly serious boy, and frightfully studiousoh, it was awful! But he also had a very strong character, a strong will, and there was something interesting about him. When he was studying to enter the Polytechnique, I studied with himit interested me. We were very intimate (there were only eighteen months between us). He was quite violent, but with an extraordinary strength of character. He almost killed me three times,9 but when my mother told him, Next time, you will kill her, he resolved that it wouldnt happen again and it never did. But what I wanted to tell you is that one day when he was eighteen, just before the Polytechnique exams, as he was crossing the Seine (I think it was the Pont des Arts), suddenly in the middle of the bridge he felt something descend into him with such force that he became immobilized, petrified; then, although he didnt exactly hear a voice, a very clear message came to him: If you want, you can become a godit was translated like that in his consciousness. He told me that it took hold of him entirely, immobilized hima formidable and extremely luminous power: If you want, you can become a god. Then, in the thick of the experience itself, he replied, No, I want to serve humanity. And it was gone. Of course, he took great care to say nothing to my mother, but we were intimate enough for him to tell me about it. I told him, Well (laughing), what an idiot you are!
Thats the story.
0 1961-09-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What struck me is that he never wanted to write anything else. To write those Articles for the Bulletin1 was really a heavy sacrifice for him. He had said he would complete certain p Arts of The Synthesis of Yoga,2 but when he was asked to do so, he replied, No, I dont want to go down to that mental level!
Savitri comes from somewhere else altogether.
0 1961-10-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And precisely because a large p Art of the book is reasonable enough, Artistic, well-expressed and well-presented, it can afford a few pages (there need not be many), a few pages that are like a leap into sheer madness!
I SEE, I am looking at all that, sparkling.
0 1961-10-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Nor was it insignificant that fire, Agni, was the core of the Vedic mysteries: Agni, the inner flame, the soul within us (for who can deny that the soul is fire?), the innate aspiration drawing man towards the heights; Agni, the ardent will within us that sees, always and forever, and remembers; Agni, the priest of the sacrifice, the divine worker, the envoy between e Arth and heaven (Rig-veda III, 3.2) he is there in the middle of his house (I.70.2). The Fathers who have divine vision set him within as a child that is to be born (IX.83.3). He is the boy suppressed in the secret cavern (V.2.1). He is as if life and the breath of our existence, he is as if our eternal child (I.66.1). O Son of the body (III.4.2), O Fire, thou Art the son of heaven by the body of the e Arth (III.25.1). Immortal in mortals (IV.2. 1), old and outworn he grows young again and again (II.4.5). When he is born he becomes one who voices the godhead: when as life who grows in the mother he has been fashioned in the mother he becomes a gallop of wind in his movement (III.29.11). O Fire, when thou Art well borne by us thou becomest the supreme growth and expansion of our being, all glory and beauty are in thy desirable hue and thy perfect vision. O Vastness, thou Art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way; thou Art a multitude of riches spread out on every side (II.1.12). O Fire brilliant ocean of light in which is divine vision (III.22.2), the Flame with his hundred treasures O knower of all things born(I.59).
But the divine fire is not our exclusive privilegeAgni exists not only in man: He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there (I.70.2).
--
The voyage draws to its close. Agni has recovered its solar totality, its two concealed extremities. The inviolable work is fulfilled. For Agni is the place where high meets lowand in truth, there is no longer high nor low, but a single Sun everywhere: O Flame, thou goest to the ocean of Heaven, towards the gods; thou makest to meet together the godheads of the planes, the waters that are in the realm of light above the sun and the waters that abide below (III.22.3). O Fire O universal Godhead, thou Art the navel-knot of the e Arths and their inhabitants; all men born thou controllest and supportest like a pillar (I.59.1). O Flame, thou foundest the mortal in a supreme immortality thou createst divine bliss and human joy (I.31.7). For the worlds he Art is Joy, Joy dwells in the depths of all things, the well of honey covered by the rock (II.24.4).
The day before, Mother had listened to the passage of the manuscript concerning 'The Secret of the Veda.' Several extracts from it are included in the Addendum to this conversation.
0 1961-11-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother is alluding to the following aphorism of Sri Aurobindo: 'If when thou sittest alone, still and voiceless on the mountain-top, thou canst perceive the revolutions thou Art conducting, then hast thou the divine vision and Art freed from appearances.' This aphorism is completed by another: 'If when thou Art doing great actions and moving giant results, thou canst perceive that THOU Art doing nothing, then know that God has removed His seal on thy eyelids.'
Cent. Ed., Vol. XVII, p. 92
0 1961-11-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Art of good writing consists in knowing how to be silent. The things you dont say are far more important than the things you do.
Not including poetry.
0 1962-01-09, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But following that, and because of the overwork, an old thing I thought I had cured has come back. It was originally brought on by overwork when I was going to the Playground and resting only two hours out of twenty-four, which wasnt enougha sort of ulcer formed between my nose and throat. Its an old complaint, dating from the removal of adenoids in my childhood; the operation left a kind of small cavity, which was nothing in itself, except that occasionally it would give me a cold. But as a result of overwork it came back in the form of an ulcer, and gave me Artificial colds; it was so sour and corrosive, a terrible irritation in the throat and nose. It got much worse when I was giving classes at the Playground, and once I showed it to the doctor. Why, you have an ulcer! he said. A big fuss. He offered to treat me. No thanks! I said. Dont worry, it will pass. And I began my own yogic treatment. It was over in a week and for three years there was no further sign of it. Recently (the last two or three months) I had felt it trying to come back, for exactly the same reason of overwork. And with that little adventure the other day, it did come backit gave me one of those stupid colds: sneezing, coughing. Its not quite over yet. But its nothing, it just gives me an excuse (laughing) to tell people I am still not quite well!
I am resting.
0 1962-01-12 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I didnt say it with the idea of writing an Article!
When I read that note6 you sent me, I immediately reconnected with the experience, and things became clear. I have told them to you as well as they can be told.
0 1962-03-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To those with the spiritual sense, the most dazzling vital lights always seem to have something Artificial about themthey FEEL Artificial and cold, hard, aggressive, deceptive. But thats the point: you yourself must be beyond all this. Not to be fooled, you mustnt fool yourself!
Actually, thats the main reason I dont like to talk about occultism. It puts people in touch with an extremely dangerous world which cant be safely entered unless one is (I cant even say a saint, because its not true; some saints enter the vital world and get right into it!) unless one is transformed, unless one has the true spiritual consciousness. On this condition alone are you perfectly safe. So where are the people with the spiritual consciousness? There are really very few of them, very few. And above all, in those who have this occult curiosity there are also all sorts of vital movements, which make it dangerous for them to enter that world. Unless, of course, they go shielded by the gurus presence; with that, you can go anywhere, its the same as going there with him. And if you do go with him, all is well; he has the knowledge and he protects you. But going there all on your own is you need the Divine Protection itself! Or the protection of the guru who represents the Divine. With the gurus protection you are safe.
--
In Sri Aurobindo's terminology, the Overmind represents the highest level of the mind, the world of the gods and origin of all the revelations and highest Artistic creations the world that has ruled mental man till now.
***
0 1962-05-31, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Art of letting oneself be carried by the Supreme, within Infinity.
(silence)
--
The Art of letting oneself be carried by the Supreme (Mother clasps her hands together) within the Infinite Becoming.
(long silence)
0 1962-06-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A whiteness and a strength is in the skies... Virgin formidable In beauty, disturber of the ancient world!... How Art thou white and beautiful and calm, Yet clothed in tumult! Heaven above thee shakes Wounded with lightnings, goddess, and the sea Flees from thy dreadful tranquil feet.
Perseus the Deliverer, Cent. Ed., VI. 6.
0 1962-06-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There was another time at Blois. They make Anjou wine at Blois. It was the same story: I never drank anything but water or herb tea, but there was a luncheon and they served us sparkling Anjou wine it seemed so light! Afterwards (I was with an Artist friend, we were all Artists) we went to see the museum, and it appears I was sparkling with wit! And I suddenly halted in front of a painting by now lets see, who was it? Cou? No, Clouet! Clouet: the princess one of the princesses.4 And I st Arted making a few remarks out loud (it took me a little while to notice that people were listening). Look at this! I was saying. Just look at this! Look what this fellow has done to me! See what hes done to meit wasnt at all like that! It was actually a beautiful painting, but I was quite unhappy about it: Look what hes done to me! Lookhe made this like that, but thats not at all how it was, it was LIKE THIS! Details. And then I became aware (I wasnt too conscious physically) I realized that people were standing around listening, so I got a grip on myself, and left without a word. But I told my friends, Listen, it was definitely me! It was MY portrait, it was ME!
Almost all my memories of past lives came like that; the p Articular being reincarnated in me rises to the surface and begins acting as if it were all on its own! Once in Italy, when I was fifteen, it happened in an extraordinary way. But that time I did some research. I was in Venice with my mother and I researched in museums and archives, and I discovered my name, and the names of the other people involved. I had relived a scene in the Ducal Palace, but relived it in such a such an absolutely intense way (laughinga scene where I was being strangled and thrown into a canal!) that my mother had to hurry me out of there as fast as she could! But that experience I wrote down, so the exact memory has been kept (I didnt write down the other experiences, so the details have all faded away, but this one was noted, although I didnt include any names). The next morning I did some research and uncovered the whole story. I told it all to Thon and Madame Thon, and he also had the memory of a past life there, during the same period. And as a matter of fact, I had seen a portrait there that was the spitting image of Thon! The portrait of one of the doges. It was absolutely (it was a Titian) absolutely Thon! HIS portrait, you know, as if it had just been done.5
0 1962-07-07, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Keep on. Certain sections can be made into magazine Articles for serious readers, the few who like to think.
Just send it to your publisher, youll see. Well cut if they ask us to, and send what we cut to a magazine. Then theyll have their nice little storybook!1
0 1962-07-14, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For a while yesterday I was put in contact with the way people think, how they think. And I saw that I must be very careful; it is better to keep silent or theyll think Ive finally gone off the deep end! You know: She is getting old, theres Arteriosclerosis of the brain, she is becoming a little silly, reverting to a second childhood. I saw this, its really funny. I saw, I was shown a whole way of thinking. Ah, they think theyre intelligent, they think they know a lot!
Anyhow.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You may say, what need is there of a Samgha? Let me be free and live in every vessel; let all become one without form and let whatever must be happen in the midst of that vast formlessness. There is a truth there, but only one side of the truth. Our business is not with the formless Spirit alone; we have also to direct the movement of life. And there can be no effective movement of life without form. It is the Formless that has taken form and that assumption of name and form is not a caprice of Maya. Form is there because it is indispensable. We do not want to rule out any activity of the world as beyond our province. Politics, industry, society, poetry, literature, Art will all remain, but we must give them a new soul and a new form.
Why have I left politics? Because the politics of the country is not a genuine thing belonging to India. It is an importation from Europe and an imitation. At one time there was a need of it. We also have done politics of the European kind. If we had not done it, the country would not have risen and we too would not have gained experience and attained full development. There is still some need of it, not so much in Bengal as in the other provinces of India. But the time has come to stop the shadow from extending and to seize on the reality. We must get to the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works.
--
Then look at India. Except for some solitary giants, everywhere there is your simple man, that is, the average man who does not want to think and cannot think, who has not the least Shakti but only a temporary excitement. In India, you want the simple thought, the easy word. In Europe they want the deep thought, the deep word; there even an ordinary laborer or Artisan thinks, wants to know, is not satisfied with surface things but wants to go behind. But there is still this difference: there is a fatal limitation in the strength and thought of Europe. When it comes into the spiritual field, its thought-power can no longer move ahead. There Europe sees everything as riddlenebulous metaphysics, yogic hallucination. They rub their eyes as in smoke and can see nothing clear. Still, some effort is being made in Europe to surmount even this limitation. We already have the spiritual sensewe owe it to our forefa thersand whoever has that sense has at his disposal such Knowledge and Shakti as with one breath might blow away all the huge power of Europe like a blade of grass. But to get that Shakti one must be a worshiper of Shakti. We are not worshipers of Shakti. We are worshipers of the easy way. But Shakti is not to be had by the easy way. Our forefa thers dived into a sea of vast thought and gained a vast Knowledge and established a mighty civilization. As they went on in their way, fatigue and weariness came upon them. The force of thought diminished and with it also the strong current of Shakti. Our civilization has become an achalayatana [prison], our religion a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of religious intoxication. And so long as this sort of thing continues, any permanent resurgence of India is improbable
In Bengal this weakness has gone to the extreme. The Bengali has a quick intelligence, emotional capacity and intuition. He is foremost in India in all these qualities. All of them are necessary but they do not suffice. If to these there were added depth of thought, calm strength, heroic courage and a capacity for and pleasure in prolonged labor, the Bengali might be a leader not only of India, but of mankind. But he does not want that, he wants to get things done easily, to get knowledge without thinking, the fruits without labor, siddhi by an easy sadhana [discipline]. His stock is the excitement of the emotional mind. But excess of emotion, empty of knowledge, is the very symptom of the malady. In the end it brings about fatigue and inertia. The country has been constantly and gradually going down. The life-power has ebbed away. What has the Bengali come to in his own country? He cannot get enough food to eat or clothes to wear, there is lamentation on all sides, his wealth, his trade and commerce, his lands, his very agriculture have begun to pass into the hands of others. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and Shakti has abandoned us. We do the sadhana of Love, but where Knowledge and Shakti are not, there Love does not remain, there narrowness and littleness come, and in a little and narrow mind there is no place for Love. Where is Love in Bengal? There is more quarreling, jealousy, mutual dislike, misunderstanding and faction there than anywhere else even in India which is so much afflicted by division.
0 1962-07-25, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then at a very young age (about eight or ten), along with my studies I began to paint. At twelve I was already doing portraits. All aspects of Art and beauty, but p Articularly music and painting, fascinated me. I went through a very intense vital development during that period, with, just like in my early years, the presence of a kind of inner Guide; and all centered on studies: the study of sensations, observations, the study of technique, comparative studies, even a whole spectrum of observations dealing with taste, smell and hearinga kind of classification of experiences. And this extended to all facets of life, all the experiences life can bring, all of themmiseries, joys, difficulties, sufferings, everythingoh, a whole field of studies! And always this presence within, judging, deciding, classifying, organizing and systematizing everything.
Then conscious yoga made a sudden entry into the picture when I met Thon; I must have been about twenty-one. Lifes orientation changed, a whole series of experiences took place, with the development of the vital giving interesting occult results.
--
Is it different for men? I dont know. Sri Aurobindos case was quite special, and ap Art from him I dont see any convincing example. But generally speaking, what is most developed in a man, along with the mind, is the physical consciousness; the vital is very impulsive, practically ungoverned. Thats my experience of the hundreds and hundreds of men I have met. Theres normally a physical strength built up through games and exercises, and side by side a more or less advanced, but primarily mental development, very mental. The vital is terribly impulsive and barely organized, except in Artists, and even there. I lived among Artists for ten years and found this ground to be mostly fallow. I mingled with all the great Artists of the time, I was like a kid sister to them (it was at the turn of the century, with the Universal Exposition in 1900; and these were the leading Artists of the epoch); so I was by far the youngest, much younger than any of themthey were all thirty, thirty-five, forty years old, while I was nineteen or twenty. Well I was much more advanced in their own fieldnot in what I was producing (I was a perfectly ordinary Artist), but from the viewpoint of consciousness: observations, experiences, studies.
I am not sure, but it seems to me that the problem of consciousness ought to come first.
--
You would really need to add a play of lights, too. But nothing Artificial.
(long silence)
0 1962-07-28, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have seen that the different stages of my development occurred in twelve-year periods, though I dont recall the exact dates. The first period, from the age of five (I cant st Art earlier than five!) to about eighteen, dealt with consciousness. Then came all the Artistic and vital development, culminating in the occult development with Thon (I met Thon around 1905 or 06, I think1). Then right around this time an intensive mental development beganfrom 1908 to 1920, or a little before; but it was especially intense before coming here in 1914.
And 1920 marked the beginning of full development. Not spiritual development that had been going on from the very st Art but ACTION, the action with Sri Aurobindo. That was clearly from 1920 on; I had met Sri Aurobindo earlier, but it really began in 1920.2
0 1962-09-05, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The other things, exteriorization and so forth, are innate, just as some people are born Artists or painters or aviators. Its one of Natures special combinations. Ive known some downright stupid girls who could exteriorize remarkably well and be fully conscious of their experiences in the subtle physical or the mind or the material vital (when one is undeveloped its more often in the material vital than the subtle physical). And they would tell you all about what they saw. But incapable of yoga.
Natures fancies, I tell you.
0 1962-09-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It has even come to the point where things lit from outside seem Artificial to me. They have lost their light.
There may be a very dim and subdued lightnot bright, I mean but its self-luminous. And so the higher you rise, the more brilliant and uniform light becomes.
0 1962-10-12, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Of course, when we st Art thinking of all the zones, all the universal planes of consciousness, and that Hes way, way, way up there at the end of all that, well then it does become very far, very far indeed! (Mother laughs) But if we think of Him as being everywhere, in everything, that He is everything, that only our way of perceiving things keeps us from seeing and feeling Him, and all we have to do is this (Mother turns her hands inwards) a movement like this, a movement like that (Mother turns her hands inwards and outwards in turn), then it gets to be quite concrete: you go like this (outward gesture) and everything becomes Artificialhard, dry, false, deceptive, Artificial; you go like that (inward gesture) and all is vast, tranquil, luminous, peaceful, immense, joyous. And its merely this or that (Mother turns her hands inwards and outwards in turn). How? Where? It cant be described, but it is solelysolelya movement of consciousness, nothing else. A movement of consciousness. And the difference between the true and the false consciousness becomes more and more precise and at the same time THIN: you dont need to do great things to get out of it. Before, there used to be a feeling of living WITHIN something and that a great effort of interiorization, concentration, absorption was needed to get out of it; but now I feel its something one accepts (Mother puts her hand in front of her face like a screen), something like a thin little rind, very hardmalleable, but very hard, very dry, very thin, very thin something like a mask you put on then you go like this (gesture), and its gone.
I foresee a time when it will no longer be necessary to be aware of the mask: the mask will be so thin that we can see and feel and act through it, and it wont be necessary to put it back on.
--
No, I am incapable of speaking, I cant say anything publishable; its impossible, impossible. It seems so Artificial to me, so Artificial. And besides, it gives me a headache.
So youre the one who has to do the work. You can condense a littlea sentence here, a sentence there.
0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All those zones of Artistic creation are very high up in human consciousness, which is why Art can be a wonderful tool for spiritual progress. For this world of creation is also the world of the gods; but the gods, I am sorry to say, have absolutely no taste for Artistic creation.1 They feel absolutely no need for permanence in formsthey couldnt care less! When they want something, there it isall they have to do is want it. When they wish a p Articular surrounding or atmosphere, it takes form all by itself at their wish. They get everything the way they want it, so they feel no need for fixed forms. Man, on the other hand, who doesnt get what he wants the way he wants it, must make an effort to create forms, and thats why he progresses Art is a great means of spiritual progress.
But about those great waves of music that interest me I had the impression they must be located well above the world of thought.
0 1962-11-17, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In April 1942, when England was struggling against the Nazis and Japan, which was threatening to invade Burma and India, Churchill sent an emissary, Sir Stafford Cripps, to New Delhi with a very generous proposal which he hoped would rally India's goodwill and cooperation in the fight against the worldwide threat. In this proposal, Great Britain offered India Dominion status, as a first step towards an independent government. Sri Aurobindo at once came out of retirement to wire his adhesion to Cripps; he wired all of India's leaders, and even sent a personal messenger to Gandhi and the Indian Congress to convince them to accept this unhoped for proposal without delay. One of Sri Aurobindo's telegrams to Rajagopalachari (the future President of India) spoke of the grave danger, which no one seemed to see, of rejecting Cripps' proposal: "... Some immediate solution urgent face grave peril. Appeal to you to save India formidable danger new foreign domination when old on way to self-elimination." No one understood: "Why is he meddling?" Had it accepted Dominion status, India would have avoided the p Artition of the country in two, the Artificial creation of Pakistan, as well as the three wars that were to follow (and which we haven't heard the last of), and the blood bath that ravaged Bengal and the Punjab in 1947 at the time of the p Artition. (See in Addendum an extract from Sri Aurobindo's message on the occasion of India's Independence.)
There is another side to the story. When Nehru died, Mother said in a message of May 27, 1964: "Nehru leaves his body but his soul is ONE with the Soul of India, that lives for Eternity."
0 1962-11-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the body very distinctly feels that things are ALWAYS that way. Always that way. And that everything oh, the feeling of just how Artificial all lifes complications and problems are, and how different it could be! Thats always in the background. For example, whenever the body feels ill at ease or something isnt working right, theres always a kind of deep feeling behind that its just bad habitswhich are lingering, fading away, losing their force and becoming more and more unreal. But its its like a machine that takes time to run down.
In the other consciousness (the human consciousness), you have the joy, the excitement of the experience; that has completely gone away, absolutely. Theres neither the joy of the experience nor the wonder nor. Everything is so obvious, so obvious: thats IT. And its not something youre looking at: its LIKE THAT. Thats all, its just like that.
0 1963-03-13, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Art thou indeed so strong, O he Art,
O Soul, so free?
0 1963-08-31, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother may be alluding to the following Aphorism (141): "Nietzsche saw the superman as the lion-soul passing out of camelhood, but the true heraldic device and token of the superman is the lion seated upon the camel which stands upon the cow of plenty. If thou canst not be the slave of all mankind, thou Art not fit to be its master, and if thou canst not make thy nature as Vasishtha's cow of plenty with all mankind to draw its wish from her udders, what avails thy leonine supermanhood?" (The Rishi Vasishtha had a cow that supplied all that he needed for himself and his ashram, including armies to defend him.)
***
0 1963-09-25, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Far more difficult than what people consider purity to be! Which is something quite Artificial and false.
The last sentence I wrote in French, too (the two came together):
--
The other day, the process was less complete, but it was something similar, a first hint: K. had sent me an Article he wanted to publish somewhere with quotations from Sri Aurobindo and myself, and he wanted to make sure it was correct and he hadnt muddled it (!) In one place, I saw a comment by him (you know how people delight in wordplays when they are fully in the mind: the mind loves to play with words and contrast one sentence with another), it was in English, I am not quoting word for word, but he said that the age of religions was the age of the gods; and, naturally, as our Mr. Mind loves to play with words, it made him say that, now, the age of the gods is over and it is the age of Godwhich means he was deplorably falling back into the Christian religion without noticing it! And just as I saw his written sentence, I saw that tendency of the mind which loves it and finds it very oh, charming, such a nice turn of phrase (!) I didnt say anything, I went on to the end of his Article. Then where that sentence was I saw a little light shining: it was like a little spark (I saw that with my eyes open). I looked at my spark, and in the place of God, there was The One. So I took my pen and made the correction.
But my first translation was The All-Containing One, because it was an experience, not a thought. What I saw was The One containing all. And innocently, I wrote it down on a paper (Mother shows a little scrap of paper): The All-Containing One. But just then, I saw what looked like someone giving me a slap and telling me, Not that: you should put The One, thats all. So I wrote The One.
0 1963-12-14, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is simply the Art of putting yourself in the right place in order to be in the path of the Force.
Or else, when you are able to see things from above, you can direct concentrations and channel the Force, as it were [on people and events]. And Ive noticed (since it became a natural fact for me), Ive noticed those two categories of people (with all kinds of nuances and differences): those who are happy to receive, and who are therefore much more conscious of the moment when the Force comes IN, and those (they are generous by nature, but also dominating) who are happier when they have a feeling of giving; so they are far more conscious of the Movement when it goes out of their individuality.
0 1964-01-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are four aspects or "sides" of the universal Mother: Maheshwari (the supreme Mother), Mahakali (the warrior aspect and the aspect of love), Mahalakshmi (the aspect of harmony and beauty), and Mahasaraswati (perfection in the Arts and in work).
We give the complete passage in Addendum.
0 1964-01-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the idea has been taken up again through Khrushchev and he continues to be quite enthusiastic.2 It seems (I dont know if its quite true, because its Z [a Russian disciple] who says so) but Z sent him my Article A Dream,3 on the possibility of creating a small international center (I dont like the word international, but never mind), and Khrushchev answered, This idea is excellent, the entire world should make it a reality. Well, I dont know whether its correct, but anyway the gentleman seems to be well-disposed. And this S.G. is very intimate with the U.S. ambassador in Delhi. In brief, S.G. has sent me the new proposal the first one, I had approved it, I had even put my blessings on it, and he had gone to see Nehru: Nehru immediately called both ambassadors for a conference.4 At the time, I worked a good deal and things were moving. Now, it seems that the new president [Johnson] is, for the time being, continuing what the other did: he wont upset the apple c Art. Well see.
If it succeeds, it will give some concrete expression to the effort of transformation without violence.
--
There should be somewhere upon e Arth a place that no nation could claim as its own, a place where every human being of goodwill, sincere in his aspiration, could live freely as a citizen of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony, where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weakness and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasures and material enjoyment. In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls; education would be given not with a view to passing examinations or obtaining certificates and posts, but to enrich ones existing faculties and bring forth new ones. In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organize; everyones bodily needs would be provided for equally, and in the general organization, intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed not by increased pleasures and powers in life, but by greater duties and responsibilities. Beauty in all its Art formspainting, sculpture, music, literaturewould be accessible to all equally, the ability to share in the joys it brings being limited solely by ones capacities and not by social or financial position. For in this ideal place, money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social position. There, work would not be for earning ones living, but the means to express oneself and develop ones capacities and possibilities, while at the same time being of service to the group as a whole, which would in turn provide for everyones subsistence and field of action. In short, it would be a place where human relationships, ordinarily based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in trying to do ones best, of collaboration and real brotherhood.
The e Arth is not ready to realize such an ideal, for humanity does not yet possess either the knowledge necessary to understand and adopt it or the conscious force indispensable for its execution. This is why I call it a dream.
0 1964-02-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The photos attempt to be very Artistic. They are taken from quite unusual angles and some are very fine. On the whole, a little vulgar: too many people kissing, socks hanging in the sunthey confuse the Artistic with the uncommon, the unconventional. To be unconventional is very good, but still it could be directed towards the Beautiful rather than Anyway. I was looking at the book, turning the pages, and while looking I thought, Well, really, someone who doesnt know Paris at all would get a queer idea of it! There isnt one single picture that makes you say, Oh, thats beautiful, except a view of the Seine and also a few trees, which could as well be in the countryside. And I kept turning and turning the pages. Suddenly I saw (I had my magnifying glass to see better) a view of the banks of the Seine with the boxes of those what are they called?
The bouquinistes.1
--
Ill have to find the way to organize this new type of experience and make use of it but I need to know how it comes about! Because when I was looking at those pictures, I wasnt at all in a special state, I was looking at them somewhat superficially I was finding them hm! I saw their effort to be Artistic and I found the perspectives from which the photos were taken interesting, but thats all. The subjects except for the angler (there were more than four anglers in the book, mon petit!) and people sleeping in the street, things of that sort. And then people kissing everywhere: on chairs, on the banks of the Seine, on benches, in swings in amusement parks. And rather vulgar. But the photos, the patches of light and shadewell taken. I didnt want to tire my eyes reading those peoples literature, but it must be very modern probably there were some authors signatures! The signature alone was the portrait of the individual: pretentious, affected.
The atmosphere of Paris is unbreathable. When I returned to France, first I fell sick, and then that atmosphere
0 1964-02-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats why I let that Article be published, because otherwise You see, when I read something or when, for instance, Nolini reads me a translation, I read with the others consciousness how flat it had become! Flat, flat: all the Power was gone.
I made some discoveries of this kind on the way people understand and readvery cultured people.
--
My Article gives them a sense of something both very boring and very childishboth at once, so that crowns it all! Because the external form is very simple, of course, without literary pretensions; so it isnt exciting for the brain, not in the least (on the contrary I try to calm it down as much as possible!).
No, those who understand you best are the simple-he Arted.
0 1964-03-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And with the feeling that it was something unceasing,1 but that the consciousness [of Mother] was only changing its position because of the necessities of the work. And this change of position took place in a few minutes, quickly enough, without the sense of losing the other experience; it simply remained there, behind, in order for the work to be done outwardly in a normal way, that is, without too abrupt a change. And the consciousness seemed to revert to a sort of superficial bark: it gave exactly the impression of something hard, rather inert, very Artificial, extremely thin, dry, with just an Artificial transcription of life and that was the ordinary consciousness, the consciousness that makes you feel you are in a body.
For a very long time the body hasnt felt in the least separatenot in the least. There is even a sort of constant identification with the people around which at times is troublesome enough, but which I see as a means of action (of control and action). Ill give an example: on the 4th, the last time I saw you, the doctor left for America. He had his lunch here (I told you he was very moved); he was given a sort of little ceremony for his dep Arture. He was sitting on the floor as usual, next to me (I was seated at the table, facing the light), and they served him his lunch; he turned towards me to receive the things. He was in a state of intense emotion (nothing apparent at all; the appearance was very quiet, he didnt say or do anything extraordinary, but inwardly). At one point I looked at him to encourage him to eat, and our eyes met. Then there came into me from him such a violent emotion that I almost st Arted sobbing, can you imagine! And its always there, in the lower abdomen (really in the abdomen), that this identification with the outside world takes place. There (gesture above the he Art center), it dominates; the identification is here (gesture to the abdomen), but the Force dominates (Mother holds up her head); while here (the abdomen), it seems to be still its the lower vital, I mean the lower vital OF MATTER, the vital subdegree OF MATTER. Its on the way to transformation, this is where the work is being done materially. But all those emotions have rather unpleasant repercussions. Even, when I looked at it in detail, I came to think that there must be something analogous in you; you must be open to certain currents of force in the lower vital, and those kinds of spasms which you get must be the result. So then, the solution there is only one solution, because immediately I called, I put the Lords Presence there (gesture to the abdomen), and I saw it was extremely CONTAGIOUS. Because I had received the vibrations, they had entered straight in without meeting any obstacles; so the response had a considerable contagious power I saw it immediately: I stopped the doctors vibrations; it took me a few minutes, and everything was back in order again. Then I understood that this opening, this contagion was kept as a means of actionit isnt pleasant for the body (!), but its a means of action.
--
It [this body] wasnt much more interesting or important than many other bodiesit didnt at all have the sense of its importance. Even, in the overall vision of the Work, its present imperfections were quite simply tolerated, even accepted, not because they are unavoidable, but because the amount of concentration and exclusive attention necessary to change them does not appear to be important enough to stop or reduce the general work. Thats how it was there was a smile for lots of little things. Finally, as for the Thing (the great thing from the Artistic point of view of the material appearance, great too from the point of view of public faith, which only goes by appearances, of course, and which will be convinced only when there is an obvious transformation), it appeared to be, for the moment, at any rate, something secondary and not urgent. But there was a fairly clear perception that soon (how can I put it?) the state of being or way of being (I think they say the modus vivendi) of the body, of this fragment of terrestrial Matter, could be altered, ruled, entirely driven by the direct Will. Because it was as if ALL the illusions had fallen away one after another, and every time an illusion disappeared it produced one of those little promises that came in succession, announcing something that would come about later. So that prepared the final realization.
When I got up this morning, I had the feeling that a corner had been turned. But not at alloh, not at all!a subjective thing, not at all: a corner has been turned FOR THE E ArtH. It doesnt matter in the least if people arent aware of it.2
0 1964-03-11, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All our endeavour is to make this consciousness and this will govern our lives and action and organise all our activities. It is the way in which the Ashram has been created. Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me full charge of it (at that time there were only two rented houses and a handful of disciples) all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and each service was created not by any Artificial planning but by a living and dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress. The present difficulties come chiefly from psychological resistances in the disciples who have not been able to follow the rather rapid pace of the sadhana and the yielding to the intrusion of mental methods which have corrupted the initial working.
A growth and purification of the consciousness is the only remedy.
0 1964-03-29, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because thou Art, men yield not to their doom,
But ask for happiness and strive with fate.
0 1964-07-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
People who are quite shut up in their bag of skin, in their vital and mental ego, give you the feeling of something totally Artificial, hardhard, dry and Artificial. And exact. Thats troublesome, you feel like taking a hammer and bashing themit happens!
We publish below the letter in full.
0 1964-08-11, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Of course, very philosophical or learned people will pity you, but personally I dont care! I dont care. I am not a philosopher, I am not a scholar, I am not a savant, and I declare it very loudly: neither a philosopher nor a scholar nor a savant. And no pretension. Nor a littrateur, nor an Artist I am nothing at all. I am truly convinced of this. And its absolutely unimportant thats perfection for human beings.
There is no greater joy than to know that you can do nothing and are absolutely helpless, that youre not the one who does, and that what little is donelittle or big, it doesnt matteris done by the Lord; and the responsibility is fully His. That makes you happy. With that, you are happy.
0 1964-08-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I wanted to point out to you an Article in the Readers Digest on the structure of the cell according to the latest scientific discoveries.1 I thought it might throw light on certain aspects of your experiences. They speak in p Articular of the cells consciousness; they have discovered rather mysterious things. You would see the correspondence with your own experiences.
The question I am asking myself is whether the cells have an autonomous existence or whether they must remain aggregated in the way they are, obeying a collective consciousness.2 I do not mean the body consciousness, which is an entity; I mean: does the cell, as an individuality, have the will to remain in its present collectivity? Just as an individual willingly collaborates with a society, with an aggregate, does the individual cell have the will to remain in its aggregate, or is it only the central consciousness that has that will?
0 1965-03-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And the other day, when Nolini read me his Article, it was neutral (vague gesture to a medium height), neutral all the time, and then, suddenly, a spark of Ananda; thats what made me appreciate it. And when you read me just now that text by Y., when she expressed her experience of the sunrise, there was a little beam of light (gesture to the throat level), so I knew. A pleasant beam of lightnot Ananda, but a pleasant light here (same gesture), so I knew there was something there, that she had touched something.
And there are degrees in quality, you know, its almost infinite.
0 1965-04-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a quotation from Sri Aurobindo in which he says that the first point to be acquired is prolongation of life at willit isnt directly immortality: it is prolongation of life at will. He wrote it in the Articles on The Supramental Manifestation.
The Human Cycle, Cent. Ed. XV.252.
0 1965-06-02, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It begins with taste, but that doesnt interest me much, so I dont take notice, I dont pay attention. But a few days ago I had the experience that the quality of tastes had changed: certain things had an Artificial taste (the usual taste is an Artificial taste) while others carried in themselves a TRUE taste; so this is very clearvery clear and very precise. But its not so interesting a subject, so I am not occupied with it so much.
What struck me the most is sight. Hearing for a very, very long timeyears Ive had the feeling that when people dont think very clearly, I cant hear. But thats not quite the point: its when their consciousness isnt ALIVE in what theyre sayingits not so much a question of thought, its their consciousness that isnt ALIVE in what theyre saying; its a mental machine; then I dont understand anything at allnothing. When their consciousness is alive, it reaches me. And I have noticed, for instance, that people whom I dont hear think its because I am deaf in the ordinary way, so they st Art shoutingwhich is even worse! Then its as if they were throwing stones in my face.1
0 1965-06-14, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I must tell you that I was born in a family in which nobody smoked: my father had never smoked and neither had his brothersanyway, no one smoked. So since my early childhood, I hadnt been used to others smoking. Later, when I lived with Artists Artists smoke, of course (it seems it gives them inspiration!), but I detested the smell. I didnt say anything because I didnt want to be unpleasant, but I detested it. Then I came hereSri Aurobindo smoked. He smoked deliberately, he smoked in order to say: one can do the yoga while smoking, I say one can smoke and do the yoga, and I smoke. And he smoked. And naturally all the disciples smoked, since Sri Aurobindo smoked. For some time, I even gave them pocket money so they could buy cigars (they smoked cigarsit was ghastly!). Then I came to live in Sri Aurobindos house, we spoke freely, and one day I told him, How awful the smell of smoke is! (laughing) Its disgusting! So he said to me, Oh, you dont like the smell? Oh, no! I said, Not only that, but I had to make a yogic effort to stop it from making me feel sick! The next day, he had stopped. It was over, he never smoked again. That was kind. It wasnt on principle, it was because he didnt want to impose the smell on me. But I had never said anything: it was simply because he asked me just like that, while talking, so I told him. And when he stopped smoking, everyone had to stop toosmoking wasnt allowed anymore, since he didnt smoke anymore.
No, for those who dont smoke (laughing), others smoke is very
--
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... Thou Art his spur to greatness in his works, The whip to his yearning for eternal bliss, His poignant need of immortality. Live, Death, awhile, be still my instrument.
X.IV.666
0 1965-08-07, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Towards the end of the conversation, Satprem, who has been approached a second time about an Article for a magazine, asks for Mothers advice.)
Do you know that theyve asked me to write an Article?
Yes. Are you doing it?
--
(an Article by Satprem)
On a December morning, almost twenty years ago, on the platforms of the Gare du Nord, a youth was preparing to set off for anywhere, as long as it was as far and adventurous as possible for the time being, it was South America. And beneath the enormous clock which weighed several tons and seemed to him as weighty as Western time, this youth was repeating a curious mantra in his he Art: Sri Aurobindo-Mauthausen. Only these two words remained to live and walk with. Behind, there was a world collapsed once for all under the Austrian watchtowers. Although the watchtowers might as well have been Boulevard Montparnasseit was the same thing; another searchlight would have pierced the scenery perfectly well. And there was in that word all the force of a man who had emerged from the dead. Then this name, which did not have a very precise meaning, Sri Aurobindo, but it goes without saying that open sesames have never spoken to the headthey open the door. And there was in it all the force of a man who needs one true little thing to live.
--
Satprem's Article is published in addendum.
Savitri, XII.719.
0 1965-09-11, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Right to the end = Karachi. Sri Aurobindo, it may be recalled, repeatedly said that until the p Artition of India is abolished, "India may be seriously weakened, even crippled: civil strife may always remain possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest." It may also be recalled that Pakistan is an Artificial creation by the British, in line with the policy of "divide and rule." The Americans and the Chinese have taken up the same policy again.
Mother is referring to the continual border clashes.
0 1965-09-15a, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Maybe its one of the publishers, or maybe the man to whom you sent your Article.1
But I went there simply to get out of that hurricane: I didnt really intend to concern myself with all that, but I did; I told you, Everything is fine, everything is fine, dont worry! I rarely see you so concretely: we almost bumped into each other! That was around 3:30 in the morning. You were fast asleep, no?
--
Satprem's Article on Sri Aurobindo, which will eventually be published in the magazine Synthses.
Revolutionary unrest against the military caste. Confiscation of British and American assets.
0 1965-09-18, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Pakistan, there was a firing system of the latest American model, in which they take aim with, I dont know, electrical systems, and they can fire several thousand shots in anyway, its frightening; and shots that reach exactly where they want. Its quite an organization. Theyve become very efficient. It was given to Pakistan by the Americans. And it had to be destroyed. So one of the Indian pilots went and crashed his plane into it. Naturally, the plane crushed everythinghe too was crushed. But the installation was demolished. People here are capable of such things. If they feel what Sri Aurobindo says in this letter I have just given you, that the leader of our march is the Almighty, if they feel that way Thats what made the strength of the Japanese in the past. Thats what makes the strength of people here, once they are convinced. Thats how the Japanese took Port Arthur; there was a sort of ditch around the fortress, as there are in fortified places, and because of that they couldnt get in; well, they let themselves be killed till they were able to walk across on the bodies: the bodies made a bridge by filling up the ditch, and then they walked across.
People who are conscious that death isnt the end, that death is the beginning of something else, it gives them a strength that these Europeans cannot have.
0 1965-09-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah, but this wont do for an aphorism, its not an answer to what Sri Aurobindo says! No, I told you, I had the experience long ago. I remember, it was so lovely, so clear, so luminous, and I expressed it so well to myself (!), it would have made a very nice little Article! But now its there, behind (gesture over the shoulder), far, far behind. So I dont know what to do.
I think unless you have a question to ask (but you see the condition!), well take up our Savitri.
0 1965-10-16, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For instance, for precise problems, a decision to be made, the problem is put to me; I dont answer materially right away, I send the answer like this (gesture of inner communication), then I wait. Well, it has happened (rather rarely, but anyway it has happened) that the person wrote to me, I have received the answer, its this and that. Then I say, Thats good. But when I write words and because I write words, they say the same thing, it doesnt prove anything. Its an Artificial obedience.
And I am not talking about those who immediately feel, Oh, Mother is wrong, I am not even talking about those; I am talking about those who truly have goodwill, but who are up to here (gesture to the mouth), even up to here (gesture to the forehead) fully in Ignorance and Falsehood, and who cover that with the cloak of a knowledge they have learned but dont even feel.
0 1965-11-23, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its only when you have touched, seen somehow or other, and had a contact with the true Light that you can discern the Vital, and you realize that its absolutely like lighting effects on a theater stage: theatrical effects, an Artificial light. But otherwise people are bedazzledits dazzling, its magnificent, and so they are misled. Its only when you have SEEN and had a contact with the Truth Ah! then it makes you smile.
Its showing off, but you have to know the truth in order to discern the showing off.
0 1965-11-27, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There was the whole humanity that isnt quite animal anymore, that has benefited from mental development and created a certain harmony in its lifea vital, Artistic, literary harmony and the vast majority of which live satisfied with life. They have caught a sort of harmony and live in it a life as it exists in a civilized milieu, that is to say, somewhat cultured, with refinement in taste, refinement in habits. And this whole life has a sort of harmony in which they find themselves at ease, and unless something catastrophic happens to them, they live happy and content, satisfied with life. Those may be attracted (because they have taste, they are intellectually developed), they may be attracted to the new forces, the new things, the future life; for instance, they may mentally, intellectually become disciples of Sri Aurobindo. But they dont at all feel the need to change materially, and if they were to be forced to, it would be first of all premature and unjust, and it would quite simply create a great disorder and would upset their lives quite unnecessarily.
It was very clear.
0 1966-01-22, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The interesting point is that the experience arose from my encounter with Purani last night. I met Purani in a certain world and he was in a certain state, like the one I have just described, but then the difference between Purani as he was here and Purani as he is now suddenly, it was like a key. I spoke to him, he spoke to me, saying, Oh, now I am so happy, so happy! And it was in that state that I lived this morning for more than an hour and a half. Afterwards, I am obliged to come back to a state I find Artificial, but which cant be helped because of others, the contact with others and things and the innumerable amount of things to be done. But still, the experience remains in the background. And you are left with a sort of amused smile at all the complications of life the state in which people are is the result of a choice, and individually the freedom of choice is there, but they have FORGOTTEN it. Thats what is so interesting!
At the same time, I saw the whole picture of human knowledge (because when those states are present, all human realizations, all human knowledge come like a panorama in front of the new state and are put back in their proper placewhen an experience comes, its always, always as though retrospective), and I saw all the theories, all the beliefs, all the philosophical ideas, how they were connected to the new state. Oh, it was such fun!
0 1966-02-23, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there is a sequel to the story. He came afterwards. Once he was formed again, he came; he stayed near me and told me, I have come because it was my desire and intention to go to India with you, and I want to accomplish it. And he came with me; when I left for India (the second time), he came with me. And long after my returnlong after, when Pavitra came hereone night, I suddenly saw F. and Pavitra embracing each other! Just like that. Then F. entered him. And the interesting thing is that Pavitra had no liking for poetry and very little interest in Art, and after that boy united with him, he began having a very special understanding of poetry and showing interest in Art! He really felt a change in him (I hadnt told him what had happened).
I have seen several such cases, but that one was so clear! So clear, so precise. And without the collaboration of active thought I wasnt thinking about it at all: one night I saw them like that, Pavitra having come out of his body, and the other leaving (he was always in repose in my aura), he left my aura, they embraced, and then one entered the other.1
0 1966-03-04, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like an Artist, but an Artist shaping himself, and who makes one attempt, two attempts, three attempts, as many attempts as necessary, then ends up with something complete enough in itself and receptive enough to be able to adapt to new manifestations, to the needs of new manifestations, so that it wouldnt be necessary to draw everything back in order to mix it all together again and put it all out again. But now its now more than that, and, as I said, a question of choice. In other words, the manifestation was made for the delight of objectification (the delight or interest, or anyway), and once what has been shaped has become plastic enough, receptive enough, supple enough and vast enough to be constantly molded by the new forces that manifest, theres no longer any need to undo everything in order to redo everything.
The curve showed itself along with an adage: What begins must end. That seems to be one of those human mental constructions that arent necessarily true.
0 1966-04-27, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I saw that, it was so amusing! I saw it all. Oh, it was an extraordinary experience. All of a sudden I was outside and, I cant say above (but it was above), but outside the whole human creation, outside everything, everything man has created in all the worlds, even in the most ethereal worlds. And seen from there, it was I saw that play of all the possible conceptions men have had of God and of the way to approach God (what they call God), and also of the invisible worlds and the gods, all that: one thing came upon another, one upon another, it all went by (as its written in Savitri), one thing upon another went by (gesture as if on a screen), one upon another with its Artificiality, its inadequacy to express the Truth. And with such precision! A precision so accurate that you felt in anguish, because the impression was of being in a world of nothing but imagination, of imaginative creation, but in nothing real, there wasnt a feeling of of touching the Thing. To such a point that it became yes, a terrible anguish: But then, what? What? Whats truly TRUE and outside all that we can conceive?
And it came. It was like this: (gesture of self-abandon) the total, complete self-annulment, annulment of that which can know, of that which tries to knoweven surrender isnt an adequate word: a sort of annulment. And suddenly it ended with a slight movement as a child could have who doesnt know anything, doesnt try to know anything, doesnt understand anything, doesnt try to understand but who abandons himself. A slight movement of such simplicity, such ingenuousness, such extraordinary sweetness (words cant express it): nothing, just this (gesture of self-abandon), and instantaneously, THE Certitude (not expressed, lived), the lived Certitude.
0 1966-06-02, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Have you heard of dolphins speech? Havent you seen those Articles? They have discovered that dolphins speak an Articulate speech, but with a much more extensive range than ours: it rises much higher and goes much lower. And its far more varied. And they frequently talk (it seems it can be recorded), they talk but people dont understand what they say. And then, they were given our speech to listen tothey imitate it and make fun of it! They laugh! (Mother looks very amused)
I saw some photos, they look nice, but the photos arent enough. They have, as porpoises do, rows of small teeth (it seems they arent ferocious at all, they never fly into a fury). They talk and talk! And they know how to listen. And then, they imitate and laugh, as if they found us extremely ridiculous.
0 1966-06-11, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its because when one st Arts writing, one enters the mental atmosphere, the human mental atmosphere. And the passage is almost imperceptible, theres such a habit of thinking, of expressing oneself, of feeling within a human mental atmosphere which is nevertheless, in comparison with the human individual, something very vast, very complex, very supple (and those who move about in it already have the sense of a higher intelligence, an exceptional understanding and so on), but from the standpoint of the Truth, its so Artificial and CONVENTIONAL! Its a very durable convention, which undergoes slight changes, alterations according to the times, the ages, but which has some sort of permanence. I feel it as (Mother makes a circular gesture around her head) a globe one is inside, luminous but so Artificial!
This morning, I had, for instance, a whole series of experiences regarding the notion of selfishness. I remember that the first time someone said to Sri Aurobindo in my presence (many years ago) about someone else, Oh, he is selfish, Sri Aurobindo smiled and answered, Selfish? But the most selfish of all is the Divine, since everything belongs to Him and He sees everything in relation to Himself! I found it rather daring! And this morning (strangely, just this morning; its not the first time, either), I suddenly felt how false that notion of selfishness is and that sort of reprobation of the selfish, with, at the same time, all the shades of leniency, understanding, how false all that is, that whole world, how rigid and outside the Truth. Outside the Truth, not that its opposite would be true, no, thats not the point! Its that sort of moral-mental notion, which is such a self-evident affair that nobody questions ithow far, far away it is from the Truth.
--
But I feel that Artificiality constantly.
Yes.
Constantly. But I dont know, I am waiting for, hoping for something that will be pure or true. But I constantly feel that Artificiality.
Thats right.
0 1966-06-15, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Maybe what you want to write is very human? I mean, very much in the human consciousness: the human reactions, human perceptions. Because if thats the case I find it so useless, futile, uninteresting, absurd, and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, untrue, false. So then, maybe I am responsible! I find it sickening, you know, now that there is that sort of sweetness a sweetness Its not drowsy, it has nothing to do with inertia; its a sort of (same gesture of a pendulum), its like letting oneself flow along, but on a luminous stream. So, ever since this has been there, all human stories, all their stories in all fields, from politics to Artistic creation and all that, oh, I find it terribly futile and so ridiculously agitated.
My idea (if I have one), and what makes me persist in writing, is that all that I have said in an intellectual way, which appeals to peoples intellectual consciousness, Id like to say it in a deeper way, which is a rhythm (people call it poetry, but as for me I dont understand a thing about poetry). What Id like is to express an inner rhythm, to touch another layer of the being, deeper than those things of the intellect. The Adventure of Consciousness appeals to peoples intellectual consciousness, its to make them understand. But what Id like is to touch something else. To say the same thing with an inner rhythm images.
0 1966-07-06, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
119If when thou Art doing great actions and moving giant results, thou canst perceive that thou Art doing nothing, then know that God has removed His seal from thy eyelids.
120If when thou sittest alone, still and voiceless on the mountain-top, thou canst perceive the revolutions thou Art conducting, then hast thou the divine vision and Art freed from appearances.
121The love of inaction is folly and the scorn of inaction is folly; there is no inaction. The stone lying inert upon the sands which is kicked away in an idle moment, has been producing its effect upon the hemispheres.
0 1966-07-23, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Were still receiving a number of letters because of the Article in Plante, or from people who have read your book. And there are lots of them who want to come here! Thats more serious! But anyway, we send them literature. We tell most of them that they have to prepare themselves. And I direct a large number towards Auroville; maybe thats the essential raison dtre of Auroville.
***
0 1966-07-27, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, to the body consciousness it seems long. Up above, of course, there is a smile, but for the body And strangely enough, there isnt in the body that joy of the memory of the experience. You have the joy of the memory of the experiences up above, but here, its not like that! Its not that. The body might say, Its no use for me to remember: I want to have the thing. Because wherever the mind comes in, the memory is charming, but here, its not like that. Its not like that: on the contrary, it intensifies the need to be, the aspiration, the need. And life looks like something so stupid, false, Artificial, meaningless, without Whats all this nonsense we constantly live in! And yet, when That was there, nothing was destroyed, everything remained, but it was something else altogether.
Later (Mother seems about to say something, then stops her self) later.
--
You remember, I dont know if it was in a letter or an Article, Sri Aurobindo spoke of the manifestation of divine Love; he said, Truth will have to be established first, otherwise there will be catastrophes. I understand that very well.
But its a long time in coming! (Mother laughs)
0 1966-11-03, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, yes, yes, I know that Article.
A $ 200,000 reward has been offered to anyone on this e Arth who can give some scientific proof of a soul of a human body which leaves at death. This was found in the will of James Kidd, an Arizona miner who died in 1951. Lawyers executing the will claim that if no real scientific proof is submitted the money will go to any research institute aimed at proving the existence of the human soul.
--
I was asked the question (by someone who sent me the Article in the hope I would answer), I said, No! They arent ready for the answer; let them do their homework first, then well answer them.
They are ignorant people who want to be taught things the ready-cooked dinner! (Laughing) That wont do.
0 1966-11-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There, the problem comes up again. Because there are various detailed experiences (in tiny details), detailed experiences of different attitudes of consciousness to find out which of them is effective. Its a whole field of study. Its microscopic, of course, but extremely interesting. And then, the answer is always the same; its so lovely: When you forget that you are, when there only remains the Lord, all difficulties instantly disappear. Instantly: the previous second, the difficulty was there; the next second, gone. But its not something that can be done Artificially; its not some mental or personal will to take this attitude: it must be spontaneous. And when its spontaneous, then all difficulties INSTANTLY disappear.
Stop existing the Lord alone exists.
0 1966-12-21, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats how it is. So then, once its objectified on paper, you can become aware of the relationship between the pressure you received and the things you wrote, which have varying qualities. When, for instance, you read me those few pages, with certain things I saw the Light behind; with others, it was like a horizontal origin or will (horizontal gesture at forehead level), and it was very pretty, very fine (you understand, I am not looking at it from the literary standpoint at all, or even the standpoint of the beauty of the form, thats not it). Its the quality of the vibration in whats written. And while you were reading to me, I felt the two origins, and I felt a sort of conflict between what came like this (gesture from above) and what came out of habit, like that (horizontal gesture to the forehead): it was especially an old habit, something that came from the past and belonged to a mental, Artistic, literary region (all that likes the form, likes certain emotions, certain expressions, all that). And it all constituted a horizontal world that exerted a pressure to be expressed, mostly out of habit, but also with a sort of will to be, a will to last. The other way was a Light falling and expressing itself quite naturallyspontaneously, effortlessly, and UNCONCERNED WITH THE EXTERNAL FORM. And that was much more direct in its expression. But of course, the distinction isnt clear-cut, its not easy to say, Oh, this comes from here (gesture to a p Articular level), oh, that comes from there (gesture to another level). But there is a movement above and another below.
So I think the sadhana would consist in sifting it out, or rather in developing a sensitivity such that the difference would become clear, quite perceptible, so it would no longer be the mind that chose and said, This is all right, that isnt. There would be a spontaneous adherence to what is clothed in this light from above and a rejection of what isnt. The sadhana would consist in developing this sensitivity by separating yourself from the old movement, by taking the old movement outside you.
0 1967-01-28, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, the man who is to write an extensive Article on India in Plante.
So then, whats this gentleman like?
0 1967-02-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And after all, what we want we know that we need, not an Artificially new language, but something supple enough to be able to adapt to the needs of a new CONSCIOUSNESS; and thats probably how that language will emerge, from a number of old languages, through the elimination of habits.
Whats specific to each language (ap Art from a few differences in words) is the order in which ideas are presented: the construction of sentences. The Japanese (and especially the Chinese) have solved the problem by using only the sign of the idea. Now, under the influence from outside, they have added phonetic signs to build a sentence; but even now the order in the construction of the ideas is different. Its different in Japan and different in China. And unless you FEEL this, you can never know a foreign language really well. So we speak according to our very old habit (and basically its more convenient for us simply because it comes automatically). But when I receive, for instance, its not even a thought: its Sri Aurobindos formulated consciousness; then, there is a sort of progressive approximation of the expression, and sometimes it comes very clearly; but very often its a spontaneous mixture of French and English forms and I feel it is something else trying to be expressed. At times (it follows the notation), it makes me correct something; at other times it comes perfectly wellit depends. Oh, it depends on the limpidity. If you are very tranquil, it comes very well. And there, too, I see its not really French and not really English. Its not so much the words (words are nothing) as the ORDER in which things come up. And when afterwards I look at it objectively, I see its in p Art the order in which they come in French, and in p Art the order in which they come in English. And the result is a mixture, which is neither one language nor the other, and endeavours to express what might be called a new way of consciousness.
--
The ideal is to have this suppleness and receptivity and surrender, that is, so total an acceptance of the Influence that no matter what comes the instrument adapts itself instantly to express it naturally, spontaneously and effortlessly. With everything, of course: with the plastic Arts, with music, with writing.
(silence)
The nature (of Mother) was rather shy, and as a matter of fact, there wasnt much confidence in the personal capacity (although there was the sense of being able to do anything, if the need arose). Till the age of twenty or twenty-one I spoke very little, and never, never anything like a speech. I wouldnt take p Art in conversations: I would listen, but speak very little. Then I was put in touch with Abdul Baha (the Bahai), who was then in Paris, and a sort of intimacy grew between us. I used to go to his gatherings because I was interested. And one day (when I was in his room), he said to me, I am sick, I cant speak; go and speak for me. I said, Me! But I dont speak. He replied, You just have to go there, sit quietly and concentrate, and what you have to say will come to you. Go and do it, you will see. Well then (laughing), I did as he said. There were some thirty or forty people. I went and sat in their midst, stayed very still, and then I sat like that, without a thought, nothing, and suddenly I st Arted speaking. I spoke to them for half an hour (I dont even know what I told them), and when it was over everybody was quite pleased. I went to find Abdul Baha, who told me, You spoke admirably. I said, It wasnt me! And from that day (I had got the knack from him, you understand!), I would stay like that, very still, and everything would come. Its especially the sense of the I that must be lost thats the great Art in everything, for everything, for everything you do: for painting, for (I did painting, sculpture, architecture even, I did music), for everything, but everything, if you are able to lose the sense of the I, then you open yourself to to the knowledge of the thing (sculpture, painting, etc.). Its not necessarily beings, but the spirit of the thing that uses you.
Well, I think it should be the same thing with language. One should be tuned in to someone in that way, or through that someone to something still higher: the Origin. And then, very, very passive. But not inertly passive: vibrantly passive, receptive, like that, attentive, letting that come in and be expressed. The result would be there to see. As I said, we are limited by what we know, but that may be because were still too much of a person; if we could be perfectly plastic it might be different: there have been instances of people speaking in a language they didnt know, consequently
0 1967-03-04, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother will henceforth stop her "Comments on the Aphorisms," preferring to let her experience flow freely outside the Artificial framework of a "commentary." In 1969, at a disciple's instance, She will briefly resume these comments and answer questions in a few written lines.
The following sentence was added by Mother afterwards.
0 1967-04-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are other, very interesting examples. Theres a Burmese (you may have heard of this) who has just received a peace prize. He has written an Article (he is Burmese, I dont know which language he wrote it in, but it has been published in French in a Swiss newspaper), in which he says what everybody knows, but what everybody forgets too: that if all the money wasted on preparing means of destruction were used for the progress of human well-being, we could work wonders. And he adds (I cant quote him exactly): for that to be possible, mennations and menmust stop distrusting and fearing each other, and live in the sense of unity. And he says, if, for that, HUMAN NATURE HAS TO CHANGE, its high time it changed and we must all work for that to happen.
I am extremely happy to hear this. Here is a man who has caught the true thing.2
0 1967-05-17, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont know if you would be interested in this Ive read an Article on the electric power of cells.1
Oh!
0 1967-06-03, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I saw Y. on the 31st. She stayed for about an hour and told me of her hopes: she sees the possibility of a sort of world television (I dont know how that would be arranged), with a telephone, and there would be a central office with a collection of answers to all possible questionseach question answered by someone eminent or qualified. The result would be the organization of a universal educationwell, terrestrial that would really be an education for all countries, in which the knowledge and best qualities of every country in the Artistic, literary and scientific fields would be gathered in a kind of transmitting centre, and all you would have to do would be to get into communication with it. So then, instead of having more or less incapable teachers to teach what they also know more or less, you would have the answer to every question, the most competent and best answer. Thus there would really be all over the e Arth an education that would be the best possible, from which everyone would receive only what he wants; you wouldnt have to attend classes, a number of useless classes, in order to catch the little you want to know: you would have it just by getting into communication with the centre; you would ask for such and such a number and would get your answer.
If it could be realized, it would be very good. It means that the most beautiful works of Art, the most beautiful teachings, all the best of what humanity is GOING to produce, would be collected and within reach of all those who had a television. There would be the image along with the explanation, or the text or speech. A kind of imposing central building where everything would be gathered. I found it rather attractive. I told her that we would have that in Auroville (not the central office: just a receiving set). She said that instead of teachers who teach poorly what they know, there would be the best teaching on each subject. (I didnt ask her WHO would select those people that remains the somewhat delicate point.) But I found the idea very attractive. She said things are moving in that direction.
Yes, but its still a kind of encyclopedia.
0 1967-06-21, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
See Satprem's Article in Addendum.
Bangladesh was born four years later, in December 1971.
0 1967-06-24, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As soon as its said, it becomes Artificial.
Its as if, in order to replace that habit, there was a kind of effort to create another one(!) which is only an approximation. Does that state of consciousness, that way of being, that way of existing, reacting, expressing, does it strive towards the Divine Manifestation? Is it in conformity with the tendency towards the Divine Manifestation? The thought is silent, immobile, so the imagination doesnt function (all that is deliberate), and the movement is trying to be as sincere and spontaneous as possible under the influence of the divine Presence. Words distort too much.
0 1967-06-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But as soon as one tries to explain it, there comes a sort of principle of Artificiality, and its no longer the thing.
It was there, oh, for (this morning, in detail) for more than an hour (what can I call it?) the substitution of one kind of vibration by another. And on the whole, something simply harmonious, a great simplicity, a great harmony.
0 1967-07-12, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That screaming soprano was quite simply abominable. Even Schuberts music, even Haydns trio seemed to me Artificial.
I can no longer listen to music.
0 1967-07-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That I can quite understand! Its so Artificial.
You know, I have no memory left at all, only the consciousness, and to the consciousness thats meaningless!
0 1967-07-22, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Wait, theres something else again. Oh, poor K., he held examinations (theyre out of their minds with their exams!), he held examinations on a text or a subject he had dictated to the students in his class. In other words, they had the answer quite ready. Two of the boys (one of whom K. finds very intelligen the is, moreover and has a liking for, while he doesnt like the other) were late, and K. asked the boy he doesnt like to bring to him at home the result of their work. He brought it. K. read it, and to one of the questions, the two boys answers were not quite identical but extremely similar. It was precisely the subject K. had dictated to them, so it was natural enough that the answers should be similar. K. felt right away that the boy had copied from the other, and told him so! The boy lost his temper and spoke to him rather rudely. So K. writes to tell me the whole story in his own way, and the boy writes to tell me the whole story, in his own way, moreover expressing regret that he was rude to his teacher. But K. remains convinced that he copied. So, a flood of letters Finally I wrote to K., Send me the two texts, I will see (not see with my eyes, but like that, feeling the thing). The boy did NOT copy. But to me, its far worse, because it means K. made a mental formation with wordswords put in a certain order and stuffed it into their brains. And they repeat it parrot fashionnaturally, it bears an extraordinary similarity to his teaching. Finally, K. told me, If I accept that the boy didnt copy, I am obliged to give him a very good mark, which I cant do! (Mother laughs) And he asks me, What should I do? I replied yesterday evening: There is a very simple way out: cancel the exam. Take all the papers, tie them into a bundle, put them away in your cupboard, and pretend it never existed and in future, no more exams! And at the end of the year, when you have to give marks to the students, well, instead of using such an Artificial method, you will be obliged to observe attentively, follow the childs inner development, have a deeper contact with him (Mother laughs mockingly), and know if he has really understood or not! Then you will be able to give marks instead of basing yourself on the parrot-like repetition of something they have learned without understanding. And I sent that. So now, theyre in a fix! (Mother laughs) I find it so funny, its very amusing!
They had to hold a teachers meeting to face up to my answer! (Mother laughs) I upset the whole School!
0 1967-08-12, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Islam was a return towards sensation, beauty, harmony in the form, and the legitimization of sensations and joy in beauty. From a higher viewpoint, it wasnt of a very superior quality, but from a vital viewpoint, it was extremely powerful, and thats what gave them so much power to spread, to appropriate, to seize, to dominate. But what they did is very beautifulall their Art is magnificent, magnificent! It was a flowering of beauty. Then there were othersit all came one after the other. And every religion came as a stage in the development and the relationship with the Divine, to lead the consciousness towards a union which is a totality and not a removal from a whole reality so as to obtain another. The need for totality, completeness, is what caused those religions to come like that, one after another.
Seen in that light, its very interesting.
0 1967-08-26, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now that girl was a true Artist and a great intelligence, so I had the example. When she was awake, she understood wonderfully; and she herself was furious, but she didnt have she didnt have the power to get free of the influence on her subconscient.
She was far more intelligent than Mrs. Z, theres no comparison. She was a great Artist.
What should I do? Should I attempt something? I am like an intermediary, you understand. Or should I put it to her bluntly, but with consciousness and force, that she is a prisoner and I really cannot do anything for her?
0 1967-09-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Pope, in an Article published here last night, has said his journey to India in 1964 was the revelation of an unknown world.
The Osservatore Romano published in an Article excerpts from a forthcoming book of conversations with the Pope by a lifelong friend, the French philosopher and academician, Jean Guitton.
I saw, as is said in the Apocalypse, a limitless crowd, a multitude, an enormous welcome. In those thousands of faces I read, stronger than curiosity, a kind of indescribable sympathy, the Pope said.
0 1967-10-11, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And that was the Artistic constructionmental, Artisticwhich was more beautiful than reality. Thats it, the guiding idea of the person in question. Thats it you see; Isnt this more beautiful than real nature? There.
It was very beautiful, a beautiful thing, but its the mental fossilization of the Thing. It was very interestingunexpected, I didnt expect to see that: a shape of a coiled snake, in bronze, with bronze inlays, but magnificently wrought! And the burning lamps, the burning light superior to reality: Isnt this superior?
0 1967-10-19, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
On the e Arth! A humorist wrote an Article in which the Americans had reached the moon, and while they were looking around, they suddenly saw people coming towards them: Theyre Moonlings! They couldnt understand each other (they could speak to each other but couldnt understand); but one of them spoke English and other languages, and so they discovered that the Moonlings were Russians! That was very funny.
Well, I dont know very well, I read the Gospel long ago, but I dont remember, I didnt know a great battle was announced in it. I know they announced the Last Judgment when all the people who were buried will rise and appear before the Lord God seated in his armchair (Mother laughs), who will tell them whether they are (Laughing) He will put some on one side and others on the other side! I am not exaggerating, thats how its written.
0 1967-10-25, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, I see quite clearly that they dont believe in it, there is no one who feels. So does it? And the concrete materialization of the spirit of Auroville hasnt taken place yet, it doesnt exist, there isnt in the e Arth atmosphere a formation of the spirit of Auroville, which is a spirit. (Mother remains absorbed for a long time) At bottom it is: The Art of building unity out of complexity. Without uniformity, you understand: unity through harmony in complexity, with each thing in its place.
Its very difficult.
0 1967-12-20, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the interesting p Art is that formulating it in words makes it sound Artificialits much more sincere, much truer, much more spontaneous than anything expressed or expressible by the mind. No formula can render the sinceritysimplicity, sincerity, spontaneity, something uncalculatingof the material movement. There was a time when expressing or formulating caused a very unpleasant sensation, like putting something Artificial on something spontaneously true; and that unpleasantness was cured only, to begin with, by a higher knowledge that all that is formulated must be surpassed. For instance, every experience expressed or described CALLS FOR a new progress, a new experience. In other words, it hastens the movement. That has been a consolation, because in fact, with the old sensation of something very stable and solid and immobile because of inertia (a past inertia, which is now being transformed but has left marks), because of that inertia there is a tendency to prefer things to be solid; so there is a thrill at being forced to No, no! No rest, no halt, go on!f Arther and f Arther and f Arther on When an experience has been very fruitful and highly pleasant, let us say, when its had a great force and a great effect, the first movement is to say, We wont talk about that, well keep it. Then after comes, Well say it in order to go f Arther onto go f Arther on, ever f Arther, ever f Arther.
There is a stability in the resolve and in the aspiration, a stability that can be found nowhere as much as here (Mother strikes the ground). Thats a characteristic of Matter. And you know, when it has given itself and has faith, it becomes so stable, so constant, and the joy, that sort of widening, of luminous expansionit becomes such a perpetual need that in no other p Art of the being has it ever been like that. Its something ESTABLISHED. And established effortlessly, established spontaneously, naturally, normally. So we can foresee that when this Matter will become truly divinetruly divineits manifestation will be infinitely more complete, more perfect in the details, and more stable than anywhere else.
0 1967-12-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats what weve said. The industries will p Articipate actively, they will contri bute. If they are industries producing Articles that arent in constant need and are therefore in quantities or numbers too great for the townships own use that will be sold outsidethose industries must naturally p Articipate through money. And I take the example of food: those who produce food will give the township what it needs (in proportion to what they produce, naturally), and it is the townships responsibility to feed everyone. That means people wont have to buy their food with money, but they will have to earn it.
Its a kind of adaptation of the Communist system, but not in a spirit of levelling: according to everyones capacity, his position (not a psychological or intellectual one), his INNER position.
0 1968-02-17, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The city of love is probably not going to be understood as it should be. You know, the magazine Plante is sending Mr. D. to write an Article on Auroville; well, I saw this D. a year ago when he came here, and hes precisely a great adept of this yoga of sexuality.2 I had a whole talk with him, a talk so heated that afterwards, I got a sort of revelation and wrote a whole letter on the problem of sexuality in yoga. But the man reeks with this business of sex. He is sent by Plante. So if they show him this, the city of love
Its troublesome.
0 1968-04-06, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some Articles have appeared in newspapers about Aurovilles foundation, for instance with the theme, A utopia on the way to realization. So then, there are those who tell you, Youll never succeed! Their argument is, They are human beings and they will remain human thats where theyre wrong. Human nature cannot be changed, thats the basis on which they tell you, You wont succeed. Therefore the only thing needed is not only to accept and to want the future, but to adhere to the will for transformation and progress. As a general formula, thats quite fine.
But you see, with drugs, for instancetake chloroform used for operations: well, on every individual chloroform has different effects (they dont accept that in theory, but its a fact). We have S. here, who was an anesthetist, and the upshot of his experience is that it has a different effect on everyone. Some it hurls into unconsciousness (the large majority, I think), but in certain cases, on the contrary, people are thrown into another consciousness.
0 1968-04-10, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As this vision grows clearer Its a long, long time, years and years, since the sense of possession went away; thats childishness, its nothingits so silly! Will you tell me what pleasure a man can take in keeping heaps of papers in a box or in his wall! A real pleasure he cant have. The height of pleasure is that of the miser who goes and opens his box to look at it thats not much! Some people love to spend, they love to possess and spend; thats different, they are generous natures, but unregulated, unorganized. But the joy of enabling all TRUE needs, all NECESSITIES to express themselves, thats good. Its like the joy of turning an illness into good health, a falsehood into truth, a suffering into joy, its the same thing: turning an Artificial and stupid need, which doesnt correspond to anything natural, into a possibility which becomes something quite naturala need for so much money to do this and that which needs to be done, to set right here, repair there, build here, organize there thats good. And I understand one may enjoy being the transmitting channel for all that and bring money just where its needed. It must be the true movement in people who enjoy (thats when it becomes stupid selfishness) who need to hoard.
The combination of the need to hoard and the need to spend (both of them ignorant and blind), the two combined can make for a clear vision and a utilization as useful as possible. Thats good.
--
Someone had written to Mother, "I want my money to be used exclusively to conquer the causes of our sufferings and misery." Mother had replied, "That is what we are working towards here, but not in the Artificial way of the philanthropists, who only deal with the outward effects. We want to eliminate forever the CAUSE of suffering, by divinizing matter through the integral transformation."
Mother means socialism or communism.
0 1968-05-11, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(A disciple has written an Article on the Ashram's future in which she said in p Articular, "The Ashram will become an occult center, a select collectivity....")
I am not at all anxious for advertisement or publicity for the Ashram. Its not necessary at all.
0 1968-06-15, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You too? Why? Its very pretty. So I dont know why. It gives the impression of an Artificial adoration!
***
0 1968-07-03, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Externally the provinces of India are very different in character, tendencies, culture, as well as in language, and any attempt to unify them Artificially could only have disastrous results.
But her soul is one, intense in her aspiration towards the spiritual truth, the essential unity of the creation and the divine origin of life, and by uniting with this aspiration the whole country can recover a unity that has never ceased to exist for the superior mentality.
0 1968-11-06, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theyre worse. Ive known both, seen both: the Protestants are worse. They are much more theyre hard. Very hard. They did away (laughing) with all that was Artistic in the Catholic religion! Theyve turned it into something
Its mental moralizing.
0 1969-01-18, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"It would seem that the most compelling, evident aspect, which probably will be the first to manifestprobablywill be the aspect of Power more than the aspect of Joy and the aspect of Truth. For a new race to be established on e Arth, it would necessarily have to be protected from the other terrestrial elements so as to survive, and the protection is in the power (not an Artificial power external and false, but the true Power, the victorious Will). We may therefore think that the supramental action, even before it becomes an action of harmonization and illumination, of joy, of beauty, will be an action of power, so as to give protection. Naturally, for this action of power to be truly effective, it would have to be founded on Knowledge and Truth and Love and Harmony; but those things could manifestvisibly, little by littleonce the ground, so to speak, had been prepared by the action of a sovereign will and power."
Questions and Answers, December 18, 1957.
0 1969-01-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Arthme Fayard.2
It will have to appear in several volumes.
0 1969-01-29, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theyve asked me for Articlesnot they, others. I said, What on e Arth can I say! It doesnt come, I am not interested.
Oh, theyve asked you
--
So I am constantly asked for messages (not Articles because I no longer write any), but Y wants me to see her and to note down what I will tell her. But I know very well that everything I will say will be completely distorted.
One would like to be able to keep a little quiet.
0 1969-02-08, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But if its described as it can be described, with words following each other, it becomes like F.s text on Auroville: flat, Artificial, devoid of life.
For the moment, the human means are inadequate. What will the superhuman means be? I dont know. But the human means are inadequate.
--
Organization is a discipline of action, but for Auroville we aspire to go beyond organizations, which are arbitrary and Artificial. We want an organization that is the expression of a higher consciousness working for the manifestation of the Truth of the Future.
3) Until we have a common consciousness and the true and correct way of working collectively is in operation, what should we do?
0 1969-02-15, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats something strange: all human qualities and faults look like childishnessfoolishness. Strange. And its not a thought: its a concrete sensation. Like a lifeless substance; all ordinary things are like a substance lacking lifeTRUE life. Artificial and false. Its strange.
Its not so much in others, thats not it: its the inner training. And this true Consciousness, this true Attitude is something so tre-mendous-ly strong, powerful, in such smiling PEACE! So smiling, incapable of getting angry thats absolutely impossibleso smiling, so smiling and watching.
0 1969-02-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, words are useless, I dont know what to do, I dont know if its because I have too few of them, or because they really All mental expression seems Artificial; it gives a sense of a lifeless coating. Its odd. And the entire language belongs to that region. When I want to say that experience With some people, I very clearly, very easily make contact in the silence, and I tell them infinitely more things than I could with words; its more supple, more precise, deeper I might say that words, sentences, written things strike me as a two-dimensional image (the ordinary image), while this contact, which I can have with people as soon as I stop speaking, adds a depth and something truer (its not wholly true, far from it, but its truer), and there is a depth.
(silence)
--
In the ordinary functioning of life, there is the sense of things are fine, which in people is expressed by a sensation of good health, and on the other hand, disequilibrium, disorganization; well, now that opposition appears WHOLLY Artificial: theres only a continuous movement, with transitions from one type of vibration to another type of vibration whose origin is (what should I say? Its not deeper, not higher, and truer gives only one side, its not that), anyway, superior in some waywords are idiotic, quite idiotic. Thats how it is, how it is all the time [this continuous movement]. So then, you are drawn to one place or another: its simply the play of our consciousness. But to an all-seeing consciousness, its a continuous and overall movement towards yes, thats it, its for this inert Inconscient to become the absolute Conscient. I dont know, I have a vague impression that theyve discovered that a certain intensity of movement (that is, what we call speed) results in a sense of immobility I have a vague impression that Ive been told that. But it corresponds to something. What Ive called peace in the message, that peace (I hesitate to speak because words are stupid), that peace, whats felt as peace, is a paroxysm of movement, but a general movementharmonious, general.
As soon as one speaks, it becomes a caricature.
0 1969-03-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother may be referring to Artificial insemination.
Conversation of 15 February 1969: "There is something wholly independent of our aspiration, our will, our effort... wholly independent. And this something appears to be absolutely all-powerful."
0 1969-03-26, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
These last few days, Mothers presence has revealed itself in my being and activities, stronger and more VISIBLE. In the polls commission, of which you know I am a member at the Popes pleasure, I felt the other day an irrepressible force in my breast: I had to speak out. I knew that my words would cause a scandal in the meeting. The little voice was telling me, Now is the time, cry out the message Mother has given you; do not fear, she is with you. And I spoke, to the great consternation of those present. Listen to me, all of you. The only thing that could open up Christianity (because its closed in on itself, turned towards the past, and therefore immutable, unprogressive: there is the seed of its own death and decomposition), the only thing would be for it to admit a force from the FUTURE. Satprem, do you remember these words? You conveyed them from Mother to me on 26 November 68, the day I sent you that Article on the crisis of Christianity. I went on: There are new forces and new facts. Someone has said it (I did not name Sri Aurobindo, following your same letter), and has spoken of the SUPRAMENTAL, but the word, the form or terms matter little.(There I quoted you again.) If only Christianity could admit, for instance, Christs reincarnation, or a second, FUTURE Christ, it would be saved, its attitude would be open instead of being closed. That is the crux of the whole matter, and beating about the bush, carrying out all kinds of reform and modernization is nothing, it only touches appearances, and unless we touch this center But of course, it instantly means heresy! Yet there is the only salvation for the Church, the only thing that really needs rethinking. All the rest is chatter. We have shut everything up: we are the depositaries of the faithDepositum Fidei! And nothing to add. Does it mean that Christ died without leaving any possibility to add to his message? But we arent the same men as in Palestine. We have limited the Divines powers. We have forbidden Christ any expansion. We have locked him up and thrown the key into the sea..
The silence was dense, the stupefaction huge. And I went on again: But we believe we are the interpreters, and except us none has the right to speak. Nevertheless we are faced with the current phenomenon of anti-establishment protest. The youth is running away from us, our formulas are old, ineffective, we preach without conviction, we demand absurd things, and to have peace, we stick a label of sin on all taboos. I know that my speech will be called subversive. In dictatorial or established regimes, those who move forward are suspicious. For twenty centuries we have used the weapon of heresy, and we know the atrocities that were committed in the name of Christ: that was our defenseit was his wisdom to keep power But if Christ suddenly appeared here, in front of us, do you think he would recognize himself in us? Is the Christ we preach the Christ of the BEATITUDES? Our preoccupation is to prohibit opening. And we make fools of ourselves with the pill. But are we also preoccupied with the TRUTH? Yet we should read our holy books again, but read them without passion, without egoistic interest; almost two thousand years ago, St. Paul said, Multifariam, multisque modis olim Deus loquens in prophetis, novissime diebus istis locutus est nobis in Filio (several times and in several ways God has spoken through the prophets, but now in these last days he has spoken to us through his Son Jesus Christ). Thus God has spoken in several ways. I know that a new light has just appeared, a new Consciousness let us go in search of it. But we shall have to step down from our throne, from our convenience; perhaps to leave the place to others and do away with the Hierarchy: no more Pope or Cardinals or Bishops, but all of us seekers of the TRUTH, of the CONSCIOUSNESS, the POWER, the SUPRANATURAL, the SUPRAHUMAN..
--
Thank you for the photos and the interesting Article on the crisis of the Church. In this connection, Mother told me that the only thing that could open up Christianity (because it is closed in on itself, turned towards the past, and therefore immutable, unprogressive, that is the germ of its death and its decomposition), the only thing would be for it to admit a Force from the Future. Sri Aurobindo spoke of the supramental, but the form or the terms matter little; if only Christianity could admit, for instance, the reincarnation of Christ, or a second, future Christ, it would be savedits attitude would be open instead of being closed. Thats the crux of the whole matter, and beating about the bush, carrying out all kinds of reform and modernization is nothing, it only touches appearances, leaving this center untouched. But of course, it instantly means heresy! Yet, there is the only salvation for the Church, the only thing that really needs rethinking. All the rest is chatter and papering over the old cracks.
Your photo of Msgr. Z fitted precisely with the vision! Now you have nothing to fear anymore. Simply keep me informed if you notice outer changes in this person.
0 1969-04-30, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Also, theres a kind of demonstration from the general point of view. Man gives a great importance to life and death-for him theres a great difference, death is a rather capital event (!). And I am shown to what extent the disequilibrium which, in circumstances, results in what people call death (which is death only quite apparently), how the two things, so to speak, are constantly there: this all-containing Harmony which is the very essence of Life, and this division (its a sort of division, yes, of fragmentation), this fragmentation, this APPARENT, UNREAL division, which has an ArtIFICIAL existence, and which is the cause of deathhow the two are interwoven in such a way that you can go from one to the other at any time and on any occasion. And its not at all as people think, that there needs to be something seriousits not that, it can happen with the most futile thing! Its simply being here or being there (with the edge of her hand, Mother very slightly tilts to one side and to the other), and thats all. So you are here (slight tilt to the left) and remain here: its over; you are here, and then you are there (gesture in between the two), you are here one second, then you are there: it makes for a life with sufferings and troublesall kinds of things. And being there (slight tilt to the right) is perpetual Life, absolute Power and you cant even call it peace, its something immutable. And at the same time, everything is there: this state and that state are both there. And man makes a more or less clumsy mixture of the two things.
But a few seconds of the true state in its purity and theres an awesome power. Only its still far, far away.
0 1969-05-31, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Two nights ago, I spent more than three hours with Sri Aurobindo, and I showed him all that was going to descend for Auroville. It was rather interesting. There were games, there was Art, there was even cooking! But all that was very symbolic. I explained it to him as if on a table, in front of a large landscape; I explained the principle on whose basis physical exercises and games were going to be organized. It was very clear, very precise, I even did a demonstration, as if showing him on a very small scale: a representation on a very small scale of what was going to be done. I moved people, things (gesture as if on a chessboard). But it was very interesting, and he was interested: he gave kinds of broad laws of organization (I dont know how to explain).
There was Art and it was lovely, it was fine. And how to make houses pleasant and beautiful, with what principle of construction. And cooking too, it was very amusing! There were the different manners of presenting a dish; take a fish, for instance, with the different ways of preparing it, and everyone came with his own invention. It went on for more than three hours (three hours of the night, thats huge). I woke up at 4 oclock with that (4 oclock, and I had gone back to bed at I oclock: I to 4 is three hours I can still calculate!). Very interesting.
Yet the conditions on e Arth seem very far from all that.
No It was just there, it didnt seem foreign to the e Arth. It was a harmony A conscious harmony behind things: a conscious harmony behind physical exercises and games; a conscious harmony behind decoration and Art; a conscious harmony behind food
I mean that all this looks poles ap Art from what is now on e Arth.
--
So I told her that the whole Artistic, athletic, even culinary organizations, and all others, are ready in the subtle physicalready to descend and incarnate-and I said, All that is needed is a little soil (gesture in the hollow of the hand), a little soil to let the plant grow. I said that to her, I am telling you because we have to find a little soil to let it grow. I dont know if she understood!
(silence)
--
And all the methodswhich we may call Artificial, Nirvana includedall the methods to get out of it are worthless. Beginning with the fool who kills himself to Put an end to his life: thats of all stupidities, that one is the biggest, it makes his case still worse. From that up to Nirvana (where one imagines one can get out of it), all of it, all of it is worth NOTHING. Those are different stages, but theyre worth NOTHING. And then, after that, when you really have a sense of perpetual hell, all of a sudden (nothing but a state of consciousness, its nothing but that), all of a sudden, a state of consciousness in which all is light, splendor, beauty, happiness, goodness. And all that is inexpressible. It comes like that: Oh, here it is, and then pfft! It shows itself, and hop! its gone. Then the Consciousness, which sees, imposes itself, and says, Now, the next step. So its in the presence of all this that the body had never, never in its whole life had it felt such a sorrow, and even now (Mother touches her he Art).
Is this, is this the lever? I dont know. But salvation is PHYSICALnot at all mental, but PHYSICAL. I mean its not in escape: its HERE. That I felt very strongly.
0 1969-06-28, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Then Satprem reads out to Mother the Article he has written for Italian television.)
Its for Paolo, for Italian television.
0 1969-07-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Maybe a new consciousness is trying to use this body? Its a new consciousness in the sense that what this body did, its activities, all the events of its life, appear in the memory as COMPLETELY different from the way it remembered themnot that events have changed, but the sense or sensation or vision or understanding of things is COMPLETELY, completely different. Completely different. It finds its earlier state unconscious to the point of stupidity for everything, everything. And there is a sort of strange gap: it now finds its former state of consciousness Artificial, untrue, and incredibly stupid; and then, in the new consciousness, the SAME circumstances have a completely different MEANINGano ther meaning, they give another sensation.
I think theres something changing in here.
0 1969-08-06, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But thats it: its something that PRESSES to be manifested. I told you, at night I felt that. And then you wake up and its THERE, it hasnt budged; you dont MOVE from one world into the other: the two consciousnesses are together (Mother slips the fingers of her right hand between those of her left hand). The ordinary consciousness seems Artificial, and its dominating but its NOT truer, its less true. Last night, it was very, very clear.
It makes for wonderful nights, mon petit! You dont sleep, yet you are much more rested than if you slept.
0 1969-10-11, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In an Article entitled, P Arty and the Country, in 1908.1
Oh, long before I met him. That was when he wrote in newspapers.
0 1969-12-31, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So then, for the rest, its the same to me, they will do as they like. They first thought of building a dwelling for me, but Ill never go, so its no use, its quite unnecessary. And to watch over the islet, it was agreed there would be a small house for H. who wanted to be there simply as a guard . Then R. had arranged a whole system of bridges to link that to the other bank. The other bank would be entirely made of gardens all around. Those gardens we thought of twelve gardens (dividing the distance into twelve), twelve gardens with each of them concentrated on one thing: a state of consciousness with the flowers representing it. And the twelfth garden would be in the islet, around (not around but beside) the Mandir with the tree, the banyan which is there. Thats what is at the center of the city. And there, there would be a repetition of the twelve gardens around, with the flowers arranged in the same way There are now two Americans here, husb and and wife, and the husb and studied there for more than a year the Art of gardening, and he came here with that knowledge. So I asked him to st Art straight away preparing the plan for the inner garden: theyre working on it.
But then, the answer is always the same: We have no money!
0 1970-01-03, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I could describe it. It came like this. It will be a kind of hall which will be like the inside of a column. No windows. Ventilation will be Artificial, with this kind of machinery (Mother points to an air conditioner), and just a roof. And sunlight striking the center; or, when there is no sunlight (at night or on overcast days), an electric spotlight. The idea is to build right now an example or a model for a hundred people or so. Once the city is built and the experiment is made, we will make a BIG thing of it but then it will be very big, for one or two thousand people. And the second one will be built around the first, which means that the first will go only when the second is built.
Theres the idea.
--
But inside, there will be neither windows nor lights, it will always be in a sort of clear half-light, night and day: during the day with sunlight, at night with Artificial light. And on the ground, nothing, except for a floor like this one [in Mothers room], that is, first a wooden floor (wooden or something else), then a sort of thick rubber foam, very soft, and then a carpet. A carpet covering everything, except for the center. And people will be able to sit anywhere. The twelve columns are for those who need a backrest!
But then, people will not come for regular meditations or anything of the kind (the internal organization will be taken care of later): it will be a place for concentration. Not everyone will be allowed in; there will be a time of the week or the day (I dont know) when visitors will be allowed, but anyway without mixture. There will be a fixed hour or day to show the visitors, and the rest of the time only for those who are seriousserious, sincere, who truly want to learn to concentrate.
--
It was there (gesture of vision above), I still see it when I talk about it I SEE. As I see it, its very beautiful, really very beautiful. A sort of half-light: you can see, but its very peaceful, and with very clear and strong beams of light on that globe (the projected, Artificial light will have to be slightly golden, it shouldnt be coldit will depend on the spotlights). A globe that will be made of plastic or I dont know.
Crystal?
0 1970-01-07, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
272Fight, while thy hands are free, with thy hands and thy voice and thy brain and all manner of weapons. Art thou chained in the enemys dungeons and have his gags silenced thee? Fight with thy silent all-besieging soul and thy wide-ranging will-power and when thou Art dead, fight still with the world-encompassing force that went out from God within thee.
***
0 1970-01-31, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But in Indias constitution there was an Article stating that personal property could in no way be taken away, in other words affirming the right to personal property. Now theyll remove it, they will say that in certain cases it can be taken away. So you understand
Its obvious, I know it: its past, it will gopersonal property is the past. Only You see, the Russians said it was the State that replaced the person, and then (laughing) what happened with the State?Its the State that has grown rich at the expense of everybody else. Now they are back-pedaling. But the other countries, without having the common sense of benefiting from the experience, want to follow the same blunder.
0 1970-02-07, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The sort of Artificial harmony the body lives in is due almost entirely to the unconsciousness it lives in, and as soon as a little consciousness comes in, it throws everything off balance; if too much comes in, the body cant bear it anymore. I see that now. So, on a tremendous scale? I remember, I had two or three nights (Mother shakes her head inexpressibly).
(silence)
0 1970-03-14, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
382Machinery is necessary to modern humanity because of our incurable barbarism. If we must encase ourselves in a bewildering multitude of comforts and trappings, we must needs do without Art and its methods; for to dispense with simplicity and freedom is to dispense with beauty. The luxury of our ancestors was rich and even gorgeous, but never encumbered.
383I cannot give to the barbarous comfort and encumbered ostentation of European life the name of civilisation. Men who are not free in their souls and nobly rhythmical in their appointments are not civilised.
0 1970-04-01, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
428What is the use of admiring Nature or worshipping her as a Power, a Presence and a goddess? What is the use, either, of appreciating her aesthetically or Artistically? The secret is to enjoy her with the soul as one enjoys a woman with the body.
Have you seen my answer?
0 1970-04-11, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, I think thats it: I dont feel I [exist] its limitless, you understand, thats the strange thing. This (Mother points to her body) is quite Artificial.
Then its good, no
0 1970-06-03, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The idea is this: We come to Auroville to escape social and moral rules that are Artificially practiced everywhere, but it is not to live in the licentiousness of the satisfaction of every desire: it is to rise above desires in a truer consciousness. Something like that. It appears they quite need this! (Mother laughs) So we should add it.
We could draw up a whole program, that would be interesting enough.
0 1970-06-06, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One should organize ones life not according to external and Artificial rules, but according to an organized inner consciousness, because if one leaves life alone without imposing on it the control of a higher consciousness, it becomes hazy and inexpressive. It means wasting ones time, in the sense that matter remains without conscious utilization.
***
--
If thou Art Spirit and Nature is thy robe,
Cast off thy garb and be thy naked self
0 1970-06-10, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
540Canst thou see God in thy torturer and slayer even in thy moment of death or thy hours of torture? Canst thou see Him in that which thou Art slaying, see and love even while thou slayest? Thou hast thy hand on the supreme knowledge. How shall he attain to Krishna who has never worshipped Kali?
You answer:
0 1970-06-13, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
P. L. is a good channel for the Force, oh! I knew that. Already two or three times (this isnt the first time: two or three times before) I had that sensation with him. How can I explain it? The Power at work is spread out everywhere, like this (universal gesture), and two or three times already (maybe even more) I saw P. L. as I FEEL him as an instrument gathering the Rays the rays of the Force and directing them with an extraordinary power to obtain the result. He is like a. I dont know, my impression is that of a machine gun! My impression is quite that of a machine gun gathering the Force (gesture showing the machine guns barrel) and vrrrm! hurling it forth. But its MATERIAL. He has an extraordinary power! Yes, its like an Artillery shot, I dont know, something that overcomes resistances in an extraordinary manner. They must feel it there [at the Vatican], those people are very sensitive. They must have found he has an extraordinary power of action they dont want to lose him, thats why theyre not answering him.2
Its like a capacity of directing (gesture of concentrating the Force through a channel), and something that has the power to sweep away resistances.
0 1970-06-20, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Surely thy boons are great since thou Art He!
Savitri, X.IV.647
0 1970-10-14, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To take care of ones skin and hair is no more Artificial than to take care of ones teeth.
If a sadhika [a female disciple] has spare time and the inclination to make up, I see no harm in that, provided she does not do it out of vanity or affectation.
0 1970-10-17, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For sure, publishers are incapable of What we should do is to have a good edition here (we can do it; from the point of view of the work, it could be good), and then prepare quite a general publicity, all over the world. Articles in literary newspapers: to organize a publicity campaign. I think that will be better than to leave it to an individual who We should arrange the thing ourselveswe can do it. If we want to, we can.
The only advantage of publishers is that they have the name of their house and the way to reach the pressand to distribute the book. Thats their power.
0 1971-03-03, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let us recall the Tantrasara: "Although thou Art the primordial cause of the worlds, yet thou Art forever young."
The Adventure of Consciousness.
0 1971-04-07, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Satprem does not mean the physical liquidation of Pakistan, of course, but the disappearance of the Artificial separation created by the British in order to "divide and rule." It should be recalled that for centuries the Muslims lived in perfect harmony with the Hindus, until the day in 1947 when Downing Street decided otherwise, playing on the political ambitions of some Indians eager to have their share of power.
In 1965, with the infamous cease-fire and the Tashkent surrender.
0 1971-05-15, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The idea came to me to write an Article on Sri Aurobindo and Bangladesh. But I dont know whether it would be helpful, or whether anything should be said at all.
But where could it be published?
--
(Satprem reads the Article. At one point in the text, he briefly mentions what he thinks each country represents: France = clarity of intellect; Germany = ingenuity; Russia = the brotherhood of man. Mother interrupts:)
You said nothing for the United States.
--
And thats what I said to. N.S.2 sent U. expressly to ask me what she should do, because Indira doesnt listen to her at all anymorenot at alland she seems to be completely well, anyway, as though submerged by a hostile formation.3 So I replied that I personally have only one hope (Mother clenches her fists in front of her as though clinging to something): Let the Divine Will be done, and All those who are capable of helping the contact and hastening the reception of that Will here must put all their consciousness and aspiration into it. Thats what I replied. And this (indicating the Article), from the standpoint of action, is the last chancenot that people listen very much, but it creates a current of force.
(silence)
--
I called I called, I asked for help and that [the Article] came, and its good, its very good. Since it came, its a last hope.
We must find a large number of newspapers in all the provinces.
--
The Article appears at the end of this conversation
A minister in the Indian government and, at the time, a friend of Indira's.
0 1971-05-26, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(To Satprem:) Who translated your Article [on Bangladesh]?
Z, Mother.1
--
The translation of Satprem's Article appearing in this book under the date May 15, 1971 has been done specially for the Agenda.
Satprem had informed Mother that he felt he was in the blackest hole of his life and that everything was as it used to be before, as if the seventeen years in the Ashram had never existed.
0 1971-06-09, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(First Mother informs Satprem that the Article on "Sri Aurobindo and Bangladesh" has been translated into Hindi and sent to Delhi.)
Theres an onslaught of adverse forces. A ferocious onslaught. But the Response is beginning to comejust a very small beginning. In each person there was like a storm, and its not completely over. Everything you thought was conquered and pushed away is rushing backin the most unexpected personsunder every guise, but mainly in the character, oh! doubts, revolts, everything.
0 1971-06-23, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Your Article [on Bangladesh] seems to have had a lot of effecta lot.2 Theres a complete reversal. Theyre now expecting war.
But do you know that the Americans are sending arms to Pakistan?
--
Ten or twenty thousand (?) copies had been printed; the Article was translated into all the Indian languages and sent in p Articular to all the members of the Indian Parliament.
Swaran Singh, minister of foreign affairs, who has just visited Washington, London, Moscow, Paris, etc.
0 1971-06-30, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Why couldnt you have Indira read my Article [on Bangladesh]?
But I believe somebody had her read it.
0 1971-07-28, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Did he receive the Article?
Yes, I suppose. I think so, I think it was sent to him. In any case, hes in total agreement. He says, I am here on the scene, I can see whats going on, I know how things really are. And he is absolutely against Pakistan. But the others.
0 1971-08-25, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All the time, all the time, there is the thought of the Divine, but like a a kind ofthirst to be and to understand. All mental notions seem Artificial to me. At times there is terrible anguish; at times there is perfect peace.
(long silence)
0 1971-10-02, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Do you know that Y.L., whom you saw a few days ago, met Malraux in Paris and gave him my Article on Bangladesh, and On the Way to Supermanhood? And this morning I received a note from Malraux.
Ah!
0 1971-11-10, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The organ of the p Arty in power in the state of Madras (the DMK) just published a long Article on "the exploitation by the Ashram," the unscrupulous businessmen of the Ashram who were killing local business, the loose morals of the Ashram girls, the enormous unexplained wealth of the Ashram, the "regimentation" of the boys and girls of the Ashram and the possibility that one day troops from the Ashram would drive the Tamils out of Pondicherry, "like Yahya Khan in Bengal," to establish an "Aurobindo-Desh"!
Among the band of doubtful businessmen who used Mother, there were indeed a few notable exceptions, such as New Horizon Sugar Mills, to mention only the most honest.
0 1971-11-24, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(In another letter, Sri Aurobindo replies to a journalist who wanted to bring out, 27 years later, an Article on The Ideal of the Karmayogin. This book is made up of a series of political Articles written by Sri Aurobindo between 1909 and 1910 when he was leading the struggle against the British.)
Yes, I have seen it, but I dont think it can be published in its present form as it prolongs the political Aurobindo of that time into the Sri Aurobindo of the present time. You even assert that I have thoroughly revised the book and these Articles are an index of my latest views on the burning problems of the day and there has been no change in my views in 27 years (which would surely be proof of a rather unprogressive mind). How do you get all that? My spiritual consciousness and knowledge at that time was as nothing to what it is nowhow would the change leave my view of politics and life unmodified altogether?
21 April 1937
0 1972-03-29a, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
She means my Article Sri Aurobindo and the E Arths Future. Then, a few days later, I received a second letter from Y.L., in which she says:
This morning I received the enclosed reply. Please read it to Mother. I leave it to you to decide what should be done . I have not informed A. [Sri Aurobindo Study Center in Paris]. Your Article on Sri Aurobindo and the E Arths Future is what has won his support.
Malraux agrees to be a member of the Centenary Committee. His secretary sent the following reply to Y.L.:
--
I seem to find in Sri Aurobindos work an answer that meets yours and develops it for the question is indeed to reinstate the gods IN man after having reinstated the demons, as you rightly stated in the Swedish Article but I also find there an answer to the agonizing question constantly raised by your characters from The Royal Way to The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Indeed, all of them seek a deeper notion in man that will deliver them from death and solitudethis is THE question of the West, to which Sri Aurobindo brings a solution at once dynamic and illuminating. Hence, I am taking the liberty of sending by surface mail one of Sri Aurobindos books in the original English entitled The Human Cycle. I hope it will interest you.
I call on you rather than any other contemporary writer because I think your works embody the very anguish of the West, an anguish I have bitterly experienced all the way to the German concentration camps at the age of twenty, and then in a long and uneasy wandering around the world. Insofar as I have always turned to you, daring and searching with each of your characters what surpasses man, I am again turning to you because I have a feeling that, more than anyone else, you can understand Sri Aurobindos message and perhaps draw a new impetus from it. I am also thinking of a whole generation of young people who expect much from you: more than an ideal of pure heroism, which only opens the doors (as does all self-offering) on another realm of man we have yet to explore, and more than a fascination with death, which also is only a means and not an end, although its brutal nakedness can sometimes open a luminous breach in the bodily prisonwhere we seem to have been immured alive and we emerge into a new dimension of our being. For we tend too often to forget that it is for living that your heroes think so constantly of death; also I think that the young people I mentioned want the truth of Tchen and Katow, the truth of Hernandez, Perken and Moreno [characters in Malrauxs novels] beyond their death.
0 1972-03-29b, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother was never allowed to live her experience. A few days after she left her body, in a speech before the assembled disciples, Pranab, Mother's "bodyguard," ingenuously declared: "According to the advice of Dr. Sanyal, we were to give Her about 20 to 25 ozs. of food every day. It consisted of a little vegetable soup, milk with some protein compound, paste made of almonds, mushrooms, Artichokes or things like that and some fruit juice at the end.... All those who were in the courtyard below [Mother's room] must have heard how we had to fight with Her to make Her eat a little." [Original English] This fight over food (to mention only one) created a sharp conflict in Mother's body; she was torn between their suggestions"If you don't eat, you're going to die"and the thrust of the Experience.
***
0 1972-04-13, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But does he know the difference between the ego and the psychic? Because the ego is very Artfula rogue!
***
0 1973-02-18, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Turn it into an Art! An Art for cultivating calm, skill and self-control. Theres no need to cry out indignantly as Gandhi would. Its useless, useless, absolutely useless I am not at all in favor of it! One should master the means of self-defense, and one should cultivate them in order to do so.
Above all, make them understand that moral violence is just as bad as physical violence. It can even be worse, that is, at least physical violence forces you to become strong and control yourself, whereas moral violence is. You may be like this [apparently quiet] and harbor the worst moral violence in yourself.
0 1973-04-14, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thus she was alone among themshe was soon to be truly alone, from May 19 onward, exactly thirty-five days after the present conversation. I still hear Mothers son Artlessly asking me, a few days after that May 19, How will we communicate with Mother now? There will be NO MORE communication, I replied. He was flabbergastednot I. WHO could she communicate with? But as I said, I was positive that the experience would continue with or without communication: Mother was going to sever the nutrient link to the old physiology they did not let her. There remained cataleptic trance, the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty they did not want it. I can still hear the voice of the Brute: No, I dont want to.
So?
02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A mind that is not rigidly limited to the ratiocinative process, but has been remoulded in the light and rhythm of inspiration and intuition and revelation and other higher sources still beyond becomes at once a transfigured vessel, an apt instrument to incarnate and dynamise in the physical and material field truths and realities that normally lie far and above. Something of the kind, though in a small measure, happens, for example, in a poet or an Artist. A poet who moves by vision and inspiration is not, at least need not be, devoid of mind: the mind in ills case is not annihilated or even kept in abeyance, but sublimated, undergoing a reorientation and reorganisation, acquiring a new magnitude. Even if there is a suspension of the ratiocinative faculty, it would not mean a suspension of the mental power in itself, but rather an enhancement in a new degree. The same may happen to the other p Arts and planes of human consciousness and existence.
Of course, if one chooses, one can sidetrack these intervening ranges of consciousness between the Spirit and Matter, and strike something like a chord line between the two; but also one need not follow this bare straight ascetic line of ascension; one can pursue a wider, a circular or global movement which not only arrives but fulfils. The latter is Nature's method of activity, Nature being all reality. The exclusive line is meant for individuals, and even as such it has a value and sense in the global view, for this too is contri butory to the total urge and its total consummation.
02.01 - The World-Stair, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Artist's joy shall laugh at reason's rules;
The divine intention suddenly shall be seen,
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now this imprisoned consciousness in Matter forces Matter to be conscious again when driven on the upward gradient. This tension creates a fire, as it were, in the he Art of Matter, a mighty combustion and whorl in the core of things, of which the blazing sun is an image and a symbol. All this pressure and heat and concussion and explosion mean a mighty struggle in Matter to give birth to that which is within. Consciousness that is latent must be made patent; it must reveal itself in Matter and through Matter, making Matter its vehicle and embodiment. This is the mystery of the birth of Life, the first sprouting of consciousness in Matter. Life is half-awakened consciousness, consciousness yet in a dream state. Its earliest and most rudimentary manifestation is embodied in the plant or vegetable world. The submerged consciousness strives to come still further up, to express itself to a greater degree and in a clearer mode, to become more free and plastic in its movements; hence the appearance of the animal as the next higher formulation. Here consciousness delivers itself as a psyche, a rudimentary one, no doubt, a being of feeling and sensation, and elementary mentality playing in a field of vitalised Matter. Even then it is not satisfied with itself, it asks for a still more free and clear Articulation: it is not satisfied, for it has not yet found its own level. Hence after the animal, arrives man with a full-fledged Mind, with intelligence and self-consciousness and capacity for self-determination.
Thus we see that evolution, the unfolding of consciousness follows exactly the line of its involution, only the other way round: the mounting consciousness re-ascends step by step the same gradient, retraces the same path along which it had descended. The descending steps are broadly speaking (I) Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, (2) Supermind and its secondary form Overmind, (3) Mind(i) mind proper and (ii) the intermediary psyche, (4) Life, (5) Matter. The ascending consciousness st Arting from Matter rises into Life, passes on through Life and Psyche into Mind, driving towards the Supermind and Sachchidananda. At the present stage of evolution, consciousness has arrived at the higher levels of Mind; it is now striving to cross it altogether and enter the Overmind and the Supermind. It will not rest content until it arrives at the organisation in and through the Supermind: for that is the drive and purpose of Nature in the next cycle of evolution.
--
We were speaking of the descent into the Vital, the domain of dynamism, desire and hunger. The Vital is also the field of some strong creative Powers who follow, or are in secret contact with the line of unitary consciousness, who are open to influences from a deeper or higher or subtler consciousness. Along with the demons there is also a line of daimona, guardian angels, in the hierarchy of vital beings. Much of what is known as aesthetic or Artistic creation derives its spirit from this sphere. Many of the gods of beauty and delight are denizens of this heaven. Gandharvas and Kinnaras are here, Dionysus and even Apollo perhaps (at least in their mythological aspectin their occult reality they properly belong to the Overmind which is the own home of the gods), many of the angels, seraphs and cherubs dwell here. In fact, the mythological heaven for the most p Art can be located in this region.
All this is comprised within what we term the Higher or the Middle Vital. In the lower vital, we have said, consciousness has become still more circumscribed, dark, ignorantly obstinate, disparately disintegrated. It is the seed-bed of lust and cruelty, of all that is small and petty and low and mean, all that is dirt and filth. It is here that we place the picas, djinns, ghouls and ghosts, and vampires, beings who possess the possessed.
02.02 - Rishi Dirghatama, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
About the Word, the mystery which Dirghatama unveils is an extraordinary revelationso curious, so illuminating. In later times many lines of spiritual discipline have adopted his scheme and spread it far and wide. Dirghatama himself was an uncommon wizard of words. The truths he saw and clothed in mantras have attained, as I have already said, general celebrity. He says: "The Word is off our categories. It has four stations or levels or gradations." The Rishi continues: "Three of them are unmanifested, unbodied; only the fourth one is manifest and bodied, on the tongue of man." This terminology embodying a fundamental principle has had many commentaries and explanations. Of these the most well-known is that given by the Tantras. They have named the fourfold words as (1) par, supreme; (2) payant, the seeing one; (3) madhyam, the middle one or the one within and (4) vaikhar, the Articulate word. In modern language we may say that the first one is the self-vibration of the Supreme Being or Consciousness; the second is the vibration of the higher-mind or the pure intelligence; the third is the vibration of the inner he Art; and the fourth the vibration of physical sound, of voice. In philosophical terms of current English we may name these as (1) revelatory, (2) intuitive, (3) inspirational and (4) vocal.
Now in conclusion I will just speak of the fundamental vision of the rishi. His entire realisation, the whole Veda of his life, he has, it appears, pressed into one single k We have heard it said that the entire range of all scriptures is epitomised in the Gita and the Gita' itself is epitomised in one slokasarvadharmn parityajya... Even so we may say that Rishi Dirghatama has summarised his experience, at least the fundamental basic one, and put it into a sutra. It is the famous k with which he opens his long hymn to Surya:
02.02 - The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Its Artist good begins our evil's tale.
A heaven of creative truths above,
--
Her rarest works are copies of heaven's Art.
A radiance of a golden Artifice,
A masterpiece of inspired device and rule,
--
To copy on e Arth's copies is his Art.
For when he strives for things surpassing e Arth,
--
This faery Artistry could not keep his will:
Only a moment's fine release it gave;
02.03 - The Shakespearean Word, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
All these images however, or most of them, belong to one category or genre. They are painted pictures,still life, on the whole, presented in two dimensions. Kalidasa himself has described the nature or character of this Artistic effect. In describing a gesture of Uma he says, 'she moved not, she stopped not' (na yayau na tasthau); it was, as it were, a movement suddenly arrested and held up on a canvas. The imagery is as though of a petrification. The figures of statuary present themselves to our eyes in this connection-a violent or intense action held at one point and stilled, as for example, in the Laocoon or the Discabolo.
This is usually what the poets, the great poets have done. They have presented living and moving bodies as fixed, stable entities, as a procession of statues. But Shakespeare's are not fixed stable pictures but living and moving beings. They do not appear as pictures, even like moving pictures on a screen, a two-dimensional representation. Life in Shakespeare appears, as in life, exactly like a three-dimensional phenomenon. You seem to see forms and figures in the round, not simply in a frontal view. A Shakespearean scene is not only a feast for the eye but is apprehended as though through all the' senses.
--
We know that almost no paraphernalia are really needed to present a Shakespearean drama on the stage. His magical, all powerful words are sufficient to do the work of the decorative Artist. The magic of the Articulate word, the mere sound depicts, not only depicts but carries you and puts you face to face with the living reality. I will give you three examples to show how Shakespeare wields his Prosperian wand. First I take the lines from Macbeth, that present before you the castle of Duncan, almost physicallyperhaps even a little more than physicallywith its characteristic setting and atmosphere:
Dun. This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
--
Hast heavy substance, bleed'st not, speak'st, Art sound.
Ten masts at each make not the altitude
--
Mar. Thou Art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.
Bar. Looks'a not like the King? Mark it, Horatio.
--
Hor. What Art thou that usurp'st this time of night
Together with that fair and warlike form
--
Hor. As thou Art to thyself:
Such was the very armour he had on
--
Such is the magical creative power in the Shakespearean word. It is the evocative force of the Articulate sound. In India, we call it mantra Mantra means a certain sum of syllables charged with dynamic force, creative consciousness. It is that which induces life into the body of a clay image, it is that which awakens the Divinity, establishes Him in a dead materialform. Shakespeare has, as it were, instilled his life's breath into his words and made them move and live as living creatures, physical beings upon e Arth.
Borrowing an analogy from modern knowledge, I may say that the Shakespearean word is a p Article or wave of life-power. Modern science posits as the basis of the material creation, as its ultimate constituents, these energy-p Articles. Even so it seems to me that at the basis of all poetic creation there lie what may be called word-p Articles, and each poet has a characteristic quality or energy of the word-unit. The Shakespearean word, I have said, is a life-energy packet; and therefore in his elaboration of the Word, living figures, moving creatures leap up to our sight.
--
Even so the whole body of Shakespearean utterances may be described as consisting, in the last analysis, of starry vocables, quanta of Articulate life-energy.
Yes, Shakespearean syllables are indeed the glorious members cut out of the body as it were of a beautiful vital being transmuted into heavenly luminaries.
02.05 - The Godheads of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A strange pell-mell of magic Artisans,
Was seen moulding the plastic clay of life,
--
His erring sense and his instruments' Artifice.
44.13
--
An Art and ingenuity without sense,
This minute elaborate orchestrated life
02.06 - Boris Pasternak, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The first Article of his faith thenit is not merely a faith but a deep and concrete perceptionis that the world is one. Creation forms a global unity and there is one pulsation, one throb running through all life. In this regard he is a unanimist of the school of Jules Romains. Life's single pulsation, however, he feels most in the plant world; the global unity there moves in a wonderfully perfect rhythm and harmony. Mankind in its natural, unsophisticated state shares in that rhythm and harmony and forms p Art of it. That is perhaps the stage of happy innocence of which many of the first great Romantics dreamed, e.g., Rousseau and Wordsworth. Viewed as such, placed as a natural phenomenon in the midst of Nature, in its totality, mankind still appears as a harmonious entity fitting into a harmonious whole. But that is a global bird's-eye view. There is a near view that isolates the human phenomenon, and then a different picture emerges. That is the second Article of Pasternak's faith. Life is a rhythmic whole, but it is not static, it is a dynamic movement, it is a movement forwardtoward growth and progress. It is not merely the movement of recurrence; life does not consist in pulsation only a perpetual repetition. As I say, it means growing, advancing, progressing, as well. That is, in other words, the inevitable urge of evolution. Ay, and there's the rub. For it is that which brings in conflict and strife: together with creation comes destruction.
Nature in her sovereign scheme of harmony accepts destruction, it is true, and has woven that element too in her rhythmic pattern and it seems quite well and good. She is creating, destroying and re-creating eternally. She denudes herself in winter, puts on a garb of bare, dismal aridity and is again all lush, verdant beauty in spring. Pain and suffering, cruelty and battle are all there. And all indeed is one harmonious whole, a symphony of celestial music.
--
An element of the human tragedy the very central core perhapsis the calvary of the individual. Pasternak's third Article of faith is human freedom, the freedom of the individual. Indeed if evolution is to mean progress and growth it must base itself upon that one needful thing. And here is the gist of the problem that faces Pasternak (as Zhivago) in his own inner consciousness and in his outer social life. The problemMan versus Society, the individual and the collective-the private and the public sector in modern jargonis not of today. It is as old as Sophocles, as old as Valmiki. Antigone upheld the honour of the individual against the law of the State and sacrificed herself for that ideal. Sri Rama on the contrary sacrificed his personal individual claims to the demand of his people, the collective godhead.
Pasternak's tragedy runs on the same line. Progress and welfare of the group, of humanity at large is an imperative necessity and the collective personality does move in that direction. But it moves over the sufferings, over the corpses of individuals composing the collectivity. The individuals, in one sense, are indeed the foci, the conscious centres that direct and impel the onward march, but they have something in them which is over and above the dynamism of physical revolution. There is an inner aspiration and preoccupation whose object is other than outer or general progress and welfare. There is a more intimate quest. The conflict is there. The human individual, in one p Art of his being, is independent and separate from the society in which he lives and in another he is in solidarity with the rest.
02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Of sparing lines limned by an abstract Art
In a rare scanted light with faint dream-brush
--
Invents devices of her magic Art
To find new bodies for the Infinite
--
In Art and life they catch the All-Beautiful's ray
And make the world their radiant treasure house:
--
Alone the God-given hymn escapes her Art
That came with her from her spiritual home
02.07 - The Descent into Night, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Turned lust into a decorative Art:
Abusing Nature's gift her pervert skill
--
And Art-parades of weird distorted forms,
And gargoyle masques obscene and terrible
--
A new aesthesis of Inferno's Art
That trained the mind to love what the soul hates,
02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Artificers of Nature's fall and pain
Have built their altars of triumphant Night
--
How great we are, how merciful Art Thou."
Thus thought they to reach God's impassive throne
--
And the Articles of the bound soul's contract,
Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured shape.
02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Magic of percept joined with concept's Art
And lent to each object an interpreting name:
Idea was disguised in a body's Artistry,
And by a strange atomic law's mystique
--
Imposed its rigid Artifice on the soul;
An aide of the inventor intellect,
--
Then new-built Truth's slain body by its Art:
A robot exact and serviceable and false
--
Came Reason, the squat godhead Artisan,
To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time.
--
Art of her wisdom, Artifice of her lore.
68.50
This Art, this Artifice are her only stock.
68.51
--
Our reason only a toys’ Artificer,
A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.
02.11 - New World-Conditions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
First of all, the colonies, which mean practically the Eastern hemisphere, can no longer be regarded, even by those who would very much wish to, as the field of exploitation, the granary of raw materials or the dumping ground of finished Articles. Industrialism, the spirit and urge of it at least, has reached these places too: the exploiters themselves have been instrumental In bringing it about. The growing industrialism in countries so long held in subjection or tutelage, as safe preserves, need not necessarily mean a further spell of keen competition. If we look closely, we see things moving in a different direction. It is self-evident that all countries do not and cannot grow or manufacture all things with equal ease and facility. Countries are naturally complementary or supplementary to each other with regard to their raw produce or industrial manufacture. And an inevitable give and take, mutual understanding and help must follow such an alignment of economic forces.
It must also be noted that all countries need not and cannot have the same pattern of economic life, even that of a successful economic life. A vast country like India, with the manifold resources of a whole continent, can at once be industrial and agriculturalmodern America, to some extent, is an example of this type. She can follow both the lines of economic development with equal vigour and success. And in the midst of an intensive and extensive agricultural and industrial occupation, there may be still room for the age-long, old-world cottage industry, for the individual Artisan or craftsman whose God-given hand may always give to things an added value beyond the reach of the mere machine.
With this perspective in view, keeping always in front the probable shape of things to come, one must learn to consider the present, look for those forces that make for the new world and thus help the course of evolution and progress. Nature does not care for her past formations, she is not bound to them; she is always throwing up chances and opportunitiesvariations-for new developments. Nature red in tooth and claw is only one side of the shield; and the picture is not as true today as it was even a few hundred years ago, in spite of the spells of devastating carnage she still allows in her surface movements. It may be that the very pressure and insistence of an inner harmony has brought to the fore, made acute difficulties and contraries that have to be met and solved for good.
02.13 - In the Self of Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An Artist Sight constructed the Beyond
In contrary patterns and conflicting hues;
02.13 - On Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is the thing in human society which makes it valuable, worthy of humanity, gives it a place of honour and the right to live and continue to live? It is its culture and civilisation, as everyone knows. Greece or Rome, China or India did not attain, at least according to modern conceptions, a high stage in economic evolution: the production and distribution of wealth, the classification and organization of producers and consumers, their relation and functions were, in many respects, what is called primitive. An American of today would laugh at their uncouth simplicity. And yet America has to bow down to those creators of other values that are truly valuable. And the values are the creations of the great poets, Artists, philosophers, law-givers; sages and seers. It is they who made the glory that was Greece or Rome or China or India or Egypt. Indeed they are the builders of Culture, culture which is the inner life of a civilisation. The decline of culture and civilisation means precisely the displacement of the "cultured" man by the economic man. In the present age when economic values have been grossly exaggerated holding the entire social fabric in its stifling grip, the culture spirit has been pushed into the background and made subservient to economic and other cruder forces. That was what Julien Benda, the famous French critic and moralist, once stigmatised as "La Trahison des Clercs"; only, the "clercs" did not voluntarily betray, but circumstanced as they were they could do no better. The process reached its climaxperhaps one should say the very nadirin the Nazi experiment and something of it still continues in the Russian dispensation. There the intellectuals or the intelligentsia are totally harnessed to the political machine, their capacities are prostituted in the service of a socio-economic plan. Poets and Artists and thinkers are made to be protagonists and propagandists of the new order. It is a significant sign of the times how almost the whole body of scientists the entire Brain Trust of mankind today, one might sayhave been mobilised for the fabrication of the Atom Bomb. Otherwise they cannot subsist, they lose all economic status.
In the older order, however, a kindlier treatment was meted out to this class, this class of the creators of values. They had patrons who looked after their physical well-being. They had the necessary freedom and leisure to follow their own bent and urge of creativity. Kings and princes, the court and the nobility, in spite of all the evils ascribed to them, and often very justly, have nevertheless been the nursery of Art and culture, of all the Art and culture of the ancient times. One remembers Shakespeare reading or enacting his drama before the Great Queen, or the poignant scene of Leonardo dying in the arms of Francis the First. Those were the truly great classical ages, and Art or man's creative genius hardly ever rose to that height ever since. The downward curve st Arted with the advent and growth of the bourgeoisie when the Artist or the creative genius lost their supporters and had to earn their own living by the sweat of their brow. Indeed the greatest tragedies of frustration because of want and privation, occur, not as much among the "lowest" classes who are usually considered as the poorest and the most miserable in society, but in that section from where come the intellectuals, "men of light and leading," to use the epithet they are honoured with. For very few of this group are free to follow their inner trend and urge, but have either to coerce and suppress them or stultify them in the service of lesser alien duties, which mean "forced labour." The punishment for refusing to be drawn away and to falsify oneself is not unoften the withdrawal of the bare necessities of life, in certain cases sheer destitution. A Keats wasting his energies in a work that has no relation to his inner life and light, or a Madhusudan dying in a hospital as a pauper, are examples significant of the nature of the social structure man lives in.
It is one of the great illusionsor perhaps a show plank for propagandato think or say that the so-called poorer classes are the poorest and the most miserable. It is not so in fact. Really poor are those who have a standard of life commensurate with their inner nature and consciousnessof beauty and orderliness and material sufficiency and yet their actual status and function in society do not provide them with the necessary where-withals and resources. No amount of philanthropic sentimentalising can suppress or wipe off the fact that the poor do not feel the pinch of poverty so much as do those who are poor and yet are to live and move as not poor. It all depends upon one's standard. One is truly rich or poor not in proportion- to one's income, but" in accordance with one's needs and the means to meet them. And all do not have the same needs and requirements. This does not mean that the needs of the princes, the aristocrats, the magnates are greater than those of the mere commoner. No, it means that there are people, there is a section of humanity found more or less in all these classes, but mostly in less fortunate classes, whose needs are intrinsically greater and they require preferential treatment. There should be none poor or miserable in society, well and good. But this should not mean that all the economic resources of the society must be requisitioned only to enrichto pamper the poor. For there is a pampering possible in this matter. We know the nouveaux riches, the parvenus and the kind of life they lead with their fair share boldly seized. A levelling, a formal equalisation of the economic status, although it may mean uplift in certain cases, may involve gross injustice to others. The ideal is not equal distribution but rational distribution of wealth, and that distribution should not depend upon any material function, but upon psychological demands. Is this bourgeois economics? Even if it is so, the truth has to be faced and recognised. You can call truth by the name bourgeois and hang it, but it will revive all the same, like the Phoenix out of the ashes.
02.14 - Appendix, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
For us in India, especially to Bengalis, the first and foremost obstacle to accepting Wordsworth as a poet would be his simple, Artless and homely manner:
Behold her, single in the field,
--
Once we cross beyond these second gates we reach an inner region, a secluded ap Artment of the soul where poetry assumes the garb of magic, a transcendent skill lends to words the supernatural beauty and grace of a magician's Art. How often we have read these lines and heard them repeated and yet they have not grown stale:
A voice so thrilling never was heard. . .
--
Atul Gupta had seen perhaps only the adverse side of Wordsworth. He had marked the heavy hand of the logician, sthla-hastvalepa, but omitted to see the delicate workmanship of the Artist. But a man's true quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order.
Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Words-worth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet.11
02.14 - Panacea of Isms, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Communism cannot save humanity. For if it means the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, well, a healthy normal society will not bear or tolerate it longno Dictatorship, whether of one or of many, is likely to endure or bring in the millennium. In that sense communism is only a fascismo of small people fighting against a fascismo of big people. A society is not normally made up of proletarians only: it does not consist merely of lotus-eaters nor does it consist of hewers of wood and drawers of water (peasants and labourers) alone. Even a proletariate society will slowly and inevitably gravitate towards a stratification of its own. In its very bosom the bureaucracy, the military, the officialdom of a closed body will form a class of its own. A Lenin cannot prevent the advent of a Stalin. Even if the proletarians form the majority, by far a very large majority, even then the tyranny of the majority is as reprehensible as the tyranny of the minority. Communism pins its faith on struggle the class struggle, it says, is historically true and morally justifiable. But this is a postulate all are not bound to accept. Then again, if communism means also materialism (dialectical or any other), that also cannot meet and satisfy all the needs and urges of man, indeed it leaves out of account all the deeper yearnings that lie imbedded in him and that cannot be obliterated by a mere denial. For surely man does not live by bread alone, however indispensable that Article may be to him: not even culture the kind admitted by communism, severely intellectual, rational, scientific, pragmaticcan be the be-all and end-all of human civilisation. Communistic Russia attempted to sweep away all traces of religion and church and piety; the attempt does not seem to have been very successful.
As a matter of fact, Communism is best taken as a symptom of the disease society suffers from and not as a remedy. The disease is a twofold bondage from which man has always been trying to free himself. It is fundamentally the same "bondage which the great French Revolution sought most vigorously and violently to shake offan economic and an ideological bondage, that is to say, translated in the terms of those days, the tyranny of the court and the nobility and the tyranny of the Church. The same twofold bondage appears, again today combated by Communism, viz., Capitalism and Bourgeoisie. Originally and essentially, however, Communism meant an economic system in which there is no personal property, all property being held in common. It is an ideal that requires a good deal of ingenuity to be worked out in all details, to say the least. Certain religious sects within restricted membership tried the experiment. Indeed some kind of religious mentality is required, a mentality freed from normal mundane reactions, as a preliminary condition in order that such an attempt might be successful. A perfect or ideal communism may be possible only when man's character and nature has undergone a thorough and radical change. Till then it will be a Utopia passing through various avatars.
--
So the cry is for greater human values. Man needs food and shelter, goes without saying, but he yearns for other things also, air and light: he needs freedom, he needs culturehigher thoughts, finer emotions, nobler urges the field and expression of personal worth. The acquisition of knowledge, the creation of beauty, the pursuit of philosophy, Art, literature, and science in their pure forms and for their own sake are things man holds dear to his he Art. Without them life loses its charm and significance. Mind and sensibility must be free to roam, not turned and tied to the exclusive needs and interests of physical life, free, that is to say, to discover and create norms and ideals and truths that are values in themselves and also lend values to the matter-of-fact terrestrial life. It is not sufficient that all men should have work and wages, it is not sufficient that I all should have learnt the three R's, it is not sufficient that they should understand their rightssocial, political, economic and claim and vindicate them. Nor is it sufficient for men to r become merely useful or indispensablealthough happy and I contentedmembers of a collective body. The individual must be free, free in his creative joy to bring out and formulate, in thought, in speech, in action, in all the modes of expression, the truth, the beauty, the good he experiences within. An all-round culture, a well-developed mind, a well-organised life, a well-formed body, a harmonious working of all the members of the system at a high level of consciousness that is man's need, for there lies his self-fulfilment. That is the ideal of Humanismwhich the ancient Grco-Roman culture worshipped, which was again revived by the Renaissance and which once again became a fresh and living force after the great Revolution and is still the high light to which Science and modern knowledge turns.
The More Beyond
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Appendix The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Man, Human and DivineHumanism and Humanism
--
Appendix The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art
03.01 - The Malady of the Century, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The ancients, on the contrary, knew not many thingsnot so many as we know; but what they knew they knew well, they were sure of their knowledge. Their creations were not perhaps on the whole as rich and varied and subtleeven in a certain sense as deep as those of modern humanity; but they were finished and completed things, net and clear and full of power. The simple unambiguous virile line that we find in Kalidasa or in the Ajanta, in Homer or in the Par thenon, no longer comes out of the hands of a modern Artist. Our delight is in the complexity and turbidity of the composition; we are not satisfied with richness only, we require a certain tortuousness and tangledness in the movement. We love the intermingling of many tints, the play of light dying away into haze and mist and obscurity, of shades that blur the sharpness of the contour. Our preoccupation, in Art, is how to create the impression of the many in its all-round simultaneity of forms and movements. The ancients were more simple and modest; they were satisfied with expressing one thing at a time and that simply done.
The ancient Rishis were worshippers of the Sun and the Day; they were called Finders of the Day, Discoverers of the Solar World. They knew what they were about and they sought to make their meaning plain to others who cared to go to them. They were clear in their thought, direct in their perception; their feelings, however deep, were never obscure. We meet in their atmosphere and in their creative activity no circum-ambulating chiaroscuro, nothing of the turbid magic that draws us today towards the uncertain, the unexpected and the disconcerting. It is a world of certitude, of solid realityeven if it be on the highest spiritual levels of consciousness presenting a bold and precise and clear outline. When we hear them speak we feel they are uttering self-evident truths; there is no need to pause and question. At least so they were to their contemporaries; but the spokesman of our age must needs be a riddle even to ourselves.
03.02 - Aspects of Modernism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is this pluralisation which has resulted in a necessary polarisation in the human consciousness. We have gained a power which was not only rare but perhaps totally absent in the old world, at least in the general mind; we have reached in a novel way that very wideness or wholeness which was at the outset negatived by the urge towards separativeness and parcellation. Thus the modern mind can take in more view-points than oneeven contrary onesat the same time. The individual has acquired the capacityto put it in popular languageto enter into another's skin, not to be confined to its own outlook, limited within its linear groove, but to be able, with ease and grace to look through the eyes of others, even though they be on the other side of the arena. A wide and supple, large and subtle perception that goes round the entire contour of the observed object, not a perspective but a global view, is a characteristic capacity of the modern mind. We can see the same thing from all angles and distances; we can turn our gaze upon ourselves; we can see ourselves not only with our own way of looking but also as others see us, with equal detachment and imp Artiality. At least this is the character of the cultured, the representative man of today. Modern Art too has sought in some of its significant expressions to demonstrate this protean nature of truth and reality, to bring out the simultaneity of its multiple modes, to give a living sense of its tangled dynamism.
We spoke of the extreme atomism of modern Science that has thrown into the background the solid unity of creation and is laying emphasis for the moment more upon the division and scattering of forces than upon the cohesiveness and identity of the substratum; still that unity has not been abrogated but has been maintained on the whole, even if as an underlying note. Not only so, the reign of multiplicity, by a curious detour, is working towards a discovery of enhanced unity. The plurality of the modern consciousness is moving towards a richer and intenser unity; it is not a static, but a dynamic unitya unity that does not suppress or merely transcend the diversity and disparity of its components but holds them together as an immanent force, and brings forth out of each its fullness of individuality. In the same way the present-day movement towards internationalism or supra-nationalism has produced a rebound towards regionalism or infra-nationalism. And the voice of anarchism tends to be as insistent as that of collectivism.
03.02 - The Adoration of the Divine Mother, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Antagonist poles of the world's Artifice,
Impose the illusion of their twofold screen
03.02 - The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:03.02 - The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Man, Human and Divine The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art
The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art
I wonder why Philosophy has never been considered as a variety of Art. Philosophy is admired for the depth and height of its substance, for its endeavour to discover the ultimate Truth, for its one-pointed adherence to the supremely Real; but precisely because it does so it is set in opposition to Art which is reputed as the domain of the ideal, the imaginative or the fictitious. Indeed it is the antagonism between the two that has always been emphasised and upheld as an axiomatic truth and an indisputable fact. Of course, old Milton (he was young, however, when he wrote these lines) says that philosophy is divine and charming:
Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
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In the face of established opinion and tradition (and in the wake of the prophetic poet) I propose to demonstrate that Philosophy has as much claim to be called an Art, as any other orthodox Art, painting or sculpture or music or architecture. I do not refer to the element of philosophyperhaps the very large element of philosophy that is imbedded and ingrained in every Art; I speak of Philosophy by itself as a distinct type of au thentic Art. I mean that Philosophy is composed or created in the same way as any other Art and the philosopher is moved and driven by the inspiration and impulsion of a genuine Artist. Now, what is Art? Please do not be perturbed by the question. I am not trying to enter into the philosophy the metaphysicsof it, but only into the science the physicsof it. Whatever else it may be, the sine qua non, the minimum requisite of Art is that it must be a thing of beauty, that is to say, it must possess a beautiful form. Even the Vedic Rishi says that the poet by his poetic power created a heavenly formkavi kavitva divi rpam asajat. As a matter of fact, a supreme beauty of form has often marked the very apex of Artistic creation. Now, what does the Philosopher do? The sculptor hews beautiful forms out of marble, the poet fashions beautiful forms out of words, the musician shapes beautiful forms out of sounds. And the philosopher? The philosopher, I submit, builds beautiful forms out of thoughts and concepts. Thoughts and concepts are the raw materials out of which the Artist philosopher creates mosaics and patterns and designs architectonic edifices. For what else are philosophic systems? A system means, above all, a form of beauty, symmetrical and harmonious, a unified whole, rounded and polished and firmly holding together. Even as in Art, truth, bare sheer truth is not the object of philosophical inquiry either. Has it not been considered sufficient for a truth to be philosophically true, if it is consistent, if it does not involve self-contradiction? The equation runs: Truth=Self-consistency; Error=Self-contradiction. To discover the absolute truth is not the philosopher's taskit is an ambitious enterprise as futile and as much of a my as the pursuit of absolute space, absolute time or absolute motion in Science. Philosophy has nothing more to doand nothing lessthan to evolve or build up a system, in other words, a self-consistent whole (of concepts, in this case). Art also does exactly the same thing. Self-contradiction means at bottom, want of harmony, balance, symmetry, unity, and self-consistency means the contrary of these things the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value.
Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong and slender, mounting straight and tapering into a vanishing point among the clouds; it has the characteristic linear movement of Indian melody. On the otherhand, the march of the Kantian Critiques or of the Hegelian Dialectic has a broader base and involves a composite strain, a balancing of contraries, a blending of diverse notes: thereis something here of the amplitude and comprehensiveness of harmonic architecture (without perhaps a corresponding degree of altitude).
All these systems, commonly called philosophical, appear to me supremely Artistic. The logical intellect has worked here exactly like a chisel or a brush in the hands of the Artist. It did not care for truth per se, its prime preoccupation was arrangement, disposition; the problem it set before itself was how best to present a consistent and unified, that is to say, a beautiful whole.
But the philosopher's stone is not, after all, a myth, as is being proved by modern science. Even so, the philosopher's truth the truth, that is to say, in the noumenal sense, to which he aspires in his he Art of he Artsis also existent. There is a reality ap Art from and beyond all relativities and contingencies: truth is not mere self-consistence, it is self-existence. Art and philosophy as an Art may not comprehend it, but they circuit round it and even have glimpses of it and touch it, though the vision they have more often aberrates, distorting a rope into a snake.
It is a grain of this truth that is the substance and the core of all true Art and philosophy. Philosophy works upon this secret strand by its logic, Art by imaginationalthough logic and imagination may not be so incommensurable as they are commonly thought to be; even so, both Art and philosophy arrive at the same result, viz., the building of a beautiful superstructure.
This golden core of truth comes from elsewhere it is beyond the myic circle of Art and philosophy. To have access to it, a lid overhead is to be broken throughra ther, as it is said, it is that that breaks through of its own accord and reveals its identity.
Plato would not tolerate the poets in his ideal society since they care too much for beauty and very little for the true and good. He wanted it all to be a kingdom of philosophers. I am afraid Plato's philosopher is not true to type, the type set up by his great disciple. Plato's philosopher is no longeran Artist, he has become a mystica Rishi in our language.
For we must remember that Plato himself was really more of a poet than a philosopher. Very few among the great representative souls of humanity surpassed him in the true poetic afflatus. The poet and the mysticKavi and Rishiare the same in our ancient lore. However these two, Plato and Aristotle, the mystic and the philosopher, the master and the disciple, combine to form one of these dual personalities which Nature seems to like and throws up from time to time in her evolutionary marchnot as a mere study in contrast, a token of her dialectical process, but rather as a movement of polarity making for a greater comprehensiveness and richer values. They may be taken as the symbol of a great synthesis that humanity needs and is preparing. The role of the mystic is to envisage and unveil the truth, the supernal reality which the mind cannot grasp nor all the critical apparatus of human reason demonstrate and to bring it down and present it to the understanding and apprehending consciousness. The philosopher comes at this stage: he receives and gathers all that is given to him, arranges and systematises, puts the whole thing in a frame as it were.
03.03 - A Stainless Steel Frame, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art Towardsa New Ideology
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Man, Human and DivineA Stainless Steel Frame
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The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art Towardsa New Ideology
03.03 - Modernism - An Oriental Interpretation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Modernism means the release of life from this subjugation; it means the expression of life's own truths in its own way, life's self-determination: that is the great endeavour and achievement of today. It was a rationalised, emotionalised, idealised life that man sought to live and create yesterday; his Art too consisted in showing life through that mask and veil, because it considered that that was the way to bring out the beautiful in life.
The history of the emancipation of the different psychological domains in man is an interesting and instructive study. For the he Art and the mind too were not always free and autonomous. An old-world consciousness was ruled or inspired by another faculty the religious sense. It is a sense, a faculty that has its seat neither in the mind nor even in the he Art proper. Some would say it is in an inmost or topmost region, the Self, while others would relegate it to something quite the opposite, the lowest and most external strand in the human consciousness, viz., that of unconsciousness or infra-consciousness, ignorance, fear, superstition.
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Rousseau brought in the positive element that determined the new poise of humanity. It was the advent of the he Art, the coming in of the Romantic the man of sentiment and sensibility. 1 But life had not yet had its chance. Life, pure life the biological domainfirst declared its autonomy in Art, for example, through the Realists and Naturalists. These pioneers, however, could bring forward mainly the facts, the constituents, the materials that compose life. The stuff was found, but the movement, life's own rhythm, was not there. It was new wine, but more or less in the old bottle. Zola or Maupassant or the Goncourts sought to express a life intrinsic and independent, but the instrument, the mould was still the old one; the manner and the movement, germane to mind and he Art, continued to persist.
That mould was broken, and something of the mystery of Life's own rhythm first revealed by the Impressionists. But the Impressionists were too vague and had too much of a generalised sense to enter into the core of the matter. They touched life, caressed its contour and periphery and larger lines, but did not penetrate it, grasp and grip it, bring out the kernel, as it were, break it and express if in its atomic structure and movement. This is what is being done today.
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Today, however, in pursuit of the mystery of life we have entered into darker and more obscure regionsof cells and genes, of colloid actions and neuron reactions: the elementary instincts, the primary reflexes, the tangle of short and brief vibrations, and half- Articulate pulsations of the most physical and material consciousness are the stuff of the life we seek to live and to capture and mirror. The creative and active force in life as well as in Art is now invested in the nervous dynamism and sensational perception. The old morals and sthetics and the sentiments and notions around them are considered today merely conventional and bourgeois; they have given place to a freer life-movement, the expression and embodiment of an unrestrained and au thentic life, life in its natural, original; unspoilt (and crude and coarse) verity. We are probing into the mystery of the crust.
It appears then that we have come down perilously near the level of the sheer animal; by a curious loop in the cycle of evolution, the most civilised and enlightened type of mankind seems to be retroverting to the status of his original ancestor.
03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An Artist teeming with her world-idea,
She never could exhaust its numberless thoughts
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An Artistry of glad outwardness of self,
A treasure-house of lasting images
03.04 - The Body Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Christian conception of God-man is also extremely beautiful and full of meaning. God became man: He sent down upon e Arth his own and only Son to live among men as man. This indeed is His supreme Grace, His illimitable love for mankind. It is thus, in the words of the Offertory, that He miraculously created the dignity of human substance, holding Himself worthy to p Artake of our humanity. This carnal sinful body has been sanctified by the Christ having assumed it. In and through Himhis divine consciousness it has been strained and purified, uplifted and redeemed. He has anointed it and given it a place in Heaven even by the side of the Father. Again, Marysymbolising the e Arth or body consciousness, as Christian mystics themselves declarewas herself taken up bodily into the heavenly abode. The body celestial is this very physical human body cleared of its dross and filled with the divine substance. This could have been so precisely because it was originally the projection, the very image of God here below in the world of Matter. The mystery of Transubstantiation repeats and confirms the same symbology. The bread and wine of our secular body become the flesh and blood of the God-Man's body. The human frame is, as it were, woven into the very fabric of God's own truth and substance. The human form is inherent in the Divine's own personality. Is it mere anthropomorphism to say like this? We know the adage that the lion were he self-conscious and creative, would paint God as a super-lion, that is to say, in his own image. Well, the difference is precisely here, that the lion is not self-conscious and creative. Man createsnot man the mere imaginative Artist but man the seer, the Rishihe expresses and embodies, represents faithfully the truth that he sees, the truth that he is. It is because of this conscious personality, referred to in the parable of the Aitareya Upanishad,-that God has chosen the human form to inhabit.
This is man's great privilege that, unlike the animal, he can surpass himself (the capacity, we may note, upon which the whole Nietzschean conception of humanity was based). Man is not bound to his human nature, to his anthropomorphism, he can rise above and beyond it, become what is (apparently) non-human. Therefore the Gita teaches: By thy self upraise thy self, lower not thy self by thy self. Indeed, as we have said, man means the whole gamut of existence. All the worlds and all the beings in all the worlds are also within his frame; he has only to switch or focus his consciousness on to a p Articular point or direction and he becomes a p Articular type in life. Man can be the very supreme godhead or at the other extreme a mere brute or any other intermediary creature in the hierarchy extending between the two.
03.04 - The Other Aspect of European Culture, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So it is contended by some dissident voices that Europe and Asia are, as a matter of fact, different and disparate and incommensurable bodies they belong to categories that are as poles asunder; and therefore the twain can and shall never merge nor meet. For Europe, on the one hand, with her materialistic and mechanistic culture, forms one indivisible unity, her entire life in its manifold expression is moulded according to a definite pattern, forming a closed circle; on the other hand, Asia basing herself upon the spiritual and the other world has in quite a different way fashioned an altogether different culture-complex. One cannot take some spiritual element out of Asiatic culture and mix it with some profane element extracted from European culture, serving the product to humanity as its universal Ideal. The details the multitudinous forms and forces that make up an integral whole are irrevocably determined by a basic intuition which is the soul of that integrality; the entire edifice is a compact unityeach piece of brick, every bit of space is in its own place and has its own function by virtue of a dominant, a compelling Idea. Like an object of Art, even like a living organism, a "body cultural" is inviolable in its self-sufficient and jealous completeness.
In other words, the difference between Europe and Asia is the difference between two species; and there can be no fruitful union between them. So, the meeting and fusion of Europe and Asia is nothing but a barren ideal, a chimera. It is a hope and a desire cherished, no doubt, by sentimental visionaries, but it is bound to come to grief in the end, when brought to face the realities of life and the stern forces that shape the forms of the concrete world.
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Herein lay Europe's soul; and to it turned often and anon the gaze of those who, among a profane humanity, are still the guardians of the Spiritpoets and Artistswho, even in the very midst of the maelstrom of Modernism, sought to hark back, back to the rock of the ages. The mediaevalism and archaicism of which a Rossetti or a Morris, for example, is often accused embodies only a defensive reaction on the p Art of Europe's soul; it is an attempt to return to her more fundamental life-intuition.
In this connection the history of Ireland's destiny affords an instructive study, since it is symbolic also of Europe's life-course. It was the natural idealism, the inborn spiritual outlook which Ireland possessed of yore the Druidic Mysteries were more ancient than the Greek culture and formed perhaps the basis of the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysterieswhich impelled her foremost to embrace the new revelation brought on by Christianity. As she was among the pioneers to champion the cause of the Christ, she became also the fortress where the new cult found a safe refuge when the old world was being overwhelmed and battered to pieces by the onrush of peoples of a dense and rough-hewn nature. When continental Europe lay a desert waste under the heels of the barbarians that almost wiped away the last vestiges of the Classical Culture, it was Ireland who nursed and reared the New Child in her bosom and when the time came sent Him out again to reconquer and revivify Europe. Once more when the tide of Modernism began to rise and swell and carry everything before it, Ireland stood firm and threw up an impregnable barrier. The story of Ireland's struggle against Anglo-Saxon domination is at bottom the story of the struggle between Europe's soul power and body power. Ireland was almost slain in the combat, physically, but would not lose her soul. And now she rises victorious at long last, her ancient spirit shines resplendent, the voice of the Irish Renaissance that speaks through Yeats and Russell1 heralds a new dawn for her and who knows if not for Europe and the whole West?
03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Creatrix, the Eternal's Artist Bride,
Linger not long with thy transmuting hand
03.04 - Towardsa New Ideology, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And India is pre-eminently fitted to discover this pattern of spiritual values and demonstrate how our normal lifeindividual and collectivecan be moulded and built according to that pattern. It has been India's special concern throughout the millenaries of her history to know and master the one thing needful (tamevaikam jnatha tmnam any vaco vimucatha), knowing which one knows all (tasmin vijte sarvam vijtam). She has made countless experiments in that line and has attained countless achievements. Her resurgence can be justified and can be inevitable only if she secures the poise and position which will enable her to imp Art to the world this master secret of life, this Art of a supreme savoir vivre. A new India in the old way of the nations of the world, one more among the already too many has neither sense nor necessity. Indeed, it would be the denial of what her soul demands and expects to be achieved and done.
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03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thus Religion and Spirituality, two fundamental categories that form one realm when held up in opposition to Materialism, are, when considered by themselves, really very different things and may be even contradictory to and destructive of each other. What then is Religion? and what, on the other hand, is Spirituality? Religion st Arts from and usually ends with a mental and emotional approach to realities beyond the mind; Spirituality goes straight forward to direct vision and communion with the Beyond. Religion labours to experience and express the world of Spirit in and through a turn, often a twist, given by the mental beingmanuin man; it bases itself upon the demands of the mental, the vital and the physical complex the triple nexus that forms the ordinary human personality and seeks to satisfy them under a holier garb. Spirituality knows the demands of the Spirit alone; it lives in a realm where the body, the life and the mind stand uplifted and transmuted into their utter realities. Religion is the human way of approaching and enjoying the Divine; Spirituality is the divine way of meeting the Divine. Religion, as it is usually practised, is a special Art, one the highest it may be, still only oneamong many other pursuits that man looks to for his enjoyment and fulfilment; but spirituality is nothing if it does not swallow up the entire man, take in his each and every preoccupation and new-create it into an inevitable expression of its own master truth. Religion gives us a moral discipline for the internal consciousness, and for the external life, a code of conduct based upon a system of rules and rites and ceremonies; spirituality aims at a revolution in the consciousness and in the being.
Keeping this difference in view, we may at once point out that Europe, when she is non-materialist, is primarily religious and only secondarily spiritual, but India is always primarily spiritual and only secondarily religious. The vein of real spirituality in European culture runs underground and follows narrow and circuitous by-paths; rarely does it appear on the top in sudden and momentary flashes and even then only to dive back again into its subterranean hiding-place; upon the collective life and culture it acts more as an indirect influence, an auxiliary leaven than as a direct and dynamic Force. In India there is an abundance, a superfluity even, of religious paraphernalia, but it is the note of spirituality that rings clear and high above all lesser tones and wields a power vivid and manifest. We could say in terms of modern Biology that spirituality tends to be a recessive character in European culture, while in India, it is dominant.
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The French, for example, have developed as a people a special characteristic and mental turn that has set its pervading impress upon their culture and civilisation, upon their creations and activities; that which distinguishes them is a fine, clear and subtle, rational, logical, Artistic and literary mind. France, it has often been said, is the head of modern Europe. The Indians are not in the same way a predominantly intellectual race, in spite of the mighty giants of intellect India has always produced, and still produces. Nor are they a literary race, although a rich and grandiose literature, unrivalled in its own great qualities, is their patrimony. It was the few, a small minority, almost a closed circle, that formed in India the elite whose interest and achievement lay in this field; the characteristic power, the main life-current of the nation, did not flow this way, but followed a different channel. Among the ancients the Greeks, and among the moderns the French alone, can rightfully claim as their special genius, as the hallmark of their corporate life, a high intellectual and literary culture. It is to this treasure,a serene and yet vigorous and organized rational mind, coupled with a wonderful felicity of expression in speech,that one turns when one thinks of the special gift that modern France and ancient Greece have brought to the heritage of mankind.
Again, the Japanese, as a people, have developed to a consummate degree the sense of beauty, especially as applied to life and living. No other people, not even the old-world Greeks, possessed almost to a man, as do these children of the Rising Sun, so fine and infallible an sthetic sensibility,not static or abstract, but of the dynamic kinduniformly successful in making out of their work-a-day life, even to its smallest accessories, a flawless object of Art. It is a wonder to see in japan how, even an unlettered peasant, away in his rustic environment, chooses with unerring taste the site of his house, builds it to the best advantage, arranges everything about it in a faultless rhythm. The whole motion of the life of a Japanese is almost Art incarnate.
Or take again the example of the British people. The practical, successful life instinct, one might even call it the business instinct, of the Anglo-Saxon races is, in its general diffusion, something that borders on the miraculous. Even their Shakespeare is reputed to have been very largely endowed with this national virtue. It is a faculty which has very little to do with calculation, or with much or close thinking, or with any laborious or subtle mental operationa quick or active mind is perhaps the last thing with which the British people can be accredited; this instinct of theirs is something spontaneous, almost aboriginal, moving with the sureness, the ruthlessness of nature's unconscious movements,it is a tact, native to the force that is life. It is this attribute which the Englishman draws from the collective genius of his race that marks him out from among all others; this is his forte, it is this which has created his nation and made it great and strong.
03.07 - Some Thoughts on the Unthinkable, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Divine Humanism The Standpoint of Indian Art
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Malady of the CenturySome Thoughts on the Unthinkable
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Divine Humanism The Standpoint of Indian Art
03.08 - The Democracy of Tomorrow, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The great mantra of individual liberty, in the social and political domain, was given by Rousseau in that famous opening line of his famous book,The Social Contract, almost the Bible of an age; Man is born free. And the first considerable mass rising seeking to vindicate and realise that ideal came with the toxin of the mighty French Revolution. It was really an awakening or rebirth of the individual that was the true source and sense of that miraculous movement. It meant the advent of democracy in politics and romanticism in Art. The century that followed was a period of great experiment: for the central theme of that experiment was the search for the individual. In honouring the individual and giving it full and free scope the movement went far and even too far: liberty threatened to lead towards licence, democracy towards anarchy and disintegration; the final consequence of romanticism was surrealism, the deification of individual reason culminated in solipsism or ego-centricism. Naturally there came a reaction and we are in this century, still, on the high tide of this movement of reaction. Totalitarianism in one form or another continues to be the watchword and although neither Hitler nor Mussolini is there, a very living ghost of theirs stalks the human stage. The liberty of the individual, it is said and is found to be so by experience, is another name of the individual's erraticism and can produce only division and mutual clash and strife, and, in the end, social disintegration. A strong centralised power is necessary to hold together the warring elements of a group. Indeed, it is asserted, the group is the true reality and to maintain it and make it great the component individuals must be steamrollered into a compact mass. Evidently this is a poise that cannot stand long: the repressed individual rises in revolt and again we are on the move the other way round. Thus a never-ending see-saw, a cyclic recurrence of the same sequence of movements appears to be an inevitable law governing human society: it seems to have almost the absolutism of a law of Nature.1
In this connection we can recall Plato's famous serial of social types from aristocracy to tyranny, the last coming out of democracy the type that precedes it, (almost exactly as we have experienced it in our own days). But the most interesting point to which we can look with profit is Plato's view that the types are as men are, that is to say, the character and nature of man in a given period determines the kind of government or social system he is going to have. There has been this cyclic rotation of types, because men themselves were rotating types, because, in other words, the individuals composing human society had not found their true reality, their abiding status. Plato's aristocracy was the ideal society, it was composed of and ruled by the best of men (aristas, srestha) the wisest. And the question was put by many and not answered by Plato himself, what brought about the decline in a perfect system. We have attempted to give our answer.
03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Some Thoughts on the Unthinkable Art and Katharsis
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Malady of the Century The Standpoint of Indian Art
The Standpoint of Indian Art
India Art is not in truth unreal and unnatural, though it may so appear to the eye of the ordinary man or to an eye habituated to the classical tradition of European Art. Indian Art, too, does hold the mirror up to Nature; but it is a different kind of Nature, not altogether this outward Nature that the mere physical eye envisages. All Art is human creation; it is man's review of Nature; but the p Articular type of Art depends upon the p Articular 'view-point that the Artist takes for his survey. The classical Artist surveys his field with the physical eye, from a single point of observation and at a definite angle; it is this which gives him the sine qua non of his Artistic composition, anatomy and perspective. And the genius of the Artist lies very much in the selection of a vantage ground from which his survey would throw into relief all the different p Arts of the objective in the order and gradation desired; to this vantage ground the entire construction is organicallyone could even say, in this case, geometricallycorrelated.
Indian Art, too, possesses a perspective and an anatomy; it, too, has a focus of observation which governs and guides the composition, in the ensemble and in detail. Only, it is not the physical eye, but an inner vision, not the angle given by the retina, but the angle of a deeper perception or consciousness. To understand the difference, let us ask ourselves a simple question: when we call back to memory a landscape, how does the picture form itself in the mind? Certainly, it is not an exact photograph of the scenery observed. We cannot, even if we try, re-form in memory the objects in the shape, colour and relative positions they had when they appeared to the physical eye. In the picture represented to the mind's eye, some objects loom large, others are thrown into the background and others again do not figure at all; the whole scenery is reshuffled and rearranged in deference to the stress of the mind's interest. Even the structure and build of each object undergoes a change; it does not faithfully re-copy Nature, but gives the mind's version of it, aggrandizing certain p Arts, suppressing others, reshaping and recolouring the whole aspect, metamorphosing the very contour into something that may not be "natural" or anatomical figure at all. Only we are not introspective enough to observe this phenomenon of the mind's alchemy; we think we are representing with perfect exactitude in the imagination whatever is presented to the senses, whereas in fact we do nothing of the kind; our idea that we do it is a pure illusion.
All Art is based upon this peculiar virtue of the mind that naturally and spontaneously transforms or distorts the objective world presented to its purview. The question, then, is only of the degree to which the metamorphosis has been carried. At the one end, there is the Art of photography, in which the degree of metamorphosis is at its minimum; at the other, there seems to be no limit, for the mind's capacity to dissolve and recreate the world of sense-perception is infinite and many modern schools of European Art have gone even beyond the limit that the "unnatural" Indian Art did not consider it necessary to transgress. Now, the classical Artist selects a position as close as he can to the photographer, tries to give the mind's view of Nature and creation, as far as possible, in the style and norm of the sense-perceptions. He takes his stand upon these and from there reaches out towards whatever imaginative reconstructions are justified within the bounds laid out by them. The general ground-plan is, almost rigorously, the form given by the physical eye. The Art of the East, and even, to a large extent, the Art of mediaeval Europe, followed a different line. Here the scheme of the sense-perceptions was rejected, the Artist sought to build on other foundations. His procedure was, first, to get a focus within the mind, to discover a psychological standpoint, and from there and in accordance with the subtler laws and conventions of an inner vision create a world that is unique and stands by itself. The aim was always to build from within, at the most, from within outwards, but not from without, not even from without inwards. This inner world has its own laws and they differ from the laws of optics which govern the physical sight; but there is no reason why it should be called unnatural. It is unnatural only in the sense that it does not copy physical Nature; it is quite natural in the 1 sense that it is a faithful reproduction of another, a psychological Nature.
Indian Art is pre-eminently and par excellence the Art of this inner re-formation and revaluation. It has thrown down completely and clearly the rigid scaffolding of the physical vision. We take here a sudden leap, as it were, into another world, and sometimes the feeling is that everything is reversed; it is not exactly that we feel ourselves standing on our heads, but it is, as if, in the Vedic phrase, the foundations were above and all the rest branched out from them downwards. The Artist sees with an eye, and constructs upon a plan that conveys the merest excuse of an actual visible world. There are other schools in the East which have also moved very far away from the naturalistic view; yet they have kept, if not the form, at least, the feeling of actuality in their composition. Thus a Chinese, a Japanese, or a Persian masterpiece cannot be said to be "natural" in the sense in which a Tintoretto, or even a Raphael is natural; yet a sense of naturalness persists, though the appearance is not naturalistic. What Indian Art gives is not the feeling of actuality or this sense of naturalness, but a feeling of truth, a sense of realityof the deepest reality.
Other Art shows the world of creative imagination, the world reconstructed by the mind's own formative delight; the Indian Artist reveals something more than that the faculty through which he seeks to create is more properly termed vision, not imagination; it is the movement of an inner consciousness, a spiritual perception, and not that of a more or less outer sensibility. For the Indian Artist is a seer or rishi; what he envisages is the mystery, the truth and beauty of another worlda real, not merely a mental or imaginative world, as real as this material creation that we see and touch; it is indeed more real, for it is the basic world, the world of fundamental truths and realities behind this universe of apparent phenomena. It is this that he contemplates, this I upon which his entire consciousness is concentrated; and all his Art consists in giving a glimpse of it, bodying it forth or expressing it in significant forms and symbols.
European the Far Western Art gives a front-view of reality; Japanese the Far Eastern Art gives a side-view; Indian Art gives a view from above. 1 Or we may say, in psychological terms, that European Art embodies experiences of the conscious mind and the external senses, Japanese Art gives expression to experiences that one has through the subtler touches of the nerves and the sensibility, and Indian Art proceeds through a spiritual consciousness and records experiences of the soul.
The frontal view of reality lays its stress upon the display of the form of things, their contour, their aspect in mass and volume and dimension; and the Art, inspired and dominated by it, is more or less a sublimated form of the Art of photography. The side-view takes us behind the world of forms, into the world of movement, of rhythm. And behind or above the world of movement, again, there is a world of typal realities, essential form-movements, fundamental modes of consciousness in its universal and transcendent status. It is this that the Indian Artist endeavours to envisage and express.
A Greek Apollo or Venus or a Madonna of Raphael is a human form idealized to perfection,moulded to meet the criterion of beauty which the physical eye demands. The purely sthetic appeal of such forms consists in the balance and symmetry, the proportion and adjustment, a certain roundedness and uniformity and regularity, which the physical eye especially finds beautiful. This beauty is akin to the beauty of diction in poetry.
Ap Art from the beauty of the mere form, there is behind it and informing it what may be called the beauty of character, the beauty revealed in the expression of psychological movement. It corresponds to the beauty of rhythm in poetry. Considered sthetically, the beauty of character, in so far as it is found in what we have called formal Art, is a corollary,an ornamental and secondary theme whose function is to heighten the effect of the beauty of form, or create the atmosphere and environment necessary for its display.
A Chinese or a Japanese piece of Artistic creation is more of a study in character than in form; but it is a study in character in a deeper sense than the meaning which the term usually bears to an European mind or when it is used in reference to Europe's Art-creations.
Character in the European sense means that p Art of nature which is dynamically expressed in conduct, in behaviour, in external movements. But there is another sense in which the term would refer to the inner mode of being, and not to any outer exemplification in activity, any reaction or set of reactions in the kinetic system, nor even to the mental state, the temperament, immediately inspiring it, but to a still deeper status of consciousness. A Raphael Madonna, for example, purposes to pour wholly into flesh and blood the beauty of motherhood. A Japanese Madonna (a Kwanon), on the other hand, would not present the "natural" features and expressions of motherhood; it would not copy faithfully the model, however idealized, of a woman viewed as mother. It would endeavour rather to bring out something of the subtler reactions in the "nervous" world, the world of pure movements that is behind the world of form; it would record the rhythms and reverberations attendant upon the conception and experience of motherhood somewhere on the other side of our wakeful consciousness. That world is made up not of forms, but of vibrations; and a picture of it, therefore, instead of being a representation in three-dimensional space, would be more like a scheme, a presentation in graph, something like the ideography of the language of the Japanese themselves, something carrying in it the beauty characteristic of the calligraphic Art. 2
An Indian Madonna owes its conception to an experience at the very other end of consciousness. The Indian Artist does not at all think of a human mother; he has not before his mind's eye an idealized mother, nor even a subtilized feeling of motherhood. He goes deep into the very origin of things, and, from there seeks to bring out that which belongs to the absolute I and the universal. He endeavours to grasp the sense that : motherhood bears in its ultimate truth and reality. Beyond the form, beyond even the rhythm, he enters into bhva, the: spiritual substance of things. An Indian Madonna (Ganesh-janani, for example) is not solely or even primarily a human I mother, but the mother, universal and transcendent, of sentientand insentient creatures and supersentient beings. She embodies not the human affection only, but also the parallel sentiment that finds play in the lower and in the higher creations as well. She expresses in her limbs not only the gladness of the mother animal tending its young, but also the exhilaration that a plant feels in the uprush of its sap while giving out new shoots, and, above all, the supreme nanda which has given birth to the creation itself. The lines that portray such motherhood must have the largeness, the sweep, the au thenticity of elemental forces, the magic and the mystery of things behind the veil.
It is this quality which has sometimes made Indian Art seem deficient in its human appeal: the Artist chose deliberately to be non-human, even in the portrayal of human subjects, in order to bring out the universal and the transcendent element in the truth and beauty of things. Man is not the measure of creation, nor human motives the highest or the deepest of nature's movements: at best, man is but a symbol of truths beyond his humanity.
It is this characteristic that struck the European mind in its first contact with the Indian Artistic world and called forth the criticism that Indian culture lacks in humanism. It is true, a very sublimated humanism finds remarkable expression in Ajanta, and perhaps it is here that the Western eye began to learn and appreciate the Indian style of beauty; even in Ajanta, however, in the pieces where the Art reaches its very height, mere humanism seems to be at its minimum. And if we go beyond these productions that reflect the mellowness and humaneness of the Buddhist Compassion, if we go into the sanctuary of the Brahmanic Art, we find that the experiences embodied there and the method of expression become more and more "anonymous"; they have not, that is to say, the local colour of humanity, which alone makes the European mind feel entirely at home. Europe's revulsion of feeling against Indian Art came chiefly from her first meeting with the multiple-headed, multiple-armed, expressionless, strangely poised Hindu gods and goddesses, so different in every way from ordinary human types.
Indian Art had to be non-human, because its aim was to be supra-human, unnatural, because its very atmosphere was the supra-natural.
I am tempted to add a fourth view the view from behind or the occult view something of which may be found in the Art of Egypt in its most ancient and na Ive aspects, in the Art of archaic Tibet, in the remnants of some of the old world submerged civilizations, now known as "primitive" (Polynesian, for example).
It is not my intention to say that the Art of character, even in the deeper sense, is totally absent in Europe. On the contrary, it is that which has been growing day by day,although perhaps often along rather odd lines. It is a moot question how far this orientation is due to the influence of the Eastern, especially, the Far Eastern Art. In speaking of Europe, I was referring to the bedrock of the Artistic tradition of Europe, its fundamental classical tone.
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Some Thoughts on the Unthinkable Art and Katharsis
03.09 - Art and Katharsis, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:03.09 - Art and Katharsis
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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The Standpoint of Indian Art Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Malady of the Century Art and Katharsis
Art and Katharsis
Art, we all know, is concerned with the Beautiful; it is no less intimately connected with the True; the Good too is in like manner p Art and parcel of the sthetic movement. For, Art not only delights or illumines, it uplifts also to the same degree. Only it must be noted that the uplifting aimed at or effected is not a mere moral or ethical edificationeven as the Truth which Art experiences or expresses is not primarily the truth of external facts and figures in the scientific manner, nor the Beauty it envisages or creates the merely pleasant and the pretty.
There is a didactic Art that looks openly and crudely to moral hygiene. And because of this, there arose, as a protest and in opposition, a free-lance Art that sought to pursue Art for Art's sake and truth for truth's sakeeven if that truth and that Art were unpleasant and repellent to the morality-ridden sophisticated consciousness. Or perhaps it may have been the other way round: because of the degeneracy of Art from its high and serious and epic nobility and sublimity to lesser levels of sthetic hedonism and dilettantism that the didactic took its rise and sought to yoke Art to duty, to moral welfare and social service. Not that there is an inherent impossibility of moralising Art becoming good Art in its own way; but great Art is essentially a-moralnot in the sense of being infra-moral, but in the sense of being supra-moral.
Art does not tend towards the Good in the manner of the moralist. It does not teach or preach that virtue is to be pursued and vice to be shunned, that a good deed is rewarded and a wrong one punished. Poetic justice, of the direct and crude style, is a moral code or dogma, and, if imposed upon the sthetic movement, serves only to fetter and curb and twist it. Art opens the vision to a higher good than what the conventions of moral idealism can frame. Great Art does not follow the lines laid down by the ethical mentality, not only because this mentality cannot embody the true truth, but also because it does not give us the Good which Art should aim at, that is to say, the purest and the highest good.
Aristotle speaks of the purifying function of the tragic Art. How is the purification effected? By the evocation of the feelings of pity and terror. For such feelings widen the sympathies, pull us out of our small egoistic personal ephemeral pleasures and put us in contact with what is to be shared and enjoyed in wide commonalty. Tragedy, in this way, initiates the spectator into the enjoyment that is born not of desire and gain but of detachment and freedom.
The uplifting power of Art is inherent in its nature, for Art itself is the outcome of an uplifted nature. Art is the expression of a heightened consciousness. The ordinary consciousness in which man lives and moves is narrow, limited, obscure, faltering, unhappyit is the abode of all that is evil and ugly; it is in Artistic. The poetic zeal, enthusiasm or frenzy, when it seizes the consciousness, at once lifts it high into a state that is characterised by wideness and depth and a new and fresh exhilarating intensity of perception and experience. We seem to arrive at the very fountain-head, where things take birth and are full of an unspoilt life and power and beauty and light and harmony. A line burdened with the whole tragedy of e Arthly existence such as Shakespeare's:
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain...
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even if they make us sad do not depress the soul; it is a divine sadness fraught with a profound calm and a strange poignant sweetness of secret delight. The rhythm and the sound and the suggestions so insinuate themselves into our nerve and blood that these seem to be sublimatedas if by a process of oxygenationto a finer substance, a purer and more limpid and vibrant valency. A consciousness opens in our very flesh and marrow that enables us to pierce the veil of things and pass beyond and understandsee and experience the why and the how and the whither of it all. It is a consciousness cosmic in its purview and disposition, which even like the Creator could contemplate all and declare it all as good. Indeed, this is the Good which Art at its highest seeks to envisage and embody the summum bonum that accompanies a summit consciousness. It is idle to say that all or most poets have this revelatory vision of the SeerRishi but a poet is a poet in so far as he is capable of this vision; otherwise he remains more or less either a moralist or a mere sthete.
Whatever is ugly and gross, all the ills and evils of life that is to say, what appears as such to our external mind and senseswhen they have passed through the crucible of the poet's consciousness undergoes a sea-change and puts on an otherworldly beauty and value. We know of the alchemy of poetic transformation that was so characteristic of Wordsworth's manner and to which the poet was never tired of referring, how the physical and brute natureeven a most insignificant and meaningless and unshapely object in it attains a spiritual sense and beauty when the poet takes it up and treasures it in his tranquil and luminous and in-gathered consciousness, his "inward eye". A crude feeling, a raw passion, a tumult of the senses, in the same way, sifted through the poetic perception, becomes something that opens magic casements, glimpses the silence of the f Arthest Hebrides, wafts us into the bliss of the invisible and the beyond.
The voice of Art is sweetly persuasivekntsmmita, as the Sanskrit rhetoricians say-it is the voice of the beloved, not that of the school-master. The education of Poetry is like the education of Nature: the poet said of the child that grew in sun and shower
And beauty born of murmuring sound
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The Standpoint of Indian Art Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul
03.10 - Hamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Art and Katharsis Modernist Poetry
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Malady of the CenturyHamlet: A Crisis of the Evolving Soul
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Art and Katharsis Modernist Poetry
03.11 - Modernist Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
and a modernist critic acclaims it as a marvellous, aye, a stupendous piece of poetic Art; it figures, according to him, the very body of the modern consciousness and resthesis. The modern consciousness, it is said, is marked with two characteristics: first, it is polyphonic, that is to say, it is not a simple and unilateral thing, but a composite consisting of many planes and strands, both horizontal and vertical. A modern consciousness is a section of world-consciousness extending in space as well as in time; there is, on one hand, the bringing together and intermingling of diverse and even disparate contemporary cultures, produced by free and easy and rapid communication between different p Arts of the world; on the other hand, there is the connection and communion with all the past civilisations brought about by modern scientific researches. A modern man, who is representative of the age, when he looks close into himself, would find in him a texture of consciousness, the warp of which is spread out from the culture of the Greenlander in the North Pole to that of the Polynesian near the South Pole as well as from the culture of the Anglo-Saxon in the far West to that of the Korean and Nipponese in the far East; and the woof consists of traditions and legends threading past the Egyptian, the Sumerian and Atlantean glyphs and runes, and forward to present-day ideologiestotalitarianism and proletarianism or others like and unlike.
A modern Artist when he creates, as he cannot but create himself, will have to embrace and express something of this peculiar cosmopolitanism or universalism of today. When Ezra bursts into a Greek hypostrophe or Eliot chants out a Vedic mantra in the very middle of King's English, we have before us the natural and inevitable expression of a fact in our consciousness. Even so, if we are allowed the liberty of comparing the flippant with the serious, even so, a fact of Anglo-vernacular consciousness was given graphic expression in the well-known lines of the famous Bengali poet and dramatist, D. L. Roy, ending in
mara (we) ...
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Indeed it has been pointed out that the second great characteristic of modern Art is the curious and wondrous amalgam in it of the highly serious and the keenly comic. It is not, however, the Shakespearean manner; for in that old-world poet, the two are merely juxtaposed, but they remain separate; very often they form an ill-assorted couple. At best, it is a mechanical mixture the sthetic taste of each remains distinct, although they are dosed together. In a modern poet, in Pound, or to a greater degree, in Eliot, the tragic and the comic, the serious and the flippant, the climax and the bathos are blended together, chemically fused, as p Art and parcel of a single whole. Take, for example, the lines from Ezra Pound quoted above, the obvious pun (Greek tin' or tina, meaning "some one" and English "tin"), the cheap claptrap, it may be explained, is intentional: the trick is meant to bring out a sense of lightness and even levity in the very he Art of seriousness and solemnity. The days of Arnold's high seriousness, of grand style pure and severe, are gone. Today the high lights are no longer set on a high pedestal away and aloof, they are brought down and immixed with the low lights and often the two are indistinguishable from each other. The grand style rides always on the crest of the waves, the ballad style glides in the trough; but the modern style has one foot on either and attempts to make that gait the natural and normal manner of the consciousness and poetic movement. Here, for example, is something in that manner as Eliot may be supposed to illustrate:
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
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My lover of air, like Artemis
Spectrally embraced,
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In general, however, and as we come down to more and more recent times we find we have missed the track. As in the material field today, we seek to create and achieve by science and organisation, by a Teutonic regimentation, as in the moral life we try to save our souls by attending to rules and regulations, codes and codicils of conduct, even so a like habit and practice we have brought over into our sthetic world. But we must remember that Napoleon became the invincible military genius he was, not because he followed the Art of war in accordance with laws and canons set down by military experts; neither did Buddha become the Enlightened because of his scrupulous adherence to the edicts which Asoka engraved centuries later on rocks and pillars, nor was Jesus the Christ because of his being an exemplar of the Sermon on the Mount.
The truth of the matter is that the spirit bloweth where it listeth. It is the soul's realisation and dynamic perception that expresses itself inevitably in a living and au thentic manner in all that the soul creates. Let the modernist possess a soul, let it find out its own inmost being and he will have all the newness and novelty that he needs and seeks. If the soul-consciousness is burdened with a special and unique vision, it will find its play in the most categorically imperative manner.
03.11 - The Language Problem and India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Even then, even though French has been ousted from the market-place, it holds still a place of honour in the cultural world, among the lite and the intelligentsia. I have said French rules the continent of Europe. Indeed even now an intellectual on the ,continent feels more at ease in French and would prefer to have the French version of a theme or work rather than the English. Indeed we may say in fact that the two languages appeal to two types of mentality, each expressing a characteristically different version of the same original truth or fact or statement. If you wish to have your ideas on a subject clear, rational and unambiguous, you must go to French. French is the language par excellence of law and logic. Mental presentation, as neat and transparent as possibly can be is the special aid French language brings to you. But precisely because it is intellectually so clear, and neat, it has often to avoid or leave out certain shades and nuances or even themes which do not go easily into its logical frame. English is marvellous in this respect, that being an illogical language it is more supple and pliant and rich and through its structural ambiguities can catch and reflect or indicate ideas and realities, rhythms and tones that are supra-rational. French, as it has been pointed out by French writers themselves, is less rich in synonyms than English. There each word has a very definite and limited (or limiting) connotation, and words cannot be readily interchanged. English, on the other hand, has a richer, almost a luxuriant vocabulary, not only in respect of the number of words, but also in the matter of variation in the meaning a given word conveys. Of course, double entendre or suggestiveness is a quality or capacity that all languages that claim a status must possess; it is necessary to express something of the human consciousness. Still, in French that quality has a limited, if judicious and Artistic application; in English it is a wild growth.
French expresses better human psychology, while meta-physical realities find a more congenial home in the English language. This is not to say that the English are born meta-physicians and that the French are in the same manner natural psychologists. This is merely to indicate a general trait or possible capacity of the respective languages. The English or the English language can hold no candle to the German race or the German language in the matter of metaphysical abstruseness. German is rigid, ponderous, if recondite. English is more flexible and has been used and can be used with great felicity by the mystic and the metaphysician. The insular English with regard to his language and letters have been more open to external influences; they have benefited by their wide contact with other peoples and races and cultures.
03.12 - TagorePoet and Seer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The miracle that Tagore has done is this: he has brought out the very soul of the raceits soul of lyric fervour and grace, of intuitive luminosity and poignant sensibility, of beauty and harmony and delicacy. It is this that he has made living and vibrant, raised almost to the highest pitch and amplitude in various modes in the utterance of his nation. What he always expresses, in all his creations, is one aspect or another, a rhythm or a note of the soul movement. It is always a cry of the soul, a profound experience in the inner he Art that wells out in the multifarious cadences of his poems. It is the same motif that finds a local habitation and a name in his short stories, perfect gems, masterpieces among world's masterpieces of Art. In his dramas and novels it is the same element that has found a wider canvas for a more detailed and graphic notation of its play and movement. I would even include his essays (and certainly his memoirs) within the sweep of the same master-note. An essay by Rabindranath is as characteristic of the poet as any lyric poem of his. This is not to say that the essays are devoid of a solid intellectual content, a close-knit logical argument, an acute and penetrating thought movement, nor is it that his novels or dramas are mere lyrics drawn out arid thinned, lacking in the essential elements of a plot and action and character. What I mean is that over and above these factors which Tagores Art possesses to a considerable degree, there is an imponderable element, a flavour, a breath from elsewhere that suffuses the entire creation, something that can be characterised only as the soul-element. It is this presence that makes whatever the poet touches not only living and graceful but instinct with something that belongs to the world of gods, something celestial and divine, something that meets and satisfies man's deepest longing and aspiration.
I have been laying special stress upon this aspect of Tagore's genius, because humanity is in great need of it today, because all has gone wrong with the modern world since it lost touch with its soul and was beguiled into a path lighted by false glimmers and will-o'-the-wisps, hires of a superficial and infra-human consciousness, or into the by-ways and backwashes and aberrations of a sophisticated intellectualism.
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Tagore is modern, because his modernism is based upon a truth not local and temporal, but eternal and universal, something that is the very bed-rock of human culture and civilisation. Indeed, Tagore is also ancient, as ancient as the Upanishads. The great truths, the basic realities experienced and formulated by the ancients ring clear and distinct in the core of all his Artistic creation. Tagore's intellectual make-up may be as rationalistic and scientific as that of any typical modern man. Nor does he discard the good things (preya)that e Arth and life offer to man for his banquet; and he does not say like the bare ascetic: any vco vimucatha, "abandon everything else". But even like one of the Upanishadic Rishis, the great Yajnavalkya, he would possess and enjoy his share of terrestrial as well as of spiritual wealthubhayameva. In a world of modernism, although he acknowledges and appreciates mental and vital and physical values, he does not give them the place demanded for them. He has never forgotten the one thing needful. He has not lost the moorings of the soul. He has continued to nestle close to the eternal verities that sustain e Arth and creation and give a high value and purpose to man's life and creative activity.
In these iconoclastic times, we are liable, both in Art and in life, to despise and even to deny certain basic factors which were held to be almost indispensable in the old world. The great triads the True, the Beautiful and the Good, or God, Soul and Immortalityare of no consequence to a modernist mind: these mighty words evoke no echo in the he Art of a contemporary human being. Art and Life meant in the old world something decent, if not great. They were perhaps, as I have already said, framed within narrow limits, certain rigid principles that cribbed and cabined the human spirit in many ways; but they were not anarchic, they obeyed a law, a dharma, which they considered as an ideal, a standard to look up to and even live up to. The modernist is an anarchic being in all ways. He does not care for old-world verities which seem to him mere convention or superstition. Truth and Beauty and Harmony are non-existent for him: if at all they exist they bear a totally different connotation, the very opposite of that which is normally accepted.
The modernist does not ask: is it good? is it beautiful? He asks: is it effective? is it expressive? And by effectivity and expressiveness he means something nervous and physical. Expressiveness to him would mean the capacity to tear off the veil over what once was considered not worth the while or decent to uncover. A strange recklessness and shamelessness, an unhealthy and perverse curiosity, characteristic of the Asura and the Pisacha, of the beings of the underworld, mark the movement of the modernist. But I forget. The Modernist is not always an anarchist, for he too seeks to establish a New Order; indeed he arrogates to himself that mission and declares it to be his and his alone. Obviously it is not the order of the higher gods of Olympus: these have been ousted and dethroned. We are being led back to the mysteries of an earlier race, reverting to an infra-evolutionary status, into the arcana of Thor and Odin, godlings of an elemental Nature.
03.13 - Human Destiny, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
On a comparatively shorter view of the human evolution we observe as, for example, Spengler has shown, a serial or serials of the rise and fall of races and nations and cultures. Is that a mere repetition, more or less of the same or very similar facts of life, or is there a running thread that points to a growth, at least a movement towards some goal or purpose to attain and fulfil? The present cycle of humanity, which we may call and is usually called the historic age, dates from the early Egyptians and, in India, from the ancestral Vedic sages (prve pitra). On a longer outlook, what has been the nature of man's curve of life since then to the present day? Races and cultures have risen and have perished, but they have been pursuing one line, moving towards one direction the growth of homo fabricus the term coined by NietzscheMan the Artisan. Man has become man through the discovery and use of toolsfrom tools of stone to tools of iron, that marks his growth from primitiveness to civilisation. And the degree of civilisation, the distance he has travelled from his origins is measured precisely by the development of his tools in respect of precision, variety, efficiency, serviceability. Viewed from that standpoint the modern man has travelled indeed very far and has civilised himself consummately. For the tools have become the whole man; man has lost his human element and almost become a machine. A machine cannot run indefinitely, it has got to stop when life is not there. So it is often prognosticated now that man is at the end of his career. He is soon going to be a thing of the past, an extinct racelike one of the prehistoric species that died out because they could not change with the circumstances of life, because they became unchanging, hard and brittle, soto say, and fell to pieces, or otherwise they continued to exist but in a degraded, a mere vegetative form.
But, as we have said, man seems to have yet retained his youthfulness. He always just falls short of the perfect perfection, that is to say, in any single form or expression of life. Life did become stereotyped, mechanised, and therefore fossilised, more or less, in Egypt of the later Dynasties; in India too life did not become less inert and vegetative during two long periods, once just preceding the advent of the Buddha,.
04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We are familiar with the phrase "Augustan Age": it is in reference to a p Articular period in a nation's history when its creative power is at its highest both in respect of quantity and quality, especially in the domain of Art and literature, for it is here that the soul of a people finds expression most easily and spontaneously. Indeed, if we look at the panorama that the course of human evolution unfolds, we see epochs of high light in various countries spread out as towering beacons or soaring peaks bathed in sunlight dominating the flat plains or darksome valleys of the usual normal periods. Take the Augustan Age itself which has given the name: it is a very crucial and one of the earlier outflowerings of the human genius on a considerable scale. We know of the appearance of individuals on the stage of life each with a special mission and role in various ages and various countries. They are great men of action, great men of thought, creative Artists or spiritual and religious teachers. In India we call them Vibhutis (we can include the AvatarasDivine Incarnationsalso in the category). Even so, there is a collective manifestation too, an upsurge in which a whole race or nation takes p Art and is carried and raised to a higher level of living and achievement. There is a tide in the affairs not only of men, but of peoples also: and masses, large collectivities live on the crest of their consciousness, feeling and thinking deeply and nobly, acting and creating powerfully, with breadth of vision and intensity of aspiration, spreading all around something that is new and not too common, a happy guest come from elsewhere.
Ancient Greece, the fountainhead of European civilisationof the world culture reigning today, one can almost sayfound itself epitomised in the Periclean Age. The lightgrace, harmony, sweet reasonableness that was Greece, reached its highest and largest, its most characteristic growth in that period. Earlier, at the very beginning of her life cycle, there came indeed Homer and no later creation reached a higher or even as high a status of creative power: but it was a solitary peak, it was perhaps an announcement, not the realisation of the national glory. Pericles stood as the guardian, the representative, the emblem and nucleus of a nation-wide efflorescence. Not to speak of the great names associated with the age, even the common peoplemore than what was normally so characteristic of Greecefelt the tide that was moving high and shared in that elevated sweep of life, of thought and creative activity. Greece withdrew. The stage was made clear for Rome. Julius Caesar carried the Roman genius to its sublimest summit: but it remained for his great nephew to consolidate and give expression to that genius in its most characteristic manner and lent his name to a characteristic high-water mark of human civilisation.
Greece and Rome may be taken to represent two types of culture. And accordingly we can distinguish two types of elevation or crest-formation of human consciousness one of light, the other of power. In certain movements one feels the intrusion, the expression of light, that is to say, the play of intelligence, understanding, knowledge, a fresh outlook and consideration of the world and things, a revaluation in other terms and categories of a new consciousness. The greatest, at least, the most representative movement of this kind is that of the Renaissance. It was really a New Illumination: a flood of light poured upon the mind and intellect and understanding of the period. There was a brightness, a brilliance, a happy agility and keenness in the movements of the brain. A largeness of vision, a curious sensibility, a wide and alert consciousness: these are some of the fundamental characteristics of this remarkable New Birth. It is the birth of what has been known as the scientific outlook, in the- broadest sense: it is the threshold of the modern epoch of humanity. All the modern European languages leaped into maturity, as it were, each attaining its definitive form and full-blooded individuality. Art and literature flooded in their magnificent creativeness all nations and peoples of the whole continent. The Romantic Revival, st Arting somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth century, is another outstanding example of a similar phenomenon, of the descent of light into human consciousness. The light that descended into human consciousness at the time of the Renaissance captured the higher mind and intelligence the Ray touched as it were the frontal lobe of the brain; the later descent touched the he Art, the feelings and emotive sensibility, it evoked more vibrant, living and powerful perceptions, created varied and dynamic sense-complexes, new idealisms and aspirations. The manifestation of Power, the descent or inrush of forcemighty and terriblehas been well recognised and experienced in the great French Revolution. A violence came out from somewhere and seized man and society: man was thrown out of his gear, society broken to pieces. There came a change in the very character and even nature of man: and society had to be built upon other foundations. The past was gone. Divasa gatah. Something very similar has happened again more recently, in Russia. The French Revolution brought in the bourgeois culture, the Russian Revolution has rung in the Proletariate.
In modern India, the movement that led her up to Independence was at a crucial moment a mighty evocation of both Light and Power. It had not perhaps initially the magnitude, the manifest scope or scale of either the Renaissance or the Great Revolutions we mention. But it carried a deeper import, its echo far-reaching into the future of humanity. For it meant nothing less than the spiritual awakening of India and therefore the spiritual regeneration of the whole world: it is the harbinger of the new epoch in human civilisation.
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If we look at Europe once again and cast a glance at its origins, we find at the source the Grco-Roman culture. It was pre-eminently a culture based upon the powers of mind and reason: it included a strong and balanced body (both body natural and body politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one the earlierphase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian tradition. The practical and robust Roman did not indulge in the loftier and subtler activities of the higher or intuitive mind; his was applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expression in law and order and governance. Virgil was a representative poet of the race; finely sensitive and yet very self-consciouse Arth-bound and mind-boundas a creative Artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination that is yet sober and fancy-free is the very hall mark of his poetic genius. In the post-Roman age this bias for mental consciousness or the play of reason and intellectual understanding moved towards the superficial and more formal faculties of the brain ending in what is called scholasticism: it meant stagnation and decadence. It is out of this slough that the Renaissance raised the mind of Europe and bathed it with a new light. That movement gave to the mind a wider scope, an alert curiosity, a keener understanding; it is, as I have said, the beginning of that modern mentality which is known as the scientific outlook, that is to say, study of facts and induction from given data, observation and experience and experiment instead of the other scholastic standpoint which goes by a priori theorising and abstraction and deduction and dogmatism.
We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances: but it regained and re-established and carried to a new degree the spirit of inquiry and curiosity, an appreciation of human motives and preoccupations, a rational understanding of man and the mechanism of the world. The original intuitive fiat, the imaginative brilliance, the spirit of adventure (in the mental as well as the physical world) that inspired the epoch gradually dwindled: it gave place to an age of consolidation, organisation, stabilisation the classical age. The seventeenth century Europe marked another peak of Europe's civilisation. That is the Augustan Age to which we have referred. The following century marked a further decline of the Intuition and higher imagination and we come to the eighteenth century terre terre rationalism. Great figures still adorned that agestalw Arts that either stuck to the prevailing norm and gave it a kind of stagnant nobility or already leaned towards the new light that was dawning once more. Pope and Johnson, Montesquieu and Voltaire are its high-lights. The nineteenth century brought in another crest wave with a special gift to mankind; apparently it was a reaction to the rigid classicism and dry rationalism of the preceding age, but it came burdened with a more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his he Art, his higher feeling and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint of the emotive and aspiring personality that seeks in and through the cosmic panorama and dreams of
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To sum up then. Man progresses through cycles of crest movements. They mark an ever-widening circle of the descent of Light, the growth of consciousness. Thus there is at first a small circle of elite, a few chosen people at the top, then gradually the limited aristocracy is widened out into a larger and larger democracy. One may describe the phenomenon in the Indian terms of the Four Orders. In the beginning there is the Brahminic culture, culture confined only to the highest and the fewest possible select representatives. Then came the wave of Kshatriya culture which found a broader scope among a larger community. In India, after the age of the Veda and the Upanishad, came the age of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata which was pre-eminently an age of Kshatriya-hood. In Europe too it was the bards and minstrels, sages and soothsayers who originally created, preserved and propagated the cultural movement: next came the epoch of the Arthurian legends, the age of chivalry, of knights and templars with their heroic code of conduct and high living. In the epoch that followed, culture was still further broad-based and spread to the Vaishya order. It is the culture of the bourgeoisie: it was brought about, developed and maintained by that class in society preoccupied with the production or earning of wealth. The economic bias of the literature of the period has often been pointed out. Lastly the fourth dimension of culture has made its appearance today when it seeks to be coterminous with the proletariate. With the arrival of the Sudra, culture has extended to the very base of the social pyramid in its widest commonalty.
This movement of extension, looked at from the standpoint of intensiveness, is also a movement of devolution, of reclamation. The Brahminic stage represents culture that is knowledge; it touches the mind, it is the brain that is the recipient and instrument of the Light. The Kshatriya comes into the field when the light, the vibration of awakening, from the mind comes down into the vital energies, from the brain to the he Art region. The Vaishya spirit has taken up man still at a lower region, the lower vital: the economic man that has his gaze fixed upon his stomach and entrails. Lastly, the final stage is reached when physical work, bodily labour, material service have attained supreme importance and are considered almost as the only values worth the name for a human being. To walk and work firmly upon E Arth the Light needs a strong pair of feet. Therefore, the Veda says, Padbhym sudro ajyata, out of the feet of the Cosmic Godhead the Sudra was born.
04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
An animal does not separate itself from Nature, exteriorise it and then seek to fashion it as he wants, try to make it yield things he requires. Man is precisely man because he has just this sense of self and of not-self and his whole life is the conquest of the not-self by the self: this is the whole story of his evolution. In the early stages his sense of agency and selfhood is at its minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's Artisanship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to stand over and above it. In this process of extricating itself from the sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon itself, became more and more aware of its freedom and individual identity and agency.
The question is now asked how far this self-consciousness given to man by his progress from stone to steelhas advanced and what is its future. The crucial problem is whether man has progressed in historical times. Granted that man with an iron tool is a more advanced type of humanity than man with a chipped stone tool, it may still be enquired whether he has made any real advance since the day he learnt to manipulate metal. If by advance or progress we mean efficiency and multiplication of tools, then surely there can be no doubt that Germany of today (perhaps now we have to say Germany of yesterday and America of today) is the most advanced type of humanityindeed they do make the claim in that country.
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We characterise the change as a special degree or order of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, we have seen, is the sine qua non of humanity. It is the faculty or power by and with which man appears on e Arth and maintains himself as such, as a distinct species. Thanks to this faculty man has become the tool-making animal, the Artisanhomo faber. But on emerging from the original mythopoeic to the scientific status man has become doubly self-conscious. Self-consciousness means to be aware of oneself as standing separate from and against the environment and the world and acting upon it as a free agent, exercising one's deliberate will. Now the first degree of self-consciousness displayed itself in a creative activity by which consciousness remained no longer a suffering organon, but became a growing and directing, a reacting and new-creating agent. Man gained the power to shape the order of Nature according to the order of his inner will and consciousness. This creative activity, the activity of the Artisan, developed along two lines: first, Artisanship with regard to one's own self, one's inner nature and character, and secondly, with regard to the external nature, the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially cultivated in India, while the second has led us to Science, man's physical mastery, which is the especial field of European culture.
Now the second degree of self-consciousness to which we referred is the scientific consciousness par excellence. It can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation, or more precisely, of scientific experimentation: it involves generically the process with which we are familiar in the domain of industry and is termed synthetic, that is to say, it means the skill and capacity to create the conditions under which a given phenomenon can be repeated at will. Hence it means a perfect knowledge of the process of thingswhich again is a dual knowledge: (1) the knowledge of the steps gradually leading to the result and (2) the knowledge that has the power to resolve the result into its antecedent conditions. Thus the knowledge of the mechanism, the detailed working of things, is scientific knowledge, and therefore scientific knowledge can be truly said to be mechanistic knowledge, in the best sense of the term. Now the knowledge of the ends and the knowledge of the means (to use a phrase of Aldous Huxley) and the conscious control over either have given humanity a new degree of self-consciousness.
04.02 - The Growth of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And Art and beauty sprang from the human depths;
Nature and soul vied in nobility.
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Nor yet the Art and wisdom of the Gods.
04.03 - The Call to the Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This wonder of the divine Artist's make
Carved like a nectar-cup for thirsty gods,
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Stanzaed to glimmering curves by Artist gods,
Dep Art where love and destiny call your charm.
04.07 - Matter Aspires, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I said it is an amusing discussion. But what is apt to be forgotten in such "scientific" discussions is, as has been pointed out by Rev. Trethowan in his criticism of Sir Robert, that all genuine creation is a freak, that is to say, it is a movement of freedom, of incalculable spontaneity. A machine is exactly the sum of its component p Arts; it can give that work (both as regards quantity and quality) which is confined within the frame and function of the p Arts. Man's creative power is precisely this that it can make two and two not merely four but infinity. There is a force of intervention in him whichupsets the rule of the parallelogram of forces that normally governs Matter and even his own physical brain and mind. There is in him truly a deus ex machine. Poetry, Art, all creative act is a revelation, an intrusion of a truth, a reality from another plane, of quite a different order, into the rigid actuality and factual determinism.. Man's secret person is a sovereignly free will. A machine is wholly composed of actualities-the given-and brings out only a resultant of the permutation and combination of the data: it is a pure deduction.
But there is another even more interesting aspect of the matter. The attempt of the machine to embody or express something non-mechanical, to leap as high as possible from material objects to psychological values has a special significance for us today and is not all an amusing or crazy affair. It indicates, what we have been always saying, an involved pressure in Matter, a presence, a force of consciousness secreted there that seeks release and growth and expression.
04.07 - Readings in Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The deepest and the most fundamental mystery of the human consciousness (and in fact of the e Arth consciousness) is not that there is an unregenerate aboriginal being there as its bed-rock, a being made of the very stuff of ignorance and I inconscience and inertia that is Matter: it is this that the I submerged being is not merely dead matter, but a concentrated, a solidified flame, as it were, a suppressed aspiration that burns inwardly, all the more violent because it is not Articulate and in the open. The aboriginal is that which harbours in its womb the original being. That is the Inconscient Godhead, the Divinity in painMater Dolorosa the Divine Being who lost himself totally when transmuted into Matter and yet is harassed always by the oestrus of a secret flame driving it to know itself, to find itself, to be itself again. It is Rudra, the Energy coiled up in Matter and forging ahead towards a progressive evolution in light and consciousness. That is what Savitri, the universal Divine Grace become material and human, finds at the core of her being, the field and centre of concentrated struggle, a millennial aspiration petrified, a grief of ages congealed, a divinity lone and benumbed in a trance. This divinity has to awake and labour. The god has to be cruel to himself, for his divinity demands that he must surpass himself, he cannot abdicate, let Nature go her own way, the inferior path of ease and escape. The godhead must exercise its full authority, exert all its pressure upon itselftapas taptv and by this heat of incubation release the energy that leads towards the light and the high fulfilment. In the meanwhile, the task is not easy. The divine sweetness and solicitude lights upon this hardened divinity: but the inertia of the Inconscient, the 'Pani', hides still the light within its rocky cave and would not deliver it. The Divine Grace, mellow with all the tears of love and sympathy and tenderness she has gathered for the labouring godhead, has pity for the hard lot of a humanity stone-bound to the material life, yet yearning and surging towards freedom. The godhead is not consoled or appeased until that freedom is achieved and light and immortality released. The Grace is working slowly, laboriously perhaps but surely to that end: the stone will wear down and melt one day. Is that fateful day come?
That is the meaning of human life, the significance of even the very ordinary human life. It is the field of a dire debate, a fierce question, a constant struggle between the two opposing or rather polar forces, the will or aspiration to be and the will of inertia not to be the friction, to use a Vedic image, of the two batons of the holy sacrificial wood, arani out of which the flame is to leap forth. The pain and suffering men are subject to in this unhappy vale of tears physical illness and incapacity, vital frustration or mental confusionare symbols and expressions of a deeper fundamental Pain. That pain is the pain of labour, the travail for the birth and incarnation of a godhead asleep or dead. Indeed, the sufferings and ills of life are themselves powerful instruments. They inevitably lead to the Bliss, they are the fuel that kindles, quickens and increases the Fire of Ecstasy that is to blaze up on the day of victory in the full and integral spiritual consciousness. The round of ordinary life is not vain or meaningless: its petty innocent-looking moments and events are the steps of the marching Divinity. Even the commonest life is the holy sacrificial rite progressing, through the oblations of our experiences, bitter or sweet, towards the revelation and establishment of the immortal godhead in man.
04.08 - An Evolutionary Problem, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I am afraid the metaphysics here found fault with is not surely false, it is the critics appreciation that is at fault. The metaphysics is perhaps somewhat too physical in its imagery and terminology, that is to say, graphic in the Shavian manner, but the matter seems to us quite all right. What the critic fails to understand is that it is not the conscious idea in the mind that brings about its concrete realisation. What is there at the outset in the evolutionary urge is a life-force, blind, no doubt in the usual sense, but driving towards greater expression and Articulation, towards a more and more conscious and clear perception of ends and means. Thus, for example,the root shoots out of the e Arth into the open air, throws up the stem and the stem grows upward and branches out into tendrils and leaves: all that process means an ardent yearning, a wanting, to rush and plunge into the light and air above: The root or the seed underground does not see the light or air, how then does it move towards that? In fact, it is not necessary to have seen eyes, known what eyes are in order to grow the vision and the organ. We will what we need: yes, but what we need is not always or wholly covered by the conscious minds conception of it. The needs lie deep down and most of them are unconscious; and at a time, at a stage when conscious mind has not yet evolved, it is a secret sense of the life-force, an instinctive orientation to what is useful and needful that infallibly guides the living organism.
Evolution is purposive: not because it has had always a mentally conscious aim before it, for the mind is a later production, but because the purpose is latent within as an involved force and is gradually unrolled and worked out. It is not as indeterminate and unpredictable as Bergson would have it; it has a veiled determination, a disposition implanted in the very movement by the stress of an apparent unconsciousness seeking conscious formulation. We might also say, reverting to our analogy, that the seed sprouts towards light and air, because it had absorbed light and air in its original formation out of the flower blooming in the open space: the impress of that contact is taken into the very grain of its substance, in its chromosomes and genesit remains there as an indelible memory (although not of the human cerebral variety). It is no wonder therefore that an inner urge towards light gradually leads towards the formation of the instrument for sight. The organism may have no notion of the external eye, but the external eye is only a projection of an inner eye that lies imbedded in the sensory continuum. Behind the physical eye there is a subtle eye, the eye of the eye, as the Upanishad calls it, the secret gaze of an involved consciousness in the apparently unconscious.
The whole Articulation of the external organism is, as we know, contained in a secret disposition of elements within the cellnot in the way, as was once supposed, viz., that a whole full-grown tree lies in a miniature form within the seed andgrowth simply means a gradual enlargement of that form but that there is a pattern of ultimate p Articlesvital quantaa rhythm and vibration of life energy, that is the origin, the formal and efficient cause, of the material form. Deeper still, behind the blind instinctive urge of life, the unconsciousness that is the inertia of matter, there is a consciousness, a vision, a supernal self-conscious energy that inspires, guides, fashions the whole evolutionary scheme in the large as well as in all details.
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04.09 - To the Heights-I (Mahasarswati), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Supreme Artisan and Fashioner of perfection,
Atom by atom she builds up the world-she is slow, patient, faultless.
04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Value refers to the p Articular poise or status, the mode of being or function of a thing. In its ultimate formulation we can say it is the rhythm or force of consciousness that vibrates in an object, it is the becomingof the being:but becoming does not cancel being, it only activises, energises, formulates. The debate brings us back to the ancient quarrel between the Buddhists and the Vedantists, the latter posits sat, being or existence, while the former considers sat as only an assemblage of asat. The object and its function, the thing-in-itself and its attribute (the fire and its burning power, as the Indian logicians used to cite familiarly as an example) are not to be separated they are not separated in fact but given together as one unified entity; it is the logical mind that separates them Artificially.
III
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It is India's great achievement and speciality that she has found the way the way to all truly high fulfilment. It is Yoga and the Yogic consciousness. Yoga is the science and Art of discovering the higher truths, indeed, the highest reality and of living there, not a midway moral elevation only. In its integral view it combines all the three processes mentioned above. The Yogic consciousness seeks to lift the consciousness as high as possible, in fact, to the very highestit literally means union or identity (with the highest Reality, Spirit or God). Thus it has the true perception or vision of the forces that act in and upon the world and the powers that decide and is in union with them. The Yogic consciousness and power is also embodied in the Divine Incarnation for he is Yogeshwara: and in India it is accepted as a commonplace that God descends in a human shape, whenever there is a great crisis and man needs salvaging and salvation. God comes then with all his angels, with the divine host to battle for him and with him to establish the Dharma.
Sri Aurobindo's stand in this field is very definite and clear. The goal or end is clear, and with it the way too. What he envisages is the transformation of Matter and material life, that is to say, neither rejecting it as an impossible thing nor trying to gloss it over with a coat of mental luminosity, but delving into it and cleaning and purifying it, removing its mire and dross wholly and absolutely so that its true divine nature comes out and remains as Nature's highest and fullest expression on e Arth. That is the goal: the waytoo is not less characteristic. The total spiritual transformation, the divinisation of Matter is possible, not only possible but inevitable, because it is : Matter that wants it, because Matter in its essence, in its true reality is spiritual energy, is the Spirit itself. That is the great secret Sri Aurobindo has brought to light. The ideals in the past for the reclamation of human nature and reformation of human society were tackled with mental and moral powers which were not adequate to the task. Even when the spiritual power was invoked, it was of the static category which is above, aloof, witness and can have at best a kindly look and influence. That the spirit dynamic is involved in Matter and as Matter is a truth that has to be discovered.
04.10 - To the Heights-X, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thou Art the one pivot on which revolves the universe,
The hidden spring that presses my he Art to a ceaseless beating;
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Thou Art the gladness that makes the e Arth green and the sky blue-
Thou Art the ecstasy that has turned the blood in my veins To a crimson red!
October 15, 1932
04.12 - To the Heights-XII, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thou Art neither too subtle nor too vast, neither the far transcendent, nor the wide universal;
Thou hast framed thyself into the limits of common mortality,
04.13 - To the HeightsXIII, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the he Art of the devotee thou Art the delight that is heaven's nectar,
O Mother of Love, Mother victorious!
04.14 - To the Heights-XXIV, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thou Art the Strength of the strong,
and the stronger he becomes the more he knows it:
04.18 - To the Heights-XVIII, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And now we blame thee and slight thee, because thou Art
become like us-e Arthly and human.
Divine, thou Art too far-human, too near!
For, the aberration of our petty minds knows no limits!
04.21 - To the HeightsXXI, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thou Art the Architect that builds from within,
From the deepest foundations:
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Thou Art the Child that we carry as in a womb
And nourish with the light that we press out of every cell and every pore;
04.24 - To the Heights-XXIV, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thou Art the Strength of the strong,
and the stronger he becomes the more he knows it:
05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man possesses characters that mark him as an entity sui generis and give him the value that is his. First, toil and suffering and more failures than success have given him the quality of endurance and patience, of humility and quietness. That is the quality of e Arth-naturee Arth is always spoken of by the poets and seers as all-bearing and all-forgiving. She never protests under any load put upon her, never rises in revolt, never in a hurry or in worry, she goes on with her appointed labour silently, steadily, calmly, unflinchingly. Human consciousness can take infinite pains, go through the infinite details of execution, through countless repetitions and mazes: patience and perseverance are the very badge and blazon of the tribe. Ribhus, the Artisans of immortalitychildren of Mahasaraswatiwere originally men, men who have laboured into godhood. Human nature knows to wait, wait infinitely, as it has all the eternity before it and can afford and is prepared to continue and persist life after life. I do not say that all men can do it and are of this nature; but there is this essential capacity in human nature. The gods, who are usually described as the very embodiment of calmness and firmness, of a serene and concentrated will to achieve, nevertheless suffer ill any delay or hindrance to their work. Man has not perhaps the even tenor, the steadiness of their movement, even though intense and fast flowing; but what man possesses is persistence through ups and downshis path is rugged with rise and fall, as the poet says. The steadiness or the staying power of the gods contains something of the nature of indifference, something hard in its grain, not unlike a crystal or a diamond. But human patience, when it has formed and taken shape, possesses a mellowness, an understanding, a sweet reasonableness and a resilience all its own. And because of its intimacy with the tears of things, because of its long travail and calvary, human consciousness is suffused with a quality that is peculiarly human and humane that of sympathy, compassion, comprehension, the psychic feeling of closeness and oneness. The gods are, after all, egoistic; unless in their supreme supramental status where they are one and identical with the Divine himself; on the lower levels, in their own domains, they are separate, more or less immiscible entities, as it were; greater stress is laid here upon their individual functioning and fulfilment than upon their solidarity. Even if they have not the egoism of the Asuras that sets itself in revolt and antagonism to the Divine, still they have to the fullest extent the sense of a separate mission that each has to fulfil, which none else can fulfil and so each is bound rigidly to its own orbit of activity. There is no mixture in their workingsna me thate, as the Vedas say; the conflict of the later gods, the apple of discord that drove each to establish his hegemony over the rest, as narrated in the mythologies and popular legends, carry the difference to a degree natural to the human level and human modes and reactions. The egoism of the gods may have the gait of aristocracy about it, it has the aloofness and indifference and calm nonchalance that go often with nobility: it has a family likeness to the egoism of an ascetic, of a saintit is sttwic; still it is egoism. It may prove even more difficult to break and dissolve than the violent and ebullient rjasicpride of a vital being. Human failings in this respect are generally more complex and contain all shades and rhythms. And yet that is not the whole or dominant mystery of man's nature. His egoism is thw Arted at every stepfrom outside, by, the force of circumstances, the force of counter-egoisms, and from inside, for there is there the thin little voice that always cuts across egoism's play and takes away from it something of its elemental blind momentum. The gods know not of this division in their nature, this schizophrenia, as the malady is termed nowadays, which is the source of the eternal strain of melancholy in human nature of which Matthew Arnold speaks, of the Shelleyan saddest thoughts: Nietzsche need not have gone elsewhere in his quest for the origin and birth of Tragedy. A Socrates discontented, the Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and Amitabha, the soul of pity and compassion are peculiarly human phenomena. They are not merely human weaknesses and failings that are to be brushed aside with a godlike disdain; but they contain and yield a deeper sap of life and out of them a richer fulfilment is being elaborated.
Human understanding, we know, is a tangled skein of light and shademore shade perhaps than lightof knowledge and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this limited and e Arthly frame that mind is has something to give which even the overmind of the gods does not possess and needs. It is indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates effective ideas, as they are translated into facts and events. It has not the initiative, the creative power of the vision of a god, but it is an indispensable aid, a precious instrument for the canalisation and expression of that vision, for the intimate application of the divine inspiration to physical life and external conduct. If nothing else, it is a sort of blue print which an engineer of life cannot forego if he has to execute his work of building a new life accurately and beautifully and perfectly.
--
We have spoken of the stability, the fixity, the rigidity even, of the god type and we contrasted it with the variability, the many-sidedness, the multiple character of the human consciousness. In another view, however, the tables are turned and the opposite appears as the truth. Man, for example., has a physical body and nothing is more definite and fixed and rigid than this material sheath. The gods have no body, but they have a form which is supple and changeful, not hard and crystallised like the human figure. Gods, we said, are cosmic forceslines (or vectors, if we wish to be scientifically precise) of universal forces; this does not mean that they have no shape or form. They too have a form and can be recognised by it even as a human being is recognisable by his body. In spite of variability the form retains its identity. The form changes, for a god has the capacity to act in different contexts at the same time; within his own universe a god is multi-dimensional. The Indian seer and Artist often seeks to convey this character of the immortals by giving them a plurality of arms and heads. In modern times the inspiration behind the surrealist movement lies precisely in this attempt to express simultaneity of diverse gestures and activities, a synthetic close-up of succeeding moments and disparate objects or events. But in spite of all changes Proteus remains Proteus and can be recognised as such by the vigilant and careful eye. The human frame, we have said, is more fixed and rigid, being made of the material substance. It has not evidently the variability of the body of a god. And yet there is a deeper mystery: the human body is not or need not be so inflexible as it appears to be or as it usually is. It has considerable plastic capacities. We would say that the human body holds a marvellous juste milieu. By its solid concreteness it acts as a fortress for the inner consciousness to dwell in safe from easy attacks of the hostiles: it acts also as a firm weapon for the same inner consciousness to cut into the material world and indent and impress its pattern of truth upon an otherwise hard and refractory material made of ignorance and obscurity and falsehood. Furthermore, it is supple enough to receive and record into its grain the pattern and substance of the higher reality. The image of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ is symbolic of the alchemy of which the human body is capable when one knows how to treat it in occult knowledge and power. The human body can suffer a sea-change which is not within the reach of the radiant body of an immortal.
IV
05.01 - The Destined Meeting-Place, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Man the deep-browed Artificer had not come
To lay his hand on happy inconscient things,
05.02 - Of the Divine and its Help, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thou Art the goal, Thou the way.
Thou Art Thyself what we have to be; by Thy example Thou showest us how to be.
Thou givest us the power to work and achieve; Thou Art That which works and achieves; and that which is achieved in us is Thou.
What is the Truth? The Man who bears the Truth.
05.02 - Satyavan, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Artist spirit needs not for its work
And puts aside in memory's shadowy rooms.
05.03 - Of Desire and Atonement, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Life itself becomes Art-the very highest form of Art-when it is moulded in the rhythm of the Supreme Beauty, when its steps follow the cadences of the Divine.
Every softening of the he Art towards things of the e Arth is a hardening of it to the things of Heaven.
05.03 - Satyavan and Savitri, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
How Art thou named among the sons of men?
Whence hast thou dawned filling my spirit's days,
--
Princess of Madra. Who Art thou? What name
Musical on e Arth expresses thee to men?
--
Speak of thyself and all thou Art within;
I would know thee as if we had ever lived
--
It knows that thou Art he my spirit has sought
Amidst e Arth's thronging visages and forms
--
I strove to find its hints through Beauty and Art,
But Form cannot unveil the indwelling Power;
--
I know that thou and only thou Art he."
Then down she came from her high carven car
05.04 - Of Beauty and Ananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Beauty is Delight perfectly Articulate.
Love is Beauty enjoying itself.
--
All Art is the re-creation of Truth in Beauty.
Rhythm is the gait of Truth dynamic with Delight.
--
Beauty is the soul's delight perfectly Articulate and organised.
Where the soul does not speak out, where the rhythm of the spirit does not manifest, there comes in ugliness.
--
Art is the incarnation of Truth in Beauty,
The Divine the truest Truth and the Beauty most beautiful,
The incarnation of the Divine the supreme Art.
An Art with the Divine left out is like a trunk without the head:
It is built with the lower members and not with the higher members of Beauty;
--
The very nature of Art is rhythm and harmony.
The Divine is integral harmony and perfect rhythm.
The element of divine harmony and rhythm is the measure of the beautiful in Art.
Even so it is with the Art of life.
All things are beautiful, for the All-beautiful is in every thing.
The domain of Art encompasses the entire creation.
The Divine is present everywhere, but in essence.
--
The progress of Art too consists in recording this march of the soul in its ever-growing consciousness and ever-deepening Ananda towards a higher incarnation of the Divine.
***
05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Ego means a hardened core that is not easily broken by the impact of forces. It delimits, ,cuts out, endeavours to maintain its formation by a strong violent self-assertion. Ego is a helper, but also it is a bar. It assists the first formation but delays and obstructs the true and final formation. For the ego is a formation, an individual formation, but on the level of universal Nature: it is of a piece with the normal cosmic movement, only bounded by a peripheral line. In the general expanse it puts up enclosures and preserves and fencings; the constituting elements remaining the same in substance and quality. Even the delimitation is illusory in reality, it is something like the membrane in the body separating the different functional organs, rigid yet allowing interaction and interpenetration. That is why, when death removes the outward fencing, the individuality also cannot long maintain itself and merges into the general. We may look upon egoism as a kind of Artificial or experimental individuality, a laboratory formation, as it were, tried and developed under given conditions. In fact, however, egoism is a shadow or an echo upon this side of our nature of the true individuality which lies and comes from elsewhere.
And that is the soul of the man. We have spoken of the body, the life and the mind of the individual, but beside and beyond these elements which are only instruments there is this secret master and overlord. It is the p Article of divinity in each, the developing consciousness the spark of Fire, the ray of Light the immortal in the mortal no bigger than one's thumb." The soul is an individual, an individual formation of the divine reality: it is a godhead formulating an aspect or function of God. We may thus say that the whole purpose of e Arthly evolution is the evolution of this soul-formation, that is to say, its growing individualisation in light and power, in the expression of the godhead. This growth is first in itself and of itself, its inherent being and consciousness; then, the growth is that of its instrumentation, in other words, the development and organisation of the mind, the life and the body.
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To a more detached and imp Artial view this may appear very much like the ostrich-policy. If a thing really exists, one cannot negate it by simply closing one's eyes. This involves a dichotomy which the logical mind may like to impose and live by, but man cannot be thus Artificially segmented. And if both the worlds are found in him both have to be accepted and if they are found together, there must be some sort of commensurability between the two.
Indeed the second way of approach to the problem is the positivist's own way. That is to say, let us take our stand on the terra firmaof the physical and probe into it and find out whether there are facts there which open the way or point to the other side of nature, whether there are signs, hints, intimations, factors involved there that lead to conclusions, if not inevitable, at least conformable to supraphysical truths. It is usually asserted, for example, that the scientist the positivist par excellencefollows a rigid process of ratiocination, of observation, analysis and judgment. He collects facts and a sufficient number of them made to yield a general law the probability of a generic factwhich is tested or exemplified by other correlate facts. This is however an ideal, a theoretical programme not borne out by actual practice, it is a rationalisation of a somewhat different actuality. The scientist, even the most hard-headed among them, the mathematician, finds his laws often and perhaps usually not by a long process of observation and induction or deduction, but all on a sudden, in a flash of illumination. The famous story of Newton .and the falling apple, Kepler's happy guess of the elliptical orbit of the planetsand a host of examples can be cited as rather the rule than the exception for the methodology of scientific discovery. Prof. Hadamard, the great French mathematician the French are well-known for their intransigent, logical and rational attitude in Science,has been compelled to admit the supreme role of an intuitive faculty in scientific enquiry. If it is argued that the so-called sudden intuition is nothing but the final outburst, the cumulative resultant of a long strenuous travail of thinking and reasoning and arguing, Prof. Hadamard says', in reply, that it does not often seem to be so, for the answer or solution that is suddenly found does not lie in the direction of or in conformity with the, conscious rational research but goes against it and its implications.
This faculty of direct knowledge, however, is not such a rare thing as it may appear to be. Indeed if we step outside the circumscribed limits of pure science instances crowd upon us, even in our normal life, which would compel one to conclude that the rational and sensory process is only a fringe and a very small p Art of a much greater and wider form of knowing. Poets and Artists, we all know, are familiar only with that form: without intuition and inspiration they are nothing. Ap Art from that, modern inquiries and observations have established beyond doubt certain facts of extra-sensory, suprarational perceptionof clairvoyance and clairaudience, of prophecy, of vision into the future as well as into the past. Not only these unorthodox faculties of knowledge, but dynamic powers that almost negate or flout the usual laws of science have been demonstrated to exist and can be and are used by man. The Indian yogic discipline speaks of the eight siddhis, super-natural powers attained by the Yogi when he learns to control nature by the force of his consciousness. Once upon a time these facts were challenged as facts in the scientific world, but it is too late now in the day to deny them their right of existence. Only Science, to maintain its scientific prestige, usually tries to explain such phenomena in the material way, but with no great success. In the end she seems to say these freaks do not come within her purview and she is not concerned with them. However, that is not for us also the subject for discussion for the moment.
The first point then we seek to make out is that even from a rigid positivist stand a form of knowledge that is not strictly positivist has to be accepted. Next, if we come to the content of the knowledge that is being gained, it is found one is being slowly and inevitably led into a world which is also hardly positivistic. We have in our study of the physical world come in close contact with two disconcerting facts or two ends of one fact the infinitely small and the infinitely large. They have disturbed considerably the normal view of things, the view that dominated Science till yesterday. The laws that hold good for the ordinary sensible magnitudes fail totally, in the case of the infinite magnitudes (whether big or small). In the infinite we begin squaring the circle.
--
Consciousness or thought in man, we know, is linked with the brain: and sentience which is the first step towards thought and consciousness is linked with the nervous system (of which the brain is an extension). Now the same Indian wizard who first, scientifically speaking, linked up the non-living with the living, has also demonstrated, if not absolutely, at least to a high degree of plausibility, that the plant also possesses a kind of rudimentary nervous system (although we accept more easily a respiratory system there). All this, however, one has to admit, is still a far cry from any intimation of consciousness in Matter. Yet if life is admitted to be involved in matter and consciousness is found to be involved in life, then the unavoidable conclusion is that Matter too must contain involved in it a form of consciousness. The real difficulty in the way of attri buting consciousness to Matter is our conception of consciousness which we usually identify with Articulate thought, intelligence or reason. But these are various formations of consciousness, which in itself is something else and can exist in many other forms and formulations.
One remarkable thing in the material world that has always attracted and captivated man's attention, since almost the very dawn of his consciousness, is the existence of a pattern, of an Artistic layout in the composition and movement of material things. When the Vedic Rishi sings out: "These countless stars that appear glistening night after night, where do they vanish during the day?" he is awed by the inviolable rhythm of the Universe, which other sages in other climes sang as the music of the spheres. The presence of Design in Nature has been in the eyes of Believers an incontrovertible proof of the existence of a Designer. What we want to say is not that a watch (if we regard the universe as a watch) presupposes the existence of a watch-maker: we say the pattern itself is the expression of an idea, it involves a conception not imposed or projected from outside but inherent in itself. The Greek view of the Artist's mode of operation is very illuminating in this connection. The Artist, according to this view, when he carves out a statue for example, does not impose upon the stone a figure that he has only in his mind, but that the stone itself contains the figure, the Artist has the vision to see it, his chisel follows the lines he sees imbedded in the stone. It is why we say that the geometry in the structure of a crystal or an atom or an astronomical system, the balance and harmony, the symmetry and polarity that govern the composition of objects and their relations, the blend of colour schemes, the marshalling of lines and the building of volumes, in a word, the Artistic make-up, perfect in detail and in the ensemble that characterise all nature's body and limbs and finally the mathematical laws that embrace and picture as it were Nature's movements, all point to the existence of a truth, a reality whose characteristic marks are or are very much like those of consciousness and Idea-Force. We fight shy of the wordconsciousness for it brings in a whole association of anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy. But in our anxiety to avoid a ditch let us not fall over a precipice. If it is blindness to see nothing but the spirit, it is not vision to see nothing but Matter.
A hypothesis, however revolutionary or unorthodox it may seem for the moment, has to be tested by its effective application, in its successful working out. All scientific discoveries in the beginning appear as inconveniences that upset the known and accepted order. Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Maxwell or Einstein in our day enunciated principles that were not obvious sense-given axioms. These are at the outset more or less postulates that have to be judged by their applicability.
05.05 - Man the Prototype, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The essential appearance of Man is, as we have said, the prototype of the actual man. That is to say, the actual man is a projection, even though a somewhat disfigured projection, of the original form; yet there is an essential similarity of pattern, a commensurability between the two. The winged angels, the cherubs and seraphs are reputed to be ideal figures of beauty, but they are nothing akin to the Prototype, they belong to a different line of emanation, other than that of the human being. We may have some idea of what it is like by taking recourse to the distinction that Greek philosophers used to make between the formal and the material cause of things. The prototype is the formal reality hidden and imbedded in the material reality of an object. The essential form is made of the original configuration of primary vibrations that later on consolidate and become a compact mass, arriving finally at its end physico-chemical composition. A subtle yet perfect harmony of vibrations forming a living whole is what the prototype essentially is. An Artist perhaps is in a better position to understand what we have been labouring to describe. The Artist's eye is not confined to the gross physical form of an object, even the most realistic Artist does not hold up the mirror to Nature in that sense: he goes behind and sees the inner contour, the subtle figuration that underlies the external volume and mass. It is that that is beautiful and harmonious and significant, and it is that which the Artist endeavours to bring out and fix in a system or body of lines and colours. That inner form is not the outer visible form and still it is that form fundamentally, essentially. It is that and it is not that. We may add another analogy to illustrate the point. Pythagoras, for example, spoke of numbers being realities, the real realities of all sensible objects. He was evidently referring to the basic truth in each individual and this truth appeared to him as a number, the substance and relation that remain of an object when everything concrete and superficial is extractedor abstractedout of it. A number to him is a quality, a vibration, a quantum of wave-p Articles, in the modern scientific terminology, a norm. The human prototype can be conceived as something of the category of the Pythagorean number.
The conception of the Purusha at the origin of things, as the very source of things, so familiar to the Indian tradition, gives this high primacy to the human figure. We know also of the cosmic godhead cast in man's mouldalthough with multiple heads and feetvisioned and hymned by sages and seers. The gods themselves seem to possess a human frame. The Upanishads say that once upon a time the gods looked about for a proper body to dwell in, they were disappointed with all others; it is only when the human form was presented that they exclaimed, This is indeed a perfect form, a perfect form indeed. All that indicates the feeling and perception that there is something eternal and transcendent in the human body-frame.
05.09 - The Changed Scientific Outlook, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Shall we elucidate a little? We were once upon a time materialists, that is to say, we had very definite and fixed notions about Matter: to Matter we gave certain invariable characteristics, inalienable properties. How many of them stand today unscathed on their legs? Take the very first, the crucial property ascribed to Matter: "Matter is that which has extension." Well, an electric charge, a unit energy of it, the ultimate constituent of Matter as discovered by Science today, can it be said to occupy space? In the early days of Science, one Boscovich advanced a theory according to which the ultimate material p Article (a molecule, in his time) does not occupy space, it is a mere mathematical point toward or from which certain forces act. The theory, naturally, was laughed out of consideration; but today we have come perilously near it. Again, another postulate describing Matter's dharma was: "two material p Articles cannot occupy the same place at the same time". Now what do you say of the neutron and proton that coalesce and form the unit of a modern atomic nucleus? Once more, the notion of the indestructibility of Matter has been considerably modified in view of the phenomenon of an electric p Article (electron) being wholly transmuted ("dematerialised" as the scientists themselves say) into a light p Article (photon). Lastly, the idea of the constancy of massa bed-rock of old-world physicsis considered today to be a superstition, an illusion. If after all these changes in the idea of Matter, a man still maintains that he is a materialist, as of old, well, I can only exclaim in the Shakespearean phrase: "Bottom, thou Art translated"! What I want to say is that the changes that modern physics proposes to execute in its body are not mere amendments and emendations, but they mean a radical transfiguration, a subversion and a mutation. And more than the actual changes effected, the possibilities, the tendencies that have opened out, the lines along which further developments are proceeding do point not merely to a reformation, but a revolution.
Does this mean that Science after all isveering to the Idealist position? Because we have modified the meaning and connotation of Matter does it 'follow that we have perforce arrived at spirituality? Not quite so. As Jeans says, the correct scientific position would be to withhold one's judgment about the ultimate nature of matter, whether it is material or mental (spiritual, we would prefer to say): it is an attitude of non possumus. But such neutrality, is it truly possible and is it so very correct? We do see scientists lean .on one side or the other, according to the vision or predisposition that one carries.
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The higher Gods, like those, for example, envisaged in the Veda, may be considered each as an emanation of one or other of these Divine Aspects. They are dwellers of Swar or the Overmind. Varuna seems to be an emanation of Mahavira, a son of Maheshwari: for he is pre-eminently the god of the pure and vast consciousness who releases us from the triple bonds and shows us the winding way into the embrace of the infinite Mother. His associate, Mitra, is the lord of love and harmony, evidently an emanation of Pradyumna (or Mahalakshmi). Other gods of the same category are Bhaga and Soma. The Balarama or Mahakali aspect is manifested in Aryaman: Rudra being another form of the same. And Mahasaraswati (or Aniruddha) must have given birth to and inspired the Ribhus, who are Artisans of divinity. The Puranic trinityBrahma, Vishnu and Shivawith lndra as the fourth member forms a parallel system embodying a similar conception.
Another tradition gives the Four Supernals as (1) Light or Consciousness, (2) Truth or Knowledge, (3) Life and (4) Love. The tradition also says that the beings representing these four fundamental principles of creation were the first and earliest gods that emanated from the Supreme Divine, and that as they separated themselves from their source and from each other, each followed his own independent line of fulfilment, they lost their divinity and turned into their oppositesLight became obscurity, Consciousness unconsciousness or the inconscient, Truth became falsehood and Knowledge ignorance, Life became death and finally Love and Delight became suffering and hatred. These are the fallen angels, the Asuras that deny their divine essence and now rule the world. They have possessed mankind and are controlling e Arthly existence. They too have their emanations, forces and beings that are born out of them and serve them in their various degrees of power. Men talk and act inspired and impelled by these beings and when they do so, they lose their humanity and become worse than animals.
--
We may try to illustrate by examples, although it is a rather dangerous game and may tend to put into a too rigid and' mathematical formula something that is living and variable. Still it will serve to give a clearer picture of the matter. Napoleon, evidently was a child of Mahakali; and Caesar seems to have been fashioned largely by the principle of Maheshwari; while Christ or Chaitanya are clearly emanations in the line of Mahalakshmi. Constructive geniuses, on the other hand, like the great statesman Colbert, for example, or Louis XIV, Ie grand monarque, himself belong to a family (or gotra, as we say in India) that originated from Mahasaraswati. Poets and Artists again, although generally they belong to the clan of Mahalakshmi, can be regrouped according to the principle that predominates in each, the godhead that presides over the inspiration in each. The large breath in Homer and Valmiki, the high and noble style of their movement, the dignity and vastness that compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheshwari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony, LoveMahalakshmi. And the perfect Artisanship of Mahasaraswati has found its especial embodiment in Horace and Racine and our Kalidasa. Michael Angelo in his fury of inspirations seems to have been impelled by Mahakali, while Mahalakshmi sheds her genial favour upon Raphael and Titian; and the meticulous care and the detailed surety in a Tintoretto makes us think of Mahasaraswati's grace. Mahasaraswati too seems to have especially favoured Leonardo da Vinci, although a brooding presence of Maheshwari also seems to be intermixed there.
For it must be remembered that the human soul after all is not a simple and unilateral being, it is a little cosmos in itself. The soul is not merely a point or a single ray of light come down straight from its divine archetype or from the Divine himself, it is also a developing fire that increases and enriches itself through the multiple experiences of an evolutionary progressionit not only grows in height but extends in wideness also. Even though it may originally emanate from one principle and Personality, it takes in for its development and fulfilment influences and elements from the others also. Indeed, we know that the Four primal personalities of the Divine are not separate and distinct as they may appear to the human mind which cannot understand distinction without disparity. The Vedic gods themselves are so linked together, so interpenetrate one another that finally it is asserted that there is only one existence, only it is given many names. All the divine personalities are aspects of the Divine blended and fused together. Even so the human soul, being a replica of the Divine, cannot but be a complex of many personalities and often it may be difficult and even harmful to find and fix upon a dominant personality. The full flowering of the human soul, its perfect divinisation demands the realisation of a many-aspected personality, the very richness of the Divine within it.
05.14 - The Sanctity of the Individual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The sanctity of the individual, the value of the human person is one of the cardinal Articles of faith of the modern consciousness. Only it has very many avatars. One such has been the characteristic mark of the group of philosophers (and mystics) who are nowadays making a great noise under the name of Existentialists. The individual personality exists, they say, and its nature is freedom. In other words, it chooses, as it likes, its course of life, at every step, and Creates its destiny. This freedom, however, may lead man and will inevitably lead him, according to one section of the group, to the perception and realisation of God, an infinite in which the individual finite lives and moves and has his being; according to others, the same may lead to a very different consummation, to Nothingness, the Great Void, Nihil. All existence is bounded by something unknown and intangible which differs according to your luck or taste,one would almost say to your line of approach, put philosophically, according either to the positive pole or the negative, God or Non-existence. The second alternative seems to be an inevitable corollary of the p Articular conception of the individual that is entertained by some, viz.,the individual existing only in relation to individuals. Indeed the leader of the French school, Jean-Paul S Artrenot a negligible playwright and novelistseems to conceive the individual as nothing more than the image formed in other individuals with whom he comes in contact. Existence literally means standing out or outside (ex+sistet), coming out of one-self and living in other's consciousnessas one sees one's exact image in another's eye. It is not however the old-world mystic experience of finding one's self in other selves. For here we have an exclusively level or horizontal view of the human personality. The personality is not seen in depth or height, but in line with the normal phenomenal formation. It looks as though, to save personality from the impersonal dissolution to which all monistic idealism leads, the present conception seeks to hinge all personalities upon each other so that they may stand by and confirm each other. But the actual result seems to have been not less calamitous. When we form and fashion each other, we are not building with anything more substantial than sand. Personalities are thus mere eddies in the swirl of cosmic life, they rise up and die down, separate and melt into each other and have no consistency and no reality in the end. The freedom too which is ascribed to such individuals, even when they feel it so, is only a sham and a make-believe. Within Nature nothing is free, all is mechanical lawKarma is supreme. The Sankhya posits indeed many Purushas, free, lodged in the midst of Prakriti, but there the Purusha is hardly an active agent, it is only an inactive, passive, almost impotent, witness. The Existentialist, on the contrary, seeks to make of the individual an active agent; he is not merely being, imbedded or merged in the original Dasein, mere existence, but becoming, the entity that has come out, stood out in its will and consciousness, Articulated itself in name and form and act. But the person that stands out as p Art and parcel of Prakriti, the cosmic movement, is, as we have said, only an instrument, a mode of that universal Nature. The true person that informs that apparent formulation is something else. .
To be a person, it is said, one must be ap Art from the crowd. A person is the "single one", one who has attained his singularity, his individual wholeness. And the life's work for each individual person is to make the crowd no longer a crowd, but an association of single ones. But how can this be done? It is not simply by separating oneself from the crowd, by dwelling upon oneself that one can develop into one's true person. The individuals, even when perfect single ones, do not exist by themselves or in and through one another. The mystic or spiritual perception posits the Spirit or God, the All-self as the background and substance of all the selves. Indeed, it is only when one finds and is identified with the Divine in oneself that one is in a position to attain one's true selfhood and find oneself in other selves. And the re-creation of a crowd into such divine individuals is a cosmic work in which the individual is at best a collaborator, not the master and dispenser. Anyway, one has to come out of the human relationship, rise above the give-and-take of human individualshowever completely individual each one may beand establish oneself in the Divine's consciousness which is the golden thread upon which is strung all the assembly of individuals. It is only in and through the Divine, the Spiritual Reality and Person, that one enters into true relation and dynamic harmony with others.
05.17 - Evolution or Special Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
According to the Yogic or occult view of things, however, the two conceptions that human mind sets against each other need not be and are not contradictory. Indeed both are true and both are factors working out the progress of life. Evolution is a movement upward, the urge of consciousness to grow and expand and rise to a higher and greater Articulation: the change follows a scale of degrees. But there comes a point in the progressive march when a change of degree means a change of kind and the phenomenon presents itself as a sudden, unforeseen mutation. This is due to the fact that there happens at the moment, in answer to a last call as it were from below, a descent of consciousness from the higher into the lower. All the grades of being or consciousness are always there in the cosmic infinity, only it is a matter of gradual manifestation in the physical world. The higher scales are kept in the background,the march of life st Arts from the lowest, the material rung. One by one they manifest or descend, formulate themselvesin the lower as these grow and rise and get ready to receive the descent. The gap or missing link means the irruptionof a new principle or mode of consciousness, the bursting of the cocoon, as it were, at the end of the period of gestation in the previous mode. Thus we can say that in the beginning there was only Matter and Matter was being churned until a point of tension or saturation was reached when Life precipitated and became embodied and evident in Matter. In the same way, out of a concentrated incubation that Life underwent,it brought down Mind from the hidden mind-plane and the vegetable kingdom gave birth to the animal. Latterly when Intelligence and self-consciousness descended, it was Man that appeared on e Arth.
Looked at from below, as the lower marches forward and upward, the scene presents itself as Evolution, growth, Nature's gradual unfolding of herself: looked at from above, as the higher seems poised and descends when the time and occasion are ready, creation appears as a series of special intervention. Both movements are facts of Nature and implement each other.
05.23 - The Base of Sincerity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That is the definition of sincerity: to be transparent and single-pointed to your soul-consciousness, to your deity. And that also is the only way by which there can be realised in you, the highest and largest, the most intimate and absolute harmony you are capable of and that is demanded of you. The perfect organisation of the individual life can be obtained in and through the harmony inherent in the central reality, in the natural order of its activities. In the scheme or pattern laid out in the inmost consciousness, each element has its own orbit and its own quantum of energy, each force its allotted function: the will in each is exactly commensurable with what should be the expression in it of the total reality, each is the whole and rounded Articulation of an aspect or figure put forth by the central truth in its self-display. As in a musical theme, each note has a definite pitch, amplitude, tone which give it its perfect form in order to constitute a common pattern the highest pitch, the largest amplitude or the most vibrant tone is not needed, not only not needed, would be a bar on the contraryeven so, the individual man when he attains perfection realises in himself a harmony which gives the true expression of all his limbs, the fullest and fairest expression of each and every one as demanded by the divine role destined for him.
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06.01 - The Word of Fate, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And thou Art kin in joy to heaven's sons.
O thou who hast come to this great perilous world
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Thou who Art human, think not like a god.
For man, below the god, above the brute,
06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Life is a marvel missed, an Art gone wry;
A seeker in a dark and obscure place,
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His science is an Artificer of doom;
He ransacks e Arth for means to harm his kind;
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Thou Art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.
It seeks relief from Time's envelopment,
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Thou Art thyself the author of thy pain.
Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,
07.01 - The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And make the soul the Artist of its fate.
This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:
07.03 - The Entry into the Inner Countries, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Fortunate Art thou to reach our brilliant air
Flaming with thought's supreme finality.
07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Thou Art a portion of my soul put forth
To bear the unbearable sorrow of the world.
Because thou Art, men yield not to their doom,
But ask for happiness and strive with fate;
Because thou Art, the wretched still can hope.
But thine is the power to solace, not to save.
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Like God in his astuce of Artist skill,
Mould from one primal plasm protean forms,
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I have grown a master of the Arts of life.
I have tamed the wild beast, trained to be my friend;
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Thou Art a portion of my soul put forth
To help mankind and help the travail of Time.
Because thou Art in him, man hopes and dares;
Because thou Art, men's souls can climb the heavens
And walk like gods in the presence of the Supreme.
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Thou Art a portion of my self put forth
To raise the spirit to its forgotten heights
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Because thou Art, the soul draws near to God;
Because thou Art, love grows in spite of hate
And knowledge walks unslain in the pit of Night.
07.05 - The Finding of the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And the vivid splendour of his Artist thought.
A channel of the mighty Mother s choice,
07.06 - Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
"Who Art thou who claimst thy crown of separate birth,
534
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The patterns sketched out by an Artist God.
Often our thoughts are finished cosmic wares
07.18 - How to get rid of Troublesome Thoughts, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are several ways and also it depends upon the case. The first and the easiest way is to think of something else. Concentrate your attention upon a subject which has nothing to do with what troubles you. You can read something interesting or take up a work that demands care and consideration. Something creative would be more effective; writers and Artists, for example, when they are engaged in their p Articular occupation forget everything else, their whole mind is engrossed in that one matter. But, of course, once the work is done, the trouble begins again, if one has not learnt to control the thoughts in the meanwhile. So there is the second method which is a little more difficult. You have to learn a movement of rejection. As you reject or throwaway a physical object, even so you must throwaway and reject the thought. It is more difficult, but if you succeed, it is more effective. You have to practise and continue the endeavour, repeat and persevere and there is no reason why you should not succeed, if you are thoroughly sincere and serious.
There is a third method. It is to bring down from above a greater light which is in its nature the very opposite of the thoughts you are dealing with, opposite in a very radical and deep sense; that is to say, if the thoughts that trouble you are obscure and ignorant, especially if they happen to rise from the subconscient or the inconscient, supported by the mere instincts, then, by calling down the light from above and turning it upon the dark thoughts you can simply dissolve them or transform them, wherever possible. It is the supreme means, but perhaps not within the easy reach of all. But if you succeed in it, not only the thoughts do not come, their very cause is removed. The first method is to turn aside, the second to face and fight, the third to rise above and transform. In the third you are not only cured, but you make a progressa true progress.
07.28 - Personal Effort and Will, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Supposing under given circumstances a work has come upon you. Take an Artist, for example, a painter. He has an inspiration and has decided to do a painting. He knows very well that if he has not the inspiration he will not be able to do anything good, the painting would be nothing more than a daub. If he were simply passive, with neither effort nor will, he would tell the Divine: Here I leave the palette, the brush and the canvas, you will do the painting now. But the Divine does not act in that way. The painter himself must arrange everything, concentrate upon his subject, put all his will upon a perfect execution. On the other hand, if he has not the inspiration, he may take all the trouble and yet the result be nothing more than a work like other thousands of examples. You must feel what your painting is to express and know or find out how to express it. A great painter often gets a very exact vision of the painting he is to do. He has the vision and he sets himself to work out the vision. He labours day by day, with a will and consciousness, to reproduce as exactly as possible what he sees clearly with his inner sight. He works for the Divine; his surrender is active and dynamic. For the poet too it is the same thing. Anyone who wants to do something for the Divine, it is the same.
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07.31 - Images of Gods and Goddesses, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Well when a little child draws a picture of an object, is there any likeness? It is about the same or even worse here. For the child is simple and sincere, while the image-maker is full of prejudices and preconceived ideas, stuffed with things he has heard or read. And he is tied to his constructions. But at times, here and there, very rarely indeed, Artists appear with an inner vision, with a great aspiration and a great purity of soul; they do things that are acceptable. But they are exceptions, the contrary is the rule.
I have seen some of these forms in the vital world and also in the mental world; they are truly creations of man. There is a Power from beyond that manifests, but in this triple world of Ignorance man creates God Himself in his own image and beings that appear there are more or less the outcome of the creative human thought. So at times we do have things that are truly frightful. I have seen formations that are so obscure, so un-understandable, so inexpressive! There are some divine beings that are treated worse than the others. Take, for example, this poor Mahakali. What has man made of her, wildly terrible, a nightmare beyond imagination! Such creations however live in a very inferior world, in the lowest vital world; and if there is anything there of the original being, it is such a far off reflection that it is hardly recognisable. And yet it is that which is pulled by the human consciousness. When, for example, an image is made and installed and the priest calls down into it a form, an emanation of a god, through an inner invocation there is usually a whole ceremony in this connectionif the priest is someone having the power of evocation, then the thing succeeds (what Ramakrishna did in the Kali temple). But generally priests are people with the commonest ideas and the most traditional training and education; when they think of the gods they give them attributes and appearances which are popular, which belong normally to entities of the vital world, at best to mental formations but which do not represent in any way the truth of the beings behind. All the idols in temples or the household gods worshipped by the many are inhabited by beings who know only how to lead you to unhappiness and disaster. They are so far away from the divinity that one means to worship. There are certain family Kalis that are real monsters. I have even advised some to throw such an image into the Ganges to get rid of the evil influence emanating from it. But of course it is always the fault of man and not of the divinity. For man wishes so much to make his gods in his own image.
07.36 - The Body and the Psychic, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That depends. There is a kind of progress sometimes. There are, for example, writers, musicians, Artists, people who lived on a high mental level, who feel that they have yet something to do upon e Arth, they did not finish their work, fulfil their mission, reach the goal they set before themselves. So they wish to remain in the e Arth's atmosphere as much as possible, retain as much cohesion of their being as needed and seek to manifest themselves and progress through other living human forms. I have seen many such cases: I shall tell you the very interesting case of a musician, a pianist, a pianist of a very high order; he had hands that had become something marvellous, full of skill, accuracy, precision, force, swiftness; it was truly remarkable. The man died comparatively young and with the feeling that had he lived he would have gone on advancing in his musical self-expression. Such was the intensity of his aspiration that his subtle hands retained their form without getting dissolved and wherever there was someone passive and receptive and at the same time a good musician the hands of the dead man would enter into the living hands that played. In the case that I saw the man used to play well enough normally but quite in the ordinary way; he became, however, as he continued to play all on a sudden not only a virtuoso, but a marvellous Artist; it was the hands of the other person who made use of him. The same thing may happen with regard to a painter; in his case too, the hands are the instrument. For certain writers also a like thing may happen; but here it is the brain of the dead man that retains its formation and it is this that enters the brain of the living writer which must be receptive enough to allow the formation in all its precision. I have seen a writer who was nothing extraordinary in his normal capacity, but used to write things much more beautiful in those moments than he was capable of doing or was doing usually. I know the case of a musical composer, not executor like the one I referred to before, which was p Articularly remarkable. In the case of the composer, like the writer, it is the brain that serves him; for the executor the hands are the chief instrument. Beethoven, Bach, Cesar Franck were great composers, although the last one was an executor also. The composition of music is a cerebral activity. Now the brain of a great musician used to enter in contact with that of the composer and made him compose marvellous pieces. The man was writing a musical opera. You must remember what a complicated thing an opera music is. It is a complex whole in which roles are distributed to a very large number of performers each playing differently on different instruments and they must all of them together and severally express the idea and the theme the composer has in his mind. Now, this man I am speaking of, when he sat down with the blank paper in front, used to receive the musical formation in his brain and wrote down continuously as if he was recording something ready-made placed before him. I saw him filling up a whole page from top to bottom with all the details of orchestration. He had no need to hear any instrument, he did it all on paper; and the distribution was perfect. He himself was not very unconscious, he used to feel that something entered into him and helped him to bring out the music.
You must note here that when I speak of a formation entering into a living person, the formation does not mean the man himself who is dead, that is to say, his soul or psychic being. I say that it is only a special faculty which continues to remain in the e Arth atmosphere, even after the death of the man to whom the faculty belonged: it was so well developed, well formed that it continues to retain its independent identity. The soul, the true being of the man is no longer there; I have told you often that after death it goes away as soon as possible to the psychic world, its own world, for rest, assimilation and preparation. Not that it cannot happen otherwise. A soul incarnating as a great musician may incarnate again in or as a great musician, although I said in another connection that a soul usually prefers to vary, even to contrast and contradict its incarnations with each other. Take for example, the great violinist, Isai; he was a Belgian and the most marvellous violinist of his century. I knew him and I am sure he was an incarnation, at least, an emanation, of the soul that was the great Beethoven. It may not have been the whole psychic being that so reincarnated, but the soul in its musical capacity. He had the same appearance, the same head. When I saw him first appearing on the stage I was greatly surprised, I said to myself, he looks so like Beethoven, the very portrait of that great genius. And then he stood, the bow poised, one stroke and there were in it three or four notes only, but three or four supreme notes, full of power, greatness and grandeur; the entire hall was charged with an atmosphere marvellous and unique. I could recognise very well the musical genius of Beethoven behind. It may be possible here too the soul of Beethoven in its entirety the whole psychic beingwas not present; the central psychic might have been elsewhere gathering more modest, commonplace experiences, as a shoemaker, for example. But what was left and what manifested itself was something very characteristic of the great musician. He had disciplined his mental and vital being and even his physical being in view of his musical capacity and this formation remained firm and sought to reincarnate. The musical being was originally organised and fashioned around the psychic consciousness and therefore it acquired its peculiar power and its force of persistence, almost an immortality. Such formations, though not themselves the psychic being, have a psychic quality, are independent beings, possess their own life and seek their fulfilment by manifesting and incarnating themselves whenever the occasion presents itself.
07.37 - The Psychic Being, Some Mysteries, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I did not say it quite like that. The psychic being is not stupid. What happens may be described in this way: for example, suppose the psychic being has had the experience of the life of a writer. The function of the writer is to express himself, his perceptions and observations and judgements in words; he has a certain field, a certain range of associations and circumstances in which to live and move. But there are other fields and ranges beyond and outside of which he has no experience. So he may say to himself: I have lived with my head, I know something of the intellectual reactions to life: now let me live with my he Art and experience the reactions of feeling and passion. Indeed, sometimes an overactivity of the intellect impoverishes the capacities of the he Art. So the psychic being, in order to have this new kind of experience, abandons his intellectual heights, so to say, and comes down to the vital plane. He is no longer a creative genius, but an ordinary man, but with a he Art enriched or enriching itself with its intense or generous movements. (One can remember in this connection the story of Shankaracharya who being a Sannyasi from boyhood has had no experience of love: he entered the body of a king in order to gather this experience.) It is not rare to see psychic beings that have reached the maximum of their growth in certain directions, take up a very modest and ordinary life in some other new direction or for some other purpose. One who was a king, for example, as I already narrated once, who has had the experiences of power and authority and domination, the imperial heights, may choose to descend to ordinary life, to work as an obscure person without being troubled by the pomps of high position; he may choose very bourgeois surroundings, very humdrum conditions among humdrum men and things, to procure, so to say, a kind of incognito so that he may work in peace and quite. Can you say it is a decline and a fall? It is only facing life, meeting its problems from another angle, another point of view. You must know that for consciousness, the true consciousness the consciousness of the psychicglory and obscurity are the same, success and failure are the same. What is important is the growth of consciousness. Certain conditions which to your human eye appear favourable, may in reality be quiet unfavourable for the growth of consciousness. With your ordinary thoughts and your ordinary reactions you judge everything according to success and failure. But that is the very last way of judging, for it is the most Artificial, most superficial and absolutely contrary to truth. In human life, as it is organised at present, it is perhaps only once in a million cases, or even less than that, that truth is given the first place; always there is an element of show mixed up. When a man has success, much success, you may be sure there is mixed up with it as much show.
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07.41 - The Divine Family, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Service Human and Divine The Nature and Destiny of Art
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta P Art SevenThe Divine Family
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Service Human and Divine The Nature and Destiny of Art
07.42 - The Nature and Destiny of Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:07.42 - The Nature and Destiny of Art
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta P Art SevenThe Nature and Destiny of Art
The Nature and Destiny of Art
True Art means the expression of beauty in the material world. In a world wholly converted, that is to say, expressing integrally the divine reality, Art must serve as the revealer and teacher of this divine beauty in life. In other words, the Artist must be able to enter into communion with the Divine and receive the inspiration as to what should be the form or forms for the material realisation of the divine beauty. At the same time, in expressing true beauty in the physical, he also sets an example, becomes an instrument of education... Art not only creates beauty, but educates the taste of people to find true beauty, the essential beauty that expresses the divine truth. That is the true role of Art. But between that and what it is now there is a great difference.
The decline comes in the normal course of evolution which follows a spiral movement. From the beginning of the last century to the middle of it, Art became totally a debased thing, commercial, obscure, ignorant, something very far from its true nature and function. But the spirit of Art cannot die; only as it rose as a movement of protest or revolt, the forms it chose were equally bizarre. In attempting to counteract the general debasing of taste it went to the other extreme, as is the character of all movements of nature. One was a servile copy of nature, it was pointed out or not even that. In those days it used to be called photographic Art, if one were to condemn it: But now it is no longer a term of condemnation, for photography has developed into a consummate Art. Neither could it be truly called realism, for there are realistic paintings which belong to a very high order. That Art was conventional, Artificial, I lifeless. Now the reaction to this movement said: we do not concern ourselves with physical life any more, the reality as we see with outward eyes is no longer our business; we want instead to express the vital life, the mental life. Hence came a whole host of reformers and rebelscubists, surrealists, futurists and so onwho sought to create Art with their head. They forgot the simple truth that in Art it is not the head that commands, but the feeling of beauty in the he Art. So Art landed into the most absurd, ridiculous and frightful of worlds. Indeed with the two wars behind us we have gone further in that direction. Each war has brought down a world in decomposition. And now we seem to be in the very he Art of chaos.
Perhaps we are at the bottom of the curve and it is time to mount up. This disintegration is a necessary prelude; it is even from a certain point of view a better condition than that of the epoch of Queen Victoria or the Second Empire in France, the age of the practical, successful bourgeoisie, of snug contentment and dull mediocrity, of death in life. As I say, the movement of progress follows a curve. In a certain epoch some fine things are expressed in a fine way. Then follows an epoch which is tired of the old things, wants to find new things and express them in a new way. The age of Louis XIV, for example, was an age dominated by the sense of Artistic creation and it represented the peak of a certain type of the truly beautiful in Art and life. In the course of social evolution other ideas, other needs appearedthose of a commercial age. So the curve took a downward course. For there is nothing so antagonistic to Art as commerce. For the association of commerce with Art means the popularisation of something which is exceptional: it is putting within the reach of all and sundry a thing which is understood and appreciated only by the chosen few, the elite. Perhaps it is because of this, because Art has no outlet in the world, it has in these days turned to other directions, into the domains of the mental and the vital, into sideways and bypaths of consciousness. When, however, better conditions prevail, when instead of the spirit of mercantilism, there appears upon e Arth the sense of a more beautiful reality, then Art will be reborn and come to its own. That seems to be still a long way off.
The Art of this decadent epoch is what I call mushroom Art. You know how mushrooms grow? They grow anywhere and do not seem to form p Art, for example, of what you cultivate or where you cultivate. Just think of it! There is a spot on the wall which becomes humid and you see it soon covered with this growth. You have a tree which does not get the sunlight, you will find its roots covered with mushrooms. It is a kind of spontaneous growth which is not linked to the spot where it grows. It is not a limb of its environment, but something extraneous added to it. Instead of mushrooms I could have spoken of parasites: they belong to the same category. You have seen parasite plants? They grow upon trees, they fix themselves there. They have not their own life and organs, they do not draw their food directly from e Arth, as all normal plants do; they live upon the life of another, make use of the labour of another. There are also animal parasites that live upon another animal, growing and profiting by its labour. Parasites or mushrooms have no raison d'lre to be where they are-they are invaders, interpolators, anomalies.
In ancient times, in the great ages, in Greece, for example or even during the Italian Renaissance, p Articularly, however, in Greece and in Egypt, they erected buildings, constructed monuments for the sake of public utility. Their buildings were meant for the most p Art to be temples, sanctuaries to lodge their gods and deities. What they had in view was something total, whole and entire, beautiful and complete in itself. That was the purpose of architecture embodying the harmony of sweeping and majestic lines: sculpture was a p Art of architecture supplying details of expression and even painting came up to complete the expression: but the whole held together in a coordinated unity which was the monument itself. The sculpture was for the monument, the painting was for the monument; it was not that each was separate from the other and existed for itself and one did not know why it was there. In India, when a temple was being built, for example, what was aimed at was a total creation, all the p Arts combined to give effect to one end, to make a beautiful vesture for God, the one object of their adoration. All the great epochs of Art were of this kind. But in modern times, in the latter p Art of the last century, Art' became a matter of business. A painting was done in order to be sold. You do your paintings, put each one in a frame and place them side by side or group them, that is, lump them together without much reason. The same with regard to sculpture. You make a statue and set it up anywhere without any connection whatsoever with the surroundings. It is always something foreign, extraneous in its setting, like a mushroom or a parasite. The thing in itself may not be quite ugly, but it is out of place, it is not p Art of an organic whole. We exhibit Art today. Indeed, it is exhibitionism, it is the showing off of cleverness, talent, skill, virtuosity. A piece of architecture does not incarnate a living force as it used to do once upon a time. It is no longer the expression of an aspiration, of something that uplifts the spirit nor the expression of the magnificence of the Divine whose dwelling it is meant to be. You build houses here and there pell-mell or somehow juxtaposed without any coordinating idea governing them, without any relation to the environment where they are situated. When you enter a house, it is the same thing. A bit of painting here, a bit of sculpture there, some objects of Art in one corner, a few others in another. Yes, it is an exhibition, a museum, a kaleidoscopic collection. It gives a shock to the truly sensitive Artistic taste.
I do not say that a museum is not necessary or useful. It is a good means of education, that is to say, getting information about what other people or other epochs did. It is an aid to the historic knowledge of things. But it is far from being Artistic. A museum is not the place where Art can find its highest or its true expression. There is an Art which seeks to coordinate, integrate distinct, discrete, contrary objects. It is called decorative Art. And in so far as this Art is successful, we are a step forward even in these days towards true Art.
Here in India things are and should be a little different. In spite of the modern European invasion and in spite of certain lapses in some directions I may refer to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Ravi Varma interlude the he Art of India is not anglicised or Europeanised. The Calcutta School is a signalthough their attempt is rather on a small scaleyet it is a sign that India's Artistic taste, in spite of a modern education, still turns to what is essential and permanent in her culture and civilisation. You have still before you, within your reach, the old temples, the old paintings, to teach you that Art creation is meant to express a faith, to give you the sense of totality and organisation. You will note in this connection another fact which is very significant. All these paintings, all these sculptures in caves and temples bear no signature. They were not done with the idea of making a name. Today you fix your name to every bit of work you do, announce the event with a great noise in the papers, so that the thing may not be forgotten. In those days the Artist did what he had to do, without caring whether posterity would remember his name or not. The work was done in an urge of aspiration towards expressing a higher beauty, above all with the idea of preparing a dwelling fit for the deity whom one invokes. In Europe in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, things were done in the same spirit. There too at that time works were anonymous and bore no signature of the author. If any name came to be preserved, it was more or less by accident.
However, even the commercialism of today, hideous as it is, has an advantage of its own. Commercialism means the mixing together of all p Arts of the world. It effaces the distinction between Orient and Occident, brings the Orient near to the Occident and the Occident near to the Orient. With the exchange of goods, there happens an exchange of ideas and even of habits and manners. In ancient days Rome conquered Greece and through that conquest was herself conquered by the culture and civilisation of Greece. The thing is happening today on a much greater scale and more intensely perhaps. At one time Japan was educating herself on the American pattern; now that America has conquered Japan physically, she is being conquered by the spirit of Japan; even in objects manufactured in America, you notice the Japanese influence in some way or other.
07.43 - Music Its Origin and Nature, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Nature and Destiny of Art Music Indian and European
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta P Art SevenMusic Its Origin and Nature
--
Music, you must remember, like any other Art, is a means for expressing somethingsome idea, some feeling, some emotion, a certain aspiration and so on. There is even a domain where all these movements exist and from where they are brought down under a musical form. A good composer with some inspiration would produce good music; he is then called a good musician. A bad musician can have also a good inspiration, he can receive something from the higher domain, but possessing no musical capacity, he would produce only what is very commonplace, very ordinary and uninteresting. However, if you go beyond, precisely over to this place where lies the origin of music, get to the idea, the emotion, the inspiration behind, you can then taste of these things without being held back by the form. Still this musical form can be joined on to what is behind or beyond the form; for it is that which originally inspired the musician to compose. Of course, there are instances where no inspiration exists, where the source is only a kind of sound mechanics, which is not, in any case, always interesting. What I mean is this that there is an inner state in which the outer form is not the most important thing: there lies the origin of music, the inspiration that is beyond. It is trite to say, but one often forgets that it is not sound that makes music, the sound has to express something.
There is a music that is quite mechanical and has no inspiration. There are musicians who play with great virtuosity, that is to say, they have mastered the technique and execute faultlessly the most complicated and rapid movements. It is music perhaps, but it expresses nothing; it is like a machine. It is clever, there is much skill, but it is uninteresting, soulless. The most important thing, not only in music, but in all human creations, in all that man does even, is, I repeat, the inspiration behind. The execution naturally is expected to be on a par with the inspiration; but to express truly well, one must have truly great things to express. It is not to say that technique is not necessary; on the contrary, one must possess a very good technique; it is even indispensable. Only it is not the one thing indispensable, not is it as important as the inspiration. For the essential quality of music comes from the region where it has its source.
--
There is a graded scale in the source of music. A whole category of music is there that comes from the higher vital, for example: it is very catching, perhaps even a little vulgar, something that twines round your nerves, as it were, and twists them. It catches you somewhere about your loinsnavel centre and charms you in its way. As there is a vital music there is also what can be called psychic music coming from quite a different source; there is further a music which has spiritual origin. In its own region this higher music is very magnificent; it seizes you deeply and carries you away somewhere else. But if you were to express it perfectlyexecute ityou would have to pass this music too through the vital. Your music coming from high may nevertheless fall absolutely flat in the execution, if you do not have that intensity of vital vibration which alone can give it its power and splendour. I knew people who had very high inspiration, but their music turned to be quite commonplace, because their vital did not move. Their spiritual practice put their vital almost completely to sleep; yes, it was literally asleep and did not work at all. Their music thus came straight into the physical. If you could get behind and catch the source, you would see that there was really something marvellous even there, although externally it was not forceful or effective. What came out was a poor little melody, very thin, having nothing of the power of harmony which is there when one can bring into play the vital energy. If one could put all this power of vibration that belongs to that vital into the music of higher origin we would have the music of a genius. Indeed, for music and for all Artistic creation, in fact, for literature, for poetry, for painting, etc. an intermediary is needed. Whatever one does in these domains depends doubtless for its intrinsic value upon the source of the inspiration, upon the plane or the height where one stands. But the value of the execution depends upon the strength of the vital that expresses the inspiration. For a complete genius both are necessary. The combination is rare, generally it is the one or the other, more often it is the vital that predominates and overshadows.
When the vital only is there, you have the music of caf concert and cinema. It is extraordinarily clever and at the same time extraordinarily commonplace, even vulgar. Since, however, it is so clever, it catches hold of your brain, haunts your memory, rings in (or wrings) your nerves; it becomes so difficult to get rid of its influence, precisely because it is done so well, so cleverly. It is made vitally with vital vibrations, but what is behind is not, to say the least, wholesome. Now imagine the same vital power of expression joined to the inspiration coming from above, say, the highest possible inspiration when the entire heaven seems to open out, then it is music indeed; Some things in Csar Franck, some in Beethoven, some in Bach, some in some others possess this sovereignty. But after all it is only a moment, it comes for a moment and does not abide. There is not a single Artist whose whole work is executed at such a pitch. The inspiration comes like a flash of lightning, most often it lasts just long enough to be grasped and held in a few snatches.
Something similar to that experience may happen to you when your consciousness is all attentive and concentrated; you feel suddenly that you are being carried aloft, that all your energies are gathered and lifted up, as if your head has opened out and you are thrown into the free air, into the far spaces of extraordinary heights and magnificent lights. The experience gives you in a few seconds what one may in the normal course of things achieve after many years of difficult yoga. Only immediately after the experience you drop down below upon the e Arth, because the basis has not been built; even you may begin to doubt whether you really had the experience. Still the consciousness has been prepared, something definitive has been done and remains.
--
The Nature and Destiny of Art Music Indian and European
07.45 - Specialisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
From my childhood I have been hearing of the same lesson; I am afraid it was taught also in the days of our fathers and grandfa thers and great grandfa thers, namely, that if you wish to be successful in something you must do that only and nothing else. I was rebuked very much because I was busy with many different things at the same time. I was told I would be in the end good for nothing. I was studying, I was painting, I was doing music and many other things. I was repeatedly warned that my painting would be worthless, my music would be worthless, my studies would be incomplete and defective if I had my way. Perhaps it was true; but I found that my way, too, had its advantagesprecisely the advantages I was speaking of at the outset, namely, it widens and enriches the mind and consciousness, makes it supple and flexible, gives it a spontaneous power to understand and handle anything new presented to it. If, however, I had wanted to become an executant of the first order and play in concerts, then of course I would have had to restrict myself. Or in painting if my aim had been to be one of the great Artists of the age, I could have done only that and nothing else. One understands the position very well, but it is only a point of view. I do not see why I should become the greatest musician or the greatest painter. It seems to me to be nothing but vanity.
But it is a very natural and spontaneous movement in man to change from one work to another in order to maintain a kind of balance. Change also means rest. We have often heard of great Artists or scholars seeking for rest and having great need for it. They find it by changing their activity. For example, Ingres was a painter; painting was his normal and major occupation. But whenever he found time he took up his violin. Curiously, it was his violin which interested him more than his painting. He was not very good at music, but he took great pleasure in it. He was sufficiently good at painting, but it interested him less. But the real thing is that he needed a stable poise or balance. Concentration upon a single thing is very necessary, I have said, if one aims at a definite and special result; but one can follow a different line that is more subtle, more comprehensive and complete. Naturally, there is a physical limit somewhere to your comprehensiveness; for on the physical plane you are confined in respect of time and space; and also it is true that great things are difficult to achieve unless there is a special concentration. But if you want to lead a higher and deeper life, you can comm and capacities which are much greater than those available to the methods of restriction and limitation belonging to the normal consciousness. There is a considerable advantage in getting rid of one's limits, if not from the point of view of actual accomplishment, at least from the point of view of spiritual realisation.
***
08.03 - Death in the Forest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Even as a slave might, yet Art thou beyond
All that thou doest, all our minds conceive,
08.06 - A Sign and a Symbol, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It means that you must be able to formulate your aspiration during the time the star is visible, that is to say, a very short time. Now, if an aspiration can be formed and formulated in such a short time, it shows that the aspiration is there all the while quite at the front of your consciousness. Of course, the thing is true of the spiritual aspiration only: it is not applicable to matters of ordinary life. So I say that if you are capable of Articulating your aspiration in a split second, it means that the object of your aspiration lies in front and dominates your consciousness. And necessarily whatever dominates your consciousness is likely to be quickly realised.
I had the occasion to make the experiment and have had the experience. It happened exactly as you say. I saw a shooting star and as it passed, at the precise moment, leaped out of my consciousness the words: To realise for my body union with the Divine. And before the year ended, it was done.
08.08 - The Mind s Bazaar, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is nothing like an idea belonging to oneself and an idea belonging to others. No one has an idea exclusively his own. There is an immensity out of which one can draw according to one's personal affinity. Ideas are a collective possession, a joint property. Only there are different stages. There is the most common or commonplace stage where all of us have our brain sunk in a crowded mass of impersonal notions. It is the stage of Mr. Everybody. The next stage is a little higher, that of thinkers, as they are called. There are other stages further up, many others, some beyond the domain of words, others still within the domain of ideas. Those who can mount sufficiently high are able to catch something that looks like light and bring it down with its packet of ideas or its bundle of thoughts. An idea brought down from a higher region organises itself, crystallises itself into a variety of thoughts that are capable of expressing the idea in different ways. Then, if you are a writer, a poet or an Artist and bring it further down into more concrete forms, then you can have all kinds of expressions, infinite ways of presenting a single idea, a single small idea perhaps, but coming down from a great height. If you can do that, you know also how to distinguish between the pure idea and the manner of expressing it. If you are unable to do it by yourself, you can take the help of others, you can learn from persons and books. You can, for example, note how one p Articular idea has been given so many different forms by different poets. There is the pure or essential idea, then there is the typal or generic idea and then the many formulations.
You can exercise your mind in this way, teach it suppleness, subtlety, strength and other virtues.
08.18 - The Origin of Desire, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
At its very origin, I think, it was an obscure need for growth or increase. In the lowest forms of life we find love transformed into an instinctive and irresistible need for enlarging, swelling, absorbing, adding to it another body. This need to take in is desire. So perhaps if you go back far enough into the last depths of inconscience, you will see that the ultimate source of desire is love: it is love in its most dark and inconscient form. It is, as I said, a need for accretion, an attraction for an outside object in order to embrace it, swallow it, make it p Art of itself and so grow bigger. Now, suppose you have before you something beautiful, harmonious, pleasing: if you have the true consciousness, you enjoy and are happy to the full, by simply looking at the thing, by having an inner contact in consciousness with the beauty and harmony that is there. And there the matter ends. You have the joy and that is all. Such a movement is very common in the Artist. He sees a beautiful person, he has the joy of observing the grace of the form, the harmony of the movements and all that. But it does not go beyond. He is perfectly happy, perfectly satisfied when he has seen something beautiful.
An ordinary consciousness, on the contrary, I mean very ordinary, flat as ordinary things are, when it sees something beautiful, whether it is a material object or a person, it immediately jumps at it, shouting, "I must have it!" It is pitiable, isn't it? And even then with such a consciousness you cannot enjoy beauty, for the anguish of desire will pursue you. You lose true enjoyment but do not get anything in return. There is no happiness in desiring something. It only puts you in an unhappy state.
08.19 - Asceticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is a psychological problem. It depends upon the region where there is the sense of beauty. There may be a physical sense of beauty, a vital sense of beauty and a mental sense of beauty. If you have the moral sense of beauty, that is to say, a sense of decency and nobility, you can never be cruel. You will be always generous; your movements will consist of fine gestures. But, as I say often, man is composed of many different bits pieced together. For example, I frequented very much the Artists. I knew all the great Artists of the end of the last century and the beginning of the present. I lived among them. They had really a great sense of beauty. But morally some were very cruel. It is because when you see an Artist in his study at work you find him living in an atmosphere of great beauty, but when you see the gentleman at home, he is a different person, having very little contact with the Artist he was. Here he becomes vulgar and commonplace. Many of them are indeed like that. But there are always exceptions. Some have a unified personality, that is to say, they live their Art and are truly generous, fine.
***
08.24 - On Food, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, people who try to develop their taste are rarely very much attached to food. They cultivate their taste for developing, refining their senses, not for the sake of eating. In the same way the Artist, a painter, for example, trains his eyes so that he can know how to appraise the beauty of form and colour, line and design, composition and harmony that is found in physical nature. It is not mere desire or hunger that drives them, it is taste, culture, development of the sense of sight, appreciation of beauty that is his preoccupation. Generally, Artists who are truly Artists, who love and live their Art, who are in search of beauty are people who do not have many desires. They live in their aesthetic sensibility, in their senses turned to the enjoyment and creation of beauty. They are not the kind of people who live by their vital impulses and physical desires.
In a general way, education, cultures, refinement of the senses are the means of curing movements of crude instinct and desire and passion. To obliterate them is not curing them; instead, they have to be cultivated, intellectualised, refined. That is the surest way of curing them. To give them their maximum growth in view of the progress and development of consciousness, so that one may acquire to a sense of harmony and exactitude of perception is p Art of culture and education for the human being. Men cultivate their intelligence in the same way: they read, they think, compare and contrast, they make a study. In this way their mind enlarges itself, it becomes wider and more comprehensive than the minds of those who live without a mental education, who possess only a few ideas that perhaps even contradict each other. They are moved wholly by these as they have no other, they think those are the only ideas that should govern them: such minds are extremely narrow and limited. On the other hand, they who have cultivated their intelligence, who have studied and thought, who have widened their mental range a little and so can see and note and compare other ideas and possible notions discover easily that it is sheer ignorance and absurdity to be attached to a limited set of ideas and to consider that alone as the expression of truth.
--- Overview of noun art
The noun art has 4 senses (first 4 from tagged texts)
1. (49) art, fine art ::: (the products of human creativity; works of art collectively; "an art exhibition"; "a fine collection of art")
2. (15) art, artistic creation, artistic production ::: (the creation of beautiful or significant things; "art does not need to be innovative to be good"; "I was never any good at art"; "he said that architecture is the art of wasting space beautifully")
3. (7) art, artistry, prowess ::: (a superior skill that you can learn by study and practice and observation; "the art of conversation"; "it's quite an art")
4. (3) artwork, art, graphics, nontextual matter ::: (photographs or other visual representations in a printed publication; "the publisher was responsible for all the artwork in the book")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun art
4 senses of art
Sense 1
art, fine art
=> creation
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 2
art, artistic creation, artistic production
=> creation, creative activity
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
art, artistry, prowess
=> superior skill
=> ability, power
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
artwork, art, graphics, nontextual matter
=> visual communication
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun art
4 senses of art
Sense 1
art, fine art
=> artificial flower
=> commercial art
=> cyberart
=> decoupage
=> diptych
=> gem, treasure
=> genre
=> graphic art
=> grotesque
=> kitsch
=> mosaic
=> plastic art
=> triptych
=> work of art
=> dance
Sense 2
art, artistic creation, artistic production
=> arts and crafts
=> ceramics
=> decalcomania
=> decoupage
=> drawing, draftsmanship, drafting
=> glyptography
=> gastronomy
=> origami
=> painting
=> perfumery
=> printmaking
=> sculpture, carving
=> topiary
Sense 3
art, artistry, prowess
=> aviation, airmanship
=> eristic
=> falconry
=> fortification
=> homiletics
=> horology
=> minstrelsy
=> musicianship
=> enology, oenology
=> puppetry
=> taxidermy
=> telescopy
=> ventriloquism, ventriloquy
Sense 4
artwork, art, graphics, nontextual matter
=> illustration
=> drawing
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun art
4 senses of art
Sense 1
art, fine art
=> creation
Sense 2
art, artistic creation, artistic production
=> creation, creative activity
Sense 3
art, artistry, prowess
=> superior skill
Sense 4
artwork, art, graphics, nontextual matter
=> visual communication
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun art
4 senses of art
Sense 1
art, fine art
-> creation
=> art, fine art
=> classic
=> composition
=> improvisation
=> invention, innovation
=> master, master copy, original
=> needlework, needlecraft
=> product, production
=> remake, remaking
=> representation
=> piece
Sense 2
art, artistic creation, artistic production
-> creation, creative activity
=> pornography, porno, porn, erotica, smut
=> re-creation
=> creating from raw materials
=> production
=> creating by mental acts
=> art, artistic creation, artistic production
=> creating by removal
Sense 3
art, artistry, prowess
-> superior skill
=> art, artistry, prowess
Sense 4
artwork, art, graphics, nontextual matter
-> visual communication
=> video, picture
=> video
=> gesture, motion
=> body language
=> demonstration, demo
=> eye contact
=> projection
=> artwork, art, graphics, nontextual matter
=> graphic design
=> chart
=> graph, graphical record
--- Grep of noun art
abstract art
after part
aliquant part
aliquot part
amelia earhart
american redstart
apple tart
applecart
art
art class
art collection
art critic
art dealer
art deco
art department
art director
art editor
art exhibition
art form
art gallery
art historian
art history
art movement
art nouveau
art object
art paper
art rock
art school
art student
art tatum
art teacher
artamidae
artamus
artaxerxes
artaxerxes i
artaxerxes ii
artefact
artemia
artemia salina
artemis
artemis pontica
artemis spinescens
artemisia
artemisia abrotanum
artemisia absinthium
artemisia annua
artemisia californica
artemisia campestris
artemisia cana
artemisia dracunculus
artemisia filifolia
artemisia frigida
artemisia gnaphalodes
artemisia ludoviciana
artemisia maritima
artemisia stelleriana
artemisia tridentata
artemisia vulgaris
artemision at ephesus
artemus ward
arteria
arteria alveolaris
arteria alveolaris inferior
arteria alveolaris superior
arteria angularis
arteria appendicularis
arteria arcuata
arteria ascendens
arteria auricularis
arteria axillaris
arteria basilaris
arteria brachialis
arteria buccalis
arteria bulbi penis
arteria bulbi vestibuli
arteria carotis
arteria celiaca
arteria centralis retinae
arteria cerebelli
arteria cerebri
arteria choroidea
arteria ciliaris
arteria circumflexa femoris
arteria circumflexa humeri
arteria circumflexa ilium
arteria circumflexa scapulae
arteria colica
arteria communicans
arteria coronaria
arteria cystica
arteria digitalis
arteria epigastrica
arteria ethmoidalis
arteria facialis
arteria femoralis
arteria gastrica
arteria gastrica breves
arteria gastrica sinistra
arteria glutes
arteria hepatica
arteria ileocolica
arteria ileum
arteria iliaca
arteria iliolumbalis
arteria infraorbitalis
arteria intercostalis
arteria labialis
arteria labialis inferior
arteria labialis superior
arteria lacrimalis
arteria laryngea
arteria lienalis
arteria lingualis
arteria lumbalis
arteria maxillaris
arteria meningea
arteria mesenterica
arteria metacarpea
arteria metatarsea
arteria musculophrenica
arteria nutricia
arteria ophthalmica
arteria ovarica
arteria palatina
arteria pancreatica
arteria perinealis
arteria poplitea
arteria pudenda
arteria pulmonalis
arteria radialis
arteria rectalis
arteria renalis
arteria subclavia
arteria temporalis anterior
arteria temporalis intermedia
arteria temporalis posterior
arteria testicularis
arteria ulnaris
arteria uterina
arteria vaginalis
arteria vertebralis
arterial blood
arterial blood gases
arterial blood vessel
arterial plaque
arterial pressure
arterial road
arterial sclerosis
arteriectasia
arteriectasis
arteriogram
arteriography
arteriola
arteriole
arteriolosclerosis
arteriosclerosis
arteriosclerosis obliterans
arteritis
artery
artery of the labyrinth
artery of the penis bulb
artery of the vestibule bulb
artesian well
artfulness
arthralgia
arthritic
arthritis
arthrocentesis
arthrodesis
arthrogram
arthrography
arthromere
arthropathy
arthroplasty
arthropod
arthropod family
arthropod genus
arthropoda
arthropteris
arthroscope
arthroscopy
arthrospore
arthur
arthur ashe
arthur compton
arthur conan doyle
arthur edwin kennelly
arthur evans
arthur fiedler
arthur garfield hays
arthur holly compton
arthur holmes
arthur honegger
arthur jacob arshawsky
arthur james balfour
arthur john gielgud
arthur koestler
arthur laffer
arthur marx
arthur meier schlesinger
arthur meier schlesinger jr.
arthur miller
arthur mitchell
arthur neville chamberlain
arthur rimbaud
arthur robert ashe
arthur rubinstein
arthur schlesinger
arthur schlesinger jr.
arthur schopenhauer
arthur seymour sullivan
arthur stanley jefferson laurel
arthur sullivan
arthur symons
arthur tappan
arthur tatum
arthur wellesley
arthurian legend
artichoke
artichoke heart
artichoke plant
article
article of clothing
article of commerce
article of faith
article of furniture
articles of agreement
articles of confederation
articles of incorporation
articular muscle
articulated ladder
articulated lorry
articulateness
articulatio
articulatio coxae
articulatio cubiti
articulatio genus
articulatio humeri
articulatio plana
articulatio radiocarpea
articulatio spheroidea
articulatio synovialis
articulatio talocruralis
articulatio temporomandibularis
articulatio trochoidea
articulation
articulator
articulatory system
artie shaw
artifact
artifice
artificer
artificial additive
artificial blood
artificial flower
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