TERMS STARTING WITH
manable ::: a. --> Marriageable.
manace ::: n. & v. --> Same as Menace.
manacled ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manacle
manacle ::: n. --> A handcuff; a shackle for the hand or wrist; -- usually in the plural. ::: v. t. --> To put handcuffs or other fastening upon, for confining the hands; to shackle; to confine; to restrain from the use of the limbs or natural powers.
manacling ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manacle
manageability ::: n. --> The state or quality of being manageable; manageableness.
manageable ::: a. --> Such as can be managed or used; suffering control; governable; tractable; subservient; as, a manageable horse.
manageable ::: that can be managed or controlled.
managed code "operating system" Code that is executed by the {.NET} {common language runtime} (CLR). {VB.NET} code is always managed code but {C++ .NET} can optionally use unmanaged code. Managed code provides {metadata} allowing the CLR to manage security (role-based as well as new approaches to code access security). The CLR also handles errors, manages the program {stack} and finds {methods} in assembly modules. Managed data is memory that's subject to {garbage collection}. There are additional restrictions to permit interoperability of different languages, for example, {Visual Basic} {arrays} must be zero-based. (2007-07-13)
managed ::: handled, directed, governed, or controlled in action or use. managing.
managed ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manage
manageless ::: a. --> Unmanageable.
management 1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see also {suit}). Spoken derisively, as in "*Management* decided that ...". 2. Mythically, a vast bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed "The Mgt"; this derives from the "Illuminatus!" novels. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-28)
management ::: the act, manner, or practice of managing; handling, supervision, or control.
management ::: v. --> The act or art of managing; the manner of treating, directing, carrying on, or using, for a purpose; conduct; administration; guidance; control; as, the management of a family or of a farm; the management of state affairs.
Business dealing; negotiation; arrangement.
Judicious use of means to accomplish an end; conduct directed by art or address; skillful treatment; cunning practice; -- often in a bad sense.
manage ::: n. --> The handling or government of anything, but esp. of a horse; management; administration. See Manege.
To have under control and direction; to conduct; to guide; to administer; to treat; to handle.
Hence: Esp., to guide by careful or delicate treatment; to wield with address; to make subservient by artful conduct; to bring around cunningly to one&
managerial ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to management or a manager; as, managerial qualities.
manager ::: n. --> One who manages; a conductor or director; as, the manager of a theater.
A person who conducts business or household affairs with economy and frugality; a good economist.
A contriver; an intriguer.
managership ::: n. --> The office or position of a manager.
managery ::: n. --> Management; manner of using; conduct; direction.
Husbandry; economy; frugality.
managing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manage
manah.kosa (manahkosha; manah-kosha) ::: the sheath (kosa) commanahkosa posed of mental substance, "the mental sheath or subtle body in which our true mental being [manomaya purus.a] lives". m manapamanabodha
manah-kosa ::: the mental sheath.
manah-prana ::: [mind-life].
manah. ::: same as manas.
manakin ::: n. --> Any one of numerous small birds belonging to Pipra, Manacus, and other genera of the family Pipridae. They are mostly natives of Central and South America. some are bright-colored, and others have the wings and tail curiously ornamented. The name is sometimes applied to related birds of other families.
A dwarf. See Manikin.
manana. ::: deep contemplation; subtle enquiry; hearing and profound reflection; meditation on the eternal verities; second of the three stages of vedantic realisation
manana ::: thinking. ::: mananam [nominative]
manasa ananda ::: [mental bliss].
manasa buddhi ::: mental reason.
manasa-dr.s.t.i (manas-drishti) ::: mental vision; perception by the manasa-drsti manas, "an inner or subliminal mental consciousness and sense capable of perceiving and experiencing directly, not only the life forces and their play and results and phenomena, but the mental and psychical worlds and all they contain and the mental activities, vibrations, phenomena, forms, images of this world also". manasa m
manasa ::: mental; pertaining to manas, having the nature of mind in manasa general or of the sensational mind; mentality; subtle sense-perception (vis.ayadr.s.t.i) on the mental plane by means of the inner manas. m manasa anasa abhy abhyasa
manasa niyamya arabhate karmayogam ::: controlling (the senses) by the mind he engages in the yoga of action. [Gita 3.7]
manasa putra ::: mind-born child.
manasasmr.ti (manasasmriti) ::: mental smr.ti. manasasmrti
manasa tapas ::: [mental tapas].
manas brahman ::: brahman experienced on the mental level.
manasbuddhi ::: see manasabuddhi.
manas-citta (manas-chitta; manas chitta) ::: the emotional mind, "the life of sensations and emotions which are at the mercy of the outward touches of life and matter and their positive or negative reactions, joy and grief, pleasure and pain", constituting a "surface desire-soul" behind which is "the subliminal soul in us open to the universal delight [ananda] which the cosmic soul takes in its own existence and in the existence of the myriad souls that represent it and in the operations of mind, life and matter by which Nature lends herself to their play and development".
manasika (manasik) ::: mental, relating to the sensational mind manasika (manas). m manasika anasika sus susupti
manasika ::: [mental].
manasika. ::: pertaining to the mind; mental; mental action
mana&
manas. ::: mind; reason; mentality; the middle levels of mind which exist as or include the mental body &
manas ::: mind, the mind proper [as distinct from the intellect (buddhi)], sense-mind.
manas ::: mind, the psychological principle or degree of consciousness that is the basis of the mental world (manoloka or svar), the highest plane of the triloka and the summit of the aparardha or lower hemisphere of existence; in its essence, "a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer"; the sensational mind, "the original sense [indriya] which perceives all objects and reacts upon them", capable not only of "a translation into sense of so much of the outer impacts as it receives through the nervous system and the physical organs", but also of "a subtle sight, hearing, power of contact of its own which is not dependent on the physical organs"; the principle that governs the realm of svarga, the lower plane of svar; (on page 1281) the name of a particular svarga.
manastattva (manastattwa; manas tattwa) ::: mind-principle.
manatee ::: n. --> Any species of Trichechus, a genus of sirenians; -- called alsosea cow.
manation ::: n. --> The act of issuing or flowing out.
manava ::: human; man. manava
manmana maccittah ::: [with mind (manas) and citta given up to Me]. [cf. Gita 9.34]
manbote ::: n. --> A sum paid to a lord as a pecuniary compensation for killing his man (that is, his vassal, servant, or tenant).
manca ::: n. --> See Mancus.
manche ::: n. --> A sleeve.
manchet ::: n. --> Fine white bread; a loaf of fine bread.
manchineel ::: n. --> A euphorbiaceous tree (Hippomane Mancinella) of tropical America, having a poisonous and blistering milky juice, and poisonous acrid fruit somewhat resembling an apple.
manchu ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Manchuria or its inhabitants. ::: n. --> A native or inhabitant of Manchuria; also, the language spoken by the Manchus.
mancipate ::: v. t. --> To enslave; to bind; to restrict.
mancipation ::: n. --> Slavery; involuntary servitude.
manciple ::: n. --> A steward; a purveyor, particularly of a college or Inn of Court.
mancona bark ::: --> See Sassy bark.
mancus ::: n. --> An old Anglo Saxon coin both of gold and silver, and of variously estimated values. The silver mancus was equal to about one shilling of modern English money.
mandala ::: circle, a "book" of the Rg-veda; [a district or province of a large kingdom].
man.d.ala ::: circle, orb; any of the ten books of the R mandala . g Veda.
mandala. :::realm; encirclement; circle; zone
mandamus ::: n. --> A writ issued by a superior court and directed to some inferior tribunal, or to some corporation or person exercising authority, commanding the performance of some specified duty.
mandarinate ::: n. --> The collective body of officials or persons of rank in China.
mandarinic ::: a. --> Appropriate or peculiar to a mandarin.
mandarining ::: n. --> The process of giving an orange color to goods formed of animal tissue, as silk or wool, not by coloring matter, but by producing a certain change in the fiber by the action of dilute nitric acid.
mandarinism ::: n. --> A government mandarins; character or spirit of the mandarins.
mandarin ::: n. --> A Chinese public officer or nobleman; a civil or military official in China and Annam.
A small orange, with easily separable rind. It is thought to be of Chinese origin, and is counted a distinct species (Citrus nobilis)mandarin orange; tangerine --.
manda ::: slow.
mandatary ::: n. --> One to whom a command or charge is given; hence, specifically, a person to whom the pope has, by his prerogative, given a mandate or order for his benefice.
One who undertakes to discharge a specific business commission; a mandatory.
mandate ::: an authoritative command or instruction.
mandate ::: n. --> An official or authoritative command; an order or injunction; a commission; a judicial precept.
A rescript of the pope, commanding an ordinary collator to put the person therein named in possession of the first vacant benefice in his collation.
A contract by which one employs another to manage any business for him. By the Roman law, it must have been gratuitous.
mandator ::: n. --> A director; one who gives a mandate or order.
The person who employs another to perform a mandate.
mandatory ::: a. --> Containing a command; preceptive; directory. ::: n. --> Same as Mandatary.
mandelate ::: n. --> A salt of mandelic acid.
mandelbug "jargon, programming" /man'del-buhg/ (From the {Mandelbrot set}) A {bug} whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behaviour appear chaotic or even {nondeterministic}. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a {Bohr bug}, rather than a {heisenbug}. See also {schroedinbug}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-08)
mandelic ::: a. --> Pertaining to an acid first obtained from benzoic aldehyde (oil of better almonds), as a white crystalline substance; -- called also phenyl glycolic acid.
manderil ::: n. --> A mandrel.
mander ::: v. t. & i. --> See Maunder.
mandible ::: n. --> The bone, or principal bone, of the lower jaw; the inferior maxilla; -- also applied to either the upper or the lower jaw in the beak of birds.
The anterior pair of mouth organs of insects, crustaceaus, and related animals, whether adapted for biting or not. See Illust. of Diptera.
mandibular ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a mandible; like a mandible. ::: n. --> The principal mandibular bone; the mandible.
mandibulate ::: a. --> Alt. of Mandibulated ::: n. --> An insect having mandibles.
mandibulated ::: a. --> Provided with mandibles adapted for biting, as many insects.
mandibuliform ::: a. --> Having the form of a mandible; -- said especially of the maxillae of an insect when hard and adapted for biting.
mandibulohyoid ::: a. --> Pertaining both to the mandibular and the hyoid arch, or situated between them.
mandilion ::: n. --> See Mandil.
mandil ::: n. --> A loose outer garment worn the 16th and 17th centuries.
mandingos ::: n. pl. --> ; sing. Mandingo. (Ethnol.) An extensive and powerful tribe of West African negroes.
mandioca ::: n. --> See Manioc.
mandioc ::: n. --> Alt. of Mandioca
mandira (Mandir) ::: [temple].
mandir&
mandlestone ::: n. --> Amygdaloid.
mandment ::: n. --> Commandment.
mand ::: n. --> A demand.
mandoline ::: n. --> A small and beautifully shaped instrument resembling the lute.
mandolin ::: n. --> Alt. of Mandoline
mandore ::: n. --> A kind of four-stringed lute.
mandragora ::: n. --> A genus of plants; the mandrake. See Mandrake, 1.
mandragorite ::: n. --> One who habitually intoxicates himself with a narcotic obtained from mandrake.
mandrake ::: n. --> A low plant (Mandragora officinarum) of the Nightshade family, having a fleshy root, often forked, and supposed to resemble a man. It was therefore supposed to have animal life, and to cry out when pulled up. All parts of the plant are strongly narcotic. It is found in the Mediterranean region.
The May apple (Podophyllum peltatum). See May apple under May, and Podophyllum.
mandrel ::: n. --> A bar of metal inserted in the work to shape it, or to hold it, as in a lathe, during the process of manufacture; an arbor.
The live spindle of a turning lathe; the revolving arbor of a circular saw. It is usually driven by a pulley.
mandrill ::: n. --> a large West African baboon (Cynocephalus, / Papio, mormon). The adult male has, on the sides of the nose, large, naked, grooved swellings, conspicuously striped with blue and red.
manducable ::: a. --> Such as can be chewed; fit to be eaten.
manducated ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manducate
manducate ::: v. t. --> To masticate; to chew; to eat.
manducating ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manducate
manducation ::: n. --> The act of chewing.
manducatory ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or employed in, chewing.
manductor ::: n. --> A conductor; an officer in the ancient church who gave the signal for the choir to sing, and who beat time with the hand, and regulated the music.
manducus ::: n. --> A grotesque mask, representing a person chewing or grimacing, worn in processions and by comic actors on the stage.
man-eater ::: n. --> One who, or that which, has an appetite for human flesh; specifically, one of certain large sharks (esp. Carcharodon Rondeleti); also, a lion or a tiger which has acquired the habit of feeding upon human flesh.
maned ::: a. --> Having a mane.
manege ::: n. --> Art of horsemanship, or of training horses.
A school for teaching horsemanship, and for training horses.
maneh ::: n. --> A Hebrew weight for gold or silver, being one hundred shekels of gold and sixty shekels of silver.
maneless ::: a. --> Having no mane.
mane ::: n. --> The long and heavy hair growing on the upper side of, or about, the neck of some quadrupedal animals, as the horse, the lion, etc. See Illust. of Horse.
manequin ::: n. --> An artist&
manerial ::: a. --> See Manorial.
manesheet ::: n. --> A covering placed over the upper part of a horse&
manes ::: n. pl. --> The benevolent spirits of the dead, especially of dead ancestors, regarded as family deities and protectors.
mane ::: the long hair along the top and sides of the neck of certain mammals, such as the horse and the male lion. manes, maned, dense-maned, lion-maned.
maneticness ::: n. --> Magneticalness.
maneuvered ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manoeuvre
maneuverer ::: n. --> Alt. of Manoeuvrer
maneuvering ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manoeuvre
maneuver ::: n. --> Alt. of Manoeuvre
Alt. of Manoeuvre ::: v. t. --> Alt. of Manoeuvre
manful ::: a. --> Showing manliness, or manly spirit; hence, brave, courageous, resolute, noble.
maṅgala (mangala; mangalam) ::: good fortune, favourable circummangala stances. ma mangala-amangala
mangala ::: good fortune.
maṅgalamaya ::: fortunate, favourable. mangalamaya ma mangala
maṅgalam ::: see maṅgala. mangalam ma mangalamangala
mangala&
maṅgalya ::: fortunate, favourable. mangalya
manganate ::: n. --> A salt of manganic acid.
manganesate ::: n. --> A manganate.
manganese ::: n. --> An element obtained by reduction of its oxide, as a hard, grayish white metal, fusible with difficulty, but easily oxidized. Its ores occur abundantly in nature as the minerals pyrolusite, manganite, etc. Symbol Mn. Atomic weight 54.8.
manganesian ::: a. --> Manganic.
manganesic ::: a. --> Manganic.
manganesious ::: a. --> Manganous.
manganesium ::: n. --> Manganese.
manganesous ::: a. --> Manganous.
manganic ::: a. --> Of, pertaining to resembling, or containing, manganese; specif., designating compounds in which manganese has a higher valence as contrasted with manganous compounds. Cf. Manganous.
manganiferous ::: a. --> Containing manganese.
manganite ::: n. --> One of the oxides of manganese; -- called also gray manganese ore. It occurs in brilliant steel-gray or iron-black crystals, also massive.
A compound of manganese dioxide with a metallic oxide; so called as though derived from the hypothetical manganous acid.
manganium ::: n. --> Manganese.
mangan ::: n. --> See Mangonel.
manganous ::: a. --> Of, pertaining to, designating, those compounds of manganese in which the element has a lower valence as contrasted with manganic compounds; as, manganous oxide.
mangcorn ::: n. --> A mixture of wheat and rye, or other species of grain.
manged /mahnjd/ [probably from the French "manger" or Italian "mangiare", to eat; perhaps influenced by English "mange", "mangy"] Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair. "The disk was manged after the electrical storm." Compare {mung}. [{Jargon File}]
mangel-wurzel ::: n. --> A kind of large field beet (B. macrorhiza), used as food for cattle, -- by some considered a mere variety of the ordinary beet. See Beet.
mange ::: n. --> The scab or itch in cattle, dogs, and other beasts.
manger ::: n. --> A trough or open box in which fodder is placed for horses or cattle to eat.
The fore part of the deck, having a bulkhead athwart ships high enough to prevent water which enters the hawse holes from running over it.
mangily ::: adv. --> In a mangy manner; scabbily.
manginess ::: n. --> The condition or quality of being mangy.
mangled ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Mangle
mangled ::: injured severely, disfigured, or mutilated by cutting, slashing, or crushing.
mangler [DEC] A manager. Compare {mango}; see also {management}. Note that {system mangler} is somewhat different in connotation. [{Jargon File}]
mangler ::: n. --> One who mangles or tears in cutting; one who mutilates any work in doing it.
One who smooths with a mangle.
mangle Used similarly to {mung} or {scribble}, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed.
mangle ::: v. t. --> To cut or bruise with repeated blows or strokes, making a ragged or torn wound, or covering with wounds; to tear in cutting; to cut in a bungling manner; to lacerate; to mutilate.
To mutilate or injure, in making, doing, or pertaining; as, to mangle a piece of music or a recitation. ::: n.
mangling ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Mangle
mangoes ::: pl. --> of Mango
mango "jargon" /mang'go/ (Originally in-house jargon at {Symbolics}) A manager. Compare {mangler}. See also {devo} and {doco}. (1995-03-21)
mangoldwurzel ::: n. --> See Mangel-wurzel.
mangonel ::: n. --> A military engine formerly used for throwing stones and javelins.
mangonism ::: n. --> The art of mangonizing, or setting off to advantage.
mangonist ::: n. --> One who mangonizes.
A slave dealer; also, a strumpet.
mangonize ::: v. t. --> To furbish up for sale; to set off to advantage.
mango ::: n. --> The fruit of the mango tree. It is rather larger than an apple, and of an ovoid shape. Some varieties are fleshy and luscious, and others tough and tasting of turpentine. The green fruit is pickled for market.
A green muskmelon stuffed and pickled.
mangostan ::: n. --> A tree of the East Indies of the genus Garcinia (G. Mangostana). The tree grows to the height of eighteen feet, and bears fruit also called mangosteen, of the size of a small apple, the pulp of which is very delicious food.
mangosteen ::: n. --> Alt. of Mangostan
mangrove ::: n. --> The name of one or two trees of the genus Rhizophora (R. Mangle, and R. mucronata, the last doubtfully distinct) inhabiting muddy shores of tropical regions, where they spread by emitting aerial roots, which fasten in the saline mire and eventually become new stems. The seeds also send down a strong root while yet attached to the parent plant.
The mango fish.
mangue ::: n. --> The kusimanse.
mangy ::: superl. --> Infected with the mange; scabby.
manhaden ::: n. --> See Menhaden.
manhead ::: n. --> Manhood.
manhole ::: n. --> A hole through which a man may descend or creep into a drain, sewer, steam boiler, parts of machinery, etc., for cleaning or repairing.
manhood ::: n. --> The state of being man as a human being, or man as distinguished from a child or a woman.
Manly quality; courage; bravery; resolution.
maniable ::: a. --> Manageable.
maniacal ::: a. --> Affected with, or characterized by, madness; maniac.
maniac ::: a. --> Raving with madness; raging with disordered intellect; affected with mania; mad. ::: n. --> A raving lunatic; a madman.
mania ::: n. --> Violent derangement of mind; madness; insanity. Cf. Delirium.
Excessive or unreasonable desire; insane passion affecting one or many people; as, the tulip mania.
manicate ::: a. --> Covered with hairs or pubescence so platted together and interwoven as to form a mass easily removed.
manichaean ::: n. --> Alt. of Manichee ::: a. --> Alt. of Manichean
manichaeism ::: n. --> Alt. of Manicheism
manichean ::: manicheans or their doctrines; i.e. adherents of the dualistic religious system of Manes, a combination of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and various other elements, with a basic doctrine of a conflict between light and dark, matter being regarded as dark and evil.
manichean ::: n. --> Alt. of Manichee ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the Manichaeans.
manichee ::: n. --> A believer in the doctrines of Manes, a Persian of the third century A. D., who taught a dualism in which Light is regarded as the source of Good, and Darkness as the source of Evil.
manicheism ::: n. --> The doctrines taught, or system of principles maintained, by the Manichaeans.
manicheist ::: n. --> Manichaean.
manichord ::: --> Alt. of Manichordon
manichordon ::: --> The clavichord or clarichord; -- called also dumb spinet.
manicure ::: n. --> A person who makes a business of taking care of people&
manid ::: n. --> Any species of the genus Manis, or family Manidae.
manie ::: n. --> Mania; insanity.
manifestable ::: a. --> Such as can be manifested.
manifest ::: a document.
manifest ::: a. --> Evident to the senses, esp. to the sight; apparent; distinctly perceived; hence, obvious to the understanding; apparent to the mind; easily apprehensible; plain; not obscure or hidden.
Detected; convicted; -- with of.
A public declaration; an open statement; a manifesto. See Manifesto.
A list or invoice of a ship&
manifestation ::: n. --> The act of manifesting or disclosing, or the state of being manifested; discovery to the eye or to the understanding; also, that which manifests; exhibition; display; revelation; as, the manifestation of God&
manifested ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manifest
manifestible ::: a. --> Manifestable.
manifesting ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manifest
manifestly ::: adv. --> In a manifest manner.
manifestness ::: n. --> The quality or state of being manifest; obviousness.
manifestoes ::: pl. --> of Manifesto
manifesto ::: n. & a. --> A public declaration, usually of a prince, sovereign, or other person claiming large powers, showing his intentions, or proclaiming his opinions and motives in reference to some act done or contemplated by him; as, a manifesto declaring the purpose of a prince to begin war, and explaining his motives.
manifests ::: pl. --> of Manifest
manifest ::: v. 1. To show or demonstrate plainly; reveal, display. manifested. adj. 2. Readily noticed or perceived; evident; obvious; apparent; plain; visible. manifesting.
manifold ::: a. --> Various in kind or quality; many in number; numerous; multiplied; complicated.
Exhibited at divers times or in various ways; -- used to qualify nouns in the singular number. ::: n. --> A copy of a writing made by the manifold process.
manifolded ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manifold ::: a. --> Having many folds, layers, or plates; as, a manifolded shield.
manifold ::: having numerous different parts, elements, features, forms, etc.
manifolding ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manifold
manifoldly ::: adv. --> In a manifold manner.
manifoldness ::: n. --> Multiplicity.
A generalized concept of magnitude.
maniform ::: a. --> Shaped like the hand.
maniglion ::: n. --> Either one of two handles on the back of a piece of ordnance.
manihoc ::: n. --> Alt. of Manihot
manihot ::: n. --> See Manioc.
mani. ::: jewel
manikin ::: n. --> A little man; a dwarf; a pygmy; a manakin.
A model of the human body, made of papier-mache or other material, commonly in detachable pieces, for exhibiting the different parts and organs, their relative position, etc.
manila ::: a. --> Alt. of Manilla
manilio ::: n. --> See Manilla, 1.
manilla ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Manila or Manilla, the capital of the Philippine Islands; made in, or exported from, that city.
Same as Manila. ::: n. --> A ring worn upon the arm or leg as an ornament, especially among the tribes of Africa.
manille ::: n. --> See 1st Manilla, 1.
manioc ::: n. --> The tropical plants (Manihot utilissima, and M. Aipi), from which cassava and tapioca are prepared; also, cassava.
maniple ::: a. --> A handful.
A division of the Roman army numbering sixty men exclusive of officers, any small body of soldiers; a company.
Originally, a napkin; later, an ornamental band or scarf worn upon the left arm as a part of the vestments of a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. It is sometimes worn in the English Church service.
manipular ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the maniple, or company.
Manipulatory; as, manipular operations.
manipulated ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manipulate
manipulate ::: v. t. --> To treat, work, or operate with the hands, especially when knowledge and dexterity are required; to manage in hand work; to handle; as, to manipulate scientific apparatus.
To control the action of, by management; as, to manipulate a convention of delegates; to manipulate the stock market; also, to manage artfully or fraudulently; as, to manipulate accounts, or election returns.
manipulating ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manipulate
manipulation ::: n. --> The act or process of manipulating, or the state of being manipulated; the act of handling work by hand; use of the hands, in an artistic or skillful manner, in science or art.
The use of the hands in mesmeric operations.
Artful management; as, the manipulation of political bodies; sometimes, a management or treatment for purposes of deception or fraud.
manipulative ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to manipulation; performed by manipulation.
manipulator ::: n. --> One who manipulates.
manipulatory ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to manipulation.
manipura ::: [name of the navel-lotus (nabhipadma)].
man.ipura ::: the cakra behind the navel (nabhicakra), "the central seat manipura of the Vital, the Life Principle".
manis.ah. ::: illumined thoughts. manisah
manisa ::: intellect. [Ved.]
manis.i (manishi) ::: thinker. manisi
manisi (Manishi) ::: the thinker.
manis ::: n. --> A genus of edentates, covered with large, hard, triangular scales, with sharp edges that overlap each other like tiles on a roof. They inhabit the warmest parts of Asia and Africa, and feed on ants. Called also Scaly anteater. See Pangolin.
manito ::: n. --> Alt. of Manitu
manitou ::: n. --> Alt. of Manitu
manitrunk ::: n. --> The anterior segment of the thorax in insects. See Insect.
manitu ::: n. --> A name given by tribes of American Indians to a great spirit, whether good or evil, or to any object of worship.
mankind ::: n. --> The human race; man, taken collectively.
Men, as distinguished from women; the male portion of human race.
Human feelings; humanity. ::: a. --> Manlike; not womanly; masculine; bold; cruel.
manks ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the language or people of the of Man. ::: n. --> The language spoken in the Isle of Man. See Manx.
manless ::: a. --> Destitute of men.
Unmanly; inhuman.
manlessly ::: adv. --> Inhumanly.
manlike ::: a. --> Like man, or like a man, in form or nature; having the qualities of a man, esp. the nobler qualities; manly.
manliness ::: n. --> The quality or state of being manly.
manling ::: n. --> A little man.
manly ::: superl. --> Having qualities becoming to a man; not childish or womanish; manlike, esp. brave, courageous, resolute, noble. ::: adv. --> In a manly manner; with the courage and fortitude of a manly man; as, to act manly.
manma ::: expression of thought in mind; thought of the mind. [Ved.]
man ::: “Man is pre-eminently the mental being.” Social and Political Thought
manmaya mam upasritah ::: [they who are full of Me and take refuge in Me]. [Gita 4.10]
manna croup ::: --> The portions of hard wheat kernels not ground into flour by the millstones: a kind of semolina prepared in Russia and used for puddings, soups, etc. -- called also manna groats.
The husked grains of manna grass.
man ::: n. --> A human being; -- opposed tobeast.
Especially: An adult male person; a grown-up male person, as distinguished from a woman or a child.
The human race; mankind.
The male portion of the human race.
One possessing in a high degree the distinctive qualities of manhood; one having manly excellence of any kind.
An adult male servant; also, a vassal; a subject.
manna ::: n. --> The food supplied to the Israelites in their journey through the wilderness of Arabia; hence, divinely supplied food.
A name given to lichens of the genus Lecanora, sometimes blown into heaps in the deserts of Arabia and Africa, and gathered and used as food.
A sweetish exudation in the form of pale yellow friable flakes, coming from several trees and shrubs and used in medicine as a gentle laxative, as the secretion of Fraxinus Ornus, and F.
manned ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Man
mannered ::: a. --> Having a certain way, esp. a polite way, of carrying and conducting one&
mannerism ::: n. --> Adherence to a peculiar style or manner; a characteristic mode of action, bearing, or treatment, carried to excess, especially in literature or art.
mannerist ::: n. --> One addicted to mannerism; a person who, in action, bearing, or treatment, carries characteristic peculiarities to excess. See citation under Mannerism.
mannerliness ::: n. --> The quality or state of being mannerly; civility; complaisance.
mannerly ::: a. --> Showing good manners; civil; respectful; complaisant. ::: adv. --> With good manners.
manner ::: n. --> Mode of action; way of performing or effecting anything; method; style; form; fashion.
Characteristic mode of acting, conducting, carrying one&
mannheim gold ::: --> A kind of brass made in imitation of gold. It contains eighty per cent of copper and twenty of zinc.
mannide ::: n. --> A white amorphous or crystalline substance, obtained by dehydration of mannite, and distinct from, but convertible into, mannitan.
manning ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Man
mannish ::: a. --> Resembling a human being in form or nature; human.
Resembling, suitable to, or characteristic of, a man, manlike, masculine.
Fond of men; -- said of a woman.
mannitan ::: n. --> A white amorphous or crystalline substance obtained by the partial dehydration of mannite.
mannitate ::: n. --> A salt of mannitic acid.
mannite ::: n. --> A white crystalline substance of a sweet taste obtained from a so-called manna, the dried sap of the flowering ash (Fraxinus ornus); -- called also mannitol, and hydroxy hexane. Cf. Dulcite.
A sweet white efflorescence from dried fronds of kelp, especially from those of the Laminaria saccharina, or devil&
mannitic ::: a. --> Of, pertaining to, resembling, or derived from, mannite.
mannitol ::: n. --> The technical name of mannite. See Mannite.
mannitose ::: n. --> A variety of sugar obtained by the partial oxidation of mannite, and closely resembling levulose.
mano brahma ::: Mind as the Eternal [brahman]. [Tait. 3.4]
manoeuvred ::: --> of Manoeuvre
manoeuvre ::: n. --> Management; dexterous movement; specif., a military or naval evolution, movement, or change of position.
Management with address or artful design; adroit proceeding; stratagem.
To perform a movement or movements in military or naval tactics; to make changes in position with reference to getting advantage in attack or defense.
To manage with address or art; to scheme.
manoeuvrer ::: n. --> One who maneuvers.
manoeuvring ::: --> of Manoeuvre
man of Sorrows, the
manofwar ::: n --> A government vessel employed for the purposes of war, esp. one of large size; a ship of war.
manolaya. ::: temporary stillness of thought; temporary suspension of all mental faculties; involution and dissolution of the mind into its cause
manoloka ::: the mental world, a loka where mind "is not determined by material conditions or by the life-force, but itself determines and uses them for its own satisfaction"; the mental layer of the material world (see manoloka of bhū). manoloka of bh bhu
manomaya ::: [ =manomayapurusa].
manomaya ::: mental; mental activity; the mental being; the mental plane.
manomaya purusa (Manomaya Purusha) ::: mental Person, the mental being.
manomaya (purusa) prana-sarira-neta ::: the mental Being, leader of the life and the body. [Mund. 2.2.8]
manomayi ::: mental (feminine of manomaya). manomayi
manometer ::: n. --> An instrument for measuring the tension or elastic force of gases, steam, etc., constructed usually on the principle of allowing the gas to exert its elastic force in raising a column of mercury in an open tube, or in compressing a portion of air or other gas in a closed tube with mercury or other liquid intervening, or in bending a metallic or other spring so as to set in motion an index; a pressure gauge. See Pressure, and Illust. of Air pump.
manometric ::: a. --> Alt. of Manometrical
manometrical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the manometer; made by the manometer.
manonasa. ::: extinction of the mind; complete and permanent destruction of the mind; remaining permanently as one is without the rising of any doubt or thought such as, "Nothing is known" or
manonirodha. ::: control or annihilation of the mind
manorial ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a manor.
manor ::: n. --> The land belonging to a lord or nobleman, or so much land as a lord or great personage kept in his own hands, for the use and subsistence of his family.
A tract of land occupied by tenants who pay a free-farm rent to the proprietor, sometimes in kind, and sometimes by performing certain stipulated services.
manoscope ::: n. --> Same as Manometer.
manoscopy ::: n. --> The science of the determination of the density of vapors and gases.
manovery ::: n. --> A contrivance or maneuvering to catch game illegally.
mano vidván na bibheti kutaschana) ::: he who possesses the delight of the brahman (see brahmananda) has no fear from anything in the world. [Cf. Taittiriya Upanis.ad 2.4]Ananda Mimamsa Ānanda
man page {Unix manual page}
manqueller ::: n. --> A killer of men; a manslayer.
manred ::: n. --> Alt. of Manrent
manrent ::: n. --> Homage or service rendered to a superior, as to a lord; vassalage.
manrope ::: n. --> One of the side ropes to the gangway of a ship.
mansard roof ::: --> A hipped curb roof; that is, a roof having on all sides two slopes, the lower one being steeper than the upper one.
manse ::: n. --> A dwelling house, generally with land attached.
The parsonage; a clergyman&
manservant ::: n. --> A male servant.
mansionary ::: a. --> Resident; residentiary; as, mansionary canons.
mansion ::: a very large, impressive, or stately residence. mansion"s, mansions.
mansion ::: n. --> A dwelling place, -- whether a part or whole of a house or other shelter.
The house of the lord of a manor; a manor house; hence: Any house of considerable size or pretension.
A twelfth part of the heavens; a house. See 1st House, 8.
The place in the heavens occupied each day by the moon in its monthly revolution.
mansionry ::: n. --> The state of dwelling or residing; occupancy as a dwelling place.
manslaughter ::: n. --> The slaying of a human being; destruction of men.
The unlawful killing of a man, either in negligenc/ or incidentally to the commission of some unlawful act, but without specific malice, or upon a sudden excitement of anger.
manslayer ::: n. --> One who kills a human being; one who commits manslaughter.
man ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Man is pre-eminently the mental being.” *Social and Political Thought
manstealer ::: n. --> A person who steals or kidnaps a human being or beings.
manstealing ::: n. --> The act or business of stealing or kidnaping human beings, especially with a view to e/slave them.
mansuete ::: a. --> Tame; gentle; kind.
mansuetude ::: n. --> Tameness; gentleness; mildness.
manswear ::: v. i. --> To swear falsely. Same as Mainswear.
manta ::: n. --> See Coleoptera and Sea devil.
mantchoo ::: a. & n. --> Same as Manchu.
manteau ::: n. --> A woman&
manteaus ::: pl. --> of Manteau
manteaux ::: pl. --> of Manteau
mantelet ::: n. --> A short cloak formerly worn by knights.
A short cloak or mantle worn by women.
A musket-proof shield of rope, wood, or metal, which is sometimes used for the protection of sappers or riflemen while attacking a fortress, or of gunners at embrasures; -- now commonly written mantlet.
mantel ::: n. --> The finish around a fireplace, covering the chimney-breast in front and sometimes on both sides; especially, a shelf above the fireplace, and its supports.
mantelpiece ::: n. --> Same as Mantel.
mantelshelf ::: n. --> The shelf of a mantel.
manteltree ::: n. --> The lintel of a fireplace when of wood, as frequently in early houses.
mantharagati [Hind.] ::: [slow-paced].
mantic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to divination, or to the condition of one inspired, or supposed to be inspired, by a deity; prophetic.
mantilla ::: n. --> A lady&
mantis ::: n. --> Any one of numerous species of voracious orthopterous insects of the genus Mantis, and allied genera. They are remarkable for their slender grotesque forms, and for holding their stout anterior legs in a manner suggesting hands folded in prayer. The common American species is M. Carolina.
mantispid ::: n. --> Any neuropterous insect of the genus Mantispa, and allied genera. The larvae feed on plant lice. Also used adjectively. See Illust. under Neuroptera.
mantissa 1. "programming" The part of a {floating point} number which, when multiplied by its {radix} raised to the power of its {exponent}, gives its value. The mantissa may include the number's sign or this may be considered to be a separate part. 2. "mathematics" The fractional part of a {logarithm}. (1996-06-15)
mantissa ::: n. --> The decimal part of a logarithm, as distinguished from the integral part, or characteristic.
mantle ::: 1. A loose, always sleeveless cloak or cape of varying length. 2. Something that covers, envelopes, or conceals.
mantled ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Mantle
mantle ::: n. --> A loose garment to be worn over other garments; an enveloping robe; a cloak. Hence, figuratively, a covering or concealing envelope.
Same as Mantling.
The external fold, or folds, of the soft, exterior membrane of the body of a mollusk. It usually forms a cavity inclosing the gills. See Illusts. of Buccinum, and Byssus.
Any free, outer membrane.
mantlet ::: n. --> See Mantelet.
mantling ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Mantle ::: n. --> The representation of a mantle, or the drapery behind and around a coat of arms: -- called also lambrequin.
mantologist ::: n. --> One who is skilled in mantology; a diviner.
mantology ::: n. --> The act or art of divination.
manto ::: n. --> See Manteau.
mantra ::: a mystic formula, "a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental", which can not only "reveal knowledge and faculties we did not before possess", but in some cases "produce vibrations in the mental and vital atmosphere which result in effects . . . on the physical plane".
mantraksharas. ::: potent sound syllables for the worship of deities
mantra ::: n. --> A prayer; an invocation; a religious formula; a charm.
mantrap ::: n. --> A trap for catching trespassers.
A dangerous place, as an open hatch, into which one may fall.
mantra ::: sacred syllable, name or mystic formula; the intuitive and inspired rhythmic utterance; any of the verses of the Veda, revealed verses of power not of an ordinary but of a divine inspiration and source.
mantra&
mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” *The Future Poetry
mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry
mantra ::: : “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry
mantuamaker ::: n. --> One who makes dresses, cloaks, etc., for women; a dressmaker.
mantuan ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Mantua. ::: n. --> A native or inhabitant of Mantua.
mantua ::: n. --> A superior kind of rich silk formerly exported from Mantua in Italy.
A woman&
manu ::: 1. the thinker, the mental being, man. ::: 2. Manu: the father of man. ::: 3. the four Manus (catvaro manavah): the spiritual Fathers of every human mind and body. ::: 4. [one of the fourteen progenitors who preside successively over the fourteen manvantaras; to the first of these is attributed the Manava-dharmasastra; the manu of the present (seventh) manvantara is Vaivasvata].
manual ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the hand; done or made by the hand; as, manual labor; the king&
manualist ::: n. --> One who works with the hands; an artificer.
manually ::: adv. --> By hand.
manual testing "testing" That part of software testing that requires human input, analysis, or evaluation. (1996-12-27)
manuary ::: a. --> Manual. ::: n. --> An artificer.
manubial ::: a. --> Belonging to spoils; taken in war.
manubrial ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a manubrium; shaped like a manubrium; handlelike.
manubria ::: pl. --> of Manubrium
manubrium ::: n. --> A handlelike process or part; esp., the anterior segment of the sternum, or presternum, and the handlelike process of the malleus.
The proboscis of a jellyfish; -- called also hypostoma. See Illust. of Hydromedusa.
manubriums ::: pl. --> of Manubrium
manucode ::: n. --> Any bird of the genus Manucodia, of Australia and New Guinea. They are related to the bird of paradise.
manuducent ::: n. --> One who leads by the hand; a manuductor.
manuduction ::: n. --> Guidance by the hand.
manufactory ::: n. --> Manufacture.
A building or place where anything is manufactured; a factory. ::: a. --> Pertaining to manufacturing.
manufactural ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to manufactures.
manufactured ::: concocted or invented; fabricated.
manufactured ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manufacture
manufacture ::: n. 1. The making or producing of anything; generation; or the thing produced, product. 2. Fictitious invention, fabrication, concoction. manufactures. *v. 3. To make or produce by hand or machinery, especially on a large scale. *manufactured.
manufacture ::: n. --> The operation of making wares or any products by hand, by machinery, or by other agency.
Anything made from raw materials by the hand, by machinery, or by art, as cloths, iron utensils, shoes, machinery, saddlery, etc. ::: v. t.
manufacturer ::: n. --> One who manufactures.
manufacturing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manufacture ::: a. --> Employed, or chiefly employed, in manufacture; as, a manufacturing community; a manufacturing town.
Pertaining to manufacture; as, manufacturing projects.
manularity /man"yoo-la"ri-tee/ ("manual" + "granularity") A notional measure of the manual labor required for some task, particularly one of the sort that {automation} is supposed to eliminate. "Composing English on paper has much higher manularity than using a text editor, especially in the revising stage." Hackers tend to consider manularity a symptom of primitive methods; in fact, a true hacker confronted with an apparent requirement to do a computing task {by hand} will inevitably seize the opportunity to build another tool (see {toolsmith}). [{Jargon File}] (1994-10-26)
manul ::: n. --> A wild cat (Felis manul), having long, soft, light-colored fur. It is found in the mountains of Central Asia, and dwells among rocks.
manumise ::: v. t. --> To manumit.
manumission ::: n. --> The act of manumitting, or of liberating a slave from bondage.
manumitted ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manumit
manumitting ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manumit
manumit ::: v. t. --> To release from slavery; to liberate from personal bondage or servitude; to free, as a slave.
manumotive ::: a. --> Movable by hand.
manumotor ::: n. --> A small wheel carriage, so constructed that a person sitting in it may move it.
man {Unix manual page}
manu ::: n. --> One of a series of progenitors of human beings, and authors of human wisdom.
manurable ::: a. --> Capable of cultivation.
Capable of receiving a fertilizing substance.
manurage ::: n. --> Cultivation.
manurance ::: n. --> Cultivation.
manured ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Manure
manurement ::: n. --> Cultivation.
manurer ::: n. --> One who manures land.
manure ::: v. t. --> To cultivate by manual labor; to till; hence, to develop by culture.
To apply manure to; to enrich, as land, by the application of a fertilizing substance. ::: n. --> Any matter which makes land productive; a fertilizing
manurial ::: a. --> Relating to manures.
manuring ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Manure ::: n. --> The act of process of applying manure; also, the manure applied.
manusah ::: men, human powers. [Ved.]
manuscriptal ::: a. --> Manuscript.
manuscript ::: a. --> Written with or by the hand; not printed; as, a manuscript volume.
A literary or musical composition written with the hand, as distinguished from a printed copy.
Writing, as opposed to print; as, the book exists only in manuscript.
manusim tanum asritam ::: lodged in the human body. [Gita 9.11]
manus ::: pl. --> of Manus ::: n. --> The distal segment of the fore limb, including the carpus and fore foot or hand.
manusvat ::: human.
manusya ::: [a man].
manutenency ::: n. --> Maintenance.
manvantara ::: [an age or period of a Manu, an extremely long period of time, one fourteenth of a day of Brahma].
manvantara (manvantara; manwantara) ::: an aeon comprising several caturyugas and corresponding to the reign of one of the fourteen Manus.
manway ::: n. --> A small passageway, as in a mine, that a man may pass through.
manx ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the Isle of Man, or its inhabitants; as, the Manx language. ::: n. --> The language of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man, a dialect of the Celtic.
manyamanah ::: the thinkers of the word. [Ved.]
many-minded ::: a. --> Having many faculties; versatile; many-sided.
many ::: n. --> A retinue of servants; a household. ::: a. / pron. --> Consisting of a great number; numerous; not few. ::: a.
manyplies ::: n. --> The third division, or that between the reticulum, or honeycomb stomach, and the abomasum, or rennet stomach, in the stomach of ruminants; the omasum; the psalterium. So called from the numerous folds in its mucous membrane. See Illust of Ruminant.
many questions;
many-sided ::: a. --> Having many sides; -- said of figures. Hence, presenting many questions or subjects for consideration; as, a many-sided topic.
Interested in, and having an aptitude for, many unlike pursuits or objects of attention; versatile.
many-sided ::: having many aspects, talents, or interests.
manyu ::: temperament, emotive mind. [Ved.]
manyways ::: adv. --> Alt. of Manywise
manywise ::: adv. --> In many different ways; variously.
manzanita ::: n. --> A name given to several species of Arctostaphylos, but mostly to A. glauca and A. pungens, shrubs of California, Oregon, etc., with reddish smooth bark, ovate or oval coriaceous evergreen leaves, and bearing clusters of red berries, which are said to be a favorite food of the grizzly bear.
Mana: An impersonal power or force believed to reside in natural objects contact with which infixes benefits of power, success, good or evil. A belief held by the Melanesians. -- V.F.
Management Information Base "networking" (MIB) A {database} of managed objects acessed by {network management} {protocols}. An {SNMP} MIB is a set of parameters which an {SNMP} {management station} can query or set in the {SNMP agent} of a network device (e.g. {router}). {SNMP} has two {standard} MIBs. The first, MIB I, was established in {RFC 1156}, was defined to manage {TCP/IP}-based {internets}. MIB II, defined in {RFC 1213}, is an update. Standard minimal MIBs have been defined, and many hardware (and certain software, e.g. {DBMS}) providers have developed private MIBs in {ASN.1} format allowing them to be compiled for use in a {Network Management System}. In theory, any {SNMP manager} can talk to any {SNMP agent} with a properly defined MIB. See also {client-server model}. (2004-07-22)
Management Information System "application" (MIS) A computer system, usually based on a {mainframe} or {minicomputer}, designed to provide management personnel with up-to-date information on an organisation's performance, e.g. inventory and sales. These systems output information in a form that is useable by managers at all levels of the organisation: strategic, tactical, and operational. A good example of an MIS report is an annual report for a stockholder (a scheduled report). [Que's Computer User's Dictionary Second Edition, 1992]. (2001-04-01)
Manager of Business Applications "job" A person who plans and oversees multiple projects and project managers. He works with the {CIO} and senior management to determine systems development strategy and standards. He administers the department budget and reviews project managers. (2004-03-18)
Man alive, your proposed emendations are an admirable exposition of the art of bringing a line down the steps till my poor "slow miraculous” above-mind line meant to give or begin the concrete portrayal of an act of some hidden Godhead finally becomes a mere metaphor thrown out from its more facile mint by a brilliantly imaginative poetic intelligence. First of all, you shift my "dimly” out of the way and transfer it to something to which it does not inwardly belongs make it an epithet of the gesture or an adverb qualifying its epithet instead of something that qualifies the atmosphere in which the act of the Godhead takes place. That is a preliminary havoc which destroys what is very important to the action, its atmosphere. I never intended the gesture to be dim, it is a luminous gesture, but forcing its way through the black quietude it comes dimly. Then again the bald phrase "a gesture came” without anything to psychicise it becomes simply something that "happened”, "came” being a poetic equivalent for "happened”, instead of the expression of the slow coming of the gesture. The words "slow” and "dimly” assure this sense of motion and this concreteness to the word"s sense here. Remove one or both whether entirely or elsewhere and you ruin the vision and change altogether its character. That is at least what happens wholly in your penultimate version and as for the last its "came” gets another meaning and one feels that somebody very slowly decided to let out the gesture from himself and it was quite a miracle that it came out at all! "Dimly miraculous” means what precisely or what "miraculously dim” — it was miraculous that it managed to be so dim or there was something vaguely miraculous about it after all? No doubt they try to mean something else — but these interpretations come in their way and trip them over. The only thing that can stand is the first version which is no doubt fine poetry, but the trouble is that it does not give the effect I wanted to give, the effect which is necessary for the dawn"s inner significance. Moreover, what becomes of the slow lingering rhythm of my line which is absolutely indispensable? Letters on Savitri
Man alive, your proposed emendations are an admirable exposition of the art of bringing a line down the steps till my poor”slow miraculous” above-mind line meant to give or begin the concrete portrayal of an act of some hidden Godhead finally becomes a mere metaphor thrown out from its more facile mint by a brilliantly imaginative poetic intelligence. First of all, you shift my”dimly” out of the way and transfer it to something to which it does not inwardly belongs make it an epithet of the gesture or an adverb qualifying its epithet instead of something that qualifies the atmosphere in which the act of the Godhead takes place. That is a preliminary havoc which destroys what is very important to the action, its atmosphere. I never intended the gesture to be dim, it is a luminous gesture, but forcing its way through the black quietude it comes dimly. Then again the bald phrase”a gesture came” without anything to psychicise it becomes simply something that”happened”,”came” being a poetic equivalent for”happened”, instead of the expression of the slow coming of the gesture. The words”slow” and”dimly” assure this sense of motion and this concreteness to the word’s sense here. Remove one or both whether entirely or elsewhere and you ruin the vision and change altogether its character. That is at least what happens wholly in your penultimate version and as for the last its”came” gets another meaning and one feels that somebody very slowly decided to let out the gesture from himself and it was quite a miracle that it came out at all!”Dimly miraculous” means what precisely or what”miraculously dim”—it was miraculous that it managed to be so dim or there was something vaguely miraculous about it after all? No doubt they try to mean something else—but these interpretations come in their way and trip them over. The only thing that can stand is the first version which is no doubt fine poetry, but the trouble is that it does not give the effect I wanted to give, the effect which is necessary for the dawn’s inner significance. Moreover, what becomes of the slow lingering rhythm of my line which is absolutely indispensable? Letters on Savitri
Manas, sense-mind, is the activity, emerging from the basic consciousness, which makes up the whole essentiality of what we call sense.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 651
Manas, sense-mind, is the activity, emerging from the basic consciousness, which makes up the whole Wessentiality of what we call sense.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 651
Manas (Sense-mind) ::: …the manas is a development from the external chitta; it is a first organising of the crude stuff of the consciousness excited and aroused by external contacts, bahya-sparsa.
Ref: CSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 663
Manas: (Skr.) Mind, mentality, the unifying principle involved in sensation (cf. indriya), perception, conation, conception, always thought of in Indian philosophy as a kinetic entity, will and desire being equally present with thinking. -- K.F.L.
MANAS. ::: The sense-mind as opposed to the reason.
Manava-dharmasastra ::: [name of the famous code of laws attributed to Manu]; the science of the law of conduct of the mental or human being.
Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man ; the mental being cannot by his own unaided force change him- self into a supramental spirit. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptable.
Manchester Autocode "language, history" The predecessor of {Mercury Autocode}. ["The Programming Strategy Used with the Manchester University Mark I Computer", R.A. Brooker, Proc IEE 103B Suppl:151-157, 1956]. (2000-10-02)
Manchester encoding "communications, protocol" A method of transmitting bits which enables the receiver to easily synchronise with the sender. A simple way of signalling bits might be to transmit a high voltage for some period for a 1-bit and a low voltage for a 0 bit: Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High ___________ Low |___________ Time: -" . . . . . However, when several identical bits are sent in succession, this provides no information to the receiver about when each bit starts and stops. Manchester encoding splits each bit period into two, and ensures that there is always a transition between the signal levels in the middle of each bit. This allows the receiver to synchronise with the sender. In normal Manchester encoding, a 1-bit is transmitted with a high voltage in the first period, and a low voltage in the second, and vice verse for the 0 bit: Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High __ __ __ __ Low |__| |_____| |__| Time: -" . ' . ' . ' . ' . In Differential Manchester encoding, a 1-bit is indicated by making the first half of the signal equal to the last half of the previous bit's signal and a 0-bit is indicated by making the first half of the signal opposite to the last half of the previous bit's signal. That is, a zero bit is indicated by a transition at the beginning of the bit. Like normal Manchester encoding, there is always a transition in the middle of the transmission of the bit. Differential Manchester Encoding Bits Sent: 1 1 0 0 Signal: High ____ __ __ __ Low |_____| |__| |__| Time: -" . ' . ' . ' . ' . With each bit period half as long, twice as much {bandwidth} is required when using either of the Manchester encoding schemes. (1995-11-23)
Mandala "language" A system based on {Concurrent Prolog}, developed at {ICOT}, Japan. ["Mandala: A Logic Based Knowledge Programming System", K. Furukawa et al, Intl Conf 5th Gen Comp Sys 1984]. (1995-11-23)
Mandelbrot, Benoit {Benoit Mandelbrot}
Mandelbrot set "mathematics, graphics" (After its discoverer, {Benoit Mandelbrot}) The set of all {complex numbers} c such that | z[N] | " 2 for arbitrarily large values of N, where z[0] = 0 z[n+1] = z[n]^2 + c The Mandelbrot set is usually displayed as an {Argand diagram}, giving each point a colour which depends on the largest N for which | z[N] | " 2, up to some maximum N which is used for the points in the set (for which N is infinite). These points are traditionally coloured black. The Mandelbrot set is the best known example of a {fractal} - it includes smaller versions of itself which can be explored to arbitrary levels of detail. {The Fractal Microscope (http://ncsa.uiuc.edu/Edu/Fractal/Fractal_Home.html/)}. (1995-02-08)
Mandy Rice-Davis Applies "chat" (MRDA) An acronym used to imply that someone is lying to protect their own interests. During the trial of Stephen Ward (who was charged with living off the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and Rice-Davies), the prosecuting counsel pointed out that Lord Astor denied any involvement with her and Rice-Davies replied, "Well, he would, wouldn't he?" (2010-01-01)
Man has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusion of the body and the senses and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason.
MANIAC {Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer}
Manichean ::: Manicheans or their doctrines; i.e. adherents of the dualistic religious system of Manes, a combination of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and various other elements, with a basic doctrine of a conflict between light and dark, matter being regarded as dark and evil.
Manicheism, a religio-philosophical doctrine which spread from Persia to the West and was influential during the 3rd and 7th century, was instituted by Mani (Grk. Manes, Latinized: Manichaeus), a Magian who, upon conversion to Christianity, sought to synthesize the latter with the dualism of Zoroastrianism (q.v.), not without becoming a martyr to his faith. To combat the powers of darkness, the mother of light created the first man. As Buddha (q.v.) and Zoroaster he worked illumination among men ; as Jesus, the Son of Man, he had to suffer, become transfigured and symbolize salvation by his apparent death at the cross; as spirit of the sun he attracts all connatural light particles to himself. But final salvation from the throes of evil demons is accomplished by ascetic living, reminding of the Hindu code of ethics (see Indian Ethics), and belief in Mani as the prophesied paraclete (John 14.16-17). Revived once more in the Occident during the crusades by the Cathari. -- K.F.L.
Manifestation ::: The Absolute cannot indeed be bound in its nature to manifest a cosmos of relations, but neither can it be bound not to manifest any cosmos. It is not itself a sheer emptiness; for a vacant Absolute is no Absolute,—our conception of a Void or Zero is only a conceptual sign of our mental inability to know or grasp it: it bears in itself some ineffable essentiality of all that is and all that can be; and since it holds in itself this essentiality and this possibility, it must also hold in itself in some way of its absoluteness either the permanent truth or the inherent, even if latent, realisable actuality of all that is fundamental to our or the world’s existence. It is this realisable actuality actualized or this permanent truth deploying its possibilities that we call manifestation and see as the universe.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 664
Manifest Content ::: According to Freud, the story-like superficial content of a dream, often representing only the daily activities and little underlying unconscious material.
Manifold of Sense: (A.S. manig, many + feold, fold) The sensuous ingredients of experience (colors, sounds, etc.) considered as a multiplicity of discrete items. See I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A. 77-9-B. 102-5. -- L.W.
MANIN mind 256
Man is a developing spirit trying here to find and fulfil itself in the forms of mind, life and body.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 25, Page: 125
Man is God hiding himself from Nature so that he may possess her by struggle, insistence, violence and surprise. God is universal and transcendent Man hiding himself from his own individuality in the human being. The animal is Man disguised in a hairy skin and upon four legs; the worm is Man writhing and crawling towards the evolution of his Manhood. Even crude forms of Matter are Man in his inchoate body. All things are Man, the Purusha. For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 203
Man ::: Man is a transitional being; he is not final.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 265
MAN {Metropolitan Area Network}
Manna ::: The force of power in the names of Allah comprising your essence.
Man of Sorrows, the
Manomrtya pitru^a ::: mental person ; mental soul ; mind-soul and niind-consctousness.
Man’s highest accomplished range is the life of the reason or ordered and harmonised intelligence with its dynamic power of intelligent will, the buddhi, which is or should be the driver of man’s chariot.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 25, Page: 84
Man"s representative in the house of God,
Man’s representative in the house of God,
Man, the deep-browed artificer, had not come
MANTIS "language" A structured, full-function procedural {4GL} and application development system from {Cincom}. MANTIS enables the developer to design prototypes, create transaction screens and reports, define logical data views, write structured procedures, and dynamically test, correct, document, secure, and release applications for production in a single, integrated, interactive session. MANTIS applications can be enhanced with gOOi, the graphical object-oriented interface, which creates graphical Windows representations of existing MANTIS screens. {(http://cincom.com/products/mantis/)}. (2003-08-08)
Mantra ::: In fact, speech is creative. It creates forms of emotion, mental images and impulses of action. The ancient Vedic theory and practice extended this creative action of speech by the use of the Mantra. The theory of the Mantra is that it is a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental, framed in the heart and not originally constructed by the intellect, held in the mind, again concentrated on by the waking mental consciousness and then thrown out silently or vocally —the silent word is perhaps held to be more potent than the spoken—precisely for the work of creation. The Mantra can not only create new subjective states in ourselves, alter our psychical being, reveal knowledge and faculties we did not before possess, can not only produce similar results in other minds than that of the user, but can produce vibrations in the mental and vital atmosphere which result in effects, in actions and even in the production of material forms on the physical plane.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 18, Page: 30
Mantra is at once a symbol, an instrument and a sound body for the divine manifestation.
MANTRA. ::: Set words or sounds having a spiritual signifi- cance and power ; the expressive sound-symbol.
Mantra: (Skr.) Pious thought couched in repeated prayerful utterances, for meditation or charm. Also the poetic portion of the Veda (q.v.). In Shaktism (q.v.) and elsewhere the holy syllables to which as manifestations of the eternal word or sound (cf. iabda, vac, aksara) is ascribed great mystic significance and power. -- K.F.L.
Mantra symbolises and is supposed indeed to carry within itself.
Manufacturer Resource Planning "application" (MRP II) A system based on {MRP} which allows manufacturers to optimise materials, procurement, manufacturing processes, etc., and provide financial and planning reports. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, manufacturers integrated MRP and other manufacturing and business functions. This renaissance is commonly known as Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II). According to the American Production and Inventory Control Society, Inc. (APICS), MRP II is a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company. Ideally, it addresses operational planning in units, financial planning in dollars, and has a simulation capability to answer "what if" questions. It includes business planning, sales and operations planning, production scheduling, material requirements planning (MRP), capacity requirements planning, and the execution support systems for capacity and material. Output from these systems is integrated with financial reports such as the business plan, purchase commitment report, shipping budget, and inventory projections in dollars. Manufacturing resource planning is a direct outgrowth and extension of closed-loop MRP. See also {Enterprise Resource Planning}, {SAP} R/2, R/3, and {Baan}. (1999-02-16)
Manufacturers Automation Protocol {Manufacturing Automation Protocol}
Manufacturing Automation Protocol "protocol" (MAP) A set of {protocols} developed by General Motors based on {Token Bus} ({IEEE 802.4}) and giving predictable {real-time} response. (1994-10-21)
Manuputra ::: son of Manu; a human soul. manusa m anus.a sabda
Manu ::: the mental being; same as Manu Prajapati; each of the fourteen manifestations of Manu Prajapati governing the manvantaras of a pratikalpa; each of "the four Type-Souls from whom all human Purushas are born".Manu Praj Prajapati
Many Integrated Core Architecture "architecture" (MIC) Intel's name for {integrated circuits} with around 50 {processing cores} on a single chip, fabricated with a 22-{nanometer} IC manufacturing process. The {Intel Xeon Phi} coprocessor, the first product based on Intel MIC Architecture, is targeted at {high-performance computing} applications. {intel.com (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/many-integrated-core/intel-many-integrated-core-architecture.html)}. (2014-10-14)
Many moralists deny that there are any categorical obligations, and maintain that moral obligations are all hypothetical. E.g., John Gay defines obligation as "the necessity of doing or omitting any action in order to be happy." On such views one's obligation to do a certain deed reduces to one's desire to do it or to have that to which it conduces. Obligation and motivation coincide. Hence J. S. Mill identifies sanctions, motives, and sources of obligation. Other moralists hold that hypothetical obligations are merely pragmatic or prudential, and that moral obligations are categorical (Kant, Sidgwick). On this view obligation and motivation need not coincide, for obligation is independent of motivation. There is, it is said, a real objective necessity or obligation to do certain sorts of action, independently of our desires or motives. Indeed, it is sometimes said (Kant, Sidgwick) that there is no obligation for one to do an action unless one is at least susceptible to an inclination to do otherwise.
Many of Lenin's briefer philosophical writings may be found in Selected Works, vol. XI. -- J.M.S.
Many questions: The name given to the fallacy -- or, rather, misleading device of disputation -- which consists in requiring a single answer to a question which either involves several questions that ought to be answered separately or contains an implicit assertion to which any unqualified answer would give assent. -- A. C.
Many-valued logic: See propositional calculus, many-valued. Marburg School: Founded by Herman Cohen (1842-1918) and Paul Natorp (1854-1924) and supported by Ernst Cassirer (1874-), the noteworthy historian of philosophy, and Rudolf Stammler (1856-1938), the eminent legal philosopher, the school revived a specialized tendency of critical idealism. Stress is laid on the a priori, non-empirical, non-psychological and purely logical of every certain knowledge. Cohen and Natorp register an emphatic opposition to psychologism, and sought to construct a system upon pure thought on the basis of Kant and the Kantian reconstruction of Platonism. The logical and a priori in aesthetics, ethics, psychology and law is, being also independent of experience, the essential basis of these fields. Cf. Natorp, Kant u.d. Marburger Schule, 1915. -- H.H.
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. A distinctive and pervasive quality or character; air; atmosphere. 2. A subtle emanation from and enveloping living persons and things, viewed by mystics as consisting of the essence of the individual.
1. A gradation or variety of a colour; tint. 2. Colour. 3. Form or appearance. 4. The complexion, appearance or aspect of a person. hues, hued, hueless, hue-robed, hue-winged, hundred-hued, many-hued.
1. Imagination or fantasy, esp. as exercised in a capricious manner. 2. A mental image or conception. 3. An idea or opinion with little foundation; illusion. 4. A caprice; whim. 5. A sudden or irrational liking for a person or thing. fancy"s, Fancy"s, fancies.
1. Made or produced a likeness of; mirrored or reflected; mentally pictured; imagined. 2. Decorated with an image or images. many-imaged.
1. Settled securely, permanently and unconditionally. 2. Placed or settled in a secure position or condition; installed. 3. Brought about or set up or accepted; especially long established. established.
1. The condition or quality of being human. 2. Humans considered as a group; the human race. humanity"s.
1. The state or quality of being divine. 2. A deity, such as a god or goddess; the Supreme Being. 3. The nature of a deity or the state of being divine. 4. A being having divine attributes, ranking below God but above humans. divinity"s, divinities.
1. To give light to; illuminate; shine on. 2. Make lighter or brighter. 3. To bestow spiritual enlightenment. 4. To enlighten, as with knowledge. 5. To make lucid or clear; throw light on (a subject). 6. To make resplendent or illustrious. 7. To decorate (a manuscript, book, etc.) with colours and gold or silver, as was often done in the Middle Ages. illumines, illumined, illumining, half-illumined.
1. To make or be like; resemble or simulate. 2. To copy the actions, appearance, mannerisms, or speech of; mimic. imitates, imitated, imitating.
"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.
A being of the lower vital plane who by the medium of a living human being or by some other means or agency is able to materialise itself sufficiently so as to appear and act in a visible form or speak with an audible voice or, without so appearing, to move about material things, e.g., furniture or to materialise objects or to shift them from place to place. This accounts for what are called poltergeists , phenomena of stone-throwing, tree-inhabiting Bhutas, and other well-known phenomena.
a man who has been freed from slavery.
acclaimed ::: laid claim to, claimed; demanded as one"s own or one"s due; sought or asked for on the ground of right.
"A conscious being, no larger than a man"s thumb, stands in the centre of our self; he is master of the past and the present . . . he is today and he is tomorrow. — Katha Upanishad. (6)” The Life Divine - See *conscious being.
acrid ::: bitterly irritating to the feelings; of bitter and irritating temper or manner; sharp, biting, caustic.
action ::: 1. The process or condition of acting or doing (in the widest sense), the exertion of energy, influence, power or force. 2. A way or manner of moving. 3. A thing done, a deed**. action"s, actions, self-action.
"Action is a resultant of the energy of the being, but this energy is not of one sole kind; the Consciousness-Force of the Spirit manifests itself in many kinds of energies: there are inner activities of mind, activities of life, of desire, passion, impulse, character, activities of the senses and the body, a pursuit of truth and knowledge, a pursuit of beauty, a pursuit of ethical good or evil, a pursuit of power, love, joy, happiness, fortune, success, pleasure, life-satisfactions of all kinds, life-enlargement, a pursuit of individual or collective objects, a pursuit of the health, strength, capacity, satisfaction of the body.” The Life Divine*
adamantine ::: utterly unyielding or firm in attitude or opinion.
adamant ::: n. 1. Any impenetrably or unyieldingly hard substance. 2. A legendary stone of impenetrable hardness, formerly sometimes identified with the diamond. adj. **3. Unshakeable, inflexible, utterly unyielding. 4. Incapable of being broken, dissolved, or penetrated; immovable, impregnable. adamantine.**
"A divine Force is at work and will choose at each moment what has to be done or has not to be done, what has to be momentarily or permanently taken up, momentarily or permanently abandoned. For provided we do not substitute for that our desire or our ego, and to that end the soul must be always awake, always on guard, alive to the divine guidance, resistant to the undivine misleading from within or without us, that Force is sufficient and alone competent and she will lead us to the fulfilment along ways and by means too large, too inward, too complex for the mind to follow, much less to dictate. It is an arduous and difficult and dangerous way, but there is none other.” The Synthesis of Yoga
adj. 1. Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty. 2. Unconstrained; unconfined. 3. Unobstructed; clear. 4. Ready or generous in using or giving; liberal; lavish. 5. Exempt from external authority, interference, restriction, etc., as a person or one"s will, thought, choice, action, etc.; independent; unrestricted. 6. Exempt or released from something specified that controls, restrains, burdens, etc. (usually followed by from or of). 7. Given readily or in profusion. freer, thought-free, world-free. *adv. *8. In a free manner; without constraints; unimpeded. v. 9. To make free; set at liberty; release from bondage, imprisonment, or restraint. 10. To disengage or clear something from an entanglement. 11. To relieve or rid of a burden, an inconvenience or an obligation. freed. set free. Released; liberated; freed.
"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*
admonishing ::: 1. Reproving or scolding, especially in a mild or good-willed manner. 2. Urging to a duty; reminding.
adversary ::: a person, group or force that opposes or attacks, or acts in a hostile manner; an opponent, antagonist; an enemy, foe. adversary"s.
"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
"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.*
a game in which a blindfolded player tries to catch and identify one of the other players. The game has been around for at least 2000 years and probably longer. It is known to have been played in Greece about the time of the Roman Conquest.
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
*[Agni]. Sri Aurobindo: "Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame[Agni] is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.” *The Secret of the Veda
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.
a large group of rather pretty birds, chiefly of Australasia, popularly called Honey-eaters, having a bill and tongue adapted for extracting the sweet juices of many flowers.
::: "All conscious being is one and indivisible in itself, but in manifestation it becomes a complex rhythm, a scale of harmonies, a hierarchy of states or movements.” The Upanishads
"All depends on the meaning you attach to words used; it is a matter of nomenclature. Ordinarily, one says a man has intellect if he can think well; the nature and process and field of the thought do not matter. If you take intellect in that sense, then you can say that intellect has different strata, and Ford belongs to one stratum of intellect, Einstein to another — Ford has a practical and executive business intellect, Einstein a scientific discovering and theorising intellect. But Ford too in his own field theorises, invents, discovers. Yet would you call Ford an intellectual or a man of intellect? I would prefer to use for the general faculty of mind the word intelligence. Ford has a great and forceful practical intelligence, keen, quick, successful, dynamic. He has a brain that can deal with thoughts also, but even there his drive is towards practicality. He believes in rebirth (metempsychosis), for instance, not for any philosophic reason, but because it explains life as a school of experience in which one gathers more and more experience and develops by it. Einstein has, on the other hand, a great discovering scientific intellect, not, like Marconi, a powerful practical inventive intelligence for the application of scientific discovery. All men have, of course, an ‘intellect" of a kind; all, for instance, can discuss and debate (for which you say rightly intellect is needed); but it is only when one rises to the realm of ideas and moves freely in it that you say, ‘This man has an intellect".” Letters on Yoga
"All disease is a means towards some new joy of health, all evil & pain a tuning of Nature for some more intense bliss & good, all death an opening on widest immortality. Why and how this should be so, is God"s secret which only the soul purified of egoism can penetrate.” Essays Divine and Human
"All evolution is in essence a heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being so that it may be raised into the greater intensity of what is still unmanifest, from matter into life, from life into mind, from the mind into the spirit.” The Life Divine
::: "All evolution is the progressive self-revelation of the One to himself in the terms of the Many out of the Inconscience through the Ignorance towards self-conscient perfection.” Essays Divine and Human **evolution"s, Evolution"s.**
"All existence, – as the mind and sense know existence – is manifestation of an Eternal and Infinite which is to the mind and sense unknowable but not unknowable to its own self-awareness.” The Hour of God
::: "All existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence . . . .” Essays on the Gita
"All knowledge is ultimately the knowledge of God, through himself, through Nature, through her works. Mankind has first to seek this knowledge through the external life; for until its mentality is sufficiently developed, spiritual knowledge is not really possible, and in proportion as it is developed, the possibilities of spiritual knowledge become richer and fuller.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"All life is only a lavish and manifold opportunity given us to discover, realise , express the Divine.” Social and Political Thought
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.
amicable ::: characterized by or showing goodwill; friendly; done in a friendly manner; peaceable.
amuse ::: to hold the attention of (someone) pleasantly; entertain or divert in an enjoyable or cheerful manner. amused, amusing.
"Anarchism is likely to be the protest of the human soul against the tyranny of a bureaucratic Socialism.” Essays Divine and Human
anew ::: 1. Over again; again; once more. 2. In a new form or manner different from the previous.
angel ::: 1. One of a class of spiritual beings; a celestial attendant of the Deity; a divine messenger of an order of spiritual beings superior to man in power. 2. A fallen or rebellious spirit once a spiritual attendant of the Divine. angel, Angels, **angels.
**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*
animal ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?” *The Life Divine
::: "An incarnation is something more, something special and individual to the individual being. It is the substitution of the Person of a divine being for the human person and an infiltration of it into all the movements so that there is a dynamic personal change in all of them and in the whole nature; not merely a change of the character of the consciousness or general surrender into its hands, but a subtle intimate personal change. Even when there is an incarnation from the birth, the human elements have to be taken up, but when there is a descent, there is a total conscious substitution.” Letters on Yoga
"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
apocalypse ::: 1. Any revelation or prophecy. 2. A prophetic revelation, esp. concerning a cataclysm in which the forces of good permanently triumph over the forces of evil.
appearance ::: 1. The act or fact of coming forward into view ; becoming visible. 2. The state, condition, manner, or style in which a person or object appears; outward look or aspect. 3. Outward show or seeming; semblance. appearances.
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 religious official among the Romans, whose duty it was to predict future events and advise upon the course of public business, in accordance with omens derived from the flight, singing, and feeding of birds. Hence extended to: A soothsayer, diviner, or prophet, generally; one that foresees and foretells the future. (Sri Aurobindo employs the word as an adjective.) augured.
arrange ::: 1. To put into a specific order or relation; dispose. 2. To settle the order, manner, and circumstantial relations of (a thing to be done); to prepare or plan beforehand. arranged, arranging, self-arranged.
"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.
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.
". . . as Mind is only a final operation of Supermind, so Life is only a final operation of the Consciousness-Force of which Real-Idea is the determinative form and creative agent. Consciousness that is Force is the nature of Being and this conscious Being manifested as a creative Knowledge-Will is the Real-Idea or Supermind.” The Life Divine
"As supramental Truth is not merely a sublimation of our mental ideas, so Divine Love is not merely a sublimation of human emotions; it is a different consciousness, with a different quality, movement and substance.” Letters on Yoga
"As there is a cosmic Self and Spirit pervading and upholding the universe and its beings, so too there is a cosmic Force that moves all things, and on this original cosmic Force depend and act many cosmic Forces that are its powers or arise as forms of its universal action.” The Life Divine
astral ::: 1. Of, relating to, emanating from, or resembling the stars. 2. Of the spirit world [Greek astron star].
aswapati ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her [Savitri"s] human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; . . . .” (From a letter written by Sri Aurobindo) Aswapati"s.
"A third step is to find out that there is something in him other than his instrumental mind, life and body, not only an immortal ever-developing individual soul that supports his nature but an eternal immutable self and spirit, and to learn what are the categories of his spiritual being, until he discovers that all in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes the link between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to remove his constitutional self-ignorance. Discovering self and spirit he discovers God; he finds out that there is a Self beyond the temporal: he comes to the vision of that Self in the cosmic consciousness as the divine Reality behind Nature and this world of beings; his mind opens to the thought or the sense of the Absolute of whom self and the individual and the cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the original ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him.” The Life Divine
::: "A 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
austere ::: 1. Severe in manner or appearance; uncompromising; strict; forbidding; stark. 2. Rigorously self-disciplined and severely moral; ascetic; abstinent. 3. Grave; sober; solemn; serious. 4. Without excess, luxury, or ease; severely simple; without ornament. austerity.
authority ::: the power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.
avatars ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The word Avatar means a descent; it is a coming down of the Divine below the line which divides the divine from the human world or status.” *Essays on the Gita
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
base ::: n. 1. The fundamental principle or underlying concept of a system or theory; a basis, foundation. 2. A fundamental ingredient; a chief constituent. adj. 3. Having or showing a contemptible, mean-spirited, or selfish lack of human decency; morally low. base"s. baser.
beam ::: 1. A ray of light. 2. A ray or collection of parallel rays. 3. A column of light, a gleam, emanation. Also fig. **beams.**
beast ::: 1. An animal other than a human, especially a large four-footed mammal. 2. Fig. Animal nature as opposed to intellect or spirit. 3. A large wild animal. 4. A domesticated animal used by man. (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as an adj.) beast"s, Beast"s, beasts, wild-beast. ::: —the Beast. Applied to the devil and evil spirits.
"Beauty is Ananda taking form — but the form need not be a physical shape. One speaks of a beautiful thought, a beautiful act, a beautiful soul. What we speak of as beauty is Ananda in manifestation; beyond manifestation beauty loses itself in Ananda or, you may say, beauty and Ananda become indistinguishably one.” The Future Poetry
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.
behaviour ::: 1. Manner of behaving or conducting oneself. 2. The aggregate of the responses or reactions or movements made by an organism in any situation, or the manner in which a thing acts under such circumstances. behaviour"s.
behest ::: an authoritative command or directive.
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*
"Be thyself, immortal, and put not thy faith in death; for death is not of thyself, but of thy body. For the Spirit is immortality.” Essays Divine and Human
bid ::: 1. To invite to attend; summon. 2. To issue a command to; direct. bids.
bidding ::: an order; command.
binding ::: n. **1. The covering within which the pages of a book are abound. adj. 2.* Fig.* Commanding adherence to a commitment, obligatory.
"Birth is an assumption of a body by the spirit, death is the casting off [of] the body; there is nothing original in this birth, nothing final in this death. Before birth we were; after death we shall be. Nor are our birth and death a single episode without continuous meaning or sequel; it is one episode out of many, scenes of our drama of existence with its denouement far away in time.” Essays Divine and Human*
blaspheme ::: to speak in an irreverent, contemptuous or disrespectful manner; curse; (esp. God, a divine being or sacred things).
blind ::: adj. 1. Unable to see; lacking the sense of sight; sightless. Also fig. 2. Unwilling or unable to perceive or understand. 3. Lacking all consciousness or awareness. 4. Not having or based on reason or intelligence; absolute and unquestioning. 5. Not characterized or determined by reason or control. 6. Purposeless; fortuitous, random. 7. Undiscriminating; heedless; reckless. 8. Enveloped in darkness; dark, dim, obscure. 9. Dense enough to form a screen. 10. Covered or concealed from sight; hidden from immediate view. 11. Having no openings or passages for light; (a window or door) walled up. blindest, half-blind. v. 12. To deprive of sight permanently or temporarily. 13. To make sightless momentarily; dazzle. blinded.* n. 14. A blind person, esp. as pl., those who are blind. 15. Fig.* Any thing or action intended to conceal one"s real intention; a pretence, a pretext; subterfuge.
blind-man"s-buff
blossom ::: v. 1. To produce or yield flowers. 2. To flourish; develop. blossomed.* *n. 3. The flower of a plant. mango-blossoms.**
manageable ::: that can be managed or controlled.
managed ::: handled, directed, governed, or controlled in action or use. managing.
management ::: the act, manner, or practice of managing; handling, supervision, or control.
mandate ::: an authoritative command or instruction.
man of Sorrows, the
". . . [man"s] nature calls for a human intermediary so that he may feel the Divine in something entirely close to his own humanity and sensible in a human influence and example. This call is satisfied by the Divine manifest in a human appearance, the Incarnation, the Avatar. . . .” The Synthesis of Yoga
man ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Man is pre-eminently the mental being.” *Social and Political Thought
bodily ::: 1. Physical as opposed to mental or spiritual. 2. Of, relating to, or belonging to the body or the physical nature of man.
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.
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.
"Brahma is the Eternal"s Personality of Existence; from him all is created, by his presence, by his power, by his impulse.” Essays Human and Divine
brahma ("s) ::: "Brahma is the nominative; the uninflected form of the word is brahman; it differs from brahman ‘the Eternal" only in gender.” *Glossary of Terms in Sri Aurobindo"s Writings
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.
breast ::: 1. Each of two milk-secreting glandular organs on the chest of a woman; the human mammary gland. 2. The front of the body from the neck to the abdomen; chest. 3. Fig. The seat of the affection and emotion. 4. Fig. A source of nourishment. 5. Something likened to the human breast, as a surface, etc. breasts, breasts".
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.
breeds ::: a group of organisms within a species, esp. a group of domestic animals, originated and maintained by man and having a clearly defined set of characteristics.
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.
bridegroom ::: a man who is about to be married, or has recently been married.
brute ::: n. **1. Any animal except man; a beast; a lower animal. brute"s. adj. 2. Animal, not human. 3. Lacking or showing a lack of reason or intelligence. 4. Wholly instinctive; senseless; coarse; brutish; dull. 5. Resembling a beast; showing lack of human sensibility; cruel or savage. brute-sensed.**
bubble ::: anything that lacks firmness, substance, or permanence.
building ::: 1. The act or action of constructing; erecting. Also fig. **2. **Something that is built, as for human habitation; a structure.
"But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the Spirit it is the Spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible.” The Life Divine
"But man also has a life-mind, a vital mentality which is an instrument of desire: this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a dealer in possibilities; it has the passion for novelty and is seeking always to extend the limits of experience for the satisfaction of desire, for enjoyment, for an enlarged self-affirmation and aggrandisement of its terrain of power and profit. It desires, enjoys, possesses actualities, but it hunts also after unrealised possibilities, is ardent to materialise them, to possess and enjoy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical and objective only, but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a purely emotive satisfaction and pleasure.” *The Life Divine
"But 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.
"But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power of being of this Spirit which manifests itself in all that we experience as universe. This universal Nature is not a lifeless, inert or unconscious mechanism, but informed in all its movements by the universal Spirit. The mechanism of its process is only an outward appearance and the reality is the Spirit creating or manifesting its own being by its own power of being in all that is in Nature. Soul and Nature in us too are only a dual appearance of the one existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
cabbala ::: 1 A body of mystical Jewish teachings based on an interpretation of hidden meanings in the Hebrew Scriptures. Among its central doctrines are, all creation is an emanation from the Deity and the soul exists from eternity. 2. Any secret or occult doctrine or science. 3. "Esoteric system of interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures based on the assumption that every word, letter, number, and accent in them has an occult meaning. The system, oral at first, claimed great antiquity, but was really the product of the Middle Ages, arising in the 7th century and lasting into the 18th. It was popular chiefly among Jews, but spread to Christians as well. (Col. Enc.)” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
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
captain ::: 1. One who commands, leads, or guides others. 2. The officer in command of a ship, an aircraft, or a spacecraft.
caress ::: n. 1. A gentle touch or gesture of fondness, tenderness, or love. v. 2. To touch or stroke lightly in a loving or endearing manner. caressed, caressing.
celestial ::: 1. Of or relating to the sky or the heavens. 2. Of or relating to heaven; divine. 3. Heavenly; divine; spiritual. celestials", celestial-human.
centaur ::: greek Mythology, one of a race of monsters having the head, arms, and trunk of a man and the body and legs of a horse. centaur"s, Centaur, Centaur"s.** ::: *
centurion ::: the commander of a century (100 men) in the Roman army.
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
challenge ::: 1. A call or summons to engage in a contest, fight, or competition. 2. A demand for explanation or justification; a calling into question. v. **3. To invite; arouse; stimulate; provoke. challenges, challenged, challenging.**
chant ::: n. **1. A short, simple series of syllables or words that are sung on or intoned to the same note or a limited range of notes. 2. A song or melody. v. 3. To sing, especially in the manner of a chant. chants, chanted, chanting, chantings.**
charge ::: 1. An assigned duty or task; a responsibility given to one. 2. Care; custody. 3. An order, an impetuous onset or attack, command, or injunction. 4. The quantity of anything that a receptacle is intended to hold. v. 5. *Fig. To load to capacity; fill. *charged.
charity ::: benevolence or generosity toward others or toward humanity.
cheaply ::: in a cheap or stingy manner; at little cost; lit. and fig.
choric ::: of, like, for, or in the manner of a chorus, esp. of singing, dancing, or the speaking of verse.
citadel ::: **A fortress that commands a city and is used in the control of the inhabitants and in defence during attack or siege. citadels.**
clamant ::: clamorous; loud; noisy.
claimant ::: someone who claims a benefit, right or title. claimants.
claim ::: n. 1. A demand for something as rightful or due. 2. Something claimed in a formal or legal manner as a right or title. claims. *v. *3. To demand, ask for, assert, or take as one"s own or one"s due. 4. To state to be true, especially when open to question; assert or maintain. claims, claimed, claiming, claimest, claimst, death-claimed, trance-claimed.
clamorous ::: 1. Full of, marked by, or of the nature of clamour; shouting; noisy, loud. 2. Insistently demanding attention; importunate.
clamouring ::: 1. Raising an outcry for; seeking, demanding, or calling importunately for, or to do a thing. 2. Making a clamour; shouting, or uttering loud and continued cries or calls; raising an outcry, making a noise or din of speech.
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.
commandment (‘s) ::: a divine command; an edict.
command ::: n. 1. An order; mandate. 2. The possession or exercise of controlling authority. Command. v. 3. To direct with specific authority or prerogative; order. 4. To give orders. 5. To have or exercise authority or control over; be master of; have at one"s bidding or disposal. commands, commanded.
common ::: 1. Belonging equally to or shared alike by two or more. 2. Of or relating to the community or humanity as a whole. 3. Belonging equally to or shared equally by two or more; joint. 4. Not distinguished by superior or noteworthy characteristics; average; ordinary. 5. Occurring frequently or habitually; usual. commonest.
confidante ::: a woman to whom secrets are confided or with whom private matters and problems are discussed.
::: "Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound — for there is much above or below that is to man invisible and inaudible. So there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it unconscious, — supramental or overmental and submental ranges.” *Letters on Yoga
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.
contemptuous ::: manifesting or feeling contempt; scornful. contemptuously.
contrivance ::: 1. The act or faculty of devising or adapting; inventive skill or ability esp. in a negative sense. 2. The act or manner of contriving; the faculty or power of contriving. inventing or making with thought and skill; invention.
control ::: n. 1. Power to direct, determine or command. 2. A means of regulation or restraint; curb; check. v. 3. To exercise authoritative control or power over. 4. To hold in restraint; check, esp. one"s emotions. controls, controlled, controlling.
copy-book ::: a book containing models, usually of penmanship, for learners to imitate. Hence adj. commonplace; stereotyped.
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.
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 Self ::: Sri Aurobindo: "When one has the cosmic consciousness, one can feel the cosmic Self as one"s own self, one can feel one with other beings in the cosmos, one can feel all the forces of Nature as moving in oneself, all selves as one"s own self. There is no why except that it is so, since all is the One.” Letters on Yoga (See also Cosmic Spirit)
"Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; . . . .” *The Life Divine
"An eternal infinite self-existence is the supreme reality, but the supreme transcendent eternal Being, Self and Spirit, — an infinite Person, we may say, because his being is the essence and source of all personality, — is the reality and meaning of self-existence: so too the cosmic Self, Spirit, Being, Person is the reality and meaning of cosmic existence; the same Self, Spirit, Being or Person manifesting its multiplicity is the reality and meaning of individual existence.” The Life Divine
"But this cosmic self is spiritual in essence and in experience; it must not be confused with the collective existence, with any group soul or the life and body of a human society or even of all mankind.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"It is the Cosmic Self and Spirit that is in and behind all things and beings, from which and in which all is manifested in the universe — although it is now a manifestation in the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga*
cosmic Spirit ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Cosmic Spirit or Self contains everything in the cosmos — it upholds cosmic Mind, universal Life, universal Matter as well as the overmind. The Self is more than all these things which are its formulations in Nature.” *Letters on Yoga
"[The Divine in one of its three aspects] . . . is the Cosmic Self and Spirit that is in and behind all things and beings, from which and in which all is manifested in the universe - although it is now a manifestation in the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga
". . . the cosmic spirit, the one self inhabiting the universe, . . . .” *The Life Divine
"For the cosmic Spirit inhabits each and all, but is more than all; . . . .”The Life Divine
cosmic Will ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Agni is the Deva, the All-Seer, manifested as conscious-force or, as it would be called in modern language, Divine or Cosmic Will, first hidden and building up the eternal worlds, then manifest, ``born"", building up in man the Truth and the Immortality.” *The Secret of the Veda
::: "Cosmos is not the Divine in all his utter reality, but a single self-expression, a true but minor motion of his being.” *The Human Cycle
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.
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).
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.
creature ::: 1. Something created; a living being, esp. an animal. 2. A human. 3. A person who is dependent upon another; tool or puppet. creature"s, creatures, creatures".
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.
daemon ::: 1. A guardian spirit. 2. *Mythology: A mythological being that is part-god and part-human. *3. A demigod.
dally ::: 1. To waste time idly; linger; dawdle. 2. To talk or behave amorously, or behave in a careless manner without serious intentions; toy with. dallies, dallying, dalliance.
demand ::: n. 1. A formal claim. 2. An urgent requirement or need. demands. v. 3. To ask urgently or peremptorily, to claim as just or due. 4. To require as useful, just, proper, or necessary; call for. demands, demanded, demanding.
decree ::: n. **1. A formal and authoritative order, esp. one having the force of law. 2. A judicial decision or order. 3. Theol. One of the eternal purposes of God by which events are foreordained. v. 4. To command, ordain, decide by decree. Decree, decrees, decreed, decreeing.**
delicately ::: 1. In a delicate manner. 2. Fine or soft in touch or skill; gently, exquisitely fine.
deliver ::: 1. To give into another"s possession or keeping; surrender. 2. To set free or liberate; emancipate, release. 3. To rescue or save. 4. To assist (a female) in bringing forth young. 5. To disburden (oneself) of thoughts, opinions, etc. delivered, delivering, deliverers.
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.)
desert ::: 1. A region so arid because of little rainfall that it supports only sparse and widely spaced vegetation or no vegetation at all. 2. Any area in which few forms of life can exist because of lack of water, permanent frost, or absence of soil. 3. Any place lacking in something; desolate, barren. deserts.
"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
dialect ::: 1. The manner or style of expressing oneself in language. 2. A form of a language that is considered inferior.
dictate ::: to prescribe with authority; impose; issue an authoritative command.
difficult ::: 1. Hard to do or accomplish; demanding considerable effort or skill; arduous. 2. Not easily or readily done; requiring much labour, skill, or planning to be performed successfully. 3. Hard to understand or solve; perplexing, puzzling, obscure.
diplomat ::: one who is tactful and skilful in negotiating and managing delicate situations, handling people, etc. diplomatic.
direct ::: adj. 1. Proceeding without interruption in a straight course or line; not deviating or swerving. adv. 2. In a straightforward manner; directly; straight.
discolouring ::: changing or causing to change in colour; fading or staining, often in an undesired manner.
disguise ::: n. 1. A mask, costume, or manner that conceals the identity of. 2. Something that serves or is intended for concealment of identity, character, or quality; a deceptive covering, condition, manner, etc. 3. The state of being disguised; masquerade. disguises, self-disguise. v. 4. To hide under a false appearance. disguised.
display ::: to show or make visible; make manifest; reveal. displayed.
divine ::: adj. **1. Of or pertaining to God or the Supreme Being. 2. Of, relating to, emanating from, or being the expression of a deity. 3. Being in the service or worship of a deity; sacred. 4. Heavenly, celestial. 5. Supremely good or beautiful; magnificent. diviner, divinest, divinely, half-divine. v. 6. To perceive by intuition or insight. divines, divined, divining.**
divine life ::: Sri Aurobindo: "A life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature.” *The Life Divine ::: "The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man"s real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.” The Life Divine
".. . Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; . . . . ” The Synthesis of Yoga
divine Mother ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence. The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates.” *The Mother
::: "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 .
doings ::: actions; performances; executions; deeds; proceedings; happenings; events.
drive ::: v. 1. To impel; constrain; urge; compel. 2. To manoeuvre, guide or steer the progress of. 3. To impel (matter) by physical force; to cause (something) to move along by direct application of physical force; to propel, carry along. 4. To send, expel, or otherwise cause to move away or out by force or compulsion. 5. To strive vigorously and with determination toward a goal or objective. 6. To cause and guide the movement of (a vehicle, an animal, etc.). n. 7. A strong organized effort to accomplish a purpose, with energy, push or aggressiveness. 8. Impulse; impulsive force. adj. 9. Urged onward, impelled. 10. Pertaining to an inner urge that stimulates activity or inhibition. drives, drove, drov"st, driving, driven.
dumbly ::: in an inarticulate manner; mutely.
durga ::: "In Hindu religion, the goddess who is the Energy of Shiva and the conquering and protecting aspect of the Universal Mother. She is the slayer of many demons including Mahisasura. Durga is usually depicted in painting and sculpture riding a lion, having eight or ten arms, each holding the special weapon of one or another of the gods who gave them to her for her battles with demons. (A; Enc. Br.)” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.
dwarf ::: n. 1. (In folklore) a being in the form of a small, often misshapen and ugly man, usually having magic powers. dwarf"s. adj. 2. Of unusually small stature or size; diminutive.
dwell ::: 1. To live or stay as a permanent resident; reside. 2. To live or continue in a given condition or state. dwells, dwellst, dwelt, dwelling
::: "Each man has to grow into the Divine Reality within himself through his own individual being, . . . " The Human Cycle
"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-born ::: born on or sprung from the earth; of earthly origin; mortal, human.
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
eclipse ::: n. **1. A temporary or permanent dimming or cutting off of light. 2. A fall into obscurity or disuse; a decline. v. 3. To obscure; darken. eclipsed, eclipsing.**
economy ::: careful, thrifty management of resources, such as money, materials, or labour. economised.
elfin ::: suggestive of an elf in strangeness and otherworldliness; in reference to legendary beings with magical powers, usually characterized as small, manlike, and mischievous.
else ::: adv. 1. In a different or additional time, place, or manner. adj. 2. Other than the persons or things mentioned or implied.
enduring ::: lasting; continuing; durable; permanent.
epiphany ::: 1. An appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity. 2. A sudden intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something. epiphanies.
"Equality is the chief support of the true spiritual consciousness and it is this from which a sadhak deviates when he allows a vital movement to carry him away in feeling or speech or action. Equality is not the same thing as forbearance, — though undoubtedly a settled equality immensely extends, even illimitably, a man"s power of endurance and forbearance. Letters on Yoga
". . . equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
::: "Erinyes, in Greek mythology, the goddesses of vengeance, usually represented as three winged maidens, with snakes in their hair. They pursued criminals, drove them mad, and tormented them in Hades. They were spirits of punishment, avenging wrongs done especially to kindred. In Roman literature they were called Furies.” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works*
errant ::: 1. Wandering in search of adventure. 2. Straying from the proper course or standards. 3. Moving in an aimless or lightly changing manner.
ethics ::: 1. A system of moral principles. 2. The branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions. **ethics".
"Even the words Eternal and Infinite are only symbolic expressions through which the mind feels without grasping some vague impression of this Supreme.” Essays Divine and Human
"Evolution is the one eternal dynamic law and hidden process of the earth-nature.” Essays Divine and Human
express ::: 1. To represent by a sign or a symbol; indicate; symbolize. 2. To set forth in words; state; verbalise. 3. To represent symbolically. 4. To manifest, reveal or communicate, as by a gesture; show. expresses, expressed, expressing.
expression ::: 1. The act of expressing, conveying, or representing in something such as a movement, etc. 2. A manifestation. self-expression.
faerylike; of the nature of a faery (one of a class of supernatural beings, generally conceived as having a diminutive human form and possessing magical powers with which they intervene in human affairs); magical. faeries", faery-small.
**"Faith in the heart is the obscure & often distorted reflection of a hidden knowledge.” Essays Divine and Human
::: "Faith is the soul"s witness to something not yet manifested, achieved or realised, but which yet the Knower within us, even in the absence of all indications, feels to be true or supremely worth following or achieving.” *Letters on Yoga
::: "Fate is God"s foreknowledge outside Space & Time of all that in Space & Time shall yet happen; what He has foreseen, Power & Necessity work out by the conflict of forces.” *Essays Divine and Human
faun ::: in classical mythology, any of a group of rural deities represented as having the body of a man and the horns, ears, tail, and sometimes legs of a goat.
::: **"Fear and anxiety are perverse forms of will. What thou fearest & ponderest over, striking that note repeatedly in thy mind, thou helpest to bring about; for, if thy will above the surface of waking repels it, it is yet what thy mind underneath is all along willing, & the subconscious mind is mightier, wider, better equipped to fulfil than thy waking force & intellect. But the spirit is stronger than both together; from fear and hope take refuge in the grandiose calm and careless mastery of the spirit.” Essays Divine and Human
feast ::: 1. A large, elaborately prepared meal, usually for many persons and often accompanied by entertainment; a banquet. 2. Something giving great pleasure or satisfaction.
felicitous ::: 1. Marked by happiness or good fortune. 2. Exhibiting an agreeably appropriate manner or style. felicitously
fell ::: of an inhumanly cruel nature; fierce; destructive. (All other references to the word are as the past tense of fall.)
fiat ::: official sanction; authoritative permission or order; command.
field ::: 1. A wide unbroken expanse, as of ice. 2. An area or sphere of activity. 3. A broad, level, open expanse of land; a stretch of open land, esp. one used for pasture or tillage; a plain. 4. The surface on which something is portrayed or enacted. An area of human activity or interest. 5. A piece of ground devoted to sports or contests; playing field. 6. A region of space characterized by a physical property, such as gravitational or electromagnetic force or fluid pressure. fields, field-paths, star-field, time-field, play-fields, race-fields.
figure ::: n. 1. The form or shape of anything; appearance, aspect. 2. The human form, esp. as regards size or shape. 3. A representation or likeness of the human form.4. An emblem, type, symbol. 5. An amount or value expressed in numbers. 6. A written symbol other than a letter. v. 7. To compute or calculate. 8. To represent by a pictorial or sculptured figure, a diagram, or the like; picture or depict. 9. To shape to; symbolize; represent. figures, figured, figuring, figure-selves.**
"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
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.
fix ::: 1. To set or place firmly or definitely; establish. 2. Also refl. To direct one"s efforts or attention; concentrate. 3.* *To give a permanent or final form to. 4. To settle definitely; decide. fixes, fixed, fixing.**
fixed ::: 1. Securely placed or fastened or set. 2. Set or intent upon something; steadily directed (as of a person"s eyes, mind, etc.). 3. Definitely and permanently placed. 4. Not fluctuating or varying; definite. 5. Coming each year on the same calendar date. 6. Assigned to a definite place, time, etc.
flasque ::: Sri Aurobindo: "‘Flasque" is a French word meaning ‘slack", ‘loose", ‘flaccid" etc. I have more than once tried to thrust in a French word like this, for instance, ‘A harlot empress in a bouge" – somewhat after the manner of Eliot and Ezra Pound.” Letters on Savitri.
fleeting ::: 1. Passing swiftly by: Chiefly of life or time. 2. Passing or gliding swiftly away. 3. Existing for a brief period; not permanent or enduring; transitory, passing, fading.
foam ::: n. 1. A mass of small bubbles of gas formed on the surface of a liquid, such as the froth produced by agitating a solution of soap or detergent in water. v. 2. To produce or cause to produce froth. foamed, foaming, foam-curled, foam-leap, foam-maned.
folded ::: 1. Enclosed, wrapped, enveloped. 2. Clasped as in prayer. 3. Brought (the arms, hands, etc.) together in an intertwined or crossed manner; clasped, crossed.
follow ::: 1. To come or go after; proceed behind. 2. Lit. and fig. To move along the course of; take a path. 3. Fig. To come after in order, time, or position. 4. To occur or be evident as a consequence; result. 5. Fig. To accompany; attend. 6. To take (a person) as a guide, leader, or master; to accept the authority or example of, obey the dictates or guidance of; to adhere to, espouse the opinions, side, or cause of. 7. Fig. To go after in or as if in pursuit. 8. To accept and follow the leadership or command or guidance of. 9. To watch or trace the movements, progress, or course of. follows, followed, following. ::: following out. Proceeding; following; pursuing something to an end or conclusion.
forbid ::: 1. To command (someone) not to do something. 2. To command against the doing or use of (something); prohibit. forbids, forbade, forbidding, forbidden, half-forbidden.
" For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower.” The Synthesis of Yoga
". . . Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva and Kali, Brahman and Shakti are one and not two who are separable. Force inherent in existence may be at rest or it may be in motion, but when it is at rest, it exists none the less and is not abolished, diminished or in any way essentially altered.” The Life Divine
". . . for doubt is the mind"s persistent assailant.” Letters on Yoga ::: "The enemy of faith is doubt, and yet doubt too is a utility and necessity, because man in his ignorance and in his progressive labour towards knowledge needs to be visited by doubt, otherwise he would remain obstinate in an ignorant belief and limited knowledge and unable to escape from his errors.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
::: "For God the Time-Spirit does not destroy for the sake of destruction, but to make the ways clear in the cyclic process for a greater rule and a progressing manifestation, . . . .” *Essays on the Gita
"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
"For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher. Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge.” The Life Divine*
"For it is only the few who can make the past Teacher and his teaching, the past Incarnation and his example and influence a living force in their lives. For this need also the Hindu discipline provides in the relation of the Guru and the disciple. The Guru may sometimes be the Incarnation or World-Teacher; but it is sufficient that he should represent to the disciple the divine wisdom, convey to him something of the divine ideal or make him feel the realised relation of the human soul with the Eternal.” The Synthesis of 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
"For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements.” The Supramental Manifestation
freedman
freely ::: in a free manner; without restraint.
frescoed ::: painted on fresh moist plaster with pigments dissolved in water. many-frescoed.
gait ::: manner of walking or running; bearing.
gargoyle ::: a grotesquely carved face or figure of a human or animal.
genii ::: 1. A rendering of Arab., jinn, the collective name of a class of spirits (some good, some evil) supposed to interfere powerfully in human affairs. 2. Spirits, often appearing in human form, that when summoned carry out the wishes of the summoner.
"Genius is Nature"s first attempt to liberate the imprisoned god out of her human mould; the mould has to suffer in the process. It is astonishing that the cracks are so few and unimportant.” Essays Divine and Human
gethsemane ::: the name of a ‘garden" on the Mount of Olives east of Jerusalem near the brook of Kedron, scene of the agony and betrayal of Christ, hence a scene or occasion of suffering.
giantess ::: an imaginary female being of human form but superhuman size, strength, etc.
glimmer ::: n. 1. A dim or intermittent flicker or flash of light. 2. A slight suggestion or vague understanding. v. 3. To shine faintly; twinkle, shimmer, or flicker. glimmers, glimmered, glimmering, glimmerings, glimmer-realms, many-glimmered.
glint ::: 1. A tiny, quick flash of light. 2. A brief or slight manifestation; inkling; trace.
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
god ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . the Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the Self manifest in the cosmos and Lord of Nature, — all this is what we mean by God, . . . .” *The Life Divine
gods ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.” *The Upanishads
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
grace ::: n. **1. Elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action. 2. Favour or goodwill. 3. A manifestation of favour, especially by a superior. 4. Theol. a. The freely given, unmerited favour and love of God. b. The influence or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them. c. A virtue or excellence of divine origin. d. The condition of being in God"s favour or one of the elect. 5. Divine love and protection bestowed freely on people. v. 6. To lend or add grace to; adorn. graced, graceful, graceless.**
grim ::: 1. Unrelenting; rigid. 2. Harsh or formidable in manner or appearance. 3. Cruel, severe, or ghastly.
grotesques ::: characterized by ludicrous or incongruous distortion, as of appearance or manner; bizarre; outlandish.
grovel ::: 1. To lie or creep or crawl in a prostrate position with the face down as in subservience, fear or humility. 2. To behave in a servile or demeaning manner; cringe. 3. To take pleasure in mean or base things. grovels, grovelling.
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.
guarded ::: 1. Protected; defended. 2. Prudent, restrained or noncommittal. many-guarded
guest ::: Sri Aurobindo: " When the Rishis speak of Indra or Agni or Soma in men, they are speaking of the god in his cosmic presence, power or function. This is evident from the very language when they speak of Agni as the immortal in mortals, the immortal Light in men, the inner Warrior, the Guest in human beings.” *Letters on Yoga
harlot ::: a woman prostitute; a whore.
harp ::: a usually large musical instrument which is held upright, and which has many strings of varying length which are plucked with the fingers. harp"s, harps.
::: "Hatred is a sword of power, but its edge is always double.” Essays Divine and Human
headlong ::: 1. With the head leading; headfirst. 2. At breakneck speed or with uncontrolled force. 3. In an impetuous manner; rashly.
"He [man] is a soul and not a body and his earthly life is a means by which he determines the future conditions of his spiritual being.” The Synthesis of Yoga
heel ::: the rounded posterior portion of the human foot under and behind the ankle. Also fig.
herdsman ::: one who is the keeper of a herd or tends to it.
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.
"High beyond the Intelligence is the Great Self, beyond the Great Self is the Unmanifest, beyond the Unmanifest is the Conscious Being. There is nothing beyond the Being, — that is the extreme ultimate, that the supreme goal.” — Katha Upanishad. (4) (Sri Aurobindo"s translation) The Life Divine
high-bred ::: of high birth; highly refined in manner; of pure blood. highbred.
high Command ::: the leadership or highest authority.
hint ::: n. 1. A brief or indirect suggestion; a tip. 2. Perceived indication or suggestion; note; intimation. 3. A very slight or hardly noticeable amount. hints, heaven-hints. v. 4. To indicate or make known in an indirect manner. hinted.
humanity
humankind
human life
"Ideals are truths that have not yet effected themselves for man, the realities of a higher plane of existence which have yet to fulfil themselves on this lower plane of life and matter, our present field of operation.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"Ideals are truths that have not yet effected themselves for man, the realities of a higher plane of existence which have yet to fulfil themselves on this lower plane of life and matter, our present field of operation. To the pragmatical intellect which takes its stand upon the ever-changing present, ideals are not truths, not realities, they are at most potentialities of future truth and only become real when they are visible in the external fact as work of force accomplished. But to the mind which is able to draw back from the flux of force in the material universe, to the consciousness which is not imprisoned in its own workings or carried along in their flood but is able to envelop, hold and comprehend them, to the soul that is not merely the subject and instrument of the world-force but can reflect something of that Master-Consciousness which controls and uses it, the ideal present to its inner vision is a greater reality than the changing fact obvious to its outer senses. The Supramental Manifestation*
::: "Identity is the first truth of existence; division is the second truth; all division is a division in oneness. There is one Existence which looks at itself from many self-divided unities observing other similar and dissimilar self-divided unities by the device of division. Being is one; division is a device or a secondary condition of consciousness; but the primary truth of consciousness also is a truth of oneness and identity.” Essays Divine and Human
"I have said that the Avatar is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness —. . . .” Letters on Yoga
"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
"I may say that the opening upwards, the ascent into the Light and the subsequent descent into the ordinary consciousness and normal human life is very common as the first decisive experience in the practice of yoga and may very well happen even without the practice of yoga in those who are destined for the spiritual change, especially if there is a dissatisfaction somewhere with the ordinary life and a seeking for something more, greater or better.” Letters on Yoga*
immanence
immanent
"Immortality is not the survival of the mental personality after death, though that also is true, but the waking possession of the unborn & deathless self of which body is only an instrument and a shadow.” Essays Divine and Human
"Immortality is one of the possible results of supramentalisation, but it is not an obligatory result and it does not mean that there will be an eternal or indefinite prolongation of life as it is. That is what many think it will be, that they will remain what they are with all their human desires and the only difference will be that they will satisfy them endlessly; but such an immortality would not be worth having and it would not be long before people are tired of it. To live in the Divine and have the divine Consciousness is itself immortality and to be able to divinise the body also and make it a fit instrument for divine works and divine life would be its material expression only.” *Letters on Yoga
imperative ::: n. 1. An action, etc. involving or expressing a command; a command. 2. Something that demands attention or action; an unavoidable obligation or requirement; necessity. 3. The verbal mood (or any form belonging to it) which expresses a command, request, or exhortation. adj. **4. Absolutely necessary or required; unavoidable. 5. Of the nature of or expressing a command; commanding. imperatives.**
impermanent ::: not lasting or durable; not permanent; fleeting. impermanence.
". . . imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding.” The Human Cycle etc.*
impersonal ::: 1. Having no personal reference or connection. 2. Lacking personality; not being a person; devoid of human character or traits.
impersonal ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Impersonal is not He, it is It. . . . The Impersonal Brahman is inactive, aloof, indifferent, not concerned with what happens in the universe.” *Letters on Yoga
importunate ::: persistent, pressing, relentless; holding tenaciously to a purpose or course of action in demand or solicitation.
in a disdainfully proud manner; snobbishly, scornfully arrogant, superciliously.
incarnate ::: adj. 1. Embodied in flesh; given a bodily, esp. a human, form. 2. Personified or typified, as a quality or idea. v. 3. Invested with bodily nature and form. 4. To realize in action or fact; actualize. incarnated, incarnating.
incarnation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "An incarnation is the Divine Consciousness and Being manifesting through the body.” *Letters on Yoga
incertitude ::: absence of confidence; doubt; uncertainty. incertitudes. ::: Sri Aurobindo: [referring to the line] "The incertitude of man"s proud confident thought.” ::: "‘Uncertainty" would mean that the thought was confident but uncertain of itself, which would be a contradiction. ‘Incertitude" means that its truth is uncertain in spite of its proud confidence in itself.” Letters on Savitri — 1936
inconscience ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscience is an inverse reproduction of the supreme superconscience: it has the same absoluteness of being and automatic action, but in a vast involved trance; it is being lost in itself, plunged in its own abyss of infinity.” *The Life Divine
"All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite"s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit"s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being, — an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves, — but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” *The Life Divine
"Once consciousnesses separated from the one consciousness, they fell inevitably into Ignorance and the last result of Ignorance was Inconscience.” Letters on Yoga
*inconscience.
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.**
"Indian devotion has especially seized upon the most intimate human relations and made them stepping-stones to the supra-human. God the Guru, God the Master, God the Friend, God the Mother, God the Child, God the Self, each of these experiences — for to us they are more than merely ideas, — it has carried to its extreme possibilities.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"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*
"In fact ethics is not in its essence a calculation of good and evil in the action or a laboured effort to be blameless according to the standards of the world, — those are only crude appearances, — it is an attempt to grow into the divine nature.” The Human Cycle
inferno ::: a place or condition suggestive of hell, especially with respect to human suffering or death; the infernal regions. Inferno"s.
"In God"s providence there is no evil, but only good or its preparation.” Essays Divine and Human
inhuman ::: lacking humane feelings, such as sympathy, understanding, etc.; cruel; brutal. Also fig.
inly ::: 1. In an inward manner; inwardly. 2. Intimately; deeply within.
"In our errors is the substance of a truth which labours to reveal its meaning to our groping intelligence. The human intellect cuts out the error and the truth with it and replaces it by another half-truth half-error; but the Divine Wisdom suffers our mistakes to continue until we are able to arrive at the truth hidden and protected under every false cover.” The Synthesis of Yoga
in political and legal philosophy and theology, doctrines based on the theory that there are certain unchanging laws which pertain to man"s nature, which can be discovered by reason, and therefore ethically binding in human society, and to which man-made laws should conform.
insistent ::: earnest or emphatic in dwelling upon, maintaining, or demanding something; persistent. insistence, insistency.
intermediate zone ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higher Mind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels , but one can receive something from them, even from the overmind, indirectly. Only, as one is still immersed in the cosmic Ignorance, all that comes from above can be mixed, perverted, taken hold of for their purposes by lower, even by hostile Powers. ::: It is not necessary for everyone to struggle through the intermediate zone. If one has purified oneself, if there is no abnormal vanity, egoism, ambition or other strong misleading element, or if one is vigilant and on one"s guard, or if the psychic is in front, one can either pass rapidly and directly or with a minimum of trouble into the higher zones of consciousness where one is in direct contact with the Divine Truth.
internal ::: 1. Of or relating to man"s mental or spiritual nature. 2. Of, relating to, or located within the limits or surface; interior; inner.
". . . in the Avatar there is the special manifestation, the divine birth from above, the eternal and universal Godhead descended into a form of individual humanity, âtmânam srjâmi, and conscious not only behind the veil but in the outward nature.” Essays on the Gita
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
invader ::: one who intrudes or enters in a hostile manner or with hostile intent. invaders.
::: "I regard the spiritual history of mankind and especially of India as a constant development of a divine purpose, not a book that is closed, the lines of which have to be constantly repeated.” Letters on Yoga
iron ::: n. 1. A silver-white metal, usually an admixture of some other substance, usually carbon, rendering it extremely hard and useful for tools, implements, machinery, constructions, and in many other applications. adj. 2. Inflexible; unyielding; firm. 3. Stern; harsh; cruel. 4. *Fig.* Resembling iron in firmness, strength, colour, etc.
"Ishwara is Brahman the Reality, Self, Spirit, revealed as possessor, enjoyer of his own self-existence, creator of the universe and one with it, Pantheos, and yet superior to it, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Ineffable, the Divine Transcendence.” The Life Divine
"It is not possible for the individual mind, so long as it remains shut up in its personality, to understand the workings of the Cosmic Will, for the standards made by the personal consciousness are not applicable to them. A cell in the body, if conscious, might also think that the human being and its actions are only the resultant of the relations and workings of a number of cells like itself and not the action of a unified self. It is only if one enters into the Cosmic Consciousness that one begins to see the forces at work and the lines on which they work and get a glimpse of the Cosmic Self and the Cosmic Mind and Will.” Letters on Yoga
"It [the Cosmic Spirit] uses Truth and Falsehood, Knowledge and Ignorance and all the other dualities as elements in the manifestation and works out what has to be worked out till all is ready for a higher working.” Letters on Yoga*
"It [the psychic] is constantly in contact with the immanent Divine — the Divine secret in the individual.” Letters on Yoga
joyful ::: causing, bringing, manifesting or expressing joy. joyfully.
kali ::: hinduism. One of the manifestations and titles of the wife of Shiva and mother goddess Devi, especially in her role as a goddess of death and destruction. **Kali"s.
"Kali is Krishna revealed as dreadful Power & wrathful Love. She slays with her furious blows the self in body, life & mind in order to liberate it as spirit eternal.” Essays Divine and Human
::: "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
knead ::: 1. To mix and work into a uniform mass, as by folding, pressing, and stretching with the hands. 2. To make or shape by or as if by folding, pressing, and stretching; manipulate. kneaded.
::: "Knowledge is a child with its achievements; for when it has found out something, it runs about the streets whooping and shouting; Wisdom conceals hers for a long time in a thoughtful and mighty silence.” *Essays Divine and Human
"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
labourer ::: 1. Someone who works with their hands; someone engaged in manual labour. 2. A worker; one who is engaged in physical work, esp. of an unskilled kind. labourers.
lacerated ::: 1. *Lit. Torn; mangled. 2. Fig.* Torn with deep emotional pain; distress.
lamely ::: in a weakened manner, haltingly.
largely ::: 1. Principally; to a great extent. 2. On a large scale or in a large manner.
lash ::: n. **1. A whip. 2. Something that goads or pains in a manner compared to that of a whip. lashed, lashing.**
lasting ::: adj. Permanent or enduring.
latent ::: hidden or undeveloped, but capable of being developed; not as yet manifested; concealed.
"Law is a process or a formula; but the soul is the user of processes and exceeds formulas.” Essays Divine and Human ::: **law"s, laws, stone-laws, world-law, world-laws.**
::: "Law is necessary for order and stability, but it becomes a conservative and hampering force unless it provides itself with an effective machinery for changing the laws as soon as circumstances and new needs make that desirable.” *The Human Cycle
leaf ::: 1. A usually green, flattened, lateral structure attached to a stem and functioning as a principle organ of photosynthesis and transpiration in most plants. 2. A page of a book or manuscript. lotus-leaf. (See also gold-leaf.)
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.)
leisure ::: 1. Time free from the demands of work or duty. 2. Unhurried ease.
light ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . light is primarily a spiritual manifestation of the Divine Reality illuminative and creative; material light is a subsequent representation or conversion of it into Matter for the purposes of the material Energy.” *The Life Divine
"Our sense by its incapacity has invented darkness. In truth there is nothing but Light, only it is a power of light either above or below our poor human vision"s limited range.
For do not imagine that light is created by the Suns. The Suns are only physical concentrations of Light, but the splendour they concentrate for us is self-born and everywhere.
God is everywhere and wherever God is, there is Light.” *The Hour of God
"Light is a general term. Light is not knowledge but the illumination that comes from above and liberates the being from obscurity and darkness.” The Mother
The Mother: "The light is everywhere, the force is everywhere. And the world is so small.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15. ::: *Light, light"s, lights, light-petalled, light-tasselled, half-light.
line ::: 1. *Gen.* Text consisting of a row of words written across a page. 2. A chronological or ancestral series, esp. of people. 3. A course of progress or movement; a route. 4. A manner or course of procedure determined by a specified factor. 5. A sequence of related things that leads to a certain ending. 6. A border or boundary. 7. A narrow continuous mark, as one made by a pencil, pen, or brush across a surface.
lolled ::: 1. Leaned, or lounged in a lazy or relaxed manner. 2. (of the tongue) Hung down or out. lolling.
lord ::: Sri Aurobindo: "There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.” *The Life Divine
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
luxuriantly ::: in a richly abundant, profuse or superabundant manner; copiously.
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.
maid ::: an unmarried girl or woman. maiden.
"Man, born into the world, revolves between world and world in the action of Prakriti and Karma. Purusha in Prakriti is his formula: what the soul in him thinks, contemplates and acts, that always he becomes. All that he had been, determined his present birth; and all that he is, thinks, does in this life up to the moment of his death, determines what he will become in the worlds beyond and in lives yet to be. If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation.” Essays on the Gita
"Man himself is not a life and mind born of Matter and eternally subject to physical Nature, but a spirit that uses life and body.” The Renaissance in India
"Man is a transitional being, he is not final. He is too imperfect for that, too imperfect in capacity for knowledge, too imperfect in will and action, too imperfect in his turn towards joy and beauty, too imperfect in his will for freedom and his instinct for order. Even if he could perfect himself in his own type, his type is too low and small to satisfy the need of the universe. Something larger, higher, more capable of a rich all embracing universality is needed, a greater being, a greater consciousness summing up in itself all that the world set out to be. He has, as was pointed out by a half blind seer, to exceed himself; man must evolve out of himself the divine superman: he was born for transcendence. Humanity is not enough, it is only a strong stepping stone; the need of the world is a superhuman perfection of what the world can be, the goal of consciousness is divinity. The inmost need of man is not to perfect his humanity, but to be greater than himself, to be more than man, to be divine, even to be the Divine.” Essays Divine and Human
"Man is God hiding himself from Nature so that he may possess her by struggle, insistence, violence and surprise. God is universal and transcendent Man hiding himself from his own individuality in the human being.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
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. 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 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.
"Next it [the Gita] 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.” Essays on the Gita
"Nor can the human confusion of values which obliterates the distinction between spiritual and moral and even claims that the moral is the only true spiritual element in our nature be of any use to us; for ethics is a mental control, and the limited erring mind is not and cannot be the free and ever-luminous spirit.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "Nothing can be destroyed for all is He who is for ever.” Essays Divine and Human*
"Nothing can happen without the presence and support of the Divine, for Nature or Prakriti is the Divine Force and it is this that works out things, but it works them out according to the nature and through or with the will of each man which is full of ignorance — that goes on until men turn to the Divine and become conscious of Him and united with Him. Then only can it be said that all begins to be done in him by the direct Will of the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
"Of course, that is the real fact — death is only a shedding of the body, not a cessation of the personal existence. A man is not dead because he goes into another country and changes his clothes to suit that climate.” Letters on Yoga
". . . One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection.” On Himself
opportunities, favourable conditions, for the easier performance of any action.
"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
"O son of Immortality, live not thou according to Nature, but according to God; and compel her also to live according to the deity within thee.” Essays Divine and Human*
::: "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
"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*
::: **"See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks. Believe that all falsehood is truth in the making or truth in the breaking, all failure an effectuality concealed, all weakness strength hiding itself from its own vision, all pain a secret & violent ecstasy.” Essays Divine and Human
"Soma is the Gandharva, the Lord of the hosts of delight, and guards the true seat of the Deva, the level or plane of the Ananda; gandharva itthâ padam asya rakshati. He is the Supreme, standing out from all other beings and over them, other than they and wonderful, adbhuta, and as the supreme and transcendent, present in the worlds but exceeding them, he protects in those worlds the births of the gods, pâti devânâm janimâni adbhutah. The ‘births of the gods" is a common phrase in the Veda by which is meant the manifestation of the divine principles in the cosmos and especially the formation of the godhead in its manifold forms in the human being.” The Secret of the Veda
". . . spiritual freedom is not the egoistic assertion of our separate mind and life but obedience to the Divine Truth in ourself and our members and in all around us.” The Human Cycle
"Spirituality respects the freedom of the human soul, because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; and the deepest meaning of freedom is the power to expand and grow towards perfection by the law of one"s own nature, dharma.” The Human Cycle
*Sri Aurobindo: "Action is the first power of life. Nature begins with force and its works which, once conscious in man, become will and its achievements; therefore it is that by turning his action Godwards the life of man best and most surely begins to become divine.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "A life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As there are Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood and support it and work for its victory; as there are powers whose life is intimately bound up with the existence, the idea and the impulse of Good, so there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and the government of the life of man; — this was the significance of the contest between the Vedic Gods and their opponents, sons of Darkness and Division, figured in a later tradition as Titan and Giant and Demon, Asura, Rakshasa, Pisacha; the same tradition is found in the Zoroastrian Double Principle and the later Semitic opposition of God and his Angels on the one side and Satan and his hosts on the other, — invisible Personalities and Powers that draw man to the divine Light and Truth and Good or lure him into subjection to the undivine principle of Darkness and Falsehood and Evil.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Atheism is the shadow or dark side of the highest perception of God.” *Essays Divine and Human
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: "But if the individual is a persistent reality, an eternal portion or power of the Eternal, if his growth of consciousness is the means by which the Spirit in things discloses its being, the cosmos reveals itself as a conditioned manifestation of the play of the eternal One in the being of Sachchidananda with the eternal Many.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "But what do we mean by the individual? What we usually call by that name is a natural ego, a device of Nature which holds together her action in the mind and body. This ego has to be extinguished, otherwise there is no complete liberation possible; but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his manifestation as the Many. This is the true spiritual individual which appears in its complete truth when we get rid of the ego and our false separative sense of individuality, realise our oneness with the transcendent and cosmic Divine and with all beings.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Chance is not *in this universe; the idea of illusion is itself an illusion. There was never illusion yet in the human mind that was not the concealing [?shape] and disfigurement of a truth.” Essays Divine and Human
*Sri Aurobindo: "Creation is not a making of something out of nothing or of one thing out of another, but a self-projection of Brahman into the conditions of Space and Time. Creation is not a making, but a becoming in terms and forms of conscious existence.” The Upanishads*
*Sri Aurobindo: "Dawn always means an opening of some kind — the coming of something that is not yet fully there.” Letters on Yoga ::: "As the Sun is image and godhead of the golden Light of the divine Truth, so Dawn is image and godhead of the opening out of the supreme illumination on the night of our human ignorance. Dawn daughter of Heaven and Night her sister are obverse and reverse sides of the same eternal Infinite.” The Secret of the Veda
Sri Aurobindo: " . . . Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Faith is a necessary means for arriving at realisation, because we are ignorant and do not yet know that which we are seeking to realise; faith is indeed knowledge giving the ignorance an intimation of itself previous to its own manifestation, it is the gleam sent before by the yet unrisen Sun. When the Sun shall rise, there will be no longer any need of the gleam.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Finally, we have the goddess Dakshina who may well be a female form of Daksha, himself a god and afterwards in the Purana one of the Prajapatis, the original progenitors, — we have Dakshina associated with the manifestation of knowledge and sometimes almost identified with Usha, the divine Dawn, who is the bringer of illumination. I shall suggest that Dakshina like the more famous Ila, Saraswati and Sarama, is one of four goddesses representing the four faculties of the Ritam or Truth-consciousness, — Ila representing truth-vision or revelation, Saraswati truth-audition, inspiration, the divine word, Sarama intuition, Dakshina the separative intuitional discrimination.” *The Secret of the Veda
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . for each individual is in himself the Eternal who has assumed name and form and supports through him the experiences of life turning on an ever-circling wheel of birth in the manifestation. The wheel is kept in motion by the desire of the individual, which becomes the effective cause of rebirth and by the mind"s turning away from the knowledge of the eternal self to the preoccupations of the temporal becoming.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Form is the basic means of manifestation and without it it may be said that the manifestation of anything is not complete. Even if the Formless logically precedes Form, yet it is not illogical to assume that in the Formless, Form is inherent and already existent in a mystic latency, otherwise how could it be manifested?” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "God and Man, World and Beyond-world become one when they know each other. Their division is the cause of ignorance as ignorance is the cause of suffering.” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Hatred is the sign of a secret attraction that is eager to flee from itself and furious to deny its own existence. That too is God"s play in His creature.” *Essays Divine and Human
Sri Aurobindo: "He is the Cosmic Spirit and all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever. No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Hell and heaven are often imaginary states of the soul or rather of the vital which it constructs about it after its passing. What is meant by hell is a painful passage through the vital or lingering there, as for instance, in many cases of suicide where one remains surrounded by the forces of suffering and turmoil created by this unnatural and violent exit. There are, of course, also worlds of mind and vital worlds which are penetrated with joyful or dark experiences. One may pass through these as the result of things formed in the nature which create the necessary affinities, but the idea of reward or retribution is a crude and vulgar conception which is a mere popular error.” 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: "Human life is itself only a term in a graded series, through which the secret Spirit in the universe develops gradually his purpose and works it out finally through the enlarging and ascending individual soul-consciousness in the body. This ascent can only take place by rebirth within the ascending order; an individual visit coming across it and progressing on some other line elsewhere could not fit into the system of this evolutionary existence.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . *ideals and idealists are necessary; ideals are the savour and sap of life, idealists the most powerful diviners and assistants of its purposes.” The Human Cycle
*Sri Aurobindo: "If thou think defeat is the end of thee, then go not forth to fight, even though thou be the stronger. For Fate is not purchased by any man nor is Power bound over to her possessors. But defeat is not the end, it is only a gate or a beginning.” Essays Human and Divine*
Sri Aurobindo: "In considering the action of the Infinite we have to avoid the error of the disciple who thought of himself as the Brahman, refused to obey the warning of the elephant-driver to budge ::: from the narrow path and was taken up by the elephant"s trunk and removed out of the way; ‘You are no doubt the Brahman," said the master to his bewildered disciple, ‘but why did you not obey the driver Brahman and get out of the path of the elephant Brahman?"” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "In fact it [the world] is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence.” Letters on Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "In other words, ethics is a stage in evolution. That which is common to all stages is the urge of Sachchidananda towards self-expression. This urge is at first non-ethical, then infra-ethical in the animal, then in the intelligent animal even anti-ethical for it permits us to approve hurt done to others which we disapprove when done to ourselves. In this respect man even now is only half-ethical. And just as all below us is infra-ethical, so there may be that above us whither we shall eventually arrive, which is supra-ethical, has no need of ethics. The ethical impulse and attitude, so all-important to humanity, is a means by which it struggles out of the lower harmony and universality based upon inconscience and broken up by Life into individual discords towards a higher harmony and universality based upon conscient oneness with all existences. Arriving at that goal, this means will no longer be necessary or even possible, since the qualities and oppositions on which it depends will naturally dissolve and disappear in the final reconciliation.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Intelligence does not depend on the amount one has read, it is a quality of the mind. Study only gives it material for its work as life also does. There are people who do not know how to read and write who are more intelligent than many highly educated people and understand life and things better. On the other hand, a good intelligence can improve itself by reading because it gets more material to work on and grows by exercise and by having a wider range to move in. But book-knowledge by itself is not the real thing, it has to be used as a help to the intelligence but it is often only a help to stupidity or ignorance — ignorance because knowledge of facts is a poor thing if one cannot see their true significance.” 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: "It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the supreme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind"s highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Krishna is the Eternal"s Personality of Ananda; because [of] him all creation is possible, because of his play, because of his delight, because of his sweetness.” *Essays Divine and Human
*Sri Aurobindo: ". . . liberty is at once the condition of vigorous variation and the condition of self-finding.” The Human Cycle
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: "Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man; the mental being cannot by his own unaided force change himself into a supramental spirit. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptacle.” Essays Divine and Human
Sri Aurobindo: "Only those thoughts are true the opposite of which is also true in its own time and application; indisputable dogmas are the most dangerous kind of falsehoods.” Essays Divine and Human
Sri Aurobindo: "Our sense by its incapacity has invented darkness. In truth there is nothing but Light, only it is a power of light either above or below our poor human vision"s limited range.” *Essays Divine and Human
*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: ” See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks. Believe that all falsehood is truth in the making or truth in the breaking, all failure an effectuality concealed, all weakness strength hiding itself from its own vision, all pain a secret & violent ecstasy. If thou believest firmly & unweariedly, in the end thou wilt see & experience the All-true, Almighty & All-blissful.” Essays Divine and Human*
Sri Aurobindo: "The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.” Essays Divine and Human*
*Sri Aurobindo: ". . . the divine Ananda, the principle of Bliss [is that] from which, in the Vedic conception, the existence of Man, this mental being, is drawn. A secret Delight is the base of existence, its sustaining atmosphere and almost its substance. This Ananda is spoken of in the Taittiriya Upanishad as the ethereal atmosphere of bliss without which nothing could remain in being. In the Aitareya Upanishad Soma, as the lunar deity, is born from the sense-mind in the universal Purusha and, when man is produced, expresses himself again as sense-mentality in the human being. For delight is the raison d"être of sensation, or, we may say, sensation is an attempt to translate the secret delight of existence into the terms of physical consciousness.” The Secret of the Veda
Sri Aurobindo: "The Divinity in man dwells veiled in his spiritual centre; there can be no such thing as self-exceeding for man or a higher issue for his existence if there is not in him the reality of an eternal Self and Spirit.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The duality is a position taken up, a double status accepted for the operations of the self-manifestation of the being; but there is no eternal and fundamental separateness and dualism of Being and its Consciousness-Force, of the Soul and Nature.” *The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The earth is a material field of evolution. Mind and life, supermind, Sachchidananda are in principle involved there in the earth-consciousness; but only Matter is at first organized; then life descends from the life plane and gives shape and organization and activity to the life principle in Matter, creates the plant and animal; then mind descends from the mind plane, creating man. Now supermind is to descend so as to create a supramental race.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "The faith in the divine Shakti must be always at the back of our strength and when she becomes manifest, it must be or grow implicit and complete. There is nothing that is impossible to her who is the conscious Power and universal Goddess all-creative from eternity and armed with the Spirit"s omnipotence.” 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: "The idea is the realisation of a truth in Consciousness as the fact is its realisation in Power.” *The Supramental Manifestation
Sri Aurobindo: "The ordinary mind in man is not truly the thinking mind proper, it is a life-mind, a vital mind as we may call it, which has learned to think and even to reason but for its own ends and on its own lines, not on those of a true mind of knowledge.” The Human Cycle (footnote).
Sri Aurobindo: "The Purusha, the inner Self, no larger than the size of a man"s thumb.” *The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The timeless Spirit is not necessarily a blank; it may hold all in itself, but in essence, without reference to time or form or relation or circumstance, perhaps in an eternal unity. Eternity is the common term between Time and the Timeless Spirit. What is in the Timeless unmanifested, implied, essential, appears in Time in movement, or at least in design and relation, in result and circumstance. These two then are the same Eternity or the same Eternal in a double status; they are a twofold status of being and consciousness, one an eternity of immobile status, the other an eternity of motion in status.” The Life Divine ::: "The spiritual fullness of the being is eternity; . . . ” The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The typal worlds do not change. In his own world a god is always a god, the Asura always an Asura, the demon always a demon. To change they must either migrate into an evolutionary body or else die entirely to themselves that they may be new born into other Nature.” Essays Divine and Human*
Sri Aurobindo: "The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The word ‘descend" has various meanings according to the context — I used it here in the sense of the psychic being coming down into the human consciousness and body ready for it.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "The word ‘ghost" as used in popular parlance covers an enormous number of distinct phenomena which have no necessary connection with each other. To name a few only: ::: An actual contact with the soul of a human being in its subtle body and transcribed to our mind by the appearance of an image or the hearing of a voice.
Sri Aurobindo: "This truth of Karma has been always recognised in the East in one form or else in another; but to the Buddhists belongs the credit of having given to it the clearest and fullest universal enunciation and the most insistent importance. In the West too the idea has constantly recurred, but in external, in fragmentary glimpses, as the recognition of a pragmatic truth of experience, and mostly as an ordered ethical law or fatality set over against the self-will and strength of man: but it was clouded over by other ideas inconsistent with any reign of law, vague ideas of some superior caprice or of some divine jealousy, — that was a notion of the Greeks, — a blind Fate or inscrutable Necessity, Ananke, or, later, the mysterious ways of an arbitrary, though no doubt an all-wise Providence.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga *Ananke"s.
Sri Aurobindo: "Very usually, altruism is only the sublimest form of selfishness.” *Essays Divine and Human
Sri Aurobindo: "We mean by the Absolute something greater than ourselves, greater than the cosmos which we live in, the supreme reality of that transcendent Being which we call God, something without which all that we see or are conscious of as existing, could not have been, could not for a moment remain in existence. Indian thought calls it Brahman, European thought the Absolute because it is a self-existent which is absolved of all bondage to relativities . . . The Absolute is for us the Ineffable.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "What is meant by hell is a painful passage through the vital or lingering there, as for instance, in many cases of suicide where one remains surrounded by the forces of suffering and turmoil created by this unnatural and violent exit.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . wrong will and falsehood of the steps, . . . separative egoism inflicting by its ignorance and separate contrary will harm on oneself or harm on others, self-driven to a wrong dealing with one"s own soul, mind, life or body or a wrong dealing with the soul, mind, life, body of others, . . . is the practical sense of all human evil.” *The Life Divine
"The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "The ancient Vedanta presents us with . . . the conception and experience of Brahman as the one universal and essential fact and of the nature of Brahman as Sachchidananda [Existence, Consciousness, Bliss]. In this view the essence of all life is the movement of a universal and immortal existence, the essence of all sensation and emotion is the play of a universal and self-existent delight in being, the essence of all thought and perception is the radiation of a universal and all-pervading truth, the essence of all activity is the progression of a universal and self-effecting good.” The Life Divine
"The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.” The Life Divine
"The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man"s real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.” The Life Divine
"The Atheist is God playing at hide & seek with Himself; . . . .” Essays Divine and Human*
"The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in the human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by moulding its principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into the divine. The law, the Dharma which the Avatar establishes is given for that purpose chiefly; the Christ, Krishna, Buddha stands in its centre as the gate, he makes through himself the way men shall follow.” Essays on the Gita
"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 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 Cross is in Yoga the symbol of the soul & nature in their strong & perfect union, but because of our fall into the impurities of ignorance it has become the symbol of suffering and purification.” Essays Divine and Human*
"The Divine Force concealed in the subconscient is that which has originated and built up the worlds. At the other end in the superconscient it reveals itself as the Divine Being, Lord and Knower who has manifested Himself out of the Brahman.” The Upanishads ::: See also divine Force for additional definitions.
"The Divine Grace is there ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the Law of Ignorance into the Law of Light, and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers.” Letters on Yoga
". . . the Divine is formless and nameless, but by that very reason capable of manifesting all possible names and shapes of being.” The Life Divine
". . . the Divine is in his essence infinite and his manifestation too is multitudinously infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"The divinisation of the nature of which we speak is a metamorphosis, not a mere growth into some kind of super-humanity, but a change from the falsehood of our ignorant nature into the truth of God-nature.” The Hour of God
"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 essential cause and condition of universal existence is the Lord, Ishwara or Purusha, manifesting and occupying individual and universal forms.” *The Life Divine
"The force at work in us must be the manifest divine Shakti, the supreme or the universal Force unveiled in the liberated individual being, . . . .” The Synthesis of Yoga
"The form is the manifestation or appearance, the idea is the truth. The form is phenomenon, the idea is reality.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"The form of that which is in Time is or appears to be evanescent, but the self, the substance, the being that takes shape in that form is eternal and is one self, one substance, one being with all that is, all that was, all that shall be. But even the form is in itself eternal and not temporal, but it exists for ever in possibility, in power, in consciousness in the Eternal.” Essays Divine and Human
"The freedom of the Gita is that of the freeman, the true freedom of the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity. Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in the Divine; he is the privileged child of the mansion, bâlavat, who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of the Perfect, the All-blissful, the All-loving, the All-beautiful. The kingdom which he enjoys, râjyam samrddham, is a sweet and happy dominion of which it may be said, in the pregnant phrase of the Greek thinker, ``The kingdom is of the child."" Essays on the Gita
"The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human workings in man raise him to the truth and the immortality.” The Secret of the Veda
::: "The Gods, as has already been said, are in origin and essence permanent Emanations of the Divine put forth from the Supreme by the Transcendent Mother, the Adya Shakti; in their cosmic action they are Powers and Personalities of the Divine each with his independent cosmic standing, function and work in the universe. They are not impersonal entities but cosmic Personalities, although they can and do ordinarily veil themselves behind the movement of impersonal forces.” Letters on Yoga
"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 of man is nearer to the Truth than his intelligence.” *The Renaissance in India
the human race; human beings collectively; mankind.
::: "The human vital and physical external nature resist to the very end, but if the soul has once heard the call, it arrives, sooner or later.” Letters on Yoga
"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 ideation of the gnosis is radiating light-stuff of the consciousness of the eternal Existence; each ray is a truth. The will in the gnosis is a conscious force of eternal knowledge; it throws the consciousness and substance of being into infallible forms of truth-power, forms that embody the idea and make it faultlessly effective, and it works out each truth-power and each truth-form spontaneously and rightly according to its nature. Because it carries this creative force of the divine Idea, the Sun, the lord and symbol of the gnosis, is described in the Veda as the Light which is the father of all things, Surya Savitri, the Wisdom-Luminous who is the bringer-out into manifest existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
the Immanent.
"The individual is in nature one expression of the universal Being, in spirit an emanation of the Transcendence. For if he finds his self, he finds too that his own true self is not this natural personality, this created individuality, but is a universal being in its relations with others and with Nature and in its upward term a portion or the living front of a supreme transcendental Spirit.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The Ineffable: *Sri Aurobindo: "It is this essential indeterminability of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities, the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of activities, the Non-being, the Ineffable and the Unknowable. On the other side it is the essence and source of all determinations, and this dynamic essentiality manifests to us through the fundamental affirming positives in which the Absolute equally meets us; for it is the Self that becomes all things, the Saguna Brahman, the Eternal with infinite qualities, the One who is the Many, the infinite Person who is the source and foundation of all persons and personalities, the Lord of creation, the Word, the Master of all works and action; it is that which being known all is known: these affirmatives correspond to those negatives. For it is not possible in a supramental cognition to split asunder the two sides of the One Existence, — even to speak of them as sides is excessive, for they are in each other, their co-existence or one-existence is eternal and their powers sustaining each other found the self-manifestation of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
"The Infinite creates and is Brahma.” The Renaissance in India ::: "Brahman is not only the cause and supporting power and indwelling principle of the universe, he is also its material and its sole material. Matter also is Brahman and it is nothing other than or different from Brahman.” The Life Divine*
"The inner Divinity is the eternal Avatar in man; the human manifestation is its sign and development in the external world.” Essays on the Gita
"The inner vision is an open door on higher planes of consciousness beyond the physical mind which gives room for a wider truth and experience to enter and act upon the mind. It is not the only or the most important door, but it is one which comes readiest to very many if not most and can be a very powerful help.” Letters on Yoga
". . . the inner vital or life-self, . . . .” Essays Human and Divine*
::: "The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; he is Space and all that is in Space; he is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe.” The Life Divine*
"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 lower nature is ignorant and undivine, not in itself hostile but shut to the Light and Truth. The hostile forces are anti-divine, not merely undivine; they make use of the lower nature, pervert it, fill it with distorted movements and by that means influence man and even try to enter and possess or at least entirely control him.” *Letters on Yoga
"The message of the Gita is the gospel of the Divinity in man who by force of an increasing union unfolds himself out of the veil of the lower Nature, reveals to the human soul his cosmic spirit, reveals his absolute transcendences, reveals himself in man and in all beings. The potential outcome here of this union, this divine Yoga, man growing towards the Godhead, the Godhead manifest in the human soul and to the inner human vision, is our liberation from limited ego and our elevation to the higher nature of a divine humanity.” Essays on the Gita ::: *Divinity"s.
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: "And this Vibration (which I feel and see) gives the feeling of a fire. That"s probably what the Vedic Rishis translated as the "Flame” – in the human consciousness, in man, in Matter. They always spoke of a "Flame.” It is indeed a vibration with the intensity of a higher fire. Mother"s Agenda 25 March 1964.
The Mother: "In the physical world, of all things it is beauty that expresses best the Divine. the physical world is the world of form and the perfection of form is beauty. Beauty interprets, expresses, manifests the Eternal. Its role is to put all manifested nature in contact with the Eternal through the perfection of form, through harmony and a sense of the ideal which uplifts and leads towards something higher. On Education, MCW Vol. 12.
::: The Mother: "Krishna represents both the universal Godhead and the immanent Godhead, he whom one can meet within one"s being and in all that constitutes the manifested world.
The Mother: "Man is the intermediary being between what is and what is to be realised.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15. ::: *man"s
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: "With the Divine"s Love is the power of Transformation. It has this power because it is for the sake of Transformation that it has given itself to the world and manifested everywhere. Not only into man but into all the atoms of Matter it has infused itself in order to bring the world back to the original Truth. The moment you open to it, you also receive its power of Transformation.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15.
" The natural attitude of the psychic being is to feel itself as the Child, the Son of God, the Bhakta; it is a portion of the Divine, one in essence, but in the dynamics of the manifestation there is always even in identity a difference.” Letters on Yoga
"The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine. Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and the ineffable Presence; containing or calling the Truths that have to be manifested, she brings them down from the Mystery in which they were hidden into the light of her infinite consciousness and gives them a form of force in her omnipotent power and her boundless life and a body in the universe.” The Mother
"The other parts of our natural composition are not only mutable but perishable; but the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame.” *The Life Divine
::: "The perfect cosmic vision & cosmic sentiment is the cure of all error & suffering; but most men succeed only in enlarging the range of their ego.” Essays Divine and Human
"There are lesser & larger eternities, for eternity is a term of the soul & can exist in Time as well as exceeding it.” Essays Divine and Human*
"There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that dies and the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go out of existence, though it may change the forms through which it appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is and cannot cease to be. This opposition of is and is not, this balance of being and becoming which is the mind"s view of existence, finds its end in the realisation of the soul as the one imperishable self by whom all this universe has been extended. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new; and what is there in this to grieve at and recoil and shrink? This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body. Who can slay the immortal spirit? Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry. Eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested like the body, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed by the thought, but greater than all mind, not capable of change and modification like the life and its organs and their objects, but beyond the changes of mind and life and body, it is yet the Reality which all these strive to figure.” Essays on the Gita
"There results an integral vision of the Divine Existent at once as the transcendent Reality, supracosmic origin of cosmos, as the impersonal Self of all things, calm continent of the cosmos, and as the immanent Divinity in all beings, personalities, objects, powers and qualities, the Immanent who is the constituent self, the effective nature and the inward and outward becoming of all existences.” Essays on the Gita*
"The Son of God born as the Son of man ::: Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead"s debt,”
"The sunlit path can only be followed if the psychic is constantly or usually in front or if one has a natural spirit of faith and surrender or a face turned habitually towards the sun or psychic predisposition (e.g. a faith in one"s spiritual destiny) or, if one has acquired the psychic turn. That does not mean that the sunlit man has no difficulties; he may have many, but he regards them cheerfully as all in the day's work''. If he gets a bad beating, he is capable of saying,Well, that was a queer go but the Divine is evidently in a queer mood and if that is his way of doing things, it must be the right one; I am surely a still queerer fellow myself and that, I suppose, was the only means of putting me right."" Letters on Yoga
::: ". . . the true individual is not the ego, but the divine individuality which is through our evolution preparing to emerge in us. . . .” The Human Cycle
"This eternity is not of Time; the eternity of Time is an extension in movement of the Timeless.” Essays Divine and Human
"This Godhead is one in all things that are, the self who lives in all and the self in whom all live and move; therefore man has to discover his spiritual unity with all creatures, to see all in the self and the self in all beings, even to see all things and creatures as himself, âtmaupamyena sarvatra, and accordingly think, feel and act in all his mind, will and living. This Godhead is the origin of all that is here or elsewhere and by his Nature he has become all these innumerable existences, abhût sarvâni bhûtâni; therefore man has to see and adore the One in all things animate and inanimate, to worship the manifestation in sun and star and flower, in man and every living creature, in the forms and forces, qualities and powers of Nature, vâsudevah sarvam iti.” Essays on the Gita ::: *godhead, godheads, godhead"s.
"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*
"Though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at his highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god, is something so much greater than what he is that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to the animal. This means a great and arduous labour of growth before him, but also a splendid crown of his race and his victory. A kingdom is offered to him beside which his present triumphs in the realms of mind or over external Nature will appear only as a rough hint and a poor beginning. The Human Cycle
::: "To be free from all preference and receive joyfully whatever comes from the Divine Will is not possible at first for any human being. What one should have at first is the constant idea that what the Divine wills is always for the best even when the mind does not see how it is so, . . . .” Letters on Yoga*
"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.” The Human Cycle
"To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote "His anger climbed against me in a stream", it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the Guest-House, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. What is to be done under these circumstances? The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer.” Letters on Savitri
::: "To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
"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
"Vitality means life-force — wherever there is life, in plant or animal or man, there is life-force — without the vital there can be no life in matter and no living action. The vital is a necessary force and nothing can be done or created in the bodily existence, if the vital is not there as an instrument.” Letters on Yoga*
"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
"What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.” Essays Divine and Human
"What we call Chance is a play of the possibilities of the Infinite; . . . .” Essays Divine and Human*
"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.
::: "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 Frank Zappa
1 Franklin D. Roosevelt
1 Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king
1 Evagrius of Pontus
1 Ernest Hemingway
1 Epistle to Diognetus
1 E O Wilson
1 Emil Cioran
1 Emerald Tablets of Thoth
1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1 Eliphas Levi
1 Eleanor Roosevelt
1 Edgar Cayce
1 Edgar Allan Poe
1 Dylan Thomas
1 Drucker
1 Dhammapada
1 Desiderius Erasmus
1 Demosthenes
1 Democritus
1 Deepak Chopra
1 Debbie Millman
1 David
1 Darqawi
1 Dante
1 Daniel Goleman
1 Dalai Lama
1 Crosby
1 Confueins
1 Chinese Proverb
1 Chi-King
1 Charles Williams
1 Charles Darwin
1 Charles Bukowski
1 Charles Baudelaire
1 Cervantes
1 Carlyle
1 Carl Sagan
1 Caesarius of Arles
1 Buddhist Texts
1 Buddhist Proverb
1 Buddhist Maxims
1 Buddhist Maxim
1 Buckminster Fuller
1 Brian Tracy
1 Brian Spellman
1 Boncho
1 Bob Marley
1 Bl. Humbert of Romans
1 Bhagavat Purana
1 Bhagavad Gita
1 Benoît Mandelbrot
1 Beethoven
1 Bauvard
1 Avesta: Vendidad
1 Avadhut Gita
1 Attar of Nishapur
1 Attack On Titan
1 Asclepius
1 Arthur Schopenauer
1 Arthur Lovejoy
1 Aristotle?
1 Apollonius of Tyana
1 Antoine the Healer; Revelations
1 Antoine the Healer: "Revelations"
1 Anita Krizzan
1 Angelus Silesius
1 Anandamayi Ma
1 Alice Hoffman
1 Alfred Korzybski
1 Aleksandr Solzlhenitsyn
1 Aleister Crowley
1 Aldous Huxley
1 Albert Camus
1 Saint Teresa of Avila
1 Plotinus
1 Leonardo da Vinci
1 Lao Tzu
1 Kobayashi Issa
1 Jorge Luis Borges
1 Ibn Arabi
1 Homer Simpson
1 Aristophanes
1 Aleister Crowley
1 Abraham Lincoln
1 Abd al-Rahman al-Majdhüb
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
47 Neil Gaiman
30 Anonymous
28 Gayle Forman
24 Herman Melville
20 Walt Whitman
20 Sri Ramana Maharshi
13 Andr Aciman
12 Salman Rushdie
10 William Goldman
10 Mark Manson
10 Gordon Korman
9 Lisa McMann
8 John Green
8 Amie Kaufman
7 Plato
7 Marilyn Manson
7 Lev Grossman
7 Hermann Hesse
7 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
6 William Shakespeare
1:No man hath seen God at any time. ~ John, #KEYS
2:Each man suffers his own destiny. ~ Virgil, #KEYS
3:Man only has what he strives for. ~ Darqawi, #KEYS
4:An honest man is always a child.
~ Socrates,#KEYS
5:Walking is man's best medicine.
~ Hippocrates,#KEYS
6:Adversity introduces a man to himself." ~ Unknown, #KEYS
7:Every man is the son of his own works. ~ Cervantes, #KEYS
8:This therefore is the highest state of man. ~ Lao Tzu, #KEYS
9:It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.
~ Diogenes,#KEYS
10:The fool wonders, the wise man asks." ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #KEYS
11:The fool wonders, the wise man asks.
~ Benjamin Disraeli,#KEYS
12:The world can never own a man who wants nothing. ~ Wu Hsin, #KEYS
13:Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. ~ Carl Jung, #KEYS
14:A contented man is never disappointed. ~ Tao Te Ching, ch.44, #KEYS
15:A wise man once said nothing." ~ Tanya Masse Source doubtful:, #KEYS
16:Every man's memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Huxley, #KEYS
17:Thou canst not then be false to any man. ~ William Shakespeare, #KEYS
18:He was a wise man who invented God. ~ Plato, #KEYS
19:You can knock on a deaf man's door forever. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, #KEYS
20:Judge a man by his Questions, Rather then his Answer. ~ Voltaire, #KEYS
21:Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.
~ Socrates,#KEYS
22:A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
23:God is a dark night to man in this life. ~ Saint John of the Cross, #KEYS
24:No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience. ~ John Locke, #KEYS
25:A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.
~ Marcus Aurelius,#KEYS
26:Man is on earth as in an egg. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
27:A man's character is his fate. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
28:A prosperous man is never sure that he is loved for himself. ~ Lucan, #KEYS
29:A slave is but half a man. ~ Aristophanes, #KEYS
30:The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day. ~ John Milton, #KEYS
31:A wise man's questions contain half the answer. ~ Solomon Ibn Gabirol, #KEYS
32:The man who knows how will always have a job.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#KEYS
33:A man who governs his passions is master of his world. ~ Saint Dominic, #KEYS
34:It is conscious life that constitutes a man's whole being. ~ Asclepius, #KEYS
35:Let a man conquer anger by love, let him subdue evil by good. ~ Buddha, #KEYS
36:Man must use what he has, not hope for what is not. ~ George Gurdjieff, #KEYS
37:A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." ~ Francis Bacon, #KEYS
38:A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. ~ Oscar Wilde, #KEYS
39:Remember no man is really defeated unless he is discouraged. ~ Bruce Lee, #KEYS
40:and the conflict is eternal between a man's self and God. ~ William Blake, #KEYS
41:Concentration is the root of all the higher abilities in man. ~ Bruce Lee, #KEYS
42:In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. ~ Desiderius Erasmus, #KEYS
43:A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #KEYS
44:Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one. ~ Martin Heidegger, #KEYS
45:For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, [T5],#KEYS
46:In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
~ Diogenes,#KEYS
47:Man has become disconnected from his faith in perceptions. ~ Claudio Naranjo, #KEYS
48:The New Man Jesus Christ is Son of man and Son of God. ~ Ignatius of Antioch, #KEYS
49:Even if a man has no natural ability, he can be a warrior. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
50:Man's greatest wisdom is to choose his obsession well.
~ Eliphas Levi, [T5],#KEYS
51:The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. ~ Bruce Lee, #KEYS
52:But he who knows, and knows that he knows, is a wise man-follow him." ~ Sufism, #KEYS
53:If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed. ~ C.S. Lewis, #KEYS
54:No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. ~ C.S. Lewis #KEYS
55:No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words." ~ Roger Zelazny, #KEYS
56:The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus." ~ Bruce Lee, #KEYS
57:The will is what man has as his unique possession. ~ Saint Joseph of Cupertino, #KEYS
58:Whatever happens on the earth-man must share the responsibility. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
59:What is possible for individual man is impossible for the masses." ~ Gurdjieff, #KEYS
60:You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension. ~ Nikola Tesla, #KEYS
61:A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer,#KEYS
62:If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on. ~ Kant , #KEYS
63:The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #KEYS
64:The test of a man is: does he bear apples? Does he bear fruit? ~ Abraham Maslow, #KEYS
65:Is there a single man who can see what the Sage cannot even conceive? ~ Tseu-tse, #KEYS
66:Man believes either in a God or in an idol. ~ Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, #KEYS
67:A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. ~ John F. Kennedy, #KEYS
68:In the highest level a man has the look of knowing nothing . ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #KEYS
69:The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. ~ Confucius, #KEYS
70:Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
71:Numberless are the worlds wonders, but none more wonderful than man.
~ Sophocles,#KEYS
72:Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?" ~ Zhuangzi, #KEYS
73:Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.
~ Socrates,#KEYS
74:People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book. ~ Malcolm X #KEYS
75:Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value. ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
76:Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man. ~ Aristotle? #KEYS
77:The end and the beginning both grow sweet when a god urges on a man's work. ~ Pindar, #KEYS
78:A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief. ~ John Steinbeck, #KEYS
79:Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun." ~ Alan Watts, #KEYS
80:Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
81:As a man thinketh in his heart so shall he be
~ Anonymous, The Bible, Proverbs, 23:7,#KEYS
82:Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. ~ Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man #KEYS
83:It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
84:It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.
~ Blaise Pascal,#KEYS
85:Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
~ Alan Watts,#KEYS
86:One man is worth thousand if he is extraordinary ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
87:The present is the only reality of wich a man can truly be deprived. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
88:Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. ~ Mark Twain, #KEYS
89:For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind.
~ Geraldine Brooks,#KEYS
90:Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#KEYS
91:The soul bound is man; free, it is God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
92:What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
~ Abraham Maslow,#KEYS
93:Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough. ~ William Shakespeare, The Tempest#KEYS
94:No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity ~ Seneca, #KEYS
95:No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #KEYS
96:No man liveth to himself. ~ St. Paul, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
97:Pride alienates man from heaven, humility unites us to heaven. ~ Saint Bridget of Sweden, #KEYS
98:the uniting of man and God, the two sides of the transformation. Effort and Grace.
~ ?,#KEYS
99:Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Job, 5 7, #KEYS
100:Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
~ Michel de Montaigne,#KEYS
101:It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. ~ Winston Churchill, #KEYS
102:It is better for a man to confess his sins than to harden his heart. ~ Pope St. Clement I, #KEYS
103:Man is a small universe. ~ Democritus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
104:Man suffers through lack of faith in God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
105:No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus]. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
106:A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance." ~ Gregory Bateson, #KEYS
107:Beware the man of a single book. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
108:For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
109:It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor." ~ Seneca, #KEYS
110:It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman." ~ Pope St. John Paul II, #KEYS
111:I don't want to be a genius, I have enough problems just trying to be a man. ~ Albert Camus, #KEYS
112:A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman - the idea of her. ~ Bauvard, #KEYS
113:No man hath seen God at any time. ~ John, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
114:In working for life, a man works for death, or rather, for immortality." ~ George Gurdjieff -, #KEYS
115:Let no man think that he is loved by any who loveth none. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
116:Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
117:The man least dependent upon the morrow goes to meet the morrow most cheerfully.
~ Epicurus,#KEYS
118:The naked woman's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man. ~ William Blake, #KEYS
119:What a man loves, a man is. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
120:I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
~ Oscar Wilde,#KEYS
121:The Guru is the mediator. He takes man to God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
122:There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing. ~ David, Prometheus, Aliens: Covenant, #KEYS
123:To me one man is worth ten thousand if he is first-rate. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
124:Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,#KEYS
125:The worst pain a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing ~ Herodotus, #KEYS
126:A fool is known by his speech; and a wise man by silence." ~ Pythagoras, #KEYS
127:As Meander says, "For our mind is God;" and as Heraclitus, "Man's genius is a deity." ~ Plutarch, #KEYS
128:Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
~ Albert Einstein,#KEYS
129:Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. ~ Mark Twain, #KEYS
130:Faith is a dark night for man, but in this very way it gives him light. ~ Saint John of the Cross, #KEYS
131:No man is free who is not master of himself.
~ Epictetus, [T5],#KEYS
132:The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him. ~ Arthur Schopenauer, #KEYS
133:Beware of a man of one book. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
134:Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
~ Rabindranath Tagore,#KEYS
135:Every man possesses the Buddha-nature. Do not demean yourselves. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
136:If any man hopes to do a deed without God's knowledge, he errs. ~ Pindar, Olympian Odes, I, l. 104, #KEYS
137:Man's first duty is to conquer fear. ~ Carlyle, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
138:No man can serve two masters. ~ Sankhya Karika, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
139:The righteous man is always active. ~ Chi-King, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
140:A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
141:It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Psalms, 118:8, #KEYS
142:Ecclesiastes shows that man without God is in total ignorance and inevitable misery. ~ Blaise Pascal, #KEYS
143:Every man has in himself the most dangerous traitor of all. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, [T5], #KEYS
144:The biggest coward is a man who awakens a woman's love with no intention of loving her. ~ Bob Marley, #KEYS
145:The good man remains calm and serene. ~ Chi-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
146:The heart of man is, so to speak, the paradise of God." ~ Saint Alphonsus Marie Liguori, (1696-1787), #KEYS
147:A man needs a little madness, or else... he never dares cut the rope and be free. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, #KEYS
148:A monk asked Master Haryo, What is the way? Haryo said, An open-eyed man falling into the well.
~ ?,#KEYS
149:Blessed is the man who can love every man equally. ~ Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Charity 1.17, #KEYS
150:If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #KEYS
151:If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson #KEYS
152:a greater degree than a man is ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.93.3)., #KEYS
153:A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him. " ~ Aleksandr Solzlhenitsyn, #KEYS
154:The glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God. ~ Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, #KEYS
155:The reaction of a mentality headed for a fall, is only too typical of man in transition. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
156:True appreciation of his own value will make a man really indifferent to insult. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #KEYS
157:A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." ~ George A. Moore, #KEYS
158:Education worthy of the name is essentially education of character. ~ Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, #KEYS
159:What is a man? A mortal God. What then is a God? An immortal man. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
160:How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden #KEYS
161:Know that the greatest service that man can offer to God is to help convert souls." ~ Saint Rose of Lima, #KEYS
162:Man's salvation is from grace ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.19.4ad3)., #KEYS
163:The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man. ~ G K Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity, #KEYS
164:The saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The sage is a man who rids himself of his ego." ~ Wei Wu Wei, #KEYS
165:A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
166:A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
~ Bruce Lee,#KEYS
167:For the man who is beautiful is beautiful to see but the good man will at once also beautiful be ~ Sappho, #KEYS
168:The man of taste will read only what is good; but the statesman will permit both bad and good. ~ Voltaire, #KEYS
169:The soul bound is man; free, it is God. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
170:We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. ~ C S Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943), #KEYS
171:Every man is divine and strong in his real nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
172:Hatred of God is man's worst sin ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.34.2)., #KEYS
173:O seeing Flame, thou carriest man of the crooked ways into the abiding truth and the knowledge. ~ Rig Veda, #KEYS
174:There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight ~ Ezra Pound #KEYS
175:The soul of man is the mirror of the world. ~ Leibnitz, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
176:The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
177:A fine quotation is a diamond in the hand of a man of wit and a pebble in the hand of a fool. ~ Joseph Roux, #KEYS
178:If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. ~ William Blake, #KEYS
179:The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. ~ Carl Jung, #KEYS
180:The perfect man does not hunt after wealth. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
181:The superior man is distressed by his want of ability. ~ Confucius, Analects, 15:18, #KEYS
182:Whatever a man does, good or evil, comes back to him someday. And he pays for everything. ~ Valmiki Jayanti, #KEYS
183:Man is in the process of changing to forms of light that are not of this world.
~ Emerald Tablets of Thoth,#KEYS
184:The charm of a man is in his kindness. ~ Proverbs XII 22, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
185:There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
~ William James,#KEYS
186:A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind." ~ John Neal, #KEYS
187:A wise man among the ignorant is as a beautiful girl in the company of blind men. ~ Saadi, #KEYS
188:Blessed is the man that endureth temptation. ~ James I 12, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
189:Man is divine so long as he is in communion with the Eternal. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
190:No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning #KEYS
191:Poetic Knowledge is as natural to the spirit of man as the return of the bird to his nest. ~ Jacques Maritain, #KEYS
192:Why did Jordan Peterson cross the road?
The answer isn't obvious. It's no joke man. ~ Reddit, hardlygospel,#KEYS
193:All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #KEYS
194:All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. ~ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, #KEYS
195:Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go. ~ G. J. Gurdjieff, #KEYS
196:To every man is given a key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.
~ Buddhist Proverb,#KEYS
197:When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has, the greater is his confusion. ~ Herbert Spencer #KEYS
198:A man who prays lives out the mystery of existence, and a man who does not pray scarcely exists. ~ Saint Charbel, #KEYS
199:I will define him simply as someone set on becoming a god rather than a man. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
200:No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
~ John Donne,#KEYS
201:What thou seest, man, That too become thou must- God, if thou seest God, Dust, if thou seest Dust.
~ Anonymous,#KEYS
202:For anyone, man or woman, who has faith in me, I have never departed. I sleep on their threshold. ~ Guru Rinpoche, #KEYS
203:God cannot make a man to be without a soul ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 2.25)., #KEYS
204:Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that we were compelled to invent laughter. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
205:The ideal of man is to see God in everything. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. II. 152), #KEYS
206:The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche #KEYS
207:God provides the wind, Man must raise the sail." ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
208:It is a fine thing when a man who thoroughly understands a subject is unwilling to open his mouth. ~ Yoshida Kenko, #KEYS
209:Man achieves likeness to God through grace ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.151)., #KEYS
210:Owe no man anything but to love one another. ~ Ro-mans. XIV. 8, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
211:A wise man is full of strength, and a man of knowledge enhances his might,
~ Anonymous, The Bible, Proverbs, 24:5,#KEYS
212:For all things difficult to acquire, the intelligent man works with perseverance.
~ Lao Tzu,#KEYS
213:Man in many respects may be compared with those animals which have long been domesticated.
~ Charles Darwin, 1871,#KEYS
214:The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trial.
~ Confucius,#KEYS
215:Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him? ~ Chuang Tzu, #KEYS
216:A dumb man's tongue is better than the liar's. ~ Turkish Proverb, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
217:Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
~ Albert Einstein,#KEYS
218:As a lamp cannot burn without oil, so a man cannot live without God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
219:Every sin makes man a citizen of Babylon ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.77.4sc)., #KEYS
220:In this Kali Yuga, even three days are enough to make a man perfect. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
221:Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. ~ Oscar Wilde, #KEYS
222:Nothing is more dangerous for man than negligence. ~ Mahabharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
223:The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month." ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #KEYS
224:If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#KEYS
225:It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, #KEYS
226:Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand. ~ Hippocrates, Regimen, IV, 87, #KEYS
227:As a lamp does not burn without oil, so a man cannot live without God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
228:I have been born anew. I have become a self-made man in battle, that is how I came to be my own father. ~ Quetzalcoatl, #KEYS
229:I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman.
~ Homer Simpson,#KEYS
230:The happiest is the man who is not at all selfish. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. II. 465), #KEYS
231:The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man. ~ T S Eliot, #KEYS
232:What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
233:All my words are but chaff next to the faith of a simple man. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
234:A man does not always choose what his guardian angel intends. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
235:A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something." ~ Plato, #KEYS
236:Blessed is the man who consumes his lion, and cursed is the man who is consumed by his lion. ~ Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, #KEYS
237:Each man who thinks ahead of his times is sure to be misunderstood. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
238:Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself? ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
239:Let the man in whom there is intelligence... know himself. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
240:Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
~ Heraclitus,#KEYS
241:Such a reaction, the reaction of a mentality headed for a fall, is only too typical of man in transition. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
242:The just man is himself his own law. ~ Inscription on the Catacombs, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
243:Faith can achieve miracles, while vanity or egotism is the death of man. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
244:Man is fortunately inconsistent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Materialism, #KEYS
245:So long as a man has not realized God, he will have to be born on earth. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
246:A man of understanding is of an excellent spirit. ~ Proverbs XVII. 27, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
247:God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man. ~ Ibn Arabi, #KEYS
248:Let the wise man fight Mara with the sword of wisdom. He should now protect what he has won, without attachment. ~ Buddha, #KEYS
249:No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
~ Karl Popper,#KEYS
250:The most perfect man is the one who is most useful to others. ~ Koran, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
251:Without God, man cannot, and without man, God will not. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
252:You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics. ~ Charles Bukowski, #KEYS
253:Be not astonished that man can become like God. ~ Epistle to Diognetus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
254:Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear #KEYS
255:By constantly living in the company of a holy man one verily becomes holy. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
256:He is the happy man whose soul is superior to all happenings. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
257:...spirituality alone will not take a man far in the Mysteries; he must have intellectual powers as well.
~ Dion Fortune,#KEYS
258:A just man falleth seven times and riseth up again. ~ Proverbs XXIV. 16, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
259:The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Proverbs, 18:10, #KEYS
260:To wear out the veil that occludes the vision of reality is all that man can do, and that he has got to do. ~ Anandamayi Ma, #KEYS
261:I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. ~ C S Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 1932), #KEYS
262:The world is full of marvels and the greatest marvel is man. ~ Sophocles, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
263:Who is blinder even than the blind? The man of passion. ~ Buddhist Maxim, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
264:A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#KEYS
265:I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses. ~ Johannes Kepler, #KEYS
266:I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#KEYS
267:My children, the three acts of faith, hope, and charity contain all the happiness of man upon the earth. ~ Saint John Vianney, #KEYS
268:The wise man acts towards all beings even as towards himself. ~ Madharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
269:When an ordinary man attains knowledge he is a sage; when a sage attains understanding, he is an ordinary man." ~ Zen Proverb, #KEYS
270:Man out of Nature wakes to God's complexities, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I, #KEYS
271:The man who docth these things shall live by them. ~ Epistle to the Romans, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
272:But at the same time God is great and unspeakably glorious, so that no man shall see God and live. ~ Irenaeus, Against Heresies, #KEYS
273:Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. ~ Samuel Johnson, #KEYS
274:Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life. ~ Terry Pratchett, Jingo, #KEYS
275:If man surrenders himself to Tao, he identifies himself with Tao. ~ Lao-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
276:Man is divine so long as he is in communion with the Eternal. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
277:The perfect man is a divine child! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Heraclitus - VII, #KEYS
278:Wise kings generally have wise counselors; and he must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one.
~ Diogenes,#KEYS
279:God plays invisible in the heart of man, being screened by Maya from human view. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
280:Man achieves the highest goal through the practice of Japa. Japa leads to success. Yes, Japa leads to success! ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
281:Man follows the earth Earth follows the universe The universe follows the Tao The Tao follows only itself. ~ Tao Te Ching, ch.25, #KEYS
282:Respect man as a spiritual being in whom dwells the divine Spirit. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
283:The man who knows the Tao, does not speak; he who speaks, knows It not. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
284:It is useless for a man to flaunt his knowledge of the law if he undermines its teaching by his actions. ~ Saint Anthony of Padua, #KEYS
285:The mind of the worldly man is largely diluted with the water of impure thoughts. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
286:The mind pre-eminently is man; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Perfection of the Body, #KEYS
287:The simple and upright man is as strong as if he were a great host. ~ Lao-Tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
288:The whole dignity of man is in thought. Labour then to think aright. ~ Pascal, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
289:Indeed, neither fasts nor vigils nor prayers nor alms nor faith nor virginity can help a man without charity. ~ Caesarius of Arles, #KEYS
290:Rest is in Him alone. Man knows no peace in the world; but he has no disturbance when he is with God. ~ Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, #KEYS
291:The man who has done good does not cry it through the world. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
292:Happy is the man whose senses are purified and utterly under curb. ~ Udanavarga, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
293:In old times a lamb, a Calf was offered; now Christ is offered. But He is offered as man and as enduring suffering. ~ Saint Ambrose, #KEYS
294:It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. ~ Jane Austen, #KEYS
295:It is by the path of love, which is charity, that God draws near to man, and man to God. ~ Saint Albert the Great, (c. 1200 - 1280), #KEYS
296:Man lifted up the burden of his fate
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn,#KEYS
297:Poetry like everything else in man evolves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, New Birth or Decadence?, #KEYS
298:Pride changes angels into devils, humility makes man into angels. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
299:That man to me seems equal to the gods,
the man who sits opposite you
and close by listens
to your sweet voice ~ Sappho,#KEYS
300:The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
301:A man is great not because he hasn't failed; a man is great because failure hasn't stopped him." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
302:Is there a single man who can see what the Sage cannot even conceive? ~ Tseu-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
303:It is through the search after Truth that man can elevate himself. This he should regard in the light of a duty. ~ SRI ANANDAMAYI MA, #KEYS
304:Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #KEYS
305:Man's perfect beatitude consists in the enjoyment of divinity ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.54)., #KEYS
306:Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man (n. 368) (Divine Love and Wisdom, 1763)
~ Emanuel Swedenborg,#KEYS
307:The knowledge of God may be likened to a man, while the Love of God is like a woman. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
308:The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
309:Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. ~ Revelations III, 11, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
310:Nothing moves a man to anger except a hurt that grieves him ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.47.3)., #KEYS
311:The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
312:There is a potential function in man which is ordinarily inactive for lack of nervous energy or sufficient intensity. ~ Rodney Collin, #KEYS
313:The spiritual man is one who has discovered his soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being, #KEYS
314:What the superior man seeks is in himself. What the mean man seeks is in others. ~ Confucius, Analects, 15:20, #KEYS
315:By endeavor, diligence, discipline, and self-mastery, let the wise man make of himself an island that no flood can overwhelm. ~ Buddha, #KEYS
316:If a man covets nothing, how shall he fail to do what is just and good? ~ Chi-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
317:I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's, I will not reason and compare, my business is to create. ~ William Blake, [T5], #KEYS
318:Just as a silver smith step by step, moment to moment, blows away the impurities of molten silver - so the wise man, his own. ~ Buddha, #KEYS
319:The man who flees from all worldly pleasures is an impregnable tower before the assaults of the demon of sadness. ~ Evagrius of Pontus, #KEYS
320:The new man, reborn and restored to his God by grace, says first of all, Father! because he has now begun to be a son. ~ Saint Cyprian, #KEYS
321:All the world's possibilities in man
Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri,#KEYS
322:He that killeth an ox is as if lie slew a man. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Isaiah, LXVT, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
323:It is more grievous for a man to kill himself than another ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.73.9ad2)., #KEYS
324:man carries the seed of the divine life in himself ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Faith and Shakti, #KEYS
325:Man is like an ignorant spectator of a drama played on the stage. ~ Bhagavat Purana, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
326:No man of war entangleth himself with the affairs of this life. ~ II Timothy. II. 4, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
327:Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true. ~ Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac, sec. 19, #KEYS
328:Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant. ~ Saadi, #KEYS
329:Only in human limits man lives safe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Towards the Black Void, #KEYS
330:The superior man must always remain himself in all situations of life. ~ Tsung yung, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
331:A spiritual man is happy with the whole existence. He says 'yes' to the whole existence." ~ Swami Dhyan Giten, born in Sweden. Author of, #KEYS
332:Let the man [woman] find out his undying Self and die and be immortal and happy. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
333:Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God
~ Anonymous, The Bible, Matthew, 4:4, NIV,#KEYS
334:No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
335:The Divinity in man dwells veiled in his spiritual centre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Life, #KEYS
336:The principal effect of sanctifying grace is for man to love God ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.151)., #KEYS
337:Upright and sincere is the virtue of the man who directs well his mind. ~ Lao-Tsu-Te, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
338:Who am I?
The Divine under many disguises.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, "The Divine" and "Man",#KEYS
339:Happy the man who has tamed the senses and is utterly their master. ~ Buddhist Maxims, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
340:Man understands his life only when he sees himself in each one of his kind. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
341:The ordinary man is not yet a rational being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Curve of the Rational Age, #KEYS
342:To the soul and Shakti in man nothing is impossible. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Faith and Shakti, #KEYS
343:... we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
~ Ezra Pound,#KEYS
344:Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.
~ Sri Ramakrishna,#KEYS
345:Every man is not only himself, he is that which he represents. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Facts and Opinions, #KEYS
346:Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know How useful it is to be useless. ~ Thomas merton. The Way Of Chuang Tzu, #KEYS
347:The greatest kindness one can render to any man is leading him to truth. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
348:The real truth of man is to be found in his soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Spiritual Aim and Life, #KEYS
349:A dreamer is man who can find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ~ Oscar Wilde, #KEYS
350:By whom is this world conquered? By the patient and truthful man. ~ Pranottaratrayamala, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
351:I call him a man who recognises no possessions save those he finds in himself. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
352:Let the man find out his undying Self and die and be immortal and happy. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 64, #KEYS
353:Man's conscience is a creation of his evolving nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Good, #KEYS
354:The more a man uses moderation in his life, the more he is at peace, for he is not full of cares for many things. ~ Saint Anthony the Great, #KEYS
355:A pleasant and happy life does not come from external things. Man draws from within himself, as from a spring, pleasure and joy." ~ Plutarch, #KEYS
356:Karma in its effect on character is the most tremendous power that man has to deal with. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
357:Let a man make haste towards good, let him turn away his thought from evil. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
358:Man is a creature blinded by the sun
Who errs by seeing ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act III,#KEYS
359:Purity is, next to birth, the greatest good that can be given to man. ~ Avesta: Vendidad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
360:A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. ~ Francis Bacon, Atheism, #KEYS
361:A solitary may miss his goal and a man of the world become asage. ~ Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
362:Man's perfect Happiness consists in the vision of the Divine Essence ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.5.5)., #KEYS
363:One who thinks that his spiritual guide is merely a man, can draw no profit from his contact. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
364:The man of knowledge with-out a good heart is like the bee without honey ~ Sadi: Gulistan, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
365:To be a man of worth and not to try to look like one is the true way to glory. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
366:A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part, #KEYS
367:For all things difficult to acquire the intelligent man works with perseverance. ~ Lao-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
368:I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.
~ Henry David Thoreau,#KEYS
369:The salvation of many is to be preferred to the peace of any single man ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.42.2), #KEYS
370:The superior man enacts equity and justice is the foundation of all his deeds. ~ Confueins, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
371:All virtues are comprised injustice; if thou art just, thou art a man of virtue. ~ Theegris, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
372:In sinning, man subjected himself by his affections to corporeal things ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.61.1)., #KEYS
373:In the realized man [woman], the mind may be active or inactive; the Self alone exists. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
374:The chief purpose of the avatar is to give to man concrete proof that the Divine can manifest upon earth. ~ The Mother, #KEYS
375:The great man is he who has not lost the child's heart within him. ~ Meng-Tse. I V. II. XII, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
376:Those actions alone are properly called "human" of which man is master ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.1.1)., #KEYS
377:Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #KEYS
378:Let the superior man regard all men who dwell within the four seas as his brothers. ~ Lun Yu, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
379:There is always one man who more than others represents the divine thought of the epoch. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
380:Each man in this path has his own method of Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Synthesis of the Systems, #KEYS
381:Evolution is an inverse action of the involution. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
382:Eye and ear are poor witnesses for man, if his inner life has not been made fine. ~ Heraclitus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
383:If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.
~ Franz Kafka,#KEYS
384:If a man thinks of the images of gods and goddesses as symbols of the Divine, he reaches Divinity. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
385:Man is too weak to bear the Infinite's weight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon, #KEYS
386:Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
~ Bertrand Russell,#KEYS
387:One man's perfection still can save the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul, #KEYS
388:To have a great man for an intimate friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.
~ Homer,#KEYS
389:Without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, #KEYS
390:It is always the business of man the thinker to know. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Knowledge and the Ignorance, #KEYS
391:So long as the heart of man is directed towards God, he cannot be lost in the ocean of worldliness. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
392:The ignorant is the slave of his passions, the wise man is their master. ~ Sutra in 42 articles, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
393:When man is free in spirit, all other freedom is at his command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, Asiatic Democracy, #KEYS
394:Other things a man can do unwillingly, but he must be willing in order to believe. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
395:The divine law was given chiefly for this reason: that man might embrace God ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.121)., #KEYS
396:The intellect or mind of man is, as it were, a light lit up by the light of the Divine Word. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III q5 a4 ad 2, #KEYS
397:The life-work of a great man often does not begin till he dies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, Mustafa Kamal Pasha, #KEYS
398:Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. ~ II Coriothians IV. 16, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
399: Thou shalt not kill " relates not solely to the murder of man, but of all that lives. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
400:When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say. ~ George R R Martin, #KEYS
401:But the Holy Spirit works this in man, by bringing him to everlasting life ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.139.1)., #KEYS
402:Each man ought to say to himself, "I was the creator, may I become again what I was". ~ Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
403:ho has ruder battles to sustain than the man who labours for self-conquest? ~ Imitation of Christ, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
404:It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #KEYS
405:Man's mind is the dupe of his animal self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour, #KEYS
406:The growth of the god in man is man's proper business. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Works, Devotion and Knowledge, #KEYS
407:The man of merit and ability is always humble and meek, but the fool is always puffed up with vanity. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
408:There is no knowledge without experience, and man has to see God in his own soul. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VI. 133), #KEYS
409:God in man is the whole revelation and the whole of religion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, The Glory of God in Man, #KEYS
410:I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what' ~ Norbert Wiener, #KEYS
411:No salvation is possible for a man as long as he has desire, as long as he hankers for worldly things. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
412:The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
413:The one thing that man sees above the intellect is the spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Power of the Spirit, #KEYS
414:What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? ~ Matthew. XVI. 26, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
415:As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.
~ Diogenes,#KEYS
416:Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another 'What! You too? I thought that no one but myself' . . .
~ C S Lewis, The Four Loves,#KEYS
417:I am an epitome of opposites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man, the Despot of Contraries, #KEYS
418:I meet the sincere man with sincerity and tie insincere also with sincerity. ~ Lao-tse: Tao-te-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
419:A diversity in oneness is the law of the manifestation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
420:A man's pride shall bring him low, but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit. ~ Proverbs XXIX. 23, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
421:As a living man abstains from mortal poisons, so put away from thee all defilement. ~ Buddhist Texts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
422:If we could comprehend all the good things contained in Holy Communion, nothing more would be wanting to content the heart of man." ~ Saint John Vianney, #KEYS
423:Man cannot persevere after the corruption of human nature without God's grace ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (On Job ch. 7)., #KEYS
424:Man, human, follows in God's human steps. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries, #KEYS
425:Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed. ~ Pindar, Nemean Odes, V, l. 30, #KEYS
426:Realize that you must lead a dying life; the more a man dies to himself, the more he begins to live unto God. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
427:The sentinel love in man ever imagines
Strange perils for its object. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
428:The whole course of a man's life becomes reoriented as a result of holy association; and its effect, too, is very lasting. ~ Manapurush Swami Shivananda, #KEYS
429:As the drowning man pants hard for breath, so must ones heart yearn for the Lord before one can find Him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
430:Having once seen God, man can have no farther object in life than to reach and possess Him.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad,#KEYS
431:Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. ~ Philippians II. 4, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
432:Nobility is for each man within him; only he never thinks of seeking for it within. ~ Meng-Tse II 5.17, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
433:Often man is preoccupied with human rules and forgets the inner law. ~ Antoine the Healer; Revelations, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
434:The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep. ~ Chuang Tzu, #KEYS
435:Thou who hast been set in thy station of man to aid by all means the common interest ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
436:A holy man not only pays to womankind honor and respect, but actually worships them as a son does a mother. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
437:I never knew a sorrow that an hour of reading could not assuage, a great man had once said. Let's put it to the test. ~ Anna Gavalda, Hunting and Gathering, #KEYS
438:Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him. ~ Proverbs XXVI. 12, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
439:The business of poetry is to express the soul of man to himself. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Ideal Spirit of Poetry, #KEYS
440:This ultimate end of man is called that human good: happiness ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Ethics 1, lect. 9)., #KEYS
441:As the monkey sacrifices his life at the feet of the hunter, so does a man at the feet of a beautiful woman. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
442:Every individual man must be in little what the Cosmos is in large. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, The Eternal in His Universe, #KEYS
443:Every man who returns into himself, will find there traces of the Divinity. ~ Cicero, "De Regibus. I. 22, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
444:Man's consciousness can be nothing else than a form of Nature's consciousness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Conscious Force, #KEYS
445:The man of Tao remains unknown. Perfect virtue produces nothing. No self is True self. And the greatest man is nobody. ~ Chuang Tzu, #KEYS
446:Force of character is man's great strength. If he uses it in his dealings with the world he will indeed be victorious in most directions. ~ SRI ANANDAMAYI MA, #KEYS
447:It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
448:It is when one feels like a blind man that one begins to be ready for the illumination.
~ The Mother, Some Answers From The Mother,#KEYS
449:The sage regards the heart of every man in the millions of the crowd and sees only one heart. ~ Tseng Tee, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
450:The supreme Self is one, but the souls of the Self are many. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
451:Truth and error live always together in the human evolution. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
452:All that man has to do is to take care of three things; good thought, good word, good deed. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. I. 492), #KEYS
453:A man must be strong and free in himself before he can live usefully for others. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Opinion and Comments, #KEYS
454:As a nail cannot be driven into a stone, so the advice of the pious does not affect the soul of a worldly man. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
455:Even the animal is more in touch with a certain harmony in things than man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Science and Yoga, #KEYS
456:For we are always glad to have something to comfort us, and only with difficulty does a man divest himself of self. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
457:God having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man in the Universe, #KEYS
458:Men die that man may live and God be born. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #KEYS
459:The free choice of an angel occupies a middle ground between that of God and that of man ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (DV 24.3)., #KEYS
460:The malady of the world is that the individual cannot find his real soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Double Soul in Man, #KEYS
461:Through the shocks of difficulty and death
Man shall attain his godhead. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Prologue,#KEYS
462:When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:11, #KEYS
463:Your duty as a married man is to live with your wife as brother and sister after one or two children are born. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
464:A vast subliminal is man's measureless part. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul, #KEYS
465:Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth." ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
466:It is the Absolute who is all these relativities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
467:Man moves towards something which fulfils the universe by transcending it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Knowledge and Ignorance, #KEYS
468:Neither the ethical being nor the aesthetic being is the whole man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Aesthetic and Ethical Culture, #KEYS
469:One who thinks that his spiritual guide is merely a man, can draw no profit from his contact. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
470:The deeds a man has accomplished follow him in his journeying when he fares to another world. ~ Mahabharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
471:There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. ~ Proverbs XIV. 12, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
472:To make hardship less severe is to face it with strength. That is man's life. Man wants to conquer and God has given the power for it. ~ SWAMI TRIGUNATITANANDA, #KEYS
473:Blessed is the man who knows his own weakness, because this knowledge becomes to him the foundation, root, and beginning of all Goodness. ~ Saint Isaac of Syria, #KEYS
474:Do you seek God? Then see Him in man! His divinity is manifest more in man (and woman) than in any other object. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
475:It is the Self who has become all these becomings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
476:Money is a conditioning factor of a very strong nature. As soon as a man becomes rich, he is thoroughly changed. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
477:The man veritably free is he who, disburdened of fear and desire, is subjected only to his reason. ~ Fenelon, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
478:This man who knew not scripture, had the highest learning, for he had a pure love for God and could realize him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
479:All the terrestrial past of the world is there summarised in man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Ascending Unity, #KEYS
480:By knowing for an absolute fact that he does not live but is being lived, the man of wisdom is aware of the perfect futility of all intentions. ~ Ramesh Balsekar, #KEYS
481:Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
482:If a man could cast a firm and clear glance into the depths of his being, he would see there God. ~ J. Tauler, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
483:Man is all Imagination. God is Man and exists in us and we in Him... The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God, Himself
~ William Blake, Laocoon,#KEYS
484:Self-interest is the prolongation in us of the animal. Humanity begins in man with disinterestedness. ~ Amiel, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
485:So long as the mind is unsteady, it avails nothing, even though a man has got a good Guru and company of the holy ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
486:The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, #KEYS
487:There is nothing in the world that man's intelligence cannot attain, annihilate or accomplish. ~ Hindu Saying, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
488:Yoga means 'yoke', 'to join', that is, to join the soul of man with the supreme Soul or God. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VIII. 36), #KEYS
489:Your duty as a married man is to live with your wife as brother and sister after one or two children born to you. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
490:A man should be glad of heart. If you have joy no longer, find out where you have fallen into error. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
491:He alone is truly a man who is illumined by the light of the true knowledge. Others are only men in name. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
492:Man demands miracles that he may have faith; he wishes to be dazzled in order that he may see
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
493:Man is constantly acting upon man both by the silent and the spoken word. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Supreme Word, #KEYS
494:The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, The Glory of God in Man, #KEYS
495:The spirit is doomed to pain till man is free. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #KEYS
496:Whatever work you do, do it as perfectly as you can. That is the best service to the Divine in man
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
497:You will see God when your yearning for him is as intense as a drowning man's yearning for the next breath of air. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
498:Each form and way of being has its own appropriate way of the delight of being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man and the Evolution, #KEYS
499:Man is deluded by the intermingling of the conscious Self with the insentient body. This delusion must end. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
500:Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, [T5], #KEYS
501:Men, despise not yourselves: the Son of God became a man; women, despise not yourselves, the Son of God was born of a woman. ~ Saint Augustine, De Agone Christ. XI), #KEYS
502:Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
503:No one understands the passion of Christ so thoroughly or heartily as the man whose lot it is to suffer the like himself. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
504:Only what the man admires and accepts, becomes part of himself; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, A System of National Education, #KEYS
505:Poetry is a highly charged power of aesthetic expression of the soul of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, New Birth or Decadence?, #KEYS
506:A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #KEYS
507:As a bee when it has made honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
508:Every man is knowingly or unknowingly the instrument of a universal Power. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Master of the Work, #KEYS
509:Everything is full of signs, and the one who understands one thing on the basis of another is a wise man of sorts. ~ Plotinus, Enneads §2.3.7, #KEYS
510:If by realizing God, a man receives a commission and preaches God for the good of others -- there is no harm in that. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
511:The life of a man is unfulfilled unless he has found the Divine. 2 June 1972
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The True Aim of Life, 7,#KEYS
512:The man who has not found God is full of vain disputation, but he who has seen Him, enjoys silently the Bliss Divine. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
513:A man who governs his passions is master of the world. We must either command them, or be enslaved by them. It is better to be a hammer than an anvil. ~ Saint Dominic, #KEYS
514:As you turn the direction of the wicked mind, that mind itself will be able to grasp the Chosen Deity. It is the pure mind which shows man the path. ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
515:Even his petty world man cannot rule.
We fear, we blame; life wantons her own way, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act II,#KEYS
516:For instance, that a white-man happens to be a builder is only an accidental cause of the house ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.14)., #KEYS
517:I'm re-reading Savitri.
Lucky man! I would love to read it again. And the more you read, the more marvellous it becomes.
~ The Mother,#KEYS
518:It is the resurgence of the barbarian in ourselves, in civilised man, that is the peril. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Life, #KEYS
519:Man his passion prefers to the voice that guides from the immortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
520:The heart of man is nearer to the Truth than his intelligence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - I, #KEYS
521:There never was a struggle or a battle that required greater valor than that in which a man forgets or denies himself. ~ Meister Eckhart, #KEYS
522:Until man in his heart is ready, a profound change of the world conditions cannot come. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Internationalism, #KEYS
523:he wise man sits not inert; he is ever walking incessantly forward towards a greater light. ~ Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
524:Man has a natural inclination toward knowing the truth about God and toward living in society ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.94.2)., #KEYS
525:Man is at present only partly liberated from the animal involution. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Gradations of the Supermind, #KEYS
526:No man is simply good or simply bad; every man is a mixture of contraries. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Eternal and the Individual, #KEYS
527:Sin is nothing other than man's act of turning his face away from God and himself towards death. ~ Angelus Silesius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
528:The Great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson... have taught man to look within himself to find God.
~ Ernest Holmes,#KEYS
529:The 'work,' whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have created it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, #KEYS
530:To the natural unredeemed economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Civilisation and Barbarism, #KEYS
531:Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms ~ to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. , #KEYS
532:God alone could produce either a man from the slime of the earth, or a woman from the rib of man ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.92.4)., #KEYS
533:He who has perfectly mastered himself in thought and speech and act, he is indeed a man of religion. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
534:Man needs freedom of thought and life and action in order that he may grow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The End of the Curve of Reason, #KEYS
535:Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
536:All things attained by man have been only a possibility in their earlier stages. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, The Intellect and Yoga, #KEYS
537:Ananda is the secret principle of all being and the support of all activity of being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man and the Evolution, #KEYS
538:As a drunkard will sometimes put his coat on his head, so the God-intoxicated man is not conscious of the external world. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
539:Ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite, our defence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Double Soul in Man, #KEYS
540:Every - real - happiness - for - man - can - arise - exclusively - only - from - some - unhappiness - also - real - which - he - has - already - experienced. ~ Gurdjieff, #KEYS
541:If a man shows pity for animals, he is all the more disposed to take pity on his fellow-men ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.102.6ad8)., #KEYS
542:Man as a whole is always a complex being, even man savage or degenerate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Infrarational Age of the Cycle, #KEYS
543:Only by falling back on our better thought, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, can we know what that wisdom saith. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
544:Science is a light within a limited room, not the sun which illumines the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, The Glory of God in Man, #KEYS
545:The greatest man in the world is not the conqueror, but the man who has domination over his own being. ~ Schopenhauer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
546:The just man is not one who does hurt to none, but one who having the power to hurt represses the will. ~ Pytha-goras, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
547:The natural reason of man is nothing other than the reflected gleam of divine clarity in the soul ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (In Ps. 35)., #KEYS
548:We have indeed many things to learn from others; yea, that man who refuses to learn is already dead. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. III. 381), #KEYS
549:As every man hath received the gilt, even so minister the same one to another. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 Peter, IV. 10, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
550:Follow the great man and you will see what the world has at heart in these ages. There is no omen like that. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
551:Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
~ Anonymous, The Bible, John, 3-3, [T5],#KEYS
552:The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness. ~ C K Chesterton, #KEYS
553:The man who lives in the bosom of the temptations of the world and attains perfection, is the true hero. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
554:We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.
~ Voltaire,#KEYS
555:Adultery is more grave than theft, since a man's wife is more dear to him than his possessions ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.73.5ad1)., #KEYS
556:All is Narayana, man or animal, the wise and the wicked, the whole world is Narayana, the Supreme Spirit. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
557:He is not a man of religion who does ill to another. He is not a disciple who causes suffering to another. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
558:Man [Woman] is deluded by the intermingling of the conscious Self with the insentient body. This delusion must end. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
559:See that the world and your ego are derived from the same Supreme Being. God, Man, and nature are faces of the One Reality. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
560:The Eternal is in every man, but all men are not in the Eternal; there lies the cause of their suffering. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
561:The man who recognises in his own soul the supreme Soul present in all creatures, shows himself the same to all. ~ Manu, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
562:Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release, #KEYS
563:If you cannot sustain japa at all times, at any rate complete two rosaries twice day, morning and evening. The search after Truth is man's real vocation. ~ Sri Ananamayi Ma, #KEYS
564:Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. ~ Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx , #KEYS
565:The Divine is ultimately self-revealed in both man and Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
566:The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding, shall remain in the congregation of the dead. ~ Proverbs XXI. 16, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
567:The youthful maiden is the ever-youthful earth; so the youthful maiden implies the blessed stage of the God-intoxicated man. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
568:But he turned and rebuked them, You do not understand, he said, what spirit it is you share. The Son of Man has come to save men's lives, not to destroy them. ~ Luke 9:54-56, #KEYS
569:The man who knows Tao is inaccessible to favour as to disgrace, to profit as to loss, to honour as to ignominy. ~ Lao-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
570:The ninety and nine are with dreams, content, but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #KEYS
571:The wise man should rein in intently this mental action like a chariot drawn by untrained horses. ~ Swetawatara Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
572: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
573:To the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Threefold Life, #KEYS
574:Yea, the soul of a man too is mighty
More than the stone and the mortar! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
575:You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
576: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
577:As the musician knows how to tune his lyre, so the wise man knows how to set his mind in tune with all minds. ~ Demophilus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
578:God exists in Himself and not by virtue of the cosmos or of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
579:He is a true man to whom money is a servant. Those who have it and do not know how to use it, do not deserve to be called men. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
580:If a man continues to mix with the world, it is likely that he will be tainted; but he will remain pure if he lives out of it. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
581:It needs a lion-hearted man to travel the extraordinary path; for the way is long and the sea is deep. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
582:Mental man has not been Nature's last effort or highest reach. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #KEYS
583:That it may be easy for thee to live with every man, think of what unites thee to him and not of what separates. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
584:The man who prays, the prayer, and the God to whom he prays all have reality only as manifestations of the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, [T5], #KEYS
585:Too heavy falls a Shadow on man's heart;
It dares not be too happy upon earth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate,#KEYS
586:When one says to a man, "Know thyself," it is not only to lower his pride, but to make him sensible of his own value. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
587:And this is what he means when the Apostle says, 'the just man lives by faith' ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Galatians 3, lect. 4)., #KEYS
588:As soon as a man falls into sin, charity, faith, and mercy do not free him from sin, without penance ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (St 3.84.5ad2)., #KEYS
589:A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
~ Bertrand Russell,#KEYS
590:By inordinately using the body through lust, a man wrongs God Who is the Supreme Lord of our body ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.153.3ad2)., #KEYS
591:If a man puts a drop of wine into a thousand measures of water, he is not mixing, but spoiling, the wine ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.35)., #KEYS
592:Man can only be happy by the fruit of the labour which he spends on his self-improvement. ~ Antoine the Healer: Revelations, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
593:Man's continuous attempt to freeze time in fixed moments, out of the purposeless swirling of its dance, is the cause of his frustration, fear and insecurity. ~ Ramesh Balsekar, #KEYS
594:No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us. ~ John IV. 12, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
595:One must accustom oneself to say in the mind when one meets a man, "I will think of him only and not of myself. " ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
596:The reason of man struggling with life becomes either an empiric or a doctrinaire. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Reason as Governor of Life, #KEYS
597:A man can be secure from sin in the will, only when his intellect is secure from ignorance and from error ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.70)., #KEYS
598:A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #KEYS
599:A man who has comm and over his senses and the forces of his being, has a just title to the name of king. ~ Angelus Silesius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
600:Circumstances, though they attack obstinately the man who is firm, cannot destroy his proper virtue,-firmness. ~ Bhartrihari, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
601:Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. ~ Louis Brandeis, #KEYS
602:If anything is to be had — whatsoever, in whatever way — it must be had of Him alone. Man's bounden duty as a human being is to seek refuge at His Feet. ~ SRI ANANDAMAYI MA, #KEYS
603:It is the legitimate function of the reason to justify to man his action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #KEYS
604:Let the Godhead within thee protect there a virile being, respect-worthy, a chief, a man self-disciplined. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
605:Man ordinarily offers his sacrifice openly or under a disguise to his own ego. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Fullness of Spiritual Action, #KEYS
606:So long as man clamours for the I and Mine, his works are as naught: When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done. ~ Kabir, #KEYS
607:Spirituality cannot be called upon to deal with life by a non-spiritual method. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
608:That man who seeth the self in all beings and all beings in the self, has no disdain for any thing that is. ~ Isha Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
609:The virtue of a man who has attained to the height of perfection, extends even to a foreknowledge of the future. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
610:A man must of necessity love himself, and it is impossible for a man to hate himself, properly speaking ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.29.4)., #KEYS
611:A man's deeds are slavish, his very thoughts false, so long as he has not succeeded in putting fear under his feet. ~ Carlyle, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
612:Heaven and Earth are the father and mother of all beings; among beings man alone has intelligence for his portion. ~ Chu-King, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
613:It is only necessary to destroy in oneself the roots of those motives which determine a man's course, in order to enjoy the omnipotence and immunity of a god. ~ Aleister Crowley, #KEYS
614:Man was moulded from the original brute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.05, #KEYS
615:We aspire for a knowledge truly knowing, for a power truly powerful, for a love that truly loves.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Divine and Man,#KEYS
616:A man has the spirit of true renunciation who, upon meeting a beautiful young woman, turns away from her, seeing her as his mother ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
617:A man's spiritual gain depends on his ideas and sentiments; it is the product of his heart and not of his works. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
618:A prayer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Issue, [T5],#KEYS
619:Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #KEYS
620:Man's vast spirit in its power to understand things, has a wider extent than heaven and earth. ~ J. Tauler, "Institutions" XII, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
621:No one is shut out from this joy; all share the same reason for rejoicing. Our Lord, victor over sin and death, finding no man free from sin, came to free us all. ~ Leo the Great, #KEYS
622:The ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Double Soul in Man, #KEYS
623:The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man in the Universe, #KEYS
624:The harmony of the inner and outer man which is the true meaning of civilisation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, "Is India Civilised?" - I, #KEYS
625:The scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Civilisation and Barbarism, #KEYS
626:The Son of God is also the Son of Man and both elements are necessary to the complete Christhood. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #KEYS
627:If a holy man, however cautious he may be, lives in the company of a young woman, some casual thought is sure to arise in his mind. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
628:Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, #KEYS
629:Man cannot possess perfect happiness until all that separates him from others has been abolished in oneness. ~ Angolua Siloaius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
630:Man is a spirit, but a spirit that lives as a mental being in physical Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ladder of Self-Transcendence, #KEYS
631:Man is the creator of the gods whom he worships in his temples. Therefore humanity has made its gods in its own image. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
632:The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance. Between the two remains the son of man to struggle. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
633:The perfection of man lies in the unfolding of the ever-perfect Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #KEYS
634:Who is the superior man ? It is he who first puts his words in practice and then speaks in agreement with his acts. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
635:Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave. ~ Gurdjieff, #KEYS
636:For as without woman Adam produced woman, so did the Virgin without man this day bring forth a man. For it is a man, saith the Lord, and who shall know him. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #KEYS
637:Hell has not been created by any one, but when a man does evil, he lights the fires of hell and burns in his own fire. ~ Mahomed, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
638:If, indeed, there were anything better or more useful for man's salvation than suffering, Christ would have shown it by word and example. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
639:Man should never cease to believe that the incomprehensible can be comprehended; otherwise he would give up his search. ~ Goethe, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
640:The disease of a worldly man is of a serious type. Attachment to Kama Kanchana (sex and wealth) has brought all this trouble on him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
641:The disease of a worldly man is of a serious type. Attachment to Kama-Kanchana (sex and wealth) has brought all this trouble on him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
642:The innocent man grieves only for the penalty, yet this pain is more intensified because of his innocence ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.46.6ad5)., #KEYS
643:Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave." ~ Gurdjieff, #KEYS
644:A man must be considered as a tool of a higher world-order, a vessel found worth to receive divine influence.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#KEYS
645:Knowledge can never be created, it can only be discovered; and every man who makes a great discovery is inspired. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VII. 39), #KEYS
646:Man does not actually live as an isolated being, nor can he grow by an isolated freedom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The End of the Curve of Reason, #KEYS
647:Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon Of Man, #KEYS
648:The soul in man is greater than his fate: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day, The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation, #KEYS
649:What is God?
God is the perfection that we must aspire to realise. 8 November 1969
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, "The Divine" and "Man" [17],#KEYS
650:As soon as a man takes on the responsibility of a family, he is weighed down and feels himself unfit for the high attainments of life. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
651:Be master of thyself by taming thy heart, thy mind and thy senses; for each man is his own friend and his own enemy. ~ Mahabharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
652:Even though it be true that the conception of God is absolute help, it is also the only help which is absolutely capable of revealing to man his own helplessness. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #KEYS
653:It does not really rest with a man whether he goes to this place or that or whether he gives up his duties or not. All these events happen according to destiny. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
654:It is in a total knowledge that all knowing becomes one and indivisible. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
655:Man is in his self a unique Person, but he is also in his manifestation of self a multiperson. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Triple Transformation, #KEYS
656:Man's virtue, a coarse-spun ill-fitting dress,
Apparels wooden images of Good; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Heavens of the Ideal,#KEYS
657:Restore to heaven and earth that which thou owest unto them...But of this dead man there is a portion that is immortal. ~ Rig Veda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
658:With what understanding can man apprehend God, who does not yet apprehend that very understanding itself of his own, by which he desires to apprehend Him? ~ Saint Augustine, (DT 5.1), #KEYS
659: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
660:By the assemblage of all that is exalted and all that is base man was always the most astonishing of mysteries. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
661:Every man seeks the brotherhood of his fellow and we can only live by fraternity with others. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin: The Right of Association, Speech, #KEYS
662:The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but ~ what is worse ~ the slave of as many masters as he has vices., #KEYS
663:The kripa-siddhas attain perfection through the manifest grace of God, they are like a poor man made wealthy by the kindness of a king. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
664:The spiritual perfected only by man accomplished first in body, life and mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - IV, #KEYS
665:A man cannot comprehend spiritual things with his ordinary intelligence. To understand them he must live in the company of holy persons. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
666:He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of youbut to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Micah, 6:8, #KEYS
667:It is part of the nature of a man that he should exist in matter, and so there cannot be a man without matter ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.44.3ad2)., #KEYS
668:Every man is born into this world as a servant. He must serve life and nature, those to whom he has personal responsibilities, and the spiritual needs of his own soul."
~ Manly P Hall,#KEYS
669:I say to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly. ~ Romans X II, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
670:It is not by shaving the head that one becomes a man of religion; truth and rectitude alone make the true religious man. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
671:No machinery invented by the reason can perfect either the individual or the collective man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The End of the Curve of Reason, #KEYS
672:Our past thinking has determined our present status, and our present thinking will determine our future status; for man is what man thinks. ~ Padmasambhava, The Tibetan Book of The Dead, #KEYS
673:The death of a man or animal results from the separation of the soul, which completes the nature of animal or man ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.50.4)., #KEYS
674:The Hathat-siddhas attains perfection suddenly, as a poor man may suddenly become rich by finding hidden treasure or marrying into money. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
675:The man of superior virtue is well pleased in the humblest situation. His heart loves to be deep as the abyss. ~ Lao-Tse: Tao-te-King, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
676:The man who does not try to raise his spirit above itself, is not worthy to live in the condition of a man. ~ Angelus Silesius II. 22, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
677:Youth, beauty, life, riches, health, friends are things that pass; let not the wise man attach himself at all to these. ~ Mahabharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
678:A Guru does not entrust to a worldly man valuable and exalting precepts, for he is sure to misuse them in pursuit of his own mean designs. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
679:A holy man used to look at a glass prism and smile. He could see various colors, yet he knew these colors were false just as the world is. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
680:If a man loves God, living upon the flesh of pigs, he is blessed; unlike the man who lives on milk and rice but is fixed on lust and gold. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
681:In man it is the ego idea which chiefly supports the falsehood of a separative existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Liberation of the Spirit, #KEYS
682:Kali when she enters into a man cares nothing for rationality and possibility. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Greatness of the Individual, #KEYS
683:Some great souls have reached the seventh, highest plane of samadhi, and have thus become merged in God. They come down for man's benefit. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
684:The kingdom of heaven is already in existence if we will have it, that perfection is already in man if he will see it. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VI. 354), #KEYS
685:The vain main of intellect is busy finding out the why and wherefore of creation, while the humble man acquaints himself with the creator. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
686:Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the fully active mind and the body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Three Steps of Nature, #KEYS
687:In Supermind is the integrating Light, the consummating Force, the wide entry into the supreme Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Double Soul in Man, #KEYS
688:Man himself, who takes up all that went before him and transmutes it into the term of manhood. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Eternal and the Individual, #KEYS
689:Man's consciousness of the divine within himself and the world is the supreme fact of his existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Civilisation and Culture, #KEYS
690:Man, sole awake in an unconscious world,
Aspires in vain to change the cosmic dream. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon,#KEYS
691:A man's heart showeth to him what he should do better than seven sentinels on the summit of a rock. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
692:Every man is divine and strong in his real nature. What are weak and evil are his habits, his desires and thoughts, but not himself. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
693:For example, man, ass, stone agree in the one precise formality of being colored, which is the formal object of sight ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.1.3)., #KEYS
694:Man is sanctified by each of the sacraments, since sanctity means immunity from sin, which is the effect of grace ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.63.3ad2)., #KEYS
695:Man must come to the realization that the two most valuable things that he has are his heart and his time. When time is wasted, the heart is ruined and all benefit is lost. ~ Ibn Al-Jawzee, #KEYS
696:Only the man who knows that God lives in his soul, can be humble; such a one is absolutely indifferent to what men say of him. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
697:Our consciousness a torch that plays Between the Abyss and a supernal Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator, #KEYS
698:Our lives are useful only in proportion as they help others by example or action or tend to fulfil God in man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Opinion and Comments, #KEYS
699:The man full of uprightness is happy here below, sweet is his sleep by night and by day his heart is radiant with peace. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
700:A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer,#KEYS
701:If you wish to battle and strive for Truth become a thinker, that is to say, a free man. ~ Apollonius of Tyana, 28th Letter to the King.", the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
702:The Master of man and his infinite Lover,
He is close to our hearts, had we vision to see. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
703:When man is introduced by the action of God into the world of Uncreated Light, there are no words to express his wonder, no words, no sighs to tell of his gratitude." ~ Silouan the Athonite, #KEYS
704:As dawn announces the rising of the sun, so in a man disinterestedness, purity, rectitude forerun the coming of the Eternal. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
705:A wise man emulates the smallest good trait of others even if he has innumerable good qualities of his own." ~ Sakya Pandita, (1182-1251), a Tibetan spiritual leader and Buddhist, Wikipedia., #KEYS
706:But God's Word is our Lord Jesus Christ, who in these last times was made a man among men, that he might join the end to the beginning: that is, join man to God. ~ Irenaeus, Against Heresies, #KEYS
707:If a man loves his Guru with his whole heart, obeys what the latter says, his mind being devoted to Him, will naturally shun other attractions and thus get concentrated. ~ SWAMI SUBODHANANDA, #KEYS
708:If a man loves his Guru with his whole heart, obeys what the latter says, his mind being devoted to Him, will naturally shun other attractions and thus get concentrated. ~ Swami Subodhananda, #KEYS
709:Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ephesians, IV. 25, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
710:The greatest error of a man is to think that he is weak by nature, evil by nature. Everyone is divine and strong in their real nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
711:You can force a man to enter a church, to approach the altar, to receive the sacrament; but you cannot force him to believe. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
712:And yet, O the happiness of being man and of being able to recognise the way of the Truth and by following it to attain the goal. ~ Gyothai, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
713:Fourthly, our REVERENCE for Him is thereby increased, since we no longer deem Him an earthly man, but the God of heaven ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.57.6)., #KEYS
714:Intellect void of the spirit can only pile up external knowledge and machinery and efficiency. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
715:The superior soul asks nothing from any but itself. The vulgar and unmeritable man asks everything of others. ~ Confucius: Lia yu II XV. 20, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
716:Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
717:Fear of the gods arose from man's ignorance of God and his ignorance of the laws that govern the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Godward Emotions, #KEYS
718:Man may help or man may resist, but the Zeitgeist works, shapes, overbears, insists. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Greatness of the Individual, #KEYS
719:The high gods look on man and watch and choose
Today's impossibles for the future's base. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon,#KEYS
720:Both of these are imperfect in man if he is compared to the perfect righteousness of the divine standard ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Job, lect. 4)., #KEYS
721:elf-control which lies on a man like a fine garment, falls away from him who negligently gives himself up to slumber. ~ Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
722:It is not good to say that what we ourselves think of God is the only truth and what others think is false. Can a man really fathom God's nature? ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
723:Secrecy is sometimes a cause of sin, as when a man employs secrecy in order to commit a sin, as in the case of fraud ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.66.3ad1)., #KEYS
724:The divine Spirit dwells in every man. How can we make a difference among those who carry in themselves one and the same principle? ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
725:The sot drinks, and is drunken: the coward drinks not, and shivers: the wise man, brave and free, drinks, and gives glory to the Most High God. ~ Aleister Crowley, #KEYS
726:Whoever has once felt the glory of God within him can never again believe that the intellect is supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, The Glory of God in Man, #KEYS
727:A man may conquer thousands and thousands of men in battle, but he is the greatest conqueror who has mastered himself. ~ Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
728:Looking for the meaning of life, one man can discover the order of the universe. To discover the truth, to achieve. a higher spiritual state, that is the true meaning of ninja. ~ Masaaki Hatsumi, #KEYS
729:There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annihilation of his being ~ Schopenhauer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
730:Those operations in man not subject to the will and reason are not properly called human but natural ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Ethics 1, lect. 1)., #KEYS
731:He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,
And does what Matter must or Spirit can. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Enigma,#KEYS
732:He whose mind is utterly pure from all evil as the Sun is pure of stain and the moon of soil, him indeed I call a man of religion. ~ Udanavagga, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
733:Let no man deceive himself; if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him a fool that he may be wise. ~ I. Corinthians III. 18, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
734:Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.
~ Gustav Fechner, Life after Death,#KEYS
735:The mind is everything. It is in the mind alone that one feels pure and impure. A man, first of all, must make his own mind guilty and then alone can he see another man's guilt. ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
736:The soul that dwells in the body of every man is unslayable, and therefore thou shouldst not weep for all these beings. ~ Bhagavad Gita. II. 30, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
737:Tt is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Life, #KEYS
738:Whatever work you do, do it as perfectly as you can. That is the best service to the Divine in man
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Progress and Perfection in Work,#KEYS
739:Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. ~ Philip K Dick, #KEYS
740:Considered mystically, the story of the Flood is the wise man's mastery of adversity. It is the philosopher surviving the onslaughts of ignorance. It is ... ~ Manly P Hall?, Understand your Bible?, #KEYS
741:For he [Christ] receives his own Spirit, and partakes of it, insofar as he was a man, but he gives it to himself, as God. ~ Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel according to St John 12.17, #KEYS
742:If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
~ Henry David Thoreau,#KEYS
743:One man who earnestly pursues the Yoga is of more value than a thousand well-known men. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, No Propaganda or Proselytism, #KEYS
744:Step by step, piece by piece, hour by hour, the wise man should purify his soul of all impurity as a silver worker purifies silver. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
745:The nearer we get to the absolute Ananda, the greater becomes our joy in man and the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty, #KEYS
746:The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitators and no pupils. He forces men through himself. The God is his own follower in man. He imitates himself" ~ Carl Jung, Red Book, #KEYS
747:The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character. (461) ~ G Santayana, #KEYS
748:All the world's possibilities in man
Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul,#KEYS
749:For man here is the result of an evolution and contains in himself the whole of that evolution. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Realisation of Sachchidananda, #KEYS
750:How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #KEYS
751:If a man could write a book on Ethics that was really a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all other books in the world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'A Lecture on Ethics' (1929), #KEYS
752:It is according to his intelligence and reason, which are incorporeal, that man is said to be according to the image of God ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.3.1ad2)., #KEYS
753:Religion today is but a crutch. God made man with Himself within man, so that man might lean on Him, not on religion." ~ Sunyata, (1890- 1984) Danish mystic, "Dancing with the Void,", (2001, 2015)., #KEYS
754:That man whose mind attaches itself only to sensible objects, death carries away like a torrent dragging with it a sleeping village. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
755:The knowledge of faith does not bring rest to desire but rather sets it aflame, since every man desires to see what he believes ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.40), #KEYS
756:We need more understanding of human nature, because the only danger that exists is man himself ~ he is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man ~ far too little., #KEYS
757:Even as I are these, even as they am I,-identifying himself thus with others, the wise man neither kills nor is a cause of killing. ~ Sutta Nipata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
758:Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
759:Everyone who remembers his own educational experience remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the kingpin of the educational situation. ~ Sidney Hook, Education for Modern Man, #KEYS
760:Man epitomises in his being not only the animal existence below him, but the obscurer subanimal being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Ascending Unity, #KEYS
761:Many are God's forms by which he grows in man; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #KEYS
762:No man has a right to constrain another to think like himself. Each must bear with patience and indulgence the beliefs of others. ~ Giordano Bruno, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
763:Self-conquest is the most glorious of victories; it shall better serve a man to conquer himself than to be master of the whole world. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
764:Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
765:That which distinguishes from others the upright man, is that he never pollutes the genius within him which dwells in his heart. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
766:The goldness of gold, the silverness of silver, the manhood of man, the womanhood of woman, the reality of everything is the Lord. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VI. 378), #KEYS
767:The knowledge of faith does not bring rest to desire but rather sets it aflame, since every man desires to see what he believes ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.40)., #KEYS
768:When the man who does good, ceases to concern himself with the result of his act, ambition and wrath are extinguished within him. ~ Lalita Vistara, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
769:All philosophies as divergent view-points looking at different sides of a single Reality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
770:Integral reality is the world's transparency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of the truth of the world and of man and of all that transluces both. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
771:Like a chariot drawn by wild horses is the mind, the man of knowledge should hold it in with an unswerving attention. ~ CwetawataraUpanishad. II. 9, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
772:Man falls not suddenly into death, but moves to meet him step by step. We are dying each day; each day robs us of a part of our existence. ~ Sencea, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
773:Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,#KEYS
774:No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - I, Bhawani Mandir, #KEYS
775:There is no one who is without faults, and who is not in some way a burden to others, whether he is a superior or a subject, an old man or a young one, a scholar or a dunce. ~ Saint Robert Bellarmine, #KEYS
776:312. Each man of us has a million lives yet to fulfil upon this earth. Why then this haste and clamour and impatience?
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma[53],#KEYS
777:A man might sit still and motionless for ever and yet be as much bound to the Ignorance as the animal or the insect. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Divine Work, #KEYS
778:If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
779:Man, every time he gives up and abandons himself, finds God in the depths of his heart, as if the immutable principle of his abnegation. ~ J. Tauler, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
780:That man whose hair stands on end at the mere mention of the name of God, and from whose eyes flow tears of love—he has indeed reached his last birth. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
781:The Church teaches, "Mary is truly 'Mother of God' since she is the mother of the eternal Son of God made man, who is God himself." ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (CCC 509), #KEYS
782:We love irrational creatures out of charity, in as much as we wish them to endure, to give glory to God, and be useful to man ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.25.11)., #KEYS
783:What is man?... Thou crownedst him with glory and honour.... thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Hebrews,, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
784:At a certain stage in the path of devotion the religious man finds satisfaction in the Divinity with a form, at another stage in the formless Impersonal. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
785:A Witness dwells within our secrecies,
The incarnate Godhead in the body of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,#KEYS
786:Fate is a balance drawn in Destiny's book.
Man can accept his fate, he can refuse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
787:he man who has conquered his unreined desires, offers no hold to sorrow; it glides over him like water over the leaves of the lotus. ~ Buddhist Texts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
788:However man's mind may tire or fail his flesh,
A will prevails cancelling his conscious choice .
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon,#KEYS
789:Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of the Being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Life, #KEYS
790:No-Man's Land
Non-violence is better than violence as a rule, and still sometimes violence may be the right thing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Morality and Yoga,#KEYS
791:No man works, but Nature works through him for the self-expression of a Power within that proceeds from the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Divine Work, #KEYS
792:There is a greater accumulation of divinity in man. Man is Narayana Himself. If God can manifest Himself through an image, then why not through man also? ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
793:The thought of a solitary man can become, by exercise of selfless and undoubting Will, the thought of a nation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The Real Difficulty, #KEYS
794:A higher instrumental dynamis than mind is needed to transform totally a nature created by the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
795:Although lustful actions may accord with the nature of man as animal, they are not fitting to it as rational ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Colossians, ch. 3)., #KEYS
796:He whose mind is utterly purified from soil, as heaven is pure from stain and the moon from dust, him indeed I call a man of religion. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
797:In the prone obscure beginnings of the race
The human grew in the bowed apelike man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul,#KEYS
798:In this rude combat with the fate of man
Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#KEYS
799:The whole future of the Earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, #KEYS
800:The whole world has been made by the energy of man, by the power of enthusiasm, by the power of faith. Arise and awake, the world is calling upon you. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
801:After sin, the sacrament of penance is necessary for salvation, even as bodily medicine after man has contracted a dangerous disease ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.84.5). #KEYS
802:Not by denying all relations, but through all relations is the Divine Infinite naturally approachable to man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Supreme Word of the Gita, #KEYS
803:To perish is better for man or for nation
Nobly in battle, nor end disgraced by disease or subjection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
804:After sin, the sacrament of penance is necessary for salvation, even as bodily medicine after man has contracted a dangerous disease ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.84.5)., #KEYS
805:Its light stirs man the thinker to create
An earthly semblance of diviner things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
806:Our I is not that spiritual being which can look on the Divine Existence and say, "That am I". ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
807:The foundation of man's life is the dwelling in him of the divine Spirit equal in all men. And that is why men among themselves are all equal. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
808:There is a need within the soul of man
The splendours of the surface never sate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,#KEYS
809:Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, I, 2, 3, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
810:Christianity was an assertion of human equality in the spirit, a great assertion of the unity of the divine spirit in man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, Asiatic Democracy, #KEYS
811:Every being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant; and although no being in the whole universe is as weak as man, none is as divine as he.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
812:If man thinks only of himself and seeks everywhere his own profit, he cannot be happy. If thou wouldst really live for thyself, live for others. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
813:Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. ~ Saint Ignatius of Antioch, #KEYS
814:Man can only exceed the law of battle by discovering the greater law of his immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Vision of the World-Spirit - Time the Destroyer, #KEYS
815:Man, if thou wouldst discover in the crowd the friends of God, observe simply those who carry love in their hearts and in their hands. ~ Angeles Silesins, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
816:The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance. Between the two remains the son of man to struggle." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
817:The man in whose vision all things are becomings of the Self and who sees in all things oneness, whence shall he have grief or delusion? ~ Isha Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
818:The superior type of man is in all the circumstances of his life exempt from prejudices and obstinacy; he regulates himself by justice alone. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
819:What we see as error is very frequently the symbol or a disguise or a corruption or malformation of a truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
820:When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. ~ Mark Twain #KEYS
821:Yet is the dark Inconscient whence came all
The self-same Power that shines on high unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator,#KEYS
822:Fortunate is the man who does not lose himself in the labyrinths of philosophy, but goes straight to the Source from which they all rise. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Guru Ramana, #KEYS
823:Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,#KEYS
824:Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
825:Man, wouldst thou be a sage, wouldst thou know thyself and know God? First thou shouldst extinguish in thyself the desire of the world. ~ Angelus Silesius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
826:The supreme duty of man is to remember the Lord always, whether one is engaged in consciously repeating His name or not. Every breath of ours should be associated with Him, in our mind. ~ Swami Vijnanananda, #KEYS
827:The truly religious man is he, who does not commit any sin even when he is alone, and when no man observes him, because he feels, that God sees him even then. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
828:Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay
He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#KEYS
829:Faith is indispensable to man, for without it he could not proceed forward in his journey through the Unknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
830:God and the angels have a ready free choice of the will, whereas man suffers difficulty in choosing because of uncertainty and hesitation ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (DV 24.3)., #KEYS
831:Not in this living net
Of flesh and nerve, nor in the flickering mind
Is a man's manhood seated. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,#KEYS
832:The religious instinct in man is most of all the one instinct in him that cannot be killed, it only changes its form. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Religion as the Law of Life, #KEYS
833:Within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
834:For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, I, 5, par. 3, #KEYS
835:If man surrenders totally to the Divine, he identifies himself with the Divine.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Elements of Yoga, Surrender to the Divine Will, Surrender, [T5],#KEYS
836:Man insists continually on making God in his own image instead of seeking to make himself more and more in the image of God, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Rebirth, #KEYS
837:Man separates from Nature only that Nature may be found again in a higher dignity in the Man. For as the Ideal is realized in Nature, so is the Real idealized in man. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Theory of Life, #KEYS
838:Since the race of women owed to men a debt, as from Adam without woman woman came, therefore without man the Virgin this day brought forth, and on behalf of Eve repaid the debt to man. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #KEYS
839:The history of the cycles of man is a progress towards the unveiling of the Godhead in the soul and life of humanity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Theory of the Vibhuti, #KEYS
840:What will a man gain by knowing many scriptures? The one thing needful is to know how to cross the river of the world. God alone is real, and all else illusory. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
841:When a man's knowledge is sufficient to attain, and his virtue is not sufficient to enable him to hold, whatever he may have gained, he will lose again. ~ Confucius, Analects, 15:32, i, #KEYS
842:Faith is the unshaken stance of the soul and is unmoved by any adversity. The believing man is not one who thinks God can do all things, but one who trusts that he will obtain everything. ~ Saint John Climacus, #KEYS
843:I saw the Son of Man, and he said to me, "Have no fear! I am the First and the Last. I was dead and now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and of the underworld." ~ Revelation 1:17-18, #KEYS
844:Just as man understands God through visible creatures, so an angel understands God by understanding its own essence ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Romans 1, lect. 6)., #KEYS
845:Only by falling back on our better thought, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, can we know what that wisdom saith. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
846:The proud man wishes to distinguish himself from others and deprives himself thus of the best joy of life, of a free and joyful communion with men. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
847:The works of man recoil upon himself, and it is of the nature of things human that in collective terms the agent becomes the creature, perhaps the victim, of his action. ~ Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays p.48, #KEYS
848:Why do you believe in what the astrologers say? It is the belief that brings the trouble.
Sri Aurobindo says that a man becomes what he thinks he is.
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
849:Let not therefore the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches. ~ Jeremiah IX. 23, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
850:One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
~ Robert Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love (1973). This is sometimes misquoted as One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.,#KEYS
851:That man whose mind is solely attached to the objects of sense, him death drags with it as an impetuous torrent sweeps away a slumbering village. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
852: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
853:A man is not a master because he despotically subjects being living at his mercy. He can be called a master who has compassion for all that lives. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
854:Man is not and cannot be wholly governed either in his thought or his action by the reason alone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Instruments - Thought-Process, #KEYS
855:Man's natural joy of life is overcast
And sorrow is his nurse of destiny. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.04#KEYS
856:Nothing can be thought of which is more marvelous than this divine accomplishment: that the true God, the Son of God, should become true man ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.27)., #KEYS
857:Realism is in its essence an attempt to see man and his world as they really are without veils and pretences. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Movement of Modern Literature - I, #KEYS
858:Religion is the first attempt of man to get beyond himself and beyond the obvious and material facts of his existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Lower Triple Purusha, #KEYS
859:That is one of the many reasons why I avoid speaking as much as possible. For I always say either too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine... ~ Samuel Becket, #KEYS
860:The foundation of the pure spiritual consciousness that is the first object in the evolution of the spiritual man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
861:Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do." ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
862:When a man shakes from him the clinging yoke of desire, affliction drops away from him little by little as drops of water glide from a lotus-leaf. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
863:Man's knowledge casked in the barrels of Memory
Has the harsh savour of a mortal draught: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
864:Many things are wanting to indigence, but everything is wanting to greed. A covetous man is useful to none and still less is he of any good to himself. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
865:To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise,
Up from man's bare beginning is our climb; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind,#KEYS
866:Every grace granted to man has three degrees in order; for by God it is communicated to Christ, from Christ it passes to the Virgin, and from the Virgin it descends to us." ~ Saint Bernardine of Siena, (1380-1444), #KEYS
867:Hearing ultimate Truth, the dull-witted man is bewildered.
The wise man hearing Truth retreats within and appears dull-witted. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Ashtavakra Gita, 18.32,#KEYS
868:It is at some one point or a few points that the fire is lit and spreads from hearth to hearth, from altar to altar. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
869:One may say boldly that no man has a just perception of any truth, if that truth has not reacted on him so intensely that be is ready to be its martyr. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
870:Since an unlooked-for salvation was to be provided for men through the help of God, so also was the unlooked-for birth from a virgin accomplished; God giving this sign, but man not working it out. ~ Saint Irenaeus, #KEYS
871:The act done under right rule, with detachment, without liking or dislike, by the man who grasps not at the fruit, that is a work of light. ~ Bhagavad Gita 18.23, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
872:The Divine is the perfection towards which we move. And if you like, I shall lead you to Him very willingly. Have confidence.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, "The Divine" and "Man",#KEYS
873:The man who has conquered himself and is tranquillised, remains fixed in his highest self, whether in pleasure or pain, in honour or in disgrace. ~ Bhagavad Gita, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
874:Three things are necessary for the salvation of man : to know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do.
~ Saint Thomas Aquinas,#KEYS
875:All things yield to a man and Zeus is himself his accomplice
When like a god he wills without remorse or longing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
876:But the holy man (Saint Martin) chose to serve the heavenly God rather than to fight under an earthly emperor... to exchange the sacramenta of the military for evangelical edicts... ~ Alcuin of York, Vita Martini 2, #KEYS
877:Man within the community is now at least a half-civilised creature, but his international existence is still primitive. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Inadequacy of the State Idea, #KEYS
878:One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king. ~ Abraham Maslow, #KEYS
879:se man is never less alone than when he is alone." ~ Jonathan Swift, (1667-1745), an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric, became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, Wikipedia., #KEYS
880:Slumbering in a sealed and secret cave
The powers that sleep unused in man within. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release,#KEYS
881:Sometimes, when a man is already excited by violent passions, he is disturbed by mere trifles and behaves as though he were really angry ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (In I DA lect. 2)., #KEYS
882:The human mind existing in its nature is not a person, for it is not the whole which subsists, but a part of the subsistent; namely, of the man ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.26)., #KEYS
883:These limitations of his power, knowledge, life, delight of existence are the whole cause of man's dissatisfaction with himself and the universe.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
884:All alters in a world that is the same.
Man most must change who is a soul of Time;
His gods too change and live in larger light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act V,#KEYS
885:All creation tends toward man, all mankind tends toward Christ, and, in turn, Christ, as he has revealed himself to us, tends to unite with all mankind, and through it with the universe. ~ Louis Bouyer, Cosmos (231), #KEYS
886:A man is called virtuous by reason of a single perfect virtue, namely, prudence, upon which all the moral virtues depend ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Politics, lesson 3)., #KEYS
887:GIRISH: "If a man is so strongly tied hand and foot, then what is his way?"
MASTER: "He has nothing to fear if God Himself, as the guru, cuts the chain of maya." ~ Sri Ramakrishna,#KEYS
888:Man's soul crosses through thee to Paradise,
Heaven's sun forces its way through death and night. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
889:The active Brahman fulfils Itself in the world by works and man also is in the body for self-fulfilment by action. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad: The Inhabiting Godhead, Life and Action, #KEYS
890:The more a man is truthful, the more he is divine; unconquerableness, immortality, the greatness of the godhead enter into a man along with truthfulness. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
891:The small man builds cages for everyone he knows
While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the beautiful rowdy prisoners. ~ Hafiz,#KEYS
892:The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #KEYS
893:To seek for delight is therefore the fundamental impulse and sense of Life; to find and possess and fulfil it is its whole motive. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Double Soul in Man, #KEYS
894:When a man has subdued himself and lives in perfect continence, not god, not Gandharva, not Mara, not Brahma himself can turn into defeat his victory. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
895:Each part of man's being has its own dharma which it must follow and will follow in the end, put on it what fetters you please. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Spiritual Aim and Life, #KEYS
896:If you give to a man all riches and all might and he looks upon himself with the same humility as before, then that man far surpasses other human beings. ~ Meng-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
897:In each life man has to figure a certain sum of its complexity and put that into some kind of order. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture - V, #KEYS
898:Man at his highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly abnormal in it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #KEYS
899:Regarding virtue, perfection consists in man not following the passions of the body, but moderating and controlling them in accordance with reason ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 2.79), #KEYS
900:The entire world, from its beginning to end, is nothing more than the dream of a man, who becomes captivated by what he sees, only to awaken and find that it was nothing (fa idhā lā shayy). ~ Umar b. Al-Khaṭṭāb #KEYS
901:The group-man follows in the wake of the individual and is always far behind the highest individual development. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Drive towards Economic Centralisation, #KEYS
902:Without the man the moment is a lost opportunity; without the moment the man is a force inoperative. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings: Historical Impressions, The French Revolution, #KEYS
903:For man, below the god, above the brute,
Is given the calm reason as his guide;
He is not driven by an unthinking will ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate,#KEYS
904:Gold is tested by the fire, the good man by his acts, heroes by perils, the prudent man by difficult circumstances, friends and enemies by great needs. ~ Mahabharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
905:The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #KEYS
906:Universe is a diffusion of the divine All in infinite Space and Time, the individual its concentration within limits of Space and Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man in the Universe, #KEYS
907:You must remember one thing. God knows our inner feeling. A man gets the fulfillment of the desire he cherishes while practicing sadhana. As one thinks, so one receives. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
908:But others question because of a desire to know, as the Blessed Virgin did when she said to the angel: "How shall this be, since I do not know man?" ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Lk 1:34)., #KEYS
909:Earth cannot long resist the man whom Heaven has chosen;
Gods with him walk; his chariot is led; his arm is assisted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
910:He who practises wisdom without anger or covetousness, who fulfils with fidelity his vows and lives master of himself, he is indeed a man of religion. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
911:Inwardly, the man who does not destroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Vision of the World-Spirit - Time the Destroyer, #KEYS
912:A single day of life of the man who stimulates himself by an act of energy, is of more value than a hundred years passed in norchalance and indolence. ~ Buddhist Texts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
913:At a certain stage in the path of devotion the religious man finds satisfaction in the Divinity with a form, at another stage in the formless Impersonal. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
914:Leader here with his uncertain mind,
Alone who stares at the future's covered face,
Man lifted up the burden of his fate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn,#KEYS
915:Leave to the night its phantoms, leave to the future its curtain!
Only today Heaven gave to mortal man for his labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
916:Let the superior man bear himself in the commerce of men with an always dignified deference, regarding all men that dwell in the world as his own brothers. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
917:Man is good when he raises very high his divine and spiritual "I", but frightful when he wishes to exalt above men his fleshly vain, ambitious and exclusive. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
918:Son of man, thou hast crowned thy life with flowers that are scentless,
Chased the delights that wound. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
919:The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.
~ Eliphas Levi,#KEYS
920:The life of grace unto which a man is regenerated, presupposes the life of the rational nature, in which man is capable of receiving instruction ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.71.1ad1)., #KEYS
921:The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill;
I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Man,#KEYS
922:At times because of one man's evil, ten thousand people suffer. So you kill that one man to let the tens of thousands live. Here, truly, the blade that deals death becomes the sword that saves lives. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #KEYS
923:God and the human are paradigms of each other, and to the degree that God is humanized in a man because of his love for humanity, so does the human deify itself into God, empoweredby love. ~ Maximus, Amb. 10. 1113B11~ 14, #KEYS
924:It is always well for the man to go the moment his work is done and not to outstay the Mother's welcome. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings: Historical Impressions, The French Revolution, #KEYS
925:Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, [he] is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, #KEYS
926:No man ever succeeded in this sadhana by his own merit. To become open and plastic to the Mother is the one thing needed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Difficulties of the Path - VII, #KEYS
927:Occult powers can only be for the spiritual man an instrumentation of the Divine Power that uses him. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, The Danger of the Ego and the Need of Purification, #KEYS
928:Religion's real business is to prepare man's mind, life and bodily existence for the spiritual consciousness to take it up. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
929:Seek the bridegroom not the teacher; God and not man; darkness not daylight; and look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervour and glowing love. ~ Saint Bonaventure, #KEYS
930:So long as man has not thrown from him the load of worldly desire which he carries about with him, he cannot be in tranquillity and at peace with himself. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
931:Why was not man created good from the beginning?
It is not God who made man wicked. It is man who makes himself wicked by separating himself from God.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
932:It is contrary to good morals for one man to have several wives, for the result of this is discord in domestic society, as is evident from experience ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.124)., #KEYS
933:It is impossible for man who has a body to abstain absolutely from all action, but whoever; renounces its fruits, is the man of true renunciation. ~ Bhagavad Gita. 18.11, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
934:Leave inimical thoughts aside if you want to have permanent Bhakti. Hatred is a thing which greatly impedes the course of Bhakti, and the man who hates none reaches God. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
935:Virtues are formed by prayer. Prayer preserves temperance. Prayer suppresses anger. Prayer prevents emotions of pride and envy. Prayer draws into the soul the Holy Spirit, and raises man to Heaven. ~ Saint Ephrem of Syria, #KEYS
936:A man shall shake off every tie; for when he has no more attachment for form and name, when he is utterly without possessions, sorrow does not run after him. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
937:A truly religious man should think that other religions are also so many paths leading to the Truth. We should always maintain an attitude of respect towards other religions. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
938:Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence. ~ Paracelsus, #KEYS
939:She puts forth a small portion of herself,
A being no bigger than the thumb of man
Into a hidden region of the heart ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
940:The highest and widest seeing is the wisest; for then all knowledge is unified in its one comprehensive meaning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
941:The savage is perhaps not so much the first forefather of civilised man as the degenerate descendant of a previous civilisation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Three Steps of Nature, #KEYS
942:A formless yearning passions in man's heart,
A cry is in his blood for happier things ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.04#KEYS
943:All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 2 Timothy, 3:16-17, #KEYS
944:Having studied books, the sage uniquely consecrated to knowledge and wisdom, should leave books completely aside as a man who wants the rice abandons the husk. ~ Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
945:In evolutionary fact the superior is not prior but posterior in appearance, the less developed precedes the more developed and prepares it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man and the Evolution, #KEYS
946:Inheritor of the brief animal mind,
Man, still a child in Nature's mighty hands,
In the succession of the moments lives; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#KEYS
947:Man over woman, woman o'er man, over lover and foeman
Wrestling we strive to expand in our souls, to be wide, to be happy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
948:The senses are delusive. Even the highest man is sometimes dragged down by them to the lowest plane of sensuality. For this reason you must wage an incessant war against them. There is no other way. ~ Swami Ramakrishnananda, #KEYS
949:The superior man lives in peace with all men with- out acting absolutely like them. The vulgar man acts absolutely like them without being in accord with them. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
950:The vault of heaven
Is not a true similitude for man
Whose space outgyres thought's last horizon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
951:Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany
Of the timeless vastness of Infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#KEYS
952:We all have inner demons to fight. We call these demons 'fear', 'hatred' and 'anger'. If you don't conquer them, then a life of a hundred years... is a tragedy. If you do, a life of a single day can be a triumph.
~ Yip Man,#KEYS
953:Barbarism is the state of society in which man is almost entirely preoccupied with his life and body, his economic and physical existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Civilisation and Culture, #KEYS
954:He who has conquered the desire of the present life and of the future life, who has vanquished all fear and broken all chain, he is indeed a man of religion. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
955:The harmony of the inner and outer man which is the true meaning of civilisation and the efficient condition of a true progress. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, "Is India Civilised?" - I, #KEYS
956:Whatever the brain may plan, the heart knows first and whoever can go beyond the brain to the heart, will hear the voice of the Eternal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, The Glory of God in Man, #KEYS
957:A man my fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, (1809-1894), poet, physician, and essayist, father of the judge, Wikipedia., #KEYS
958:Charity demands that a man should grieve for the offense committed against his friend, and that he should be anxious to make satisfaction to his friend ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (St 3.84.5ad2)., #KEYS
959:For man alone of terrestrial creatures to live rightly involves the necessity of knowing rightly. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Nature's Law in Our Progress - Unity in Diversity, Law and Liberty, #KEYS
960:Man does not see God by his own powers; but God is seen by men when it pleases him that this should be so. He decides by whom he should be seen, and when, and how for God is powerful in all things. ~ Irenaeus, Against Heresies, #KEYS
961: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
962:What we call sin,
Is but man's leavings as from deep within
The Pilot guides him in his pilgrimage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,#KEYS
963:All she beheld that surges from man's depths,
The animal instincts prowling mid life's trees, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute,#KEYS
964:A man's mind runs after bad things. If he wants to act virtuously, the mind fails to co-operate. Therefore, if one wants to achieve something noble, he must be sincerely arduous and seized with a firm resolve. ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
965:A truly religious man ought to think that the other religions are also paths leading towards the Reality. We should always maintain an attitude of respect towards other religions. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
966:Holiness had to be brought to man by the humanity assumed by one who was God, so that God might overcome the tyrant by force and so deliver us and lead us back to himself through the mediation of his Son. ~ Gregory of Nazianzen, #KEYS
967:If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ? ~ John IV. 20, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
968:It needs the eye of genius to dispense with the necessity of experience and see truth with a single intuitive glance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - I, The Man of the Past and the Man of the Future, #KEYS
969:Look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every man you meet - you just find your way between. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
970:The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another, one which will last forever…" ~ Anatole France, (1844-1924), a French poet, journalist, and successful novelist with several best-sellers, Wikipedia., #KEYS
971:The will of self-giving forces away by its power the veil between God and man; it annuls every error and annihilates every obstacle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Works, Devotion and Knowledge, #KEYS
972:Why does it take many people such a long time to realize Him? - MASTER: The truth is that a man doesn't feel restless for God unless he is finished with his enjoyments and duties. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
973:All sadhanas (spiritual practices) are methods to decrease the thoughts and to increase peace and thus slowly man can become God. Not only does one enjoy peace oneself but can give peace to others as well. ~ MATA AMRITANANDAMAYI, #KEYS
974:An Angel can illuminate the thought and mind of man by strengthening the power of vision and by bringing within his reach some truth which the Angel himself contemplates. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
975:Faith in one's own Guru is necessary. If a man loves his Guru with his whole heart, obeys what the latter says, his mind being devoted to him, will naturally shun other attractions and thus get concentrated. ~ SWAMI SUBODHANANDA, #KEYS
976:God and the human are paradigms of each other, and to the degree that God is humanized in a man because of his love for humanity, so does the human deify itself into God, empowered by love. ~ Maximus the Confessor, Amb. 10.1113b, #KEYS
977:He is in truth the man of piety who is dead even in his lifetime, that is to say, whose passions and desires have been destroyed and are like a body that is dead. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
978:he man whose understanding is in union with the Spirit, casts from him both good doing and evil doing; get this union, it is the perfect skill in works. ~ Bhagavad Gita. II- 50, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
979:...if a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest. ~ Plato, The Republic and Other Works, #KEYS
980:It is said that man is the only being that has a fourfold nature exactly corresponding in its levels to the cosmos. The angels lack the lower planes, and the animals lack the higher planes.
~ Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah,#KEYS
981:Man is right when he believes that in all the world there is not a single being above him, but he errs when he thinks that there is on earth a single man beneath him. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
982:Mind is only a cloud that hides the sun of Truth. Man is, in fact, God playing the fool. When He chooses, He liberates himself." ~ Swami Ramdas, (188 -1963), an Indian saint, philosopher, philanthropist, pilgrim, Wikipedia. See:, #KEYS
983:Remember your nothingness in the presence of the Great Spirit." ~ Black Elk, (1863 - 1950), Medicine man, holy man of the Oglala Lakota people, Wikipedia. Quote from: "The Spiritual Athlete: A Primer for the Inner Life,", (1992), #KEYS
984:So we find the humility of the God-man praiseworthy in the extreme when He bore those abject things which He was called on to suffer for the salvation of men ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.55)., #KEYS
985:The collectivity is a mass, a field of formation; the individual is the diviner of truth, the form-maker, the creator. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
986:The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #KEYS
987:The self is the master of the self, what other master of it canst thou have? The wise man who has made himself the master of himself, is a world-illumining beacon. ~ Udanavarga, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
988:And the Lord Jehovah said, "Behold, the man is become as one of us...and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever ~ Genesis, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
989:If the discontented man were plunged into the joys of heaven, disquietude would still gnaw at his heart, because precisely contentment is not within him. ~ Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
990:Immortality for imperfect man,
A god who hurts himself at every step,
Would be a cycle of eternal pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
991:Some sadness is praiseworthy, as Augustine proves, namely when it flows from holy love, as, for instance, when a man is saddened over his own or others' sins ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.46.6)., #KEYS
992:The man who knows the principles of right reason is less than the man who loves them and he less then the man who makes of them his delight and practices them ~ Confucius:Lun-yu, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
993:There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called man to assent or not to assent to the Divine leading. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother with Letters on The Mother, Surrender to the Mother, #KEYS
994:We should not make comparisons between the gods. When a man has really seen a divinity, he knows that all divinities are manifestations of one and the same Brahman. ~ Ramakishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
995:In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives;
It knows but turns away from divine Light
Preferring the dark ignorance of the fall. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame,#KEYS
996:Man cannot teach by his own power. One cannot conquer ignorance without the power of God. He who teaches men gets his power from God. None but a man of renunciation can teach others. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
997:The love for all living creatures is the most notable attribute of man." ~ Charles Darwin, (1809 - 19 April 1882) English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution, Wikipedia, #KEYS
998:The will of man works in the ignorance by a partial light or more often flickerings of light which mislead as much as they illuminate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind, #KEYS
999:Whatever may be a householder's profession, it is necessary for him to live in the company of holy men now and then. If a man loves God, he will himself seek the company of holy men. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1000:But the man who bringeth not by his own movement on living beings the pains of slavery and death and who desireth the good of all creatures, attaineth to happiness. ~ Laws of Manu, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1001:He [Francis Bacon] was a devoutly religious man and was convinced that he would rather believe all the fables of antiquity than deny that the vast fabric of creation is without a mind. ~ Manly P Hall, The Bible, the Story of a Book, #KEYS
1002:However much their systems of philosophy and religion may differ, all mankind stand in reverence and awe before the man who is ready to sacrifice himself for others. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. I. 86), #KEYS
1003:It is appropriate to human nature that a man after coitus remain together with a woman, and not desert her right away to have such relations with another woman ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.122)., #KEYS
1004:Man and cosmos exist by virtue of God and not in themselves except in so far as their being is one with the being of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
1005:Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world, becoming aware of it only within himself, and of himself only within it. Each new subject, well observed, opens up within us a new organ of thought. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
1006: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
1007:Suddenly, the persecutors of the Church of Jesus Christ and all those given over to sin will perish and the earth will become desert-like. And then peace will be made, and man will be reconciled with God." ~ Our Lady of La Salette , #KEYS
1008:The Immanent lives in man as in his house;
He has made the universe his pastime's field,
A vast gymnasium of his works of might. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#KEYS
1009:They are caught by the Wheel that they had hoped to break,
On their shoulders they must bear man's load of fate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
1010:A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." ~ Francis Bacon, (1561-1626), an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, and author, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1011:Atom and molecule in their unseen plan
Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses,
Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#KEYS
1012:By virtue alone man cannot attain to the highest, but by virtue he can develop a first capacity for attaining to it, adhikāra. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge, #KEYS
1013:If every man dared speak frankly and highly what he thinks, he would abide always in the reality. How unhappy we make ourselves by striving to hide our nature. ~ Antoine the Healer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1014:Only of one thing
Man can be sure, the will in his heart and his strength in his purpose:
This too is Fate and this too the gods ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1015:So long as a man has a little knowledge, he goes everywhere reading and preaching; but when the perfect knowledge has been attained, one ceases from vain ostentation. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1016:The individual self and the universal self are one; in every world, in every being, in each thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man's mission is to manifest it.
~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago,#KEYS
1017:This is our present Festival; it is this which we are celebrating today, the Coming of God to Man, that we might go forth, or rather (for this is the more proper expression) that we might go back to God. ~ Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, #KEYS
1018:Under the pressure of his own need, man can change. He can wipe out the past if he wants to badly enough; but most persons not only do not want to, but do not realize that they can. ~ Manly P Hall, (The Sins of the Father 1967, p.8), #KEYS
1019:When you raise yourself beyond praise and blame and your will, the will of a man who loves, intends to be master of all things, then for you is the beginning of virtue. ~ Nietzsche, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1020:God is the universal cause of the enlightening of souls, according to Jn. 1:9: "That was the true light which enlightens every man that cometh into this world" ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.79.3)., #KEYS
1021:I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?
~ Epictetus,#KEYS
1022:In the man who keeps no watch over his conduct, desire extends itself like a creeper. It wanders hither and thither like the monkey running in the forest after a fruit. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1023:It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways. Even if a man has no natural ability he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the Way. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
1024:Attentive in the midst of the heedless, awake amidst sleepers, the intelligent man walks on leaving the others as far behind him as a courser distances beasts of burden. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1025:Do not try. Just Be. One man cannot be like another, because all are beautifully different. You can only 'try' to do spontaneously what you deem to be good, using intuition to decide." ~ Sunyata, a Danish mystic. http://bit.ly/2MabD8D, #KEYS
1026:Every man's true teacher is his own Higher Self, and when the life is brought under the control of reason, this Higher Self is released from bondage to appetites and impulses, and becomes Priest, Sage and Illuminator.
~ Manly P Hall,#KEYS
1027:It is quite natural that man forgets God. Therefore whenever the need arises, God Himself incarnates on earth and shows the path by Himself practicing Sadhana. This time He has also shown the example of renunciation. ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
1028:Nothing is equal to prayer; for what is impossible it makes possible, what is difficult, easy.... For it is impossible, utterly impossible, for the man who prays eagerly and invokes God ceaselessly ever to sin. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #KEYS
1029:Seek the answer in God's grace, not in doctrine; in the longing of the will, not in the understanding; in the sighs of prayer, not in research; seek the bridegroom not the teacher; God and not man; darkness not daylight. ~ Bonaventure, #KEYS
1030:If a man knows himself, he shall know God." ~ Clement of Alexandria, (c. 150 - c. 215), Christian theologian. A convert to Christianity, he was an educated man who was familiar with classical Greek philosophy and literature, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1031:If you love your Bridegroom, you must observe His death, must picture in your mind His humility, and must press solidly to your intellect as on a coin the virtues which He bore in the flesh after the manner of man. ~ Leander of Seville, #KEYS
1032:Man is there to affirm himself in the universe, that is his first business, but also to evolve and finally to exceed himself. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
1033:On his mind vacillating, mobile, difficult to hold in, difficult to master the intelligent man should impose the same straightness as an arrow-maker gives to an arrow. ~ Dhammapada-33, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1034:Suffocated by the shallowness of the human nature we aspire to the knowledge that truly knows, the power that truly can, the love that truly loves.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, "The Divine" and "Man",#KEYS
1035:There is nothing on earth more important than the love which conscious beings feel towards each other, whether or not it is every expressed." ~ Thaddeus Golas, (1924 - 1997) "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, ", (2010), Wikipedia., #KEYS
1036:Language is different but man is the same everywhere. That is why spoken Reason is one, and through its translation we see it to be the same in Egypt, in Persia and in Greece. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1037:That man is a true man whose mind dwells on God. He alone is a man whose spiritual consciousness has been awakened and who is firmly convinced that God alone is real and all else illusory. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1038:The superior man does not set his mind either for or against anything." ~ Confucius, (551-479) a Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1039:The woman was not formed from the feet of the man as a servant, nor from the head as lording it over her husband, but from the side as a companion, as it says in Genesis ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (2:21)., #KEYS
1040:A man who cannot comm and himself, should obey. But there are too those who know how to comm and themselves, but yet are very far from knowing how also to obey. ~ Nietzsche, Zarathustra, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1041:As the perfect man speaks so he acts; as he acts, so the perfect man speaks. It is because he speaks as he acts and acts as he speaks that he is called the perfect. ~ Buddhist Scripture, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1042:He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.
~ Plato,#KEYS
1043:It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. ~ Bertrand Russell, #KEYS
1044:Man cannot seize or hold at once all that the illumination brings to him; it has to be repeated constantly so that he may grow in the light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, The Ashwins, Lords of Bliss, #KEYS
1045:Man is a hero so long as he struggles. But to conquer one's passions is no joke. Man can only do it by finding something that gives him greater pleasure. Man must give up everything to God, then alone he thrives. ~ Swami Ramakrishnananda, #KEYS
1046:Since nothing can be expected to rise again, unless it has first been prostrated. It is only the man who is ignorant of the fact that the flesh falls by death, that can fail to discover that it stands erect by means of life. ~ Tertullian, #KEYS
1047:Taking pity on mankind's weakness, and moved by our corruption, he could not stand aside and see death have the mastery over us; he did not want creation to perish and his Father's work in fashioning man to be in vain. ~ Saint Athanasius, #KEYS
1048:The crown of conscious Immortality,
The godhead promised to our struggling souls
When first man's heart dared death and suffered life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#KEYS
1049:Though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #KEYS
1050:Too hard the gods are with man's fragile race;
In their large heavens they dwell exempt from Fate
And they forget the wounded feet of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate,#KEYS
1051:An adversary Force was born of old:
Invader of the life of mortal man,
It hides from him the straight immortal path. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
1052:For such a man, one who neglects no effort to set himself from now in the ranks of the best, is a priest, a minister of the gods, a friend of Him who dwells within him. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1053:He is the wise man who, having once taken up his resolve, acts and does not cease from the labour, who does not lose uselessly his days and who knows how to govern himself. ~ Mahabharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1054:If a man loves, he will know the sound of this voice. For this warm affection of soul is a loud voice crying in the ears of God, and it says: My God, my love, You are all mine and I am all Yours. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1055:If you make much of mind you make much of doubt. People are skeptics. Why? Because they make much of this little mind. But the mind never directs man properly. Go beyond the mind and you will go beyond all doubts. ~ Swami Ramakrishnananda, #KEYS
1056:Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them. ~ Bertrand Russell, #KEYS
1057:Therefore neither you, O judges, nor men in general ought to fear death: they have only to remember one thing, that for a just man there is no ill in life and no ill in death. ~ Socrates, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1058:You must be genuine if you want to advance in spiritual life. You may cheat a man for some time, but you cannot cheat God. Nor can you deceive the world for long. Your face, your tone, your manner will betray you. ~ Swami Ramakrishnananda, #KEYS
1059:A branch detached from the contiguous branch must needs be detached from the whole tree: even so man separated even from a single man is detached from the whole society. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1060:A lonely soul passions for the Alone,
The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God,
A body is his chamber and his shrine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,#KEYS
1061:A man cannot see God unless he gives his whole mind to Him. The mind is wasted on 'lust and greed'. As long as there is bhoga, there will be less of yoga. Furthermore, bhoga begets suffering. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1062:If we make every effort to avoid death of the body, still more should it be our endeavor to avoid death of the soul. There is no obstacle for a man who wants to be saved other than negligence and laziness of soul. ~ Saint Anthony the Great, #KEYS
1063:I guide man to the path of the Divine
And guard him from the red Wolf and the Snake. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
1064:It is only by hundreds or thousands, perhaps even millions of human lives that man can grow into his divine self-existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture - V, #KEYS
1065:That which brings well-being to man is Dharma. Dharma supports this world. The people are upheld by Dharma. That which secures preservation of beings is Dharma. Dharma leads to eternal happiness and immortality. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #KEYS
1066:The captain had answered the man of God, "If the Lord himself should make windows in heaven, could such a thing be?" And he had said, "You shall see it with your own eyes, but you shall not eat of it." ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 2 Kings, 7:19, #KEYS
1067:There is nothing to prevent a man, who cannot grasp a proof, accepting as a matter of faith, what in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.2.2ad1)., #KEYS
1068:The superior man perseveres in the middle path. Even though he remains unknown and the world esteems him not, he feels no regret. The sage alone is capable of such an action. ~ Tsang-Yung, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1069:Wisdom is greater than all terrestrial sciences and than all human knowledge. She renders a man indifferent to the joys of the world and permits him to consider with an impassive heart their precipitous and tumultous course. ~ Fa.khen-pi.u, #KEYS
1070:At the time of Japa and meditation, we meditate on the Lord keeping our mind concentrated on Him, in the same way, if we learn to see the same Lord in every man, then we shall not forget God even in the midst of work. ~ SWAMI VIRESWARANANDA, #KEYS
1071:Awake, mankind! For your sake God has become man. Awake, you who sleep, rise up from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you. I tell you again: for your sake, God became man. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1072:Be like a solid tower whose brave height remains unmoved by all the winds that blow; the man who lets his thoughts be turned aside by one thing or another, will lose sight of his true goal, his mind sapped of its strength. ~ Dante Alighieri, #KEYS
1073:Free from the happiness desired by slaves, delivered from the gods and their adoration, fearless and terrible, grand and solitary is the will of the man of truth. ~ Nietzsche, Zarathoustra, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1074:It would be very surprising if a church constructed by the hands of man should be full of symbols while the universe would not be infinitely full of them. They must be read. ~ Simone Weil, 'The First Condition for the Work of a Free Person', #KEYS
1075:Let men blame him or praise, let fortune enter his house or go forth from it, let death come to him today or late, the man of firm mind never deviates from the straight path. ~ Bhartrihari, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1076:No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu cannot prevail till the debt to Rudra is paid. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Vision of the World-Spirit - Time the Destroyer, #KEYS
1077:Things will come to a head, but when man's hand can do nothing and everything seems to be lost, God Himself will intervene and rearrange the world in the blink of an eye, like from morning to night." ~ Ven. Bernardo Maria Clausi (1787-1849), #KEYS
1078:Think of the life you have lived until now as over and, as a dead man, see what's left as a bonus and live it according to Nature. Love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own, for what could be more fitting?" ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
1079:When by a constant practice a man is capable of effecting mental concentration, then wherever he may be, his mind will always lift itself above his surroundings and will repose in the Eternal. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1080:Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #KEYS
1081: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
1082: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
1083:Not on the tramp of the multitudes, not on the cry of the legions
Founds the strong man his strength but the god that he carries within him. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1084:On the safe land
To linger is to lose what God has planned
For man's wide soul,
Who set eternal godhead for its goal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To the Sea,#KEYS
1085:The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. ~ Thomas merton. "No man is an island", #KEYS
1086:You cannot fathom a wise man's depth until you question or debate him. Until you beat a drum, What distinguishes it from other objects." ~ Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyeltsen, (1182-1251), a Tibetan spiritual leader and Buddhist scholar, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1087:Gods change not their strength, but are of old
And as of old, and man, though less than these,
May yet proceed to greater, self-evolved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#KEYS
1088:God was manifested to man by birth. On the one hand Being, and eternally Being, of the Eternal Being, above cause and word, for there was no word before The Word; and on the other hand for our sakes also Becoming. ~ Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, #KEYS
1089:It is always the individual who receives the intuitions of Nature and takes the step forward dragging or drawing the rest of humanity behind him. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
1090:It is always well for a man to get experience for himself, when he will not take the benefit of superior experience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest, To Motilal Roy, #KEYS
1091:Man finds happiness only in serving his neighbour. And he finds it there because, rendering service to his neighbours, he is in communion with the divine spirit that lives in them. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1092:The devil is said to rejoice most over the sin of lust because it involves the greatest attachment and it is only with difficulty that a man can be torn away from it ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.73.5ad2)., #KEYS
1093:The natural man has to evolve himself into the divine Man; the sons of Death have to know themselves as the children of Immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
1094:There is only one physician—of flesh yet spiritual, born yet uncreated God become man, true life in death, sprung from both Mary and from God first subject to suffering and then incapable of it—Jesus Christ our Lord. ~ Ignatius of Antioch, #KEYS
1095:The ultimate felicity of man lies in speculation. So it clearly does not lie in the act of any moral virtue, nor of prudence or craft, though these are intellectual virtues ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.44), #KEYS
1096:Things will disappear [or appear] only as man changes in consciousness. Deny it if you will, it still remains a fact that consciousness is the only reality and things but mirror that which you are in consciousness." ~ Neville Goddard. Mystic., #KEYS
1097:Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, Two Precepts of Charity (1273), #KEYS
1098:Beyond the earth, but meant for delivered earth,
Wisdom and joy prepare their perfect crown;
Truth superhuman calls to thinking man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,#KEYS
1099:Just as the principal intention of human law is to create friendship of one man to another; so the chief intention of Divine law is to establish friendship of man to God ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.99.2)., #KEYS
1100:Nothing profits the world as much as the abandoning of profits. A man who no longer thinks in terms of loss and gain is truly the non-violent man, for he is beyond all conflict. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
1101:Occultism is the ancient science which deals with the hidden forces of nature, the laws governing them, and the means by which such forces can be brought under the control of the enlightened human mind. ~ Manly P Hall, Spiritual Centers in Man, #KEYS
1102:The cause moving to the Incarnation of the Word could be none other than the unmeasured love of God for man whose nature He wished to couple with Himself in unity of person ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.46)., #KEYS
1103:This grey hour was born
For the ascetic in his silent cave
And for the dying man whose heart released
Loosens its vibrant strings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,#KEYS
1104:Whoever thinks himself an imperfect and worldly soul, is really an imperfect and worldly soul; whoever deems himself divine, becomes divine. What a man thinks he is, he becomes. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1105:All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature mental and vital and physical is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfections. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #KEYS
1106:And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept. ~ Jean Cocteau, #KEYS
1107:God sports in the world as man. He incarnates Himself as man -- as in the case of Krishna, Rama, and Chaitanya. One needs spiritual practice in order to know God and recognize Divine Incarnations. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1108:If a thing is difficult for thee, imagine not therefore! that it is impossible to man; but if a thing is possible and proper to man, think that it is accessible to thee also. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1109:Man, by experience of passion purged,
His myriad faculty perfecting, widens
His nature as it rises till it grows
With God conterminous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#KEYS
1110:The action of our intellect is primarily the function of understanding, but secondarily critical and finally organising, controlling and formative. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
1111:There is no culture, no civilisation ancient or modern which in its system has been entirely satisfactory to the need of perfection in man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - IV, #KEYS
1112:When the thought of a man is without attachment, when he has conquered himself and is rid of desire, by that renunciation he reaches a supreme perfection of quietude. ~ Bhagavad Gita XVIII. 49, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1113:A truly religious man ought to think that the other religions are also paths leading towards the Reality. We should always maintain an attitude of respect towards other religions. ~ Ramakrishss, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1114:such as I am, belong not to myself. ..A man should think thus, "All earth is mine," or thus, "All this belongs to others just as well as to myself;" such a man is never afflicted. ~ Mahabharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1115:The UNDERSTANDING of principles results from man's very nature, which is equally shared by all: whereas FAITH results from the gift of grace, which is not equally in all ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.5.4ad3)., #KEYS
1116:This hidden foe lodged in the human breast
Man must overcome or miss his higher fate.
This is the inner war without escape. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
1117:Always man's Fate hangs poised on the flitting breath of a moment;
Called by some word, by some gesture it leaps, then 'tis graven, 'tis granite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1118:A man needs a supernatural light in order to penetrate further, so that he might have cognition of certain things that he is unable to have cognition of by the natural light ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.8.1)., #KEYS
1119:A man's face shines out more than the rest of his body and it is by the face that we perceive strangers and recognise our friends. How much more, then, is the face of God able to bring illumination to whoever he looks at! ~ Saint Ambrose of Milan, #KEYS
1120:I beg you to understand this one fact - no good comes out of the man who day and night thinks he is nobody. If a man, day and night, thinks he is miserable, low, and nothing, nothing he becomes. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1121:... prophecy is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty. ~ Maimonides, #KEYS
1122:The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Man in the Universe, #KEYS
1123:There is only one physician — of flesh yet spiritual, born yet uncreated God become man, true life in death, sprung from both Mary and from God first subject to suffering and then incapable of it — Jesus Christ our Lord. ~ Ignatius of Antioch, #KEYS
1124:Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1125:If a man is to be healed of sin his mind must necessarily cleave not only to God, but also to the mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ, in whom rests the remission of all sins ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.72)., #KEYS
1126:God dwells in the nothing-at-all that 'was' prior to nothing, in the hidden Godhead of pure gnosis where of no man durst speak." ~ Meister Eckhart, (c. 1260 - c. 1328), German theologian and philosopher, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1127:It is well known that when a man repents the errors of his ways, he is likely to develop an overdose of virtue that will lead to extremes and incline him to become fanatical in his living and thinking. ~ Manly P Hall, (Journey in Truth, 1945 p.153), #KEYS
1128:I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. ~ Anaïs Nin, #KEYS
1129:Sin exalted
Seizes secure on the thrones of the world for her glorious portion,
Down to the bottomless pit the good man is thrust in his virtue. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1130:The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but- what is worse - the slave of as many masters as he has vices. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1131:We image your divinity, but you image our humanity in that union of the two which you have worked in a man. You have veiled the Godhead in a cloud, in the clay of our humanity. Only your love could so dignify the flesh of Adam. ~ Catherine of Siena, #KEYS
1132:When man has known beyond this world the Being who is hidden according to the form in every creature, the Lord who contains in himself all things, then he becomes immortal. ~ wetaswatara Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1133:Whoever wishes to be truly a man, must abandon all preoccupation by the wish to please the world. There is nothing more sacred or more fecund than the curiosity of an independent spirit. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1134:And all man's ghastly company of fears
Are born of folly that believes this span
Of brittle life can limit immortal man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To Weep because a Glorious Sun,#KEYS
1135:Even in all that life and man have marred,
A whisper of divinity still is heard,
A breath is felt from the eternal spheres. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
1136:Longing is the means of realizing Ātman. A man must strive to attain God with all his body, with all his mind, and with all his speech. By thinking day and night of God one acquires the nature of God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1137:The present difficulty is that man thinks he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the higher power which does everything and man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles, otherwise he courts them. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1138:The two phases of this distinction in life are—first, that the man who knows the real Self, will not be affected by anything; secondly, that that man alone can do good to the world. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (CW. V. 285), #KEYS
1139:We are the children of the Almighty, we are sparks of the infinite, divine fire. How can we be nothings? We are everything, ready to do everything, we can do everything, and man must do everything. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1140:A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. ~ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, #KEYS
1141:God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#KEYS
1142:I keep men's own ideals intact. But this also I say to them 'Never feel that your path alone is right and that the paths of others a wrong and full of errors. A man can realize God by following his own path if his prayer is sincere. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1143:It is not the eating of meat that makes a man impure; it is to be hard, calumnious, disloyal, without compassion, proud, avaricious, giving no part of one's possessions to another. ~ Amaghanda Susta, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1144:No man is fit to enjoy heaven unless he has resigned himself to suffer hardship for Christ. (Nothing is more acceptable to God, nothing more helpful for you on this earth than to suffer willingly for Christ. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1145:O young man, go out with your heart, stripped naked of all of your possessions, and be secluded from the whole of you so that you will be compensated for all of that.. ~ Shaykh Abdul Qadir Jilani, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1146:That man, O beloved, who knows this imperishable Spirit, in which the Self is gathered with all its powers, lives and creatures, penetrates into all things and becomes omniscient. ~ Prasna Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1147:The nature of the Spirit is a spacious inner freedom and a large unity into which each man must be allowed to grow according to his own nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age, #KEYS
1148:Vice is contrary to man's nature, in as much as he is a rational animal: and when a thing acts contrary to its nature, that which is natural to it is corrupted little by little ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.34.5)., #KEYS
1149:If a man sin after receiving the grace of the New Testament, he deserves greater punishment, as being ungrateful for greater benefits, and as not using the help given to him ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.106.2ad2)., #KEYS
1150:Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. He that soweth to his flesh, shall reap corruption: but he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. ~ Galatians VI. 7. 8, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1151:What wonder if feel no burden when borne up by the Almighty and led on by the Supreme Guide! For we are always glad to have something to comfort us, and only with difficulty does a man divest himself of self. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1152:I pronounced a great day, not wherein any temporal potentate should minister, but wherein the Terrible Judge should reveal all men's consciences and try every man of each kind of religion. This is the day of change." ~ Saint Edmund Campion, (1540-1581), #KEYS
1153:MY CHILD, hear My words, words of greatest sweetness surpassing all the knowledge of the philosophers and wise men of earth. My words are spirit and life, and they are not to be weighed by man's understanding. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1154:Now, Macarius, true lover of Christ, we must take a step further in the faith of our holy religion, and consider the Word's becoming Man and His divine Appearing in our midst. That mystery the Jews traduce, the Greeks deride, but we adore. ~ Athanasius, #KEYS
1155:That being known which is without sound, touch or form, inexhaustible, eternal, without beginning or end, greater than the great self, immutable, man escapes from the month of death. ~ Katha Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1156:The anvil of the blacksmith remains unshaken under numberless blows of the hammer; so should a man endure with unshaken patience all the ordeals and persecutions which may come upon him. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1157:The Son of God born as the Son of man
Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead's debt,
The debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
1158:They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer,#KEYS
1159:Vain, they have said, is the anguish of man and his labour diurnal,
Vainly his caravans cross through the desert of Time to the Eternal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,#KEYS
1160:As soon as there is a little light in the sky early in the morning, we can understand that the sun is in the sky. Similarly, since there is some consciousness in all bodies-whether man or animal-we can understand the presence of the soul. ~ Bhagwad Gita, #KEYS
1161:His will be done! He is omnipotent! What power has man? All that you can do is to love God. Have intense yearning for Him. The whole world is mad for something; why run mad after fleeting objects of this world? Better be mad for God. ~ SWAMI BRAHMANANDA, #KEYS
1162:Nature moves forward always in the midst of all stumblings and secures her aims in the end more often in spite of man's imperfect mentality than by its means. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Inadequacy of the State Idea, #KEYS
1163:Pythagoras said that the universal Creator had formed two things in His own image: The first was the cosmic system with its myriads of suns, moons, and planets; the second was man, in whose nature the entire universe existed in miniature. ~ Manly P Hall, #KEYS
1164:The mind of mortal man is led by words,
His sight retires behind the walls of Thought
And looks out only through half-opened doors. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
1165:The Prince, travelling through his domains, noticed a man in the cheering crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. He beckoned him over and asked: Was your mother ever employed in my palace? ... No, Sire, the man replied. But my father was. ~ ?, #KEYS
1166:Both states of consciousness, sleep and the waking state, are equally subjective. Only by beginning to remember himself does a man really awaken. And then all surrounding life acquires for him a different aspect and a different meaning. ~ Peter Ouspensky, #KEYS
1167:He who watches over his body, his speech, his whole self, who is full of serenity and joy, possesses a spirit unified and finds satisfaction in solitude, he is in-deed a man of religion. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1168:In this life no one can fulfill his longing, nor can any creature satisfy man's desire. Only God satisfies, he infinitely exceeds all other pleasures. That is why man can rest in nothing but God." ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
1169:Lord Naoshige said, The Way of the Samurai is in desperateness. Ten men or more cannot kill such a man. Common sense will not accomplish such things. Simply become insane and desperate.
~ HAGAKURE: THE BOOK OF THE SAMURAI, YAMAMOTO TSUNETOMO, 1650 1720,#KEYS
1170:The present difficulty is that man thinks that he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the Higher Power which does everything and man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles; otherwise he courts them. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1171:There is only one sin and it is: weakness. When I was a boy, I read Milton's Paradise Lost. The only good man I had any respect for was Satan. The only saint is that person who never weakens, faces everything, and determines die game. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1172:Without faith, our calendar is simply a way by which the revolutions of the earth around itself and around the sun are measured… In faith, time is measured…by the acts of God, whose heart is, in all his activity, turned toward man. ~ Joseph Ratzinger, #KEYS
1173:For God appears the greater to every man in proportion as he has grasped a larger survey of the creatures: and when his heart is lifted up by that larger survey, he gains withal a greater conception of God. ~ Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures IX.2, #KEYS
1174:If human will could be made one with God's,
If human thought could echo the thoughts of God,
Man might be all-knowing and omnipotent; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
1175:Let your heart burn away with yearning for God! Feel that life is not worth living without Him! Then He will reveal Himself! As the poor man longs for wealth, as the lustful man longs for a woman, so must the devotee long for the Lord. ~ Swami Turiyananda, #KEYS
1176:The beasts are mortal, but they do not know or fully understand that fact; the gods are immortal, and they know it - but poor man, up from beasts and not yet a god, was that unhappy mixture: he was mortal, and he knew it. ~ Ken Wilber, Up From Eden, p. x., #KEYS
1177:If one hears an ill word from one's neighbor, and, though he could reply in kind, yet fights in his heart to endure the toil and forces himself not to reply ill so as to sadden the other, such a man lays down his life for his friend. ~ Paschasius of Dumium, #KEYS
1178:Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work;
Nature does most in him, God the high rest:
Only his soul's acceptance is his own. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute,#KEYS
1179:Mysticism-Magic and Yoga-is the means, therefore, to a new universal life, richer, greater and more full of resource than ever before, as free as sunlight, as gracious as the unfolding of a rose. It is for man to take.
~ Israel Regardie, The Tree Of Life,#KEYS
1180:Great figures of gods
Conscious in stone and living without breath,
Watching with fixed regard the soul of man,
Executive figures of the cosmic self ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
1181:If a man is detested by the crowd, you must examine, before you judge him, why they condemn, and if a man is venerated by the crowd, equally must you, before you judge, examine why they admire. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1182:There are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep. ~ GG, #KEYS
1183:This is the highest, all-embracing benefit that Christ has bestowed on us. This is the revelation of the mystery, this is the emptying out of the divine nature, the union of God and man, and the deification of the manhood that was assumed. ~ Andrew of Crete, #KEYS
1184:Every action a man performs in thought, word and act, remains his veritable possession. It follows him and does not leave him even as a shadow separates not by a line from him who casts it. ~ Buddhist Texts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1185:If a man possesses the true light, darkness cannot lodge in his soul. Who can describe the peace of that luminous country where the true light shines out for ever in its limpid purity? ~ Imitation of Christ, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1186:Never give a sword to a man who can't dance." ~ Confucius, (551-479), Chinese philosopher and politician. Emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice, kindness, and sincerity, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1187:Prayer is the light of the spirit, true knowledge of God, mediating between God and man.... I speak of prayer, not words. It is the longing for God, love too deep for words, a gift not given by man but by God's grace. ~ Saint John Chrysostom [PG 64, 462-466], #KEYS
1188:The self is the master of the self, what other master of it canst thou have? The wise man who has made himself the master of himself, has broken his chains, he has rent the ties of his bondage. ~ Udanavarga, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1189:Well is the unconscious rule for the animal breeds
Content to live beneath the immutable yoke;
Man turns to a nobler walk, a master path. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
1190:When by a constant practice a man is capable of effecting mental concentration, then wherever he may be, his mind will always lift itself above his surroundings and will repose in the Eternal. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1191:All knowledge and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience and has become a part of the consciousness and its established operations. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
1192:It is appropriate to human nature that a man after coitus remain together with a woman, and not ditch her right away to have such relations with another woman, as happens with fornicators ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.122)., #KEYS
1193:Man's concept of his world built on experience of the five senses is no longer adequate and in many cases no longer valid." ~ Shafica Karagulla, (1914 - ca. 1986), Turkish born Medical doctor and psychiatrist who took a special interest in psychic perception., #KEYS
1194:Man's nature is like a cup of dirty water—the water has to be thrown out, the cup left clean and empty for the divine liquor to be poured into it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Emptiness, Voidness, Blankness and Silence, #KEYS
1195:Man worships the ungrasped. His vagrant thought
Still busy with the illimitable void
Lives all the time by little things upbuoyed
Which he contemns ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Euphrosyne,#KEYS
1196: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. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,#KEYS
1197:It is the Blessed One, the sole Being, thou sayest, who dwells in every soul: whence then come the misery and sorrow to which he is condemned by his presence in the heart of the soul of man? ~ Bhagavat Purana, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1198:Man is obliged by a Power within him to be the labourer of a more or less conscious self-evolution that shall lead him to self-mastery and self-knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #KEYS
1199:Matrimony as a sacrament of the Church is a union of one man to one woman to be held indivisibly, and this is included in the faithfulness by which the man and wife are bound to one another ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.78)., #KEYS
1200:The magnetic needle always points to the north, and hence it is that sailing vessel does not lose her direction. So long as the heart of man is directed towards God, he cannot be lost in the ocean of worldliness. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1201:The man who is sincere and careful to do nothing to others that he would not have done to him, is not far from the Law. What he does not desire to be done to him, let him not himself do to others. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1202:To discover the spiritual being in himself is the main business of the spiritual man and to help others towards the same evolution is his real service to the race. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
1203:What is the reason for creating everything unless it is for the Son of Man? We must religiously confess and reverently admit that it is for this Son of Man crowned with glory and honour that God created all things. ~ Rupert of Deutz, Commentary on Matthew 1.13, #KEYS
1204:When a man is intoxicated with ecstatic love of God, then who is his father or mother or wife? His love of God is so intense that he becomes mad with it. Then he has no duty to perform. He is free from all debts. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1205:Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you." ~ Carl Jung, (1875 - 1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies, #KEYS
1206:The opinion of the Supreme Lord alone has importance. The Supreme Lord alone deserves all our love and He returns it to us a hundredfold.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Man's relationship with the Divine, The Divine Is with You,#KEYS
1207:To think that this world is the aim and end of life is brutal and degenerating. Any man who starts in life with that idea degenerates himself He will never rise higher, he will always be a slave to the senses. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1208:And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history-money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
~ C S Lewis,#KEYS
1209:Christ does not want you to have hatred—or grief, or wrath, or grudge-bearing—toward a man, in any way whatsoever or because of any sort of temporal reality. All four gospels cry aloud this very thing. ~ Saint Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Charity 4.84, #KEYS
1210:If you want to be great, give up hatred. Then God's grace will descend on you. No one can become great unless God makes one great. A hateful man can never make progress. If you want to rise high up, renounce hatred. Perform good works alone. ~ Swami Adbhutananda, #KEYS
1211:On the vacillating, the mobile mind so difficult to hold in, so difficult to master the man of intelligence imposes a rectitude like the direct straightness which the arrow-maker gives to an arrow. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1212:We feel in our conscience that that by which we live, that which we call our true " I " is the same not only in each man but also in a dog, a horse, a mouse, a fowl, a sparrow, a bee and even a plant. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1213:When a thought of anger or cruelty or a bad and unwholesome inclination awakes in a man, let him immediately throw it from him. let him dispel it, destroy it, prevent it from staying with him. ~ Buddhist Maxims, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1214:One should know a little of everything. If a man starts a grocery-shop, he keeps all kinds of articles there, including a little lentil and tamarind. An expert musician knows how to play a little on all instruments. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1215:The growth of the individual is the indispensable means for the inner growth as distinguished from the outer force and expansion of the collective being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature, #KEYS
1216:The Wise men fulfil their desire, and come to the child, the Lord Jesus Christ, the same star going before them. They adore the Word in flesh, the Wisdom in infancy, the Power in weakness, the Lord of majesty in the reality of man. ~ Pope Leo the Great, Sermon 31, #KEYS
1217:We are not conscious. If we are not conscious we cannot have unity, cannot have individuality, cannot have an Ego or 'I'. All these things are invented by man to keep the illusion of consciousness. Man can be conscious, but at present he is not. ~ Peter Ouspensky, #KEYS
1218:Ego sum ostium. Per me si quis introierit, salvabitur: et ingredietur, et egredietur, et pascua inveniet."
(I am the dooR By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved: and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures.) ~ Anonymous, The Bible, John, 10:9,#KEYS
1219:Having a body capable of suffering, he took the pain of fallen man upon himself; he triumphed over the diseases of soul and body that were its cause, and by his Spirit, which was incapable of dying, he dealt man's destroyer, death, a fatal blow. ~ Melito of Sardis, #KEYS
1220:If a man gathers his whole, mind and fixes it on Me, then, indeed, he achieves everything. "But what am I? It is all He. I am the machine and He is its Operator. It is God alone who exists in this [meaning his body]. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1221:Let us have always in our hearts this thought: I am a man and nothing that interests humanity is foreign to me. We have a common birth; our society resembles the stones of a road that sustain each other. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1222:The gnostic individual would be the consummation of the spiritual man; his whole way of being, thinking, living, acting would be governed by the power of a vast universal spirituality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being, #KEYS
1223:To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely. ~ Jorge Luis Borge,#KEYS
1224:Try peaceful tactics the first ninety-nine times, at the hundredth try, you have no choice if there's demand for a fight. A man who doesn't understand this is worse than a dog. If you encounter an aggressive dog, hit it on the nose with a stick." ~ Tibetan saying., #KEYS
1225:Ever-knowing - as they hide they seek. Appearing other than they are - to the ordinary man; In inward light they roam - making miracles come to pass, Yet they are 'really' known to none." ~ Aflākī, (d. 1360), wrote "Virtues of the gnostics." http://bit.ly/39gbmbp, #KEYS
1226:e who punishes not, kills not, permits not to be killed, who is full of love among those who are full of hate, full of sweetness among those who are full of cruelty, he is indeed a man of religion. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1227:I chant the name of Hari. How can I be a sinner? He who constantly repeats: 'I am a sinner! I am a wretch!' verily becomes a sinner. What lack of faith! A man chants the name of God so much, and still he talks of sin! ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1228:If any man be devout and love God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast. If any man be a wise servant, let him rejoicing enter into the joy of his Lord. If any have laboured long in fasting, let him now receive his recompense. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #KEYS
1229:The role of the wise man is to meditate on the truth, especially the truth regarding the first principle, and to discuss it with others, but also to fight against the falsity that is its contrary ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 1.1)., #KEYS
1230:Ye have been taught that ye put off the old man which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, that ye put on the new man. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ephesians, IV. 21-24, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1231:A man attains everything when he discovers his true Self in himself. The object of sādhanā is to realize that. That also is the purpose of assuming a human body. The body may be given up after the realization of God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1232:Don't be ruled by the light in which birds and serpents, beasts and cattle, flies and worms delight. Keep the material light for your bodily senses, and with all your mental powers embrace the 'true light that enlightens every man' ~ John 1:9). ~ Saint Leo the Great, #KEYS
1233:Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into a multiplicity of his desires, in refusing to await the time of promise, his life story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. ~ Pope Francis, Lumen Fidei 13, #KEYS
1234:Temple-ground
Man, shun the impulses dire that spring armed from thy nature's abysms!
Dread the dusk rose of the gods, flee the honey that tempts from its petals! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1235:Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine [his mind], man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave." ~ George Gurdjieff, (c. 1870 - 1949) mystic, philosopher, spiritual teacher, Wikipedia, #KEYS
1236:As an apparent entity, man does not live his life but is being lived, like a puppet on strings. All his attempts to "live his life", are nothing more than reactions to impulses, engendered by psycho-physical conditions, over which he has no control. ~ Ramesh Balsekar, #KEYS
1237:For true success ask yourself these four questions: Why? Why not? Why not me? Why not now?" ~ James Allen, (1864 - 1912) British philosopher, wrote inspirational books and poetry, pioneer of the self-help movement. His best known work, "As a Man Thinketh," Wikipedia., #KEYS
1238:ho is the Wise man? Whosoever is constantly learning something from one man or another. Who is the rich man? Whosoever is contented with his lot. Who is the strong man? Whosoever is capable of self-mastery. ~ Talmud, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1239:Meet together in common — every single one of you — in grace, in one faith and on Jesus Christ (who was of David's line in his human nature, son of man and son of God) that you may obey the bishop and presbytery with undistracted mind. ~ Saint Ignatius of Antioch, #KEYS
1240:Rarely indeed is a man so spiritual as to strip himself of all things. And who shall find a man so truly poor in spirit as to be free from every creature? His value is like that of things brought from the most distant lands. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1241:To whom will you compare God? What image will you compare him to? As for an idol, a craftsman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and fashions silver chains for it. A man too poor to present such an offering selects wood that will not rot ~ Is. 40:18-19)., #KEYS
1242:A man said to Rabia al-Adawiyya, "I have committed many sins and acts of disobedience. If I decide to turn to Allah - would He turn to me?"
She answered: “No. Only if He were to turn to you, then you would be able to turn to Him." ~ al-Risala al-Qushayriyya#KEYS
1243:Let me assure you that a man can realize his Inner Self through sincere prayer. But to the extent that he has the desire to 'enjoy worldly objects,his vision of the Self becomes obstructed. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1244:Thinking-mind
There throned on concentration's native seat
He opens that third mysterious eye in man,
The Unseen's eye that looks at the unseen, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
1245:The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves,
But perish in the strangling hands of the years,
Discarded from man's thought, proved false by Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
1246:The Son of God in the fullness of time which the inscrutable depth of the Divine counsel has determined, has taken on him the nature of man, thereby to reconcile it to its Author: in order that the inventor of death, the devil, might be conquered. ~ Saint Leo the Great, #KEYS
1247:A man has certain debts to pay: his debts to the gods and rishis, and his debts to mother, father, and wife. He cannot achieve anything without paying the debt he owes to his parents. A man is indebted to his wife as well. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1248:A man who does the lower work is not, for that reason only, a lower man than he who does the higher works; a man should not be judged by the nature of his duties, but by the manner in which he does them. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. V. 239), #KEYS
1249:A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#KEYS
1250:How shall we conquer the old man in us? When the flower becomes a fruit, the petals fall of themselves; so when the divinity increases in us, all the weaknesses of human nature vanish of their own accord. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1251:I have never met a man so religious and devout that he has not experienced at some time a withdrawal of grace and felt a lessening of fervor. No saint was so sublimely rapt and enlightened as not to be tempted before and after. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1252:Is it from without that there can come to a man the sweetness and the charm of his life? Is it not rather from the wisdom of his virtues that flow as from a happy source his real pleasures and his real joys? ~ Plutarch, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1253:The light of God which illumines an Angel enlightens him, and sets him on fire with love, for he is a spirit already prepared for the infusion of that light; but man, being impure and weak, is ordinarily enlightened in darkness, in distress and pain. ~ John of the Cross, #KEYS
1254:One must renounce the ' I ' that makes one feel, ' I am so and so', ' I am a learned man, and so on. But the ' ego of Knowledge' does not injure one. Sankaracharya retained the ' ego of Knowledge' in order to teach mankind. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1255:Plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is there containing and repressing himself as it were in order to make a certain statement of his being. Each is the whole Eternal concealed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Eternal and the Individual, #KEYS
1256:The greatest error of a man is to think that he is weak by nature, evil by nature. Every man is divine and strong in his real nature. What are weak and evil are his habits, his desires and thoughts, but not himself. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1257:The pure shall not die, but he who leads not the spiritual life dies without ceasing. The wise man knows this difference and takes pleasure in purity and spirituality; it is his joy to live like the saints. ~ Udanavarga, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1258:When a man who has carried out a great work is destroyed, it is for the egoism by which he has misused the force within that the force itself breaks him to pieces. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, The Greatness of the Individual, #KEYS
1259:A man can reach God if he follows one path rightly. Then he can learn about all the other paths. A devotee can know everything when God's grace descends on him. If you but realize Him, you will be able to know all about Him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1260:Even if the whole world should believe in the truth of a doctrine and if it should be very ancient, man ought to control it by his reason and throw it boldly away if it does not agree with the demands of his reason. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1261:Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man." ~ Rabindranath Tagore, (1861 - 1941), a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent. he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1262:There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. There will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment." ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #KEYS
1263:You are still under the control of the Divine Mother. You cannot escape Her. You are not free. You must do what She makes you do. A man attains Brahmajnana only when it is given to him by the Ādyāśakti, the Divine Mother. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1264:Fanaticism rises from man's will to dominate others. Once it is born, it brings in its frame a lot of other evils. It blinds man's vision and stirs up the animal in him. It hardens man's heart, destroys all sublime sentiments that give sanctity to life. ~ Swami Abhedananda, #KEYS
1265:I become what I see in myself. All that thought suggests to me, I can do; all that thought reveals in me, I can become. This should be man's unshakable faith in himself, because God dwells in him.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga,#KEYS
1266:It imitates the Godhead it denies,
Puts on his figure and assumes his face.
A Manichean creator and destroyer,
This can abolish man, annul his world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul,#KEYS
1267:Man's nature is made up of four elements, which produce in him four attributes, namely, the beastly, the brutal, the satanic, and the divine. In man there is something of the pig, the dog, the devil, and the saint. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, #KEYS
1268:'Son of man, I have appointed you as watchman to the house of Israel.' ~ Note that Ezekiel, whom the Lord sent to preach his word, is described as a watchman. Now a watchman always takes up his position on the heights so that he can see from a distance whatever approaches., #KEYS
1269:The middle path is made for thinking man.
To choose his steps by reason's vigilant light,
To choose his path among the many paths
Is given him, for each his difficult goal ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate,#KEYS
1270:We do not know where death awaits us; so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave." ~ Michel de Montaigne, (1533 - 1592) French philosopher of the French Renaissance, Wikipedia, #KEYS
1271:Ever since consciousness was born on earth,
Life is the same in insect, ape and man,
Its stuff unchanged, its way the common route. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.05,#KEYS
1272:God must be born on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God.
He who would save the world must be one with the world ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute,#KEYS
1273:He who afflicts no living creature, who neither kills nor allows to be killed, him indeed I call a man of religion. Whoever wishes to consecrate himself to the spiritual life, ought not to destroy any life. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1274:In tasting gall Jesus took on himself the bitterness and toil of man's mortal, painful life. By drinking vinegar he made his own the degradation men had suffered, and in the same act gave us the grace to better our condition treatise ~ Theodoret of Cyr, On the Incarnation)., #KEYS
1275:Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine…. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, What Is Man? (89), #KEYS
1276:Love is in the depths of man as water is in the depths of the earth, and man suffers from not being able to enjoy this infinity that he carries within himself and for which he is made." ~ Frithjof Schuon, (1907 - 1998), Swiss spiritual master, philosopher, author, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1277:Man finds himself a centre of Nature, his fragment of Time surrounded by Eternity, his span of Space surrounded by Infinity. How can he help asking himself, "What am I? and whence have I come and whither do I go?" ~ Carlyle, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1278:No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 Corinthians, 10:13, #KEYS
1279:The body is the chariot and the senses are the horses of the driving and it is through the bloodstained and mire-sunk ways of the world that Sri Krishna pilots the soul of man to Vaicuntha. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Karmayoga, #KEYS
1280:The dying man understands with difficulty what lives, not because his mental faculties are dulled, but because he understands something the living do not and cannot understand, and in this he is entirely absorbed. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1281:As long as a man is the doer, he also reaps the fruit of his deeds, but, as soon as he realizes the Self through enquiry as to who is the doer, his sense of being the doer falls away and the triple karma is ended. This is the state of eternal liberation. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1282:It is far better to be an animal than to be a man making no effort to attain knowledge, for … the animals have no sin and have no need to expiate them." ~ Chandrashekhara Bharati III, (1892-1954 ) a significant spiritual figure in Hinduism during the 20th century, Wikipedia, #KEYS
1283:Loving yourself is not a matter of building your ego. Egotism is proving you are worthwhile after you have sunk into hating yourself. Loving yourself will dissolve your ego: you will feel no need to prove you are superior." ~ T. Golas, "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment.", #KEYS
1284:Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
~ Blaise Pascal,#KEYS
1285:A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #KEYS
1286:Faith is the mother of us all, going forward with hope following and with love of God and Christ and neighbor leading the way. If a man is among these then he has fulfilled the commandment of righteousness, for he who has love is far from all sin. ~ Polycarp to the Philippians, #KEYS
1287:Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,#KEYS
1288:The characteristic of the ignorant man is that he strives to be other than what he is. To the enlightened one, there is none who are ignorant." ~ "Yoga Vasistha," a philosophical text attributed to Valmiki, real author unknown., (6th-cent. to as late as 14th-cent.), Wikipedia., #KEYS
1289:There are two allied powers in man; knowledge & wisdom. Knowledge is so much of the truth seen in a distorted medium as the mind arrives at by groping, wisdom what the eye of divine vision sees in the spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, #KEYS
1290:When you kick a man when he is down — do you realize that you are kicking yourself? Give him another kick — if you think you deserve it." ~ Terence James Stannus Gray, (1895 - 1986), under the pen name "Wei Wu Wei", he published eight books on Taoist philosophy, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1291:A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
~ Joseph Campbell,#KEYS
1292:A man practices spiritual discipline, but his mind is on 'lust and greed'-it is turned toward enjoyment. Therefore, in his case, the spiritual discipline does not produce the right result. Such people cannot be true to their word. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1293:By their gifts, they acknowledge what they believe in their hearts, that they may show forth the mystery of their faith and understanding. ~ The incense they offer to GOD, the myrrh to MAN, the gold to the KING, consciously paying honour to the Divine and human Nature in union., #KEYS
1294:In deep sleep the man is devoid of possessions, including his own body. Instead of being unhappy he is quite happy. Happiness is inherent in man and is not due to external causes. One must realise his Self in order to open the store of unalloyed happiness. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1295:Love is immortal. Man obtaining it becomes perfect, becomes satisfied, becomes immortal. Once it is obtained, he desires nothing, is not afflicted, does not hate, is not diverted, strains no more after anything. ~ Narada Sutra, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1296:Man is given faith in himself, his ideas and his powers that he may work and create and rise to greater things and in the end bring his strength as a worthy offering to the altar of the Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Faith and Shakti, #KEYS
1297:Men know full well that if they put their hand into the fire, it will get burned; still they do it again and again. Not only that; they invite others to do likewise. If any man differs from them, they call him mad and even go to the point of persecuting him. ~ SWAMI BRAHMANANDA, #KEYS
1298:Science is the struggle of man in the outer world. Religion is the struggle of man in the inner world. Both struggles are great, no doubt, but one ends in success and the other ends in failure. That is the difference. Religion begins where science ends. ~ Swami Ramakrishnananda, #KEYS
1299:The divine Narayana of whom the universe is only one ray is revealed and fulfilled in man; the complete man is Nara-Narayana and in that completeness he symbolises the supreme mystery of existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #KEYS
1300:The man of wisdom does not wish for the dissolution of the universe nor is he interested in its continuance. The blessed one lives perfectly contented with whatever turns up in life." ~ "Ashtavakra Gita" [163], (just after 400 BC), classical Advaita Vedanta scripture, Wikipedia, #KEYS
1301:The very word paradox is paradoxical. Let the paradox be... Remember, after all, that the Gospel is full of paradoxes, that man is himself a living paradox, and that according to the Fathers of the Church, the Incarnation is the supreme Paradox." ~ Henri De Lubac, Par. of Faith, #KEYS
1302:Uqba ibn Muslim said: 'No quality in a man is dearer to God, Great and Glorious is He, than the longing to meet Him. At no moment is a man closer to God, Great and Glorious is He, than when he sinks down in prostration. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, #KEYS
1303:We are not mere creatures of the mud, but souls, minds, wills that can know all the mysteries of this and every world and become not only Nature's pupils but her adepts and masters. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
1304:Every essence or quiddity can be understood without knowing anything about its being. I can know, e.g., what a man or a phoenix is and still be ignorant whether it has being in reality. From this it is clear that being is other than essence for quiddity. ~ Aquinas, De Ente cap 4, #KEYS
1305:Grown men may learn from very little children, for the hearts of little children are pure, and, therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss." ~ Black Elk, (1863 - 1950) medicine man, holy man and heyoka of the Oglala Lakota people, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1306:He [man] is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
1307:Man only sees the cosmic surfaces.
Then wondering what may lie hid from the sense
A little way he delves to depths below: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
1308:The common good of many is more divine than the good of an individual. So it is virtuous for a man to endanger even his own life, either for the spiritual or for the temporal common good of the republic ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.31.3ad2)., #KEYS
1309:When man has seen that he is one with the infinite being of the universe, all separation is at an end, all men, women, angels, gods, animals, plants, the whole world lost in this oneness, then all fear disappears. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1310:According to his nature, man is rational. And thus when he acts according to reason, he is acting by his own proper motion and is acting of himself; and this is a characteristic of freedom ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on John 8, lect. 4)., #KEYS
1311:A man who has been justified, who from impious has been made pious, receives a gift (since he had no antecedent good merit) by which he may also acquire merit: what was begun in him by Christ's grace can also be augmented by the industry of his free choice. ~ Prosper of Aquitaine, #KEYS
1312:A self-willed man cannot be grateful—because when he gets what he wants he gives all the credit for it to his own will, and when he gets what he does not want he resents it badly and throws all the blame on whomever he considers responsible, God, man or Nature. ~ The Mother, WTM #KEYS
1313:As our Saviour spent three days and three nights in the depths of the earth, so your first rising from the water represented the first day and your first immersion represented the first night. At night a man cannot see, but in the day he walks in the light. ~ Jerusalem Catecheses, #KEYS
1314:Man has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead." ~ Idries Shah, (1924-1996) author and teacher in the Sufi tradition, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1315:None is greater than he. The gods themselves will have to descend upon earth and it is in a human form that they will get their salvation. Man alone reaches the perfection of which the gods themselves are ignorant. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1316:The measurements of right and wrong belong to man along. To life there is nothing right or wrong… Stop asking whether you are worthy or unworthy to receive that which you desire." ~ Neville Goddard, (1905-1972), mystic teacher. From "The Complete Reader,", (2013), ed. D. Allen., #KEYS
1317:They will ridicule Christian simplicity;... As a result, no principle at all, however holy, authentic, ancient, and certain it may be, will remain free of censure, criticism, false interpretation, modification, and delimitation by man…" ~ Ven. Bartholomew Holzhauser (1613-1658), #KEYS
1318:This universal order is the same for everything; neither God nor man has created it; it has always been, it is and will be always an eternally living Fire which kindles itself periodically and is again extinguished. ~ Heraclitus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1319:Who indeed was This Virgin and from what sort of parents did She come? Mary, the glory of all, was born of the tribe of David, and from the seed of Joachim. She was descended from Eve, and was the child of Anna. Joachim was a gentle man, pious, raised in God's law. ~ Saint Andrew, #KEYS
1320:Christ is both the way and the door. Christ is the staircase and the vehicle, like the throne of mercy over the Ark of the Covenant, and the mystery hidden from the ages. A man should turn his mind to this throne of mercy, and should gaze at him hanging on the cross. ~ Bonaventure, #KEYS
1321:Flee the Ignorance and flee also the Illusion. Turn thy face from the deceptions of the world; distrust thy senses, they are liars. But in thy body which is the tabernacle of sensation, seek the "Eternal Man." ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1322:It is not eating meat that makes a man impure; it is anger, intemperance, egoism, hypocrisy, disloyalty, envy, ostentation, vanity, pride; it is to take pleasure in the society of those who perpetrate injustice. ~ Amaghanda Susta, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1323:Little man, rise up! Flee your preoccupations for a little while. Hide yourself for a time from your turbulent thoughts. Cast aside, now, your heavy responsibilities and put off your burdensome business. Make a little space free for God; and rest for a little time in him. ~ Anselm, #KEYS
1324:Man has the possibility of re-creating himself, or more correctly, the human being has the possibility of making itself into a man... what distinguishes man from animals is his possibility of becoming conscious of his own existence and of his place in the universe. ~ Rodney Collin, #KEYS
1325:Man was created to praise, honor, and serve God. We therefore no more prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to disdain, long life to short, but desire and choose only that which more surely conduces toward the end for which we were created. ~ Saint Ignatius of Loyola, #KEYS
1326:Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are. ~ Osho, #KEYS
1327:When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. ~ Matthew 25:31, #KEYS
1328:A Divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being.
~ Sri Aurobindo,#KEYS
1329:After his departure out of the body, a man may want what is better when he gains knowledge of the difference between virtue and vice and finds that he is not able to partake of divinity until purged of the filthy contagion in his soul by the purifying fire. ~ Saint Gregory of Nyssa, #KEYS
1330:Before the Christian Churches are renovated and united, God will send the Eagle, who will travel to Rome and bring much happiness and good. The Holy Man will bring peace between the clergy and the Eagle and his reign will last four years." ~ Saint Hilarion of Czenstochau, (+291 AD), #KEYS
1331:God has entrusted me with myself. No man is free who is not master of himself. A man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things. The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.
~ Epictetus,#KEYS
1332:Not wishing to be known any longer, as in former times, through mere image and shadow of his wisdom existing in creatures, he caused true Wisdom himself to take flesh, to become man, and to suffer death on the cross so that all who believed in him might be saved. ~ Saint Athanasius, #KEYS
1333:The Prophet said: Don't sit with every learned man. Sit with the learned man who calls towards five matters towards faith from doubt, sincerity from show, modesty from pride, love from enmity, and ascetism from worldliness. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, #KEYS
1334:There's a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It's a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I'd take advantage of it while you can. ~ Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, #KEYS
1335:All the world's pleasures, and all the earth's kingdoms, shall profit me nothing. It is better for me to die on behalf of Jesus Christ, than to reign over all the ends of the earth. For what shall a man be profited, if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul? ~ Saint Ignatius, #KEYS
1336:I am Prometheus under the vulture's beak,
Man the discoverer of the undying fire,
In the flame he kindled burning like a moth ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
1337:If a man chooses a certain Way and seems to have no particular talent for this Way, he can still become a master if he so chooses. By keeping at a particular form of study a man can attain perfection either in this life or the next (if a next life is believed in). ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
1338:If someone wants to study the law and find out what gives it its force (it is the bond of love, for whoever loves his neighbour has fulfilled the law) let him read in the psalms how love led one man to undergo great dangers to wipe out the shame of his entire people. ~ Saint Ambrose, #KEYS
1339:Only if God assumes the human mind
And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak
And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,
Can he help man to grow into the God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries,#KEYS
1340:The Inconscient could not read without man's mind
The mystery of the world its sleep has made:
Man is its key to unlock a conscious door. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day, The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation,#KEYS
1341:Unhappy is the man who knows all those things, but knows You not; but happy is he who knows You, though these he may not know. But he who knows both You and them is not the happier on account of them. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions 5.4, #KEYS
1342:When a man has studied all sciences and learned what men know and have known, he will find that all these sciences taken as a whole are so insignificant that they bring with them no possibility of understanding the world. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1343:An average man's mind is filled with countless thoughts, and therefore each individual one is extremely weak. When, instead of these many useless thoughts, there appears only one, it is a power in itself and has a wide influence. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1344:Just as the fly settles now on an unclean sore and now on the sweetmeats offered to the gods, so a worldly man's thoughts stop for a moment on religious subjects and the next stray into the pleasures of luxury and lust. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1345:One has no reason to regret when one dies, when one has lost money, property or house; all that does not belong to the man. One should have regret when man loses his real good, his greatest happiness: the faculty of loving. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1346:Some huge somnambulist Intelligence
Devising without thought process and plan
Arrayed the burning stars' magnificence,
The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,#KEYS
1347:Truth, then, has arisen from the earth: Christ who said, I am the Truth, was born of the Virgin. And justice looked down from heaven: because believing in this new-born child, man is justified not by himself but by God. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1348:Only if God assumes the human mind
And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak
And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,
Can he help man to grow into the God.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries,#KEYS
1349:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,#KEYS
1350: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
1351:Although human nature is not nobler than that of an angel, there has nevertheless been conferred upon a human person a grace greater than upon any angel, namely, upon the Blessed Virgin and upon Christ as man ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (On Truth, 24.9ad2)., #KEYS
1352:Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;
Love is man's lien on the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,#KEYS
1353:To be malevolent and violent, a slanderer and unfaithful, without compassion, arrogant and greedy to the point of not giving anything whatsoever to others, it is that and not the eating of meat that makes a man impure. ~ Amaghanda Susta, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1354:To slander is to speak ill of an absent person in order to blacken his good name. Now it is a very grave matter to blacken a man's good name, because of all temporal things a man's good name seems the most precious ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.73.2)., #KEYS
1355:Truly, man has no retreat more tranquil and less troubled than that which he finds in his own soul, especially if he carries in it those truths to which it is enough to turn to acquire in a moment an absolute quietude. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1356:When a man lusts after a woman then even if she remains chaste he is still an adulterer. The Lord's judgement is clear and true: If a man looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1357:You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say that there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man, because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1358:...a man should say to his soul every morning, "God has given thee twenty-four treasures; take heed lest thou lose anyone of them, for thou wilt not be able to endure the regret that will follow such loss. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness, #KEYS
1359:On heights unreached by mind's most daring soar,
Upon a dangerous edge of failing Time
The soul draws back into its deathless Self;
Man's knowledge becomes God's supernal Ray. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,#KEYS
1360:The world possesses a thought and a sensation which is not like that of man nor so varied but superior and more simple. The world has only one sentiment, only one thought, to create all things and make them re-enter into itself. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1361:What business had anybody to direct and dictate to anyone what he should worship and through what? How could any other man know through what he would grow, whether his spiritual growth would be by worshiping an image, by worshiping fire, or by worshiping even a pillar? ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1362:A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#KEYS
1363:Who are the truly wealthy? Those who are possessed of the Supreme Treasure —they alone are really rich and live in abundance. Poor and destitute must be called the man in whose heart the remembrance of God abides not. To depend solely on Him is man's one and only duty ~ Sri Anandamayi Ma, #KEYS
1364:Human perfection resides in this: that the love of God should conquer a man's heart and possess it wholly, and even if it does not possess it wholly it should predominate in the heart over the love of all other things. ~ Imam Al Ghazali, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1365:Man is a thinker. He is that what he thinks. When he thinks fire he is fire. When he thinks war, he will create war. Everything depends if his entire imagination will be an entire sun, that is, that he will imagine himself completely that what he wants. ~ Paracelsus, #KEYS
1366:One develop divine love through restlessness- the restlessness a child feels for his mother. The child feels bewildered when he is separated from his mother, and weeps longingly for her. If a man can weep like that for God he can even see Him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1367:The body of man is a chariot, his mind the driver, his senses the horses. The man of intelligence who keeps watch over himself, travels on his way like an owner of a chariot, happy and contented, drawn by well-trained horses. ~ Mahabharata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1368:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur, #KEYS
1369:Wisdom is greater than all terrestrial sciences and than all human knowledge. She renders a man indifferent to the joys of the world and permits him to consider with an impassive heart their precipitous and tumultous course. ~ Fa.khen-pi.u, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1370:To him who is perfect in meditation salvation is near" is an old saying. Do you know when a man is perfect in meditation? When as soon as he sits to meditate, he is surrounded with the divine atmosphere and his soul communes with the Ineffable. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1371:Our cravings alone keep us separated from God. Root out all desires and call on Him! If He wills that the body should die, let it die while chanting His name! By worldly standards a man may be great. But he too in some life or other will have to renounce everything for God.~ Swami Turiyananda, #KEYS
1372:Why don't you give your power of attorney to God? Rest all your responsibilities on Him. If you entrust an honest man with your responsibilities, will he misuse his power over you? God alone knows whether or not He will punish you for your sins. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1373:Only when Eternity takes Time by the hand,
Only when infinity weds the finite's thought,
Can man be free from himself and live with God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
1374:There is no peace for the man who is troubled with thought for the future, makes himself unhappy before even unhappiness comes to him and claims to assure till the end of his life his possession of the objects to which he is attached. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1375:All doubts disappear when one sees God. It is one thing to hear of God, but quite a different thing to see Him. A man cannot have one hundred per cent conviction through mere hearing. But if he beholds God face to face, then he is wholly convinced. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1376:A man thinks of God, no doubt, but he has no faith in Him. Again and again he forgets God and becomes attached to the world. It is like giving the elephant a bath; afterwards he covers his body with mud and dirt again. 'The mind is a mad elephant.' ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1377:The man who consents to the death of an animal, he who kills it, he who cuts it up, the buyer, the seller, he who prepares the flesh, he who serves it and he who eats it, are all to be regarded as having taken part in the murder. ~ Laws of Maim, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1378:All Nature dumbly calls to her alone
To heal with her feet the aching throb of life
And break the seals on the dim soul of man
And kindle her fire in the closed heart of things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Adoration of the Divine Mother,#KEYS
1379:Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest." ~ Plato, (428/427 or 424/423 - 348/347) Greek philosopher, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1380:He is only our Beloved, and we should adore Him devoid all thoughts of fear. A man loves God only when he has no other desire, when he thinks of nothing else and when he is mad after Him. That love which a man has for his beloved can illustrate the love we ought to have for God. ~ Swami Vivekananda? #KEYS
1381:If soul and body were not united in Christ, Christ was not a man. This goes against the Apostle's words ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (1 Tim. 2:5): "The mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus" ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 4.37)., #KEYS
1382:I know, O God, the day shall dawn at last
When man shall rise from playing with the mud
And taking in his hands the sun and stars
Remould appearance, law and process old. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
1383:The mind and intellect must develop to their fullness so that the spirituality of the race may rise securely upward upon a broad basis of the developed lower nature in man, the intelligent mental being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Infrarational Age of the Cycle, #KEYS
1384:The superman shall wake in mortal man
And manifest the hidden demigod
Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force
Revealing the secret deity in the cave. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day, The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation,#KEYS
1385:Though a man should have lived a hundred years consecrating his whole life to the performance of numerous sacrifices to the gods, all this is far from having the same worth as a single act of love which consists in succouring a life. ~ Fa-khen-pi-, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1386:The man who has plunged deep into a pure knowledge of the profound secrets of the spirit, is neither a terrestrial nor a celestial being. He is the most high spirit robed in the perishable body, the sublime and very Divinity. ~ Pico de la Mirandola, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1387:Holy companionship has the power of generating love for God. Who is really holy man? The man in whose heart sits God Himself. It is only as the result of merit earned in a succession of lives that one has the good fortune to associate with holy people & be blessed by the ~ Manapurush Swami Shivananda, #KEYS
1388:There is only one temple in the universe and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than this noble form. To bow down before man is a homage offered to this revelation in the flesh. We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body. ~ Novalis, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1389:The sin of unbelief, which fundamentally severs a man from the unity of the Church, simply speaking, makes him to be utterly unfit for receiving this sacrament of the Eucharist because it is the sacrament of the Church's unity ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 3.80.5ad2)., #KEYS
1390:The stuff of the universe, woven in a single piece according to one and the same system, but never repeating itself from one point to another, represents a single figure. Structurally it forms a Whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959), #KEYS
1391:Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry. ~ Plato, Phaedrus, sec. 279, #KEYS
1392:Scared for their pathetic little lives, they would agree to be injected with literally anything. ~ For surely no man knows his time: Like fish caught in a evil net or birds trapped in a snare, so men are ensnared in an evil time that suddenly falls upon them. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, 9:12, #KEYS
1393:The worldly man is a hypocrite. He cannot be guileless. He professes to love God, but he is attracted by worldly objects. He doesn't give God even a very small part of the love he feels for 'lust & greed'. But he says that he loves God. Give up hypocrisy ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1394:To man's righteousness this is his cosmic crime,
Almighty beyond good and evil to dwell
Leaving the good to their fate in a wicked world
And evil to reign in this enormous scene. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
1395:If a man repeats the name of God, his body, mind, and everything become pure. Why should one talk only about sin and hell, and such things? Say but once, 'O Lord, I have undoubtedly done wicked things, but I won't repeat them.' And have faith in His name. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1396:The belief in supernatural beings may to a certain extent increase the action in man, but it produces also a moral deterioration. Dependence, fear, superstition accompany it; it degenerates into a miserable belief in the weakness of man. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1397: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
1398:If a man does not read with an intense desire to know the truth renouncing for its sake all that is vain and frivolous and even that which is essential if needs be, mere reading will only inspire him with pedantry, presumption and egoism. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1399:Just as a fly settles now on an unclean sore in the body, now on the offerings consecrated to the gods, so the mind of a worldly man stops for a moment upon religious ideas, but the next it strays away to the pleasures of luxury and lust. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1400:There is no difference between a man of the world and a solitary if both have conquered the illusion of the ego; but if the heart isa slave to the desires of the senses, the external signs of self-control serve no useful object. ~ Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1401:A creature of his own grey ignorance,
A mind half shadow and half gleam, a breath
That wrestles, captive in a world of death,
To live some lame brief years. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#KEYS
1402:One should not use the name of God artificially and superficially without feeling.
To use the name of God one must call upon Him and surrender to Him unreservedly.
After such surrender the name of God is constantly with the man. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 426,#KEYS
1403:Those who were with Krishna were in all appearance men like other men. They spoke and acted with each other as men with men and were not thought of by those around them as gods. Krishna himself was known by most as a man-only a few worshipped him as the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
1404:Where there is knowledge there is also ignorance. Therefore I ask you to go beyond both knowledge & ignorance. The thorn of ignorance has pierced the sole of a man's foot. He needs the thorn of knowledge to take it out. Afterwards he throws away both thorns ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1405:It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,
Offered by God's martyred body for the world;
Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,
He carries the cross on which man's soul is nailed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
1406:Man's house of life holds not the gods alone:
There are occult Shadows, there are tenebrous Powers,
Inhabitants of life's ominous nether rooms,
A shadowy world's stupendous denizens. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul,#KEYS
1407:Two genii in the dubious heart of man,
Two great unhappy foes together bound
Wrestle and strive to win unhampered ground;
They strive for ever since the race began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,#KEYS
1408:A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the 'why' for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any 'how'.
~ Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning,#KEYS
1409:Man's hopes and longings build the journeying wheels
That bear the body of his destiny
And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge of Death and the Heart's Grief and Pain,#KEYS
1410:Moved man's tongue in its wrath looses speech that is hard to be pardoned,
Afterwards stilled we regret, we forgive. If all were resented,
None could live on this earth that is thick with our stumblings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1411:The man whose soul aspires to the Eternal cannot give thought to such silly questions as that of daivic food, that is to say, a simple vegetarian diet, and for him who does not desire to attain to the Eternal, beef is as good as daivic food. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1412:God cannot cease from leaning towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the infinite. When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga,#KEYS
1413:Knowledge of God can be compared to a man while Love of God is like a woman. The one has his right of entry to the outer chambers of the Eternal, but only love can penetrate into the inner chambers, she who has access to the mysteries of the Almighty. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1414:What right has a man to say he has a soul if he has not felt it or that there is a God, if he has not seen Him? If we have a soul, we must penetrate to it; otherwise it is better not to believe, to be frankly an atheist rather than hypocrite. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1415:But if the man who is animated by hatred, could by an effort of his hate enter even into the most detested of his adversaries and arrive in him to the very centre, then would he be greatly astonis bed, for he would discover there his own self. ~ Schopenhauer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1416:Man was created to express the Divine. His duty is therefore to become conscious of the Divine and to surrender himself entirely to His Will. All the rest, whatever the appearance, is falsehood and ignorance.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The True Aim of Life, 8, [T0],#KEYS
1417:Remember that work is only the first step in spiritual life. God cannot be realized without sattva-love, discrimination, kindness, and so on. If a man is entangled in too many activities he surely forgets God. He becomes more and more attached to 'lust and gold' ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1418:To him who is perfect in meditation salvation is near" is an old saying. Do you know when a man is perfect in meditation? When as soon as he sits to meditate, he is surrounded with the divine atmosphere and his soul communes with the Ineffable. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1419:War making nought the sweet smiling calm of life,
Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre
Are still the fierce pastimes of man's warring tribes;
An idiot hour destroys what centuries made, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
1420:If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.01, #KEYS
1421:All that man does comes to its perfection in knowledge. That do thou learn by prostration to the wise and by questioning and by serving them; they who have the knowledge and see the truths of things shall instruct thee in the knowledge. ~ Bhagavadgita IV-33-34, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1422:As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven
Built by the aspiring soul of man to live
Near to his dream of the Invisible.
Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs;
Its spire touches the apex of the world; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair,#KEYS
1423:I bow not to thee, O huge mask of death,
Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,
Unreal, inescapable end of things,
Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness,#KEYS
1424:But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1425:Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to get rid of it. Oh, the destiny of man ! ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, #KEYS
1426:Never to cause pain by thought, word or act to any living being is what is meant by innocence. Than this there is no higher virtue. There is no greater happiness than that of the man who has reached this attitude of good will towards all creation. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1427:The foolish follow after the desires that are outward and they fall into the snare of death that is wide open for them, but the wise man sets his mind on the immortal and the certain and longs not here below for uncertain and transient things. ~ Katha Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1428:Leave to the gods their godhead and, mortal, turn to thy labour;
Take what thou canst from the hour that is thine and be fearless in spirit;
This is the greatness of man and the joy of his stay in the sunlight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1429:There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #KEYS
1430:The gods have invented
Only one way for a man through the world, O my slavegirl Briseis,
Valiant to be and noble and truthful and just to the humble,
Only one way for a woman, to love and serve and be faithful. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1431:The world is not prepared yet to understand the philosophy of Occult Sciences - let them assure themselves first of all that there are beings in an invisible world, whether 'Spirits' of the dead or Elementals; and that there are hidden powers in man, which are capable of making a God of him on earth. ~ H P Blavatsky, #KEYS
1432:To be a common man mid common men
And live an unaspiring mortal life
Than call into oneself a Titan strength
Too dire and mighty for its human frame,
That only afflicts the oppressed astonished world,
Then breaks its user. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act V,#KEYS
1433:None of the heavenly gods quits his sphere to come upon the earth, while man mounts up to heaven and measures it. He knows what is on high and what is below. He knows all correctly and, what is more, has no need to leave the earth in order to exalt himself. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1434:It is natural to all men to love each other. The mark of this is the fact that, by some natural prompting, a man comes to the aid of another in need, even a stranger. For example, he may call him back from a wrong road, or help him up from a fall. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.117)., #KEYS
1435:When he is animated by a certain desire and by hope, man ought not to shrink from risking his life. He ought not to halt for a moment in his quest, nor to remain an instant in inaction. If he halts, he will be violently rejected far from the road. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1436:Lying words are unworthy of a disciple, for his aspiration should be sincere and straightforward and knavish and flattering words are kin to witchcraft. The man who occupies himself with spiritual questions, ought not to proffer any such utterances. ~ Fo-sho-tsan-kiug, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1437:One who first founds on a large scale and rapidly, needs always as his successor a man with the talent or the genius for organisation rather than an impetus for expansion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ancient Cycle of Prenational Empire-Building - The Modern Cycle of Nation-Building, #KEYS
1438:Yet his advance,
Attempt of a divinity within,
A consciousness in the inconscient Night,
To realise its own supernal Light,
Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#KEYS
1439:In the Grand Grimoire we are told "to buy an egg without haggling"; and attainment, and the next step in the path of attainment, is that pearl of great price, which when a man hath found he straightway selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that pearl. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, The Wand, #KEYS
1440:These words are explained by our oneness with Christ, for he is our head and we are his body. No one ascended into heaven except Christ because we also are Christ: he is the Son of Man by his union with us, and we by our union with him are the sons of God. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1441:I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he
Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;
To enjoy my agony God built the earth,
My passion he has made his drama's theme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
1442:Each man, before he is Austrian, Serb, Turk or Chinese, is first of all a man, that is to say a thinking and loving being whose one mission is to fulfil his destiny during the short lapse of time that he is to live in this world. That mission is to love all men. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1443:He is not sized by the eye, nor by the speech, nor by the other gods, nor by the austerity of force, nor by action; when a man's being has been purified by a calm clarity of knowledge, he meditating beholds that which has not parts nor members. ~ Mundaka Upanishad III.1-8, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1444:My Force is Nature that creates and slays
The hearts that hope, the limbs that long to live.
I have made man her instrument and slave,
His body I made my banquet, his life my food. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness,#KEYS
1445:To follow jnanayoga in this age is very difficult. First, a man's life depends entirely on food. Second, he has a short span of life. Third, he can by no means get rid of body-consciousness;& the Knowledge of Brahman is impossible without the destruction of body-consciousness ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1446:It is for this meaningful development of consciousness by thought, will, emotion, desire, action and experience, leading in the end to a supreme divine self-discovery, that Man, the mental being, has entered into the material body.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Surrender in Works,#KEYS
1447:Nothing is more evident to the sage than the things hidden in the secrecy of his consciousness, nothing more manifest than the subtle causes of his actions. Therefore the superior man watches attentively over the secret inspirations of his conscience. ~ Tsu-Tse: Tsung-yung, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1448:One must have the true mettle of a man within, if one wishes to be successful in life. But there are many, who have no grit in them ― who are like popped rice soaked in milk, soft & cringing! No strength within! No sustained effort! No power of will! They are failures in life ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1449:Man's law of progress progress perfection man
He [man] needs the help of the secret Divine above his mentality in his superconscient self; he needs the help also of the secret Divine around him in Nature and in his fellow-men. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Ideal Law of Social Development,#KEYS
1450:Weight of the event and its surface we bear, but the meaning is hidden.
Earth sees not; life's clamour deafens the ear of the spirit:
Man knows not; least knows the messenger chosen for the summons.
Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Ilion,#KEYS
1451:What is the way of making the consciousness of human unity grow in man?
Spiritual education, that is to say an education which gives more importance to the growth of the spirit than to any religious or moral teaching or to the material so-called knowledge.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III,#KEYS
1452:And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine ~ each was discovered by one man., #KEYS
1453:the centre in her brow
Where the mind's Lord in his control-room sits;
There throned on concentration's native seat
He opens that third mysterious eye in man,
The Unseen's eye that looks at the unseen. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
1454:It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. ~ Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, #KEYS
1455:Nothing is more difficult to conquer in all the world than intellectual pride. If battleships could be lined with it instead of armour, no shell could ever pierce it. This is easy to understand, for if a man thinks he knows it all, there is nothing left for him to know, not even what God might tell him. ~ Venerable Fulton Sheen, #KEYS
1456:He is only our Beloved, and we should adore Him devoid all thoughts of fear. A man loves God only when he has no other desire, when he thinks of nothing else and when he is mad after Him. That love which a man has for his beloved can illustrate the love we ought to have for God ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1457:182. To mingle the right action with the action that is not akin to it is called the confused practice. The man that erreth therein hath not attained unto the single heart. He knoweth not thankfulness for the grace of the Enlightened One. ~ Shinran, Wisdom of the East Buddhist Psalms translated from the Japanese of Shinran Shonin, #KEYS
1458:What is it that makes a man want to become sad in beholding mournful and tragic events which he himself would not willingly undergo? Yet, as he watches, he wishes to suffer their sorrow; this sorrow is his own pleasure. What is this but a wretched weakness of mind? ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1459:You have been changing every moment of your life. You were a child & thought in one way, now you are a man & think another way, again you will be an old man & think differently. Everybody is changing. If so,where is your individuality? Certainly not in the body,mind,or in thought~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1460:The ordinary man says in his ignorance "My religion is the sole religion, my religion is the best." But when his heart is illumined by the true knowledge, he knows that beyond all the battles of sects and of sectaries presides the one, indivisible, eternal and omniscient Benediction. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1461:For if a man moves among sensible objects with the senses delivered from liking and dislike and obedient to his self, he attains to serenity. By serenity is born the slaying of all sorrows, for when the heart is serene, the intelligent mind soon comes to its poise. ~ Bhagavad Gita, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1462:Who is worthy of the name of Man and of Roman who does not want to be tested and does not look for a dangerous task? For the strong man inaction is torture. There is only one sight able to command the attention even of a god, and it is that of a strong man battling with bad luck, especially if he has himself challenged it. ~ Seneca, #KEYS
1463:I read [in certain Platonic books] that God the Word was born not of flesh nor of blood, nor of the will of man nor of the will of the flesh, but of God (Jn 1.13). But that the Word was made flesh and lived among us (Jn 1.14) I did not read there. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions 13.9.14, #KEYS
1464:Just as the proud devil led the proud man to death, so the humble Christ led the obedient man back to life; and as the former fell when he was exalted and dragged down him who consented to him, so the latter when He was humbled arose and raised him who believed in Him. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1465:Whosoever desireth salvation hath no expectation from man, but from him alone who dwelleth in him inwardly and from within the voice speaketh to him; then is he astonished that such words he hath never heard from any mouth, nor hath ever desired to hear them. ~ Epistle of St. Barnabas, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1466:he action of man made of desire, dislike and illusion starts from his own being, in himself it has its source and, wherever it is found, must come to ripeness, and wherever his action comes to ripeness, man gathers its fruits whether in this or some other form of life. ~ Buddhist Texts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1467:Thus said Ramakrishna and thus said Vivekananda. Yes, but let me know also the truths which the Avatar cast not forth into speech and the prophet has omitted from his teachings. There will always be more in God than the thought of man has ever conceived or the tongue of man has ever uttered.
~ Sri Aurobindo,#KEYS
1468:68-The sense of sin was necessary in order that man might become disgusted with his own imperfections. It was God's corrective for egoism. But man's egoism meets God's device by being very dully alive to its own sins and very keenly alive to the sins of others.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana,#KEYS
1469:In the work of Transformation, who is the slowest to do his part, man or God?
I replied, - Man finds that God is too slow to answer his prayers. God finds that man is too slow to receive His influence. But for the Truth-Consciousness all is going on as it ought to go.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III,#KEYS
1470:There is in man a tendency to good, acc to the nature of his reason, which nature is proper to him, thus man has a natural tendency to know the truth about God and to live in society. In this respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.94.2)., #KEYS
1471:A man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind. ~ James Allen, As a Man Thinketh, #KEYS
1472:Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing," but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes. ~ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, #KEYS
1473:A gay liver who spreads gladness around him, is better than the devotee who fasts all the year round.Fasting is a merit in the man who distributes his food to the needy; otherwise what mortification is it to take in the evening a meal you have abstained from during the day? ~ Sadi: Bostan, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1474:But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
1475:I looked into my own heart and I saw reflected there in its entirety the vast world with all its passions,-pride, hope, fear and the conflagration of the desires. So gazing I understood the word of the ancient sage, "Man is a mirror in which there appears the image of the world." ~ Ryonen, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1476:Sin makes a man unhappy and makes him feel inferior. Being unhappy, he is likely to make claims upon other people which are excessive and which prevent him from enjoying happiness in personal relations. Feeling inferior, he will have a grudge against those who seem superior. He will find admiration difficult and envy easy. ~ Bertrand Russell, #KEYS
1477:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1478:the priest and the mage, the man of piety, the just man, the man of wisdom, the saint, the prophet, the Rishi, the Yogi, the seer, the spiritual sage and the mystic ... the saint, the devotee, the spiritual sage, the seer, the prophet, the servant of God, the soldier of the spirit
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
1479:If thou wouldst not be slain by them, thou shouldst make free from offence thy own creations, the children of thy invisible and impalpable thoughts, whose swarms keep wheeling around mankind and who are the descendants and heirs of man and of his terrestrial leavings. ~ Book of Golden Precepts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1480:Man when he dies, knows that nothing peculiar will happen to him, only what has already happened to millions of beings, and all he does is to change his mode of journeying, but it is impossible for him not to feel an emotion when he comes to the place where he must undergo the change. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1481:And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. ~ Albert Camus, The Plague, #KEYS
1482:Ignorance of oneself is then an evil in all respects, whether ignoring the greatness and dignity of the inner man one lowers one's divine principle or ignoring the natural baseness of the external man one commits the fault of glorifying oneself. ~ Porphyry, "Treatise on the Precept, Know Thyself", the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1483:Such were a dream of some sage at night when he muses in fancy,
Imaging freely a flawless world where none were afflicted,
No man inferior, all could sublimely equal and brothers
Live in a peace divine like the gods in their luminous regions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1484:hen a man is delivered from all the dispositions of his heart which turn towards evil and not towards good and which can be extinguished, let him uproot them like the stock of a palm-tree, so that they shall be destroyed and have no power to sprout again. That I call a true repentance. ~ Mahavagga, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1485:The ordinary man says in his ignorance "My religion is the sole religion, my religion is the best." But when his heart is illumined by the true knowledge, he knows that beyond all the battles of sects and of sectaries presides the one, indivisible, eternal and omniscient Benediction. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1486:8. O Fire, they have set thee here the Messenger, the Immortal in generation after generation, the Carrier of offerings, protector of man and the Godhead of his prayer. Gods alike and mortals sit with obeisance before the all-pervading Master of the peoples, the ever-wakeful Fire.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire,#KEYS
1487: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
1488:He who puts away from him all passion, hatred, pride and hypocrisy, who pronounces words instructive and benevolent, who does not make his own what has not been given to him, who without desire, covetousness, impatience knows the depths of the Permanent, he is indeed a.man of religion. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1489:But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud.
This by pain we prevent; we compel his ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1490:To be a man, discipline is indispensable.
Without discipline one is only an animal.
One begins to be a man only when one aspires to a higher and truer life and when one accepts a discipline of transformation. For this one must start by mastering one's lower nature and its desires. ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
1491:An absolute supernatural darkness falls
On man sometimes when he draws near to God:
An hour arrives when fail all Nature's means;
Forced out from the protecting Ignorance
And flung back on his naked primal need,
He at length must cast from him his surface ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Issue,#KEYS
1492:The man in whom all desires disappear like rivers into a motionless sea, attains to peace, not he whom they move to longing. That man whose walk is free from longing, for he has thrown all desires from him, who calls nothing his and has no sense of ego, is moving towards peace. ~ Bhagavad Gita II. 70-71, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1493:This is the burden of man that he acts from his heart and his passions,
Stung by the goads of the gods he hews at the ties that are dearest.
Lust was the guide they sent us, wrath was a whip for his coursers,
Madness they made the heart's comrade, r ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1494:What can man suffer direr or worse than enslaved from a victor
Boons to accept, to take safety and ease from the foe and the stranger,
Fallen from the virtue stern that heaven permits to a mortal?
Death is not keener than this nor the slaughter of f ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1495:Man who has towered
Out of the plasm and struggled by thought to Divinity's level,
Man, this miniature second creator of good and of evil,
He too was only a compost of Matter made living, organic,
Forged as her thinking tool by an Energy blind and ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
1496:Though the people hear us not, yet are we bound to our nation:
Over the people the gods are; over a man is his country;
This is the deity first adored by the hearths of the noble.
For by our nation's will we are ruled in the home and the battle
An ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
1497:It was a no man's land of evil air,
A crowded neighbourhood without one home,
A borderland between the world and hell.
There unreality was Nature's lord:
It was a space where nothing could be true,
For nothing was what it had claimed to be:
A h ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night#KEYS
1498:The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
In Nature's instrument loiters secret God.
The immanent lives in man as his house;
He has made the universe his pastime's field,
A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#KEYS
1499:How soon is spent
This treasure wasted by the gods on man,
This happy closeness as of soul to soul,
This honey of the body's companionship,
This heightened joy, this ecstasy in the veins,
This strange illumination of the sense! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
1500:Man is in truth a compound of eternity and time. The more he is attached to temporal things and rests in them, the farther he grows from things eternal; they seem to him petty, just as great objects appear small when we see them from a distance, and he can never attain to real peace. ~ J. Tauler: Institutions, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Success is man's god. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 2:Let the poor man mind his tongue ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 3:No man is born without faults. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 4:All bibles are man-made. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 5:As a man is, so he sees. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 6:Every man is his own hell. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 7:No man provokes me with impunity. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 8:A man's kiss is his signature. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 9:A man who has been in danger, ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 10:But a man needs company. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 11:Hope is man's inner effort. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 12:Man is a universe in little. ~ democritus, @wisdomtrove 13:No man is hurt but by himself. ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 14:Only man makes Karma. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 15:A man perfect to the finger tips. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 16:Behold! I've brought you a man. ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 17:I am looking for an honest man. ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 18:I'm a good woman for a bad man. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 19:Let mortal man keep to his own ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 20:Poor man. Poor mankind. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 21:The covetous man is ever in want. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 22:The end of man is action. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 23:A man's character is his fate. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 24:An angry man is full of poison. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 25:He was a wise man who invented God. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 26:Man is a thought-adventurer. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 27:An honest man is always a child. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove 28:I like a man what takes his time. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 29:Man is a tool-using animal. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 30:Man must endure his going hence. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 31:Ability is a poor man's wealth. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 32:A man of refined taste and judgment. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 33:A true man hates no one. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 34:Money is the wise man's religion. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 35:Never ask a man where he has been. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 36:The king is the man who can. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 37:The unenvied man is not enviable. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 38:War ought to be no man's wish. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 39:A man is known by the company he keeps ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 40:A man is the origin of his action. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 41:A man of wisdom delights in water. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 42:Call no man happy till he is dead. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 43:It is right to give every man his due. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 44:Let a man nobly live or nobly die. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 45:Man is a universe within himself. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 46:Man is condemned to be free ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 47:Man is not made for defeat. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 48:Man must choose his world ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 49:Nobody loves life like an old man. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 50:Silence is an answer to a wise man. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 51:What man speaks to the stars. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 52:Without dance, a man can do nothing. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 53:A man can laugh while he suffers. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 54:A man is sorry to be honest for nothing. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 55:An accomplished man to his fingertips. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 56:As a man believes, so he will act. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 57:Beware the fury of a patient man. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 58:Conscience is God present in man. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 59:Even a poor man can receive honors. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 60:Happiness is not the portion of man. ~ voltaire, @wisdomtrove 61:Kill the king but spare the man. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 62:Man is neither angel nor beast. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 63:No one loves the man whom he fears. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 64:What a man can be, he must be. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 65:A man's perfection is his work. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 66:Beware the man of a single book. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 67:I'm a holy man minus the holiness. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 68:In an easy cause any man may be eloquent. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 69:Man is always exploited through fear. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 70:Man is not mind, he is soul. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 71:Man must be invented each day ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 72:Prosperity knits a man to the world. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 73:Tempt not a desperate man. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 74:The sky is an enormous man. ~ emanuel-swedenborg, @wisdomtrove 75:The true man breathes with his heels. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 76:Beware the man of a single book. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 77:Life gives nothing to man without labor. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 78:Man is greater than the gods. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 79:Man shoot at nothing, sure to hit it. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 80:Men, Renaissance, Renaissance Man ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 81:No man is great if he thinks he is. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 82:Prayer is man's greatest power! ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 83:Reason is God's crowning gift to man. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 84:The man is either crazy or he is a poet. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 85:The wise man’s home is the universe. ~ democritus, @wisdomtrove 86:Time and tide wait for no man. ~ geoffrey-chaucer, @wisdomtrove 87:Happy the man who can count his sufferings. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 88:Never trust a man in a jumpsuit ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 89:No honest man will argue on every side ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 90:Only the just man enjoys peace of mind. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 91:The ignorant man never enjoys. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 92:The intelligent man is never bored. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 93:The whole earth is the brave man's country. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 94:Time is the great art of man. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 95:Walking with her man, Lost in a dream. ~ a-a-milne, @wisdomtrove 96:Where the mind goes the man follows. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 97:A fearful man is always hearing things. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 98:A man is nothing but breath and shadow. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 99:A man must constantly exceed his level. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 100:A man perfects himself by working. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 101:A man's fate is his own temper. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 102:A man without a home can't be lost. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 103:For the weariest road that man may wend ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 104:I never met a man that I didn't like. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 105:It is the lot of man to suffer. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 106:Jesus Chris was more than man. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 107:Man's conscience is the oracle of God. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 108:Man, who don't like spaghetti? ~ rodney-dangerfield, @wisdomtrove 109:The old men know when an old man dies. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 110:The wise man once said invest young ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 111:Where the mind goes, the man follows. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 112:A man growing old becomes a child again. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 113:A man lives by believing something. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 114:And thus the child imposes on the man. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 115:Beware of the fury of the patient man. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 116:Every man should stay within his own fortune. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 117:How dark are all the ways of god to man! ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 118:How many roads must a man walk down? ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 119:I am a man who does not exist for others. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 120:I am as free as nature first made man. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 121:I hope they bury me near a strait man ~ groucho-marx, @wisdomtrove 122:In life, man proposes, God disposes. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 123:I start where the last man left off. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 124:It takes a man to make a devil. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 125:Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 126:Service to man is service to god ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 127:Silence is the eternal duty of man. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 128:The essence of man is imperfection. ~ norman-cousins, @wisdomtrove 129:The gift of a bad man can bring no good. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 130:The object of the superior man is truth. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 131:Every man needs a place to go to. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 132:Fear is the tool of a man-made devil. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 133:For man is by nature an artist. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 134:For the wise man, every day is a festival. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 135:God made only water, but man made wine. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 136:Happy is the man who is nothing. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 137:I hate a man who skins the land. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 138:Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 139:Man is a perpetually wanting animal. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 140:Man is bound to lie about himself ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 141:Man is free at the instant he wants to be. ~ voltaire, @wisdomtrove 142:Man is more powerful than matter. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 143:Man's worst ill is stubbornness of heart. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 144:Men are cruel, but Man is kind. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 145:Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 146:Nobody likes the man who brings bad news. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 147:No man fails who does his best. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 148:The inferiority of women is man-made. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 149:The man of humanity delights in mountains ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 150:The normal food of man is vegetable. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 151:The soul of Man must quicken to creation. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 152:The superior man limits his achievements. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 153:Every man knows the smell of his own fart. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 154:God never made his work for man to mend. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 155:I decline to accept the end of man. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 156:I love not man the less, but Nature more. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 157:It is the poor man who'll ever count his flock. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 158:It takes a wise man to discover a wise man. ~ diogenes, @wisdomtrove 159:Man is his own most vexing problem. ~ reinhold-niebuhr, @wisdomtrove 160:Man is what he wills himself to be. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 161:Never slap a man who is chewing tobacco. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 162:No empty handed man can lure a bird ~ geoffrey-chaucer, @wisdomtrove 163:Old man! & 164:That man made me miss my destiny. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 165:The best way to hold a man is in your arms. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 166:The man who does ill, ill must suffer too. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 167:There is a good deal in a man's mode of eating. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 168:When facts speak, the wise man listens. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 169:A fearless man thrives on far horizons. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 170:A man is known by the company he owns. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 171:A man is the sum of his misfortunes. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 172:A man who lies about beer makes enemies. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 173:Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 174:Don't mess with me, man, I'm a lawyer! ~ robin-williams, @wisdomtrove 175:If you face a man's job, find a woman! ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 176:Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 177:Man's existence precedes his essence ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 178:Man's greatest weakness is his love for life. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 179:Man's most serious activity is play. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 180:Man who want pretty nurse, must be patient. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 181:No man hates him at whom he can laugh. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 182:One man cannot practice many arts with success. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 183:The man is either mad, or he is making verses. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 184:The man is either mad or his is making verses. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 185:These are the days that try man's heart. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 186:A man must take the fat with the lean. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 187:A man's character is his guardian divinity. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 188:An envious man grows lean at another's fatness. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 189:Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 190:Hope is man's preparation for the unknown. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 191:Light means nothing to a blind man. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 192:Man appoints, and God disappoints. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 193:Man is an animal that cooks his victuals. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 194:Man's best possession is a sympathetic wife. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 195:Never give a sword to a man who can't dance. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 196:Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 197:No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 198:Now I understand,‚Äù said the last man. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 199:The fool wonders, the wise man asks. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 200:The learned man knows that he is ignorant. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 201:The man who dies rich, dies disgraced. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 202:The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 203:To the man who is afraid everything rustles. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 204:You can kill a man but you cant kill a idea. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 205:Your neighbor is the man who needs you. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 206:A boy becomes a man when a man is needed ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 207:Ah! devout though I may be, I am no less a man! ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 208:A man in the house is worth two in the street. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 209:A man's only as old as the woman he feels. ~ groucho-marx, @wisdomtrove 210:A man that is afraid is never a man. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 211:An artist, a man, a failure, must proceed. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 212:Beware of a man of one book. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 213:In peace, a wise man makes preparations for war. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 214:It is best for the wise man not to seem wise. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 215:Let every man look before he leaps. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 216:Man is a degeneration of what he was. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 217:Man's wonder grows with his knowledge. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 218:No man can lead mean, we have to have unity. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 219:No man is rich enough to buy back his past. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 220:Respect a man, and he will do all the more. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 221:Strike at a great man, and you will not miss. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 222:The happy man in this life needs friends. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 223:The man whom heaven helps has friends enough. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 224:The perfect man sees nothing but God. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 225:The soul in man is greater than his fate. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 226:The wise man does not grow old, but ripens. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 227:To do something is in every man's power. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 228:Treat a man like dirt-he produces flowers. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 229:A man does not exist until he is drunk. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 230:A man who causes fear cannot be free from fear. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 231:Any man's life, told truly, is a novel. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 232:A prudent man should neglect no circumstances. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 233:Every man is like the company he wont to keep. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 234:Every man is the maker of his own fortune ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 235:Every man over forty is a scoundrel. ~ george-bernard-shaw, @wisdomtrove 236:Faith is the highest passion in a man. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 237:Fate finds for every man; his share of misery. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 238:How hard, how bitter it is to become a man! ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 239:I like a man who grins when he fights. ~ winston-churchill, @wisdomtrove 240:It is a sin to judge any man by his post ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 241:Let every man be master of his time. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 242:Let every man mind his own business. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 243:Light may be shed on man and his origins. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 244:Man can learn everything if he will but try. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 245:Man must go back to nature for information. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 246:Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 247:Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 248:No man can be merry unless he is serious. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 249:No man ever quite believes in any other man. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 250:No man is greater than his respect for sleep. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 251:No man loves life like him that's growing old. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 252:The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 253:The happy man in this life needs friends. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 254:The Highest Being reveals himself in man. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 255:The more a man dreams, the less he believes. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 256:There is no benefit in the gifts of a bad man. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 257:All God wants of man is a peaceful heart. ~ meister-eckhart, @wisdomtrove 258:A man can smile and smile and be a villain. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 259:A man who lacks reliability is utterly useless. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 260:A woman should soften but not weaken a man. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 261:Except he be willing, man cannot believe. ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 262:God created man on purpose, and for a purpose. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 263:How does a man become brave? By doing brave things. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 264:[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 265:Infinite is the help man can yield to man. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 266:It is faith that makes a lion of a man. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 267:Man is the nearest approach to Brahman. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 268:Man, like Deity, creates in his own image. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 269:Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 270:Man suffers through lack of faith in God. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove 271:Man who eat many prunes get good run for money. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 272:Of all God's creatures, Man alone is poor. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 273:Oh, give us the man who sings at his work. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 274:One aged man - one man - can't fill a house. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 275:Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 276:The man in Christ rose again, not only the God. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 277:The real man is the one Unit Existence. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 278:There are lessons to be learned from a stupid man. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 279:We do not admire a man of timid peace. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 280:We judge of man's wisdom by his hope. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 281:A barber lathers a man before he shaves him. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 282:After 40, a man is responsible for his face. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 283:A man cannot do good before he is made good. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 284:A man who knows he is a fool is not a great fool. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 285:A state is not a state if it belongs to one man. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 286:Every man is the son of his own works. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 287:I can't explain 9/11, except the evil of man. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 288:I've never met another man I'd rather be. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 289:Learn that the present hour alone is man's. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 290:Man have to have friends even in hell. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 291:Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 292:The Bible is God's Word given in man's language ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 293:The rich man and his daughter are soon parted. ~ kin-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 294:Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 295:What a man has, so much he is sure of. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 296:Young man, make your name worth something. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 297:A great artist is a great man in a great child. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 298:Although I am a pious man, I am not the less a man. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 299:A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 300:A man's mind grows narrow in a narrow place. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 301:A man without a mustache is a man without a soul. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 302:A Man Without Honor is Worse than Dead. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 303:An ethical man is a Christian holding four aces. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 304:Colors express the main psychic functions of man. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 305:Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 306:Every man has a coward and hero in his soul. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 307:Every man has a sane spot somewhere. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 308:Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do. ~ voltaire, @wisdomtrove 309:Every man should be capable of all ideas. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 310:Every man should be content to mind his own business. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 311:Everything comes if a man will only wait. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 312:God exalts the man who humbles himself. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 313:God's most lordly gift to man is decency of mind. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 314:He was a wise man who originated the idea of God. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 315:I ain't no movie star, man. I'm a booty star. ~ richard-pryor, @wisdomtrove 316:It is the nature of mortals to kick a fallen man. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 317:It's the wise man who stays home when he's drunk. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 318:Man is, above all, he who creates. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 319:Man is by his constitution a religious animal. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 320:Man is not free unless government is limited. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 321:Man's greatness lies in his power of thought. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 322:No man truly has joy unless he lives in love. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 323:Not one false man but doth uncountable evil. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 324:One man's remorse is another man's reminiscence. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 325:The discontented man finds no easy chair. ~ benjamin-franklin, @wisdomtrove 326:The inner nature of man is the province of Music. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 327:The purpose of man is in action not thought. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 328:When a man's willing and eager the god's join in. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 329:Woe to the man who offends a small child! ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 330:You should not consider a man's age but his acts. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 331:A man without words is a man without thought. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 332:America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, ~ george-carlin, @wisdomtrove 333:An old young man, will be a young old man. ~ benjamin-franklin, @wisdomtrove 334:Baseball is wrong, man with four balls cannot walk ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 335:Danger gleams like sunshine to a brave man's eyes. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 336:Every man has his secret sorrows. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 337:Every man is a book in which God himself writes. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 338:God is absence. God is the solitude of man. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 339:Good and great are seldom in the same man. ~ winston-churchill, @wisdomtrove 340:He is the truly courageous man who never desponds. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 341:I saw a man with a wooden leg and a real foot. ~ steven-wright, @wisdomtrove 342:Let every man come to God in his own way. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 343:Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 344:Luck is what a capricious man believes in. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 345:Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 346:No man ever did or can do a great work alone. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 347:No man is an island; but some are peninsulas. ~ robin-williams, @wisdomtrove 348:No man truly has joy unless he lives in love. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 349:Nothing makes a man broad-minded like adversity. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 350:Reason in man is rather like God in the world. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 351:Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 352:Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 353:The man who ain't got an enemy is really poor. ~ josh-billings, @wisdomtrove 354:The man whose authority is recent is always stern. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 355:The real man lies in the depths of subconscious. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 356:Where a man can live, he can also live well. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 357:Where flowers degenerate man cannot live. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 358:A man becomes the creature of his uniform. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 359:A man is as big as the measure of his thinking. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 360:A man should be upright, not be kept upright. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 361:A man's life is what his thoughts make of it. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 362:A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 363:By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich. ~ democritus, @wisdomtrove 364:Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters. ~ jules-renard, @wisdomtrove 365:Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 366:Each man is haunted until his humanity awakens. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 367:Every man gets an opportunity once in a lifetime. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 368:Everyone wishes that the man whom he fears would perish. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 369:God lends a helping hand to the man who tries hard. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 370:Heaven begat Virtue in me; what can man do unto me? ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 371:Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 372:Let a man accept his destiny, No pity and no tears. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 373:Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 374:Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 375:Man governs himself more by impulse than reason ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 376:Man has will, but woman has her way. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 377:Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 378:Man is the greatest being that ever can be. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 379:Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 380:No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 381:Occasionally, a man must rise above principles. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 382:Reason in man is rather like God in the world. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 383:Shun an inquisitive man, he is invariably a tell-tale. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 384:Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 385:The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 386:The man of upright life is obeyed before he speaks. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 387:There are things stronger than the strongest man. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 388:The superior man is never in anyone's way. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 389:The wise man is he who knows when and how to stop ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 390:The worse the man, the better the soldier. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 391:Time and tide and hookers wait for no man. ~ rodney-dangerfield, @wisdomtrove 392:To be doing good deeds is man's most glorious task. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 393:What can a man do with music who is not benevolent? ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 394:Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 395:You're not a man, you're a mushroom! ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 396:A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 397:A man must become wise at his own expense. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 398:A man prepared has half fought the battle. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 399:A wise man hears one word and understands two. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 400:Faults and defects every work of man must have. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 401:Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 402:God became man, granted. The devil became a woman. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 403:Heaven never helps the man who will not help himself ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 404:He (man) is both dust of earth and breath of God. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 405:I am just a common man who is true to his beliefs. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 406:If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 407:In love, each man is his own personal challenge. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove 408:In the life of one man, never The same time returns. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 409:It is commonly a weak man who marries for love. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 410:Make sure to send a lazy man the angel of death. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 411:Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel! ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 412:Man is Creation's masterpiece. But who says so? ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 413:Man is only great when he acts from passion. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 414:Man knows that love is, but not what it is. ~ emanuel-swedenborg, @wisdomtrove 415:Man seems the only growth that dwindles here. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 416:No man becomes rich unless he enriches others. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 417:No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 418:One man's style must not be the rule of another's. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 419:Power gravitates to the man who knows how. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 420:The center of every man's existence is a dream. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 421:The first duty of man is that of subduing fear. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 422:The ideal man takes joy in doing favours for others. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 423:The inner man has access to the sense organs of god. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 424:The man who has no problems is out of the game. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 425:The man who wins, is the man who thinks he can. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 426:There's many a man has more hair than wit. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 427:The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 428:Think of a man in a chronic state of anger! ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 429:Trouthe is the hyest thyng that man may kepe. ~ geoffrey-chaucer, @wisdomtrove 430:Truth is the highest thing that man may keep. ~ geoffrey-chaucer, @wisdomtrove 431:Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 432:A fair-minded man tries to see both sides of an argument. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 433:A great man is always willing to be little. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 434:A man can't ride your back unless it's bent. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 435:A man is what he thinks about all day long. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 436:A man should never neglect his family for business. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove 437:Each man's life represents a road toward himself. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 438:Every man is ignorant - just on different subjects. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 439:Everyone asks if a man is rich, no one if he is good. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 440:God provides the wind, Man must raise the sail. ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 441:He who never says "no" is no true man. ~ antoine-de-saint-exupery, @wisdomtrove 442:I know enough to know that no man is an island. ~ richard-branson, @wisdomtrove 443:I long to set foot where no man has trod before. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 444:Immoderate desire is the mark of a child, not a man. ~ democritus, @wisdomtrove 445:It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 446:Life is full of amusement to an amusing man. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 447:Man's restlessness makes him strive. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 448:(Man,) the glory and the scandal of the universe. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 449:Many the wonders but nothing walks stranger than man. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 450:No man is more cheated than the selfish man. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 451:No man is useless while he has a friend. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 452:No man profiteth but by the loss of others. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 453:Nothing happens to man without the permission of God. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 454:Nothing is so difficult but that man will accomplish it. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 455:One monster there is in the world, the idle man. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 456:The Angel's bread is made the Bread of man today. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 457:The Great Man is a man who lives a long way off. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 458:The man who falls in love chill find plenty of occupation. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 459:The man who fights for his ideals is alive. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 460:The salvation of man is through love and in love. ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 461:When a man of God dies, nothing of God dies. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 462:Whenever a man makes haste, God too hastens with him. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 463:With out some kind of god, man is not very intresting ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 464:A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 465:A man never has good luck who has a bad wife. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 466:A man without a smiling face must not open a shop. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 467:An honest man's word is as good as his bond. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 468:Best thing that can happen to a man is a good woman. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 469:Busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 470:Character, not circumstances, makes the man. ~ booker-t-washington, @wisdomtrove 471:Each man was his own executioner and his own victim. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 472:Every man I meet is in some way my superior. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 473:God never tempts any man. That is Satan's business. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 474:He's the kind of man who picks his friends - to pieces. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 475:I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man. ~ charlie-chaplan, @wisdomtrove 476:I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 477:If the great man be not grave, he will not be revered. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 478:I have never loved a man as much as I have loved myself ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 479:I have never seen a man as fond of virtue as of women. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 480:In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 481:In the stars is written the death of every man. ~ geoffrey-chaucer, @wisdomtrove 482:In war it is not men, but the man who counts. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 483:It is only God who creates. Man merely rearranges. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 484:I want to live like a poor man with lots of money. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 485:Like the man said, a little hope never hurt anybody ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 486:Listen to no man who has not listened to God. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 487:“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove 488:Man does not have a soul. He is a soul. He has a body. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 489:Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 490:Man is a piece of the universe made alive. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 491:Man is the being whose project it is to be God. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 492:Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. ~ francis-bacon, @wisdomtrove 493:No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 494:No man is born without ambitious worldly desires. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 495:The Angel's bread is made the Bread of man today. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 496:The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 497:The greatest man in history was the poorest. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 498:The man on top of the mountain didn't fall there. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 499:The man who has lost his purse will go wherever you wish. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 500:There is no end to the power a man can obtain. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:A man is but an ass ~ W S Gilbert, #NFDB
2:Fame is a Bleet, man. ~ Brad Pitt, #NFDB
3:I am a man of my word. ~ Augustus, #NFDB
4:I'm a very old man. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
5:I'm no' a good man. ~ Donna Grant, #NFDB
6:Man thinks, God directs. ~ Alcuin, #NFDB
7:Man was mark'd ~ Philip Massinger, #NFDB
8:No man is an island. ~ John Donne, #NFDB
9:Success is man's god. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
10:the man next to me. ~ Renee Rosen, #NFDB
11:Drink it in, man!! ~ Chris Jericho, #NFDB
12:I am a wife-made man. ~ Danny Kaye, #NFDB
13:Man is a bad animal. ~ Brion Gysin, #NFDB
14:Man is a moral being. ~ Gaspar Noe, #NFDB
15:Man plans, God laughs, ~ Greg Iles, #NFDB
16:Man, the mask of God, ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
17:No man is an island. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
18:Part 1
A Just Man ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
19:Right wrongs no man. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
20:Vader was not a man. ~ Paul S Kemp, #NFDB
21:Be groovy or leave, man ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
22:droom van een man ~ Kristan Higgins, #NFDB
23:Every virtuous man is free. ~ Philo, #NFDB
24:I am a one success man. ~ Tom Baker, #NFDB
25:I'm not a leading man. ~ Aaron Paul, #NFDB
26:I've been a free man. ~ V S Naipaul, #NFDB
27:Like sweet morning dew ~ Method Man, #NFDB
28:Lil Wayne is the man. ~ Layzie Bone, #NFDB
29:little gray man. ~ Antonio J M ndez, #NFDB
30:Man be my metaphor’, ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
31:Man is no man, but a wolf ~ Plautus, #NFDB
32:sex crimes and a man ~ T J Brearton, #NFDB
33:A good man never dies. ~ Callimachus, #NFDB
34:A man polished to the nail. ~ Horace, #NFDB
35:Beat a Pan, Save a Man ~ Tracy Ellen, #NFDB
36:Chigarid. The man who ~ John Berendt, #NFDB
37:God is man idealized. ~ Amiri Baraka, #NFDB
38:I am the rich man's guru. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
39:I'm a very wealthy man. ~ Elton John, #NFDB
40:Man is all symmetry ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
41:Man plans, God laughs. ~ Erik Larson, #NFDB
42:No man is an island... ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
43:No man liveth to himself. ~ St. Paul, #NFDB
44:Oh, no man knows ~ Walter de La Mare, #NFDB
45:Oouuu, you nasty man! ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
46:THE CROOKED MAN ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
47:the Masked Man’s son, ~ Chris Colfer, #NFDB
48:There is no dark man ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
49:Women love an honest man. ~ Rita Ora, #NFDB
50:Alas for the seed of man. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
51:Happy man, happy dole. ~ John Heywood, #NFDB
52:I am dead man alive. ~ Santosh Kalwar, #NFDB
53:I don't need a man in my life. ~ Enya, #NFDB
54:Man can hope, dream even. ~ E L James, #NFDB
55:Man is a bad animal.... ~ Brion Gysin, #NFDB
56:Man is a small universe. ~ Democritus, #NFDB
57:Man must choose his world ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
58:Man must conquer nature. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
59:man plans god laughs ~ Craig Ferguson, #NFDB
60:Man plans. God laughs. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
61:Man proposes, God disposes. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
62:Man with the Muckrake ~ Edmund Morris, #NFDB
63:Masked Man—it was Dad! ~ Chris Colfer, #NFDB
64:The man read my thoughts. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
65:Time waits for no man. ~ Choi Hong Hi, #NFDB
66:What's Your Road, Man? ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
67:White Man’s Grave ~ David A Livermore, #NFDB
68:A hard man is good to find. ~ Mae West, #NFDB
69:A man is never ugly". ~ Buchi Emecheta, #NFDB
70:A man who is 100% sane is dead. ~ Osho, #NFDB
71:Any man can turn traitor. ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
72:A selfish man is a thief. ~ Jose Marti, #NFDB
73:Don't have a cow, man. ~ Matt Groening, #NFDB
74:Every man is an artist. ~ Joseph Beuys, #NFDB
75:followed ir the man’s ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
76:God pity a one-dream man. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
77:I am a man of my word. ~ Aleatha Romig, #NFDB
78:I am not a normal man. ~ Stevie Wonder, #NFDB
79:I hated the man ~ William Kent Krueger, #NFDB
80:Man, I'm sick of doubt. ~ Jim Morrison, #NFDB
81:Man is a gaming animal. ~ Charles Lamb, #NFDB
82:Man is what he reads. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
83:Man seeks answers from afar ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
84:Man's Place in Nature. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
85:Modesty becomes a young man. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
86:Money makes a man laugh. ~ John Selden, #NFDB
87:the Mind of Man-- ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
88:Water is the key to life, man. ~ Dessa, #NFDB
89:A bad man is a good man's job ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
90:Art? That's a man's name. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
91:Bruckner he is my man! ~ Richard Wagner, #NFDB
92:Doubt makes a man decent. ~ Harry Crews, #NFDB
93:Every man has one destiny, ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
94:Every man heals himself. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
95:fear no man but only God ~ Tupac Shakur, #NFDB
96:Grace was a good man, ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
97:I am a dead man alive. ~ Santosh Kalwar, #NFDB
98:I'm a horse of a man! ~ Jeremy Clarkson, #NFDB
99:I'm a regular supra man ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
100:I think I am a moral man. ~ Gary Condit, #NFDB
101:I will hit a man with glasses. ~ Eminem, #NFDB
102:Let the poor man mind his tongue ~ Ovid, #NFDB
103:Man plans, God laughs. ~ Nelson DeMille, #NFDB
104:Man’s Search for Meaning: ~ Russ Harris, #NFDB
105:man with a chinchilla beard ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
106:Milk-livered man! ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
107:Milk-livered man, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
108:No man is born without faults. ~ Horace, #NFDB
109:No man is infallible. ~ Kristin Cashore, #NFDB
110:No man was ever wise by chance ~ Seneca, #NFDB
111:No other man will have you ~ Maya Banks, #NFDB
112:Serve man Serve god ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
113:The common man is a fool. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
114:This man is my boatswain. ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
115:This man might kill me. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
116:Who is the honest man? ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
117:Wine is a peep-hole on a man. ~ Alcaeus, #NFDB
118:Ain't fit for man nor beast ~ W C Fields, #NFDB
119:As a man is, so he sees. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
120:As man acts, God reacts. ~ Baal Shem Tov, #NFDB
121:Baby You’re a Rich Man ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
122:Be kind to an old man. ~ Walter Cronkite, #NFDB
123:Chess is a curse upon a man. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
124:Every man is his own hell. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
125:Follow the blind man. ~ Maureen A Miller, #NFDB
126:freckle-and-red man ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
127:Hello, Doctor. It's your man. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
128:I am a hard man to replace. ~ Junot D az, #NFDB
129:I'm not a lovable man. ~ Richard M Nixon, #NFDB
130:I'm really a one-man band. ~ Graham King, #NFDB
131:in the mind of man, ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
132:is the man who finds wisdom, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
133:It’s all part of it, man. ~ Jerry Garcia, #NFDB
134:Know a man by his metaphors. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
135:Man alone can enslave man. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
136:Man and wife make one fool. ~ Ben Jonson, #NFDB
137:Man believes and lives. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
138:Man by nature wants to know. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
139:Man is a biped without feathers. ~ Plato, #NFDB
140:Man is what he believes. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
141:Man plans and God laughs, ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
142:Never trust a man in red trousers ~ Mika, #NFDB
143:No man hath seen God at any time. ~ John, #NFDB
144:No man provokes me with impunity. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
145:she treads lightly old man. ~ John Green, #NFDB
146:Stupid f***ing white man. ~ Jim Jarmusch, #NFDB
147:Sutton is a good man. ~ Clifford D Simak, #NFDB
148:Thanks, man.” “And Maggie ~ Stormy Glenn, #NFDB
149:The fate of man is man. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
150:The good man does not grieve ~ Confucius, #NFDB
151:"The greatest man is nobody." ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
152:The Man of a Thousand Voices ~ Mel Blanc, #NFDB
153:the one-eyed man is king, ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
154:The tide tarrieth no man. ~ John Heywood, #NFDB
155:Time waits upon no man. ~ Pip Ballantine, #NFDB
156:Age will flatten a man. ~ Tommy Lee Jones, #NFDB
157:A man posing for a painting. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
158:A man's house is his castle. ~ James Otis, #NFDB
159:A man’s kiss is his signature. ~ Mae West, #NFDB
160:A man who has been in danger, ~ Euripides, #NFDB
161:A slave is but half a man. ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
162:A wise man once said nothing. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
163:But a man needs company. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
164:Each man is a little war. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
165:Every man has his price. ~ Robert Walpole, #NFDB
166:Evil man make me kill you. ~ Jimi Hendrix, #NFDB
167:God created woman to tame man. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
168:He's my man, he was great ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
169:He was a scribble of a man. ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
170:Hope is man's inner effort. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
171:Hunger makes a fool of a man. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
172:If a man owns land, ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
173:I'm a cruel man to myself. ~ Duncan Jones, #NFDB
174:I'm a simple, simple man. ~ Jeremy Renner, #NFDB
175:I'm looking for a man. ~ Susanna Kearsley, #NFDB
176:I'm ready to meet a nice man! ~ Kim Coles, #NFDB
177:In Yeah Man (aka Yemen), ~ Megan McDonald, #NFDB
178:I want to live like a man. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
179:Man, I really like Vegas. ~ Elvis Presley, #NFDB
180:Man is embedded in nature. ~ Lewis Thomas, #NFDB
181:Man isn't an idea, Rambert ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
182:Man's character is his fate. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
183:Money makes a man mirthful. ~ Scott Lynch, #NFDB
184:No man becomes bad all at once. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
185:No man hath seen God at any time. ~ John, #NFDB
186:No man is hurt but by himself. ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
187:one-man wave of destruction ~ Morgan Rice, #NFDB
188:Only man makes Karma. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
189:Peter Norman's a man's man. ~ John Carlos, #NFDB
190:The lot of man-to suffer and die. ~ Homer, #NFDB
191:The man gave Westin two ~ Jerry B Jenkins, #NFDB
192:The proud man is forsaken of God. ~ Plato, #NFDB
193:Violence is fun, man. ~ Quentin Tarantino, #NFDB
194:When a man comes to die, ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
195:who is this we, white man, ~ Annie Bellet, #NFDB
196:You're a good man, Hunter. ~ Lisa Kessler, #NFDB
197:A dead man has no age ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
198:A dyslexic man walks into a bra. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
199:All bibles are man-made. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
200:A man always has a choice ~ Lorraine Heath, #NFDB
201:a man is his own worst enemy. ~ James Hunt, #NFDB
202:A man perfect to the finger tips. ~ Horace, #NFDB
203:A man who is 100% sane is dead. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
204:...a man within the breast... ~ Adam Smith, #NFDB
205:Are you a man or a mouse? ~ Kate DiCamillo, #NFDB
206:Bless you, daugher of man, ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
207:Bless you, daugher of man. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
208:He wanted another man. It ~ Sloane Kennedy, #NFDB
209:Hey man! Get away from me! ~ Mickey Mantle, #NFDB
210:I ain’t Jesus. I’m just a man. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
211:I am looking for an honest man. ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
212:Idle man, chases after fairy tales. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
213:I do like to belong to a man. ~ Eva Mendes, #NFDB
214:I fear no man, no woman; ~ Hilda Doolittle, #NFDB
215:I left my mark on that man. ~ Alice Sebold, #NFDB
216:I'm a condition, not a man. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
217:I'm taking one for the team, ~ Method Man, #NFDB
218:In every cry of every man, ~ William Blake, #NFDB
219:I will tell the stork-man. ~ Tamora Pierce, #NFDB
220:Let mortal man keep to his own ~ Euripides, #NFDB
221:Man by Nature desires to know. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
222:Man delights not me. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
223:Man is incurably curious. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
224:Man is on earth as in an egg. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
225:man lies to himself a lot. ~ G I Gurdjieff, #NFDB
226:Man lives by imagination. ~ Havelock Ellis, #NFDB
227:Man was not made for himself alone ~ Plato, #NFDB
228:Mind the dead man, my dear. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
229:Noble be man, ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
230:no man’s a hero to himself. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
231:Only the bad man is alone. ~ Denis Diderot, #NFDB
232:Opportunity makes the man ~ Jos de Alencar, #NFDB
233:Poor man. Poor mankind. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
234:Reading maketh a full man. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
235:Slowly you become your own man. ~ Bob Weir, #NFDB
236:Smith, a tall, lean man with ~ Mary Burton, #NFDB
237:The covetous man is ever in want. ~ Horace, #NFDB
238:The end of man is action. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
239:The good man makes others good. ~ Menander, #NFDB
240:THE OLD MAN AND HIS GRANDSON ~ Jacob Grimm, #NFDB
241:The right man won't care ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
242:Unconcerned but not indifferent. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
243:Words have divided man from woman, ~ Laozi, #NFDB
244:A man is above all his will ~ Prabhavananda, #NFDB
245:A man's character is his fate. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
246:A man's head is his castle. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
247:A man who causes fear cannot be ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
248:An angry man is full of poison. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
249:An honest man is always a child. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
250:A real man makes his own luck. ~ Billy Zane, #NFDB
251:Art is man added to Nature. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
252:At dinner my man appeares. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
253:A true artist is an ugly man. ~ Osamu Dazai, #NFDB
254:A wise man once said nothing. ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
255:Call no man happy until he is dead. ~ Solon, #NFDB
256:dead man’s chest. He needed ~ Toni Anderson, #NFDB
257:Each man is led by his own liking. ~ Virgil, #NFDB
258:Each man's soul is his genius. ~ Xenocrates, #NFDB
259:Each man suffers his own destiny. ~ Virgil, #NFDB
260:Every man lives by exchanging. ~ Adam Smith, #NFDB
261:Every man's entitled to hope. ~ David Milch, #NFDB
262:For a significant man ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
263:God, I love a man who reads ~ Tiffany Reisz, #NFDB
264:Good morning,” the man said. ~ Blake Pierce, #NFDB
265:He was a wise man who invented God. ~ Plato, #NFDB
266:I'm a man of my word. ~ Floyd Mayweather Jr, #NFDB
267:I paint when I cannot photograph. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
268:I pity the man who can’t cry. ~ Janny Wurts, #NFDB
269:I've never been a yes man. ~ Rogers Hornsby, #NFDB
270:Jesus loves a free black man. ~ Cornel West, #NFDB
271:Make this man a saint now, OK? ~ Elton John, #NFDB
272:Man is always on the way. ~ Rudolf Bultmann, #NFDB
273:Man is a thought-adventurer. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
274:Man is nature's sole mistake. ~ W S Gilbert, #NFDB
275:Man is not born to be happy. ~ Sarah Dunant, #NFDB
276:Man is on earth as in an egg. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
277:Man shall learn from man's lot. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
278:Man’s Search for Meaning. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
279:Man was formed for society. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
280:Money makes the man a beast. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
281:No man is wise enough by himself. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
282:The Masked Man – it was Dad! ~ Chris Colfer, #NFDB
283:There is no man can take, ~ Hilda Doolittle, #NFDB
284:The sun will stand as your best man ~ Hafez, #NFDB
285:The wise man knows he doesn't know. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
286:Time and tide wait for no man. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
287:To justify God's ways to man. ~ A E Housman, #NFDB
288:Vom Leben muß man saufen. ~ Benjamin Lebert, #NFDB
289:You cannot con an honest man. ~ Ally Carter, #NFDB
290:You can't cheat an honest man. ~ W C Fields, #NFDB
291:You've become a clever man. ~ Richard Russo, #NFDB
292:A Gentle Man and a Gentleman. ~ Jack Dempsey, #NFDB
293:A man's character is his fate. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
294:And man will go on. Man, not men. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
295:A shamefaced man makes a bad beggar. ~ Homer, #NFDB
296:A strange enigma is man ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
297:Beware of a man with manners. ~ Eudora Welty, #NFDB
298:business of man is to be happy, ~ John Locke, #NFDB
299:count no man happy until he be dead. ~ Solon, #NFDB
300:day. You lost your man and ~ Tracie Peterson, #NFDB
301:Defect in one's limb ruins a man. ~ Chanakya, #NFDB
302:Every man must choose his world. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
303:Genius: the superhuman in man. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
304:God is the mirror of man. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
305:He was a man of great statue ~ Thomas Menino, #NFDB
306:He was a wise man who invented God. ~ Plato, #NFDB
307:I ain't afraid to love a man. ~ Annie Oakley, #NFDB
308:I don't wear jewelry, as a man. ~ Alan Tudyk, #NFDB
309:If man made it, don't eat it. ~ Jack LaLanne, #NFDB
310:I like being able to be a man. ~ Anson Mount, #NFDB
311:It's a Man's Man's Man's World ~ James Brown, #NFDB
312:Jason hated being an old man. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
313:Man cannot choose his duties. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
314:Man is a being in search of meaning. ~ Plato, #NFDB
315:Man is a god in ruins. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
316:Man is a mistake. He must go. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
317:Man is a self-conscious Nothing, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
318:Man is a social animal. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
319:Man is a tool-using animal. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
320:Man is a vile creature! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
321:Man must endure his going hence. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
322:Man proposes and God disposes. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
323:Never trust a man who can dance. ~ E L James, #NFDB
324:No man can outrun Logic or Time. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
325:No man has perpetual good fortune. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
326:No man's pie is freed ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
327:One day man will connect his ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
328:Paper is more patient than man. ~ Anne Frank, #NFDB
329:People know when youre frontin. ~ Method Man, #NFDB
330:Revenge of the Giant Grill Man. ~ Joan Bauer, #NFDB
331:Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. ~ Saul, #NFDB
332:Sex is the poor man's polo. ~ Clifford Odets, #NFDB
333:Spider-Man had Peter Parker. ~ Gordon Korman, #NFDB
334:The jungle changes a man. ~ Cynthia Kadohata, #NFDB
335:The test of any man lies in action. ~ Pindar, #NFDB
336:The tongue of man is a twisty thing. ~ Homer, #NFDB
337:time and tide wait for no man. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
338:What man dare, I dare. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
339:What you call man is time. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
340:A brave man is seldom unkind. ~ Pretty Shield, #NFDB
341:All critics should be assassinated. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
342:A man can die but once. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
343:A man of logic is a man of sin. ~ Mike Norton, #NFDB
344:A man of refined taste and judgment. ~ Horace, #NFDB
345:A man who had felt less, might. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
346:America is a white man's country. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
347:An aged man is a thinking ruin. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
348:Art is the signature of man. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
349:A true man hates no one. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
350:A true man hates no one. ~ Napol on Bonaparte, #NFDB
351:Bernie Sanders is a crazy man. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
352:Beware the fury of a patient man ~ Tom Clancy, #NFDB
353:Be your own father, young man ~ Ralph Ellison, #NFDB
354:But is God a Yale man? ~ William F Buckley Jr, #NFDB
355:But no man’s a hero to himself ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
356:Call no man happy before he dies. ~ Herodotus, #NFDB
357:Effort is a measure of a Man. ~ William James, #NFDB
358:Even a man who's pure in heart ~ Curt Siodmak, #NFDB
359:Every breath taken in by the man ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
360:Every man is a poet at heart. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
361:Every monster was a man first. ~ Edward Albee, #NFDB
362:for vain is the salvation of man! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
363:God sinks into dust before man. ~ Max Stirner, #NFDB
364:going to see a man about a dog. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
365:Harold?’ ‘Poor man, I suppose ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
366:Heaven forbids that man should know ~ Statius, #NFDB
367:Hope is the dream of a waking man ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
368:Hunger makes thief of any man. ~ Pearl S Buck, #NFDB
369:I am any man's suitor, ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
370:I'm a good man with a good heart ~ John Mayer, #NFDB
371:Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin ~ Homer, #NFDB
372:I was a man of jagged risings ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
373:I was not always a man of woe. ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
374:Look twice at a two-faced man. ~ Chief Joseph, #NFDB
375:Man has created death. ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
376:Man hath a weary pilgrimage, ~ Robert Southey, #NFDB
377:Man is an endangered species. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
378:Man is an imagining being. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
379:Man is a robot with defects. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
380:Man is not meant to live alone. ~ Dorothy Day, #NFDB
381:Man is the creature he fears. ~ Josh Malerman, #NFDB
382:Man is what his dreams are. ~ Benjamin E Mays, #NFDB
383:Man rarely knows his own power, ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
384:Man's life is thought, ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
385:Man, sometimes God really sucks. ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
386:Man Va?Haya Va?Haya
~ Bahinabai Chaudhari,#NFDB
387:Mathematics is as old as Man. ~ Stefan Banach, #NFDB
388:Modern man is starved for life. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
389:Money is the wise man's religion. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
390:Money is what makes a man act funny. ~ Eminem, #NFDB
391:My father is an amazing man. ~ Sherman Alexie, #NFDB
392:My father was a beautiful man. ~ Shania Twain, #NFDB
393:Nobody picks on a strong man. ~ Charles Atlas, #NFDB
394:no man,
is ever happy, no one. ~ Euripides,#NFDB
395:No man is above the law. ~ William H Pryor Jr, #NFDB
396:The king is the man who can. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
397:There is a dog in every man. ~ Linda Hamilton, #NFDB
398:There is no Great Dark Man!!! ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
399:The unenvied man is not enviable. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
400:The wise man knows without traveling. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
401:Throw the lumber over, man! ~ Jerome K Jerome, #NFDB
402:Time and tide wait for no man. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
403:Time is greedy, man is greedier ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
404:Vaster is Man than his works. ~ Rockwell Kent, #NFDB
405:Walking is man's best medicine. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
406:Ware the man who fakes a limp. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
407:War ought to be no man's wish. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
408:Welcome to Suckersville, man. ~ Matt Groening, #NFDB
409:Western man is schizophrenic. ~ J B Priestley, #NFDB
410:What one man can do, another can do ~ Various, #NFDB
411:2Now a man who was lame from birth ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
412:Account no man happy till he dies. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
413:A good man who did a bad thing. ~ Mary Matalin, #NFDB
414:A hungry man is an angry one. ~ Buchi Emecheta, #NFDB
415:A man after God's own heart is... ~ Jim George, #NFDB
416:A man can get killed in there. ~ Robert Jordan, #NFDB
417:A man is a god in ruins. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
418:A man is known by the company he keeps ~ Aesop, #NFDB
419:A man is more than his failings. ~ Rick Reilly, #NFDB
420:A man is the origin of his action. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
421:A man is virgin if he says so. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
422:A man must know his destiny. ~ George S Patton, #NFDB
423:A man of wisdom delights in water. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
424:An honest man is always a child.
~ Socrates,#NFDB
425:A rich man's joke is always funny. ~ T E Brown, #NFDB
426:Ariel Sharon is a man of peace. ~ Ariel Sharon, #NFDB
427:Art is man's refuge from adversity. ~ Menander, #NFDB
428:A wise man sees failure as progress. ~ Canibus, #NFDB
429:balding man with a drooping ~ Michael Connelly, #NFDB
430:But no man's a hero to himself. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
431:Call no man happy till he is dead. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
432:Credit is a young man's capital. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
433:Every man is a potential rapist. ~ Nandita Das, #NFDB
434:Every man measures his own greed. ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
435:For a man's house is his castle. ~ Edward Coke, #NFDB
436:Forget the brother and resume the man. ~ Homer, #NFDB
437:For never, never, wicked man was wise. ~ Homer, #NFDB
438:Hope is the poor man's bread. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
439:Hope proves a man deathless. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
440:Humor is man's greatest blessing. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
441:I am basically a religious man. ~ Cyril Cusack, #NFDB
442:I like man, but not men. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
443:I love you like a man insane. ~ Amanda Bouchet, #NFDB
444:I never met a man I could marry. ~ Greta Garbo, #NFDB
445:I never met a man I didn't like. ~ Will Rogers, #NFDB
446:Is he a good man?" "Define 'good'. ~ Cleopatra, #NFDB
447:I sing of arms and of a man: his fate ~ Virgil, #NFDB
448:This was to be man sex. ~ Brandon Shire, #NFDB
449:It is right to give every man his due. ~ Plato, #NFDB
450:I want a man with nuclear power. ~ Carla Bruni, #NFDB
451:Let a man nobly live or nobly die. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
452:Let the end try the man. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
453:Lincoln, the Man of the People ~ Edwin Markham, #NFDB
454:Lucky is the man who dies at work. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
455:Man, I look ugly when I cry. ~ Debra Anastasia, #NFDB
456:Man is an eternal sophomore. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
457:Man is a universe within himself. ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
458:Man is condemned to be free ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
459:Man is not made for defeat. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
460:Man is the measure of all things. ~ Protagoras, #NFDB
461:Man made God in his own image. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
462:Man Proposeth, God disposeth. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
463:Man’s first duty is to conquer fear. ~ Carlyle, #NFDB
464:Man's greatest fear is chaos. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
465:Mind is the foundation of man. ~ Baal Shem Tov, #NFDB
466:My love ruined that man’s life. ~ Karina Halle, #NFDB
467:Never kill a man who says nothing. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
468:Nobody loves life like an old man. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
469:No man can serve two masters. ~ Sankhya Karika, #NFDB
470:No man is an island unto himself. ~ John Donne, #NFDB
471:No man is ever just one thing. ~ Michael Scott, #NFDB
472:No man to lord, no child to hold. ~ Tanith Lee, #NFDB
473:Pigpen grins like a crazy man. ~ Katie McGarry, #NFDB
474:Reality is fabricated out of desire. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
475:Silence is an answer to a wise man. ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
476:Steel itself oft lures a man to fight. ~ Homer, #NFDB
477:The bravest man in the universe ~ Bobby Womack, #NFDB
478:The common enemy is the white man. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
479:There is no great Dark Man !!! ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
480:The righteous man is always active. ~ Chi-King, #NFDB
481:The stars spoke once to man. ~ Rudolf Steiner, #NFDB
482:To laugh is proper to man. ~ Francois Rabelais, #NFDB
483:When a man plans, a woman laughs. ~ David Wong, #NFDB
484:Who knows what any man can do? ~ David Lindsay, #NFDB
485:Without dance, a man can do nothing. ~ Moliere, #NFDB
486:You are a better man than I. ~ Madeline Miller, #NFDB
487:You can't trust a man, any man ~ Ellen Hopkins, #NFDB
488:A boy trying out a man's language. ~ Eowyn Ivey, #NFDB
489:Act like a lady think like a man ~ Steve Harvey, #NFDB
490:A drunkard is a dead man ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
491:A dyslexic man walks into a bra. ~ Tommy Cooper, #NFDB
492:A few lines to spell a man’s doom. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
493:A gallant man is above ill words. ~ John Selden, #NFDB
494:Ain't no man can outrun his fate. ~ Esi Edugyan, #NFDB
495:A man can laugh while he suffers. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
496:A man is known by the company he keeps. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
497:A Man Is Known By The Mice He Keeps ~ Ken Kesey, #NFDB
498:A man is sorry to be honest for nothing. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
499:A man's bathroom is his castle ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
500:A man's biggest enemy is his mouth. ~ Greg Iles, #NFDB
501:A man's fortune is his own affair ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
502:A man with a club is a law-maker. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
503:An accomplished man to his fingertips. ~ Horace, #NFDB
504:An ancient old raisin of a man. I ~ Esi Edugyan, #NFDB
505:An empty man is full of himself. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
506:An honest man is a rare treasure. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
507:Anything a man can do, I can fix. ~ Chris Abani, #NFDB
508:A real man's weapon is his mind. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
509:As a man believes, so he will act. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
510:A shark who dreamed he was a man. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
511:Beware the fury of a patient man. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
512:Bravery is not man's monopoly. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
513:But man proposes, God disposes. ~ Sigrid Undset, #NFDB
514:Come on, man, I got a full beard! ~ Aziz Ansari, #NFDB
515:Conquer the angry man by love. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
516:Conscience is God present in man. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
517:Constancy in a man is rare. ~ Catherine Cookson, #NFDB
518:Don't. You don't know this man. ~ Stylo Fantome, #NFDB
519:Each man dreams his own heaven. ~ John Connolly, #NFDB
520:Evan Arden - hit man gone spooner ~ Shay Savage, #NFDB
521:Even a poor man can receive honors. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
522:Every man is a poet when he is in love. ~ Plato, #NFDB
523:Every man is grave alone. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
524:Every man lives at swordspoint. ~ Ellen Kushner, #NFDB
525:Every man's actions belong to him. ~ Ben Harper, #NFDB
526:Every moment dies a man, ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
527:Happiness is not the portion of man. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
528:her butt could drive a man crazy. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
529:Hunger makes a thief of any man. ~ Pearl S Buck, #NFDB
530:I am the wilderness lost in man. ~ Mervyn Peake, #NFDB
531:I do not hate the man, but his vices. ~ Martial, #NFDB
532:I feel like a young man of 15. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
533:If man makes it, I don't eat it! ~ Jack LaLanne, #NFDB
534:I'm a blue Powerade man myself. ~ Evan Goldberg, #NFDB
535:I’m a man again, and a man works. ~ Dani Harper, #NFDB
536:I man don't come red, I come Black ~ Peter Tosh, #NFDB
537:I never mewt a man I didn't like. ~ Will Rogers, #NFDB
538:Kill the king but spare the man. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
539:Let each man do his best. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
540:Let no man thirst for good beer. ~ Samuel Adams, #NFDB
541:Lipstick is the red badge of courage. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
542:Man becomes what he thinks about ~ Rhonda Byrne, #NFDB
543:Man, God really does love medics. ~ Mark Bowden, #NFDB
544:Man hopes, genius creates ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
545:Man is a reasoning Animal. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
546:Man is a tool-making animal ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
547:...man is a useless passion. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
548:Man is condemned to be free. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
549:Man is condemned to be free; ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
550:Man is in love and loves ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
551:Man is nature as much as the trees. ~ Dan Kiley, #NFDB
552:Man is neither angel nor beast. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
553:man, letting all her doubts fade ~ Rachel Hauck, #NFDB
554:Man's best friend is his dogma. ~ Timothy Leary, #NFDB
555:Man's greatest victory is over oneself. ~ Plato, #NFDB
556:Nae man can tether time nor tide. ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
557:Nae man can tether time or tide. ~ Robert Burns, #NFDB
558:Nobody can hate man more than man. ~ Karel apek, #NFDB
559:No fox is foxier than man! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
560:No man is quick enough to enjoy life. ~ Martial, #NFDB
561:No one loves the man whom he fears. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
562:No sane man will dance. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
563:Oh, Tocqueville, you're the man. ~ Maira Kalman, #NFDB
564:Or maybe it wasn’t a man at all. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
565:respected man once said, that the ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
566:Tempt not a desperate man ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
567:That's worst than gonerreha, man! ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
568:The emperor is just a man, after all. ~ Ken Liu, #NFDB
569:The happy man's without a shirt. ~ John Heywood, #NFDB
570:The man-at-arms is the only man. ~ Henrik Ibsen, #NFDB
571:The man, most man, ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #NFDB
572:The proper study of mankind is man, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
573:There is no indispensable man. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
574:There live a great man named Joe ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB
575:There was a young man of Herne Bay ~ Ogden Nash, #NFDB
576:The sleep of a laboring man is sweet. ~ Solomon, #NFDB
577:The wise man says: Perhaps? ~ Guy de Maupassant, #NFDB
578:They say every man needs protection ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
579:to look for a man named Nimble Dick ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
580:Tongues wrangled dark at a man. ~ Carl Sandburg, #NFDB
581:Walking is a man's best medicine. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
582:Whatever things a man gives up, ~ Thiruvalluvar, #NFDB
583:What is man? Dust turned to hope. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
584:Who that man in the black Sedan ~ Mickey Avalon, #NFDB
585:Woman is the lesser man. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
586:Y are you called the cheese man? ~ Barbara Park, #NFDB
587:You can't hate a man you understand. ~ Ben Bova, #NFDB
588:A great man is one sentence. ~ Clare Boothe Luce, #NFDB
589:A mad man sees what he sees. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
590:A man has a right to want to live. ~ Dalia Sofer, #NFDB
591:A man is not a financial plan. ~ Robert Kiyosaki, #NFDB
592:A man must know his limitations. ~ David Gemmell, #NFDB
593:A man's perfection is his work. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
594:A man that runs away may fight again. ~ Menander, #NFDB
595:A man with courage has every blessing. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
596:An armed man need not fight. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
597:As a man thinketh, so he behaveth, ~ Mike Dooley, #NFDB
598:Best is the man who thinks for himself. ~ Hesiod, #NFDB
599:Beware of the man of one book. ~ Isaac D Israeli, #NFDB
600:Desire is the essence of a man. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
601:Don't ever let the Man get you. ~ Sophia Amoruso, #NFDB
602:Don't let the man bring you down. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
603:Evan Arden – hit man gone spooner. ~ Shay Savage, #NFDB
604:Every experience makes you a man. ~ Eric Cantona, #NFDB
605:Every great man is unique. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
606:Every ill man hath his ill day. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
607:Every man is a new method. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
608:Every man makes a god of his own desire ~ Virgil, #NFDB
609:Fate is not in man but around him ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
610:God improvises. Man systematizes. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
611:Hope is a working-man's dream. ~ Pliny the Elder, #NFDB
612:[Hope is] the dream of a waking man. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
613:How can kindliness rule that man ~ Thiruvalluvar, #NFDB
614:I am no man, I am dynamite ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
615:I am not man, I'm dynamite ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
616:I do love competence in a man. ~ Katharine Weber, #NFDB
617:If a man can beat you, walk him. ~ Satchel Paige, #NFDB
618:I have never painted a recent picture. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
619:—Ilse Aichinger, “The Bound Man ~ China Mi ville, #NFDB
620:I'm a holy man minus the holiness. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
621:I'm a man without a corporation. ~ Robert Duvall, #NFDB
622:I'm a rapper trying to be an actor. ~ Method Man, #NFDB
623:In an easy cause any man may be eloquent. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
624:I saw a man pursuing the horizon ~ Stephen Crane, #NFDB
625:I smoke because I like to get high. ~ Method Man, #NFDB
626:It really expresses a man in pain. ~ Mark Hoppus, #NFDB
627:Luck never made a man wise. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
628:Man, an animal that makes bargains. ~ Adam Smith, #NFDB
629:Man becomes what he thinks about. ~ Rhonda Byrne, #NFDB
630:Man.
Motorcyle.
Mountains. ~ Tracy March,#NFDB
631:Man.
Motorcyle.
Mountains. ~ Tracy March,#NFDB
632:Man cannot stand a meaningless life. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
633:Man does not live by GNP alone. ~ Paul Samuelson, #NFDB
634:Man is always exploited through fear. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
635:Man is by nature a political animal. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
636:Man is not mind, he is soul. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
637:Man lives in a world of meaning. ~ George H Mead, #NFDB
638:Man made God in his own image... ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
639:Man must be invented each day ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
640:Man's feeble race what ills await! ~ Thomas Gray, #NFDB
641:Man's word is God in man. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
642:No bad man can be a good poet. ~ Boris Pasternak, #NFDB
643:No man is as big as his own idea. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
644:Obsession is a young man’s game. ~ Michael Caine, #NFDB
645:Old man! 'Tis not difficult to die. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
646:One man with God is a majority. ~ Brother Andrew, #NFDB
647:Pride and excess bring disaster for man. ~ Xunzi, #NFDB
648:Progress is the life-style of man. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
649:Prosperity knits a man to the world. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
650:Remember that dead man you saw ~ Lindsay Buroker, #NFDB
651:Take it easy man, but take it. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
652:The free man is a warrior. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
653:The good man remains calm and serene. ~ Chi-king, #NFDB
654:The man’s been accused of murder. ~ Lauren Royal, #NFDB
655:The man was poetry in motion. ~ Danielle Bourdon, #NFDB
656:The man who walks with Henslow. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
657:The man would fight with a stump. ~ Terri Osburn, #NFDB
658:The mind's the standard of the man. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
659:The one man who changed everything. ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
660:the sin of the representative man. ~ Frank Sheed, #NFDB
661:The sky is an enormous man. ~ Emanuel Swedenborg, #NFDB
662:The spirit gone, man is garbage. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
663:Time and Tide wait for no man ~ Geoffrey Chaucer, #NFDB
664:To be busy is man's only happiness. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
665:Walking is man's best medicine.
~ Hippocrates,#NFDB
666:Was this kid ever going to be a man? ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
667:We salute the rank not the man ~ Richard Winters, #NFDB
668:When a man's life is under debate, ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
669:Which man, Fitz?" I asked quietly. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
670:You are a rare kind of crazy, man. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
671:"You're a bitter man," said Candide. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
672:A blind man. I can stare at him ~ Denise Levertov, #NFDB
673:A lucky man is rarer than a white crow. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
674:A man by himself is in bad company. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
675:A man is either free or he is not. ~ Amiri Baraka, #NFDB
676:A man is great by deeds, not by birth. ~ Chanakya, #NFDB
677:A man must love his bear. ~ Gregory David Roberts, #NFDB
678:A name is what a man makes it,” I ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
679:And can a man his own quietus make ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
680:And not a man appears to tell their fate. ~ Homer, #NFDB
681:An invisible man is a man with power. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
682:Apart from Jesus I am a greedy man. ~ Johnny Hunt, #NFDB
683:Are you looking at a dead man now? ~ Markus Zusak, #NFDB
684:Are you strong enough to be my man? ~ Sheryl Crow, #NFDB
685:Are you woman enough to be my man? ~ Eddie Vedder, #NFDB
686:A wise man can be a fool in love. ~ Chetan Bhagat, #NFDB
687:A word writ doon can hang a man ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
688:Britney Spears has shoulders like a man. ~ Eminem, #NFDB
689:Circumstance does not make the man; ~ James Allen, #NFDB
690:Come the hour, come the man. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky, #NFDB
691:Conscience is a man's compass. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
692:Donald Trump is man of action. ~ Kellyanne Conway, #NFDB
693:Don't kiss a man who hasn't shaved. ~ Kevin Kline, #NFDB
694:Each man the architect of his own fate. ~ Sallust, #NFDB
695:Everybody likes the ice cream man. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
696:Every man alone is sincere. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
697:Every man to the Devil his own way—as ~ Susan Kay, #NFDB
698:Give me an honest con man any day. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
699:Guessing at the dead man too late. ~ Annie Proulx, #NFDB
700:Here I am, an old man in a dry month, ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
701:He was the perfectly flawed man. ~ Samantha Chase, #NFDB
702:Honor is the presence of God in man. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
703:How easy it is to fool a man’s brain. ~ Matt Shaw, #NFDB
704:I am no man, I am dynamite. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
705:I am two lesbians in a man's body. ~ Eddie Izzard, #NFDB
706:I believe I am an honorable man. ~ Joseph J Ellis, #NFDB
707:If a man's a good kisser, he's a great f-. ~ Cher, #NFDB
708:I look like the man in the moon. ~ Martin Freeman, #NFDB
709:I'm a selfish, little pig of a man. ~ Lewis Black, #NFDB
710:I'm more of a man than any liberal. ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
711:I’m no longer a man, I’m a chorus ~ Stuart Turton, #NFDB
712:In no man's land, alien is the queen. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
713:In order to exist, man must rebel. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
714:I trusted an untrustworthy man, ~ Jennifer Becton, #NFDB
715:I've always been a proud man. ~ Herve Villechaize, #NFDB
716:Jesus you're hurting my man-boobs. ~ Lev Grossman, #NFDB
717:Let no such man be trusted. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
718:Life gives nothing to man without labor. ~ Horace, #NFDB
719:Man does not steal, he conquers ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
720:Man follows only phantoms. ~ Pierre Simon Laplace, #NFDB
721:Man in society is like a flow'r, ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
722:Man is a self-conscious Nothing, ~ Thomas Ligotti, #NFDB
723:Man is free the moment he wants to be. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
724:Man is greater than the gods. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
725:Man, I smashed her like an Idaho Potato ~ Mos Def, #NFDB
726:Man is never perfect nor contented. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
727:Man is the animal who laughs, ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
728:Man is the cruelest animal. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
729:Man proposes, but God disposes. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #NFDB
730:Man’s First Mistake: The Wheel ~ Laurence J Peter, #NFDB
731:Man shoot at nothing, sure to hit it. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
732:man was born to betray his destiny ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
733:Men are men, but Man is a woman. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
734:mummified body of a London man who ~ Jeremy Bates, #NFDB
735:Never rub another man's rhubarb. ~ Jack Nicholson, #NFDB
736:Never touch another man's button. ~ Blake Shelton, #NFDB
737:Never trust a man who doesn't drink. ~ W C Fields, #NFDB
738:No man is a failure who has friends. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
739:No man is great if he thinks he is. ~ Will Rogers, #NFDB
740:No man is happy; he is at best fortunate. ~ Solon, #NFDB
741:No man should be angry with what is true. ~ Plato, #NFDB
742:One man cannot make a team. ~ Kareem Abdul Jabbar, #NFDB
743:Pain does not matter to a man. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
744:Reason is God's crowning gift to man. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
745:reflection of a very handsome man ~ Scarlett Dawn, #NFDB
746:Ron Thompson, he's my main man! ~ John Lee Hooker, #NFDB
747:She was seriously hooked on this man ~ Katie Reus, #NFDB
748:Sing us a song you're the piano man. ~ Billy Joel, #NFDB
749:Some things a man simply cannot do. ~ Emily Rodda, #NFDB
750:Sunshine helps to make man patient. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
751:Take it like a man and shut the fuck up. ~ Eminem, #NFDB
752:That man gave piggy banks orgasms. ~ Dannika Dark, #NFDB
753:The life of man is a winter way. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
754:The man is either crazy or he is a poet. ~ Horace, #NFDB
755:The man was allergic to sleep. ~ Scott Westerfeld, #NFDB
756:THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
757:The mastermind, the man with the plan ~ Mikey Way, #NFDB
758:There was a young man of Quebec ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
759:The sea hath fish for every man. ~ William Camden, #NFDB
760:The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
761:The wise man’s home is the universe. ~ Democritus, #NFDB
762:The wisest man the warl' e'er saw, ~ Robert Burns, #NFDB
763:The wit of man has devised cruel statutes, ~ Ovid, #NFDB
764:This is a very sick man, this Obama. ~ Mark Levin, #NFDB
765:This man belongs to me, I want him! ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
766:Time and tide wait for no man. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer, #NFDB
767:Trample not on the ruins of a man. ~ Charles Lamb, #NFDB
768:Valentine cards and birthday wishes? ~ Method Man, #NFDB
769:Walking with her man, Lost in a dream ~ A A Milne, #NFDB
770:What a man wishes, he will believe. ~ Demosthenes, #NFDB
771:what i really need is a dead man. ~ Chester Himes, #NFDB
772:Who are you as a man? What defines you? ~ Roosh V, #NFDB
773:Wit and wisdom are born with a man. ~ John Selden, #NFDB
774:You make me feel like a natural man ~ Carole King, #NFDB
775:You need a man to go to hell with. ~ Tuesday Weld, #NFDB
776:Adversity introduces a man to himself. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
777:A logoless company is a faceless man ~ David Airey, #NFDB
778:A man can drown in shades of grey. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
779:A man got to have a code. --The Wire ~ David Simon, #NFDB
780:A man in love is an awful sight. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
781:A man must constantly exceed his level ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
782:A man should be what he can do. ~ Montgomery Clift, #NFDB
783:A man will be known by his books. ~ William Martin, #NFDB
784:A man without regrets cannot be cured. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
785:And Oh. My. God. The man could kiss. ~ Marie Force, #NFDB
786:An ugly sight, a man who is afraid. ~ Jean Anouilh, #NFDB
787:Any man that walks the mead ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
788:A poet is a world enclosed in a man. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
789:A poor man is a living dead one. ~ Anzia Yezierska, #NFDB
790:As a man thinks so it becomes. ~ Genevi ve Behrend, #NFDB
791:bhole whose form no man might see. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
792:CHAPTER LXXII ‘BID HIM BE A MAN ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
793:Count no man happy until the end is known. ~ Solon, #NFDB
794:course we are reminded of the big man ~ Eva Jordan, #NFDB
795:Desire is the very essence of man ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
796:Dreams are what keep a man going. ~ Daniel Wallace, #NFDB
797:Each man has his own batch of poems. ~ Saul Bellow, #NFDB
798:Evan Arden – hit man gone spooner. I ~ Shay Savage, #NFDB
799:Every man at time of Death, ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, #NFDB
800:failings. I also know that a man, by ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
801:Fear the power of estrogen, old man. ~ John Corwin, #NFDB
802:For man plans, but God arranges. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #NFDB
803:Free is a man who has no desires. ~ Nizami Ganjavi, #NFDB
804:Fuck her, but she loved this man. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
805:Good man always stands against that. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
806:Great is the man who can overcome the ~ Confucius, #NFDB
807:Happy the man who can count his sufferings. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
808:He is our man's-man of literature. ~ Andrew Barger, #NFDB
809:He's just a man names Gatsby. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
810:he smiled like a weather man, ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
811:he was a man on a date with destiny, ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
812:He who fears God fears no man. ~ Leonard Ravenhill, #NFDB
813:I am a shipwrecked man who fears every sea. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
814:I am the luckiest man in the world. ~ Chuck Pagano, #NFDB
815:Ignorance of the law excuses no man. ~ John Selden, #NFDB
816:I have believed the best of every man. ~ W B Yeats, #NFDB
817:I love kicking a man when he’s down. ~ Celia Aaron, #NFDB
818:I'm not much of a song-and-dance man. ~ Nick Nolte, #NFDB
819:I'm the bitch who makes you a man. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
820:I was thirty. An old man in Fallujah. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
821:Language is the charnel house of man. ~ C E Morgan, #NFDB
822:Leave it to a man to mess things up ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
823:Let a man overcome anger by love. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
824:Let no man's deathbed be a futon. ~ Demetri Martin, #NFDB
825:Man - a figment of God's imagination. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
826:man can be destroyed but not defeated. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
827:Man cannot live by profit alone. ~ James A Baldwin, #NFDB
828:Man created God, not God, man ~ Giuseppe Garibaldi, #NFDB
829:Man does not live by destruction. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
830:Man had to hang on to his pride. ~ Robert Ferrigno, #NFDB
831:Man is an imitative creature. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
832:Man is emphatically self-made. ~ John Henry Newman, #NFDB
833:Man is free the instant he wants to be. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
834:Man is ill because he is never still. ~ Paracelsus, #NFDB
835:Man is never perfect, nor contended. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
836:Man is the dwarf of himself. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
837:Man proposes, and God disposes. ~ Ludovico Ariosto, #NFDB
838:My father was an extraordinary man. ~ Nicolas Roeg, #NFDB
839:My old man is a man of few words. ~ Scott Eastwood, #NFDB
840:Never play cards with a man called Doc. ~ Amy Sohn, #NFDB
841:Never trust a man in a jumpsuit ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
842:No honest man will argue on every side ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
843:No man is a devil in his own mind. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
844:No man is hurt but by himself ~ Diogenes of Sinope, #NFDB
845:No man is lost while he yet lives. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
846:No man is the wiser for his learning ~ John Selden, #NFDB
847:Oh, man, man—race of crocodiles, ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
848:One Man's food is another Man's Poison ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
849:Only the just man enjoys peace of mind. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
850:Only the man who says no is free ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
851:Pension never inriched young man. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
852:Sadness diminishes a man's powers ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
853:Say it for me, Rainy. No other man. ~ Kenya Wright, #NFDB
854:Sleep is sweet to the labouring man. ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
855:S’tjwetla is a black man’s striptease. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
856:Success has ruin'd many a man. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
857:Success has ruined many a man. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
858:Takes more than combat gear to make a man ~ Sting, #NFDB
859:That man with my brother is an envoy ~ Naomi Novik, #NFDB
860:The desire for knowledge shapes a man, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
861:The dignity of man is in free choice. ~ Max Frisch, #NFDB
862:The idle man is the devil's cushion. ~ Joseph Hall, #NFDB
863:The ignorant man never enjoys. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
864:The intelligent man is never bored. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
865:The lazy man does the hardest work”, ~ James Allen, #NFDB
866:The man has stick-up-his-ass-itis. ~ R G Alexander, #NFDB
867:The man was an emotional Fort Knox. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
868:The man was cold as an albino frog. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
869:The man was ruining me, bit by bit. ~ Karina Halle, #NFDB
870:The man who flies shall fight again. ~ Demosthenes, #NFDB
871:The man with courage is a majority. ~ Andrew Young, #NFDB
872:There are some things no man man face. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
873:There is no harm in a man's cub. ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
874:The truthful man is usually a liar. ~ Alfred Nobel, #NFDB
875:The whole earth is the brave man's country. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
876:the wise man celebrates what he can. ~ Amor Towles, #NFDB
877:The woman is the reflection of her man ~ Brad Pitt, #NFDB
878:Time is the great art of man. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
879:To be a man you've gotta beat the man. ~ Ric Flair, #NFDB
880:To be the man, you gotta beat the man! ~ Ric Flair, #NFDB
881:Understand your man, meditate on it. ~ Johnny Cash, #NFDB
882:What a piece of work is man! ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
883:What is a rebel? A man who says no. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
884:Where the mind goes the man follows. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
885:Who can know the heart of a man? ~ Alice McDermott, #NFDB
886:You could trust nature but not man. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
887:A blind man can see how much I love you ~ Amy Bloom, #NFDB
888:A drowning man groping for a twig. ~ Alison Goodman, #NFDB
889:A fearful man is always hearing things. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
890:Always this man gives me strength. ~ Naoko Takeuchi, #NFDB
891:A man has to know his limitations. ~ Harry Callahan, #NFDB
892:A man is known by his heroes. ~ Beno t B Mandelbrot, #NFDB
893:A man is nothing but breath and shadow. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
894:A man of one book, a student of many. ~ John Wesley, #NFDB
895:A man perfects himself by working. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
896:A man's fate is his own temper. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
897:A man's just gotta know his limits ~ Clint Eastwood, #NFDB
898:A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere. ~ Martial, #NFDB
899:A man with perspective! That’s rare. ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
900:Any man that tells me what to do is sexy! ~ Rihanna, #NFDB
901:Art is the signature of man. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
902:A sketch of a man facing to the right. ~ Adam Smith, #NFDB
903:A State for one man is no State at all. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
904:As the government is, such will be the man. ~ Plato, #NFDB
905:Beat a man with what he doesn't know. ~ Gene LeBell, #NFDB
906:Behind every fortune, there's a crime. ~ Method Man, #NFDB
907:beware love, especially the wrong man ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
908:Branch Rickey made me a better man. ~ Branch Rickey, #NFDB
909:Bravery is the dead man’s virtue. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
910:Cultivated leisure is the aim of man. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
911:Demons run when a good man goes to war. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
912:Distress does not permit man to think.... ~ Various, #NFDB
913:Dumbledore’s man through and through, ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
914:Each man believes only his experience. ~ Empedocles, #NFDB
915:Each man kills the thing he loves ~ Anthony Burgess, #NFDB
916:Every long travel changes man! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
917:Every man is betrayed by his mother. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
918:Every man is the son of his own works. ~ Cervantes, #NFDB
919:Every man looks better in a powdered wig. ~ Various, #NFDB
920:Everything man needs is in the world. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
921:For the weariest road that man may wend ~ Euripides, #NFDB
922:God dwells wherever man lets Him in. ~ Martin Buber, #NFDB
923:God is more lasting than the white man. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
924:God loves to make a man break a vow. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
925:God's ways are better than man's. ~ Karen Kingsbury, #NFDB
926:Good man, Thorne, thought Adams. ~ Clifford D Simak, #NFDB
927:Heaven made virtue; man, the appearance. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
928:Holy Hannah, that man is dangerous! ~ Colleen Houck, #NFDB
929:Hope is a desperate man's currency. ~ Paul Tremblay, #NFDB
930:I am not a man, I am dynamite ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
931:I am not a monster, I am just a man. ~ Ronnie Radke, #NFDB
932:I am still the fastest man on earth. ~ Asafa Powell, #NFDB
933:I am the odd man out in the family. ~ Loni Anderson, #NFDB
934:I don't owe one man one cent. Anywhere. ~ Roy Acuff, #NFDB
935:I eat more chicken any man ever seen. ~ Howlin Wolf, #NFDB
936:I have not hated the man, but his faults. ~ Martial, #NFDB
937:I'm man enough to know when to scream. ~ Obert Skye, #NFDB
938:I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man! ~ Jay Z, #NFDB
939:I'm the man of a million names. ~ Giancarlo Stanton, #NFDB
940:I never met a man that I didn't like. ~ Will Rogers, #NFDB
941:I preach as a dying man to dying men. ~ Greg Laurie, #NFDB
942:"Is God a Man or a Woman ?" ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
943:It is the duty of man to raise up man. ~ Jose Marti, #NFDB
944:It is the lot of man to suffer. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
945:It's doubt that drives a man onward. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
946:It takes nine tailors to make a man. ~ John Heywood, #NFDB
947:It well becomes a young man to be modest. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
948:I watched the needle take another man. ~ Neil Young, #NFDB
949:Jesus Chris was more than man. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
950:Let us make man [8] in our image, after ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
951:ManBearPig, half man, half bear, half pig ~ Al Gore, #NFDB
952:Man becomes what he thinks about ~ Morris E Goodman, #NFDB
953:Man begets, but land does not beget. ~ Cecil Rhodes, #NFDB
954:Man cannot live by swine alone. ~ Charlotte MacLeod, #NFDB
955:Man created words to free himself ~ Leo F Buscaglia, #NFDB
956:Man-eaters are finally shot dead. ~ Mahendra Jakhar, #NFDB
957:Man is his own worst enemy. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
958:Man is in love and loves what vanishes. ~ W B Yeats, #NFDB
959:Man is the creature of circumstances. ~ Robert Owen, #NFDB
960:Man is the only animal to borrow tools. ~ Tim Allen, #NFDB
961:Man is what he thinks all day long. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
962:man jadda wa jada man shabara zhafira ~ Ahmad Fuadi, #NFDB
963:Man loves most that which is his own. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
964:Man must suffer to be wise. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
965:Man naturally yearns for novelty. ~ Pliny the Elder, #NFDB
966:Man proposes, but God blocks the game. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
967:Man's conscience is the oracle of God. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
968:man that confirmed they were similar ~ Lili Valente, #NFDB
969:Man, who don't like spaghetti? ~ Rodney Dangerfield, #NFDB
970:Man with frailty is allied by birth. ~ Robert Lowth, #NFDB
971:No driven man hears unwanted counsel. ~ Janny Wurts, #NFDB
972:No man can bear a child's cross. ~ Fran ois Mauriac, #NFDB
973:No man can see his own prejudices. ~ Frances Wright, #NFDB
974:No man is an island, entire of itself. ~ John Donne, #NFDB
975:No man is hurt but by himself. ~ Diogenes of Sinope, #NFDB
976:No man was ever wise by chance” “Associate ~ Seneca, #NFDB
977:No one man should have all that power. ~ Kanye West, #NFDB
978:Nothing can unman you like an un-man. ~ Chuck Hogan, #NFDB
979:One can love any man that is generous. ~ Leigh Hunt, #NFDB
980:Play it cool, that's the old school rule man. ~ Nas, #NFDB
981:Sight is the noblest sense of man. ~ Albrecht Durer, #NFDB
982:Silence is the space where man wakes up. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
983:Spider-Man is such a whiny loser. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
984:Surely mortal man is a broomstick! ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
985:Takes more than combat boots to make a man. ~ Sting, #NFDB
986:Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices ~ Homer, #NFDB
987:The best of man is still at best a man. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
988:The cholerick man never wants woe. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
989:The more a man knows, the less he talks. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
990:The old men know when an old man dies. ~ Ogden Nash, #NFDB
991:The way is light and fluid for the man with ~ Laozi, #NFDB
992:The wisest man may be a blind father. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
993:This man’s name was Albus Dumbledore. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
994:To a good man nothing that happens is evil. ~ Plato, #NFDB
995:To be a man, a boy must see a man. ~ J R Moehringer, #NFDB
996:Truth is superior to man s wisdom. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
997:us killed, Barda McClean, to help a man ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
998:Violence is man re-creating himself. ~ Frantz Fanon, #NFDB
999:Well that's like, your opinion, man. ~ Jeff Bridges, #NFDB
1000:What a piece of work is a man ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1001:When a man grows old his joy ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
1002:Why not be a man and fight like a man. ~ Tito Ortiz, #NFDB
1003:Will was now all man. And all cowboy. ~ B J Daniels, #NFDB
1004:Wise man also fears a weak enemy. ~ Publilius Syrus, #NFDB
1005:Women love a self-confident bald man. ~ Larry David, #NFDB
1006:A drowning man will clutch at a straw. ~ Thomas More, #NFDB
1007:A dying man can do nothing easy. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
1008:A great man is made so for others. ~ Thomas F Wilson, #NFDB
1009:A honest man is seldom a vagrant. ~ Cato the Younger, #NFDB
1010:A man can be a hero in any profession ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1011:A man growing old becomes a child again. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1012:A man is always better than he thinks. ~ Woody Hayes, #NFDB
1013:A man lives by believing something. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
1014:A man newly in love knows what life is. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1015:A man oughta do what he thinks is best. ~ John Wayne, #NFDB
1016:A man should be what he seems. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1017:A man's life breath cannot come back again-- ~ Homer, #NFDB
1018:A man’s past is forever set in stone. There ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1019:A man without enemies is a dishonest man. ~ Dan Rice, #NFDB
1020:An angry man is always a stupid man. ~ Chinua Achebe, #NFDB
1021:and a hypnotized man is easy to lead. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1022:And since the mind is of a man one part, ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
1023:A nice man is a man of nasty ideas. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
1024:A noisy man is always in the right. ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
1025:A perfect woman's but a softer man. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
1026:A tenor is not a man but a disease. ~ Hans von Bulow, #NFDB
1027:Basically, man, I just love myself. ~ Edward Furlong, #NFDB
1028:Be a man. Boys brag men don’t need to. ~ Celia Aaron, #NFDB
1029:Behold! I've brought you a man. ~ Diogenes of Sinope, #NFDB
1030:Beware of the fury of the patient man. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
1031:Beware of the man who has no enemies. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
1032:Beware the anger of a patient man. ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
1033:Beware the fury of a patient man. ~ Penelope Douglas, #NFDB
1034:Beware the man of the single book ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1035:But God’s ways are better than man ~ Karen Kingsbury, #NFDB
1036:Conscience, man's moral medicine chest. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1037:Dignity: the doomed man's final refuge. ~ Max Frisch, #NFDB
1038:Disobedience is man's original virtue. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1039:Don’t mistake man’s weakness for God’s. ~ Ted Dekker, #NFDB
1040:Each man kills the thing he loves. ~ Anthony Burgess, #NFDB
1041:Every man has a right to kill himself. ~ James Jones, #NFDB
1042:Every man paddles his own canoe. ~ Frederick Marryat, #NFDB
1043:Every man should stay within his own fortune. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1044:Every unjust man is unjust against his will. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1045:Fear is the tool of a man-made devil ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
1046:God made man because He loves stories. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
1047:Half Man, Half Sit-Out-The-Season. ~ Charles Barkley, #NFDB
1048:Heal the boy and the man will appear. ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
1049:Hitler is a medicine man type of leader. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1050:How dark are all the ways of god to man! ~ Euripides, #NFDB
1051:How many roads must a man walk down? ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1052:Hvis En Telegraph Man Vidste
~ Christian Winther,#NFDB
1053:I always wanted to be a leading man! ~ Randy Jackson, #NFDB
1054:I am a man who does not exist for others. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
1055:I am as free as nature first made man, ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
1056:I am a thespian trapped in a man's body. ~ Tim Allen, #NFDB
1057:I am not a man, I am dynamite! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1058:I can't spare this man, he fights! ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
1059:I don't like to look a man in the eye. ~ Lech Walesa, #NFDB
1060:If I'm with a man I'm soft and buttery. ~ Diana Ross, #NFDB
1061:I had no desire to crash a man's world. ~ Ida Lupino, #NFDB
1062:I hope they bury me near a strait man ~ Groucho Marx, #NFDB
1063:I killed one man to save 100,000. ~ Charlotte Corday, #NFDB
1064:I lost the man I love without reason. ~ Sejal Badani, #NFDB
1065:MAN IS THE CREATURE HE FEARS. ~ Josh Malerman, #NFDB
1066:I'm not perfect. I am not Iron Man. ~ Nobu Matsuhisa, #NFDB
1067:I'm the man that made wrestling famous. ~ Hulk Hogan, #NFDB
1068:In choosing myself, I choose man. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
1069:In life, man proposes, God disposes. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
1070:It takes a man to make a devil. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
1071:Juice is a poor man’s dessert. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
1072:looking man, I know my way around ~ Melanie Moreland, #NFDB
1073:Man absolutely cannot live by himself. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1074:Man all of your flows bore me, paint drying. ~ Drake, #NFDB
1075:Man blir ikke ensom av å være alene. ~ Tomas Espedal, #NFDB
1076:Man created God in his own image. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
1077:Man gave us laws, and God gave us time, ~ ASAP Rocky, #NFDB
1078:Man Har Sagn Om Borgtapeter (I)
~ Emil Aarestrup,#NFDB
1079:Man has become great through struggle ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1080:Man is a two-legged animal without feathers. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1081:Man is born for deeds of kindness. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1082:Man is the inventor of stupidity. ~ Remy de Gourmont, #NFDB
1083:Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren ~ Paul Watzlawick, #NFDB
1084:Man's fatal flaw is misplaced optimism. ~ Allan Wolf, #NFDB
1085:Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
1086:Many a good man I have seen go under. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1087:Many times man lives and dies ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
1088:May the inward and outward man be as one. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
1089:Money, like vodka, makes a man queer ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1090:No man can be just who is not free. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
1091:No man is a devil in his own mind. ~ James A Baldwin, #NFDB
1092:No man was ever great by imitation. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1093:No man was ever wise by chance. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
1094:Not for any one man's delight has Nature made ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1095:Not to sink under being man and wife, ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
1096:now, young man. That’s no small thing, ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
1097:Observation is an old man's memory. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
1098:of character for John Kennedy, a man ~ Bill O Reilly, #NFDB
1099:One man decides, and the rest obey. ~ Upton Sinclair, #NFDB
1100:One man's bane is another's bliss. ~ Robert E Howard, #NFDB
1101:Plain as a nose in a man's face. ~ Francois Rabelais, #NFDB
1102:Richard, you got to be a man today. ~ Stephen Hunter, #NFDB
1103:Running should be free, man. ~ Christopher McDougall, #NFDB
1104:Service to man is service to god ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1105:Silence in woman is like speech in man. ~ Ben Jonson, #NFDB
1106:Silence is the eternal duty of man. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
1107:Sometimes it takes just one good man ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
1108:Thank you, Mister Stabby Sword Man, ~ David Dalglish, #NFDB
1109:The child is father of the man. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
1110:The child is the father of man. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
1111:The essence of man is imperfection. ~ Norman Cousins, #NFDB
1112:The gift of a bad man can bring no good. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
1113:The healthy man does not torture others. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1114:The honest man, though e'er sae poor, ~ Robert Burns, #NFDB
1115:The inferiority of women is man-made. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
1116:The Jew bows before no man only God ~ Menachem Begin, #NFDB
1117:The man who was only a silhouette. She ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
1118:The object of the superior man is truth. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
1119:The present alone can make no man wretched. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1120:The proper study of Mankind is Man. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
1121:The proud man hath no God; the envious ~ Joseph Hall, #NFDB
1122:There once was a man name Barack, ~ Stephen Colbert, #NFDB
1123:The wise man is astonished by anything. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
1124:The wise man once said invest young ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
1125:The wise man sayth, store is no sore. ~ John Heywood, #NFDB
1126:This man is wrecking me. I’m wrecked. ~ Sarina Bowen, #NFDB
1127:..to laugh is proper to the man. ~ Fran ois Rabelais, #NFDB
1128:Vices of the time; vices of the man. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
1129:Violence is man re-creating himself. ~ Frantz Fanon, #NFDB
1130:Walking with her man,
Lost in a dream ~ A A Milne,#NFDB
1131:Weapons themselves can tempt a man to fight. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1132:We sent a robot to do a man’s job. ~ Daniel H Wilson, #NFDB
1133:what is man that you are mindful of him, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1134:What is one man among so many men? ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
1135:What man does not know, ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1136:What measures a man?
'Conduct ~ Devdutt Pattanaik,#NFDB
1137:What wouldst thou do, old man? ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1138:When a man is just and firm in his purpose, ~ Horace, #NFDB
1139:Who can judge another man's suffering? ~ Janet Fitch, #NFDB
1140:You can just fight one man at a time. ~ Lennox Lewis, #NFDB
1141:You can't surprise a man with a dog. ~ Cindy Chupack, #NFDB
1142:You gotta judge a man by his principles. ~ Rick Ross, #NFDB
1143:You make me wanna be a better man. ~ Theodora Taylor, #NFDB
1144:You train your man to do nothing. ~ Jennifer Aniston, #NFDB
1145:A frightened man is a beaten man. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
1146:A lie faces God and shrinks from man. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
1147:A man can learn wisdom even from a foe ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
1148:A man has got to keep his extrication. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
1149:A man hates most what’s in his own heart. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1150:A man in love is a sorry spectacle. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
1151:A man is only as faithful as his options ~ Chris Rock, #NFDB
1152:A man is only as good as what he loves. ~ Saul Bellow, #NFDB
1153:A man is related to all nature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1154:A man may beg, but a woman has to sell. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1155:A man’s best friend is a good wife. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
1156:A man's got to know his limitations. ~ Harry Callahan, #NFDB
1157:A man's wounded pride is a violate force. ~ Jean Haus, #NFDB
1158:A man trusts his ears less than his eyes. ~ Herodotus, #NFDB
1159:A man with God is always in the majority. ~ John Knox, #NFDB
1160:A man without memories is just a shell. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
1161:And pain does not matter to a man. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1162:And The Cherry On Top Of The Cake A MAN! ~ Steph Bowe, #NFDB
1163:...an old man is twice a child. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1164:Any man who reads is a fine one. ~ Karen Marie Moning, #NFDB
1165:A [real] man does not flee from truth ~ Rudolfo Anaya, #NFDB
1166:Art attests to what is inhuman in man. ~ Alain Badiou, #NFDB
1167:Art is the window to man's soul. ~ Lady Bird Johnson, #NFDB
1168:A stupid man is every woman’s downfall. ~ Nina George, #NFDB
1169:A tiny fly can choke a big man. ~ Solomon Ibn Gabirol, #NFDB
1170:A woman dies young, it’s man trouble. ~ Laura Lippman, #NFDB
1171:Be assured, he is not an ordinary man. ~ George Meade, #NFDB
1172:Beauty is the greatest seducer of man. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1173:But he knows that no man is an island. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1174:Call no man happy until he is dead. ~ Johnny B Truant, #NFDB
1175:Dance is the landscape of man's soul. ~ Martha Graham, #NFDB
1176:Do not mess with this man's threads! ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
1177:Don't write about Man; write about a man. ~ E B White, #NFDB
1178:Everyday is a new life to a wise man. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
1179:Every man is the hero of his own song. ~ Tad Williams, #NFDB
1180:Every man needs a place to go to. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
1181:Every man prays in his own language. ~ Duke Ellington, #NFDB
1182:every man’s watchman, is his conscience. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
1183:Fear of women love more than hate the man. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
1184:...for iron of itself draws a man
thereto. ~ Homer,#NFDB
1185:For man is by nature an artist. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
1186:For the wise man, every day is a festival. ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
1187:Get on yo job little man this ain't Saturday ~ J Cole, #NFDB
1188:God made only water, but man made wine. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1189:Goodness, man, don't be so lachrymose. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
1190:Happy is the man who is nothing. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
1191:He is not immutable. No man can be. ~ Dorothy Dunnett, #NFDB
1192:...he'll never lie - the man is far too wise. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1193:He looks like a horse in a man costume! ~ Dylan Moran, #NFDB
1194:I am not a businessman. I am a business, man. ~ Jay Z, #NFDB
1195:I am not a man at all. I am a cause. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1196:I am the man, I suffered, I was there. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1197:I am the man my father loved and was. ~ Derek Walcott, #NFDB
1198:I hate a man who skins the land. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
1199:I live, like every real man, in my work. ~ Max Frisch, #NFDB
1200:I love a tree more than a man. ~ Ludwig van Beethoven, #NFDB
1201:I love not man the less, but nature more ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
1202:I'm a decent man who exports flowers. ~ Pablo Escobar, #NFDB
1203:I may be a man, but I fight like a girl. ~ Andy Cohen, #NFDB
1204:Improving the soil improved the man. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
1205:In my mind I'm a blind man doin' time. ~ Tupac Shakur, #NFDB
1206:Is not parody the eternal lot of man? ~ Milan Kundera, #NFDB
1207:It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile. ~ Sting, #NFDB
1208:I’ve never known a man who loved me. ~ Sufjan Stevens, #NFDB
1209:I want a man in my life, not in my house. ~ Joy Behar, #NFDB
1210:John is a man of his word. And so am I. ~ Bruce Irvin, #NFDB
1211:Like Pac-Man, she swallows my ghosts. ~ Andrea Gibson, #NFDB
1212:Mama shrieked. The first man turned ~ Raymond E Feist, #NFDB
1213:Man cannot contend with the divine. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1214:Man Har Sagn Om Borgtapeter (Ii)
~ Emil Aarestrup,#NFDB
1215:Man Har Sagn Om Borgtapeter (Iv)
~ Emil Aarestrup,#NFDB
1216:Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature. ~ Moliere, #NFDB
1217:Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature. ~ Moli re, #NFDB
1218:Man is a fugitive from nature. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
1219:Man is a genius when he is dreaming. ~ Akira Kurosawa, #NFDB
1220:Man is an animal that writes letters. ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
1221:Man is a perpetually wanting animal. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
1222:Man is a universe in little [Microcosm]. ~ Democritus, #NFDB
1223:Man is bound to lie about himself ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
1224:Man is free at the instant he wants to be. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
1225:Man is more powerful than matter. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
1226:man jadda wa jadda, man shabara zhafira ~ Ahmad Fuadi, #NFDB
1227:Man makes god in his own image. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1228:Man makes his plans. God has his own. ~ Sujatha Gidla, #NFDB
1229:Man must fend off the void with his dick. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1230:Man's books are but man's alphabet, ~ Joaquin Miller, #NFDB
1231:Man's chiefest treasure is a sparing tongue. ~ Hesiod, #NFDB
1232:Man's rank is his power to uplift. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
1233:Man's singularity is his divinity. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1234:Man's worst ill is stubbornness of heart. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1235:Man was created to complete the horse. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
1236:Men are cruel, but Man is kind. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
1237:Merry Christmas! the man threatened. ~ William Gaddis, #NFDB
1238:Money is a poor man's credit card. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
1239:Nature and man are opposed in Spain. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
1240:Necessity makes an honest man a knave. ~ Daniel Defoe, #NFDB
1241:Nobody likes the man who brings bad news. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1242:No man can be judge to his own cause. ~ Thomas Hobbes, #NFDB
1243:No man could be a khan to his mother. ~ Conn Iggulden, #NFDB
1244:No man ever became very wicked all at once. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
1245:No man fails who does his best. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
1246:No man may be completely invulnerable. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1247:No man's credit is as good as his money. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1248:One step at a time, a man walked on the moon. ~ Q Tip, #NFDB
1249:Oppression makes a wise man mad. ~ Frederick Douglass, #NFDB
1250:Poor is the man who desires a lot ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
1251:Reason is God's crowning gift to a man... ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1252:She has an eye like a man-eating fish ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
1253:She was a feast, and I was a man starved. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1254:Sorry. I’m too much man for half a woman. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
1255:That man is strongest who stands alone! ~ Ruskin Bond, #NFDB
1256:That man positively cherishes a grudge. ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
1257:The blind man cannot move without a guide ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
1258:The devil’s man with the angel eyes.” I ~ Tillie Cole, #NFDB
1259:The fool wanders, a wise man travels. ~ Thomas Fuller, #NFDB
1260:The free man is the man with no fears. ~ Dick Gregory, #NFDB
1261:The Lord instructs me not to judge any man. ~ Marilyn, #NFDB
1262:The majority can never replace the man ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1263:The man is nothing, the work--all. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
1264:The man of humanity delights in mountains ~ Confucius, #NFDB
1265:The man was awake but not glad to be. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1266:The man who wins is the average man, ~ Conrad Hilton, #NFDB
1267:The normal food of man is vegetable. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
1268:The other man's arse is always cleaner! ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
1269:The righteous man pays the sinner's bill. ~ Jos Rizal, #NFDB
1270:The soul of man is immortal and imperishable. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1271:The soul of Man must quicken to creation. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1272:The superior man limits his achievements. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
1273:This isn’t a man. It’s a broken kite. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1274:Time and tide will wait for no man, ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1275:To be a king, is to be a disappointed man. ~ K lid sa, #NFDB
1276:To create is divine, to reproduce is human. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
1277:Tranquility is the old man's milk. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1278:We will not be caught in no man's land. ~ Masai Ujiri, #NFDB
1279:Who needed a man when they had a dog? ~ Toni Anderson, #NFDB
1280:You make me want to be a better man. ~ Jack Nicholson, #NFDB
1281:A brave man's hand can speak for itself; ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
1282:A heart is a heart in a child or a man. ~ Shannon Hale, #NFDB
1283:A hero is a man who does what he can. ~ Romain Rolland, #NFDB
1284:Ahesta boro, Mah-e-man, ahesta boro. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
1285:A man always looks good in a dark suit. ~ Greg Kinnear, #NFDB
1286:A man can suffocate on courtesy. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1287:A man in armor is his armor's slave. ~ Robert Browning, #NFDB
1288:A man in debt is so far a slave. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1289:A man is only as faithful as his options. ~ Chris Rock, #NFDB
1290:A man may be down, but he is never out. ~ Bruce Barton, #NFDB
1291:A man may learn wisdom even from a foe. ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
1292:A man-of-war is the best ambassador. ~ Oliver Cromwell, #NFDB
1293:A man's books are very much himself. ~ Ford Madox Ford, #NFDB
1294:A man's country is the world. ~ William Lloyd Garrison, #NFDB
1295:A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality. ~ Karl Kraus, #NFDB
1296:A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
1297:A man's got to do what a man's got to do. ~ John Wayne, #NFDB
1298:A man well mounted is ever Cholerick. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
1299:A man who lies about beer makes enemies ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1300:A man who won't listen can't hear. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
1301:A man without fear cannot be a slave. ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
1302:An afro is a poor man’s haircut. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
1303:As a man thinketh in his heart so is he, ~ James Allen, #NFDB
1304:Because audacity is a young man’s sword. ~ Brent Weeks, #NFDB
1305:Be it sin or no, I hate the man! ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
1306:Cunning to wise, is as an Ape to a Man. ~ William Penn, #NFDB
1307:Demons run when a good man goes to war ~ Steven Moffat, #NFDB
1308:Each man is for his lord, do not give chase. ~ Cao Cao, #NFDB
1309:Empathy is the curse of the new age man. ~ John Zunski, #NFDB
1310:Even the wisest man grows tense ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
1311:Every day is a new life to a wise man. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
1312:Every man dies. Not every man lives. ~ Anthony Robbins, #NFDB
1313:Every man is the author of his own life. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
1314:Every man knows the smell of his own fart. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
1315:For rarely man escapes his destiny. ~ Ludovico Ariosto, #NFDB
1316:God created man, but I could do better. ~ Erma Bombeck, #NFDB
1317:God does not need man nor his won works. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
1318:God had stood up when man had not. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
1319:God, it's nice to be treated like a man. ~ Jim Edmonds, #NFDB
1320:God never made his work for man to mend. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
1321:Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
1322:He looks like a gingerbread man. Ginger ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
1323:He thought of the man he’d seen seconds ~ Lisa Jackson, #NFDB
1324:He was a man too busy to flush toilets. ~ Mona Simpson, #NFDB
1325:Hey man! I'm a comedian but I'm not a clown. ~ Godfrey, #NFDB
1326:History and man made each other. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
1327:Honor, thou strong idol of man's mind. ~ Philip Sidney, #NFDB
1328:I am just a plain, common man. ~ Nicholas II of Russia, #NFDB
1329:I am not a number, I am a free man! ~ Patrick McGoohan, #NFDB
1330:I decline to accept the end of man. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
1331:I'd like to be a song and dance man. ~ Walter Cronkite, #NFDB
1332:I do love a man with a big vocabulary. ~ Tiffany Reisz, #NFDB
1333:I’d pay a man to talk to me that way. ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB
1334:I fear no man, no beast or evil, brother. ~ Hulk Hogan, #NFDB
1335:I love not man the less, but Nature more. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
1336:Im a peaceful man with bad intentions. ~ Charlie Sheen, #NFDB
1337:I'm a single man! I'm allowed to flirt! ~ Belle Aurora, #NFDB
1338:In man or woman, but far most in man, ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
1339:I set off, off to kill the man I love. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
1340:I start where the last man left off. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
1341:I think buddy is man talk for sweetie. ~ Emma Donoghue, #NFDB
1342:It is the poor man who'll ever count his flock. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1343:It takes a brave man to be truly mad. ~ Atticus Poetry, #NFDB
1344:It takes a wise man to discover a wise man. ~ Diogenes, #NFDB
1345:I've never been called a man of few words. ~ Joe Biden, #NFDB
1346:I want to dominate the man's world. ~ Marina Abramovic, #NFDB
1347:Keep your mind out of the pigsty, man! ~ Robert Jordan, #NFDB
1348:Let each man exercise the art he knows. ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
1349:Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player. ~ Miles Davis, #NFDB
1350:Lucy almost killed a man during dinner ~ Jenny B Jones, #NFDB
1351:Man always dies before he is fully born. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1352:Man. Being mostly dead is hard on a guy. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
1353:Man dies of cold, not of darkness. ~ Miguel de Unamuno, #NFDB
1354:Man does not live by bread alone. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1355:Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
1356:Man Har Sagn Om Borgtapeter (Iii)
~ Emil Aarestrup,#NFDB
1357:Man is a sun and his senses are the planets. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
1358:Man is bound to lie about himself ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1359:man is not truly one, but two ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
1360:Man is what he wills himself to be. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
1361:Man makes plans . . . and God laughs. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
1362:Man, not the earth, makes civilization. ~ Ariel Durant, #NFDB
1363:Man's life is like a drop of dew on a leaf. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
1364:Man's security comes from within himself. ~ Manly Hall, #NFDB
1365:Man, there's no boundary line to art! ~ Charlie Parker, #NFDB
1366:Meant to be doesn't have to man forever. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
1367:Nashville, man. That's the place to be. ~ Willie Geist, #NFDB
1368:Never met a wise man, if so its a woman. ~ Kurt Cobain, #NFDB
1369:New Year's Day is every man's birthday. ~ Charles Lamb, #NFDB
1370:No empty handed man can lure a bird ~ Geoffrey Chaucer, #NFDB
1371:No man can be wise on an empty stomach. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1372:No noble man ever hated good wine. ~ Francois Rabelais, #NFDB
1373:One man and God can change the world, ~ MaryLu Tyndall, #NFDB
1374:One man's famine makes another man's feast. ~ Ray Kroc, #NFDB
1375:One man's fish is another man's poisson. ~ Mark Gatiss, #NFDB
1376:One man with courage is a majority. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1377:Only a self-learnt man can teach others ~ Girish Kohli, #NFDB
1378:Only a self-taught man can teach others ~ Girish Kohli, #NFDB
1379:Posterity gives to every man his true honor. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
1380:President Trump is a man of his word. ~ Reince Priebus, #NFDB
1381:Real life is much stranger than fiction, man. ~ Mike D, #NFDB
1382:She didn’t need a man. She wanted one. ~ Robin Bielman, #NFDB
1383:That man made me miss my destiny. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
1384:THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1385:The best way to hold a man is in your arms. ~ Mae West, #NFDB
1386:The car bomb is the poor man’s air force. ~ Mike Davis, #NFDB
1387:The gentleman is a man of truth. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1388:"The life of man is a dubious experiment." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1389:...the man of my dreams is a girl. ~ Julie Anne Peters, #NFDB
1390:The man who acts the least, upbraids the most. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1391:The man who does ill, ill must suffer too. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
1392:The man who fears war and squats opposing ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
1393:The man who seeks revenge digs two graves. ~ Ken Kesey, #NFDB
1394:The man who thinks with Horace thinks divine. ~ Horace, #NFDB
1395:There is a good deal in a man's mode of eating. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1396:There is a reason God limits man's days. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
1397:There's no escape. I'm God's only man. ~ Paul Schrader, #NFDB
1398:The soul of man is the mirror of the world. ~ Leibnitz, #NFDB
1399:The vain man does not think he is vain. ~ Gilbert Ryle, #NFDB
1400:The will of man is his happiness. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
1401:The wisest man knows he know nothing. ~ A Lee Martinez, #NFDB
1402:To Sachin, the man we all want to be. ~ Andrew Symonds, #NFDB
1403:War had made a man of him before his time. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1404:War makes you a man; war makes you dead. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
1405:What man is, only his history tells. ~ Wilhelm Dilthey, #NFDB
1406:When facts speak, the wise man listens. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1407:When God made man she was practicing. ~ Rita Mae Brown, #NFDB
1408:Who else speaks for the Family of Man? ~ Carl Sandburg, #NFDB
1409:Yiddish proverb: Man plans, God laughs. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1410:You are quite unnecessary, young man! ~ Antonin Artaud, #NFDB
1411:You can’t catch up from a body bag, man. ~ Celia Aaron, #NFDB
1412:You can't let a man like this beat you. ~ Ricky Hatton, #NFDB
1413:Youre a rich man, why arent you smart? ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
1414:A Brave Man in a Brave Country Surprised ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
1415:A critic is a man who expects miracles. ~ James Gibbons, #NFDB
1416:A father is a man who fails every day. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
1417:A fearless man thrives on far horizons. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
1418:Agua mala', the man said, 'you whore ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1419:All a man can betray is his conscience. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
1420:All art is a revolt against man's fate. ~ Andre Malraux, #NFDB
1421:A man got to have a code. - Omar Little ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1422:A man is known by the company he owns. ~ Vince Lombardi, #NFDB
1423:A man is known by the silence he keeps ~ Oliver Herford, #NFDB
1424:A man is responsible for his ignorance. ~ Milan Kundera, #NFDB
1425:A man is the sum of his misfortunes. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
1426:A man needs enough...no less, no more. ~ Marina Lewycka, #NFDB
1427:A man only has a soul to be won or lost. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1428:A man's fate is always shrouded by fog ~ Giles Kristian, #NFDB
1429:A man's idee in a card game is war ~ Finley Peter Dunne, #NFDB
1430:A man's pride needs careful handling. ~ Sally MacKenzie, #NFDB
1431:A man's reach should exceed his grasp ~ Robert Browning, #NFDB
1432:A man who cheats, cheats only himself. ~ Yasmina Khadra, #NFDB
1433:A man who lies about beer makes enemies. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1434:A man with no imaginations has no wings. ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB
1435:A man without vision is a man without God. ~ T B Joshua, #NFDB
1436:An alone man is always badly accompanied. ~ Paul Val ry, #NFDB
1437:Any man who was a man could travel alone. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
1438:Are you the man who reads phone books? ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
1439:A rich man's war and a poor man's fight. ~ Shelby Foote, #NFDB
1440:As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
1441:A young man of pleasure is a man of pains. ~ Neil Young, #NFDB
1442:Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
1443:Beware the man of a single book. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
1444:Blame is seldom on one man’s shoulders. ~ Heather Burch, #NFDB
1445:Brooding on God, I may become a man. ~ Theodore Roethke, #NFDB
1446:But man does not create...he discovers. ~ Antonio Gaudi, #NFDB
1447:…but mortal man was helpless there… ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
1448:But without a family, a man is nothing. ~ Aravind Adiga, #NFDB
1449:By the grace of God, I'll be that man. ~ Dwight L Moody, #NFDB
1450:Character, not circumstance, make a man. ~ Andy Andrews, #NFDB
1451:Darwin was Wrong! Man's still an ape. ~ Jerome Lawrence, #NFDB
1452:Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem. ~ Joe Hill, #NFDB
1453:Demons run when a good man goes to war. ~ Steven Moffat, #NFDB
1454:Don’t ever thank a man for kissing you. ~ Julie Johnson, #NFDB
1455:Don't mess with me, man, I'm a lawyer! ~ Robin Williams, #NFDB
1456:Electronic man has no physical body. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
1457:Even a dark purpose can keep a man alive. ~ Dan Millman, #NFDB
1458:Even chitlins smell good to a starving man. ~ Greg Iles, #NFDB
1459:Every man and every woman is a star. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
1460:Every man dies. Not every man truly lives. ~ Mel Gibson, #NFDB
1461:Every man is of importance to himself. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1462:Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1463:Every man thinks his own geese swans. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1464:Everything Man Sees He Takes for a Toy. ~ Jessie Burton, #NFDB
1465:For Brutus is an honourable man; ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1466:God delights to disappoint man's fears. ~ Lettie Cowman, #NFDB
1467:Her expression stroked the man on his face. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1468:He was a great man. And he was also me. ~ Jeff Goldblum, #NFDB
1469:Hope could ruin a man who faced forever. ~ Lisa Kessler, #NFDB
1470:I am not an economist. I am an honest man! ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1471:I cannot love a man who cannot protect me. ~ Anne Bront, #NFDB
1472:I'd like to do plays, maybe a one man show. ~ Jean Reno, #NFDB
1473:I envy no man's nightingale or spring; ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
1474:If any man thinks to swindle God, he is wrong. ~ Pindar, #NFDB
1475:I feel that I am a man of destiny. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
1476:If you face a man's job, find a woman! ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1477:I guess a good man IS hard to find! ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
1478:I LIVED IN the home of the man I’d killed. ~ Lori M Lee, #NFDB
1479:I love a man with dishpan hands! ~ Suzanne Woods Fisher, #NFDB
1480:I may not be a human, but I am a man. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
1481:I need to put bread on the table man ~ Latrell Sprewell, #NFDB
1482:I never saw a man get superior so fast. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
1483:Inhibition is no good provider for a needy man ~ Hesiod, #NFDB
1484:I set off, off to kill the man I loved. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
1485:It`s very hard for a man to fight naked. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1486:It takes a Real man to fill my shoes. ~ Madonna Ciccone, #NFDB
1487:John Lee Hooker is the funkiest man alive ~ Miles Davis, #NFDB
1488:Just be yourself man, be proud of who you are. ~ Eminem, #NFDB
1489:Knowledge is the treasure of a wise man. ~ William Penn, #NFDB
1490:Last time I was sober, man I felt bad, ~ Mark Knopfler, #NFDB
1491:Love is a beautiful man bearing caffeine. ~ Sierra Dean, #NFDB
1492:Man, a hybrid of plant and ghost. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1493:Man alone is made in the image of God. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1494:Man is an ape with possibilities. ~ Roy Chapman Andrews, #NFDB
1495:Man is a pupil, pain is his teacher. ~ Alfred de Musset, #NFDB
1496:Man is a restless creature, nomadic at heart. ~ Tash Aw, #NFDB
1497:Man is not above nature, but in nature. ~ Ernst Haeckel, #NFDB
1498:Man is something to be surpassed. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1499:Man is stupid, phenomenally stupid. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
1500:Man is the only animal that can be bored. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
2787 Integral Yoga
1613 Poetry
307 Philosophy
302 Occultism
257 Mysticism
244 Fiction
185 Christianity
138 Yoga
89 Psychology
54 Philsophy
40 Science
34 Hinduism
25 Sufism
22 Mythology
22 Kabbalah
21 Education
20 Theosophy
16 Integral Theory
15 Buddhism
9 Zen
8 Cybernetics
6 Baha i Faith
2 Taoism
1 Thelema
1 Alchemy
1515 The Mother
1230 Sri Aurobindo
881 Satprem
528 Nolini Kanta Gupta
200 William Wordsworth
187 Walt Whitman
178 William Butler Yeats
143 Percy Bysshe Shelley
139 Aleister Crowley
123 H P Lovecraft
95 John Keats
89 Carl Jung
85 Friedrich Nietzsche
71 Robert Browning
69 James George Frazer
65 Rabindranath Tagore
63 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
63 Friedrich Schiller
59 Plotinus
57 Sri Ramakrishna
54 Ralph Waldo Emerson
49 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
38 Swami Vivekananda
38 Jorge Luis Borges
37 Swami Krishnananda
34 Saint Augustine of Hippo
34 Anonymous
32 Lucretius
31 A B Purani
29 Saint John of Climacus
29 Aldous Huxley
27 Saint Teresa of Avila
26 Franz Bardon
25 Rudolf Steiner
24 Jalaluddin Rumi
23 Li Bai
23 Kabir
22 Vyasa
22 Rabbi Moses Luzzatto
20 Edgar Allan Poe
17 Rainer Maria Rilke
17 Aristotle
15 Nirodbaran
14 Ovid
14 Hafiz
12 Plato
12 Paul Richard
11 Hsuan Chueh of Yung Chia
11 George Van Vrekhem
10 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
10 Peter J Carroll
9 Sri Ramana Maharshi
9 Ramprasad
8 Norbert Wiener
8 Joseph Campbell
8 Farid ud-Din Attar
7 Lewis Carroll
7 Henry David Thoreau
7 Baha u llah
7 Alice Bailey
6 William Blake
6 Thubten Chodron
6 Taigu Ryokan
6 Omar Khayyam
6 Jordan Peterson
6 Bokar Rinpoche
6 Al-Ghazali
5 Patanjali
5 Kobayashi Issa
5 Jetsun Milarepa
5 Ibn Arabi
4 Saint Francis of Assisi
4 Hakim Sanai
3 Sarmad
3 Saadi
3 R Buckminster Fuller
3 Rabbi Abraham Abulafia
3 Ken Wilber
3 Basava
3 Alfred Tennyson
3 Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
2 Yuan Mei
2 Wang Wei
2 Thomas Merton
2 Solomon ibn Gabirol
2 Shiwu (Stonehouse)
2 Shankara
2 Saint Hildegard von Bingen
2 Mechthild of Magdeburg
2 Mansur al-Hallaj
2 Mahendranath Gupta
2 Lalla
2 Judah Halevi
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 Jean Gebser
2 Jayadeva
2 Italo Calvino
2 Ikkyu
2 Ibn Ata Illah
2 H. P. Lovecraft
2 Genpo Roshi
2 Chuang Tzu
2 Baba Sheikh Farid
2 Allama Muhammad Iqbal
2 Alexander Pope
480 Record of Yoga
200 Wordsworth - Poems
178 Yeats - Poems
178 Whitman - Poems
155 Prayers And Meditations
144 The Synthesis Of Yoga
143 Shelley - Poems
123 Lovecraft - Poems
120 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
107 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
104 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
97 Agenda Vol 01
95 Keats - Poems
91 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
81 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
77 Magick Without Tears
76 Agenda Vol 10
76 Agenda Vol 08
72 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
71 Browning - Poems
70 Agenda Vol 03
69 The Golden Bough
67 Agenda Vol 09
66 Agenda Vol 13
65 Agenda Vol 04
64 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
63 Tagore - Poems
63 Schiller - Poems
59 Agenda Vol 11
58 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
58 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
57 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
57 Agenda Vol 07
56 The Life Divine
55 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
55 Agenda Vol 06
55 Agenda Vol 02
54 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
54 Emerson - Poems
53 Agenda Vol 12
51 Questions And Answers 1956
49 Liber ABA
49 Agenda Vol 05
47 Letters On Yoga IV
45 Savitri
44 Letters On Yoga II
40 Questions And Answers 1953
38 Letters On Yoga III
37 The Study and Practice of Yoga
37 Mysterium Coniunctionis
35 Questions And Answers 1955
35 Collected Poems
34 Questions And Answers 1954
34 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
33 Words Of Long Ago
32 The Divine Comedy
32 Of The Nature Of Things
31 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
31 Essays Divine And Human
31 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
30 Essays On The Gita
29 The Perennial Philosophy
29 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
28 The Bible
27 Goethe - Poems
26 Letters On Yoga I
26 Labyrinths
25 Letters On Poetry And Art
24 The Practice of Psycho therapy
24 The Human Cycle
24 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
23 Li Bai - Poems
22 Vishnu Purana
22 The Future of Man
22 General Principles of Kabbalah
22 Faust
22 City of God
21 On Education
20 Bhakti-Yoga
19 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
19 Poe - Poems
19 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
18 Let Me Explain
17 The Way of Perfection
17 Rilke - Poems
17 Poetics
17 On the Way to Supermanhood
17 Crowley - Poems
16 Words Of The Mother II
16 Songs of Kabir
16 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
15 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
15 Isha Upanishad
14 The Secret Of The Veda
14 The Phenomenon of Man
14 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
14 Some Answers From The Mother
14 Metamorphoses
14 Anonymous - Poems
14 Aion
13 Twilight of the Idols
13 The Practice of Magical Evocation
13 Theosophy
13 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
13 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
13 Initiation Into Hermetics
12 Talks
12 Raja-Yoga
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
12 Borges - Poems
11 Vedic and Philological Studies
11 Rumi - Poems
11 Preparing for the Miraculous
11 Kena and Other Upanishads
11 Dark Night of the Soul
10 The Problems of Philosophy
10 The Interior Castle or The Mansions
10 The Integral Yoga
10 Liber Null
10 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
10 Hafiz - Poems
10 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
9 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
9 Hymn of the Universe
9 5.1.01 - Ilion
8 Words Of The Mother III
8 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
8 The Blue Cliff Records
8 Song of Myself
8 Cybernetics
8 Amrita Gita
7 Walden
7 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
6 Words Of The Mother I
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Alchemy of Happiness
6 Tara - The Feminine Divine
6 Ryokan - Poems
6 Maps of Meaning
6 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
6 Alice in Wonderland
5 The Red Book Liber Novus
5 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
5 Milarepa - Poems
4 Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit
4 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
4 Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin
3 The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma
3 The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep
3 The Lotus Sutra
3 The Gateless Gate
3 The Book of Certitude
3 Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Jerusalum
3 Arabi - Poems
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 The Essentials of Education
2 The Castle of Crossed Destinies
2 Symposium
2 Selected Fictions
2 Sefer Yetzirah The Book of Creation In Theory and Practice
2 God Exists
2 Chuang Tzu - Poems
2 Agenda Vol 1
2 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E
0 0.01 - Introduction, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When we have passed beyond hu manity, then we shall be the man.
Sri Aurobindo
This AGENDA ... One day, another species among men will pore over this fabulous document as over the tumultuous drama that must have surrounded the birth of the first man among the hostile hordes of a great, delirious Paleozoic. A first man is the dangerous contradiction of a certain simian logic, a threat to the established order that so genteelly ran about amid the high, indefeasible ferns - and to begin with, it does not even know that it is a man. It wonders, indeed, what it is. Even to itself it is strange, distressing. It does not even know how to climb trees any longer in its usual way
- and it is terribly disturbing for all those who still climb trees in the old, millennial way. Perhaps it is even a heresy. Unless it is some cerebral disorder? A first man in his little clearing had to have a great deal of courage. Even this little clearing was no longer so sure. A first man is a perpetual question. What am I, then, in the midst of all that? And where is my law? What is the law? And what if there were no more laws? ... It is terrifying. Mathematics - out of order. Astronomy and biology, too, are beginning to respond to mysterious influences. A tiny point huddled in the center of the world's great clearing. But what is all this, what if I were 'mad'? And then, claws all around, a lot of claws against this uncommon creature. A first man ... is very much alone. He is quite unbearable for the pre-hu man 'reason.' And the surrounding tribes growled like red monkies in the twilight of Guiana.
One day, we were like this first man in the great, stridulant night of the Oyapock. Our heart was beating with the rediscovery of a very ancient mystery - suddenly, it was absolutely new to be a man amidst the diorite cascades and the pretty red and black coral snakes slithering beneath the leaves. It was even more extraordinary to be a man than our old confirmed tribes, with their infallible equations and imprescriptible biologies, could ever have dreamed. It was an absolutely uncertain 'quantum' that delightfully eluded whatever one thought of it, including perhaps what even the scholars thought of it. It flowed otherwise, it felt otherwise. It lived in a kind of flawless continuity with the sap of the giant balata trees, the cry of the macaws and the scintillating water of a little fountain. It 'understood' in a very different way. To understand was to be in everything. Just a quiver, and one was in the skin of a little iguana in distress. The skin of the world was very vast.
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 hu man 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.
And then, and then ... a singular air, an incurable lightness, was beginning to fill his lungs. And what if we were a fable? And what are the means?
--
And what if man were not yet invented? What if he were not yet his own species?
A little white silhouette, twelve thousand miles away, solitary and frail amidst a spiritual horde which had once and for all decided that the meditating and miraculous yogi was the apogee of the species, was searching for the means, for the reality of this man who for a moment believes himself sovereign of the heavens or sovereign of a machine, but who is quite probably something completely different than his spiritual or material glories. Another, a lighter air was throbbing in that breast, unburdened of its heavens and of its prehistoric machines. Another Epic was beginning.
Would Matter and Spirit meet, then, in a third PHYSIOLOGICAL position that would perhaps be at last the position of man rediscovered, the something that had for so long fought and suffered in quest of becoming its own species? She was the great Possible at the beginning of man. Mother is our fable come true. 'All is possible' was her first open sesame.
Yes, She was in the midst of a spiritual 'horde,' for the pioneer of a new species must always fight against the best of the old: the best is the obstacle, the snare that traps us in its old golden mire.
--
'Something else' is ominous, perilous, disrupting - it is quite unbearable for all those who resemble the old beast. The story of the Pondicherry 'Ashram' is the story of an old clan ferociously clinging to its 'spiritual' privileges, as others clung to the muscles that had made them kings among the great apes. It is armed with all the piousness and all the reasonableness that had made logical man so 'infallible' among his less cerebral brothers. The spiritual brain is probably the worst obstacle to the new species, as were the muscles of the old orangutan for this fragile stranger who no longer climbed so well in the trees and sat, pensive, at the center of a little, uncertain clearing.
There is nothing more pious than the old species. There is nothing more legal. Mother was searching for the path of the new species as much against all the virtues of the old as against all its vices or laws. For, in truth, 'Something Else' ... is something else.
--
'Are you conscious of your ceils?' She asked us a short time after the little operation of spiritual demolition She had undergone. 'No? Well, become conscious of your cells, and you will see that it gives TERRESTRIAL results.' To become conscious of one's cells? ... It was a far more radical operation than crossing the Maroni with a machete in hand, for after all, trees and lianas can be cut, but what cannot be so easily uncovered are the grandfa ther and the grandmo ther and the whole atavistic pack, not to mention the animal and plant and mineral layers that form a teeming humus over this single pure little cell beneath its millennial genetic program. The grandfa thers and grandmo thers grow back again like crabgrass, along with all the old habits of being hungry, afraid, falling ill, fearing the worst, hoping for the best, which is still the best of an old mortal habit. All this is not uprooted nor entrapped as easily as celestial 'liberations,' which leave the teeming humus in peace and the body to its usual decomposition. She had come to hew a path through all that. She was the Ancient One of evolution who had come to make a new cleft in the old, tedious habit of being a man. She did not like tedious repetitions, She was the adventuress par excellence - the adventuress of the earth. She was wrenching out for man the great Possible that was already beating there, in his primeval clearing, which he believed he had momentarily trapped with a few machines.
She was uprooting a new Matter, free, free from the habit of inexorably being a man who repeats himself ad infinitum with a few improvements in the way of organ transplants or monetary exchanges. In fact, She was there to discover what would happen after materialism and after spiritualism, these prodigal twin brothers. Because Materialism is dying in the West for the same reason that Spiritualism is dying in the East: it is the hour of the new species. man needs to awaken, not only from his demons but also from his gods. A new Matter, yes, like a new Spirit, yes, because we still know neither one nor the other. It is the hour when Science, like Spirituality, at the end of their roads, must discover what Matter TRULY is, for it is really there that a Spirit as yet unknown to us is to be found. It is a time when all the 'isms' of the old species are dying: 'The age of
Capitalism and business is drawing to its close. But the age of Communism too will pass ... 'It is the hour of a pure little cell THAT WILL HAVE TERRESTRIAL REPERCUSSIONS, infinitely more radical than all our political and scientific or spiritualistic panaceas.
This fabulous discovery is the whole story of the AGENDA. What is the passage? How is the path to the new species hewed open? ... Then suddenly, there, on the other side of this old millennial habit - a habit, nothing more than a habit! - of being like a man endowed with time and space and disease: an entire geometry, perfectly implacable and 'scientific' and medical; on the other side ... none of that at all! An illusion, a fantastic medical and scientific and genetic illusion:
death does not exist, time does not exist, disease does not exist, nor do 'scar' and 'far' - another way of being IN A BODY. For so many millions of years we have lived in a habit and put our own thoughts of the world and of Matter into equations. No more laws! Matter is FREE. It can create a little lizard, a chipmunk or a parrot - but it has created enough parrots. Now it is SOMETHING
ELSE ... if we want it.
--
Day after day, for seventeen years, She sat with us to tell us of her impossible odyssey. Ah, how well we now understand why She needed such an 'outlaw' and an incorrigible heretic like us to comprehend a little bit of her impossible odyssey into 'nothing.' And how well we now understand her infinite patience with us, despite all our revolts, which ultimately were only the revolts of the old species against itself. The final revolt. 'It is not a revolt against the British government which any one can easily do. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature!' Sri Aurobindo had proclaimed fifty years earlier. She listened to our grievances, we went away and we returned. We wanted no more of it and we wanted still more. It was infernal and sublime, impossible and the sole possibility in this old, asphyxiating world. It was the only place one could go to in this barbedwired, mechanized world, where Cincinnati is just as crowded and polluted as Hong Kong. The new species is the last free place in the general Prison. It is the last hope for the earth. How we listened to her little faltering voice that seemed to return from afar, afar, after having crossed spaces and seas of the mind to let its little drops of pure, crystalline words fall upon us, words that make you see. We listened to the future, we touched the other thing. It was incomprehensible and yet filled with another comprehension. It eluded us on all sides, and yet it was dazzlingly obvious. The 'other species' was really radically other, and yet it was vibrating within, absolutely recognizable, as if it were THAT we had been seeking from age to age, THAT we had been invoking through all our illuminations, one after another, in Thebes as in Eleusis as everywhere we have toiled and grieved in the skin of a man. It was for THAT we were here, for that supreme Possible in the skin of a man at last. And then her voice grew more and more frail, her breath began gasping as though She had to traverse greater and greater distances to meet us. She was so alone to beat against the walls of the old prison. many claws were out all around. Oh, we would so quickly have cut ourself free from all this fiasco to fly away with Her into the world's future. She was so tiny, stooped over, as if crushed beneath the 'spiritual' burden that all the old surrounding species kept heaping upon her. They didn't believe, no. For them, She was ninety-five years old + so many days. Can someone become a new species all alone? They even grumbled at Her: they had had enough of this unbearable Ray that was bringing their sordid affairs into the daylight. The Ashram was slowly closing over Her. The old world wanted to make a new, golden little Church, nice and quiet. No, no one wanted TO
BECOME. To worship was so much easier. And then they bury you, solemnly, and the matter is settled - the case is closed: now, no one need bother any more except to print some photographic haloes for the pilgrims to this brisk little business. But they are mistaken. The real business will take place without them, the new species will fly up in their faces - it is already flying in the face of the earth, despite all its isms in black and white; it is exploding through all the pores of this battered old earth, which has had enough of shams - whether illusory little heavens or barbarous little machines.
It is the hour of the REAL Earth. It is the hour of the REAL man. We are all going there - if only we could know the path a little ...
This AGENDA is not even a path: it is a light little vibration that seizes you at any turning - and then, there it is, you are IN IT. 'Another world in the world,' She said. One has to catch the light little vibration, one has to flow with it, in a nothing that is like the only something in the midst of this great debacle. At the beginning of things, when still nothing was FIXED, when there was not yet this habit of the pelican or the kangaroo or the chimpanzee or the XXth century biologist, there was a little pulsation that beat and beat - a delightful dizziness, a joy in the world's great adventure; a little never-imprisoned spark that has kept on beating from species to species, but as if it were always eluding us, as if it were always over there, over there - as if it were something to become,
something to be played forever as the one great game of the world; a who-knows-what that left this sprig of a pensive man in the middle of a clearing; a little 'something' that beats, beats, that keeps on breathing beneath every skin that has ever been put on it - like our deepest breath, our lightest air, our air of nothing - and it keeps on going, it keeps on going. We must catch the light little breath, the little pulsation of nothing. Then suddenly, on the threshold of our clearing of concrete, our head starts spinning incurably, our eyes blink into something else, and all is different, and all seems surcharged with meaning and with life, as though we had never lived until that very minute.
Then we have caught the tail of the Great Possible, we are upon the wayless way, radically in the new, and we flow with the little lizard, the pelican, the big man, we flow everywhere in a world that has lost its old separating skin and its little baggage of habits. We begin seeing otherwise, feeling otherwise. We have opened the gate into an inconceivable clearing. Just a light little vibration that carries you away. Then we begin to understand how it CAN CHANGE, what the mechanism is - a light little mechanism and so miraculous that it looks like nothing. We begin feeling the wonder of a pure little cell, and that a sparkling of joy would be enough to turn the world inside out. We were living in a little thinking fishbowl, we were dying in an old, bottled habit. And then suddenly, all is different. The Earth is free! Who wants freedom?
It begins in a cell.
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But what is not recognised in this view of things is that there are secrecies and secrecies. The material secrecies of Nature are of one category, the mystic secrecies are of another. The two are not only disparate but incommensurable. Any man with a mind and understanding of average culture can see and handle the 'scientific' forces, but not the mystic forces.
A scientist once thought that he had clinched the issue and cut the Gordian knot when he declared triumphantly with reference to spirit sances: "Very significant is the fact that spirits appear only in closed chambers, in half obscurity, to somnolent minds; they are nowhere in the open air, in broad daylight to the wide awake and vigilant intellect!" Well, if the fact is as it is stated, what does it prove? Night alone reveals the stars, during the day they vanish, but that is no proof that stars are not existent. Rather the true scientific spirit should seek to know why (or how) it is so, if it is so, and such a fact would exactly serve as a pointer, a significant starting ground. The attitude of the jesting Pilate is not helpful even to scientific inquiry. This matter of the Spirits we have taken only as an illustration and it must not be understood that this is a domain of high mysticism; rather the contrary. The spiritualists' approach to Mysticism is not the right one and is fraught with not only errors but dangers. For the spiritualists approach their subject with the entire scientific apparatus the only difference being that the scientist does not believe while the spiritualist believes.
--
The mystic forces are not only of immense potency but of a definite moral disposition and character, that is to say, they are of immense potency either for good or for evil. They are not mechanical and amoral forces like those that physical sciences deal with; they are forces of consciousness and they are conscious forces, they act with an aim and a purpose. The mystic forces are forces either of light or of darkness, either Divine or Titanic. And it is most often the powers of darkness that the naturally ignorant consciousness of man contacts when it seeks to cross the borderline without training or guidance, by the sheer arrogant self-sufficiency of mental scientific reason.
Ignorance, certainly, is not man's ideal conditionit leads to death and dissolution. But knowledge also can be equally disastrous if it is not of the right kind. The knowledge that is born of spiritual disobedience, inspired by the Dark ones, leads to the soul's fall and its calvary through pain and suffering on earth. The seeker of true enlightenment has got to make a distinction, learn to separate the true and the right from the false and the wrong, unmask the luring Mra say clearly and unfalteringly to the dark light of Luciferapage Satana, if he is to come out into the true light and comm and the right forces. The search for knowledge alone, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the path of pure scientific inquiry and inquisitiveness, in relation to the mystic world, is a dangerous thing. For such a spirit serves only to encourage and enhance man's arrogance and in the end not only limits but warps and falsifies the knowledge itself. A knowledge based on and secured exclusively through the reason and mental light can go only so far as that faculty can be reasonably stretched and not infinitelyto stretch it to infinity means to snap it. This is the warning that Yajnavalkya gave to Gargi when the latter started renewing her question ad infinitum Yajnavalkya said, "If you do not stop, your head will fall off."
The mystic truth has to be approached through the heart. "In the heart is established the Truth," says the Upanishad: it is there that is seated eternally the soul, the real being, who appears no bigger than the thumb. Even if the mind is utilised as an instrument of knowledge, the heart must be there behind as the guide and inspiration. It is precisely because, as I have just mentioned, Gargi sought to shoot uplike "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself" of which Shakespeare speaksthrough the mind alone to the highest truth that Yajnavalkya had to pull her up and give the warning that she risked losing her head if she persisted in her questioning endlessly.
--
For it must be understood that the heart, the mystic heart, is not the external thing which is the seat of emotion or passion; it is the secret heart that is behind, the inner heartantarhdaya of the Upanishadwhich is the centre of the individual consciousness, where all the divergent lines of that consciousness meet and from where they take their rise. That is what the Upanishad means when it says that the heart has a hundred channels which feed the hu man vehicle. That is the source, the fount and origin, the very substance of the true personality. Mystic knowledge the true mystic knowledge which saves and fulfilsbegins with the awakening or the entrance into this real being. This being is pure and luminous and blissful and sovereignly real, because it is a portion, a spark of the Divine Consciousness and Nature: a contact and communion with it brings automatically into play the light and the truth that are its substance. At the same time it is an uprising flame that reaches out naturally to higher domains of consciousness and manifests them through its translucid dynamism.
The knowledge that is obtained without the heart's instrumentation or co-operation is liable to be what the Gita describes as Asuric. First of all, from the point of view of knowledge itself, it would be, as I have already said, egocentric, a product and agent of one's limited and isolated self, easily put at the service of desire and passion. This knowledge, whether rationalistic or occult, is, as it were, hard and dry in its constitution, and oftener than not, negative and destructivewi thering and blasting in its career like the desert simoom.
00.01 - The Mother on Savitri, #Sweet Mother - Harmonies of Light, #unset, #Zen
On a few other occasion also, the Mother had spoken to the same sadhak on the value of reading Savitri which he had noted down afterwards. These notes have been added at the end of the main report. A few members of the Ashram had privately read this report in French, but afterwards there were many requests for its English version. A translation was therefore made in November 1967. A proposal was made to the Mother in 1972 for its publication and it was submitted to Her for approval. The Mother wanted to check the translation before permitting its publication but could check only a portion of it.
Do you read Savitri?
--
In truth, the entire form of Savitri has descended "en masse" from the highest region and Sri Aurobindo with His genius only arranged the lines - in a superb and magnificent style. Sometimes entire lines were revealed and He has left them intact; He worked hard, untiringly, so that the inspiration could come from the highest possible summit. And what a work He has created! Yes, it is a true creation in itself. It is an unequalled work. Everything is there, and it is put in such a simple, such a clear form; verses perfectly harmonious, limpid and eternally true. My child, I have read so many things, but I have never come across anything which could be compared with Savitri. I have studied the best works in Greek, Latin, English and of course French literature, also in Ger man and all the great creations of the West and the East, including the great epics; but I repeat it, I have not found anywhere anything comparable with Savitri. All these literary works seems to me empty, flat, hollow, without any deep reality - apart from a few rare exceptions, and these too represent only a small fraction of what Savitri is. What grandeur, what amplitude, what reality: it is something immortal and eternal He has created. I tell you once again there is nothing like in it the whole world. Even if one puts aside the vision of the reality, that is, the essential substance which is the heart of the inspiration, and considers only the lines in themselves, one will find them unique, of the highest classical kind. What He has created is something man cannot imagine. For, everything is there, everything.
It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide to Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practice Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. Surely, if one sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one will reach finally the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge, and I repeat this, the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound, which is OM.
My child, yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny - all is there. You can find all the answers to all your questions there. Everything is explained, even the future of man and of the evolution, all that nobody yet knows. He has described it all in beautiful and clear words so that spiritual adventurers who wish to solve the mysteries of the world may understand it more easily. But this mystery is well hidden behind the words and lines and one must rise to the required level of true consciousness to discover it. All prophesies, all that is going to come is presented with the precise and wonderful clarity. Sri Aurobindo gives you here the key to find the Truth, to discover the Consciousness, to solve the problem of what the universe is. He has also indicated how to open the door of the Inconscience so that the light may penetrate there and transform it. He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb up to the superconscience; each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and attain immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail, and as you go forward you can discover things altogether unknown to man. That is Savitri and much more yet. It is a real experience - reading Savitri. All the secrets that man possessed, He has revealed, - as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral Yoga.
All this is His own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which He has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when He was writing He used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear Him read Savitri. During the night He would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences He read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word by word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it all, put by Him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which He read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day by chance, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what He said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told Him my experiences and that He had noted them down afterwards, no, He knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences He has presented at length and they were His experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of Our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.
These are experiences lived by Him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy or sorrow, physically. He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighborhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery to brea the the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like Him. He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. It is something that has never happened before, He is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown, so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Supermind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is His whole Yoga of transformation, and this Yoga appears now for the first time in the earth-consciousness.
And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it, for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experiences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, - it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.
And men have the audacity to compare it with the work of Virgil or Homer and to find it inferior. They do not understand, they cannot understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. Men will know what it is, but in a distant future. It is only the new race with a new consciousness which will be able to understand. I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with Savitri. It is the mystery of mysteries. It is a *super-epic,* it is super-literature, super-poetry, super-vision, it is a super-work even if one considers the number of lines He has written. No, these hu man words are not adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives, hyperboles to describe it. It is a hyper-epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is, at least I do not find them. It is of immense value - spiritual value and all other values; it is eternal in its subject, and infinite in its appeal, miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more you come into contact with it, the higher will you be uplifted. Ah, truly it is something! It is the most beautiful thing He has left for man, the highest possible. What is it? When will man know it? When is he going to lead a life of truth? When is he going to accept this in his life? This yet remains to be seen.
My child, every day you are going to read Savitri; read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is through the heart. I tell you, if you try to really concentrate with this aspiration you can light the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness; as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness; as if Savitri were a being, a real guide. I tell you, whoever, wanting to practice Yoga, tries sincerely and feels the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practice it anywhere. For him Savitri alone will be the guide, for all that he needs he will find Savitri. If he remains very quiet when before a difficulty, or when he does not know where to turn to go forward and how to overcome obstacles, for all these hesitations and incertitudes which overwhelm us at every moment, he will have the necessary indications, and the necessary concrete help. If he remains very calm, open, if he aspires sincerely, always he will be as if lead by the hand. If he has faith, the will to give himself and essential sincerity he will reach the final goal.
00.02 - Mystic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Mystics all over the world and in all ages have clothed their sayings in proverbs and parables, in figures and symbols. To speak in symbols seems to be in their very nature; it is their characteristic manner, their inevitable style. Let us see what is the reason behind it. But first who are the Mystics? They are those who are in touch with supra-sensual things, whose experiences are of a world different from the common physical world, the world of the mind and the senses.
These other worlds are constituted in other ways than ours. Their contents are different and the laws that obtain there are also different. It would be a gross blunder to attempt a chart of any of these other systems, to use an Einsteinian term, with the measures and conventions of the system to which our external waking consciousness belongs. For, there "the sun shines not, nor the moon, nor the stars, neither these lightnings nor this fire." The difficulty is further enhanced by the fact that there are very many unseen worlds and they all differ from the seen and from one another in manner and degree. Thus, for example, the Upanishads speak of the swapna, the suupta, and the turya, domains beyond the jgrat which is that where the rational being with its mind and senses lives and moves. And there are other systems and other ways in which systems exist, and they are practically innumerable.
If, however, we have to speak of these other worlds, then, since we can speak only in the terms of this world, we have to use them in a different sense from those they usually bear; we must employ them as figures and symbols. Even then they may prove inadequate and misleading; so there are Mystics who are averse to all speech and expression they are mauni; in silence they experience the inexpressible and in silence they communicate it to the few who have the capacity to receive in silence.
--
We can make a distinction here between two types of expression which we have put together indiscriminately, figures and symbols. Figures, we may say, are those that are constructed by the rational mind, the intellect; they are mere metaphors and similes and are not organically related to the thing experienced, but put round it as a robe that can be dropped or changed without affecting the experience itself. Thus, for example, when the Upanishad says, tmnam rathinam viddhi (Know that the soul is the master of the chariot who sits within it) or indriyi haynhu (The senses, they say, are the horses), we have here only a comparison or analogy that is common and natural to the poetic manner. The particular figure or simile used is not inevitable to the idea or experience that it seeks to express, its part and parcel. On the other hand, take this Upanishadic perception: hirayamayena patrea satyasyphitam mukham (The face of the Truth lies hidden under the golden orb). Here the symbol is not mere analogy or comparison, a figure; it is one with the very substance of the experience the two cannot be separated. Or when the Vedas speak of the kindling of the Fire, the rushing of the waters or the rise of the Dawn, the images though taken from the material world, are not used for the sake of mere comparison, but they are the embodiments, the living forms of truths experienced in another world.
When a Mystic refers to the Solar Light or to the Fire the light, for example, that struck down Saul and transformed him into Saint Paul or the burning bush that visited Moses, it is not the physical or material object that he means and yet it is that in a way. It is the materialization of something that is fundamentally not material: some movement in an inner consciousness precipitates itself into the region of the senses and takes from out of the material the form commensurable with its nature that it finds there.
--
Thus there is a great diversity of symbols. At the one end is the mere metaphor or simile or allegory ('figure', as we have called it) and at the other end is the symbol identical with the thing symbolized. And upon this inner character of the symbol depends also to a large extent its range and scope. There are symbols which are universal and intimately ingrained in the hu man consciousness itself. mankind has used them in all ages and climes almost in the same sense and significance. There are others that are limited to peoples and ages. They are made out of forms that are of local and temporal interest and importance. Their significances vary according to time and place. Finally, there are symbols which are true of the individual consciousness only; they depend on personal peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, on one's environment and upbringing and education.
man being an embodied soul, his external consciousness (what the Upanishad calls jgrat) is the milieu in which his soul-experiences naturally manifest and find their play. It is the forms and movements of that consciousness which clo the and give a concrete habitation and name to perceptions on the subtler ranges of the inner existence. If the experiences on these planes are to be presented to the conscious memory and to the brain-mind and made communicable to others through speech, this is the inevitable and natural process. Symbols are a translation in mental and sensual (and vocal) terms of experiences that are beyond the mind and the sense and the speech and yet throw a kind of echoing vibrations upon these lesser levels.
***
0 0.02 - Topographical Note, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was only in 1958 that we began having the first tape-recorded conversations, which, properly speaking, constitute Mother's Agenda. But even then, many of these conversations were lost or only partly noted down. Or else we considered that our own words should not figure in these notes and we carefully omitted all our questions - which was absurd. At that time, no one - neither Mother, nor ourself - knew that this was 'the Agenda' and that we were out to explore the 'Great Passage.'
Only gradually did we become aware of the true nature of these meetings. Furthermore, we were constantly on the road, so much so that there are sizable gaps in the text. In fact, for seven years,
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Brihadaranyaka speaks of several lights that man possesses, one in the absence of another, for his illumination and guidance.
First of all, he has the Sun; it is the primary light by which he lives and moves. When the Sun sets, the Moon rises to replace it. When both the Sun and the Moon set, he has recourse to the Fire. And when the Fire, too, is extinguished, there comes the Word. In the end, when the Fire is quieted and the Word silenced, man is lighted by the Light of the At man. This At man is All-Knowledge; it is secreted within the life, within the heart: it is selfluminous Vijnamaya preu rdyantar jyoti..
The progression indicated by the order of succession points to a gradual withdrawal from the outer to the inner light, from the surface to the deep, from the obvious to the secret, from the actual and derivative to the real and original. We begin by the senses and move towards the Spirit.
The Sun is the first and the most immediate source of light that man has and needs. He is the presiding deity of our waking consciousness and has his seat in the eyecakusa ditya, ditya caku bhtvakii prviat. The eye is the representative of the senses; it is the sense par excellence. In truth, sense-perception is the initial light with which we have to guide us, it is the light with which we start on the way. A developed stage comes when the Sun sets for us, that is to say, when we retire from the senses and rise into the mind, whose divinity is the Moon. It is the mental knowledge, the light of reason and intelligence, of reflection and imagination that govern our consciousness. We have to proceed farther and get beyond the mind, exceed the derivative light of the Moon. So when the Moon sets, the Fire is kindled. It is the light of the ardent and aspiring heart, the glow of an inner urge, the instincts and inspirations of our secret life-will. Here we come into touch with a source of knowledge and realization, a guidance more direct than the mind and much deeper than the sense-perception. Still this light partakes more of heat than of pure luminosity; it is, one may say, incandescent feeling, but not vision. We must probe deeper, mount higherreach heights and profundities that are serene and transparent. The Fire is to be quieted and silenced, says the Upanishad. Then we come nearer, to the immediate vicinity of the Truth: an inner hearing opens, the direct voice of Truth the Wordreaches us to lead and guide. Even so, however, we have not come to the end of our journey; the Word of revelation is not the ultimate Light. The Word too is clothing, though a luminous clothinghiramayam ptram When this last veil dissolves and disappears, when utter silence, absolute calm and quietude reign in the entire consciousness, when no other lights trouble or distract our attention, there appears the At man in its own body; we stand face to face with the source of all lights, the self of the Light, the light of the Self. We are that Light and we become that Light.
II. The Four Oblations
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Ritualistically these four terms are the formulae for oblation to four Deities, Powers or Presences, whom the sacrificer wishes to please and propitiate in order to have their help and blessing and in order thereby to discharge his dharma or duty of life. Svh is the offering especially dedicated to Agni, the foremost of the Gods, for he is the divine messenger who carries men's offering to the Gods and brings their blessing to men. Vaatkr is the offering to the Gods generally. Hantakr is the offering to mankind, to our kin, an especial form of it being the worship of the guests,sarvadevamayo' tithi. Svadh is the offering to the departed Fathers (Pitris).
The duty of life consists, it is said, in the repaying of three debts which every man contracts as soon as he takes birth upon earth the debt to the Gods, to Men and to the Ancestors. This threefold debt or duty has, in other terms, reference to the three fields or domains wherein an embodied being lives and moves and to which he must adjust and react rightly -if he is to secure for his life an integral fulfilment. These are the family, society and the world and beyond-world. The Gods are the Powers that rule the world and beyond, they are the forms and forces of the One Spirit underlying the universe, the varied expressions of divine Truth and Reality: To worship the Gods, to do one's duty by them, means to come into contact and to be unitedin being, consciousness and activitywith the universal and spiritual existence, which is the supreme end and purpose of hu man life. The seconda more circumscribed fieldis the society to which one belongs, the particular group of hu manity in which he functions as a limb. The service to society or good citizenship entails the worship of hu manity, of man as a god. Lastly, man belongs to the family, which is the unit of society; and the backbone of the family is the continuous line of ancestors, who are its presiding deity and represent the norm of a living dharma, the ethic of an ideal life.
From the psychological standpoint, the four oblations are movements or reactions of consciousness in its urge towards the utterance and expression of Divine Truth. Like some other elements in the cosmic play, these also form a quartetcaturvyha and work together for a common purpose in view of a perfect and all-round result.
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Hantakr is the appearance, the manifestation of the Divinity that which makes the worshipper cry in delight, "Hail!" It is the coming of the Dawnahanwhen the night has been traversed and the lid rent open, the appearance of the Divine to a hu man vision for the hu man consciousness to seize, almost in a hu man form.
Finally, once the Truth is reached, it is to be held fast, firmly established, embodied and fixed in its inherent nature here in life and the waking consciousness. This is Svadh.
The Gods feed upon Svdh and Vaa, as these represent the ascending movement of hu man consciousness: it is man's self-giving and aspiration and the upward urge of his heart and soul that reach to the Gods, and it is that which the immortals take into themselves and are, as it were, nourished by, since it is something that appertains to their own nature.
And in response they descend and approach and enter into the aspiring hu man soulthis descent and revelation and near and concrete presence of Divinity, this Hanta is man's food, for by it his consciousness is nourished.
This interchange, or mutual giving, the High Covenant between the Gods and Men, to which the Gita too refers
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One is an ideal in and of the world, the other is an ideal transcending the world. The Path of the Fathers (Pityna) enjoins the right accomplishing of the dharma of Lifeit is the path of works, of Karma; it is the line of progressive evolution that, man follows through the experience of life after life on earth. The Path of the Gods (Devayna) runs above life's evolutionary course; it lifts man out of the terrestrial cycle and places him in a superior consciousness it is the path of knowledge, of Vidya.4 The Path of the Fathers is the soul's southern or inferior orbit (dakiyana, aparrdha); the Path of the Gods is the northern or superior orbit (uttaryaa, parrdha)The former is also called the Lunar Path and the latter the Solar Path.5 For the moon represents the mind,6 and is therefore, an emblem that befits man so long as he is a mental being and pursues a dharma that is limited by the mind; the sun, on the other hand, is the knowledge and consciousness that is beyond the mindit is the eye of the Gods.7
man has two aspects or natures; he dwells in two worlds. The first is the manifest world the world of the body, the life and the mind. The body has flowered into the mind through the life. The body gives the basis or the material, the life gives power and energy and the mind the directing knowledge. This triune world forms the hu manity of man. But there is another aspect hidden behind this apparent nature, there is another world where man dwells in his submerged, larger and higher consciousness. To that his soul the Purusha in his heart only has access. It is the world where man's nature is transmuted into another triune realitySat, Chit and Ananda.
The one, however, is not completely divorced from the other. The apparent, the inferior nature is only a preparation for the real, the superior nature. The Path of the Fathers concerns itself with man as a mental being and seeks so to ordain and accomplish its duties and ideals as to lead him on to the Path of the Gods; the mind, the life, and the body consciousness should be so disciplined, educated, purified, they should develop along such a line and gradually rise to such a stage as to make them fit to receive the light which belongs to the higher level, so allowing the hu man soul imbedded in them to extricate itself and pass on to the Immortal Life.
And they who are thus lifted up into the Higher Orbit are freed from the bondage to the cycle of rebirth. They enjoy the supreme Liberation that is of the Spirit; and even when they descend into the Inferior Path, it is to work out as free agents, as vehicles of the Divine, a special purpose, to bring down something of the substance and nature of the Solar reality into the lower world, enlighten and elevate the lower, as far as it is allowed, into the higher.
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Agni is the divine spark in man, the flaming consciousness in the mortal which purifies and uplifts (pvaka) mortality into immortality. It is the god "seated in the secret heart, who is the possession of infinity and the foundation of existence," as Yama says to Nachiketas.8
Indeed, it was to this godhead that Nachiketas turned and he wanted to know of it and find it, when faith seized on his pure heart and he aspired for the higher spiritual life. The very opening hymn of the Rig Veda, too, is addressed to Agni, who is invoked as the vicar seated in the front of the sacrifice, the giver of the supreme gifts.
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The three fires are named elsewhere Garhapatya, Dakshina, and Ahavaniya.9 They are the three tongues of the one central Agni, that dwells secreted in the hearth of the soul. They manifest as aspirations that flame up from the three fundamental levels of our being, the body, the life and the mind. For although the spiritual consciousness is the natural element of the soul and is gained in and through the soul, yet, in order that man may take possession of it and dwell in it consciously, in order that the soul's empire may be established, the external being too must respond to the soul's impact and yearn for its truth in the Spirit. The mind, the life and the body which are usually obstructions in the path, must discover the secret flame that is in them tooeach has his own portion of the Soul's Fireand mount on its ardent tongue towards the heights of the Spirit.
Garhapatya is the Fire in the body-consciousness, the fire of Earth, as it is sometimes called; Dakshina is the Fire of the moon or mind, and Ahavaniya that of life.10 The earthly fire is also the fire of the sun; the sun is the source of all earth's heat and symbolises at the same time the spiritual light manifested in the physical consciousness. The lunar fire is also the fire of the stars, the stars, mythologically, being the consorts or powers of the moon and they symbolise, in Yogic experience, the intuitive thoughts. The fire of the life-force has its symbol in lightning, electric energy being its vehicle.
Agni in the physical consciousness is calledghapati, for the body is the house in which the soul is lodged and he is its keeper, guardian and lord. The fire in the mental consciousness is called daki; for it is that which gives discernment, the power to discriminate between the truth and the falsehood, it is that which by the pressure of its heat and light cleaves the wrong away from the right. And the fire in the life-force is called havanya; for pra is not only the plane of hunger and desire, but also of power and dynamism, it is that which calls forth forces, brings them into' play and it is that which is to be invoked for the progression of the Sacrifice, for an onward march on the spiritual path.
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Earth represents the material world itself, Matter or existence in its most concrete, its grossest form. It is the basis of existence, the world that supports other worlds (dhar, dharitri),the first or the lowest of the several ranges of creation. In man it is his body. The principle here is that of stability, substantiality, firmness, consistency.
Water represents the next rung the vital world, the world life-force (pra). Physiologically also we know that water is the element forming three-fourths of the constituents of a living body and that dead and dry are synonymous terms; it is the medium in which the living cells dwell and through which they draw their sustenance. Water is the veritable sap of lifeit is the emblem of life itself. The principle it represents is that of movement, continuity, perpetuity.
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The Science of the Five Agnis (Fires), as propounded by Pravahan, explains and illustrates the process of the birth of the body, the passage of the soul into earth existence. It describes the advent of the child, the building of the physical form of the hu man being. The process is conceived of as a sacrifice, the usual symbol with the Vedic Rishis for the expression of their vision and perception of universal processes of Nature, physical and psychological. Here, the child IS said to be the final fruit of the sacrifice, the different stages in the process being: (i) Soma, (ii) Rain, (iii) Food, (iv) Semen, (v) Child. Soma means Rasaphysically the principle of water, psychologically the 'principle of delightand symbolises and constitutes the very soul and substance of life. Now it is said that these five principles the fundamental and constituent elementsare born out of the sacrifice, through the oblation or offering to the five Agnis. The first Agni is Heaven or the Sky-God, and by offering to it one's faith and one's ardent desire, one calls into manifestation Soma or Rasa or Water, the basic principle of life. This water is next offered to the second Agni, the Rain-God, who sends down Rain. Rain, again, is offered to the third Agni, the Earth, who brings forth Food. Food is, in its turn, offered to the fourth Agni, the Father or Male, who elaborates in himself the generating fluid.
Finally, this fluid is offered to the fifth Agni, the Mother or the Female, who delivers the Child.
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We have, in modern times, a movement towards a more conscious and courageous, knowledge of things that were taboo to puritan ages. Not to shut one's eyes to the lower, darker and hidden strands of our nature, but to bring them out into the light of day and to face them is the best way of dealing with such elements, which otherwise, if they are repressed, exert an unhealthy influence on the mind and nature. The Upanishadic view runs on the same lines, but, with the unveiling and the natural and not merely naturalisticdelineation of these under-worlds (concerning sex and food), it endows them with a perspective sub specie aeternitatis. The sexual function, for example, is easily equated to the double movement of ascent and descent that is secreted in nature, or to the combined action of Purusha and Prakriti in the cosmic Play, or again to the hidden fount of Delight that holds and moves the universe. In this view there is nothing merely secular and profane, but all is woven into the cosmic spiritual whole; and man is taught to consider and to mould all his movementsof soul and mind and bodyin the light and rhythm of that integral Reality.11
The central secret of the transfigured consciousness lies, as we have already indicated, in the mystic rite or law of Sacrifice. It is the one basic, fundamental, universal Law that upholds and explains the cosmic movement, conformity to which brings to the thrice-bound hu man being release and freedom. Sacrifice consists essentially of two elements or processes: (i) The offering or self giving of the lower reality to the higher, and, as a consequence, an answering movement of (ii) the descent of the higher into the lower. The lower offered to the higher means the lower sublimated and integrated into the higher; and the descent of the higher into the lower means the incarnation of the former and the fulfilment of the latter. The Gita elaborates the same idea when it says that by Sacrifice men increase the gods and the gods increase men and by so increasing each other they attain the supreme Good. Nothing is, nothing is done, for its own sake, for an egocentric satisfaction; all, even movements relating to food and to sex should be dedicated to the Cosmic BeingVisva Purusha and that alone received which comes from Him.
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TheChhandyogya12 gives a whole typal scheme of this universal reality and explains how to realise it and what are the results of the experience. The Universal Brah man means the cosmic movement, the cyclic march of things and events taken in its global aspect. The typical movement that symbolises and epitomises the phenomenon, embodies the truth, is that of the sun. The movement consists of five stages which are called the fivefold sma Sma means the equal Brah man that is ever present in all, the Upanishad itself says deriving the word from sama It is Sma also because it is a rhythmic movement, a cadencea music of the spheres. And a rhythmic movement, in virtue of its being a wave, consists of these five stages: (i) the start, (ii) the rise, (iii) the peak, (iv) the decline and (v) the fall. Now the sun follows this curve and marks out the familiar divisions of the day: dawn, forenoon, noon, afternoon and sunset. Sometimes two other stages are added, one at each end, one of preparation and another of final lapse the twilights with regard to the sun and then ,we have seven instead of five smas Like the Sun, the Fire that is to say, the sacrificial Firecan also be seen in its fivefold cyclic movement: (i) the lighting, (ii) the smoke, (iii) the flame, (iv) smouldering and finally (v) extinction the fuel as it is rubbed to produce the fire and the ashes may be added as the two supernumerary stages. Or again, we may take the cycle of five seasons or of the five worlds or of the deities that control these worlds. The living wealth of this earth is also symbolised in a quintetgoat and sheep and cattle and horse and finally man. Coming to the microcosm, we have in man the cycle of his five senses, basis of all knowledge and activity. For the macrocosm, to I bring out its vast extra-hu man complexity, the Upanishad refers to a quintet, each term of which is again a trinity: (i) the threefold Veda, the Divine Word that is the origin of creation, (ii) the three worlds or fieldsearth, air-belt or atmosphere and space, (iii) the three principles or deities ruling respectively these worldsFire, Air and Sun, (iv) their expressions, e manations or embodimentsstars and birds and light-rays, and finally, (v) the original inhabitants of these worldsto earth belong the reptiles, to the mid-region the Gandharvas and to heaven the ancient Fathers.
Now, this is the All, the Universal. One has to realise it and possess in one's consciousness. And that can be done only in one way: one has to identify oneself with it, be one with it, become it. Thus by losing one's individuality one lives the life universal; the small lean separate life is enlarged and moulded in the rhythm of the Rich and the Vast. It is thus that man shares in the consciousness and energy that inspire and move and sustain the cosmos. The Upanishad most emphatically enjoins that one must not decry this cosmic godhead or deny any of its elements, not even such as are a taboo to the puritan mind. It is in and through an unimpaired global consciousness that one attains the All-Life and lives uninterruptedly and perennially: Sarva manveti jyok jvati.
Still the Upanishad says this is not the final end. There is yet a higher status of reality and consciousness to which one has to rise. For beyond the Cosmos lies the Transcendent. The Upanishad expresses this truth and experience in various symbols. The cosmic reality, we have seen, is often conceived as a septenary, a unity of seven elements, principles and worlds. Further to give it its full complex value, it is considered not as a simple septet, but a threefold heptad the whole gamut, as it were, consisting of 21 notes or syllables. The Upanishad says, this number does not exhaust the entire range; I for there is yet a 22nd place. This is the world beyond the Sun, griefless and deathless, the supreme Selfhood. The Veda I also sometimes speaks of the integral reality as being represented by the number 100 which is 99 + I; in other words, 99 represents the cosmic or universal, the unity being the reality beyond, the Transcendent.
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VIII. How many Gods?
"How many Gods are there?" Yajnavalkya was once asked.13 The Rishi answered, they say there are three thousand and three of them, or three hundred and three, or again, thirty-three; it may be said too there are six or three or two or one and a half or one finally. Indeed as the Upanishad says elsewhere, it is the One Unique who wished to be many: and all the gods are the various glories (mahim) or e manations of the One Divine. The ancient of ancient Rishis had declared long long ago, in the earliest Veda, that there is one indivisible Reality, the seers name it in various ways.
In Yajnavalkya's enumeration, however, it is to be noted, first of all, that he stresses on the number three. The principle of triplicity is of very wide application: it permeates all fields of consciousness and is evidently based upon a fundamental fact of reality. It seems to embody a truth of synthesis and comprehension, points to the order and harmony that reigns in the cosmos, the spheric music. The metaphysical, that is to say, the original principles that constitute existence are the well-known triplets: (i) the superior: Sat, Chit, Ananda; and (ii) the inferior: Body, Life and Mindthis being a reflection or translation or concretisation of the former. We can see also here how the dual principle comes in, the twin godhead or the two gods to which Yajnavalkya refers. The same principle is found in the conception of Ardhanarishwara, Male and Female, Purusha-Prakriti. The Upanishad says 14 yet again that the One original Purusha was not pleased at being alone, so for a companion he created out of himself the original Female. The dual principle signifies creation, the manifesting activity of the Reality. But what is this one and a half to which Yajnavalkya refers? It simply means that the other created out of the one is not a wholly separate, independent entity: it is not an integer by itself, as in the manichean system, but that it is a portion, a fraction of the One. And in the end, in the ultimate analysis, or rather synthesis, there is but one single undivided and indivisible unity. The thousands and hundreds, very often mentioned also in the Rig Veda, are not simply multiplications of the One, a graphic description of its many-sidedness; it indicates also the absolute fullness, the complete completeness (prasya pram) of the Reality. It includes and comprehends all and is a rounded totality, a full circle. The hundred-gated and the thousand-pillared cities of which the ancient Rishis chanted are formations and embodiments of consciousness hu man and divine, are realities whole and entire englobing all the layers and grades of consciousness.
Besides this metaphysics there is also an occult aspect in numerology of which Pythagoras was a well-known adept and in which the Vedic Rishis too seem to take special delight. The multiplication of numbers represents in a general way the principle of e manation. The One has divided and subdivided itself, but not in a haphazard way: it is not like the chaotic pulverisation of a piece of stone by hammer-blows. The process of division and subdivision follows a pattern almost as neat and methodical as a genealogical tree. That is to say, the e manations form a hierarchy. At the top, the apex of the pyramid, stands the one supreme Godhead. That Godhead is biune in respect of manifestation the Divine and his creative Power. This two-in-one reality may be considered, according to one view of creation, as dividing into three forms or aspects the well-known Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra of Hindu mythology. These may be termed the first or primary e manations.
Now, each one of them in its turn has its own e manations the eleven Rudriyas are familiar. These are secondary and there are tertiary and other graded e manations the last ones touch the earth and embody physico-vital forces. The lowest formations or beings can trace their origin to one or other of the primaries and their nature and function partake of or are an echo of their first ancestor.
man, however, is an epitome of creation. He embraces and incarnates the entire gamut of consciousness and comprises in him all beings from the highest Divinity to the lowest jinn or elf. And yet each hu man being in his true personality is a lineal descendant of one or other typal aspect or original Personality of the one supreme Reality; and his individual character is all the more pronounced and well-defined the more organised and developed is the being. The psychic being in man is thus a direct descent, an immediate e manation along a definite line of devolution of the supreme consciousness. We may now understand and explain easily why one chooses a particular Ishta, an ideal god, what is the drive that pushes one to become a worshipper of Siva or Vishnu or any other deity. It is not any rational understanding, a weighing of pros and cons and then a resultant conclusion that leads one to choose a path of religion or spirituality. It is the soul's natural call to the God, the type of being and consciousness of which it is a spark, from which it has descended, it is the secret affinity the spiritual blood-relation as it were that determines the choice and adherence. And it is this that we name Faith. And the exclusiveness and violence and bitterness which attend such adherence and which go "by the "name of partisanship, sectarianism, fanaticism etc., a;e a deformation in the ignorance on the physico-vital plane of the secret loyalty to one's source and origin. Of course, the pattern or law is not so simple and rigid, but it gives a token or typal pattern. For it must not be forgotten that the supreme source or the original is one and indivisible and in the highest integration consciousness is global and not exclusive. And the hu man being that attains such a status is not bound or wholly limited to one particular formation: its personality is based on the truth of impersonality. And yet the two can go together: an individual can be impersonal in consciousness and yet personal in becoming and true to type.
The number of gods depends on the level of consciousness on which we stand. On this material plane there are as many gods as there are bodies or individual forms (adhar). And on the supreme height there is only one God without a second. In between there are gradations of types and sub-types whose number and function vary according to the aspect of consciousness that reveals itself.
IX. Nachiketas' Three Boons
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The first boon regards the individual, that is to say, the individual identity and integrity. It asks for the maintenance of that individuality so that it may be saved from the dissolution that Death brings about. Death, of course, means the dissolution of the body, but it represents also dissolution pure and simple. Indeed death is a process which does not stop with the physical phenomenon, but continues even after; for with the body gone, the other elements of the individual organism, the vital and the mental too gradually fall off, fade and dissolve. Nachiketas wishes to secure from Death the safety and preservation of the earthly personality, the particular organisation of mind and vital based upon a recognisable physical frame. That is the first necessity for the aspiring mortalfor, it is said, the body is the first instrument for the working out of one's life ideal. But man's true personality, the real individuality lies beyond, beyond the body, beyond the life, beyond the mind, beyond the triple region that Death lords it over. That is the divine world, the Heaven of the immortals, beyond death and beyond sorrow and grief. It is the hearth secreted in the inner heart where burns the Divine Fire, the God of Life Everlasting. And this is the nodus that binds together the threefold status of the manifested existence, the body, the life and the mind. This triplicity is the structure of name and form built out of the bricks of experience, the kiln, as it were, within which burns the Divine Agni, man's true soul. This soul can be reached only when one exceeds the bounds and limitations of the triple cord and experiences one's communion and identity with all souls and all existence. Agni is the secret divinity within, within the individual and within the world; he is the Im manent Divine, the cosmic godhead that holds together and marshals all the elements and components, all the principles that make up the manifest universe. He it is that has entered into the world and created facets of his own reality in multiple forms: and it is he that lies secret in the hu man being as the immortal soul through all its adventure of life and death in the series of incarnations in terrestrial evolution. The adoration and realisation of this Im manent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the hu man soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore, Agni, the master of the psychic being, is called jtaveds, he who knows the births, all the transmigrations from life to life.
The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature of that thing? What is there outside creation, outside manifestation, outside Maya, to use a latter day term? Is there existence or non-existence (utter dissolution or extinctionDeath in his supreme and absolute status)? King Yama did not choose to answer immediately and even endeavoured to dissuade Nachiketas from pursuing the question over which people were confounded, as he said. Evidently it was a much discussed problem in those days. Buddha was asked the same question and he evaded it, saying that the pragmatic man should attend to practical and immediate realities and not, waste time and energy in discussing things ultimate and beyond that have hardly any relation to the present and the actual.
But Yama did answer and unveil the mystery and impart the supreme secret knowledge the knowledge of the Transcendent Brah man: it is out of the transcendent reality that the im manent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Mastersarvabhtntartm, antarymis called brahmajam, born of the Brah man. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and experience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brah man, there is a definite line along which the hu man consciousness (or unconsciousness, as it is at present) is to ascend and evolve. The first step is to learn to distinguish between the Good and the Pleasurable (reya and preya). The line of pleasure leads to the external, the superficial, the false: while the other path leads towards the inner and the higher truth. So the second step is the gradual withdrawal of the consciousness from the physical and the sensual and even the mental preoccupation and focussing it upon what is certain and per manent. In the midst of the death-ridden consciousness in the heart of all that is unstable and fleetingone has to look for Agni, the eternal godhead, the Immortal in mortality, the Timeless in time through whom lies the passage to Immortality beyond Time.
man has two souls corresponding to his double status. In the inferior, the soul looks downward and is involved in the current of Imper manence and Ignorance, it tastes of grief and sorrow and suffers death and dissolution: in the higher it looks upward and communes and joins with the Eternal (the cosmic) and then with the Absolute (the transcendent). The lower is a reflection of the higher, the higher comes down in a diminished and hence tarnished light. The message is that of deliverance, the deliverance and reintegration of the lower soul out of its bondage of worldly ignorant life into the freedom and immortality first of its higher and then of its highest status. It is true, however, that the Upanishad does not make a trenchant distinction between the cosmic and the transcendent and often it speaks of both in the same breath, as it were. For in fact they are realities involved in each other and interwoven. Indeed the triple status, including the Individual, forms one single totality and the three do not exclude or cancel each other; on the contrary, they combine and may be said to enhance each other's reality. The Transcendence expresses or deploys itself in the cosmoshe goes abroad,sa paryagt: and the cosmic individualises, concretises itself in the particular and the personal. The one single spiritual reality holds itself, aspects itself in a threefold manner.
The teaching of Yama in brief may be said to be the gospel of immortality and it consists of the knowledge of triple immortality. And who else can be the best teacher of immortality than Death himself, as Nachiketas pointedly said? The first immortality is that of the physical existence and consciousness, the preservation of the personal identity, the individual name and formthis being in itself as expression and embodiment and instrument of the Inner Reality. This inner reality enshrines the second immortality the eternity and continuity of the soul's life through its incarnations in time, the divine Agni lit for ever and ever growing in flaming consciousness. And the third and final immortality is in the being and consciousness beyond time, beyond all relativities, the absolute and self-existent delight.
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Cndram mano bhtvAitareya, 1.2.4; manasascandramBrihadaranyaka,1.1.4.
Divva cakurtatamRig Veda
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The secularisation of man's vital functions in modem ages has not been a success. It has made him more egocentric and blatantly hedonistic. From an occult point of view he has in this way subjected himself to the influences of dark and undesirable world-forces, has made an opening, to use an Indian symbolism, for Kali (the Spirit of the Iron Age) to enter into him. The sex-force is an extremely potent agent, but it is extremely fluid and elusive and uncontrollable. It was for this reason that the ancients always sought to give it a proper mould, a right continent, a fixed and definite channel; the moderns, on the other hand, allow it to run free and play with it recklessly. The result has been, in the life of those born under such circumstances, a growing lack of poise and balance and a corresponding incidence of neuras thenia, hysteria and all abnormal pathological conditions.
Chhandyogya, II, III.
00.04 - The Beautiful in the Upanishads, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
awakening is born, wide manifest
ruadvast rua wetygt
--
The form of a thing can be beautiful; but the formless too has its beauty. Indeed, the beauty of the formless, that is to say, the very sum and substance, the ultimate essence, the soul of beauty that is what suffuses, with in-gathered colour and enthusiasm, the realisation and poetic creation of the Upanishadic seer. All the forms that are scattered abroad in their myriad manifest beauty hold within themselves a secret Beauty and are reflected or projected out of it. This veiled Name of Beauty can be compared to nothing on the phenomenal hemisphere of Nature; it has no adequate image or representation below:
na tasya pratimsti
--
The perception of beauty in the Upanishadic consciousness is something elemental-of concentrated essence. It silhouettes the main contour, outlines the primordial gestures. Pregnant and pulsating with the burden of beauty, the mantra here reduces its external expression to a minimum. The body is bare and unadorned, and even in its nakedness, it has not the emphatic and vehement musculature of an athlete; rather it tends to be slim and slender and yet vibrant with the inner nervous vigour and glow. What can be more bare and brief and full to the brim of a self-gathered luminous energy than, for example:
yat prena na praiti yena pra
--
The rich and sensuous beauty luxuriating in high colour and ample decoration that one meets often in the creation of the earlier Vedic seers returned again, in a more chiselled and polished and stylised manner, in the classical poets. The Upanishads in this respect have a certain kinship with the early poets of the intervening ageVyasa and Valmiki. Upam KlidsasyaKalidasa revels in figures and images; they are profusely heaped on one another and usually possess a complex and composite texture. Valmiki's images are simple and elemental, brief and instinct with a vast resonance, spare and full of power. The same brevity and simplicity, vibrant with an extraordinary power of evocation, are also characteristic of the Upanishadic mantra With Valmiki's
kamiva dupram
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 hu man 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.
Indeed delight is the third and the supremely intimate element of the poetic personality. Dear and delightful is the poet, dear and delightful his works, priya, priyi His hand is dripping with sweetness,kavir hi madhuhastya.24 The Poet-God shines in his pristine beauty and is showering delight.25 He is filled with utter ecstasy so that he may rise to the very source of the luminous Energy.26? Pure is the Divine Joy and it enters and purifies all forms as it moves to the seat of the Immortals.27Indeed this sparkling Delight is the Poet-Seer and it is that that brings forth the creative word, the utterance of Indra.28
--
The Vedic Poet is doubtless the poet of Life, the architect of Divinity in man, of Heaven upon earth. 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
It is ironic that a period of the most tremendous technological advancement known to recorded history should also be labeled the Age of Anxiety. Reams have been written about modern man's frenzied search for his soul-and, indeed, his doubt that he even has one at a time when, like castles built on sand, so many of his cherished theories, long mistaken for verities, are crumbling about his bewildered brain.
The age-old advice, "Know thyself," is more imperative than ever. The tempo of science has accelerated to such a degree that today's discoveries frequently make yesterday's equations obsolescent almost before they can be chalked up on a blackboard. Small wonder, then that every other hospital bed is occupied by a mental patient. man was not constructed to spend his life at a crossroads, one of which leads he knows not where, and the other to threatened annihilation of his species.
In view of this situation it is doubly reassuring to know that, even in the midst of chaotic concepts and conditions there still remains a door through which man, individually, can enter into a vast store-house of knowledge, knowledge as dependable and immutable as the measured tread of Eternity.
For this reason I am especially pleased to be writing an introduction to a new edition of A Garden of Pomegranates. I feel that never, perhaps, was the need more urgent for just such a roadmap as the Qabalistic system provides. It should be equally useful to any who chooses to follow it, whether he be Jew, Christian or Buddhist, Deist, Theosophist, agnostic or atheist.
The Qabalah is a trustworthy guide, leading to a comprehension both of the Universe and one's own Self. Sages have long taught that man is a miniature of the Universe, containing within himself the diverse elements of that macrocosm of which he is the microcosm. Within the Qabalah is a glyph called the Tree of Life which is at once a symbolic map of the Universe in its major aspects, and also of its smaller counterpart, man.
manly P. Hall, in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, deplores the failure of modern science to "sense the profundity of these philosophical deductions of the ancients." Were they to do so, he says, they "would realize those who fabricated the structure of the Qabalah possessed a knowledge of the celestial plan comparable in every respect with that of the modern savant."
Fortunately many scientists in the field of psycho therapy are beginning to sense this correlation. In Francis G. Wickes' The Inner World of Choice reference is made to "the existence in every person of a galaxy of potentialities for growth marked by a succession of personalogical evolution and interaction with environments." She points out that man is not only an individual particle but "also a part of the hu man stream, governed by a Self greater than his own individual self."
The Book of the Law states simply, "Every man and every wo man is a star." This is a startling thought for those who considered a star a heavenly body, but a declaration subject to proof by anyone who will venture into the realm of his own Unconscious. This realm, he will learn if he persists, is not hemmed in by the boundaries of his physical body but is one with the boundless reaches of outer space.
Those who, armed with the tools provided by the Qabalah, have made the journey within and crossed beyond the barriers of illusion, have returned with an impressive quantity of knowledge which conforms strictly to the definition of "science" in Winston's College Dictionary: "Science: a body of knowledge, general truths of particular facts, obtained and shown to be correct by accurate observation and thinking; knowledge condensed, arranged and systematized with reference to general truths and laws."
--
Each letter of the Qabalistic alphabet has a number, color, many symbols and a Tarot card attributed to it. The Qabalah not only aids in an understanding of the Tarot, but teaches the student how to classify and organize all such ideas, numbers and symbols. Just as a knowledge of Latin will give insight into the meaning of an unfamiliar English word with a Latin root, so the knowledge of the Qabalah with the various attri butions to each character in its alphabet will enable the student to understand and correlate ideas and concepts which otherwise would have no apparent relation.
A simple example is the concept of the Trinity in the Christian religion. The student is frequently amazed to learn through a study of the Qabalah that Egyptian mythology followed a similar concept with its trinity of gods, Osiris the father, Isis the virgin-mother, and Horus the son. The Qabalah indicates similar correspondences in the pantheon of Ro man and Greek deities, proving the father-mother (Holy Spirit) - son principles of deity are primordial archetypes of man's psyche, rather than being, as is frequently and erroneously supposed a development peculiar to the Christian era.
At this juncture let me call attention to one set of attri butions by Rittangelius usually found as an appendix attached to the Sepher Yetzirah. It lists a series of "Intelligences" for each one of the ten Sephiros and the twenty-two Paths of the Tree of Life. It seems to me, after prolonged meditation, that the common attri butions of these Intelligences is altogether arbitrary and lacking in serious meaning.
For example, Keser is called "The Admirable or the Hidden Intelligence; it is the Primal Glory, for no created being can attain to its essence." This seems perfectly all right; the meaning at first sight seems to fit the significance of Keser as the first e manation from Ain Soph. But there are half a dozen other similar attri butions that would have served equally well. For instance, it could have been called the "Occult Intelligence" usually attri buted to the seventh Path or Sephirah, for surely Keser is secret in a way to be said of no other Sephirah. And what about the "Absolute or Perfect Intelligence." That would have been even more explicit and appropriate, being applicable to Keser far more than to any other of the Paths. Similarly, there is one attri buted to the 16th Path and called "The Eternal or Triumphant Intelligence," so-called because it is the pleasure of the Glory, beyond which is no Glory like to it, and it is called also the Paradise prepared for the Righteous." Any of these several would have done equally well. Much is true of so many of the other attri butions in this particular area-that is the so-called Intelligences of the Sepher Yetzirah. I do not think that their use or current arbitrary usage stands up to serious examination or criticism.
A good many attri butions in other symbolic areas, I feel are subject to the same criticism. The Egyptian Gods have been used with a good deal of carelessness, and without sufficient explanation of motives in assigning them as I did. In a recent edition of Crowley's masterpiece Liber 777 (which au fond is less a reflection of Crowley's mind as a recent critic claimed than a tabulation of some of the material given piecemeal in the Golden Dawn knowledge lectures), he gives for the first time brief explanations of the motives for his attri butions. I too should have been far more explicit in the explanations I used in the case of some of the Gods whose names were used many times, most inadequately, where several paths were concerned. While it is true that the religious coloring of the Egyptian Gods differed from time to time during Egypt's turbulent history, nonetheless a word or two about just that one single point could have served a useful purpose.
Some of the passages in the book force me today to emphasize that so far as the Qabalah is concerned, it could and should be employed without binding to it the partisan qualities of any one particular religious faith. This goes as much for Judaism as it does for Christianity. Neither has much intrinsic usefulness where this scientific scheme is concerned. If some students feel hurt by this statement, that cannot be helped. The day of most contemporary faiths is over; they have been more of a curse than a boon to mankind. Nothing that I say here, however, should reflect on the peoples concerned, those who accept these religions. They are merely unfortunate. The religion itself is worn out and indeed is dying.
The Qabalah has nothing to do with any of them. Attempts on the part of cultish-partisans to impart higher mystical meanings, through the Qabalah, etc., to their now sterile faiths is futile, and will be seen as such by the younger generation. They, the flower and love children, will have none of this nonsense.
I felt this a long time ago, as I still do, but even more so. The only way to explain the partisan 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 particularly 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.
What Jung calls archetypal images constantly rise to the surface of man's awareness from the vast unconscious that is the common heritage of all mankind.
The tragedy of civilized man is that he is cut off from awareness of his own instincts. The Qabalah can help him achieve the necessary understanding to effect a reunion with them, so that rather than being driven by forces he does not understand, he can harness for his conscious use the same power that guides the homing pigeon, teaches the beaver to build a dam and keeps the planets revolving in their appointed orbits about the sun.
I began the study of the Qabalah at an early age. Two books I read then have played unconsciously a prominent part in the writing of my own book. One of these was "Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception" by Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones), which I must have first read around 1926. The other was "An Introduction to the Tarot" by Paul Foster Case, published in the early 1920's. It is now out of print, superseded by later versions of the same topic. But as I now glance through this slender book, I perceive how profoundly even the format of his book had influenced me, though in these two instances there was not a trace of plagiarism. It had not consciously occurred to me until recently that I owed so much to them. Since Paul Case passed away about a decade or so ago, this gives me the opportunity to thank him, overtly, wherever he may now be.
By the middle of 1926 I had become aware of the work of Aleister Crowley, for whom I have a tremendous respect. I studied as many of his writings as I could gain access to, making copious notes, and later acted for several years as his secretary, having joined him in Paris on October 12, 1928, a memorable day in my life.
All sorts of books have been written on the Qabalah, some poor, some few others extremely good. But I came to feel the need for what might be called a sort of Berlitz handbook, a concise but comprehensive introduction, studded with diagrams and tables of easily understood definitions and correspondences to simplify the student's grasp of so complicated and abstruse a subject.
During a short retirement in North Devon in 1931, I began to amalgamate my notes. It was out of these that A Garden of Pomegranates gradually emerged. I unashamedly admit that my book contains many direct plagiarisms from Crowley, Waite, Eliphas Levi, and D. H. Lawrence. I had incorporated numerous fragments from their works into my notebooks without citing individual references to the various sources from which I condensed my notes.
Prior to the closing down of the mandrake Press in London about 1930-31, I was employed as company secretary for a while. Along with several Crowley books, the mandrake Press published a lovely little monogram by D. H. Lawrence entitled "Apropos of Lady Chatterley's Lover." My own copy accompanied me on my travels for long years. Only recently did I discover that it had been lost. I hope that any one of my former patients who had borrowed it will see fit to return it to me forthwith.
The last chapter of A Garden deals with the Way of Return. It used almost entirely Crowley's concept of the Path as described in his superb essay "One Star in Sight." In addition to this, I borrowed extensively from Lawrence's Apropos. Somehow, they all fitted together very nicely. In time, all these variegated notes were incorporated into the text without acknowledgment, an oversight which I now feel sure would be forgiven, since I was only twenty-four at the time.
--
In 1932, at the suggestion of Thomas Burke, the novelist, I submitted my manuscript to one of his publishers, Messrs. Constable in London. They were unable to use it, but made some encouraging comments and advised me to submit it to Riders. To my delight and surprise, Riders published it, and throughout the years the reaction it has had indicated other students found it also fulfilled their need for a condensed and simplified survey of such a vast subject as the Qabalah.
The importance of the book to me was and is five-fold. 1) It provided a yardstick by which to measure my personal progress in the understanding of the Qabalah. 2) Therefore it can have an equivalent value to the modern student. 3) It serves as a theoretical introduction to the Qabalistic foundation of the magical work of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 4) It throws considerable light on the occasionally obscure writings of Aleister Crowley. 5) It is dedicated to Crowley, who was the Ankh-af-na-Khonsu mentioned in The Book of the Law -a dedication which served both as a token of personal loyalty and devotion to Crowley, but was also a gesture of my spiritual independence from him.
In his profound investigation into the origins and basic nature of man, Robert Ardrey in African Genesis recently made a shocking statement. Although man has begun the conquest of outer space, the ignorance of his own nature, says Ardrey, "has become institutionalized, universalized and sanctified." He further states that were a brotherhood of man to be formed today, "its only possible common bond would be ignorance of what man is."
Such a condition is both deplorable and appalling when the means are readily available for man to acquire a thorough understanding of himself-and in so doing, an understanding of his neighbor and the world in which he lives as well as the greater Universe of which each is a part.
May everyone who reads this new edition of A Garden of Pomegranates be encouraged and inspired to light his own candle of inner vision and begin his journey into the boundless space that lies within himself. Then, through realization of his true identity, each student can become a lamp unto his own path. And more. Awareness of the Truth of his being will rip asunder the veil of unknowing that has heretofore enshrouded the star he already is, permitting the brilliance of his light to illumine the darkness of that part of the Universe in which he abides.
0.00a - Participants in the Evening Talks, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Nirodbaran Dr. manilal Parekh
Champaklal Dr. Srinivasa Rao
000 - Humans in Universe, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
closed-system sphere, it apparently became scientifically manifest that there is a
fundamental inadequacy of life support on our planet. Until then all opinions on
--
iron, carbon, and manganese having a tensile strength of 50,000 p.s.i. as well as a
compression-resisting capability of 50.000 p.s.i. Steel has the same compression-
--
Steel brought mankind a structural-tension capability to match stone's previous
millions of years of exclusive compressional supremacy. With far higher tensile
--
witness the ever more vertical takeoff-angle capabilities manifesting hu man
comprehension of the fundamental structuring principles and their military
--
feasible to retool and redirect world industry in such a manner that within 10 years
we can have all of hu manity enjoying a sustainably higher standard of living-with
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
RAM AND manOMOHAN
SURENDRA
--
SRI RAMAKRISHNA, the God- man of modern India, was born at Kamarpukur. This village in the Hooghly District preserved during the last century the idyllic simplicity of the rural areas of Bengal. Situated far from the railway, it was untouched by the glamour of the city. It contained rice-fields, tall palms, royal banyans, a few lakes, and two cremation grounds. South of the village a stream took its leisurely course. A mango orchard dedicated by a neighbouring zemindar to the public use was frequented by the boys for their noonday sports. A highway passed through the village to the great temple of Jagannath at Puri, and the villagers, most of whom were farmers and craftsmen, entertained many passing holy men and pilgrims. The dull round of the rural life was broken by lively festivals, the observance of sacred days, religious singing, and other innocent pleasures.
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-heartedness. 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."
--
Gadadhar was seven years old when his father died. This incident profoundly affected him. For the first time the boy realized that life on earth was imper manent. Unobserved by others, he began to slip into the mango orchard or into one of the cremation grounds, and he spent hours absorbed in his own thoughts. He also became more helpful to his mother in the discharge of her household duties. He gave more attention to reading and hearing the religious stories recorded in the Puranas. And he became interested in the wandering monks and pious pilgrims who would stop at Kamarpukur on their way to Puri. These holy men, the custodians of India's spiritual heritage and the living witnesses of the ideal of renunciation of the world and all-absorbing love of God, entertained the little boy with stories from the Hindu epics, stories of saints and prophets, and also stories of their own adventures. He, on his part, fetched their water and fuel and
served them in various ways. Meanwhile, he was observing their meditation and worship.
At the age of nine Gadadhar was invested with the sacred thread. This ceremony conferred upon him the privileges of his brahmin lineage, including the worship of the Family Deity, Raghuvir, and imposed upon him the many strict disciplines of a brahmin's life. During the ceremony of investiture he shocked his relatives by accepting a meal cooked by his nurse, a sudra wo man. His father would never have dreamt of doing such a thing But in a playful mood Gadadhar had once promised this wo man that he would eat her food, and now he fulfilled his plighted word. The wo man had piety and religious sincerity, and these were more important to the boy than the conventions of society.
Gadadhar was now permitted to worship Raghuvir. Thus began his first training in meditation. He so gave his heart and soul to the worship that the stone image very soon appeared to him as the living Lord of the Universe. His tendency to lose himself in contemplation was first noticed at this time. Behind his boyish light-heartedness was seen a deepening of his spiritual nature.
--
Gadadhar himself now organized a dramatic company with his young friends. The stage was set in the mango orchard. The themes were selected from the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Gadadhar knew by heart almost all the roles, having heard them from professional actors. His favourite theme was the Vrindavan episode of Krishna's life, depicting those exquisite love-stories of Krishna and the milkmaids and the cowherd boys. Gadadhar would play the parts of Radha or Krishna and would often lose himself in the character he was portraying. His natural feminine grace heightened the dramatic effect. The mango orchard would ring with the loud kirtan of the boys. Lost in song and merry-making, Gadadhar became indifferent to the routine of school.
In 1849 Ramkumar, the eldest son, went to Calcutta to improve the financial condition of the family.
--
The Christian missionaries gave the finishing touch to the process of transformation. They ridiculed as relics of a barbarous age the images and rituals of the Hindu religion. They tried to persuade India that the teachings of her saints and seers were the cause of her downfall, that her Vedas, Puranas, and other scriptures were filled with superstition. Christianity, they maintained, had given the white races position and power in this world and assurance of happiness in the next; therefore Christianity was the best of all religions. many intelligent young Hindus became converted. The man in the street was confused. The majority of the educated grew materialistic in their mental outlook. Everyone living near Calcutta or the other strong-holds of Western culture, even those who attempted to cling to the orthodox traditions of Hindu society, became infected by the new uncertainties and the new beliefs.
But the soul of India was to be resuscitated through a spiritual awakening. We hear the first call of this renascence in the spirited retort of the young Gadadhar: "Brother, what shall I do with a mere bread-winning education?"
Ramkumar could hardly understand the import of his young brother's reply. He described in bright colours the happy and easy life of scholars in Calcutta society. But Gadadhar intuitively felt that the scholars, to use one of his own vivid illustrations, were like so many vultures, soaring high on the wings of their uninspired intellect, with their eyes fixed on the charnel-pit of greed and lust. So he stood firm and Ramkumar had to give way.
--- KALI TEMPLE AT DAKSHINESWAR
At that time there lived in Calcutta a rich widow named Rani Ras mani, belonging to the sudra caste, and known far and wide not only for her business ability, courage, and intelligence, but also for her largeness of heart, piety, and devotion to God. She was assisted in the management of her vast property by her son-in-law Mathur Mohan.
In 1847 the Rani purchased twenty acres of land at Dakshineswar, a village about four miles north of Calcutta. Here she created a temple garden and constructed several temples. Her Ishta, or Chosen Ideal, was the Divine Mother, Kali.
--
Within a very short time Sri Ramakrishna attracted the notice of Mathur Babu, who was impressed by the young man's religious fervour and wanted him to participate in the worship in the Kali temple. But Sri Ramakrishna loved his freedom and was indifferent to any worldly career. The profession of the priesthood in a temple founded by a rich wo man did not appeal to his mind. Further, he hesitated to take upon himself the responsibility for the ornaments and jewelry of the temple. Mathur had to wait for a suitable occasion.
At this time there came to Dakshineswar a youth of sixteen, destined to play an important role in Sri Ramakrishna's life. Hriday, a distant nephew2 of Sri Ramakrishna, hailed from Sihore, a village not far from Kamarpukur, and had been his boyhood friend. Clever, exceptionally energetic, and endowed with great presence of mind, he moved, as will be seen later, like a shadow about his uncle and was always ready to help him, even at the sacrifice of his personal comfort. He was destined to be a mute witness of many of the spiritual experiences of Sri Ramakrishna and the caretaker of his body during the stormy days of his spiritual practice. Hriday came to Dakshineswar in search of a job, and Sri Ramakrishna was glad to see him.
Unable to resist the persuasion of Mathur Babu, Sri Ramakrishna at last entered the temple service, on condition that Hriday should be asked to assist him. His first duty was to dress and decorate the image of Kali.
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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 hu man aspects of the indescribable and incomprehensible Spirit, as conceived by the finite hu man mind. They understand and appreciate hu man 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 hu man limitations, he cannot but worship God through hu man forms. He must use hu man 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 hu man 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 heart. 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 heart 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.
Ramkumar wanted Sri Ramakrishna to learn the intricate rituals of the worship of Kali. To become a priest of Kali one must undergo a special form of initiation from a qualified guru, and for Sri Ramakrishna a suitable brahmin was found. But no sooner did the brahmin speak the holy word in his ear than Sri Ramakrishna, overwhelmed with emotion, uttered a loud cry and plunged into deep concentration.
Mathur begged Sri Ramakrishna to take charge of the worship in the Kali temple. The young priest pleaded his incompetence and his ignorance of the scriptures. Mathur insisted that devotion and sincerity would more than compensate for any lack of formal knowledge and make the Divine Mother manifest Herself through the image. In the end, Sri Ramakrishna had to yield to Mathur's request. He became the priest of Kali.
In 1856 Ramkumar breathed his last. Sri Ramakrishna had already witnessed more than one death in the family. He had come to realize how imper manent is life on earth. The more he was convinced of the transitory nature of worldly things, the more eager he became to realize God, the Fountain of Immortality.
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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 earthly 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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Yet this was only a foretaste of the intense experiences to come. The first glimpse of the Divine Mother made him the more eager for Her uninterrupted vision. He wanted to see Her both in meditation and with eyes open. But the Mother began to play a teasing game of hide-and-seek with him, intensifying both his joy and his suffering. Weeping bitterly during the moments of separation from Her, he would pass into a trance and then find Her standing before him, smiling, talking, consoling, bidding him be of good cheer, and instructing him. During this period of spiritual practice he had many uncommon experiences. When he sat to meditate, he would hear strange clicking sounds in the joints of his legs, as if someone were locking them up, one after the other, to keep him motionless; and at the conclusion of his meditation he would again hear the same sounds, this time unlocking them and leaving him free to move about. He would see flashes like a swarm of fire-flies floating before his eyes, or a sea of deep mist around him, with luminous waves of molten silver. Again, from a sea of translucent mist he would behold the Mother rising, first Her feet, then Her waist, body, face, and head, finally Her whole person; he would feel Her breath and hear Her voice. Worshipping in the temple, sometimes he would become exalted, sometimes he would remain motionless as stone, sometimes he would almost collapse from excessive emotion. many of his actions, contrary to all tradition, seemed sacrilegious to the people. He would take a flower and touch it to his own head, body, and feet, and then offer it to the Goddess. Or, like a drunkard, he would reel to the throne of the Mother, touch Her chin by way of showing his affection for Her, and sing, talk, joke, laugh, and dance. Or he would take a morsel of food from the plate and hold it to Her mouth, begging Her to eat it, and would not be satisfied till he was convinced that She had really eaten. After the Mother had been put to sleep at night, from his own room he would hear Her ascending to the upper storey of the temple with the light steps of a happy girl, Her anklets jingling. Then he would discover Her standing with flowing hair. Her black form silhouetted against the sky of the night, looking at the Ganges or at the distant lights of Calcutta.
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 uncharted sea, with no earthly 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.
As his spiritual mood deepened he more and more felt himself to be a child of the Divine Mother. He learnt to surrender himself completely to Her will and let Her direct him.
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Sri Ramakrishna one day fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to Kali. This was too much for the manager of the temple garden, who considered himself responsible for the proper conduct of the worship. He reported Sri Ramakrishna's insane behaviour to Mathur Babu.
Sri Ramakrishna has described the incident: "The Divine Mother revealed to me in the Kali temple that it was She who had become everything. She showed me that everything was full of Consciousness. The image was Consciousness, the altar was Consciousness, the water-vessels were Consciousness, the door-sill was Consciousness, the marble floor was Consciousness — all was Consciousness. I found everything inside the room soaked, as it were, in Bliss — the Bliss of God. I saw a wicked man in front of the Kali temple; but in him also I saw the power of the Divine Mother vibrating. That was why I fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to the Divine Mother. I clearly perceived that all this was the Divine Mother — even the cat. The manager of the temple garden wrote to Mathur Babu saying that I was feeding the cat with the offering intended for the Divine Mother. But Mathur Babu had insight into the state of my mind. He wrote back to the manager: 'Let him do whatever he likes. You must not say anything to him.'"
One of the painful ailments from which Sri Ramakrishna suffered at this time was a burning sensation in his body, and he was cured by a strange vision. During worship in the temple, following the scriptural injunctions, he would imagine the presence of the "sinner" in himself and the destruction of this "sinner". One day he was meditating in the Panchavati, when he saw come out of him a red-eyed man of black complexion, reeling like a drunkard. Soon there emerged from him another person, of serene countenance, wearing the ochre cloth of a sannyasi and carrying in his hand a trident. The second person attacked the first and killed him with the trident. Thereafter Sri Ramakrishna was free of his pain.
About this time he began to worship God by assuming the attitude of a servant toward his master. He imitated the mood of Hanu man, the monkey chieftain of the Ramayana, the ideal servant of Rama and traditional model for this self-effacing form of devotion. When he meditated on Hanu man his movements and his way of life began to resemble those of a monkey. His eyes became restless. He lived on fruits and roots. With his cloth tied around his waist, a portion of it hanging in the form of a tail, he jumped from place to place instead of walking. And after a short while he was blessed with a vision of Sita, the divine consort of Rama, who entered his body and disappeared there with the words, "I bequeath to you my smile."
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Mathur and Rani Ras mani began to ascribe the mental ailment of Sri Ramakrishna in part, at least, to his observance of rigid continence. Thinking that a natural life would relax the tension of his nerves, they engineered a plan with two women of ill fame. But as soon as the women entered his room, Sri Ramakrishna beheld in them the manifestation of the Divine Mother of the Universe and went into samadhi uttering Her name.
--- HALADHARI
In 1858 there came to Dakshineswar a cousin of Sri Ramakrishna, Haladhari by name, who was to remain there about eight years. On account of Sri Ramakrishna's indifferent health, Mathur appointed this man to the office of priest in the Kali temple. He was a complex character, versed in the letter of the scriptures, but hardly aware of their spirit. He loved to participate in hair-splitting theological discussions and, by the measure of his own erudition, he proceeded to gauge Sri Ramakrishna. An orthodox brahmin, he thoroughly disapproved of his cousin's unorthodox actions, but he was not unimpressed by Sri Ramakrishna's purity of life, ecstatic love of God, and yearning for realization.
One day Haladhari upset Sri Ramakrishna with the statement that God is incomprehensible to the hu man mind. Sri Ramakrishna has described the great moment of doubt when he wondered whether his visions had really misled him: "With sobs I prayed to the Mother, 'Canst Thou have the heart to deceive me like this because I am a fool?' A stream of tears flowed from my eyes. Shortly afterwards I saw a volume of mist rising from the floor and filling the space before me. In the midst of it there appeared a face with flowing beard, calm, highly expressive, and fair. Fixing its gaze steadily upon me, it said solemnly, 'Remain in bhavamukha, on the threshold of relative consciousness.' This it repeated three times and then it gently disappeared in the mist, which itself dissolved. This vision reassured me."
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Hardly had he crossed the threshold of the Kali temple when he found himself again in the whirlwind. His madness reappeared tenfold. The same meditation and prayer, the same ecstatic moods, the same burning sensation, the same weeping, the same sleeplessness, the same indifference to the body and the outside world, the same divine delirium. He subjected himself to fresh disciplines in order to eradicate greed and lust, the two great impediments to spiritual progress. With a rupee in one hand and some earth in the other, he would reflect on the comparative value of these two for the realization of God, and finding them equally worthless he would toss them, with equal indifference, into the Ganges. Women he regarded as the manifestations of the Divine Mother. Never even in a dream did he feel the impulses of lust. And to root out of his mind the idea of caste superiority, he cleaned a pariahs house with his long and neglected hair. When he would sit in meditation, birds would perch on his head and peck in his hair for grains of food. Snakes would crawl over his body, and neither would be aware of the other. Sleep left him altogether. Day and night, visions flitted before him. He saw the sannyasi who had previously killed the "sinner" in him again coming out of his body, threatening him with the trident, and ordering him to concentrate on God. Or the same sannyasi would visit distant places, following a luminous path, and bring him reports of what was happening there. Sri Ramakrishna used to say later that in the case of an advanced devotee the mind itself becomes the guru, living and moving like an embodied being.
Rani Ras mani, the foundress of the temple garden, passed away in 1861. After her death her son-in-law Mathur became the sole executor of the estate. He placed himself and his resources at the disposal of Sri Ramakrishna and began to look after his physical comfort. Sri Ramakrishna later spoke of him as one of his five "suppliers of stores" appointed by the Divine Mother. Whenever a desire arose in his mind, Mathur fulfilled it without hesitation.
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Sri Ramakrishna welcomed the visitor with great respect, described to her his experiences and visions, and told her of people's belief that these were symptoms of madness. She listened to him attentively and said: "My son, everyone in this world is mad. Some are mad for money, some for creature comforts, some for name and fame; and you are mad for God." She assured him that he was passing through the almost unknown spiritual experience described in the scriptures as mahabhava, the most exalted rapture of divine love. She told him that this extreme exaltation had been described as manifesting itself through nineteen physical symptoms, including the shedding of tears, a tremor of the body, horripilation, perspiration, and a burning sensation. The Bhakti scriptures, she declared, had recorded only two instances of the experience, namely, those of Sri Radha and Sri Chaitanya.
Very soon a tender relationship sprang up between Sri Ramakrishna and the Brah mani, she looking upon him as the Baby Krishna, and he upon her as mother. Day after day she watched his ecstasy during the kirtan and meditation, his samadhi, his mad yearning; and she recognized in him a power to transmit spirituality to others. She came to the conclusion that such things were not possible for an ordinary devotee, not even for a highly developed soul. Only an Incarnation of God was capable of such spiritual manifestations. She proclaimed openly that Sri Ramakrishna, like Sri Chaitanya, was an Incarnation of God.
When Sri Ramakrishna told Mathur what the Brah mani had said about him, Mathur shook his head in doubt. He was reluctant to accept him as an Incarnation of God, an Avatar comparable to Rama, Krishna, Buddha, and Chaitanya, though he admitted Sri Ramakrishna's extraordinary spirituality. Whereupon the Brah mani asked Mathur to arrange a conference of scholars who should discuss the matter with her. He agreed to the proposal and the meeting was arranged. It was to be held in the nat mandir in front of the Kali temple.
Two famous pundits of the time were invited: Vaishnavcharan, the leader of the Vaishnava society, and Gauri. The first to arrive was Vaishnavcharan, with a distinguished company of scholars and devotees. The Brah mani, like a proud mother, proclaimed her view before him and supported it with quotations from the scriptures. As the pundits discussed the deep theological question, Sri Ramakrishna, perfectly indifferent to everything happening around him, sat in their midst like a child, immersed in his own thoughts, sometimes smiling, sometimes chewing a pinch of spices from a pouch, or again saying to Vaishnavcharan with a nudge: "Look here. Sometimes I feel like this, too." Presently Vaishnavcharan arose to declare himself in total agreement with the view of the Brah mani. He declared that Sri Ramakrishna had undoubtedly experienced mahabhava and that this was the certain sign of the rare manifestation of God in a man. The people assembled
there, especially the officers of the temple garden, were struck dumb. Sri Rama- krishna said to Mathur, like a boy: "Just fancy, he too says so! Well, I am glad to learn that after all it is not a disease."
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According to the Tantra, the Ultimate Reality is Chit, or Consciousness, which is identical with Sat, or Being, and with Ananda, or Bliss. This Ultimate Reality, Satchidananda, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute, is identical with the Reality preached in the Vedas. And man is identical with this Reality; but under the influence of maya, or illusion, he has forgotten his true nature. He takes to be real a merely apparent world of subject and object, and this error is the cause of his bondage and suffering. The goal of spiritual discipline is the rediscovery of his true identity with the divine Reality.
For the achievement of this goal the Vedanta prescribes an austere negative method of discrimination and renunciation, which can be followed by only a few individuals endowed with sharp intelligence and unshakable will-power. But Tantra takes into consideration the natural weakness of hu man beings, their lower appetites, and their love for the concrete. It combines philosophy with rituals, meditation with ceremonies, renunciation with enjoyment. The underlying purpose is gradually to train the aspirant to meditate on his identity with the Ultimate.
The average man wishes to enjoy the material objects of the world. Tantra bids him enjoy these, but at the same time discover in them the presence of God. Mystical rites are prescribed by which, slowly, the sense-objects become spiritualized and sense attraction is transformed into a love of God. So the very "bonds" of man are turned into "releasers". The very poison that kills is transmuted into the elixir of life. Outward renunciation is not necessary. Thus the aim of Tantra is to sublimate bhoga, or enjoyment into yoga, or union with Consciousness. For, according to this philosophy, the world with all its manifestations is nothing but the sport of Siva and Sakti, the Absolute and Its inscrutable Power.
The disciplines of Tantra are graded to suit aspirants of all degrees. Exercises are prescribed for people with "animal", "heroic", and "divine" outlooks. Certain of the rites require the presence of members of the opposite sex. Here the aspirant learns to look on wo man as the embodiment of the Goddess Kali, the Mother of the Universe. The very basis of Tantra is the Motherhood of God and the glorification of wo man. Every part of a wo man's body is to be regarded as incarnate Divinity. But the rites are extremely dangerous. The help of a qualified guru is absolutely necessary. An unwary devotee may lose his foothold and fall into a pit of depravity.
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Sri Ramakrishna set himself to the task of practising the disciplines of Tantra; and at the bidding of the Divine Mother Herself he accepted the Brah mani as his guru. He performed profound and delicate ceremonies in the Panchavati and under the bel-tree at the northern extremity of the temple compound. He practised all the disciplines of the sixty-four principal Tantra books, and it took him never more than three days to achieve the result promised in any one of them. After the observance of a few preliminary rites, he would be overwhelmed with a strange divine fervour and would go into samadhi, where his mind would dwell in exaltation. Evil ceased to exist for him. The word "carnal" lost its meaning. The whole world and everything in it appeared as the lila, the sport, of Siva and Sakti. He beheld held everywhere manifest the power and beauty of the Mother; the whole world, animate and inanimate, appeared to him as pervaded with Chit, Consciousness, and with Ananda, Bliss.
He saw in a vision the Ultimate Cause of the universe as a huge luminous triangle giving birth every moment to an infinite number of worlds. He heard the Anahata Sabda, the great sound Om, of which the innumerable sounds of the universe are only so many echoes. He acquired the eight supernatural powers of yoga, which make a man almost omnipotent, and these he spurned as of no value whatsoever to the Spirit. He had a vision of the divine Maya, the inscrutable Power of God, by which the universe is created and sustained, and into which it is finally absorbed. In this vision he saw a wo man of exquisite beauty, about to become a mother, emerging from the Ganges and slowly approaching the Panchavati. Presently she gave birth to a child and began to nurse it tenderly. A moment later she assumed a terrible aspect, seized the child with her grim jaws, and crushed it. Swallowing it, she re-entered the waters of the Ganges.
But the most remarkable experience during this period was the awakening of the Kundalini Sakti, the "Serpent Power". He actually saw the Power, at first lying asleep at the bottom of the spinal column, then waking up and ascending along the mystic Sushumna canal and through its six centres, or lotuses, to the Sahasrara, the thousand-petalled lotus in the top of the head. He further saw that as the Kundalini went upward the different lotuses bloomed. And this phenomenon was accompanied by visions and trances. Later on he described to his disciples and devotees the various movements of the Kundalini: the fishlike, birdlike, monkeylike, and so on. The awaken- ing of the Kundalini is the beginning of spiritual consciousness, and its union with Siva in the Sahasrara, ending in samadhi, is the consummation of the Tantrik disciplines.
About this time it was revealed to him that in a short while many devotees would seek his guidance.
--- VAISHNAVA DISCIPLINES
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Vaishnavism is exclusively a religion of bhakti. Bhakti is intense love of God, attachment to Him alone; it is of the nature of bliss and bestows upon the lover immortality and liberation. God, according to Vaishnavism, cannot be realized through logic or reason; and, without bhakti, all penances, austerities and rites are futile. man cannot realize God by self-exertion alone. For the vision of God His grace is absolutely necessary, and this grace is felt by the pure of heart. The mind is to be purified through bhakti. The pure mind then remains for ever immersed in the ecstasy of God-vision. It is the cultivation of this divine love that is the chief concern of the Vaishnava religion.
There are three kinds of formal devotion: tamasic, rajasic, and sattvic. If a person, while showing devotion, to God, is actuated by malevolence, arrogance, jealousy, or anger, then his devotion is tamasic, since it is influenced by tamas, the quality of inertia. If he worships God from a desire for fame or wealth, or from any other worldly ambition, then his devotion is rajasic, since it is influenced by rajas, the quality of activity. But if a person loves God without any thought of material gain, if he performs his duties to please God alone and maintains toward all created beings the attitude of friendship, then his devotion is called sattvic, since it is influenced by sattva, the quality of harmony. But the highest devotion transcends the three gunas, or qualities, being a spontaneous, uninterrupted inclination of the mind toward God, the Inner Soul of all beings; and it wells up in the heart of a true devotee as soon as he hears the name of God or mention of God's attributes. A devotee possessed of this love would not accept the happiness of heaven if it were offered him. His one desire is to love God under all conditions — in pleasure and pain, life and death, honour and dishonour, prosperity and adversity.
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While practising the discipline of the madhur bhava, the male devotee often regards himself as a wo man, 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 wo man, he can get rid of the desires peculiar to his male body. Again, the idea that he is a wo man may in turn be made to give way to another higher idea, namely, that he is neither man nor wo man, 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.
A beautiful expression of the Vaishnava worship of God through love is to be found in the Vrindavan episode of the Bhagavata. The gopis, or milk-maids, of Vrindavan regarded the six-year-old Krishna as their Beloved. They sought no personal gain or happiness from this love. They surrendered to Krishna their bodies, minds, and souls. Of all the gopis, Radhika, or Radha, because of her intense love for Him, was the closest to Krishna. She manifested mahabhava and was united with her Beloved. This union represents, through sensuous language, a supersensuous experience.
Sri Chaitanya, also known as Gauranga, Gora, or Nimai, born in Bengal in 1485 and regarded as an Incarnation of God, is a great prophet of the Vaishnava religion. Chaitanya declared the chanting of God's name to be the most efficacious spiritual discipline for the Kaliyuga.
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Now one with Radha, he manifested the great ecstatic love, the mahabhava, which had found in her its fullest expression. Later Sri Ramakrishna said: "The manifestation in the same individual of the nineteen different kinds of emotion for God is called, in the books on bhakti, mahabhava. An ordinary man takes a whole lifetime to express even a single one of these. But in this body [meaning himself] there has been a complete manifestation of all nineteen."
The love of Radha is the precursor of the resplendent vision of Sri Krishna, and Sri Ramakrishna soon experienced that vision. The enchanting ing form of Krishna appeared to him and merged in his person. He became Krishna; he totally forgot his own individuality and the world; he saw Krishna in himself and in the universe. Thus he attained to the fulfilment of the worship of the Personal God. He drank from the fountain of Immortal Bliss. The agony of his heart vanished forever. He realized Amrita, Immortality, beyond the shadow of death.
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Totapuri was the bearer of a philosophy new to Sri Ramakrishna, the non-dualistic Vedanta philosophy, whose conclusions Totapuri had experienced in his own life. This ancient Hindu system designates the Ultimate Reality as Brah man, also described as Satchidananda, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Brah man is the only Real Existence. In It there is no time, no space, no causality, no multiplicity. But through maya, Its inscrutable Power, time, space, and causality are created and the One appears to break into the many. The eternal Spirit appears as a manifold of individuals endowed with form and subject to the conditions of time. The Immortal becomes a victim of birth and death. The Changeless undergoes change. The sinless Pure Soul, hypnotized by Its own maya, experiences the joys of heaven and the pains of hell. But these experiences based on the duality of the subject-object relationship are unreal. Even the vision of a Personal God
is, ultimately speaking, as illusory as the experience of any other object. man attains his liberation, therefore, by piercing the veil of maya and rediscovering his total identity with Brah man. Knowing himself to be one with the Universal Spirit, he realizes ineffable Peace. Only then does he go beyond the fiction of birth and death; only then does he become immortal. 'And this is the ultimate goal of all religions — to dehypnotize the soul now hypnotized by its own ignorance.
The path of the Vedantic discipline is the path of negation, "neti", in which, by stern determination, all that is unreal is both negated and renounced. It is the path of jnana, knowledge, the direct method of realizing the Absolute. After the negation of everything relative, including the discriminating ego itself, the aspirant merges in the One without a Second, in the bliss of nirvikalpa samadhi, where subject and object are alike dissolved. The soul goes beyond the realm of thought. The domain of duality is transcended. Maya is left behind with all its changes and modifications. The Real man towers above the delusions of creation, preservation, and destruction. An avalanche of indescribable Bliss sweeps away all relative ideas of pain and pleasure, good and evil. There shines in the heart the glory of the Eternal Brah man, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Knower, knowledge, and known are dissolved in the Ocean of one eternal Consciousness; love, lover, and beloved merge in the unbounded Sea of supreme Felicity; birth, growth, and death vanish in infinite Existence. All doubts and misgivings are quelled for ever; the oscillations of the mind are stopped; the momentum of past actions is exhausted. Breaking down the ridge-pole of the tabernacle in which the soul has made its abode for untold ages, stilling the body, calming the mind, drowning the ego, the sweet joy of Brah man wells up in that superconscious state. Space disappears into nothingness, time is swallowed in eternity, and causation becomes a dream of the past. Only Existence is. Ah! Who can describe what the soul then feels in its communion with the Self?
Even when man descends from this dizzy height, he is devoid of ideas of "I" and "mine"; he looks on the body as a mere shadow, an outer sheath encasing the soul. He does not dwell on the past, takes no thought for the future, and looks with indifference on the present. He surveys everything in the world with an eye of equality; he is no longer touched by the infinite variety of phenomena; he no longer reacts to pleasure and pain. He remains unmoved whether he — that is to say, his body — is worshipped by the good or tormented by the wicked; for he realizes that it is the one Brah man that manifests Itself through everything. The impact of such an experience devastates the body and mind. Consciousness becomes blasted, as it were, with an excess of Light. In the Vedanta books it is said that after the experience of nirvikalpa samadhi the body drops off like a dry leaf. Only those who are born with a special mission for the world can return
from this height to the valleys of normal life. They live and move in the world for the welfare of mankind. They are invested with a supreme spiritual power. A divine glory shines through them.
--- TOTAPURI
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On the appointed day, in the small hours of the morning, a fire was lighted in the Panchavati. Totapuri and Sri Ramakrishna sat before it. The flame played on their faces. "Ramakrishna was a small brown man with a short beard and beautiful eyes, long dark eyes, full of light, obliquely set and slightly veiled, never very wide open, but seeing half-closed a great distance both outwardly and inwardly. His mouth was open over his white teeth in a bewitching smile, at once affectionate and mischievous. Of medium height, he was thin to emaciation and extremely delicate. His temperament was high-strung, for he was supersensitive to all the winds of joy and sorrow, both moral and physical. He was indeed a living reflection of all that happened before the mirror of his eyes, a two-sided mirror, turned both out and in." (Romain Rolland, Prophets of the New India, pp. 38-9.) Facing him, the other rose like a rock. He was very tall and robust, a sturdy and tough oak. His constitution and mind were of iron. He was the strong leader of men.
In the burning flame before him Sri Ramakrishna performed the rituals of destroying his attachment to relatives, friends, body, mind, sense-organs, ego, and the world. The leaping flame swallowed it all, making the initiate free and pure. The sacred thread and the tuft of hair were consigned to the fire, completing his severance from caste, sex, and society. Last of all he burnt in that fire, with all that is holy as his witness, his desire for enjoyment here and hereafter. He uttered the sacred mantras giving assurance of safety and fearlessness to all beings, who were only manifestations of his own Self. The rites completed, the disciple received from the guru the loin-cloth and ochre robe, the emblems of his new life.
The teacher and the disciple repaired to the meditation room near by. Totapuri began to impart to Sri Ramakrishna the great truths of Vedanta.
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Totapuri had no idea of the struggles of ordinary men in the toils of passion and desire. Having maintained all through life the guilelessness of a child, he laughed at the idea of a man's being led astray by the senses. He was convinced that the world was maya and had only to be denounced to vanish for ever. A born non-dualist, he had no faith in a Personal God. He did not believe in the terrible aspect of Kali, much less in Her benign aspect. Music and the chanting of God's holy name were to him only so much nonsense. He ridiculed the spending of emotion on the worship of a Personal God.
--- KALI AND MAYA
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Thus, after nirvikalpa samadhi, Sri Ramakrishna realized maya in an altogether new role. The binding aspect of Kali vanished from before his vision. She no longer obscured his understanding. The world became the glorious manifestation of the Divine Mother. Maya became Brah man. The Transcendental Itself broke through the Im manent. Sri Ramakrishna discovered that maya operates in the relative world in two ways, and he termed these "avidyamaya" and "vidyamaya". Avidyamaya represents the dark forces of creation: sensuous desires, evil passions, greed, lust, cruelty, and so on. It sustains the world system on the lower planes. It is responsible for the round of man's birth and death. It must be fought and vanquished. But vidyamaya is the higher force of creation: the spiritual virtues, the enlightening qualities, kindness, purity, love, devotion. Vidyamaya elevates man to the higher planes of consciousness. With the help of vidyamaya the devotee rids himself of avidyamaya; he then becomes mayatita, free of maya. The two aspects of maya are the two forces of creation, the two powers of Kali; and She stands beyond them both. She is like the effulgent sun, bringing into existence and shining through and standing behind the clouds of different colours and shapes, conjuring up wonderful forms in the blue autumn heaven.
The Divine Mother asked Sri Ramakrishna not to be lost in the featureless Absolute but to remain, in bhavamukha, on the threshold of relative consciousness, the border line between the Absolute and the Relative. He was to keep himself at the "sixth centre" of Tantra, from which he could see not only the glory of the seventh, but also the divine manifestations of the Kundalini in the lower centres. He gently oscillated back and forth across the dividing line. Ecstatic devotion to the Divine Mother alternated with serene absorption in the Ocean of Absolute Unity. He thus bridged the gulf between the Personal and the Impersonal, the im manent and the transcendent aspects of Reality. This is a unique experience in the recorded spiritual history of the world.
--- TOTAPURI'S LESSON
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One day, when guru and disciple were engaged in an animated discussion about Vedanta, a servant of the temple garden came there and took a coal from the sacred fire that had been lighted by the great ascetic. He wanted it to light his tobacco. Totapuri flew into a rage and was about to beat the man. Sri Ramakrishna rocked with laughter. "What a shame!" he cried. "You are explaining to me the reality of Brah man and the illusoriness of the world; yet now you have so far forgotten yourself as to be about to beat a man in a fit of passion. The power of maya is indeed inscrutable!" Totapuri was embarrassed.
About this time Totapuri was suddenly laid up with a severe attack of dysentery. On account of this miserable illness he found it impossible to meditate. One night the pain became excruciating. He could no longer concentrate on Brah man. The body stood in the way. He became incensed with its de mands. A free soul, he did not at all care for the body. So he determined to drown it in the Ganges. Thereupon he walked into the river. But, lo! He walks to the other bank." (This version of the incident is taken from the biography of Sri Ramakrishna by Swami Saradananda, one of the Master's direct disciples.) Is there not enough water in the Ganges? Standing dumbfounded on the other bank he looks back across the water. The trees, the temples, the houses, are silhouetted against the sky. Suddenly, in one dazzling moment, he sees on all sides the presence of the Divine Mother. She is in everything; She is everything. She is in the water; She is on land. She is the body; She is the mind. She is pain; She is comfort. She is knowledge; She is ignorance. She is life; She is death. She is everything that one sees, hears, or imagines. She turns "yea" into "nay", and "nay" into "yea". Without Her grace no embodied being can go beyond Her realm. man has no free will. He is not even free to die. Yet, again, beyond the body and mind She resides in Her Transcendental, Absolute aspect. She is the Brah man that Totapuri had been worshipping all his life.
Totapuri returned to Dakshineswar and spent the remaining hours of the night meditating on the Divine Mother. In the morning he went to the Kali temple with Sri Ramakrishna and prostrated himself before the image of the Mother. He now realized why he had spent eleven months at Dakshineswar. Bidding farewell to the disciple, he continued on his way, enlightened.
--
From now on Sri Ramakrishna began to seek the company of devotees and holy men. He had gone through the storm and stress of spiritual disciplines and visions. Now he realized an inner calmness and appeared to others as a normal person. But he could not bear the company of worldly people or listen to their talk. Fortunately the holy atmosphere of Dakshineswar and the liberality of Mathur attracted monks and holy men from all parts of the country. Sadhus of all denominations — monists and dualists, Vaishnavas and Vedantists, Saktas and worshippers of Rama — flocked there in ever increasing numbers. Ascetics and visionaries came to seek Sri Ramakrishna's advice. Vaishnavas had come during the period of his Vaishnava sadhana, and Tantriks when he practised the disciplines of Tantra. Vedantists began to arrive after the departure of Totapuri. In the room of Sri Ramakrishna, who was then in bed with dysentery, the Vedantists engaged in scriptural discussions, and, forgetting his own physical suffering, he solved their doubts by referring directly to his own experiences. many of the visitors were genuine spiritual souls, the unseen pillars of Hinduism, and their spiritual lives were quickened in no small measure by the sage of Dakshineswar. Sri Ramakrishna in turn learnt from them anecdotes concerning the ways and the conduct of holy men, which he subsequently narrated to his devotees and disciples. At his request Mathur provided him with large stores of food-stuffs, clothes, and so forth, for distribution among the wandering monks.
"Sri Ramakrishna had not read books, yet he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of religions and religious philosophies. This he acquired from his contacts with innumerable holy men and scholars. He had a unique power of assimilation; through meditation he made this knowledge a part of his being. Once, when he was asked by a disciple about the source of his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge, he replied; "I have not read; but I have heard the learned. I have made a garland of their knowledge, wearing it round my neck, and I have given it as an offering at the feet of the Mother."
Sri Ramakrishna used to say that when the flower blooms the bees come to it for honey of their own accord. Now many souls began to visit Dakshineswar to satisfy their spiritual hunger. He, the devotee and aspirant, became the Master. Gauri, the great scholar who had been one of the first to proclaim Sri Ramakrishna an Incarnation of God, paid the Master a visit in 1870 and with the Master's blessings renounced the world. Narayan Shastri, another great pundit, who had mastered the six systems of Hindu philosophy and had been offered a lucrative post by the Maharaja of Jaipur, met the Master and recognized in him one who had realized in life those ideals which he himself had encountered merely in books. Sri Ramakrishna initiated Narayan Shastri, at his earnest request, into the life of sannyas. Pundit Padmalochan, the court pundit of the Maharaja of Burdwan, well known for his scholarship in both the Vedanta and the Nyaya systems of philosophy, accepted the Master as an Incarnation of God. Krishnakishore, a Vedantist scholar, became devoted to the Master. And there arrived Viswanath Upadhyaya, who was to become a favourite devotee; Sri Ramakrishna always addressed him as "Captain". He was a high officer of the King of Nepal and had received the title of Colonel in recognition of his merit. A scholar of the Gita, the Bhagavata, and the Vedanta philosophy, he daily performed the worship of his Chosen Deity with great devotion. "I have read the Vedas and the other scriptures", he said. "I have also met a good many monks and devotees in different places. But it is in Sri Ramakrishna's presence that my spiritual yearnings have been fulfilled. To me he seems to be the embodiment of the truths of the scriptures."
The Knowledge of Brah man in nirvikalpa samadhi had convinced Sri Ramakrishna that the gods of the different religions are but so many readings of the Absolute, and that the Ultimate Reality could never be expressed by hu man tongue. He understood that all religions lead their devotees by differing paths to one and the same goal. Now he became eager to explore some of the alien religions; for with him understanding meant actual experience.
--- ISLAM
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Eight years later, some time in November 1874, Sri Ramakrishna was seized with an irresistible desire to learn the truth of the Christian religion. He began to listen to readings from the Bible, by Sambhu Charan Mallick, a gentle man of Calcutta and a devotee of the Master. Sri Ramakrishna became fascinated by the life and teachings of Jesus. One day he was seated in the parlour of Jadu Mallick's garden house (This expression is used throughout to translate the Bengali word denoting a rich man's country house set in a garden.) at Dakshineswar, when his eyes became fixed on a painting of the Madonna and Child. Intently watching it, he became gradually overwhelmed with divine emotion. The figures in the picture took on life, and the rays of light e manating from them entered his soul. The effect of this experience was stronger than that of the vision of Mohammed. In dismay he cried out, "O Mother! What are You doing to me?" And, breaking through the barriers of creed and religion, he entered a new realm of ecstasy. Christ possessed his soul. For three days he did not set foot in the Kali temple. On the fourth day, in the afternoon, as he was walking in the Panchavati, he saw coming toward him a person with beautiful large eyes, serene countenance, and fair skin. As the two faced each other, a voice rang out in the depths of Sri Ramakrishna's soul: "Behold the Christ, who shed His heart's blood for the redemption of the world, who suffered a sea of anguish for love of men. It is He, the Master Yogi, who is in eternal union with God. It is Jesus, Love Incarnate." The Son of man embraced the Son of the Divine Mother and merged in him. Sri Ramakrishna krishna realized his identity with Christ, as he had already realized his identity with Kali, Rama, Hanu man, Radha, Krishna, Brah man, and Mohammed. The Master went into samadhi and communed with the Brah man with attributes. Thus he experienced the truth that Christianity, too, was a path leading to God-Consciousness. Till the last moment of his life he believed that Christ was an Incarnation of God. But Christ, for him, was not the only Incarnation; there were others — Buddha, for instance, and Krishna.
--- ATTITUDE TOWARD DIFFERENT RELIGIONS
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Without being formally initiated into their doctrines, Sri Ramakrishna thus realized the ideals of religions other than Hinduism. He did not need to follow any doctrine. All barriers were removed by his overwhelming love of God. So he became a Master who could speak with authority regarding the ideas and ideals of the various religions of the world. "I have practised", said he, "all religions — Hinduism, Islam, Christianity — and I have also followed the paths of the different Hindu sects. I have found that it is the same God toward whom all are directing their steps, though along different paths. You must try all beliefs and traverse all the different ways once. Wherever I look, I see men quarrelling in the name of religion — Hindus, Mohammedans, Brahmos, Vaishnavas, and the rest. But they never reflect that He who is called Krishna is also called Siva, and bears the name of the Primal Energy, Jesus, and Allah as well — the same Rama with a thousand names. A lake has several ghats. At one the Hindus take water in pitchers and call it 'jal'; at another the Mussal mans take water in leather bags and call it pani'. At a third the Christians call it 'water'. Can we imagine that it is not 'jal', but only 'pani' or 'water'? How ridiculous! The substance is One under different names, and everyone is seeking the same substance; only climate, temperament, and name create differences. Let each man follow his own path. If he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God, peace be unto him! He will surely realize Him."
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-hearted, 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 heart. The joy was indescribable."
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On January 27, 1868, Mathur Babu with a party of some one hundred and twenty-five persons set out on a pilgrimage to the sacred places of northern India. At Vaidyanath in Behar, when the Master saw the inhabitants of a village reduced by poverty and starvation to mere skeletons, he requested his rich patron to feed the people and give each a piece of cloth. Mathur demurred at the added expense. The Master declared bitterly that he would not go on to Benares, but would live with the poor and share their miseries. He actually left Mathur and sat down with the villagers. Whereupon Mathur had to yield. On another occasion, two years later, Sri Ramakrishna showed a similar sentiment for the poor and needy. He accompanied Mathur on a tour to one of the latter's estates at the time of the collection of rents. For two years the harvests had failed and the tenants were in a state of extreme poverty. The Master asked Mathur to remit their rents, distribute help to them, and in addition give the hungry people a sumptuous feast. When Mathur grumbled, the Master said: "You are only the steward of the Divine Mother. They are the Mother's tenants. You must spend the Mother's money. When they are suffering, how can you refuse to help them? You must help them." Again Mathur had to give in. Sri Ramakrishna's sympathy for the poor sprang from his perception of God in all created beings. His sentiment was not that of the hu manist or philanthropist. To him the service of man was the same as the worship of God.
The party entered holy Benares by boat along the Ganges. When Sri Ramakrishna's eyes fell on this city of Siva, where had accumulated for ages the devotion and piety of countless worshippers, he saw it to be made of gold, as the scriptures declare. He was visibly moved. During his stay in the city he treated every particle of its earth with utmost respect. At the manikarnika Ghat, the great cremation ground of the city, he actually saw Siva, with ash-covered body and tawny matted hair, serenely approaching each funeral pyre and breathing into the ears of the corpses the mantra of liberation; and then the Divine Mother removing from the dead their bonds. Thus he realized the significance of the scriptural statement that anyone dying in Benares attains salvation through the grace of Siva. He paid a visit to Trailanga Swami, the celebrated monk, whom he later declared to be a real paramahamsa, a veritable image of Siva.
Sri Ramakrishna visited Allahabad, at the confluence of the Ganges and the Jamuna, and then proceeded to Vrindavan and Mathura, hallowed by the legends, songs, and dramas about Krishna and the gopis. Here he had numerous visions and his heart overflowed with divine emotion. He wept and said: "O Krishna! Everything here is as it was in the olden days. You alone are absent." He visited the great wo man saint, Gangamayi, regarded by Vaishnava devotees as the reincarnation of an intimate attendant of Radha. She was sixty years old and had frequent trances. She spoke of Sri Ramakrishna as an incarnation of Radha. With great difficulty he was persuaded to leave her.
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In 1872 Sarada Devi paid her first visit to her husband at Dakshineswar. Four years earlier she had seen him at Kamarpukur and had tasted the bliss of his divine company. Since then she had become even more gentle, tender, introspective, serious, and unselfish. She had heard many rumours about her husband's insanity. People had shown her pity in her misfortune. The more she thought, the more she felt that her duty was to be with him, giving him, in whatever measure she could, a wife's devoted service. She was now eighteen years old. Accompanied by her father, she arrived at Dakshineswar, having come on foot the distance of eighty miles. She had had an attack of fever on the way. When she arrived at the temple garden the Master said sorrowfully: "Ah! You have come too late. My Mathur is no longer here to look after you." Mathur had passed away the previous year.
The Master took up the duty of instructing his young wife, and this included everything from housekeeping to the Knowledge of Brah man. He taught her how to trim a lamp, how to behave toward people according to their differing temperaments, and how to conduct herself before visitors. He instructed her in the mysteries of spiritual life — prayer, meditation, japa, deep contemplation, and samadhi. The first lesson that Sarada Devi received was: "God is everybody's Beloved, just as the moon is dear to every child. Everyone has the same right to pray to Him. Out of His grace He reveals Himself to all who call upon Him. You too will see Him if you but pray to Him."
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 Brah man 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 wo man alike as Brah man. 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 Wo man". Sri Ramakrishna realized the significance of the great statement of the Upanishad: "O Lord, Thou art the wo man. 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.
--- THE "EGO" OF THE MASTER
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First, he was an Incarnation of God, a specially commissioned person, whose spiritual experiences were for the benefit of hu manity. Whereas it takes an ordinary man a whole life's struggle to realize one or two phases of God, he had in a few years realized God in all His phases.
Second, he knew that he had always been a free soul, that the various disciplines through which he had passed were really not necessary for his own liberation but were solely for the benefit of others. Thus the terms liberation and bondage were not applicable to him. As long as there are beings who consider themselves bound. God must come down to earth as an Incarnation to free them from bondage, just as a magistrate must visit any part of his district in which there is trouble.
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Second, the three great systems of thought known as Dualism, Qualified Non-dualism, and Absolute Non-dualism — Dvaita, Visishtadvaita, and Advaita — he perceived to represent three stages in man's progress toward the Ultimate Reality. They were not contradictory but complementary and suited to different temperaments. For the ordinary man with strong attachment to the senses, a dualistic form of religion, prescribing a certain amount of material support, such as music and other symbols, is useful. A man of God-realization transcends the idea of worldly duties, but the ordinary mortal must perform his duties, striving to be unattached and to surrender the results to God. The mind can comprehend and describe the range of thought and experience up to the Visishtadvaita, and no further. The Advaita, the last word in spiritual experience, is something to be felt in samadhi. for it transcends mind and speech. From the highest standpoint, the Absolute and Its manifestation are equally real — the Lord's Name, His Abode, and the Lord Himself are of the same spiritual Essence. Everything is Spirit, the difference being only in form.
Third, Sri Ramakrishna realized the wish of the Divine Mother that through him She should found a new Order, consisting of those who would uphold the universal doctrines illustrated in his life.
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During this period Sri Ramakrishna suffered several bereavements. The first was the death of a nephew named Akshay. After the young man's death Sri Ramakrishna said: "Akshay died before my very eyes. But it did not affect me in the least. I stood by and watched a man die. It was like a sword being drawn from its scabbard. I enjoyed the scene, and laughed and sang and danced over it. They removed the body and cremated it. But the next day as I stood there (pointing to the southeast verandah of his room), I felt a racking pain for the loss of Akshay, as if somebody were squeezing my heart like a wet towel. I wondered at it and thought that the Mother was teaching me a lesson. I was not much concerned even with my own body — much less with a relative. But if such was my pain at the loss of a nephew, how much more must be the grief of the householders at the loss of their near and dear ones!" In 1871 Mathur died, and some five years later Sambhu Mallick — who, after Mathur's passing away, had taken care of the Master's comfort. In 1873 died his elder brother Rameswar, and in 1876, his beloved mother. These bereavements left their imprint on the tender hu man heart of Sri Ramakrishna, albeit he had realized the immortality of the soul and the illusoriness of birth and death.
In March 1875, about a year before the death of his mother, the Master met Keshab Chandra Sen. The meeting was a momentous event for both Sri Ramakrishna and Keshab. Here the Master for the first time came into actual, contact with a worthy representative of modern India.
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The real organizer of the Samaj was Devendranath Tagore (1817-1905), the father of the poet Rabindranath. His physical and spiritual beauty, aristocratic aloofness, penetrating intellect, and poetic sensibility made him the foremost leader of the educated Bengalis. These addressed him by the respectful epithet of Maharshi, the "Great Seer". The Maharshi was a Sanskrit scholar and, unlike Raja Rammohan Roy, drew his inspiration entirely from the Upanishads. He was an implacable enemy of image worship ship and also fought to stop the infiltration of Christian ideas into the Samaj. He gave the movement its faith and ritual. Under his influence the Brahmo Samaj professed One Self-existent Supreme Being who had created the universe out of nothing, the God of Truth, Infinite Wisdom, Goodness, and Power, the Eternal and Omnipotent, the One without a Second. man should love Him and do His will, believe in Him and worship Him, and thus merit salvation in the world to come.
By far the ablest leader of the Brahmo movement was Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-1884). Unlike Raja Rammohan Roy and Devendranath Tagore, Keshab was born of a middle-class Bengali family and had been brought up in an English school. He did not know Sanskrit and very soon broke away from the popular Hindu religion. Even at an early age he came under the spell of Christ and professed to have experienced the special favour of John the Baptist, Christ, and St. Paul. When he strove to introduce Christ to the Brahmo Samaj, a rupture became inevitable with Devendranath. In 1868 Keshab broke with the older leader and founded the Brahmo Samaj of India, Devendra retaining leadership of the first Brahmo Samaj, now called the Adi Samaj.
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In 1878 a schism divided Keshab's Samaj. Some of his influential followers accused him of infringing the Brahmo principles by marrying his daughter to a wealthy man before she had attained the marriageable age approved by the Samaj. This group seceded and established the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Keshab remaining the leader of the Navavidhan. Keshab now began to be drawn more and more toward the Christ ideal, though under the influence of Sri Ramakrishna his devotion to the Divine Mother also deepened. His mental oscillation between Christ and the Divine Mother of Hinduism found no position of rest. In Bengal and some other parts of India the Brahmo movement took the form of unitarian Christianity, scoffed at Hindu rituals, and preached a crusade against image worship. Influenced by Western culture, it declared the supremacy of reason, advocated the ideals of the French Revolution, abolished the caste-system among its own members, stood for the e mancipation of women, agitated for the abolition of early marriage, sanctioned the remarriage of widows, and encouraged various educational and social-reform movements. The immediate effect of the Brahmo movement in Bengal was the checking of the proselytizing activities of the Christian missionaries. It also raised Indian culture in the estimation of its English masters. But it was an intellectual and eclectic religious ferment born of the necessity of the time. Unlike Hinduism, it was not founded on the deep inner experiences of sages and prophets. Its influence was confined to a comparatively few educated men and women of the country, and the vast masses of the Hindus remained outside it. It sounded monotonously only one of the notes in the rich gamut of the Eternal Religion of the Hindus.
--- ARYA SAMAJ
The other movement playing an important part in the nineteenth-century religious revival of India was the Arya Samaj. The Brahmo Samaj, essentially a movement of compromise with European culture, tacitly admitted the superiority of the West. But the founder of the Arya Samaj was a ' pugnacious Hindu sannyasi who accepted the challenge of Islam and Christianity and was resolved to combat all foreign influence in India. Swami Dayananda (1824-1883) launched this movement in Bombay in 1875, and soon its influence was felt throughout western India. The Swami was a great scholar of the Vedas, which he explained as being strictly monotheistic. He preached against the worship of images and re-established the ancient Vedic sacrificial rites. According to him the Vedas were the ultimate authority on religion, and he accepted every word of them as literally true. The Arya Samaj became a bulwark against the encroachments of Islam and Christianity, and its orthodox flavour appealed to many Hindu minds. It also assumed leadership in many movements of social reform. The caste-system became a target of its attack. Women it liberated from many of their social disabilities. The cause of education received from it a great impetus. It started agitation against early marriage and advocated the remarriage of Hindu widows. Its influence was strongest in the Punjab, the battle-ground of the Hindu and Islamic cultures. A new fighting attitude was introduced into the slumbering Hindu society. Unlike the Brahmo Samaj, the influence of the Arya Samaj was not confined to the intellectuals. It was a force that spread to the masses. It was a dogmatic movement intolerant of those who disagreed with its views, and it emphasized only one way, the Arya Samaj way, to the realization of Truth. Sri Ramakrishna met Swami Dayananda when the latter visited Bengal.
--- KESHAB CHANDRA SEN
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 apart, 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.
Keshab's sincerity was enough for Sri Ramakrishna. Henceforth the two saw each other frequently, either at Dakshineswar or at the temple of the Brahmo Samaj. Whenever the Master was in the temple at the time of divine service, Keshab would request him to speak to the congregation. And Keshab would visit the saint, in his turn, with offerings of flowers and fruits.
--
Shivanath, one day, was greatly impressed by the Master's utter simplicity and abhorrence of praise. He was seated with Sri Ramakrishna in the latter's room when several rich men of Calcutta arrived. The Master left the room for a few minutes. In the mean time Hriday, his nephew, began to describe his samadhi to the visitors. The last few words caught the Master's ear as he entered the room. He said to Hriday: "What a mean-spirited fellow you must be to extol me thus before these rich men! You have seen their costly apparel and their gold watches and chains, and your object is to get from them as much money as you can. What do I care about what they think of me? (Turning to the gentlemen) No, my friends, what he has told you about me is not true. It was not love of God that made me absorbed in God and indifferent to external life. I became positively insane for some time. The sadhus who frequented this temple told me to practise many things. I tried to follow them, and the consequence was that my austerities drove me to insanity." This is a quotation from one of Shivanath's books. He took the Master's words literally and failed to see their real import.
Shivanath vehemently criticized the Master for his other-worldly attitude toward his wife. He writes: "Ramakrishna was practically separated from his wife, who lived in her village home. One day when I was complaining to some friends about the virtual widowhood of his wife, he drew me to one side and whispered in my ear: 'Why do you complain? It is no longer possible; it is all dead and gone.' Another day as I was inveighing against this part of his teaching, and also declaring that our program of work in the Brahmo Samaj includes women, that ours is a social and domestic religion, and that we want to give education and social liberty to women, the saint became very much excited, as was his way when anything against his settled conviction was asserted — a trait we so much liked in him — and exclaimed, 'Go, thou fool, go and perish in the pit that your women will dig for you.' Then he glared at me and said: 'What does a gardener do with a young plant? Does he not surround it with a fence, to protect it from goats and cattle? And when the young plant has grown up into a tree and it can no longer be injured by cattle, does he not remove the fence and let the tree grow freely?' I replied, 'Yes, that is the custom with gardeners.' Then he remarked, 'Do the same in your spiritual life; become strong, be full-grown; then you may seek them.' To which I replied, 'I don't agree with you in thinking that women's work is like that of cattle, destructive; they are our associates and helpers in our spiritual struggles and social progress' — a view with which he could not agree, and he marked his dissent by shaking his head. Then referring to the lateness of the hour he jocularly remarked, 'It is time for you to depart; take care, do not be late; otherwise your wo man will not admit you into her room.' This evoked hearty laughter."
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 Quarterly 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 per manent 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 hearts 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 perfor mance of one's duties without thought of results, and discrimination between the Real and the unreal.
This contact with the educated and progressive Bengalis opened Sri Ramakrishna's eyes to a new realm of thought. Born and brought up in a simple village, without any formal education, and taught by the orthodox holy men of India in religious life, he had had no opportunity to study the influence of modernism on the thoughts and lives of the Hindus. He could not properly estimate the result of the impact of Western education on Indian culture. He was a Hindu of the Hindus, renunciation being to him the only means to the realization of God in life. From the Brahmos he learnt that the new generation of India made a compromise between God and the world. Educated young men were influenced more by the Western philosophers than by their own prophets. But Sri Ramakrishna was not dismayed, for he saw in this, too, the hand of God. And though he expounded to the Brahmos all his ideas about God and austere religious disciplines, yet he bade them accept from his teachings only as much as suited their tastes and temperaments.
^The term "wo man and gold", which has been used throughout in a collective sense, occurs again and again in the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna to designate the chief impediments to spiritual progress. This favourite expression of the Master, "kaminikanchan", has often been misconstrued. By it he meant only "lust and greed", the baneful influence of which retards the aspirant's spiritual growth. He used the word "kamini", or "wo man", as a concrete term for the sex instinct when addressing his man devotees. He advised women, on the other hand, to shun " man". "Kanchan", or "gold", symbolizes greed, which is the other obstacle to spiritual life.
Sri Ramakrishna never taught his disciples to hate any wo man, or wo mankind in general. This can be seen clearly by going through all his teachings under this head and judging them collectively. The Master looked on all women as so many images of the Divine Mother of the Universe. He paid the highest homage to wo mankind by accepting a wo man as his guide while practising the very profound spiritual disciplines of Tantra. His wife, known and revered as the Holy Mother, was his constant companion and first disciple. At the end of his spiritual practice he literally worshipped his wife as the embodiment of the Goddess Kali, the Divine Mother. After his passing away the Holy Mother became the spiritual guide not only of a large number of householders, but also of many monastic members of the Ramakrishna Order.
--- THE MASTER'S YEARNING FOR HIS OWN DEVOTEES
Contact with the Brahmos increased Sri Ramakrishna's longing to encounter aspirants who would be able to follow his teachings in their purest form. "There was no limit", he once declared, "to the longing I felt at that time. During the day-time I somehow managed to control it. The secular talk of the worldly-minded was galling to me, and I would look wistfully to the day when my own beloved companions would come. I hoped to find solace in conversing with them and relating to them my own realizations. Every little incident would remind me of them, and thoughts of them wholly engrossed me. I was already arranging in my mind what I should say to one and give to another, and so on. But when the day would come to a close I would not be able to curb my feelings. The thought that another day had gone by, and they had not come, oppressed me. When, during the evening service, the temples rang with the sound of bells and conch-shells, I would climb to the roof of the kuthi in the garden and, writhing in anguish of heart, cry at the top of my voice: 'Come, my children! Oh, where are you? I cannot bear to live without you.' A mother never longed so intensely for the sight of her child, nor a friend for his companions, nor a lover for his sweetheart, as I longed for them. Oh, it was indescribable! Shortly after this period of yearning the devotees1 began to come."
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
--
--- RAM AND manOMOHAN
The first two householder devotees to come to Dakshineswar were Ramchandra Dutta and manomohan Mitra. A medical practitioner and chemist, Ram was sceptical about God and religion and never enjoyed peace of soul. He wanted tangible proof of God's existence. The Master said to him: "God really" exists. You don't see the stars in the day-time, but that doesn't mean that the stars do not exist. There is butter in milk. But can anybody see it by merely looking at the milk? To get butter you must churn milk in a quiet and cool place. You cannot realize God by a mere wish; you must go through some mental disciplines." By degrees the Master awakened Ram's spirituality and the latter became one of his foremost lay disciples. It was Ram who introduced Narendranath to Sri Ramakrishna. Narendra was a relative of Ram.
manomohan at first met with considerable opposition from his wife and other relatives, who resented his visits to Dakshineswar. But in the end the unselfish love of the Master triumphed over worldly affection. It was manomohan who brought Rakhal to the Master.
--- SURENDRA
Suresh Mitra, a beloved disciple whom the Master often addressed as Surendra, had received an English education and held an important post in an English firm. Like many other educated young men of the time, he prided himself on his atheism and led a Bohemian life. He was addicted to drinking. He cherished an exaggerated notion about man's free will. A victim of mental depression, he was brought to Sri Ramakrishna by Ramchandra chandra Dutta. When he heard the Master asking a disciple to practise the virtue of self-surrender to God, he was impressed. But though he tried thenceforth to do so, he was unable to give up his old associates and his drinking. One day the Master said in his presence, "Well, when a man goes to an undesirable place, why doesn't he take the Divine Mother with him?" And to Surendra himself Sri Ramakrishna said: "Why should you drink wine as wine? Offer it to Kali, and then take it as Her prasad, as consecrated drink
. But see that you don't become intoxicated; you must not reel and your thoughts must not wander. At first you will feel ordinary excitement, but soon you will experience spiritual exaltation." Gradually Surendra's entire life was changed. The Master designated him as one of those commissioned by the Divine Mother to defray a great part of his expenses. Surendra's purse was always open for the Master's comfort.
--
Harish, a young man in affluent circumstances, renounced his family and took shelter with the Master, who loved him for his sincerity, singleness of purpose, and quiet nature. He spent his leisure time in prayer and meditation, turning a deaf ear to the entreaties and threats of his relatives. Referring to his undisturbed peace of mind, the Master would say: "Real men are dead to the world though living. Look at Harish. He is an example." When one day the Master asked him to be a little kind to his wife, Harish said: "You must excuse me on this point. This is not the place to show kindness. If I try to be sympathetic to her, there is a possibility of my forgetting the ideal and becoming entangled in the world."
--- BHAVANATH
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Balaram Bose came of a wealthy Vaishnava family. From his youth he had shown a deep religious temperament and had devoted his time to meditation, prayer, and the study of the Vaishnava scriptures. He was very much impressed by Sri Ramakrishna even at their first meeting. He asked Sri Ramakrishna whether God really existed and, if so, whether a man could realize Him. The Master said: "God reveals Himself to the devotee who thinks of Him as his nearest and dearest. Because you do not draw response by praying to Him once, you must not conclude that He does not exist. Pray to God, thinking of Him as dearer than your very self. He is much attached to His devotees. He comes to a man even before He is sought. There is none more intimate and affectionate than God." Balaram had never before heard God spoken of in such forceful words; every one of the words seemed true to him. Under the Master's influence he outgrew the conventions of the Vaishnava worship and became one of the most beloved of the disciples. It was at his home that the Master slept whenever he spent a night in Calcutta.
--- MAHENDRA OR M.
Mahendranath Gupta, better known as "M.", arrived at Dakshineswar in March 1882. He belonged to the Brahmo Samaj and was headmaster of the Vidyasagar High School at Syambazar, Calcutta. At the very first sight the Master recognized him as one of his "marked" disciples. Mahendra recorded in his diary Sri Ramakrishna's conversations with his devotees. These are the first directly recorded words, in the spiritual history of the world, of a man recognized as belonging in the class of Buddha and Christ. The present volume is a translation of this diary. Mahendra was instrumental, through his personal contacts, in spreading the Master's message among many young and aspiring souls.
--- NAG MAHASHAY
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Girish Chandra Ghosh was a born rebel against God, a sceptic, a Bohemian, a drunkard. He was the greatest Bengali dramatist of his time, the father of the modem Bengali stage. Like other young men he had imbibed all the vices of the West. He had plunged into a life of dissipation and had become convinced that religion was only a fraud. Materialistic philosophy he justified as enabling one to get at least a little fun out of life. But a series of reverses shocked him and he became eager to solve the riddle of life. He had heard people say that in spiritual life the help of a guru was imperative and that the guru was to be regarded as God Himself. But Girish was too well acquainted with hu man nature to see perfection in a man. His first meeting with Sri Ramakrishna did not impress him at all. He returned home feeling as if he had seen a freak at a circus; for the Master, in a semi-conscious mood, had inquired whether it was evening, though the lamps were burning in the room. But their paths often crossed, and Girish could not avoid further encounters. The Master attended a perfor mance in Girish's Star Theatre. On this occasion, too, Girish found nothing impressive about him. One day, however, Girish happened to see the Master dancing and singing with the devotees. He felt the contagion and wanted to join them, but restrained himself for fear of ridicule. Another day Sri Ramakrishna was about to give him spiritual instruction, when Girish said: "I don't want to listen to instructions. I have myself written many instructions. They are of no use to me. Please help me in a more tangible way If you can." This pleased the Master and he asked Girish to cultivate faith.
As time passed, Girish began to learn that the guru is the one who silently unfolds the disciple's inner life. He became a steadfast devotee of the Master. He often loaded the Master with insults, drank in his presence, and took liberties which astounded the other devotees. But the Master knew that at heart Girish was tender, faithful, and sincere. He would not allow Girish to give up the theatre. And when a devotee asked him to tell Girish to give up drinking, he sternly replied: "That is none of your business. He who has taken charge of him will look after him. Girish is a devotee of heroic type. I tell you, drinking will not affect him." The Master knew that mere words could not induce a man to break deep-rooted habits, but that the silent influence of love worked miracles. Therefore he never asked him to give up alcohol, with the result that Girish himself eventually broke the habit. Sri Ramakrishna had strengthened Girish's resolution by allowing him to feel that he was absolutely free.
One day Girish felt depressed because he was unable to submit to any routine of spiritual discipline. In an exalted mood the Master said to him: "All right, give me your power of attorney. Henceforth I assume responsibility for you. You need not do anything." Girish heaved a sigh of relief. He felt happy to think that Sri Ramakrishna had assumed his spiritual responsibilities. But poor Girish could not then realize that He also, on his part, had to give up his freedom and make of himself a puppet in Sri Ramakrishna's hands. The Master began to discipline him according to this new attitude. One day Girish said about a trifling matter, "Yes, I shall do this." "No, no!" the Master corrected him. "You must not speak in that egotistic manner. You should say, 'God willing, I shall do it.'" Girish understood. Thenceforth he tried to give up all idea of personal responsibility and surrender himself to the Divine Will. His mind began to dwell constantly on Sri Ramakrishna. This unconscious meditation in time chastened his turbulent spirit.
The householder devotees generally visited Sri Ramakrishna on Sunday afternoons and other holidays. Thus a brotherhood was gradually formed, and the Master encouraged their fraternal feeling. Now and then he would accept an invitation to a devotee's home, where other devotees would also be invited. Kirtan would be arranged and they would spend hours in dance and devotional music. The Master would go into trances or open his heart in religious discourses and in the narration of his own spiritual experiences. many people who could not go to Dakshineswar participated in these meetings and felt blessed. Such an occasion would be concluded with a sumptuous feast.
But it was in the company of his younger devotees, pure souls yet unstained by the touch of worldliness, that Sri Ramakrishna took greatest joy. Among the young men who later embraced the householder's life were Narayan, Paitu, the younger Naren, Tejchandra, and Purna. These visited the Master sometimes against strong opposition from home.
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Pratap Hazra, a middle-aged man, hailed from a village near Kamarpukur. He was not altogether unresponsive to religious feelings. On a moment's impulse he had left his home, aged mother, wife, and children, and had found shelter in the temple garden at Dakshineswar, where he intended to lead a spiritual life. He loved to argue, and the Master often pointed him out as an example of barren argumentation. He was hypercritical of others and cherished an exaggerated notion of his own spiritual advancement. He was mischievous and often tried to upset the minds of the Master's young disciples, criticizing them for their happy and joyous life and asking them to devote their time to meditation. The Master teasingly compared Hazra to Jatila and Kutila, the two women who always created obstructions in Krishna's sport with the gopis, and said that Hazra lived at Dakshineswar to "thicken the plot" by adding complications.
--- SOME NOTED MEN
Sri Ramakrishna also became acquainted with a number of people whose scholarship or wealth entitled them everywhere to respect. He had met, a few years before, Devendranath Tagore, famous all over Bengal for his wealth, scholarship, saintly character, and social position. But the Master found him disappointing; for, whereas Sri Ramakrishna expected of a saint complete renunciation of the world, Devendranath combined with his saintliness a life of enjoyment. Sri Ramakrishna met the great poet Michael Madhusudan, who had embraced Christianity "for the sake of his stomach". To him the Master could not impart instruction, for the Divine Mother "pressed his tongue". In addition he met Maharaja Jatindra Mohan Tagore, a titled aristocrat of Bengal; Kristodas Pal, the editor, social reformer, and patriot; Iswar Vidyasagar, the noted philanthropist and educator; Pundit Shashadhar, a great champion of Hindu orthodoxy; Aswini Kumar Dutta, a headmaster, moralist, and leader of Indian Nationalism; and Bankim Chatterji, a deputy magistrate, novelist, and essayist, and one of the fashioners of modern Bengali prose. Sri Ramakrishna was not the man to be dazzled by outward show, glory, or eloquence. A pundit without discrimination he regarded as a mere straw. He would search people's hearts for the light of God, and if that was missing he would have nothing to do with them.
--- KRISTODAS PAL
The Europeanized Kristodas Pal did not approve of the Master's emphasis on renunciation and said; "Sir, this cant of renunciation has almost ruined the country. It is for this reason that the Indians are a subject nation today. Doing good to others, bringing education to the door of the ignorant, and above all, improving the material conditions of the country — these should be our duty now. The cry of religion and renunciation would, on the contrary, only weaken us. You should advise the young men of Bengal to resort only to such acts as will uplift the country." Sri Ramakrishna gave him a searching look and found no divine light within, "You man of poor understanding!" Sri Ramakrishna said sharply. "You dare to slight in these terms renunciation and piety, which our scriptures describe as the greatest of all virtues! After reading two pages of English you think you have come to know the world! You appear to think you are omniscient. Well, have you seen those tiny crabs that are born in the Ganges just when the rains set in? In this big universe you are even less significant than one of those small creatures. How dare you talk of helping the world? The Lord will look to that. You haven't the power in you to do it." After a pause the Master continued: "Can you explain to me how you can work for others? I know what you mean by helping them. To feed a number of persons, to treat them when they are sick, to construct a road or dig a well — isn't that all? These, are good deeds, no doubt, but how trifling in comparison with the vastness of the universe! How far can a man advance in this line? How many people can you save from famine? Malaria has ruined a whole province; what could you do to stop its onslaught? God alone looks after the world. Let a man first realize Him. Let a man get the authority from God and be endowed with His power; then, and then alone, may he think of doing good to others. A man should first be purged of all egotism. Then alone will the Blissful Mother ask him to work for the world." Sri Ramakrishna mistrusted philanthropy that presumed to pose as charity. He warned people against it. He saw in most acts of philanthropy nothing but egotism, vanity, a desire for glory, a barren excitement to kill the boredom of life, or an attempt to soothe a guilty conscience. True charity, he taught, is the result of love of God — service to man in a spirit of worship.
--- MONASTIC DISCIPLES
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Even before Rakhal's coming to Dakshineswar, the Master had had visions of him as his spiritual son and as a playmate of Krishna at Vrindavan. Rakhal was born of wealthy parents. During his childhood he developed wonderful spiritual traits and used to play at worshipping gods and goddesses. In his teens he was married to a sister of manomohan Mitra, from whom he first heard of the Master. His father objected to his association with Sri Ramakrishna but afterwards was reassured to find that many celebrated people were visitors at Dakshineswar. The relationship between the Master and this beloved disciple was that of mother and child. Sri Ramakrishna allowed Rakhal many liberties denied to others. But he would not hesitate to chastise the boy for improper actions. At one time Rakhal felt a childlike jealousy because he found that other boys were receiving the Master's affection. He soon got over it and realized his guru as the Guru of the whole universe. The Master was worried to hear of his marriage, but was relieved to find that his wife was a spiritual soul who would not be a hindrance to his progress.
--- THE ELDER GOPAL
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Narendra was born in Calcutta on January 12, 1863, of an aristocratic kayastha family. His mother was steeped in the great Hindu epics, and his father, a distinguished attorney of the Calcutta High Court, was an agnostic about religion, a friend of the poor, and a mocker at social conventions. Even in his boyhood and youth Narendra possessed great physical courage and presence of mind, a vivid imagination, deep power of thought, keen intelligence, an extraordinary memory, a love of truth, a passion for purity, a spirit of independence, and a tender heart. An expert musician, he also acquired proficiency in physics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, history, and literature. He grew up into an extremely handsome young man. Even as a child he practised meditation and showed great power of concentration. Though free and passionate in word and action, he took the vow of austere religious chastity and never allowed the fire of purity to be extinguished by the slightest defilement of body or soul.
As he read in college the rationalistic Western philosophers of the nineteenth century, his boyhood faith in God and religion was unsettled. He would not accept religion on mere faith; he wanted demonstration of God. But very soon his passionate nature discovered that mere Universal Reason was cold and bloodless. His emotional nature, dissatisfied with a mere abstraction, required a concrete support to help him in the hours of temptation. He wanted an external power, a guru, who by embodying perfection in the flesh would still the commotion of his soul. Attracted by the magnetic personality of Keshab, he joined the Brahmo Samaj and became a singer in its choir. But in the Samaj he did not find the guru who could say that he had seen God.
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When they returned to the room and Narendra heard the Master speaking to others, he was surprised to find in his words an inner logic, a striking sincerity, and a convincing proof of his spiritual nature. In answer to Narendra's question, "Sir, have you seen God?" the Master said: "Yes, I have seen God. I have seen Him more tangibly than I see you. I have talked to Him more intimately than I am talking to you." Continuing, the Master said: "But, my child, who wants to see God? People shed jugs of tears for money, wife, and children. But if they would weep for God for only one day they would surely see Him." Narendra was amazed. These words he could not doubt. This was the first time he had ever heard a man saying that he had seen God. But he could not reconcile these words of the Master with the scene that had taken place on the verandah only a few minutes before. He concluded that Sri Ramakrishna was a mono maniac, and returned home rather puzzled in mind.
During his second visit, about a month later, suddenly, at the touch of the Master, Narendra felt overwhelmed and saw the walls of the room and everything around him whirling and vanishing. "What are you doing to me?" he cried in terror. "I have my father and mother at home." He saw his own ego and the whole universe almost swallowed in a nameless void. With a laugh the Master easily restored him. Narendra thought he might have been hypnotized, but he could not understand how a mono maniac could cast a spell over the mind of a strong person like himself. He returned home more confused than ever, resolved to be henceforth on his guard before this strange man.
But during his third visit Narendra fared no better. This time, at the Master's touch, he lost consciousness entirely. While he was still in that state, Sri Ramakrishna questioned him concerning his spiritual antecedents and whereabouts, his mission in this world, and the duration of his mortal life. The answers confirmed what the Master himself had known and inferred. Among other things, he came to know that Narendra was a sage who had already attained perfection, and that the day he learnt his real nature he would give up his body in yoga, by an act of will.
A few more meetings completely removed from Narendra's mind the last traces of the notion that Sri Ramakrishna might be a mono maniac or wily hypnotist. His integrity, purity, renunciation, and unselfishness were beyond question. But Narendra could not accept a man, an imperfect mortal, as his guru. As a member of the Brahmo Samaj, he could not believe that a hu man intermediary was necessary between man and God. Moreover, he openly laughed at Sri Ramakrishna's visions as hallucinations. Yet in the secret chamber of his heart he bore a great love for the Master.
Sri Ramakrishna was grateful to the Divine Mother for sending him one who doubted his own realizations. Often he asked Narendra to test him as the money-changers test their coins. He laughed at Narendra's biting criticism of his spiritual experiences and samadhi. When at times Narendra's sharp words distressed him, the Divine Mother Herself would console him, saying: "Why do you listen to him? In a few days he will believe your every word." He could hardly bear Narendra's absences. Often he would weep bitterly for the sight of him. Sometimes Narendra would find the Master's love embarrassing; and one day he sharply scolded him, warning him that such infatuation would soon draw him down to the level of its object. The Master was distressed and prayed to the Divine Mother. Then he said to Narendra: "You rogue, I won't listen to you any more. Mother says that I love you because I see God in you, and the day I no longer see God in you I shall not be able to bear even the sight of you."
The Master wanted to train Narendra in the teachings of the non-dualistic Vedanta philosophy. But Narendra, because of his Brahmo upbringing, considered it wholly blasphemous to look on man as one with his Creator. One day at the temple garden he laughingly said to a friend: "How silly! This jug is God! This cup is God! Whatever we see is God! And we too are God! Nothing could be more absurd." Sri Ramakrishna came out of his room and gently touched him. Spellbound, he immediately perceived that everything in the world was indeed God. A new universe opened around him. Returning home in a dazed state, he found there too that the food, the plate, the eater himself, the people around him, were all God. When he walked in the street, he saw that the cabs, the horses, the streams of people, the buildings, were all Brah man. He could hardly go about his day's business. His parents became anxious about him and thought him ill. And when the intensity of the experience abated a little, he saw the world as a dream. Walking in the public square, he would strike his head against the iron railings to know whether they were real. It took him a number of days to recover his normal self. He had a foretaste of the great experiences yet to come and realized that the words of the Vedanta were true.
At the beginning of 1884 Narendra's father suddenly died of heart-failure, leaving the family in a state of utmost poverty. There were six or seven mouths to feed at home. Creditors were knocking at the door. Relatives who had accepted his father's unstinted kindness now became enemies, some even bringing suit to deprive Narendra of his ancestral home. Actually starving and barefoot, Narendra searched for a job, but without success. He began to doubt whether anywhere in the world there was such a thing as unselfish sympathy. Two rich women made evil proposals to him and promised to put an end to his distress; but he refused them with contempt.
Narendra began to talk of his doubt of the very existence of God. His friends thought he had become an atheist, and piously circulated gossip adducing unmentionable motives for his unbelief. His moral character was maligned. Even some of the Master's disciples partly believed the gossip, and Narendra told these to their faces that only a coward believed in God through fear of suffering or hell. But he was distressed to think that Sri Ramakrishna, too, might believe these false reports. His pride revolted. He said to himself: "What does it matter? If a man's good name rests on such slender foundations, I don't care." But later on he was amazed to learn that the Master had never lost faith in him. To a disciple who complained about Narendra's degradation, Sri Ramakrishna replied: "Hush, you fool! The Mother has told me it can never be so. I won't look at you if you speak that way again."
The moment came when Narendra's distress reached its climax. He had gone the whole day without food. As he was returning home in the evening he could hardly lift his tired limbs. He sat down in front of a house in sheer exhaustion, too weak even to think. His mind began to wander. Then, suddenly, a divine power lifted the veil over his soul. He found the solution of the problem of the coexistence of divine justice and misery, the presence of suffering in the creation of a blissful Providence. He felt bodily refreshed, his soul was bathed in peace, and he slept serenely.
--
Others destined to be monastic disciples of Sri Ramakrishna came to Dakshineswar. Taraknath Ghoshal had felt from his boyhood the noble desire to realize God. Keshab and the Brahmo Samaj had attracted him but proved inadequate. In 1882 he first met the Master at Ramchandra's house and was astonished to hear him talk about samadhi, a subject which always fascinated his mind. And that evening he actually saw a manifestation of that superconscious state in the Master. Tarak became a frequent visitor at Dakshineswar and received the Master's grace in abundance. The young boy often felt ecstatic fervour in meditation. He also wept profusely while meditating on God. Sri Ramakrishna said to him: "God favours those who can weep for Him. Tears shed for God wash away the sins of former births."
--- BABURAM
--
Nitya Niranjan Sen was a disciple of heroic type. He came to the Master when he was eighteen years old. He was a medium for a group of spiritualists. During his first visit the Master said to him: "My boy, if you think always of ghosts you will become a ghost, and if you think of God you will become God. Now, which do you prefer?" Niranjan severed all connexions with the spiritualists. During his second visit the Master embraced him and said warmly: "Niranjan, my boy, the days are flitting away. When will you realize God? This life will be in vain if you do not realize Him. When will you devote your mind wholly to God?" Niranjan was surprised to see the Master's great anxiety for his spiritual welfare. He was a young man endowed with unusual spiritual parts. He felt disdain for worldly pleasures and was totally guileless, like a child. But he had a violent temper. One day, as he was coming in a country boat to Dakshineswar, some of his fellow passengers began to speak ill of the Master. Finding his protest futile, Niranjan began to rock the boat, threatening to sink it in mid stream. That silenced the offenders. When he reported the incident to the Master, he was rebuked for his inability to curb his anger.
--- JOGINDRA
--
Sri Ramakrishna employed a ruse to bring Jogindra to him. As soon as the disciple entered the room, the Master rushed forward to meet the young man. Catching hold of the disciple's hand, he said: "What if you have married? Haven't I too married? What is there to be afraid of in that?" Touching his own chest he said: "If this [meaning himself] is propitious, then even a hundred thousand marriages cannot injure you. If you desire to lead a householder's life, then bring your wife here one day, and I shall see that she becomes a real companion in your spiritual progress. But if you want to lead a monastic life, then I shall eat up your attachment to the world." Jogin was dumbfounded at these words. He received new strength, and his spirit of renunciation was re-established.
--- SASHI AND SARAT
Sashi and Sarat were two cousins who came from a pious brahmin family of Calcutta. At an early age they had joined the Brahmo Samaj and had come under the influence of Keshab Sen. The Master said to them at their first meeting: "If bricks and tiles are burnt after the trade-mark has been stamped on them, they retain the mark for ever. Similarly, man should be stamped with God before entering the world. Then he will not become attached to worldliness." Fully aware of the future course of their life, he asked them not to marry. The Master asked Sashi whether he believed in God with form or in God without form. Sashi replied that he was not even sure about the existence of God; so he could not speak one way or the other. This frank answer very much pleased the Master.
Sarat's soul longed for the all-embracing realization of the Godhead. When the Master inquired whether there was any particular form of God he wished to see, the boy replied that he would like to see God in all the living beings of the world. "But", the Master demurred, "that is the last word in realization. One cannot have it at the very outset." Sarat stated calmly: "I won't be satisfied with anything short of that. I shall trudge on along the path till I attain that blessed state." Sri Ramakrishna was very much pleased.
--
Harinath had led the austere life of a brahmachari even from his early boyhood — bathing in the Ganges every day, cooking his own meals, waking before sunrise, and reciting the Gita from memory before leaving bed. He found in the Master the embodiment of the Vedanta scriptures. Aspiring to be a follower of the ascetic Sankara, he cherished a great hatred for women. One day he said to the Master that he could not allow even small girls to come near him. The Master scolded him and said: "You are talking like a fool. Why should you hate women? They are the manifestations of the Divine Mother. Regard them as your own mother and you will never feel their evil influence. The more you hate them, the more you will fall into their snares." Hari said later that these words completely changed his attitude toward women.
The Master knew Hari's passion for Vedanta. But he did not wish any of his disciples to become a dry ascetic or a mere bookworm. So he asked Hari to practise Vedanta in life by giving up the unreal and following the Real. "But it is not so easy", Sri Ramakrishna said, "to realize the illusoriness of the world. Study alone does not help one very much. The grace of God is required. Mere personal effort is futile. A man is a tiny creature after all, with very limited powers. But he can achieve the impossible if he prays to God for His grace." Whereupon the Master sang a song in praise of grace. Hari was profoundly moved and shed tears. Later in life Hari achieved a wonderful synthesis of the ideals of the Personal God and the Impersonal Truth.
--- GANGADHAR
--
One day, in January 1884, the Master was going toward the pine-grove when he went into a trance. He was alone. There was no one to support him or guide his footsteps. He fell to the ground and dislocated a bone in his left arm. This accident had a significant influence on his mind, the natural inclination of which was to soar above the consciousness of the body. The acute pain in the arm forced his mind to dwell on the body and on the world outside. But he saw even in this a divine purpose; for, with his mind compelled to dwell on the physical plane, he realized more than ever that he was an instrument in the hand of the Divine Mother, who had a mission to fulfil through his hu man body and mind. He also distinctly found that in the phenomenal world God manifests Himself, in an inscrutable way, through diverse hu man beings, both good and evil. Thus he would speak of God in the guise of the wicked, God in the guise of the pious. God in the guise of the hypocrite, God in the guise of the lewd. He began to take a special delight in watching the divine play in the relative world. Sometimes the sweet hu man relationship with God would appear to him more appealing than the all-effacing Knowledge of Brah man. many a time he would pray: "Mother, don't make me unconscious through the Knowledge of Brah man. Don't give me Brahmajnana, Mother. Am I not Your child, and naturally timid? I must have my Mother. A million salutations to the Knowledge of Brah man! Give it to those who want it." Again he prayed: "O Mother let me remain in contact with men! Don't make me a dried-up ascetic. I want to enjoy Your sport in the world." He was able to taste this very rich divine experience and enjoy the love of God and the company of His devotees because his mind, on account of the injury to his arm, was forced to come down to the consciousness of the body. Again, he would make fun of people who proclaimed him as a Divine Incarnation, by pointing to his broken arm. He would say, "Have you ever heard of God breaking His arm?" It took the arm about five months to heal.
--- BEGINNING OF HIS ILLNESS
--
In the beginning of September 1885 Sri Ramakrishna was moved to Syampukur. Here Narendra organized the young disciples to attend the Master day and night. At first they concealed the Master's illness from their guardians; but when it became more serious they remained with him almost constantly, sweeping aside the objections of their relatives and devoting themselves whole-heartedly to the nursing of their beloved guru. These young men, under the watchful eyes of the Master and the leadership of Narendra, became the antaranga bhaktas, the devotees of Sri Ramakrishna's inner circle. They were privileged to witness many manifestations of the Master's divine powers. Narendra received instructions regarding the propagation of his message after his death.
The Holy Mother — so Sarada Devi had come to be affectionately known by Sri Ramakrishna's devotees — was brought from Dakshineswar to look after the general cooking and to prepare the special diet of the patient. The dwelling space being extremely limited, she had to adapt herself to cramped conditions. At three o'clock in the morning she would finish her bath in the Ganges and then enter a small covered place on the roof, where she spent the whole day cooking and praying. After eleven at night, when the visitors went away, she would come down to her small bedroom on the first floor to enjoy a few hours' sleep. Thus she spent three months, working hard, sleeping little, and praying constantly for the Master's recovery.
--
The more the body was devastated by illness, the more it became the habitation of the Divine Spirit. Through its transparency the gods and goddesses began to shine with ever increasing luminosity. On the day of the Kali Puja the devotees clearly saw in him the manifestation of the Divine Mother.
It was noticed at this time that some of the devotees were making an unbridled display of their emotions. A number of them, particularly among the householders, began to cultivate, though at first unconsciously, the art of shedding tears, shaking the body, contorting the face, and going into trances, attempting thereby to imitate the Master. They began openly to declare Sri Ramakrishna a Divine Incarnation and to regard themselves as his chosen people, who could neglect religious disciplines with impunity. Narendra's penetrating eye soon sized up the situation. He found out that some of these external manifestations were being carefully practised at home, while some were the outcome of malnutrition, mental weakness, or nervous debility. He mercilessly exposed the devotees who were pretending to have visions, and asked all to develop a healthy religious spirit. Narendra sang inspiring songs for the younger devotees, read with them the Imitation of Christ and the Gita, and held before them the positive ideals of spirituality.
--- LAST DAYS AT COSSIPORE
--
"I shall make the whole thing public before I go", the Master had said some time before. On January 1, 1886, he felt better and came down to the garden for a little stroll. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. Some thirty lay disciples were in the hall or sitting about under the trees. Sri Ramakrishna said to Girish, "Well, Girish, what have you seen in me, that you proclaim me before everybody as an Incarnation of God?" Girish was not the man to be taken by surprise. He knelt before the Master and said, with folded hands, "What can an insignificant person like myself say about the One whose glory even sages like Vyasa and Valmiki could not adequately measure?" The Master was profoundly moved. He said: "What more shall I say? I bless you all. Be illumined!" He fell into a spiritual mood. Hearing these words the devotees, one and all, became overwhelmed with emotion. They rushed to him and fell at his feet. He touched them all, and each received an appropriate benediction. Each of them, at the touch of the Master, experienced ineffable bliss. Some laughed, some wept, some sat down to meditate, some began to pray. Some saw light, some had visions of their Chosen Ideals, and some felt within their bodies the rush of spiritual power.
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 words were tender and touching. Like a mother he caressed Narendra and Rakhal, gently stroking their faces. He said in a half whisper to M., "Had this body been allowed to last a little longer, many more souls would have been illumined." He paused a moment and then said: "But Mother has ordained otherwise. She will take me away lest, finding me guileless and foolish, people should take advantage of me and persuade me to bestow on them the rare gifts of spirituality." A few minutes later he touched his chest and said: "Here are two beings. One is She and the other is Her devotee. It is the latter who broke his arm, and it is he again who is now ill. Do you understand me?" After a pause he added: "Alas! To whom shall I tell all this? Who will understand me?" "Pain", he consoled them again, 'is unavoidable as long as there is a body. The Lord takes on the body for the sake of His devotees."
Yet one is not sure whether the Master's soul actually was tortured by this agonizing disease. At least during his moments of spiritual exaltation — which became almost constant during the closing days of his life on earth — he lost all consciousness of the body, of illness and suffering. One of his attendants (Latu, later known as Swami Adbhutananda.) said later on: "While Sri Ramakrishna lay sick he never actually suffered pain. He would often say: 'O mind! Forget the body, forget the sickness, and remain merged in Bliss.' No, he did not really suffer. At times he would be in a state when the thrill of joy was clearly manifested in his body. Even when he could not speak he would let us know in some way that there was no suffering, and this fact was clearly evident to all who watched him. People who did not understand him thought that his suffering was very great. What spiritual joy he transmitted to us at that time! Could such a thing have been possible if he had 'been suffering physically? It was during this period that he taught us again these truths: 'Brah man is always unattached. The three gunas are in It, but It is unaffected by them, just as the wind carries odour yet remains odourless.' 'Brah man is Infinite Being, Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Bliss. In It there exist no delusion, no misery, no disease, no death, no growth, no decay.' 'The Transcendental Being and the being within are one and the same. There is one indivisible Absolute Existence.'"
The Holy Mother secretly went to a Siva temple across the Ganges to intercede with the Deity for the Master's recovery. In a revelation she was told to prepare herself for the inevitable end.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
only of Free Masonry but of many other traditions
blazed upon my spiritual vision. From that moment
--
helpful for the light it throws on many of its passages.
The Editors
--
The broken manifests Light. (2)
The Second Triad which is GOD
--
GOD is manifest in gathering: harmony: considera-
tion: the Mirror of the Sun and of the Heart.
--
manifestation even of God does not appear until Tiphareth; and
the universe itself not until Malkuth.
The chapter many therefore be considered as the most complete
treatise on existence ever written.
--
The many is as adorable to the One as the One is to
the many. This is the Love of These; creation-
parturition is the Bliss of the One; coition-
dissolution is the Bliss of the many.
The All, thus interwoven of These, is Bliss.
--
The man delights in uniting with the Wo man; the
Wo man in parting from the Child.
--
Compare the doctrine of the higher and lower manas in
Theosophy.
--
Each star contained a many thousand million things.
Of these the reasoner took six, and, preening, said:
--
that substance is composed of many spheres.
The account given of Creation is the same as that
--
Logos transforming the unity into the many.
We then see what different classes of people do with
the many.
The Rationalist takes the six Sephiroth of Micro-
--
All that a man is or may be is hidden therein.
Bodily functions are parts of the machine; silent,
--
Therefore is man only himself when lost to himself
in The Charioting.
--
Therefore, except in the case of an Adept, man only
rises to a glimmer of the universal consciousness, while,
--
Wherefore hath Matter manifested itself in Motion?
Answer not, O silent one! For THERE is no "where-
--
This Abyss is also called "Hell", and "The many".
Its name is "Consciousness", and "The Universe",
--
thus identified with consciousness, the many, and both;
but within this is a secret unity which rejoices; this
--
for all that is, what is it but a manifestation, that is,
a part, that is, a falsehood, of THAT which is not?
--
illusions; let me play the man, and thrust it from
me! Amen.
--
of its manifested side. Those which are above the Abyss
are therefore said to live in the Night of Pan; they are
--
Now, below the Abyss, the manifested part of the
Master of the temple, also reaches Samadhi, as the
--
unity manifested as the many, for {Sigma} (1-13) gives the
whole course of numbers from the simple unity of 1
--
As man loses his personality in physical love, so
does the magician annihilate his divine personality in
--
Modern Greek peasants, in many cases, cling to Pagan
belief, and suppose that in death they are united to the
--
the Adept to mankind. Their hate and contempt are
necessary steps to his acquisition of sovereignty over
--
man returneth not again; the stream floweth not
uphill; the old life is no more; there is a new life
--
than that of the man who is its guardian and servant.
[47]
--
and refers to the letter Tau, the Phallus in manifesta-
tion; hence the title, "The Blind Webster".
--
But no man is strong enough to have no interest.
Therefore the best king would be Pure Chance.
--
What man is at ease in his Inn?
Get out.
--
Work under the figure of a man ridding himself of all
his accidents.
--
(13) T, manhood, the sign of the cross or phallus.
UT, the Holy Guardian Angel; UT, the first syllable
--
These six and four are ten, 10, the One manifested
that returns into the Naught un manifest.
--
grammaton, the manifest creator, Jehovah.
He is called the Second in relation to that which is
--
Strain forth thine Intelligence, O man, O worthy
one, O chosen of IT, to apprehend the discourse
--
IT, I being the secret, and T being the manifested,
phallus.
--
of mantra-Yoga.
A mantra is not being properly said as long as the
man knows he is saying it. The same applies to all other
forms of Magick.
--
Each act of man is the twist and double of an hare.
Love and death are the greyhounds that course him.
--
This is the Comedy of Pan, that man should think
he hunteth, while those hounds hunt him.
This is the Tragedy of man when facing Love and
Death he turns to bay. He is no more hare, but
--
All that we know of man, Nature, God, is just that
which they are not; it is that which they throw off
--
HIMOG from the inglorious man of earth?
Distinguish not!
--
Classing in this manner all things as illusions, the
question arises as to the distinguishing between illusions;
how are we to tell whether a Holy Illuminated man of
God is really so, since we can see nothing of him but
--
Illuminated man of God.
[91]
--
In any may he manifest; yet in one hath he chosen
to manifest; and this one hath given His ring as a
Seal of Authority to the Work of the A.'.A.'.
--
mand.
Also, since below the Abyss Reason is Lord, let men
--
manifestation of magical force, the spermatozoon in the
conical phallus. For wheels, see Chapter 78.
--
wo man is superior to man, and that all men are born
equal.
--
many, or of the many to the One. This also is the
cause of joy.
--
Hunger thou, O man, for the infinite: be insatiable
even for the finite; thus at The End shalt thou
--
Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise:
But late to watch and early to pray
--
man may come nigh unto Her.
In Her wine-cup are seven streams of the blood of
--
head of a man of Valour: the head of a Satyr:
and the head of a Lion-Serpent.
--
In paragraph 3 NO man is of course NEMO, the
Master of the Temple, Liber 418 will explain most of the
--
many names: of those names BABALON is the holiest.
It is the name referred to in Liber Legis, 1, 22.
--
jewel between his eyes-Aum mani Padmen
Hum! (Keep us from Evil!)
--
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts
of love."
--
this jewel being the divine spark in man, and indeed in all
that "lives and moves and has its being". Note this phrase,
--
manual signs in each of these degrees.
The moral of the chapter is apparently that the
--
God! in what prism may any man analyse my Light?
Immortal are the adepts; and ye hey die-They
--
man that has spine, and hopes of heaven-to-be,
Lacks the Amoeba's immortality.
--
The qualities which have made a man, a race, a city,
a caste, must be thrown off; death is the penalty
--
The word virtus means "the quality of manhood".
Modern "virtue" is the negation of all such qualities.
--
Who told thee, man, that LAYLAH is not Nuit, nd
I hadit?
--
opposite rules apply. His unity seeks the many, and
the many is again transmuted to the one. Solve et
Coagula.
--
"An man of spunk," they urged, "would hardly
choose
--
THE PRAYING manTIS
"Say: God is One." This I obeyed: for a thousand
--
66 is the number of Allah; the praying mantis is a
blasphemous grasshopper which caricatures the pious.
--
manNA
At four o'clock there is hardly anybody in Rumpel-
--
manna was a heavenly cake which, in the legend, fed
the Children of Israel in the Wilderness.
--
mankind, but comforts himself with the following
reflections:
--
man!
Plunge from the height, O man, and interlock with
Beast!
--
to the confessions made by many witches.
I paragraph 7 is seen the meaning of the chapter;
--
and practice; and the whole of mantra-Yoga has been
built on this foundation.
--
O Hanged man, O Camel-Termination-of-the-
third-person-plural for thy multiplicity, thou
--
With this gift a man can spend his seventy years in
peace.
--
Emphasise gift, then man, then spend, then seventy
years, and lastly peace, and change the intonations
--
of many most worthy brethren that we have yielded up
that time and thought which gold could not have bought,
--
criticism of metaphysics as such, and this is doubtless one of its many sub-
meanings.
--
IN ITS MATURE MAGICAL manIFESTATION
THROUGH MATTER: AS IT IS WRITTEN: AN
--
7, the septenary; 11, the magical number; 77, the mani-
festation, therefore, of the septenary.
--
veils) of truth are obscure and many, the Truth itself plain
and one; but that the latter must be reached through the
--
Meditate long and broad and deep, O man, upon this
Wheel, revolving it in thy mind
--
These then proclaim "The Good Law" unto mankind.
These preach renunciation, "virtue", cowardice in
--
While there exists the burgess, the hunting man, or
any man with ideals less than Shelley's and self-
discipline less than Loyola's-in short, any man
who falls far short of MYSELF-I am against
--
the government like so many ticket-of-leave men.
The only solution of the Social Problem is the
--
and the manners and obligations of chivalry.
[173]
--
many becomes two: two one: one Naught. What
comes to Naught?
--
Ay! shall he not do so? he knows that the many is
Naught; and having Naught, enjoys that Naught
even in the enjoyment of the many.
For when Naught becomes Absolute Naught, it
becomes again the many.
Any this many and this Naught are identical; they
are not correlatives or phases of some one deeper
--
reduced the many to Naught; as a consequence, he
is no longer afraid of the many.
Paragraph 4. See berashith.
--
I distrust any thoughts uttered by any man whose
health is not robust.
--
for another analysis of the elements; but after a different manner.
Alpha ({Alpha}) is Air; Rho ({Rho}) the Sun; these are the Spirit and the
--
manDARIN-MEALS
There is a dish of sharks' fins and of sea-slug, well set
--
A man advertises that he could tell anyone how to
make four hundred a year certain, and would do so
--
Behold! I have lived many years, and I have travelled
in every land that is under the dominion of the
--
66. The Praying mantis.
67. Sodom-Apples.
68. manna.
[195]
--
ARY IN ITS MATURE MAGICAL manI-
FESTATION THROUGH MATTER: AS IT
--
87. mandarin-Meals.
88. Gold Bricks.
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 Ecker mann.
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.
"M", as the author modestly styles himself, was peculiarly qualified for his task. To a reverent love for his master, to a deep and experiential knowledge of that master's teaching, he added a prodigious memory for the small happenings of each day and a happy gift for recording them in an interesting and realistic way. Making good use of his natural gifts and of the circumstances in which he found himself, "M" produced a book unique, so far as my knowledge goes, in the literature of hagiography. No other saint has had so able and indefatigable a Boswell. Never have the small events of a contemplative's daily life been described with such a wealth of intimate detail. Never have the casual and unstudied utterances of a great religious teacher been set down with so minute a fidelity. To Western readers, it is true, this fidelity and this wealth of detail are sometimes a trifle disconcerting; for the social, religious and intellectual frames of reference within which Sri Ramakrishna did his thinking and expressed his feelings were entirely Indian. But after the first few surprises and bewilderments, we begin to find something peculiarly stimulating and instructive about the very strangeness and, to our eyes, the eccentricity of the man revealed to us in "M's" narrative. What a scholastic philosopher would call the "accidents" of Ramakrishna's life were intensely Hindu and therefore, so far as we in the West are concerned, unfamiliar and hard to understand; its "essence", however, was intensely mystical and therefore universal. To read through these conversations in which mystical doctrine alternates with an unfamiliar kind of humour, and where discussions of the oddest aspects of Hindu mythology give place to the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality, is in itself a liberal, education in humility, tolerance and suspense of judgment. We must be grateful to the translator for his excellent version of a book so curious and delightful as a biographical document, so precious, at the same time, for what it teaches us of the life of the spirit.
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The reader will find mentioned in this work many visions and experiences that fall outside the ken of physical science and even psychology. With the development of modern knowledge the border line between the natural and the supernatural is ever shifting its position. Genuine mystical experiences are not as suspect now as they were half a century ago. The words of Sri Ramakrishna have already exerted a tremendous influence in the land of his birth. Savants of Europe have found in his words the ring of universal truth.
But these words were not the product of intellectual cogitation; they were rooted in direct experience. Hence, to students of religion, psychology, and physical science, these experiences of the Master are of immense value for the understanding of religious phenomena in general. No doubt Sri Ramakrishna was a Hindu of the Hindus; yet his experiences transcended the limits of the dogmas and creeds of Hinduism. Mystics of religions other than Hinduism will find in Sri Ramakrishna's experiences a corroboration of the experiences of their own prophets and seers. And this is very important today for the resuscitation of religious values. The sceptical reader may pass by the supernatural experiences; he will yet find in the book enough material to provoke his serious thought and solve many of his spiritual problems.
There are repetitions of teachings and parables in the book. I have kept them purposely. They have their charm and usefulness, repeated as they were in different settings. Repetition is unavoidable in a work of this kind. In the first place, different seekers come to a religious teacher with questions of more or less identical nature; hence the answers will be of more or less identical pattern. Besides, religious teachers of all times and climes have tried, by means of repetition, to hammer truths into the stony soil of the recalcitrant hu man mind. Finally, repetition does not seem tedious if the ideas repeated are dear to a man's heart.
I have thought it necessary to write a rather lengthy Introduction to the book. In it I have given the biography of the Master, descriptions of people who came in contact with him, short explanations of several systems of Indian religious thought intimately connected with Sri Ramakrishna's life, and other relevant matters which, I hope, will enable the reader better to understand and appreciate the unusual contents of this book. It is particularly important that the Western reader, unacquainted with Hindu religious thought, should first read carefully the introductory chapter, in order that he may fully enjoy these conversations. many Indian terms and names have been retained in the book for want of suitable English equivalents. Their meaning is given either in the Glossary or in the foot-notes. The Glossary also gives explanations of a number of expressions unfamiliar to Western readers. The diacritical marks are explained under Notes on Pronunciation.
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 part written by men of mystical experience. For giving the songs their present form I am grateful to Mr. John Moffitt, Jr.
In the preparation of this manuscript I have received ungrudging help from several friends. Miss Margaret Woodrow Wilson and Mr.Joseph Campbell have worked hard in editing my translation. Mrs.Elizabeth Davidson has typed, more than once, the entire manuscript and rendered other valuable help. Mr.Aldous Huxley has laid me under a debt of gratitude by writing the Foreword. I sincerely thank them all.
In the spiritual firmament Sri Ramakrishna is a waxing crescent. Within one hundred years of his birth and fifty years of his death his message has spread across land and sea. Romain Rolland has described him as the fulfilment of the spiritual aspirations of the three hundred millions of Hindus for the last two thousand years. Mahatma Gandhi has written: "His life enables us to see God face to face. . . . Ramakrishna was a living embodiment of godliness." He is being recognized as a compeer of Krishna, Buddha, and Christ.
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May it enable seekers of Truth to grasp the subtle laws of the supersensuous realm, and unfold before man's restricted vision the spiritual foundation of the universe, the unity of existence, and the divinity of the soul!
- Sw mi Nikhilnanda
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He was an educationist all his life both in a spiritual and in a secular sense. After he passed out of College, he took up work as headmaster in a number of schools in succession Narail High School, City School, Ripon College School, Metropolitan School, Aryan School, Oriental School, Oriental Seminary and Model School. The causes of his migration from school to school were that he could not get on with some of the managements on grounds of principles and that often his spiritual mood drew him away to places of pilgrimage for long periods. He worked with some of the most noted public men of the time like Iswar Chandra Vidysgar and Surendranath Banerjee. The latter appointed him as a professor in the City and Ripon Colleges where he taught subjects like English, philosophy, history and economics. In his later days he took over the Morton School, and he spent his time in the staircase room of the third floor of it, administering the school and preaching the message of the Master. He was much respected in educational circles where he was usually referred to as Rector Mahashay. A teacher who had worked under him writes thus in warm appreciation of his teaching methods: "Only when I worked with him in school could I appreciate what a great educationist he was. He would come down to the level of his students when teaching, though he himself was so learned, so talented. Ordinarily teachers confine their instruction to what is given in books without much thought as to whether the student can accept it or not. But M., would first of all gauge how much the student could take in and by what means. He would employ aids to teaching like maps, pictures and diagrams, so that his students could learn by seeing. Thirty years ago (from 1953) when the question of imparting education through the medium of the mother tongue was being discussed, M. had already employed Bengali as the medium of instruction in the Morton School." (M The Apostle and the Evangelist by Swami Nityat mananda Part I. P. 15.)
Imparting secular education was, however, only his profession ; his main concern was with the spiritual regeneration of man a calling for which Destiny seems to have chosen him. From his childhood he was deeply pious, and he used to be moved very much by Sdhus, temples and Durga Puja celebrations. The piety and eloquence of the great Brahmo leader of the times, Keshab Chander Sen, elicited a powerful response from the impressionable mind of Mahendra Nath, as it did in the case of many an idealistic young man of Calcutta, and prepared him to receive the great Light that was to dawn on him with the coming of Sri Ramakrishna into his life.
This epoch-making event of his life came about in a very strange way. M. belonged to a joint family with several collateral members. Some ten years after he began his career as an educationist, bitter quarrels broke out among the members of the family, driving the sensitive M. to despair and utter despondency. He lost all interest in life and left home one night to go into the wide world with the idea of ending his life. At dead of night he took rest in his sister's house at Baranagar, and in the morning, accompanied by a nephew Siddheswar, he wandered from one garden to another in Calcutta until Siddheswar brought him to the Temple Garden of Dakshineswar where Sri Ramakrishna was then living. After spending some time in the beautiful rose gardens there, he was directed to the room of the Paramahamsa, where the eventful meeting of the Master and the disciple took place on a blessed evening (the exact date is not on record) on a Sunday in March 1882. As regards what took place on the occasion, the reader is referred to the opening section of the first chapter of the Gospel.
The Master, who divined the mood of desperation in M, his resolve to take leave of this 'play-field of deception', put new faith and hope into him by his gracious words of assurance: "God forbid! Why should you take leave of this world? Do you not feel blessed by discovering your Guru? By His grace, what is beyond all imagination or dreams can be easily achieved!" At these words the clouds of despair moved away from the horizon of M.'s mind, and the sunshine of a new hope revealed to him fresh vistas of meaning in life. Referring to this phase of his life, M. used to say, "Behold! where is the resolve to end life, and where, the discovery of God! That is, sorrow should be looked upon as a friend of man. God is all good." ( Ibid P.33.)
After this re-settlement, M's life revolved around the Master, though he continued his professional work as an educationist. During all holidays, including Sundays, he spent his time at Dakshineswar in the Master's company, and at times extended his stay to several days.
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An appropriate allusion indeed! Bhagavata, the great scripture that has given the word of Sri Krishna to mankind, was composed by the Sage Vysa under similar circumstances. When caught up in a mood of depression like that of M, Vysa was advised by the sage Nrada that he would gain peace of mind only qn composing a work exclusively devoted to the depiction of the Lord's glorious attributes and His teachings on Knowledge and Devotion, and the result was that the world got from Vysa the invaluable gift of the Bhagavata Purana depicting the life and teachings of Sri Krishna.
From the mental depression of the modem Vysa, the world has obtained the Kathmrita (Bengali Edition) the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in English.
Sri Ramakrishna was a teacher for both the Orders of mankind, Sannysins and householders. His own life offered an ideal example for both, and he left behind disciples who followed the highest traditions he had set in respect of both these ways of life. M., along with Nag Mahashay, exemplified how a householder can rise to the highest level of sagehood. M. was married to Nikunja Devi, a distant relative of Keshab Chander Sen, even when he was reading at College, and he had four children, two sons and two daughters. The responsibility of the family, no doubt, made him dependent on his professional income, but the great devotee that he was, he never compromised with ideals and principles for this reason. Once when he was working as the headmaster in a school managed by the great Vidysgar, the results of the school at the public examination happened to be rather poor, and Vidysgar attri buted it to M's preoccupation with the Master and his consequent failure to attend adequately to the school work. M. at once resigned his post without any thought of the morrow. Within a fortnight the family was in poverty, and M. was one day pacing up and down the verandah of his house, musing how he would feed his children the next day. Just then a man came with a letter addressed to 'Mahendra Babu', and on opening it, M. found that it was a letter from his friend Sri Surendra Nath Banerjee, asking whether he would like to take up a professorship in the Ripon College. In this way three or four times he gave up the job that gave him the wherewithal to support the family, either for upholding principles or for practising spiritual Sadhanas in holy places, without any consideration of the possible dire worldly consequences; but he was always able to get over these difficulties somehow, and the interests of his family never suffered. In spite of his disregard for worldly goods, he was, towards the latter part of his life, in a fairly flourishing condition as the proprietor of the Morton School which he developed into a noted educational institution in the city. The Lord has said in the Bhagavad Git that in the case of those who think of nothing except Him, He Himself would take up all their material and spiritual responsibilities. M. was an example of the truth of the Lord's promise.
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 part of his Sdhan.
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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 participated 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.
After the Master's demise, M. went on pilgrimage several times. He visited Banras, Vrindvan, Ayodhy and other places. At Banras he visited the famous Trailinga Swmi and fed him with sweets, and he had long conversations with Swami Bhaskarananda, one of the noted saintly and scholarly Sannysins of the time. In 1912 he went with the Holy Mother to Banras, and spent about a year in the company of Sannysins at Banras, Vrindvan, Hardwar, Hrishikesh and Swargashram. But he returned to Calcutta, as that city offered him the unique opportunity of associating himself with the places hallowed by the Master in his lifetime. Afterwards he does not seem to have gone to any far-off place, but stayed on in his room in the Morton School carrying on his spiritual ministry, speaking on the Master and his teachings to the large number of people who flocked to him after having read his famous Kathmrita known to English readers as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.
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While many educated people heard Sri Ramakrishna's talks, it was given to this illustrious personage alone to leave a graphic and exact account of them for posterity, with details like date, hour, place, names and particulars about participants. Hu manity owes this great book to the ingrained habit of diary-keeping with which M. was endowed.
Even as a boy of about thirteen, while he was a student in the 3rd class of the Hare School, he was in the habit of keeping a diary. "Today on rising," he wrote in his diary, "I greeted my father and mother, prostrating on the ground before them" (Swami Nityat mananda's 'M The Apostle and the Evangelist' Part I. P 29.) At another place he wrote, "Today, while on my way to school, I visited, as usual, the temples of Kli, the Mother at Tharitharia, and of Mother Sitala, and paid my obeisance to them." About twenty-five years after, when he met the Great Master in the spring of 1882, it was the same instinct of a born diary-writer that made him begin his book, 'unique in the literature of hagiography', with the memorable words: "When hearing the name of Hari or Rma once, you shed tears and your hair stands on end, then you may know for certain that you do not have to perform devotions such as Sandhya any more."
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Besides the prompting of his inherent instinct, the main inducement for M. to keep this diary of his experiences at Dakshineswar was his desire to provide himself with a means for living in holy company at all times. Being a school teacher, he could be with the Master only on Sundays and other holidays, and it was on his diary that he depended for 'holy company' on other days. The devotional scriptures like the Bhagavata say that holy company is the first and most important means for the generation and growth of devotion. For, in such company man could hear talks on spiritual matters and listen to the glorification of Divine attri butes, charged with the fervour and conviction e manating from the hearts of great lovers of God. Such company is therefore the one certain means through which Sraddha (Faith), Rati (attachment to God) and Bhakti (loving devotion) are generated. The diary of his visits to Dakshineswar provided M. with material for re-living, through reading and contemplation, the holy company he had had earlier, even on days when he was not able to visit Dakshineswar. The wealth of details and the vivid description of men and things in the midst of which the sublime conversations are set, provide excellent material to re-live those experiences for any one with imaginative powers. It was observed by M.'s disciples and admirers that in later life also whenever he was free or alone, he would be pouring over his diary, transporting himself on the wings of imagination to the glorious days he spent at the feet of the Master.
During the Master's lifetime M. does not seem to have revealed the contents of his diary to any one. There is an unconfirmed tradition that when the Master saw him taking notes, he expressed apprehension at the possibility of his utilising these to publicise him like Keshab Sen; for the Great Master was so full of the spirit of renunciation and humility that he disliked being lionised. It must be for this reason that no one knew about this precious diary of M. for a decade until he brought out selections from it as a pamphlet in English in 1897 with the Holy Mother's blessings and permission. The Holy Mother, being very much pleased to hear parts of the diary read to her in Bengali, wrote to M.: "When I heard the Kathmrita, (Bengali name of the book) I felt as if it was he, the Master, who was saying all that." ( Ibid Part I. P 37.)
The two pamphlets in English entitled the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna appeared in October and November 1897. They drew the spontaneous acclamation of Swami Vivekananda, who wrote on 24th November of that year from Dehra Dun to M.:" many many thanks for your second leaflet. It is indeed wonderful. The move is quite original, and never was the life of a Great Teacher brought before the public untarnished by the writer's mind, as you are doing. The language also is beyond all praise, so fresh, so pointed, and withal so plain and easy. I cannot express in adequate terms how I have enjoyed them. I am really in a transport when I read them. Strange, isn't it? Our Teacher and Lord was so original, and each one of us will have to be original or nothing.
I now understand why none of us attempted His life before. It has been reserved for you, this great work. He is with you evidently." ( Vednta Kesari Vol. XIX P. 141. Also given in the first edition of the Gospel published from Ramakrishna Math, Madras in 1911.)
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In 1905 he retired from the active life of a Professor and devoted his remaining twenty-seven years exclusively to the preaching of the life and message of the Great Master. He bought the Morton Institution from its original proprietors and shifted it to a commodious four-storeyed house at 50 Amherst Street, where it flourished under his management as one of the most efficient educational institutions in Calcutta. He generally occupied a staircase room at the top of it, cooking his own meal which consisted only of milk and rice without variation, and attended to all his personal needs himself. His dress also was the simplest possible. It was his conviction that limitation of personal wants to the minimum is an important aid to holy living. About one hour in the morning he would spend in inspecting the classes of the school, and then retire to his staircase room to pour over his diary and live in the divine atmosphere of the earthly days of the Great Master, unless devotees and admirers had already gathered in his room seeking his holy company.
In appearance, M. looked a Vedic Rishi. Tall and stately in bearing, he had a strong and well-built body, an unusually broad chest, high forehead and arms extending to the knees. His complexion was fair and his prominent eyes were always tinged with the expression of the divine love that filled his heart. Adorned with a silvery beard that flowed luxuriantly down his chest, and a shining face radiating the serenity and gravity of holiness, M. was as imposing and majestic as he was handsome and engaging in appearance. Humorous, sweet-tongued and eloquent when situations required, this great Maharishi of our age lived only to sing the glory of Sri Ramakrishna day and night.
0.00 - The Wellspring of Reality, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
As Korzybski, the founder of general se mantics, pointed out, the consequence of its single-tagging is that the rose becomes reflexively considered by man only as a red, white, or pink device for paying tribute to a beautiful girl, a thoughtful hostess, or last night's deceased acquaintance. The tagging of the complex biological process under the single title rose tends to detour hu man curiosity from further differentiation of its integral organic operations as well as from consideration of its interecological functionings aboard our planet. We don't know what a rose is, nor what may be its essential and unique cosmic function. Thus for long have we inadvertently deferred potential discovery of the essential roles in Universe that are performed complementarily by many, if not most, of the phenomena we experience.
But, goaded by youth, we older ones are now taking second looks at almost everything. And that promises many ultimately favorable surprises. The oldsters do have vast experience banks not available to the youth. Their memory banks, integrated and reviewed, may readily disclose generalized principles of eminent importance.
The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case.
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It follows that the more specialized society becomes, the less attention does it pay to the discoveries of the mind, which are intuitively beamed toward the brain, there to be received only if the switches are "on." Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of the all-powerful generalized principles. Again we see how society's perverse fixation on specialization leads to its extinction. We are so specialized that one man discovers empirically how to release the energy of the atom, while another, unbeknownst to him, is ordered by his political factotum to make an atomic bomb by use of the secretly and anonymously published data. That gives much expedient employment, which solves the politician's momentary problem, but requires that the politicians keep on preparing for further warring with other political states to keep their respective peoples employed. It is also mistakenly assumed that employment is the only means by which hu mans can earn the right to live, for politicians have yet to discover how much wealth is available for distribution. All this is rationalized on the now scientifically discredited premise that there can never be enough life support for all. Thus hu manity's specialization leads only toward warring and such devastating tools, both, visible and invisible, as ultimately to destroy all Earthians.
Only a comprehensive switch from the narrowing specialization and toward an evermore inclusive and refining comprehension by all hu manity-regarding all the factors governing omnicontinuing life aboard our spaceship Earth-can bring about reorientation from the self-extinction-bound hu man trending, and do so within the critical time remaining before we have passed the point of chemical process irretrievability.
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Anticipating, cooperating with, and employing the forces of nature can be accomplished only by the mind. The wisdom manifest in the omni-interorderliness of the family of generalized principles operative in Universe can be employed only by the highest integrity of engagement of the mind's metaphysical intuiting and formulating capabilities.
We are able to assert that this rationally coordinating system bridge has been established between science and the hu manities because we have made adequate experimental testing of it in a computerized world-resource-use-exploration system, which by virtue of the proper inclusion of all the parameters-as guaranteed by the synergetic start with Universe and the progressive differentiation out of all the parts-has demonstrated a number of alternate ways in which it is eminently feasible not only to provide full life support for all hu mans but also to permit all hu mans' individual enjoyment of all the Earth without anyone profiting at the expense of another and without any individuals interfering with others.
While it takes but meager search to discover that many well-known concepts are false, it takes considerable search and even more careful examination of one's own personal experiences and inadvertently spontaneous reflexing to discover that there are many popularly and even professionally unknown, yet nonetheless fundamental, concepts to hold true in all cases and that already have been discovered by other as yet obscure individuals. That is to say that many scientific generalizations have been discovered but have not come to the attention of what we call the educated world at large, thereafter to be incorporated tardily within the formal education processes, and even more tardily, in the ongoing political-economic affairs of everyday life. Knowledge of the existence and comprehensive significance of these as yet popularly unrecognized natural laws often is requisite to the solution of many of the as yet unsolved problems now confronting society. Lack of knowledge of the solution's existence often leaves hu manity confounded when it need not be.
Intellectually advantaged with no more than the child's facile, lucid eagerness to understand constructively and usefully the major transformational events of our own times, it probably is synergetically advantageous to review swiftly the most comprehensive inventory of the most powerful hu man environment transforming events of our totally known and reasonably extended history. This is especially useful in winnowing out and understanding the most significant of the metaphysical revolutions now recognized as swiftly tending to reconstitute history. By such a comprehensively schematic review, we might identify also the unprecedented and possibly heretofore overlooked pivotal revolutionary events not only of today but also of those trending to be central to tomorrow's most cataclysmic changes.
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The supposed location of the threshold between animate and inanimate was methodically narrowed down by experimental science until it was confined specifically within the domain of virology. Virologists have been too busy, for instance, with their DNA-RNA genetic code isolatings, to find time to see the synergetic significance to society of the fact that they have found that no physical threshold does in fact exist between animate and inanimate. The possibility of its existence vanished because the supposedly unique physical qualities of both animate and inanimate have persisted right across yesterday's supposed threshold in both directions to permeate one another's-previously perceived to be exclusive- domains. Subsequently, what was animate has become foggier and foggier, and what is inanimate clearer and clearer. All organisms consist physically and in entirety of inherently inanimate atoms. The inanimate alone is not only omnipresent but is alone experimentally demonstrable. Belated news of the elimination of this threshold must be interpreted to mean that whatever life may be, it has not been isolated and thereby identified as residual in the biological cell, as had been supposed by the false assumption that there was a separate physical phenomenoncalled animate within which life existed. No life per se has been isolated. The threshold between animate and inanimate has vanished. Those chemists who are preoccupied in synthesizing the particular atomically structured molecules identified as the prime constituents of hu manly employed organisms will, even if they are chemically successful, be as remote from creating life as are automobile manufacturers from creating the hu man drivers of their automobiles. Only the physical connections and development complexes of distinctly "nonlife" atoms into molecules, into cells, into animals, has been and will be discovered. The genetic coding of the design controls of organic systems offers no more explanation of life than did the specifications of the designs of the telephone system's apparatus and operation explain the nature of the life that communicates weightlessly to life over the only physically ponderable telephone system. Whatever else life may be, we know it is weightless. At the moment of death, no weight is lost. All the chemicals, including the chemist's life ingredients, are present, but life has vanished. The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic.
It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand.
The overconcentration on details of hyperspecialization has also been responsible for the lack of recognition by science of its inherently mandatory responsibility to reorient all our educational curricula because of the synergetically disclosed, but popularly uncomprehended, significance of the 1956 Nobel Prize-winning discovery in physics of the experimental invalidation of the concept of "parity" by which science previously had misassumed that positive-negative complementations consisted exclusively of mirror-imaged behaviors of physical phenomena.
Science's self-assumed responsibility has been self-limited to disclosure to society only of the separate, supposedly physical (because separately weighable) atomic component isolations data. Synergetic integrity would require the scientists to announce that in reality what had been identified heretofore as physical is entirely metaphysical-because synergetically weightless. Metaphysical has been science's designation for all weightless phenomena such as thought. But science has made no experimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected-like it or not-life is but a dream.Science has found no up or down directions of Universe, yet scientists are personally so ill-coordinated that they all still personally and sensorially see "solids" going up or down-as, for instance, they see the Sun "going down." Sensorially disconnected from their theoretically evolved information, scientists discern no need on their part to suggest any educational reforms to correct the misconceiving that science has tolerated for half a millennium.
Society depends upon its scientists for just such educational reform guidance.
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And whence will come the wealth with which we may undertake to lead world man into his new and validly hopeful life? From the wealth of the minds of world man-whence comes all wealth. Only mind can discover how to do so much with so little as forever to be able to sustain and physically satisfy all hu manity.
0.01f - FOREWARD, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
others see what happens to man, and what conclusions are forced
upon us, when he is placed fairly and squarely within the frame-
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single out man as our object ?
Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb
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gift of existence. And this, in superior measure, is man's condition.
But if it is true that it is so vital and so blessed to know, let us
ask again why we are turning our attention particularly to man.
Has man not been adequately described already, and is he not a
tedious subject ? Is it not precisely one of the attractions of science
that it rests our eyes by turning them away from man ?
man has a double title, as the twofold centre of the world, to
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That seems to be the privilege of man's knowledge.
It is not necessary to be a man to perceive surrounding things
and forces ' in the round '. All the animals have reached this point
as well as us. But it is peculiar to man to occupy a position in
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should look closely at man in order to increase our capacity to
live.
--
From the dawn of his existence, man has been held up as a
spectacle to himself. Indeed for tens of centuries he has looked at
--
the newly-opened retina. For man to discover man and take his
measure, a whole series of ' senses ' have been necessary, whose
--
Without these qualities to illuminate our vision, man will
remain indefinitely for us whatever is done to make us see
what he still represents to so many minds : an erratic object in a
disjointed world. Conversely, we have only to rid our vision of
--
man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind,
neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life un-
related to the universe.
--
of the phenomenon of man.
The phenomenon of man I stress this.
This phrase is not chosen at random, but for three reasons.
First to assert that man, in nature, is a genuine fact falling (at
least partially) within the scope of the requirements and methods
--
experience of man. A whole which unfolds.
So please do not expect a final explanation of things here, nor
--
there would be a cosmic contradiction in imagining a man as
spectator of those phases which ran their course before the
--
one example, of the way in which the problem of man presents
itself in science today.
--
jurists, man is a tiny, even a shrinking, creature. His over-
pronounced individuality conceals from our eyes the whole to
--
to consider man as an object of scientific scrutiny except through
his body.
--
the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the
world.
--
In such a vision man is seen not as a static centre of the world
as he for long believed himself to be but as the axis and
0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The question which Arjuna asks Sri Krishna in the Gita (second chapter) occurs pertinently to many about all spiritual personalities: "What is the language of one whose understanding is poised? How does he speak, how sit, how walk?" Men want to know the outer signs of the inner attainment, the way in which a spiritual person differs outwardly from other men. But all the tests which the Gita enumerates are inner and therefore invisible to the outer view. It is true also that the inner or the spiritual is the essential and the outer derives its value and form from the inner. But the transformation about which Sri Aurobindo writes in his books has to take place in nature, because according to him the divine Reality has to manifest itself in nature. So, all the parts of nature including the physical and the external are to be transformed. In his own case the very physical became the transparent mould of the Spirit as a result of his intense Sadhana. This is borne out by the impression created on the minds of sensitive outsiders like Sj. K. M. Munshi who was deeply impressed by his radiating presence when he met him after nearly forty years.
The Evening Talks collected here may afford to the outside world a glimpse of his external personality and give the seeker some idea of its richness, its many-sidedness, its uniqueness. One can also form some notion of Sri Aurobindo's personality from the books in which the height, the universal sweep and clear vision of his integral ideal and thought can be seen. His writings are, in a sense, the best representative of his mental personality. The versatile nature of his genius, the penetrating power of his intellect, his extraordinary power of expression, his intense sincerity, his utter singleness of purpose all these can be easily felt by any earnest student of his works. He may discover even in the realm of mind that Sri Aurobindo brings the unlimited into the limited. Another side of his dynamic personality is represented by the Ashram as an institution. But the outer, if one may use the phrase, the hu man side of his personality, is unknown to the outside world because from 1910 to 1950 a span of forty years he led a life of outer retirement. No doubt, many knew about his staying at Pondicherry and practising some kind of very special Yoga to the mystery of which they had no access. To some, perhaps, he was living a life of enviable solitude enjoying the luxury of a spiritual endeavour. many regretted his retirement as a great loss to the world because they could not see any external activity on his part which could be regarded as 'public', 'altruistic' or 'beneficial'. Even some of his admirers thought that he was after some kind of personal salvation which would have very little significance for mankind in general. His outward non-participation in public life was construed by many as lack of love for hu manity.
But those who knew him during the days of the national awakening from 1900 to 1910 could not have these doubts. And even these initial misunderstandings and false notions of others began to evaporate with the growth of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from 1927 onwards. The large number of books published by the Ashram also tended to remove the idea of the other-worldliness of his Yoga and the absence of any good by it to mankind.
This period of outer retirement was one of intense Sadhana and of intellectual activity it was also one during which he acted on external events, though he was not dedicated outwardly to a public cause. About his own retirement he writes: "But this did not mean, as most people supposed, that he [Sri Aurobindo] had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness, but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to base life on the Spirit and give it a spiritual meaning. In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened, whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action; for it is part of the experience of those who have advanced in yoga that besides the ordinary forces and activities of the mind and life and body in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can and do act from behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in spiritual consciousness, though all do not care to possess or, possessing, to use it and this power is greater than any other and more effective. It was this force which, as soon as he attained to it, he used at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces."[1]
--
Over and above Sadhana, writing work and rendering spiritual help to the world during his apparent retirement there were plenty of other activities of which the outside world has no knowledge. many prominent as well as less known persons sought and obtained interviews with him during these years. Thus, among well-known persons may be mentioned C.R. Das, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sarala Devi, Dr. Munje, Khasirao Jadhav, Tagore, Sylvain Levy. The great national poet of Tamil Nadu, S. Subra manya Bharati, was in contact with Sri Aurobindo for some years during his stay at Pondicherry; so was V.V.S. Aiyar. The famous V. Ramaswamy Aiyangar Va Ra of Tamil literature[3] stayed with Sri Aurobindo for nearly three years and was influenced by him. Some of these facts have been already mentioned in The Life of Sri Aurobindo.
Jung has admitted that there is an element of mystery, something that baffles the reason, in hu man personality. One finds that the greater the personality the greater is the complexity. And this is especially so with regard to spiritual personalities whom the Gita calls Vibhutis and Avatars.
Sri Aurobindo has explained the mystery of personality in some of his writings. Ordinarily by personality we mean something which can be described as "a pattern of being marked out by a settled combination of fixed qualities, a determined character.... In one view personality is regarded as a fixed structure of recognisable qualities expressing a power of being"; another idea regards "personality as a flux of self-expressive or sensitive and responsive being.... But flux of nature and fixity of nature" which some call character "are two aspects of being neither of which, nor indeed both together, can be a definition of personality.... But besides this flux and this fixity there is also a third and occult element, the Person behind of whom the personality is a self-expression; the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the present act of his long drama of manifested existence. But the Person is larger than his personality, and it may happen that this inner largeness overflows into the surface formation; the result is a self-expression of being which can no longer be described by fixed qualities, normalities of mood, exact lineaments, or marked out by structural limits."[4]
The gospel of the Supermind which Sri Aurobindo brought to man envisages a new level of consciousness beyond Mind. When this level is attained it imposes a complete and radical reintegration of the hu man personality. Sri Aurobindo was not merely the exponent but the embodiment of the new, dynamic truth of the Supermind. While exploring and sounding the tremendous possibilities of hu man personality in his intense spiritual Sadhana, he has shown us that practically there are no limits to its expansion and ascent. It can reach in its growth what appears to man at present as a 'divine' status. It goes without saying that this attainment is not an easy task; there are conditions to be fulfilled for the transformation from the hu man to the divine.
The Gita in its chapters on the Vibhuti and the Avatar takes in general the same position. It shows that the present formula of our nature, and therefore the mental personality of man, is not final. A Vibhuti embodies in a hu man manifestation a certain divine quality and thus demonstrates the possibility of overcoming the limits of ordinary hu man personality. The Vibhuti the embodiment of a divine quality or power, and the Avatar the divine incarnation, are not to be looked upon as supraphysical miracles thrown at hu manity without regard to the process of evolution; they are, in fact, indications of hu man possibility, a sign that points to the goal of evolution.
In his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo says about the Avatar: "He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of divine life, the divine personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a per manent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth."[5]
--
"The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what are the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, impersonal, universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the divine love. He comes as the divine personality which shall fill the consciousness of the hu man being and replace the limited egoistic personality, so that it shall be liberated out of ego into infinity and universality, out of birth into immortality."[7]
It is clear that Sri Aurobindo interpreted the traditional idea of the Vibhuti and the Avatar in terms of the evolutionary possibilities of man. But more directly he has worked out the idea of the 'gnostic individual' in his masterpiece The Life Divine. He says: "A supramental gnostic individual will be a spiritual Person, but not a personality in the sense of a pattern of being marked out by a settled combination of fixed qualities, a determined character; he cannot be that since he is a conscious expression of the universal and the transcendent." Describing the gnostic individual he says: "We feel ourselves in the presence of a light of consciousness, a potency, a sea of energy, can distinguish and describe its free waves of action and quality, but not fix itself; and yet there is an impression of personality, the presence of a powerful being, a strong, high or beautiful recognisable Someone, a Person, not a limited creature of Nature but a Self or Soul, a Purusha."[8]
One feels that he was describing the feeling of some of us, his disciples, with regard to him in his inimitable way.
This transformation of the hu man personality into the Divine perhaps even the mere connection of the hu man with the Divine is probably regarded as a chimera by the modern mind. To the modern mind it would appear as the apotheosis of a hu man personality which is against its idea of equality of men. Its difficulty is partly due to the notion that the Divine is unlimited and illimitable while a 'personality', however high and grand, seems to de mand imposition, or assumption, of limitation. In this connection Sri Aurobindo said during an evening talk that no hu man manifestation can be illimitable and unlimited, but the manifestation in the limited should reflect the unlimited, the Transcendent Beyond.
This possibility of the hu man touching and manifesting the Divine has been realised during the course of hu man history whenever a great spiritual Light has appeared on earth. One of the purposes of this book is to show how Sri Aurobindo himself reflected the unlimited Beyond in his own self.
Greatness is magnetic and in a sense contagious. Wherever manifested, greatness is claimed by hu manity as something that reveals the possibility of the race. The highest utility of greatness is not merely to attract us but to inspire us to follow it and rise to our own highest spiritual stature. To the majority of men Truth remains abstract, impersonal and far unless it is seen and felt concretely in a hu man personality. A man never knows a truth actively except through a person and by embodying it in his own personality. Some glimpse of the Truth-Consciousness which Sri Aurobindo embodied may be caught in these Evening Talks.
***
0.01 - Letters from the Mother to Her Son, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
true that in my answers many aspects of the question have been
neglected which could have been examined with interest - that
--
machines, a dozen typewriters, many garages, an automobile
repair workshop, an electrical service, a building service, sewing
--
But the Mukerjee quoted there must have lived for many years
A literary monthly published in France until 1939.
--
as many people as she needs to carry out her plan. The earth
will surely never suffer from a dearth of men.
--
worse than they have been many times before. But I want them
to be different, I want them to be more harmonious and more
--
anti-divine forces they have only too many to choose from, and
always they find wills which they enslave and individuals whom
0.01 - Life and Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HERE are two necessities of Nature's workings which seem always to intervene in the greater forms of hu man activity, whether these belong to our ordinary fields of movement or seek those exceptional spheres and fulfilments which appear to us high and divine. Every such form tends towards a harmonised complexity and totality which again breaks apart into various channels of special effort and tendency, only to unite once more in a larger and more puissant synthesis. Secondly, development into forms is an imperative rule of effective manifestation; yet all truth and practice too strictly formulated becomes old and loses much, if not all, of its virtue; it must be constantly renovated by fresh streams of the spirit revivifying the dead or dying vehicle and changing it, if it is to acquire a new life. To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality. We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are being subjected to a supreme test and given their opportunity of rebirth. The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence. Indian Yoga, in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of hu manity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the secret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living hu man powers and utilities. But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
The Conditions of the Synthesis
--
In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and - highest condition of victory in that effort - a union of the hu man individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises selfconscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained.
Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compressing one's evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few months of bodily existence. A given system of Yoga, then, can be no more than a selection or a compression, into narrower but more energetic forms of intensity, of the general methods which are already being used loosely, largely, in a leisurely movement, with a profuser apparent waste of material and energy but with a more complete combination by the great
Mother in her vast upward labour. It is this view of Yoga that can alone form the basis for a sound and rational synthesis of Yogic methods. For then Yoga ceases to appear something mystic and abnormal which has no relation to the ordinary processes of the World-Energy or the purpose she keeps in view in her two great movements of subjective and objective selffulfilment; it reveals itself rather as an intense and exceptional use of powers that she has already manifested or is progressively
Life and Yoga
--
Yogic methods have something of the same relation to the customary psychological workings of man as has the scientific handling of the force of electricity or of steam to their normal operations in Nature. And they, too, like the operations of Science, are formed upon a knowledge developed and confirmed by regular experiment, practical analysis and constant result. All
Rajayoga, for instance, depends on this perception and experience that our inner elements, combinations, functions, forces, can be separated or dissolved, can be new-combined and set to novel and formerly impossible workings or can be transformed and resolved into a new general synthesis by fixed internal processes. Hathayoga similarly depends on this perception and experience that the vital forces and functions to which our life is normally subjected and whose ordinary operations seem set and indispensable, can be mastered and the operations changed or suspended with results that would otherwise be impossible and that seem miraculous to those who have not seized the rationale of their process. And if in some other of its forms this character of Yoga is less apparent, because they are more intuitive and less mechanical, nearer, like the Yoga of Devotion, to a supernal ecstasy or, like the Yoga of Knowledge, to a supernal infinity of consciousness and being, yet they too start from the use of some principal faculty in us by ways and for ends not contemplated in its everyday spontaneous workings. All methods grouped under the common name of Yoga are special psychological processes founded on a fixed truth of Nature and developing, out of normal functions, powers and results which were always latent but which her ordinary movements do not easily or do not often manifest.
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 hu man 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
--
God. Therefore we see in India that a sharp incompatibility has been created between life in the world and spiritual growth and perfection, and although the tradition and ideal of a victorious harmony between the inner attraction and the outer de mand remains, it is little or else very imperfectly exemplified. In fact, when a man turns his vision and energy inward and enters on the path of Yoga, he is popularly supposed to be lost inevitably to the great stream of our collective existence and the secular effort of hu manity. So strongly has the idea prevailed, so much has it been emphasised by prevalent philosophies and religions that to escape from life is now commonly considered as not only the necessary condition, but the general object of Yoga. No synthesis of Yoga can be satisfying which does not, in its aim, reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected hu man life or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consummation of both. For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower. To avoid the life which is given him for the realisation of that possibility, can never be either the indispensable condition or the whole and ultimate object of his supreme endeavour or of his most powerful means of self-fulfilment. It can only be a temporary necessity under certain conditions or a specialised extreme effort imposed on the individual so as to prepare a greater general possibility for the race. The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious
Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: "All life is Yoga."
0.02 - II - The Home of the Guru, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Guru-griha-vsa staying in the home of the Guru is a very old Indian ideal maintained by seekers through the ages. The Aranyakas the ancient teachings in the forest-groves are perhaps the oldest records of the institution. It was not for education in the modern sense of the term that men went to live with the Guru; for the Guru is not a 'teacher'. The Guru is one who is 'enlightened', who is a seer, a Rishi, one who has the vision of and has lived the Truth. He has, thus, the knowledge of the goal of hu man life and has learnt true values in life by living the Truth. He can impart both these to the willing seeker. In ancient times seekers went to the Guru with many questions, difficulties and doubts but also with earnestness. Their questions were preliminary to the quest.
The Master, the Guru, set at rest the puzzled hu man mind by his illuminating answers, perhaps even more by his silent consciousness, so that it might be able to pursue unhampered the path of realisation of the Truth. Those ancient discourses answer the mind of man today even across the ages. They have rightly acquired as everything of the past does a certain sanctity. But sometimes that very reverence prevents men from properly evaluating, and living in, the present. This happens when the mind instead of seeking the Spirit looks at the form. For instance, it is not necessary for such discourses that they take place in forest-groves in order to be highly spiritual. Wherever the Master is, there is Light. And guru-griha the house of the Master can be his private dwelling place. So much was this feeling a part of Sri Aurobindo's nature and so particular was he to maintain the personal character of his work that during the first few years after 1923 he did not like his house to be called an 'Ashram', as the word had acquired the sense of a public institution to the modern mind. But there was no doubt that the flower of Divinity had blossomed in him; and disciples, like bees seeking honey, came to him. It is no exaggeration to say that these Evening Talks were to the small company of disciples what the Aranyakas were to the ancient seekers. Seeking the Light, they came to the dwelling place of their Guru, the greatest seer of the age, and found it their spiritual home the home of their parents, for the Mother, his companion in the great mission, had come. And these spiritual parents bestowed upon the disciples freely of their Light, their Consciousness, their Power and their Grace. The modern reader may find that the form of these discourses differs from those of the past but it was bound to be so for the simple reason that the times have changed and the problems that puzzle the modern mind are so different. Even though the disciples may be very imperfect representations of what he aimed at in them, still they are his creations. It is in order to repay, in however infinitesimal a degree, the debt which we owe to him that the effort is made to partake of the joy of his company the Evening Talks with a larger public.
***
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I could give many explanations; the how and the why can easily
he described - but is it really necessary? This is not what heals.
--
should be gone. So I replied, "Yes, Mother, the last man
has gone." And lo, there he is, arranging the polishing
--
The explanation of many events may be found along this line -
although, of course, it is not the only explanation!
--
All that you say is quite true and there are still many other
things you have not said, but which I know. The trouble might
--
1) Too many workers.
2) Too many different projects undertaken at the same time.
3) Lack of consciousness in some of the supervisors.
--
that is why there are many things I do not say, because to me they
are so obvious that it would be utterly pointless to mention them.
--
One really cannot dismiss a man because he laughed. He should
be given some other work and advised to be polite in the future.
--
It is only by long experience, tested many times very carefully,
that one can discriminate between various types of suggestions
--
did not have the power to dominate the other man's will.
So you should have the nails removed.
--
This is not right. When I ask a question, I ask it in order to get exact and objective information. I have said this many times. I have
no preconceived idea, no preference, no opinion about things.
--
to dominate the other man's will. So you should get the
nails removed." This is the sentence that upset me. Why
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The progressive self- manifestation of Nature in man, termed in modern language his evolution, must necessarily depend upon three successive elements. There is that which is already evolved; there is that which, still imperfect, still partly fluid, is persistently in the stage of conscious evolution; and there is that which is to be evolved and may perhaps be already
10
--
Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies and realisations, and the Life-Energy which is our means of existence in a material body and the basis there even of our mental and spiritual activities. She has successfully achieved a certain stability of her constant material movement which is at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in hu manity. This is what is meant by the fable in the Aitareya Upanishad which tells us that the gods rejected the animal forms successively offered to them by the Divine Self and only when man was produced, cried out, "This indeed is perfectly made," and consented to enter in. She has effected also a working compromise between the inertia of matter and the active Life that lives in and feeds on it, by which not only is vital existence sustained, but the fullest developments of mentality are rendered possible. This equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed
The Three Steps of Nature
--
If, then, this inferior equilibrium is the basis and first means of the higher movements which the universal Power contemplates and if it constitutes the vehicle in which the Divine here seeks to reveal Itself, if the Indian saying is true that the body is the instrument provided for the fulfilment of the right law of our nature, then any final recoil from the physical life must be a turning away from the completeness of the divine Wisdom and a renunciation of its aim in earthly manifestation. Such a refusal may be, owing to some secret law of their development, the right attitude for certain individuals, but never the aim intended for mankind. It can be, therefore, no integral Yoga which ignores the body or makes its annulment or its rejection indispensable to a perfect spirituality. Rather, the perfecting of the body also should be the last triumph of the Spirit and to make the bodily life also divine must be God's final seal upon His work in the universe. The obstacle which the physical presents to the spiritual is no argument for the rejection of the physical; for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. A supreme difficulty is Nature's indication to us of a supreme conquest to be won and an ultimate problem to be solved; it is not a warning of an inextricable snare to be shunned or of an enemy too strong for us from whom we must flee.
Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for a great utility; they too de mand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment. The great part assigned to this element in the universal scheme is powerfully emphasised by the catholic wisdom of the Upanishads. "As the spokes of a wheel in its nave, so in the Life-Energy is all established, the triple knowledge and the Sacrifice and the power of the strong and the purity of the wise. Under the control of the LifeEnergy is all this that is established in the triple heaven."2 It is therefore no integral Yoga that kills these vital energies, forces them into a nerveless quiescence or roots them out as the source
--
If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as her base and first instrument, it is our mental life that she is evolving as her immediate next aim and superior instrument. This in her ordinary exaltations is the lofty preoccupying thought in her; this, except in her periods of exhaustion and recoil into a reposeful and recuperating obscurity, is her constant pursuit wherever she can get free from the trammels of her first vital and physical realisations. For here in man we have a distinction which is of the utmost importance. He has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason. Mind in man is first emmeshed in the life of the body, where in the plant it is entirely involved and in animals always imprisoned. It accepts this life as not only the first but the whole condition of its activities and serves its needs as if they were the entire aim of existence. But the bodily life in man is a base, not the aim, his first condition and not his last determinant. In the just idea of the ancients man is essentially the thinker, the manu, the mental being who leads the life and the body,3 not the animal who is led by them. The true hu man existence, therefore, only begins when the intellectual mentality emerges out of the material and we begin more and more to live in the mind independent of the nervous and physical obsession and in the measure of that liberty are able to accept rightly and rightly to use the life of the body. For freedom and not a skilful subjection is the true means of mastery. A free, not a compulsory acceptance of the conditions, the enlarged and sublimated conditions of our physical being, is the high hu man ideal. But beyond this intellectual mentality is the divine.
The mental life thus evolving in man is not, indeed, a
manomayah. pran.asarraneta. Mundaka Upanishad II. 2. 8.
The Three Steps of Nature
--
Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the fully active mind and the body; he does not normally possess it.
Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life seems to create, frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the hu man elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to describe genius as a form of insanity, a result of degeneration, a pathological morbidity of Nature. The phenomena which are used to justify this exaggeration, when taken not separately, but in connection with all other relevant data, point to a different truth. Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall be prepared for those more puissant, direct and rapid faculties which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine mind. It is not, then, a freak, an inexplicable phenomenon, but a perfectly natural next step in the right line of her evolution.
--
Nor are the disturbances created by her process as great as is often represented. Some of them are the crude beginnings of new manifestations; others are an easily corrected movement of disintegration, often fruitful of fresh activities and always a small price to pay for the far-reaching results that she has in view.
We may perhaps, if we consider all the circumstances, come
--
to this conclusion that mental life, far from being a recent appearance in man, is the swift repetition in him of a previous achievement from which the Energy in the race had undergone one of her deplorable recoils. The savage is perhaps not so much the first forefa ther of civilised man as the degenerate descendant of a previous civilisation. For if the actuality of intellectual achievement is unevenly distributed, the capacity is spread everywhere. It has been seen that in individual cases even the racial type considered by us the lowest, the negro fresh from the perennial barbarism of Central Africa, is capable, without admixture of blood, without waiting for future generations, of the intellectual culture, if not yet of the intellectual accomplishment of the dominant European. Even in the mass men seem to need, in favourable circumstances, only a few generations to cover ground that ought apparently to be measured in the terms of millenniums. Either, then, man by his privilege as a mental being is exempt from the full burden of the tardy laws of evolution or else he already represents and with helpful conditions and in the right stimulating atmosphere can always display a high level of material capacity for the activities of the intellectual life.
It is not mental incapacity, but the long rejection or seclusion from opportunity and withdrawal of the awakening impulse that creates the savage. Barbarism is an intermediate sleep, not an original darkness.
Moreover the whole trend of modern thought and modern endeavour reveals itself to the observant eye as a large conscious effort of Nature in man to effect a general level of intellectual equipment, capacity and farther possibility by universalising the opportunities which modern civilisation affords for the mental life. Even the preoccupation of the European intellect, the protagonist of this tendency, with material Nature and the externalities of existence is a necessary part of the effort. It seeks to prepare a sufficient basis in man's physical being and vital energies and in his material environment for his full mental possibilities. By the spread of education, by the advance of the backward races, by the elevation of depressed classes, by the multiplication of labour-saving appliances, by the movement
The Three Steps of Nature
--
towards ideal social and economic conditions, by the labour of Science towards an improved health, longevity and sound physique in civilised hu manity, the sense and drift of this vast movement translates itself in easily intelligible signs. The right or at least the ultimate means may not always be employed, but their aim is the right preliminary aim, - a sound individual and social body and the satisfaction of the legitimate needs and de mands of the material mind, sufficient ease, leisure, equal opportunity, so that the whole of mankind and no longer only the favoured race, class or individual may be free to develop the emotional and intellectual being to its full capacity. At present the material and economic aim may predominate, but always, behind, there works or there waits in reserve the higher and major impulse.
And when the preliminary conditions are satisfied, when the great endeavour has found its base, what will be the nature of that farther possibility which the activities of the intellectual life must serve? If Mind is indeed Nature's highest term, then the entire development of the rational and imaginative intellect and the harmonious satisfaction of the emotions and sensibilities must be to themselves sufficient. But if, on the contrary, man is more than a reasoning and emotional animal, if beyond that which is being evolved, there is something that has to be evolved, then it may well be that the fullness of the mental life, the suppleness, flexibility and wide capacity of the intellect, the ordered richness of emotion and sensibility may be only a passage towards the development of a higher life and of more powerful faculties which are yet to manifest and to take possession of the lower instrument, just as mind itself has so taken possession of the body that the physical being no longer lives only for its own satisfaction but provides the foundation and the materials for a superior activity.
The assertion of a higher than the mental life is the whole foundation of Indian philosophy and its acquisition and organisation is the veritable object served by the methods of Yoga.
--
Yoga, the inner instrument.4 And Indian tradition asserts that this which is to be manifested is not a new term in hu man experience, but has been developed before and has even governed hu manity in certain periods of its development. In any case, in order to be known it must at one time have been partly developed.
And if since then Nature has sunk back from her achievement, the reason must always be found in some unrealised harmony, some insufficiency of the intellectual and material basis to which she has now returned, some over-specialisation of the higher to the detriment of the lower existence.
--
The only approximate terms in the English language have other associations and their use may lead to many and even serious inaccuracies. The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body and doubly composed of the food sheath and the vital vehicle, besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind sheath or mental vehicle,5 a third, supreme and divine status of supra-mental being, termed the causal body and composed of a fourth and a fifth vehicle6 which are described as those of knowledge and bliss. But this knowledge is not a systematised result of mental questionings and reasonings, not a temporary arrangement of conclusions and opinions in the terms of the highest probability, but rather a pure self-existent and self-luminous Truth. And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also selfexistent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite existence.
antah.karan.a.
manah.-kos.a.
vijnanakos.a and anandakos.a.
--
Do such psychological conceptions correspond to anything real and possible? All Yoga asserts them as its ultimate experience and supreme aim. They form the governing principles of our highest possible state of consciousness, our widest possible range of existence. There is, we say, a harmony of supreme faculties, corresponding roughly to the psychological faculties of revelation, inspiration and intuition, yet acting not in the intuitive reason or the divine mind, but on a still higher plane, which see Truth directly face to face, or rather live in the truth of things both universal and transcendent and are its formulation and luminous activity. And these faculties are the light of a conscious existence superseding the egoistic and itself both cosmic and transcendent, the nature of which is Bliss. These are obviously divine and, as man is at present apparently constituted, superhu man states of consciousness and activity. A trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight7 is, indeed, the metaphysical description of the supreme At man, the self-formulation, to our awakened knowledge, of the Unknowable whether conceived as a pure Impersonality or as a cosmic Personality manifesting the universe. But in Yoga they are regarded also in their psychological aspects as states of subjective existence to which our waking consciousness is now alien, but which dwell in us in a superconscious plane and to which, therefore, we may always ascend.
For, as is indicated by the name, causal body (karan.a), as opposed to the two others which are instruments (karan.a), this crowning manifestation is also the source and effective power of all that in the actual evolution has preceded it. Our mental activities are, indeed, a derivation, selection and, so long as they are divided from the truth that is secretly their source, a deformation of the divine knowledge. Our sensations and emotions have the same relation to the Bliss, our vital forces and actions to the aspect of Will or Force assumed by the divine consciousness, our physical being to the pure essence of that Bliss and
Consciousness. The evolution which we observe and of which
--
we are the terrestrial summit may be considered, in a sense, as an inverse manifestation, by which these supreme Powers in their unity and their diversity use, develop and perfect the imperfect substance and activities of Matter, of Life and of Mind so that they, the inferior modes, may express in mutable relativity an increasing harmony of the divine and eternal states from which they are born. If this be the truth of the universe, then the goal of evolution is also its cause, it is that which is im manent in its elements and out of them is liberated. But the liberation is surely imperfect if it is only an escape and there is no return upon the containing substance and activities to exalt and transform them.
The im manence itself would have no credible reason for being if it did not end in such a transfiguration. But if hu man mind can become capable of the glories of the divine Light, hu man emotion and sensibility can be transformed into the mould and assume the measure and movement of the supreme Bliss, hu man action not only represent but feel itself to be the motion of a divine and non-egoistic Force and the physical substance of our being sufficiently partake of the purity of the supernal essence, sufficiently unify plasticity and durable constancy to support and prolong these highest experiences and agencies, then all the long labour of Nature will end in a crowning justification and her evolutions reveal their profound significance.
0.03 - III - The Evening Sittings, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo was never a social man in the current sense of the term and definitely he was not a man of the crowd. This was due to his grave temperament, not to any feeling of superiority or to repulsion for men. At Baroda there was an Officers' Club which was patronised by the Maharajah and though Sri Aurobindo enrolled himself as a member he hardly went to the Club even on special occasions. He rather liked a small congenial circle of friends and spent most of his evenings with them whenever he was free and not occupied with his studies or other works. After Baroda when he went to Calcutta there was hardly any time in the storm and stress of revolutionary politics to permit him to lead a 'social life'. What little time he could spare from his incessant activities was spent in the house of Raja Subodh Mallick or at the Grey Street house. In the Karmayogin office he used to sit after the office hours till late chatting with a few persons or trying automatic writing. Strange dictations used to be received sometimes: one of them was the following: "Moni [Suresh Chakravarty] will bomb Sir Edward Grey when he will come as the Viceroy of India." In later years at Pondicherry there used to be a joke that Sir Edward took such a fright at the prospect of Moni's bombing him that he never came to India!
After Sri Aurobindo had come to Pondicherry from Chandernagore, he entered upon an intense period of Sadhana and for a few months he refused to receive anyone. After a time he used to sit down to talk in the evening and on some days tried automatic writing. Yogic Sadhan, a small book, was the result. In 1913 Sri Aurobindo moved to Rue Franois Martin No. 41 where he used to receive visitors at fixed times. This was generally in the morning between 9 and 10.30.
--
These sittings, in fact, furnished Sri Aurobindo with an occasion to admit and feel the outer atmosphere and that of the group living with him. It brought to him the much-needed direct contact of the mental and vital make-up of the disciples, enabling him to act on the atmosphere in general and on the individual in particular. He could thus help to remould their mental make-up by removing the limitations of their minds and opinions, and correct temperamental tendencies and formations. Thus, these sittings contributed at least partly to the creation of an atmosphere amenable to the working of the Higher Consciousness. Far more important than the actual talk and its content was the personal contact, the influence of the Master, and the divine atmosphere he e manated; for through his outer personality it was the Divine Consciousness that he allowed to act. All along behind the outer manifestation that appeared hu man, there was the influence and presence of the Divine.
What was talked in the small group informally was not intended by Sri Aurobindo to be the independent expression of his views on the subjects, events or the persons discussed. Very often what he said was in answer to the spiritual need of the individual or of the collective atmosphere. It was like a spiritual remedy meant to produce certain spiritual results, not a philosophical or metaphysical pronouncement on questions, events or movements. The net result of some talks very often was to point out to the disciple the inherent incapacity of the hu man intellect and its secondary place in the search for the ultimate Reality.
--
The long period of the Second World War with all its vicissitudes passed through these years. It was a priceless experience to see how he devoted his energies to the task of saving hu manity from the threatened reign of Nazism. It was a practical lesson of solid work done for hu manity without any thought of return or reward, without even letting hu manity know what he was doing for it! Thus he lived the Divine and showed us how the Divine cares for the world, how He comes down and works for man. I shall never forget how he who was at one time in his own words "not merely a non-co-operator but an enemy of British Imperialism" bestowed such anxious care on the health of Churchill, listening carefully to the health-bulletins! It was the work of the Divine, it was the Divine's work for the world.
There were no formal evening sittings during these years, but what appeared to me important in our informal talks was recorded and has been incorporated in this book.
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[3] His initials, in the Tamil manner, by which he was widely known.
[4]The Life Divine, Centenary Edition, pp. 994-5.
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
worked for many years embroidering clothes for the Mother and
later became one of her personal attendants. She began writing
--
my blessings, my congratulations for the manner in which she
has passed her French test.
--
receive many such things to read. But if You become
serious, as You were this morning, I would rather put an
--
So many times I have resolved to work regularly and so
many times I have failed! So I thought that if I told You,
--
there is a kind of noise in my head, as if many people
were talking at once and I can understand nothing of
--
feelings as carefully as a prudent man bolts the doors of his
house.
--
at such and such a time after having slept for so many hours; I
got up, washed and dressed, then I ate my breakfast and started
--
No, all that is only the manifestation of a universal harmony
which lies, as it were, at the very heart of creation. But the
--
to manifest, this perfect beauty will express itself quite naturally
and spontaneously in all forms.
--
work all day every day, how can I make so many big
and beautiful things such as I want to make for my dear,
--
have managed to give you a few minutes. It is nice of you to
think of not increasing my work unnecessarily; there are not
--
won't tell You how many hours I work because if I
write "I worked for ten hours", You write to me, "It is
--
January - at that time there are many visitors because of the
vacations and I shall then wear the embroidered saris with the
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For man, the head of terrestrial Nature, the sole earthly frame in which her full evolution is possible, is a triple birth. He has been given a living frame in which the body is the vessel and life the dynamic means of a divine manifestation. His activity is centred in a progressive mind which aims at perfecting itself as well as the house in which it dwells and the means of life that it uses, and is capable of awaking by a progressive self-realisation to its own true nature as a form of the Spirit. He culminates in what he always really was, the illumined and beatific spirit which is intended at last to irradiate life and mind with its now concealed splendours.
Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in hu manity, the whole method and aim of our existence must work by the interaction of these three elements in the being. As a result of their separate formulation in Nature, man has open to him a choice between three kinds of life, the ordinary material existence, a life of mental activity and progress and the unchanging spiritual beatitude. But he can, as he progresses, combine these three forms, resolve their discords into a harmonious rhythm and so create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect man.
In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic and governing impulse.
The characteristic energy of bodily Life is not so much in progress as in persistence, not so much in individual selfenlargement as in self-repetition. There is, indeed, in physical Nature a progression from type to type, from the vegetable to the animal, from the animal to man; for even in inanimate Matter Mind is at work. But once a type is marked off physically, the chief immediate preoccupation of the terrestrial Mother seems to be to keep it in being by a constant reproduction. For Life always seeks immortality; but since individual form is imper manent and only the idea of a form is per manent in the consciousness that creates the universe, - for there it does not perish, - such constant reproduction is the only possible material immortality.
Self-preservation, self-repetition, self-multiplication are necessarily, then, the predominant instincts of all material existence.
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In each of these forms Nature acts both individually and collectively; for the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single form and in the group-existence, whether family, clan and nation or groupings dependent on less physical principles or the supreme group of all, our collective hu manity. man also may seek his own individual good from any or all of these spheres of activity, or identify himself in them with the collectivity and live for it, or, rising to a truer perception of this complex universe, harmonise the individual realisation with the collective aim. For as it is the right relation of the soul with the Supreme, while it is in the universe, neither to assert egoistically its separate being nor to blot itself out in the Indefinable, but to realise its unity with the Divine and the world and unite them in the individual, so the right relation of the individual with the collectivity is neither to pursue egoistically his own material or mental progress or spiritual salvation without regard to his fellows, nor for the sake of the community to suppress or maim his proper development, but to sum up in himself all its best and completest possibilities and pour them out by thought, action and all other means on his surroundings so that the whole race may approach nearer to the attainment of its supreme personalities.
It follows that the object of the material life must be to fulfil, above all things, the vital aim of Nature. The whole aim of the material man is to live, to pass from birth to death with as much comfort or enjoyment as may be on the way, but anyhow to live.
He can subordinate this aim, but only to physical Nature's other instincts, the reproduction of the individual and the conservation of the type in the family, class or community. Self, domesticity, the accustomed order of the society and of the nation are the constituents of the material existence. Its immense importance in the economy of Nature is self-evident, and commensurate is the importance of the hu man type which represents it. He assures her of the safety of the framework she has made and of the orderly continuance and conservation of her past gains.
But by that very utility such men and the life they lead are condemned to be limited, irrationally conservative and earthbound. The customary routine, the customary institutions, the inherited or habitual forms of thought, - these things are the life-breath of their nostrils. They admit and jealously defend the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it in the present. For to the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or mad man. The old Semites who stoned the living prophets and adored their memories when dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unintelligent principle in Nature. In the ancient Indian distinction between the once born and the twice born, it is to this material man that the former description can be applied. He does Nature's inferior works; he assures the basis for her higher activities; but not to him easily are opened the glories of her second birth.
Yet he admits so much of spirituality as has been enforced on his customary ideas by the great religious outbursts of the past and he makes in his scheme of society a place, venerable though not often effective, for the priest or the learned theologian who can be trusted to provide him with a safe and ordinary spiritual pabulum. But to the man who would assert for himself the liberty of spiritual experience and the spiritual life, he assigns, if he admits him at all, not the vestment of the priest but the robe of the Sannyasin. Outside society let him exercise his dangerous freedom. So he may even serve as a hu man lightning-rod receiving the electricity of the Spirit and turning it away from the social edifice.
Nevertheless it is possible to make the material man and his life moderately progressive by imprinting on the material mind the custom of progress, the habit of conscious change, the fixed idea of progression as a law of life. The creation by this means of progressive societies in Europe is one of the greatest triumphs of Mind over Matter. But the physical nature has its revenge; for the progress made tends to be of the grosser and more outward kind and its attempts at a higher or a more rapid movement bring about great wearinesses, swift exhaustions, startling recoils.
It is possible also to give the material man and his life a moderate spirituality by accustoming him to regard in a religious spirit all the institutions of life and its customary activities. The creation of such spiritualised communities in the East has been one of the greatest triumphs of Spirit over Matter. Yet here, too, there is a defect; for this often tends only to the creation of a religious temperament, the most outward form of spirituality.
Its higher manifestations, even the most splendid and puissant, either merely increase the number of souls drawn out of social life and so impoverish it or disturb the society for a while by a momentary elevation. The truth is that neither the mental effort nor the spiritual impulse can suffice, divorced from each other, to overcome the immense resistance of material Nature.
She de mands their alliance in a complete effort before she will suffer a complete change in hu manity. But, usually, these two great agents are unwilling to make to each other the necessary concessions.
The mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant At man,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.
--
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.
That highest thing, the spiritual existence, is concerned with what is eternal but not therefore entirely aloof from the transient. For the spiritual man the mind's dream of perfect beauty is realised in an eternal love, beauty and delight that has no dependence and is equal behind all objective appearances; its dream of perfect Truth in the supreme, self-existent, self-apparent and eternal Verity which never varies, but explains and is the secret of all variations and the goal of all progress; its dream of perfect action in the omnipotent and self-guiding Law that is inherent for ever in all things and translates itself here in the rhythm of the worlds. What is fugitive vision or constant effort of creation in the brilliant Self is an eternally existing Reality in the Self that knows2 and is the Lord.
But if it is often difficult for the mental life to accommodate itself to the dully resistant material activity, how much more difficult must it seem for the spiritual existence to live on in a world that appears full not of the Truth but of every lie and illusion, not of Love and Beauty but of an encompassing discord and ugliness, not of the Law of Truth but of victorious selfishness and sin? Therefore the spiritual life tends easily in the saint and Sannyasin to withdraw from the material existence and reject it either wholly and physically or in the spirit. It sees this world as the kingdom of evil or of ignorance and the eternal and divine either in a far-off heaven or beyond where there is no world and no life. It separates itself inwardly, if not also physically, from the world's impurities; it asserts the spiritual reality in a spotless isolation. This withdrawal renders an invaluable service to the material life itself by forcing it to regard and even to bow down to something that is the direct negation of its own petty ideals, sordid cares and egoistic self-content.
--
But the spiritual life, like the mental, may thus make use of this outward existence for the benefit of the individual with a perfect indifference to any collective uplifting of the merely symbolic world which it uses. Since the Eternal is for ever the same in all things and all things the same to the Eternal, since the exact mode of action and the result are of no importance compared with the working out in oneself of the one great realisation, this spiritual indifference accepts no matter what environment, no matter what action, dispassionately, prepared to retire as soon as its own supreme end is realised. It is so that many have understood the ideal of the Gita. Or else the inner love and bliss may pour itself out on the world in good deeds, in service, in compassion, the inner Truth in the giving of knowledge, without therefore attempting the transformation of a world which must by its inalienable nature remain a battlefield of the dualities, of sin and virtue, of truth and error, of joy and suffering.
But if Progress also is one of the chief terms of worldexistence and a progressive manifestation of the Divine the true sense of Nature, this limitation also is invalid. It is possible for the spiritual life in the world, and it is its real mission, to change the material life into its own image, the image of the Divine. Therefore, besides the great solitaries who have sought and attained their self-liberation, we have the great spiritual teachers who have also liberated others and, supreme of all, the great dynamic souls who, feeling themselves stronger in the might of the Spirit than all the forces of the material life banded together, have thrown themselves upon the world, grappled with it in a loving wrestle and striven to compel its consent to its own transfiguration. Ordinarily, the effort is concentrated on a mental and moral change in hu manity, but it may extend itself also to the alteration of the forms of our life and its institutions so that they too may be a better mould for the inpourings of the Spirit. These attempts have been the supreme landmarks in the progressive development of hu man ideals and the divine preparation of the race. Every one of them, whatever its outward results, has left Earth more capable of Heaven and quickened in its tardy movements the evolutionary Yoga of Nature.
In India, for the last thousand years and more, the spiritual life and the material have existed side by side to the exclusion of the progressive mind. Spirituality has made terms for itself with Matter by renouncing the attempt at general progress. It has obtained from society the right of free spiritual development for all who assume some distinctive symbol, such as the garb of the Sannyasin, the recognition of that life as man's goal and those who live it as worthy of an absolute reverence, and the casting of society itself into such a religious mould that its most customary acts should be accompanied by a formal reminder of the spiritual symbolism of life and its ultimate destination. On the other hand, there was conceded to society the right of inertia and immobile self-conservation. The concession destroyed much of the value of the terms. The religious mould being fixed, the formal reminder tended to become a routine and to lose its living sense. The constant attempts to change the mould by new sects and religions ended only in a new routine or a modification of the old; for the saving element of the free and active mind had been exiled. The material life, handed over to the Ignorance, the purposeless and endless duality, became a leaden and dolorous yoke from which flight was the only escape.
The schools of Indian Yoga lent themselves to the compromise. Individual perfection or liberation was made the aim, seclusion of some kind from the ordinary activities the condition, the renunciation of life the culmination. The teacher gave his knowledge only to a small circle of disciples. Or if a wider movement was attempted, it was still the release of the individual soul that remained the aim. The pact with an immobile society was, for the most part, observed.
--
We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others.
Therefore from a concrete view of hu man life in its threefold potentialities we come to the same conclusion that we had drawn from an observation of Nature in her general workings and the three steps of her evolution. And we begin to perceive a complete aim for our synthesis of Yoga.
--
But their aim is one in the end. The generalisation of Yoga in hu manity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression.
The ages when that is accomplished, are the legendary Satya or Krita3 Yugas, the ages of the Truth manifested in the symbol, of the great work done when Nature in mankind, illumined, satisfied and blissful, rests in the culmination of her endeavour.
It is for man to know her meaning, no longer misunderstanding, vilifying or misusing the universal Mother and to aspire always by her mightiest means to her highest ideal.
3 Satya means Truth; Krita, effected or completed.
0.04 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As there is no better man I am trying to get on with
him.
The bullocks seem to like this man and this is the most important
point.
--
the man and to find a better one.
The proposal to frighten them in order to master them is
--
act like the ignorant ordinary man?
I can tell you this to finish with the subject, that from the
--
I do not find the new man better than the previous one. He is far
too nervous and restless. If he could be a little more quiet and
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the places, many things are observed on that day. Horns
are painted in red and blue colour, no work is given and
--
A man who is cruel with beasts is worse than a beast.
2 April 1934
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal operations. In the ancient tradition of Hathayoga it has always been supposed that this conquest could be pushed so far even as to conquer to a great extent the force of gravitation. By various subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hathayogin next contrives to keep the body free from all impurities and the nervous system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are his most important instruments. These are called pran.ayama, the control of the breath or vital power; for breathing is the chief physical functioning of the vital forces. Pranayama, for the Hathayogin, serves a double purpose. First, it completes the perfection of the body. The vitality is liberated from many of the ordinary necessities of physical Nature; robust health, prolonged youth, often an extraordinary longevity are attained.
On the other hand, Pranayama awakens the coiled-up serpent of the Pranic dynamism in the vital sheath and opens to the Yogin fields of consciousness, ranges of experience, abnormal faculties denied to the ordinary hu man life while it puissantly intensifies such normal powers and faculties as he already possesses.
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Rajayoga takes a higher flight. It aims at the liberation and perfection not of the bodily, but of the mental being, the control of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness. It fixes its eyes on the citta, that stuff of mental consciousness in which all these activities arise, and it seeks, even as Hathayoga with its physical material, first to purify and to tranquillise. The normal state of man is a condition of trouble and disorder, a kingdom either at war with itself or badly governed; for the lord, the Purusha, is subjected to his ministers, the faculties, subjected even to his subjects, the instruments of sensation, emotion, action, enjoyment. Swarajya, self-rule, must be substituted for this subjection.
First, therefore, the powers of order must be helped to overcome
--
Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which is known; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His being. It is in this triple path that we come most readily to the absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings and in the entire cosmic manifestation.
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
to make you a strong and conscious man who is master of
himself - that is, in control of his lower nature and capable of
--
No obscurity must be allowed to manifest through you.
12 April 1934
--
cannot give up this habit. I have made many efforts to
stop all hu man contacts, but I cannot. I don't know
--
of knowledge which are indispensable to a man if he does not
want to be ignorant and uncultured.
--
withdraw, though it is always there, behind, ready to manifest
again. But above all you must not believe the suggestions of incapacity and failure; they come from an adverse source and ought
--
multiple in its manifestation. There is only one moon and yet
each reflection of the moon is different. This is what I wanted
--
opened to many influences and that is why it is difficult for them
to be steady.
--
I feel completely suffocated. The struggle has become fiercer. How many days must I go on like this?
My dear child,
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the Divine is the one thing needful and it includes or leads up to all the rest; towards this sole good we have to drive and this attained, all the rest that the divine Will chooses for us, all necessary form and manifestation, will be added.
The synthesis we propose cannot, then, be arrived at either by combination in mass or by successive practice. It must therefore be effected by neglecting the forms and outsides of the
--
This system is the way of the Tantra. Owing to certain of its developments Tantra has fallen into discredit with those who are not Tantrics; and especially owing to the developments of its left-hand path, the Vama Marga, which not content with exceeding the duality of virtue and sin and instead of replacing them by spontaneous rightness of action seemed, sometimes, to make a method of self-indulgence, a method of unrestrained social immorality. Nevertheless, in its origin, Tantra was a great and puissant system founded upon ideas which were at least partially true. Even its twofold division into the right-hand and left-hand paths, Dakshina Marga and Vama Marga, started from a certain profound perception. In the ancient symbolic sense of the words Dakshina and Vama, it was the distinction between the way of Knowledge and the way of Ananda, - Nature in man liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities and Nature in man
The Synthesis of the Systems
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Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method, its Tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his discipline, - mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and conquered. But in the end, as is the general tendency of Prakriti, Tantric Yoga largely lost its principle in its machinery and became a thing of formulae and occult mechanism still powerful when rightly used but fallen from the clarity of their original intention.
We have in this central Tantric conception one side of the truth, the worship of the Energy, the Shakti, as the sole effective force for all attainment. We get the other extreme in the Vedantic conception of the Shakti as a power of Illusion and in the search after the silent inactive Purusha as the means of liberation from the deceptions created by the active Energy. But in the integral conception the Conscious Soul is the Lord, the Nature-Soul is his executive Energy. Purusha is of the nature of Sat, the being of conscious self-existence pure and infinite; Shakti or Prakriti is of the nature of Chit, - it is power of the Purusha's self-conscious existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed
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Yoga. In man we render these terms by Will and Faith, - a will that is eventually self-effective because it is of the substance of
Knowledge and a faith that is the reflex in the lower consciousness of a Truth or real Idea yet unrealised in the manifestation.
It is this self-certainty of the Idea which is meant by the Gita when it says, yo yac-chraddhah. sa eva sah., "whatever is a man's faith or the sure Idea in him, that he becomes."
We see, then, what from the psychological point of view,
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Yoga that we seek must also be an integral action of Nature, and the whole difference between the Yogin and the natural man will be this, that the Yogin seeks to substitute in himself for the integral action of the lower Nature working in and by ego and division the integral action of the higher Nature working in and by God and unity. If indeed our aim be only an escape from the world to God, synthesis is unnecessary and a waste of time; for then our sole practical aim must be to find out one path out of the thousand that lead to God, one shortest possible of short cuts, and not to linger exploring different paths that end in the same goal. But if our aim be a transformation of our integral being into the terms of God-existence, it is then that a synthesis becomes necessary.
The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His. Thus in a sense
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Strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for our weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It "makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills." The intellect becomes aware of a Law that beneficently insists and a succour that upholds; the heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet, in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the most easy and sure of all.
There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of
Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but
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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 hu man 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
Nature, in the other it becomes swift and self-conscious and the instrument confesses the hand of the Master. All life is a Yoga of Nature seeking to manifest God within itself. Yoga marks the stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering up and concentration of the movements dispersed and loosely combined in the lower evolution.
An integral method and an integral result. First, an integral realisation of Divine Being; not only a realisation of the One in its indistinguishable unity, but also in its multitude of aspects which are also necessary to the complete knowledge of it by
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functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ananda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our hu manity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the hu man manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga.
Perfection includes perfection of mind and body, so that the highest results of Rajayoga and Hathayoga should be contained in the widest formula of the synthesis finally to be effected by mankind. At any rate a full development of the general mental and physical faculties and experiences attainable by hu manity through Yoga must be included in the scope of the integral method. Nor would these have any raison d'etre unless employed for an integral mental and physical life. Such a mental and physical life would be in its nature a translation of the spiritual existence into its right mental and physical values. Thus we would arrive at a synthesis of the three degrees of Nature and of the three modes of hu man existence which she has evolved or is evolving. We would include in the scope of our liberated being and perfected modes of activity the material life, our base, and the mental life, our intermediate instrument.
Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection embraces the realisation of ourselves in being, in life and in love through others as well as through ourselves, the extension of our liberty and of its results in others would be the inevitable outcome as well as the broadest utility of our liberation and perfection. And the constant and inherent attempt of such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately complete generalisation in mankind.
The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect
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0.06 - INTRODUCTION, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
that by himself, and with the ordinary aid of grace, man cannot attain to that
degree of purgation which is essential to his transformation in God. He needs
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Sense, we are told, is 'common' and 'comes to many,' whereas that of Spirit 'is the
portion of very few.'5 The one is 'bitter and terrible' but 'the second bears no
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and draw it gradually nearer to God; we have here, as it were, so many stages of the
ascent of the Mount on whose summit the soul attains to transforming union.
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before doing so,10 for they still have many imperfections, both habitual and actual
(Chapter ii). After a brief introduction (Chapter iii), the Saint describes with some
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between the principles of sound reason and the sublimest manifestations of Divine
grace.
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
an aim as to be united with the Divine and to manifest Him, how
can he be affected by all the futilities and foolishnesses of life?
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If you were a man of the world as you say, you would not be
here; you would be in the world. These are certain elements in
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would be worthless words behind which a man seeks
shelter and protection. But even so, I am always Your
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At no moment do I forget you. Don't you rather allow too many
other influences to come between you and me?
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It is impossible to cease to be; nothing that belongs to the manifested universe can go out of it except through the door of
spiritual liberation, that is, transformation.
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and the ordinary consciousness of ignorant man.
Series Six - To a Young Sadhak
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and on the manner of one's approach to the Divine depends
what he receives and knows of the Divine. The bhakta meets
a Divine full of affection and sweetness, the wise man will find
a Divine full of wisdom and knowledge. He who fears meets a
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True love is something very deep and very calm in its intensity; it may very well not manifest itself through outer effusiveness.
To love is not to possess, but to give oneself.
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By "passion" we mean all the violent desires which take possession of a man and finally govern his life - the drunkard has
the passion for drink, the debauchee the passion for women,
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to me many things. There is a jealousy in me which blinds
me; another part in me is very vain, it gives me the idea
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It is when one feels like a blind man that one begins to be ready
for the illumination.
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than by mixing with many people and doing much work.
I have had the experience myself that one can be fully concentrated and be in union with the Divine even while working
0.07 - DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
IN this book are first set down all the stanzas which are to be expounded; afterwards, each of the stanzas is expounded separately, being set down before its exposition; and then each line is expounded separately and in turn, the line itself also being set down before the exposition. In the first two stanzas are expounded the effects of the two spiritual purgations: of the sensual part of man and of the spiritual part. In the other six are expounded various and wondrous effects of the spiritual illumination and union of love with God.
STANZAS OF THE SOUL
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Begins the exposition of the stanzas which treat of the way and manner which the soul follows upon the road of the union of love with God. Before we enter upon the exposition of these stanzas, it is well to understand here that the soul that utters them is now in the state of perfection, which is the union of love with God, having already passed through severe trials and straits, by means of spiritual exercise in the narrow way of eternal life whereof Our Saviour speaks in the Gospel, along which way the soul ordinarily passes in order to reach this high and happy union with God. Since this road (as the Lord Himself says likewise) is so strait, and since there are so few that enter by it,19 the soul considers it a great happiness and good chance to have passed along it to the said perfection of love, as it sings in this first stanza, calling this strait road with full propriety 'dark night,' as will be explained hereafter in the lines of the said stanza. The soul, then, rejoicing at having passed along this narrow road whence so many blessings have come to it, speaks after this manner.
BOOK THE FIRST
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IN this first stanza the soul relates the way and manner which it followed in going forth, as to its affection, from itself and from all things, and in dying to them all and to itself, by means of true mortification, in order to attain to living the sweet and delectable life of love with God; and it says that this going forth from itself and from all things was a 'dark night,' by which, as will be explained hereafter, is here understood purgative contemplation, which causes passively in the soul the negation of itself and of all things referred to above.
2. And this going forth it says here that it was able to accomplish in the strength and ardour which love for its Spouse gave to it for that purpose in the dark contemplation aforementioned. Herein it extols the great happiness which it found in journeying to God through this night with such signal success that none of the three enemies, which are world, devil and flesh (who are they that ever impede this road), could hinder it; inasmuch as the aforementioned night of purgative20 contemplation lulled to sleep and mortified, in the house of its sensuality, all the passions and desires with respect to their mischievous desires and motions. The line, then, says:
0.07 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are many things wrong with me, I know. But
there must be something fundamentally wrong. What is
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of all your creation and many are your children. But
your Grace is our sole refuge and to whom shall we
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people say; it would save you from many falls of consciousness.
This afternoon when I looked at you in silence I told you, "Be
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have been doing for so many years. I expect these moods
will come and go. But may I never lose sight of your
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there are many other kinds of energies, or rather many
other forms of Energy, which is one and universal.
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by yoga that one can do it. There have been, throughout the spiritual history of hu manity, many methods of yoga - which Sri
Aurobindo has described and explained for us in The Synthesis
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There are many ways to attain self-realisation, and each one
must choose the way that comes to him most naturally.
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true being of man.
29 September 1959
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appearance of mind in man, culminates in consciousness. This
consciousness likewise is progressive, and in proportion as man
evolves, it will change into superconscience.
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On 29 February 1956 there took place, in the Mother's words, "the manifestation of the Supramental upon earth"; "Then the supramental Light and Force and
Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow."
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"supreme faculties" are being referred to here? Those of man on
the way to becoming super man, or those that the supramental
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In the first case, they are the faculties that develop in man as
he opens to the higher mind and overmind, and through those
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mental activities, and no mental activity is fit to manifest the
Divine.
0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
it. But there are many persons who, without giving anything,
Words of the Mother - I, CWM, Vol. 13, p. 29.
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of many different entities which are sometimes even contrary to
one another: some want the spiritual life, others are attached to
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In terrestrial man, it is only the psychic being that knows true
love. As for perfect love, it exists only in the Divine.
01.01 - A Yoga of the Art of Life, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When Sri Aurobindo said, Our Yoga is not for ourselves but for hu manity, 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 hu man society (or even perhaps to their own selves). People understood his Yoga to be a modern one, dedicated to the service of hu manity. If service to hu manity 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 hu man 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 hu manity but for the Divine. But I am afraid this change of front, this volte-face, as it seemed, was not welcomed in many quarters; 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 Brah man.
II
In order to get a nearer approach to the ideal for which Sri Aurobindo has been labouring, we may combine with advantage the two mottoes he has given us and say that his mission is to find and express the Divine in hu manity. This is the service he means to render to hu manity, viz, to manifest and embody in it the Divine: his goal is not merely an amelioration, but a total change and transformation, the divinisation of hu man life.
Here also one must guard against certain misconceptions that are likely to occur. The transformation of hu man life does not necessarily mean that the entire hu manity will be changed into a race of gods or divine beings; it means the evolution or appearance on earth of a superior type of hu manity, even as man evolved out of animality as a superior type of animality, not that the entire animal kingdom was changed into hu manity.
As regards the possibility of such a consummation,Sri Aurobindo says it is not a possibility but an inevitabilityone must remember that the force that will bring about the result and is already at work is not any individual hu man power, however great it may be, but the Divine himself, it is the Divine's own Shakti that is labouring for the destined end.
Here is the very heart of the mystery, the master-key to the problem. The advent of the superhu man or divine race, however stupendous or miraculous the phenomenon may appear to be, can become a thing of practical actuality, precisely because it is no hu man agency that has undertaken it but the Divine himself in his supreme potency and wisdom and love. The descent of the Divine into the ordinary hu man nature in order to purify and transform it and be lodged there is the whole secret of the sadhana in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. The sadhaka has only to be quiet and silent, calmly aspiring, open and acquiescent and receptive to the one Force; he need not and should not try to do things by his independent personal effort, but get them done or let them be done for him in the dedicated consciousness by the Divine Master and Guide. All other Yogas or spiritual disciplines in the past envisaged an ascent of the consciousness, its sublimation into the consciousness of the Spirit and its fusion and dissolution there in the end. The descent of the Divine Consciousness to prepare its definitive home in the dynamic and pragmatic hu man nature, if considered at all, was not the main theme of the past efforts and achievements. Furthermore, the descent spoken of here is the descent, not of a divine consciousness for there are many varieties of divine consciousness but of the Divine's own consciousness, of the Divine himself with his Shakti. For it is that that is directly working out this evolutionary transformation of the age.
It is not my purpose here to enter into details as to the exact meaning of the descent, how it happens and what are its lines of activity and the results brought about. For it is indeed an actual descent that happens: the Divine Light leans down first into the mind and begins its purificatory work therealthough it is always the inner heart which first recognises the Divine Presence and gives its assent to the Divine action for the mind, the higher mind that is to say, is the summit of the ordinary hu man consciousness and receives more easily and readily the Radiances that descend. From the Mind the Light filters into the denser regions of the emotions and desires, of life activity and vital dynamism; finally, it gets into brute Matter itself, the hard and obscure rock of the physical body, for that too has to be illumined and made the very form and figure of the Light supernal. The Divine in his descending Grace is the Master-Architect who is building slowly and surely the many-chambered and many-storeyed edifice that is hu man nature and hu man life into the mould of the Divine Truth in its perfect play and supreme expression. But this is a matter which can be closely considered when one is already well within the mystery of the path and has acquired the elementary essentials of an initiate.
Another question that troubles and perplexes the ordinary hu man mind is as to the time when the thing will be done. Is it now or a millennium hence or at some astronomical distance in future, like the cooling of the sun, as someone has suggested for an analogy. In view of the magnitude of the work one might with reason say that the whole eternity is there before us, and a century or even a millennium should not be grudged to such a labour for it is nothing less than an undoing of untold millenniums in the past and the building of a far-flung futurity. However, as we have said, since it is the Divine's own work and since Yoga means a concentrated and involved process of action, effectuating in a minute what would perhaps take years to accomplish in the natural course, one can expect the work to be done sooner rather than later. Indeed, the ideal is one of here and nowhere upon this earth of material existence and now in this life, in this very bodynot hereafter or elsewhere. How long exactly that will mean, depends on many factors, but a few decades on this side or the other do not matter very much.
As to the extent of realisation, we say again that that is not a matter of primary consideration. It is not the quantity but the substance that counts. Even if it were a small nucleus it would be sufficient, at least for the beginning, provided it is the real, the genuine thing
01.01 - Sri Aurobindo - The Age of Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Well, the view expressed in these words is not a new revelation. It has been the cry of suffering hu manity through the ages. man has borne his cross since the beginning of his creation through want and privation, through disease and bereavement, through all manner of turmoil and tribulation, and yetmirabile dictuat the same time, in the very midst of those conditions, he has been aspiring and yearning for something else, ignoring the present, looking into the beyond. It is not the prosperous and the more happily placed in life who find it more easy to turn to the higher life, it is not the wealthiest who has the greatest opportunity to pursue a spiritual idea. On the contrary, spiritual leaders have thought and experienced otherwise.
Apart from the well-recognised fact that only in distress does the normal man think of God and non-worldly things, the real matter, however, is that the inner life is a thing apart and follows its own line of movement, does not depend upon, is not subservient to, the kind of outer life that one may happen to live under. The Bible says indeed, "Blessed are the poor, blessed are they that mourn"... But the Upanishad declares, on the other hand, that even as one lies happily on a royal couch, bathes and anoints himself with all the perfumes of the world, has attendants all around and always to serve him, even so, one can be full of the divine consciousness from the crown of the head to the tip of his toe-nail. In fact, a poor or a prosperous life is in no direct or even indirect ratio to a spiritual life. All the miseries and immediate needs of a physical life do not and cannot detain or delay one from following the path of the ideal; nor can all your riches be a burden to your soul and overwhelm it, if it chooses to walk onit can not only walk, but soar and fly with all that knapsack on its back.
If one were to be busy about reforming the world and when that was done then alone to turn to other-worldly things, in that case, one would never take the turn, for the world will never be reformed totally or even considerably in that way. It is not that reformers have for the first time appeared on the earth in the present age. Men have attempted social, political, economic and moral reforms from times immemorial. But that has not barred the spiritual attempt or minimised its importance. To say that because an ideal is apparently too high or too great for the present age, it must be kept in cold storage is to set a premium on the present nature of hu manity arid eternise it: that would bind the world to its old moorings and never give it the opportunity to be free and go out into the high seas of larger and greater realisations.
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Indeed, looking from a standpoint that views the working of the forces that act and achieve and not the external facts and events and arrangements aloneone finds that things that are achieved on the material plane are first developed and matured and made ready behind the veil and at a given moment burst out and manifest themselves often unexpectedly and suddenly like a chick out of the shell or the young butterfly out of the cocoon. The Gita points to that truth of Nature when it says: "These beings have already been killed by Me." It is not that a long or strenuous physical planning and preparation alone or in the largest measure brings about a physical realisation. The deeper we go within, the farther we are away from the surface, the nearer we come to the roots and sources of things even most superficial. The spiritual view sees and declares that it is the Brahmic consciousness that holds, inspires, builds up Matter, the physical body and form of Brah man.
The highest ideal, the very highest which God and Nature and man have in view, is not and cannot be kept in cold storage: it is being worked out even here and now, and it has to be worked out here and now. The ideal of the Life Divine embodies a central truth of existence, and however difficult or chimerical it may appear to be to the normal mind, it is the preoccupation of the inner being of manall other ways or attempts of curing hu man ills are faint echoes, masks, diversions of this secret urge at the source and heart of things. That ideal is a norm and a force that is ever dynamic and has become doubly so since it has entered the earth atmosphere and the waking hu man consciousness and is labouring there. It is always safer and wiser to recognise that fact, to help in the realisation of that truth and be profited by it.
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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 hu manity 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 de mand 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, hu manity 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 hu manity has lived through. On the momentous day when man appeared on earth, 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.
And now the days of captivity or rather of inner preparation are at an end. The voice in the wilderness was necessary, for it was a call and a communion in the silence of the soul. Today the silence seeks utterance. Today the shell is ripe enough to break and to bring out the mature and full-grown being. The king that was in hiding comes in glory and triumph, in his complete regalia.
Another hu manity is rising out of the present hu man species. The beings of the new order are everywhere and it is they who will soon hold sway over earth, be the head and front of the terrestrial evolution in the cycle that is approaching as it was with man in the cycle that is passing away. What will this new order of being be like? It will be what man is not, also what man is. It will not be man, because it will overstep the limitations and incapacities inherent in man; and it will be man by the realisation of those fundamental aspirations and yearnings that have troubled and consoled the deeper strata the soulin him throughout the varied experiences of his terrestrial life.
The New man will be Master and not slave. He will be master, first, of himself and then of the world. man as he actually is, is but a slave. He has no personal voice or choice; the determining soul, the Ishwara, in him is sleep-bound and hushed. He is a mere plaything in the hands of nature and circumstances. Therefore it is that Science has become his supreme Dharmashastra; for science seeks to teach us the moods of Nature and the methods of propitiating her. Our actual ideal of man is that of the cleverest slave. But the New man will have found himself and by and according to his inner will, mould and create his world. He will not be in awe of Nature and in an attitude of perpetual apprehension and hesitation, but will ground himself on a secret harmony and union that will declare him as the lord. We will recognise the New man by his very gait and manner, by a certain kingly ease and dominion in every shade of his expression.
Not that this sovereign power will have anything to do with aggression or over-bearingness. It will not be a power that feels itself only by creating an eternal opponentErbfeindby coming in constant clash with a rival that seeks to gain victory by subjugating. It will not be Nietzschean "will to power," which is, at best, a supreme Asuric power. It will rather be a Divine Power, for the strength it will exert and the victory it will achieve will not come from the egoit is the ego which requires an object outside and against to feel and affirm itself but it will come from a higher personal self which is one with the cosmic soul and therefore with other personal souls. The Asura, in spite of, or rather, because of his aggressive vehemence betrays a lack of the sovereign power that is calm and at ease and self-sufficient. The Devic power does not assert hut simply accomplishes; the forces of the world act not as its opponent but as its instrument. Thus the New man shall affirm his individual sovereignty and do so to perfection by expressing through it his unity with the cosmic powers, with the infinite godhead. And by being Swarat, Self-Master, he will become Samrat, world-master.
This mastery will be effected not merely in will, but in mind and heart also. For the New man will know not by the intellect which is egocentric and therefore limited, not by ratiocination which is an indirect and doubtful process, but by direct vision, an inner communion, a soul revelation. The new knowledge will be vast and profound and creative, based as it will be upon the reality of things and not upon their shadows. Truth will shine through every experience and every utterance"a truth shall have its seat on our speech and mind and hearing", so have the Vedas said. The mind and intellect will not be active and constructive agents but the luminous channel of a self-luminous knowledge. And the heart too which is now the field of passion and egoism will be cleared of its noise and obscurity; a serener sky will shed its pure warmth and translucent glow. The knot will be rent asunderbhidyate hridaya granthih and the vast and mighty streams of another ocean will flow through. We will love not merely those to whom we are akin but God's creatures, one and all; we will love not with the yearning and hunger of a mortal but with the wide and intense Rasa that lies in the divine identity of souls.
And the new society will be based not upon competition, nor even upon co-operation. It will not be an open conflict, neither will it be a convenient compromise of rival individual interests. It will be the organic expression of the collective soul of hu manity, working and achieving through each and every individual soul its most wide-winging freedom, manifesting the godhead that is, proper to each and every one. It will be an organisation, most delicate and subtle and supple, the members of which will have no need to live upon one another but in and through one another. It will be, if you like, a henotheistic hierarchy in which everyone will be the greatest, since everyone is all and all everyone simultaneously.
The New Hu manity will be something in the mould that we give to the gods. It will supply the link that we see missing between gods and men; it will be the race of embodied gods. man will attain that thing which has been his first desire and earliest dream, for which he coveted the gods Immortality, amritatwam. The mortalities that cut and divide, limit and bind man make him the sorrowful being he is. These are due to his ignorance and weakness and egoism. These are due to his soul itself. It is the soul that requires change, a new birth, as Christ de manded. Ours is a little soul that has severed itself from the larger and mightier self that it is. And therefore does it die every moment and even while living is afraid to live and so lives poorly and miserably. But the age is now upon us when the god-like soul anointed with its immortal royalties is ready to emerge and claim our salutation.
The breath and the surge of the new creation cannot be mistaken. The question that confronts us today is no longer whether the New man, the Super-hu manity, will come or if at all, when; but the question we have to answer is who among us are ready to be its receptacle, its instrument and embodiment.
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01.01 - The One Thing Needful, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the lesson of life that always in this world everything fails a man - only the Divine does not fail him, if he turns entirely towards the Divine. It is not because there is something bad in you that blows fall on you - blows fall on all hu man beings because they are full of desire for things that cannot last and they lose them or, even if they get, it brings disappointment and cannot satisfy them. To turn to the Divine is the only truth in life.
To find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life; it is the one thing indispensable and all the resit is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him, - that is, first of all to transform one's own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the infinite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss, to become that in one's essential nature and, as a consequence, to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one's active nature. To bring into activity the principle of oneness on the material plane or to work for hu manity is a mental mistranslation of the Truth - these things cannot be the first true object of spiritual seeking. We must find the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine de mands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a help or a means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. As we grow in inner consciousness, or as the spiritual Truth of the Divine grows in us, our life and action must indeed more and more flow from that, be one with that. But to decide beforeh and by our limited mental conceptions what they must be is to hamper the growth of the spiritual Truth within. As that grows we shall feel the Divine Light and Truth, the Divine Power and Force, the Divine Purity and Peace working within us, dealing with our actions as well as our consciousness, making use of them to reshape us into the Divine Image, removing the dross, substituting the pure Gold of the Spirit. Only when the Divine Presence is there in us always and the consciousness transformed, can we have the right to say that we are ready to manifest the Divine on the material plane. To hold up a mental ideal or principle and impose that on the inner working brings the danger of limiting ourselves to a mental realisation or of impeding or even falsifying by a halfway formation the truth growth into the full communion and union with the Divine and the free and intimate outflowing of His will in our life. This is a mistake of orientation to which the mind of today is especially prone. It is far better to approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but it can only be fulfilled by an ourflowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outwards, not by the working out of a mental principle.
The realisation of the Divine is the one thing needful and the rest is desirable only in so far as it helps or leads towards that or when it is realised, extends and manifests the realisation. manifestation and organisation of the whole life for the divine work, - first, the sadhana personal and collective necessary for the realisation and a common life of God-realised men, secondly, for help to the world to move towards that, and to live in the Light - is the whole meaning and purpose of my Yoga. But the realisation is the first need and it is that round which all the rest moves, for apart from it all the rest would have no meaning.
Yoga is directed towards God, not towards man. If a divine supramental consciousness and power can be brought down and established in the material world, that obviously would mean an immense change for the earth including hu manity and its life. But the effect on hu manity would only be one result of the change; it cannot be the object of the sadhana. The object of the sadhana can only be to live in the divine consciousness and to manifest it in life.
Sadhana must be the main thing and sadhana means the purification of the nature, the consecration of the being, the opening of the psychic and the inner mind and vital, the contact and presence of the Divine, the realisation of the Divine in all things, surrender, devotion, the widening of the consciousness into the cosmic Consciousness, the Self one in all, the psychic and the spiritual transformation of the nature.
01.01 - The Symbol Dawn, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All the fierce question of man's hours relived.
2.38
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This process of a developing consciousness in Nature is precisely what is known as Evolution. It is the bringing out and fixing of a higher and higher principle of consciousness, hitherto involved and concealed behind the veil, in the earth consciousness as a dynamic factor in Nature's manifest working. Thus, the first stage of evolution is the status of inconscient Matter, of the lifeless physical elements; the second stage is that of the semi-conscious life in the plant, the third that of the conscious life in the animal, and finally the fourth stage, where we stand at present, is that of the embodied self-conscious life in man.
The course of evolution has not come to a stop with man and the next stage, Sri Aurobindo says, which Nature envisages and is labouring to bring out and establish is the life now superconscious to us, embodied in a still higher type of created being, that of the super man or god- man. The principle of consciousness which will determine the nature and build of this new, being is a spiritual principle beyond the mental principle which man now incarnates: it may be called the Supermind or Gnosis.
For, till now Mind has been the last term of the evolutionary consciousness Mind as developed in man is the highest instrument built up and organised by Nature through which the self-conscious being can express itself. That is why the Buddha said: Mind is the first of all principles, Mind is the highest of all principles: indeed Mind is the constituent of all principles mana puvvangam dhamm1. The consciousness beyond mind has not yet been made a patent and dynamic element in the life upon earth; it has been glimpsed or entered into in varying degrees and modes by saints and seers; it has cast its derivative illuminations in the creative activities of poets and artists, in the finer and nobler urges of heroes and great men of action. But the utmost that has been achieved, the summit reached in that direction, as exampled in spiritual disciplines, involves a withdrawal from the evolutionary cycle, a merging and an absorption into the static status that is altogether beyond it, that lies, as it were, at the other extreme the Spirit in itself, At man, Brah man, 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.
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But the initial illusory consciousness of the Overmind need not at all lead to the static Brahmic consciousness or Sunyam alone. As a matter of fact, there is in this particular processes of consciousness a hiatus between the two, between Maya and Brah man, as though one has to leap from the one into the other somehow. This hiatus is filled up in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga by the principle of Supermind, not synthetic-analytic2 in knowledge like Overmind and the highest mental intelligence, but inescapably unitarian even in the utmost diversity. Supermind is the Truth-consciousness at once static and dynamic, self-existent and creative: in Supermind the Brahmic consciousness Sachchidanandais ever self-aware and ever manifested and embodied in fundamental truth-powers and truth-forms for the play of creation; it is the plane where the One breaks out into the many and the many still remain one, being and knowing themselves to be but various self-expressions of the One; it develops the spiritual archetypes, the divine names and forms of all individualisations of an evolving existence.
SRI AUROBINDO
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In the Supermind things exist in their perfect spiritual reality; each is consciously the divine reality in its transcendent essence, its cosmic extension, its, spiritual individuality; the diversity of a manifested existence is there, but the mutually exclusive separativeness has not yet arisen. The ego, the knot of separativity, appears at a later and lower stage of involution; what is here is indivisible nexus of individualising centres of the one eternal truth of being. Where Supermind and Overmind meet, one can see the multiple godheads, each distinct in his own truth and beauty and power and yet all together forming the one supreme consciousness infinitely composite and inalienably integral. But stepping back into Supermind one sees something moreOneness gathering into itself all diversity, not destroying it, but annulling and forbidding the separative consciousness that is the beginning of Ignorance. The first shadow of the Illusory Consciousness, the initial possibility of the movement of Ignorance comes in when the supramental light enters the penumbra of the mental sphere. The movement of Supermind is the movement of light without obscurity, straight, unwavering, unswerving, absolute. The Force here contains and holds in their oneness of Reality the manifold but not separated lines of essential and unalloyed truth: its march is the inevitable progression of each one assured truth entering into and upholding every other and therefore its creation, play or action admits of no trial or stumble or groping or deviation; for each truth rests on all others and on that which harmonises them all and does not act as a Power diverging from and even competing with other Powers of being. In the Overmind commences the play of divergent possibilities the simple, direct, united and absolute certainties of the supramental consciousness retire, as it were, a step behind and begin to work themselves out through the interaction first of separately individualised and then of contrary and contradictory forces. In the Overmind there is a conscious underlying Unity but yet each Power, Truth, Aspect of that Unity is encouraged to work out its possibilities as if it were sufficient to itself and the others are used by it for its own enhancement until in the denser and darker reaches below Overmind this turns out a thing of blind conflict and battle and, as it would appear, of chance survival. Creation or manifestation originally means the concretisation or devolution of the powers of Conscious Being into a play of united diversity; but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Divine Consciousness. Creation as it descends' towards the Ignorance becomes an involution of the Spirit through Mind and Life into Matter; evolution is a movement backward, a return journey from Matter towards the Spirit: it is the unravelling, the gradual disclosure and deliverance of the Spirit, the ascension and revelation of the involved consciousness through a series of awakeningsMatter awakening into Life, Life awakening into Mind and Mind now seeking to awaken into something beyond the Mind, into a power of conscious Spirit.
The apparent or actual result of the movement of Nescienceof Involutionhas been an increasing negation of the Spirit, but its hidden purpose is ultimately to embody the Spirit in Matter, to express here below in cosmic Time-Space the splendours of the timeless Reality. The material body came into existence bringing with it inevitably, as it seemed, mortality; it appeared even to be fashioned out of mortality, in order that in this very frame and field of mortality, Immortality, the eternal Spirit Consciousness which is the secret truth and reality in Time itself as well as behind it, might be established and that the Divine might be possessed, or rather, possess itself not in one unvarying mode of the static consciousness, as it does even now behind the cosmic play, but in the play itself and in the multiple mode of the terrestrial existence.
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The secret of evolution, I have said, is an urge towards the release and unfoldment of consciousness out of an apparent unconsciousness. In the early stages the movement is very slow and gradual; there it is Nature's original unconscious process. In man it acquires the possibility of a conscious and therefore swifter and concentrated process. And this is in fact the function of Yoga proper, viz, to bring about the evolution of consciousness by hastening the process of Nature through the self-conscious will of man.
An organ in the hu man being has been especially developed to become the effective instrument of this accelerated Yogic process the self-consciousness which I referred to as being the distinctive characteristic of man is a function of this organ. It is his soul, his psychic being; originally it is the spark of the Divine Consciousness which came down and became involved in Matter and has been endeavouring ever since to release itself through the upward march of evolution. It is this which presses on continually as the stimulus to the evolutionary movement; and in man it has attained sufficient growth and power and has come so far to the front from behind the veil that it can now lead and mould his external consciousness. It is also the channel through which the Divine Consciousness can flow down into the inferior levels of hu man nature. It is the being no bigger than the thumb ever seated within the heart, spoken of in the Upanishads. It is likewise the basis of true individuality and personal identity. It is again the reflection or expression in evolutionary Nature of one's essential selfjivt man that is above, an eternal portion of the Divine, one with the Divine and yet not dissolved and lost in it. The psychic being is thus on the one hand in direct contact with the Divine and the higher consciousness, and on the other it is the secret upholder and controller' (bhart, antarymin) of the inferior consciousness, the hidden nucleus round which the body and the life and the mind of the individual are built up and organised.
The first decisive step in Yoga is taken when one becomes conscious of the psychic being, or, looked at from the other side, when the psychic being comes forward and takes possession of the external being, begins to initiate and influence the movements of the mind and life and body and gradually free them from the ordinary round of ignorant nature. The awakening of the psychic being means, as I have said, not only a deepening and heightening of the consciousness and its release from the obscurity and limitation of the inferior Prakriti, confined to the lower threefold status, into what is behind and beyond; it means also a return of the deeper and higher consciousness upon the lower hemisphere and a consequent purification and illumination and regeneration of the latter. Finally, when the psychic being is in full self-possession and power, it can be the vehicle of the direct supramental consciousness which will then be able to act freely and absolutely for the entire transformation of the external nature, its transfiguration into a perfect body of the Truth-consciousness in a word, its divinisation.
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The soul or the true being in man uplifted in the supramental consciousness and at the same time coming forward to possess a divinised mind and life and body as an instrument and channel of its self-expression and an embodiment of the Divine Will and Purposesuch is the goal that Nature is seeking to realise at present through her evolutionary lan. It is to this labour that man has been called so that in and through him the destined transcendence and transformation can take place.
It is not easy, however, nor is it necessary for the moment to envisage in detail what this divinised man would be like, externallyhis mode of outward being and living, kimsita vrajeta kim, as Arjuna queriedor how the collective life of the new hu manity would function or what would be the composition of its social fabric. For what is happening is a living process, an organic growth; it is being elaborated through the actions and reactions of multitudinous forces and conditions, known and unknown; the precise configuration of the final outcome cannot be predicted with exactitude. But the Power that is at work is omniscient; it is selecting, rejecting, correcting, fashioning, creating, co-ordinating elements in accordance with and by the drive of the inviolable law of Truth and Harmony that reigns in Light's own homeswe dame the Supermind.
It is also to be noted that as mind is not the last limit of the march of evolution, even so the progress of evolution will not stop with the manifestation and embodiment of the Supermind. There are other still higher principles beyond and they too presumably await manifestation and embodiment on earth. Creation has no beginning in time (andi) nor has it an end (ananta). It is an eternal process of the unravelling of the mysteries of the Infinite. Only, it may be said that with the Supermind the creation here enters into a different order of existence. Before it there was the domain of Ignorance, after it will come the reign of Light and Knowledge. Mortality has been the governing principle of life on earth till now; it will be replaced by the consciousness of immortality. Evolution has proceeded through struggle and pain; hereafter it will be a spontaneous, harmonious and happy flowering.
Now, with regard to the time that the present stage of evolution is likely to take for its fulfilment, one can presume that since or if the specific urge and stress has manifested and come up to the front, this very fact would show that the problem has become a problem of actuality, and even that it can be dealt with as if it had to be solved now or never. We have said that in man, with man's self-consciousness or the consciousness of the psychic being as the instrument, evolution has attained the capacity of a swift and concentrated process, which is the process of Yoga; the process will become swifter and more concentrated, the more that instrument grows and gathers power and is infused with the divine afflatus. In fact, evolution has been such a process of gradual acceleration in tempo from the very beginning. The earliest stage, for example, the stage of dead Matter, of the play of the mere chemical forces was a very, very long one; it took millions and millions of years to come to the point when the manifestation of life became possible. But the period of elementary life, as manifested in the plant world that followed, although it too lasted a good many millions of years, was much briefer than the preceding periodit ended with the advent of the first animal form. The age of animal life, again, has been very much shorter than that of the plant life before man came upon earth. And man is already more than a million or two years oldit is fully time that a higher order of being should be created out of him.
The Dhammapada, I. 1
The Supermind is not merely synthetic. The Supermind is synthetic only on the lowest spaces of itself, where it has to prepare the principles of Overmind,synthesis is necessary only where analysis has taken place, one has dissected everything, put in pieces (analysis), so one has to piece together. But Supermind is unitarian, has never divided up, so it does not need to add and piece together the parts and fragments. It has always held the conscious many together in the conscious One.
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01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is the world that Sri Aurobindo sees and creates? Poetry is after all passion. By passion I do not mean the fury of emotion nor the fume of sentimentalism, but what lies behind at their source, what lends them the force they have the sense of the "grandly real," the vivid and pulsating truth. What then is the thing that Sri Aurobindo has visualised, has endowed with a throbbing life and made a poignant reality? Victor Hugo said: Attachez Dieu au gibet, vous avez la croixTie God to the gibbet, you have the cross. Even so, infuse passion into a thing most prosaic, you create sublime poetry out of it. What is the dead matter that has found life and glows and vibrates in Sri Aurobindo's passion? It is something which appears to many poetically intractable, not amenable to aesthetic treatment, not usually, that is to say, nor in the supreme manner. Sri Aurobindo has thrown such a material into his poetic fervour and created a sheer beauty, a stupendous reality out of it. Herein lies the greatness of his achievement. Philosophy, however divine, and in spite of Milton, has been regarded by poets as "harsh and crabbed" and as such unfit for poetic delineation. Not a few poets indeed foundered upon this rock. A poet in his own way is a philosopher, but a philosopher chanting out his philosophy in sheer poetry has been one of the rarest spectacles.1 I can think of only one instance just now where a philosopher has almost succeeded being a great poet I am referring to Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura. Neither Shakespeare nor Homer had anything like philosophy in their poetic creation. And in spite of some inclination to philosophy and philosophical ideas Virgil and Milton were not philosophers either. Dante sought perhaps consciously and deliberately to philosophise in his Paradiso I Did he? The less Dante then is he. For it is his Inferno, where he is a passionate visionary, and not his Paradiso (where he has put in more thought-power) that marks the nee plus ultra of his poetic achievement.
And yet what can be more poetic in essence than philosophy, if by philosophy we mean, as it should mean, spiritual truth and spiritual realisation? What else can give the full breath, the integral force to poetic inspiration if it is not the problem of existence itself, of God, Soul and Immortality, things that touch, that are at the very root of life and reality? What can most concern man, what can strike the deepest fount in him, unless it is the mystery of his own being, the why and the whither of it all? But mankind has been taught and trained to live merely or mostly on earth, and poetry has been treated as the expression of hu man joys and sorrows the tears in mortal things of which Virgil spoke. The savour of earth, the thrill of the flesh has been too sweet for us and we have forgotten other sweetnesses. It is always the hu man element that we seek in poetry, but we fail to recognise that what we obtain in this way is hu manity in its lower degrees, its surface formulations, at its minimum magnitude.
We do not say that poets have never sung of God and Soul and things transcendent. Poets have always done that. But what I say is this that presentation of spiritual truths, as they are in their own home, in other words, treated philosophically and yet in a supreme poetic manner, has always been a rarity. We have, indeed, in India the Gita and the Upanishads, great philosophical poems, if there were any. But for one thing they are on dizzy heights out of the reach of common man and for another they are idolised more as philosophy than as poetry. Doubtless, our Vaishnava poets sang of God and Love Divine; and Rabindranath, in one sense, a typical modern Vaishnava, did the same. And their songs are masterpieces. But are they not all hu man, too hu man, as the mad prophet would say? In them it is the hu man significance, the hu man manner that touches and moves us the spiritual significance remains esoteric, is suggested, is a matter of deduction. Sri Aurobindo has dealt with spiritual experiences in a different way. He has not clothed them in hu man symbols and allegories, in images and figures of the mere earthly and secular life: he presents them in their nakedness, just as they are seen and realised. He has not sought to tone down the rigour of truth with contrivances that easily charm and captivate the common hu man mind and heart. Nor has he indulged like so many poet philosophers in vague generalisations and colourless or too colourful truisms that do not embody a clear thought or rounded idea, a radiant judgment. Sri Aurobindo has given us in his poetry thoughts that are clear-cut, ideas beautifully chiselledhe is always luminously forceful.
Take these Vedantic lines that in their limpidity and harmonious flow beat anything found in the fine French poet Lamartine:
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We have been speaking of philosophy and the philosophic manner. But what are the exact implications of the words, let us ask again. They mean nothing more and nothing lessthan the force of thought and the mass of thought content. After all, that seems to be almost the whole difference between the past and the present hu man consciousness in so far at least as it has found expression in poetry. That element, we wish to point out, is precisely what the old-world poets lacked or did not care to possess or express or stress. A poet meant above all, if not all in all, emotion, passion, sensuousness, sensibility, nervous enthusiasm and imagination and fancy: remember the classic definition given by Shakespeare of the poet
Of imagination all compact.. . .
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The heart and its urges, the vital and its surges, the physical impulsesit is these of which the poets sang in their infinite variations. But the mind proper, that is to say, the higher reflective ideative mind, was not given the right of citizenship in the domain of poetry. I am not forgetting the so-called Metaphysicals. The element of metaphysics among the Metaphysicals has already been called into question. There is here, no doubt, some theology, a good dose of mental cleverness or conceit, but a modern intellectual or rather rational intelligence is something other, something more than that. Even the metaphysics that was com mandeered here had more or less a decorative value, it could not be taken into the pith and substance of poetic truth and beauty. It was a decoration, but not unoften a drag. I referred to the Upanishads, but these strike quite a different, almost an opposite line in this connection. They are in a sense truly metaphysical: they bypass the mind and the mental powers, get hold of a higher mode of consciousness, make a direct contact with truth and beauty and reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness, to have brought into play the power of the rational intellect and used it in support of the spiritual experience. That is not to say that he was the very first person, the originator who initiated the movement; but at least this seems to be true that in him and his au thentic followers the movement came to the forefront of hu man consciousness and attained the proportions of a major member of man's psychological constitution. We may remember here that Socrates, who started a similar movement of rationalisation in his own way in Europe, was almost a contemporary of the Buddha.
Poetry as an expression of thought-power, poetry weighted with intelligence and rationalised knowledge that seems to me to be the end and drive, the secret sense of all the mystery of modern technique. The combination is risky, but not impossible. In the spiritual domain the Gita achieved this miracle to a considerable degree. Still, the power of intelligence and reason shown by Vyasa is of a special order: it is a sublimated function of the faculty, something aloof and other-worldly"introvert", a modern mind would term it that is to say, something a priori, standing in its own au thenticity and self-sufficiency. A modern intelligence would be more scientific, let us use the word, more matter-of-fact and sense-based: the mental light should not be confined in its ivory tower, however high that may be, but brought down and placed at the service of our perception and appreciation and explanation of things hu man and terrestrial; made im manent in the mundane and the ephemeral, as they are commonly called. This is not an impossibility. Sri Aurobindo seems to have done the thing. In him we find the three terms of hu man consciousness arriving at an absolute fusion and his poetry is a wonderful example of that fusion. The three terms are the spiritual, the intellectual or philosophical and the physical or sensational. The intellectual, or more generally, the mental, is the intermediary, the Paraclete, as he himself will call it later on in a poem9 magnificently exemplifying the point we are trying to make out the agent who negotiates, bridges and harmonises the two other firmaments usually supposed to be antagonistic and incompatible.
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And it would be wrong too to suppose that there is want of sympathy in Sri Aurobindo for ordinary hu manity, that he is not susceptible to sentiments, to the weaknesses, that stir the natural man. Take for example this line so instinct with a haunting melancholy strain:
Cold are your rivers of peace and their banks are leafless and lonely.
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Son of man, thou hast crowned the life with the flowers that are scentless,
And the whole aspiration of striving mortality finds its echo in:
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The Greek sings of the hu manity 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 earthly life and its sweetness. And as we are passionate about the earthly 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 hu manity, beyond earth, therefore could they make divine poetry of hu manity and what is of earth. 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.
Mark the stately march, the fullness of voice, the wealth of imagery, the vigour of movement of these lines:
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brought from its manger
Arching its neck as it paces grand to the gorges
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And if there is something in the creative spirit of Sri Aurobindo which tends more towards the strenuous than the genial, the arduous than the mellifluous, and which has more of the austerity of Vyasa than the easy felicity of Valmiki, however it might have affected the ultimate value of his creation, according to certain standards,14 it has illustrated once more that poetry is not merely beauty but power, it is not merely sweet imagination but creative visionit is even the Rik, the mantra that impels the gods to manifest upon earth, that fashions divinity in man.
James H. Cousins in his New Ways in English Literature describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet."
01.02 - The Creative Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So the problem that concerns man, the riddle that hu manity has to solve is how to find out and follow the path of creativity. If we are not to be dead matter nor mere shadowy illusions we must be creative. A misconception that has vitiated our outlook in general and has been the most potent cause of a sterilising atavism in the moral evolution of hu manity is that creativity is an aristocratic virtue, that it belongs only to the chosen few. A great poet or a mighty man of action creates indeed, but such a creator does not appear very frequently. A Shakespeare or a Napoleon is a rare phenomenon; they are, in reality, an exception to the general run of mankind. It is enough if we others can understand and follow themMahajano yena gatahlet the great souls initiate and create, the common souls have only to repeat and imitate.
But this is not as it should be, nor is it the truth of the matter. Every individual soul, however placed it may be, is by nature creative; every individual being lives to discover and to create.
The inmost reality of man is not a passive receptacle, a mere responsive medium but it is a dynamoa power-station generating and throwing out energy that produces and creates.
Now the centre of this energy, the matrix of creativity is the soul itself, one's own soul. If you want to createlive, grow and be real-find yourself, be yourself. The simple old wisdom still remains the eternal wisdom. It is because we fall off from our soul that we wander into side-paths, paths that do not belong to our real nature and hence that lead to imitation and repetition, decay and death. This is what happens to what we call common souls. The force of circumstances, the pressure of environment or simply the momentum of custom or habit compel them to choose the easiest and the readiest way that may lie before them. They do not consult the de mand of the inner being but the requirement of the moment. Our bodily needs, our vital hungers and our mental prejudices obsess and obscure the impulsions that thrill the hidden spirit. We hasten to gratify the immediate and forget the eternal, we clutch at the shadow and let go the substance. We are carried away in the flux and tumult of life. It is a mixed and collective whirla Weltgeist that moves and governs us. We are helpless straws drifting in the current. But manhood de mands that we stop and pause, pull ourselves out of the Maelstrom and be what we are. We must shape things as we want and not allow things to shape us as they want.
Let each take cognisance of the godhead that is within him for self is Godand in the strength of the soul-divinity create his universe. It does not matter what sort of universe he- creates, so long as he creates it. The world created by a Buddha is not the same as that created by a Napoleon, nor should they be the same. It does not prove anything that I cannot become a Kalidasa; for that matter Kalidasa cannot become what I am. If you have not the genius of a Shankara it does not mean that you have no genius at all. Be and become yourselfma gridhah kasyachit dhanam, says the Upanishad. The fountain-head of creative genius lies there, in the free choice and the particular delight the self-determination of the spirit within you and not in the desire for your neighbours riches. The world has become dull and uniform and mechanical, since everybody endeavours to become not himself, but always somebody else. Imitation is servitude and servitude brings in grief.
In one's own soul lies the very height and profundity of a god-head. Each soul by bringing out the note that is his, makes for the most wondrous symphony. Once a man knows what he is and holds fast to it, refusing to be drawn away by any necessity or temptation, he begins to uncover himself, to do what his inmost nature de mands and takes joy in, that is to say, begins to create. Indeed there may be much difference in the forms that different souls take. But because each is itself, therefore each is grounded upon the fundamental equality of things. All our valuations are in reference to some standard or other set up with a particular end in view, but that is a question of the practical world which in no way takes away from the intrinsic value of the greatness of the soul. So long as the thing is there, the how of it does not matter. Infinite are the ways of manifestation and all of them the very highest and the most sublime, provided they are a manifestation of the soul itself, provided they rise and flow from the same level. Whether it is Agni or Indra, Varuna, Mitra or the Aswins, it is the same supreme and divine inflatus.
The cosmic soul is true. But that truth is borne out, effectuated only by the truth of the individual soul. When the individual soul becomes itself fully and integrally, by that very fact it becomes also the cosmic soul. The individuals are the channels through which flows the Universal and the Infinite in its multiple emphasis. Each is a particular figure, aspectBhava, a particular angle of vision of All. The vision is entire and the figure perfect if it is not refracted by the lower and denser parts of our being. And for that the individual must first come to itself and shine in its opal clarity and translucency.
01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Her mind moved in a many-imaged past
That lived again and saw its end approach:
--
As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,
Her life's broad highways and its sweet bypaths
--
On man sometimes when he draws near to God:
An hour arrives when fail all Nature's means;
--
Alone amid the many faces loved,
Aware among unknowing happy hearts,
--
Reduced the heavy framework of man's days
And his overburdening mass of outward needs
--
And must confront the riddle of man's birth
And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.
--
To win or lose the godlike game for man,
Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.
--
To the afflicting penalty of man's hopes,
Her head she bowed not to the stark decree
--
So bows and must the mind-born will in man
Obedient to the statutes fixed of old,
--
Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force.
4.39
--
Annul the claim of man's free hu man will.
4.41
--
A victory was won for God in man,
The deity revealed its hidden face.
01.02 - The Object of the Integral Yoga, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Matter. Our object is not to remove all "limitations" on the expansion of the ego or to give a free field and make unlimited room for the fulfilment of the ideas of the hu man mind or the desires of the ego-centred life-force. None of us are here to "do as we like", or to create a world in which we shall at last be able to do as we like; we are here to do what the Divine wills and to create a world in which the Divine Will can manifest its truth no longer deformed by hu man ignorance or perverted and mistranslated by vital desire. The work which the sadhak of the supramental Yoga has to do is not his own work for which he can lay down his own conditions, but the work of the Divine which he has to do according to the conditions laid down by the Divine. Our Yoga is not for our own sake but for the sake of the Divine. It is not our own personal manifestation that we are to seek, the manifestation of the individual ego freed from all bounds and from all bonds, but the manifestation of the Divine. Of that manifestation our own spiritual liberation, perfection, fullness is to be a result and a part, but not in any egoistic sense or for any ego-centred or self-seeking purpose.
This liberation, perfection, fullness too must not be pursued for our own sake, but for the sake of the Divine.
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When the Spirit speaks its own language in its own name, we have spiritual poetry. If, however, the Spirit speaksfrom choice or necessity-an alien language and manner, e.g., that of a profane consciousness, or of the consciousness of another domain, idealistic or philosophical or even occult, puts on or imitates spirit's language and manner, we have what we propose to call mystic poetry proper. When Samain sings of the body of the dancer:
Et Pannyre deviant fleur, flamme, papillon! ...
--
both so idealise, etherealize, almost spiritualise the earth and the flesh that they seem ostensibly only a vesture of something else behind, something mysterious and other-worldly, something other than, even just opposite to what they actually are or appear to be. That is the mystique of the senses which is a very characteristic feature of some of the best poetic inspirations of France. Baudelaire too, the Satanic poet, by the sheer intensity of sympathy and sincerity, pierces as it were into the soul of things and makes the ugly, the unclean, the diseased, the sordid throb and glow with an almost celestial light. Here is the Baudelairean manner:
Tout casss
--
there is nothing in the matter or manner which can indicate, to the uninitiated, any reference to the Spirit or the Divine. Or this again,
I have gazed upon beauty from my very birth
--
one can explain that it is the Christ calling the Church or God appealing to the hu man soul or one can simply find in it nothing more than a man pining for his wo man. Anyhow I would not call it spiritual poetry or even mystic poetry. For in itself it does not carry any double or oblique meaning, there is no suggestion that it is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper,
Breaking the silence of the seas
--
This is spiritual matter and spiritual manner that can never be improved upon. This is spiritual poetry in its quintessence. I am referring naturally here to the original and not to the translation which can never do full justice, even at its very best, to the poetic value in question. For apart from the individual genius of the poet, the greatness of the language, the instrument used by the poet, is also involved. It may well be what is comparatively easy and natural in the language of the gods (devabhasha) would mean a tour de force, if not altogether an impossibility, in a hu man language. The Sanskrit language was moulded and fashioned in the hands of the Rishis, that is to say, those who lived and moved and had their being in the spiritual consciousness. The Hebrew or even the Zend does not seem to have reached that peak, that absoluteness of the spiritual tone which seems inherent in the Indian tongue, although those too breathed and grew in a spiritual atmosphere. The later languages, however, Greek or Latin or their modern descendants, have gone still farther from the source, they are much nearer to the earth and are suffused with the smell and effluvia of this vale of tears.
Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and unpoetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath and love and, like Seneca and Aurelius, gave himself up to moralising and philosophising, delving 'into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian,atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the content, the manner has made a whole difference. There was an idealism, a clarity of vision and an intensity of perception, which however scientific apparently, gave his creation a note, an accent, an atmosphere high, tense, aloof, ascetic, at times bordering on the supra-sensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reactionit is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual consciousness, yet it is something on the way towards that.
There have been other philosophical poets, a good number of them since thennot merely rationally philosophical, as was the vogue in the eighteenth century, but metaphysically philosophical, that is to say, inquiring not merely into the phenomenal but also into the labyrinths of the noumenal, investigating not only what meets the senses, but also things that are behind or beyond. Amidst the earlier efflorescence of this movement the most outstanding philosopher poet is of course Dante, the Dante of Paradiso, a philosopher in the mediaeval manner and to the extent a lesser poet, according to some. Goe the is another, almost in the grand modern manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo some kind of martyrdom because of it. And Shelley, the supremely lyric singer, has had a very rich undertone of thought-content genuinely metaphysical. And Browning and Arnold and Hardyindeed, if we come to the more moderns, we have to cite the whole host of them, none can be excepted.
We left out the Metaphysicals, for they can be grouped as a set apart. They are not so much metaphysical as theological, religious. They have a brain-content stirring with theological problems and speculations, replete with scintillating conceits and intricate fancies. Perhaps it is because of this philosophical burden, this intellectual bias that the Metaphysicals went into obscurity for about two centuries and it is precisely because of that that they are slowly coming out to the forefront and assuming a special value with the moderns. For the modern mind is characteristically thoughtful, introspective"introvert"and philosophical; even the exact physical sciences of today are rounded off in the end with metaphysics.
The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imaginationremember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisationsof whatever order or world they may beexpressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistencea definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the 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 de mand 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 hu man 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 de mand.
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.
The religious poet seeks to tone down or cover up the mundane taint, since he does not know how to transcend it totally, in two ways: (1) by a strong thought-element, the metaphysical way, as it may be called and (2) by a strong symbolism, the occult way. Donne takes to the first course, Blake the second. And it is the alchemy brought to bear in either of these processes that transforms the merely religious into the mystic poet. The truly spiritual, as I have said, is still a higher grade of consciousness: what I call Spirit's own poetry has its own matter and mannerswabhava and swadharma. A nearest approach to it is echoed in those famous lines of Blake:
To see a World in a grain of Sand,
--
Something of the fullness of spiritual matter and manner overflows in these epic lines:
His spirit mingles with eternity's heart
--
The many-patterned ground of all we are. ||26.16||
An idol of self is our mortality. ||26.17||
--
To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return and a progressive approach to the spiritual source of poetic inspiration, which was also the original, though somewhat veiled, source from the very beginning. The movement has followed devious waysstrongly negative at timeseven like man's life and consciousness in general of which it is an organic member; but the ultimate end and drift seems to have been always that ideal and principle even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues. The poet's ideal in the dawn of the world was, as the Vedic Rishi sang, to raise things of beauty in heaven by his poetic power,kavi kavitv divi rpam sajat. Even a Satanic poet, the inaugurator, in a way, of modernism and modernistic consciousness, Charles Baudelaire, thus admonishes his spirit:
"Flyaway, far from these morbid miasmas, go and purify yourself in the higher air and drink, like a pure and divine liquor, the clear fire that fills the limpid spaces."18
--
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, hu man 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 hu man speech, in taking the name of God hu man 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,
--
This is religious poetry, pure and simple, expressing man's earliest and most elementary feeling, marked by a broad candour, a rather shallow monotone. But that feeling is raised to a pitch of fervour and scintillating sensibility in Vaughan's
They are all gone into the world of light
--
For though through many streights, and lands I roame,
I launch at paradise, and saile towards home,23
--
But all that is left far behind, when we hear a new voice announcing an altogether new manner, revelatory of the truly and supremely spiritual consciousness, not simply mystic or religious but magically occult and carved out of the highest if recondite philosophia:
A finite movement of the Infinite
01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is Reason, the faculty that is said to be the proud privilege of man, the sovereign instrument he alone possesses for the purpose of knowing? What is the value of knowledge that Reason gives? For it is the manner of knowing, the particular faculty or instrument by which we know, that determines the nature and content of knowledge. Reason is the collecting of available sense-perceptions and a certain mode of working upon them. It has three component elements that have been defined as observation, classification and deduction. Now, the very composition of Reason shows that it cannot be a perfect instrument of knowledge; the limitations are the inherent limitations of the component elements. As regards observation there is a two-fold limitation. First, observation is a relative term and variable quantity. One observes through the prism of one's own observing faculty, through the bias of one's own personality and no two persons can have absolutely the same manner of observation. So Science has recognised the necessity of personal equation and has created an imaginary observer, a "mean man" as the standard of reference. And this already takes us far away from the truth, from the reality. Secondly, observation is limited by its scope. All the facts of the world, all sense-perceptions possible and actual cannot be included within any observation however large, however collective it may be. We have to go always upon a limited amount of data, we are able to construct only a partial and sketchy view of the surface of existence. And then it is these few and doubtful facts that Reason seeks to arrange and classify. That classification may hold good for certain immediate ends, for a temporary understanding of the world and its forces, either in order to satisfy our curiosity or to gain some practical utility. For when we want to consider the world only in its immediate relation to us, a few and even doubtful facts are sufficient the more immediate the relation, the more immaterial the doubtfulness and insufficiency of facts. We may quite confidently go a step in darkness, but to walk a mile we do require light and certainty. Our scientific classification has a background of uncertainty, if not, of falsity; and our deduction also, even while correct within a very narrow range of space and time, cannot escape the fundamental vices of observation and classification upon which it is based.
It might be said, however, that the guarantee or sanction of Reason does not lie in the extent of its application, nor can its subjective nature (or ego-centric predication, as philosophers would term it) vitiate the validity of its conclusions. There is, in fact, an inherent unity and harmony between Reason and Reality. If we know a little of Reality, we know the whole; if we know the subjective, we know also the objective. As in the part, so in the whole; as it is within, so it is without. If you say that I will die, you need not wait for my actual death to have the proof of your statement. The generalising power inherent in Reason is the guarantee of the certitude to which it leads. Reason is valid, as it does not betray us. If it were such as anti-intellectuals make it out to be, we would be making nothing but false steps, would always remain entangled in contradictions. The very success of Reason is proof of its being a reliable and perfect instrument for the knowledge of Truth and Reality. It is beside the mark to prove otherwise, simply by analysing the nature of Reason and showing the fundamental deficiencies of that nature. It is rather to the credit of Reason that being as it is, it is none the less a successful and trustworthy agent.
--
But in knowledge it is precisely finality that we seek for and no mere progressive, asymptotic, rapprochement ad infinitum. No less than the Practical Reason, the Theoretical Reason also de mands a categorical imperative, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason cannot do that, it must be regarded as inefficient. It is poor consolation to man that Reason is gradually finding out the truth or that it is trying to grapple with the problems of God, Soul and Immortality and will one day pronounce its verdict. Whether we have or have not any other instrument of knowledge is a different question altogether. But in the meanwhile Reason stands condemned by the evidence of its own limitation.
It may be retorted that if Reason is condemned, it is condemned by itself and by no other authority. All argumentation against Reason is a function of Reason itself. The deficiencies of Reason we find out by the rational faculty alone. If Reason was to die, it is because it consents to commit suicide; there is no other power that kills it. But to this our answer is that Reason has this miraculous power of self-destruction; or, to put it philosophically, Reason is, at best, an organ of self-criticism and perhaps the organ par excellence for that purpose. But criticism is one thing and creation another. And whether we know or act, it is fundamentally a process of creation; at least, without this element of creation there can be no knowledge, no act. In knowledge there is a luminous creativity, Revelation or Categorical Imperative which Reason does not and cannot supply but vaguely strains to seize. For that element we have to search elsewhere, not in Reason.
--
The fact is that Reason is a lower manifestation of knowledge, it is an attempt to express on the mental level a power that exceeds it. It is the section of a vast and unitarian Consciousness-Power; the section may be necessary under certain conditions and circumstances, but unless it is viewed in its relation to the ensemble, unless it gives up its exclusive absolutism, it will be perforce arbitrary and misleading. It would still remain helpful and useful, but its help and use would be always limited in scope and temporary in effectivity.
***
01.03 - Sri Aurobindo and his School, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This much as regards what Sri Aurobindo is not doing; let us now turn and try to understand what he is doing. The distinguished man of action speaks of conquering Nature and fighting her. Adopting this war-like imagery, we can affirm that Sri Aurobindo's work is just such a battle and conquest. But the question is, what is nature and what is the kind of conquest that is sought, how are we to fight and what are the required arms and implements? A good general should foresee all this, frame his plan of campaign accordingly and then only take the field. The above-mentioned leader proposes ceaseless and unselfish action as the way to fight and conquer Nature. He who speaks thus does not know and cannot mean what he says.
European science is conquering Nature in a way. It has attained to a certain kind and measure, in some fields a great measure, of control and conquest; but however great or striking it may be in its own province, it does not touch man in his more intimate reality and does not bring about any true change in his destiny or his being. For the most vital part of nature is the region of the life-forces, the powers of disease and age and death, of strife and greed and lustall the instincts of the brute in man, all the dark aboriginal forces, the forces of ignorance that form the very groundwork of man's nature and his society. And then, as we rise next to the world of the mind, we find a twilight region where falsehood masquerades as truth, where prejudices move as realities, where notions rule as ideals.
This is the present nature of man, with its threefold nexus of mind and life and body, that stands there to be fought and conquered. This is the inferior nature, of which the ancients spoke, that holds man down inexorably to a lower dharma, imperfect mode of life the life that is and has been the hu man order till today. No amount of ceaseless action, however selflessly done, can move this wheel of Nature even by a hair's breadth away from the path that it has carved out from of old. Hu man nature and hu man society have been built up and are run by the forces of this inferior nature, and whatever shuffling and reshuffling we may make in its apparent factors and elements, the general scheme and fundamental form of life will never change. To displace earth (and to conquer nature means nothing less than that) and give it another orbit, one must find a fulcrum outside earth.
Sri Aurobindo does not preach flight from life and a retreat into the silent and passive Infinite; the goal of life is not, in his view, the extinction of life. Neither is he satisfied on that account to hold that life is best lived in the ordinary round of its unregenerate dharma. If the first is a blind alley, the second is a vicious circle,both lead nowhere.
Sri Aurobindo's sadhana starts from the perception of a Power that is beyond the ordinary nature yet is its inevitable master, a fulcrum, as we have said, outside the earth. For what is required first is the discovery and manifestation of a new soul-consciousness in man which will bring about by the very pressure and working out of its self-rule an absolute reversal of man's nature. It is the Asuras who are now holding sway over hu manity, for man has allowed himself so long to be built in the image of the Asura; to dislodge the Asuras, the Gods in their sovereign might have to be forged in the hu man being and brought into play. It is a stupendous task, some would say impossible; but it is very far removed from quietism or passivism. Sri Aurobindo is in retirement, but it is a retirement only from the outward field of present physical activities and their apparent actualities, not from the true forces and action of life. It is the retreat necessary to one who has to go back into himself to conquer a new plane of creative power,an entrance right into the world of basic forces, of fundamental realities, into the flaming heart of things where all actualities are born and take their first shape. It is the discovery of a power-house of tremendous energism and of the means of putting it at the service of earthly life.
And, properly speaking, it is not at all a school, least of all a mere school of thought, that is growing round Sri Aurobindo. It is rather the nucleus of a new life that is to come. Quite naturally it has almost insignificant proportions at present to the outward eye, for the work is still of the nature of experiment and trial in very restricted limits, something in the nature of what is done in a laboratory when a new power has been discovered, but has still to be perfectly formulated in its process. And it is quite a mistake to suppose that there is a vigorous propaganda carried on in its behalf or that there is a large de mand for recruits. Only the few, who possess the call within and are impelled by the spirit of the future, have a chance of serving this high attempt and great realisation and standing among its first instruments and pioneer workers.
01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And paying here God's debt to earth and man
A greater sonship was his divine right.
--
Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.
His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years
--
Then is revealed in man the overt Divine.
A static Oneness and dynamic Power
--
A long dim preparation is man's life,
A circle of toil and hope and war and peace
--
The powers that sleep unused in man within.
He made of miracle a normal act
--
Lit with its grace man's outward earthliness;
The soul's experience of its deeper sheaths
--
And beings of many kingdoms neared and spoke:
The ever-living whom we name as dead
--
Bridging the gap between man's force and Fate
Made whole the fragment-being we are here.
--
And felt the occult impulse behind man's will.
Time's secrets were to him an oft-read book;
01.03 - Yoga and the Ordinary Life, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But even if he can live partly in it or keep himself constantly open to it, he receives enough of this spiritual light and peace and strength and happiness to carry him securely through all the shocks of life. What one gains by opening to this spiritual consciousness, depends on what one seeks from it; if it is peace, one gets peace; if it is light or knowledge, one lives in a great light and receives a knowledge deeper and truer than any the normal mind of man can acquire; if it [is] strength or power, one gets a spiritual strength for the inner life or Yogic power to govern the outer work and action; if it is happiness, one enters into a beatitude far greater than any joy or happiness that the ordinary hu man life can give.
There are many ways of opening to this Divine consciousness or entering into it. My way which I show to others is by a constant practice to go inward into oneself, to open by aspiration to the Divine and once one is conscious of it and its action to give oneself to It entirely. This self-giving means not to ask for anything but the constant contact or union with the Divine Consciousness, to aspire for its peace, power, light and felicity, but to ask nothing else and in life and action to be its instrument only for whatever work it gives one to do in the world. If one can once open and feel the Divine Force, the
Power of the Spirit working in the mind and heart and body, the rest is a matter of remaining faithful to It, calling for it always, allowing it to do its work when it comes and rejecting every other and inferior Force that belongs to the lower consciousness and the lower nature.
Apart from external things there are two possible inner ideals which a man can follow. The first is the highest ideal of ordinary hu man life and the other the divine ideal of 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 hu man 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
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Morality is a question of man's mind and vital, it belongs to a lower plane of consciousness. A spiritual life therefore cannot be founded on a moral basis, it must be founded on a spiritual basis. This does not mean that the spiritual man must be immoral - as if there were no other law of conduct than the moral. The law of action of the spiritual consciousness is higher, not lower than the moral - it is founded on union with the Divine and living in the Divine Consciousness and its action is founded on obedience to the Divine Will.
01.04 - Motives for Seeking the Divine, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Let us first put aside the quite foreign consideration of what we would do if the union with the Divine brought eternal joylessness, Nirananda or torture. Such a thing does not exist and to drag it in only clouds the issue. The Divine is Anandamaya and one can seek him for the Ananda he gives; but he has also in him many other things and one may seek him for any of them, for peace, for liberation, for knowledge, for power, for anything else of which one may feel the pull or the impulse. It is quite possible for someone to say: "Let me have Power from the
Divine and do His work or His will and I am satisfied, even if the use of Power entails suffering also." It is possible to shun bliss as a thing too tremendous or ecstatic and ask only or rather for peace, for liberation, for Nirvana. You speak of self-fulfilment,
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That means what? That men, country, Truth and other things besides can be loved for their own sake and not for anything else, not for any circumstance or attendant quality or resulting enjoyment, but for something absolute that is either in them or behind their appearance and circumstance. The Divine is more than a man or wo man, a stretch of land or a creed, opinion, discovery or principle. He is the Person beyond all persons, the
Home and Country of all souls, the Truth of which truths are only imperfect figures. And can He then not be loved and sought for his own sake, as and more than these have been by men even in their lesser selves and nature?
What your reasoning ignores is that which is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine - something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is the soul's inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when "I seek you for this, I seek you for that" changes to a sheer "I seek you for you." It is that marvellous and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, "Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna."
The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and
01.04 - Sri Aurobindos Gita, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This neo-spirituality which might claim its sanction and authority from the real old-world Indian disciplinesay, of Janaka and Yajnavalkyalabours, however, in reality, under the influence of European activism and ethicism. It was this which served as the immediate incentive to our spiritual revival and revaluation and its impress has not been thoroughly obliterated even in the best of our modern exponents. The bias of the vital urge and of the moral imperative is apparent enough in the modernist conception of a dynamic spirituality. Fundamentally the dynamism is made to reside in the lan of the ethical man,the spiritual element, as a consciousness of supreme unity in the Absolute (Brah man) or of love and delight in God, serving only as an atmosphere for the mortal activity.
Sri Aurobindo has raised action completely out of the mental and moral plane and has given it an absolute spiritual life. Action has been spiritualised by being carried back to its very source and origin, for it is the expression in life of God's own Consciousness-Energy (Chit-Shakti).
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Arrived so far, we now find, if we look back, a change in the whole perspective. Karma and even Karmayoga, which hitherto seemed to be the pivot of the Gita's teaching, retire somewhat into the background and present a diminished stature and value. The centre of gravity has shifted to the conception of the Divine Nature, to the Lord's own status, to the consciousness above the three Gunas, to absolute consecration of each limb of man's hu manity to the Supreme Purusha for his descent and incarnation and play in and upon this hu man world.
The higher secret of the Gita lies really in the later chapters, the earlier chapters being a preparation and passage to it orpartial and practical application. This has to be pointed out, since there is a notion current which seeks to limit the Gita's effective teaching to the earlier part, neglecting or even discarding the later portion.
The style and manner of Sri Aurobindo's interpretation1 is also supremely characteristic: it does not carry the impress of a mere metaphysical dissertation-although in matter it clothes throughout a profound philosophy; it is throbbing with the luminous life of a prophet's message, it is instinct with something of the Gita's own mantraakti.
Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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 hu manity 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 heartour urges and ideals and visions will attain an effective clarity, an unshaken purpose and an inevitable achievement.
That is to say, the change has been in the soul of man himself, the being has veered round and taken a new orientation. It is this which one must envisage, recognise and consciously possess, in order that one may best fulfil the call of the age. But what we are doing instead is to observe the mere external signs and symbols and symptoms, to fix upon the distant quiverings, the echoes on the outermost rim, which are not always faithful representations, but very often distorted images of the truth and life at the centre and source and matrix. We must know that if there has been going on a redistribution and new-marshalling of forces, it is because the fiat has come from the Etat Major.
Now, in order to understand the new orientation of the spirit of the present age, we may profitably ask what was the inspiration of the past age, the characteristic note which has failed to satisfy us and which we are endeavouring to transform. We know that that age was the Scientific age or the age of Reason. Its great prophets were Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists or if you mount further up in time, we may begin from Bacon and the hu manists. Its motto was first, "The proper study of mankind is man" and secondly, Reason is the supreme organon of knowledge, the highest deity in manla Desse Raison. And it is precisely against these two basic principles that the new age has entered its protest. In face of Hu manism, Nietzsche has posited the Super man and in face of Reason Bergson has posited Intuition.
The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively hu man necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Hu manism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and mentality of the age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says, "All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding hu manity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and hu manity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been another leaven which worked constantly within, if intermittently without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia always reflected that which transcends the mind the spirit, the Gods and the Beyonds.
However, we are concerned more with the immediate past, the mentality that laid its supreme stress upon the hu man rationality. What that epoch did not understand was that Reason could be overstepped, that there was something higher, something greater than Reason; Reason being the sovereign faculty, it was thought there could be nothing beyond, unless it were draison. The hu man attribute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man is not bound by his hu manity and that reason can be transformed and sublimated into other more powerful faculties.
Now, the question is, what is the insufficiency of Reason? How does it limit man? And what is the Super man into which man is asked or is being impelled to grow?
Reason is insufficient and unsatisfactory because, as Bergson explains, it does not and cannot embrace life as a whole, seize man and the world in an integral realisation. The greater part of the vast mystery of existence escapes its envergure. Reason is that faculty which is for analysing, defining, classifying and fixing things. It is a power that has grown in man in order that he may best manipulate the things of the world. It is utilitarian, practical in its nature and outlook. And as practical dealing requires that things should be stable and separate entities, therefore Reason cannot but see things in solid and in the fragments of a solid. It cuts up existence into distinct parts and diverse elements; and these again it seeks to relate and aggregate, in accordance with what it calls "laws". Such a process has been necessary for man in conducting life and action successfully. Originally a bye-product of active life, Reason gradually separated itself and came finally to have an independent status and function, became or sought to become the instrument of knowledge, of Truth.
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 Super man has also a similar orientation and significance; for, according to him, the Super man 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 Super man is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "hu man, all too hu man"who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom.
This then is the mantra of the new ageLife with Intuition as its guide and not Reason and mechanical efficiency, not man but Super man. The right mantra has been found, the principle itself is irreproachable. But the interpretation, the application, does not seem to have been always happy. For, Nietzsche's conception of the Super man is full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long been adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche asks us, on the other hand, to deify the vital man. According to him the super man is he who has (1) the supreme sense of the ego, (2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who lives dangerously. All this means an Asura, that is to say, one who has, it may be, dominion over his animal and vital impulsions in order, of course, that he may best gratify them but who has not purified them. Purification does not necessarily mean, annihilation but it does mean sublimation and transformation. So if you have to transcend man, you have to transcend egoism also. For a conscious egoism is the very characteristic of man and by increasing your sense of egoism you do not supersede man but simply aggrandise your hu manity, fashion it on a larger, a titanic scale. And then the will to power is not the only will that requires fulfilment, there is also the will to knowledge and the will to love. In man these three fundamental constitutive elements coexist, although they do it, more often than not, at the expense of each other and in a state of continual disharmony. The super man, if he is to be the man "who has surmounted himself", must embody a poise of being in which all the three find a fusion and harmonya perfect synthesis. Again, to live dangerously may be heroic, but it is not divine. To live dangerously means to have eternal opponents, that is to say, to live ever on the same level with the forces you want to dominate. To have the sense that one has to fight and control means that one is not as yet the sovereign lord, for one has to strive and strain and attain. The supreme lord is he who is perfectly equanimous with himself and with the world. He has not to batter things into a shape in order to create. He creates means, he manifests. He wills and he achieves"God said 'let there be light' and there was light."
As a matter of fact, the super man is not, as Nietzsche thinks him to be, the highest embodiment of the biological force of Nature, not even as modified and refined by the aesthetic and aristocratic virtues of which the higher reaches of hu manity seem capable. For that is after all hu manity only accentuated in certain other fundamentally hu man modes of existence. It does not carry far enough the process of surmounting. In reality it is not a surmounting but a new channelling. Instead of the ethical and intellectual man, we get the vital and aesthetic man. It may be a change but not a transfiguration.
And the faculty of Intuition said to be the characteristic of the New man does not mean all that it should, if we confine ourselves to Bergson's definition of it. Bergson says that Intuition is a sort of sympathy, a community of feeling or sensibility with the urge of the life-reality. The difference between the sympathy of Instinct and the sympathy of Intuition being that while the former is an unconscious or semi-conscious power, the latter is illumined and self-conscious. Now this view emphasises only the feeling-tone of Intuition, the vital sensibility that attends the direct communion with the life movement. But Intuition is not only purified feeling and sensibility, it is also purified vision and knowledge. It unites us not only with the movement of life, but also opens out to our sight the Truths, the fundamental realities behind that movement. Bergson does not, of course, point to any existence behind the continuous flux of life-power the elan vital. He seems to deny any static truth or truths to be seen and seized in any scheme of knowledge. To him the dynamic flow the Heraclitian panta reei is the ultimate reality. It is precisely to this view of things that Bergson owes his conception of Intuition. Since existence is a continuum of Mind-Energy, the only way to know it is to be in harmony or unison with it, to move along its current. The conception of knowledge as a fixing and delimiting of things is necessarily an anomaly in this scheme. But the question is, is matter the only static and separative reality? Is the flux of vital Mind-Energy the ultimate truth?
Matter forms the lowest level of reality. Above it is the elan vital. Above the elan vital there is yet the domain of the Spirit. And the Spirit is a static substance and at the same a dynamic creative power. It is Being (Sat) that realises or expresses itself through certain typal nuclei or nodi of consciousness (chit) in a continuous becoming, in a flow of creative activity (ananda). The dynamism of the vital energy is only a refraction or precipitation of the dynamism of the spirit; and so also static matter is only the substance of the spirit concretised and solidified. It is in an uplift both of matter and vital force to their prototypesswarupa and swabhavain the Spirit that lies the real transformation and transfiguration of the hu manity of man.
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 hu man 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 hu manity and not as before merely with its artificial scaffolding. The Alexandrine civilisation of hu manity, 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 hu manity 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 hu manity is not the transcendence of one or other of its levels but the total transcendence to an altogether different status and the transmutation of hu manity 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
Mystic Poetry Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great man
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and Mystics The Poetry in the Making
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When we say one is conscious, we usually mean that one is conscious with the mental consciousness, with the rational intelligence, with the light of the brain. But this need not be always so. For one can be conscious with other forms of consciousness or in other planes of consciousness. In the average or normal man the consciousness is linked to or identified with the brain function, the rational intelligence and so we conclude that without this wakeful brain activity there can be no consciousness. But the fact is otherwise. The experiences of the mystic prove the point. The mystic is conscious on a level which we describe as higher than the mind and reason, he has what may be called the overhead consciousness. (Apart from the normal consciousness, which is named jagrat, waking, the Upanishad speaks of three other increasingly subtler states of consciousness, swapna, sushupti and turiya.)And then one can be quite unconscious, as in samadhi that can be sushupti or turiyaorpartially consciousin swapna, for example, the external behaviour may be like that of a child or a lunatic or even a goblin. One can also remain normally conscious and still be in the superconscience. Not only so, the mystic the Yogican be conscious on infraconscious levels also; that is to say, he can enter into and identify with the consciousness involved in life and even in Matter; he can feel and realise his oneness with the animal world, the plant world and finally the world of dead earth, of "stocks and stones" too. For all these strands of existence have each its own type of consciousness and all different from the mode of mind which is normally known as consciousness. When St. Francis addresses himself to the brother Sun or the sister Moon, or when the Upanishad speaks of the tree silhouetted against the sky, as if stilled in trance, we feel there is something of this fusion and identification of consciousness with an infra-conscient existence.
I said that the supreme artist is superconscious: his consciousness withdraws from the normal mental consciousness and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the artist's mentalityhis ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions, in other words, his normal psychological make-upserves as a channel, an instrument, a medium for transcription. Now, there are two stages, or rather two lines of activity in the processus, for they may be overlapping and practically simultaneous. First, there is the withdrawal and the in-gathering of consciousness and then its reappearance into expression. The consciousness retires into a secret or subtle worldWords-worth's "recollected in tranquillity"and comes back with the riches gathered or transmuted there. But the purity of the gold thus garnered and stalled in the artistry of words and sounds or lines and colours depends altogether upon the purity of the channel through which it has to pass. The mental vehicle receives and records and it can do so to perfection if it is perfectly in tune with what it has to receive and record; otherwise the transcription becomes mixed and blurred, a faint or confused echo, a poor show. The supreme creators are precisely those in whom the receptacle, the 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.
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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 part of one and indivisible movement. Historically, hu man 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 farther 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 Ro mantics. The very essence of Ro manticism 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, Hous man 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 Ro manticism. 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 hu man 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 Hous man's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Natureagainst God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the triflingtins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sicklehe is still a prophet, a violent one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and 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 crafts manship 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 crafts man 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 hu man 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 hu man 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 e manation 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 hu man consciousness de mands 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 crafts man, 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 participation 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 heart.
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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 de manded 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 hu man 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 hu man 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?
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But the more truly modern mind looks at the thing in a slightly different way. The good and the evil are not, to it, contrary to each other: one does not deny or negate the other. They are intermixed, fused in a mysterious identity. The best and the worst are but two conditions, two potentials of the same entity. Baudelaire, who can be considered as the first of the real moderns in many ways, saw and experienced this intimate polarity or identity of opposites in hu man nature and consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One:
Une Ide, uneForme, Un tre
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Mystic Poetry Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great man
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The dim reply in man's unknowing heart
And meets, not understanding why it came
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Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,
Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,
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And man's corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thief's in the night shall be the covert tread
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For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.
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Their aloofness drives man to surpass himself.
Our passion heaves to wed the Eternal's calm,
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When first man's heart dared death and suffered life.
One who has shaped this world is ever its lord:
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There are Two who are One and play in many worlds;
In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met
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He leaves to her the cosmic management
And watches all, the Witness of her scene.
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The Im manent lives in man as in his house;
He has made the universe his pastime's field,
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Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
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A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
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He is the many who was the silent One.
In the symbol figures of the cosmic Force
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Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man's soul
And the morns of God have overtaken his night.
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And the world manifest the unveiled Divine.
For this he left his white infinity
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great man
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsRabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great man
Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great man
Tagore is a great poet: he will be remembered as one of the I greatest world-poets. But hu manity owes him anotherperhaps a greaterdebt of gratitude: his name has a higher value, a more significant potency for the future.
In an age when Reason was considered as the highest light given to man, Tagore pointed to the Vision of the mystics as always the still greater light; when man was elated with undreamt-of worldly success, puffed up with incomparable material possessions and powers, Tagore's voice rang clear and emphatic in tune with the cry of the ancients: "What shall I do with all this mass of things, if I am not made immortal by that?" When men, in their individual as well as collective egoism, were scrambling for earthly gains and hoards, he held before them vaster and cleaner horizons, higher and deeper ways of being and living, maintained the sacred sense of hu man solidarity, the living consciousness of the Divine, one and indivisible. When the Gospel of Power had all but hypnotised men's minds, and Super man or God- man came to be equated with the Titan, Tagore saw through the falsehood and placed in front and above all the old-world eternal verities of love and self-giving, harmony and mutuality, sweetness and light. When pessimism, cynicism, agnosticism struck the major chord of hu man temperament, and grief and frustration and death and decay were taken as a matter of course to be the inevitable order of earthlylifebhas mantam idam shariramhe continued to sing the song of the Rishis that Ananda and Immortality are the breath of things, the birth right of hu man beings. When Modernism declared with a certitude never tobe contested that Matter is Brah man, Tagore said with the voice of one who knows that Spirit is Brah man.
Tagore is in direct line with those bards who have sung of the Spirit, who always soared high above the falsehoods and uglinesses of a merely mundane life and lived in the undecaying delights and beauties of a diviner consciousness. Spiritual reality was the central theme of his poetic creation: only and naturally he viewed it in a special way and endowed it with a special grace. We know of another God-intoxicated man, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who saw things sub specie aeternitatis, under the figure or mode of eternity. Well, Tagore can be said to see things, in their essential spiritual reality, under the figure or mode of beauty. Keats indeed spoke of truth being beauty and beauty truth. But there is a great difference in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty, unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein in all these poets remains secondary. In the old Indian master, it is part of his intellectual equipment, no doubt, but nothing much more than that. In the other two it comes in as strange flashes from an unknown country, as a sort of irruption or on the peak of the poetic afflatus or enthousiasmos.
The world being nothing but Spirit made visible is, according to Tagore, fundamentally a thing of beauty. The scars and spots that are on the surface have to be removed and mankind has to repossess and clo the itself with that mantle of beauty. The world is beautiful, because it is the image of the Beautiful, because it harbours, expresses and embodies the Divine who is Beauty supreme. Now by a strange alchemy, a wonderful effect of polarisation, the very spiritual element in Tagore has made him almost a pagan and even a profane. For what are these glories of Nature and the still more exquisite glories that the hu man body has captured? They are but vibrations and modulations of beauty the delightful names and forms of the supreme Lover and Beloved.
Socrates is said to have brought down Philosophy from Heaven to live among men upon earth. A similar exploit can be ascribed to Tagore. The Spirit, the bare transcendental Reality contemplated by the orthodox Vedantins, has been brought nearer to our planet, close to hu man consciousness in Tagore's vision, being clothed in earth and flesh and blood, made vivid with the colours and contours of the physical existence. The Spirit, yes and by all means, but not necessarily asceticism and monasticism. So Tagore boldly declared in those famous lines of his:
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The spirit of the age de mands this new gospel. mankind needs and awaits a fresh revelation. The world and life are not an illusion or a lesser reality: they are, if taken rightly, as real as the pure Spirit itself. Indeed, Spirit and Flesh, Consciousness and Matter are not antinomies; to consider them as such is itself an illusion. In fact, they are only two poles or modes or aspects of the same reality. To separate or divide them is a one-sided concentration or abstraction on the part of the hu man mind. The fulfilment of the Spirit is in its expression through Matter; hu man life too reaches its highest term, its summum bonum, in embodying the spiritual consciousness here on earth and not dissolving itself in the Transcendence. That is the new Dispensation which answers to the deepest aspiration in man and towards which he has been travelling through the ages in the course of the evolution of his consciousness. many, however, are the prophets and sages who have set this ideal before hu manity and more and more insistently and clearly as we come nearer to the age we live in. But none or very few have expressed it with such beauty and charm and compelling persuasion. It would be carping criticism to point out-as some, purists one may call them, have done-that in poetising and aesthetising the spiritual truth and reality, in trying to make it hu man and terrestrial, he has diminished and diluted the original substance, in endeavouring to render the diamond iridescent, he has turned it into a baser alloy. Tagore's is a poetic soul, it must be admitted; and it is not necessary that one should find in his ideas and experiences and utterances the cent per cent accuracy and inevitability of a Yogic consciousness. Still his major perceptions, those that count, stand and are borne out by the highest spiritual realisation.
Tagore is no inventor or innovator when he posits Spirit as Beauty, the spiritual consciousness as the ardent rhythm of ecstasy. This experience is the very core of Vaishnavism and for which Tagore is sometimes called a Neo-Vaishnava. The Vaishnava sees the world pulsating in glamorous beauty as the Lila (Play) of the Lord, and the Lord, God himself, is nothing but Love and Beauty. Still Tagore is not all Vaishnava or merely a Vaishnava; he is in addition a modern (the carping voice will say, there comes the dilution and adulteration)in the sense that problems exist for himsocial, political, economic, national, hu manitarianwhich have to be faced and solved: these are not merely mundane, but woven into the texture of the fundamental problem of hu man destiny, of Soul and Spirit and God. A Vaishnava was, in spite of his acceptance of the world, an introvert, to use a modern psychological phrase, not necessarily in the pejorative sense, but in the neutral scientific sense. He looks upon the universe' and hu man life as the play of the Lord, as an actuality and not mere illusion indeed; but he does not participate or even take interest in the dynamic working out of the world process, he does not care to know, has no need of knowing that there is a terrestrial purpose and a diviner fulfilment of the mortal life upon earth. The Vaishnava dwells more or less absorbed in the Vaikuntha of his inner consciousness; the outer world, although real, is only a symbolic shadowplay to which he can but be a witness-real, is only a nothing more.
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Not the acceptance of the world as it is, not even a joyous acceptance, viewing it as an inexplicable and mysterious and magic play of, God, but the asp ration and endeavour to change it, mould it in the pattern of its inner divine realities for there are such realities which seek expression and embodiment in earthly life that is the great mission and labour of hu manity and that is all the meaning of man's existence here below. And Tagore is one of the great prophets and labourers who had the vision of the shape of things to come and worked for it. Only it must be noted, as I have already said, that unlike mere moral reformists or scientific planners, Tagore grounded himself upon the eternal ancient truths that "age cannot wither nor custom stale"the divine truths of the Spirit.
Tagore was a poet; this poetic power of his he put in the service of the great cause for the divine uplift of hu manity. Naturally, it goes without saying, his poetry did not preach or propagandize the truths for which he stoodhe had a fine and powerful weapon in his prose to do the work, even then in a poetic way but to sing them. And he sang them not in their philosophical bareness, like a Lucretius, or in their sheer transcendental austerity like some of the Upanishadic Rishis, but in and through hu man values and earthly norms. The especial aroma of Tagore's poetry lies exactly here, as he himself says, in the note of unboundedness in things bounded that it describes. A mundane, profane sensuousness, Kalidasian in richness and sweetness, is matched or counterpointed by a simple haunting note imbedded or trailing somewhere behind, a lyric cry persevering into eternity, the nostalgic cry of the still small voice.2
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Tagore the poet reminds one often and anon of Kalidasa. He was so much in love, had such kinship with the great old master that many of his poems, many passages and lines are reminiscences, echoes, modulations or a paraphrase of the original classic. Tagore himself refers in his memoirs to one Kalidasian line that haunted his juvenile brain because of its exquisite music and enchanting imagery:
mandki nirjharikarm vodh muhuh-kamPita-deva-druh
Winds carrying spray from the falls of mandakini, making deodars all astir.
Both the poets were worshippers, idolaters, of beauty, especially of natural physical beauty, of beauty heaped on beauty, of beauty gathered, like honey from all places and stored and ranged and stalled with the utmost decorative skill. Yet the difference between the two is not less pronounced. A philosopher is reminded of Bergson, the great exponent of movement as reality, in connection with certain aspects of Tagore. Indeed, Beauty in Tagore is something moving, flowing, dancing, rippling; it is especially the beauty which music embodies and expresses. A Kalidasian beauty, on the contrary, is statuesque and plastic, it is to be appreciated in situ. This is, however, by the way.
01.05 - The Nietzschean Antichrist, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Nietzsche as the apostle of force is a name now familiar to all the world. The hero, the warrior who never tamely accepts suffering and submission and defeat under any condition but fights always and fights to conquersuch is the ideal man, according to Nietzsche,the champion of strength, of greatness, of mightiness. The dominating personality infused with the supreme "will to power"he is Ubermensch, the Super man. Sentiment does not move the mountains, emotion diffuses itself only in vague aspiration. The motive power, the creative fiat does not dwell in the heart but somewhere higher. The way of the Cross, the path of love and charity and pity does not lead to the kingdom of Heaven. The world has tried it for the last twenty centuries of its Christian civilisation and the result is that we are still living in a luxuriant abundance of misery and sordidness and littleness. This is how Nietzsche thinks and feels. He finds no virtue in the old rgimes and he revolts from them. He wants a speedy and radical remedy and teaches that by violence only the Kingdom of Heaven can be seized. For, to Nietzsche the world is only a clash of forces and the Super man therefore is one who is the embodiment of the greatest force. Nietzsche does not care for the good, it is the great that moves him. The good, the moral is of man, conventional and has only a fictitious value. The great, the non-moral is, on the other hand, divine. That only has a value of its own. The good is nothing but a sort of makeshift arrangement which man makes for himself in order to live commodiously and which changes according to his temperament. But the great is one with the Supreme Wisdom and is absolute and imperative. The good cannot create the great; it is the great that makes for the good. This is what he really means when he says, "They say that a good cause sanctifies war but I tell thee it is a good war that sanctifies all cause." For the goodness of your cause you judge by your personal predilections, by your false conventionalities, by a standard that you set up in your ignoranceBut a good war, the output of strength in any cause is in itself a cause of salvation. For thereby you are the champion of that ultimate verity which conduces to the ultimate good. Do not shrink, he would say, to be even like the cyclone and the avalanche, destructive, indeed, but grand and puissant and therefore truer emblems of the BeyondJenseitsthan the weak, the little, the pitiful that do not dare to destroy and by that very fact cannot hope to create.
This is the Nietzsche we all know. But there is another aspect of his which the world has yet been slow to recognise. For, at bottom, Nietzsche is not all storm and fury. If his Super man is a Destroying Angel, he is none the less an angel. If he is endowed with a supreme sense of strength and power, there is also secreted in the core of his heart a sense of the beautiful that illumines his somewhat sombre aspect. For although Nietzsche is by birth a Slavo-Teuton, by culture and education he is pre-eminently Hellenic. His earliest works are on the subject of Greek tragedy and form what he describes as an "Apollonian dream." And to this dream, to this Greek aesthetic sense more than to any thing else he sacrifices justice and pity and charity. To him the weak and the miserable, the sick and the maimed are a sort of blot, a kind of ulcer on the beautiful face of hu manity. The herd that wallow in suffering and relish suffering disfigure the aspect of the world and should therefore be relentlessly mowed out of existence. By being pitiful to them we give our tacit assent to their persistence. And it is precisely because of this that Nietzsche has a horror of Christianity. For compassion gives indulgence to all the ugliness of the world and thus renders that ugliness a necessary and indispensable element of existence. To protect the weak, to sympathise with the lowly brings about more of weakness and more of lowliness. Nietzsche has an aristocratic taste par excellencewhat he aims at is health and vigour and beauty. But above all it is an aristocracy of the spirit, an aristocracy endowed with all the richness and beauty of the soul that Nietzsche wants to establish. The beggar of the street is the symbol of ugliness, of the poverty of the spirit. And the so-called aristocrat, die millionaire of today is as poor and ugly as any helpless leper. The soul of either of them is made of the same dirty, sickly stuff. The tattered rags, the crouching heart, the effeminate nerve, the unenlightened soul are the standing ugliness of the world and they have no place in the ideal, the perfect hu manity. Hu manity, according to Nietzsche, is made in order to be beautiful, to conceive the beautiful, to create the beautiful. Nietzsche's Super man has its perfect image in a Grecian statue of Zeus cut out in white marble-Olympian grandeur shedding in every lineament Apollonian beauty and Dionysian vigour.
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The incertitude of man's proud confident thought,
The transience of the achievements of his force.
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One among many thousands never touched,
Engrossed in the external world's design,
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His mind the many-frescoed outer court
Of an imperishable Inhabitant:
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Paces of the many-visaged Wonderful,
Predestined stadia of the evolving Way,
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A many-miracled Consciousness unrolled
Vast aim and process and unfettered norms,
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, what such an uncompromising individualism fails to recognise is that individuality and ego are not the same thing, that the individual may have his individuality intact and entire and yet sacrifice his ego, that the soul of man is a much greater thing than his vital being. It is simply ignoring the fact and denying the truth to say that man is only a fighting animal and not a loving god, that the self within the individual realises itself only through competition and not co-operation. It is an error to conceive of society as a mere parallelogram of forces, to suppose that it has risen simply out of the struggle of individual interests and continues to remain by that struggle. Struggle is only one aspect of the thing, a particular form at a particular stage, a temporary manifestation due to a particular system and a particular habit and training. It would be nearer the truth to say that society came into being with the de mand of the individual soul to unite with the individual soul, with the stress of an Over-soul to express itself in a multitude of forms, diverse yet linked together and organised in perfect harmony. Only, the stress for union manifested itself first on the material plane as struggle: but this is meant to be corrected and transcended and is being continually corrected and transcended by a secret harmony, a real commonality and brotherhood and unity. The individual is not so self-centred as the individualists make him to be, his individuality has a much vaster orbit and fulfils itself only by fulfilling others. The scientists have begun to discover other instincts in man than those of struggle and competition; they now place at the origin of social grouping an instinct which they name the herd-instinct: but this is only a formulation in lower terms, a translation on the vital plane of a higher truth and reality the fundamental oneness and accord of individuals and their spiritual impulsion to unite.
However, individualism has given us a truth and a formula which collectivism ignored. Self-determination is a thing which has come to stay. Each and every individual is free, absolutely free and shall freely follow his own line of growth and development and fulfilment. No extraneous power shall choose and fix what is good or evil for him, nor coerce and exploit him for its own benefit. But that does not necessarily mean that collectivism has no truth in it; collectivism also, as much as individualism, has a lesson for us and we should see whether we can harmonise the two. Collectivism signifies that the individual should not look to himself alone, should not be shut up in his freedom but expand himself and envelop others in a wider freedom, see other creatures in himself and himself in other creatures, as the Gita says. Collectivism de mands that the individual need not and should not exhaust himself entirely in securing and enjoying his personal freedom, but that he can and should work for the salvation of others; the truth it upholds is this that the individual is from a certain point of view only a part of the group and by ignoring the latter it ignores itself in the end.
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Communism takes man not as ego or the vital creature; it turns him upside downurdhomulo' vaksakhah and establishes him upon his soul, his inner godhead. Thus established the individual soul finds and fulfils the divine law that by increasing itself it increases others and by increasing others it increases itself and thus by increasing one another they attain the supreme good. Unless man goes beyond himself and reaches this self, this godhead above, he will not find any real poise, will always swing between individualism and collectivism, he will remain always boundbound either in his freedom or in his bondage.
A commune is a group of individuals having a common self and a common life-intuition. A common self presupposes the realisation by each individual of his deepest being the self which is at once distinct from and instinct with other selves; a common life-intuition presupposes the awakening of each individual to his inmost creative urge, which, pure and true and vast as it is, fulfils itself in and through other creative urges.
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The individual must find himself and establish his secret god-head, and then only, when such free and integral individualities meet and reciprocate and coalesce, can the community they form have a living reality and a per manent potency. On the other hand, unless individuals come together and through the interchange of each other's soul and substance' enhance the communal Godhead, the separate individual godheads also will not manifest in their supreme and sovereign powers.
If society, that is to say, community, be the fieldkshetra for the individual to live, move and have its being, then we must begin at the very outset with the community itself, at least, with a nucleus that will go to form such a thing. The fear that the untimely grouping together of immature souls may crush out individuality and dig its own grave has, no doubt, sufficient justification behind it to deter one from the attempt; but neither can we be certain that souls nursed and nourished in solitary cells, absolutely apart from any mellowing and broadening influence of the outside world will ever reach to that stage of perfect maturity when they will suddenly and spontaneously break open their cells and recognise in one another the communal brother-self.
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The individual who leads a severely individual life from the very beginning, whose outlook of the world has been fashioned by that conception, can hardly, if at all, enter at the end the communal life. He must perforce be either a vagabond or a recluse: But the recluse is not an integral man, nor the vagabond an ideal personality. The individual need not be too chaste and shy to associate with others and to give and take as freely and fully as he can. Individuality is not necessarily curtailed or mutilated in this process, but there is this other greater possibility of its getting enlarged and enhanced. Rather it is when you shut yourself up in your own self, that you stick to only one line of your personality, to a single phase of your self and thus limit and diminish yourself; the breadth and height and depth of your self, the cubic completeness of your personality you can attain only through a multiple and variegated stress by which you come in contact with the world and things.
So first the individual and then the commune is not the natural nor the ideal principle. On the other hand, first the commune and then the individual would appear to be an equally defective principle. For first a commune means an organisation, its laws and rules and regulations, its injunctions and prohibitions; all which signifies or comes to signify that every individual is not free to enter its fold and that whoever enters must know how to dovetail himself therein and thus crush down the very life-power whose enhancement and efflorescence is sought. First a commune means necessarily a creed, a dogma, a set form of being and living indelibly marked out from beforehand. The individual has there no choice of finding and developing the particular creed or dogma or mode of being and living, from out of his own self, along his particular line of natural growth; all that is imposed upon him and he has to accept and make it his own by trial and effort and self-torture. Even if the commune be a contractual association, the members having joined together in a common cause to a common end, by voluntarily sacrificing a portion of their personal choice and freedom, even then it is not the ideal thing; the collective soul will be diminished in exact proportion as each individual soul has had to be diminished, be that voluntary or otherwise. That commune is plenary and entire which ensures plenitude and entirety to each of its individuals.
01.06 - Vivekananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great man Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsVivekananda
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A personal reminiscence. A young man in prison, accused of conspiracy and waging war against the British Empire. If convicted he might have to suffer the extreme penalty, at least, transportation to the Anda mans. The case is dragging on for long months. And the young man is in a solitary cell. He cannot always keep up his spirits high. Moments of sadness and gloom and despair come and almost overwhelm him. Who was there to console and cheer him up? Vivekananda. Vivekananda's speeches, From Colombo to Almora, came, as a godsend, into the hands of the young man. Invariably, when the period of despondency came he used to open the book, read a few pages, read them over again, and the cloud was there no longer. Instead there was hope and courage and faith and future and light and air.
Such is Vivekananda, the embodiment of Fearlessnessabh, the Upanishadic word, the mantra, he was so fond of. The life and vision of Vivekananda can be indeed summed up in the mighty phrase of the Upanishads, nyam tm balahnena labhya. 'This soul no weakling can attain.' Strength! More strength! Strength evermore! One remembers the motto of Danton, the famous leader in the French Revolution:De l'audance, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!
The gospel of strength that Vivekananda spread was very characteristic of the man. For it is not mere physical or nervous bravery, although that too is indispensable, and it is something more than moral courage. In the speeches referred to, the subject-matter (as well as the manner to a large extent) is philosophical, metaphysical, even abstract in outlook and treatment: they are not a call to arms, like the French National Anthem, for example; they are not merely an ethical exhortation, a moral lesson either. They speak of the inner spirit, the divine in man, the supreme realities that lie beyond. And yet the words are permeated through and through with a vibration life-giving and heroic-not so much in the explicit and apparent meaning as in the style and manner and atmosphere: it is catching, even or precisely when he refers, for example, to these passages in the Vedas and the Upanishads, magnificent in their poetic beauty, sublime in their spiritual truth,nec plus ultra, one can say, in the grand style supreme:
Yasyaite himavanto mahitv
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The consciousness that breathed out these mighty words, these heavenly sounds was in itself mighty and heavenly and it is that that touches you, penetrates you, vibrates in you a kindred chord, "awakening in you someone dead" till thenmrtam kcana bodhayant. More than the matter, the thing that was said, was the personality, the being who embodied the truth expressed, the living consciousness behind the words and the speech that set fire to your soul. Indeed it was the soul that Vivekananda could awaken and stir in you. Any orator, any speaker with some kind of belief, even if it is for the moment, in what he says, by the sheer force of assertion, can convince your mind and draw your acquiescence and adhesion. A leader of men, self-confident and bold and fiery, can carry you off your feet and make you do brave things. But that is a lower degree of character and nature, ephemeral and superficial, that is touched in you thereby. The spiritual leader, the Guide, goes straight to the spirit in youit is the call of the deep unto the deep. That was what Vivekananda meant when he said that Brah man is asleep in you, awaken it, you are the Brah man, awaken it, you are free and almighty. It is the spirit consciousness Sachchidananda that is the real man in you and that is supremely mighty and invincible and free absolutely. The courage and fearlessness that Vivekananda gave you was the natural attribute of the lordship of your spiritual reality. Vivekananda spoke and roused the At man in man.
Vivekananda spoke to the At man in man, he spoke to the At man of the world, and he spoke specially to the At man of India. India had a large place in Vivekananda's consciousness: for the future of hu manity and the world is wedded to India's future. India has a great mission, it has a spiritual, rather the spiritual work to do. Here is India's work as Vivekananda conceived it in a nutshell:
"Shall India die? Then from the world all spirituality will be extinct." And wherefore is this call for the life spiritual? Thus the aspiring soul would answer:
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The answer is as old as that of Nachiketas: "These horses and these songs and dances of yours, let them remain yours, man is not appeased with riches"; or that of Maitreyi, "What am I to do with that which will not bring me immortality?" This is then man's mission upon earth:
" man is higher than all animals, than all angels: none is greater than man. Even the Devas will have to come down again and attain to salvation though a hu man body. man alone attains to perfection, not even the Devas." Indeed, men are gods upon earth, come down here below to perfect themselves and perfect the worldonly, they have to be conscious of themselves. They do not know what they are, they have to be actually and sovereignly what they are really and potentially. This then is the life-work of everyone:
"First, let us be Gods, and then help others to be Gods.
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and not conformity to nature that makes man what he is."
Work and not abstention from work is the way, but not work for ignorant enjoyment:
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These are luminous life-giving mantras and the world and hu manity of today, sore distressed and utterly confounded, have great need of them to live them by and be saved.
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Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great man Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
01.07 - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
"The zeal for the Lord hath eaten me up." Such has indeed been the case with Pascal, almost literally. The fire that burned in him was too ardent and vehement for the vehicle, the material instrument, which was very soon used up and reduced to ashes. At twenty-four he was already a broken man, being struck with paralysis and neuras thenia; he died at the comparatively early age of 39, emulating, as it were, the life career of his Lord the Christ who died at 33. The Fire martyrised the body, but kindled and brought forth experiences and realisations that save and truths that abide. It was the Divine Fire whose vision and experience he had on the famous night of 23 November 1654 which brought about his final and definitive conversion. It was the same fire that had blazed up in his brain, while yet a boy, and made him a precocious genius, a marvel of intellectual power in the exact sciences. At 12 this prodigy discovered by himself the 32nd proposition of Euclid, Book I. At sixteen he wrote a treatise on conic sections. At nineteen he invented a calculating machine which, without the help of any mathematical rule or process, gave absolutely accurate results. At twenty-three he published his experiments with vacuum. At twenty-five he conducted the well-known experiment from the tower of St. Jacques, proving the existence of atmospheric pressure. His studies in infinitesimal calculus were remarkably creative and original. And it might be said he was a pioneer in quite a new branch of mathematics, viz., the mathematical theory of probability. We shall see presently how his preoccupation with the mathematics of chance and probability coloured and reinforced his metaphysics and theology.
But the pressure upon his dynamic and heated brain the fiery zeal in his mindwas already proving too much and he was advised medically to take complete rest. Thereupon followed what was known as Pascal's mundane lifea period of distraction and dissipation; but this did not last long nor was it of a serious nature. The inner fire could brook no delay, it was eager and impatient to englobe other fields and domains. Indeed, it turned to its own field the heart. Pascal became initiated into the mystery of Faith and Grace. Still he had to pass through a terrible period of dejection and despair: the life of the world had given him no rest or relaxation, it served only to fill his cup of misery to the brim. But the hour of final relief was not long postponed: the Grace came to him, even as it came to Moses or St. Paul as a sudden flare of fire which burnt up the Dark Night and opened out the portals of Morning Glory.
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The process of conversion of the doubting mind, of the dry intellectual reason as propounded and perhaps practised by Pascal is also a characteristic mark of his nature and genius. It is explained in his famous letter on "bet" or "game of chance" (Le Pari). Here is how he puts the issue to the doubting mind (I am giving the substance, not his words): let us say then that in the world we are playing a game of chance. How do the chances stand? What are the gains and losses if God does not exist? What 'are the gains and losses if God does exist? If God exists, by accepting and reaching him what do we gain? All that man cares forhappiness, felicity. And what do we lose? We lose the world of misery. If, on the other 'hand, God does not exist, by believing him to exist, we lose nothing, we are not more miserable than what we are. If, however, God exists and we do not believe him, we gain this world of misery but we lose all that is worth having. Thus Pascal concludes that even from the standpoint of mere gain and loss, belief in God is more advantageous than unbelief. This is how he applied to metaphysics the mathematics of probability.
One is not sure if such reasoning is convincing to the intellect; but perhaps it is a necessary stage in conversion. At least we can conclude that Pascal had to pass through such a stage; and it indicates the difficulty his brain had to undergo, the tension or even the torture he made it pass through. It is true, from Reason Pascal went over to Faith, even while giving Reason its due. Still it seems the two were not perfectly synthetised or fused in him. There was a gap between that was not thoroughly bridged. Pascal did not possess the higher, intuitive, luminous mind that mediates successfully between the physical discursive ratiocinative brain-mind and the vision of faith: it is because deep in his consciousness there lay this chasm. Indeed,Pascal's abyss (l' abme de Pascal) is a well-known legend. Pascal, it appears, used to have very often the vision of an abyss about to open before him and he shuddered at the prospect of falling into it. It seems to us to be an experience of the Infinity the Infinity to which he was so much attracted and of which he wrote so beautifully (L'infiniment grand et l'infiniment petit)but into which he could not evidently jump overboard unreservedly. This produced a dichotomy, a lack of integration of personality, Jung would say. Pascal's brain was cold, firm, almost rigid; his heart was volcanic, the faith he had was a fire: it lacked something of the pure light and burned with a lurid glare.
And the reason is his metaphysics. It is the Jansenist conception of God and hu man nature that inspired and coloured all his experience and consciousness. According to it, as according to the Calvinist conception, man is a corrupt being, corroded to the core, original sin has branded his very soul. Only Grace saves him and releases him. The order of sin and the order of Grace are distinct and disparate worlds and yet they complement each other and need each other. Greatness and misery are intertwined, united, unified with each other in him. Here is an echo of the manichean position which also involves an abyss. But even then God's grace is not a free agent, as Jesuits declare; there is a predestination that guides and controls it. This was one of the main subjects he treated in his famous open letters (Les Provinciales) that brought him renown almost overnight. Eternal hell is a possible prospect that faces the Jansenist. That was why a Night always over-shadowed the Day in Pascal's soul.
man then, according to Pascal, is by nature a sinful thing. He can lay no claim to noble virtue as his own: all in him is vile, he is a lump of dirt and filth. Even the greatest has his full share of this taint. The greatest, the saintliest, and the meanest, the most sinful, all meet, all are equal on this common platform; all have the same feet of clay. man is as miserable a creature as a beast, as much a part and product of Nature as a plant. Only there is this difference that an animal or a tree is unconscious, while man knows that he is miserable. This knowledge or perception makes him more miserable, but that is his real and only greatness there is no other. His thought, his self-consciousness, and his sorrow and repentance and contrition for what he is that is the only good partMary's part that has been given to him. Here are Pascal's own words on the subject:
"The greatness of man is great in this that he knows he is miserable. A tree does not know that it is miserable.
It is misery indeed to know oneself miserable. But one is great when one knows thus that he is miserable.
Thought is man's greatness.
man is a mere reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed."7
Pascal's faith had not the calm, tranquil, serene, luminous and happy self-possession of an Indian Rishi. It was ardent and impatient, fiery and vehement. It had to be so perhaps, since it was to stand against his steely brain (and a gloomy vital or life force) as a counterpoise, even as an antidote. This tension and schism brought about, at least contri buted to his neuras thenia and physical infirmity. But whatever the effect upon his inner consciousness and spiritual achievement, his power of expression, his literary style acquired by that a special quality which is his great gift to the French language. If one speaks of Pascal, one has to speak of his language also; for he was one of the great masters who created the French prose. His prose was a wonderful blend of clarity, precision, serried logic and warmth, colour, life, movement, plasticity.
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"Know then, a you proud one, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, impotent Reason. Learn, man surpasses man infinitely. Hear from your Master your true state which you do not know. Listen to God."11
"Ils ne peuvent plus nous dire qu'il n'y a que de petits esprits qui aient de la pit: car on leur en fait voir de la mieux pouss dans run des plus grands go-mtres, l'un des plus subtils mtaphysiciens, et des plus pntrants esprits que aient jamais t au monde. La pit d'un tel philosophe devrait faire dire aux indvots et awe libertins ce que dit un jour un certain Diocls, en voyant Epicure dans un temple: 'Quelle fte,' s'criait-il, 'quelle spectacle pour moi, de voir Epicure dans un temple! Tous mes soupons s'vanouissent: la pit reprend sa place; et je ne vis jamais mieux la grandeur de Jupiter que depuis que je vois Epicure genoux!' " aBayle: Nouvelle de la Rpublique des Lettres.
01.07 - The Bases of Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Any real reconstruction of society, any per manent reformation of the world presupposes a real reconstruction, a per manent reformation of hu man nature. Otherwise any amount of casting and recasting the mere machineries would not bring about any appreciable result, but leave the thing as it is. Change the laws as much as you like, but if you do not change the nature of man, the world will not change. For it is man that makes laws and not laws that make man. Laws express at best the de mand which man feels within himself. A truth must realise itself in hu man nature before it can be codified. You may certainly legalise an ideal, but that does not necessarily mean realising it. The realisation must come first in nature and character, then it is naturally translated into laws and institutions. A man lives the laws of his soul and being and not the law given him by the shastras. He violates the shastras, modifies them, utilises them according to the greater imperative of his Swabhava.
The French Revolution wanted to remould hu man society and its ideal was liberty, equality and fraternity. It pulled down the old machinery and set up a new one in its stead. And the result? "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" remained always in effect a cry in the wilderness. Another wave of idealism is now running over the earth and the Bolshevists are its most fiercely practical exponents. Instead of dealing merely with the political machinery, the Socialistic Revolution tries to break and remake, above all, the social machinery. But judged from the results as yet attained and the tendencies at work, few are the reasons to hope but many to fear the worst. Even education does not seem to promise us anything better. Which nation was better educatedin the sense we understood and still commonly understand the wordthan Ger many?
And yet we have no hesitation today to call them Huns and Barbarians. That education is not giving us the right thing is proved further by the fact that we are constantly changing our programmes and curriculums, everyday remodelling old institutions and founding new ones. Even a revolution in the educational system will not bring about the desired millennium, so long as we lay so much stress upon the system and not upon man himself. And finally, look to all the religions of the worldwe have enough of creeds and dogmas, of sermons and mantras, of churches and templesand yet hu man life and society do not seem to be any the more worthy for it.
Are we then to say that hu man nature is irrevocably vitiated by an original sin and that all our efforts at reformation and regeneration are, as the Indian saying goes, like trying to straighten out the crooked tail of a dog?
It is this persuasion which, has led many spiritual souls, siddhas, to declare that theirs is not the kingdom upon this earth, but that the kingdom of Heaven is within. And it is why great lovers of hu manity have sought not to eradicate but only to mitigate, as far as possible, the ills of life. Earth and life, it is said, contain in their last analysis certain ugly and loathsome realities which are an inevitable and inexorable part of their substance and to eliminate one means to annihilate the other. What can be done is to throw a veil over the nether regions in hu man nature, to put a ban on their urges and velleities and to create opportunities to make social arrangements so that the higher impulses only find free play while the lower impulses, for want of scope and indulgence, may fall down to a harmless level. This is what the Reformists hope and want and no more. Life is based upon animality, the soul is encased in an earth-sheath man needs must procreate, man needs must seek food. But what hu man effort can achieve is to set up barriers and limitations and form channels and openings, which will restrain these impulses, allow them a necessary modicum of play and which for the greater part will serve to encourage and enhance the nobler urges in man. Of course, there will remain always the possibility of the whole scaffolding coming down with a crash and the aboriginal in man running riot in his nudity. But we have to accept the chance and make the best of what materials we have in hand.
No doubt this is a most dismal kind of pessimism. But it is the logical conclusion of all optimism that bases itself upon a particular view of hu man nature. If we question that pessimism, we have to question the very grounds of our optimism also. As a matter of fact, all our idealism has been so long infructuous and will be so in the future, if we do not shift our foundation and start from a different IntuitionWeltanschauung.
Our ideals have been mental constructions, rather than spiritual realitiesrealities of the deepest and highest being. And the power by which we sought to realise those ideals was mainly the insistence of our emotional urges, rather than Nature's Truth-Power. For this must be understood that the mental, the vital and the physical form a nexus of reality which works in its own inexorable law and so long as we are within them we cannot but obey the laws that guide them. Of these three strata which form the hu man adhara, it is the vital which holds the key to man's nature. It is the executive power, the force that fashions the realities on the physical plane; it is what creates the character. The power of thought and sentiment is often much too exaggerated, even so the power of the body, that of physical and external rules and regulations. The mental or the physical or both together can mould the vital only to a limited extent, to the extent which is allowed by the inherent law of the vital. If the de mands of the mental and the physical are stretched too far and are not suffered by the vital, a crash and catastrophe is bound to come in the end.
This is the meaning of the Reformist's pessimism. So long as we remain within the domain of the triple nexus, we must always take account of an original sin, an aboriginal irredeemability in hu man nature. And it, is this fact which a too hasty optimistic idealism is apt to ignore. The point, however, is that man need not be necessarily bound to this triple chord of life. He can go beyond, transcend himself and find a reality which is the basis of even this lower poise of the mental and vital and physical. Only in order to get into that higher poise we must really transcend the lower, that is to say, we must not be satisfied with experiencing or envisaging it through the mind and heart but must directly commune with it, be it. There is a higher law that rules there, a power that is the truth-substance of even the vital and hence can remould it with a sovereign inevitability, according to a pattern which may not and is not the pattern of mental and emotional idealism, but the pattern of a supreme spiritual realism.
What then is required is a complete spiritual regeneration in man, a new structure of his soul and substancenot merely the realisation of the highest and supreme Truth in mental and emotional consciousness, but the translation and application of the law of that truth in the power of the vital. It is here that failed all the great spiritual or rather religious movements of the past. They were content with evoking the divine in the mental being, but left the vital becoming to be governed by the habitual un-divine or at the most to be just illumined by a distant and faint glow which served, however, more to distort than express the Divine.
The Divine Nature only can per manently reform the vital nature that is ours. Neither laws and institutions, which are the results of that vital nature, nor ideas and ideals which are often a mere revolt from and more often an auxiliary to it, can comm and the power to regenerate society. If it is thought improbable for any group of men to attain to that God Nature, then there is hardly any hope for mankind. But improbable or probable, that is the only way which man has to try and test, and there is none other.
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01.08 - A Theory of Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Yoga is another form of a normal function in man, it is the consciously regulated and heightened process of a habitual activity of the mind.
The recent science of Psycho-analysis has brought to light certain hidden springs and undercurrents of the mind; it has familiarised us with a mode of viewing the entire psychical life of man which will be fruitful for our present enquiry. Mind, it has been found, is a house divided, against itself, that is to say it is an arena where different and divergent forces continually battle against one another. There must be, however, at the same time, some sort of a resolution of these forces, some equation that holds them in balance, otherwise the mind the hu man being itselfwould cease to exist as an entity. What is the mechanism of this balance of power in the hu man mind? In order to ascertain that we must first of all know the fundamental nature of the struggle and also the character of the more elemental forces that are engaged in it.
There are some primary desires that seek satisfaction in man. They are the vital urges of life, the most prominent among them being the instinct of self-preservation and that of self-reproduction or the desire to preserve one's body by defensive as well as by offensive means and the desire to multiply oneself by mating. These are the two biological necessities that are inevitable to man's existence as a physical being. They give the minimum conditions required to be fulfilled by man in order that he may live and hence they are the strongest and the most fundamental elements that enter into his structure and composition.
It would have been an easy matter if these vital urges could flow on unhindered in their way. There would have been no problem at all, if they met satisfaction easily and smoothly, without having to look to other factors and forces. As a matter of fact, man does not and cannot gratify his instincts whenever and wherever he chooses and in an open and direct manner. Even in his most primitive and barbarous condition, he has often to check himself and throw a veil, in so many ways, over his sheer animality. In the civilised society the check is manifold and is frankly recognised. We do not go straight as our sexual impulsion leads, but seek to hide and camouflage it under the institution of marriage; we do not pounce upon the food directly we happen to meet it and snatch and appropriate whatever portion we get but we secure it through an elaborate process, which is known as the economic system. The machinery of the state, the cult of the kshatriya are roundabout ways to meet our fighting instincts.
What is the reason of this elaboration, this check and constraint upon the natural and direct outflow of the animal instincts in man? It has been said that the social life of man, the fact that he has to live and move as member of a group or aggregate has imposed upon him these restrictions. The free and unbridled indulgence of one's bare aboriginal impulses may be possible to creatures that live a separate, solitary and individual life but is disruptive of all bonds necessary for a corporate and group life. It is even a biological necessity again which has evolved in man a third and collateral primary instinct that of the herd. And it is this herd-instinct which naturally and spontaneously restrains, diverts and even metamorphoses the other instincts of the mere animal life. However, leaving aside for the moment the question whether man's ethical and spiritual ideals are a mere dissimulation of his animal instincts or whether they correspond to certain actual realities apart from and co-existent with these latter, we will recognise the simple fact of control and try to have a glimpse into its mechanism.
There are three lines, as the Psycho-analysts point out along which this control or censuring of the primary instincts acts. First, there is the line of Defence Reaction. That is to say, the mind automatically takes up an attitude directly contrary to the impulse, tries to shut it out and deny altogether its existence and the measure of the insistence of the impulse is also the measure of the vehemence of the denial. It is the case of the lady protesting too much. So it happens that where subconsciously there is a strong current of a particular impulse, consciously the mind is obliged to take up a counteracting opposite impulse. Thus in presence of a strong sexual craving the mind as if to guard and save itself engenders by a reflex movement an ascetic and puritanic mood. Similarly a strong unthinking physical attraction translates itself on the conscious plane as an equally strong repulsion.
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The hu man mind naturally, without any effort on its part, takes to one or more of these devices to control and conceal the aboriginal impulses. But this spontaneous process can be organised and consciously regulated and made to serve better the purpose and urge of Nature. And this is the beginning of yoga the conscious fulfilment of Nature. The Psycho-analysts have given us the first and elementary stage of this process of yoga. It is, we may say, the fourth line of control. With this man enters a new level of being, develops a new mode of life. It is when the automatism of Nature is replaced by the power of Conscious Control. man is not here, a blind instrument of forces, his activities (both indulging and controlling) are not guided according to an ignorant submission to the laws of almost subconscious impulsions. Conscious control means that the mind does not fight shy of or seek to elude the aboriginal insistences, but allows them to come up freely, meets them squarely, recognises them and establishes an easy mastery over them.
The method of unconscious or subconscious nature is fundamentally that of repression. Apart from Defence Reaction which is a thing of pure coercion, even in Substitution and Sublimation there always remains in the background a large amount of repressed complexes in all their primitive strength. The system is never entirely purified but remains secretly pregnant with those urges; a part only is deflected and camouflaged, the surface only assumes a transformed appearance. And there is always the danger of the superstructure coming down helplessly by a sudden upheaval of the nether forces. The whole system feels, although not in a conscious manner, the tension of the repression and suffers from something that is unhealthy and ill-balanced. Dante's spiritualised passion is a supreme instance of control by Sublimation, but the Divina Comedia hardly bears the impress of a serene and tranquil soul, sovereignly above the turmoils of the tragedy of life and absolutely at peace with itself.
In conscious control, the mind is for the first time aware of the presence of the repressed impulses, it seeks to release them from the pressure to which they are habitually and normally subjected. It knows and recognises them, however ugly and revolting they might appear to be when they present themselves in their natural nakedness. Then it becomes easy for the conscious determination to eliminate or regulate or transform them and thus to establish a healthy harmony in the hu man vehicle. The very recognition itself, as implied in conscious control, means purification.
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 hu man 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 hu man will, brings into play the supernal puissance of a Divine Will.
This is the real meaning and sense of the moral struggle in man, the continuous endeavour towards a transvaluation of the primary and aboriginal instincts and impulses. Looked at from one end, from below up the ascending line, man's ethical and spiritual ideals are a dissimulation and sublimation of the animal impulsions. But this is becauseas we see, if we look from the other end, from above down the descending line man is not all instinct, he is not a mere blind instrument in the hands of Nature forces. He has in him another source, an opposite pole of being from which other impulsions flow and continually modify the structure of the lower levels. If the animal is the foundation of his nature, the divine is its summit. If the bodily de mands form his manifest reality, the de mands of the spirit enshrine his higher reality. And if as regards the former he is a slave, as regards the latter he is the Master. It is by the interaction of these double forces that his whole nature has been and is being fashioned. man does not and cannot give carte blanche to his vital, inclinations, since there is a pressure upon them of higher forces coming down from his mental and spiritual levels. It is these latter which have deviated him from the direct line of the pure animal life.
Thus then we may distinguish three types of control on three levels. First, the natural control, secondly the conscious, i.e. to say the mental the ethical and religious control, and thirdly the spiritual or divine control. Now the spirit is the ultimate truth and reality, behind the forces that act in the mind and in the body, so that the natural control and the ethical control are mere attempts to establish and realise the spiritual control. The animal impulses feel the hidden stress of the divine urges that are their real essence and thus there rises first an unconscious conflict in the natural life and then a conscious conflict in the higher ethical life. But when both of these are transcended and the conflict is carried on to a still higher level, then do we find their real significance and arrive at the consummation to which they move. Yoga is the ultimate transvaluation of physical (and of moral) values, it is the trans-substantiation of life-power into its spiritual substance.
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
From the twentieth century back to the fourteenth is a far cry: a far cry indeed from the modern scientific illumination to mediaeval superstition, from logical positivists and mathematical rationalists to visionary mystics, from Russell and Huxley to Ruysbroeck and Hilton. The mystic lore, the Holy Writ, the mediaeval sage says, echoing almost the very words of the Eastern Masters, "may not be got by study nor through man's travail only, but principally by the grace of the Holy Ghost." As for the men living and moving in the worldly way, there are "so mickle din and crying in their heart and vain thoughts and fleshly desires" that it is impossible for them to listen or understand the still small voice. It is the pure soul touched by the Grace that alone "seeth soothfastness of Holy Writ wonderly shewed and opened, above study and travail and reason of man's kindly (i.e. natural) wit."
What is day to us is night to the mystics and what is day to the mystics is night for us. The first thing the mystic asks is to close precisely those doors and windows which we, on the contrary, feel obliged to keep always open in order to know and to live and move. The Gita says: "The sage is wakeful when it is night for all creatures and when all creatures are wakeful, that is night for the sage." Even so this sage from the West says: "The more I sleep from outward things, the more wakeful am I in knowing of Jhesu and of inward things. I may not wake to Jhesu, but if I sleep to the world."
Close the senses. Turn within. And then go forward, that is to say, more and more inward. In that direction lies your itinerary, the journey of your consciousness. The sense-ridden secular man, who goes by his physical eye, has marked in his own way the steps of his forward march and progress. His knowledge and his power grew as he proceeded in his survey from larger masses of physical objects to their component molecules and from molecules to their component atoms and from atoms once more into electrons and protons or energy-points pure and simple, or otherwise as, in another direction, he extended his gaze from earth to the solar system, from the solar system to other starry systems, to far-off galaxies and I from galaxies to spaces beyond. The record of this double-track march to infinityas perceived or conceived by the physical sensesis marvellous, no doubt. The mystic offers the spectacle of a still more marvellous march to another kind of infinity.
Here is the Augustinian mantra taken as the motto of The Scale of Perfection: We ascend the ascending grades in our heart and we sing the song of ascension1. The journey's end is heavenly Jerusalem, the House of the Lord. The steps of this inner ascension are easily visible, not surely to the outer eye of the sense-burdened man, but to the "ghostly seeing" of the aspirant which is hazy in the beginning but slowly clears as he advances. The first step is the withdrawal from the outer senses and looking and seeing within. "Turn home again in thyself, and hold thee within and beg no more without." The immediate result is a darkness and a restless darknessit is a painful night. The outer objects of attraction and interest have been discarded, but the inner attachments and passions surge there still. If, however, one continues and persists, refuses to be drawn out, the turmoil settles down and the darkness begins to thin and wear away. One must not lose heart, one must have patience and perseverance. So when the outward world is no more-there and its call also no longer awakes any echo in us, then comes the stage of "restful darkness" or "light-some darkness". But it is still the dark Night of the soul. The outer light is gone and the inner light is not yet visible: the night, the desert, the great Nought, stretches between these two lights. But the true seeker goes through and comes out of the tunnel. And there is happiness at the end. "The seeking is travaillous, but the finding is blissful." When one steps out of the Night, enters into the deepest layer of the being, one stands face to face to one's soul, the very image of God, the perfect God- man, the Christ within. That is the third degree of our inner ascension, the entry into the deepest, purest and happiest statein which one becomes what he truly is; one finds the Christ there and dwells in love and union with him. But there is still a further step to take, and that is real ascension. For till now it has been a going within, from the outward to the inner and the inmost; now one has to go upward, transcend. Within the body, in life, however deep you may go, even if you find your soul and your union with Jesus whose tabernacle is your soul, still there is bound to remain a shadow of the sinful prison-house; the perfect bliss and purity without any earthly taint, the completeness and the crowning of the purgation and transfiguration can come only when you go beyond, leaving altogether the earthly form and worldly vesture and soar into Heaven itself and be in the company of the Trinity. "Into myself, and after... above myself by overpassing only into Him." At the same time it is pointed out, this mediaeval mystic has the common sense to see that the going in and going above of which one speaks must not be understood in a literal way, it is a figure of speech. The movement of the mystic is psychological"ghostly", it is saidnot physical or carnal.
This spiritual march or progress can also be described as a growing into the likeness of the Lord. His true self, his own image is implanted within us; he is there in the profoundest depth of our being as Jesus, our beloved and our soul rests in him in utmost bliss. We are aware neither of Jesus nor of his spouse, our soul, because of the obsession of the flesh, the turmoil raised by the senses, the blindness of pride and egoism. All that constitutes the first or old Adam, the image of Nought, the body of death which means at bottom the "false misruled love in to thyself." This self-love is the mother of sin, is sin itself. What it has to be replaced by is charity that is the true meaning of Christian charity, forgetfulness of self. "What is sin but a wanting and a forbearing of God." And the whole task, the discipline consists in "the shaping of Christ in you, the casting of sin through Christ." Who then is Christ, what is he? This knowledge you get as you advance from your sense-bound perception towards the inner and inmost seeing. As your outer nature gets purified, you approach gradually your soul, the scales fall off from your eyes too and you have the knowledge and "ghostly vision." Here too there are three degrees; first, you start with faith the senses can do nothing better than have faith; next, you rise to imagination which gives a sort of indirect touch or inkling of the truth; finally, you have the "understanding", the direct vision. "If he first trow it, he shall afterwards through grace feel it, and finally understand it."
It is never possible for man, weak and bound as he is, to reject the thraldom of his flesh, he can never purify himself wholly by his own unaided strength. God in his infinite mercy sent his own son, an e manation created out of his substancehis embodied loveas a hu man being to suffer along with men and take upon himself the burden of their sins. God the Son lived upon earth as man and died as man. Sin therefore has no longer its final or definitive hold upon mankind. man has been made potentially free, pure and worthy of salvation. This is the mystery of Christ, of God the Son. But there is a further mystery. Christ not only lived for all men for all time, whether they know him, recognise him or not; but he still lives, he still chooses his beloved and his beloved chooses him, there is a conscious acceptance on either side. This is the function of the Holy Ghost, the redeeming power of Love active in him who accepts it and who is accepted by it, the dynamic Christ-Consciousness in the true Christian.
Indeed, the kernel of the mystic discipline and its whole bearingconsists in one and only one principle: to love Jhesu. All roads lead to Rome: all preparations, all trials lead to one realisation, love of God, God as a living person close to us, our friend and lover and master. The Christian mystic speaks almost in the terms of the Gita: Rise above your senses, give up your ego-hood, be meek and humble, it is Jesus within you, who embraces your soul: it is he who does everything for you and in you, give yourself up wholly into his hands. He will deliver you.
The characteristic then of the path is a one-pointed concentration. Great stress is laid upon "oneliness", "onedness":that is to say, a perfect and complete withdrawal from the outside and the world; an unmixed solitude is required for the true experience and realisation to come. "A full forsaking in will of the soul for the love of Him, and a living of the heart to Him. This asks He, for this gave He." The rigorous exclusion, the uncompromising asceticism, the voluntary self-torture, the cruel dark night and the arid desert are necessary conditions that lead to the "onlyness of soul", what another prophet (Isaiah, XXIV, 16) describes as "My privity to me". In that secreted solitude, the "onlistead"the graphic language of the author calls itis found "that dignity and that ghostly fairness which a soul had by kind and shall have by grace." The utter beauty of the soul and its absolute love for her deity within her (which has the fair name of Jhesu), the exclusive concentration of the whole of the being upon one point, the divine core, the manifest Grace of God, justifies the annihilation of the world and life's manifold existence. Indeed, the image of the Beloved is always within, from the beginning to the end. It is that that keeps one up in the terrible struggle with one's nature and the world. The image depends upon the consciousness which we have at the moment, that is to say, upon the stage or the degree we have ascended to. At the outset, when we can only look through the senses, when the flesh is our master, we give the image a crude form and character; but even that helps. Gradually, as we rise, with the clearing of our nature, the image too slowly regains its original and true shape. Finally, in the inmost soul we find Jesus as he truly is: "an unchangeable being, a sovereign might, a sovereign soothfastness, sovereign goodness, a blessed life and endless bliss." Does not the Gita too say: "As one approaches Me, so do I appear to him."Ye yath mm prapadyante.
Indeed, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the Eastern and Western approach to Divine Love, the Christian and the Vaishnava, for example. Indian spirituality, whatever its outer form or credal formulation, has always a background of utter unity. This unity, again, is threefold or triune and is expressed in those great Upanishadic phrases,mahvkyas,(1) the transcendental unity: the One alone exists, there is nothing else than theOneekamevdvityam; (2) the cosmic unity: all existence is one, whatever exists is that One, thereare no separate existences:sarvam khalvidam brahma neha nnsti kincaa; (3) That One is I, you too are that One:so' ham, tattvamasi; this may be called the individual unity. As I have said, all spiritual experiences in India, of whatever school or line, take for granted or are fundamentally based upon this sense of absolute unity or identity. Schools of dualism or pluralism, who do not apparently admit in their tenets this extreme monism, are still permeated in many ways with that sense and in some form or other take cognizance of the truth of it. The Christian doctrine too says indeed, 'I and my Father in Heaven are one', but this is not identity, but union; besides, the hu man soul is not admitted into this identity, nor the world soul. The world, we have seen, according to the Christian discipline has to be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but a resolution, not the rejection of what is totally foreign and extraneous, but a resolution of the external into its inner and inmost substance, of the effect into its original cause. Brah man is in the world, Brah man is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brah mansi, pravttiit has to be rolled back into its, cause and substance if it is to regain its pure nature (that is the process of nivitti). Likewise, the individual being in the world, "I", is the transcendent being itself and when it withdraws, it withdraws itself and the whole world with it and merges into the Absolute. Even the Maya of the Mayavadin, although it is viewed as something not inherent in Brah man but superimposed upon Brah man, still, has been accepted as a peculiar power of Brah man itself. The Christian doctrine keeps the individual being separate practically, as an associate or at the most as an image of God. The love for one's neighbour, charity, which the Christian discipline enjoins is one's love for one's kind, because of affinity of nature and quality: it does not dissolve the two into an integral unity and absolute identity, where we love because we are one, because we are the One. The highest culmination of love, the very basis of love, according to the Indian conception, is a transcendence of love, love trans-muted into Bliss. The Upanishad says, where one has become the utter unity, who loves whom? To explain further our point, we take two examples referred to in the book we are considering. The true Christian, it is said, loves the sinner too, he is permitted to dislike sin, for he has to reject it, but he must separate from sin the sinner and love him. Why? Because the sinner too can change and become his brother in spirit, one loves the sinner because there is the possibility of his changing and becoming a true Christian. It is why the orthodox Christian, even such an enlightened and holy person as this mediaeval Canon, considers the non-Christian, the non-baptised as impure and potentially and fundamentally sinners. That is also why the Church, the physical organisation, is worshipped as Christ's very body and outside the Church lies the pagan world which has neither religion nor true spirituality nor salvation. Of course, all this may be symbolic and it is symbolic in a sense. If Christianity is taken to mean true spirituality, and the Church is equated with the collective embodiment of that spirituality, all that is claimed on their behalf stands justified. But that is an ideal, a hypothetical standpoint and can hardly be borne out by facts. However, to come back to our subject, let us ow take the second example. Of Christ himself, it is said, he not only did not dislike or had any aversion for Judas, but that he positively loved the traitor with a true and sincere love. He knew that the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and had betrayed, the Son of man continued to love him. It was no make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said, the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is God's servant. And who knows even a Judas would not change in the end? many who come to scoff do remain to pray. But it can be asked, 'Does God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality, one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no difference between the Brahmin and the cow and the elephant. It is his own self he finds in every person and every objectsarvabhtsthitam yo mm bhajati ekatvamsthitah"he has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings."2
This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of hu man nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of manone level or mode of his being and consciousness purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised hu manity.
The conception of original sin is a cardinal factor in Christian discipline. The conception, of sinfulness is the very motive-power that drives the aspirant. "Seek tensely," it is said, "sorrow and sigh deep, mourn still, and stoop low till thine eye water for anguish and for pain." Remorse and grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier temperaments, like the present one, for example, who show an unusual balance, a sturdy common sense even in the midst of their darkest nights, who have chalked out as much of the sunlit path as is possible in this line. Thus this old-world mystic says: it is true one must see and admit one's sinfulness, the grosser and apparent and more violent ones as well as all the subtle varieties of it that are in you or rise up in you or come from the Enemy. They pursue you till the very end of your journey. Still you need not feel overwhelmed or completely desperate. Once you recognise the sin in you, even the bare fact of recognition means for you half the victory. The mystic says, "It is no sin as thou feelest them." The day Jesus gave himself away on the Cross, since that very day you are free, potentially free from the bondage of sin. Once you give your adherence to Him, the Enemies are rendered powerless. "They tease the soul, but they harm not the soul". Or again, as the mystic graphically phrases it: "This soul is not borne in this image of sin as a sick man, though he feel it; but he beareth it." The best way of dealing with one's enemies is not to struggle and "strive with them." The aspirant, the lover of Jesus, must remember: "He is through grace reformed to the likeness of God ('in the privy substance of his soul within') though he neither feel it nor see it."
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 heart, where the stead of love is, thou shouldst be able to have part of that love... " What exquisite utterance, what a deep truth!
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The ultimate truth is that God is the sole doer and the best we can do is to let him do freely without let or hindrance. "He that through Grace may see Jhesu, how that He doth all and himself doth right nought but suffereth Jhesu work in him what him liketh, he is meek." And yet one does not arrive at that condition from the beginning or all at once. "The work is not of the hour nor of a day, but of many days and years." And for a long time one has to take up one's burden and work, co-operate with the Divine working. In the process there is this double movement necessary for the full achievement. "Neither Grace only without full working of a soul that in it is nor working done without grace bringeth a soul to reforming but that one joined to that other." Mysticism is not all eccentricity and irrationality: on the contrary, sanity seems to be the very character of the higher mysticism. And it is this sanity, and even a happy sense of humour accompanying it, that makes the genuine mystic teacher say: "It is no mastery to me for to say it, but for to do it there is mastery." Amen.
Ascendimus ascensiones in corde et cantamus canticum graduum." Confessions of St. Augustine XIII. 9.
01.09 - The Parting of the Way, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To remain hu man means to continue the fundamental nature of man. In what consists the hu manity of man? We can ascertain it by distinguishing what forms the animality of the animal, since that will give us the differentia that nature has evolved to raise man over the animal. The animal, again, has a characteristic differentiating it from the vegetable world, which latter, in its turn, has something to mark it off from the inorganic world. The inorganic, the vegetable, the animal and finally manthese are the four great steps of Nature's evolutionary course.
The differentia, in each case, lies in the degree and nature of consciousness, since it is consciousness that forms the substance and determines the mode of being. Now, the inorganic is characterised by un-consciousness, the vegetable by sub-consciousness, the animal by consciousness and man by self-consciousness. man knows that he knows, an animal only knows; a plant does not even know, it merely feels or senses; matter cannot do that even, it simply acts or rather is acted upon. We are not concerned here, however, with the last two forms of being; we will speak of the first two only.
We say, then, that man is distinguished from the animal by his having consciousness as it has, but added to it the consciousness of self. man acts and feels and knows as much as the animal does; but also he knows that he acts, he knows that he feels, he knows that he knowsand this is a thing the animal cannot do. It is the awakening of the sense of self in every mode of being that characterises man, and it is owing to this consciousness of an ego behind, of a per manent unit of reference, which has modified even the functions of knowing and feeling and acting, has refashioned them in a mould which is not quite that of the animal, in spite of a general similarity.
So the hu manity of man consists in his consciousness of the self or ego. Is there no other higher mode of consciousness? Or is self-consciousness the acme, the utmost limit to which consciousness can raise itself? If it is so, then we are bound to conclude that hu manity will remain eternally hu man in its fundamental nature; the only progress, if progress at all we choose to call it, will consist perhaps in accentuating this consciousness of the self and in expressing it through a greater variety of stresses, through a richer combination of its colour and light and shade and rhythm. But also, this may not be sothere may be the possibility of a further step, a transcending of the consciousness of the self. It seems unnatural and improbable that having risen from un-consciousness to self-consciousness through a series of continuous marches, Nature should suddenly stop and consider what she had achieved to be her final end. Has Nature become bankrupt of her creative genius, exhausted of her upward drive? Has she to remain content with only a clever manipulation, a mere shuffling and re-arranging of the materials already produced?
As a matter of fact it is not so. The glimpses of a higher form of consciousness we can see even now present in self-consciousness. We have spoken of the different stages of evolution as if they were separate and distinct and incommensurate entities. They may be described as such for the purpose of a logical understanding, but in reality they form a single progressive continuum in which one level gradually fuses into another. And as the higher level takes up the law of the lower and evolves out of it a characteristic function, even so the law of the higher level with its characteristic function is already involved and envisaged in the law of the lower level and its characteristic function. It cannot be asserted positively that because man's special virtue is self-consciousness, animals cannot have that quality on any account. We do see, if we care to observe closely and dispassionately, that animals of the higher order, as they approach the level of hu manity, show more and more evident signs of something which is very much akin to, if not identical with the hu man characteristic of self-consciousness.
So, in man also, especially of that order which forms the crown of hu manityin 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 Brah manin its static being, in its undivided and indivisible unity; it is the dynamic Brah man, 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 hu man 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 hu man. 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 hu man 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 hu man 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.)
This passage from the self-conscient to the super-conscient does not imply merely a shifting of the focus of consciousness. The transmutation of consciousness involves a purer illumination, a surer power and a wider compass; it involves also a fundamental change in the very mode of being and living. It gives quite a different life-intuition and a different life-power. The change in the motif brings about a new form altogether, a re-casting and re-shaping and re-energising of the external materials as well. As the lift from mere consciousness to self-consciousness meant all the difference between an animal and a man, so the lift again from self-consciousness to super-consciousness will mean the difference of a whole world between man and the divine creature that is to be.
Indeed it is a divine creature that should be envisaged on the next level of evolution. The mental and the moral, the psychical and the physical transfigurations which must follow the change in the basic substratum do imply such a mutation, the birth of a new species, as it were, fashioned in the nature of the gods. The vision of angels and Siddhas, which man is having ceaselessly since his birth, may be but a prophecy of the future actuality.
This then, it seems to us, is the immediate problem that Nature has set before herself. She is now at the parting of the ways. She has done with man as an essentially hu man being, she has brought out the fundamental possibilities of hu manity and perfected it, so far as perfection may be attained within the cadre by which she chose to limit herself; she is now looking forward to another kind of experiment the evolving of another life, another being out of her entrails, that will be greater than the hu manity we know today, that will be superior even to the supreme that has yet been actualised.
Nature has marched from the unconscious to the sub-conscious, from the sub-conscious to the conscious and from the conscious to the self-conscious; she has to rise yet again from the self-conscious to the super-conscious. The mineral gave place to the plant, the plant gave place to the animal and the animal gave place to man; let man give place to and bring out the divine.
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01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.. . . If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
Such is to be the ideal, the perfect, the spiritual man. Have we here the progenitor of the Nietzschean Super man? Both smell almost the same sulphurous atmosphere. But that also seems to lie in the direction to which the whole world is galloping in its evolutionary course. Hu manity in its agelong travail has passed through the agony, one might say, of two extreme and opposite experiences, which are epitomised in the classic phrasing of Sri Aurobindo as: (1) the Denial of the Materialist and (2) the Refusal of the Ascetic.1 Neither, however, the Spirit alone nor the body alone is man's reality; neither only the earth here nor only the heaven there embodies man's destiny. Both have to be claimed, both have to belivedubhayameva samrt, as the old sage, Yajnavalkya, declared.
The earliest dream of hu manity is also the last fulfilment. The Vedic Rishis sang of the marriage of heaven and earthHeaven is my father and this Earth my mother. And Blake and Nietzsche are fiery apostles of that dream and ideal in an age crippled with doubt, falsehood, smallness, crookedness, impotence, colossal ignorance.
We welcome voices that speak of this ancient tradition, this occult Knowledge of a high Future. Recently we have come across one aspirant in the line, and being a contemporary, his views and reviews in the matter will be all the more interesting to us.2 He is Gustave Thibon, a French man-not a priest or even a religious man in the orthodox sense in any way, but a country farmer, a wholly self-educated laque. Of late he has attracted a good deal of attention from intellectuals as well as religious people, especially the Catholics, because of his remarkable conceptions which are so often unorthodox and yet so often ringing true with an old-world au thenticity.
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 hu man society be raised and will be raised. Monsieur Thibon insistsand very rightlyupon the variety and diversity of individual and local growths in a unified hu manity 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."
So far so good. For it is not far enough. The being or becoming that is de manded in fulfilment of the divine advent in hu manity must go to the very roots of life and nature, must seize God in his highest and sovereign status. No prejudice of the past, no notion of our mental habits must seek to impose its law. Thus, for example, in the matter of redeeming the senses by the influx of the higher light, our author seems to consider that the senses will remain more or less as they are, only they will be controlled, guided, used by the higher light. And he seems to think that even the sex relation (even the institution of marriage) may continue to remain, but sublimated, submitted to the laws of the Higher Order. This, according to us, is a dangerous compromise and is simply the imposition of the lower law upon the higher. Our view of the total transformation and divinisation of the Lower is altogether different. The Highest must come down wholly and inhabit in the Lowest, the Lowest must give up altogether its own norms and lift itself into the substance and form too of the Highest.
Viewed in this light, Blake's memorable mantra attains a deeper and more momentous significance. For it is not merely Earth the senses and life and Matter that are to be uplifted and affianced to Heaven, but all that remains hidden within the bowels of the Earth, the subterranean regions of man's consciousness, the slimy viscous undergrowths, the darkest horrors and monstrosities that man and nature hide in their subconscient and inconscient dungeons of material existence, all these have to be laid bare to the solar gaze of Heaven, burnt or transmuted as de manded by the law of that Supreme Will. That is the Hell that has to be recognised, not rejected and thrown away, but taken up purified and transubstantiated into the body of Heaven itself. The hand of the Highest Heaven must extend and touch the Lowest of the lowest elements, transmute it and set it in its rightful place of honour. A mortal body reconstituted into an immemorial fossil, a lump of coal revivified into a flashing carat of diamond-that shows something of the process underlying the nuptials of which we are speaking.
The Life Divine
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
attack that can manifest as an illness. But, as you clearly experienced in your dream, if you are not frightened and go on your
way unperturbed, nothing bad will happen to you.
--
dangerous, for is it possible to satisfy man's desire?
Elsewhere he says explicitly that it is useless to try to satisfy
--
it is that we take part in as many items as possible in the
2nd December programme.3 Would it not be better to
--
be better) and I have heard a great many compliments about
the 2nd December perfor mance. You should not listen to people
--
in the Kaliyuga9 that the Divine manifests fully because
man is in great danger in this age. And here he is! He
himself reveals the great secret: the Divine has fully manifested in India. But he has the modesty not to say that
he himself is this manifestation!
Those who accomplish the work are not in the habit of boasting.
--
There are too many tight knots in the immense organisation of this Ashram. When will the promised day
come when there will be nothing but unmixed harmony,
--
We see too many films these days and I fail to see
how they educate us!
--
the vibrations of love from manifesting in their purity.
4 June 1963
--
would continue his career as a pilot. He is a man of
fantastic vitality, full of energy...
--
This morning I saw a man with protruding ribs,
deeply depressed hips and twisted legs. It was a pitiful
--
What does "Yoga" mean and how many among us
are practising it?
--
Yes, that is what Sri Aurobindo has written many times; man
clings to his misery, his pettiness, his weakness, his ignorance
--
and conjugation which I have corrected many times.
One would think that even if you read your notebook when
--
Joy belongs to the desireless man.
Pleasure is within the reach of all living beings, but with its
--
desireless man a sincere sadhak?
My answers are given in order to open your mind and to make
--
does not seem to be evident at all. Moreover, there are many
different kinds of sensitivity: some stem from weakness, others
--
hu man being is made up of many different parts, and generally
one part or another progresses in its turn while the other parts
--
in the Government will follow. After that, a young man
will appear on the scene who will be guided by a divine
--
People say many things - especially astrologers!
We have only to wait; we shall surely see what happens.
--
Japa: continuous repetition of a mantra.
Series Ten - To a Young Captain
--
What man in his ignorance calls "pardon" is the effacement, the
dissolution of errors committed.
--
We see many people leaving the Ashram, either to
seek a career or to study; and they are mostly those
--
reach the goal. Few are ready for a total consecration. many
children who have studied here need to come to grips with life
--
you that your question is an ignorant one. There are many others
which you could read to advantage and which will make your
--
attraction of man for wo man and of wo man for man?
The relationship between Purusha and Prakriti.
--
loss for hu man society if persons endowed with an exceptional capacity to serve mankind, such as a gifted
doctor or barrister, come to stay here in the Ashram
--
On the evening of February 11, many Ashram buildings were stoned, burned or
looted, ostensibly as part of an anti-Hindi agitation.
--
towards man and towards the Divine?
Why do you put man and the Divine together?
It is true that man is essentially divine, but at present, apart
from a few very rare exceptions, man is quite unconscious of the
Divine he carries within him; and it is just this unconsciousness
--
But the shades of difference are subtle and many, and it is
by a very attentive and sincere observation (that is to say, free
--
The Divine often advises or tries to guide man,
knowing very well that His help will be refused. Why
--
that only the Divine exists. But the manifestation is progressive,
and in order to have the strength to advance by rejecting what
--
but they act as separate beings in the manifestation.
The individual must make decisions in order to live, but it
--
body at will"? For example, will a hundred-year old man
be able to renew his body and become a young man of
twenty-five?
--
"No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace;
the law of Vishnu cannot prevail till the debt to Rudra is paid.
To turn aside then and preach to a still unevolved mankind
the law of love and oneness? Teachers of the law of love and
--
salvation. But not till the Time-Spirit in man is ready, can the
inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality.
--
fierce forward labour of mankind tormented and oppressed by
the powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their servants
--
it is preparing for the manifestation of a new force, for
the descent of the Truth, or is it the result of the action
--
comes down to manifest upon earth, some change is
effected in the earth's atmosphere."29
--
cause to manifest itself.
17 November 1965
--
engaged in safeguarding the freedom of man? Is that the
Divine Will?
--
all the many and varied opinions on social and political subjects. All these are only OPINIONS and have no value at all
from the Divine point of view - the Divine who does not
--
Are there many people - I am not speaking of those who
have a religion: they learn a catechism when they are young and
--
- are there many who believe in the Divine? Not in Europe
anyway. But even here, there are quite a number who by tradition have a "family deity", yet it doesn't bother them at all
--
one has an aspiration that mankind should become better, or
less unhappy, less miserable; all sorts of things like that. One
--
- not man-made: spontaneous, a blossoming; one has only to
see it to be sure that there is a Divine. It is a certainty. One
--
There is room for many other activities which have their
purpose in an integral Yoga.
--
Divine Compassion acting on as many as it can reach through the nets of the Law and
giving them their chance; (3) the Divine Grace which acts more incalculably but also
--
The ordinary man is often guided in life by his conscience, isn't he? So what becomes of one who has no
conscience, who has lost it by having disregarded it too
--
People are saying many things about the 4th of
May33 - sometimes You too are quoted. But in spite
--
Sri Aurobindo wrote: "1.2.34. It is supposed to be always a year of manifestation.
2.3.45 is the year of power - when the thing manifested gets full force. 4.5.67 is the
year of complete realisation." (Letter of 2 February 1934)
--
existence, a moment when, upon earth, everything is being prepared for a new creation, or rather, for a new manifestation in
the eternal creation.
01.10 - Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Nicholas Berdyaev is an ardent worker, as a Russian is naturally expected to be, in the cause of the spiritual rehabilitation of mankind. He is a Christian, a neo-Christian: some of his conclusions are old-world truths and bear repetition and insistence; others are of a more limited, conditional and even doubtful nature. His conception of the value of hu man person, the dignity and the high reality he gives to it, can never be too welcome in a world where the individual seems to have gone the way of vanished empires and kings and princes. But even more important and interesting is the view he underlines that the true person is a spiritual being, that is to say, it is quite other than the empirical ego that man normally is"not this that one worships" as the Upanishads too declare. Further, in his spiritual being man, the individual, is not simply a portion or a fraction; he is, on the contrary, an integer, a complete whole, a creative focus; the true individual is a microcosm yet holding in it and imaging the macrocosm. Only perhaps greater stress is laid upon the aspect of creativity or activism. An Eastern sage, a Vedantin, would look for the true spiritual reality behind the flux of forces: Prakriti or Energy is only the executive will of the Purusha, the Conscious Being. The personality in Nature is a formulation and e manation of the transcendent impersonality.
There is another aspect of personality as viewed by Berdyaev which involves a bias of the more orthodox Christian faith: the Christ is inseparable from the Cross. So he says: "There is no such thing as personality if there is no capacity for suffering. Suffering is inherent in God too, if he is a personality, and not merely an abstract idea. God shares in the sufferings of men. He yearns for responsive love. There are divine as well as hu man passions and therefore divine or creative personality must always suffer to the end of time. A condition of anguish and distress is inherent in it." The view is logically enforced upon the Christian, it is said, if he is to accept incarnation, God becoming flesh. Flesh cannot but be weak. This very weakness, so hu man, is and must be specially characteristic of God also, if he is one with man and his lover and saviour.
Eastern spirituality does not view sorrow and sufferingevilas an integral part of the Divine Consciousness. It is born out of the Divine, no doubt, as nothing can be outside the Divine, but it is a local and temporal formation; it is a disposition consequent upon certain conditions and with the absence or elimination of those conditions, this disposition too disappears. God and the Divine Consciousness can only be purity, light, immortality and delight. The compassion that a Buddha feels for the suffering hu manity is not at all a feeling of suffering; pain or any such normal hu man reaction does not enter into its composition; it is the movement of a transcendent consciousness which is beyond and purified of the normal reactions, yet overarching them and entering into them as a soothing and illumining and vivifying presence. The healer knows and understands the pain and suffering of his patient but is not touched by them; he need not contract the illness of his patient in order to be in sympathy with him. The Divine the Soulcan be in flesh and yet not smirched with its mire; the flesh is not essentially or irrevocably the ooze it is under certain given conditions. The divine physical body is composed of radiant matter and one can speak of it even as of the soul that weapons cannot pierce it nor can fire burn it.
01.10 - Principle and Personality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is asked of us why do we preach a man and not purely and solely a principle. Our ideal being avowedly the establishment and reign of a new principle of world-order and not gathering recruits for the camp of a sectarian teacher, it seems all the more inconsistent, if not thoroughly ruinous for our cause, that we should lay stress upon a particular individual and incur the danger of overshadowing the universal truths upon which we seek to build hu man society. Now, it is not that we are unconscious or oblivious of the many evils attendant upon the system of preaching a man the history of the rise and decay of many sects and societies is there to give us sufficient warning; and yet if we cannot entirely give the go-by to personalities and stick to mere and bare principles, it is because we have clear reasons for it, because we are not unconscious or oblivious either of the evils that beset the system of preaching the principle alone.
Religious bodies that are formed through the bhakti and puja for one man, social reconstructions forced by the will and power of a single individual, have already in the inception this grain of incapacity and disease and death that they are not an integrally self-conscious creation, they are not, as a whole, intelligent and wide awake and therefore constantly responsive to the truths and ideals and realities for which they exist, for which at least, their founder intended them to exist. The light at the apex is the only light and the entire structure is but the shadow of that light; the whole thing has the aspect of a dark mass galvanised into red-hot activity by the passing touch of a dynamo. Immediately however the solitary light fails and the dynamo stops, there is nothing but the original darkness and inertiatoma asit tamasa gudham agre.
man, however great and puissant he may be, is a perishable thing. People who gather or are gathered round a man and cling to him through the tie of a personal relation must fall off and scatter when the man passes away and the personal tie loses its hold. What remains is a memory, a gradually fading memory. But memory is hardly a creative force, it is a dead, at best, a moribund thing; the real creative power is Presence. So when the great man's presence, the power that crystallises is gone, the whole edifice crumbles and vanishes into air or remains a mere name.
Love and admiration for a mahapurusha is not enough, even faith in his gospel is of little avail, nor can actual participation, consecrated work and labour in his cause save the situation; it is only when the principles, the bare realities for which the mahapurusha stands are in the open forum and men have the full and free opportunity of testing and assimilating them, it is only when individuals thus become living embodiments of those principles and realities that we do create a thing universal and per manent, as universal and per manent as earthly things may be. Principles only can embrace and unify the whole of hu manity; a particular personality shall always create division and limitation. By placing the man in front, we erect a wall between the Principle and men at large. It is the principles, on the contrary, that should be given the place of honour: our attempt should be to keep back personalities and make as little use of them as possible. Let the principles work and create in their freedom and power, untrammelled by the limitations of any mere hu man vessel.
We are quite familiar with this cry so rampant in our democratic ageprinciples and no personalities! And although we admit the justice of it, yet we cannot ignore the trenchant one-sidedness which it involves. It is perhaps only a reaction, a swing to the opposite extreme of a mentality given too much to personalities, as the case generally has been in the past. It may be necessary, as a corrective, but it belongs only to a temporary stage. Since, however, we are after a universal ideal, we must also have an integral method. We shall have to curb many of our susceptibilities, diminish many of our apprehensions and soberly strike a balance between opposite extremes.
We do not speak like politicians or banias; but the very truth of the matter de mands such a policy or line of action. It is very well to talk of principles and principles alone, but what are principles unless they take life and form in a particular individual? They are airy nothings, notions in the brain of logicians and metaphysicians, fit subjects for discussion in the academy, but they are devoid of that vital urge which makes them creative agencies. We have long lines of philosophers, especially European, who most scrupulously avoided all touch of personalities, whose utmost care was to keep principles pure and unsullied; and the upshot was that those principles remained principles only, barren and infructuous, some thing like, in the strong and puissant phrase of BaudelaireLa froide majest de la femme strile. And on the contrary, we have had other peoples, much addicted to personalitiesespecially in Asiawho did not care so much for abstract principles as for concrete embodiments; and what has been the result here? None can say that they did not produce anything or produced only still-born things. They produced living creaturesephemeral, some might say, but creatures that lived and moved and had their days.
But, it may be asked, what is the necessity, what is the purpose in making it all a one man show? Granting that principles require personalities for their fructuation and vital functioning, what remains to be envisaged is not one personality but a plural personality, the people at large, as many individuals of the hu man race as can be consciously imbued with those principles. When principles are made part and parcel of, are concentrated in a single solitary personality, they get "cribbed and cabined," they are vitiated by the idiosyncrasies of the man, they come to have a narrower field of application; they are emptied of the general verities they contain and finally cease to have any effect.
The thing, however, is that what you call principles do not drop from heaven in their virgin purity and all at once lay hold of mankind en masse. It is always through a particular individual that a great principle manifests itself. Principles do not live in the general mind of man and even if they live, they live secreted and unconscious; it is only a puissant personality, who has lived the principle, that can bring it forward into life and action, can awaken, like the Vedic Dawn, what was dead in allmritam kanchana bodhayanti. Men in general are by themselves 'inert and indifferent; they have little leisure or inclination to seek, from any inner urge of their own, for principles and primal truths; they become conscious of these only when expressed and embodied in some great and rare soul. An Avatar, a Messiah or a Prophet is the centre, the focus through which a Truth and Law first dawns and then radiates and spreads abroad. The little lamps are all lighted by the sparks that the great torch scatters.
And yet we yield to none in our de mand for holding forth the principles always and ever before the wide open gaze of all. The principle is there to make people self-knowing and self-guiding; and the man is also there to illustrate that principle, to serve as the hope and prophecy of achievement. The living soul is there to touch your soul, if you require the touch; and the principle is there by which to test and testify. For, we do not ask anybody to be a mere automaton, a blind devotee, a soul without individual choice and initiative. On the contrary, we insist on each and every individual to find his own soul and stand on his own Truththis is the fundamental principle we declare, the only creedif creed it be that we ask people to note and freely follow. We ask all people to be fully self-dependent and self-illumined, for only thus can a real and solid reconstruction of hu man nature and society be possible; we do not wish that they should bow down ungrudgingly to anything, be it a principle or a personality. In this respect we claim the very first rank of iconoclasts and anarchists. And along with that, if we still choose to remain an idol-lover and a hero-worshipper, it is because we recognise that our mind, hu man as it is, being not a simple equation but a complex paradox, the idol or the hero symbolises for us and for those who so will, the very iconoclasm and anarchism and perhaps other more positive things as wellwhich we behold within and seek to manifest.
The world is full of ikons and archons; we cannot escape them, even if we try the world itself being a great ikon and as great an archon. Those who swear by principles, swear always by some personality or other, if not by a living creature then by a lifeless book, if not by Religion then by Science, if not by the East then by the West, if not by Buddha or Christ then by Bentham or Voltaire. Only they do it unwittingly they change one set of personalities for another and believe they have rejected them all. The veils of Maya are a thousand-fold tangle and you think you have entirely escaped her when you have only run away from one fold to fall into another. The wise do not attempt to reject and negate Maya, but consciously accept herfreedom lies in a knowing affirmation. So we too have accepted and affirmed an icon, but we have done it consciously and knowingly; we are not bound by our idol, we see the truth of it, and we serve and utilise it as best as we may.
01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
"The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullnessto its heights we can always reachwhen we keep our feet firmly on the physical. 'Earth is His footing' says the Upanishad, whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe." Huxley's commentary is as follows:
"To its heights we can always come. For those of us who are still splashing about in the lower ooze, the phrase has a rather ironical ring. Nevertheless, in the light of even the most distant acquaintance with the heights and the fullness, it is possible to understand what its author means. To discover the Kingdom of God exclusively within oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there, but also in the outer worlds of minds and things and living creatures. It is easier because the heights within reveal themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview all that lies without. And though this exclusion may be a painful and mortificatory process, the fact remains that it is less arduous than the process of inclusion, by which we come to know the fullness as well as the heights of spiritual life. Where there is exclusive concentration on the heights within, temptations and distractions are avoided and there is a general denial and suppression. But when the hope is to know God inclusivelyto realise the divine Ground in the world as well as in the soul, temptations and distractions must not be avoided, but submitted to and used as opportunities for advance; there must be no suppression of outward-turning activities, but a transformation of them so that they become sacramental."
--
We fear Mr. Huxley has completely missed the point of the cryptic sentence. He seems to take it as meaning that hu man kindness and morality are a means to the recovery of the Lost Way-although codes of ethics and deliberate choices are not sufficient in themselves, they are only a second best, yet they mark the rise of self-consciousness and have to be utilised to pass on into the unitive knowledge that is Tao. This explanation or amplification seems to us somewhat confused and irrelevant to the idea expressed in the apophthegm. What is stated here is much simpler and transparent. It is this that when the Divine is absent and the divine Knowledge, then comes in man with his hu man mental knowledge: it is man's hu manity that clouds the Divine and to reach the' Divine one must reject the hu man values, all the moralities, sarva dharmn, seek only the Divine. The lesser way lies through the dualities, good and evil, the Great Way is beyond them and cannot be limited or measured by the relative standards. Especially in the modern age we see the decline and almost the disappearance of the Greater Light and instead a thousand smaller lights are lighted which vainly strive to dispel the gathering darkness. These do not help, they are false lights and men are apt to cling to them, shutting their eyes to the true one which is not that that one worships here and now, nedam yadidam upsate.
There is a beautiful quotation from the Chinese sage, Wu Ch'ng-n, regarding the doubtful utility of written Scriptures:
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A modern society or people cannot have religion, that is to say, credal religion, as the basis of its organized collective life. It was mediaeval society and people that were organized on that line. Indeed mediaevalism means nothing more and nothing lessthan that. But whatever the need and justification in the past, the principle is an anachronism under modern conditions. It was needed, perhaps, to keep alive a truth which goes into the very roots of hu man life and its deepest aspiration; and it was needed also for a dynamic application of that truth on a larger scale and in smaller details, on the mass of mankind and in its day to day life. That was the aim of the Church Militant and the Khilafat; that was the spirit, although in a more Sattwic way, behind the Buddhistic evangelism or even Hindu colonization.
The truth behind a credal religion is the aspiration towards the realization of the Divine, some ultimate reality that gives a per manent meaning and value to the hu man life, to the existence lodged in this 'sphere of sorrow' here below. Credal paraphernalia were necessary to express or buttress this core of spiritual truth when mankind, in the mass, had not attained a certain level of enlightenment in the mind and a certain degree of development in its life-relations. The modern age is modern precisely because it had attained to a necessary extent this mental enlightenment and this life development. So the scheme or scaffolding that was required in the past is no longer unavoidable and can have either no reality at all or only a modified utility.
A modern people is a composite entity, especially with regard to its religious affiliation. Not religion, but culture is the basis of modern collective life, national or social. Culture includes in its grain that fineness of temperament which appreciates all truths behind all forms, even when there is a personal allegiance to one particular form.
--
The rise of this spirit in modern times and conditions is a phenomenon that has to be explained and faced: it is a ghost that has come out of the past and has got to be laid and laid for good. First of all, it is a reaction from modernism; it is a reaction from the modernist denial of certain fundamental and eternal truths, of God, soul, and immortality: it is a reaction from the modernist affirmation of the mere economic man. And it is also a defensive gesture of a particular complex of consciousness that has grown and lives powerfully and now apprehends expurgation and elimination.
In Europe such a contingency did not arise, because the religious spirit, rampant in the days of Inquisitions and St. Bartholomews, died away: it died, and (or, because) it was replaced by a spirit that was felt as being equally, if not more, au thentic and, which for the moment, suffused the whole consciousness with a large and high afflatus, commensurate with the amplitude of man's aspiration. I refer, of course, to the spirit of the Renaissance. It was a spirit profane and secular, no doubt, but on that level it brought a catholicity of temper and a richness in varied interesta hu manistic culture, as it is calledwhich constituted a living and unifying ideal for Europe. That spirit culminated in the great French Revolution which was the final coup de grace to all that still remained of mediaevalism, even in its outer structure, political and economical.
In India the spirit of renascence came very late, late almost by three centuries; and even then it could not flood the whole of the continent in all its nooks and corners, psychological and physical. There were any number of pockets (to use a current military phrase) left behind which guarded the spirit of the past and offered persistent and obdurate resistance. Perhaps, such a dispensation was needed in India and inevitable also; inevitable, because the religious spirit is closest to India's soul and is its most direct expression and cannot be uprooted so easily; needed, because India's and the world's future de mands it and depends upon it.
Only, the religious spirit has to be bathed and purified and enlightened by the spirit of the renascence: that is to say, one must learn and understand and realize that Spirit is the thing the one thing needfulTamevaikam jnatha; 'religions' are its names and forms, appliances and decorations. Let us have by all means the religious spirit, the fundamental experience that is the inmost truth of all religions, that is the matter of our soul; but in our mind and life and body let there be a luminous catholicity, let these organs and instruments be trained to see and compare and appreciate the variety, the numberless facets which the one Spirit naturally presents to the hu man consciousness. Ekam sat viprh bahudh vadanti. It is an ancient truth that man discovered even in his earliest seekings; but it still awaits an adequate expression and application in life.
II
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Nature, on the whole, has solved the problem of blood fusion and mental fusion of different peoples, although on a smaller scale. India today presents the problem on a larger scale and on a higher or deeper level. The de mand is for a spiritual fusion and unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is the true bed-rock of unitysince, at bottom, it means identityit is on this plane that mankind has not yet been able to really meet and coalesce. India's genius has been precisely working in the line of a perfect solution of this supreme problem.
Islam comes with a full-fledged spiritual soul and a mental and vital formation commensurable with that inner being and consciousness. It comes with a dynamic spirit, a warrior mood, that aims at conquering the physical world for the Lord, a temperament which Indian spirituality had not, or had lost long before, if she had anything of it. This was, perhaps, what Vivekananda meant when he spoke graphically of a Hindu soul with a Muslim body. The Islamic dispensation, however, brings with it not only something complementary, but also something contradictory, if not for anything else, at least for the strong individuality which does not easily yield to assimilation. Still, in spite of great odds, the process of assimilation was going on slowly and surely. But of late it appears to have come to a dead halt; difficulties have been presented which seem insuperable.
If religious toleration were enough, if that made up man's highest and largest achievement, then Nature need not have attempted to go beyond cultural fusion; a liberal culture is the surest basis for a catholic religious spirit. But such a spirit of toleration and catholicity, although it bespeaks a widened consciousness, does not always enshrine a profundity of being. Nobody is more tolerant and catholic than a dilettante, but an ardent spiritual soul is different.
To be loyal to one's line of self-fulfilment, to follow one's self-law, swadharma, wholly and absolutelywithout this no spiritual life is possible and yet not to come into clash with other lines and loyalties, nay more, to be in positive harmony with them, is a problem which has not been really solved. It was solved, perhaps, in the consciousness of a Ramakrishna, a few individuals here and there, but it has always remained a source of conflict and disharmony in the general mind even in the field of spirituality. The clash of spiritual or religious loyalties has taken such an acute form in India today, they have been carried to the bitter extreme, in order, we venture to say, that the final synthesis might be absolute and irrevocable. This is India's mission to work out, and this is the lesson which she brings to the world.
01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The year 1949 has just celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great force of light that was Goethe. We too remember him on the occasion, and will try to present in a few words, as we see it, the fundamental experience, the major Intuition that stirred this hu man soul, the lesson he brought to mankind. Goe the was a great poet. He showed how a language, perhaps least poetical by nature, can be moulded to embody the great beauty of great poetry. He made the Ger man language sing, even as the sun's ray made the stone of Memnon sing when falling upon it. Goe the was a man of consummate culture. Truly and almost literally it could be said of him that nothing hu man he considered foreign to his inquiring mind. And Goe the was a man of great wisdom. His observation and judgment on thingsno matter to whatever realm they belonghave an arresting appropriateness, a happy and revealing insight. But above all, he was an aspiring soulaspiring to know and be in touch with the hidden Divinity in man and the world.
Goe the and the Problem of Evil
No problem is so vital to the hu man consciousness as the problem of Evilits why and wherefore It is verily the Sphinx Riddle. In all ages and in all climes man has tried to answer; the answers are of an immense variety, but none seems to be sure and certain. Goethe's was an ardent soul seeking to embrace the living truth whole and entire; the problem was not merely of philosophical interest to him, but a burning question of life and deathlife and death of the body and even of the soul.
One view considers Evil as coeval with Good: the Prince of Evil is God's peer, equal to him in all ways, absolutely separate, independent and self-existent. Light and Darkness are eternal principles living side by side, possessing equal reality. For, although it is permissible to the individual to pass out of the Darkness and enter into Light, the Darkness itself does not disappear: it remains and maintains its domain, and even it is said that some hu man beings are meant eternally for this domain. That is the manichean principle and that also is fundamentally the dualistic conception of chit-achit in some Indian systems (although the principle of chit or light is usually given a higher position and priority of excellence).
The Christian too accepts the dual principle, but does not give equal status to the two. Satan is there, an eternal reality: it is anti-God, it seeks to oppose God, frustrate his work. It is the great tempter whose task it is to persuade, to inspire man to remain always an earthly creature and never turn to know or live in God. Now the crucial question that arises is, what is the necessity of this Antagonist in God's scheme of creation? What is the meaning of this struggle and battle? God could have created, if he had chosen, a world without Evil. The orthodox Christi an answer is that in that case one could not have fully appreciated the true value and glory of God's presence. It is to manifest and proclaim the great victory that the strife and combat has been arranged in which man triumphs in the end and God's work stands vindicated. The place of Satan is always Hell, but he cannot drag down a soul into his pit to hold it there eternally (although according to one doctrine there are or may be certain eternally damned souls).
Goe the carries the process of convergence and even harmony of the two powers a little further and shows that although they are contrary apparently, they are not contradictory principles in essence. For, Satan is, after all, God's servant, even a very obedient servant; he is an instrument in the hand of the Almighty to work out His purpose. The purpose is to help and lead man, although in a devious way, towards a greater understanding, a nearer approach to Himself.
The Challenge and the Pact
There is on the earthly stage the play of a challenge, a twofold challenge, one between God and Satan and another, as a consequence, between man and Satan.
Satan is jealous of man who is God's favourite. He tells God that his partiality to man is misplaced. God has put into man a little of his light (reason and intelligence and something more perhaps), but to what purpose? man tries to soar, he thinks he flies high and wide, but in fact he is and will be an insect that "lies always in the grass and sings its old song in the grass." God answers that whatever the perplexity in which man now is, in the end he will come out and reach the Light with a greater and richer experience of it. Satan smiles in return and says he will prove otherwise. Given a free hand, he can do whatever he likes with man: "Dust shall he eat and with a relish." God willingly agrees to the challenge: there is no harm in Satan's trying his hand. Indeed, Satan will prove to be a good companion to man; for man is normally prone to inertia and sinks into repose and rest and stagnation. Satan will be the goad, the force that drives towards ceaseless activity. For activity is life, and without activity no progress.
Thus, as sanctioned by God, there is a competition, a wager between man and Satan. The pact between the parties is this that, on the one hand, Satan will serve man here in life upon earth, and on the other hand, in return, man will have to serve Satan there, on the other side of life. That is to say, Satan will give the whole world to man to enjoy, man will have to give Satan only his soul. man in his ignorance says he does not care for his soul, does not know of a there or elsewhere: he will be satisfied if he gets what he wants upon earth. That, evidently, is the de mand of what is familiarly known as life-force (lan vital): the utmost fulfilment of the life-force is what man stands for, although the full significance of the movement may not be clear to him or even to Satan at the moment. For life-force does not necessarily drag man down, as its grand finale as it were, into hellhowever much Satan might wish it to be so. In what way, we shall see presently. Now Satan promises man all that he would desire and even more: he would give him his fill so' that he will ask for no more. man takes up the challenge and declares that his hunger is insatiable, whatever Satan can bring to it, it will take in and press on: satisfaction and satiety will never come in his way. Satan thinks he knows better, for he is armed with a master weapon to lay man low and make him cry halt!
Love Hu man and Love Divine
Satan proposes to lead man down into hell through a sure means, nothing more sure, according to him, viz., love for a wo man and a wo man's love in return. Nothing like that to make man earth-bound or hell-bound and force out of him the nostalgic cry, "Time must have a stop." A most simple, primal and primeval lyric love will most suit Satan's purpose. Hence the Margaret episode. Love=Passion=Lust=Hell; that is the inevitable equation sequence, and through which runs the magic thread of infatuation. And that charm is invincible. Satan did succeed and was within an ace, as they say, of the final and definitive triumph: but that was not to be, for he left out of account an incalculable element. Love, even hu man love has, at least can have, a wonderful power, the potency of reversing the natural decree and bring about a supernatural intervention. Hu man love can at a crucial momentin extremiscall down the Divine Grace, which means God's love for man. And the soul meant for perdition and about to be seized and carried away by Satan finds itself suddenly free and lifted up and borne by Heaven's messengers. Hu man Jove is divine love itself in earthly form and figure and whatever its apparent aberrations it is in soul and substance that thing. Satan is hoisted with his own petard. That is God's irony.
But Goethe's Satan seems to know or feel something of his fate. He knows his function and the limit too of his function. He speaks of the doomsday for people, but it is his doomsday also, he says in mystic terms. Yes, it is his doomsday, for it is the day of man's liberation. Satan has to release man from the pact that stands cancelled. The soul of man cannot be sold, even if he wanted it.
The Cosmic Rhythm
The angels weave the symphony that is creation. They represent the various notes and rhythmsin their higher and purer degrees that make up the grand harmony of the spheres. It is magnificent, this music that moves the cosmos, and wonderful the glory of God manifest therein. But is it absolutely perfect? Is there nowhere any flaw in it? There is a doubting voice that enters a dissenting note. That is Satan, the Antagonist, the Evil One. man is the weakest link in the chain of the apparently all-perfect harmony. And Satan boldly proposes to snap it if God only let him do so. He can prove to God that the true nature of his creation is not cosmos but chaos not a harmony in peace and light, but a confusion, a Walpurgis Night. God acquiesces in the play of this apparent breach and proves in the end that it is part of a wider scheme, a vaster harmony. Evil is rounded off by Grace.
The total eradication of Evil from the world and hu man nature and the remoulding of a terrestrial life in the substance and pattern of the Highest Good that is beyond all dualities is a conception which it was not for Goe the to envisage. In the order of reality or existence, first there is the consciousness of division, of trenchant separation in which Good is equated with not-evil and evil with not-good. This is the outlook of individualised consciousness. Next, as the consciousness grows and envelops the whole existence, good and evil are both embraced and are found to form a secret and magic harmony. That is the universal or cosmic consciousness. And Goethe's genius seems to be an outflowering of something of this status of consciousness. But there is still a higher status, the status of transcendence in which evil is not simply embraced but dissolved and even transmuted into a supreme reality of which it is an aberration, a reflection or projection, a lower formulation. That is the mystery of a spiritual realisation to which Goe the aspired perhaps, but had not the necessary initiation to enter into.
01.12 - Three Degrees of Social Organisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Declaration of Rights is a characteristic modern phenomenon. It is a message of liberty and freedom,no doubt of secular liberty and freedomthings not very common in the old world; and yet at the same time it is a clarion that calls for and prepares strife and battle. If the conception of Right has sanctified the individual or a unit collectivity, it has also pari passu developed a fissiparous tendency in hu man organisation. Society based on or living by the principle of Right becomes naturally and inevitably a competitive society. Where man is regarded as nothing moreand, of course, nothing lessthan a bundle of rights, hu man aggregation is bound to be an exact image of Darwinian Naturered in tooth and claw.
But Right is not the only term on which an ideal or even a decent society can be based. There is another term which can serve equally well, if not better. I am obviously referring to the conception of duty. I tis an old world conception; it isa conception particularly familiar to the East. The Indian term for Right is also the term for dutyadhikara means both. In Europe too, in more recent times, when after the frustration of the dream of a new world envisaged by the French Revolution, man was called upon again to rise and hope, it was Mazzini who brought forward the new or discarded principle as a mantra replacing the other more dangerous one. A hierarchy of duties was given by him as the pattern of a fulfilled ideal life. In India, in our days the distinction between the two attitudes was very strongly insisted upon by the great Vivekananda.
Vivekananda said that if hu man society is to be remodelled, one must first of all learn not to think and act in terms of claims and rights but in terms of duties and obligations. Fulfil your duties conscientiously, the rights will take care of themselves; it is such an attitude that can give man the right poise, the right impetus, the right outlook with regard to a collective living. If instead of each one de manding what one considers as one's dues and consequently scrambling and battling for them, and most often not getting them or getting at a ruinous pricewhat made Arjuna cry, "What shall I do with all this kingdom if in regaining it I lose all my kith and kin dear to me?"if, indeed, instead of claiming one's right, one were content to know one's duty and do it as it should be done, then not only there would be peace and amity upon earth, but also each one far from losing anything would find miraculously all that one most needs and must have,the necessary, the right rights and all.
It might be objected here however that actually in the history of hu manity the conception of Duty has been no less pugnacious than that of Right. In certain ages and among certain peoples, for example, it was considered the imperative duty of the faithful to kill or convert by force or otherwise as many as possible belonging to other faiths: it was the mission of the good shepherd to burn the impious and the heretic. In recent times, it was a sense of high and solemn duty that perpetrated what has been termed "purges"brutalities undertaken, it appears, to purify and preserve the integrity of a particular ideological, social or racial aggregate. But the real name of such a spirit is not duty but fanaticism. And there is a considerable difference between the two. Fanaticism may be defined as duty running away with itself; but what we are concerned with here is not the aberration of duty, but duty proper self-poised.
One might claim also on behalf of the doctrine of Right that the right kind of Right brings no harm, it is as already stated another name for liberty, for the privilege of living and it includes the obligation to let live. One can do what one likes provided one does not infringe on an equal right of others to do the same. The measure of one's liberty is equal to the measure of others' liberty.
--
Indian wisdom has found this other, a fairer terma tertium quid,the mystic factor, sought for by so many philosophers on so many counts. That is the very well- known, the very familiar termDharma. What is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature.
We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. Consciousness at Its origin and in its primitive formulation is dominated by the principle of inertia (tamas); in that state things have mostly an undifferentiated collective existence, they helplessly move about acted upon by forces outside them. A rise in growth and evolution brings about differentiation, specialisation, organisation. And this means consciousness of oneself of the distinct and separate existence of each and everyone, in other words, self-assertion, the claim, the right of each individual unit to be itself, to become itself first and foremost. It is a necessary development; for it signifies the growth of self consciousness in the units out of a mass unconsciousness or semi-consciousness. It is the expression of rajas, the mode of dynamism, of strife and struggle, it is the corrective of tamas.
--
The conception of Right had to appear in order to bring out the principle of individuality, of personal freedom and fulfilment. For, a true healthy collectivity is the association and organisation of free and self-determinate units. The growth of independent individuality naturally means at first clash and rivalry, and a violently competitive society is the result. It is only at this stage that the conception of duty can fruitfully come in and develop in man and his society the mode of Sattwa, which is that of light and wisdom, of toleration and harmony. Then only a society is sought to be moulded on the principle of co-ordination and co-operation.
Still, the conception of duty cannot finally and definitively solve the problem. It cannot arrive at a perfect harmonisation of the conflicting claims of individual units; for, duty, as I have already said, is a child of mental idealism, and although the mind can exercise some kind of control over life-forces, it cannot altogether eliminate the seeds of conflict that lie imbedded in the very nature of life. It is for this reason that there is an element of constraint in duty; it is, as the poet says, the "stern daughter of the Voice of God". One has to compel oneself, one has to use force on oneself to carry out one's dutythere is a feeling somehow of its being a bitter pill. The cult of duty means rajas controlled and coerced by Sattwa, not the transcendence of rajas. This leads us to the high and supreme conception of Dharma, which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one has to obey: it is the law of self-nature that one inevitably follows, it is easy, spontaneous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic, the path of Dharma is of the gods, godly (cf. Virabhava and Divyabhava of the Tantras).
The principle of Dharma then inculcates that each individual must, in order to act, find out his truth of being, his true soul and inmost consciousness: one must entirely and integrally merge oneself into that, be identified with it in such a manner that all acts and feelings and thoughts, in fact all movements, inner and outerspontaneously and irrepressibly well out of that fount and origin. The individual souls, being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature, never collide or haltna me thate na tas thatuh but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony.
The future society of man is envisaged as something of like nature. When the mortal being will have found his immortal soul and divine self, then each one will be able to give full and free expression to his self-nature (swabhava); then indeed the utmost sweep of dynamism in each and all will not cause clash or conflict; on the contrary, each will increase the other and there will be a global increment and fulfilmentparasparam bhavayantah. The division and conflict, the stress and strain that belong to the very nature of the inferior level of being and consciousness will then have been transcended. It is only thus that a diviner hu manity can be born and replace all the other moulds and types that can never lead to anything final and absolutely satisfactory.
***
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is the song of redemption, of salvation achieved, of Paradise regained. The full story of the purgatory, of man's calvary is beautifully hymned in these exquisite lines of a haunting poetic beauty married to a real mystic sense:
The dove descending breaks the air
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The Divine Love is a greater fire than the low smouldering fire that our secular unregenerate life is. One has to choose and declare his adhesion. Indeed, the stage of conversion, the crucial turn from the ordinary life to the spiritual life Eliot has characterised in a very striking manner. We usually say, sometimes in an outburst of grief, sometimes in a spirit of sudden disgust and renunciation that the world is dark and dismal and lonesome, the only thing to do here is to be done with it. The true renunciation, that which is deep and abiding, is not, however, so simple a thing, such a short cut. So our poet says, but the world is not dark enough, it is not lonesome enough: the world lives and moves in a superficial half-light, it is neither real death nor real life, it is death in life. It is this miserable mediocrity, the shallow uncertainty of consciousness that spells danger and ruin for the soul. Hence the poet exclaims:
. . . . Not here
--
But Thompson was not an intellectual, his doubts and despondencies were not of the mental order, he was a boiling, swelling life-surge, a geyser, a volcano. He, too, crossed the Night and saw the light of Day, but in a different way. Well, I he did not march into the day, it was the Day that marched I into him! Yes, the Divine Grace came and seized him from behind with violence. A modern, a modernist consciousness cannot expect that indulgence. God meets him only halfway, he has to work up himself the other half. He has laid so many de mands and conditions: the knots in his case are not cut asunder but slowly disengaged.
The modern temper is especially partial to harmony: it cannot assert and reject unilaterally and categorically, it wishes to go round an object and view all its sides; it asks for a synthesis and reconciliation of differences and contraries. Two major chords of life-experience that de mand accord are Life and Death, Time and Eternity. Indeed, the problem of Time hangs heavy on the hu man consciousness. It has touched to the quick philosophers and sages in all ages and climes; it is the great question that confronts the spiritual seeker, the riddle that the Sphinx of life puts to the journeying soul for solution.
A modern Neo-Brahmin, Aldous Huxley, has given a solution of the problem in his now famous Shakespearean apothegm, "Time must have a stop". That is an old-world solution rediscovered by the modern mind in and through the ravages of Time's storm and stress. It means, salvation lies, after all, beyond the flow of Time, one must free oneself from the vicious and unending circle of mortal and mundane life. As the Rajayogi controls and holds his breath, stills all life-movement and realises a dead-stop of consciousness (Samadhi), even so one must control and stop all secular movements in oneself and attain a timeless stillness and vacancy in which alone the true spiritual light and life can descend and manifest. That is the age-long and ancient solution to which the Neo-Brahmin as well the Neo-Christian adheres.
Eliot seems to demur, however, and does not go to that extreme length. He wishes to go beyond, but to find out the source and matrix of the here below. As I said, he seeks a synthesis and not a mere transcendence: the transcendence is indeed a part of the synthesis, the other part is furnished by an im manence. He does not cut away altogether from Time, but reaches its outermost limit, its rim, its summit, where it stops, not altogether annihilated, but held in suspended animation. That is the "still point" to which he refers in the following lines:
--
All manner of thing shall be well. 12
Nothing can be clearer with regard to the ultimate end the poet has in view. Listen once more to the hymn of the higher reconciliation:
--
Our poet is too self-conscious, he himself feels that he has not the perfect voice. A Homer, even a Milton possesses a unity of tone and a wholeness of perception which are denied to the modern. To the modern, however, the old masters are not subtle enough, broad enough, psychological enough, let us say the word, spiritual enough. And yet the poetic inspiration, more than the religious urge, needs the injunction not to be busy with too many things, but to be centred upon the one thing needful, viz., to create poetically and not to discourse philosophically or preach prophetically. Not that it is impossible for the poet to swallow the philosopher and the prophet, metabolising them into the substance of his bone and marrow, of "the trilling wire in his blood", as Eliot graphically expresses. That perhaps is the consummation towards which poetry is tending. But at present, in Eliot, at least, the strands remain distinct, each with its own temper and rhythm, not fused and moulded into a single streamlined form of beauty. Our poet flies high, very high indeed at times, often or often he flies low, not disdaining the perilous limit of bathos. Perhaps it is all wilful, it is a mannerism which he cherishes. The mannerism may explain his psychology and enshrine his philosophy. But the poet, the magician is to be looked for elsewhere. In the present collection of poems it is the philosophical, exegetical, discursive Eliot who dominates: although the high lights of the subject-matter may be its justification. Still even if we have here doldrums like
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence
01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I speak of Roerich as a Western soul, but more precisely perhaps he is a soul of the mid-region (as also in another sense we shall see subsequently) intermediary between the East and the West. His external make-up had all the characteristic elements of the Western culture, but his mind and temperament, his inner soul was oriental. And yet it was not the calm luminous staticancientsoul that an Indian or a Chinese sage is; it is a nomad soul, newly awakened, young and fresh and ardent, something primitive, pulsating with the unspoilt green sap of life something in the manner of Whit man. And that makes him all the more representative of the young and ardent West yearning for the light that was never on sea or land.
Is it not strange that one should look to the East for the light? There is a light indeed that dwells in the setting suns, but that is the inferior light, the light that moves level with the earth, pins us down to the normal and ordinary life and consciousness: it" leads into the Night, into Nihil, pralaya. It is the light of the morning sun that man looks up to in his forward march, the sun that rises in the East whom the Vedic Rishi invoked in these magnificent lines:
Lo, the supreme light of all lights is come, a vast and varied consciousness is born in us. . . .
--
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 hu manism, 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 hu manity has been dreaming continuously since its very childhood, that is to say, when there will be peace and harmony on earth, 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 hu manity 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 de manded. 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 earth are elemental and fundamental, although apparently simple and commonplace.
0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The soul is in fact like a divine spark which puts on many states
of being of increasing density, down to the most material; it is
--
and perfected in the course of many earthly lives and form the
psychic being. When the psychic being is fully formed, it is aware
of the consciousness of the soul and manifests it perfectly.
1 February 1967
--
One moment of the Lord probably means many years for
us!
--
We are made up of many different parts which have to be unified
around the psychic being, if we are conscious of it or at least
--
impulse, each reaction, as it manifests, must be presented in the
consciousness to the central being or its aspiration. What is in
--
It is a long endeavour which may take many years - but
once it is done, the unification is achieved and the path becomes
--
slower - man or the Divine Himself?
To man the Divine seems slow.
In the eyes of the Divine man is slow indeed!
But perhaps in these two cases, the slowness is not the same.
--
First the dead man must have a daughter in order to be reborn
in her child.
--
slipped away, saying that to make a stupid man intelligent is an
impossibility.
To make a dishonest man honest is an even more impossible
miracle.
--
Which came first in the manifestation, the god or the
Asura?
--
Yes, it is a very conscious flower - I have had many proofs of
it.
--
contains duality since the Mahashakti will manifest for the needs
of the creation.
--
The One is both one and two; the manifested and the
un manifested, everything exists at the same time. When
--
It is objectified in the creation, in the manifestation, there
is a succession: one, two... But this is only a way of
--
and calls for its release from the covering that conceals it in manifested Nature."
Sri Aurobindo
--
What is the origin of man's love for his own ignorance?
It is inconscience.
--
into the manifestation the spark that extinguishes itself
in Him?
--
Oneness means identity in origin; but in the manifestation each
entity follows its own path of conscious return to the Oneness.
--
Essence and in the manifestation.
16 October 1968
--
One has to cut off all connection with the manifested world
in order to be immune.
--
Is the Divine Love equal for all even in the manifestation?
Yes, equal and immutable.
--
of many lives of preparation.
17 November 1968
--
It seems to me, Mother, that when man does not accept the Divine, it is more out of ignorance than out of
wickedness. Isn't it so?
--
They are ONE in essence and manifestation.
5 December 1968
--
which is the purpose of the universal manifestation.
11 December 1968
--
Can man delay or hasten the coming of this hour?
Neither the one nor the other in their apparent contradiction
0.12 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
certain that this consciousness has manifested in bodies other
than their present one and that it will survive the disappearance
--
The possibilities are different for each person: there are as many
cases as there are persons. But each one can learn which conditions are best for his rest.
--
Knowledge and intelligence are precisely the higher mental qualities in man, those that differentiate him from the animal.
Series Twelve - To a Student
Without knowledge and intelligence, one is not a man but
an animal in hu man form.
--
exists between man and the most advanced ape; but what this
difference will be we can hardly know until the new species
0.13 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, for some it will take many, many lives, whereas there are
others who will do it in this very lifetime. It is a question of will.
--
It is man (the hu man being) who calls all kinds of feelings
"love": all the desires, attractions, vital exchanges, sexual relations, attachments, even friendships, and many other things
besides.
--
and manifests the physical being.
Ordinarily, one becomes aware of the presence of this consciousness only when one has to face some danger or an unexpected event or a great sorrow.
--
we are here in the Ashram to manifest the Divine upon
earth. But there remains one question: if everything is
--
To visit one's parents is to return to an influence which is generally stronger than any other; and there are not many cases where
the parents help you in your spiritual progress, because they are
--
have learned to be conscious. Now they are ready to manifest
a far higher consciousness, the consciousness that will act fully
--
will be to man what man is to the animal. The consciousness of
this new race is already at work on earth to give light to all who
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
itself for the new manifestation, but the hu man body is not
plastic enough and offers resistance; this is why the number of
--
Total union and the perfect manifestation of the Divine are the
sole means of putting an end to the suffering and misery of the
--
and diminished manifestation of the Divine Consciousness.
That is why I said "progressive perfection", because the
--
be able to manifest Him.
Persevere, and what you cannot do today you will be able
--
goal of life, many difficulties would find their solution.
The best way to avoid growing old is to make progress the
--
Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to announce the manifestation
of the supramental world. And not only did he announce this
--
ourselves for this manifestation. The best thing we can do is to
study all he has told us, strive to follow his example and prepare
ourselves for the new manifestation.
This gives life its true meaning and will help us to overcome
--
order to manifest the Divine in the hu man being.
It is under the psychic influence that the Divine manifests in
man and thus prepares the coming of superhu manity.
--
immortality can be manifested on earth.
So the important thing now is to find one's psychic, unite
--
we must manifest.
This body lives by You alone and goes on repeating to You:
--
This truth that man has vainly sought to know will be the
birthright of the new race, the race of tomorrow, the super man.
0 1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(A disciple:) Sweet Mother, what is this Personality and when will It manifest?
My answer is ready.
--
It is true that at present, her presence is more rhetorical than factual, since so far She has had no chance to manifest. Yet even so, She is a powerful instrument in the Work, for of all the Mothers aspects, She holds the greatest power to transform the body. Indeed, those cells which can vibrate at the touch of the divine Joy, receive it and bear it, are cells reborn, on their way to becoming immortal.
But the vibrations of divine Bliss and those of pleasure cannot cohabit in the same vital and physical house. We must therefore TOTALLY renounce all feelings of pleasure to be ready to receive the divine Ananda. But rare are those who can renounce pleasure without thereby renouncing all active participation in life or sinking into a stern asceticism. And among those who realize that the transformation is to be wrought in active life, some pretend that pleasure is a form of Ananda gone more or less astray and legitimize their search for self-satisfaction, thereby creating a virtually insuperable obstacle to their own transformation.
--
I think it was in 1946, Mother, because you told us so many things at that time.
Right.
--
Mother, there is not even one single man?
I dont know.
--
But actually, to tell you the truth, I think your lives are so easy that you dont exert yourselves very much! How many among you have truly an INTENSE need to find their psychic beings? To find out truly who they are? To find out what their roles are, why they are here? You just let yourselves drift. You even complain when things arent easy enough! You just take things as they come. And sometimes, should an aspiration arise in you and you encounter some difficulty in yourself, you say, Oh, Mother is there! Shell take care of it for me! And you think about something else.
Mother, previously things were very strict in the Ashram, but not now. Why?
Yes, I have always said that it changed when we had to take the very little children. How can you envision an ascetic life with little sprouts no bigger than that? Its impossible! But thats the little surprise package the war left on our doorstep. When it was found that Pondicherry was the safest place on earth, naturally people came wheeling in here with all their baby carriages filled and asked us if we could shelter them, so we couldnt very well turn them away, could we?! Thats how it happened, and in no other way But, in the beginning, the first condition for coming here was that you would have nothing more to do with your family! If a man was married, then he had to completely overlook the fact that he had a wife and childrencompletely sever all ties, have nothing further to do with them. And if ever a wife asked to come just because her husb and happened to be here, we told her, You have no business coming here!
In the beginning, it was very, very strict for a long time.
--
But as I said, bit by bit things changed. However, this had one advantage: we were too much outside of life. So there were a number of problems which had never arisen but which would have suddenly surged up the moment we wanted a complete manifestation. We took on all these problems a little prematurely, but it gave us the opportunity to solve them. In this way we learned many things and surmounted many difficulties, only it complicated things considerably. And in the present situation, given such a large number of elements who havent even the slightest idea why theyre here (!) well, it de mands a far greater effort on the disciples part than before.
Before, when there were we started with 35 or 36 people but even when it got up to 150, even with 150it was as if they were all nestled in a cocoon in my consciousness: they were so near to me that I could constantly guide ALL their inner or outer movements. Day and night, at each moment, everything was totally under my control. And naturally, I think they made a great deal of progress at that time: it is a fact that I was CONSTANTLY doing the sadhana2 for them. But then, with this baby boom The sadhana cant be done for little sprouts who are 3 or 4 or 5 years old! Its out of the question. The only thing I can do is wrap them in the Consciousness and try to see that they grow up in the best of all possible conditions. However, the one advantage to all this is that instead of there being such a COMPLETE and PASSIVE dependence on the disciples part, each one has to make his own little effort. Truly, thats excellent.
--
I met a man (I was perhaps 20 or 21 at the time), an Indian who had come to Europe and who told me of the Gita. There was a French translation of it (a rather poor one, I must say) which he advised me to read, and then he gave me the key (HIS key, it was his key). He said, Read the Gita (this translation of the Gita which really wasnt worth much but it was the only one available at the timein those days I wouldnt have understood anything in other languages; and besides, the English translations were just as bad and well, Sri Aurobindo hadnt done his yet!). He said, Read the Gita knowing that Krishna is the symbol of the im manent God, the God within. That was all. Read it with THAT knowledgewith the knowledge that Krishna represents the im manent God, the God within you. Well, within a month, the whole thing was done!
So some of you people have been here since the time you were toddlerseverything has been explained to you, the whole thing has been served to you on a silver platter (not only with words, but through psychic aid and in every possible way), you have been put on the path of this inner discovery and then you just go on drifting along: When it comes, it will come.If you even spare it that much thought!
--
And how many years have you all been here, half-asleep? Naturally, youre happy to think about it now and thenespecially when I speak to you about it or sometimes when you read. But THATthat fire, that will which plows through all barriers, that concentration which can triumph over EVERYTHING
Now who was it that asked me what you should do?
--
For Her, this body is but one instrument among so many others in an eternity of ages to come, and for Her its only importance is that attributed to it by the Earth and mankind the extent to which it can be used as a channel to further Her manifestation. If I find myself surrounded by people who are incapable of receiving Her, then for Her, I am quite useless.
It is very clear. So it is not I who can make Her stay. And I certainly cannot ask Her to stay for egotistical reasons. Moreover, all these Aspects, all these Personalities manifest constantly but they never manifest for personal reason. Not one of them has ever thought of helping my bodybesides, I dont ask them to because that is not their purpose. But it is more than obvious that if the people around me were receptive, She could per manently manifest since they could receive Herand this would help my body enormously because all these vibrations would run through it. But She never gets even a chance to manifestnot a single one. She only meets people who dont even feel Her when Shes there! They dont even notice Her, theyre not even aware of her presence. So how can She manifest in these conditions? Im not going to ask Her, Please come and change my body. We dont have that kind of relationship! Furthermore, the body itself wouldnt agree. It never thinks of itself, it never pays attention to itself, and besides, it is only through the work that it can be transformed.
Yes, certainly had there been any receptivity when She came down and had She been able to manifest with the power with which She came But I can tell you one thing: even before Her coming, when, with Sri Aurobindo, I had begun going down (for the Yoga) from the mental plane to the vital plane, when we brought our yoga down from the mental plane into the vital plane, in less than a month (I was forty years old at the time I didnt seem very old, I looked less than forty, but I was forty anyway), after no more than a month of this yoga, I looked exactly like an 18 year old! And someone who knew me and had stayed with me in Japan5 came here, and when he saw me, he could scarcely believe his eyes! He said, But my god, is it you? I said, Of course!
Only when we went down from the vital plane into the physical plane, all this went awaybecause on the physical plane, the work is much harder and we had so much to do, so many things to change.
But if a force like Hers could manifest and be received here, it would have INESTIMABLE results!
Well, I am only telling you all this because I thought someone might ask me about it, but otherwise I dont have that kind of relationship with Her. You see, if you consider this body, this poor body, it is very innocent: it in no way tries to draw attention to itself nor to attract forces nor to do anything at all except its workas best it can. And thats how it stands: its importance is proportionate to its usefulness and to the significance the world attri butes to itsince its action is for the world.
0 1956-02-29 - First Supramental Manifestation - The Golden Hammer, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
object:0_1956-02-29 - First Supramental manifestation - The Golden Hammer
author class:The Mother
--
FIRST SUPRAMENTAL manIFESTATION
(During the common meditation on Wednesday the 29th February 1956)
0 1956-03-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Note written by Mother in French. At this period, Mother's back was already bent. This straightening of her back seems to be the first physiological effect of the 'Supramental manifestation' of February 29, which is perhaps the reason why Mother noted down the experience under the name 'Agenda of the Supramental Action on Earth.' It was the first time Mother gave a title to what would become this fabulous document of 13 volumes. The experience took place during a 'translation class' when, twice a week, Mother would translate the works of Sri Aurobindo into French before a group of disciples.
AGENDA OF THE SUPRAMENTAL ACTION ON EARTH
0 1956-04-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The difficulties of the past weeks have taught me that as soon as one strays from the true consciousness, in however trifling a way, anything may happen, any excess, any aberration, any imbalance and I have felt very dangerous things prowling about me. Mother, you told me in regard to Patrick1 that the law of the manifestation was a law of freedom, even the freedom to choose wrongly. This evening, it has been my very deep perception that this freedom is virtually always a freedom to choose wrongly. I harbor a great fear of losing the true consciousness once again. I have become aware of how fragile everything in me is and that very little would be enough to carry me away.
Therefore, Sweet Mother, I come to ask a great grace of you, from the depths of my heart: take my freedom into your hands. Prevent me from falling back, far away from you. I place this freedom in your hands. Keep me safe, Mother, protect me. Grant me the grace of watching over me and of taking me in your hands completely, like a child whose steps are unsure. I no longer want this Freedom. It is you I want, the Truth of my being. Mother, as a grace, I implore you to free me from my freedom to choose wrongly.
0 1956-04-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality.
It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognize it.
0 1956-05-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
When the mind came down upon earth, something like a million years went by between the manifestation of the mind in the earth atmosphere and the appearance of the first man. But it will go faster this time because man is waiting for something, he has a vague idea: he is awaiting in some way or another the advent of the super man. Whereas the apes were certainly not awaiting the birth of man, they never thought of it for the excellent reason that they probably dont think very much! But man has thought about it and is waiting, so it will go faster. But faster probably still means thousands of years. We shall speak of this again in a few thousand years!
(silence)
--
Will we benefit collectively or individually from this new manifestation?
Why are you asking this question?
--
Its the same with those who ask for an interview. I tell them, Look, you have come in large numbers, and if each one asks me for an interview, how could I possibly find enough minutes in so few days to see everyone? While youre here, I wouldnt have even a single minute. Then they retort, Oh, I have taken so MUCH trouble, I have come from so FAR away, I have come from way in the North, I have travelled for so many hoursand I have no right to an interview? I reply, Im sorry, but you are not the only one in that situation.
And thats how it isswapping, bargaining. We are not a commercial enterprise, we have made it clear that we are not doing business.
--
Mother, when the mind came down into the earth atmosphere, the ape did not make any effort to convert himself into a man, did he? It was Nature that supplied the effort. But in our case
But its not man who is going to convert himself into a super man!
No?
--
Onlyyes, there is an only, I dont want to be so cruel: NOW man CAN COLLABORATE. That is, he can lend himself to the process, with good will, with aspiration, and help to his utmost. Which is why I said it will go faster. I hope it will go MUCH faster.
But even if it does go much faster, it will still take some time!
--
Individually, each ones goal was to make himself ready, to enter into a more or less intimate individual relationship with this Force, so as to help the process; or else, if he could not help, at least be ready to recognize and be open to the Force when it would manifest. Then instead of being an alien element in a world in which your OWN inner capacity remains un manifest, you suddenly become THAT, you enter directly, fully, into the very atmosphere: the Force is there, all around you, permeating you.
If you had had a little inner contact, you would have recognized it immediately, dont you think so?
Well, in any event, that was the case for those who had a little inner contact; they recognized it, they felt it, and they said, Ah, there it is! It has come! But how is it that so many hundreds of peoplenot to mention the handful of those who really wanted only that, thought only of that, had staked their whole lives on thathow is it that they felt nothing? What can this mean?
It is well known that only like knows like. It is an obvious fact.
--
Thats how the universal movement works (I read this to you a few days ago): through their inner effort and inner progress, certain individuals, who are the pioneers, the forerunners, enter into communication with the new Force which is to manifest, and they receive it in themselves. And because a number of calls like this surge forth, the thing becomes possible, and the era, the time, the moment for the manifestation comes. This is how it happened and the manifestation took place.
But then, all those who were ready should have recognized it.
--
Mother, very recently a text has been circulating which says, What has just now happened, with this Victory, is not a descent but a manifestation. And it is no longer merely an individual event: the Supermind has sprung forth into the universal play.
Yes, yes, yes! I indeed said all that. I acknowledge it. And so?
--
When this individual event has taken place sufficiently to allow a more general possibility to emerge, it is no longer a descent but a manifestation.
What I call a descent is the individual movement in an individual consciousness. But when a new world is manifesting in an old worldas when similarly the mind spread over the earth I call it a manifestation.
You may call it whatever you like, it makes no difference to me, but we must understand each other.
What I call a descent takes place in the individual consciousness. In the same way, we speak of ascent (there is no ascent really, there is no high or low, no direction: its all a manner of speaking)we speak of ascent when we feel ourselves rising up towards something, and we call it a descent when, after having caught this thing, we bring it down into ourselves.
But when the doors are opened and the flood pours in, it can no longer be called a descent: it is a Force that spreads everywhere. Understood? Ah!
0 1956-08-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
In fact, following the 'Supramental manifestation' of February 29, 1956, all of Mother's physical difficulties increased, as though all the obscurities in the physical consciousness were surging forth beneath the pressure of the new light. The same observation applies to the disciples who were around Mother and undoubtedly to the world as a whole. A strange 'mysterious acceleration' was beginning to take hold of the world.
***
0 1956-09-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This text was noted down by a disciple from memory. On the original manuscript submitted for her approval, Mother wrote, 'This account is quite correct,' and She signed the text. Words added or corrected by Mother are in italics.
(During the Wednesday class)
0 1956-09-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
My friends keep telling me that I am not ready and that, like R,1 whom they knew, I should go and spend some time in society. They say that my idea of going to the Himalayas is absurd, and they advise me to return to Brazil for a few years to stay with W W is an elderly American millionaire the only good rich man I knowwho wanted to make me an heir, as it were, to his financial affairs and who treats me rather like a son. He was quite disappointed when I came back to India. My friends tell me that if I have to go through a period in the outside world, the best way to do it is to remain near someone who is fond of me, while at the same time ensuring a material independence for the future.
These questions of money do not interest me. In fact, nothing interests me except this something I feel within me. The only question for me is to know whether I am truly ready for the Yoga, or if my failings are not the sign of some immaturity. Mother, you alone can tell me what is right.
--
This possibility appeared to me while reading what you wrote about your sojourn in Brazil with W, the only good rich man you have known. Here is my proposal, which I express to you quite plainly, spontaneously, as it presented itself to me.
Just now, the work is being delayed, curtailed, limited, almost endangered for want of money.
--
Go to Brazil, to this good rich man, make him understand the importance of our work, the extent to which his fortune would be used to the utmost for the good of all and for the earths salvation were he to put it, even partially, at the disposal of our action. Win this victory over the power of money, and by so doing you will be freed from all your personal difficulties. Then you can return here with no apprehension, and you will be ready for the transformation.
Reflect upon this, take your time, tell me very frankly how you feel about it and whether it appears to you, as it does to me, to be a door opening onto a path that will bring you back, free and strong at last to me.
0 1956-10-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
As Sri Aurobindo says, people see God as a magnified man: he is the Demiurge, Jehovahwhat I call the Lord of Falsehood.
Arbitrariness. But the Divine is not like that!
0 1956-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
One is never anything but a divine apprentice: the Divine of yesterday is only an apprentice to the Divine of tomorrow No, I am not speaking of a progressive manifestation that is much farther below.
When I am at my highest, I am already too high for the manifestation.
I have gone far beyond what I wrote this morning.
--
No, it is exactly the opposite of what you are saying. It is not that the Divine in his divinity is opposed to his own manifested selfHe is very far beyond, beyond the necessity for Grace; He perceives his unique and exclusive responsibility, and that it is He and He alone who must change in His manifestation so that all may change.
***
--
I wanted to take this little rose (Tenderness for the Divine), for I consider it to be the manifestation nearest to divine Love. Its disinterested, spontaneous, intimate.
This is what I wanted to take with me to my super-heaven, as the most precious thing in the hu man heart.
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
She clearly remembered where her room was, but each time she set out to go there, either the staircase disappeared or things were so changed that she could no longer find her way! So she went here and there, up and down, searched, went in and out but it was impossible to find the way to her room! Since all of this assumed a physical appearanceas I said, a very familiar and very common appearance, as is always the case in these symbolic visions there was somewhere (how shall I put it?) the hotels administrative office and a wo man who seemed to be the manager, who had all the keys and who knew where everyone was staying. So the daughter went to this person and asked her, Could you show me the way to my room?But of course! Easily! Everyone around the manager looked at her as if to say, How can you say that? However, she got up, and with authority asked for a key the key to the daughters roomsaying, I shall take you there. And off she went along all kinds of paths, but all so complicated, so bizarre! The daughter was following along behind her very attentively, you see, so as not to lose sight of her. But just as they should have come to the place where the daughters room was supposed to be, suddenly the manageress (let us call her the manageress), both the manageress and her key vanished! And the sense of this vanishing was so acute that at the same time, everything vanished!
So to help you understand this enigma, let me tell you that the mother is physical Nature as she is, and the daughter is the new creation. The manageress is the worlds organizing mental consciousness as Nature has developed it thus far, that is, the most advanced organizing sense to have manifested in the present state of material Nature. This is the key to the vision.
Naturally, when I awoke, I immediately knew what could resolve this problem which appeared so absolutely insoluble. The vanishing of the manageress and her key was an obvious sign that she was altogether incapable of leading what could be called the creative consciousness of the new world to its true place.
I knew this, but I did not have a vision of the solution, which means it has yet to manifest; this thing had not yet manifested in the building, this fantastic construction, although it is the very mode of consciousness which could transform this incoherent creation into something real, truly conceived, willed and materialized, with a center in its proper place, a recognized place, and with a REAL effective power.
(silence)
--
It is certainly not an arbitrary construction of the type built by men, where everything is put pell-mell, without any order, without reality, and which is held together by only illusory ties. Here, these ties were symbolized by the hotels walls, while actually in ordinary hu man constructions (if we take a religious community, for example), they are symbolized by the building of a monastery, an identity of clothing, an identity of activities, an identity even of movementor to put it more precisely: everyone wears the same uniform, everyone gets up at the same time, everyone eats the same thing, everyone says his prayers together, etc.; there is an overall identity. But naturally, on the inside there remains the chaos of many disparate consciousnesses, each one following its own mode, for this kind of group identification, which extends right up to an identity of beliefs and dogma, is absolutely illusory.
Yet it is one of the most common types of hu man 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.
--
The Supramental manifestation, (Cent. Ed. XVI, pp. 33-36.)
***
0 1957-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
There are all kinds of freedommental freedom, vital freedom, spiritual freedomwhich are the fruits of successive masteries. But a completely new freedom has become possible with the Supramental manifestation: it is the freedom of the body.
One of the very first results of the supramental manifestation was to give the body a freedom and an autonomy it has never before known. And when I say freedom, I dont mean some psychological perception or an inner state of consciousness, but something else and far betterit is a new phenomenon in the body, in the cells of the body. For the first time, the cells themselves have felt that they are free, that they have the power to decide. When the new vibrations came and combined with the old ones, I felt it at once and it showed me that a new world was really taking birth.
In its normal state, the body always feels that it is not its own master: illnesses invade it without its really being able to resist thema thousand factors impose themselves or exert pressure upon it. Its sole power is the power to defend itself, to react. Once the illness has got in, it can fight and overcome iteven modern medicine has acknowledged that the body is cured only when it decides to get cured; it is not the drugs per se that heal, for if the ailment is temporarily suppressed by a drug without the bodys will, it grows up again elsewhere in some other form until the body itself has decided to be cured. But this implies only a defensive power, the power to react against an invading enemyit is not true freedom.
But with the supramental manifestation, something new has taken place in the body: it feels it is its own master, autonomous, with its two feet solidly on the ground, as it were. This gives a physical impression of the whole being suddenly drawing itself up, with its head lifted high I am my own master.
We live perennially with a burden on our shoulders, something that bows our heads down, and we feel pulled, led by all kinds of external forces, we dont know by whom or what, nor where tothis is what men call Fate, Destiny. When you do yoga, one of the first experiences the experience of the kundalini, as it is called here in Indiais precisely one in which the consciousness rises, breaks through this hard lid, here, at the crown of the head, and at last you emerge into the Light. Then you see, you know, you decide and you realizedifficulties may still remain, but truly speaking one is above them. Well, as a result of the supramental manifestation, it is THIS experience that came into the body. The body straightened its head up and felt its freedom, its independence.
During the flu epidemic, for example, I spent every day in the midst of people who were germ carriers. And one day, I clearly felt that the body had decided not to catch this flu. It asserted its autonomy. You see, it was not a question of the higher Will deciding, no. It didnt take place in the highest consciousness: the body itself decided. When you are way above in your consciousness, you see things, you know things; but in actual fact, once you descend again into matter, it is like water running through sand. In this respect, things have changed, the body has a DIRECT power, independent of any outer intervention. Even though it is barely visible, I consider this to be a very important result.
And this new vibration in the body has allowed me to understand the mechanism of the transformation. It is not something that comes from a higher Will, not a higher consciousness that imposes itself upon the body: it is the body itself awakening in its cells, a freedom of the cells themselves, an absolutely new vibration that sets disorders righteven disorders that existed prior to the supramental manifestation.
Naturally, all this is a gradual process, but I am hopeful that little by little this new consciousness will grow, gain ground and victoriously resist the old forces of destruction and annihilation, and this Fatality we believed to be so inexorable.
0 1957-10-18, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This unique method was to be the mantra, as Mother herself would discover.
***
0 1957-12-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This physical consciousness records all it sees, all your reactions, your thoughts, all the factswithout preference, without prejudice, without personal will. Nothing escapes it. Its work is almost mechanical. Therefore I know what to tell or to ask you according to the integral truth of your being and its present possibilities. Ordinarily, in the normal man, the physical consciousness does not see things as they are, for three reasons: because of ignorance, because of preference, and because of an egoistic will. You color what you see, eliminate what displeases you. In short, you see only what you desire to see.
Now, I recently had a very striking experience: a discrepancy occurred between my physical consciousness and the consciousness of the world. In some instances decisions made in the Light and the Truth produced unexpected results, upheavals in the consciousness of others that were neither foreseen nor desired, and I did not understand. No matter how hard I tried, I could not understand and I emphasize this word understand. At last, I had to leave my highest consciousness and pull myself down into the physical consciousness to find out what was happening. And there, in my head, I saw what appeared to be a little cell bursting, and suddenly I understood: the recording had been defective. The physical consciousness had neglected to register certain of your lower reactions. It could not have been through preference or through personal will (these things were eliminated from my consciousness long, long ago). But I saw that this most material consciousness was already completely permeated with the transforming supramental truth, and it could no longer follow the rhythm of normal life. It was much more attuned to the true consciousness than to the world! I couldnt possibly blame it for lagging behind; on the contrary, it was in front, too far ahead! There was a discrepancy between the rhythm of the transformation of my being and the worlds own rhythm. The supramental action on the world is slow, it does not act directlyit acts by infiltration, by traversing the successive layers, and the results are slow to come about. So I had to pull myself violently down in order to wait for the others.
0 1958-01-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I have one thing to add: we must not misinterpret the meaning of this experience and imagine that henceforth everything will take place without difficulties or always in accordance with our personal desires. It is not at this level. It does not mean that when we do not want it to rain, it will not rain! Or when we want some event to take place in the world, it will immediately take place, or that all difficulties will be abolished and everything will be like a fairy tale. It is not like that. It is something more profound. Nature has accepted into her play of forces the newly manifested Force and has included it in her movements. But as always, the movements of Nature take place on a scale infinitely surpassing the hu man scale and invisible to the ordinary hu man consciousness. It is more of an inner, psychological possibility that has been born in the world than a spectacular change in earthly events.
I mention this because you might be tempted to believe that fairy tales are going to be realized upon earth. The time has not yet come.
0 1958-02-03b - The Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I found myself upon an immense ship, which is the symbolic representation of the place where this work is being carried out. This ship, as big as a city, is thoroughly organized, and it had certainly already been functioning for quite some time, for its organization was fully developed. It is the place where people destined for the supramental life are being trained. These people (or at least a part of their being) had already undergone a supramental transformation because the ship itself and all that was aboard was neither material nor subtle-physical, neither vital nor mental: it was a supramental substance. This substance itself was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance nearest the physical world, the first to manifest. The light was a blend of red and gold, forming a uniform substance of luminous orange. Everything was like that the light was like that, the people were like thateverything had this color, in varying shades, however, which enabled things to be distinguished from one another. The overall impression was of a shadowless world: there were shades, but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order; everything worked smoothly and silently. At the same time, I could see all the details of the education, the training in all domains by which the people on board were being prepared.
This immense ship had just arrived at the shore of the supramental world, and a first batch of people destined to become the future inhabitants of the supramental world were about to disembark. Everything was arranged for this first landing. A certain number of very tall beings were posted on the wharf. They were not hu man beings and never before had they been men. Nor were they per manent inhabitants of the supramental world. They had been delegated from above and posted there to control and supervise the landing. I was in charge of all this since the beginning and throughout. I myself had prepared all the groups. I was standing on the bridge of the ship, calling the groups forward one by one and having them disembark on the shore. The tall beings posted there seemed to be reviewing those who were disembarking, allowing those who were ready to go ashore and sending back those who were not and who had to continue their training aboard the ship. While standing there watching everyone, that part of my consciousness coming from here became extremely interested: it wanted to see, to identify all the people, to see how they had changed and to find out who had been taken immediately as well as those who had to remain and continue their training. After awhile, as I was observing, I began to feel pulled backwards and that my body was being awakened by a consciousness or a person from here1and in my consciousness, I protested: No, no, not yet! Not yet! I want to see whos there! I was watching all this and noting it with intense interest It went on like that until, suddenly, the clock here began striking three, which violently jerked me back. There was the sensation of a sudden fall into my body. I came back with a shock, but since I had been called back very suddenly, all my memory was still intact. I remained quiet and still until I could bring back the whole experience and preserve it.
The nature of objects on this ship was not that which we know upon earth; for example, the clothes were not made of cloth, and this thing that resembled cloth was not manufacturedit was a part 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 earth 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 per manent, that my presence there is per manent, 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)
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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.
0 1958-03-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
As for me, I am totally out of my element in this new life, as though I were uprooted from myself. I am living in the temple, in the midst of pujas,1 with white ashes on my forehead, barefoot dressed like a Hindu, sleeping on cement at night, eating impossible curries, with some good sunburns to complete the cooking. And there I am, clinging to you, for if you were not there I would collapse, so absurd would it all be. You are the only realityhow many times have I repeated this to myself, like a litany! Apart from this, I am holding up quite well physically. But inside and outside, nothing is left but you. I need you, thats all. Mother, this world is so horrifyingly empty. I really feel that I would evaporate if you werent there. Well, no doubt I had to go through this experience Perhaps I will be able to extract some book from it that will be of use to you. We are like children who need a lot of pictures in order to understand, and a few good kicks to realize our complete stupidity.
Swami must soon take to the road again, through Ceylon, towards March 20 or 25. So I shall go wandering with him until May; towards the beginning of May, he will return to India. I hope to have learned my lesson by then, and to have learned it well. Inwardly, I have understood that there is only you but its these problem children on the surface who must be made to toe the line once and for all.
0 1958-05-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But in a way, absolute calm implies withdrawal from action, so a choice had to be made between one or the other. I said to myself, I am neither exclusively this nor exclusively that. And actually, to do Sri Aurobindos work is to realize the Supramental on earth. So I began that work and, as a matter of fact, this was the only thing I asked of my body. I told it, Now you shall set right everything which is out of order and gradually realize this intermediate super manhood between man and the supramental being or, in other words, what I call the super man.
And this is what I have been doing for the last eight years, and even much more during the past two years, since 1956. Now it is the work of each day, each minute.
0 1958-05-11 - the ship that said OM, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Something quite curious took place during a recent meditation. I no longer recall when exactly, but it was at a time when there were many visitors, for the courtyard was full. After perhaps no more than a few minutes, I suddenly heard a distinct voice, coming from my right, say OM, like that. And then a second time, OM. What an impact it had upon me! I felt an emotion here (gesture towards the heart) as I have not felt for years and years and years. And all, all, all was filled with light, with forceit was absolutely marvelous. It was an invocation, and during the whole meditation the Presence was resplendent.
I said to myself, Who could have done that? I was not sure if only I had heard it, so I asked. The reply was, But it was the ship leaving! There was actually a ship which had left during the night3that is in support of those who said it was a ship. But for me, it was SOMEONE because I felt someone there and I thought, Oh! If someone, in the ardor of his soul, said that in this what I could call an atheistic silence. Because people here are so afraid of following tradition, of being the slaves of the old things, that they cast out anything closely or remotely resembling religion.
--
In any event, if it wasnt a man, if it was a ship, then the ship said it! Because it was THATit was that, it was nothing other than an invocation. And the result was fantastic!
People immediately thought, Oh, its the ship! Well, even if it was a ship, it was the ship that said OM!
And then I wondered, If we were to repeat the mantra we heard the other day4 (Om Namo Bhagavateh) during the half-hour meditation, what would happen?
What would happen?
--
During an Indian film on Dhruva in which this manna was chanted for a long time. This film was shown at the Ashram Playground on April 29, 1958.
In the same film.
0 1958-05-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Actually, when I myself am perfect, I believe that all the rest will become perfect automatically. But it does not seem possible to become perfect without there being a beginning of realization from the other side. So it proceeds like that, bumping from one side to the other, and we go stumbling along like a drunken man!
***
0 1958-06-06 - Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This morning while I was on the balcony, I had an interesting experience: the experience of mans effort, in all its forms and through all the ages, to approach the Divine. And I seemed to be growing wider and wider so that all the forms and all the ways of approaching the Divine attempted by man would be contained in the present Work.
It was represented by a kind of image in which I was as vast as the Universe, and each way of approaching the Divine was like a tiny image containing the characteristic form of this approach. And my impression was this: Why do people always limit, limit themselves? Narrow, narrow, narrow! They understand only when it is narrow.
--
Is this experience of May 1 related to the Supramental manifestation of 1956? Is it a supramental experience?
It is the result of the descent of the supramental substance into Matter. Only this substancewhat it has put into physical Mattercould have made it possible. It is a new ferment. From the material standpoint, it removes from physical Matter its tamas, the heaviness of its unconsciousness, and from the psychological standpoint, its ignorance and its falsehood. Matter is subtilized. But it has surely come only as a first experience to show how it will be.
0 1958-07-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
You see, the hu man species is a part of Nature, but as Sri Aurobindo has explained, from the moment mind expressed itself in man, it put him into a relationship with Nature very different from the relationship all the lower species have with her. All the lower species right up to man are completely under the rule of Nature; she makes them do whatever she wants, and they can do nothing without her consent. Whereas man begins to act and to live as an equal; not as an equal in terms of power, but from the standpoint of consciousness (he is beginning to do so since he has the capacity to study and to find out Natures secrets). He is not superior to her, far from it, but he is on an equal footing. And so he has acquiredthis is a fac the has acquired a certain power of independence that he immediately used to put himself under the influence of the hostile forces, which are not terrestrial but extra-terrestrial.
I am speaking of terrestrial Nature. Through their mental power, men had the choice and the freedom to make pacts with these extraterrestrial vital forces. There is a whole vital world that has nothing to do with the earth, it is entirely independent or prior to earths existence, it is self-existentwell, they have brought that down here! They have made what we see! And such being the case This is what terrestrial Nature told me: It is beyond my control.
--
There is nothing to say since the first thing done by the divine forces which e manated for the Creation was to take the wrong path!6 That is the origin, the seed of this marvelous spirit of independence the negation of surrender, in other words. man said, I have the power to think; I will do with it what I want, and no one has the right to intervene. I am free, I am an independent being, IN-DE-PEN-DENT! So thats how things stand: we are all independent beings!
But yesterday, in fact, I was looking (with all these mantras and these prayers and this whole vibration that has descended into the atmosphere, creating a state of constant calling in the atmosphere), and I remembered the old movements and how everything now has changed! I was also thinking of the old disciplines, one of which is to say, I am That.7 People were told to sit in meditation and repeat, I am That, to reach an identification. And it all seemed to me so obsolete, so childish, but at the same time a part of the whole. I looked, and it seemed so absurd to sit in meditation and say, I am That! I, what is this I who is That; what is this I, where is it? I was trying to find it, and I saw a tiny, microscopic point (to see it would almost require some gigantic instrument), a tiny, obscure point in an im-men-sity of Light, and that little point was the body. At the same timeit was absolutely simultaneous I saw the Presence of the Supreme as a very, very, very, VERY immense Being, within which was I in an attitude of (I was only a sensation, you see), an attitude (gesture of surrender) like this. There were no limits, yet at the same time, one felt the joy of being permeated, enveloped and of being able to widen, widen, widen indefinitelyto widen the whole being, from the highest consciousness to the most material consciousness. And then, at the same time, to look at this body and to see every cell, every atom vibrating with a divine, radiant Presence with all its Consciousness, all its Power, all its Will, all its Loveall, all, really and a joy! An extraordinary joy. And one did not disturb the other, nothing was contradictory and everything was felt at the same time. That was when I said, But truly! This body had to have the training it has had for more than seventy years to be able to bear all that without starting to cry out or dance or leap up or whatever it might be! No, it was calm (it was exultant, but it was very calm), and it remained in control of its movements and its words. In spite of the fact that it was really living in another world, it could apparently act normal due to this strenuous training in self-control by the REASONby the reasonover the whole being, which has tamed it and given it such a great cohesive power that I can BE in the experience, I can LIVE this experience, and at the same time respond with the most amiable of smiles to the most idiotic questions!
And then, it always ends in the same way, by a canticle to the action of the grace: O, Lord! You are truly marvelous! All the experiences I have needed to pass through You have given to me, all the things I needed to do to make this body ready You have made me do, and always with the feeling that it was You who was making me do itand with the universal disapproval of all the right-minded hu manity!
--
So'ham, the traditional mantra of the Vedantic path, which declares that the world is an illusion.
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0 1958-07-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It is mans mental consciousness that has filled all Nature with the idea of sin and all the misery it brings. Animals are not at all unhappy in the way we are. Not at all, not at all, exceptas Sri Aurobindo saysthose that are corrupted. Those that are corrupted are those that live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt, for their whole aspiration is to resemble man. man is the god. Hence there is dissimulation, hypocrisy: dogs lie. But men admire that. They say, Oh! How intelligent they are!
They have lost their divinity.
--
Its not a question of being conscious. There is no doubt that man is more evolved than the tiger, but the tiger is more divine than man. One shouldnt confuse things. These are two entirely different things.
The Divine is everywhere, in everything. We should never forget itnot for a second should we forget it. He is everywhere, in everything; and in an unconscious but spontaneous, therefore sincere, way, all that exists below the mental manifestation is divine, without mixture; in other words, it exists spontaneously and in harmony with its nature. It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally, he is much more conscious! Theres no question about it, its a fact, although what we call consciousness (what we call it, that is, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and mentalize things. It is not the true consciousness, but its what men call consciousness. So according to the hu man mode, it is obvious that man is much more conscious than the animal, but the hu man brings in sin and perversion which do not exist outside of this state we call consciouswhich in fact is not conscious but merely consists in mentalizing things and in having the ability to objectify them.
It is an ascending curve, but a curve that swerves away from the Divine. So naturally, one has to climb much higher to find a higher Divine, since it is a conscious Divine, whereas the others are divine spontaneously and instinctively, without being conscious of it. All our moral notions of good and evil, all of that, are what we have thrown over the creation with our distorted and perverted consciousness. It is we who have invented it.
0 1958-07-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But as soon as a man feels energetic, he immediately rushes into action. Or else, those who dont have the sense of doing something useful start gossiping. And still worse, those who have no control over themselves become intolerant and start arguing! If someone contradicts their will, they feel full of energy and they mistake that for a godlike wrath!
***
0 1958-07-23, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
In the final analysis, seeing the world such as it is and seems meant to be irremediably, hu man intellect has decided that this universe must be an error of God and that the manifestation or creation is certainly the result of a desire, the desire to manifest, know oneself, enjoy oneself. So the only thing to do is to put an end to this error as soon as possible by refusing to cling to desire and its fatal consequences.
But the Supreme Lord answers that the comedy is not entirely played out, and He adds: Wait for the last act; undoubtedly you will change your mind.
0 1958-08-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It is very difficult to manage both at the same time: the transformation of the body and taking care of people. But what can I do? I told Sri Aurobindo I would do the work, and I am doing it I cannot just abandon everything.
When I think of the time the hatha yogis devote to the work on the bodythey do nothing but that; they do nothing but that all the time, until they have attained a certain point. This is in fact the reason why Sri Aurobindo wanted none of it: he found that it took a lot of time for a rather meager result.
--
Last night, I had many dreams (not really dreams, but ); I used to find them very interesting because they gave me certain indications, all kinds of things, but when I saw it all now, I said to myself, Good Lord! What a waste of time! Instead, I could be living in a supramental consciousness and seeing things. So during the night, I made a resolution to change all this too. My nights have to change. I am already changing my days; now my nights have to change. But then all this subconscious in Matter, all this, it all has to change! Theres no choice, it has to be seen to.
Once you set to this work, it is such a formidable task! But what can I do?
0 1958-08-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Evidently the gods of the Puranas are a good deal worse than hu man beings, as we saw in that film the other day1 (and that story was absolutely true). The gods of the Overmind are infinitely more egocentric the only thing that counts for them is their power, the extent of their power. man has in addition a psychic being, so consequently he has true love and compassionwherein lies his superiority over the gods. It was very, very clearly expressed in this film, and its very true.
The gods are faultless, for they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint; it is their godly way. But if one looks at it from a higher point of view, if one has a higher vision, a vision of the whole, they have fewer qualities than man. In this film, it was proved that through their capacity for love and self-giving, men can have as much power as the gods, and even morewhen they are not egoists, when they can overcome their egoism.
Certainly man is nearer the Supreme than the gods. Provided he fulfills the necessary conditions, he can be nearerhe isnt so automatically, but he can be, he has the power, the potentiality to be.
Anusuya: wife of the rishi Atri and endowed with a great inner force. In her husband's absence, three gods came (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva) disguised as brahmins and asked her for something to eat. Then they refused to eat unless she served them naked. Since they were brahmins, she could not send them away without feeding them, so by her inner power, she changed them into babies and served them naked. This film was shown at the Ashram Playground on August 5, 1958.
0 1958-08-29, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The mantra written upon each of the souvenirs1 from the Himalayas has a strong power of evoking the Supreme Mother.
At the Thursday evening meditation, he appeared as the Guru of Tantric Initiation, magnified and seated upon a symbolic representation of the forces and riches of material Nature (in the middle of the playground, to my left), and he put into my hand something sufficiently material for me to feel the vibrations physically, and it had a great realizing power. It was a kind of luminous and very vibrant globe which I held in my hands during the whole meditation.
0 1958-08-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
[The disciple who managed the Ashram 'Atelier': mechanical workshop, maintenance garage, automobile service, etc.]
It was just at four oclock in the morning, and it woke me up. It was exactly like this I was apparently in my bathroom, and I had to open the door between the bathroom and Sri Aurobindos room; the moment I put my hand on the doorknob, I knew with an absolute certainty that destruction was awaiting me behind the door. It had the form or image of those great invaders of India, those who had swooped down upon India and destroyed everything in their wake But it was only an impression.
0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I would very much like to have a true mantra.
I have a whole stock of mantras; they have all come spontaneously, never from the head. They sprang forth spontaneously, as the Veda is said to have sprung forth.
I dont know when it begana very long time ago, before I came here, although some of them came while I was here. But in my case, they were always very short. For example, when Sri Aurobindo was here in his body, at any moment, in any difficulty, for anything, it always came like this: My Lord!simply and spontaneouslyMy Lord! And instantly, the contact was established. But since He left, it has stopped. I can no longer say it, for it would be like saying My Lord, My Lord! to myself.
I had a mantra in French before coming to Pondicherry. It was Dieu de bont et de misricorde [God of kindness and mercy], but what it means is usually not understoodit is an entire program, a universal program. I have been repeating this mantra since the beginning of the century; it was the mantra of ascension, of realization. At present, it no longer comes in the same way, it comes rather as a memory. But it was deliberate, you see; I always said Dieu de bont et de misricorde, because even then I understood that everything is the Divine and the Divine is in all things and that it is only we who make a distinction between what is or what is not the Divine.
My experience is that, individually, we are in relationship with that aspect of the Divine which is not necessarily the most in conformity with our natures, but which is the most essential for our development or the most necessary for our action. For me, it was always a question of action because, personally, individually, each aspiration for personal development had its own form, its own spontaneous expression, so I did not use any formula. But as soon as there was the least little difficulty in action, it sprang forth. Only long afterwards did I notice that it was formulated in a certain way I would utter it without even knowing what the words were. But it came like this: Dieu de bont et de misricorde. It was as if I wanted to eliminate from action all aspects that were not this one. And it lasted for I dont know, more than twenty or twenty-five years of my life. It came spontaneously.
--
The words came afterwards, as if they had been superimposed upon the states of consciousness, grafted onto them. Some of the associations seem unexpected, but they were the exact expression of the states of consciousness in their order of unfolding. They came one after another, as if the contact was trying to become more complete. And the last was like a triumph. As soon as I finished writing (in writing, all this becomes rather flat), the impetus within was still alive and it gave me the sense of an all-conquering Truth. And the last mantra sprang forth:
Seigneur, Dieu de la Vrit victorieuse!
--
Of course, these things should not be published. We can file them in this Agenda of the Supramental manifestation for later on. Later on, when the Victory is won, we shall say, If you want to see the curve
But what is going to come now? I constantly hear the Sanskrit mantra:
OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH1
It is there, all around me; it takes hold of all the cells and at once they spring forth in an ascension. And Naradas mantra, too:
Narayana, Narayana
--
When I have this mantra, instead of saying hello, good-bye, I shall say that. When I say hello, good-bye, it means Hello: the Presence is here, the Light is here. Good-bye: I am not going away, I am staying here.
But when I have this mantra, I believe something will happen.
(silence)
For the moment, of all the formulas or mantras, the one that acts most directly on this body, that seizes all the cells and immediately does this (vibrating motion) is the Sanskrit mantra: OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH.
As soon as I sit for meditation, as soon as I have a quiet minute to concentrate, it always begins with this mantra, and there is a response in the body, in the cells of the body: they all start vibrating.
This is how it happened: Y had just returned, and he brought back a trunk full of things which he then proceeded to show me, and his excitement made tight, tight little waves in the atmosphere, making my head ache; it made anyway, it was unpleasant. When I left, just after that had happened, I sat down and went like this (gesture of sweeping out) to make it stop, and immediately the mantra began.
It rose up from here (Mother indicates the solar plexus), like this: Om Namo Bhagavateh OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH. It was formidable. For the entire quarter of an hour that the meditation lasted, everything was filled with Light! In the deeper tones it was of golden bronze (at the throat level it was almost red) and in the higher tones it was a kind of opaline white light: OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH.
--
Unfortunately, I was unable to continue, because I dont have the time; it was just before the balcony darshan and I was going to be late. Something told me, That is for people who have nothing to do. Then I said, I belong to my work, and I slowly withdrew. I put on the brakes, and the action was cut short. But what remains is that whenever I repeat this mantra everything starts vibrating.
So each one must find something that acts on himself, individually. I am only speaking of the action on the physical plane, because mentally, vitally, in all the inner parts of the being, the aspiration is always, always spontaneous. I am referring only to the physical plane.
The physical seems to be more open to something that is repetitious for example, the music we play on Sundays, which has three series of combined mantras. The first is that of Chandi, addressed to the universal Mother:
Ya devi sarvabhuteshu matrirupena sansthita
--
The second is addressed to Sri Aurobindo (and I believe they have put my name at the end). It incorporates the mantra I was speaking of:
Om namo namah shrimirambikayai
--
So for these mantras, everything depends upon what you want to do with them. I am in favor of a short mantra, especially if you want to make both numerous and spontaneous repetitionsone or two words, three at most. Because you must be able to use them in all cases, when an accident is about to happen, for example. It has to spring up without thinking, without calling: it should issue forth from the being spontaneously, like a reflex, exactly like a reflex. Then the mantra has its full force.
For me, on the days when I have no special preoccupations or difficulties (days I could call normal, when I am normal), everything I do, all the movements of this body, all, all the words I utter, all the gestures I make, are accompanied and upheld by or lined, as it were, with this mantra:
OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH
--
You have no mantras that have come to you, that give you a more living feeling? Are their mantras long?
Yes, they are long. And he2 has not given me any mantra of the Mother, so They exist, but he has not given me any I dont know, they dont have much effect on me. It is something very mental.
Thats why it should spring forth from you.
--
This one, this mantra, OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, came to me after some time, for I felt well, I saw that I needed to have a mantra of my own, that is, a mantra consonant with what this body has to do in the world. And it was just then that it came.3 It was truly an answer to a need that had made itself felt. So if you feel the neednot there, not in your head, but here (Mother points to the center of her heart), it will come. One day, either you will hear the words, or they will spring forth from your heart And when that happens, you must hold onto it.
The first syllable of NAMO is pronounced with a short 'a,' as in nahmo. The final word is pronounced BHA-GAH-VA-TEH.
--
The different mantras or prayers that came to Mother and which She grouped under the heading Prayers of the Consciousness of the Cells, are included as an addendum to the Agenda of 1959.
***
0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
For people here in the Ashram, my work is not the same. It is more like a kind of atmosphere that extends everywherea very conscious atmospherewhich I let work for each one according to his need. I dont have a special action for each person, unless something requires my special attention. When I would tune into you while you were travelling, I clearly saw your image appear before me, as though you were looking at me, but now that you have returned here, I no longer see it. Rather, I receive a sensation or an impression; and as these sensations and impressions are innumerable, its rather like one element among many. It no longer imposes itself in such an entirely distinct way nor does it appear before me in the same manner, as a clear image of yourself, as though you wanted to know something.
As soon as I am alone, I enter into a very deep concentration,a state of consciousness, a kind of universal activity. Is it deep? What is it? It is far beyond all the mental regions, far, far beyond, and it is constant. As soon as I am alone or resting somewhere, thats how it is.
The other day when I was in this state of concentration, I had the vision that I mentioned to you. I felt I was being pulled, that something was pulling me and trying to draw my attention. I felt it very strongly. So I opened my eyes, my mental eyes (the physical eyes may remain opened or closed, it makes no difference either way; when I am concentrated, things on the physical plane no longer exist), I deliberately opened the minds eyes, for that is where I felt myself being pulled, and then I had this vision I told you of. Someone was trying to draw my attention, to tell me something. It takes someone really quite powerful, with a very great power of concentration, to do thatthere are certainly a great many people here and elsewhere who try to do this, yet I dont feel a thing.3
In the outer, practical domain, I might suddenly think of someone, so I know that this person is calling or thinking of me. When you left on your trip, I created a special link-up so that if ever, at any moment, you called me for anything, I would know it instantly, and I remained attentive and alert. But I do that only in exceptional cases. Generally speaking, when I havent made this special link-up, things keep coming in and coming in and coming in and coming in, and the answer goes out automatically, here or there or there or therehundreds and hundreds of things that I dont keep in my memory because then it would really be frightful. I dont keep these things in my consciousness; it is rather a work that is done automatically.
When you asked me if X4 were thinking of me, I consulted my atmosphere and saw that it was true, that even many times a day Xs thoughts were coming. So I know that he is concentrating on me, or something: it simply passes through me, and I answer automatically. But I dont particularly pay attention to X, unless you ask me a question about him, in which case I deliberately tune into him, then observe and determine whether its like this or like that. Whereas this vision the other day was something that thrust itself on me; I was in another region altogether, in my inner contemplation, my concentrationa very strong concentrationwhen I was forced to enter into contact with this being whose vision I had and who was obviously a very powerful being. After telling me what he had to tell me, he went away in a very peculiar way, not at all suddenly as most people appear and disappear, not at all like that. When I first saw him, there was a living form the being himself was there but upon leaving (probably to see the effect, to find out whether he had truly succeeded in making himself understood), he left behind a kind of image of himself. Afterwards, this image blurred and it left only a silhouette, an outline, then it disappeared altogether leaving only an impression. That was the last thing I saw. So I kept the impression and analyzed it to find out exactly what was involved; all this was filed away, and then it was over. I began my concentration once again.
I intentionally carry everybody in my active consciousness for the work, and I do the work consciously; but the extent to which people in the world, or those who are here in the Ashram, are conscious of this or receive the results depends upon them, though not exclusively.
The other day, for example, though I no longer recall exactly when (I forget everything on purpose)but it was in the last part 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 partially 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.
--
Before, I always had the negative experience of the disappearance of the ego, of the oneness of Creation, where everything implying separation disappearedan experience that, personally, I would call negative. Last Wednesday, while I was speaking (and thats why at the end I could no longer find my words), I seemed suddenly to have left this negative phenomenon and entered into the positive experience: the experience of BEING the Supreme Lord, the experience that nothing exists but the Supreme Lordall is the Supreme Lord, there is nothing else. And at that moment, the feeling of this infinite power that has no limit, that nothing can limit, was so overwhelming that all the functions of the body, of this mental machine that summons up words, all this was I could no longer speak French. Perhaps the words could have come to me in Englishprobably, because it was easier for Sri Aurobindo to express himself in English, and thats how it must have happened: it was the part embodied in Sri Aurobindo (the part of the Supreme that was embodied in Sri Aurobindo for its manifestation) that had the experience. This is what joined back with the Origin and caused the experience I was well aware of it. And that is probably why its transcription through English words would have been easier than through French words (for at these moments, such activities are purely mechanical, rather like automatic machines). And naturally the experience left something behind. It left the sense of a power that can no longer be qualified,5 really. And it was there yesterday evening.
The difficultyits not even a difficulty, its just a kind of precaution that is taken (automatically, in fact) in order to For example, the volume of Force that was to be expressed in the voice was too great for the speech organ. So I had to be a little attentive that is, there had to be a kind of filtering in the outermost expression, otherwise the voice would have cracked. But this isnt done through the will and reason, its automatic. Yet I feel that the capacity of Matter to contain and express is increasing with phenomenal speed. But its progressive, it cant be done instantly. There have often been people whose outer form broke because the Force was too strong; well, I clearly see that it is being dosed out. After all, this is exclusively the concern of the Supreme Lord, I dont bother about itits not my concern and I dont bother about itHe makes the necessary adjustments. Thus it comes progressively, little by little, so that no fundamental disequilibrium occurs. It gives the impression that ones head is swelling so tremendously it will burst! But then if there is a moment of stillness, it adapts; gradually, it adapts.
--
But how many people know how to use it in this way? Very few, which is why they have to be taught. What I call teach is to show, to give the example. We want to be the example of true living in the world. Its a challenge I am placing before the whole financial world: I am telling them that they are in the process of withering and ruining the earth with their idiotic system; and with even less than they are now spending for useless thingsmerely for inflating something that has no inherent life, that should be only an instrument at the service of life, that has no reality in itself, that is only a means and not an end (they make an end of something that is only a means)well then, instead of making of it an end, they should make it the means. With what they have at their disposal they could oh, transform the earth so quickly! Transform it, put it into contact, truly into contact, with the supramental forces that would make life bountiful and, indeed, constantly renewedinstead of becoming withered, stagnant, shrivelled up: a future moon. A dead moon.
We are told that in a few millions or billions of years, the earth will become some kind of moon. The movement should be the opposite: the earth should become more and more a resplendent sun, but a sun of life. Not a sun that burns, but a sun that illuminesa radiant glory.
--
The vastness beyond the creation or the cosmic manifestation, the solid base upon which all the rest can unfold.
***
0 1958-10-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Certain relationships are entirely within me, entirely. It is not a relationship between individuals, but a relationship between states of beingwhich means that with the same individual there may be many different relationships. If it were a single whole but I am still not sure if there is a single person with whom the relationship is global.
So there are parts which are entirely within me, entirely there is no difference; they are myself. There are other parts with which I am conscious of an exchangea very familiar, very intimate exchange. And there are parts outside of me with which I still have relationships, not exactly as with strangers but merely as acquaintances; it is still necessary to observe their reactions in order to do the correct thing. And the ratio between these different parts is naturally different depending upon the different individuals.
0 1958-10-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(The disciple asks to know what he must do and what his place is in the universal manifestation)
In all religious and especially occult initiations, the ritual of the different ceremonies is prescribed in every detail; all the words pronounced, all the gestures made have their importance, and the least infraction of the rule, the least fault committed can have fatal consequences. It is the same in material lifeif one had the initiation into the true way of living, one could transform physical existence.
--
The same can be said of physical culture and of all the sciences that are concerned with the body and its workings. If the material universe is considered as the outer sheath and the manifestation of the Supreme, then it can generally be said that all the physical sciences are the rituals of worship.
We always come back to the same thing: the absolute necessity for perfect sincerity, perfect honesty and a sense of the dignity of all we do so that we may do it as it should be done.
--
There is ones position in the universal hierarchy, which is something ineluctableit is the eternal lawand there is the development in the manifestation, which is an education; it is progressive and done from within the being. What is remarkable is that to become a perfect being, this positionwhatever it is, decreed since all eternity, a part of the eternal Truthmust manifest with the greatest possible perfection as a result of evolutionary growth. It is the junction, the union of the two, the eternal position and the evolutionary realization, that will make the total and perfect being, and the manifestation as the Lord has willed it since the beginning of all eternity (which has no beginning at all! ).
And for the cycle to be complete, one cannot stop on the way at any plane, not even the highest spiritual plane nor the plane closest to matter (like the occult plane in the vital, for example). One must descend right into matter, and this perfection in manifestation must be a material perfection, or otherwise the cycle is not completewhich explains why those who want to flee in order to realize the divine Will are in error. What must be done is exactly the opposite! The two must be combined in a perfect way. This is why all the honest sciences, the sciences that are practiced sincerely, honestly, exclusively with a will to know, are difficult pathsyet such sure paths for the total realization.
It brings up very interesting things. (What I am going to say now is very personal and consequently cannot be used, but it may be kept anyway:)
--
It opens up extraordinary horizons; once you have understood this, you have the keyyou have the key to many, many things: the different positions of each of the different saints, the different realizations and it resolves all the incoherencies of the various manifestations on earth.
For example, this question of PowerTHE Powerover Matter. Those who perceive me as the eternal, universal Mother and Sri Aurobindo as the Avatar are surprised that our power is not absolute. They are surprised that we have not merely to say, Let it be thus for it to be thus. This is because, in the integral realization, the union of the two is essential: a union of the power that proceeds from the eternal position and the power that proceeds from the sadhana through evolutionary growth. Similarly, how is it that those who have reached even the summits of yogic knowledge (I was thinking of Swami) need to resort to beings like gods or demigods to be able to realize things?Because they have indeed united with certain higher forces and entities, but it was not decreed since the beginning of time that they were this particular being. They were not born as this or that, but through evolution they united with a latent possibility in themselves. Each one carries the Eternal within himself, but one can join Him only when one has realized the complete union of the latent Eternal with the eternal Eternal.
0 1958-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
'If mankind only caught a glimpse of what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust and scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature to forbid the turning away of our feet from less ordinary pastures.'
Cent. Ed. Vol. XVII, p. 79
0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The story narrated in the film went like this: Narada, as usual, was having fun. (Narada is a demigod with a divine position that is, he can communicate with man and with the gods as he pleases, and he serves as an intermediary, but then he likes to have fun!) So he was quarrelling with one of the goddesses, I no longer recall which one, and he told her (Ah, yes! The quarrel was with Saraswati.) Saraswati was telling him that knowledge is much greater than love (much greater in that it is much more powerful than love), and he replied to her, You dont know what youre talking about! (Mother laughs) Love is much more powerful than knowledge. So she challenged him, saying, Well then, prove it to me.I shall prove it to you, he replied. And the whole story starts there. He began creating a whole imbroglio on earth just to prove his point.
It was only a film story, but anyway, the goddesses, the three wives of the Trimurti that is, the consort of Brahma, the consort of Vishnu and the consort of Shivajoined forces (!) and tried all kinds of things to foil Narada. I no longer recall the details of the story Oh yes, the story begins like this: one of the three I believe it was Shivas consort, Parvati (she was the worst one, by the way!)was doing her puja. Shiva was in meditation, and she began doing her puja in front of him; she was using an oil lamp for the puja, and the lamp fell down and burned her foot. She cried out because she had burned her foot. So Shiva at once came out of his meditation and said to her, What is it, Devi? (laughter) She answered, I burned my foot! Then Narada said, Arent you ashamed of what you have done?to make Shiva come out of his meditation simply because you have a little burn on your foot, which cannot even hurt you since you are immortal! She became furious and snapped at him, Show me that it can be otherwise! Narada replied, I am going to show you what it is to really love ones husbandyou dont know anything about it!
Then comes the story of Anusuya and her husb and (who is truly a husb and a very good man, but well, not a god, after all!), who was sleeping with his head resting upon Anusuyas knees. They had finished their puja (both of them were worshippers of Shiva), and after their puja he was resting, sleeping, with his head on Anusuyas knees. Meanwhile, the gods had descended upon earth, particularly this Parvati, and they saw Anusuya like that. Then Parvati exclaimed, This is a good occasion! Not very far away a cooking fire was burning. With her power, she sent the fire rolling down onto Anusuyas feetwhich startled her because it hurt. It began to burn; not one cry, not one movement, nothing because she didnt want to awaken her husband. But she began invoking Shiva (Shiva was there). And because she invoked Shiva (it is lovely in the story), because she invoked Shiva, Shivas foot began burning! (Mother laughs) Then Narada showed Shiva to Parvati: Look what you are doing; you are burning your husbands foot! So Parvati made the opposite gesture and the fire was put out.
Thats how it went.
--
No, not uniquely. It could apply in many other eases. Even if the Christians dont understand, there are many others who will!
Those who have read a little and who know something other than their little rut will understand.
--
To understand the workings of universal life, and even those of terrestrial life, one must know that in their own realms these are all living beings, each with his own independent reality. They would exist even if men did not exist! Most of these gods existed before man.
They are beings who belong to the progressive creation of the universe and who have themselves presided over its formation from the most etheric or subtle regions to the most material regions. They are a descent of the divine creative Spirit that came to repair the mischief in short, to repair what the Asuras had done. The first makers created disorder and darkness, an unconsciousness, and then it is said that there was a second lineage of makers to repair that evil, and the gods gradually descended through realities that were ever moreone cant say dense because it isnt really dense, nor can one even say material, since matter as we know it does not exist on these planesthrough more and more concrete substances.
--
There is the whole Chaldean tradition, and there is also the Vedic tradition, and there was very certainly a tradition anterior to both that split into two branches. Well, all these occult experiences have been the same. Only the description differs depending upon the country and the language. The story of creation is not told from a metaphysical or psychological point of view, but from an objective point of view, and this story is as real as our stories of historical periods. Of course, its not the only way of seeing, but it is just as legitimate a way as the others, and in any event, it recognizes the concrete reality of all these divine beings. Even now, the experiences of Western occultists and those of Eastern occultists exhibit great similarities. The only difference is in the way they are expressed, but the manipulation of the forces is the same.
I learned all this through Theon. Probably, he was I dont know if he was Russian or Polish (a Russian or Polish Jew), he never said who he really was or where he was born, nor his age nor anything.
--
He said he had received initiation in India (he knew a little Sanskrit and the Rig-Veda thoroughly), and then he formulated a tradition which he called the cosmic tradition and which he claimed to have received I dont know howfrom a tradition anterior to that of the Cabala and the Vedas. But there were many things (Madame Theon was the clairvoyant one, and she received visions; oh, she was wonderful!), many things that I myself had seen and known before knowing them which were then substantiated.
So personally, I am convinced that there was indeed a tradition anterior to both these traditions containing a knowledge very close to an integral knowledge. Certainly, there is a similarity in the experiences. When I came here and told Sri Aurobindo certain things I knew from the occult standpoint, he always said that it conformed to the Vedic tradition. And as for certain occult practices, he told me that they were entirely tantric and I knew nothing at that time, absolutely nothing, neither the Vedas nor the Tantras.
--
However, you must have at least a little experience of these things to understand them. Otherwise, if you are convinced that all this is just hu man fancy or mental formations, if you believe that these gods have such and such a form because men have imagined them to be like that, or that they have such and such defects or qualities because men have envisioned it that wayas with all those who say God is created in the image of man and exists only in hu man thoughtall such people wont understand, it will seem absolutely ridiculous to them, a kind of madness. You must live a little, touch the subject a little to know how concrete it is.
Naturally, children know a great dealif they have not been spoiled. There are many children who return to the same place night after night and continue living a life they have begun there. When these faculties are not spoiled with age, they can be preserved within one. There was a time when I was especially interested in dreams, and I could return exactly to the same place and continue some work I had begun there, visit something, for example, or see to something, some work of organization or some discovery or exploration; you go to a certain place, just as you go somewhere in life, then you rest a while, then you go back and begin againyou take up your work just where you left it, and you continue. You also notice that there are things entirely independent of you, certain variations which were not at all created by you and which occurred automatically during your absence.
But then, you must LIVE these experiences yourself; you yourself must see, you must live them with enough sincerity to see (by being sincere and spontaneous) that they are independent of any mental formations. Because one can take the opposite line and make an intensive study of the way mental formations act upon eventswhich is very interesting. But thats another field. And this study makes you very careful, very prudent, because you start noticing to what extent you can delude yourself. Therefore, both one and the other, the mental formation and the occult reality, must be studied to see what the ESSENTIAL difference is between them. The one exists in itself, entirely independent of what we think about it, and the other
--
In Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's terminology, 'psychic' or 'psychic being' means the soul or the portion of the Supreme in man which evolves from life to life until it becomes a fully self-conscious being. The soul is a special capacity or grace of hu man beings on earth.
The film on August 5.
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
So in fact, only the final wording is correct, but from the point of view of the historical unfolding, it is interesting to observe the passage. It was exactly the same phenomenon for the experience of the Supramental manifestation. Both these things, the experience of November 7 and of the Supramental, occurred in the same way, identically: I WAS the experience, and nothing else. Nothing but the experience at the time it was occurring. And only slowly, while coming out of it, did the previous knowledge, the previous experiences, all the accumulation of what had come before, examine it and put it in its place.
This is why I arrive at a verbal expression progressively, gropingly; these are not literary gropingsit is aimed at being precise, specific and concise at the same time.
--
This vision of the Inconscient (Mother remains gazing for a moment) it was the MENTAL Inconscient. Because the starting point was mental. A special Inconscientrigid, hard, resistantwith all that the mind has brought into our consciousness. But it was far worse, far worse than a purely material Inconscient! A mentalized Inconscient, as it were. All this rigidity, this hardness, this narrowness, this fixitya FIXITYcomes from the presence of the mind in creation. When the mind was not manifested, the Inconscient was not like that! It was formless and had the plasticity of something that is formless the plasticity has gone.
It is a terrible image of the Minds action in the Inconscient.
0 1958-11-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I feel disguised.1 And I detest hypocrisy I have many faults, but not that one.
So I believe it would be better for me to leave.
--
But there is always this wretched question of money. I need it to leave and to pay for the journey. Afterwards, I will manage. Anyway, it is all the same to me; I am not afraid of anything any longer.
It seems to me that the sooner I leave the better, because of this hypocrisy I detest.2
0 1958-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
There is night and sun, night and sun, and night again, many nights, but one must cling to this will for surrender, cling as through a storm, and put everything into the hands of the Supreme Lord. Until the day when the Sun shall shine forever, the day of total Victory.
The Supramental Ship.
0 1958-11-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And ifit can happenif the second attempt also miscarries, if the conditions make the experience the soul is seeking still more difficult for example, if one is in a body with an inadequate will or some distortion in the thought, or an egoism too too hardened, and it ends in suicide, it is dreadful. I have seen this many times, it creates a dreadful karma that can be repeated for lifetimes on end before the soul can conquer it and manage to do what it wants. And each time, the conditions become more difficult, each time it requires a still greater effort. And people who know this say, You cannot get out! In fact, it is this kind of desire to escape which pushes you into more foolish things3 that result in a still greater accumulation of difficulty. There are momentsmoments and circumstanceswhen no one is there to help you, and then things become so horrible, the circumstances become so abominable.
But if the soul has had but ONE call, but ONE contact with the Grace, then in your next life you are put in the conditions, once, whereby EVERYTHING can be swept away at one stroke. And at this present moment on earth, you cannot imagine the number of people I have met that is, the number of soulswho had reached out towards this possibility with such an intensity and they have all found themselves on my path.
--
Oh, the most terrible of all is when one does not have the strength, the courage, something indomitable! How many times do they come to tell me, I want to die, I want to flee, I want to die.I say, But die, then, die to yourself! No one is asking you to let your ego survive! Die to yourself since you want to die! Have that courage, the true courage, to die to your egoism.
But because it is karma, one must, one must DO something oneself. Karma is the construction of the ego; the ego MUST DO something, everything cannot be done for it. This is it, THIS is the thing: karma is the result of the egos actions, and only when the ego abdicates is the karma dissolved. One can help it along, one can assist it, give it strength, bestow courage upon it, but the ego must then make use of it.
0 1958-11-27 - Intermediaries and Immediacy, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It is like the story X told me of his guru2 who could comm and the coming of Kali (something which seems quite natural to me when one is sufficiently developed); well, not only could he commend the coming of Kali, but Kali with I dont know how many crores of her warriors! For me, Kali was Kali, after all, and she did her work; but in the universal organization, her action, the innumerable multiplicity of her action, is expressed by an innumerable multitude of conscious entities at work. It is this individualization, as it were, that gives to these forces a consciousness and a certain play of freedom, and this is what makes all the difference in action. It is in this respect that the occult system is an absolutely indispensable complement to spiritual action.
The spiritual action is direct, but it may not be immediate (anyway, thats my experience). Sri Aurobindo said that with the supramental presence, it becomes immediate and I have experienced this. But this would then mean that the supramental Power automatically com mands all these intermediaries, whereas if its not present, even the highest spiritual power would need a specialized knowledge to act in this realm, a knowledge equivalent to an occult or initiatory knowledge of all these realms. This is why I told X, Well, you taught me many things while you were here. There is always something to learn.
Of course, when the Supramental is here, it will be very different. I see it clearly: in moments when it is there, everything is turned inside out, and all this belongs to a world to the world of preparation. It is like a preparation, a long preparation.
It remains to be seen if all this has first to be mastered before there is even the possibility of holding the Supramental, of FIXING it in the manifestation. That is the great difference. For example, those with the power to materialize forces or beings lack the capacity to fix them, for these are fluid things which act and are then dissolved. That is the difference with the physical world where it is this condensation of energy that makes things (Mother strikes the arms of her chair) stable. All the things in the extraphysical realms are not stable, they are fluidfluid and consequently uncertain.3
The disciple's tantric guru.
0 1958-11-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
As it is, the physical body is really only a very disfigured shadow of the eternal life of the Self, but this physical body is capable of a progressive development; the physical substance progresses through each individual formation, and one day it will be able to build a bridge between physical life as we know it and the supramental life that is to manifest.
***
0 1958-12-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Mother, I have made many mistakes, I have often been rebellious and fallen into many holes. Help me to pick myself up, give me nonetheless a little of your Love. This has to change.
I do not want to remain in Hyderabad. This is not the atmosphere I need, although everything is very quiet here.
0 1958-12-15 - tantric mantra - 125,000, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
object:0_1958-12-15 - tantric mantra - 125,000
author class:The Mother
--
Swami received me warmly and is doing all he can with all his heart. I am following his instructions to the letter for I believe that your grace is acting through him. Furthermore, he is totally devoted to you and spoke of you as no one ever hashe understands many things. I was unfair in my reactions towards him.
At the new moon, when I felt very down, he gave me the first tantric mantraa mantra to Durga. For a period of 41 days, I must repeat it 125,000 times and go every morning to the Temple, stand before Parvati and recite this mantra within me for at least one hour. Then I must go to the sanctuary of Shiva and recite another mantra for half an hour. Practically speaking, I have to repeat constantly within me the mantra to Durga in a silent concentration, whatever I may be doing on the outside. In these conditions, it is difficult to think of you and this has created a slight conflict in me, but I believe that your Grace is acting through Swami and through Durga, whom I am invoking all the time I remember what you told me about the necessity for intermediaries and I am obeying Swami unreservedly.
Mother, things are far from being what they were the first time in Rameswaram, and I am living through certain moments that are hell the enemy seems to have been unleashed with an extraordinary violence. It comes in waves, and after it recedes, I am literally SHATTEREDphysically, mentally and vitally drained. This morning, while going to the temple, I lived through one of these moments. All this suffering that suddenly sweeps down upon me is horrible. Yes, I had the feeling of being BACKED UP AGAINST A WALL, exactly as in your vision I was up against a wall. I was walking among these immense arcades of sculptured granite and I could see myself walking, very small, all alone, alone, ravaged with pain, filled with a nameless despair, for nowhere was there a way out. The sea was nearby and I could have thrown myself into it; otherwise, there was only the sanctuary of Parvati but there was no more Africa to flee to, everything closed in all around me, and I kept repeating, Why? Why? This much suffering was truly inhu man, as if my last twenty years of nightmare were crashing down upon me. I gritted my teeth and went to the sanctuary to say my mantra. The pain in me was so strong that I broke into a cold sweat and almost fainted. Then it subsided. Yet even now I feel completely battered.
I clearly see that the hour has come: either I will perish right here, or else I will emerge from this COMPLETELY changed. But something has to change. Mother, you are with me, I know, and you are protecting me, you love me I have only you, only you, you are my Mother. If these moments of utter darkness return and they are bound to return for everything to be exorcised and conqueredprotect me in spite of myself. Mother, may your Grace not abandon me. I want to be done with all these old phantoms, I want to be born anew in your Light; it has to beotherwise I can no longer go on.
0 1958-12-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Your last letter was a great comfort to me. If you were not there, with me, everything would be so absurd and impossible. I am again disturbing you because Swami tells me that you are worried and that I should write to you. Not much has changed, except that I am holding on and am confident. Yesterday, I again suffered an agonizing wave, in the temple, and I found just enough strength to repeat your name with each beat of my heart, like someone drowning. I remained as motionless as a pillar of stone before the sanctuary, with only your name (my mantra would not come out), then it cleared. It was brutal. I am confident that with each wave I am gaining in strength, and I know you are there. But I am aware that if the enemy is so violent it is because something in me responds, or has responded, something that has not made its surrender that is the critical point. Mother, may your grace help me to place everything in your hands, everything, without any shadow. I want so much to emerge into the Light, to be rid of all this once and for all.
I am following Swamis instructions to the letter. Sometimes it all seems to lack warmth and spontaneity, but I am holding on. I might add that we are living right next to the bazaar, amidst a great racket 20 hours a day, which does not make things easier. So I repeat my mantra as one pounds his fists against the walls of a prison. Sometimes it opens a little, you send me a little joy, and then everything becomes better again.
Swami told me that the mantra to Durga is intended to pierce through into the subconscient. To complement this work, he does his pujas to Kali, and finally one of his friends, X, the High Priest of the temple in Rameswaram (who presided over my initiation and has great occult powers), has undertaken to say a very powerful mantra over me daily, for a period of eight days, to extirpate the dark forces from my subconscious. The operation already began four days ago. While reciting his mantra, he holds a glass of water in his hand, then he makes me drink it. It seems that on the eighth day, if the enemy has been trapped, this water turns yellow then the operation is over and the poisoned water is thrown out. (I tell you all this because I prefer that you know.) In any event, I like X very much, he is a very luminous, very good man. If I am not delivered after all this!
In truth, I believe only in the Grace. My mantra and all the rest seem to me only little tricks to try to win over your Grace.
Mother, love me. I have only you, I want to belong to you alone.
--
I have received your letter of the 24th. You did well to write, not because I was worried, but I like to receive news for it fixes my work by giving me useful material details. I am glad that X is doing something for you. I like this man and I was counting upon him. I hope he will succeed. Perhaps his work will be useful here, too for I have serious reasons to believe that this time occult and even definite magic practices aimed directly against my body have been mixed in with the attacks. This has complicated things somewhat, so as yet I have not resumed any of my usual activities I am still upstairs resting, but in reality fighting. Yesterday, the Christmas distribution took place without me, and it is likely that it will be the same for January 1st. The work, too, has been completely interrupted. And I do not yet know how long this will last.
Keep me posted on the result of Xs action; it interests me very much
0 1958-12-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
If you wish, two things can be done to help your action: either X can undertake certain mantric operations upon you here in Rameswaram, or better still, he can immediately come to Pondicherry with Swami and do what is needed in front of you.
Sweet Mother, I indeed suspect that you want to endure, to bear this struggle all alone. Oh, I think I understand a number of things about the mechanism of these attacks and their connection with me, about the Divine Love that embraces all and takes into itself the suffering and the evil of menall this overwhelms me with a sudden understanding. It seems to me that I am seeing and feeling all that you are facing, all that you are taking upon yourself for us. The suffering of the Divine in Matter has been an overwhelming revelation to meAh! I see, I want to fight, I want to be totally on your side; I am now and forever determined.
0 1958 12 - Floor 1, young girl, we shall kill the young princess - black tent, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Two or three days after I retired to my room upstairs,1 early in the night I fell into a very heavy sleep and found myself out of the body much more materially than I do usually. This degree of density in which you can see the material surroundings exactly as they are. The part that was out seemed to be under a spell and only half conscious. When I found myself at the first floor where everything was absolutely black, I wanted to go up again, but then I discovered that my hand was held by a young girl whom I could not see in the darkness but whose contact was very familiar. She pulled me by the hand telling me laughingly, No, come, come down with me, we shall kill the young princess. I could not understand what she meant by this young princess and, rather unwillingly, I followed her to see what it was. Arriving in the anteroom which is at the top of the staircase leading to the ground floor, my attention was drawn in the midst of all this total obscurity to the white figure of Kamala2 standing in the middle of the passage between the hall and Sri Aurobindos room. She was as it were in full light while everything else was black. Then I saw on her face such an expression of intense anxiety that to comfort her I said, I am coming back. The sound of my voice shook off from me the semi-trance in which I was before and suddenly I thought, Where am I going? and I pushed away from me the dark figure who was pulling me and in whom, while she was running down the steps, I recognized a young girl who lived with Sri Aurobindo and me for many years and died five years back. This girl during her life was under the most diabolical influence. And then I saw very distinctly (as through the walls of the staircase) down below a small black tent which could scarcely be perceived in the surrounding darkness and standing in the middle of the tent the figure of a man, head and face shaved (like the sannyasin or the Buddhist monks) covered from head to foot with a knitted outfit following tightly the form of his body which was tall and slim. No other cloth or garment could give an indication as to who he could be. He was standing in front of a black pot placed on a dark red fire which was throwing its reddish glow on him. He had his right arm stretched over the pot, holding between two fingers a thin gold chain which looked like one of mine and was unnaturally visible and bright. Shaking gently the chain he was chanting some words which translated in my mind, She must die the young princess, she must pay for all she has done, she must die the young princess.
Then I suddenly realized that it was I the young Princess and as I burst into laughter, I found myself awake in my bed.
0 1959-01-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And it happened just as I was despairing of ever getting out of it. I seemed to be touching a kind of fundamental bedrock, so painful, so suffering, and full of revolt because of too much suffering. And I saw that all my efforts, all the meditations, aspirations, mantras, were only covering up this suffering bedrock without touching it. I saw this fundamental thing in me very clearly, a poignant knot, ever ready for an absolute negation. I saw it and I said to you, Mother, only your grace can remove this. I said this to you in the temple that morning, in total despair. And then, the knot was undone. Xs action contri buted a lot, with your grace acting through him. But truly, I have traversed a veritable hell this last while.
X continues his work on me daily; it is to last 41 days in all. He told me that he wants to undo the things of several births. When it is over, he will explain it all to me. I do not know how to tell you how luminous and good this man is, he is a very great soul. He is also giving me Sanskrit lessons, and little by little, each evening, speaks to me of the Tantra.
His action upon you is to continue for another five days, after which he is positive that you will be entirely saved. According to him, it is indeed a magic attack originating in Pondicherry, and perhaps even from someone in the Ashram!! He told me that this evil person would finally be forced to appear before you I am learning many interesting things from him.
Mother, by way of expressing to you my gratitude, I want to work now to open myself totally to your Light and become truly an egoless instrument, your conscious instrument. Mother, you are the sole Reality.
--
His action here has been very effective and really very interesting. I still do not know whether someone has really done black magic, and the villain has yet to appear before me. But already several days ago the malefic influence completely disappeared without leaving any trace in the atmosphere. Also their mantric intervention did not stop at that, for it has had another most interesting result. I am preparing a long letter for Swami to explain all this to him
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.
0 1959-01-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Your last letter gave us great pleasure, knowing that you have finally recovered physically. But we deeply hope that you will not again take up the countless activities that formerly consumed all your timeso many people come to you egoistically, for prestige, to be able to say that they are on familiar terms with you. You know this, of course
As for myself, a step has definitely been taken, and I am no longer swept away by this painful torrent. Depressions and attacks still come, but no longer with the same violence as before. X told me that 2/3 of the work has been done and that everything would be purged in twelve days or so, then the thing will be enclosed in a jar and buried somewhere or thrown into the sea, and he will explain it all to me. I will write and tell you about it.
As for the true tantric initiation, this is what X told me: I will give you initiation. You are fit. You belong to that line. It will come soon, some months or some years. Shortly you shall reach the junction. When the time has come, you yourself will come and open a door in me and I shall give you initiation.1 And he made me understand that an important divine work was reserved for me in the future, a work for the Mother. The important practical point is that I have rapidly to develop my knowledge of Sanskrit. The mantra given to me seems to grow in power as I repeat it.
Sweet Mother, by what Grace have you guided and protected me through all these years? There are moments when I have the vision of this Grace, bringing me to the verge of tears. I see so clearly that you are doing everything, that you are all that is good in me, my aspiration and my strength. Me is all that is bad, all that resists, me is horribly false and falsifying. If your Grace withdraws for one second, I collapse, I am helpless.2 You alone are my strength, the source of my life, the joy and fulfillment to which I aspire.
--
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 1959-01-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I will therefore give you initiation this Friday or Saturday, on the day of the full moon or the day before. This first stage will last three months during which you will have to repeat 1 lakh2 times the mantra that I will give you. At the end of three months, I will come to see you in Pondicherryor you will come here for a fortnight, and as soon as I have received the message from my guru, I will give you the second stage that will last three months as well. At the end of these three months, you will receive the full initiation. X warned me that the first stage I am to receive provokes attacks and tests but that all this disappears with the second stage. Forewarned is forearmed. For what reason I do not know, but X told me that the particular nature of my initiation should remain secret and that he will say nothing about it to Swami, and he added (in speaking of the speed of the process), But you will not be less than the Swami. (!!) There, I wanted you to knowbesides, you were present in Xs vision. All this happened at a time when I was in the most desperate crisis I have ever known. Sweet Mother, there is no end to expressing my gratitude to you, and yet with the least trial, I am reduced to nothing. Why have you so much grace for me?
I would like very much to return to Pondicherry for the February Darshan and once again begin working for you. Today I am sending a second lot to Pavitra and tomorrow I will start on the Aphorisms, for I do not want to make you wait any longer. I will send a third and final lot to Pavitra by the end of the month, in time for printing. I am very touched, sweet Mother, by your attention and the money you are sending me.
--
Sweet Mother, do not waste time writing to me; you have so many things to do and I feel a little awkward disturbing you so often.
***
0 1959-01-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
By a special grace, X gave me both stages of the tantric initiation at the same time, although they are normally separated by several years; then if all goes well, he will give me the full initiation in 6 months. I have thus received a mantra, along with the power of realizing it. X told me that a realization should come at the beginning of the fifth month if I repeat the mantra strictly according to his instructions, but he again told me that the hostile forces would do all they could to prevent me from saying my mantra: mental suggestions and even illness. X has understood that I have work at the Ashram, and he has exempted me from the outer forms (pujas and other rituals), but nevertheless I must repeat my mantra very accurately every day (3,333 times, that is, a little more than 3 hours uninterrupted in the mornings, and more than 2 hours in the evening). I must therefore organize myself in such a way as to get up very early in the morning in Pondicherry, for in no case will your work suffer.
Apart from this, he has not yet entirely finished the work of purging that he has been doing on me for over a month, but I believe that everything will be completed in a short time from now.
Sweet Mother, I have a kind of fear that all these mantras are not bringing me nearer to you I mean you in your physical body, for it is not upon you physically that I was told to concentrate. Also, I almost never see you in my dreams any longer, or else only very vaguely. Last night, I dreamed that I was offering you flowers (not very pretty ones), one of which was called mantra, but I did not see you in my dream. Mother, I would like to be true, to do the right thing, to be as you want me to be.
I am your child. I belong to you alone.
--
My body would also like to have a mantra to repeat. Those it has are not enough for it anymore. It would like to have one to hasten its transformation. It is ready to repeat it as many times as needed, provided that it does not have to be out loud, for it is very rarely alone and does not want to speak of this to anyone. Truly, the Ashram atmosphere is not very favorable for this kind of thing. You will have to take precautions so as not to be disturbed or interrupted in an inopportune way. Domestic servants, curious people, so-called friends can all serve as instruments of the hostile forces to put a spoke in the wheels. I will do my best to protect you, but you will have a lot to do yourself and will have to be as firm as an iron rod.
I am not writing you all this to discourage you from coming. But I want you to succeed; for me that is more important than anything else, no matter what the price. So, know for certain that I am with you all the time and more so especially when you repeat your mantra
In constant communion in the effort towards victory; my love and my force never leave you.
0 1959-01-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I have reflected for a long time on that passage in your letter where you say that your body needs a mantra to hasten its transformation. Certainly X can do something in this realm, but I have not yet spoken to him (and I shall not speak of this to Swami).
X knows very little about your true work and what Swami has been able to explain to him is rather inadequate, for I do not believe that he himself understands it very well. So I shall have to try to make myself understood quite clearly to X and tell him exactly and simply what it is you need. The word transformation is too abstract. Each mantra has a very specific actionat least I believe soand I must be able to tell X in a concrete way the exact powers or capacities you are now seeking, and the general goal or the particular results required. Then he will find the mantra or mantras that apply.
My explanations will have to be simple, for X speaks English with difficulty, thus subtleties are out of the question. (I am teaching him a little English while he is teaching me Sanskrit, and we manage to understand each other rather well all the same. He understands more than he can speak.)
I do not want to mention this to Swami, as X is not very happy about the way Swami seizes upon every occasion to appropriate things, and particularly mantras (I will explain this to you when we meet again). It is especially the way he says I. Nothing very seriousit is Swamis bad side, though he has good ones too. You know that, however.
So I would like to speak to X knowledgeably, in a very precise way, and I am waiting only for you to tell me what I should say. The thing is too important to be approached lightly and vaguely.
--
As for my mantra, I say it only partially now, but X will fix an auspicious day to begin it really according to the rules when I am in Pondicherry, for theoretically, one should not move once the work has begun. The 12th of February is an auspicious day, if you decide that I should return by then (or a little before to get things ready); otherwise another date may be fixed later on.
Your letter, Sweet Mother, has filled me with strength and resolution. I want to be victorious and I want to serve you. I see very well that gradually I can be taught many useful things by X. The essential thing is first of all to lose this ego which falsifies everything. Finally, through your grace, I believe that I have passed a decisive turning point and that there is a beginning of real consecration and I feel your Love, your Presence. Things are opening a little.
Sweet Mother, I love you and I want to serve you truly.
--
I have reflected a great deal on a possible mantra, and I have also seen the difficulty of receiving something that does not have a narrowing effect One must at least have an idea of the possibility (at least) of the supermind to understand what I need
As for your arrival here, the day you mentioned is the Saraswati Puja I will go downstairs to give blessings. If you arrive on the previous day, the 11th I will arrange to see you at 10 oclock, and then you can begin your mantra on the 12th.
Simply send me word to let me know if this is all right. Tell me also if you need money for your return, and how much, in time for me to send it.
0 1959-03-10 - vital dagger, vital mass, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(The disciple returned to the Ashram, but as he was very quickly seized again by his mania for the road, the Agenda of 1959, alas, is strewn with great gaps and is almost nonexistent. The following conversation is in regard to one of Mother's commentaries on the Dhammapada: 'Evil')
I spent a nighta night of battlewhen, for some reason or other, a multitude of vital formations of all kinds entered into the room: beings, things, embryos of beings, residues of beingsall kinds of things And it was a frightful assault, absolutely disgusting.
0 1959-03-26 - Lord of Death, Lord of Falsehood, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This Asura of Falsehood is the one who delegated the Titan that is always near me. He chose the most powerful Titan there is on earth and sent him specially to attack this body. So even if one manages to enchain or kill this Titan, it is likely that the Lord of Falsehood will delegate another form, and still another, and still another, in order to achieve his aim.
In the end, only the Supramental will have the power to destroy it. When the hour comes, all this will disappear, without any need to do anything.
0 1959-04-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Henceforth I refuse to be an accomplice to this force. It is my enemy. Whatever form it may take, or whatever supports it may find in my nature, I will refuse to yield to it and will cling to you. You are the only reality: that is my mantra. Anything that seeks to make me doubt you is my enemy. You are the only Reality.
And each time I feel the shadow approach, I will call to you, immediately.
0 1959-04-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The divine perfection is always there above us; but for man to become divine in consciousness and act and to live inwardly and outwardly the divine life is what is meant by spirituality; all lesser meanings given to the word are inadequate fumblings or impostures.1
This text by Sri Aurobindo (The Hu man Cycle, Cent. Ed. Vol. XV p. 247) was translated into French by Mother on the occasion of writing to Satprem.
0 1959-05-19 - Ascending and Descending paths, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I have also come to realize that for this sadhana of the body, the mantra is essential. Sri Aurobindo gave none; he said that one should be able to do all the work without having to resort to external means. Had he reached the point where we are now, he would have seen that the purely psychological method is inadequate and that a japa is necessary, because only japa has a direct action on the body. So I had to find the method all alone, to find my mantra by myself. But now that things are ready, I have done ten years of work in a few months. That is the difficulty, it requires time
And I repeat my mantra constantlywhen I am awake and even when I sleep. I say it even when I am getting dressed, when I eat, when I work, when I speak with others; it is there, just behind in the background, all the time, all the time.
In fact, you can immediately see the difference between those who have a mantra and those who dont. With those who have no mantra, even if they have a strong habit of meditation or concentration, something around them remains hazy and vague. Whereas the japa imparts to those who practice it a kind of precision, a kind of solidity: an armature. They become galvanized, as it were.
Original English.
0 1959-05-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
May Your Will be done in all things and at every moment. And may Your Love manifest.
As for you, I received your promise made very solemnly at a moment of clear consciousness, and I am sure you will not fail in it.
--
I can easily understand that your task on this earth is not particularly encouraging and you must find our hu man matter stupid and rebellious. I do not wish to throw upon you more bad things than you already receive, but I wish you could also understand certain things. I am not made for this withered life, not made for putting sentences together all day long, not made for living alone in my holefriendless, loveless, with nothing but mantras, and waiting for a better that never comes. For three years I have wanted to leave and each time I yielded out of scruples that you needed me, though also because I am attached to you. But after the [book on] Sri Aurobindo, there will be something else, there will always be something else that will make my departure look like a betrayal. I am fed up with living in my head, always in my head, with paper and ink. It was not of this that I dreamed when I was ten years old and ran with the wind over the untamed heaths. I am suffocating. You ask too much of me; or rather, I am not worth your expectation.
A love for you might have held me here. And indeed, for you I have devotion, veneration, respect, an attachment, but there has never been this marvelous thing, warm and full, that links one to a being in the same beating of a heart. Through love, I could do all, accept all, endure all, sacrifice all but I do not feel this love. You cannot give yourself with your head, through a mental decision, yet that is what I have been doing for five years. I have tried to serve you as best I could. But I am at the end of my rope. I am suffocating.
0 1959-05-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
1) There is the destiny of the adventurer: it is the one in me that needs the sea or the forest and wide open spaces and struggles. This was the best part of my childhood. I can sit on it and tell myself that the adventure is within, and it might work for a while. But this untamed child in me continues to live all the same, and it is something very valuable in me. I cannot kill it through reasoning, even spiritual reasoning. And if I tell it that everything lies within, not without, it replies, Then why was I born, why this manifestation in the outer world? In the end, it is not a question of reasoning. It is a fact, like the wind upon the heaths.
2) There is the destiny of the writer in me. And this too is linked to the best of my soul. It is also a profound need, like adventuring upon the heaths, because when I write certain things, I brea the in a certain way. But during the five years I have been here, I have had to bow to the fact that, materially, there is no time to write what I would like (I recall how I had to wrench out this Orpailleur, which I have not even had time to revise). This is not a reproach, Mother, for you do all you can to help me. But I realize that to write, one must have leisure, and there are too many less personal and more serious things to do. So I can also sit on this and tell myself that I am going to write a Sri Aurobindo but this will not satisfy that other need in me, and periodically it awakens and sprouts up to tell me that it too needs to breathe.
3) There is also the destiny that feels hu man love as something divine, something that can be transfigured and become a very powerful driving force. I did not believe it possible, except in dreams, until the day I met someone here. But you do not believe in these things, so I shall not speak of it further. I can gag this also and tell myself that one day all will be filled in the inner divine love. But that does not prevent this other need in me from living and from finding that life is dry and from saying, Why this outer manifestation if all life is in the inner realms? But neither can I stifle this with reasoning.
So there remains the pure spiritual destiny, pure interiorization. That is what I have been trying to do for the last five years, without much success. There are good periods of collaboration, because one part of my being can be happy in any condition. But in a certain way this achievement remains truncated, especially when you base spiritual life on a principle of integrality. And these three destinies in me have their own good reasons, which are true: they are not inferior, they are not incidental, they are woven from the very threads that created the spiritual life in me. My error is to open the door to revolt when I feel too poignantly one or the other being stifled.
0 1959-06-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Also, I explained to him that a mantra had come to you which you were repeating between 5 and 6 in particular, and I told him about this culminating point where you wanted to express your gratitude, enthusiasm, etc., and about the French mantra. After explaining, I gave him your French and Sanskrit texts. He felt and understood very well what you wanted. His first reaction after reading it was to say, Great meaning, great power is there. It is all right. I told him that apart from the meaning of the mantra, you wanted to know if it was all right from the vibrational standpoint. He told me that he would take your text to his next puja and would repeat it himself to see. He should have done that this morning, but he has a fever (since his return from Madurai, he has not been well because of a cold and sunstroke). I will write you as soon as I know the result of his test.
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 BRAH man [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.
--
As for the Sanskrit text and the mantra, I await your next letter.
For you, I fully approve of what he told you. Fervently, and with all my love, I pray that he will succeed in what he wants to do during these 45 days of meditation. This is really what I was counting on.
--
Certainly his political rage is not only understandable but justified. However, when one begins looking at things from the external viewpoint of the manifestation, they are not as simple as that. I cannot speak of all this in detail, but as an example I can tell you that here in Pondicherry, those who are maneuvering (and not without some hope) to oust the Congress are our worst enemies, the enemy of all that is disinterested and spiritual, and if they come to power, they would be capable of anything in their hate.
For all these world events, I always leave it to the Divine vision and wisdom, and I say to the Supreme: Lord, may Thy Will be done.
0 1959-06-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Regarding my mantra, I began repeating it yesterday before receiving your letter, and I felt that it was all right. So if X makes no alterations, it is not necessary to send it back to me. I receive the force X gives me without paper.
I do not know if it is an illusion, but on several occasions I felt that if X says this mantra, it will cure his fever.
As for the predictions, I am extremely interested. Tell this to X, and also that details of this kind are a great help in my work, for they give physical clues enabling a greater precision in the action. Needless to say, I will be very grateful for any indications he may wish to give me.
0 1959-06-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
3) X has not yet begun his work with me nor for you, as he has been unwell until today. One evening, he made a very beautiful reflection concerning you and your mantra, but it is inexpressible in words, it was above all the tone in which he said, Who, who, is there a single person in the world who can repeat like that TRIOMPHE TOI MAHIMA MAHIMA? etc. And three or four times he repeated your mantra with such an expression
He has not yet done what he plans to do with your mantra in his puja, for he has been unwell and had to interrupt his pujas. But now he is better.
I have no other details to give you, except that I am not happy. The fact is that these last three years I have been tied down by my penury, otherwise I would be travelling along other roads, far from herewith no greater hope in my heart, but with space before me, at least. I am only here to render you service, but I do not know if I shall be able to repress my need for space much longerit has already been going on too long. This is the undisguised truth. But what can I do?I am tied down. If I truly loved, things would be different, but it seems I love no one, not even myself, and the only love of which I am capable, hu man love, is forbidden to me. So I can do nothing, not on any plane, and I have no hope in anything. Forgive me, I do not wish to pain you, but neither can I pretend any longer to be happy with my lot.
0 1959-06-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Even before receiving your second letter in which you say that the mantra is all right, X told me this morning that he had repeated your mantra during his puja and that it was very good, that there is nothing to be changed: The vibration is good.
Here are a few additional indications regarding the forthcoming events.
--
As for the mantra, since two days I am sure about it, and all is well.
I am extremely interested in everything X has revealed to you. But I cannot write about this either.
If X told you to go see your mother in August and return m early September, you must go. We shall manage. My finances are in an almost desperate state, but that cannot last. For what has to be done will be done.
You are constantly with me, and I am following all your inner movements with love and concern.
0 1959-06-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
As of yesterday evening I am a man delivered. It took only a very little word from X, and suddenly a weight seemed to have been lifted from me, and I knew at last that I would be fulfilled. All this is still so new, so improbable that I can scarcely believe it, and I wonder if by chance some evil blow is not still lurking in wait for me behind this promise of happiness; thus I shall be reassured only when I have told you everything, recounted all. But X has asked, me to wait a few more days before telling you this story, for he wants to give me certain additional details so that you may have all the elements, as accurately as possible.
But I did not want to wait any longer to express my gratitude. I am still not so sure how all this will turn out nor how this destiny that he predicts for me can be realized, but I want to repeat to you, with all my confidence: I am your child, may your will be done now and forever.
0 1959-06-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The last time I was in Rameswaram, I had two other very poignant dreams, but I could not make out what they meant. In one dream I was strangling someone with my bare hands; it was an abominable feeling. And in the other, I saw, in a kind of nocturnal setting, a hanged man being taken down, with all kinds of people bustling about the corpse with lamps, and suddenly I knew that this hanged man was me.
I had said nothing to X about these various dreams before he told me the story of my last three existences: three times I committed suicide the first by fire, the second by hanging, and the third by throwing myself into the void. During the first of these last three existences, I was married to a very good wo man, but for some reason I abandoned my wife and I was wandering here and there in search of something. Then I met a sannyasi who wanted to make me his disciple, but I could not make up my mind, I was neither this side nor that side, whereupon my wife came to me and pleaded with me to take her back. Apparently I rejected herso she threw herself into the fire. Horror-stricken, I followed her, throwing myself into the fire in turn. That was when I created a connection with certain beings [of the other worlds] and I fell under their power. For two other lives, under the influence of these beings, the same drama was repeated with a few variations.
--
X gave me a new mantra. My body is exhausted from too much nervous tension. I am living in a kind of cellar with four inches of filth on the floor and walls, and two openings, one onto the street of the bazaar the other onto a dilapidated courtyard with a well. On my right lives a madwo man who screams half the day. There is only my mantra which burns almost constantly in my heart, and who knows what hope that some day the future will be happy and reconciled. There is also Sujata and you.
Your child,
0 1959-07-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
A moment ago I barely found the strength not to kill myself. Destiny has repeated itself once again, but this time it was not I who rejected her, as in past existences, it is she who rejected me: Too late. For a moment, I thought I was going to go crazy too, so much pain did I have then finally I said, May Thy Will be done, (that of the Supreme Lord) and I kept repeating, Thy Grace is there, even in the greatest suffering. But I am broken, rather like a living dead man. So be happy, for I will never wear the white robe that Guruji gave me.
You will understand that I do not have the strength to come to see you. My only strength is not to rebel, my only strength is to believe in the Grace in the face of everything. I believe I have too much grief in my heart to rebel against anything at all. I seem to have a kind of great pity for this world.
0 1959-07-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This is what I should have told you this morning, but I was afraid. For the last month I have been afraid of you, afraid that you might not understand. But I cannot leave with this weight on me. I beg of you to understand, Sweet Mother. I want nothing bad, nothing impure. I feel I have something to create with Sujata, I feel she is absolutely a part of something I have to achieve, that we have something to achieve together. For the five years we have known each other I have never had a single wrong thought but suddenly she opened my heart, which had been so completely walled-off, and this was like a wonder in me and at the same time a fear. A fear, perhaps because this love has been thwarted for so many lives.
Mother, I need Sujata like my very soul. It seems to me that she is a part of me, that she alone can help me break with this horrible past, that she alone can help me to love truly at last. I need peace so much, a quiet, PEACEFUL happinessa base of happiness upon which I could use my strength to build, instead of always fighting, always destroying. Mother, I am not at all sure of what must be, but I know that Sujata is part of this realization.
0 1960-01-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
All these repetitions of the mantra, these hours of japa I have to do every day, seem to have increased the difficulties, as if they were raising up or aggravating all the resistances.
To the most stubborn goes the victory.
When I started my japa one year ago, I had to struggle with every possible difficulty, every contradiction, prejudice and opposition that fills the air. And even when this poor body began walking back and forth for japa, it used to knock against things, it would start breathing all wrong, coughing; it was attacked from all sides until the day I caught the Enemy and said, Listen carefully. You can do whatever you want, but Im going right to the end and nothing will stop me, even if I have to repeat this mantra ten crore1 times. The result was really miraculous, like a cloud of bats flying up into the light all at once. From that moment on, things started going better.
You have no idea what an irresistible effect a well-determined will can have.
0 1960-03-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Experiences are coming at a furious pacefabulous experiences. If I were to speak now, its certain that I would not at all speak as I used to. Thats why we must date all these Questions and Answers, at least all which come before the [Supramental] manifestation of February 1956, so that there will be a clear cut between those before and those after.
Only a few days ago, on the morning of the 29th, I had one of those experiences that mark ones life. It happened upstairs in my room. I was doing my japa, walking up and down with my eyes wide open, when suddenly Krishna camea gold Krishna, all golden, in a golden light that filled the whole room. I was walking, but I could not even see the windows or the rug any longer, for this golden light was everywhere with Krishna at its center. And it must have lasted at least fifteen minutes. He was dressed in those same clothes in which he is normally portrayed when he dances. He was all light, all dancing: You see, I will be there this evening during the Darshan.1 And suddenly, the chair I use for darshan came into the room! Krishna climbed up onto it, and his eyes twinkled mischievously, as if to say, I will be there, you see, and therell be no room for you.
--
And there are many, many experiences like this. It is only a small, a very small beginning. This one in particular came to mark the new stage: four years have elapsed, and now four years to come. Because everything has focused on this body to prepare it, everything has concentrated on itNature, the Master of the Yoga, the Supreme, everything So only when its over, not before, will it really be interesting to speak of all this. But maybe it will never be over, after all. Its a small beginning, very small.
The Darshan on February 29, 1960, the first anniversary of the Supramental manifestation.
On this first anniversary of the Supramental manifestation, Mother distributed medals commemorating the occasion to the disciples filing past.
***
0 1960-04-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The following passage, taken from the Revue des Deux Mondes of March 1960, was part of a course taught by Dimitri manowilski in 1931 at the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow:
Our turn will come in twenty to thirty years. To win, we need an element of surprise. The bourgeoisie should be lulled to sleep. Therefore, we must first launch the most spectacular peace movement that has ever existed, replete with inspiring proposals and extraordinary concessions. The stupid and decadent capitalist countries will cooperate joyfully in their own destruction. They will jump at this new opportunity for friendship. As soon as their guard is down, we shall crush them beneath our closed fist.
0 1960-04-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It will be a joy to be with you again and resume the work. Here, I am sparing as many hours as I can to correcting The Hu man Cycle I follow X perfectly in his inner life, unreservedly, but I have to force myself to follow him in his outer life.
Mother, I am at your feet, with my love and my gratitude.
--- Overview of noun man
The noun man has 11 senses (first 6 from tagged texts)
1. (749) man, adult male ::: (an adult person who is male (as opposed to a woman); "there were two women and six men on the bus")
2. (346) serviceman, military man, man, military personnel ::: (someone who serves in the armed forces; a member of a military force; "two men stood sentry duty")
3. (87) man ::: (the generic use of the word to refer to any human being; "it was every man for himself")
4. (29) homo, man, human being, human ::: (any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage)
5. (4) man ::: (a male subordinate; "the chief stationed two men outside the building"; "he awaited word from his man in Havana")
6. (3) man ::: (an adult male person who has a manly character (virile and courageous competent); "the army will make a man of you")
7. valet, valet de chambre, gentleman, gentleman's gentleman, man ::: (a manservant who acts as a personal attendant to his employer; "Jeeves was Bertie Wooster's man")
8. man ::: (a male person who plays a significant role (husband or lover or boyfriend) in the life of a particular woman; "she takes good care of her man")
9. Man, Isle of Man ::: (one of the British Isles in the Irish Sea)
10. man, piece ::: (game equipment consisting of an object used in playing certain board games; "he taught me to set up the men on the chess board"; "he sacrificed a piece to get a strategic advantage")
11. world, human race, humanity, humankind, human beings, humans, mankind, man ::: (all of the living human inhabitants of the earth; "all the world loves a lover"; "she always used `humankind' because `mankind' seemed to slight the women")
--- Overview of verb man
The verb man has 2 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (2) man ::: (take charge of a certain job; occupy a certain work place; "Mr. Smith manned the reception desk in the morning")
2. man ::: (provide with workers; "We cannot man all the desks"; "Students were manning the booths")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun man
11 senses of man
Sense 1
man, adult male
=> male, male person
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> adult, grownup
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 2
serviceman, military man, man, military personnel
=> skilled worker, trained worker, skilled workman
=> worker
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 3
man
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 4
homo, man, human being, human
=> hominid
=> primate
=> placental, placental mammal, eutherian, eutherian mammal
=> mammal, mammalian
=> vertebrate, craniate
=> chordate
=> animal, animate being, beast, brute, creature, fauna
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 5
man
=> subordinate, subsidiary, underling, foot soldier
=> assistant, helper, help, supporter
=> worker
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 6
man
=> male, male person
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 7
valet, valet de chambre, gentleman, gentleman's gentleman, man
=> manservant
=> servant, retainer
=> worker
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> body servant
=> servant, retainer
=> worker
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 8
man
=> male, male person
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> lover
=> domestic partner, significant other, spousal equivalent, spouse equivalent
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 9
Man, Isle of Man
INSTANCE OF=> island
=> land, dry land, earth, ground, solid ground, terra firma
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 10
man, piece
=> game equipment
=> equipment
=> instrumentality, instrumentation
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 11
world, human race, humanity, humankind, human beings, humans, mankind, man
=> homo, man, human being, human
=> hominid
=> primate
=> placental, placental mammal, eutherian, eutherian mammal
=> mammal, mammalian
=> vertebrate, craniate
=> chordate
=> animal, animate being, beast, brute, creature, fauna
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> group, grouping
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun man
4 of 11 senses of man
Sense 1
man, adult male
HAS INSTANCE=> Adam
HAS INSTANCE=> Cain
HAS INSTANCE=> Abel
HAS INSTANCE=> Seth
=> Black man
=> white man
=> yellow man
=> babu, baboo
=> bachelor, unmarried man
=> bey
=> boy
=> boyfriend, fellow, beau, swain, young man
=> ex-boyfriend
=> bull, bruiser, strapper, Samson
=> dandy, dude, fop, gallant, sheik, beau, swell, fashion plate, clotheshorse
=> ejaculator
=> Esquire, Esq
=> eunuch, castrate
=> father figure, father surrogate
=> father-figure
=> fellow, dude, buster
=> galoot
=> geezer
=> gentleman
=> grass widower, divorced man
=> guy, cat, hombre, bozo
HAS INSTANCE=> Ham
=> Herr
=> Hooray Henry
=> housefather
=> hunk
=> ex-husband, ex
=> inamorato
=> iron man, ironman
=> ironside
HAS INSTANCE=> Japheth
=> adonis
=> middle-aged man
=> Monsieur
=> old boy, old man
=> old man, greybeard, graybeard, Methuselah
=> patriarch, paterfamilias
=> Peter Pan
=> ponce
=> posseman
=> Senhor
=> shaver
HAS INSTANCE=> Shem
=> signor, signior
=> signore
=> sir
=> stiff
=> stud, he-man, macho-man
=> Tarzan
=> widower, widowman
=> womanizer, womaniser, philanderer
=> wonder boy, golden boy
=> young buck, young man
Sense 2
serviceman, military man, man, military personnel
=> air force officer, commander
=> artilleryman, cannoneer, gunner, machine gunner
=> bluejacket, navy man, sailor, sailor boy
=> commando, ranger
=> draftee, conscript, inductee
=> enlisted person
=> Marine, devil dog, leatherneck, shipboard soldier
=> military officer, officer
=> noncombatant
=> occupier
=> striper
=> veteran, vet, ex-serviceman
=> veteran, veteran soldier
=> volunteer, military volunteer, voluntary
Sense 4
homo, man, human being, human
=> world, human race, humanity, humankind, human beings, humans, mankind, man
=> Homo erectus
=> Homo soloensis
=> Homo habilis
=> Homo sapiens
=> Neandertal man, Neanderthal man, Neandertal, Neanderthal, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
=> Rhodesian man, Homo rhodesiensis
Sense 10
man, piece
=> black
=> checker, chequer
=> chessman, chess piece
=> tile
=> white
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun man
11 senses of man
Sense 1
man, adult male
=> male, male person
=> adult, grownup
Sense 2
serviceman, military man, man, military personnel
=> skilled worker, trained worker, skilled workman
Sense 3
man
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
Sense 4
homo, man, human being, human
=> hominid
Sense 5
man
=> subordinate, subsidiary, underling, foot soldier
Sense 6
man
=> male, male person
Sense 7
valet, valet de chambre, gentleman, gentleman's gentleman, man
=> manservant
=> body servant
Sense 8
man
=> male, male person
=> lover
Sense 9
Man, Isle of Man
INSTANCE OF=> island
Sense 10
man, piece
=> game equipment
Sense 11
world, human race, humanity, humankind, human beings, humans, mankind, man
=> homo, man, human being, human
=> group, grouping
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun man
11 senses of man
Sense 1
man, adult male
-> male, male person
=> boy wonder
=> chap, fellow, feller, fella, lad, gent, blighter, cuss, bloke
=> foster-brother, foster brother
=> macho
=> male child, boy
=> male offspring, man-child
=> man, adult male
=> man
=> man
=> mother's son
=> sirrah
-> adult, grownup
=> brachycephalic
=> caregiver
=> catch, match
=> centrist, middle of the roader, moderate, moderationist
=> character, eccentric, type, case
=> conservative, conservativist
=> dolichocephalic
=> elder, senior
=> ex-spouse
=> host
=> important person, influential person, personage
=> Jack of all trades
=> liberal, liberalist, progressive
=> liberal
=> man, adult male
=> militarist, warmonger
=> oldster, old person, senior citizen, golden ager
=> pacifist, pacificist, disarmer
=> patrician
=> pledgee
=> pledger
=> professional, professional person
=> sobersides
=> sophisticate, man of the world
=> stay-at-home, homebody
=> stoic, unemotional person
=> thoroughbred
=> woman, adult female
Sense 2
serviceman, military man, man, military personnel
-> skilled worker, trained worker, skilled workman
=> aquanaut, oceanaut
=> armorer, armourer
=> aviator, aeronaut, airman, flier, flyer
=> baker, bread maker
=> balloonist
=> butcher, slaughterer
=> calligrapher, calligraphist
=> coiner, minter, moneyer
=> cook
=> craftsman, artisan, journeyman, artificer
=> crewman, crew member
=> cutter
=> dental hygienist
=> draftsman, draughtsman, draftsperson
=> dyer
=> editor, editor in chief
=> electrician, lineman, linesman
=> engraver
=> esthetician, aesthetician
=> fisherman, fisher
=> founder
=> framer
=> fumigator
=> galvanizer, galvaniser
=> gilder
=> grip
=> harpooner, harpooneer
=> hunter, huntsman
=> indexer
=> laminator
=> lobsterman
=> lockmaster, lockman, lockkeeper
=> mender, repairer, fixer
=> mortician, undertaker, funeral undertaker, funeral director
=> mounter
=> official, functionary
=> oilman
=> optician, lens maker
=> painter
=> perfecter
=> phlebotomist
=> plaiter
=> plasterer
=> plater
=> power worker, power-station worker
=> printer, pressman
=> projectionist
=> refiner
=> refinisher, renovator, restorer, preserver
=> riveter, rivetter
=> router
=> sailor, crewman
=> serviceman, military man, man, military personnel
=> shearer
=> skinner
=> smith, metalworker
=> smith
=> technician
=> tuner, piano tuner
=> turner
=> turtler
=> voicer
=> vulcanizer, vulcaniser
=> wallpaperer, wall-paperer
=> wireman, wirer
Sense 3
man
-> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> self
=> adult, grownup
=> adventurer, venturer
=> anomaly, unusual person
=> applicant, applier
=> appointee, appointment
=> capitalist
=> captor, capturer
=> changer, modifier
=> color-blind person
=> commoner, common man, common person
=> communicator
=> contestant
=> coward
=> creator
=> disputant, controversialist, eristic
=> engineer, applied scientist, technologist
=> entertainer
=> experimenter
=> expert
=> face
=> female, female person
=> individualist
=> inhabitant, habitant, dweller, denizen, indweller
=> native, indigen, indigene, aborigine, aboriginal
=> native
=> innocent, inexperienced person
=> intellectual, intellect
=> juvenile, juvenile person
=> lover
=> loved one
=> leader
=> male, male person
=> money handler, money dealer
=> national, subject
=> nonreligious person
=> nonworker
=> peer, equal, match, compeer
=> perceiver, percipient, observer, beholder
=> percher
=> precursor, forerunner
=> primitive, primitive person
=> religious person
=> sensualist
=> traveler, traveller
=> unfortunate, unfortunate person
=> unwelcome person, persona non grata
=> unskilled person
=> worker
=> African
=> person of color, person of colour
=> Black, Black person, blackamoor, Negro, Negroid
=> White, White person, Caucasian
=> Amerindian, Native American
=> Slav
=> gentile
=> Jew, Hebrew, Israelite
=> Aries, Ram
=> Taurus, Bull
=> Gemini, Twin
=> Cancer, Crab
=> Leo, Lion
=> Virgo, Virgin
=> Libra, Balance
=> Scorpio, Scorpion
=> Sagittarius, Archer
=> Capricorn, Goat
=> Aquarius, Water Bearer
=> Pisces, Fish
=> abator
=> abjurer
=> abomination
=> abstainer, abstinent, nondrinker
=> achiever, winner, success, succeeder
=> acquaintance, friend
=> acquirer
=> active
=> actor, doer, worker
=> adjudicator
=> admirer
=> adoptee
=> adversary, antagonist, opponent, opposer, resister
=> advisee
=> advocate, advocator, proponent, exponent
=> affiant
=> agnostic, doubter
=> amateur
=> ancient
=> anti
=> anti-American
=> apprehender
=> appreciator
=> archaist
=> arrogator
=> assessee
=> asthmatic
=> authority
=> autodidact
=> baby boomer, boomer
=> baby buster, buster
=> bad guy
=> bad person
=> baldhead, baldpate, baldy
=> balker, baulker, noncompliant
=> bullfighter, toreador
=> bather
=> beard
=> bedfellow
=> bereaved, bereaved person
=> best, topper
=> birth
=> biter
=> blogger
=> blond, blonde
=> bluecoat
=> bodybuilder, muscle builder, muscle-builder, musclebuilder, muscleman
=> bomber
=> brunet, brunette
=> buster
=> candidate, prospect
=> case
=> cashier
=> celebrant, celebrator, celebrater
=> censor
=> chameleon
=> charmer, beguiler
=> child, baby
=> chutzpanik
=> closer
=> clumsy person
=> collector, aggregator
=> combatant, battler, belligerent, fighter, scrapper
=> complexifier
=> compulsive
=> computer user
=> contemplative
=> convert
=> copycat, imitator, emulator, ape, aper
=> counter
=> counterterrorist
=> crawler, creeper
=> creature, wight
=> creditor
=> cripple
=> dancer, social dancer
=> dead person, dead soul, deceased person, deceased, decedent, departed
=> deaf person
=> debaser, degrader
=> debtor, debitor
=> defecator, voider, shitter
=> delayer
=> deliverer
=> demander
=> dieter
=> differentiator, discriminator
=> disentangler, unraveler, unraveller
=> dissenter, dissident, protester, objector, contestant
=> divider
=> domestic partner, significant other, spousal equivalent, spouse equivalent
=> double, image, look-alike
=> dresser
=> dribbler, driveller, slobberer, drooler
=> drug user, substance abuser, user
=> dyslectic
=> ectomorph
=> effecter, effector
=> Elizabethan
=> emotional person
=> endomorph
=> enjoyer
=> enrollee
=> ethnic
=> explorer, adventurer
=> extrovert, extravert
=> faddist
=> faller
=> fastener
=> fiduciary
=> first-rater
=> follower
=> free agent, free spirit, freewheeler
=> friend
=> fugitive, runaway, fleer
=> gainer
=> gainer, weight gainer
=> gambler
=> gatekeeper
=> gatherer
=> good guy
=> good person
=> granter
=> greeter, saluter, welcomer
=> grinner
=> groaner
=> grunter
=> guesser
=> handicapped person
=> hater
=> heterosexual, heterosexual person, straight person, straight
=> homosexual, homophile, homo, gay
=> homunculus
=> hope
=> hoper
=> huddler
=> hugger
=> immune
=> insured, insured person
=> interpreter
=> introvert
=> Jat
=> jewel, gem
=> jumper
=> junior
=> killer, slayer
=> relative, relation
=> kink
=> kneeler
=> knocker
=> knower, apprehender
=> large person
=> Latin
=> laugher
=> learner, scholar, assimilator
=> left-hander, lefty, southpaw
=> life
=> lightning rod
=> linguist, polyglot
=> literate, literate person
=> liver
=> longer, thirster, yearner
=> loose cannon
=> machine
=> mailer
=> malcontent
=> man
=> manipulator
=> man jack
=> married
=> masturbator, onanist
=> measurer
=> nonmember
=> mesomorph
=> mestizo, ladino
=> middlebrow
=> miracle man, miracle worker
=> misogamist
=> mixed-blood
=> modern
=> monolingual
=> mother hen
=> mouse
=> mutilator, maimer, mangler
=> namer
=> namesake
=> neglecter
=> neighbor, neighbour
=> neutral
=> nondescript
=> nonparticipant
=> nonpartisan, nonpartizan
=> nonperson, unperson
=> nonresident
=> nonsmoker
=> nude, nude person
=> nurser
=> occultist
=> optimist
=> orphan
=> ostrich
=> ouster, ejector
=> outcaste
=> outdoorsman
=> owner, possessor
=> pamperer, spoiler, coddler, mollycoddler
=> pansexual
=> pardoner, forgiver, excuser
=> partner
=> party
=> passer
=> personage
=> personification
=> perspirer, sweater
=> philosopher
=> picker, chooser, selector
=> pisser, urinator
=> planner, contriver, deviser
=> player
=> posturer
=> powderer
=> preserver
=> propositus
=> public relations person
=> pursuer
=> pussycat
=> quarter
=> quitter
=> radical
=> realist
=> rectifier
=> redhead, redheader, red-header, carrottop
=> registrant
=> reliever, allayer, comforter
=> repeater
=> rescuer, recoverer, saver
=> rester
=> restrainer, controller
=> revenant
=> rich person, wealthy person, have
=> right-hander, right hander, righthander
=> riser
=> romper
=> roundhead
=> ruler, swayer
=> rusher
=> scientist
=> scratcher
=> second-rater, mediocrity
=> seeder, cloud seeder
=> seeker, searcher, quester
=> segregate
=> sentimentalist, romanticist
=> sex object
=> sex symbol
=> shaker, mover and shaker
=> showman
=> signer, signatory
=> simpleton, simple
=> six-footer
=> skidder, slider, slipper
=> slave
=> slave
=> sleepyhead
=> sloucher
=> small person
=> smasher
=> smiler
=> sneezer
=> sniffer
=> sniffler, sniveler
=> snuffer
=> snuffler
=> socializer, socialiser
=> sort
=> sounding board
=> sphinx
=> spitter, expectorator
=> sport
=> sprawler
=> spurner
=> squinter, squint-eye
=> stifler, smotherer
=> stigmatic, stigmatist
=> stooper
=> stranger
=> struggler
=> subject, case, guinea pig
=> supernumerary
=> surrenderer, yielder
=> survivalist
=> survivor
=> suspect
=> tagger
=> tagger
=> tapper
=> tempter
=> termer
=> terror, scourge, threat
=> testator, testate
=> thin person, skin and bones, scrag
=> third-rater
=> thrower
=> tiger
=> totemist
=> toucher
=> transfer, transferee
=> transsexual, transexual
=> transvestite, cross-dresser
=> trier, attempter, essayer
=> turner
=> tyrant
=> undoer, opener, unfastener, untier
=> user
=> vanisher
=> victim, dupe
=> Victorian
=> visionary
=> visually impaired person
=> waiter
=> waker
=> walk-in
=> wanter, needer
=> ward
=> warrior
=> watcher
=> weakling, doormat, wuss
=> weasel
=> wiggler, wriggler, squirmer
=> winker
=> withholder
=> witness
=> worldling
=> yawner
Sense 4
homo, man, human being, human
-> hominid
=> homo, man, human being, human
=> Pithecanthropus, Pithecanthropus erectus, genus Pithecanthropus
=> Sinanthropus, genus Sinanthropus
=> Javanthropus, genus Javanthropus
=> australopithecine
=> Sivapithecus
=> dryopithecine
Sense 5
man
-> subordinate, subsidiary, underling, foot soldier
=> associate
=> bottom dog
=> cog
=> man
=> second fiddle, second banana
Sense 6
man
-> male, male person
=> boy wonder
=> chap, fellow, feller, fella, lad, gent, blighter, cuss, bloke
=> foster-brother, foster brother
=> macho
=> male child, boy
=> male offspring, man-child
=> man, adult male
=> man
=> man
=> mother's son
=> sirrah
Sense 7
valet, valet de chambre, gentleman, gentleman's gentleman, man
-> manservant
=> butler, pantryman
=> footman
=> valet, valet de chambre, gentleman, gentleman's gentleman, man
-> body servant
=> valet, valet de chambre, gentleman, gentleman's gentleman, man
Sense 8
man
-> male, male person
=> boy wonder
=> chap, fellow, feller, fella, lad, gent, blighter, cuss, bloke
=> foster-brother, foster brother
=> macho
=> male child, boy
=> male offspring, man-child
=> man, adult male
=> man
=> man
=> mother's son
=> sirrah
-> lover
=> fancy man, paramour
=> man
=> mistress, kept woman, fancy woman
Sense 9
Man, Isle of Man
-> island
HAS INSTANCE=> Anguilla
HAS INSTANCE=> Aran Islands
HAS INSTANCE=> Antigua
HAS INSTANCE=> Barbuda
HAS INSTANCE=> Redonda
HAS INSTANCE=> Bermuda, Bermudas
HAS INSTANCE=> Bouvet Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Montserrat
HAS INSTANCE=> Sao Tiago Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Falkland Islands
HAS INSTANCE=> Ceylon
HAS INSTANCE=> Chiloe
HAS INSTANCE=> Taiwan, Formosa
HAS INSTANCE=> Taiwan, China, Nationalist China, Republic of China
HAS INSTANCE=> Guadalupe Island
=> Caribbean Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Netherlands Antilles
HAS INSTANCE=> Aruba
HAS INSTANCE=> Bonaire
HAS INSTANCE=> Curacao
HAS INSTANCE=> Saba
HAS INSTANCE=> Saint Eustatius, St. Eustatius
HAS INSTANCE=> Saint Martin, St. Martin, Saint Maarten, St. Maarten
HAS INSTANCE=> Cuba
HAS INSTANCE=> Guadeloupe
HAS INSTANCE=> Hispaniola, Haiti, Hayti
HAS INSTANCE=> Puerto Rico, Porto Rico
HAS INSTANCE=> Culebra
HAS INSTANCE=> Vieques
HAS INSTANCE=> Jamaica
HAS INSTANCE=> Virgin Islands
HAS INSTANCE=> Barbados
HAS INSTANCE=> Trinidad
HAS INSTANCE=> Tobago
HAS INSTANCE=> Cyprus
HAS INSTANCE=> Zealand, Seeland, Sjaelland
HAS INSTANCE=> Dominica
HAS INSTANCE=> Bioko
HAS INSTANCE=> Spitsbergen, Spitzbergen
HAS INSTANCE=> Galapagos Islands, Galapagos
HAS INSTANCE=> Fiji Islands, Fijis
HAS INSTANCE=> Viti Levu
HAS INSTANCE=> Vanua Levu
=> Aegean island
HAS INSTANCE=> Crete, Kriti
HAS INSTANCE=> Ithaca, Ithaki
HAS INSTANCE=> Egadi Islands, Aegadean Isles, Aegadean Islands, Isole Egadi, Aegates
HAS INSTANCE=> Lemnos, Limnos
HAS INSTANCE=> Capri
HAS INSTANCE=> Ischia
HAS INSTANCE=> Sardinia, Sardegna
HAS INSTANCE=> Sicily, Sicilia
HAS INSTANCE=> Greenland, Gronland, Kalaallit Nunaat
HAS INSTANCE=> Baffin Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Vancouver Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Newfoundland
HAS INSTANCE=> Cape Breton Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Tasmania
HAS INSTANCE=> Norfolk Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Saipan
HAS INSTANCE=> Guam, GU
HAS INSTANCE=> Wake Island, Wake
HAS INSTANCE=> Nauru, Nauru Island, Pleasant Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Borneo, Kalimantan
HAS INSTANCE=> Bougainville
HAS INSTANCE=> Guadalcanal
HAS INSTANCE=> New Britain
HAS INSTANCE=> New Caledonia
HAS INSTANCE=> New Guinea
HAS INSTANCE=> New Ireland
HAS INSTANCE=> Bahrain, Bahrain Island, Bahrein, Bahrein Island
HAS INSTANCE=> British Isles
HAS INSTANCE=> Great Britain, GB
HAS INSTANCE=> Ireland, Hibernia, Emerald Isle
HAS INSTANCE=> Channel Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Man, Isle of Man
HAS INSTANCE=> Isle of Skye
HAS INSTANCE=> Islay
HAS INSTANCE=> Mull
HAS INSTANCE=> Staffa
HAS INSTANCE=> Anglesey, Anglesey Island, Anglesea, Anglesea Island, Mona
HAS INSTANCE=> Java
HAS INSTANCE=> Bali
HAS INSTANCE=> Timor
HAS INSTANCE=> Sumatra
HAS INSTANCE=> Celebes, Sulawesi
HAS INSTANCE=> Moluccas, Spice Islands
HAS INSTANCE=> Hokkaido, Ezo, Yezo
HAS INSTANCE=> Honshu, Hondo
HAS INSTANCE=> Kyushu
HAS INSTANCE=> Shikoku
HAS INSTANCE=> Okinawa
HAS INSTANCE=> Iwo Jima
HAS INSTANCE=> Ile-St-Louis
HAS INSTANCE=> Corse, Corsica
HAS INSTANCE=> Martinique
HAS INSTANCE=> Faroe Islands, Faeroe Islands, Faroes, Faeroes
HAS INSTANCE=> Iceland
HAS INSTANCE=> Madagascar
HAS INSTANCE=> Maldives, Maldive Islands
HAS INSTANCE=> Malta
HAS INSTANCE=> Mauritius
HAS INSTANCE=> New Zealand, New Zealand Islands
HAS INSTANCE=> North Island
HAS INSTANCE=> South Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Cebu
HAS INSTANCE=> Luzon
HAS INSTANCE=> Mindanao
HAS INSTANCE=> Mindoro
HAS INSTANCE=> Visayan Islands, Bisayas
HAS INSTANCE=> Azores, Acores
HAS INSTANCE=> Madeira
HAS INSTANCE=> Saint Christopher, St. Christopher, Saint Kitts, St. Kitts
HAS INSTANCE=> Nevis
HAS INSTANCE=> Sombrero
HAS INSTANCE=> Saint Lucia, St. Lucia
HAS INSTANCE=> Saint Vincent, St. Vincent
HAS INSTANCE=> Tahiti
HAS INSTANCE=> Samoa, Samoan Islands
HAS INSTANCE=> Principe
HAS INSTANCE=> Seychelles, Seychelles islands
HAS INSTANCE=> Singapore, Singapore Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Novaya Zemlya, Nova Zembla
HAS INSTANCE=> Majorca
HAS INSTANCE=> Canary Islands, Canaries
HAS INSTANCE=> Tenerife
HAS INSTANCE=> Zanzibar
HAS INSTANCE=> Admiralty Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Santa Catalina, Catalina Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Hawaii, Hawaii Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Kahoolawe, Kahoolawe Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Kauai, Kauai Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Lanai, Lanai Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Maui, Maui Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Molokai, Molokai Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Nihau, Nihau Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Oahu, Oahu Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Martha's Vineyard
HAS INSTANCE=> Nantucket
HAS INSTANCE=> Liberty Island, Bedloe's Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Manhattan Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Ellis Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Long Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Galveston Island
HAS INSTANCE=> Krakatau, Krakatao, Krakatoa
HAS INSTANCE=> New Siberian Islands
=> barrier island
HAS INSTANCE=> isle, islet
HAS INSTANCE=> Kodiak, Kodiak Island
=> South Sea Islands
Sense 10
man, piece
-> game equipment
=> backboard, basketball backboard
=> ball
=> bowling equipment
=> counter
=> crossbar
=> game
=> goal
=> horseshoe
=> jack, jackstones
=> man, piece
=> net
=> paintball gun
=> pinball machine, pin table
=> pool table, billiard table, snooker table
=> quoit
=> roulette wheel, wheel
=> spinner
Sense 11
world, human race, humanity, humankind, human beings, humans, mankind, man
-> homo, man, human being, human
=> world, human race, humanity, humankind, human beings, humans, mankind, man
=> Homo erectus
=> Homo soloensis
=> Homo habilis
=> Homo sapiens
=> Neandertal man, Neanderthal man, Neandertal, Neanderthal, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
=> Rhodesian man, Homo rhodesiensis
-> group, grouping
=> world, human race, humanity, humankind, human beings, humans, mankind, man
=> arrangement
=> straggle
=> kingdom
=> biological group
=> community, biotic community
=> people
=> social group
=> collection, aggregation, accumulation, assemblage
=> edition
=> electron shell
=> ethnic group, ethnos
=> race
=> association
=> swarm, cloud
=> subgroup
=> sainthood
=> citizenry, people
=> population
=> multitude, masses, mass, hoi polloi, people, the great unwashed
=> varna
=> circuit
=> system, scheme
=> series
HAS INSTANCE=> Great Lakes
=> actinoid, actinide, actinon
=> rare earth, rare-earth element, lanthanoid, lanthanide, lanthanon
=> halogen
--- Grep of noun man
a'man
a. e. housman
abel janszoon tasman
abel tasman
able-bodied seaman
able seaman
abominable snowman
adman
age of man
ahriman
aircraftman
aircraftsman
aircrewman
airman
airwoman
alabaman
albizia saman
alderman
alfred edward housman
amman
anchorman
anglo-norman
ape-man
artilleryman
assemblyman
assemblywoman
assistant foreman
averell harriman
backup man
backwoodsman
baggageman
bagman
bandsman
barbara tuchman
barbara wertheim tuchman
bargeman
barman
barrow-man
batman
batsman
battle of omdurman
beadsman
bedesman
beef man
beggarman
beggarwoman
belle miriam silverman
bellman
benjamin david goodman
benny goodman
bergman
best man
big businessman
bionic man
bionic woman
black man
black woman
boatman
bogeyman
bondman
bondsman
bondswoman
bondwoman
boogeyman
bookman
border patrolman
boskop man
bowman
bozeman
brahman
brakeman
broth of a man
bushman
businessman
businesswoman
busman
cabman
caiman
cameraman
capital of oman
cardinal newman
career man
cattleman
cavalryman
cave man
caveman
cayman
ceriman
chairman
chairwoman
chapman
chargeman
charlotte anna perkins gilman
charwoman
chessman
chinaman
christiaan eijkman
churchman
city man
clansman
clanswoman
cleaning woman
clergyman
coachman
coalman
coastguardsman
college man
comfort woman
committeeman
committeewoman
common man
company man
con man
confidence man
congressman
congresswoman
conjure man
corner man
cornishman
cornishwoman
councilman
councilwoman
counterman
counterwoman
countryman
countrywoman
cousin-german
cow man
cowman
cracksman
craftsman
cragsman
crewman
customer's man
dairyman
dalesman
david barnard steinman
david riesman
deliveryman
deskman
dirty old man
disagreeable woman
divorced man
doberman
dolman
domingo de guzman
doorman
draftsman
dragoman
draughtsman
dustin hoffman
dustman
dutchman
e. h. harriman
earthman
east german
eastman
edward henry harriman
eijkman
ekman
elder statesman
elevator man
elizabeth cochrane seaman
elizabeth seaman
emma goldman
end man
englishman
englishwoman
enlisted man
enlisted woman
ent man
ethel merman
everyman
ex-serviceman
exciseman
fall of man
family man
fancy man
fancy woman
feral man
ferryman
feynman
fieldsman
fingerprint man
fireman
first baseman
fisherman
flying dutchman
foeman
foolish woman
footman
foreman
forewoman
four-minute man
freedman
freedwoman
freeman
freewoman
frenchman
frenchwoman
freshman
friedman
frogman
front man
frontiersman
frontierswoman
fugleman
g-man
gagman
garbage man
garbageman
gasman
gay man
gay woman
gentleman
gentleman's gentleman
gentlewoman
genus caiman
george eastman
george s. kaufman
george simon kaufman
german
gilman
gingerbread man
goldman
goodman
government man
greg norman
gregory john norman
groomsman
groundsman
guardsman
gulf of oman
gunman
hachiman
haman
handyman
hangman
hanuman
hardwareman
harriet tubman
harriman
harry s truman
harry truman
harvestman
hatchet man
he-man
head linesman
headman
headsman
heidelberg man
hellman
helmsman
henchman
herdsman
herman
high german
highwayman
hired man
hit man
hitman
hodman
hoffman
holdup man
holy man
honest woman
horseman
horsewoman
hotelman
houseman
housman
human
huntsman
husbandman
iceman
indiaman
infantryman
ingerman
ingmar bergman
ingrid bergman
irishman
irishwoman
iron man
ironman
isle of man
java man
jazzman
jessye norman
john chapman
john henry newman
journeyman
julius ullman
juryman
jurywoman
kaufman
kept woman
kinsman
kinswoman
klansman
ladies' man
lake leman
landman
landsman
laundryman
laundrywoman
lawman
layman
leading man
ledgeman
lensman
letterman
liegeman
life-of-man
liftman
lighterman
lillian hellman
liman
lineman
linesman
linkman
linksman
liveryman
lobsterman
lockman
lollipop woman
longbowman
longshoreman
lookout man
loose woman
louis the german
low german
lowerclassman
lumberman
macho-man
madman
madwoman
mailman
maintenance man
maltman
malvina hoffman
man
man's body
man's clothing
man-about-town
man-at-arms
man-child
man-eater
man-eating shark
man-made fiber
man-made lake
man-of-the-earth
man-of-war
man-of-war bird
man-on-a-horse
man and wife
man friday
man hour
man in the street
man jack
man of action
man of affairs
man of deeds
man of letters
man of means
man of the cloth
man of the world
manacle
manageability
manageableness
managed economy
management
management consultant
management consulting
management control
management personnel
manager
manageress
managership
managing director
managing editor
managua
manakin
manama
manana
manannan
manassa mauler
manat
manatee
manawydan
manawyddan
manchester
manchester terrier
manchu
manchu dynasty
manchuria
mancunian
manda
mandaean
mandaeanism
mandala
mandalay
mandamus
mandara
mandarin
mandarin chinese
mandarin dialect
mandarin duck
mandarin orange
mandarin orange tree
mandatary
mandate
mandator
mandatory
mandatory injunction
mande
mandean
mandeanism
mandela
mandelamine
mandelbrot
mandelbrot set
mandelshtam
mandelstam
mandevilla
mandevilla boliviensis
mandevilla laxa
mandible
mandibula
mandibular bone
mandibular condyle
mandibular fossa
mandibular gland
mandibular joint
mandibular notch
mandioc
mandioca
mandola
mandolin
mandragora
mandragora officinarum
mandrake
mandrake root
mandrel
mandril
mandrill
mandrillus
mandrillus leucophaeus
mandrillus sphinx
manduca
manduca quinquemaculata
manduca sexta
manduction
mane
maned sheep
maned wolf
manes
manet
maneuver
maneuverability
maneuverer
manfred eigen
manfulness
mangabey
manganate
manganese
manganese bronze
manganese steel
manganese tetroxide
manganic acid
manganite
mange
mangel-wurzel
manger
mangifera
mangifera indica
manginess
mangle
mangler
manglietia
mango
mango tree
mangold
mangold-wurzel
mangonel
mangosteen
mangosteen tree
mangrove
mangrove family
mangrove snapper
manhattan
manhattan clam chowder
manhattan island
manhattan project
manhole
manhole cover
manhood
manhunt
mania
maniac
manic-depressive
manic-depressive psychosis
manic depression
manic depressive illness
manic disorder
manichaean
manichaeanism
manichaeism
manichean
manichee
manicotti
manicure
manicure set
manicurist
manidae
manifest
manifest destiny
manifestation
manifesto
manifold
manifold paper
manihot
manihot dulcis
manihot esculenta
manihot utilissima
manikin
manila
manila bay
manila bean
manila grass
manila hemp
manila maguey
manila paper
manila tamarind
manilkara
manilkara bidentata
manilkara zapota
manilla
manilla hemp
manilla paper
manioc
manioca
manipulability
manipulation
manipulative electronic deception
manipulator
manipur
maniraptor
maniraptora
manis
manitoba
mankato
mankind
manliness
mann
manna
manna ash
manna from heaven
manna grass
manna gum
manna lichen
mannequin
manner
manner name
manner of speaking
manner of walking
mannerism
manners
mannheim
mannikin
mannitol
manoeuvrability
manoeuvre
manoeuvrer
manometer
manor
manor hall
manor house
manpad
manpower
manroot
mansard
mansard roof
mansart
manse
manservant
mansfield
mansi
mansion
mansion house
manslaughter
manslayer
manson
manta
manta birostris
manta ray
mantegna
manteidae
mantel
mantelet
mantell
mantelpiece
manteodea
mantichora
manticora
manticore
mantid
mantidae
mantiger
mantilla
mantinea
mantineia
mantis
mantis crab
mantis prawn
mantis religioso
mantis shrimp
mantispid
mantispidae
mantissa
mantle
mantled ground squirrel
mantlepiece
mantlet
mantophasmatodea
mantoux test
mantra
mantrap
mantua
manual
manual alphabet
manual dexterity
manual labor
manual laborer
manual labour
manual of arms
manubrium
manuel de falla
manuel rodriquez patriotic front
manufactory
manufacture
manufactured home
manufacturer
manufacturing
manufacturing business
manufacturing plant
manul
manumission
manumitter
manure
manus
manuscript
manx
manx cat
manx shearwater
manzanilla
manzanita
manzoni
marcus whitman
marksman
married man
married woman
matman
meatman
mechanical man
medical man
medicine man
medieval schoolman
merchantman
merman
middle-aged man
middle high german
middle low german
middleman
midshipman
military man
military policeman
militiaman
milkman
milton friedman
minuteman
miracle man
modern man
moneyman
motorcycle policeman
motorman
mount sherman
mountain man
muffin man
muscat and oman
muscleman
navy man
neandertal man
neanderthal man
needlewoman
newman
newsman
newspaperman
newspaperwoman
newswoman
night watchman
nobleman
noblewoman
norman
norseman
northman
nurseryman
oarsman
oarswoman
odd-job man
odd man out
oilman
oklahoman
old-man-of-the-woods
old high german
old man
old man of the mountain
old woman
oman
ombudsman
omdurman
one-man rule
orangeman
organization man
ottoman
outdoor man
outdoorsman
outdoorswoman
pac-man strategy
packman
pantryman
party man
patrolman
paul leonard newman
paul newman
peking man
penman
pieter zeeman
pigman
piltdown man
pinchas zukerman
pitchman
pitman
pivot man
placeman
plainclothesman
plainsman
plantsman
ploughman
plowman
point man
point woman
pointsman
policeman
policewoman
portuguese man-of-war
posseman
postman
potman
poultryman
pr man
preacher man
president truman
pressman
privateersman
property man
propman
public relations man
publicity man
pullman
quarryman
raftman
raftsman
railroad man
railway man
railwayman
ramman
red man
remittance man
renaissance man
repairman
rewrite man
rhodesian man
rich man
richard feynman
richard phillips feynman
riesman
rifleman
right-hand man
roadman
roger sherman
roman
roundsman
running postman
salesman
saleswoman
saman
sandman
sandwichman
schoolman
scotchman
scotchwoman
scotsman
scotswoman
seaman
second baseman
section man
seedman
seedsman
selectman
selectwoman
service man
serviceman
shaman
sheepman
sherman
showman
sidesman
signalman
sir isaac pitman
skilled workman
slovenly woman
small businessman
snowman
solo man
soman
soundman
spaceman
spectacled caiman
spokesman
spokeswoman
sporting man
sportsman
sportswoman
squaw man
stableman
stan the man
statesman
stateswoman
stayman
steelman
steersman
steinman
stickup man
stockman
straight man
straw man
strawman
strongman
stunt man
stunt woman
sultanate of oman
superman
swagman
switchman
swordsman
t-man
takilman
talisman
tallyman
tasman
taximan
taxman
third baseman
tibeto-burman
timberman
tollman
townsman
tradesman
trainbandsman
trainman
traveling salesman
travelling salesman
trencherman
tribesman
triggerman
trinil man
truman
tubman
tuchman
turcoman
turkoman
tv newsman
two-man saw
two-man tent
underclassman
unmarried man
unmarried woman
unpleasant woman
utility man
vagn walfrid ekman
vestryman
vestrywoman
vice chairman
vigilance man
visiting fireman
walkman
walt whitman
warehouseman
washerman
washerwoman
washwoman
watchman
water boatman
waterman
wealthy man
weatherman
welshman
white man
white woman
whitman
widow woman
widowman
wild man
william averell harriman
william tecumseh sherman
wingman
wireman
wise man
wolfman
woman
wonder woman
woodman
woodrow charles herman
woodsman
woody herman
working man
workingman
workman
worship of man
yachtsman
yachtswoman
yardman
yellow man
yellow woman
yeoman
yes-man
young man
young woman
yuman
zaman
zeeman
zukerman