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AUTH

BOOKS

The_Republic

The_Use_and_Abuse_of_History

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT

01.05_-_Rabindranath_Tagore:_A_Great_Poet,_a_Great_Man

01.09_-_William_Blake:_The_Marriage_of_Heaven_and_Hell

02.13_-_On_Social_Reconstruction

04.09_-_Values_Higher_and_Lower

1.012_-_Sublimation_-_A_Way_to_Reshuffle_Thought

1.024_-_Affiliation_With_Larger_Wholes

1.02_-_MAPS_OF_MEANING_-_THREE_LEVELS_OF_ANALYSIS

1.03_-_Spiritual_Realisation,_The_aim_of_Bhakti-Yoga

1.08_-_Psycho_therapy_Today

1.25_-_The_Knot_of_Matter

2.01_-_On_Books

2.05_-_Habit_3__Put_First_Things_First

2.0_-_THE_ANTICHRIST

2.13_-_Exclusive_Concentration_of_Consciousness-Force_and_the_Ignorance

2.18_-_The_Evolutionary_Process_-_Ascent_and_Integration

2.19_-_Out_of_the_Sevenfold_Ignorance_towards_the_Sevenfold_Knowledge

2.21_-_1940

3.6.01_-_Heraclitus

5.06_-_THE_TRANSFORMATION

r1914_04_12

Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_2

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higher

values

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higher values

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   2 Anonymous

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1:First pressings of original commercial releases usually have higher values than later pressings. 45s ~ Anonymous,

2:If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear. ~ Christopher Dawson,

3:Let the standard of everybody's mind be raised to the heights of his own inner glory and then man will feel for himself the greatness of the higher values of life and would be tempted to bring them down into practical life and live them. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,

4:This we must say, that everything is economics and economic interest as mere satisfaction of physical needs had, have and always will have a subordinate role in a normal human, that beyond this sphere must be differentiated from an order of higher values, political , spiritual and heroic. ~ Julius Evola,

5:By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that theartist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

6:There are no higher values, people in the West say. Live by your own instincts, for yourself, for your own pleasure... In America, you see, you're not supposed to take care of the elderly. You're supposed to look after yourself, chase your dreams. But what happens when you grow old? Will your individualism save you? ~ Karan Mahajan,

7:Presently we have to train our unconscious to function better. Then we can depend upon our instincts, that will be noble instincts. At this moment, our instincts are very impure. When we have practiced for a long time, living the higher values of life and following the instructions of great masters or the Scriptures, that is when you have trained your unconscious. Then when a situation comes, you can to an extent, depend on your inner voice. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,

8:The emotional states associated with the heart include some that every life would benefit from: Empathy, which makes us feel what someone else is feeling Compassion, which motivates us to extend lovingkindness Forgiveness, which wipes the slate clean of old grievances and wounding Sacrifice, which allows us to put someone else’s good above our own Devotion, which inspires reverence for higher values None of these states is a term in cardiology, yet they have medical consequences ~ Deepak Chopra,

9:Political monopoly and economic monopoly are two sides of the same coin, two heads of the same monster. Despite all the claims to the contrary, the essential ideology of Neo-Conservatism is to preserve the status quo, with all of its injustices. Its public relations experts call for "freedom and democracy" without a framework of higher values. They fail to comprehend the need for a paradigm of justice and therefore are blind to what concerns most of the people in the world. This failure is the taproot of terrorism. ~ Robert Dickson Crane,

10:Atheists tend to pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but this is to overlook secular societies’ equally powerful and continuous calls to prayer. A libertarian state truly worthy of the name would try to redress the balance of messages that reach its citizens away from the merely commercial and towards a holistic conception of flourishing. True to the ambitions of Giotto’s frescoes, these new messages would render vivid to us the many noble ways of behaving that we currently admire so much and so blithely ignore. We simply will not care for very long about the higher values when all we are given to convince us of their worth is an occasional reminder in a modestly selling, largely ignored book of essays by a so-called philosopher – while, in the city beyond, the superlative talents of the globe’s advertising agencies perform their phantasmagorical alchemy and set our every sensory fibre alight in the name of a new kind of cleaning product or savoury snack. ~ Alain de Botton,

11:The fourth generation of self-management is more advanced than the third in five important ways. First, it’s principle-centered. More than giving lip service to Quadrant II, it creates the central paradigm that empowers you to see your time in the context of what is really important and effective. Second, it’s conscience-directed. It gives you the opportunity to organize your life to the best of your ability in harmony with your deepest values. But it also gives you the freedom to peacefully subordinate your schedule to higher values. Third, it defines your unique mission, including values and long-term goals. This gives direction and purpose to the way you spend each day. Fourth, it helps you balance your life by identifying roles, and by setting goals and scheduling activities in each key role every week. And fifth, it gives greater context through weekly organizing (with daily adaptation as needed), rising above the limiting perspective of a single day and putting you in touch with your deepest values through review of your key roles. ~ Stephen R Covey,

12:173  Or (lest) you should say: Only our fathers ascribed partners (to Allah) before (us), and we were (their) descendants after them. Wilt Thou destroy us for what liars did?a 173a. The Arabic word is mubtil, which means one who says a thing in which is no truth or reality (R-LL). 174  And thus do We make the messages clear, and that haply they may return. 175  And recite to them the news of him to whom We give Our messages, but he withdraws himself from them, so the devil follows him up, and he is of those who perish.a 175a. Balaam, Umayyah ibn Abi Salt, Abu ‘Amir, and all the hypocrites, have been respectively indicated as the persons referred to here, but the best explanation is supplied by Qatadah, who says: It speaks generally of everyone to whom guidance is brought but he turns aside from it. This view is corroborated by what is stated at the conclusion of the parable in v. 176, such is the parable of the people who reject Our messages. 176  And if We had pleased, We would have exalted him thereby; but he clings to the eartha and follows his low desire. His parable is as the parable of the dog — if thou drive him away, he lolls out his tongue, and if thou leave him alone, he lolls out his tongue. Such is the parable of the people who reject Our messages. So relate the narrative that they may reflect. 176a. Earth here stands for all that is earthly, for things material. The people spoken of here are those who do not care for the higher values of life. ~ Anonymous,

13:The main problem facing immigrant communities was to change the sort of sociability they practiced from an ascriptive to a voluntary form. That is, the traditional social structures they brought with them were based on family, ethnicity, geographic origin, or some other characteristic with which they were born. For the first generation that landed in the United States, they created the trust necessary for revolving credit associations, family restaurants, laundries, and grocery stores. But in subsequent generations they could become a constraint, narrowing the range of business opportunities and keeping descendants in ethnic ghettoes. For the most successful ethnic groups, the sons and daughters of first-generation immigrants had to learn a broader kind of sociability that would get them jobs in the mainstream business world or in the professions. The speed with which immigrants could make the transition from a member of an ethnic enclave to assimilated mainstream American explains how the United States could be both ethnically diverse and strongly disposed to community at the same time. In many other societies, the descendants of immigrants were never permitted to leave their ethnic ghetto. Although solidarity within the ethnic enclave remained high, the society as a whole was balkanized and conflicted. Diversity can have clear benefits for a society, but is better taken in small sips than in large gulps. It is easily possible to have too diverse a society, in which people not only fail to share higher values and aspirations but even fail to speak the same language. The possibilities for spontaneous sociability then begin to flow only within the cleavage lines established by race, ethnicity, language, and the like. Assimilation through language policy and education must balance ethnicity if broader community is to be possible. The United States presents a mixed and changing picture. If we take into account factors like America’s religious culture and ethnicity, there are ample grounds for categorizing it simultaneously as both an individualistic and a group-oriented society. Those who see only the individualism are ignoring a critical part of American social history. “Yet the balance has been shifting toward individualism rapidly in the last couple of decades, so it is perhaps no accident that Asians and others see it as the epitome of an individualistic society. This shift has created numerous problems for the United States, many of which will play themselves out in the economic sphere. ~ Francis Fukuyama,

   5 Integral Yoga
   2 Yoga


   5 Sri Aurobindo
   3 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   2 Swami Krishnananda
   2 A B Purani


   4 The Life Divine
   2 The Study and Practice of Yoga
   2 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01

01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    Touching the very core of the malady of our age he says that our modern enlightenment seeks to cancel altogether the higher values and install instead the lower alone as true. Thus, for example, Marx and Freud, its twin arch priests, are brothers. Both declare that it is the lower, the under layer alone that matters: to one "the masses", to the other "the instincts". Their wild imperative roars: "Sweep away this pseudo-higher; let the instincts rule, let the pro-letariat dictate!" But more characteristic, Monsieur Thibon has made another discovery which gives the whole value and speciality to his outlook. He says the moderns stress the lower, no doubt; but the old world stressed only the higher and neglected the lower. Therefore the revolt and wrath of the lower, the rage of Revanche in the heart of the dispossessed in the modern world. Enlightenment meant till now the cultivation and embellishment of the Mind, the conscious Mind, the rational and nobler faculties, the height and the depth: and mankind meant the princes and the great ones. In the individual, in the scheme of his culture and education, the senses were neglected, left to go their own way as they pleased; and in the collective field, the toiling masses in the same way lived and moved as best as they could under the economics of laissez-faire. So Monsieur Thibon concludes: "Salvation has never come from below. To look for it from above only is equally vain. No doubt salvation must come from the higher, but on condition that the higher completely adopts and protects the lower." Here is a vision luminous and revealing, full of great import, if we follow the right track, prophetic of man's true destiny. It is through this infiltration of the higher into the lower and the integration of the lower into the higher that mankind will reach the goal of its evolution, both individually and collectively.    But the process, Monsieur Thibon rightly asserts, must begin with the individual and within the individual. Man must "turn within, feel alive within himself", re-establish his living contact with God, the source and origin from which he has cut himself off. Man must learn to subordinate having to being. Each individual must be himself, a free and spontaneous expression. Upon such individual , upon individuals grouped naturally in smaller collectivities and not upon unformed or ill-formed wholesale masses can a perfect human society be raised and will be raised. Monsieur Thibon insistsand very rightlyupon the variety and diversity of individual and local growths in a unified humanity and not a dead uniformity of regimented oneness. He declares, as the reviewer of the London Times succinctly puts it: "Let us abolish our insensate worship of number. Let us repeal the law of majorities. Let us work for the unity that draws together instead of idolizing the multiplicity that disintegrates. Let us understand that it is not enough for each to have a place; what matters is that each should be in his right place. For the atomized society let us substitute an organic society, one in which every man will be free to do what he alone is qualified and able to do."

02.13 - On Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    In the old Indian social organisation there was at the basis such a psychological pattern and that must have been the reason why the structure lasted through millenniums. It was a hierarchical system but based upon living psychological forces. Each group or section or class in it had inevitably its appropriate function and an assured economic status. The Four Orders the Brahmin (those whose pursuit was knowledgeacquiring and giving knowledge), the Kshattriya (the fighters, whose business it was to give physical protection), the Vaishya (traders and farmers who were in charge of the wealth of the society, its production and distribution) and the Sudra (servants and mere labourers )are a natural division or stratification of the social body based upon the nature and function of its different members. In the original and essential pattern there is no sinister mark of inferiority branded upon what are usually termed as the lower orders, especially the lowest order. If some are considered higher and are honoured and respected as such, it meant simply that the functions and qualities they stand for constitute in some way higher values, it did not mean that the others have no value or are to be spurned or neglected. The brain must be given a higher place than the stomach, although all its support and nourishment come from there. Hierarchy means, in modern terms, that the essential services must pass first, should have certain priorities. And according to the older view-point, the Brahmin, being the emblem and repository of knowledge, was considered as the head of the social body. He is the fount and origin of a culture, the creator of a civilisation; the others protect, nourish and serve, although all are equally necessary for the common welfare.    Fundamentally all human society is built upon this pattern which is psychological and which seems to be Nature's own life-plan. There is always this fourfold stratification or classification of members in any collective human grouping: the Intellectual (taken in the broadest sense) or the Intelligentsia, the Military, the Trader and the Labourer. In the earlier civilisationswhen civilisation was being formedespecially in the East, it ,was the first class that took precedence over the rest and was especially honoured; for it is they who give the tone and temper and frame of life in the society. In later epochs, in the mediaeval age for example, the age of conquerors and conquistadors, and of Digvijaya, man as the warrior, the Kshattriya, the Samurai or the Chivalry was given the place of honour. Next came the age of traders and merchants, and the industrial age with the invention of machines. Today the labourer is rising in his turn to take the prime place.

04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga    To the spiritual seeker the higher values are the first things that come first: to the ordinary man it is otherwise, lower values come first and claim topmost priority. To the experience of the spiritual seeker one should give greater value, for he has the experience of both the values, while the ordinary man knows only of one variety. Naturally, as we have said, there is synthesis, a fusion of the two values; but that is elsewhere for the present, not actually here and now.    II

1.012 - Sublimation - A Way to Reshuffle Thought, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga   The mistake is in believing that something is real, and yet not wanting it on account of a traditional attitude towards it that has been religiously introduced. The tradition of religion tells us that something is wrong, though we do not believe it. This is the difficulty. "My feelings say that something is okay, but religion says it is not okay. So I have a split between myself and the religious values." The religious novitiate then becomes a neurotic, an unhappy person, because in the cloister and the monastery he has a world of his own which is in conflict with the world outside. He has been told by religion that the world outside is wrong and the world inside the monastery is right, but he does not believe it. Oh, this is a horror that we cannot believe it and yet we are told to accept it. This is a kind of tyranny. Religion can become a tyrant; it can become a kind of dictator's order. But religion is far from dictatorship this is an important point to remember. Religion is not a dictator. Spirituality is not a tyrant. It is not asking us to do something because it says so. It is again to be emphasised that it is a process of inward adjustment to higher values by way of a positive education.   In the practice of yoga, in the understanding of vairagya, in self-control which is yoga, one should not be too enthusiastic. Over-enthusiasm is bad because it is mostly emotional, coupled with a kind of will-force but bereft of understanding, which creates a conflict psychologically and, consequently, even socially. It is better that a student takes note of all his desires. "Have I a desire?" It is no use saying, "I have no desire." If we have really no desires it is okay very good, and so much the better but we should be sure that we have no desires.

1.024 - Affiliation With Larger Wholes, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga   In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and the Taittareya Upanishad we have, for instance, an enumeration of the gradations of happiness, which is a wonderful incentive for the mind to concentrate on higher values. In the Taittariya Upanishad we are told that human happiness is the lowest kind of happiness, and not the highest happiness, as we imagine. We think that perhaps we are superior to animals, plants and stones, etc., and biologists of the modern world are likely to tell us that we are Homo sapiens, far advanced in the process of evolution, perhaps having reached the topmost level of evolution. It is not true. The Upanishad says that we are in a very low condition.   Essentially, the Upanishad tells us that all of the happiness of mankind put together is but a jot only a drop. Let us imagine the state of happiness of a healthy, young individual who is the king of the whole world. We know that there is no such person as a king of the whole world, yet let us imagine such a person who is the emperor of the whole world. No one is in opposition to this emperor. He is vibrantly healthy and youthful, and has all the powers of enjoyment. Everything in the world is under him. What is his happiness? The happiness of this emperor of the entire world can be regarded as the lowest jot of happiness.

1.25 - The Knot of Matter, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   11:This progressive development, this growing manifestation of the divine Consciousness and Force, Knowledge and Will that had lost itself in the ignorance and inertia of Matter, might well be a happy efflorescence proceeding from joy to greater and at last to infinite joy if it were not for the principle of rigid division from which Matter has started. The shutting up of the individual in his own personal consciousness of separate and limited mind, life and body prevents what would otherwise be the natural law of our development. It brings into the body the law of attraction and repulsion, of defence and attack, of discord and pain. For each body being a limited conscious-force feels itself exposed to the attack, impact, forceful contact of other such limited conscious-forces or of universal forces and, where it feels itself broken in upon or unable to harmonise the contacting and the recipient consciousness, it suffers discomfort and pain, is attracted or repelled, has to defend itself or to assail; it is constantly called upon to undergo what it is unwilling or unable to suffer. Into the emotional and the sense-mind the law of division brings the same reactions with the higher values of grief and joy, love and hatred, oppression and depression, all cast into terms of desire, and by desire into straining and effort, and by the straining into excess and defect of force, incapacity, the rhythm of attainment and disappointment, possession and recoil, a constant strife and trouble and unease. Into the mind as a whole, instead of a divine law of narrower truth flowing into greater truth, lesser light taken up into wider light, lower will surrendered to higher transforming will, pettier satisfaction progressing towards nobler and more complete satisfaction, it brings similar dualities of truth pursued by error, light by darkness, power by incapacity, pleasure of pursuit and attainment by pain of repulse and of dissatisfaction with what is attained; mind takes up its own affliction along with the affliction of life and body and becomes aware of the triple defect and insufficiency of our natural being. All this means the denial of Ananda, the negation of the trinity of Sachchidananda and therefore, if the negation be insuperable, the futility of existence; for existence in throwing itself out in the play of consciousness and force must seek that movement not merely for itself, but for satisfaction in the play, and if in the play no real satisfaction can be found, it must obviously be abandoned in the end as a vain attempt, a colossal mistake, a delirium of the self-embodying spirit.   12:This is the whole basis of the pessimist theory of the world, - optimist, it may be, as to worlds and states beyond, but pessimist as to the earthly life and the destiny of the mental being in his dealings with the material universe. For it affirms that since the very nature of material existence is division and the very seed of embodied mind is self-limitation, ignorance and egoism, to seek satisfaction of the spirit upon earth or to seek an issue and divine purpose and culmination for the world-play is a vanity and delusion; only in a heaven of the Spirit and not in the world, or only in the Spirit's true quietude and not in its phenomenal activities can we reunite existence and consciousness with the divine self-delight. The Infinite can only recover itself by rejecting as an error and a false step its attempt to find itself in the finite. Nor can the emergence of mental consciousness in the material universe bring with it any promise of a divine fulfilment. For the principle of division is not proper to Matter, but to Mind; Matter is only an illusion of Mind into which Mind brings its own rule of division and ignorance. Therefore within this illusion Mind can only find itself; it can only travel between the three terms of the divided existence it has created: it cannot find there the unity of the Spirit or the truth of the spiritual existence.

2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen    It is not that his subject is always great, but the force which he brings into his poems. In one he simply says in effect: "O God, I grant that you are just, but I don't understand why I should be made to suffer while others who do not care for any higher values of life get all the good things of life."    There is no sign of quantitative verse, he depends on 'accent' for his verse.

2.05 - Habit 3 Put First Things First, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset   But if you have Habit 2 deep inside your heart and mind, you have those higher values driving you.   You can subordinate your schedule to those values with integrity. You can adapt; you can be flexible.   --   Second, it's conscience-directed. It gives you the opportunity to organize your life to the best of your ability in harmony with your deepest values. But it also gives you the freedom to peacefully subordinate your schedule to higher values.   Third, it defines your unique mission, including values and long-term goals. This gives direction and purpose to the way you spend each day.

2.13 - Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   It must be remembered, however, that when we speak of a partial movement of Consciousness-Force absorbed in its forms and actions, in a limited field of its working, this does not imply any real division of its integrality. The putting of the rest of itself behind it has only the effect of making all that rest occult to the frontal immediately active energy in the limited field of movement, but not of shutting it out of the field; in fact the integral Force is there though veiled by the Inconscience, and it is that integral Force supported by the integral self-being which through its frontal energy does all the work and inhabits all the forms created by the movement. It is to be noted also that in order to remove the veil of the Ignorance the conscious Force of being in us uses a reverse action of its power of exclusive concentration; it quiets the frontal movement of Prakriti in the individual consciousness and concentrates exclusively on the concealed inner being, - on the Self or on the true inner, psychic or mental or vital being, the Purusha, - to disclose it. But when it has done so, it need not remain in this opposite exclusiveness; it can resume its integral consciousness or a global consciousness which includes both being of Purusha and action of Prakriti, the soul and its instruments, the Self and the dynamisms of the SelfPower, atmasakti: it can then embrace its manifestation with a larger consciousness free from the previous limitation, free from the results of Nature's forgetfulness of the indwelling Spirit. Or it may quiet the whole working it has manifested, concentrate on a higher level of Self and Nature, raise the being to it and bring down the powers of the higher level to transform the previous manifestation: all that is so transformed is still included, but as a part of the higher dynamism and its higher values, in a new and greater self-creation. This is what can happen when the   Consciousness-Force in our being decides to raise its evolution from the mental to the supramental level. In each case it is Tapas that is effective, but it acts in a different manner according to the thing that has to be done, according to the predetermined process, dynamism, self-deploying of the Infinite.

2.18 - The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   But here we have to observe two particularities of this human and at present highest development, which bring us to the heart of the matter. First, this taking up of the lower parts of life reveals itself as a turning downward of the master eye of the secret evolving spirit or of the universal Being in the individual from the height to which he has reached on all that now lies below him, a gazing down with the double or twin power of the being's consciousness-force, - the power of will, the power of knowledge, - so as to understand from this new, different and wider range of consciousness and perception and nature the lower life and its possibilities and to raise it up, it also, to a higher level, to give it higher values, to bring out of it higher potentialities. And this he does because evidently he does not intend to kill or destroy it, but, delight of existence being his eternal business and a harmony of various strains, not a sweet but monotonous melody the method of his music, he wishes to include the lower notes also and, by surcharging them with a deeper and finer significance, get more delight out of them than was possible in the cruder formulation. Still in the end he lays on them as a condition for his continued acceptance their consent to admit the higher values and, until they do consent, he can deal harshly enough with them even to trampling them under foot when he is bent on perfection and they are rebellious. And that indeed is the true inmost aim and meaning of ethics, discipline and askesis, to lesson and tame, purify and prepare to be fit instruments the vital and physical and lower mental life so that they may be transformed into notes of the higher mental and eventually the supramental harmony, but not to mutilate and destroy them. Ascent is the first necessity, but an integration is an accompanying intention of the spirit in Nature.   This downward eye of knowledge and will with a view to an all-round heightening, deepening and subtler, finer and richer intensification is the secret Spirit's way from the beginning. The plant soul takes, as we may say, a nervous-material view of its whole physical existence so as to get out of it all the vital-physical intensity possible; for it seems to have some intense excitations of a mute life-vibration in it, - perhaps, though that is difficult for us to imagine, more intense relatively to its lower rudimentary scale than the animal mind and body in its higher and more powerful scale could tolerate. The animal being takes a mentalised sense-view of its vital and physical existence so as to get out of it all the sense value possible, much acuter in many respects than man's as mere sensation or sense-emotion or satisfaction of vital desire and pleasure. Man, looking downward from the plane of will and intelligence, abandons these lower intensities, but in order to get out of mind and life and sense a higher intensity in other values, intellectual, aesthetic, moral, spiritual, mentally dynamic or practical - as he terms it; by these higher elements he enlarges, subtilises and elevates his use of life-values. He does not abandon the animal reactions and enjoyments, but more lucidly, finely and sensitively mentalises them. This he does even on his normal and his lower levels, but, as he develops, he puts his lower being to a severer test, begins to demand from it on pain of rejection something like a transformation: that is the mind's way of preparing for a spiritual life still beyond it.

2.19 - Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   It is for this reason that the process of Nature is not confined to a heightening of herself into a new principle; the new height is not a narrow intense pinnacle, it brings with it a widening and establishes a larger field of life in which the power of the new principle may have sufficient play and room for its emergence. This action of elevation and expansion is not confined to an utmost possible largeness in the essential play of the new principle itself; it includes a taking up of that which is lower into the higher values: the divine or spiritual life will not only assume into itself the mental, vital, physical life transformed and spiritualised, but it will give them a much wider and fuller play than was open to them so long as they were living on their own level. Our mental, physical, vital existence need not be destroyed by our self-exceeding, nor are they lessened and impaired by being spiritualised; they can and do become much richer, greater, more powerful and more perfect: in their divine change they break into possibilities which in their unspiritualised condition could not be practicable or imaginable.   This evolution, this process of heightening and widening and integralisation, is in its nature a growth and an ascent out of the sevenfold ignorance into the integral knowledge. The crux of that ignorance is the constitutional; it resolves itself into a manifold ignorance of the true character of our becoming, an unawareness of our total self, of which the key is a limitation by the plane we inhabit and by the present predominant principle of our nature. The plane we inhabit is the plane of Matter; the present predominant principle in our nature is the mental intelligence with the sense-mind, which depends upon Matter, as its support and pedestal. As a consequence, the preoccupation of the mental intelligence and its powers with the material existence as it is shown to it through the senses, and with life as it has been formulated in a compromise between life and matter, is a special stamp of the constitutional Ignorance. This natural materialism or materialised vitalism, this clamping of ourselves to our beginnings, is a form of self-restriction narrowing the scope of our existence which is very insistent on the human being. It is a first necessity of his physical existence, but is afterwards forged by a primal ignorance into a chain that hampers his every step upwards: the attempt to grow out of this limitation of the wholeness, power and truth of the spirit by the materialised mental intelligence and out of this subjection of the soul to material Nature is the first step towards a real progress of our humanity. For our ignorance is not entire; it is a limitation of consciousness, - it is not the complete nescience which is the stamp of the same Ignorance in purely material existences, those which have not only matter for their plane but matter for their dominant principle. It is a partial, a limiting, a dividing and, very largely, a falsifying knowledge; out of that limitation and falsification we have to grow into the truth of our spiritual being.

2.21 - 1940, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen    Sri Aurobindo: For instance, Ireland's freedom. Also, I wanted Alsace Lorraine to go to France. They were not fulfilled at the time when I willed. Many were fulfilled when I no longer wanted them. For instance, I wanted to break the British Empire. Now Hitler wants to do it. But I don't want it now, as it would mean the triumph of Hitler. Wherever he has gone, he has destroyed the higher values of life. If I want that the British must not be destroyed it is not because I like the British Empire, but because I see that it would push back the work tremendously.    Disciple: Doesn't the Divine Will foresee things?

3.6.01 - Heraclitus, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Does the thought of Heraclitus admit of any such hope as the Vedic seers held and hymned with so triumphant a confidence? or does it even give ground for any aspiration to some kind of a divine supermanhood such as his disciples the Stoics so sternly laboured for or as that of which Nietzsche, the modern Heraclitus, drew a too crude and violent figure? His saying that man is kindled and extinguished as light disappears into night, is commonplace and discouraging enough. But this may after all be only true of the apparent man Is it possible for man. in his becoming to raise his present fixed measures? to elevate his mental, relative, individual reason into direct communion with or direct participation in the divine and absolute reason? to inspire and raise the values of his human force to the higher values of the divine force? to become aware like the gods of an absolute good and an absolute beauty? to lift this mortal to the nature of immortality? Against his melancholy image of human transiency we have that remarkable and cryptic sentence, "the gods are mortals, men immortals", which, taken literally, might mean that the gods are powers that perish and replace each other and the soul of man alone is immortal, but must at least mean that there is in man behind his outward transiency an immortal spirit. We have too his saying, "thou canst not find the limits of the soul", and we have the profoundest of all Heraclitus' utterances, "the kingdom is of the child." If man is in his real being an infinite and immortal spirit, there is surely no reason why he should not awaken to his immortality, arise towards the consciousness of the universal, one and absolute, live in a higher self-realisation. "I have sought for myself" says Heraclitus; and what was it that he found?   But there is one great gap and defect whether in his knowledge of things or his knowledge of the self of man. We see in how many directions the deep divining eye of Heraclitus anticipated the largest and profoundest generalisations of Science and Philosophy and how even his more superficial thoughts indicate later powerful tendencies of the occidental mind, how too some of his ideas influenced such profound and fruitful thinkers as Plato, the Stoics, the Neo-platonists. But in his defect also he is a forerunner; it illustrates the great deficiency of later European thought, such of it at least as has not been profoundly influenced by Asiatic religions or Asiatic mysticism. I have tried to show how often his thought touches and is almost identical with the Vedic and Vedantic. But his knowledge of the truth of things stopped with the vision of the universal reason and the universal force; he seems to have summed up the principle of things in these two first terms, the aspect of consciousness, the aspect of power, a supreme intelligence and a supreme energy. The eye of Indian thought saw a third aspect of the Self and of Brahman; besides the universal consciousness active in divine knowledge, besides the universal force active in divine will, it saw the universal delight active in divine love and joy. European thought, following the line of Heraclitus' thinking, has fixed itself on reason and on force and made them the principles towards whose perfection our being has to aspire. Force is the first aspect of the world, war, the clash of energies; the second aspect, reason, emerges out of the appearance of force in which it is at first hidden and reveals itself as a certain justice, a certain harmony, a certain determining intelligence and reason in things; the third aspect is a deeper secret behind these two, universal delight, love, beauty which taking up the other two can establish something higher than justice, better than harmony, truer than reason,-unity and bliss, the ecstasy of our fulfilled existence. Of this last secret power Western thought has only seen two lower aspects, pleasure and aesthetic beauty; it has missed the spiritual beauty and the spiritual delight. For that reason Europe has never been able to develop a powerful religion of its own; it has been obliged to turn to Asia. Science takes possession of the measures and utilities of Force; rational philosophy pursues reason to its last subtleties; but inspired philosophy and religion can seize hold of the highest secret, uttamaṁ rahasyam.

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen   means perhaps some higher values. But standing for higher values doesn't   make for victory. Look at Poland and Czechoslovakia. Perhaps you may say

Wikipedia - Effort heuristic -- Tendency to judge objects that took a longer time to produce to be of higher value

Integral World - Love, Evolution and Higher Values in Darwin, Elliot Benjamin