1. An image or other material object representing a deity to which religious worship is addressed. 2. A mere image or semblance of something visible but without substance, as a phantom. 3. A false conception or notion; fallacy. Idol, idols.
1. A physical likeness or representation of a person, animal, or thing, photographed, painted, sculptured, or otherwise made visible. 2. A mental representation; idea; conception. 3. Form; appearance; semblance. 4. A type; embodiment. 5. An idol or representation of a deity. 6. A person or thing that resembles another closely; counterpart, double or copy. 7. A concrete representation, as in art, literature, or music, that is expressive or evocative of something else. images, image-face.
1. A story not founded on fact. 2. A deliberately false or improbable account; a fictitious story. fables.
1. Not proud or arrogant; modest. 2. Low in rank, importance, status, quality, etc.; lowly.
1. The act, power or property of appealing, alluring, enticing or inviting. 2. A thing or feature which draws by appealing to desires, tastes, etc. 3. The action of a body or substance in drawing to itself, by some physical force, another to which it is not materially attached; the force thus exercised. attractions.
1. The faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses. 2. Mental creative ability. 3. The product of imagining; a conception or mental creation. imagination"s, Imagination"s, imaginations, Imaginations.
"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
another ::: adj. 1. Being one more or more of the same; further; additional. 2. Very similar to; of the same kind or category as. 3. Different; distinct; of a different period, place, or kind. pron. **4. A person other than oneself or the one specified. 5. One more; an additional one. another"s**.
absence ::: the state of being away (from any place) or not being present; also the time of duration of such state.
absent ::: 1. Being away, withdrawn from, or not present (at a place). 2. Of time: Not present, distant, far off.
absolute ::: adj. 1. Free from all imperfection or deficiency; complete, finished; perfect, consummate. 2. Of degree: Complete, entire; in the fullest sense. 3. Having ultimate power, governing totally; unlimited by a constitution or the concurrent authority of a parliament; arbitrary, despotic. 4. Existing without relation to any other being; self-existent; self-sufficing. 5. Capable of being thought or conceived by itself alone; unconditioned. 6. Considered independently of its being subjective or objective. n. 7. Something that is not dependent upon external conditions for existence or for its specific nature, size, etc. (opposed to relative). Absolute, Absolute"s, absolutes, absoluteness.
" . . . a compromise is not a solution; it only salves over the difficulty and in the end increases the complexity of the problem and multiplies its issues.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"A cosmos or universe is always a harmony, otherwise it could not exist, it would fly to pieces. But as there are musical harmonies which are built out of discords partly or even predominantly, so this universe (the material) is disharmonious in its separate elements — the individual elements are at discord with each other to a large extent; it is only owing to the sustaining Divine Will behind that the whole is still a harmony to those who look at it with the cosmic vision. But it is a harmony in evolution in progress — that is, all is combined to strive towards a goal which is not yet reached, and the object of our yoga is to hasten the arrival to this goal. When it is reached, there will be a harmony of harmonies substituted for the present harmony built up on discords. This is the explanation of the present appearance of things.” Letters on Yoga
"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*
"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
"A divine life must be first and foremost an inner life; for since the outward must be the expression of what is within, there can be no divinity in the outer existence if there is not the divinisation of the inner being.” The Life Divine*
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.
adjourned ::: deferred, postponed; held over to another time.
"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
agent ::: n. **1. One who does the actual work of anything, as distinguished from the instigator or employer; hence, one who acts for another, a deputy, steward, factor, substitute, representative, or emissary. adj. 2. That which acts or exerts power. agents.**
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
alarm ::: n. 1. A warning sound of any kind to give notice of danger, or to arouse or attract attention; esp. a loud and hurried peal rung out by a tocsin or alarm bell. v. 2. To arouse to a sense of danger, to excite the attention or suspicion of, to put on the alert; warn. 3. To strike with fear or apprehension of danger; to agitate or excite with sudden fear. alarmed, alarming.
algebra ::: the branch of mathematics that deals with general statements of relations, utilizing letters and other symbols to represent specific sets of numbers, values, vectors, etc., in the description of such relations. 2. Any special system of notation adapted to the study of a special system of relationship.
alien ::: 1. Unlike one"s own; strange; not belonging to one; belonging to another person, place, or family. 2. Adverse; hostile. aliens.
"All birds of that region are relatives. But this is the bird of eternal Ananda, while the Hippogriff is the divinised Thought and the Bird of Fire is the Agni-bird, psychic and tapas. All that however is to mentalise too much and mentalising always takes most of the life out of spiritual things. That is why I say it can be seen but nothing said about it.” ::: "The question was: ‘In the mystical region, is the dragon bird any relation of your Bird of Fire with ‘gold-white wings" or your Hippogriff with ‘face lustred, pale-blue-lined"? And why do you write: ‘What to say about him? One can only see"?” Letters on Savitri
"All change must come from within with the felt or the secret support of the Divine Power; it is only by one"s own inner opening to that that one can receive help, not by mental, vital or physical contact with others.” Letters on Yoga
"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 energies put into activity — thought, speech, feeling, act — go to constitute Karma. These things help to develop the nature in one direction or another, and the nature and its actions and reactions produce their consequences inward and outward: they also act on others and create movements in the general sum of forces which can return upon oneself sooner or later. Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their effects. It is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have effect only when it is expressed in speech or act: the unspoken thought, the unexpressed will are also active energies and can produce their own vibrations, effects or reactions.” Letters on Yoga*
"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
alter ::: to make otherwise or different in some respect; to make some change in character, shape, condition, position, quantity, value, etc. without changing the thing itself for another; to modify, to change the appearance of. alters, altered, altering.
ambiguous ::: 1. Open to or having several possible meanings or interpretations; equivocal; questionable; indistinct, obscure, not clearly defined. 2. Of doubtful or uncertain nature; difficult to comprehend, distinguish, or classify; admitting more than one interpretation, or explanation; of double meaning. 3. Of oracles, people, using words of double meaning. ambiguously.
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.
". . . an Avatar is not at all bound to be a spiritual prophet — he is never in fact merely a prophet, he is a realiser, an establisher — not of outward things only, though he does realise something in the outward also, but, as I have said, of something essential and radical needed for the terrestrial evolution which is the evolution of the embodied spirit through successive stages towards the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
::: "And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also self-existent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.” The Synthesis of Yoga —**cosmic forces.**
**Angel of the Way *Sri Aurobindo: "Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. ‘By Bhakti" says the Lord in the Gita ‘shall a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the principles of my being, then he enters into Me." Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one"s love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, [work, knowledge, love] the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover"s being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
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
announcers ::: those who present, give notice and/or tell news.
annul ::: 1. To reduce to nothing; obliterate; annihilate. To put out of existence, extinguish. 2. To put an end or stop to (an action or state of things); to abolish, cancel, do away with. 3. To make void or null; abolish; cancel; invalidate; declare invalid. annuls, annulled, annulling, annulment.
antagonist ::: one who is opposed to, struggles against, or competes with another; opponent, adversary. antagonists.
antinomy ::: opposition between one law, principle, rule, etc., and another.
a person who professes beliefs and opinions that he or she does not hold in order to conceal his or her real feelings or motives; one who pretends to be what he is not. (Sri Aurobindo also uses the term as an adjective.) hypocrite"s.
"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
approach ::: v. 1. To come near or nearer to; draw near. 2. To come near to a person: i.e. into personal relations; into his presence or audience; or fig. within the range of his notice or attention. 3. To come near in quality, character, time, or condition; to be nearly equal. approaches, approached, approaching.* *n. 4. Any means of access or way of passage, avenue. 5. The act of drawing near. approaches.**
arch- ::: a combining form that represents the outcome of archi- in words borrowed through Latin from Greek in the Old English period; it subsequently became a productive form added to nouns of any origin, which thus denote individuals or institutions directing or having authority over others of their class (archbishop; archdiocese; archpriest): principal. More recently, arch-1 has developed the senses "principal” (archenemy; archrival) or "prototypical” and thus exemplary or extreme (archconservative); nouns so formed are almost always pejorative. Arch-intelligence.
arise ::: 1. To get up from sleep or rest; to awaken; wake up. 2. To go up, come up, ascend on high, mount. Now only poet. **3. To come into being, action, or notice; originate; appear; spring up. 4. Of circumstances viewed as results: To spring, originate, or result from. 5. To rise from inaction, from the peaceful, quiet, or ordinary course of life. 6. To rise in violence or agitation, as the sea, the wind; to boil up as a fermenting fluid, the blood; so of the heart, wrath, etc. Now poet. 7. Of sounds: To come up aloud, or so as to be audible, to be heard aloud. arises, arising, arose, arisen. *(Sri Aurobindo also employs arisen as an adj.*)
art ::: v. archaic** A second person singular present indicative of be, now only poet., not in modern usage. All other references are to art as the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. Also, the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria. art"s, arts, art-parades.
::: "As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body, — for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.” Letters on Yoga
as it would be if; as though. (Introducing a supposition, or way of conceiving some entity or situation, that is not to be taken literally, but yields some insight or convenience in metaphysics.)
"Aspiration should be not a form of desire, but the feeling of an inner soul"s need, and a quiet settled will to turn towards the Divine and seek the Divine. It is certainly not easy to get rid of this mixture of desire entirely — not easy for anyone; but when one has the will to do it, this also can be effected by the help of the sustaining Force.” Letters on Yoga
"A SPIRITUAL evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling Spirit, is then the keynote, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Reality, in a dense material Inconscience; a veil of Inconscience, a veil of insensibility of Matter hides the universal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that the Energy, which is the first form the Force of creation assumes in the physical universe, appears to be itself inconscient and yet does the works of a vast occult Intelligence.” The Life Divine
"A spiritual knowledge, moved to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the traditional way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. It must discover that the body is not our self, our foundation of existence; it is a sensible form of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"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
a star so distant from Earth that its position in relation to other stars appears not to change.
a stroke, beat; in music and prosody the stress or accent marking the rhythm; the intensity of delivery which distinguishes one syllable or note from others.
"At every turn it is the divine Reality which we can discover behind that which we are yet compelled by the nature of the superficial consciousness in which we dwell to call undivine and in a sense are right in using that apellation; for these appearances are a veil over the Divine Perfection, a veil necessary for the present, but not at all the true and complete figure.” The Life Divine
"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
authentic ::: not false or copied; genuine; real, original. authenticity.
awake ::: v. 1. To arouse from sleep or inactivity. 2. Fig. To rise from a state resembling sleep, such as death, indifference, inaction; to become active or vigilant. 3. To come or bring to an awareness, to become cognizant, to be fully conscious, to appreciate fully (often followed by to). awakes, awoke, awaking. *adj.* 4. Not asleep; conscious; vigilant, alert. half-awake.
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
battened ::: thrived and prospered, especially at another"s expense; grew fat. battening
"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 is not the same as Delight, but like love it is an expression, a form of Ananda, created by Ananda and composed of Ananda.” The Future Poetry
bed-fellows ::: those who are closely associated or allied with one another.
beings ::: things or entities that exist, esp. things or entities that cannot be assigned to any category.
belief ::: 1. Confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof. 2. Trust or confidence, faith. 3. Something believed; an opinion or conviction. beliefs.
Question: "Sweet Mother, l don"t understand very clearly the difference between faith, belief and confidence.”
Mother: "But Sri Aurobindo has given the full explanation here. If you don"t understand, then. . . He has written ‘Faith is a feeling in the whole being." The whole being, yes. Faith, that"s the whole being at once. He says that belief is something that occurs in the head, that is purely mental; and confidence is quite different. Confidence, one can have confidence in life, trust in the Divine, trust in others, trust in one"s own destiny, that is, one has the feeling that everything is going to help him, to do what he wants to do. Faith is a certitude without any proof. Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 6.
"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
beyond ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads *
biography ::: an account of a person"s life written, composed, or produced by another.
"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*
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.
not able to move or be moved; fixed; stationary; motionless. immobility.
not fully grown or developed.
not limitable; limitless; boundless. Illimitable, illimitably.
not memorable; also orig. as a syn. of immemorial.
not noble in quality, character, or purpose; base or mean.
not producing an intended effect; ineffectual.
border ::: n. 1. A part that forms the outer edge of something. 2. The line or frontier area separating political divisions or geographic regions; a boundary. 3. A strip of ground, as that at the edge of a garden or walk, an edging. borders. v. 4. To form the boundary of; be contiguous to. fig. To confine. 5. To lie adjacent to another. bordered.
borrowed ::: taken from another source, appropriated; assumed; adopted or adapted for the present.
borrower ::: one who receives something or appropriates it from another source.
breathless ::: 1. Motionless or still, as air without a breeze. 2. Not breathing; without breath.
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.**
"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 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*
". . . but this divine grace . . . is not simply a mysterious flow or touch coming from above, but the all-pervading act of a divine presence which we come to know within as the power of the highest Self and Master of our being entering into the soul and so possessing it that we not only feel it close to us and pressing upon our mortal nature, but live in its law, know that law, possess it as the whole power of our spiritualised nature.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"By Force I mean not mental or vital energy but the Divine Force from above — as peace comes from above and wideness also, so does this Force (Shakti). Nothing, not even thinking or meditating can be done without some action of Force. The Force I speak of is a Force for illumination, transformation, purification, all that has to be done in the yoga, for removal of hostile forces and the wrong movements — it is also of course for external work, whether great or small in appearance does not matter — if that is part of the Divine Will. I do not mean any personal force egoistic or rajasic.” Letters on Yoga
"By individual we mean normally something that separates itself from everything else and stands apart, though in reality there is no such thing anywhere in existence; it is a figment of our mental conceptions useful and necessary to express a partial and practical truth. But the difficulty is that the mind gets dominated by its words and forgets that the partial and practical truth becomes true truth only by its relation to others which seem to the reason to contradict it, and that taken by itself it contains a constant element of falsity. Thus when we speak of an individual we mean ordinarily an individualisation of mental, vital, physical being separate from all other beings, incapable of unity with them by its very individuality. If we go beyond these three terms of mind, life and body, and speak of the soul or individual self, we still think of an individualised being separate from all others, incapable of unity and inclusive mutuality, capable at most of a spiritual contact and soul-sympathy. It is therefore necessary to insist that by the true individual we mean nothing of the kind, but a conscious power of being of the Eternal, always existing by unity, always capable of mutuality. It is that being which by self-knowledge enjoys liberation and immortality.” The Life Divine
cadence ::: 1. Balanced, rhythmic flow, as of poetry or oratory. 2. Music. A sequence of notes or chords that indicates the momentary or complete end of a composition, section, phrase, etc. 3. The flow or rhythm of events. 4. A recurrent rhythmical series; a flow, esp. the pattern in which something is experienced. 5. A slight falling in pitch of the voice in speaking or reading. cadences.
calculus ::: a method of calculation, esp. one of several highly systematic methods of treating problems by a special system of algebraic notations, as differential or integral calculus.
calm ::: n. 1. Serenity; tranquillity; peace. 2. Nearly or completely motionless as a condition of no wind. Calm, Calm"s, calms, calmness. adj. 3. Not excited or agitated; composed; tranquil; 4. Without rough motion; still or nearly still. calmer, calm-lipped, stone-calm. *adv. calmly.
Sri Aurobindo: "Calm is a still unmoved condition which no disturbance can affect — it is a less negative condition than quiet.” Letters on Yoga*
"Calm is a positive tranquillity which can exist in spite of superficial disturbances.” *Letters on Yoga
"Calm is a strong and positive quietude, firm and solid — ordinary quietude is mere negation, simply the absence of disturbance.” *Letters on Yoga
"But more powerful still is the giving up of the fruit of one"s works, because that immediately destroys all causes of disturbance and brings and preserves automatically an inner calm and peace, and calm and peace are the foundation on which all else becomes perfect and secure in possession by the tranquil spirit.” Essays on the Gita
The Mother: "Calm is self-possessed strength, quiet and conscious energy, mastery of the impulses, control over the unconscious reflexes.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 14*.
candid ::: 1. Characterized by openness and sincerity of expression; unreservedly straightforward. 2. Free from prejudice; impartial. 3. Clear or pure 4. Not posed or rehearsed.
carelessness ::: the quality of not being careful or taking pains; being negligent.
casual ::: 1. Occurring by chance; accidental. 2. Occurring offhand; not premeditated. 3. Occurring at irregular or infrequent intervals; occasional. 4. Without definite or serious intention; careless or offhand; passing.
cenotaphs ::: monuments erected in honour of dead persons whose remains lie elsewhere.
"Certainly, ideals are not the ultimate Reality, for that is too high and vast for any ideal to envisage; they are aspects of it thrown out in the world-consciousness as a basis for the workings of the world-power. But they are primary, the actual workings secondary. They are nearer to the Reality and therefore always more real, forcible and complete than the facts which are their partial reflection.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Certainly, ideals are not the ultimate Reality, for that is too high and vast for any ideal to envisage; they are aspects of it thrown out in the world-consciousness as a basis for the workings of the world-power. But they are primary, the actual workings secondary. They are nearer to the Reality and therefore always more real, forcible and complete than the facts which are their partial reflection. Reflections themselves of the Real, they again are reflected in the more concrete workings of our existence. The Supramental Manifestation
chance ::: n. 1. The absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled: often personified or treated as a positive agency. 2. The happening of events; the way in which things happen; fortune. 3. An opportune or favourable time; opportunity. 4. Fortune; luck; fate. Chance, chances. *adj.* 5. Not planned or expected; accidental. v. 6. To happen by chance; be the case by chance.** chanced.
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.**
characters ::: 1. The combination of qualities, features and traits that distinguishes one person, group, or thing from another. 2. The marks or symbols used in writing systems such as the letters of the alphabet.
child ::: 1. A person between birth and full growth. 2. A baby or infant. 3. A person who has not attained maturity. 4. One who is childish or immature. 5. An individual regarded as strongly affected by another or by a specified time, place, or circumstance. 6. Any person or thing regarded as the product or result of particular agencies, influences, etc. Child, child"s, children, Children, children"s, child-god, Child-Godhead, child-heart, child-heart"s, child-laughter, child-soul, child-sovereign, child-thought, flame-child, foster-child, God-child, King-children.
cipher ::: n. 1. Something having no influence or value; a zero; a nonentity. 2. A secret method of writing, as by transposition or substitution of letters, specially formed symbols, or the like. unintelligible to all but those possessing the key; a cryptograph. ciphers. *v. 3. To put in secret writing; encode. *ciphers. Note: Sri Aurobindo also spelled the word as Cypher, the old English spelling.
clear ::: 1. Not obscured or darkened; bright. 2. Free from darkness, obscurity, or cloudiness; transparent. 3. Serene; calm; untroubled. 4. Free from doubt or confusion; certain. 5. Easily perceptible to the eye or ear; distinct. 6. Easily understood; without ambiguity. 7. Free from impediment, obstruction, or hindrance; open. clearer, sun-clear, surface-clear.
clear-cut ::: not ambiguous; clear and obvious.
coarse ::: 1. Composed of relatively large parts or particles. 2. Lacking in fineness or delicacy of texture, structure, etc. Not refined or delicate, rough.
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.
commonalty ::: not distinguished by superior or noteworthy characteristics; average; ordinary.
companion ::: 1. A person who accompanies or associates with another; a comrade. 2. Astronomy. The fainter of the two stars that constitute a double star. companions, companionless.
compassion ::: a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering. compassion"s.
concept ::: 1. An idea, esp. an abstract idea or notion. 2. An idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct. 3. A directly conceived or intuited object of thought. concept"s, concept-maps.
conception ::: 1. Origin or beginning. 2. The act or power of forming notions, ideas, or concepts. 3. The act of conceiving; the state of being conceived; fertilization; inception of pregnancy. 4. Something conceived in the mind; a concept, plan, design, idea, or thought. conception"s.
conditions ::: circumstances that are indispensable to the appearance or occurrence of another; prerequisites.
*consciousforce. ::: Sri Aurobindo: "In actual fact Mind measures Time by event and Space by Matter; but it is possible in pure mentality to disregard the movement of event and the disposition of substance and realise the pure movement of Conscious-Force which constitutes Space and Time; these two are then merely two aspects of the universal force of Consciousness which in their intertwined interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon itself. And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space, but containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer itself as a subjective and indivisible extension, — no less subjective than Time.” The Life Divine
::: "Consciousness is not only power of awareness of self and things, it is or has also a dynamic and creative energy. It can determine its own reactions or abstain from reactions; it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces. Consciousness is Chit but also Chit Shakti.” Letters on Yoga
::: ‘Consecration" generally has a more mystical sense but this is not absolute. A total consecration signifies a total giving of one"s self; hence it is the equivalent of the word ``surrender"", not of the word (soumission} which always gives the impression that one accepts'' passively. You feel a flame in the wordconsecration"", a flame even greater than in the word offering''. To consecrate oneself isto give oneself to an action""; hence, in the yogic sense, it is to give oneself to some divine work with the idea of accomplishing the divine work.” Questions and Answers, MCW Vol. 4*.
consigned ::: handed over or given into the care or charge of another; entrusted.
content ::: the state of being satisfied with what one is or has; not wanting more or anything else. contents, contented.
conversed ::: talked informally with another or others; exchanged views, opinions, etc.; communed with.
convey ::: 1. To take or carry from one place to another; transport. 2. To communicate or make known; impart. conveys, conveyed.
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 vision ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Cosmic vision is the seeing of the universal movements — it has nothing to do with the psychic necessarily. It can be in the universal mind, the universal vital, the universal physical or anywhere.” Letters on Yoga*
::: "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
counterpart ::: one of two parts that fit and complete each another. counterparts.
count ::: n. 1. The act of counting; or calculating. v. 2. To take account of; reckon to another"s credit. 3. To have merit, importance, value, etc.; deserve consideration. counts, counted, counting.
covert ::: 1. Secret or hidden from view or knowledge; not openly practiced or engaged in, shown or avowed. 2. Concealment; secrecy. 3. A covered place or shelter; hiding place.
create ::: 1. To cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes. 2. To evolve from one"s own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention. 3. To cause to happen; to bring about; arrange, as by intention or design. creates, created, creating, all-creating, self-creating, world-creating, new-create.
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".
curse ::: n. 1. The expression of a wish that misfortune, evil, doom, etc., befall a person, group, etc. 2. A formula or charm intended to cause such misfortune to another. 3. An evil brought or inflicted upon one. 4. The cause of evil, misfortune, or trouble. 5. A profane or obscene expression or oath. curses. v. 6. To wish harm upon; invoke evil upon. 7. To invoke supernatural powers to bring harm to (someone or something). cursed.
dark ::: adj. 1. Lacking or having very little light. 2. Concealed or secret; mysterious. 3. Difficult to understand; obscure. 4. Characterized by gloom; dismal. 5. Fig. Sinister; evil; absent moral or spiritual values. 6. (used of color) Having a dark hue; almost black. 7. Showing a brooding ill humor. 8. Having a complexion that is not fair; swarthy. darker, darkest, dark-browed, dark-robed.* n. 9. Absence of light; dark state or condition; darkness, esp. that of night. 10. A dark place: a place of darkness. 11. The condition of being hidden from view, obscure, or unknown; obscurity. *in the dark: in concealment or secrecy.
deathbound ::: also **death-bound. ::: **"A deathbound littleness is not all we are:”
::: "Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life and her reminder to it that it has not yet found itself. If there were no siege of death, the creature would be bound for ever in the form of an imperfect living. Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility.” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"Death is there because the being in the body is not yet developed enough to go on growing in the same body without the need of change and the body itself is not sufficiently conscious. If the mind and vital and the body itself were more conscious and plastic, death would not be necessary.” Letters on Yoga
deathless ::: 1. Not subject to termination or death; immortal. 2. Unceasing; perpetual.
death ::: Sri Aurobindo: "For the spiritual seeker death is only a passage from one form of life to another, and none is dead but only departed.” *Letters on Yoga
deceiving ::: causing to believe what is not true; misleading. self-deceiving.
deduction ::: logic. A process of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from the premises presented, so that the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true.
deep ::: n. 1. A vast extent, as of space or time; an abyss. 2. Fig. Difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; as an unfathomable thought, idea, esp. poetic. Deep, deep"s, deeps. adj. 3. Extending far downward below a surface. 4. Having great spatial extension or penetration downward or inward from an outer surface or backward or laterally or outward from a center; sometimes used in combination. 5. Coming from or penetrating to a great depth. 6. Situated far down, in, or back. 7. Lying below the surface; not superficial; profound. 8. Of great intensity; as extreme deep happiness, deep trouble. 9. Absorbing; engrossing. 10. Grave or serious. 11. Profoundly or intensely. 12. Mysterious; obscure; difficult to penetrate or understand. 13. Low in pitch or tone. 14. Profoundly cunning, crafty or artful. 15. The central and most intense or profound part; "in the deep of night”; "in the deep of winter”. deeper, deepest, deep-browed, deep-caved, deep-concealed, deep-etched, deep-fraught, deep-guarded, deep-hid, deep-honied, deep-pooled, deep-thoughted. *adv. *16. to a great depth psychologically or profoundly.
delegate ::: a person authorised to act as representative for another. delegation.
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.
denizens ::: inhabitants; occupants; residents, especially of plants or animals and people established in a place to which they are not native.
dependencies ::: subject territories that are not an integral part of the ruling country.
deputy ::: a person appointed to act on behalf of or represent another; agent, representative, surrogate, envoy.
". . . desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in things.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
"Destruction is always a simultaneous or alternate element which keeps pace with creation and it is by destroying and renewing that the Master of Life does his long work of preservation. More, destruction is the first condition of progress. Inwardly, the man who does not destroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater existence. Outwardly also, the nation or community or race which shrinks too long from destroying and replacing its past forms of life, is itself destroyed, rots and perishes and out of its debris other nations, communities and races are formed. By destruction of the old giant occupants man made himself a place upon earth. By destruction of the Titans the gods maintain the continuity of the divine Law in the cosmos. Whoever prematurely attempts to get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainly against the greater will of the World-Spirit.” Essays on the Gita
detached ::: 1. Impartial or objective; disinterested; unbiased. 2. Not involved or concerned; aloof. ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Detachment means that one stands back from [imperfections and weakness of the nature, etc.] , does not identify oneself with them or get upset or troubled because they are there, but rather looks on them as something foreign to one"s true consciousness and true self, rejects them and calls in the Mother"s Force into these movements to eliminate them and bring the true consciousness and its movements there.” Letters on Yoga
devious ::: 1. Deviating from the straight or direct course; roundabout. 2. Without definite course; vagrant. 3. Not straightforward; shifty or crooked.
different ::: 1. Not alike in character or quality; differing; dissimilar. 2. Not identical; separate or distinct.
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.
dim ::: 1. Obscure to the mind or the senses. 2. Not clearly seen; indistinct; faint. 3. Having weak or indistinct vision. 4. Faintly outlined; indistinct. 5. Lacking in brightness. v. 1. To cause to seem less bright, as by comparison. 2. Make dim or lusterless. dimly, dim-eyed, dim-heart, dim-hearted, dim-masked, dim-souled.
dimmed ::: v.**1. Made or became dim; lost brightness. Also fig. adj. 2. Not brilliant; dull in lustre. 3.** Dulled; indistinct; not seen clearly or in detail as of sight or vision.
dips ::: 1. Plunges briefly into water or another liquid and removes quickly. 2. Sinks or drops down, or below a particular level, as if dipping into water; goes down, sinks, sets. 3. Has a downward inclination; inclines or slopes downwards; is inclined to the horizon. dipped, dipping.
direct ::: adj. 1. Proceeding without interruption in a straight course or line; not deviating or swerving. adv. 2. In a straightforward manner; directly; straight.
disciples ::: those who are pupils or adherents of the doctrines of another; followers.
discontent ::: 1. A restless desire or craving for something one does not have. 2. Lack of content; dissatisfaction.
discontented ::: not content or satisfied; restlessly unhappy.
dissatisfied ::: 1. Not satisfied or pleased; discontented. 2. Feeling or exhibiting a lack of contentment or satisfaction.
divine love ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Divine Love, in my view of it, is again not something ethereal, cold and far, but a love absolutely intense, intimate and full of unity, closeness and rapture using all the nature for its expression.” *Letters on Yoga
divine Reality ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Divine Reality is infinite in its being; in this infinite being, we find limited being everywhere, — that is the apparent fact from which our existence here seems to start and to which our own narrow ego and its ego-centric activities bear constant witness. But, in reality, when we come to an integral self-knowledge, we find that we are not limited, for we also are infinite.” *The Life Divine
::: "Divinisation itself does not mean the destruction of the human elements; it means taking them up, showing them the way to their own perfection, raising them by purification and perfection to their full power and Ananda and that means the raising of the whole of earthly life to its full power and Ananda.” Letters on Yoga
draw ::: 1. To cause to move in a given direction or to a given position, as by leading. 2. To bring towards oneself or itself, as by inherent force or influence; attract. 3. To cause to come by attracting; attract. 4. To cause to move in a particular direction by or as by a pulling force; pull; drag. 5. To get, take or obtain as from a source; to derive. 6. To bring, take, or pull out, as from a receptacle or source. 7. To draw a (or the) line (fig.) to determine or define the limit between two things or groups; in modern colloquial use (esp. with at), to lay down a definite limit of action beyond which one refuses to go. 8. To make, sketch (a picture or representation of someone or something) in lines or words; to design, trace out, delineate; depict; also, to mould, model. 9. To mark or lay out; trace. 10. To compose or write out in legal format. 11. To write out (a bill of exchange or promissory note). 12. To disembowel. 13. To move or pull so as to cover or uncover something. 14. To suck or take in (air, for example); inhale. 15. To extend, lengthen, prolong, protract. 16. To cause to move after or toward one by applying continuous force; drag. draws, drew, drawn, drawing, wide-drawn.
dream ::: 1. A series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. 2. A vision occurring to a person while awake. 3. A person or thing that is as pleasant, or seemingly unreal, as a dream 4. An ideal or aspiration; goal; aim. 5. A wild or vain fancy. Dream, dream"s, Dream"s, dreams, dream-brood, dream-brush, dream-built, dream-caught, dream-fact, dream-fate, dream-god"s, dream-happiness, dream-hued, dream-life, dream-light, dream-made, dream-mind, dream-notes, dream-print, dream-sculptured, dream-shores, dream-smiles, dream-splendour, dream-truth, dream-vasts, dream-white, dream-world, half-dream, self-dream, sun-dream, world-dream. *adj. 6. Of a colour: misty, dim, or cloudy. v. 7. To have an image (of) or fantasy (about) in or as if in a dream. dreams, dreamed, *dreaming.
dubious ::: 1. Marked by or causing doubt; vague; ambiguous. 2. Not certain in outcome. 3. Fraught with uncertainty or doubt; undecided.
dull ::: adj. **1. Causing boredom; tedious; uninteresting. 2. Not brisk or rapid; sluggish. 3. Lacking responsiveness or alertness; insensitive. 4. Not clear and resonant; sounding as if striking with or against something relatively soft. 5. (of color) Very low in saturation; highly diluted; 6. Slow to learn or understand; lacking intellectual acuity. duller, dull-eyed, dull-hued, dull-visioned. v. 7. To make numb or insensitive. 8. To make or become dull or sluggish. 9. To make less lively or vigorous. dulls, dulled.**
dupe ::: one who unquestioningly or unwittingly serves a cause or another person.
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.
dyumatsena ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory.” Author"s note at beginning of Savitri.
"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*
earthly ::: 1. Terrestrial; not heavenly or divine. 2. Worldly. earthliness.
earthly life ::: Sri Aurobindo: "This earthly life need not be necessarily and for ever a wheel of half-joyous half-anguished effort; attainment may also be intended and the glory and joy of God made manifest upon earth.” The Life Divine
effect and cause ::: cause and effect. Noting a relationship between actions or events such that one or more are the result of the other or others.
"Ego is a very curious thing and in nothing more than in its way of hiding itself and pretending it is not the ego.” Letters on Yoga*
embrace ::: n. 1. The act of clasping another person in the arms. Also fig. **embraces. v. 2. To take or clasp in the arms; press to the bosom. 3. To take or receive gladly or eagerly; accept willingly. 4. To include or contain. 5. To surround; enclose; entwine. 6. To take up willingly or eagerly. embraced, embracing, all-embracing.**
emerge ::: 1. To come forth into view or notice, as from concealment, or obscurity. 2. To rise or come forth from or as if from water or other liquid. 3. To come into existence; develop. 4. To rise, as from an inferior or unfortunate state or condition. emerges, emerged, emerging.
emptied ::: holding or containing nothing of meaning, or certain specified qualities.
emptiness ::: 1. The state of containing nothing. 2. An empty area or space; a vacuum.
"Emptiness is not in itself a bad condition, only if it is a sad and restless emptiness of the dissatisfied vital. In sadhana emptiness is very usually a necessary transition from one state to another. When mind and vital fall quiet and their restless movements, thoughts and desires cease, then one feels empty. This is at first often a neutral emptiness with nothing in it, nothing in it either good or bad, happy or unhappy, no impulse or movement. This neutral state is often or even usually followed by the opening to inner experience. There is also an emptiness made of peace and silence, when the peace and silence come out from the psychic within or descend from the higher consciousness above. This is not neutral, for in it there is the sense of peace, often also of wideness and freedom. There is also a happy emptiness with the sense of something close or drawing near which is not yet there, e.g. the closeness of the Mother or some other preparing experience.” Letters on Yoga*
empty ::: 1. Holding or containing nothing. 2. Having no occupants or inhabitants; vacant. 3. Destitute of some quality or qualities; devoid. 4. Without purpose, substance, or value. emptier.
enemy ::: n. 1. A hostile person, power, force or nation. 2. One who feels hatred toward, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of another; a foe. enemy"s *adj. *3. Of, relating to, or being a hostile power or force.
engrafted ::: 1. Inserted (a scion) onto or into another plant. 2. Planted firmly; established.
envy ::: a feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another"s advantages, success, possessions, etc.; longing to possess something awarded to or achieved by another.
equal ::: adj. 1. As great as; the same as (often followed by to or with). 2. Having the same quantity, value, or measure as another. 3. Evenly proportioned or balanced. 4. Tranquil; equable; undisturbed. 5. Impartial; just; equitable. n. 6. One who is equal to another in any specified quality. v. **7. To become equal or level with. equalled.**
"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 means a quiet and unmoved mind and vital, it means not to be touched or disturbed by things that happen or things said or done to you, but to look at them with a straight look, free from the distortions created by personal feeling, and to try to understand what is behind them, why they happen, what is to be learnt from them, what is it in oneself which they are cast against and what inner profit or progress one can make out of them; it means self-mastery over the vital movements, — anger and sensitiveness and pride as well as desire and the rest, — not to let them get hold of the emotional being and disturb the inner peace, not to speak and act in the rush and impulsion of these things, always to act and speak out of a calm inner poise of the spirit.” *Letters on Yoga
escort ::: one or more persons accompanying another to guide, protect, or show honour.
Eternal"s. Sri Aurobindo: ". . . that which is, cannot perish; it can only lose itself. All is eternal in the eternal spirit.” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
::: "Even Science believes that one day death may be conquered by physical means and its reasonings are perfectly sound. There is no reason why the supramental Force should not do it. Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that there is no reason why they should not last.” Letters on Yoga
"Everything here is not perfect but all works out the cosmic Will in the course of the ages.” Letters on Yoga*
evolution ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Evolution is nothing but the progressive unfolding of spirit out of the density of material consciousness and the gradual self-revelation of God out of this apparent animal being.” *The Hour of God
"Evolution takes place on the earth and therefore the earth is the proper field for progression. The beings of the other worlds do not progress from one world to another. They remain fixed to their own type.” Letters on Yoga
excess ::: 1. The amount or degree by which one thing exceeds another. 2. Superabundance.
exclusive ::: 1. Not admitting of something else. 2. Noting that in which no others have a share.
exempt ::: released from, or not subject to, an obligation, liability, etc.
::: "Experiences are of all kinds and take all forms in the consciousness. When the consciousness undergoes, sees or feels anything spiritual or psychic or even occult, that is an experience — in the technical yogic sense, for there are of course all sorts of experiences that are not of that character.” Letters on Yoga
::: **"Faith is a certitude in the soul which does not depend on reasoning, on this or that mental idea, on circumstances, on this or that passing condition of the mind or the vital or the body. It may be hidden, eclipsed, may even seem to be quenched, but it reappears again after the storm or the eclipse; it is seen burning still in the soul when one has thought that it was extinguished for ever. The mind may be a shifting sea of doubts and yet that faith may be there within and, if so, it will keep even the doubt-racked mind in the way so that it goes on in spite of itself towards its destined goal. Faith is a spiritual certitude of the spiritual, the divine, the soul"s ideal, something that clings to that even when it is not fulfilled in life, even when the immediate facts or the persistent circumstances seem to deny it.” Letters on Yoga
::: "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
::: **"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
feats ::: notable acts or deeds, especially acts of courage; exploits.
fiction ::: an imaginative creation or a pretence that does not represent actuality but has been invented; made-up. fictions.
files ::: a line of persons or things placed one behind another (distinguished from ‘rank").
"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
firm ::: 1. Resistant to externally applied pressure. 2. Not subject to change; fixed and definite.; not likely to change. 3. Securely fixed in place. 4. Steadfast and determined. 5. Indicating firmness and steadfastness. 6. Definitely established; decided; settled. firm-based.
"First, we affirm an Absolute as the origin and support and secret Reality of all things. The Absolute Reality is indefinable and ineffable by mental thought and mental language; it is self-existent and self-evident to itself, as all absolutes are self-evident, but our mental affirmatives and negatives, whether taken separatively or together, cannot limit or define it.” The Life Divine
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.
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.
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.
floating ::: adj. 1. Being buoyed up on water or other liquid. 2. Having little or no attachment; moving from one place to another. 3. Continually changing especially as from one abode or occupation to another. 4. Being suspended in or as in a liquid with freedom to move; also, to move freely through (something).
fluent ::: fig. Changeable; not rigid or fixed.
fluid ::: changing readily; shifting; not fixed, stable, or rigid.
fold (s) ::: v. 1. To envelope or clasp; enfold. 2. To bring (the wings) close to the body, as a bird on alighting. folding. *n. 3. The doubling of any flexible substance, as cloth; one part turned or bent and laid on another. Also fig. *4. A coil of a serpent, string, etc.
follower ::: 1. Someone who travels behind or pursues another. 2. One who subscribes to the teachings or methods of another; an adherent. followers.
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.
force, divine ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Divine Force can act on any plane — it is not limited to the supramental Force. The supramental is only one aspect of the power of the Divine.” *Letters on 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 each birth is a new start; it develops indeed from the past, but is not its mechanical continuation: rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the machinery of an evolutionary process.” The Life Divine
foreboding ("s) ::: n. **1. A strong inner feeling or notion of a future misfortune, evil, etc.; presentiment. adj. 2.** Foretelling or predicting; indicating beforehand; portending.
foreign ::: alien; not natural.
forewilled ::: a word coined by Sri Aurobindo. As a prefix, fore (with or without hyphen) denotes beforehand, previously, in advance; hence, willed in advance.
::: "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 me faith is not intellectual belief but a function of the soul; . . . .” Letters on Yoga
"Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that there is no reason why they should not last.” Letters on Yoga
::: "For the impersonal Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a mere state or power and degree of being any more than we ourselves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the annullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible state of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.” *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
foster-child ::: a child raised by someone who is not its natural or adoptive parent.
friction ::: a resistance encountered when one body moves relative to another body with which it is in contact. Surface resistance to relative motion.
fro ::: to and fro. Alternating from one place to another; back and forth.
gandharva ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Gandharvas are of the vital plane but they are vital Gods, not Asuras.” *Letters on Yoga
gnarled ::: having gnarls; knotty or misshapen.
god ::: a being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions. gods, gods", God"s, Gods, God-bliss, God-born, god-chant, God-child, god-children, God-ecstasy, God-face, God-frame, God-Force, God-given, god-haunts, God-instinct"s, God-joy, God-Light, god-kind, God-knowledge, God-language, God-light, god-mind, god-phase, God-spark, god-speech, God-state, god-touch, God-vision"s, god-wings, child-god, dream-god"s, half-god, Sun-god"s.
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 is one but he is not bounded by his unity.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"God is the All and that which exceeds, transcends the All; there is nothing in existence which is not God but God is not anything in that existence, except symbolically, in image to His own consciousness.” The Life Divine
"God is the one stable and eternal Reality. He is One because there is nothing else, since all existence and non-existence are He. He is stable or unmoving, because motion implies change in Space and change in Time, and He, being beyond Time and Space, is immutable. He possesses eternally in Himself all that is, has been or ever can be, and He therefore does not increase or diminish. He is beyond causality and relativity and therefore there is no change of relations in His being.” The Upanishads
"God speaks to the heart when the brain cannot understand him.” *Essays Divine and Human
grace ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Grace is something spontaneous which wells out from the Divine Consciousness as a free flow of its being. ::: It is a power that is superior to any rule, even to the Cosmic Law — for all spiritual seers have distinguished between the Law and Grace. Yet it is not indiscriminate — only it has a discrimination of its own which sees things and persons and the right times and seasons with another vision than that of the Mind or any other normal Power. A state of Grace is prepared in the individual often behind thick veils by means not calculable by the mind and when the state of Grace comes, then the Grace itself acts. ” *Letters on Yoga
grey ::: 1. A neutral tone, intermediate between black and white, that has no hue and reflects and transmits only a little light. 2.* Fig. Dismal or dark, esp. from lack of light; gloomy. 3. Dull, dreary or monotonous. 4. Used often in reference to twilight or a gloomy or an overcast day. greyer, grey-eyed, grey-hued, silver-grey. n. *greyness.
guarantor ::: one who provides a warrant or guarantee to another.
guest ::: 1. One who is a recipient of hospitality at the home or table of another. Also fig. guests
hallucinates ::: perceives what is not there; has illusions.
hallucination ::: 1. A sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders. 2. A false notion, belief, or impression; illusion; delusion.
hang ::: 1. To fasten or attach (pictures, etc.) to a wall. 2. To suspend (something) around or in front of anything. 3.* Fig. To remain unresolved or uncertain. 4. To make (an idea, form, etc.) dependent on the situation, structure, concept, or the like, usually derived from another source. 5. To fasten or be fastened from above, esp. by a cord, chain, etc.; suspend. 6. To be suspended or poised; hover. 7. To bend forward or downward; to lean over. *hangs, hung, hanging, flower-hung, shadow-hung. ::: hung on: Remained clinging, usually implying expectation or unwillingness to sever one"s connection.
haunting ::: remaining in the consciousness; not quickly forgotten.
heart ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The heart in Vedic psychology is not restricted to the seat of the emotions; it includes all that large tract of spontaneous mentality, nearest to the subconscient in us, out of which rise the sensations, emotions, instincts, impulses and all those intuitions and inspirations that travel through these agencies before they arrive at form in the intelligence.” *The Secret of the Veda
heavy ::: 1. Having relatively great weight. lit. and fig. 2. Weighed down; burdened. 3. Marked by or exhibiting weariness. 4. Without vivacity or interest; ponderous; dull. 5. Not easily borne; oppressive; burdensome; harsh. 6. Hard to cope with; trying; difficult. 7. Weighed down with sorrow or grief; sorrowful, sad, grieved, despondent. 8. Deep, profound, intense. 9. Of great import or seriousness; grave. 10. Sober, serious, sombre or tragic. 11. With great force, intensity, turbulence, etc. 12. Having considerable thickness or substance. 13. Lacking vitality; deficient in vivacity or grace. 14. Emotionally weighed down; despondent. heavier.
hegemony ::: the predominant influence, as of a state, region, or group, over another or others.
heir ::: a person who is entitled by law or by the terms of a will to inherit the estate of another. heirs.
herbs ::: a flowering plant whose stem above ground does not become woody.
hermetic ::: 1. Having to do with the occult sciences, especially alchemy; magical. 2. Made airtight by fusion or sealing. 3. Not affected by outward influence or power; isolated.
hero ::: 1. One who is distinguished by exceptional courage, nobility, fortitude, etc. 2. A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life (Sri Aurobindo also employs the word as an adj.) hero"s, heroes.
hew ::: 1. To cut something by repeated blows, as of an axe. 2. To make or shape as with an axe. 3. To sever from a larger or another portion as with a blow. 4. To cut down with an axe; fell; slay. hews, hewed, hewn, hewing, hewer, half-hewn, rock-hewn. ::: rough-hewn. Shaped out roughly, given crude form to; worked or executed in the rough. (Here in reference to Satyavan"s abode.)
"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
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.
hold up. 16. To present to notice; expose.
" . . . humility is the first necessity, for one who has ego and pride cannot realise the Highest.” *Letters on Yoga
**"I certainly won"t have ‘attracted" [in place of ‘allured"] — there is an enormous difference between the force of the two words and merely ‘attracted by the Ecstasy" would take away all my ecstasy in the line — nothing so tepid can be admitted. Neither do I want ‘thrill" [in place of ‘joy"] which gives a false colour — precisely it would mean that the ecstasy was already touching him with its intensity which is far from my intention.Your statement that ‘joy" is just another word for ‘ecstasy" is surprising. ‘Comfort", ‘pleasure", ‘joy", ‘bliss", ‘rapture", ‘ecstasy" would then be all equal and exactly synonymous terms and all distinction of shades and colours of words would disappear from literature. As well say that ‘flashlight" is just another word for ‘lightning" — or that glow, gleam, glitter, sheen, blaze are all equivalents which can be employed indifferently in the same place. One can feel allured to the supreme omniscient Ecstasy and feel a nameless joy touching one without that Joy becoming itself the supreme Ecstasy. I see no loss of expressiveness by the joy coming in as a vague nameless hint of the immeasurable superior Ecstasy.” Letters on Savitri*
"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*
"If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation. The body is abandoned, but the soul goes on its way, . . . .” Essays on the Gita
ignorance ::: the state or fact of being ignorant; lack of knowledge, learning, information. Ignorance, ignorance"s, Ignorance"s, ignorance", world-ignorance, World-Ignorance.
Sri Aurobindo: "Ignorance is the absence of the divine eye of perception which gives us the sight of the supramental Truth; it is the non-perceiving principle in our consciousness as opposed to the truth-perceiving conscious vision and knowledge.” *The Life Divine
"Ignorance is the consciousness of being in the successions of Time, divided in its knowledge by dwelling in the moment, divided in its conception of self-being by dwelling in the divisions of Space and the relations of circumstance, self-prisoned in the multiple working of the unity. It is called the Ignorance because it has put behind it the knowledge of unity and by that very fact is unable to know truly or completely either itself or the world, either the transcendent or the universal reality.” The Life Divine
"Ignorance means Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the Supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth, — truth of being, truth of divine consciousness, truth of force and action, truth of Ananda. As a result, instead of a world of integral truth and divine harmony created in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a world founded on the part truths of an inferior cosmic Intelligence in which all is half-truth, half-error. . . . All in the consciousness of this creation is either limited or else perverted by separation from the integral Light; even the Truth it perceives is only a half-knowledge. Therefore it is called the Ignorance.” The Mother
". . . all ignorance is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledge . . . .”The Life Divine
"This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence of the supreme Truth is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts infallibly and the steps of the Ignorance itself are guided even when they seem to stumble; for what we call the Ignorance is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"Knowledge is no doubt the knowledge of the One, the realisation of the Being; Ignorance is a self-oblivion of Being, the experience of separateness in the multiplicity and a dwelling or circling in the ill-understood maze of becomings: . . . .” The Life Divine*
"I have started writing about doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the ‘doubt" whether any amount of writing or of anything else can ever persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. In the first place, to write adequately would mean anything from 60 to 600 pages, but not even 6000 convincing pages would convince doubt. For doubt exists for its own sake; its very function is to doubt always and, even when convinced, to go on doubting still; it is only to persuade its entertainer to give it board and lodging that it pretends to be an honest truth-seeker. This is a lesson I have learnt from the experience both of my own mind and of the minds of others; the only way to get rid of doubt is to take discrimination as one"s detector of truth and falsehood and under its guard to open the door freely and courageously to experience.” Letters on Yoga
illumined mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "This greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil daylight, gives place or subordinates itself to an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the Spirit: a play of lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from above into the consciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast descent of peace which characterise or accompany the action of the larger conceptual-spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge.” *The Life Divine
"The Illumined Mind does not work primarily by thought, but by vision; . . . .” The Life Divine
"As the Higher Mind brings a greater consciousness into the being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so the Illumined Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through a Truth-sight and Truth-light and its seeing and seizing power.” The Life Divine*
::: ". . . immortality in its fundamental sense does not mean merely some kind of personal survival of the bodily death; we are immortal by the eternity of our self-existence without beginning or end, beyond the whole succession of physical births and deaths through which we pass, beyond the alternations of our existence in this and other worlds: the spirit"s timeless existence is the true immortality.” *The Life Divine
"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
immutable ::: not subject or susceptible to change. Immutable, immutable"s, immutably, immutability.
impacts ::: the effects or impressions of one thing on another.
impalpable ::: 1. Not perceptible to the touch; intangible. 2. Difficult to perceive or grasp by the mind.
impartial ::: not partial or biased; unprejudiced; fair. impartially.
impassive ::: 1. Without emotion; apathetic; unmoved. 2. Calm; serene. 3. Not subject to suffering; unaffected. impassively.
impatient ::: 1. Unable to endure irritation or opposition; intolerant; not patient. 2. Eagerly desirous; restless in desire or expectation. 3. Lacking patience; easily irritated at delay, opposition.
impenitent ::: unrepentant; not sorry for.
imperfect ::: 1. Of, pertaining to, or characterized by defects or weaknesses; faulty. 2. Not perfect; lacking completeness; deficient.
". . . 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.*
imperishable ::: not subject to decay or deterioration. Imperishable, imperishable"s, Imperishable"s, imperishableness, imperishably.
impermanent ::: not lasting or durable; not permanent; fleeting. impermanence.
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
implacable ::: not to be appeased, mollified, or pacified; inexorable. implacably.
imponderables ::: things that cannot be precisely determined, measured, or evaluated.
inaccessible ::: 1. Capable of being reached only with great difficulty or not at all. 2. Not able to be (easily) approached, reached or obtained.
inadequate ::: not adequate or sufficient; inept or unsuitable.
inalienable ::: not capable of being repudiated; inviolable.
inalterable ::: unchangeable, immutable; not capable of being modified. inalterably.
inanimate ::: 1. Lacking the qualities or features of living beings; not animate or alive. 2. Spiritless; dull; lacking activity or life. Also fig.
inapt ::: 1. Without aptitude or capacity; incapable. 2. Not inclined or disposed.
inarticulate ::: 1. Lacking the ability to express oneself, esp. in clear and effective speech. 2. Not articulate; not uttered or emitted with expressive or intelligible modulations.
inaudible ::: not loud enough to be heard; not audible.
incapable ::: 1. Lacking the necessary ability, capacity, or power. 2. Not open to; not susceptible to or admitting.
incompetence ::: not possessing the necessary ability, skill, etc. to do or carry out a task; incapable.
inconclusive ::: not leading to a definite decision, result, etc.
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.**
incurable ::: 1. Not curable; that cannot be cured, remedied, or corrected. 2. Not susceptible to change.
indecipherable ::: 1. Not decipherable; illegible. 2. Not understandable; incomprehensible. Indecipherable.
indefinable ::: impossible to define, describe, or analyze; not readily identified, analysed, or determined.
independent ::: not determined or influenced by someone or something else; not contingent upon.
indeterminate ::: not precisely fixed, as to extent, size, nature, or number. Indeterminate.
indiscernible ::: that cannot be seen or perceived clearly; imperceptible.
indistinct ::: not clearly distinguishable or perceptible, as to the eye, ear, or mind. indistinctness.
indivisible ::: not separable into parts; unable to be divided. Indivisible.
inept ::: not apt or fitting; inappropriate.
inexhaustible ::: not exhaustible; incapable of being depleted.
inexorable ::: not capable of being persuaded by entreaty; relentless. inexorably.
inexpressible ::: not expressible; incapable of being uttered or described in words. Inexpressible, inexpressibly.
"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
infallible ::: 1. Incapable of failure or error. 2. Not liable to failure; certain; sure. 3. Absolutely trustworthy or sure. 4. Unfailing in effectiveness or operation; certain. infallibly, infallibility.
inflexible ::: 1. Unyielding in purpose, principle, or temper; immovable. 2. Not permitting change or variation; unalterable.
influence ::: the action or process (by a person or thing) of producing effects on the actions, behaviour, opinions, etc. of another or others. influences, Influence, Influences.
inheritor ::: fig. A person who is entitled by law or by the terms of a will to inherit the estate of another either material or immaterial; an heir. inheritors.
"In its fundamental truth the original status of Time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the Eternal, just as the fundamental truth of Space, the original sense of its reality, is the infinity of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
inner ::: 1. Of or pertaining to the mind or spirit; mental; spiritual. 2. Situated within or farther within; interior. 3. Not obvious; hidden or obscure.
innocent ::: 1. Uncorrupted by evil, malice, or wrongdoing; sinless. 2. Not dangerous or harmful; innocuous.
inordinate ::: 1. Not regulated or controlled; disorderly. 2. Exceeding reasonable limits; excessive; immoderate.
"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
insensible ::: 1. Unaware; unconscious. 2. Not endowed with feeling or sensation, as matter; inanimate. 3. Unaware; unmindful; not emotionally responsive; indifferent. 4. Unresponsive in feeling; not susceptible of emotion or passion; void of any feeling. insensibly.
insufficient ::: not sufficient; lacking in what is necessary or required. insufficiency.
"In Supermind being, consciousness of knowledge and consciousness of will are not divided as they seem to be in our mental operations; they are a trinity, one movement with three effective aspects. Each has its own effect. Being gives the effect of substance, consciousness the effect of knowledge, of the self-guiding and shaping idea, of comprehension and apprehension; will gives the effect of self-fulfilling force. But the idea is only the light of the reality illumining itself; it is not mental thought nor imagination, but effective self-awareness. It is Real-Idea.” The Life Divine
intact ::: not altered, broken, or impaired; remaining uninjured, sound, or whole; untouched; unblemished.
intangible ::: not tangible; incapable of being perceived by the sense of touch, as incorporeal or immaterial things; impalpable. intangible"s.
"Intellectual activities are not part of the inner being — the intellect is the outer mind.” Letters on Yoga
intelligence ::: 1. A capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. 2. Superior understanding. 3. An intelligent being, esp. one that is not embodied. Intelligence, Arch-Intelligence.
intercept ::: 1. To take, seize, or halt (someone or something on the way from one place to another); cut off from an intended destination. 2. To stop or check (passage, travel, etc.). 3. To stop or interrupt the course, progress, or transmission of. intercepts, intercepting, interceptor.
intercession ::: an interposing or pleading on behalf of another person. intercessors.
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.
". . . 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
intimacy ::: 1. A close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group. 2. An embracing inner closeness. Intimacy, intimacies.
intones ::: speaks or recites in a singing voice, esp. in monotone; chants. intoning.
intoxicating ::: affecting temporarily with diminished physical and mental control by means of alcoholic liquor, a drug, or another substance.
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
invisible ::: that cannot be seen; imperceptible by the sight, mind, etc.; hidden. invisibly.
::: "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
irrational ::: 1. Not endowed with reason. 2. Inconsistent with reason or logic; illogical; absurd.
irrelevant ::: not applicable or pertinent; not to the purpose.
"It [death] has no separate existence by itself, it is only a result of the principle of decay in the body and that principle is there already — it is part of the physical nature. At the same time it is not inevitable; if one could have the necessary consciousness and force, decay and death is not inevitable. But to bring that consciousness and force into the whole of the material nature is the most difficult thing of all — at any rate, in such a way as to annul the decay principle.” Letters on Yoga
"It is because of our experience won at a tremendous price that we can urge upon you and others, ``Take the psychic attitude; follow the straight sunlit path, with the Divine openly or secretly upbearing you — if secretly, he will yet show himself in good time, — do not insist on the hard, hampered, roundabout and difficult journey."" Letters on Yoga
"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 is therefore necessary from the beginning to understand and accept the arduous difficulty of the path and to feel the need of a faith which to the intellect may seem blind, but yet is wiser than our reasoning intelligence. For this faith is a support from above; it is the brilliant shadow thrown by a secret light that exceeds the intellect and its data; it is the heart of a hidden knowledge that is not at the mercy of immediate appearances.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"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
"Moreover we see that this cosmic action or any cosmic action is impossible without the play of an infinite Force of Existence which produces and regulates all these forms and movements; and that Force equally presupposes or is the action of an infinite Consciousness, because it is in its nature a cosmic Will determining all relations and apprehending them by its own mode of awareness, and it could not so determine and apprehend them if there were no comprehensive Consciousness behind that mode of cosmic awareness to originate as well as to hold, fix and reflect through it the relations of Being in the developing formation or becoming of itself which we call a universe.” The Life Divine
n. 1. Acceptance or approval of what is planned or done by another; acquiescence. v. 2. To give assent, as to the proposal of another; agree. consents, consented, consenting.
n.**1. Not subject to death. Immortal, immortal"s, Immortal"s, immortals, Immortals, immortals", Immortals". adj. 2. Everlasting; perpetual; constant. 3. Not subject to death or decay; having perpetual life. 4. Of or relating to immortal or divine beings or concepts. 5. Never to be forgotten; everlasting. adv. immortally.**
"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
::: "Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in yoga a state of samata , equality to all things.” 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
"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 ego is only a face of the universal being and has no separate existence; our apparent separative individuality is only a surface movement and behind it our real individuality stretches out to unity with all things and upward to oneness with the transcendent Divine Infinity. Thus our ego, which seems to be a limitation of existence, is really a power of infinity; the boundless multiplicity of beings in the world is a result and signal evidence, not of limitation or finiteness, but of that illimitable Infinity.” The Life Divine
::: "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
"Our nature is not only mistaken in will and ignorant in knowledge but weak in power; but the Divine Force is there and will lead us if we trust in it and it will use our deficiencies and our powers for the divine purpose. If we fail in our immediate aim, it is because he has intended the failure; often our failure or ill-result is the right road to a truer issue than an immediate and complete success would have put in our reach. If we suffer, it is because something in us has to be prepared for a rarer possibility of delight. If we stumble, it is to learn in the end the secret of a more perfect walking.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "Perhaps one could say that it [spiritual humility] is to be aware of the relativity of what has been done compared with what is still to be done — and also to be conscious of one"s being nothing without the Divine Grace.” *Letters on Yoga
::: **"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
"So long as one is not free from the ego sense, there can be no real freedom.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
". . . 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
Sri Aurobindo: "A compromise is a bargain, a transaction of interests between two conflicting powers; it is not a true reconciliation.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Akshara, the immobile, the immutable, is the silent and inactive self, it is the unity of the divine Being, Witness of Nature, but not involved in its movement; it is the inactive Purusha free from Prakriti and her works.” Essays on the Gita
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: "But when I speak of the Divine Will, I mean something different, — something that has descended here into an evolutionary world of Ignorance, standing at the back of things, pressing on the Darkness with its Light, leading things presently towards the best possible in the conditions of a world of Ignorance and leading it eventually towards a descent of a greater power of the Divine, which will be not an omnipotence held back and conditioned by the law of the world as it is, but in full action and therefore bringing the reign of light, peace, harmony, joy, love, beauty and Ananda, for these are the Divine Nature.” *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: "Concentration is a gathering together of the consciousness and either centralising at one point or turning on a single object, e.g., the Divine; there can also be a gathered condition throughout the whole being, not at a point. In meditation it is not indispensable to gather like this, one can simply remain with a quiet mind thinking of one subject or observing what comes in the consciousness and dealing with it.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Consciousness is a fundamental thing, the fundamental thing in existence — it is the energy, the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe and all that is in it — not only the macrocosm but the microcosm is nothing but consciousness arranging itself.” *Letters on Yoga
*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: ". . . desires come from outside, enter the subconscious vital and rise to the surface. It is only when they rise to the surface and the mind becomes aware of them, that we become conscious of the desire. It seems to us to be our own because we feel it thus rising from the vital into the mind and do not know that it came from outside.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Destruction in itself is neither good nor evil. It is a fact of Nature, a necessity in the play of forces, as things are in this world. The Light destroys the Darkness and the Powers of Darkness, and that is not a movement of Ignorance!” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Doubt cannot be convinced, because by its very nature it does not want to be convinced; . . . .” *Letters on Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "Emotion itself is not a bad thing; it is a necessary part of the nature, and psychic emotion is one of the most powerful helps to the sadhana. Psychic emotion, bringing tears of love for the Divine or tears of Ananda, ought not to be suppressed: . . . .” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "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: "Force is nothing but the power of being in motion.” Hymns to the Mystic Fire
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: "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 [Nature"s] evolution.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Gnosis or true supermind is a power above mind working in its own law, out of the direct identity of the supreme Self, his absolute self-conscious Truth knowing herself by her own power of absolute Light without any need of seeking, even the most luminous seeking.” The Upanishads (footnote)
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: "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: "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: "Intellectual activities are not part of the inner being – the intellect is the outer mind.” *Letters on Yoga
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: "I take upon myself the right to coin new words. ‘Immensitudes" is not any more fantastic than ‘infinitudes" to pair ‘infinity".” immensitude, Immensitudes.
*Sri Aurobindo: "It [falsehood] is created by an Asuric (hostile) power which intervenes in this creation and is not only separated from the Truth and therefore limited in knowledge and open to error, but in revolt against the Truth or in the habit of seizing the Truth only to pervert it. This Power, the dark Asuric Shakti or Rakshasic Maya, puts forward its own perverted consciousness as true knowledge and its wilful distortions or reversals of the Truth as the verity of things. It is the powers and personalities of this perverted and perverting consciousness that we call hostile beings, hostile forces. Whenever these perversions created by them out of the stuff of the Ignorance are put forward as the Truth of things, that is the Falsehood, in the yogic sense, . . . .” Letters on Yoga
"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 is an achievement to have got rid so rapidly and decisively of the shimmering mists and fogs which modern intellectualism takes for Light of Truth. The modern mind has so long and persistently wandered – and we with it – in the Valley of the False Glimmer that it is not easy for anyone to disperse its mists with the sunlight of clear vision.” Letters on Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "It is true that when Matter first emerges it becomes the dominant principle; it seems to be and is within its own field the basis of all things, the constituent of all things, the end of all things: but Matter itself is found to be a result of something that is not Matter, of Energy, and this Energy cannot be something self-existent and acting in the Void, but can turn out and, when deeply scrutinised, seems likely to turn out to be the action of a secret Consciousness and Being: when the spiritual knowledge and experience emerge, this becomes a certitude, — it is seen that the creative Energy in Matter is a movement of the power of the Spirit.” 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: " Karma is nothing but the will of the Spirit in action, consequence nothing but the creation of will. What is in the will of being, expresses itself in karma and consequence. When the will is limited in mind, karma appears as a bondage and a limitation, consequence as a reaction or an imposition. But when the will of the being is infinite in the spirit, karma and consequence become instead the joy of the creative spirit, the construction of the eternal mechanist, the word and drama of the eternal poet, the harmony of the eternal musician, the play of the eternal child.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
*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: "Of course you can [do yoga without being great]. There is no need of being great. On the contrary humility is the first necessity, for one who has ego and pride cannot realise the Highest.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . our imperfection is the sign of a transitional state, a growth not yet completed, an effort that is finding its way; . . . .” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: . . . . Our mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that are not obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures of the possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are not true to outer experience. That is at least the appearance of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind"s way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
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: ” 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: "So the possibility of the sunlit path is not a discovery or original invention of mine. The very first books on yoga I read more than thirty years ago spoke of the dark and sunlit way and emphasised the superiority of the latter over the former.” *Letters on Yoga
*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 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 first is the discovery of the soul, not the outer soul of thought and emotion and desire, but the secret psychic entity, the divine element within us. When that becomes dominant over the nature, when we are consciously the soul and when mind, life and body take their true place as its instruments, we are aware of a guide within that knows the truth, the good, the true delight and beauty of existence, controls heart and intellect by its luminous law and leads our life and being towards spiritual completeness.” *The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The Indian explanation of fate is Karma. We ourselves are our own fate through our actions, but the fate created by us binds us; for what we have sown, we must reap in this life or another. Still we are creating our fate for the future even while undergoing old fate from the past in the present. That gives a meaning to our will and action and does not, as European critics wrongly believe, constitute a rigid and sterilising fatalism. But again, our will and action can often annul or modify even the past Karma, it is only certain strong effects, called utkata karma, that are non-modifiable. Here too the achievement of the spiritual consciousness and life is supposed to annul or give the power to annul Karma. For we enter into union with the Will Divine, cosmic or transcendent, which can annul what it had sanctioned for certain conditions, new-create what it had created, the narrow fixed lines disappear, there is a more plastic freedom and wideness. Neither Karma nor Astrology therefore points to a rigid and for ever immutable fate.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "The Infinite is not a sum of things, it is That which is all things and more.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass though the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.” The Mother
*Sri Aurobindo: "There are some who often or almost invariably have the contact whenever they worship, the Deity may become living to them in the picture or other image they worship, may move and act through it; others may feel him always present, outwardly, subtle-physically, abiding with them where they live or in the very room, but sometimes this is only for a period. Or they may feel the Presence with them, see it frequently in a body (but not materially except sometimes), feel its touch or embrace, converse with it constantly — that is also a kind of milana. The greatest milana is one in which one is constantly aware of the Deity abiding in oneself, in everything in the world, holding all the world in him, identical with existence and yet supremely beyond the world — but in the world too one sees, hears, feels nothing but him, so that the very senses bear witness to him alone — . . . .” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "There is an inner vision that opens when one does sadhana and all sorts of images rise before it or pass. Their coming does not depend upon your thought or will; it is real and automatic. Just as your physical eyes see things in the physical world, so the inner eyes see things and images that belong to the other worlds and subtle images of things of this physical world also.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no difference between the terms ‘universal" and ‘cosmic" except that ‘universal" can be used in a freer way than ‘cosmic". Universal may mean ‘of the universe", cosmic in that general sense. But it may also mean ‘common to all", e.g., ‘This is a universal weakness" — but you cannot say ‘This is a cosmic weakness".” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no ignorance that is not part of the Cosmic Ignorance, only in the individual it becomes a limited formation and movement, while the Cosmic Ignorance is the whole movement of world consciousness separated from the supreme Truth and acting in an inferior motion in which the Truth is perverted, diminished, mixed and clouded with falsehood and error.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life"s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleological; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.” The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above.” Letters on Yoga*
*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 true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” *The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "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: "This mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or subliminal mind which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane, is open to the action of a world of mental forces, and can feel the ideative and other imponderable influences which act upon the material world and the life-plane but which at present we can only infer and cannot directly experience: . . . .” *The Life Divine
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: "To act according to a standard of Truth or a rule or law of action (dharma) or in obedience to a superior authority or to the highest principles discovered by the reason and intelligent will and not according to one"s own fancy, vital impulses and desires. In yoga obedience to the Guru or to the Divine and the law of the Truth as declared by the Guru is the foundation of discipline.” *Letters on Yoga
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: "We see at once that if such an Existence is, it must be, like the Energy, infinite. Neither reason nor experience nor intuition nor imagination bears witness to us of the possibility of a final terminus. All end and beginning presuppose something beyond the end or beginning. An absolute end, an absolute beginning is not only a contradiction in terms, but a contradiction of the essence of things, a violence, a fiction. Infinity imposes itself upon the appearances of the finite by its ineffugable self-existence.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "What the "void" feels as a clutch is felt by the Mother only as a reminding finger laid on her cheek. It is one advantage of the expression ‘as if" that it leaves the field open for such variation. It is intended to suggest without saying it that behind the sombre void is the face of a mother. The two other ‘as if"s have the same motive and I do not find them jarring upon me. The second is at a sufficient distance from the first and it is not obtrusive enough to prejudice the third which more nearly follows. . . .” Letters on Savitri
*Sri Aurobindo: "When there is some lowering or diminution of the consciousness or some impairing of it at one place or another, the Adversary — or the Censor — who is always on the watch presses with all his might wherever there is a weak point lying covered from your own view, and suddenly a wrong movement leaps up with unexpected force. Become conscious and cast out the possibility of its renewal, that is all that is to be done.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Yet all the time the universal forces are pouring into him without his knowing it. He is aware only of thoughts, feelings, etc., that rise to the surface and these he takes for his own. Really they come from outside in mind waves, vital waves, waves of feeling and sensation, etc., which take particular form in him and rise to the surface after they have got inside. But they do not get into his body at once. He carries about with him an environmental consciousness (called by the Theosophists the Aura) into which they first enter. If you can become conscious of this environmental self of yours, then you can catch the thought, passion, suggestion or force of illness and prevent it from entering into you. If things in you are thrown out, they often do not go altogether but take refuge in this environmental atmosphere and from there they try to get in again. Or they go to a distance outside but linger on the outskirts or even perhaps far off, waiting till they get an opportunity to attempt entrance.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Your ‘barely enough", instead of the finer and more suggestive ‘hardly", falls flat upon my ear; one cannot substitute one word for another in this kind of poetry merely because it means intellectually the same thing; ‘hardly" is the mot juste in this context and, repetition or not, it must remain unless a word not only juste but inevitable comes to replace it… . On this point I may add that in certain contexts ‘barely" would be the right word, as for instance, ‘There is barely enough food left for two or three meals", where ‘hardly" would be adequate but much less forceful. It is the other way about in this line. Letters on Savitri
::: *"Stevenson has a striking passage in "Kidnapped” where the hero notes that his fear is felt primarily not in the heart but the stomach.” Letters on Yoga
Strength is all right for the strong — but aspiration and the Grace answering to it are not altogether myths; they are great realities of the spiritual life.” Letters on Yoga*
that which cannot be appeased or placated.
". . . the Absolute is not a void or negation. It is all that is here in Time and beyond Time.” The Upanishads*
"The Avatar does not come as a thaumaturgic magician, but as the divine leader of humanity and the exemplar of a divine humanity. Even human sorrow and physical suffering he must assume and use so as to show, first, how that suffering may be a means of redemption, — as did Christ, — secondly, to show how, having been assumed by the divine soul in the human nature, it can also be overcome in the same nature, — as did Buddha. The rationalist who would have cried to Christ, ‘If thou art the Son of God, come down from the cross," or points out sagely that the Avatar was not divine because he died and died too by disease, — as a dog dieth, — knows not what he is saying: for he has missed the root of the whole matter. Even, the Avatar of sorrow and suffering must come before there can be the Avatar of divine joy; the human limitation must be assumed in order to show how it can be overcome; and the way and the extent of the overcoming, whether internal only or external also, depends upon the stage of the human advance; it must not be done by a non-human miracle.” Essays on the Gita
"The body is not only the necessary outer instrument of the physical part of action, but for the purposes of this life a base or pedestal also for all inner action.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"The call of God is imperative and cannot be weighed against any other considerations.” Essays on the Gita*
"The call, once decisive, stands; the thing that has been born cannot eventually be stifled. Even if the force of circumstances prevents a regular pursuit or a full practical self-consecration from the first, still the mind has taken its bent and persists and returns with an ever-increasing effect upon its leading preoccupation. There is an ineluctable persistence of the inner being, and against it circumstances are in the end powerless, and no weakness in the nature can for long be an obstacle.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"The centre of vision is between the eyebrows in the centre of the forehead. When it opens one gets the inner vision, sees the inner forms and images of things and people and begins to understand things and people from within and not only from outside, develops a power of will which also acts in the inner (yogic) way on things and people etc. Its opening is often the beginning of the yogic as opposed to the ordinary mental consciousness.” Letters on Yoga
"The child (when it does not mean the psychic being) is usually the symbol of something new-born in some part of the consciousness.” Letters on Yoga
the condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends. **failure"s, failures, world-failure"s.
"The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one"s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one"s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one"s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces — for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness — and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in ::: —the nature.” Letters on Yoga*
"The Cosmic Will is not, to our ordinary consciousness, something that acts as an independent power doing whatever it chooses; it works through all these beings, through the forces at play in the world and the law of these forces and their results — it is only when we open ourselves and get out of the ordinary consciousness that we can feel it intervening as an independent power and overriding the ordinary play of the forces." Letters on Yoga
the cosmological theory holding that the universe is expanding, based on the interpretation of the color shift in the spectra of all the galaxies as being the result of the Doppler effect and indicating that all galaxies are moving away from one another.
"The Divine Force can act on any plane — it is not limited to the supramental Force. The supramental is only one aspect of the power of the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
"The Divine Grace is something not calculable, not bound by anything the intellect can fix as a condition, — though ordinarily some call, aspiration, intensity of the psychic being can awaken it, yet it acts sometimes without any apparent cause even of that kind.” Letters on Yoga*
"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 a Being and not an abstract existence or a status of pure timeless infinity; . . . .” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "The Divine is always in the inner heart and does not leave it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The Divine is the unborn Eternal who has no origin; there is and can be nothing before him from which he proceeds, because he is one and timeless and absolute.” Essays on the Gita
"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 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 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, 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 greater the destruction, the freer the chances of creation; but the destruction is often long, slow and oppressive, the creation tardy in its coming or interrupted in its triumph. The night returns again and again and the day lingers or seems even to have been a false dawning. Despair not therefore, but watch and work. Those who hope violently, despair swiftly: neither hope nor fear, but be sure of God"s purpose and thy will to accomplish.” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
::: "The heart spoken of by the Upanishads corresponds with the physical cardiac centre; it is the hrdpadma of the Tantriks. As a subtle centre, cakra , it is supposed to have its apex on the spine and to broaden out in front. Exactly where in this area one or another feels it does not matter much; to feel it there and be guided by it is the main thing.” *Letters on Yoga
"The 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 Ideal is an eternal Reality which we have not yet realised in the conditions of our own being, not a non-existent which the Eternal and Divine has not yet grasped and only we imperfect beings have glimpsed and mean to create.” The Life Divine
". . . the individual is not a mere cell of the collective existence; he would not cease to exist if separated or expelled from the collective mass.” The Life Divine
"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 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 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 Mother: "And ultimately, all form is a symbol. All forms: our form is a symbol — not a very brilliant one, I admit!
::: The Mother: "Consciousness is the faculty of becoming aware of anything through identification. The Divine Consciousness is not only aware but knows and effects.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol.15*. Consciousness.
The Mother: "Immortality is not a goal, it is not even a means. It will proceed naturally from the fact of living the Truth.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15. ::: *Immortality, immortalities, immortality"s.
The Mother: "To be humble means for the mind, the vital and the body never to forget that without the Divine they know nothing, are noting and can do nothing; with the Divine they are nothing but ignorance, chaos and impotence. The Divine alone is Truth, Life, Power, Love, Felicity.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 14.
*The Mother: "To conquer the Adversary is not a small thing. One must have a greater power than his to vanquish him. But one can liberate oneself totally from his influence. And from the minute one is completely free from his influence, one"s self-giving can be total. And with the self-giving comes joy, long before the Adversary is truly vanquished and disappears.”
The Mother: "True humility consists in knowing that the Supreme Consciousness, the Supreme Will alone exists and that the I is not.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 14.
::: 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 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 reality of the Hostiles and the nature of their role and trend of their endeavour cannot be doubted by any one who has had his inner vision unsealed and made their unpleasant acquaintance.” Letters on Savitri
"There are, we might say, two beings in us, one on the surface, our ordinary exterior mind, life, body consciousness, another behind the veil, an inner mind, an inner life, an inner physical consciousness constituting another or inner self. This inner self once awake opens in its turn to our true real eternal self. It opens inwardly to the soul, called in the language of this yoga the psychic being which supports our successive births and at each birth assumes a new mind, life and body. It opens above to the Self or Spirit which is unborn and by conscious recovery of it we transcend the changing personality and achieve freedom and full mastery over our nature.” Letters on Yoga
"There is a sunlit path as well as a gloomy one and it is the better of the two — a path in which one goes forward in absolute reliance on the Mother, fearing nothing, sorrowing over nothing. Aspiration is needed but there can be a sunlit aspiration full of light and faith and confidence and joy. If difficulty comes, even that can be faced with a smile.” Letters on Yoga
"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
These notes were written apropos of Bergson"s ‘philosophy of change", ‘you" would refer to a proponent of this philosophy.
"These lights and visions are not hallucinations. They indicate an opening of the inner vision whose centre is in the forehead between the eyebrows.” Letters on Yoga
"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
"The true Person is not an isolated entity, his individuality is universal; for he individualises the universe: . . . .” The Life Divine
"The view I am presenting goes farther in idealism; it sees the creative Idea as Real-Idea, that is to say, a power of Conscious Force expressive of real being, born out of real being and partaking of its nature and neither a child of the Void nor a weaver of fictions. It is conscious Reality throwing itself into mutable forms of its own imperishable and immutable substance. The world is therefore not a figment of conception in the universal Mind, but a conscious birth of that which is beyond Mind into forms of itself.” The Life Divine
"This Divine may lead us often through darkness, because the darkness is there in us and around us, but it is to the Light he is leading and not to anything else.” Letters on Yoga*
"This eternity is not of Time; the eternity of Time is an extension in movement of the Timeless.” Essays Divine and Human
"This inner vision is one form of psychological experience; but the inner experience is not confined to that seeing; vision only opens, it does not embrace.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"This universal aesthesis of beauty and delight does not ignore or fail to understand the differences and oppositions, the gradations, the harmony and disharmony obvious to the ordinary consciousness; but, first of all, it draws a Rasa from them and with that comes the enjoyment, Bhoga. and the touch or the mass of the Ananda. It sees that all things have their meaning, their value, their deeper or total significance which the mind does not see, for the mind is only concerned with a surface vision, surface contacts and its own surface reactions. When something expresses perfectly what it was meant to express, the completeness brings with it a sense of harmony, a sense of artistic perfection; it gives even to what is discordant a place in a system of cosmic concordances and the discords become part of a vast harmony, and wherever there is harmony, there is a sense of beauty. ” Letters on Savitri*
those who assist, guide, wait upon, accompany, give service or follow another to contribute to the fulfilment of a need or furtherance of an effort or purpose; subordinate companions.
::: "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 live and act under control or according to a standard of what is right — not to allow the vital or the physical to do whatever they like and not to let the mind run about according to its fancy without truth or order. Also to obey those who ought to be obeyed.” Letters on Yoga
"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
transformed or transitioned from one state, condition, or phase to another.
::: "Universe is a diffusion of the divine All in infinite Space and Time, the individual its concentration within limits of Space and Time. Universe seeks in infinite extension the divine totality it feels itself to be but cannot entirely realise; for in extension existence drives at a pluralistic sum of itself which can neither be the primal nor the final unit, but only a recurring decimal without end or beginning.” *The Life Divine
unreadable; not legible; impossible or hard to read or decipher because of poor handwriting, faded print, etc.
"We are not the body, but the body is still something of ourselves. With realisation the erroneous identification ceases — in certain experiences the existence of the body is not felt at all. In the full realisation the body is within us, not we in it, it is an instrumental formation in our wider being, — our consciousness exceeds but also pervades it, — it can be dissolved without our ceasing to be the self.” Letters on Yoga
::: "We have to face the future"s offer of death as well as its offer of life, and it need not alarm us, for it is by constant death to our old names and forms that we shall live most vitally in greater and newer forms and names.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"We now begin to have reason for concluding that the Flame, which is only another aspect of Light, is the Vedic symbol for the Force of the divine consciousness, of the supramental Truth.” The Secret of the Veda
". . . what is this strongly separative self-experience that we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical constitution of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature — this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised, — a temporary or at least a temporal becoming; or else we conceive of ourselves as someone who supports or causes the individualisation, an immortal being perhaps but limited by its individuality. This perception and this conception constitute our ego-sense.” The Life Divine
"When the inner vision opens, there can come before it all that ever was or is now in the world, even it can open to things that will be hereafter — so there is nothing impossible in seeing thus the figures and the things of the past.” Letters on Yoga*
"When we see with the inner vision and sense and not with the physical eye a tree or other object, what we become aware of is an infinite one Reality constituting the tree or object, pervading its every atom and molecule, forming them out of itself, building the whole nature, process of becoming, operation of indwelling energy; all of these are itself, are this infinite, this Reality: we see it extending indivisibly and uniting all objects so that none is really separate from it or quite separate from other objects. ‘It stands," says the Gita, ‘undivided in beings and yet as if divided." Thus each object is that Infinite and one in essential being with all other objects that are also forms and names, — powers, numens, — of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
::: "Wherever thou seest a great end, be sure of a great beginning. Where a monstrous and painful destruction appals thy mind, console it with the certainty of a large and great creation. God is there not only in the still small voice, but in the fire and in the whirlwind.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations.” The Life Divine*
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1 John of the Cross
1 John Neal
1 John Lennon
1 John III. 14
1 John Dee
1 John 20:27-29
1 Job XXVII. 4
1 Jim Stovall
1 Jetsun Milarepa
1 Jeffrey J Kripal
1 Jean-Paul Sartre
1 Jay Gardner
1 Japanese Proverb
1 Jami
1 James Joyce
1 James Clear
1 Jalaluddin Rumi
1 Jaggi Vasudev
1 It is not sufficient just to remain calm in the event of catastrophe or emergency. When challenged by adversity
1 I. Timothy. IV. 14
1 I Thessalonians V. 19
1 it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
1 Isaac of Nineveh
1 Isaac Asimov
1 Imam Malik
1 Imam Ghazali]
1 Imam al Ghazali
1 Ikkyu
1 Ignatius of Antioch
1 Iggy Pop
1 Hunter S. Thompson
1 Huikai
1 Hitopadesha
1 Hippocrates
1 Hermann Hesse
1 Herbert McCabe
1 Heraclitus
1 Henry Ward Beecher
1 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1 Henry Ford
1 Hazrat Inayat K
1 Hasan al Basri]
1 Hans Urs von Balthasar
1 Hans Christian Andersen
1 Hakuin Ekaku
1 Hafiz
1 Haemin Sunim
1 Guru Angad
1 Gurdjieff
1 Goerge Orwell
1 G.K. Chesterton
1 G K Chesterton
1 G. J. Gurdjieff
1 Gigen
1 Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
1 Gerald Jampolsky
1 George Sand
1 George Orwell
1 George Eliot
1 George Eliot
1 Gene Clark
1 Gautama Buddha
1 Gary Gygax
1 Galatians VI. 9
1 Galatians V. 13
1 Gabriel García Marquez
1 Gabor Mate
1 Friedrich Schiller
1 Frederick Dodson
1 Franz Bardon
1 Frank Herbert
1 François de La Rochefoucauld
1 Fo-shu-hing-tsau-king
1 Exodus XX.82
1 E. W. Dijkstra
1 Everard and Morris
1 euripedes
1 Ernest Hemingway
1 Erik Erikson
1 Eric Hoffer
1 Epistle to Diognetus
1 Endo
1 Emily Dickinson 1(830 - 1886) American poet.
1 Emily Dickinson
1 Emil Cioran
1 Emerald Tablets of Thoth
1 Elon Musk
1 Elizabeth I
1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1 Elbert Hubbard
1 Eddie Cantor
1 Dylan Thomas
1 Dogen Zenji?
1 Deuteronomy XXXI. 6
1 Deuteronomy
1 Demophilus
1 Democritus
1 Demi Lovato
1 Dee Dee M. Scott
1 David Allen
1 Dan Brown
1 Dammapada 146
1 C. S. Lewis
1 C .S. Lewis
1 Confucius?
1 Colossians III. 9
1 Chu-king
1 Chinese Maxims
1 Chhandogya Uppanishad
1 Charles Williams
1 Charles Fort
1 Charles Baudelaire
1 Channing
1 Chang Yung
1 Chadana Sutta
1 Cervantes
1 Carl Sagan
1 Carlos Fuentes
1 Buson
1 Buddhist Text
1 Brecht
1 Brandon Sanderson
1 Bossuet
1 Boncho
1 Bill Campbell
1 Bhagavad Gita XI. 38
1 Bhagavad Gita. II. 16
1 Ben Jonson
1 Barry Diller
1 Bahaullah
1 Bahauddin
1 Augustus De Morgan
1 Atisa
1 Ashtavakra Gita
1 Ashley Montagu
1 Arthur Koestler
1 Arthur Ashe
1 Archilochus
1 Antonie the Healer
1 Antoine the Healer
1 Antoine de Saint-Exupery
1 Anonymous English Monk
1 Anon. See: http://bit.ly/2RMh2CF
1 Anon. From Exodus 2:22
1 Anon. 1600's
1 Annette Funicello
1 Anna Gavalda
1 Angelus Silesins
1 André Gide
1 Ancient Egyptian Proverb
1 Anatole France
1 Anaïs Nin
1 Amiel
1 Amelia Earhart
1 Allen Klein
1 al-Kabīr al-Tabrānī
1 Al-Jilani
1 Ali ibn Abi Talib
1 Alfred North Whitehead
1 Alfred Korzybski
1 Alexander von Humboldt
1 Alexander Graham Bell
1 Aleister Crowley
1 Alan W. Watts
1 Alan Perlis
1 Ajahn Chah
1 Rudolf Steiner
1 Maimonides
1 Homer Simpson
1 Aristophanes
1 African proverb
1 Adyashanti
1 Abu Said
1 Abul Husayn al-Nuri
1 Abu Bakr
1 Abraham Lincoln
1 A B Purani
1 2 Corinthians 4:8
1 ?
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
47 Anonymous
18 Laozi
15 Rumi
14 William Shakespeare
12 Junot D az
12 J K Rowling
11 George Herbert
10 Ovid
10 Horace
8 Rick Riordan
8 Plato
8 Cassandra Clare
7 Socrates
7 Aesop
6 John Green
6 Carl Jung
5 Pablo Picasso
5 Herman Melville
5 C S Lewis
5 Albert Camus
1:I do not know. ~ T. S. Eliot, #KEYS
2:Do not abandon yourself. ~ Elizabeth I, #KEYS
3:Hope does not disappoint. ~ Saint Paul, #KEYS
4:The menu is not the meal." ~ Alan Watts, #KEYS
5:Christians are made, not born. ~ Tertullian, #KEYS
6:By not dominating, the Master leads. ~ Laozi, #KEYS
7:Do not lose hope, nor be sad. ~ Koran, 3:139, #KEYS
8:To live - is that not enough?" ~ D.T. Suzuki, #KEYS
9:is not always that of the soul. ~ George Sand, #KEYS
10:We read to know we are not alone. ~ C S Lewis, #KEYS
11:Called or not, God is always there. ~ Carl Jung, #KEYS
12:Low aim, not failure, is the crime. ~ Bruce Lee, #KEYS
13:Summoned or not, the god will come. ~ Carl Jung, #KEYS
14:Do not seek water, get thirst. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
15:Failure is an event not a person.
~ Zig Ziglar,#KEYS
16:Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. ~ euripedes #KEYS
17:I know not what to do, my mind is divided ~ Sappho, #KEYS
18:Suffering is not a sign of failure
~ The Mother?,#KEYS
19:The unexamined life is not worth living ~ Socrates, #KEYS
20:It is that which is and that which is not. ~ Hermes, #KEYS
21:The unexamined life is not worth living. ~ Socrates, #KEYS
22:Go seek the wearer, not the cloak. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
23:Where I may not remove nor be removed. ~ Shakespeare, #KEYS
24:Who teaches the soul if not God? ~ John of the Cross, #KEYS
25:You are not your body-mind phenomena. ~ Robert Adams, #KEYS
26:Become comfortable with not knowing." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #KEYS
27:Even in the grave, all is not lost. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #KEYS
28:Not why the addiction, but why the pain. ~ Gabor Mate, #KEYS
29:God bears with the wicked but not forever. ~ Cervantes, #KEYS
30:Practice and enlightenment are not two." ~ Dōgen Zenji, #KEYS
31:Too much is the same as not enough. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
32:You can do anything, but not everything. ~ David Allen, #KEYS
33:Do not peer too far. ~ Pindar, Olympian Odes, I, l. 184, #KEYS
34:Depend not on fortune, but on conduct. ~ Publilius Syrus, #KEYS
35:I regret picking and not picking violets. ~ Anon. 1600's, #KEYS
36:Not now, I am trying to read my book! ~ Pino, Ergo Proxy, #KEYS
37:you have not even begun to practise Dhamma. ~ Ajahn Chah, #KEYS
38:Do not act following customary beliefs. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
39:I am a writer. Therefore. I am not sane. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #KEYS
40:The question is not can you. It's will you." ~ Jim Stovall, #KEYS
41:Time does not change us. It just unfolds us." ~ Max Frisch, #KEYS
42:Who teaches the soul if not God? ~ Saint John of the Cross, #KEYS
43:But nothing promised that is not performed. ~ Robert Graves, #KEYS
44:Everyone dies. Not everyone really lives. ~ William Wallace, #KEYS
45:Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.
~ Buddha,#KEYS
46:The greatest effort is not concerned with results." ~ Atisa, #KEYS
47:What I cannot build, I do not understand. ~ Richard Feynman, #KEYS
48:Every question does not deserve an answer. ~ Publilius Syrus, #KEYS
49:Not taking things personally is a superpower." ~ James Clear, #KEYS
50:If you are not your own doctor, you are a fool. ~ Hippocrates, #KEYS
51:Love is not consolation. It is light.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#KEYS
52:Reality is not always probable, or likely. ~ Jorge Luis Borge, #KEYS
53:Sincerity ::: Open and genuine; not deceitful
~ The Mother?,#KEYS
54:Luminous beings are we... not this crude matter. ~ Master Yoda, #KEYS
55:Thou canst not then be false to any man. ~ William Shakespeare, #KEYS
56:What I cannot create, I do not understand. ~ Richard P Feynman, #KEYS
57:Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
~ Confucius?,#KEYS
58:Live out of your imagination, not your history. ~ Stephen Covey, #KEYS
59:Do not look for a sanctuary in anyone except yourself." ~ Buddha, #KEYS
60:God does not fit in an occupied heart. ~ Saint John of the Cross, #KEYS
61:They do not think, therefore they are not. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #KEYS
62:Common people do not pray, they only beg.
~ George Bernard Shaw,#KEYS
63:Every day passes whether you participate or not." ~ Ming Dao Deng, #KEYS
64:In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
~ Carl Jung,#KEYS
65:Invoked or not invoked, God will be present. ~ Carl Jung, Epitaph, #KEYS
66:The world’s thy ship and not thy home. ~ Saint Therese of Lisieux, #KEYS
67:Illusion is perceived by that which is not illusory. ~ Shantideva-, #KEYS
68:What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
~ Robert Browning,#KEYS
69:What is not born cannot die. Words not spoken cannot lie." ~ Anon., #KEYS
70:A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered." ~ C .S. Lewis, #KEYS
71:The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.
~ Blaise Pascal,#KEYS
72:The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
~ Bertrand Russell,#KEYS
73:We have art in order not to die of the truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
74:What pleases our mind is not dangerous enough." ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi, #KEYS
75:Do not take a blind guide. ~ Aristophanes, #KEYS
76:If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.
~ Haruki Murakami,#KEYS
77:Knowledge is not intelligence. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
78:Time is not a line, but a series of now-points.
~ Taisen Deshimaru,#KEYS
79:Who does not understand should either learn, or be silent ~ John Dee, #KEYS
80:Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often. ~ Mark Twain, #KEYS
81:Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely." ~ Buddha, #KEYS
82:Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful. ~ Annette Funicello, #KEYS
83:When we do not expect anything we can be ourselves." ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #KEYS
84:All are seeing God always. But they do not know. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
85:Do not be amazed by the true dragon. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
86:Its not what the vision is, its what the vision does.
~ Robert Fritz,#KEYS
87:Man must use what he has, not hope for what is not. ~ George Gurdjieff, #KEYS
88:Only those who do not fight are never wounded. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #KEYS
89:Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre. ~ Carlos Fuentes, #KEYS
90:I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.
~ Elon Musk,#KEYS
91:Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #KEYS
92:Not knowing how near the truth is, we seek it far away." ~ Hakuin Ekaku, #KEYS
93:A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. ~ Oscar Wilde, #KEYS
94:Do not try to seem wise to others.
~ Epictetus,#KEYS
95:Live with your century; but do not be its creature. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #KEYS
96:We know what we are, but know not what we may be." ~ William Shakespeare, #KEYS
97:Wisdom is full of light and her beauty is not withered. ~ Book of Wisdom, #KEYS
98:Do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish your opinions." ~ Seng-ts'an, #KEYS
99:Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
100:Much learning does not teach sense. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
101:Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
~ Michel de Montaigne,#KEYS
102:Not being able to see any problem is itself a problem.
~ Shigeru Mizuno,#KEYS
103:Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours." ~ C. S. Lewis, #KEYS
104:Practice and enlightenment are not two. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
105:Sometimes it is a good choice not to choose at all. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #KEYS
106:The great aim of education is not knowledge but action. ~ Herbert Spencer, #KEYS
107:Zen is not an art; it's not a religion. It's a realization." ~ Gene Clark, #KEYS
108:Peace of mind comes from not wanting to change others." ~ Gerald Jampolsky, #KEYS
109:Quality is not an act, it is a habit." ~ Aristotle, #KEYS
110:The bird of paradise lands only on the hand that does not grasp ~ Roshi So, #KEYS
111:As a writer you should not judge. You should understand. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #KEYS
112:For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. ~ T S Eliot, #KEYS
113:I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
~ Socrates,#KEYS
114:I love those who do not know how to live for today.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#KEYS
115:Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off. ~ Haruki Murakami, #KEYS
116:Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #KEYS
117:The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist. ~ Novalis, [T5], #KEYS
118:There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
~ Voltaire,#KEYS
119:Whatever you do, think not of yourself, but of God." ~ Saint Vincent Ferrer, #KEYS
120:Are you not the Self? Why trouble about other matters? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
121:If God did not exist, it would be necessary for us to invent Him. ~ Voltaire, #KEYS
122:It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. ~ Confucius, #KEYS
123:Act but do not react. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
124:Be not another, if you can be yourself. ~ Paracelsus, #KEYS
125:Do not worry about the results, but be concerned with the process.
~ Nemoto,#KEYS
126:He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer,#KEYS
127:It is less what one is that should matter, than what one is not. ~ Wei Wu Wei, #KEYS
128:Not engaging in ignorance is wisdom." ~ Bodhidharma, #KEYS
129:Thou hast created me not from necessity but from grace. ~ Solomon Ibn Gabirol, #KEYS
130:To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.
~ Voltaire,#KEYS
131:Truth does not waver. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
132:What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.
~ Salvador Dali,#KEYS
133:A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.
~ William Shedd,#KEYS
134:do not grieve." ~ Hafiz, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
135:Do not let your precious movements come to naught. ~ Hafiz, #KEYS
136:Failure-resistant is achievable; failure-free is not." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #KEYS
137:Forgiveness is not for the forgiven but for the sake of the forgiver…" ~ Anon., #KEYS
138:If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed. ~ C.S. Lewis, #KEYS
139:Not Engaging in Ignorance is Wisdom.
~ Bodhidharma,#KEYS
140:The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show. ~ Leonard Cohen, #KEYS
141:The Way is in training... Do nothing which is not of value. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
142:what we have been, or now are, we shall not be tomorrow" ~ Ovid, Metamorphoses, #KEYS
143:When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it. ~ Sigmund Freud, #KEYS
144:A dog is better than I am, for he has love and does not judge. ~ Saint Xanthias, #KEYS
145:A flute with no holes is not a flute. ~ Matsuo Basho, #KEYS
146:A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer,#KEYS
147:Be the person who gives energy, not the one who takes it away." ~ Bill Campbell, #KEYS
148:Do not fear going forward slowly; fear only to stand still.
~ Chinese Proverb,#KEYS
149:Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
~ Socrates,#KEYS
150:Even if God did not exist it would continue to be sacred
~ Charles Baudelaire,#KEYS
151:I am different. Let this not upset you.
~ Paracelsus,#KEYS
152:If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on. ~ Kant , #KEYS
153:Set the mind right and not attempt to right the world. ~ Swami Ramakrishnananda, #KEYS
154:The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
~ Soren Kierkegaard,#KEYS
155:Whatever arises, simply do not cling to it, but immediately let it go. ~ Niguma, #KEYS
156:When one has not had a good father, one must create one." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
157:Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#KEYS
158:He who returns from a journey is not the same as he who left." ~ Chinese Proverb, #KEYS
159:It is not enough to try, you must succeed. ~ The Mother, #KEYS
160:It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #KEYS
161:Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #KEYS
162:We have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #KEYS
163:Whether planned or not, humor takes our mind off of our troubles." ~ Allen Klein, #KEYS
164:Are you a god? ... No. But who would not wish such a thing. - Harbard
~ Vikings,#KEYS
165:Do not forget the Mother's name. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
166:Do not laugh much or often or unrestrainedly. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
167:Give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
168:He bids fair to grow wise who has discovered that he is not so. ~ Publilius Syrus, #KEYS
169:If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space." ~ Stephen Hunt, #KEYS
170:In time of difficulties, we must not lose sight of our achievements. ~ Mao Zedong, #KEYS
171:Not creating delusions is enlightenment." ~ Bodhidharma, #KEYS
172:The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself. ~ William Blake, #KEYS
173:The process that goes on inside you is not apparent to you. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
174:The sphinx was the riddle, not the riddler. - Maester Aemon
~ George R R Martin,#KEYS
175:Words are not needed. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #KEYS
176:Is it not the same distance to God everywhere? ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
177:The true state of things is not to be found in one direction alone. ~ Dogen Zenji?, #KEYS
178:Do not despise the bottom rungs in the ascent to greatness. ~ Publilius Syrus, [T5], #KEYS
179:Roads were made for journeys not destinations." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
180:Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value. ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
181:Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment." ~ Dōgen Zenji, #KEYS
182:If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.
~ Seneca,#KEYS
183:My religion is not deceiving myself. ~ Jetsun Milarepa, #KEYS
184:The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. ~ William Shakespeare, #KEYS
185:Thoughts change but not you. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
186:We are in our Self. We are not in the world. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi #KEYS
187:We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
~ Japanese Proverb,#KEYS
188:A student should not be taught more than he can think about. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #KEYS
189:Do not waste time idling or thinking after you have set your goals ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
190:He who is being carried does not realize how far the next town is…" ~ African proverb, #KEYS
191:he who works, and not for Christ, does not know what he is doing. ~ Saint Philip Neri, #KEYS
192:If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.
~ Marcus Aurelius,#KEYS
193:Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest. ~ William Faulkner, #KEYS
194:Guru is not the physical form. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
195:Not seeing desirable things prevents confusion of the heart. ~ Tao Te Ching, chapter 3, #KEYS
196:The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
~ Taoist proverb,#KEYS
197:The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.
~ Albert Camus,#KEYS
198:Be as a tower firmly set Shakes not its top for any blast that blows. ~ Dante Alighieri, #KEYS
199:Do not become caught in the teaching. You must be able to let it go." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #KEYS
200:Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #KEYS
201:It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not. ~ André Gide, #KEYS
202:The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #KEYS
203:Thou shalt not kill. ~ Exodus XX.82, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
204:To be still is not to think.
Know, and not think, is the word. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,#KEYS
205:A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #KEYS
206:Do not accept anything as love which lacks truth." ~ Saint Teresia Benedicta a Cruce OCD, #KEYS
207:Do not view mountains from the scale of human thought. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
208:I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go. ~ Neil Gaiman, #KEYS
209:It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
210:Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #KEYS
211:Many live like angels in the midst of the world. Why not you?" ~ Saint Josemaria Escriva, #KEYS
212:One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #KEYS
213:One ought not to act and speak like people asleep. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
214:Those who seek the easy way do not seek the true way." ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
215:Where there's a will there's a way
To him that will, ways are not wanting
~ Proverb,#KEYS
216:A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. ~ Tao Te Ching, ch.27, #KEYS
217:Do not wait for leaders, do it alone, person to person. ~ Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta, #KEYS
218:I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see? ~ Lewis Carroll, #KEYS
219:Leaves falling without a break - do not rush do not rush so much. ~ Shuson kato 1905-1993, #KEYS
220:Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
~ Mark Twain,#KEYS
221:Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
~ George Orwell, 1984,#KEYS
222:The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky,#KEYS
223:The habit of knowledge
is not human but devine. ~ Heraclitus,#KEYS
224:Do not listen to those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious ~ Og Mandino, #KEYS
225:God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #KEYS
226:I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
~ Michel de Montaigne,#KEYS
227:Is not everything the work of God? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
228:It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor." ~ Seneca, #KEYS
229:Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold." ~ Zelda Fitzgerald, #KEYS
230:not a devil
not a saint
just a slug ~ Kobayashi Issa,#KEYS
231:The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory but progress.
~ Karl Popper,#KEYS
232:Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness." ~ George MacDonald, #KEYS
233:You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
234:Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
235:Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again." ~ Richard Branson, #KEYS
236:Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
~ William Butler Yeats,#KEYS
237:Gentlemen should not waste their time on trivial games - they should play go[3] ~ Confucius, #KEYS
238:High winds do not last all morning. Heavy rain does not last all day. ~ Tao Te Ching, ch.23, #KEYS
239:How can the self not know the Self? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
240:Set not thy heart upon riches. ~ Psalms, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
241:Silence is not confined to the tongue but concerns the heart and all the limbs." ~ Abu Bakr, #KEYS
242:The goal of life is not the drama being played, but the lesson that it offers. ~ SWAMI RAMA, #KEYS
243:What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? ~ George Eliot, #KEYS
244:What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#KEYS
245:Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose." ~ Lyndon B. Johnson, #KEYS
246:Act well your given part; the choice rests not with you. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
247:Child, your body is also My body. I suffer if you do not keep good health. ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
248:He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 John, 4:8, [T5], #KEYS
249:In heaven fear is not. ~ Katha-Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
250:It is for love of him that I do not spare myself in preaching him. ~ Saint Gregory the Great, #KEYS
251:Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
252:Thou shalt not kill. ~ Mat-thew. XIX. 18, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
253:Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else." ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #KEYS
254:Be not afraid, only believe. ~ Mark V. 36, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
255:Check your passions that you may not be punished by them. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
256:If you fear everything you never see danger." ~ Jack Gardner, "Words are not things,", (2005), #KEYS
257:Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. ~ Dalai Lama, #KEYS
258:Those who are not good to others are bad to themselves. ~ Saint Leo the Great, (Died: 461 AD), #KEYS
259:To become what one is, one must have not the faintest idea what one is. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
260:Truly the sage is not other than God. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
261:And if you are not a bird, then beware of coming to rest above an abyss. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
262:A true Bhakta is greater than God, for he is a giver and not a taker. ~ Swami Ramakrishnananda, #KEYS
263:Do not be afraid; our fate Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
~ Dante Alighieri, Inferno,#KEYS
264:He who seeks not the Cross of Christ seeks not the glory of Christ." ~ Saint John of the Cross, #KEYS
265:I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today. ~ William Allen White, #KEYS
266:If you do not let go of what binds you to samsara, you will never be free. ~ Chamtrul Rinpoche, #KEYS
267:Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #KEYS
268:The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.
~ Rabindranath Tagore,#KEYS
269:The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer ~ Terence McKenna, [T5], #KEYS
270:The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr., #KEYS
271:The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad. ~ Salvador Dali, #KEYS
272:We're in a world now where it's not enough to be smart. You have to be curious. ~ Barry Diller, #KEYS
273:All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
274:And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, #KEYS
275:Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering. ~ Epicurus, #KEYS
276:If it were not for injustice, men would not know justice. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
277:Lie not one to another. ~ Colossians III. 9, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
278:Love light and not darkness. ~ Orphic Hymns, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
279:Not an atom moves except by God's will. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
280:People do not wander around and then find themselves at the top of Mount Everest." ~ Zig Ziglar, #KEYS
281:Preparing food is not just about yourself and others. It's about everything!
~ Shunryu Suzuki,#KEYS
282:This is why, like E.M. Forster, I do not believe in belief ~ Karl Popper, 'Objective Knowledge', #KEYS
283:You see this and that. Why not see God? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
284:Beyond the sky where I have set the Sun, is He-Who-Speaks-Not: He knows all. ~ Myths of the Iife, #KEYS
285:Do not hurry; do not rest. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
286:Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. ~ J R R Tolkien, #KEYS
287:Do not torment your spirit.
Say the truth, always the truth. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina,#KEYS
288:I do not allow others to influence my thinking unless it is positive or uplifting." ~ Louise Hay, #KEYS
289:I do not die, I go forth from Time. ~ Lebrun, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
290:If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.
~ Voltaire,#KEYS
291:Know then that the body is merely a garment. Go seek the wearer, not the cloak. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi #KEYS
292:Not all sins are equal ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.73.2)., #KEYS
293:The Eternal is not born nor does it die. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
294:The eye could never see the sun,
If it had not a sun-like nature ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#KEYS
295:The ultimate truth of who you are is not 'I am this' or 'I am that', but 'I am'. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #KEYS
296:Truth is not private property. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
297:Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
~ Albert Einstein,#KEYS
298:You are not the mind. You are beyond it. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
299:A Psalm of David. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Psalms, 23:1, #KEYS
300:Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep but shall be changed. ~ Paul I. Cor. Ch.15.51, #KEYS
301:Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #KEYS
302:I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #KEYS
303:If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.
~ Albert Einstein,#KEYS
304:No man is free who is not master of himself.
~ Epictetus, [T5],#KEYS
305:That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons death may die.
~ H P Lovecraft,#KEYS
306:There would be no sense in saying you trusted Jesus if you would not take his advice. ~ C.S. Lewis #KEYS
307:To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.
~ Rabindranath Tagore,#KEYS
308:We are shaped and determined not only by today and yesterday, but tomorrow as well. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
309:Do not let the body be dragged along by mind nor be dragged along by the body." ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
310:Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few. ~ Pythagoras, #KEYS
311:Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
~ Rabindranath Tagore,#KEYS
312:Every man possesses the Buddha-nature. Do not demean yourselves. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
313:Everyone who can speak the truth, yet speaks it not, will be judged by God… ~ Saint Justin Martyr., #KEYS
314:For millions of years you have slept. This morning, will you not wake? ~ Kabir, #KEYS
315:If He were apparent, He would not be. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
316:It is not the outer objects that entangle us. It is the inner clinging that entangles us. ~ Tilopa, #KEYS
317:Life itself is not a thing-. . . but an act and process. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Theory of Life, #KEYS
318:o not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly. ~ Saint Francis de Sales, #KEYS
319:Quench not the spirit. ~ I Thessalonians V. 19, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
320:Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #KEYS
321:The mirror is not the same as its reflection. Being is not the same as appearing ~ Claudio Naranjo, #KEYS
322:The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth." ~ Lao Tzu, #KEYS
323:To dare is to lose ones footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
~ Soren Kierkegaard,#KEYS
324:We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
325:Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it." ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
326:A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
~ Lao Tzu,#KEYS
327:All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
~ Blaise Pascal, [T5],#KEYS
328:Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you. ~ Ali ibn Abi Talib, #KEYS
329:It is not long before those who are obedient in service obtain command. ~ Saadi, #KEYS
330:Patience is not simply the ability to wait - it's how we behave while we're waiting." ~ Joyce Meyer, #KEYS
331:Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
~ Albert Einstein,#KEYS
332:[...] a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend. ~ James Joyce, Ulysses, #KEYS
333:A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at. ~ Bruce Lee, #KEYS
334:Chase realities not dreams." ~ Jay Gardner, "I Wish I Was the Person I'm Pretending to Be,", (2008)., #KEYS
335:Do not cling to the experience of emptiness, and appearances will purify themselves. ~ Yeshe Tsogyal, #KEYS
336:He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. ~ Mark Twain, #KEYS
337:Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #KEYS
338:No one is free that has not obtained the empire of their self. ~ Pythagoras, #KEYS
339:Therefore benefit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there. ~ Tao Te Ching, ch.11, #KEYS
340:The vagaries of life though painful teach us not to cling to this floating world. ~ Ikkyu, 1394-1481, #KEYS
341:True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends - but in the worth and choice." ~ Ben Jonson, #KEYS
342:True ideas do not change or develop, but remain as they are in the timeless 'present'. ~ Rene Guenon, #KEYS
343:True knowledge does not grow old, so have declared the sages of all times. ~ Buddhist Canons in Pali, #KEYS
344:We are in our Self. We are not in the world. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
345:We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. ~ Archilochus, #KEYS
346:You shall confess your sins in the church and not go to your prayer with a bad conscience. ~ Didache, #KEYS
347:But it must truly be development of the faith, not alteration of the faith. ~ Saint Vincent of Lerins, #KEYS
348:Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything." ~ Frank Herbert, #KEYS
349:Fame is something which must be won; honor is something which must not be lost. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #KEYS
350:He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
351:If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #KEYS
352:It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
~ Arthur C Clarke,#KEYS
353:Oh, Lord, nourish me not with love, but with the desire for love. ~ Ibn Arabi, #KEYS
354:Role-playing isn't storytelling. If the dungeon master is directing it, it's not a game. ~ Gary Gygax, #KEYS
355:Unless the unhoped for is hoped for, it will not be discovered. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
356:What pleases the Deity is virtue and sincerity, not any number of material offerings ~ Shinto-Gobusho, #KEYS
357:When the restrictions you have do not limit you, this is what we mean by practice.
~ Shunryu Suzuki,#KEYS
358:A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. ~ Alan Perlis, #KEYS
359:Anyone who seeks truth seeks God, whether or not he realizes it. ~ Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, #KEYS
360:He's not your prince charming if he doesn't make sure you know that you're his princess. ~ Demi Lovato, #KEYS
361:He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions. ~ Confucius, #KEYS
362:I am not devaluing thoughts. Just do not mix up what we think with what actually is." ~ Taizan Maezumi, #KEYS
363:Imān (Faith) is not accepted without deeds, and deeds (are not accepted without) ~ al-Kabīr al-Tabrānī, #KEYS
364:It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
365:Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
366:Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.
~ Zig Ziglar,#KEYS
367:One of the most common ways of not acknowledging our faults is to blame others. ~ Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, #KEYS
368:Our works are of no value if they be not united to the merits of Jesus Christ. ~ Saint Teresa of Jesus, #KEYS
369:Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. ~ Plato, #KEYS
370:Some of their faults men readily admit, but others not so readily. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
371:To see God is the one goal. Power is not the goal. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
372:What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
~ Aristotle,#KEYS
373:You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 Corinthians, 7:23, #KEYS
374:Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine." ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #KEYS
375:Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
376:Found not thy glory on power and riches. ~ Theognis, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
377:Give not thy heart over to anxieties. ~ Mahabharara, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
378:Heaven and earth do nothing. Yet there is nothing they do not do. ~ Chuang Tzu, #KEYS
379:He prays well who is so absorbed with God that he does not know he is praying. ~ Saint Francis de Sales, #KEYS
380:If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles." ~ Sun Tzu, #KEYS
381:I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I'm with you. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #KEYS
382:I'm not ashamed to dress 'like a woman' because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman.
~ Iggy Pop,#KEYS
383:Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it.
~ Albert Einstein,#KEYS
384:It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.
~ Confucius,#KEYS
385:It is that which is and that which is not. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
386:Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not pointless. ~ Howard Gardner, #KEYS
387:Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress. ~ Maimonides, #KEYS
388:The mind which studies is not disquieted. ~ Lao-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
389:The risk of not deciding is often the greatest of all risks to the organization.
~ Everard and Morris,#KEYS
390:The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy." ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #KEYS
391:True, I am in love with suffering, but I do not know if I deserve the honor. ~ Saint Ignatius of Loyola, #KEYS
392:When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough ~ Zen proverb, #KEYS
393:Your duty is to Be, and not to be this or that. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
394:Ah, the nightingale!!
There were many people there
But not one of them heard it. ~ Taigu Ryokan,#KEYS
395:Do not even for a moment lose sight of the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
396:Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
397:Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment." ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
398:Everything that is not the divine essence is a creature. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.18.2, #KEYS
399:Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
~ Werner Heisenberg,#KEYS
400:Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#KEYS
401:The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live." ~ Buddha, #KEYS
402:We use Jesus and not people, because only he will never be without us." ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
403:Willing is not enough, we must do. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
404:Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
405:You experience the world not as it is, but as you are." ~ Frederick Dodson, "Levels of Energy,", (2010)., #KEYS
406:You want to see God in all, but not in yourself? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
407:But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, James, 1:22, #KEYS
408:Consciousness is eternal it is not vanquished with the destruction of the temporary body" ~ Bhagavad Gita, #KEYS
409:He who can accept God as his own, does not suffer so intensely from worldly sorrows. ~ SWAMI SUBODHANANDA, #KEYS
410:If all are God, are you not included in that all? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
411:It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. ~ Hunter S. Thompson, #KEYS
412:It's all about money, not freedom. You think you're free? Try going somewhere without money. ~ Bill Hicks, #KEYS
413:It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
~ Epictetus,#KEYS
414:It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
415:Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it. ~ Kahlil Gibran, #KEYS
416:.... that they did not see ...." ~ Shams of Tabriz, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
417:The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, John, 1:5, #KEYS
418:The Siddha who knows Self does not know the body. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
419:We should not moor a ship with one anchor, or our life with one hope. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
420:Whether one has wealth or not, no treasure exceeds the one called life. ~ Nichiren, #KEYS
421:A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope
~ Epictetus,#KEYS
422:Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~ Buddha, #KEYS
423:I am told I was born. I do not remember. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
424:I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. ~ Woody Allen, #KEYS
425:You want to see God in all, but not in yourself?
~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,#KEYS
426:All are seeing God always. But they do not know it. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
427:Do not thyself what displeases thee in others. ~ Thales, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
428:[Heraclitus] concluded that coming-to-be itself could not be anything evil or unjust. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
429:He who loves with purity considers not the gift of the lover, but the love of the giver." ~ Thomas a Kempis, #KEYS
430:In the universe there is nothing which God is not. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
431:Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." ~ Winston Churchill, #KEYS
432:The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. ~ Carl Jung, #KEYS
433:The lover only minds the welfare of the beloved and does not care for his own sufferings. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
434:The perfect man does not hunt after wealth. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
435:We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
~ Plato,#KEYS
436:Do not hate the evil-hearted, the jealous and the selfish. It is they who promote your Mok ~ Swami Sivananda, #KEYS
437:Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. ~ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, #KEYS
438:Grace is not an invention, it is a fact of spiritual experience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
439:I desire and love nothing that is not of the light. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
440:It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another." ~ George MacDonald, #KEYS
441:Man is in the process of changing to forms of light that are not of this world.
~ Emerald Tablets of Thoth,#KEYS
442:The Good is not Being, but is beyond Being in rank and power. ~ Plato, Republic 509b8-10, #KEYS
443:The oneness of all wisdom may be found, or not, under the name of God. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
444:We should not accept in silence the benefactions of God, but return thanks for them. ~ Saint Basil the Great, #KEYS
445:Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain." ~ Alan Watts, #KEYS
446:You are not human. You are far more than that. You are more than God or Consciousness itself. ~ Robert Adams, #KEYS
447:A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind." ~ John Neal, #KEYS
448:Along this road not a single soul - only autumn evening. ~ Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694, #KEYS
449:Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. ~ Bertrand Russell, #KEYS
450:Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
451:I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else. ~ G.K. Chesterton #KEYS
452:If you do not study, the inertia will go on increasing.
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
453:Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower." ~ Hans Christian Andersen, #KEYS
454:Most people who fail in their dream fail not from lack of ability, but from lack of commitment." ~ Zig Ziglar, #KEYS
455:Not that which is difficult to His power, but that which is contrary to His nature." ~ Saint Ambrose of Milan, #KEYS
456:Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand. ~ Dan Brown, Angels & Demons #KEYS
457:See and realize that this world is not permanent. Neither late nor early flowers will remain." ~ Taigu Ryokan, #KEYS
458:The difficult is not the impossible. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Faith, #KEYS
459:The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!" ~ Saint Hildegard of Bingen, #KEYS
460:The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
~ Marcel Proust,#KEYS
461:The You that sees cannot be shown. The You that dreams is not a dream. It is YOU - The Self—Supreme." ~ Anon., #KEYS
462:To renounce one's self is not to renounce life. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
463:You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
464:You're not yet Socrates, but you can still live as if you want to be him. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
465:Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go. ~ G. J. Gurdjieff, #KEYS
466:Do not let attachment develop for the body. Rather, protect the body for God realization. ~ Swami Adbhutananda, #KEYS
467:It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
~ Voltaire,#KEYS
468:Neglect not the gift that is in thee. ~ I. Timothy. IV. 14, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
469:When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has, the greater is his confusion. ~ Herbert Spencer #KEYS
470:Do not forget the covenant. Struggle with your lower self. Either you ride it, or it will ride you. ~ Al-Jilani, #KEYS
471:Give me chastity and continence, but not yet. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
472:Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present." ~ Jim Rohn, #KEYS
473:I am going through the pangs of being born. Do not stand in the way of my coming to life. ~ Ignatius of Antioch, #KEYS
474:If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all. ~ Michelangelo, #KEYS
475:It is not your business to succeed, but to do right; when you have done so, the rest lies with God. ~ C.S. Lewis #KEYS
476:The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. ~ Arthur Koestler, #KEYS
477:Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
~ Epictetus,#KEYS
478:We come to God by love and not by navigation. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
479:A man who prays lives out the mystery of existence, and a man who does not pray scarcely exists. ~ Saint Charbel, #KEYS
480:Be strong; fear not. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Isaiah, XXXV. 4, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
481:Do not think of what you have been, think only of what you want to be and you are sure to progress. ~ The Mother, #KEYS
482:Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater." ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
483:Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
484:God who is no other thing but love has not created anything other than love. ~ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace 36, #KEYS
485:If we do not listen to our conscience, it delivers us into the hands of our enemies. ~ Saint Isaiah the Solitary, #KEYS
486:Ignorance is not a state of innocence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Purity, #KEYS
487:I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Psalms, 119:11, #KEYS
488:Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca, #KEYS
489:The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.
~ Alexander von Humboldt,#KEYS
490:You must not let it collect dust
~ Shen-hsiu, @BashoSociety#KEYS
491:And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?
~ Edgar Allan Poe,#KEYS
492:Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
493:home is
a presence
not a place
~ Boncho, @BashoSociety#KEYS
494:It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.
~ Soren Kierkegaard,#KEYS
495:Only he who lives not for himself, does not perish. ~ Lao-Tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
496:Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings. ~ Hafiz,#KEYS
497:that cares not about whom it falls upon. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
498:The emancipated soul lives in the world but does not mix with it. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
499:The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche #KEYS
500:The sage is not a savant nor the savant a sage. ~ Lao-Tse. 44, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
501:The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. ~ Socrates, #KEYS
502:We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
~ Aristotle,#KEYS
503:When simplicity arises in your mind, do not follow cleverness; rest in the state of simplicity. ~ Jetsun Milarepa, #KEYS
504:Zealous and not slothful; fervent in spirit. ~ Romans XII. II, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
505:And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
~ Anonymous, The Bible, John, 1:5, [T5],#KEYS
506:Because he who obtained knowledge has not returned. ~ Saadi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
507:Consciousness is not born at any time, it remains eternal. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
508:Do not reduce your prayers to words, but rather make the totality of your life a prayer to God. ~ Isaac of Nineveh, #KEYS
509:For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca, #KEYS
510:I do not believe that any name, however complex, is sufficient to designate the principle of all Majesty. ~ Hermes, #KEYS
511:If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. ~ Goerge Orwell, #KEYS
512:Let Mother's will be done. Never mind sunshine or rain, we must not forget Mother at any time. ~ Swami Turiyananda, #KEYS
513:Lord, if your people need me, I will not refuse the work. Your will be done. ~ Saint Martin of Tours, (316-397 AD), #KEYS
514:Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#KEYS
515:The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. ~ Richard P Feynman, #KEYS
516:The knowledge one does not practise is a poison. ~ Hitopadesha, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
517:The sage does not 'know' the Self, because he is the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
518:The shield of the scholar is, ‘I do not know’, so if he leaves it down, his attacker will strike him. ~ Imam Malik, #KEYS
519:The world is not impermanent if one lives there after knowing God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
520:Words, by themselves, do not represent truth. ~ Mumon, @BashoSociety #KEYS
521:You are the solitary witness of all that is, forever free. Your only bondage is not seeing this. ~ Ashtavakra Gita, #KEYS
522:Being attached to someone is not about the other person. It is about your own sense of inadequacy." ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #KEYS
523:But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, John, 11:10, #KEYS
524:Do not entertain hopes for realization, but practice all your life. ~ Jetsun Milarepa, #KEYS
525:He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. ~ John III. 14, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
526:I believe it all. If I seem not to, it is only that my joy is too great to let my belief settle itself. ~ C S Lewis, #KEYS
527:I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #KEYS
528:In due season we shall reap, if we faint not. ~ Galatians VI. 9, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
529:Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. ~ Maya Angelou, #KEYS
530:No matter how subtle the sleeper's thoughts become, his dreams will not guide him home. ~ Hafiz, #KEYS
531:that Soul shines not forth; yet He is seen by subtle seers with superior, subtle intellect. ~ Katha Upanishad, 3:12, #KEYS
532:Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.
~ Albert Camus,#KEYS
533:Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points." ~ D.T. Suzuki, #KEYS
534:Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice. ~ Erik Erikson, #KEYS
535:Be strong and of a good courage; fear not. ~ Deuteronomy XXXI. 6, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
536:Do not be flattered by reason, reason is only the child of the mind. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
537:Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset. ~ Saint Frances de Sales, #KEYS
538:Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
~ Marcus Aurelius,#KEYS
539:[Heraclitus had] pride not in logical knowledge but rather in intuitive grasping of the truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
540:If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are. ~ Zen Proverb, #KEYS
541:It is impossible to find a saint who did not take the two P's" seriously: prayer and penance. ~ Saint Francis Xavier, #KEYS
542:It is not fitting, when one is in God's service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look. ~ Saint Francis of Assisi, #KEYS
543:The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
~ Socrates?,#KEYS
544:Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart. ~ Leviticus XIX.17, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
545:Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads thy grain ~ Deuteronomy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
546:Would you call Him Destiny? You will not be wrong. Providence? You will say well. Nature? That too you may. ~ Seneca, #KEYS
547:You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
548:A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest. ~ C.S. Lewis #KEYS
549:Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
~ George Bernard Shaw,#KEYS
550:I am going through the pangs of being born. Do not stand in the way of my coming to life. ~ Saint Ignatius of Antioch, #KEYS
551:If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not recognize it when it arrives. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
552:It does not matter if you do not understand it - Savitri, read it always. ~ The Mother, [T5], #KEYS
553: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
554:Our perfection does not consist of doing extraordinary things, but to do the ordinary well." ~ Saint Gabriel Possenti, #KEYS
555:Our way is not to sit to acquire something; it is to express our true nature. That is our practice." ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #KEYS
556:The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned." ~ Maya Angelou, #KEYS
557:The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see. ~ Huang Po, #KEYS
558:There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.
~ Buddha,#KEYS
559:The world being what it is, it could not be otherwise.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
560:4/ The brave alone do great things, not the cowards. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. V. 86), #KEYS
561:As a lamp does not burn without oil, so a man cannot live without God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
562:Fear not, your sincerity is your safeguard.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Sincerity,#KEYS
563:I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman.
~ Homer Simpson,#KEYS
564:Never say, I cannot. Look more closely, you will find that it means in reality, I want not. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, [T5], #KEYS
565:No matter what suffering may befall you now, do not give in to it but develop courage again and again. ~ Padmasambhava, #KEYS
566:The dog knows, but does not know that he knows. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
567:The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see." ~ Huang Po, #KEYS
568:The happiest is the man who is not at all selfish. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. II. 465), #KEYS
569:The thoughts change but not you. Let go the passing thoughts and hold on to the unchanging Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
570:The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They're not the Way." ~ Bodhidharma, #KEYS
571:A man does not always choose what his guardian angel intends. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
572:If the fruits of actions do not affect the person he [she] is free from action. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi #KEYS
573:Let not the talk of the vulgar make any impression on you. ~ Cicero, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
574:Of magic doors there is this, you do not see them, even as you are passing through." ~ Anon. See: http://bit.ly/2RMh2CF, #KEYS
575:The Church tries to fit Christ into it, not the Church into Christ. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
576:The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making. ~ E. W. Dijkstra, #KEYS
577:The mind of the one who knows the truth does not leave Brahman. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
578:The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free... You know it and they do not. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies, #KEYS
579:The Vedanta says, there is nothing that is not God. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. II. 321), #KEYS
580:Unity is a means and not an end in itself. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, About Unity, #KEYS
581:When you suffer, you yourself are the cause. Please do not imagine much, and you will be free. ~ SWAMI TRIGUNATITANANDA, #KEYS
582:Abraham offered to God his mortal son who did not die, and God gave up his immortal Son who died for all of us. ~ Origen, #KEYS
583:A mind full of preconceived ideas, subjective intentions, or habits is not open to things as they are." ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #KEYS
584:Aversion is not equality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
585:Do not complain, that shows discontent with the will of GOD in the present moment. ~ Saint Martin de Porres, (1579-1639), #KEYS
586:Give up thoughts. You need not give up anything else. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 41, #KEYS
587:God will not allow you to be lost if you persist in your determination not to lose Him. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
588:Have good trust in yourself, not in the One that you think you should be, but in the One that you are." ~ Taizan Maezumi, #KEYS
589:Knowing what wisdom is, Is the hardest piece of wisdom To acquire." ~ Jack Gardner, from "Words Are Not Things,", (2005), #KEYS
590:Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery, #KEYS
591:Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.
~ Eric Hoffer,#KEYS
592:My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
~ C S Lewis, [T5],#KEYS
593:Mystery is not the denial of reason, but its honest consummation; reason, indeed, leads inevitably to mystery. ~ Whitman, #KEYS
594:Practice not doing. When action is pure and selfless everything settles into its own perfect place. ~ Tao Te Ching, ch.2, #KEYS
595:See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#KEYS
596:So long as a man has not realized God, he will have to be born on earth. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
597:The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. ~ G K Chesterton, #KEYS
598:There are many parts of us that do not wish to work, so the moment you begin to work, friction starts.
~ P D Ouspensky,#KEYS
599:Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
600:...unless men work at occultism as they work for the prizes of their professions they will not achieve.
~ Dion Fortune,#KEYS
601:All are seeing God always. But they do not know it. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, [T5], #KEYS
602:An outer renunciation by itself does not liberate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Sex, #KEYS
603:But as long as you think you are practicing zazen for the sake of something, that is not true practice." ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #KEYS
604:Even if there is real danger, fear does not help. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Fear, #KEYS
605:For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Romans, 6:14, #KEYS
606:No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
~ Karl Popper,#KEYS
607:Without God, man cannot, and without man, God will not. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
608:Words, by themselves, do not represent truth.
~ Mumon, @BashoSociety#KEYS
609:Be not astonished that man can become like God. ~ Epistle to Diognetus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
610:But do not ask me where I am going As I travel in this limitless world. Where every step I take is my home." ~ Dōgen Zenji, #KEYS
611:Concentrate on the Seer, not on the seen. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Face to Face, 197, [T5], #KEYS
612:Do not doubt that mountains walk simply because they may not appear to walk like humans. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
613:Do not sit idle, for indeed death is seeking you. ~ Hasan al Basri], @Sufi_Path #KEYS
614:Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 Corinthians, 3:16, #KEYS
615:Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed." ~ John 20:27-29, #KEYS
616:Hold tight to your own time, hour after hour; you will not depend on the future if you grasp the present in hand. ~ Seneca, #KEYS
617:I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #KEYS
618:I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal. ~ Carl Jung, #KEYS
619:I will trust and not be afraid. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Isaiah, XII. 2, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
620:Let not worldly thoughts and anxieties disturb the mind. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
621:my book
is not worm infested
autumn wind
~ Buson, @BashoSociety#KEYS
622:Our entire good consists not only in accepting the truth of God's word, but in persevering in it. ~ Saint Francis de Sales, #KEYS
623:People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them.
~ Epictetus, Enchiridion,#KEYS
624:Simply meditating or repeating God's names, without any effort at rooting out the desires, will not do. ~ SWAMI PREMANANDA, #KEYS
625:Sleep not until thou hast held converse with thyself. ~ Chinese Maxims, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
626:...spirituality alone will not take a man far in the Mysteries; he must have intellectual powers as well.
~ Dion Fortune,#KEYS
627:The heart that is not in love will fail the test. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
628:The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky,#KEYS
629:And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word! ~ Robert Browning, Porphyria's Lover, (1842),#KEYS
630:A true initiate will never force anyone who has not reached a certain level of maturity to accept his truth. ~ Franz Bardon, #KEYS
631:Blush not to submit to a sage who knows more than thyself. ~ Democritus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
632:But it is not that way with God ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on John 1, lect. 1)., #KEYS
633:He who does not thank the people is not thankful to Allah." ~ Hadith, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
634:Let us not pose as doers but resign ourselves to the guiding power. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
635:Not for the sake of the wife, but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear to us.
~ Yajnavalkya, the Upanishads, *which?,#KEYS
636:Patience from a Buddhist perspective is not a "wait and see" attitude, but rather one of 'just be there.' " ~ Lodro Rinzler, #KEYS
637:Security does not exist but it is what we search continually, which creates the fear of not having it. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #KEYS
638:Terrestrial things are not the truth, but semblances of truth. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
639:The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
~ Soren Kierkegaard,#KEYS
640:To be in harmony with the wholeness of things is not to have anxiety over imperfections." ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
641:When darkness envelops you, do you not seek for a lamp? ~ Dammapada 146, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
642:Drink ! For you know not whence you came, nor why; Drink ! For you know not why you go nor where.
~ Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat,#KEYS
643:Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning. ~ Saint John Henry Newman, #KEYS
644:Have a care that ye sow not among men the seeds of discord. ~ Baha-ullah, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
645:If that desire did not arise, how could the quest of the Self arise? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
646:If you keep hold of your Self, you will not see the objective world. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
647:Learn to distinguish what should be done and what not; The clever soul will always select his opportunity. ~ Nagarjuna, [T5], #KEYS
648:Let not worldly thoughts and anxieties trouble your minds. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
649:Mind is a passage, not a culmination. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Supermind as Creator, #KEYS
650:Once we admit our existence, how is it that we do not know our Self? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
651:People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #KEYS
652:The problems are solved not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #KEYS
653:What we would not have done to us, we must not do to others. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
654:Wisdom is full of light and her beauty is not withered. ~ Book of Wisdom, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
655:Be not self-seeking; try to be desire-less, and take your refuge in the Lord, who is the doer of all good. ~ SWAMI PREMANANDA, #KEYS
656:Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.
~ Anonymous, The Bible, James, 1:22 NIV, [T5],#KEYS
657:Do not read to satisfy curiosity or to pass the time, but study such things as move your heart to devotion. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #KEYS
658:do not turn away; bow down in worship and draw near. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
659:Every time the world shakes you up, you feel something has happened not to your liking, you're accruing karma. ~ Robert Adams, #KEYS
660:He [she] who abandons all that is not Real directly realizes Reality. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
661:Hope not to hear truth often in royal courts. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I, #KEYS
662:If you find me not within you, you will never find me. For, I have been with you, from the beginning of me. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
663:Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. ~ John. XIV. 27, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
664:Let us walk, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness. ~ Romans XIII, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
665:Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.
~ Isaac Asimov,#KEYS
666:Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel. I want you to make love, not war ~ I know you've heard it before. ~ John Lennon, #KEYS
667:The activity of God, then, is not an alternative to my free activity. It is its source. ~ Herbert McCabe, Faith within Reason, #KEYS
668:The body will eventually drop anyway one day. Let all experiences teach you that you are not the body. ~ Roger Phillip Kaplan, #KEYS
669:The gnosis does not seek, it possesses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Vijnana or Gnosis, #KEYS
670:There is always purpose in being, but not always being in purpose." ~ Mark Nepo, (b. 1951). "The Book of Awakening,", (2011)., #KEYS
671:Uniformity is death, not life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Inadequacy of the State Idea, #KEYS
672:You are the honored guest, do not weep like a beggar for pieces of the world. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
673:Come to my Divine Mother and you will receive not only Bhakti, but also Jnana. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
674:Dive deep into the sea of Divine Love. Fear not. It is the sea of Immortality! ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
675:Do not interrupt life's natural flow by damming its river at every bend with sticks of analysis and definition. ~ Omar Khayyam, #KEYS
676:He who is a friend of wisdom, must not be violent. ~ Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
677:In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time. ~ Michio Kaku, #KEYS
678:Know the Self which is here and now; you will be steady and not waver. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
679:Let us be one even with those who do not wish to be one with us. ~ Bossuet, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
680:Let us sing a new song not with our lips but with our lives. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
681:Money can win for you bread only. Do not consider it as your sole end and aim. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
682:Never let life's hardships disturb you. No one can avoid problems, not even saints or sages. ~ Nichiren, #KEYS
683:Not to weary of well doing is a great benediction. ~ Fo-shu-hing-tsau-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
684:Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
~ Henry David Thoreau,#KEYS
685:The eye of Faith is not one with the eye of Knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, In Either Case, #KEYS
686:The way of truth is like a great road. It is not difficult to know it. The evil is only that men will not seek it.
~ Mencius,#KEYS
687:We are not disturbed by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens to us." ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
688:When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #KEYS
689:God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #KEYS
690:However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?
~ Buddha,#KEYS
691:Human language could not express what only sovereign and redeemed human nature could bear. ~ Charles Williams, All Hallows' Eve, #KEYS
692:Material Nature is not ethical. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Delight of Existence, The Problem, #KEYS
693:Never do anything which you could not do in the sight of all. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, [T5], #KEYS
694:O disciples, be ye heirs to Truth, not to worldly things. ~ Magghima Nikaya, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
695:One gains the purest joy from spirited things only when they are not tied in with earning one's livelihood.
~ Albert Einstein,#KEYS
696:The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them - but that they seize us." ~ Ashley Montagu, #KEYS
697:Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie.
~ Miyamoto Musashi, [T5],#KEYS
698:You are rewarded not according to your work or your time but according to the measure of your love." ~ Saint Catherine of Siena, #KEYS
699:Does not the discipline of the scientific spirit just commence when one no longer harbours any conviction? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
700:Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God's kingdom. ~ Leo the Great, #KEYS
701:Do not let the past disturb you, just leave everything in the Sacred Heart and begin again with joy." ~ Saint Teresa of Calcutta, #KEYS
702:For what is faith unless it is to believe what you do not see? ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
703:It is the nature of the mind to wander. You are not the mind. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 97, #KEYS
704:Let all involuntary suffering teach you to remember God, and you will not lack occasion for repentance. ~ Saint Mark the Ascetic, #KEYS
705:Let us sing a new song, not with our lips, but with our lives. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
706:One need not have any fear if one takes refuge in God. God protects His devotee. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
707:The cause of misery is not in life without; it is within you as the ego. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
708:The fool who burns by day a camphor-light
Will soon not have an oil-lamp for the night. ~ Saadi, Gulistan,#KEYS
709:The man who knows the Tao, does not speak; he who speaks, knows It not. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
710:The Mind creates the chain and not the body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Conclusion and Summary, #KEYS
711:The vital does not like waiting. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Wrong Movements of the Vital, #KEYS
712:When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
~ Voltaire,#KEYS
713:All this has been revealed to Me. I do not know much about what your books say.
~ Sri Ramakrishna,#KEYS
714:As you are not able to do spiritual practices always, you should do work, looking upon it as the Master's work. ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
715:Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus. ~ Alexander Graham Bell, #KEYS
716:I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing. ~ Alfred Korzybski, #KEYS
717:If enquired 'Who thinks?', thinking will come to an end. Even when thoughts do not exist, do not you exist? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
718:It's not what happens to you that determines how far you will go in life; it is how you handle what happens to you." ~ Zig Ziglar, #KEYS
719:My lips shall not speak wickedness nor my tongue utter deceit, ~ Job XXVII. 4, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
720:Tire not being useful to thyself by being useful to others. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
721:To every declarative sentence you hear, read, think or utter, add "or not' to it and you'll never encounter a falsehood." ~ Anon., #KEYS
722:To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.
~ Lao Tzu,#KEYS
723:When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
~ Henry Ford,#KEYS
724:Do not believe all that men say. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, XIX. 10, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
725:Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Romans, 12:2, #KEYS
726:Even in death, the individuality of the person with samskaras is not list. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
727:If our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, we are guilty of heresy. ~ Saint Ignatius of Loyola, #KEYS
728:Money is like manure, it's not worth anything unless you spread it around to help young beautiful things grow. ~ Sir Francis Bacon, #KEYS
729:Not recognizing natural mind is simply an example of the mind's unlimited capacity to create whatever it wants. ~ Mingyur Rinpoche, #KEYS
730:O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
~ Edgar Allan Poe,#KEYS
731:So long as you say "I know" or "I do not know" you look upon yourself as a person. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
732:Take heed that ye do not alms before, men, to be seen of them. ~ Matthew VI. 1, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
733:Tell your vital not to judge on appearances and to collaborate. All is well in the long run. ~ The Mother, #KEYS
734:The man who has done good does not cry it through the world. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
735:The vision of God does not depend on your will - you must depend on His. You must resign yourself completely. ~ Swami Adbhutananda, #KEYS
736:The Yogi eats not out of desire, but to maintain the body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Food, #KEYS
737:To be taken with love for a soul, God does not look on its greatness, but the greatness of its humility. ~ Saint John of the Cross, #KEYS
738:To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world." ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
739:Vedanta does not say, 'Give it up': it says, 'Transcend it'. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VIII. 130), #KEYS
740:We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves. ~ François de La Rochefoucauld, #KEYS
741:You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,#KEYS
742:You possess only whatever will not be lost in a ship wreck. ~ Imam Ghazali], @Sufi_Path #KEYS
743:Do not try to explain. They will only understand you as much as they see and hear.. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
744:I am not, I will not be.
I have not, I will not have.
This frightens all children,
And kills fear in the wise. ~ Nagarjuna,#KEYS
745:I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person. ~ Oscar Wilde, #KEYS
746:Know for certain that He will not leave you. He will never fail you when you cry His name with a longing heart. ~ Swami Saradananda, #KEYS
747:Naaman doubted until the time when he was cleansed; but you are cleansed by now, and so you should not have doubts. ~ Saint Ambrose, #KEYS
748:Vision only opens, it does not embrace. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge, #KEYS
749:we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause.
~ Aristotle,#KEYS
750:You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
751:A man is great not because he hasn't failed; a man is great because failure hasn't stopped him." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
752:Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. ~ Thomas A Kempis, #KEYS
753:Be not proud in thy riches, nor in thy strength, nor in thy wisdom. ~ Phocylides, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
754:Diversity lies in your imagination only. Unitary Being need not be acquired. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
755:God or the Good, what is it but the existence of that which yet is not? ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
756:It's not that I disagreed with Bush's economic policy... I believed he was a child of Satan here to destroy the planet. ~ Bill Hicks, #KEYS
757:Moksha is to know that you were not born. "Be still and know that I am God." ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
758:The Catholic is our brother but the materialist not less. We owe him deference as to the greatest of believers. ~ Antonie the Healer, #KEYS
759:The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #KEYS
760:There is an eternal Thinker, but his thoughts are not eternal. ~ Katha Upanisbad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
761:There should be no big I, not even a small one. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Ego and Its Forms, #KEYS
762:Whatever is not of use to the swarm, is not of use to the bee. ~ Marcus Aurelius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
763:Do not damage the land or the sea or the trees until we put the seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God." ~ Revelation 7:2-3, #KEYS
764:Dost thou not know that thou hast become God and art the son of the One? ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
765:Faith is not intellectual belief but a function of the soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Faith, #KEYS
766:If thou canst not equal thyself with God, thou canst not understand Him. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
767:If you never tasted a bad apple, you would not appreciate a good apple. You have to experience life to understand life." ~ Leon Brown, #KEYS
768:I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.
~ Leonardo da Vinci,#KEYS
769:Knowledge is not complete without works. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Love and the Triple Path, #KEYS
770:Learn the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a sceptre but a hoe. ~ Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, #KEYS
771:Let us respect men, and not only men of worth, but the public in general ~ Cicero, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
772:Matter was not ultra-materialized as I would at first have believed, but was instead metamorphosed into Psyche. ~ Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
773:Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #KEYS
774:The affairs of the world will go on forever, do not delay the practice of meditation. ~ Jetsun Milarepa, #KEYS
775:The highest goal of music is to connect one's soul to their Divine Nature, not entertainment.
~ Pythagoras,#KEYS
776: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
777:The saints were so completely dead to themselves they cared very little whether others agreed with then or not!" ~ Saint John Vianney, #KEYS
778:The sea is not aware of its wave. Similarly the Self is not aware of its ego. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
779:What we would not like being done to us, let us not do it to others. ~ Chang Yung, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
780:Words fail us when we seek, not to express Him who Is, but merely to attain to the expression of the powers that environ Him. ~ Philo, #KEYS
781:You are the Self. Was there ever a time when you were not aware of that Self? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
782:Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered. ~ Aristotle, Politics, II, 8, #KEYS
783:If Paradise is not within thee, thou shalt never enter into it. ~ Angelus Silesins, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
784: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
785:I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi,#KEYS
786:Jesus said to me a little while ago, would you have abandoned me, my son, if I had not crucified you. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
787:Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread.
~ Anonymous, The Bible, Proverbs, 20:13,#KEYS
788:The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty…. A doubt that doubtEd everything would not be a doubt. ~ Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #KEYS
789:The instant does not have time; and time is made from the movement of the instant. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #KEYS
790:What you do not wish to be done to yourselves, do not do to other men. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
791:Whether one has surrendered or not, one has never been separate from the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
792:You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you do and not upon who you are. ~ Rudolf Steiner, #KEYS
793:All that is contains Thee; I could not exist if Thou wert not in me. ~ St Augustine, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
794:Avoid slander because it is difficult to retract. Avoid offending anyone for to ask forgiveness is not delightful. ~ Saint John Cantius, #KEYS
795:Even the thought 'I do not realize' is a hindrance. In fact, the Self alone is. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
796:If you want to enter the knowledge of the Tao, the entrance is called 'not knowing'. ~ Chuang Tzu, 370BC-287BC, #KEYS
797:It is not sufficient just to remain calm in the event of catastrophe or emergency. When challenged by adversity, charge onwards with co, #KEYS
798:Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant. ~ Saadi, #KEYS
799:not only of things incorruptible, but also of things corruptible ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.22.2), #KEYS
800:Realization consists of getting rid of the false idea that one is not realized. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
801:The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ~ Aristotle, #KEYS
802:There is never a moment when the Self is not; It is ever-present, here and now. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
803:They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price. ~ Khalil Gibran, #KEYS
804:They, who have no eyes in their face, are not called blind. They alone are blind, O Nanak, who stray away from their Lord. ~ Guru Angad, #KEYS
805:Things that happen during the wakeful, dream and sleep states do not affect you at all; you remain your own Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
806:True knowledge is not attained by thinking. It is what you are; it is what you become.
~ A B Purani, EVENING TALKS WITH SRI AUROBINDO,#KEYS
807:Yoke yourself under the law, so that you may truly be free. Do not work the desire of your soul apart from God. ~ Saint Ephrem of Syria, #KEYS
808:You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
809:And I would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
810:A substance is a thing to which it belongs to be not in a subject ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (SCG 1.25)., #KEYS
811:Be gentle, strike not an inoffensive animal, break not a domestic tree. ~ Pythagoras, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
812:Be not afraid, like some foolish people, that you may run to excess in your love of God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
813:Do not believe in men's discourses before you have reflected well on them. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
814:Even the thought, "I do not realize" is a hindrance. In fact, the Self alone is. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
815:Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.
~ Franz Kafka,#KEYS
816:Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul. ~ Matthew X. 28, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
817:God is spirit, fire, being and light, and yet He is not all this. ~ Angelus Silesius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
818:If you are really not aware that God is constantly hunting for you, then pay close attention to every breath you take. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
819:It is no use reading books of guidance if one is not determined to live what they teach. Blessings ~ The Mother, #KEYS
820:Keep watch over yourselves! Struggle to improve yourselves and do not try to reform others. Stick to your own ideal! ~ Swami Turiyananda, #KEYS
821: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
822: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
823:Our allegiance is to the principles always, and not to the persons. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. III. 280), #KEYS
824:Prayer is not a form of words but an aspiration. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, The Need of the Moment, #KEYS
825:Struggle to pierce that darkness above you with the dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens. ~ Anonymous English Monk, #KEYS
826:Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience. ~ Thomas Ehrlich, #KEYS
827:The jar when it is filled makes no noise, and so one who has realized God does not talk. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
828:The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
829:There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #KEYS
830:We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps. ~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, #KEYS
831:You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don't have a life. You are life." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #KEYS
832:You must remember that you are His children. But do not let this make you proud. Pride must be given up once for all. ~ SWAMI PREMANANDA, #KEYS
833:Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
~ Jorge Luis Borges, [T1],#KEYS
834:Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. ~ Dalai Lama, #KEYS
835:Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #KEYS
836:He answered: "...wherever I did not see my own self." ~ Shaikh Abul-Hasan Kharqani, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
837:Render to God the sole worship which is fitting towards Him, not to be evil. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
838:Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
~ Lord Byron, [T5],#KEYS
839:The ordinary man is not yet a rational being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Curve of the Rational Age, #KEYS
840:There is nothing impossible. We put this bar - this is possible, this is not. Like prisoners we imprison ourselves
~ Nolini Kanta Gupta,#KEYS
841:Those who have not attained to God, what power have they to untie the bonds of the world? ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
842:What needs our time are kinder beings, not more intelligent beings. Intelligence without goodness is a failed mutation. ~ Claudio Naranjo, #KEYS
843:Why was I born, O God, if not to find Thee?
Why do I die, O God, if not to come to Thee?
~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sayings of Hazrat Khan,#KEYS
844:As a bee gathering nectar does not harm or disturb the color and fragrance of the flower; so do the wise move through the world." ~ Buddha, #KEYS
845:Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them. ~ William Shakespeare, #KEYS
846:Be not children in understanding,be men. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 Corinthians, XIV 20, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
847:Divine goodness not only does not reject the repentant soul, but always seeks to find even the obstinate. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
848:Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.
~ Sri Ramakrishna,#KEYS
849:Every man is not only himself, he is that which he represents. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Facts and Opinions, #KEYS
850:God is in all people, but all people are not in God -- that is the reason why they suffer. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
851:God is not knowledge, but the cause of Knowledge; He is not mind, but the cause of mind; He is not Light, but the cause of Light. ~ Hermes, #KEYS
852:Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get some men to accept it, but he did." ~ Bertrand Russell, #KEYS
853:He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
854:Is there anyone who is not realizing the Self? Does anyone deny his own existence? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
855:It is vision that sees Truth, not logic. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, #KEYS
856:Most of what goes on today is a dissolution; but it is not just a dissolution, for "dissolution" also contains a "solution." ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
857:Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence. ~ Saint Basil the Great, #KEYS
858:Soul determines Form & Action & is not determined by them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, The Isha Upanishad, #KEYS
859:The realization of God is not the same as the acquirement of the Siddis or psychic powers. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
860:The Unknown is not the Unknowable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Two Negations, The Materialist Denial, #KEYS
861:To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #KEYS
862:What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist? ~ C S Lewis, #KEYS
863:Why do we not doubt whether our thoughts and actions are not another sort of dreaming, and our waking a certain kind of sleep? ~ Montaigne, #KEYS
864:Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
~ John Stuart Mill,#KEYS
865:Egotism exists in ignorance, not in knowledge. He attains the Truth who is void of conceit. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
866:Equality does not include inert acceptance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Equality - The Chief Support, #KEYS
867:Happiness is the very nature of the Self; happiness and the Self are not different. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
868:If there is an underlying cause of all things. It does not matter where we begin. One measures a circle beginning anywhere." ~ Charles Fort, #KEYS
869:It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.
~ J R R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring,#KEYS
870:Meditation is not a means to reach God, but an end. The purpose of meditation is to love God and neighbor. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
871:Pray, 'Take us by the hand as a father takes his son, and leave us not.' ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VI. 91), #KEYS
872: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
873:The more we know the more we can see that we do not know. With my Blessings.
~ The Mother, Mantras Of The Mother,#KEYS
874:The Tao which can be expressed is not the eternal Tao, the name which can be named is not the eternal Name. ~ Lao Tzu, #KEYS
875:The temple of the body should not be kept in darkness; the lamp of knowledge must light it. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
876:Whether the mind becomes steady or not, practice Japa. It will be nice if you can perform a certain number of Japa daily. ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
877:And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than you joy." ~ Kahlil Gibran, #KEYS
878: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
879:Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Jeremiah, 33:3, #KEYS
880:Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price
~ Samuel Johnson,#KEYS
881:For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.
~ Anonymous, The Bible?,#KEYS
882:Has there not been a time when each and everyone of us has felt that we are a 'stranger in a strange land.'" ~ Anon. From Exodus 2:22, (KJV), #KEYS
883:I am He that is" (Ex 3,14), which is equivalent to "My nature is to be, not to be spoken." ~ Philo of Alexandria, De Mutatione Nominum 11-12, #KEYS
884:If a warrior is not unattached to life and death, he will be of no use whatsoever." ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo (Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai), #KEYS
885:On this earth everyone has his cross. But we must act in such a way that we be not the bad, but good thief. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
886:Realize your pure Be-ing. Thoughts will play as usual, but you will not be affected. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
887:The intuitive mentality is still mind and not gnosis. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Intuitive Mind, #KEYS
888:The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. ~ Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings, #KEYS
889:The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
~ Amos Tversky,#KEYS
890:Thoughts change but not you. Let go of the passing thoughts and hold on to the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
891:When you stand in the light of the Supreme Consciousness, you must not make a shadow. ~ The Mother, Agenda 10, [T5], #KEYS
892:You shall not hate anyone, but some people you shall rebuke, for some you shall pray, and some you shall love more than your life. ~ Didache, #KEYS
893:Give value to your time. Live in the present moment. Do not live in imagination and throw your time away. ~ Ibn Arabi, #KEYS
894:Healing is not only restoration to normality, but also preparation for regeneration. It is the cosmic antidote to corruption. ~ Rodney Collin, #KEYS
895:if not in the give and take of Love. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, (1207 - 1273), Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Wikipedia., #KEYS
896:If we are calm and persevering, we shall find not only ourselves, but our souls, and with that, God Himself. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
897:It is mine more to be persecuted, than to persecute. So Christ was victorious as a Crucified, and not as a crucifier. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #KEYS
898:It is not for me to bless. It is for the Divine Mother to do so. All blessings come from her. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
899:I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner. ~ Aleister Crowley, #KEYS
900:Let not thy heart give way to discouragement. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, VII 8, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
901:No one has ever made the mistake of not perceiving that he was alive ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (DV 10.8ad2)., #KEYS
902:Peace is Self-Realization. Peace need not be disturbed. One should aim at Peace only. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
903:Show kindness unto thy brothers and make them not to fall into suffering. ~ Chadana Sutta, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
904:Speak not my secret name to hostile Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon, #KEYS
905:There is only one sadness, namely, not to be Saints [II n'y a qu'une tristesse, c'est de n'etre pas des Saints]. ~ Leon Bloy, La Femme Pauvre, #KEYS
906: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
907:Vital desire grows by being indulged, it does not become satisfied. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Desire, #KEYS
908:Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another. ~ Leviticus XIX. 11, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
909:Yoga demands mastery over the nature, not subjection to the nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Desire, #KEYS
910:Do not think to gain God by thy actions...One must not gain but be God. ~ Angelus Silesius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
911:He who wishes to love God does not truly love Him if he has not an ardent and constant desire to suffer for His sake. ~ Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, #KEYS
912:I am convinced that most people do not grow up … our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias. ~ Maya Angelou, #KEYS
913:I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. ~ C S Lewis, #KEYS
914:I tell my heart, "Do not worry, the key to morning I've thrown away." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
915:miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is walk on earth .
~ Gigen, @BashoSociety#KEYS
916:So long as one goes on questioning and reasoning about God, one has not seen Him as a Reality. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
917:The mind does not exist apart from the Self, that is, it has no independent existence. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
918:The wise in joy and in sorrow depart not from the equality of their souls. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
919:When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, [T5], #KEYS
920:Without being possessed one does not possess oneself utterly. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Ascent of Life, #KEYS
921:Abide in prayers and devotion, with no thought of samsara for at least three days, if not more. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
922:Bhakti Yoga and not Jnana Yoga or Karma Yoga is the Yuga-Dharma, the adequate path of this age. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
923:Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Psalms, 139:12, #KEYS
924:Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. ~ Neil Gaiman, #KEYS
925:God is a hard master and will not be served by halves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, The Wheat and the Chaff, #KEYS
926:He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 John, IV. 8, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
927:It is not difficult to know the good, but it is difficult to put it in practice. ~ Tsu King, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
928:Lost in intense God-consciousness I could not know that I was nude the greater part of the day. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
929:Mosquitoes are teaching you that you are not the body. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Living by the Words of Bhagavan, #KEYS
930:not leave a trace
do not follow a path
~ Dogen Zenji, @BashoSociety#KEYS
931:Pursue not the outer entanglements; dwell not in the inner void; be serene in the oneness of things; and dualism vanishes by itself." ~ Sengcan, #KEYS
932:Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #KEYS
933:The genius is not something added to oneself. Rather it is a stripping away of excess to reveal the god within.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
934: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
935:The question of time does not arise at all to the one established in one's true nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
936:There is no difference in work. Do not think that this work will lead to God and that will not. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
937:Things are not always what they seem; outward form deceives many; rare is the mind that discerns what is carefully concealed within. ~ Phaedrus, #KEYS
938:Though it has no thought of keeping watch, it's not for naught that the scarecrow stands in the grain field. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
939:Thus even though it is not durable, there is no interruption in substance. ~ Lalita Vistara, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
940:Time is a convention of movement, not a condition of existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, The Isha Upanishad, #KEYS
941:Vision is not sufficient; one must become what inwardly one sees. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Self-Realisation, #KEYS
942:We do not offend God except by doing something contrary to our own good ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.122)., #KEYS
943:You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
944:Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
~ Dylan Thomas,#KEYS
945: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
946:Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #KEYS
947:God is not only true, but truth itself, so there can be no falsity in him ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 2.61)., #KEYS
948:If the unripe mind does not feel His Grace, it does not mean that God's Grace is absent. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
949:If you do not meet a sage following the same road as yourself, then walk alone. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
950:In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will. ~ Thomas Keating, #KEYS
951:It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#KEYS
952:Listen not if anyone criticizes or censures your Guru. Leave the presence of such a one at once. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
953:Mukti [Liberation] is not to be gained in the future. It is there forever, here and now. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
954:Not everyone who is enlightened by an angel knows that he is enlightened by him. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, [T5], #KEYS
955:Ordinary souls, after long practice and devotional exercises, go into samadhi and do not return. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
956:
Don't walk in front of me... I may not follow
Don't walk behind me... I may not lead
Walk beside me... just be my friend
~ Albert Camus,#KEYS
957:Shun agreeable amusements, deliver not yourselves to the pleasures of the senses. ~ Chu-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
958:Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
~ Arthur C Clarke,#KEYS
959:That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T0],#KEYS
960:The gods use instruments,
Not ask their consent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Short Stories - I, Act Five,#KEYS
961:The principle of division is not proper to Matter, but to Mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Knot of Matter, #KEYS
962:The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #KEYS
963:The reason understands itself, but not what is beyond it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Intuitive Mind, #KEYS
964:Thou remainest the same and thy years shall not fail. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Hebrews, I. 12, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
965:United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs.
~ Patrick Henry,#KEYS
966:Watch diligently over yourselves, let not negligence be born in you. ~ Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
967:We move as we must,
Not as we choose, whatever we may think. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act II,#KEYS
968:With devotion within your heart, it is not absolutely necessary that you must visit holy places. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
969:You are not apart from being which is the same as bliss. You are unchanging and eternal. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
970:Adultery involves not only a sin of lust but also a sin of injustice ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.73.5ad1)., #KEYS
971:All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison. ~ Paracelsus, #KEYS
972:Beautiful days do not
come to you. You must
walk towards them.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path#KEYS
973:Bhakti-Yoga does not say, 'Give up'; it only says, 'Love, love the Highest !' ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. III. 74), #KEYS
974:Grace is the Self. That also is not to be acquired; you only need to know that it exists. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
975:It is futile to seek human reason, purpose or meaning in the events of life, which are in fact impersonal and not human at all. ~ Ramesh Balsekar, #KEYS
976:It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily. ~ Martin Scorsese, #KEYS
977:Lest we remind you that, "He who does not thank the people, does not thank Allah. ~ Hadith, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
978:Lightning from here strikes there. When you begin to love God, God is loving you. A clapping sound does not come from one hand. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
979:O saki, let the coming of this holy day be auspicious to you And the pledges you made not slip away from your memory. ~ Hafiz, #KEYS
980:So high is my Lord's palace, my heart trembles to mount its stairs: yet I must not be shy, if I would enjoy His love. ~ Kabir, #KEYS
981:There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people. ~ Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, #KEYS
982:Whatever happens in the working of the universe at the present moment, has to be accepted. Not accepting it means human misery. ~ Ramesh Balsekar, #KEYS
983:What we are, we know not; what we know, we cannot effect. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Action and the Divine Will, #KEYS
984:Do not blame nature, God, or others. Ninety-nine percent of your problems are self-created. You know it, though you do not accept it. ~ SWAMI RAMA, #KEYS
985:Eye and ear are poor witnesses for man, if his inner life has not been made fine. ~ Heraclitus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
986:Faith has to do with things that are not seen and hope with things that are not at hand. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
987:His business is to suggest and not to impose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, A System of National Education, #KEYS
988:I do not waste my words on tired minds.
I can only talk to those who are thirsty
for the sea ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,#KEYS
989:Knowledge will not come without self-communion, without light from within. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, In Either Case, #KEYS
990:Live as though only God and yourself were in this world, so that your heart may not be detained by anything human. ~ Saint John of the Cross, [T5], #KEYS
991:One must realize that he is not the doer, but that he is only a tool of some Higher Power. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
992:There is no realization of something. There is only the unrealization of you are not That. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
993:When the soul has not self-mastery, one looks and sees not, listens and hears not. ~ Theng-tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
994:Always be faithful to God in keeping the promises made to Him and do not bother about the ridicule of the foolish. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
995:Brahman is one, not numerically, but in essence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad: Brahman, Oneness of God and the World, #KEYS
996:Do not claim to have acquired virtue unless you have suffered affliction, for without affliction virtue has not been tested. ~ St. Mark the Ascetic, #KEYS
997:Do not go off on your own, as if you were already justified, but come together and search out what is for your common benefit. ~ Letter of Barnabas, #KEYS
998:Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Good, #KEYS
999:It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
~ Gabriel García Marquez,#KEYS
1000:Not only the thirsty seek the Water , the Water as well seeks the thirsty. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1001:One must continue spiritual practices without interruption and with single-minded devotion as long as the Goal is not achieved. ~ SWAMI VIRAJANANDA, #KEYS
1002:or it is not at all. Faith is as real as life; as actual as force ; as effectual as volition. It is the physics of the moral being. ~ S T Coleridge, #KEYS
1003:Renunciation must be for us merely an instrument and not an objec. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #KEYS
1004:The griefs thou puttest upon others shall not take long to fall back upon thyself. ~ Demophilus, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1005:But do not ask me where I am going, As I travel in this limitless world, Where every step I take is my home. ~ Dogen Zenji, [T5], #KEYS
1006:Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again. ~ Brecht, #KEYS
1007:Do not use your mind to enquire in the heart about anything other than your own real nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1008:Equality, not indifference is the basis. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #KEYS
1009:If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,#KEYS
1010:If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.
~ Plato,#KEYS
1011:Not only Spirit is one, but Mind, Life, Matter are one. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Cosmic Consciousness, #KEYS
1012:The idea of time is only in your mind. It is not in the Self. There is no time for the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1013:The life-work of a great man often does not begin till he dies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, Mustafa Kamal Pasha, #KEYS
1014:There is nothing however small, however vile it be, that does not contain mind. ~ Giordano Bruno, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1015:The seer and the seen are the Self. There are not many selves either. All are only one Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1016: Thou shalt not kill " relates not solely to the murder of man, but of all that lives. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1017:Unity is sweet substance of the heart
And not a chain that binds. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
1018: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
1019:You must not be greatly troubled about many things, but you should care for the main thing — preparing yourself for death. ~ Saint Ambrose of Optina, #KEYS
1020:You shall wander in the darkness and see not till you have found the eternal Light. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1021:Do not claim to have acquired virtue unless you have suffered affliction, for without affliction virtue has not been tested. ~ Saint Mark the Ascetic, #KEYS
1022:Do not take life's experiences too seriously. Above all, do not let them hurt you, for in reality they are nothing but dream experiences. ~ Yogananda, #KEYS
1023:God does not require an intermediary.
Mind your business and all will be well. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 594,#KEYS
1024:I am sent not only to love God but to make Him loved. It is not enough for me to love God, if my neighbor does not love Him." ~ Saint Vincent de Paul, #KEYS
1025:If you must be crazy, let it not be with the things of the world; be crazy with the love of the Lord. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1026: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
1027:One should not think too much of food either to indulge or unduly to repress. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Food, #KEYS
1028:Order is indeed the law of life, but not an artificial regulation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Diversity in Oneness, #KEYS
1029:The goal always exists. It is not something new to be discovered. The Absolute is our nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1030:The most advanced technology and the most valuable asset that you will ever own is your mind. You will not find anything greater. ~ Chamtrul Rinpoche, #KEYS
1031:To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.
~ Aleister Crowley,#KEYS
1032:True teaching is not an accumulation of knowledge; it is an awaking of consciousness which goes through successive stages. ~ Ancient Egyptian Proverb, #KEYS
1033:When the thieves, the five senses, intrude into my heart, are you not in my heart Arunachala! ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1034:A fool, though he lives in the company of the wise, understands nothing of the true doctrine, as a spoon tastes not the flavor of the soup.
~ Buddha,#KEYS
1035:Desire always creates perturbation and even its fulfilment does not satisfy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Desire, #KEYS
1036:Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty ~ it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. , #KEYS
1037:If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain." ~ Emily Dickinson, (1830 -1886), American poet, wrote nearly 1,800 poems, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1038:In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? ~ Anonymous, The Bible, John, 14:2, #KEYS
1039:Is it not a wonder of wonders? The quest "Who am I?" is the axe with which to cut off the ego. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1040:Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1041:Nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not therein already contained. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Conscious Force, #KEYS
1042:Nothing can exist which is not substance and power of Brahman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
1043:Only one or two look for its owner. People enjoy the beauty of the world; they do not seek it's owner. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1044:People do not understand the simple Truth of their everyday, ever-present, eternal experience. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1045:Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions ~ Thomas S Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, #KEYS
1046:Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Micah, 7:8, #KEYS
1047:Religion has to be lived, not learned as a creed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, A System of National Education, #KEYS
1048:Sometimes I wonder if people who aggrressively seek political power are precisely those who should not be entrusted to wield it. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #KEYS
1049:Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Hebrews, XII. 4, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1050:You will not see anyone who is truly striving after his spiritual advancement who is not given to spiritual reading." ~ Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, #KEYS
1051:By knowing what you are not, you are free of it and remain in your own Natural State. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
1052:Do not focus so much on the path; keep your eyes fixed on the one who guides you and on the heavenly home to which He is guiding you. ~ Saint Padre Pio, #KEYS
1053:Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for." ~ Epicurus, #KEYS
1054:Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. ~ Anaïs Nin, #KEYS
1055:Fall in Love with
the agony of Love not the Ecstasy.
Then the Beloved will Fall in Love with you. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,#KEYS
1056:Give not up thy heart to sorrow, for it is a sister to distrust and wrath. ~ The Shepherd of Hermas, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1057:He who is face to face with reality, blessed with a vision of God, does not regard women with any fear. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1058:If you have a faith in something that cannot be proved, you must believe in everyone's else's faiths." ~ Jack Gardner, "Words are not things,", (2005)., #KEYS
1059:In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human successes, but on how well we have loved. ~ Saint John of the Cross, #KEYS
1060:Meditation must be so intense that it does not give room even to the thought 'I am meditating'. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1061:Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious." ~ D.T. Suzuki, #KEYS
1062:The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. ~ William Faulkner, #KEYS
1063:The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
~ Phillip Yancey,#KEYS
1064:The true person is Not anyone in particular; But like the deep blue color of the limitless sky, It is everyone, Everywhere in the world." ~ Dōgen Zenji, #KEYS
1065:Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions--not outside.
~ Marcus Aurelius, Book 9 Verse 13,#KEYS
1066:We have not understood the present. Why should we seek to know the future? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Day By Day, 10-2-46, #KEYS
1067:... for if you were not always present in my consciousness you would be not able to think of me. ~ The Mother, Some Answers, S6, #KEYS
1068:He who is drawn to something desirable does not desire to have it as a thought but as a thing. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
1069:He who looks on the forms of existence as a form or a mirage, shall not see death. ~ Sanyutta Nikaya, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1070:Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out ~ Vaclav Havel, #KEYS
1071:I am near you...do not see me afar! ~ You are beside me...do not feel isolated! ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1072:If you don't design your own life plan, chance are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you. Not much." ~ Jim Rohn, #KEYS
1073:In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. ~ Mortimer J. Adler, #KEYS
1074:Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 John, II. 15, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1075:Most people do not really choose—they undergo the play of the forces. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Occult Knowledge, #KEYS
1076: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
1077:Of what use are the gods
If they crown not our just desires on earth? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act I,#KEYS
1078:Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why." ~ Eddie Cantor, #KEYS
1079:That which is not cannot come to being and that which is cannot cease to be. ~ Bhagavad Gita. II. 16, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1080:There none was weak, so falsehood could not live; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Glory and Fall of Life, #KEYS
1081:True knowledge does not grow old, so have declared the sages of all times. ~ Buddhist Canons in Pali, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1082:We can't know anything outside our mind. Everything we see is contained within our mind. Thus, I am not in the world. The world is in me. ~ Haemin Sunim, #KEYS
1083:What you are must always displease you, if you would attain to that which you are not. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1084:When the soul says: "Not I, O Lord, but Thou," it has reached the end of sorrow. This is freedom itself. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1085:You did not see Pharaoh drowned with his armies, but you have seen the devil with his weapons overcome by the waters of baptism. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, #KEYS
1086:Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes." ~ Alan W. Watts, #KEYS
1087:Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. ~ Vaclav Havel, #KEYS
1088:How shouldst thou not profit by thy age of strength to issue from the evil terrain? ~ Kin-yuan-li-sao, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1089:I am not the body. I am one with the universal soul. I am that being which is absolute and unconditioned. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1090:Immortal bliss lives not in human air. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #KEYS
1091:Let no one communicate who is not of the disciples. Let no Judas receive, lest he suffer the fate of Judas. ~ Saint John Chrysostom, Homily 82 on Matthew, #KEYS
1092:Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. ~ Philippians II. 4, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1093:None who has not been prodigal of his best has ever risen to greatness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, More about Unity, #KEYS
1094:O friend, fill not with mortal thoughts thy heart which is the seat of eternal mysteries. ~ Bahaullah, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1095:One does not need to hope in order to act, nor to succeed in order to persevere. ~ William the Silent, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1096:The fatigue comes from the resistance and the worry, do not worry, let yourself go, and the fatigue will go also.
~ The Mother,#KEYS
1097:To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #KEYS
1098:You have dreamed of setting the universe ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light-up a single one! ~ Emil Cioran, #KEYS
1099:You should not have a favorite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #KEYS
1100:Aid each other in practising that which is good, but aid not each other in evil and injustice. ~ Koran, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1101:All the more, then, does God not hate anything, since He is the cause of all things ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 1.96)., #KEYS
1102:A red rose absorbs all colors but red; red is therefore the one color that it is not." ~ Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies, #KEYS
1103:God with form and God without form are not two different beings. He who is with form is also without form. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1104:Here and not elsewhere the highest Godhead has to be found. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Works, Devotion and Knowledge, #KEYS
1105:It's beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. It means the mind is not influenced and contaminated by society." ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #KEYS
1106:Labour not for the food which perishes but for that which endures into everlasting life. ~ John VI. 27, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1107:Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen. ~ Bodhidharma, #KEYS
1108:Prayer is not verbal. It is from the heart. To merge into the Heart is prayer. That is also Grace. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1109:Sometimes there are two persons who disagree, and there comes a third person and all unite together. Is this not the nature of music? ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #KEYS
1110:Tell me why you should be in search of a goal? Why are you not content with the present condition? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1111: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. … " ~ Thomas Merton, #KEYS
1112:The infirmities of the soul are not less than those of the body ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Commentary on Mt. 4, lect. 3)., #KEYS
1113:The Lord is there, not only in that self, but in Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Fullness of Spiritual Action, #KEYS
1114:The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep. ~ Chuang Tzu, #KEYS
1115:Ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh. ~ Galatians V. 13, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1116:A holy man not only pays to womankind honor and respect, but actually worships them as a son does a mother. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1117:Allah Almighty said: "Fear not for I am with you. I hear and see everything. ~ Qur'an 20:46] ~ Quran, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1118:All that is has already existed, but will not remain in the form in which we see it today. ~ Baha-ullah, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1119:And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. ~ Romans XII. 2, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1120:Escape, however high, redeems not life, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #KEYS
1121:Eternal truth lives not with mortal men. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #KEYS
1122:Grief too long continued does not help but delays the journey of the departed soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Death, #KEYS
1123:Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle ~ Amos Tversky, #KEYS
1124:Humanity does not embrace only the love of one's like: it extends over all creatures. ~ Chinese Proverb, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1125:Identification with the body is an error, not an illusion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #KEYS
1126: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
1127:It is true that God dwells even in the most wicked, but it is not meant that we should associate with them. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1128:Know certainly that the world is God's and not yours; you are His servant only, come to carry out His Will. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1129:Let not one even whom the whole world curses, nourish against it any feeling of liatred. ~ Sutta Nipata, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1130:not a devil
not a saint
just a slug
~ Kobayashi Issa, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1131:Observe thyself, not that which is thine, nor that which is around thee, but thyself alone. ~ St. Basil, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1132:...One must not go into the vital world without a special purpose or command and a special protection.
~ The Mother, White Roses,#KEYS
1133: #KEYS
1134:There can be no true freedom and happiness so long as men have not understood their oneness. ~ Channing, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1135:The truth of ourselves lies within and not on the surface. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Delight of Existence, The Solution, #KEYS
1136:Those who have been entrusted to us abandon God, and we are silent. They fall into sin, and we do not extend a hand of rebuke. ~ Pope St. Gregory the Great, #KEYS
1137:[What is the main reason that humans are not making more spiritual progress?] "The sense of beauty is being sacrificed to commercialism…" ~ Hazrat Inayat K, #KEYS
1138:Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
After you know my poems are not poems,
Then we can begin to discuss poetry! ~ Taigu Ryokan,#KEYS
1139:with lightning
one is not
enlightened
~ Matsuo Basho, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1140:You cannot transcend what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
1141:You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides God from you.
~ Paramahansa Yogananda,#KEYS
1142:All knowledge comes from the stars. Men do not invent or create ideas; the ideas exist and men are able to grasp them. ~ Paracelsus, #KEYS
1143:Do not listen if one criticises or blames thy Master, leave his presence that very moment. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1144:In failing to confess, Lord, I would only hide You from myself, not myself from You. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, [T5], #KEYS
1145:into a fool but you are a fool for not knowing and being it." ~ Mooji, (b. 1954) Jamaican spiritual teacher, author, Wikipedia. From "Before I Am,", (2012)., #KEYS
1146:It is not possible really to possess what is not-self to us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Supramental Godhead, #KEYS
1147:It is wise to listen, not to me but to the Word, and to confess that all things are one. ~ Heraclitus, On the Universe,1 fragment 1, #KEYS
1148:I've worked too hard and too long to let anything stand in the way of my goals. I will not let my teammates down and I will not let myself down." ~ Mia Hamm, #KEYS
1149:May the life I live speak for me, not my religion or denomination title." ~ Dee Dee M. Scott, (c. 1978), author, playwright, film producer and entrepreneur., #KEYS
1150:Sannyasa is only the renunciation of the 'I-thought', and not the rejection of the external objects. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1151:The Christian faith regards fire not as fire, but as representing the sublimity of God ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 2.4)., #KEYS
1152:There is no beast on the earth, no bird flying on its wings that do not form a community like us ~ Koran, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1153:The state we call Realization is simply being one's self, not knowing anything or becoming anything. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1154:Time in itself does not exist, there is only the totality of the results issuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place. ~ George Gurdjieff , #KEYS
1155:To be FALSE, to say of what is not, that it is, or of what is, that it is not ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (In I PH lect. 11)., #KEYS
1156:What gives the force and joy of the work is however not physical but vital. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Work and Yoga, #KEYS
1157:Wilt thou that thy heart should be free from sorrow ? Forget not the hearts that sorrow devours. ~ Saadi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1158:Because monks come from the midst of purity, they consider as good and pure what does not arouse desire among other people. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
1159:By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals. And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them. ~ Larry Wall, #KEYS
1160:Concentrate on the seer and not on the seen, not on the objects, but on the Light which reveals them. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1161:Difficult is union with God when the self is not under governance; but when the self is well-subjected, there are means to come by it. ~ Bhagavad Gita XI. 38, #KEYS
1162:Excessive fear makes us act without love, but excessive trust does not allow us to consider the danger we are going to face. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
1163:God, Grace and Guru are all synonymous and also eternal and immanent. Is not the Self already within? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1164:God is pouring out his wrath upon the nations that acknowledge him not, upon the kingdoms that call not upon his name. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Psalms, 78:3-4, #KEYS
1165:If anyone does not salute such representations as standing for the Lord and his saints, let him be anathema. ~ Seventh Ecumenical Council, Second Nicaea, 787, #KEYS
1166:If you are not prepared to resign or be fired for what you believe in, then you are not a worker, let alone a professional. You are a slave. ~ Howard Gardner, #KEYS
1167:In the full realisation the body is within us, not we in it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #KEYS
1168:Keep over your actions an absolute empire; be 10 not their slave, but their master. ~ Imitation of Christ, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1169:Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious.
~ Sri Ramakrishna, [T5],#KEYS
1170:Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceit. ~ Romans X II, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1171:Self Realization is not however a state which has to be reached by you. You are always in that state. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1172:Taste is natural and quite permissible so long as one is not the slave of the palate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Food, #KEYS
1173:The idea of the Self being the witness is only in the mind; it is not the absolute truth of the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1174:The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #KEYS
1175:The mind, body, and world are not separate from the Self; and they cannot remain apart from the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1176:The soul suffering is not eternity's key, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #KEYS
1177:We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
~ T S Eliot,#KEYS
1178:When the Self is sought, the mind is nowhere. Abiding in the Self, one need not worry about the mind. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1179:Yoga of Bhakti is a matter of the heart and not of the intellect. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Motives of Devotion, #KEYS
1180:Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it." ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
1181:All that we internally are is not ego, but consciousness, soul or spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, #KEYS
1182:All the aspects of the sea are not different from the sea; nor is there any difference between the universe and its supreme Principle. ~ Chhandogya Uppanishad, #KEYS
1183: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
1184:Correction: the author of the quote: "God is the Being in Whom being anything means being everything." is Nicholas of Cusa, (1401-1464) not Parmenides. ~ Endo, #KEYS
1185:It is not sufficient to acknowledge suffering; it must be understood and changed.
~ Seijyo, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1186:Karma is only a machinery, it is not the fundamental cause of terrestrial existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Rebirth, #KEYS
1187:Mental knowledge is not true knowledge; true knowledge is that which is based on the true sight, the sight of the Seer, of Surya, of the Kavi. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
1188:Not overjoyed at gaining what is pleasant, nor disturbed, overtaken by what is unpleasant. ~ Bhagavad Gita, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1189:Our life is not a one-time event, but rather it is merely one moment in the course nature. ~ Kazo, @BashoSociety #KEYS
1190:The eternal Truth shall never be attained by him who is not entirely truthful in his speech. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1191:The real difficulty is always in ourselves, not in our surroundings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The Real Difficulty, #KEYS
1192:We must not only see God and embrace Him, but become that Reality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge, #KEYS
1193:A dry and strong or even austere logic is not a key to Truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, #KEYS
1194:Although they had recognised the majesty of God in Him, yet the power of His body, wherein His Deity was contained, they did not know. ~ Pope St. Leo the Great, #KEYS
1195:Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth." ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1196:For if the truth has made you free, then you shall be free indeed, and you shall not care for the vain words of men. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1197:from my hand
she took a piece of fruit
knowing that our time was not forever
~ Saiko, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1198:God is immediately present, not only in the ethereal body, but also in the lowest things ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.68)., #KEYS
1199:Good is our nature, perfection is our nature, not imperfection, not impurity — and we should remember that. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1200:It is in the transparency of faith and knowledge, and not with their aid, that the sphere of Being becomes perceptible in its entire diaphaneity. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
1201:It is not what happens to us, but how we interpret what happens to us, that becomes the basis of our convictions. ~ Manly P Hall, Horizon Fall-Winter 1944 p.66, #KEYS
1202:It would be better not to have books than to believe all that is found in them. ~ Meng Tse. VII. II. III. 1, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1203:Life creates institutions; institutions do not create, but express and preserve life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Passing Thoughts, #KEYS
1204:One has not only to be sincere but to be faithful through all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, The Divine Grace and Guidance, #KEYS
1205:One who is not self-ruler, cannot be master of his surroundings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of Equality, #KEYS
1206:The intellect does not grasp the object to which it gives assent in the act of believing ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.40)., #KEYS
1207:The strength of every particular individual is the strength of God and not his own. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Facts and Opinions, #KEYS
1208:The "Thou" of the mother is not the "I" of the child, but both centers move in the same ellipse of love. ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology III, #KEYS
1209:The world is not cut off from Truth and God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #KEYS
1210:Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. ~ The Buddha, #KEYS
1211:... want to re-establish order. Some will try to do so, but this will not succeed and thus will end up even worse off than before!" ~ Saint Odile, (660-720 AD), #KEYS
1212:When a pot is broken, the space inside is not. Similarly, when the body dies, the Self remains eternal. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1213:When setting out on a journey, do not seek advice from those who have never left home. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1214:Who am I — what kind of watchman am I? I do not stand on the pinnacle of achievement, I languish rather in the depths of my weakness. ~ Saint Gregory the Great, #KEYS
1215:Who has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. His residence is next to mine, His furniture is love." ~ Emily Dickinson 1(830 - 1886) American poet., #KEYS
1216:With Bhakti in your heart, it is not necessary that you must visit the holy places. You are well where you are. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1217:Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ephesians, IV. 26, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1218:drinking tea
not knowing
the winds of autumn
~ Matsuo Basho, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1219:Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe." ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #KEYS
1220:Freedom and not a skilful subjection is the true means of mastery. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Three Steps of Nature, #KEYS
1221:Not seeking what is other than the Self is detachment or desirelessness; not leaving the Self is wisdom. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1222:Perfection is the end and the beginning of all things, and without perfection they could not be. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1223:The destiny of India will not wait on the falterings and failings of individuals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - I, Bhawani Mandir, #KEYS
1224:The doubt arises in you. Know who the doubter is, and then you may consider if the world is real or not. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1225:The purpose of one's birth will be fulfilled whether you will it or not. Let the purpose fulfill itself. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1226:The soul not being mistress of itself, one looks but sees not, listens buthears not. ~ Tseng-tsen-ta-hio VII, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1227:... The time shall come when they will not perform charitable acts, and truth shall not remain in them, and truth shall not remain in them." ~ Saint Columbcille, #KEYS
1228: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
1229:Truth is not far away. It is nearer than near. There is no need to attain it, since not one of your steps leads away from it." ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
1230:Violence in ordinary Nature does not justify violence in a spiritual work. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Anger and Violence, #KEYS
1231:We are the goal or peace always. To get rid of the notion that we are not peace is all that is required. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1232:We search for everything we believe we don't have, not knowing that everything we're looking for is already inside us. We are born with it." ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz, #KEYS
1233:Your tongue is quick to make promises but your nafs might not be so quick to keep them. ~ Imam al Ghazali, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1234:Blessed indeed are the ears that listen, not to the voice which sounds without, but to the truth which teaches within. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1235: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
1236:drinking tea
not knowing
the winds of autumn
~ Matsuo Basho, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1237:Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong. ~ Terry Pratchett, #KEYS
1238:Fear not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid of their revillings. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Isaiah, LI. 7, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1239:Improve others not by reasoning but by example. Let your existence, not your words be your preaching. ~ Amiel, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1240:just say, 'Not Two!'' ~ Sengcan, (died 606) Third Chinese Patriarch of Chán after Bodhidharma and thirtieth Patriarch after Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1241:Knowest thou not that thy life, whether long or brief, consists only of a few breathings? ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1242:Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body that ye should obey it in the lusts there of. ~ Romans VI. 12, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1243:Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious." ~ Stephen Hawking, #KEYS
1244:Religion is realization; not talk, nor doctrine, nor theories, however beautiful they may be. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. II. 396), #KEYS
1245:The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.
~ Bertrand Russell,#KEYS
1246:There is no body without soul, no body that is not itself a form of soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
1247:The saint does not seek to do great things; that is why he is able to accomplish them. ~ Lao-Tse: Tao-te-King, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1248:Those strong and generous in heart do not complain except for a strong reason, and even then it does not affect them intimately. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
1249:To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
1250:To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism." ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #KEYS
1251:What the mind wants is not at all always what is intended in a larger purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Occult Knowledge, #KEYS
1252:Where there is not the personal egoism of the doer, desire becomes impossible. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Divine Worker, #KEYS
1253:Wrong could not come where all was light and love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Adoration of the Divine Mother, #KEYS
1254:454. In those whom God loves, have delight; on those whom He pretends not to love, take pity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, #KEYS
1255:But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Genesis, 2:17, #KEYS
1256:Conquer the angry one by not getting angry; conquer the wicked by goodness; conquer the stingy by generosity, and the liar by speaking the truth. ~ Gautama Buddha, #KEYS
1257:Cosmos cannot be governed by a Power that does not transcend cosmos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Supreme Word of the Gita, #KEYS
1258:do not view the moon
from the scale of
the human mind
~ Dogen Zenji, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1259:Egotism exists in ignorance, not in knowledge. The rain water stands in low places, but runs off from high places. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1260:In existence there is no similarity or dissimilarity, for there is but One Reality, and a thing is not the opposite of itself. ~ Ibn Arabi, #KEYS
1261:Mental faith is not sufficient; it must be completed and enforced by a vital and even a physical faith, a faith of the body. ~ The Mother, #KEYS
1262:Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Luke, 10:20, #KEYS
1263:One can give not only one's soul, but all one's powers to the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Consecration and Offering, #KEYS
1264:One who is always stationed in the Atman will not be disturbed, even in the midst of a crowd. Such a one has no need or desire for solitude. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1265:The anger you feel towards your fellow creatures must be directed towards God, for not manifesting himself to you. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1266:The Lord's Prayer should be said to fight, not only venial sins, but also mortal sins ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.74.8ad6)., #KEYS
1267:There is not a body, however small, which does not enclose a portion of the divine substance. ~ Giordano Bruno, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1268:The soul does not move, but motion of Nature takes place in its perfect stillness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, The Isha Upanishad, #KEYS
1269:The true believer does not give up repeating God's glory even if, with his lifelong devotion, he fails to see God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1270:Those who wait on the Lord will find new strength. ... They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not fain'
~ Anonymous, The Bible, Isaiah, 40:31 NLT.,#KEYS
1271:Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul, #KEYS
1272:Unless the illusory nature of the world ceases, the vision of the true nature of the Self is not obtained. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1273:When my Lord is not playing His flute, He dances. And all that He does He does so beautifully. But in subduing evil, my Lord is at His most beautiful.
~ सर्वदास,#KEYS
1274:You shall not withdraw your hand from your son, or from your daughter, but from their infancy you shall teach them the fear of the Lord. ~ The Epistle of Barnabas, #KEYS
1275:Always be calm, go on working without any fatigue. This is the test; whether the mind is working properly or not, can be understood from this. ~ Swami Akhandananda, #KEYS
1276:Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.] ~ Niels Bohr, #KEYS
1277:For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
~ Anonymous, The Bible, Romans, 8:18,#KEYS
1278:If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Supreme Divine, #KEYS
1279:If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ~ Albert Einstein, #KEYS
1280:If the Angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced her, not by your tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning: to be a beginner. ~ ?, #KEYS
1281:It is not today nor tomorrow; who knoweth That which is Supreme? When It is approached, It vanishes. ~ Rig Veda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1282:Life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Lord of the Sacrifice, #KEYS
1283:My child, I have not abandoned you, and I am ready to forget, to efface all revolt. My help is always with you. ~ The Mother, Agenda Vol 1, #KEYS
1284:People enjoy the beauty of the world; they do not seek its owner. God alone is real, all else is illusory, magician alone is real, magic is illusory. ~ Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1285:The consciousness which does not go out to know those things which are other than Self, alone is the Heart. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1286:The cosmic mind being not limited by the ego, has nothing separate from itself and is therefore only aware. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1287:The finite is a circumstance and not a contradiction of the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #KEYS
1288:There is no reaching the Self. If Self were to be reached, it would mean that the Self is not here and now. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1289:The sins that we do against men come because each one does not respect the Divine Spirit in his like. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1290:We are not the body, but the body is still something of ourselves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #KEYS
1291:Wouldst thou abstain from action? It is not so that thy soul shall obtain liberation. ~ Book of Golden Precepts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1292:Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, [T5], #KEYS
1293:Even the profoundest and surest political instinct is not wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Ancient and Modern Methods of Empire, #KEYS
1294:God does not know of Himself what He is because He is not a 'what' [Deus itaque nescit se quid est quia non est quid]. ~ John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon II (589b), #KEYS
1295:God prepares, but He does not hasten the ripening of the fruit before its season. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, The Doctrine of Sacrifice, #KEYS
1296:However evil-minded other people may appear to you, it is not proper to hate or depise them. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Words of Grace, #KEYS
1297:Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty ~ it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. ~ George Eliot, #KEYS
1298:It is forces that effect great political changes, not moral sentiments or vague generosities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, The Elections, #KEYS
1299:Long live the feet that are the being-consciousness-bliss of him who does not stir as all else whirls about. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1300:Love does not grow on trees or brought in the market, but if one wants to be "loved" one must first know how to give unconditional love. ~ Kabir, #KEYS
1301:Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Love and the Triple Path, #KEYS
1302: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
1303:Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
1304:Our tradition tells us that God does not need the material offerings humans can give him, since he himself is the one who provides everything. ~ Saint Justin Martyr, #KEYS
1305:Purification is not complete till it brings about liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #KEYS
1306:Scorn not-the discourse of the wise, for thou shalt learn from them wisdom. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1307:Selfishness is to live for oneself and not for something greater than the self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Ego and Its Forms, #KEYS
1308:Should I try meditation?
It is not necessary if your work is a constant offering to the Divine.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother I,#KEYS
1309:Thanks be to the Gospel, by means of which we also, who did not see Christ when he came into this world, seem to be with him when we read his deeds. ~ Saint Ambrose, #KEYS
1310:The important thing is not to think much but to love much; and so do that which best stirs you to love." ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #KEYS
1311:The Tao which can be expressed is not the eternal Tao, the name which can be named is not the eternal Name. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1312:The unity or community of human nature, however, is not a thing, but only a consideration ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.39.4ad3)., #KEYS
1313:To get rid of mortal body is not to get rid of mortal mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #KEYS
1314:When a thought rises in us, let us see whether it has not its roots in the inferior worlds. ~ Antoine the Healer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1315:Why do we put people who are on drugs in jail? They're sick, they're not criminals. Sick people don't get healed in prison. You see? It makes no sense. ~ Bill Hicks, #KEYS
1316:"You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Exodus, 20:7, #KEYS
1317:A devotee does not care to relate to any but true Bhaktas the ecstatic joys he experiences in his communion with God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1318: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
1319: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
1320:Balance is the perfect state of still water. Let that be our model. It remains quiet within and is not disturbed on the surface." ~ Confucius, #KEYS
1321:Believe me…! a metaphysical Solution, that does not instantly tell for something in the Heart, is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal… ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #KEYS
1322:Do not occupy your precious time except with the most precious of things, and the most precious of things is the state of being occupied with the present. ~ Abu Said, #KEYS
1323:Even though the mind wanders, involved in external matters, one should remember: The body is not I. Who am I? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1324:If God assigns to me my place in Hell, I do not know why I should aspire to Heaven. He knows best what is for my welfare. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
1325:If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads." ~ Anatole France, (1844 - 1924) French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1326:If you do not learn to deny yourself, you can make no progress in perfection. ~ Saint John of the Cross, The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, (1991), [T9], #KEYS
1327:I looked one day at the Light and I did not cease looking at it until I became the Light ~ Abul Husayn al-Nuri, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1328:It is not what you do but the spirit in which you do it that is important for the integral Yoga.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother I, [T5],#KEYS
1329:It is the spirit within and not the mind without that is the fount of poetry. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, New Birth or Decadence?, #KEYS
1330:Mind is not the destined archangel of the transformation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #KEYS
1331:No matter how many teachings you have heard, to be motivated by ordinary concerns-such as a desire for greatness, fame or whatever-is not the way of the true Dharma., #KEYS
1332:Remember that it is not feeling of guilt that constitutes sin but the consent to sin. Only the free will is capable of good or evil. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
1333:Renunciation is always in the mind, not in going to the forest or solitary places, or giving up one's duties. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1334:Seeing many things, yet thou observest not; opening the ears ye hear not. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Isaiah, XLII.20, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1335:The ethical imperative comes not from around, but from within him and above him. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Good, #KEYS
1336:The heart of a sinner is like a curled hair. You may pull it ever so long but will not succeed in making it straight. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1337: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
1338:This burning lake is the second death; and anybody whose name could not be found written in the book of life was hurled into the burning lake." ~ Revelation 20:14-15, #KEYS
1339:Thus little by little the enemy invades the soul, if it is not resisted from the beginning. ~ Imitation of Christ, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1340:What is there in mere book-learning if it is not accompanied with Viveka, discrimination of the Real from the unreal? ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1341:Whether you can meditate properly or not, never give up the practice. Japa leads one to a state of meditation and meditation results in samadhi. ~ Swami Vijnanananda, #KEYS
1342:All loves are a bridge to divine love. Yet, those who have not had a taste of it do not know! ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1343:But not long had they run thus when Zarathustra became conscious of his folly, and shook off with one jerk all his irritation and detestation.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#KEYS
1344:Death is only a shedding of the body, not a cessation of the personal existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, Death, #KEYS
1345:Do not lower your goals to the level of your abilities. Instead, raise your abilities to the height of your goals. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1346:Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1347:I do not believe that any name, however complex, is sufficient to designate the principle of all Majesty. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1348:If the longing is there, realization will be forced on you even if you do not want it. Long for it intensely so that the mind melts in devotion. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1349:It matters not that you have been walking along a wrong path. The Lord knows what he wants and in the end fulfills it. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1350:My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. ... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
~ Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths,#KEYS
1351:Never relax, for you will not attain to the possession of true spiritual delights if first you do not learn to deny your every desire. ~ Saint John of the Cross, [T5], #KEYS
1352:... People will think and think, but they will not be able to find the right cure, which will be with God's help, all around them and in themselves." ~ Mitar Tarabich, #KEYS
1353:Some are already awake.They have certain marks. They do not care to hear or speak of anything but what relates to God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1354:There never was a time when the Self was not. Do not make it complicated for yourself. Simply return to what you were by letting go of everything else. ~ Robert Adams, #KEYS
1355:The Self alone is. Is not then the Self your Guru? Where else will Grace come from? It is from the Self alone. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1356:They say that I am dying but I am not going away.
Where could I go?
I am here ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Path of Self-Knowledge,#KEYS
1357:Think of your work only when it is being done, not before and not after. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Practical Concerns in Work, #KEYS
1358:We must pray without tiring, for the salvation of mankind does not depend upon material success . . . but on Jesus alone." ~ Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, (1850-1917), #KEYS
1359:As water does not enter into a stone, so religious advice produces no impression on the imprisoned soul or Baddha Jiva. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1360:Being aware of the sound of the bell, does not mean that bell belongs to you.
Likewise, being aware of thoughts, does not mean the thoughts belong to you. ~ Wu Hsin,#KEYS
1361:do not forget
that in the thicket
there are flowers
~ Matsuo Basho, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1362:"Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Matthew, 7:6, #KEYS
1363:Do not regret the tamas; but when satva comes into play, hold on to it fast and make the best of it. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 52, #KEYS
1364:He who denies the existence of God, has some reason for wishing that God did not exist. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, [T8], #KEYS
1365: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
1366:If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brahma, #KEYS
1367:In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.
~ Orson Welles,#KEYS
1368:It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #KEYS
1369:Let us act towards others as we would that they should act towards us: let us not cause any suffering. ~ Dhammapada, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1370:Loving devotion does not come without a great love for God and a feeling of personal possession such as: "God is mine!" ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1371:Preacher, do not be telling me about Hell's pain, worse pain of Hell inside this heart…. I'm bearing!" ~ Makhfi, (1639-1702), Zeb-un-Nissa, Mughal princess, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1372:The human mind is an instrument not of truth but of ignorance and error. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Problems in Human Relations, #KEYS
1373:The integral truth of things is truth not of the reason but of the spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The End of the Curve of Reason, #KEYS
1374:The true knowledge is truth of existence, satyam, not mere truth of form or appearance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, The Worlds - Surya, #KEYS
1375:„We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed." ~ 2 Corinthians 4:8, #KEYS
1376:We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist. ~ Carl Jung, #KEYS
1377:When going through spiritual exercises do not associate with those who never concern themselves with matters spiritual. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1378:When one advances spiritually, it is not necessary to observe rituals for long. Then the mind gets concentrated on God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1379:When spiritual consolation is given by God, receive it gratefully, but understand that it is His gift and not your meriting. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1380:With love there is no painful reaction; love only brings a reaction of bliss; if it does not, it not love, it is mistaking something else for love. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
1381:265. Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma,#KEYS
1382:A lie is sinful not only because it injures one's neighbor, but also because of its deviance ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST. 2-2.110.3)., #KEYS
1383:All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.
~ J R R Tolkien,#KEYS
1384:By 'heart' I do not mean the piece of flesh situated in the left of our bodies, but that which uses all the other faculties as its instruments and servants. ~ Bahauddin, #KEYS
1385:He who is not ready to suffer all things and to stand resigned to the will of the Beloved is not worthy to be called a lover. ~ Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, #KEYS
1386:if a mirror ever makes
you sad, remember that
it does not know you
~ Kabir, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1387:Only one who knows not that God lives in him can attri bute to certain men more importance than to others. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1388:Say to the fainthearted. Take courage, and fear not. . . God himself will come and will save you" ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (Is. 35:4)., #KEYS
1389:Slay desire, but when thou hast slain it, take heed that it arise not again from the dead. ~ Book of Golden Precepts, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1390: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
1391:The infinite could not be known actually, unless all its parts were counted, which is impossible ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.86.2)., #KEYS
1392:There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, #KEYS
1393:The very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. ~ Adyashanti, #KEYS
1394:When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace. ~ Dalai Lama, #KEYS
1395:When we open the door we go not into a strange place but we stand in the presence of the altar of our own soul. ~ Manly P Hall, Lecture #KEYS
1396:When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything." ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #KEYS
1397:Would you call Him Destiny? You will not be wrong. Providence? You will say well. Nature? That too you may. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1398:A jnani has no karma [that is, a jnani performs no actions]. That is his experience. Otherwise he is not a jnani. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1399: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
1400:... a shadow depends on light for its existence, but light does not depend for its existence on the shadow
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
1401:
The best season of your life is when your mind is not clouded by unnecessary things.
~ Huikai, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1402:Giving birth and nourishing, Bearing yet not possessing, Working yet not taking credit, Leading yet not dominating, This is the primal virtue. ~ Tao Te Ching, chapter 10, #KEYS
1403:In the silence and not in the thought we shall find the Self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #KEYS
1404: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
1405:Sin takes away grace totally, but it does not take anything away from the essence of a thing ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (QDdA a. 14ad17)., #KEYS
1406:The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
1407:The flower blooms for its flowerhood only,
And not to make its parent bed more high. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act III,#KEYS
1408: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
1409: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
1410:Thence comes it that the saint occupies himself with his inner being and not with the objects of his eyes. ~ Lao- Tse, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1411:The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #KEYS
1412:Time in itself does not exist, there is only the totality of the results issuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place." ~ Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales , #KEYS
1413:What is beyond all reach cannot be reached except in a manner that does not reach it [Attingitur inattingibile inattingibiliter]. ~ Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de sapientia, #KEYS
1414:A city of ancient Ignorance
Founded upon a soil that knew not Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night,#KEYS
1415:autumn moon
wherever you are
somebody is not happy
~ Kobayashi Issa, @BashoSociety#KEYS
1416:Because of that all this exists, but that does not exist because of all this. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Cosmic Consciousness, #KEYS
1417:Beware that, when Fighting Monsters, You Yourself do not Become a Monster... for when You Gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss Gazes also into You.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#KEYS
1418:Bliss is not added to your nature, it is merely revealed as your true and natural state, eternal and imperishable. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1419:Bondage and freedom are states of the outer mind, not of the inner spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #KEYS
1420:By not doing evil to creatures and mastering one's senses...one arrives here below at the supreme goal. ~ Laws of Manu, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1421:Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because dawn has come." ~ Rabindranath Tagore, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1422:Dwell far above the laws that govern men
And are not to be mapped by mortal judgments. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act II,#KEYS
1423:Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
1424:From little things; Knows not the livid loneliness of fear Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear The sound of wings." ~ Amelia Earhart, (1897 - 1937?), Wikipedia, #KEYS
1425:I do not like mystical language, and yet I hardly know how to express what I mean without employing phrases that sound poetic rather than scientific.
~ Bertrand Russell,#KEYS
1426:If the unripe mind does not feel his Grace, it does not mean that God's Grace is absent. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Marharshi's Gospel, [T5], #KEYS
1427:It is by resisting the passions, not by yielding to them that one finds true peace in the heart. ~ Imitation of Christ, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1428:Lord, Thou hast told us: Do not give way, hold tight. It is when everything seems lost that all is saved.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III,#KEYS
1429:One is not bound to tell everything to everybody—it might often do more harm than good. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Speech and Yoga, #KEYS
1430:Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb, #KEYS
1431:The people of Allah accustom themselves to afflictions and do not get annoyed like you. ~ Shaykh Abdul Qadir Jilani, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1432:The present is the most precious moment. Use all the forces of thy spirit not to let that momentescape thee. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1433:The sage does not talk, the talented ones talk. And the stupid ones argue." ~ Kung Tingan [no info found on 'Kung Tingan']. Quote occurs in several places on web. One is:, #KEYS
1434:Visit not miracle-mongers. They are wanderers from the path of Truth with minds entangled in the meshes of psychic powers. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1435:We are not here to make our life easy and comfortable; we are here to find the Divine, to become the Divine, to manifest the Divine. ~ The Mother, #KEYS
1436: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
1437:When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much." ~ Zen saying., #KEYS
1438:Whoever is rich within and embellished with virtue, seeks not outside himself for glory and riches. ~ Angelus Silesius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1439:Why do you wonder that globetrotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason that set you wandering is ever at your heels. ~ Socrates, #KEYS
1440:You know the value of every merchandise; but you do not know your own value -- that is stupidity. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1441:A mental control can only be a control, not a cure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #KEYS
1442:Born politicians do not care to outpace by too great a stride the speedily accomplishable fact. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Facts and Opinions, #KEYS
1443:Chit is an action of Being, not of the Void. What it sees, that becomes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad: Brahman, Oneness of God and the World, #KEYS
1444: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
1445:In the shadow of death may we not look back to the past, but seek in utter darkness the dawn of God. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
1446:Knowledge does not come gradually, little by little. It shines forth instantaneously with the ripeness of practice. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1447:Mind is intangible. In fact, it does not exist. The surest way of control is to seek it. Then its activities cease. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1448:Not able to help yourself, you are seeking the divine to help you to help the world. The divinity is directing you. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1449:Not by work, not by family, not by riches, but by renunciation great beings attain to immortality. ~ Kaivalya Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1450:Oh my soul's lute a chord was struck by Love. Transmuting all my being into love: Ages would not discharge my bounden debt Of gratitude for one short hour of love." ~ Jami, #KEYS
1451:Opinions on the world and on God are many and conflicting and I know not the truth. Enlighten me, O my Master. ~ Hermes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1452:Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own
~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 Corinthians, 6:19 ESV,#KEYS
1453:Our tasks are given, we are but instruments; Nothing is all our own that we create; The Power that acts in us is not our force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
1454:Remember, you cannot abandon what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself.
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, [T5],#KEYS
1455:Take care that the reading of numerous writers and books of all kinds does not confuse and trouble thy reason. ~ Seneca, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1456:The chain of Karma only binds the movement of Nature and not the soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad: The Inhabiting Godhead, Life and Action, #KEYS
1457:The cosmos is eternally one and many and does not by becoming cease to be one. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Heraclitus - III, #KEYS
1458: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
1459:The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know." ~ Sengcan, #KEYS
1460:There can be no guilt except in that which the soul wills, or, not having willed it, approves it and does not make an effort to remove it. ~ Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, #KEYS
1461:There often beams in our eye that we know not of. Let us therefore ask that our eye may become single, for then we ourselves shall become wholly single. ~ Vincent van Gogh, #KEYS
1462:The Self is known to everyone but not clearly. You always exist. The Be-ing is the Self. 'I am' is the name of God. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1463:The thoughts change but not you.
Let go the passing throughts and hold on to the unchanging Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 524,#KEYS
1464:The vital can take part in a movement but it must not be in control. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, The Vital and Other Levels of Being, #KEYS
1465:The words is and is not, which imply the agreement or disagreement of two ideas, must exist, explicitly or implicitly, in every assertion. (354) ~ Augustus De Morgan, [T5], #KEYS
1466:To lavish upon all men love and trust
Shows the heart's royalty, not the brain's craft. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Plays and Stories, Act II,#KEYS
1467:True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost." ~ Arthur Ashe, #KEYS
1468:True success is not measured by the amount of money that you have made. It is measured by the amount of wisdom and compassion that you have cultivated. ~ Chamtrul Rinpoche, #KEYS
1469:When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty........ but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
~ R Buckminster Fuller,#KEYS
1470:Will not past action come in the way of sadhana?
Complete consecration to the Divine wipes out what one has been in the past.
~ The Mother,#KEYS
1471:By repeating with grit and determination 'I am not bound I am Free' one really becomes so - one really becomes free.
~ Sri Ramakrishna, [T5],#KEYS
1472:Death and decrepitude are inherent in the world. The sage who knows the nature of things, does not grieve. ~ Metta Sutta, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1473:Desires are not eradicated by satisfaction. Trying to root them out that way is like pouring spirits to quench fire. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
1474:Doubt is not a sport to indulge in with impunity; it is a poison which drop by drop corrodes the soul.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, [T2],#KEYS
1475:From the standpoint of Yoga it is not so much what you do but how you do it that matters most.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, Yogic Action,#KEYS
1476:Inexhaustible energy is an excellent thing, but not an energy without discipline. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, The Nature of the Vital, #KEYS
1477:It is always the same question: have you really read all those books? My answer is always the same: a library is a sign of desire, not of accomplishment. ~ Jeffrey J Kripal, #KEYS
1478:Our whole being ought to demand God and not only our illumined eye of knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge, #KEYS
1479:Repentance even helps provided it does not bring discouragement or depression. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Depression and Despondency, #KEYS
1480:So long as thou art not dead to all things, one by one, thou canst not set thy feet in this portico. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1481:The psychic sorrow which does not disturb or depress but rather liberates the vital. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Jainism and Buddhism, #KEYS
1482:There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." ~ Oscar Wilde, (1854 -1900), an Irish poet and playwright, Wikipedia., #KEYS
1483:The world is unreal as long as you know not God. For you do not yet see him in Everything, but fasten yourself to the world. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1484:Thought is only a scout and pioneer; it can guide but not command or effectuate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
1485:You are sure to reach the goal but you must be very perseverant. To be constantly in contact with the Truth is not easy and needs time and a great sincerity. ~ Mother Mirra, #KEYS
1486:34. O Thou that lovest, strike! If Thou strike me not now, I shall know that Thou lovst me not.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana,#KEYS
1487:A soul which does not practise the exercise of prayer is very like a paralyzed body which, though possessing feet and hands, makes no use of them." ~ Saint Alphonsus Liguori, #KEYS
1488: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
1489:Do what you like, but you will regret every hour that you have not remembered God. ~ Shaykh Moulay Hashim Al Belghiti), @Sufi_Path #KEYS
1490:Early dawns cannot endure in their purity, so long as the race is not ready. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Infrarational Age of the Cycle, #KEYS
1491:Everything that is composite is soon destroyed and, like the lightning in heaven, does not last for long ~ Lalita-Vistara, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1492:How then shalt thou discover in thy age what in thy youth thou hast not gathered in? ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1493:I am timeless being. I am free of desire or fear, because I do not remember the past or imagine the future. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
1494:If he who sets out on this way will not engage himself wholly and completely, he will never be free from the sadness and melancholy which weigh him down. ~ Attar of Nishapur, #KEYS
1495:If you observe in all your acts the respect of yourself and of others, then shall you not be despised of any. ~ Confucius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
1496:Is it not a wonderful thing, that he that is the Lord and author of all liberty, would thus be bound with ropes and nailed hand and foot unto the Cross?" ~ Saint John Fisher, #KEYS
1497:Mental knowledge is not an integral but always a partial knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #KEYS
1498:Non-reaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #KEYS
1499:Nothing is mine, whatever I see, feel, or hear, even this body itself is not mine. I am always eternal, free and all-knowing. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
1500:not yet a butterfly
as autumn approaches
a caterpillar
~ Matsuo Basho, @BashoSociety#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Do not believe hastily. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 2:I am not what I once was. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 3:The words can not return. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 4:Draft beer, not people. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 5:A gun is not an argument. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 6:Comedy is not pretty. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 7:Do not dare not to dare. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 8:I shall not altogether die. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 9:I shall not completely die. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 10:Be where your enemy is not. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 11:Change is not progress. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 12:God, I'm glad I'm not me. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 13:The job is not the work. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 14:I do not evolve, I AM. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 15:I do not seek. I find. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 16:Nature is not human hearted. ~ lao-tzu, @wisdomtrove 17:The menu is not the meal. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 18:Do not press an enemy at bay. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 19:Life is not fair; God is. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 20:Time did not compose her. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 21:Delay not to seize the hour! ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 22:Do not attempt too much at once. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 23:Exactitude is not truth. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 24:My shows are not narratives. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 25:Soon is not as good as now. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 26:The great do not always prevail. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 27:The mind alone can not be exiled. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 28:Virtue is not hereditary. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 29:Be a victor , not a victim. ~ joel-osteen, @wisdomtrove 30:Be not a slave of words. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 31:Common sense is not so common. ~ voltaire, @wisdomtrove 32:Either attempt it not, or succeed. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 33:Every tale is not to be believed. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 34:I do not believe in Belief. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 35:I'm not so weird to me. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 36:Learn to express, not impress. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 37:A fate is not a punishment. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 38:Be inspired but not proud. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 39:It's not a house, it's a home. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 40:Not to ask is not be denied. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 41:Reason is not what decides love. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 42:Sanity is not statistical. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 43:Think not I am what I appear. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 44:Thou shalt not ration justice. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 45:Zeal should not outrun discretion. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 46:Do not kick against the pricks. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 47:Everyone is not your customer. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 48:It's not easy to define poetry. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 49:I want God, not my idea of God. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 50:Knowledge is not intelligence. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 51:Love your rage, not your cage. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 52:Not all bits have equal value. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 53:Not funny ha ha, funny weird. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 54:Not here not there not anywhere! ~ dr-seuss, @wisdomtrove 55:We do not suffer by accident. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 56:Why not dare to be fully human? ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 57:You are victors, not victims! ~ joel-osteen, @wisdomtrove 58:Courage is knowing what not to fear. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 59:Do not be amazed by the true dragon. ~ dogen, @wisdomtrove 60:I'm not smart enough to lie. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 61:It's not over until I (you) win. ~ les-brown, @wisdomtrove 62:Liberation is not deliverance. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 63:Love, and a cough, are not concealed. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 64:Teach us to care and not to care ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 65:To innovate is not to reform. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 66:Vulnerability is not weakness. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 67:War is not women's history. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 68:We do not become. We simply are. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 69:Why should your heart not dance? ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 70:Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 71:A wedding is not house-keeping. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 72:Daring is not safe against daring men. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 73:Getting old is not for sissies. ~ bette-davis, @wisdomtrove 74:He is not poor who has a competency. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 75:History is not was, it is. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 76:I am good, but not an angel. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 77:I cry for those not yet dead. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 78:I do not believe in my death. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 79:Incredulity is not wisdom. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 80:Is not poetry the food of love? ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 81:Love not Pleasure; love God. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 82:Only idiots are not controversial. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 83:Religion is not in fault. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 84:Seek His face and not His hand. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 85:The unenvied man is not enviable. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 86:Violence is not the way. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 87:War is not won by victory. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 88:We read to know we are not alone. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 89:Beauty is not caused. It is. ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 90:Birth is nothing where virtue is not ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 91:Blood's not thicker than money. ~ groucho-marx, @wisdomtrove 92:Good people are found, not changed. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 93:Hungry wailing standeth not aloof. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 94:I sin, but I'm not the devil. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 95:It is not righteousness to outrage ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 96:I was quiet but I was not blind. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 97:Love and dignity do not dwell together. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 98:Man is not made for defeat. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 99:The only failure is not trying. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 100:The sun's not yellow, its chicken! ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 101:To lose is not always failure. ~ quentin-crisp, @wisdomtrove 102:Unused creativity is not benign. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 103:Wealth unused might as well not exist. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 104:We do not exist for ourselves. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 105:Angry people are not always wise. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 106:Attitudes are caught, not taught. ~ fred-rogers, @wisdomtrove 107:Called or not, God is always there. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 108:Forgiveness does not mean excusing. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 109:Get a backbone, not a wishbone. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 110:God does not believe in our God. ~ jules-renard, @wisdomtrove 111:Great heart will not be denied. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 112:Happiness is not the portion of man. ~ voltaire, @wisdomtrove 113:I'm pretty, but not beautiful. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 114:Information is not knowledge. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 115:Innocence is not accustomed to blush. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 116:Low aim, not failure, is the crime. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 117:Not all men are worthy of love. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 118:Not my will, but thine, be done. ~ jesus-christ, @wisdomtrove 119:Not to remember is not an option. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 120:One lifetime is not enough to live ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 121:Pleasure itself is not a vice. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 122:Practice and enlightenment are not two. ~ dogen, @wisdomtrove 123:The Truth An Offense But Not A Sin ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 124:The truth is lived, not taught. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 125:We cannot wish for that we know not. ~ voltaire, @wisdomtrove 126:We shall not cease from exploration ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 127:God is a hacker, not an engineer ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove 128:He does not weep who does not see. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 129:I am not the river I am the net. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 130:I do not take drugs. I am drugs. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 131:If words suffice not, blows must follow. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 132:I'm good, but I'm not an angel. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 133:I'm sin, but I'm not the devil. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 134:Influence is not government. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 135:I see the cure is not worth the pain. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 136:I should not mind anything at all. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 137:Is not light grander than fire? ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 138:Judge not unless you judge yourself ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 139:Leaders grow; they are not made. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 140:Man is not mind, he is soul. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 141:Much learning does not teach sense. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 142:Success comes in cans, not can'ts. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 143:Tell the truth and not the facts. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 144:Tempt not a desperate man. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 145:The tree does not die, it waits. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 146:Those who do not weep, do not see. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 147:Truth is not private property. ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 148:Unhappy failures need not apply. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 149:Who then is sane? He who is not a fool. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 150:Work to become, not to acquire. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 151:Your opinion is not my reality. ~ steve-maraboli, @wisdomtrove 152:A leader leads by example not by force. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 153:Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 154:Better not to exist than live basely. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 155:But it is not reason that governs love. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 156:Do not be eager for things above. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 157:Do not speak defeat, speak victory. ~ joel-osteen, @wisdomtrove 158:Dread of night. Dread of not-night. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 159:Eat to live, not live to eat. ~ benjamin-franklin, @wisdomtrove 160:Enough or not... it will have to do ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 161:False words do not bring forth fruit. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 162:Fierce eagles breed not the tender dove. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 163:Give assistance, not advice, in a crisis. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 164:Happiness is not outside ourselves. ~ leo-babauta, @wisdomtrove 165:He not busy being born is busy dying. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 166:I am not now That which I have been. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 167:I court not the votes of the fickle mob. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 168:I live on good soup, not on fine words. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 169:I will not walk backward in life. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 170:Men are not realists - only women are. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 171:Not everyone who wanders is lost. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 172:Quality is not an act, it is a habit. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 173:There is no excuse for not trying. ~ barack-obama, @wisdomtrove 174:The sick mind can not bear anything harsh. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 175:Thoughts are not subject to duty. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 176:We need a backbone, not a wishbone. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 177:When somethin's not right it's wrong. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 178:Wrong must not win by technicalities. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 179:A boar is often held by a not-so-large dog. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 180:A dead body revenges not injuries. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 181:All that is gold does not glitter. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 182:Applause is a receipt, not a bill. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 183:Envy is not to be conquered but by death. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 184:For we walk by faith, not by sight. ~ jesus-christ, @wisdomtrove 185:Have no friends not equal to yourself. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 186:he who will not economize will agonize ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 187:I do sin, but I am not the devil. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 188:If not reason, then the devil. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 189:If not us, who? If not now, when? ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 190:I'm not a teacher, but an awakener. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 191:Investing is simple, but not easy. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 192:It is a direction not a destination. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove 193:Judge not, before you judge yourself. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 194:Killing time is not an easy job. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 195:Life unexamined, is not worth living. ~ democritus, @wisdomtrove 196:Not engaging in ignorance is wisdom. ~ bodhidharma, @wisdomtrove 197:One should eat to live, not live to eat. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 198:Pain lays not its touch upon a corpse. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 199:Rioting is not revolutionary. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 200:There is no place where God is not. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 201:The thought is not the thing. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 202:This world is not for cowards. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 203:Titles do not count with posterity. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 204:Unslumping yourself is not easily done. ~ dr-seuss, @wisdomtrove 205:Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 206:Well behaved women do not make history. ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 207:We're not prisoners of the past. ~ martin-seligman, @wisdomtrove 208:When he pretends to flee, do not pursue. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 209:Where will wants not, a way opens. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 210:Willing is not enough, one must apply. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 211:Wisdom is not the purchase of a day ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 212:Women should be obscene, not heard. ~ groucho-marx, @wisdomtrove 213:Wonder is not precisely knowing. ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 214:You should not honour men more than truth. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 215:A mind at peace does not engender wars. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 216:An ally need not own the land he helps. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 217:Are not beauty and delicacy the same? ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 218:Brave hearts do not back down back off. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 219:Do not spoil the wonder with haste! ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 220:Do not use a cannon to kill a mosquito. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 221:Failure is not the crime. Low aim is. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 222:From a just fraud God turneth not away. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 223:God made not pleasures for the rich alone. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 224:He who says o'er much I love not is in love. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 225:I am not a teacher, but an awakener. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 226:I do not believe in collective guilt. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 227:I hate London when it's not raining. ~ groucho-marx, @wisdomtrove 228:I'm pretty, but I'm not beautiful. ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 229:I paint flowers so they will not die. ~ frida-kahlo, @wisdomtrove 230:Is not every life, every work fine? ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 231:It ends not with a bang, but a whimper. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 232:It is not easy to bear prosperity unruffled. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 233:It is the tale, not he who tells it. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 234:Knowest thou not that kings have long hands? ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 235:Let others lead small lives, but not you ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 236:Money is usually attracted, not pursued. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 237:Panic, not the task, is the enemy. ~ melody-beattie, @wisdomtrove 238:Power is not a means; it is an end. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 239:Profit is not a cause but a result- ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 240:The goal is to know how not-to-know. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 241:The one who is not being born is dying. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 242:Tis not too late to seek a newer world ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 243:To know and not do, is to not yet know. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 244:We are taught words, not ideas. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 245:We work to become, not to acquire. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 246:Whatever you do not employ, you forfeit. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 247:What you can't enforce, do not command. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 248:All is not gold that glisters. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 249:All that is not given is lost. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 250:Civility is not a sign of weakness. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 251:Commitment is an act, not a word. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 252:Compromise does not mean cowardice. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 253:God is not there just for emergencies. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 254:Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings? ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 255:He that is jealous is not in love. ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 256:How can a president not be an actor? ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 257:Hyt is not al golde that glareth. ~ geoffrey-chaucer, @wisdomtrove 258:I am a man who does not exist for others. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 259:I am not a teacher. I am an awakener. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 260:I have come not to teach but to awaken. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 261:I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 262:I'm not a psychopath-I'm wearing a tie! ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 263:Injuries may be forgiven, but not forgotten. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 264:It is not the critic who counts ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 265:It's not dark yet But it's getting there ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 266:It's not the critic who counts. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 267:Leaders are made, they are not born ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 268:Leaders are not born, they're made. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 269:Let's build bridges, not walls. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 270:Life responds to deserve and not to need. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 271:Men blaspheme what they do not know. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 272:Merely to exist is not enough. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 273:Music is not my life. My life is music. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 274:Near a war is always not very near. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 275:Not even Ares battles against necessity. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 276:People fear what they do not understand. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 277:Science is a way to not fool ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 278:Seeing is not always believing. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 279:Take what's useful, discard what is not. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 280:We are optimists, until we are not. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 281:What is privacy if not for invading? ~ quentin-crisp, @wisdomtrove 282:Young people need models, not critics. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 283:Your fears are not walls, but hurdles. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 284:Art is to look at not to criticize. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 285:Being happy is not the only happiness. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 286:Be not for ever harassed by impotent desire. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 287:Buy land, they're not making it anymore. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 288:Do not run away, it is cowardice. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 289:Even in the grave, all is not lost. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 290:Everything that is not given is lost. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 291:Failure is an event, it is not a person. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 292:Focus on opportunities, not problems. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 293:Focus on the solution, not on the problem. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 294:For all have not the gift of martyrdom. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 295:Forgiveness is a CHOICE, not a feeling. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 296:Happiness is not by chance, but by choice. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 297:Human nature is not of itself vicious. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 298:Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 299:I am certainly an ought and not a must. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 300:I am in love and out of it I will not go. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 301:I am not an originator but a transmitter. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 302:If a battle can not be won do not fight it. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 303:If not us, who? And if not now, when? ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 304:If you haven't experienced it, it's not true. ~ kabir, @wisdomtrove 305:I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 306:In life there is not time to grieve long. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 307:I see through my eyes, not with them. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 308:It's not a competition, it's a doorway. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 309:It's not the critic that counts. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 310:It's not what you say, but how you say it! ~ mae-west, @wisdomtrove 311:It's not your job to love me-it's mine. ~ byron-katie, @wisdomtrove 312:Know not to revere human things too much. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 313:Let me listen to me and not to them. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 314:Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 315:Life did not stop, and one had to live. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 316:Love is not a feeling; it's a sensation. ~ barry-long, @wisdomtrove 317:Memory is not what the heart desires. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 318:Not even old age knows how to love death. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 319:Not everyone is worth listening to. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 320:Not I but the world says it: All is one. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 321:Not idly do the leaves of Lorien fall ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 322:Opposition is not necessarily enmity. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 323:Piracy is not the problem, obscurity is. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 324:Pray the gods do not envy your happiness! ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 325:Rastafari not a culture, it's a reality. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 326:Seek Not Every Quality In One Individual. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 327:Survival is your strength not your shame. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 328:There is not a reason for me to worry… ~ esther-hicks, @wisdomtrove 329:The soul can not think without a picture. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 330:The value is in the worth, not in the number. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 331:This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 332:True bliss is not in objects, but in us. ~ jean-klein, @wisdomtrove 333:We must not stand upon trifles. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 334:What is easy to do is also easy not to do. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 335:You must not ever stop being whimsical. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 336:Above all, do not lie to yourself. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 337:Adventures do occur, but not punctually. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 338:A world of made is not a world of born. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 339:Contempt is not a thing to be despised. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 340:Do not Blame the world. Find a solution. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 341:Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 342:Get a backbone, not a wishbone. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 343:God means movement, and not explanation. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 344:Happiness is not pleasure, it is victory. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 345:He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 346:He who goes unenvied shall not be admired. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 347:He who would not be idle, let him fall in love. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 348:I cannot pretend I am not without fear. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 349:I feed on good soup, not beautiful language. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 350:I like to give opinions, not suggestions ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 351:I love not man the less, but Nature more. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 352:I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 353:It’s not a word. It’s a sentence. ~ rodney-dangerfield, @wisdomtrove 354:Love is not emotion, it's a way of being. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 355:Marriage is a commitment, not a feeling. ~ joel-osteen, @wisdomtrove 356:Not creating delusions is enlightenment. ~ bodhidharma, @wisdomtrove 357:Not knowing anything is the sweetest life. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 358:Not to be born is, past all prizing, best. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 359:Now is now. Are you going to be here or not? ~ ram-das, @wisdomtrove 360:Old man! & 361:Plato was right, but not quite right. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 362:Prayer does not change God; it changes me. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 363:The Bible is literature, not dogma. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 364:The mere absence of war is not peace. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 365:The moderns do not realize modernity. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 366:Thou should eat to live; not live to eat. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove 367:We do not judge the people we love. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 368:What punishments of God are not gifts? ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 369:When you lose, do not lose the lesson. ~ dalai-lama, @wisdomtrove 370:And wealth abides not, it is but for a day. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 371:Beauty should be edible, or not at all. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 372:Be not selfish in your doings: pass it on. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 373:But I don't give up; I forget why not. ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove 374:But we must not suffer over the suffering. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 375: Death is not the worst that can happen to men. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 376:Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 377:Do not let a leader lead you on a bad path. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 378:Do not put all your eggs in one basket. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 379:Evaluation by others is not a guide for me. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 380:God's delays are not God's denials. ~ robert-h-schuller, @wisdomtrove 381:Heaven is a state of mind, not a location. ~ wayne-dyer, @wisdomtrove 382:He who kisses girl on hillside is not level ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 383:I am not romantic, you know; I never was. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 384:I am not strange. I am just not normal. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 385:I am not young enough to know everything. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 386:I die hard but am not afraid to go. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 387:If it is not a mess, it is not progress. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 388:If the gods do evil then they are not gods. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 389:If the Way is made clear, it is not the Way. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 390:I'm not much like myself any more. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 391:Intention, good or bad, is not enough. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 392:I was not born to share the hate, but love. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 393:Know'st not whate'er we do is done in love? ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 394:Let us not seek the Republican answer. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 395:Lifestyle is not an amount; it's a practice. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 396:Market is your servant, not your guide. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 397:Nature does not make leaps. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 398:Not being heard is no reason for silence. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 399:Obstacles come to instruct, not obstruct. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 400:Opportunity is in the person, not the job. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 401:Teach by teaching, not by correcting ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 402:The ego is not master in its own house. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 403:The fox condemns the trap, not himself. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 404:The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 405:The sky is not the limit. Your mind is ~ marilyn-monroe, @wisdomtrove 406:The universe does not work by our rules ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 407:The warrior who's strength is not to fight. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 408:The wind of revolutions is not tractable. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 409:The word impossible is not French. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 410:To live without loving is not really to live. ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 411:What is without periods of rest will not endure. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 412:White does not exist in nature. ~ pierre-auguste-renoir, @wisdomtrove 413:Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 414:Deep roots are not reached by the frost. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 415:Every cloud engenders not a storm. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 416:Excellence does not begin in Washington. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 417:Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 418:For every inch that is not fool, is rogue. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 419:For tyme y-lost may not recovered be. ~ geoffrey-chaucer, @wisdomtrove 420:God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 421:Gods should not resemble men in their anger! ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 422:Great masters merit emulation, not worship. ~ alan-cohen, @wisdomtrove 423:Heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 424:He is not a lover who does not love forever. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 425:He wants worth who dares not praise a foe. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 426:He who dares not offend cannot be honest. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 427:If it's not one thing, it's your mother. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 428:If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 429:If you are not envied, you are not enviable. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 430:I think, therefore I am ... not here. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 431:I will not be at the mercy of the telephone! ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 432:Live your spirit's dreams, not your mind's. ~ alan-cohen, @wisdomtrove 433:Love is not in our choice but in our fate. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 434:Much learning does not teach understanding. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 435:No chains around my feet, But I'm not free. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 436:Not all that have fallen are vanquished. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 437:Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 438:Not to be mad is another form of madness ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 439:People do not make wars; governments do. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 440:Progress is not accomplished in one stage. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 441:Speak up. Not just tomorrow, but every day. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 442:The arts are not a way to make a living. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 443:The journey, Not the destination matters... ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 444:The offender, who repents, is not yet lost. ~ democritus, @wisdomtrove 445:The only mistake is not to risk making one. ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 446:The only unhappiness is not to love God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 447:The right timing is not always our timing. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 448:This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 449:This world is not my concern; it is myself. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 450:True love is not for the faint-hearted. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 451:What can they suffer that do not fear to die? ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 452:When prosperity comes, do not use all of it. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 453:Why not? After all, it belongs to him. ~ charlie-chaplan, @wisdomtrove 454:You are not your resume, you are your work. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 455:A bird in a cage is not half a bird. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 456:An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 457:Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 458:Charity is love; not all love is charity. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 459:Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 460:dogs and angels are not very far apart ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 461:Do not consider painful what is good for you. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 462:God wants you to be a winner, not a whiner. ~ joel-osteen, @wisdomtrove 463:He is not a lover who does not love for ever. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 464:How many things are there which I do not want. ~ socrates, @wisdomtrove 465:I am not afraid of the word tension. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 466:I am not the kind of person I want to be. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 467:I do not expect old heads on young shoulders. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 468:I do not see the world at all; I invent it. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 469:I had a dream, which was not at all a dream. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 470:It is best for the wise man not to seem wise. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 471:I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 472:I utter what you would not dare think ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 473:Judge not, if you're not ready for judgment. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 474:Let's not grow with our roots in the ground. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 475:Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 476:Love has reasons that reason knows not. ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 477:Pure women are only those who have not been asked. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 478:roads were made for journeys not destinations ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 479:Shut not your doors to me proud libraries. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove 480:Strike at a great man, and you will not miss. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 481:The anvil is not afraid of the hammer. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 482:The God that can be named is not God. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 483:The joy is in creating, not maintaining. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 484:The least outlay is not always the greatest gain. ~ aesop, @wisdomtrove 485:The owl goes not into the nest of the lark. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 486:The wise man does not grow old, but ripens. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 487:Those who do not complain are never pitied. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 488:Thought will not work except in silence. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 489:To live at ease, and not be bound to think. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 490:Truth is not afraid of questions. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 491:We are at fault for not slaying the Jews. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 492:We are not born to wait. We are born to do. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 493:What is not possible is not to choose. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 494:Wisdom and eloquence are not always united. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 495:With women, the heart argues, not the mind. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 496:Women are made to be loved, not understood. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 497:Words are the mind's wings, are they not? ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 498:Act with kindness but do not expect gratitude. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 499:A life not lived for others is not a life. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 500:All, as they say, that glitters is not gold. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:AM I NOT MERCIFUL? ~ Amie Kaufman, #NFDB
2:Am I not merciful? ~ Jay Kristoff, #NFDB
3:and they believe not. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
4:Beasts abstract not. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
5:Because why not? ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
6:Deadshot you're not. ~ Greg Rucka, #NFDB
7:Death is not goodbye. ~ Tite Kubo, #NFDB
8:Do Not Love the World ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
9:Habit is not unimportant. ~ Plato, #NFDB
10:Had not enough gone wrong? ~ Brom, #NFDB
11:I am NOT a committee. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
12:I am not a fool. ~ Maria V Snyder, #NFDB
13:I am not like ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
14:If not now, when? ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
15:I'm not a vegetarian. ~ Carol Alt, #NFDB
16:I'm not Beethoven! ~ Jerry Garcia, #NFDB
17:I'm not superstitious. ~ Bai Ling, #NFDB
18:I prefer not to. ~ E L Konigsburg, #NFDB
19:Is the truth not kind? ~ Tom King, #NFDB
20:I will not serve”— ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
21:Make love, not war. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
22:may not be able ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
23:Nah, that's not true. ~ Rick Ross, #NFDB
24:Not very ladylike. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
25:Only change, not loss ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
26:We are not normal. ~ Sally Thorne, #NFDB
27:You’re not dead yet. ~ Katie Reus, #NFDB
28:And she’s not wrong. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
29:Atlanta is not the South. ~ Pimp C, #NFDB
30:Does not happen! ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
31:Feelings are not facts ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
32:God does not read. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
33:he does not report it, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
34:History is not hatred. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
35:I am not a hero. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
36:I am not what I once was. ~ Horace, #NFDB
37:I do not suffer fools ~ E Lockhart, #NFDB
38:I'm not a list person. ~ Joan Jett, #NFDB
39:I'm not brave at all. ~ Matt Nagle, #NFDB
40:I shall not be moved. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
41:I was not an activist. ~ Joe Biden, #NFDB
42:Life’s not a porno. ~ Ben Monopoli, #NFDB
43:Love does not forget! ~ Alex Flinn, #NFDB
44:My hits are not hits. ~ John Mayer, #NFDB
45:my life is not scripted. ~ E N Joy, #NFDB
46:Not here. Not now ~ Jennifer Niven, #NFDB
47:Not knaves, fools. ~ Mary McCarthy, #NFDB
48:Not me,” you think. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
49:Not their first rodeo. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
50:not this old chestnut. ~ E L James, #NFDB
51:seen him before. Not ~ Fred Vargas, #NFDB
52:Tears are not endless. ~ Lily King, #NFDB
53:The words can not return. ~ Horace, #NFDB
54:This is not a pipe. ~ Ren Magritte, #NFDB
55:Vader was not a man. ~ Paul S Kemp, #NFDB
56:What bends does not break. ~ Jewel, #NFDB
57:What? Why not? ~ Kim Gruenenfelder, #NFDB
58:why not? We knew ~ Catherine Bybee, #NFDB
59:Worship is not love. ~ Donald Hall, #NFDB
60:You may not assume ~ Michael Makai, #NFDB
61:You will not see ~ Hilda Doolittle, #NFDB
62:A soul which is not clothed ~ Rumi, #NFDB
63:Being is born of not being. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
64:CNN is not fake news. ~ Jolene Ivey, #NFDB
65:"Death is not the end." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
66:did not mind this ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
67:DIFFERENT NOT LESS ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
68:Dimka, not you too. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
69:Draft beer, not people. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
70:Health is not luck. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
71:Hope is not a strategy ~ Chris Voss, #NFDB
72:I am not a bat. ~Rephaim ~ P C Cast, #NFDB
73:I am not a birch. ~ Santino Hassell, #NFDB
74:I am not a crook. ~ Richard M Nixon, #NFDB
75:i chose not to run ~ Jerry Seinfeld, #NFDB
76:I do not know ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
77:I'm not a centerfold. ~ Frank Ocean, #NFDB
78:I'm not a great writer. ~ E L James, #NFDB
79:I'm not a jazz singer. ~ Boz Scaggs, #NFDB
80:I'm not a leading guy. ~ Steve Zahn, #NFDB
81:I'm not a leading man. ~ Aaron Paul, #NFDB
82:… I’m not fixable. ~ Samantha Towle, #NFDB
83:I'm not hot. I'm great. ~ Lil Wayne, #NFDB
84:I'm not me without you. ~ T Torrest, #NFDB
85:I’m not me without you. ~ T Torrest, #NFDB
86:I'm not really book-smart. ~ Eminem, #NFDB
87:I’m not . . . special ~ Erin Hunter, #NFDB
88:I'm not your enemy. ~ Marissa Meyer, #NFDB
89:I must not tell lies. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
90:Is this not enough? ~ Dave Matthews, #NFDB
91:It’s not my fault, ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
92:It's okay not to be okay ~ Jessie J, #NFDB
93:It's OK to not be OK ~ Robin Benway, #NFDB
94:I will not calm down! ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
95:Love is not a list. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
96:Men do not value a good deed ~ Ovid, #NFDB
97:Modesty, not temper. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
98:Nobody said not to go. ~ Emily Hahn, #NFDB
99:Not loving is a letting go. ~ Hafez, #NFDB
100:Real or not real? ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
101:Rumor is not always wrong ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
102:ship would not and could ~ Ted Bell, #NFDB
103:Then is not now. ~ Kate Mascarenhas, #NFDB
104:The public's not stupid. ~ Rita Ora, #NFDB
105:This is not a drill. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
106:Thought is not action. ~ John Green, #NFDB
107:Thou shalt not kill. ~ Exodus XX.82, #NFDB
108:War is not civilized. ~ Talib Kweli, #NFDB
109:Why do I not forget? ~ Louise Gl ck, #NFDB
110:You are not alone. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
111:Activity is not output. ~ Andy Grove, #NFDB
112:A gun is not an argument. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
113:A house is not a home. ~ Polly Adler, #NFDB
114:Be angry, but sin not. ~ Thomas More, #NFDB
115:Be a voice, not an echo. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
116:, but not sin ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
117:Comedy is not pretty. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
118:Curiosity is not a sin ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
119:Dead, but not stupid. ~ Sam Sisavath, #NFDB
120:Death is not ambiguous. ~ D A Powell, #NFDB
121:Do not dare not to dare. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
122:Failure is not an option, ~ L J Shen, #NFDB
123:Fear is not your fate ~ Jay Kristoff, #NFDB
124:He who tastes not, knows not. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
125:Hope is not a plan ~ Anderson Cooper, #NFDB
126:Hope is not a strategy ~ Betsy Beyer, #NFDB
127:hope is not a strategy. ~ Chris Voss, #NFDB
128:I am not a philosopher. ~ Hans Bethe, #NFDB
129:Ignorance is not bliss. ~ Dan Harris, #NFDB
130:I'm not a flamboyant artist. ~ Rakim, #NFDB
131:I'm not a sun person. ~ Laura Prepon, #NFDB
132:I'm not letting you go. ~ Katie Reus, #NFDB
133:I'm not President Bush ~ John McCain, #NFDB
134:I’m not sure I deserve you. ~ J Lynn, #NFDB
135:I shall not altogether die. ~ Horace, #NFDB
136:I shall not completely die. ~ Horace, #NFDB
137:Israel is not an aviary. ~ Abba Eban, #NFDB
138:It's not what the mind says. ~ Mooji, #NFDB
139:It's OK not to be OK. ~ Lindsey Kelk, #NFDB
140:I will move you.” “We’re not ~ Tijan, #NFDB
141:Love is not limited. ~ Sandra Dallas, #NFDB
142:Nature is not human hearted. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
143:Not dead. Just dreaming. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
144:Not ist nötig! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
145:not of this world, ~ Tracy Chevalier, #NFDB
146:Shed sweat—not blood, ~ David Irving, #NFDB
147:Stupid is not illegal. ~ Dave Ramsey, #NFDB
148:The real risk is not ~ John Coltrane, #NFDB
149:Trust not to outward show. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
150:We see not our own backs. ~ Catullus, #NFDB
151:You are not alone. ~ Michael Jackson, #NFDB
152:You are not your past. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
153:A chair is not a caste. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
154:A gentleman is not a pot. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
155:America is not the world. ~ Morrissey, #NFDB
156:Are we not all things ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
157:Atheism is not a religion ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
158:Be a Voice, not an Echo ~ Cornel West, #NFDB
159:Be strong; fear not. ~ Isaiah XXXV. 4, #NFDB
160:Be where your enemy is not. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
161:Black is not a color. ~ Edouard Manet, #NFDB
162:but it does not want ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
163:Change is not progress. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
164:Cleverness is not wisdom. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
165:Do not covet your ideas. ~ Paul Arden, #NFDB
166:Do not dehumanize others. ~ Gary Kemp, #NFDB
167:Do not feed fear. Starve it. ~ Poppet, #NFDB
168:Do not look for signs. ~ Robert Adams, #NFDB
169:Do not seek water, get thirst. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
170:Genius is born-not paid ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
171:God, I'm glad I'm not me. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
172:Hallows, not Horcruxes. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
173:him.” “I’m not allowed ~ Sejal Badani, #NFDB
174:Hope is not a strategy. ~ Betsy Beyer, #NFDB
175:Hope is not a strategy, ~ Sarah Palin, #NFDB
176:Hope is not a strategy. ~ Sarah Palin, #NFDB
177:I am me and not me. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
178:I am not a fan of books. ~ Kanye West, #NFDB
179:I am not a fashion freak! ~ Kate Moss, #NFDB
180:I am not a party girl. ~ Bridget Hall, #NFDB
181:I am not a scientist. ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
182:I am not a sex symbol. ~ Jason Isaacs, #NFDB
183:I came to heal, not deal. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
184:I get paid to not laugh. ~ Julia Barr, #NFDB
185:I have not been briefed. ~ Gray Davis, #NFDB
186:I know what I do not know. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
187:I'm not a big shopper. ~ Jon Bernthal, #NFDB
188:I'm not a gangster, bro. ~ ASAP Rocky, #NFDB
189:I'm not a human anymore ~ Darren Shan, #NFDB
190:I'm not giving up on us. ~ Katie Reus, #NFDB
191:I'm not going anywhere. ~ Allie Burke, #NFDB
192:I'm not into wrinkles. ~ Winona Ryder, #NFDB
193:I’m not living in a cage. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
194:I'm not maximized yet. ~ Ashton Eaton, #NFDB
195:impossible is not a word ~ Obert Skye, #NFDB
196:it's not too late for me. ~ Tim Tharp, #NFDB
197:I was not born to wait. ~ Gwenda Bond, #NFDB
198:I will not be ignored. ~ Vivien Leigh, #NFDB
199:I will not be misquoted! ~ Todd Barry, #NFDB
200:No baby, I’m not gay. ~ R L Mathewson, #NFDB
201:Not as bad as a Sherpa, ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
202:not having a teacher. She ~ Ryan Kirk, #NFDB
203:Obsession is not love. ~ Karina Halle, #NFDB
204:Oh! blame not the bard. ~ Thomas More, #NFDB
205:Poetry is not a luxury. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
206:Pop stars should not eat. ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
207:Shaken and not stirred. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
208:Sin is not rational. ~ Edward T Welch, #NFDB
209:Stumbling is not falling. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
210:The job is not the work. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
211:The stairway is not ~ Denise Levertov, #NFDB
212:The World Is Not Enough ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
213:Trend is not destiny. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
214:Water does not force its way. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
215:Why not shatter the sky? ~ Elise Kova, #NFDB
216:Work smarter, not harder ~ Carl Barks, #NFDB
217:You are not your mind ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
218:You are not your story. ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
219:Your not God, Steldor. ~ Cayla Kluver, #NFDB
220:Alone, but not alone ~ Trish MacGregor, #NFDB
221:Ancestry is not destiny, ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
222:And can you not learn? ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
223:and he does not report it, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
224:Are we not all things? ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
225:Be at ease, not dis-ease. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
226:Bingo: respond not react. ~ Dan Harris, #NFDB
227:...broken, but not beaten. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
228:Build bridges not walls. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
229:But this is not it, is it? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
230:Chess is not dominoes ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
231:Do not fear, only believe. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
232:Dreams come true, not cheap. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
233:Dying is not a crime. ~ Jack Kevorkian, #NFDB
234:Failure is not an option. ~ Teri Terry, #NFDB
235:Fear not for I am a cat ~ Julie Kagawa, #NFDB
236:God is not a Christian. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
237:God is not a diversion. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
238:Hast comes not alone. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
239:Hodor’s not his true name, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
240:I am not a normal man. ~ Stevie Wonder, #NFDB
241:I am not a people person. ~ Susan Juby, #NFDB
242:I am not made for despair ~ Lian Hearn, #NFDB
243:I am not President Bush. ~ John McCain, #NFDB
244:I do not believe...I know. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
245:I do not dare not to dare. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
246:I do not evolve, I AM. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
247:I do not evolve, I am. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
248:I do not fear pain. ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB
249:I do not know. ~ Joseph Louis Lagrange, #NFDB
250:I do not seek. I find. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
251:I do not write, I build. ~ Alvar Aalto, #NFDB
252:I'm a killer, not a thief. ~ John Hart, #NFDB
253:I'm a monster, not a moron. ~ P C Cast, #NFDB
254:I'm not a breakfast eater. ~ Sean Penn, #NFDB
255:I'm not a career woman. ~ June Allyson, #NFDB
256:I'm not a control freak. ~ Fiona Apple, #NFDB
257:I'm not a Hollywood guy. ~ Kevin James, #NFDB
258:I'm not a loner at all. ~ Hugh Jackman, #NFDB
259:I'm not a philosopher. ~ Truman Capote, #NFDB
260:I'm not a reactionary. ~ Renee Fleming, #NFDB
261:I'm not a sex symbol. ~ Jenny McCarthy, #NFDB
262:I'm not a true vegan. ~ Anthony Kiedis, #NFDB
263:I'm not blockbuster boy. ~ Johnny Depp, #NFDB
264:I'm not cute, I'm sexy, ~ Alanea Alder, #NFDB
265:I'm not going anywhere... ~ Katie Reus, #NFDB
266:I'm not real. I'm theatre. ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
267:I'm not too proud to beg. ~ Maya Banks, #NFDB
268:Not tea but blood! ~ Ann Leckie, #NFDB
269:I smuggle, not snuggle. ~ Chuck Wendig, #NFDB
270:Its name-what passes not away. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
271:It was time to kill, not love. ~ Tijan, #NFDB
272:I was wounded, not lost. ~ Sally Green, #NFDB
273:Life is not an apology. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
274:Life is not a submarine. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
275:Love is not love ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
276:Make Kin Not Babies. ~ Donna J Haraway, #NFDB
277:Nature is not anthropomorphic. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
278:Not a problem, friend. ~ Robert Dugoni, #NFDB
279:Our hearts do not need logic. ~ Lois W, #NFDB
280:paint was not an option ~ Randall Wood, #NFDB
281:Progress not perfection. ~ Court McGee, #NFDB
282:Separation is not fatal. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
283:sights not soon forgotten. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
284:Sport is not my thing. ~ Rupert Friend, #NFDB
285:Struggle is not exclusive. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
286:Study nature not books ~ Louis Agassiz, #NFDB
287:That is not in question, ~ Alex Segura, #NFDB
288:The menu is not the meal. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
289:The soul is not a soul, ~ John Ashbery, #NFDB
290:Too much yappening, not ~ Cameron Jace, #NFDB
291:TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
292:TV is not a baby sitter. ~ Luis Guzman, #NFDB
293:Upward, not Northward ~ Edwin A Abbott, #NFDB
294:What's not there is. ~ Cameron Conaway, #NFDB
295:Yes. But not with you. ~ Lindsay Cross, #NFDB
296:You are not trivial. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
297:You are not your buttocks. ~ Kaz Cooke, #NFDB
298:A chief does not hurry. ~ Chinua Achebe, #NFDB
299:All that glisters is not gold. ~ Common, #NFDB
300:Art must not serve might. ~ Karel Capek, #NFDB
301:Bidden or not, God is here. ~ Ami McKay, #NFDB
302:Build bridges, not walls. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
303:Christ, not to pour out his ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
304:Death was not the end. ~ Maria V Snyder, #NFDB
305:Dividends: Not an Expense! ~ Mike Piper, #NFDB
306:Do not forget my example. ~ Kate Schatz, #NFDB
307:Do not keep the slanderer away, ~ Kabir, #NFDB
308:Do not let your fire go out. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
309:Do not press an enemy at bay. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
310:Easy money did not end ~ James Rickards, #NFDB
311:Every day is not perfect. ~ Brett Favre, #NFDB
312:Friends are born,not made ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
313:Good for her! Not for me. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
314:Good for her, not for me. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
315:Hope does not disappoint. ~ Saint Paul, #NFDB
316:Hope is not illusion. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
317:Hunger is not an object. ~ Herta M ller, #NFDB
318:I am not a natural dancer. ~ Ricki Lake, #NFDB
319:I am not capitulating. ~ Eugene Ionesco, #NFDB
320:I am not the we of anyone ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
321:I am what I am not yet. ~ Maxine Greene, #NFDB
322:I dare not ask a kiss; ~ Robert Herrick, #NFDB
323:I'd rather work than not. ~ Tommy Bolin, #NFDB
324:If Not You, Who Else? ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
325:I just want to not be me. ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
326:I make music for ears, not eyes ~ Adele, #NFDB
327:I'm myself, not a label. ~ John Brunner, #NFDB
328:I'm not a big disco guy. ~ Jon Bon Jovi, #NFDB
329:I'm not a computer girl. ~ Sandy Duncan, #NFDB
330:I'm not afraid of a party! ~ Alex Riley, #NFDB
331:I'm not a hallucination. ~ Nora Sakavic, #NFDB
332:I'm not a natural joiner. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
333:I'm not anti-immigration. ~ Mickey Kaus, #NFDB
334:I'm not a role model. ~ Charles Barkley, #NFDB
335:I'm not a stunning woman. ~ Kathy Bates, #NFDB
336:I'm not even who I am, yet. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
337:I'm not exactly repulsive. ~ Vera Ellen, #NFDB
338:I’m not in the mood to die. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
339:I'm not letting go of you. ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
340:I’m not Rising or Society ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
341:I'm not the betting kind. ~ Terry Gross, #NFDB
342:I'm not too unintelligent. ~ Tom Felton, #NFDB
343:I’m not worried about it. ~ Joel Osteen, #NFDB
344:I’m Odd but I’m not nuts. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
345:I'm still not doing you ~ Tymber Dalton, #NFDB
346:It's Fifty, not Fiddy. ~ Curtis Jackson, #NFDB
347:It's not Beirut or Bosnia. ~ Carl Froch, #NFDB
348:It's not over until you win ~ Les Brown, #NFDB
349:It's not time to worry yet ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
350:It’s only just not painful. ~ E L James, #NFDB
351:i would prefer not to ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
352:Life is not a romance novel ~ Meg Cabot, #NFDB
353:Look not down but up! ~ Robert Browning, #NFDB
354:Love does not conquer all. ~ Bill Maher, #NFDB
355:Make time, not excuses. ~ Grant Cardone, #NFDB
356:Mind is a verb not a noun. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
357:Nature does not have to insist. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
358:Need is not quite belief. ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
359:Not a single path ~ Philip James Bailey, #NFDB
360:Not being perfect hurts. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
361:Not blemishes. Adornments. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
362:Not for good. Just for now. ~ Jenny Han, #NFDB
363:Not I, but the city teaches. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
364:Not insane, just stupid. ~ Jodi Meadows, #NFDB
365:Not-knowing is true knowledge. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
366:not Max … who is it? ~ Alex Michaelides, #NFDB
367:Not my but Thy will, O Lord. ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
368:Not one death but many, ~ Charles Olson, #NFDB
369:Not repaying kindness ~ Ch gyam Trungpa, #NFDB
370:Not To Decide Is To Decide ~ Harvey Cox, #NFDB
371:O let not Time deceive you, ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
372:Progress not perfection. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
373:Russia is not our friend. ~ Joe Manchin, #NFDB
374:Science is not wisdom. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
375:Set not thy heart upon riches. ~ Psalms, #NFDB
376:Tease hair, not homos! ~ James St James, #NFDB
377:Tempting is not forcing. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
378:That's not a good idea ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
379:The heart does not lie. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
380:The plan is not the goal. ~ John Scalzi, #NFDB
381:The Tao is told is not the Tao. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
382:This did not comfort me. ~ Cath Crowley, #NFDB
383:This…is not what I wanted. ~ Ruby Dixon, #NFDB
384:Time did not compose her. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
385:Well, I'm clearly not ugly. ~ Megan Fox, #NFDB
386:We must not stint ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
387:What can we not endure, ~ Magdalen Nabb, #NFDB
388:When I say we do not ~ Katharine Graham, #NFDB
389:Yield not thy neck ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
390:you're not a fucking elf ~ Erin Lawless, #NFDB
391:You're not - crazy - are you ~ Zoe Sugg, #NFDB
392:You're not scared of me ~ Stylo Fantome, #NFDB
393:Your heart mirrors not His love, ~ Rumi, #NFDB
394:A feeling is not a fact. ~ Kenneth Oppel, #NFDB
395:A good speaker does not stutter. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
396:A hairbrush is not a gun. ~ Angie Thomas, #NFDB
397:Alas. I am not an option. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
398:Are you not entertained? ~ Russell Crowe, #NFDB
399:Art is a creed, not a craft. ~ Tom Wolfe, #NFDB
400:Art is not a sack race. ~ Charles Baxter, #NFDB
401:Attraction is not a choice. ~ Eben Pagan, #NFDB
402:Be a doer and not a critic. ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB
403:Be a star not a diva! ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru, #NFDB
404:Beauty is not pretty. ~ Erwin Blumenfeld, #NFDB
405:Be a victor, not a victim. ~ Joel Osteen, #NFDB
406:be a voice not an echo ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
407:(Believe me, I’m not far.) ~ Diane Duane, #NFDB
408:Blood is not destiny. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi, #NFDB
409:Break hearts, not promises. ~ John Green, #NFDB
410:But a living is not a life. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
411:conversations, and not ~ Karin Slaughter, #NFDB
412:Courage! Do not fall back. ~ Joan of Arc, #NFDB
413:Delay not to seize the hour! ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
414:Die, but do not retreat. ~ Joseph Stalin, #NFDB
415:Different is not wrong. ~ Martin Firrell, #NFDB
416:disease is not a choice. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
417:Do not attempt too much at once. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
418:Do not obey in advance. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
419:Draco you are not a killer ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
420:Eventhough you are not equipped, ~ Rumi, #NFDB
421:Exactitude is not truth. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
422:Facts do not give advice. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
423:Happiness earned, not given. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
424:hear the not-so-distant ~ Linda Lafferty, #NFDB
425:He is not. He’s lovely. ~ Melissa Foster, #NFDB
426:Hollywood's just not funny. ~ Chris Rock, #NFDB
427:home. Not that that bothered ~ H Y Hanna, #NFDB
428:Hunger is not debatable. ~ Harry Hopkins, #NFDB
429:I am a lover, not a fighter. ~ Tim Kaine, #NFDB
430:I am not a fan of politics. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
431:I am not a juicy painter. ~ Andrew Wyeth, #NFDB
432:I am not a televangelist. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
433:I cannot be what I am not. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
434:I do not sleep to dream ~ Martin Carter, #NFDB
435:I give opinions, not advice. ~ Lou Holtz, #NFDB
436:I hope, or I could not live. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
437:I know I'm not perfect. ~ Carmen Electra, #NFDB
438:I'm not a big politics guy. ~ Kevin Hart, #NFDB
439:I'm not a fan of Twitter. ~ Alan Cumming, #NFDB
440:I'm not a good collector. ~ Kurt Russell, #NFDB
441:I'm not a lovable man. ~ Richard M Nixon, #NFDB
442:I'm not a mass-appeal artist. ~ Amos Lee, #NFDB
443:I'm not an austere person. ~ Paul Farmer, #NFDB
444:I'm not a trust-fund type. ~ Eric Church, #NFDB
445:I'm not bossy, I'm the boss. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
446:I'm not easy to deal with. ~ Jaci Burton, #NFDB
447:I'm not fake in any way. ~ Courteney Cox, #NFDB
448:I’m not going to complain, ~ Joel Osteen, #NFDB
449:I'm not gonna die in 4/4 time. ~ Moondog, #NFDB
450:I'm nothing, I'm not even here ~ Birdman, #NFDB
451:I'm not psychic myself. ~ Dionne Warwick, #NFDB
452:I'm not really a model. ~ Gaspard Ulliel, #NFDB
453:I'm not very glamorous. ~ Freema Agyeman, #NFDB
454:I'm poor, not homeless. ~ Simone Elkeles, #NFDB
455:including and not limited to ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
456:In heaven fear is not. ~ Katha-Upanishad, #NFDB
457:Intellect is not wisdom. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
458:I paint in order not to cry. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
459:Iraq is not about oil. ~ Bobby Ray Inman, #NFDB
460:I try not to be hateful. ~ Brad Williams, #NFDB
461:It's leviOsa, not levioSA! ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
462:It's not time to worry yet. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
463:It’s okay not to be perfect, ~ J S Scott, #NFDB
464:I've not had a mean life. ~ Sissy Spacek, #NFDB
465:I was not an easy kid. ~ Patricia Heaton, #NFDB
466:I would prefer not to. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
467:Jesus is not customizable. ~ David Platt, #NFDB
468:justice is not good for much ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
469:know I’m not the only one ~ Sherri Hayes, #NFDB
470:LIFE IS NOT A PARAGRAPH. ~ Paula Hawkins, #NFDB
471:Life is real, not ideal. ~ Heather Muzik, #NFDB
472:Life's managed, not cured. ~ Phil McGraw, #NFDB
473:Like a shadow, I am and I am not. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
474:Love does not die. It lives. ~ Sarah Jio, #NFDB
475:Love has wings, not anchors. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
476:Love of bustle is not industry. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
477:Love well, if not wisely. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
478:Many Sufis are not guides. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
479:Masonry is not a religion. ~ Albert Pike, #NFDB
480:Miracles do not happen. ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
481:My curves are not crazy. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
482:My shows are not narratives. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
483:Not a stone but has its history. ~ Lucan, #NFDB
484:Not brother. And never again. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
485:not have been ~ Gertrude Chandler Warner, #NFDB
486:Not to decide is to decide. ~ Harvey Cox, #NFDB
487:Not when I lost my dream ~ Katie McGarry, #NFDB
488:One size does not fit all. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
489:Paul did not give up on him. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
490:Power is not happiness. ~ William Godwin, #NFDB
491:Precision is not reality ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
492:Raise your words, not your voice. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
493:Reality is not optional. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
494:Science is not gadgetry. ~ Warren Weaver, #NFDB
495:Seeing is not believing ~ Eric Lindstrom, #NFDB
496:Soon is not as good as now. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
497:Thank God I'm not a Jungian. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
498:That's not a good idea. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
499:The devout are not spared. ~ David Sheff, #NFDB
500:The ends do not justify the means ~ Seth, #NFDB
501:The good man does not grieve ~ Confucius, #NFDB
502:The great do not always prevail. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
503:The intent and not the deed ~ John Brown, #NFDB
504:The menu is not the meal. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
505:The mind alone can not be exiled. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
506:The money is not my mission. ~ Tone Bell, #NFDB
507:The past can not be cured. ~ Elizabeth I, #NFDB
508:The Past Is Not the Future ~ David Niven, #NFDB
509:The Story Is Not the Event ~ Russ Harris, #NFDB
510:This is not an exit. ~ Bret Easton Ellis, #NFDB
511:Those who show off do not shine. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
512:Thou shalt not kill. ~ Mat-thew. XIX. 18, #NFDB
513:Thou shalt not stand idly by ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
514:To know. Not to know about. ~ Ted Dekker, #NFDB
515:Try not to try too hard, ~ James Taylor, #NFDB
516:Virtue is not hereditary. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
517:Virtue is not photogenic. ~ Kirk Douglas, #NFDB
518:we are not all made alike ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
519:Weening is not measure. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
520:Well, I'm not a crook. ~ Richard M Nixon, #NFDB
521:you are not what you own. ~ Francine Jay, #NFDB
522:You must not be weak! ~ Anthony Horowitz, #NFDB
523:You must not think ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
524:Zeal and duty are not slow ~ John Milton, #NFDB
525:Alera is not a possession. ~ Cayla Kluver, #NFDB
526:A poem is not a pop-tart. ~ Mart n Espada, #NFDB
527:Art is not disposable. ~ Jennifer Nettles, #NFDB
528:A secretary is not a toy. ~ Frank Loesser, #NFDB
529:Be a rock, not a pebble. ~ David Arquette, #NFDB
530:Be a voice not an echo. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
531:Be not afraid, only believe. ~ Mark V. 36, #NFDB
532:Be not a slave of words. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
533:Boring’ is not a virtue. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
534:But nothing lasts forever. Not ~ Zoe Sugg, #NFDB
535:But not to our Muffin. ~ Dorothy B Hughes, #NFDB
536:But we’re not a family. ~ Scott Nicholson, #NFDB
537:Cheat me not with time, ~ Hilda Doolittle, #NFDB
538:Common sense is not so common. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
539:context is not meaning. ~ Claudia Rankine, #NFDB
540:different. Not only the ~ LaVyrle Spencer, #NFDB
541:Do not act under an impulse. ~ The Mother, #NFDB
542:Do not fear mistakes. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
543:Do not meditate on the mess. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
544:Do not press a desperate enemy. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
545:Do not take a blind guide. ~ Aristophanes, #NFDB
546:Do not worry, and worry. ~ Marilyn Monroe, #NFDB
547:Dreams are not negotiable. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
548:Drink wine, not labels. ~ Maynard Amerine, #NFDB
549:Either attempt it not, or succeed. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
550:Every tale is not to be believed. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
551:Failure is not an option ~ Vince D Writer, #NFDB
552:Freedom is not enough. ~ Lyndon B Johnson, #NFDB
553:Friends are born, not made. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
554:God deceiveth thee not. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #NFDB
555:God does not play dice. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
556:God does not play dice. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
557:God does not play favorites. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
558:Godliness is not perfection. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
559:Grief is not graceful. ~ Mariette Hartley, #NFDB
560:He who loves not lives not. ~ Ramon Llull, #NFDB
561:I am a verb, not a noun. ~ Tirza Schaefer, #NFDB
562:I am Caesar not Rex ~ Gaius Julius Caesar, #NFDB
563:I am different, not less ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
564:I am not a dog. I'm a Fox. ~ Nora Sakavic, #NFDB
565:I am not anyone's enemy. ~ Sun Myung Moon, #NFDB
566:I am not a ventriloquist. ~ Russell Banks, #NFDB
567:I am not Pele or Maradona ~ Robbie Savage, #NFDB
568:I am not the worst singer. ~ William Hung, #NFDB
569:I begin by not photographing. ~ Jeff Wall, #NFDB
570:Ideas do not need weapons. ~ Fidel Castro, #NFDB
571:I do not believe in Belief. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
572:I do not feign hypotheses. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
573:I do not judge the universe. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
574:If it's not a hit, switch. ~ Derek Sivers, #NFDB
575:I have not asked for life. ~ Omar Khayyam, #NFDB
576:I just am not good at math. ~ Phil McGraw, #NFDB
577:I'm a thinker not a talker. ~ David Bowie, #NFDB
578:I'm a wild lady. Not. ~ Kristin Chenoweth, #NFDB
579:I'm certainly not a prude. ~ Kim Cattrall, #NFDB
580:I'm certainly not fearful. ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
581:I'm insane, not forgetful. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
582:I’m living, but I'm not alive. ~ L J Shen, #NFDB
583:I'm not a big dancer! ~ Kristin Cavallari, #NFDB
584:I'm not afraid of aging. ~ Shelley Duvall, #NFDB
585:I'm not afraid of O.J. now. ~ Kato Kaelin, #NFDB
586:I'm not afraid, to take a stand ~ Eminem, #NFDB
587:I'm not an instinctive actor. ~ John Thaw, #NFDB
588:I'm not an urban person. ~ David Guterson, #NFDB
589:I'm not a sentimental guy. ~ Gene Hackman, #NFDB
590:I'm not a show-off by nature. ~ Kate Moss, #NFDB
591:I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek. ~ Danny Boyle, #NFDB
592:I'm not a very dark person. ~ Norah Jones, #NFDB
593:I'm not a white nationalist. ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
594:I'm not high maintenance. ~ Sienna Miller, #NFDB
595:I'm not just a warm body. ~ Kalayna Price, #NFDB
596:I’m not, like, that smart. ~ Paris Hilton, #NFDB
597:I'm not much of a dancer. ~ Billy Eichner, #NFDB
598:I'm not really a music guy. ~ Dave Attell, #NFDB
599:I'm not really into rap. ~ Magnus Carlsen, #NFDB
600:I'm not sixty, I'm "sexty. ~ Dolly Parton, #NFDB
601:I’m not so sure about him. ~ Sarah Waters, #NFDB
602:I'm not so weird to me. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
603:I'm not sure I'm adult yet. ~ Johnny Depp, #NFDB
604:I'm not that professional. ~ Andy Richter, #NFDB
605:I'm not very computer savvy. ~ Emma Stone, #NFDB
606:I'm not very good at lying. ~ Ruth Wilson, #NFDB
607:I'm so not a celebrity. ~ Kelly Macdonald, #NFDB
608:Is it not meningitis? ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
609:I think better when I'm not sober ~ Drake, #NFDB
610:It is immoral not to tell. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
611:It’s not often talked about, ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
612:it’s okay to not be okay. ~ Dot Hutchison, #NFDB
613:It's weird not to be weird. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
614:It's Wierd not to be Wierd. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
615:I will not be triumphed over. ~ Cleopatra, #NFDB
616:Learn to express, not impress. ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
617:Liberty is not enough. ~ Lyndon B Johnson, #NFDB
618:Love is not a promissory note. ~ Todd May, #NFDB
619:Make films, not war. ~ J Andrew Schrecker, #NFDB
620:Maruman does not loll. ~ Isobelle Carmody, #NFDB
621:Meg did not have long. She ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
622:Men and women are not equal. ~ Mel Gibson, #NFDB
623:Men are a luxury, not a necessity. ~ Cher, #NFDB
624:Men are not potatoes! ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
625:Mind is not your intelligence. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
626:Misery motivates, not utopia. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
627:murder is not polite. ~ Mignon G Eberhart, #NFDB
628:My friend, judge not me, ~ William Camden, #NFDB
629:My job does not define me. ~ Meg Wolitzer, #NFDB
630:My name is not important, ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
631:My soul is not for sale. ~ Caryl Chessman, #NFDB
632:Nature cared not a jot. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
633:Need is not love. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout, #NFDB
634:Needs could not bully her. ~ Michel Faber, #NFDB
635:No, his mind is not for rent ~ Neil Peart, #NFDB
636:Not-my cousin Helen. ~ Josephine Angelini, #NFDB
637:NOT MY DAUGHTER YOU BITCH!! ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
638:Not my daughter, you bitch! ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
639:Not Sushila.’ ‘Not Sushila. ~ Ruskin Bond, #NFDB
640:One does not love breathing. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
641:One Sallow does not make Summer. ~ Horace, #NFDB
642:Only death does not lie. ~ Sadegh Hedayat, #NFDB
643:Only idiots are not controversial. ~ Osho, #NFDB
644:Please don’t not panic!” The ~ David Wong, #NFDB
645:Presentation, not reference. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
646:Punish the deed, not the breed. ~ Pitbull, #NFDB
647:Reality is not relative. ~ Tony Bertauski, #NFDB
648:SEO is a race, not a sprint. ~ Neil Patel, #NFDB
649:Singing's not my real passion. ~ Skrillex, #NFDB
650:Sports are not for everyone. ~ Dante Hall, #NFDB
651:Swim downstream, not upstream, ~ J R Rain, #NFDB
652:Temerity is not always successful. ~ Livy, #NFDB
653:The center was not holding. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
654:There was a time when He was not. ~ Arius, #NFDB
655:The unyielding army will not win. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
656:(This is not a digression.) ~ N K Jemisin, #NFDB
657:This is not for you. ~ Mark Z Danielewski, #NFDB
658:This sentence is not true ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
659:Tis not to see the world ~ Matthew Arnold, #NFDB
660:To be or not to be. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
661:To have nothing is not poverty. ~ Martial, #NFDB
662:to not act is a choice too ~ Melissa Marr, #NFDB
663:To tell or not to tell? ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
664:Violence is not funny. ~ William Friedkin, #NFDB
665:Wales: not ALWAYS raining ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
666:We are not by nature cruel. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
667:We are not our parents, ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
668:We could not be happier. ~ Prince William, #NFDB
669:We do not know alone. Dracula ~ Eula Biss, #NFDB
670:Why not make it for always? ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
671:Words are not deeds. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
672:You are not your body. ~ Douglas Copeland, #NFDB
673:Your now is not your forever ~ John Green, #NFDB
674:Act your age, not your shoe size. ~ Prince, #NFDB
675:A different lover is not a sin ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
676:A fate is not a punishment. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
677:All flesh is not venison. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
678:And I’m not just saying that ~ Marie Force, #NFDB
679:A rock star does not age! ~ Anthony Kiedis, #NFDB
680:Art is seduction, not rape. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
681:Beauty is not just physical. ~ Halle Berry, #NFDB
682:Be curious not judgemental. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
683:Be curious, not judgmental. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
684:Being in love is not cool! ~ Alice Englert, #NFDB
685:Be inspired but not proud. ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
686:Be interested, not interesting. ~ Amy Sohn, #NFDB
687:Be not slow to visit the sick. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
688:But I’m not just my genes, Dad. ~ A S King, #NFDB
689:But reason does not govern love. ~ Moli re, #NFDB
690:careful not to overexpose ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
691:Church is not for spectators. ~ Tony Evans, #NFDB
692:Competence is NOT enough. ~ Bruce Kasanoff, #NFDB
693:Crying is not an option. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
694:Data is not intelligence. ~ William Binney, #NFDB
695:Do not be afraid of no, ~ Gwendolyn Brooks, #NFDB
696:Do not delay, ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
697:Do not pity the dead, Harry. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
698:DO NOT STARE AT THE FROG. ~ William Ritter, #NFDB
699:Do not waste your pity on a scamp. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
700:Don't rap if you do not practice. ~ Hopsin, #NFDB
701:Evil Is Not Born. Evil Is Made ~ V F Mason, #NFDB
702:Free Is Not a Business Model ~ Alex Moazed, #NFDB
703:Geological time is not money. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
704:Gesture is not always action. ~ Jay Maisel, #NFDB
705:Greatness is earned, not given. ~ J J Watt, #NFDB
706:Happiness dies when not shared ~ Baba Amte, #NFDB
707:Happiness is not being afraid. ~ Roy Keane, #NFDB
708:Hope is not an illusion. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
709:Hunger not to have, but to be ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
710:I am different, not less. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
711:I am hidden and I am not. ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
712:I am not a player anymore. ~ Michael Irvin, #NFDB
713:I am not a police fan at all. ~ Gaspar Noe, #NFDB
714:I am not sleepy at all! ~ Deepika Padukone, #NFDB
715:I am not what I am.. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
716:I didn't not perform. ~ Melissa Manchester, #NFDB
717:I do not function properly. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
718:I do not have OCD OCD OCD. ~ Emilie Autumn, #NFDB
719:I do not improvise in heels. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
720:I have a black look I do not ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
721:I have not been recognized. ~ Michael Dorn, #NFDB
722:I have not yet begun to fight, ~ Jay Winik, #NFDB
723:I love having fun! Why not? ~ Debbi Fields, #NFDB
724:I'm a condition, not a man. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
725:I’m after mercy, not religion. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
726:I’m a reader, not a fighter. ~ Chloe Neill, #NFDB
727:I'm not a big prop actor. ~ Nathan Fillion, #NFDB
728:I'm not a control maniac. ~ John Malkovich, #NFDB
729:I'm not a developer; I am. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
730:I'm not a fan of routine. ~ Conor McGregor, #NFDB
731:I'm not a girl. I'm a hatchet ~ Judy Grahn, #NFDB
732:I'm not a good guitar player. ~ Adam Jones, #NFDB
733:I'm not a huge fan of my work. ~ Tea Leoni, #NFDB
734:I'm not a nest-egg person. ~ Dwight Howard, #NFDB
735:I'm not a one-trick horse. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
736:I’M NOT buying it, Daniel. ~ Melissa Scott, #NFDB
737:I'm not dumb enough to be cool. ~ K I Hope, #NFDB
738:I'm not going to doubt my life. ~ Yoko Ono, #NFDB
739:I'm not in love with you. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
740:I’m not, like, that smart. ~ Paris Hilton, #NFDB
741:I'm not much of a conformist. ~ Mel Gibson, #NFDB
742:I'm not much of a jokester. ~ Adam Baldwin, #NFDB
743:I’m not ready. But I begin. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
744:I'm not vain, I'm insecure. ~ Mariah Carey, #NFDB
745:I'm still not sure I didn't die ~ Lou Reed, #NFDB
746:I said it was simple. Not easy. ~ Dan John, #NFDB
747:It is not confused. We are. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
748:It's not a house, it's a home. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
749:It's not as bad as it sounds. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
750:It’s not like you need it. ~ R L Mathewson, #NFDB
751:It's not okay to hate anybody ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
752:Its Not Over Until You Win.... ~ Les Brown, #NFDB
753:It’s not what it isn’t. ~ Jennifer E Smith, #NFDB
754:It's up to you, not fate. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
755:Jane Austen. Anyway, I’m not ~ Edna Ferber, #NFDB
756:Judge not, lest ye be judged. ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
757:Judge not, lest you be judged. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
758:Language has not the power to ~ John Clare, #NFDB
759:Laws are not made for the good. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
760:life is not as easy as you think it is ~ M, #NFDB
761:Life's not fair, get over it! ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
762:Live by faith, not by sight. ~ Mastin Kipp, #NFDB
763:Live not by lies! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
764:Love is not about lovers. ~ Santosh Kalwar, #NFDB
765:Make coffee, not war, ~ Douglas E Richards, #NFDB
766:Man delights not me. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
767:manslaughter, not murder. ~ John Lescroart, #NFDB
768:Man was not made for himself alone ~ Plato, #NFDB
769:married a giver, not a taker. ~ Kim Holden, #NFDB
770:My instincts are not comedic. ~ Josh Lucas, #NFDB
771:Nature knows not to trust us. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
772:No one knows me. Not anymore ~ Zo Marriott, #NFDB
773:Not all dangers are obvious. ~ Leah Cypess, #NFDB
774:Not all kitsch is sweet. ~ Karsten Harries, #NFDB
775:Not all pain is significant. ~ Scott Jurek, #NFDB
776:Not all prisons have bars ~ Amanda Hocking, #NFDB
777:NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST. ~ Sonja Yoerg, #NFDB
778:Not everyone has a purpose. ~ Phil Jackson, #NFDB
779:Not every place has a story ~ Paula McLain, #NFDB
780:Not funny ha ha, funny weird ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
781: not give a fuck ~ Oxford University Press, #NFDB
782:Not lost, but gone before. ~ Matthew Henry, #NFDB
783:Not my circus, not my monkeys. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
784:Not to ask is not be denied. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
785:Not valuing wealth prevents theft. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
786:One should not, after ~ Louis de Berni res, #NFDB
787:patriotism is not enough. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
788:Poetry’s not made of words ~ Ariana Reines, #NFDB
789:Privacy is not negotiable. ~ Paul Scofield, #NFDB
790:Raoul, you shall not pass! ~ Gaston Leroux, #NFDB
791:Reason is not what decides love. ~ Moliere, #NFDB
792:Reason is not what decides love. ~ Moli re, #NFDB
793:Sanity is not statistical. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
794:Send not a Catt for Lard. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
795:Silence is not lost time. ~ Gustavo Cerati, #NFDB
796:Sneakers are not my thing. ~ Barry Manilow, #NFDB
797:someday is not a day of a week ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
798:Stupidity is not a crime. ~ Alexei Navalny, #NFDB
799:Sugar is not a vegetable. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
800:Suicide is not a remedy ~ James A Garfield, #NFDB
801:That’s not even a thing. ~ Kristin Cashore, #NFDB
802:The future did not arrive. ~ John C Wright, #NFDB
803:The iguana was not invited. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
804:The Jews are not a nation! ~ Joseph Stalin, #NFDB
805:The mind is not sex-typed. ~ Margaret Mead, #NFDB
806:the model is not the diagram. ~ Eric Evans, #NFDB
807:The present will not long endure. ~ Pindar, #NFDB
808:The public are not stupid. ~ Pete Waterman, #NFDB
809:The world is not as it seems, ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
810:Things are not what they seem. ~ A S Byatt, #NFDB
811:Think not I am what I appear. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
812:Those who boast are not respected. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
813:THOU SHALT NOT, it told me. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
814:Thou shalt not ration justice. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
815:time flies, but not memories ~ Ika Natassa, #NFDB
816:To be, or not to be. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
817:To live - is that not enough? ~ D T Suzuki, #NFDB
818:To live is to not think. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
819:Trust not too much to appearances ~ Virgil, #NFDB
820:Truth does not demand belief. ~ Dan Barker, #NFDB
821:Unconcerned but not indifferent. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
822:Virtue is not always amiable. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
823:War is not a thing one wants. ~ Hans Frank, #NFDB
824:We are not the first ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
825:We can't fix what we do not address. ~ T I, #NFDB
826:We have nothing if not belief. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
827:We have nothing, if not belief ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
828:What is love if not a hunger? ~ Shobha Rao, #NFDB
829:When love is not accepted move on; ~ Rumi, #NFDB
830:Whoever is not too wise is wise. ~ Martial, #NFDB
831:Wisdom tells us we are not worthy; ~ Rumi, #NFDB
832:You are not a lottery ticket ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
833:You are not made of metaphors, ~ Sarah Kay, #NFDB
834:You are not the car you drive. ~ Brad Pitt, #NFDB
835:You are not your wounds. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
836:Your body is not a lemon! ~ Ina May Gaskin, #NFDB
837:Your now is not your forever. ~ John Green, #NFDB
838:Zeal should not outrun discretion. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
839:A broken promise is not a lie. ~ Paul Ekman, #NFDB
840:Act but do not react. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
841:An angel; or, if not, ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
842:Anything forced is not beautiful ~ Xenophon, #NFDB
843:Apologies are not pass/fail. ~ Randy Pausch, #NFDB
844:A real collector does not sell. ~ Eli Broad, #NFDB
845:Attraction is not an option. ~ Neil Strauss, #NFDB
846:A word is not simply a word. ~ Cynthia Hand, #NFDB
847:Be curious, not judgemental. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
848:Beef is not what Jay said to Nas; ~ Mos Def, #NFDB
849:Blind is he who will not see! ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
850:But fear not: I do underdog. ~ Maria Semple, #NFDB
851:But real life is not art. ~ Eleanor Cameron, #NFDB
852:but she did not need saving ~ Sarah MacLean, #NFDB
853:But we’re not buying camels. So ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
854:By nature I'm not a brooder. ~ Hugh Jackman, #NFDB
855:Christians are made, not born. ~ Tertullian, #NFDB
856:Copiers do not collaborate. ~ Antonio Gaudi, #NFDB
857:Courage is not fearlessness. ~ Shannon Hale, #NFDB
858:Culture is action, not words. ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
859:Cycling is not rocket science. ~ Jens Voigt, #NFDB
860:Derek—” “Not a fucking word. ~ Tessa Bailey, #NFDB
861:Dew depends not on Parliament. ~ James Otis, #NFDB
862:Do not get drunk on murder. ~ Reki Kawahara, #NFDB
863:Do not go to the garden of flowers! ~ Kabir, #NFDB
864:Do not indulge your weaknesses! ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
865:Do not kick against the pricks. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
866:Do not lie to the Scholar. ~ Philip Pullman, #NFDB
867:Do not scorn little victories. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
868:Duty would not rule our destiny ~ Ker Dukey, #NFDB
869:Everyone is not your customer. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
870:Excellent conquerors do not engage. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
871:Excellent soldiers are not furious. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
872:Excellent warriors are not violent. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
873:Failure Is Not Predictive ~ Jack D Schwager, #NFDB
874:Fear is not a choice. ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick, #NFDB
875:Genius does not excuse evil. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
876:Heaven is not a republic. ~ E A Bucchianeri, #NFDB
877:He who sleeps does not sin. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
878:Hope is not a financial plan. ~ Ric Edelman, #NFDB
879:I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. ~ Gerald R Ford, #NFDB
880:i am not a hotel room i am home ~ Rupi Kaur, #NFDB
881:I ask and wish not to appear ~ Charles Lamb, #NFDB
882:I could make it not matter. ~ Ellen Kushner, #NFDB
883:I do not favor the gag order. ~ Nancy Grace, #NFDB
884:I do not fear invisible worlds. ~ Ivo Andri, #NFDB
885:I do not have hostile eyebrows. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
886:I do not quote from the scriptures; ~ Kabir, #NFDB
887:I don't mind not being cool. ~ Chris Martin, #NFDB
888:I look normal but i'm not ~ Lisa Scottoline, #NFDB
889:I'm a lesbian. I'm not dead. ~ Jill Shalvis, #NFDB
890:I'm not a gay rights activist. ~ ASAP Rocky, #NFDB
891:I'm not a girl. I'm a genius. ~ Joanna Russ, #NFDB
892:I'm not a great piano player. ~ Norah Jones, #NFDB
893:I'm not a nice person. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, #NFDB
894:I'm not a patient person. ~ Lance Armstrong, #NFDB
895:I'm not fat. I'm fluffy! ~ Gabriel Iglesias, #NFDB
896:I’m not going to get any ~ Anthony Horowitz, #NFDB
897:I’m. Not. Letting. You. Go. ~ Pippa DaCosta, #NFDB
898:I'm not mad. I'm a writer. ~ Peter Milligan, #NFDB
899:I'm not really a girly girl. ~ Selena Gomez, #NFDB
900:I’m not scary, I’m ridiculous. ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
901:I'm not smart enough to lie ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
902:I'm not so much of a joiner. ~ Joshua Homme, #NFDB
903:I'm not such a public person. ~ Phillip Lim, #NFDB
904:I'm not wearing any underwear. ~ Maya Banks, #NFDB
905:I'm quite good at not writing. ~ Ian Mcewan, #NFDB
906:Industry need not wish. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
907:Invited or not, God is present. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
908:It is silly not to hope, ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
909:It's not art, it's science. ~ Billy Sheehan, #NFDB
910:It's not easy to define poetry. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
911:It's not love if it hurts. ~ Chuck Spezzano, #NFDB
912:It's not treason if you win. ~ Lisa Shearin, #NFDB
913:It's not "wishful" thinking. ~ Rhonda Byrne, #NFDB
914:It was a cookie, not a crack pipe. ~ J Lynn, #NFDB
915:I've never not been famous. ~ Quentin Crisp, #NFDB
916:I wanted proof, not promises. ~ Ann Aguirre, #NFDB
917:I want God, not my idea of God. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
918:I was not a trained actor. ~ Frankie Avalon, #NFDB
919:I would not have gone into Iraq. ~ Jeb Bush, #NFDB
920:Judge not that ye be not judged ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
921:Knowledge is not intelligence. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
922:Know what you do not know. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
923:Leave a mark, not a blemish. ~ Jessica Hagy, #NFDB
924:Lie not one to another. ~ Colossians III. 9, #NFDB
925:Life's not all about money. ~ Ozzy Osbourne, #NFDB
926:Like a shadow,
I am and I am not. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
927:Look not in my eyes, for fear ~ A E Housman, #NFDB
928:Loss is not as bad as wanting more. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
929:Love is blind but not deaf. ~ Gilbert Adair, #NFDB
930:Love is not a victory march ~ Leonard Cohen, #NFDB
931:Love light and not darkness. ~ Orphic Hymns, #NFDB
932:Love me...I am not evil. ~ Christopher Pike, #NFDB
933:Love your rage, not your cage. ~ Alan Moore, #NFDB
934:Man is not born to be happy. ~ Sarah Dunant, #NFDB
935:Manuscripts do not burn. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov, #NFDB
936:Maybe. Someday. Just not today. ~ T Torrest, #NFDB
937:Men were fools, whole or not. ~ Alec Hutson, #NFDB
938:My music is not lovely. ~ Arnold Schoenberg, #NFDB
939:myself run over if I’m not ~ Shalini Boland, #NFDB
940:Not all bits have equal value. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
941:Not all who wonders are lost. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
942:not all wounds gush blood ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
943:Not doing evil is happiness. ~ Gil Fronsdal, #NFDB
944:Not every job is a good job. ~ Henry Cavill, #NFDB
945:Not everyone can be an orphan. ~ Andre Gide, #NFDB
946:not everyone you lose is a loss ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
947:not fare well, but fare forward ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
948:Not funny ha ha, funny weird. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
949:Not here not there not anywhere! ~ Dr Seuss, #NFDB
950:Not his circus, not his monkeys, ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
951:Not if I know myself at all. ~ Charles Lamb, #NFDB
952:Not many people ask me out. ~ Marina Sirtis, #NFDB
953:Numbers behave, words do not. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
954:Ouch. Cursing—not so dashing. ~ Rachel Cohn, #NFDB
955:Peace to you, do not be afraid. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
956:Peace visits not the guilty mind. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
957:Pray, do not mock me. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
958:Readers are made not born. ~ Aidan Chambers, #NFDB
959:Reciprocity is not mandatory. ~ David Lubar, #NFDB
960:She would live now, not read. ~ Alice Munro, #NFDB
961:Skepticism does not sell well. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
962:Sophia Loren is not a citizen. ~ Phil Gramm, #NFDB
963:Start a business, not a startup ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
964:States are not moral agents. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
965:Stories are not a waste of time ~ Grace Lin, #NFDB
966:Study men, not historians. ~ Harry S Truman, #NFDB
967:The dead should not linger. ~ Sarwat Chadda, #NFDB
968:The job is not to get caught. ~ Holly Black, #NFDB
969:The Pig, if I am not mistaken, ~ Ogden Nash, #NFDB
970:The sky is not my limit...I am. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
971:The woods do not mean you well. ~ Anne Ursu, #NFDB
972:The world will not fall apart. ~ Keri Smith, #NFDB
973:The world will not wait for us. ~ Bob Hawke, #NFDB
974:This is not the place! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
975:This is so not a good idea. ~ Abby McDonald, #NFDB
976:Time flies, but not memories. ~ Ika Natassa, #NFDB
977:Time, not image, makes Heroes ~ Tony Reinke, #NFDB
978:To advise is not to compel. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
979:today to find whether or not ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
980:To me faith means not worrying ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
981:Touch not; taste not; handle not. ~ Various, #NFDB
982:True Yankees are born, not made. ~ Jay Mohr, #NFDB
983:Trust not one night's ice. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
984:Truth does not waver. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
985:Try not to wake up on fire. ~ Eugene Mirman, #NFDB
986:War is not a jobs program. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
987:We are not made of money. ~ Kristin Cashore, #NFDB
988:We are not the Red Indians. ~ Yasser Arafat, #NFDB
989:We are not thinking machines. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
990:We die, and we do not die. ~ Shunryu Suzuki, #NFDB
991:We do not suffer by accident. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
992:We're Mexican not Mexican't! ~ George Lopez, #NFDB
993:We’re not dating, remember. ~ Toni Anderson, #NFDB
994:What is life if not a gamble? ~ F E Higgins, #NFDB
995:Years do not always make age. ~ George Sand, #NFDB
996:You are either free or not free ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
997:You are not a lottery ticket. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
998:Your customer is not your user ~ Clara Shih, #NFDB
999:You're not going anywhere. ~ Joan Tollifson, #NFDB
1000:You were not wrong to dare. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
1001:4. Focus on product, not sales ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
1002:about him, although not many ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
1003:Adultery was a sin, not a crime. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1004:A life is not a waste of time ~ Nalini Singh, #NFDB
1005:All I know is I'm not a Marxist. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1006:All that shakes falles not. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
1007:And man will go on. Man, not men. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
1008:(and not in my poo corner), ~ Betty G Birney, #NFDB
1009:Anger's not a good emotion. ~ Lincoln Chafee, #NFDB
1010:Art does not tolerate reason. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1011:Attraction is not an option. ~ Neil Strauss, #NFDB
1012:A zebra can not change it's spots. ~ Al Gore, #NFDB
1013:A zebra does not change its spots. ~ Al Gore, #NFDB
1014:Be a caretaker, not an owner. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1015:Be just, and fear not. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1016:Be not solitary, be not idle ~ Robert Burton, #NFDB
1017:be you and not someone else ~ Anne McCaffrey, #NFDB
1018:Bliss is not subtractbale. ~ Odysseas Elytis, #NFDB
1019:Botox to me is not surgery. ~ Kim Kardashian, #NFDB
1020:Buffeted but not broken. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
1021:Chess is not for the timid. ~ Irving Chernev, #NFDB
1022:Courage does not always roar, ~ Tomi Adeyemi, #NFDB
1023:Courage is knowing what not to fear. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1024:Definitely not a Gertrude. ~ Robert Liparulo, #NFDB
1025:definitely not best friends ~ Paula Danziger, #NFDB
1026:Disillusionment is not truth. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
1027:Do not be amazed by the true dragon. ~ Dogen, #NFDB
1028:Do not be ashamed of help. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1029:Do not bonk the Juliette ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
1030:Do not fall in love with him! ~ Belle Aurora, #NFDB
1031:do not foul Shortbus. ~ Ashley Edward Miller, #NFDB
1032:Don't fix what's not broken. ~ Robert Atkins, #NFDB
1033:Don't think I'm not incoheret. ~ Harold Ross, #NFDB
1034:door in my face if you’re not ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
1035:EAT SANDWICH, NOT OWN MOUTH. ~ Lauren Conrad, #NFDB
1036:Fight the fighters, not their wars. ~ Banksy, #NFDB
1037:For I am the Lord, I achange not ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1038:Four a whore does not you make. ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
1039:Freedom does not mean license. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1040:Frustration is not a work plan. ~ Ami Ayalon, #NFDB
1041:God does not fail at what He does. ~ E N Joy, #NFDB
1042:God is creativity, not a Creator. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1043:God is God, and I'm not. ~ Stephen Mansfield, #NFDB
1044:God is not a dead equation! ~ Muhammad Iqbal, #NFDB
1045:God will not waste your pain. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
1046:governess was not in yet; then, ~ Anne Bront, #NFDB
1047:Grace does not make sin safe ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
1048:Great men are forged, not born. ~ Wesley Chu, #NFDB
1049:Great men are not so selfless. ~ Brent Weeks, #NFDB
1050:Greatness is not always good. ~ Melissa Grey, #NFDB
1051:Hands have not tears to flow. ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
1052:Happiness is not a potato. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
1053:He's just not that into you. ~ Greg Behrendt, #NFDB
1054:Hope does not disappoint. ~ Paul the Apostle, #NFDB
1055:I am a Count, Not a Saint. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1056:I am a count, not a saint. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1057:I am here but I am not yours. ~ Sarah Winman, #NFDB
1058:I am not a bat. ~ P C CastRephaim ~ P C Cast, #NFDB
1059:I am not good with others. ~ Gary Shteyngart, #NFDB
1060:I am not like most women. ~ Tiffany L Warren, #NFDB
1061:I am not the one who loves - ~ Leonard Cohen, #NFDB
1062:I did not lose myself all at once. ~ Amy Tan, #NFDB
1063:Idling is not my strong suit. ~ Cam Gigandet, #NFDB
1064:I do not die, I go forth from Time. ~ Lebrun, #NFDB
1065:I do not fear invisible worlds. ~ Ivo Andric, #NFDB
1066:I do not offer one to Jenny. ~ Steven Rowley, #NFDB
1067:I do not walk like a duck. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1068:if China is not our suzerain! ~ Pearl S Buck, #NFDB
1069:If you do not, you will not. ~ Matthew Kelly, #NFDB
1070:I hate not having what I want ~ Sarah Dessen, #NFDB
1071:I live because I do not exist. ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
1072:I'm a librarian, not an oracle. ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
1073:I'm a lover not a fighter. ~ Michael Jackson, #NFDB
1074:I'm a lover, not a fighter. ~ Rachel Hawkins, #NFDB
1075:I'm a nut, but not just a nut. ~ Bill Murray, #NFDB
1076:I’m a pirate, not an asshole. ~ Lisa Kessler, #NFDB
1077:I'm crazy, but I'm not stupid. ~ Jackie Chan, #NFDB
1078:I'm not afraid of anything. ~ Jeanne Calment, #NFDB
1079:I'm not a girl. I'm a genius. ~ Joanna Russ, #NFDB
1080:I'm not a good mother at all. ~ Steve Harvey, #NFDB
1081:I'm not a great poetry fan. ~ Rupert Everett, #NFDB
1082:I'm not a huge jewelry fan. ~ Felicity Jones, #NFDB
1083:I'm not a method actress. ~ Khandi Alexander, #NFDB
1084:I'm not a ranger, I'm a pilot. ~ Mark Bowden, #NFDB
1085:I'm not a royal family watcher. ~ Bill Nighy, #NFDB
1086:I'm not a top-five player yet. ~ Eden Hazard, #NFDB
1087:I’m not done with you yet. ~ Sharon C Cooper, #NFDB
1088:I'm not good at compromise. ~ Robert Redford, #NFDB
1089:I'm not like a performer type. ~ Dave Attell, #NFDB
1090:I'm not much of a joke writer. ~ Ben Falcone, #NFDB
1091:I'm not one for wardrobe. ~ Shirley MacLaine, #NFDB
1092:I'm not particularly prolific. ~ Martin Gore, #NFDB
1093:I'm not real good at romance. ~ Jeff Bridges, #NFDB
1094:I'm not really a femme fatale. ~ Carla Bruni, #NFDB
1095:I'm not the beautiful one. ~ Heather Donahue, #NFDB
1096:I'm not vanishing into thin air. ~ Kate Bush, #NFDB
1097:I'm not worried about Instagram. ~ J R Smith, #NFDB
1098:I'm really not that confident! ~ Leona Lewis, #NFDB
1099:I'm really not that fierce. ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
1100:I’m so happy I’m not a horse! ~ Jandy Nelson, #NFDB
1101:I'm young but I'm not stupid. ~ Abby Elliott, #NFDB
1102:I ran for myself, not Finland. ~ Paavo Nurmi, #NFDB
1103:I read books, not minds, Guido. ~ Donna Leon, #NFDB
1104:Itchy does not equal sexy. ~ Jennifer DeLucy, #NFDB
1105:I tell tales, not tea leaves. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1106:I thank you for not snoring. ~ Marlon Brando, #NFDB
1107:It is not failure to fail. ~ Roshani Chokshi, #NFDB
1108:it’s a war not easily won ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1109:It's not a bad time to be me. ~ Eddie Vedder, #NFDB
1110:Its not bragging if its true. ~ Sara Shepard, #NFDB
1111:It’s not kind to mock the stupid. ~ K M Shea, #NFDB
1112:I want to create, not kill. ~ Susanne Dunlap, #NFDB
1113:I was not a member of the SS. ~ Albert Speer, #NFDB
1114:I was not an attractive child. ~ Joan Rivers, #NFDB
1115:I was not born to be saved. ~ Rosamund Hodge, #NFDB
1116:I will not be a red queen ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB
1117:I will not be my father's dog. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1118:I won't be what I'm not. -Jing-mei ~ Amy Tan, #NFDB
1119:Judge them not equally. ~ Seth Grahame Smith, #NFDB
1120:Knowledge is not intelligence. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
1121:Liberation is not deliverance. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1122:Life is not some kind of play! ~ Osamu Dazai, #NFDB
1123:Look for systems, not heroes. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
1124:Love, and a cough, are not concealed. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1125:Love does not make you a fool. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
1126:Love is not an honorable sentiment ~ Colette, #NFDB
1127:Love not often, but forever. ~ Joanne Harris, #NFDB
1128:...luck is not to be coerced. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1129:Many of my poems are not sexual. ~ Thom Gunn, #NFDB
1130:Mental illness is not funny. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
1131:Mind is memory, not intelligence. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1132:Monsters are made, not born. ~ Louise Millar, #NFDB
1133:Most style is not honest enough. ~ F L Lucas, #NFDB
1134:My ignorance is not charming. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
1135:No, big is not important! ~ Sebastien Foucan, #NFDB
1136:Not a bad life's work. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde, #NFDB
1137:° “Not a ghost, but an angel. ~ Claudia Gray, #NFDB
1138:Not all change is progress. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
1139:Not all warriors used swords. ~ Debora Geary, #NFDB
1140:not at the same time—on insomnia. ~ J D Robb, #NFDB
1141:Not everyone talks in words. ~ Nema Al Araby, #NFDB
1142:Not follow me but follow the lyrics. ~ Rakim, #NFDB
1143:Not for no cold did freeze, ~ Torquato Tasso, #NFDB
1144:Not my will, but thine, be done. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1145:Not really,” Mason answered. ~ Kendra Elliot, #NFDB
1146:Not the why but the what. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1147:Old age is not for sissies. ~ Malcolm Forbes, #NFDB
1148:One did not dismiss kindness. ~ Meg Xuemei X, #NFDB
1149:Other people are not medicine. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
1150:Pain, thou art not an evil ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1151:Parts win prizes, not actors. ~ Alan Rickman, #NFDB
1152:People do not follow robots. ~ Jocko Willink, #NFDB
1153:Politics is not for sissies. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
1154:Progess, do not regress. ~ Edward C Prescott, #NFDB
1155:Reading is not optional. ~ Walter Dean Myers, #NFDB
1156:"Reason alone does not suffice." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1157:Remarks are not literature. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
1158:Shopping is Not Creating. ~ Douglas Coupland, #NFDB
1159:Shrews are made, not born. ~ Margaret Millar, #NFDB
1160:Simple mechanisms do not love. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1161:Some have patience. I do not. ~ Karina Halle, #NFDB
1162:spirituality is not a moral code. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
1163:Suddenly I'm not half the girl ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
1164:Talent is not sexually transmitted. ~ AJ Lee, #NFDB
1165:Teach us to care and not to care ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1166:Technology alone is not enough. ~ Steve Jobs, #NFDB
1167:The Improbable Is Not Impossible ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1168:The sun has not yet set for all time. ~ Livy, #NFDB
1169:The unforeseen does not exist, ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
1170:The unforeseen does not exist. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
1171:They're not mating are they? ~ Prince Philip, #NFDB
1172:This shed does not contain me. ~ Bill Bailey, #NFDB
1173:tidy by category, not by place. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1174:Time does not die; only people. ~ J F Lawton, #NFDB
1175:- To be, or not to be. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1176:To buy deare is not bounty. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
1177:To innovate is not to reform. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1178:To me faith means not worrying. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1179:Truth is not afraid of scrutiny. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1180:Vulnerability is not weakness. ~ Brene Brown, #NFDB
1181:War is not women's history. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
1182:We can live in fear, or not. ~ Nathan Lowell, #NFDB
1183:We do not become. We simply are. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
1184:We laugh, that we may not cry. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
1185:We need a doer, not a talker. ~ Bobby Jindal, #NFDB
1186:We’re not gay. We’re eight. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
1187:We’re not going to make it,” said ~ Ben Coes, #NFDB
1188:Whatever is not stone is light ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
1189:What has not wasting time impaired? ~ Horace, #NFDB
1190:What is love if not a risk? ~ Hailey Edwards, #NFDB
1191:Why should your heart not dance? ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1192:write a book they can’t not buy. ~ Bob Mayer, #NFDB
1193:You are not easily rescued ~ Caroline Kepnes, #NFDB
1194:You will not be a chip the richer. ~ Plautus, #NFDB
1195:Age is not important in relationship ~ Yoseob, #NFDB
1196:A hairstyle's not a lifestyle. ~ Jello Biafra, #NFDB
1197:Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1198:All the world's not a stage. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
1199:An agenda is not a bad thing. ~ Kathy Ireland, #NFDB
1200:And last but not the least ~ Robert Downey Jr, #NFDB
1201:And now I just want to not exist. ~ Jenny Han, #NFDB
1202:Atheists are not Americans. ~ George H W Bush, #NFDB
1203:A wedding is not house-keeping. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1204:Be confident, not certain ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
1205:Be just, and fear not. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1206:Bethlehem star. But we were not ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
1207:Bullet points are not the point. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
1208:Burn fear, not pages. ~ E E Charlton Trujillo, #NFDB
1209:By my heel, I care not. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1210:Cake is not the issue here. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1211:callous to the kind, not to ~ Meagan McKinney, #NFDB
1212:Cold or not, God is Present ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1213:Completion does not depend on ~ Robert Henri, #NFDB
1214:Daring is not safe against daring men. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1215:Darkness is not always a foe. ~ Susan Dennard, #NFDB
1216:Deal in what is, not what if. ~ David A Wells, #NFDB
1217:Do it with passion or not at all. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1218:Do not lose hope, nor be sad. ~ Koran, 3:139, #NFDB
1219:Do not mourn the dead with the belly. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1220:Do not read what you don't like ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
1221:DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU MONKEYS. ~ Jay Kristoff, #NFDB
1222:Do or do not, there is no try. ~ George Lucas, #NFDB
1223:Do what’s right, not what’s easy, ~ Hal Elrod, #NFDB
1224:experience was not yet my friend ~ Neil Young, #NFDB
1225:Failure is an event not a person ~ Zig Ziglar, #NFDB
1226:Failure is not your identity. ~ Asa Don Brown, #NFDB
1227:Fear is not God’s will for you. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
1228:Forget not
Regret not
Live ~ Kim Holden,#NFDB
1229:Fuck him. He’s not worth it. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
1230:Geography is not egalitarian. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
1231:Getting old is not for sissies. ~ Bette Davis, #NFDB
1232:Gluttony is not a secret vice. ~ Orson Welles, #NFDB
1233:God and His acts are not in time. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1234:Go, do not be afraid and serve ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1235:Grace is power, not just pardon. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1236:Greatness is won, not awarded. ~ Guy Kawasaki, #NFDB
1237:Grown men do not need leaders. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
1238:healers are born, not made. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
1239:He is not poor who has a competency. ~ Horace, #NFDB
1240:He's not my warlock. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1241:History is not was, it is. ~ William Faulkner, #NFDB
1242:Hizbullah is not a militia. ~ Bashar al Assad, #NFDB
1243:I act when I’m not in the mood. ~ T Harv Eker, #NFDB
1244:I always avoid not working. ~ Debbie Reynolds, #NFDB
1245:I am a writer, not a transcriber. ~ Ivan Doig, #NFDB
1246:I am good, but not an angel. ~ Marilyn Monroe, #NFDB
1247:I am not cruel, only truthful. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
1248:I am not much of a mind to touch ~ Stacey Jay, #NFDB
1249:I am not strong on perfection. ~ Jasper Johns, #NFDB
1250:I am not yet born; O fill me ~ Louis MacNeice, #NFDB
1251:Are we not all things? ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
1252:I cry for those not yet dead. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1253:I did not even finish my studies ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
1254:I do not believe in hypocrisy. ~ Vijay Mallya, #NFDB
1255:I do not believe in my death. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
1256:I do not grok the reference, ~ Vaughn Heppner, #NFDB
1257:I do not innovate. I transmit. ~ Andre Derain, #NFDB
1258:I do not judge the universe. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1259:I do not steal victory. ~ Alexander the Great, #NFDB
1260:I do not want to talk about it. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
1261:If I don't terrorize, I'm not Pop. ~ Iggy Pop, #NFDB
1262:I got ham but I'm not a Hamster ~ Bill Bailey, #NFDB
1263:I have decided not to die. ~ Kathryn Stockett, #NFDB
1264:I'm an angel not a frickin' saint. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
1265:I'm not a comic person at all. ~ Ciaran Hinds, #NFDB
1266:I'm not a competitive person. ~ Chris Elliott, #NFDB
1267:I'm not a feminist at all. ~ Kirsty Gallacher, #NFDB
1268:I'm not afraid to die, Alina. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
1269:I'm not a macroeconomics person. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
1270:I'm not ambitious. Not a bit. ~ Indira Gandhi, #NFDB
1271:I’m not a mistake, McKenzie, ~ Sandy Williams, #NFDB
1272:I'm not a real blond... Shocking. ~ Alona Tal, #NFDB
1273:Im not a redneck, Im from Texas. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
1274:I'm not counting any chickens. ~ Jeff Bridges, #NFDB
1275:I'm not crazy, i'm just sensitive ~ Alex Goot, #NFDB
1276:I'm not even a little bit dead. ~ Holly Black, #NFDB
1277:I'm not going anywhere, Kara. ~ Rhoda Belleza, #NFDB
1278:I'm nothing if not honest. ~ Richard Dreyfuss, #NFDB
1279:I’m not hurt. I’m appalled. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1280:Im not interested in fad songs. ~ Ryan Tedder, #NFDB
1281:I'm not interested in pop art. ~ Billy Corgan, #NFDB
1282:I'm not letting go of you" - Sam ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
1283:I’m not mad, but I should be. ~ Bella Forrest, #NFDB
1284:I'm not really an actress. ~ Khloe Kardashian, #NFDB
1285:I'm not really an animal person. ~ Ben Barnes, #NFDB
1286:I'm not really very ambitious. ~ James D arcy, #NFDB
1287:Im not revolted by Washington. ~ Kevin Spacey, #NFDB
1288:I'm not sure history has ended. ~ John Bolton, #NFDB
1289:I'm not that interesting! ~ Lindsay Davenport, #NFDB
1290:i'M nOT thOM yorkE but a. ROBOT. ~ Thom Yorke, #NFDB
1291:I'm not tough. I'm tenacious. ~ Padma Lakshmi, #NFDB
1292:Im not your biggest girly girl. ~ Maggie Siff, #NFDB
1293:I'm trying not to change. ~ Jennifer Lawrence, #NFDB
1294:Incredulity is not wisdom. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
1295:I promise you I’m not leaving. ~ Katy Regnery, #NFDB
1296:Is not poetry the food of love? ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
1297:It as non-existent (and not named). ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
1298:It is not a band. It is an idea. ~ Gerard Way, #NFDB
1299:It is not a war. It is murder. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1300:It is not right to glory in the slain ~ Homer, #NFDB
1301:It's a dark place, not knowing. ~ Nina LaCour, #NFDB
1302:It's not about the way you look ~ Mac Lethal, #NFDB
1303:It's not easy, but it's simple. ~ Eric Thomas, #NFDB
1304:It’s not lying, it’s flirting. ~ Neil Strauss, #NFDB
1305:It's not that I'm so smart. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1306:Its not who you love. Its how. ~ Ben Affleck, #NFDB
1307:I was not always a man of woe. ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
1308:I WILL NOT BE A DINOSAUR POO! ~ Kate Saunders, #NFDB
1309:Launch not beyond your depth ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
1310:Let's not go into the past. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
1311:Life is not a dress rehearsal. ~ Rose Tremain, #NFDB
1312:Life is not a noun, it's a verb. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1313:Life is not a popularity contest ~ Susun Weed, #NFDB
1314:Life is not that complicated. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
1315:Like it or not, life is a game. ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
1316:Look for causes, not villains. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
1317:Loss is not as bad as wanting more. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
1318:Love is dope, not chicken soup. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1319:love is not time's fool ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1320:Love is pain. It’s easier not to. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
1321:Love not Pleasure; love God. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
1322:Love's not only blind but deaf. ~ Alex Turner, #NFDB
1323:Making more money will not ~ Robert Kiyosaki, #NFDB
1324:Man is not meant to live alone. ~ Dorothy Day, #NFDB
1325:M. de Salaberry was not amused. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1326:Men are swine.”“Not all of us ~ Joe Schreiber, #NFDB
1327:Mobs have passions, not brains. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
1328:Modesty is not one of my virtues. ~ Alan King, #NFDB
1329:Most sex is not really intimate. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
1330:Mother Nature does not do bailouts. ~ Al Gore, #NFDB
1331:Music, not sex, got me aroused. ~ Marvin Gaye, #NFDB
1332:My character is not flawless. ~ Breckin Meyer, #NFDB
1333:My Jenn. Not Billy’s Jenn. Mine. ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
1334:my past does not equal my future. ~ Hal Elrod, #NFDB
1335:My wife's married. I'm not. ~ Charles Barkley, #NFDB
1336:Nobody likes not having freedom. ~ Snoop Dogg, #NFDB
1337:Not all events are stories. ~ Scarlett Thomas, #NFDB
1338:Not even winged monkeys Not even. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
1339:Not everything is about you. ~ Benedict Jacka, #NFDB
1340:Not having the best situation, ~ Marie Forleo, #NFDB
1341:not. I'm not done with you. ~ Magda Alexander, #NFDB
1342:Not the end.
Far from it. ~ Colleen Hoover,#NFDB
1343:Omissions are not accidents. ~ Marianne Moore, #NFDB
1344:One stroke fells not an oke. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
1345:One swallow maketh not summer. ~ John Heywood, #NFDB
1346:O, reason not the need! ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1347:Pain, thou art not an evil. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1348:Perseus, you are not the hero. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1349:Postpone not your life. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1350:power the Dark Lord knows not – ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
1351:Predators did not need mercy. ~ Conn Iggulden, #NFDB
1352:Primitive does not mean stupid. ~ Albie Sachs, #NFDB
1353:Religion is not in fault. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1354:Rock and menopause do not mix. ~ Stevie Nicks, #NFDB
1355:Rome was not built in one day. ~ John Heywood, #NFDB
1356:Seek His face and not His hand. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
1357:Seeming to do is not doing. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
1358:Shopkeepers are not bankers. ~ Laurent Fabius, #NFDB
1359:Some rebels are made, not born ~ Rosalyn Eves, #NFDB
1360:Sometimes love is not enough. ~ Sarah MacLean, #NFDB
1361:Spirit is a person, not a thing. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
1362:Straight, not straightened. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1363:Success is not a stop sign. ~ Robert Kiyosaki, #NFDB
1364:That's Chinese, not Japanese ~ Lauren Myracle, #NFDB
1365:That's not my cane," he said. ~ Layce Gardner, #NFDB
1366:The adverb is not your friend. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1367:The dread had not left my soul. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1368:The me I am is not the me I was. ~ Val Emmich, #NFDB
1369:The not-doing spoke volumes. ~ Charles M Blow, #NFDB
1370:The past is not what it was. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1371:There are ways to not get burned, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1372:These adaptations did not ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1373:The unenvied man is not enviable. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
1374:Thirty-four is not even old! ~ Mark Childress, #NFDB
1375:Though alone, he was not lost. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
1376:To know all things is not permitted. ~ Horace, #NFDB
1377:Too much slap, not enough tickle. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
1378:Too much success is not an advantage. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
1379:To what will love not stoop! ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB
1380:Treat the cause not the effect. ~ Edward Bach, #NFDB
1381:Tyranny must not prevail. ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB
1382:Unstoppable not because she ... ~ Beau Taplin, #NFDB
1383:Visibility is not equality. ~ Chelsea Manning, #NFDB
1384:War is not won by victory. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1385:We are not infinitely malleable ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
1386:We did not come to remain whole. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
1387:Weeping must not hinder worship. ~ T B Joshua, #NFDB
1388:We forgive but not forgotten ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
1389:We know not what we do ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
1390:We live not for ourselves… it’s ~ Kass Morgan, #NFDB
1391:We need a leader, not a reader. ~ Herman Cain, #NFDB
1392:We read to know we are not alone. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1393:We’re not thieves,” Father said. ~ J D Barker, #NFDB
1394:When shall we live if not now? ~ M F K Fisher, #NFDB
1395:White House "not only dead broke, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1396:Wisdom is earned, not given ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
1397:Women will not be free ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1398:You are not easily forgotten. ~ Greg Behrendt, #NFDB
1399:You. Are. Not. Leaving. Me. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
1400:You cannot not communicate. ~ Paul Watzlawick, #NFDB
1401:You're not tough. You're broken. ~ Gail Giles, #NFDB
1402:You're not wearing running shoes. ~ E L James, #NFDB
1403:Your silence is not acceptable. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
1404:Your will, not mine, O Lord. ~ David Jeremiah, #NFDB
1405:A failure is not always a mistake, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1406:A martini. Shaken, not stirred. ~ Sean Connery, #NFDB
1407:Am I really not worth shaving for? ~ Meg Cabot, #NFDB
1408:And, is not Virtue in Mankind ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
1409:Annabeth was not going to fall. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1410:An old dog barks not in vain. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
1411:Architecture is not about form ~ Peter Zumthor, #NFDB
1412:Art is not only about angst. ~ John Corigliano, #NFDB
1413:Art is the god you have not seen. ~ Mary Butts, #NFDB
1414:Be a father, if not, why bother, son? ~ Ed O G, #NFDB
1415:Be a river - not a reservoir. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
1416:Beauty is not caused. It is. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
1417:Be the flame, not the moth. ~ Giacomo Casanova, #NFDB
1418:Be thrifty, but not covetous. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
1419:Better not to give in to it. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
1420:Birth is nothing where virtue is not ~ Moliere, #NFDB
1421:Black is not as good as Purple. ~ Ralph Lauren, #NFDB
1422:Blood's not thicker than money. ~ Groucho Marx, #NFDB
1423:Choose to love the one who does not die ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1424:collaboration, not competition. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1425:Collect moments not things. ~ Karen Salmansohn, #NFDB
1426:Common sense is not too common. ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
1427:Dally not with mony or women. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
1428:Darkness is dawn not yet born. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
1429:Death and life were not ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
1430:Difference is not division. ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB
1431:Do not be afraid of confession! ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1432:Do not be hasty, that is my motto. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1433:Do not build the seventh row. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
1434:Do not encourage my behaviour. ~ Carlos Mencia, #NFDB
1435:Do not own negative self-talk. ~ Asa Don Brown, #NFDB
1436:Do not resist the one who is evil. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1437:Do not try to seem wise to others. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
1438:Dreams are not theirs to take! ~ Myles Kennedy, #NFDB
1439:Enthusiasm is caught, not taught. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1440:Espionage is not a cricket game ~ John le Carr, #NFDB
1441:Facts do not constitute truth. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
1442:Faith is lived, not thought. ~ Terryl L Givens, #NFDB
1443:Fall in love, not fool in love. ~ Alvi Syahrin, #NFDB
1444:Fate does not play jokes. ~ Gamal Abdel Nasser, #NFDB
1445:Fear is not one of my attributes. ~ Bernie Mac, #NFDB
1446:First of all, I'm not even tired. ~ Mo Willems, #NFDB
1447:Fondue is not a good date food. ~ James Corden, #NFDB
1448:Fools are not mad folks. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1449:Forced change is not true change; ~ Alan Cohen, #NFDB
1450:God does not look at your outer forms, ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1451:God help me, I'm just not that bright. ~ Homer, #NFDB
1452:God is love? Not bloody likely. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
1453:God tests, but he does not tempt. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
1454:Goodbyes are not forever ~ John Walter Bratton, #NFDB
1455:Good people are found, not changed. ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
1456:Gossip does not matter. We will be ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1457:Gray had not gotten better. ~ Sara Pennypacker, #NFDB
1458:Have you not seen that in our days ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1459:He’s Just Not That into You? ~ Catherine Bybee, #NFDB
1460:Hungry wailing standeth not aloof. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
1461:I am a fascist, not a racist. ~ Paolo Di Canio, #NFDB
1462:I am not accustomed to protocol. ~ Evo Morales, #NFDB
1463:I am not an Internet superstar. ~ John Hodgman, #NFDB
1464:I am not anti-cop, I am pro-cop. ~ Nancy Grace, #NFDB
1465:I am not yet born; O hear me. ~ Louis MacNeice, #NFDB
1466:I believe in deeds, not words. ~ Tamora Pierce, #NFDB
1467:I bend and do not break. ~ Jean de La Fontaine, #NFDB
1468:I bend but do not break. ~ Jean de La Fontaine, #NFDB
1469:i change by not changing at all ~ Eddie Vedder, #NFDB
1470:I do not know who I am tonight. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
1471:If He were apparent, He would not be. ~ Hermes, #NFDB
1472:If it's not tested, it's broken. ~ Bruce Eckel, #NFDB
1473:I have not seen Al Gore's movie. ~ Dick Cheney, #NFDB
1474:I like man, but not men. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1475:I'll repent one day, just not right now. ~ DMX, #NFDB
1476:I'm a ballplayer, not an actor. ~ Joe DiMaggio, #NFDB
1477:I'm an actress, not a celebrity. ~ Diana Quick, #NFDB
1478:I'm growing older, but not up. ~ Jimmy Buffett, #NFDB
1479:I'm not a big raised stage fan. ~ Tom Bergeron, #NFDB
1480:I'm not about hair and makeup. ~ Sienna Miller, #NFDB
1481:I'm not acting, but I am acting. ~ Tracey Gold, #NFDB
1482:I'm not a Hollywood party guy. ~ Jason Bateman, #NFDB
1483:I'm not a kid. I'M A SHARK! ~ Noelle Stevenson, #NFDB
1484:I'm not a lady, I'm a witch. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1485:I`m not a morning person. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
1486:I’m not broken, just scarred. ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB
1487:I’m not going anywhere,” Thalia ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1488:I'm not going to be lectured to. ~ Ann Coulter, #NFDB
1489:I'm not going to let our fans down. ~ Rex Ryan, #NFDB
1490:I'm not like a high intellectual. ~ Billy West, #NFDB
1491:I'm not Lisa, my name is Julie. ~ Jessi Colter, #NFDB
1492:I'm not looking for a paycheck. ~ Howard Stern, #NFDB
1493:I'm not looking for guidance. ~ Liam Gallagher, #NFDB
1494:I'm not Misbah, Mishah is not ~ Shahid Afridi, #NFDB
1495:I'm not really an impersonator. ~ Gilda Radner, #NFDB
1496:I'm not really into musicals. ~ Christian Bale, #NFDB
1497:I'm not really one for regrets. ~ David Bailey, #NFDB
1498:I’m not scary, I’m ridiculous.” I ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
1499:I'm not serious most of the time. ~ Tim Duncan, #NFDB
1500:I'm not Stubborn; I'm right! ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
3677 Integral Yoga
2268 Poetry
418 Philosophy
331 Mysticism
320 Occultism
287 Fiction
194 Christianity
140 Yoga
92 Psychology
74 Philsophy
48 Sufism
39 Science
34 Hinduism
26 Education
22 Mythology
22 Kabbalah
22 Buddhism
21 Zen
19 Theosophy
16 Integral Theory
8 Cybernetics
6 Baha i Faith
4 Taoism
1 Thelema
1 Alchemy
2036 The Mother
1614 Sri Aurobindo
1255 Satprem
580 Nolini Kanta Gupta
258 William Wordsworth
246 Walt Whitman
183 Percy Bysshe Shelley
165 William Butler Yeats
153 Aleister Crowley
144 Rabindranath Tagore
132 H P Lovecraft
122 John Keats
94 Friedrich Nietzsche
91 Carl Jung
82 Friedrich Schiller
77 Robert Browning
74 Ralph Waldo Emerson
68 James George Frazer
66 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
65 Plotinus
64 Jalaluddin Rumi
57 Sri Ramakrishna
57 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
52 Rainer Maria Rilke
52 Jorge Luis Borges
47 Edgar Allan Poe
40 Li Bai
40 Kabir
39 Anonymous
38 Swami Vivekananda
37 Swami Krishnananda
34 Saint Augustine of Hippo
33 Saint Teresa of Avila
33 Lucretius
32 Franz Bardon
32 A B Purani
31 Hafiz
30 Saint John of Climacus
29 Aldous Huxley
24 Rudolf Steiner
24 Hsuan Chueh of Yung Chia
22 Vyasa
22 Rabbi Moses Luzzatto
22 Aristotle
18 Farid ud-Din Attar
17 Omar Khayyam
16 Ibn Arabi
15 Nirodbaran
14 Ovid
13 Hakim Sanai
12 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
12 Plato
12 Paul Richard
11 George Van Vrekhem
10 Peter J Carroll
10 Lewis Carroll
9 Sri Ramana Maharshi
9 Mirabai
9 Dogen
8 Thomas Merton
8 Ramprasad
8 Norbert Wiener
8 Joseph Campbell
8 Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
7 Solomon ibn Gabirol
7 Jordan Peterson
7 Henry David Thoreau
7 Baha u llah
7 Alice Bailey
6 Thubten Chodron
6 Matsuo Basho
6 Lalla
6 Jetsun Milarepa
6 Jacopone da Todi
6 Bulleh Shah
6 Bokar Rinpoche
6 Al-Ghazali
5 Taigu Ryokan
5 Sarmad
5 Saint John of the Cross
5 Saint Francis of Assisi
5 Patanjali
5 Allama Muhammad Iqbal
4 Tao Chien
4 Mechthild of Magdeburg
4 Chuang Tzu
4 Baba Sheikh Farid
4 Alfred Tennyson
3 William Blake
3 Symeon the New Theologian
3 Shankara
3 Saadi
3 R Buckminster Fuller
3 Ravidas
3 Rabbi Abraham Abulafia
3 Naropa
3 Namdev
3 Nachmanides
3 Muso Soseki
3 Moses de Leon
3 Mansur al-Hallaj
3 Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
3 Ken Wilber
2 Wang Wei
2 Shiwu (Stonehouse)
2 Saint Therese of Lisieux
2 Saint Hildegard von Bingen
2 Saint Clare of Assisi
2 Mahendranath Gupta
2 Lu Tung Pin
2 Kahlil Gibran
2 Judah Halevi
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 Jean Gebser
2 Italo Calvino
2 Ikkyu
2 Ibn Ata Illah
2 H. P. Lovecraft
2 Genpo Roshi
2 Dante Alighieri
2 Alexander Pope
780 Record of Yoga
258 Wordsworth - Poems
231 Whitman - Poems
211 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
191 Prayers And Meditations
183 Shelley - Poems
165 Yeats - Poems
154 Agenda Vol 01
144 The Synthesis Of Yoga
136 Tagore - Poems
132 Lovecraft - Poems
129 Agenda Vol 13
122 Keats - Poems
121 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
118 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
102 Agenda Vol 12
100 Agenda Vol 08
96 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
94 Agenda Vol 10
85 Magick Without Tears
85 Agenda Vol 03
84 Agenda Vol 09
83 Agenda Vol 11
82 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
82 Schiller - Poems
82 Letters On Yoga III
81 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
81 Agenda Vol 04
80 Agenda Vol 07
80 Agenda Vol 06
77 Browning - Poems
74 Emerson - Poems
74 Agenda Vol 02
73 Agenda Vol 05
68 The Golden Bough
68 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
68 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
64 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
60 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
56 The Life Divine
56 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
55 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
52 Rilke - Poems
52 Questions And Answers 1956
51 Liber ABA
49 Savitri
49 Letters On Yoga IV
49 Letters On Yoga II
46 Poe - Poems
41 Questions And Answers 1953
40 Li Bai - Poems
40 Letters On Poetry And Art
39 Collected Poems
38 Rumi - Poems
38 Mysterium Coniunctionis
37 The Study and Practice of Yoga
37 Questions And Answers 1955
36 Words Of Long Ago
36 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
35 Questions And Answers 1954
34 The Divine Comedy
33 Of The Nature Of Things
32 Goethe - Poems
32 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
30 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
30 Songs of Kabir
30 Essays On The Gita
30 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
29 The Perennial Philosophy
29 Essays Divine And Human
28 The Bible
28 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
27 Letters On Yoga I
27 Borges - Poems
26 Words Of The Mother II
26 On Education
25 Labyrinths
25 Faust
24 The Practice of Psycho therapy
24 The Human Cycle
22 Vishnu Purana
22 The Future of Man
22 Poetics
22 General Principles of Kabbalah
22 City of God
21 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
21 Hafiz - Poems
21 Crowley - Poems
20 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
20 Bhakti-Yoga
19 The Way of Perfection
19 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
19 Initiation Into Hermetics
19 Anonymous - Poems
17 On the Way to Supermanhood
17 Let Me Explain
15 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
15 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
15 Isha Upanishad
14 The Secret Of The Veda
14 The Phenomenon of Man
14 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
14 Some Answers From The Mother
14 Metamorphoses
14 Aion
13 Vedic and Philological Studies
13 Twilight of the Idols
13 The Practice of Magical Evocation
13 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
13 Song of Myself
13 Hymn of the Universe
12 Theosophy
12 Talks
12 Raja-Yoga
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
12 Arabi - Poems
11 Preparing for the Miraculous
11 Kena and Other Upanishads
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 Dark Night of the Soul
10 Amrita Gita
10 Alice in Wonderland
10 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
9 Dogen - Poems
9 5.1.01 - Ilion
8 Words Of The Mother III
8 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
8 The Blue Cliff Records
8 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
8 Cybernetics
7 Words Of The Mother I
7 Walden
7 Maps of Meaning
7 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Red Book Liber Novus
6 The Gateless Gate
6 The Alchemy of Happiness
6 Tara - The Feminine Divine
6 Milarepa - Poems
6 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
6 Basho - Poems
5 Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit
5 Ryokan - Poems
5 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
4 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
4 Chuang Tzu - Poems
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 Book of Certitude
3 Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Sefer Yetzirah The Book of Creation In Theory and Practice
3 Naropa - Poems
3 Agenda Vol 1
2 The Prophet
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 The Essentials of Education
2 The Castle of Crossed Destinies
2 Symposium
2 Selected Fictions
2 Notes On The Way
2 Jerusalum
2 God Exists
2 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E
00.00 - Publishers Note A, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:00.00 - Publishers note A
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Publishers note
Publishers note
The present volume consists of the first seven parts of the book The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo which has run into twelve parts, as it stands now; of these twelve, parts five to nine are based upon talks of the Mother (given by Her to the children of the Ashram). In this volume the later parts of the Talks (8 and 9) could not be included: they are to wait for a subsequent volume. The talks, originally in French, were spread over a number of years, ending in about 1960. We are pleased to note that the Government of India have given us a grant to meet the cost of publication of this volume.
13 January 1972
00.00 - Publishers Note B, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:00.00 - Publishers note B
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Publishers note
Publishers note
The present volume consists of five parts of the book Yoga of Sri Aurobindo which has now run into twelve parts. Of these five parts, eight and nine are based on talks of the Mother given by Her, in French, to the children of the Ashram.
We are pleased to note that the Government of India have given us a grant to meet the cost of publication of this volume.
13 January 1973
00.00 - Publishers Note, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:00.00 - Publishers note
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Publishers note
Publishers note
We have pleasure in presenting the Second Volume of the Collected Works of Sri Nolini Kanta Gupta. The six books in this volume were originally published separately. The Essays are mainly concerned with Mysticism and Poetry.
We are happy to note that the Government of India have given to our Centre of Education a grant to meet the cost of publication of this volume.
The Mother has graciously permitted the use of her sketch of the author as a frontispiece to the book.
0 0.01 - Introduction, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This AGENDA ... One day, a nother 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-human 'reason.' And the surrounding tribes growled like red monkies in the twilight of Guiana.
--
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, a nother rhythm was born that was strangely in tune with the rhythm of all, making one single flow of the world, and there we went, lightly, as if the body had never had any weight other than that of our human thought; and the stars were so near, even the giant airplanes roaring overhead seemed vain artifices beneath smiling galaxies. A man was the overwhelming Possible. He was even the great discoverer of the Possible.
Never had this precarious invention had any other aim through millions of species than to discover that which surpassed his own species, perhaps the means to change his species - a light and lawless species. After rediscovering a million years in the great, rhythmic night, a man was still something to be invented. It was the invention of himself, where all was not yet said and done.
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?
--
It was at this point that we met Mother, at this intersection of the anthropoid rediscovered and the 'something' that had set in motion this unfinished invention momentarily ensnared in a gilded machine. For nothing was finished, and nothing had been invented, really, that would instill peace and wideness in this heart of no species at all.
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. A nother, a lighter air was throbbing in that breast, unburdened of its heavens and of its prehistoric machines. A nother Epic was beginning.
--
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.
We landed there, one day in February 1954, having emerged from our Guianese forest and a certain number of dead-end peripluses; we had knocked upon all the doors of the old world before reaching that point of absolute impossibility where it was truly necessary to embark into something else or once and for all put a bullet through the brain of this slightly superior ape. The first thing that struck us was this exotic notre Dame with its burning incense sticks, its effigies and its prostrations in immaculate white: a Church. We nearly jumped into the first train out that very evening, bound straight for the Himalayas, or the devil. But we remained near Mother for nineteen years. What was it, then, that could have held us there? We had not left Guiana to become a little saint in white or to enter some new religion. 'I did not come upon earth to found an ashram; that would have been a poor aim indeed,' She wrote in 1934. What did all this mean, then, this 'Ashram' that was already registered as the owner of a great spiritual business, and this fragile, little silhouette at the center of all these zealous worshippers? In truth, there is no better way to smother someone than to worship him: he chokes beneath the weight of worship, which moreover gives the worshipper claim to ownership. 'Why do you want to worship?' She exclaimed. 'You have but to become! It is the laziness to become that makes one worship.' She wanted so much to make them
become this 'something else,' but it was far easier to worship and quiescently remain what one was.
She spoke to deaf ears. She was very alone in this 'ashram.' Little by little, the disciples fill up the place, then they say: it is ours. It is 'the Ashram.' We are 'the disciples.' In Pondicherry as in Rome as in Mecca. 'I do not want a religion! An end to religions!' She exclaimed. She struggled and fought in their midst - was She therefore to leave this Earth like one more saint or yogi, buried beneath haloes, the 'continuatrice' of a great spiritual lineage? She was seventy-six years old when we landed there, a knife in our belt and a ready curse on our lips.
She adored defiance and did not detest irreverence.
No, She was not the 'Mother of the Pondicherry Ashram.' Then who was She? ... We discovered
Her step by step, as one discovers a forest, or rather as one fights with it, machete in hand - and then it melts, one loves, so sublime does it become. Mother grew beneath our skin like an adventure of life and death. For seven years we fought with Her. It was fascinating, detestable, powerful and sweet; we felt like screaming and biting, fleeing and always coming back: 'Ah! You won't catch me! If you think I came here to worship you, you're wrong!' And She laughed. She always laughed.
We had our bellyful of adventure at last: if you go astray in the forest, you get delightfully lost yet still with the same old skin on your back, whereas here, there is nothing left to get lost in! It is no longer just a matter of getting lost - you have to CHANGE your skin. Or die. Yes, change species.
Or become one more nauseating little worshipper - which was not on our program. 'We are the enemy of our own conception of the Divine,' She told us one day with her mischievous little smile.
The whole time - or for seven years, in any event - we fought with our conception of God and the
'spiritual life': it was all so comfortable, for we had a supreme 'symbol' of it right there. She let us do as we pleased, She even opened up all kinds of little heavens in us, along with a few hells, since they go together. She even opened the door in us to a certain 'liberation,' which in the end was as soporific as eternity - but there was nowhere to get out: it WAS eternity. We were trapped on all sides. There was nothing left but these 4m2 of skin, the last refuge, that which we wanted to flee by way of above or below, by way of Guiana or the Himalayas. She was waiting for us just there, at the end of our spiritual or not so spiritual pirouettes. Matter was her concern. It took us seven years to understand that She was beginning there, 'where the other yogas leave off,' as Sri Aurobindo had already said twenty-five years earlier. It was necessary to have covered all the paths of the Spirit and all those of Matter, or in any case a large number geographically, before discovering, or even simply understanding, that 'something else' was really Something Else. It was not an improved
Spirit nor even an improved Matter, but ... it could be called ' nothing,' so contrary was it to all we know. For the caterpillar, a butterfly is nothing, it is not even visible and has nothing in common with caterpillar heavens nor even caterpillar matter. So there we were, trapped in an impossible adventure. One does not return from there: one must cross the bridge to the other side. Then one day in that seventh year, while we still believed in liberations and the collected Upanishads, highlighted with a few glorious visions to relieve the commonplace (which remained appallingly commonplace), while we were still considering 'the Mother of the Ashram' rather like some spiritual super-director (endowed, albeit, with a disarming yet ever so provocative smile, as though
She were making fun of us, then loving us in secret), She told us, 'I have the feeling that ALL we have lived, ALL we have known, ALL we have done is a perfect illusion ... When I had the spiritual experience that material life is an illusion, personally I found that so marvelously beautiful and happy that it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, but now it is the entire spiritual structure as we have lived it that is becoming an illusion! - not the same illusion, but an illusion far worse. And I am no baby: I have been here for forty-seven years now!' Yes, She was eighty-three years old then. And that day, we ceased being 'the enemy of our own conception of the Divine,' for this entire Divine was shattered to pieces - and we met Mother, at last. This mystery we call
Mother, for She never ceased being a mystery right to her ninety-fifth year, and to this day still, challenges us from the other side of a wall of invisibility and keeps us floundering fully in the mystery - with a smile. She always smiles. But the mystery is not solved.
Perhaps this AGENDA is really an endeavor to solve the mystery in the company of a certain
--
Where, then, was 'the Mother of the Ashram' in all this? What is even 'the Ashram,' if not a spiritual museum of the resistances to Something Else. They were always - and still today - reciting their catechism beneath a little flag: they are the owners of the new truth. But the new truth is laughing in their faces and leaving them high and dry at the edge of their little stagnant pond. They are under the illusion that Mother and Sri Aurobindo, twenty-seven or four years after their respective departures, could keep on repeating themselves - but then they would not be Mother and
Sri Aurobindo! They would be fossils. The truth is always on the move. It is with those who dare, who have courage, and above all the courage to shatter all the effigies, to de-mystify, and to go
TRULY to the conquest of the new. The 'new' is painful, discouraging, it resembles nothing we know! We can not hoist the flag of an unconquered country - but this is what is so marvelous: it does not yet exist. We must MAKE IT EXIST. The adventure has not been carved out: it is to be carved out. Truth is not entrapped and fossilized, 'spiritualized': it is to be discovered. We are in a nothing that we must force to become a something. We are in the adventure of the new species. A new species is obviously contradictory to the old species and to the little flags of the alreadyknown. It has nothing in common with the spiritual summits of the old world, nor even with its abysms - which might be delightfully tempting for those who have had enough of the summits, but everything is the same, in black or white, it is fraternal above and below. SOMETHING ELSE is needed.
'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 can not 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' - a nother 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.
Mother is the story of the free Earth. Free from its spiritual and scientific parrots. Free from its little ashrams as well - for there is nothing more persistent than those particular parrots.
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 a nother 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 a nother, 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.
--
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. 'A nother 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
Publishers note Mystic Symbolism
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Approach to Mysticism
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Mysticism is not only a science but also, and in a greater degree, an art. To approach it merely as a science, as the modern mind attempts to do, is to move towards futility, if not to land in positive disaster. Sufficient stress is not laid on this aspect of the matter, although the very crux of the situation lies here. The mystic domain has to be apprehended not merely by the true mind and understanding but by the right temperament and character. Mysticism is not merely an object of knowledge, a problem for inquiry and solution, it is an end, an ideal that has to be achieved, a life that has to be lived. The mystics themselves have declared long ago with no uncertain or faltering voice: this can not be attained by intelligence or much learning, it can be seized only by a purified and clear temperament.
The warning seems to have fallen, in the modern age, on unheeding ears. For the modern mind, being pre-eminently and uncompromisingly scientific, can entertain no doubt as to the perfect competency of science and the scientific method to seize and unveil any secret of Nature. If, it is argued, mysticism is a secret, if there is at all a truth and reality in it, then it is and must be amenable to the rules and regulations of science; for science is the revealer of Nature's secrecies.
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 a nother. 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 k not 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.
Mystic realities can not be reached by the scientific consciousness, because they are far more subtle than the subtlest object that science can contemplate. The neutrons and positrons are for science today the finest and profoundest object-forces; they belong, it is said, almost to a borderl and where physics ends. Nor for that reason is a mystic reality something like a mathematical abstraction, -n for example. The mystic reality is subtler than the subtlest of physical things and yet, paradoxical to say, more concrete than the most concrete thing that the senses apprehend.
Furthermore, being so, the mystic domain is of infinitely greater potency than the domain of intra-atomic forces. If one comes, all on a sudden, into contact with a force here without the necessary preparation to hold and handle it, he may get seriously bruised, morally and physically. The adventure into the mystic domain has its own toll of casualtiesone can lose the mind, one can lose one's body even and it is a very common experience among those who have tried the path. It is not in vain and merely as a poetic metaphor that the ancient seers have said
Kurasya dhr niit duratyay1
--
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 true knowledge comes of, and means, identity of being. All other knowledge may be an apprehension of things but not comprehension. In the former, the knower stands apart from the object and so can envisage only the outskirts, the contour, the surface nature; the mind is capable of this alone. But comprehension means an embracing and penetration which is possible when the knower identifies himself with the object. And when we are so identified we not merely know the object, but becoming it in our consciousness, we love it and live it.
The mystic's knowledge is a part and a formation of his life. That is why it is a knowledge not abstract and remote but living and intimate and concrete. It is a knowledge that pulsates with delight: indeed it is the radiance that is shed by the purest and intensest joy. For this reason it may be that in approaching through the heart there is a chance of one's getting arrested there and not caring for the still higher, the solar lights; but this need not be so. In the heart there is a golden door leading to the deepest delights, but there is also a diamond door opening up into the skies of the brightest luminosities.
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 human 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.
There are modes of knowledge that are occultand to that extent mystic and can be mastered by practices in which the heart has no share. But they have not the saving grace that comes by the touch of the Divine. They are not truly mystic the truly mystic belongs to the ultimate realities, the deepest and the highest,they, on the other hand, are transverse and tangential movements belonging to an intermediate region where light and obscurity are mixed up and even for the greater part the light is swallowed up in the obscurity or utilised by it.
The mystic's knowledge and experience is not only true and real: it is delightful and blissful. It has a supremely healing virtue. It brings a sovereign freedom and ease and peace to the mystic himself, but also to those around him, who come in contact with him. For truth and reality are made up of love and harmony, because truth is, in its essence, unity.
Sharp as a razor's edge, difficult of going, hard to traverse is that path!"
--
Publishers note Mystic Symbolism
00.01 - The Mother on Savitri, #Sweet Mother - Harmonies of Light, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The sadhak, after returning from the Mother, wanted to note down immediately what She had said, but he could not do so because he felt a great hesitation due to his sense of incapacity to transcribe exactly the Mother`s own words.
After nearly seven years, however, he felt a strong urge to note down what the Mother had spoken; so in 1967 he wrote down from memory a report in French. The report was seen by the Mother and a few corrections were made by her. To a nother sadhak who asked Her permission to read this report She wrote: "Years ago I have spoken at length about it [Savitri] to Mona Sarkar and he has noted in French what I said. Some time back I have seen what he has written and found it correct on the whole."(4.12.1967)
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?
--
not much, but I like poetry, it is because of that I read it.
It does not matter if you do not understand it - Savitri, read it always. You will see that every time you read it, something new will be revealed to you. Each time you will get a new glimpse, each time a new experience; things which were not there, things you did not understand arise and suddenly become clear. Always an unexpected vision comes up through the words and lines. Every time you try to read and understand, you will see that something is added, something which was hidden behind is revealed clearly and vividly. I tell you the very verses you have read once before, will appear to you in a different light each time you re-read them. This is what happens invariably. Always your experience is enriched, it is a revelation at each step.
But you must not read it as you read other books or newspapers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought; you must concentrate much, remain empty, calm and open; then the words, rhythms, vibrations will penetrate directly to this white page, will put their stamp upon the brain, will explain themselves without your making any effort.
Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to meditate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs. For him who wishes to follow this path, it is a concrete help as though the Lord himself were taking you by the hand and leading you to the destined goal. And then, every question, however personal it may be, has its answer here, every difficulty finds its solution herein; indeed there is everything that is necessary for doing the Yoga.
--
You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me, *I am impelled to launch on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still, I do not know how far I shall succeed. I pray for help.* And you know what it was? It was - before beginning, I warn you in advance - it was His way of speaking, so full of divine humility and modesty. He never... *asserted Himself*. And the day He actually began it, He told me: *I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.* And once having started, He wrote page after page without intermission, as though it were a thing already complete up there and He had only to transcribe it in ink down here on these pages.
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 German 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 can not 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 can not 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 can not 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 can not 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 human 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 can not 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.
Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, Tapasya, Sadhana, everything, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo reveals there for us. This is the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble. - 5 November 1967
00.02 - Mystic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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 a nother 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.
But those who do speak, how do they choose their figures and symbols? What is their methodology? For it might be said, since the unseen and the seen differ out and out, it does not matter what forms or signs are taken from the latter; for any meaning and significance could be put into anything. But in reality, it does not so happen. For, although there is a great divergence between figures and symbols on the one hand and the things figured and symbolised on the other, still there is also some link, some common measure. And that is why we see not unoften the same or similar figures and symbols representing an identical experience in ages and countries far apart from each other.
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 can not 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 a nother 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.
And there is such a commensurability or parallelism between the various levels of consciousness, in and through all the differences that separate them from one a nother. Thus an object or a movement apprehended on the physical plane has a sort of line of re-echoing images extended in a series along the whole gradation of the inner planes; otherwise viewed, an object or movement in the innermost consciousness translates itself in varying modes from plane to plane down to the most material, where it appears in its grossest form as a concrete three-dimensional object or a mechanical movement. This parallelism or commensurability by virtue of which the different and divergent states of consciousness can portray or represent each other is the source of all symbolism.
0 0.02 - Topographical Note, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:0_0.02 - Topographical note
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Topographical note
From the time of Sri Aurobindo's departure (1950) until 1957, we have only a few notes and fragments or rare statements noted from memory. These are the only landmarks of this period, along with Mother's Questions and Answers from her talks at the Ashram Playground. A few of these conversations have been reproduced here insofar as they mark stages of the Supramental
Action.
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Mother would be seated in this rather medieval-looking chair with its high, carved back, her feet on a little tabouret, while we sat on the floor, on a slightly faded carpet, conquered and seduced, revolted and never satisfied - but nevertheless, very interested. Treasures, never noted down, were lost until, with the cunning of the Sioux, we succeeded in making Mother consent to the presence of a tape recorder. But even then, and for a long time thereafter, She carefully made us erase or delete in our notes all that concerned Her rather too personally - sometimes we disobeyed Her.
But finally we were able to convince Her of the value inherent in keeping a chronicle of the route.
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,
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From 1960, the Agenda took its final shape arid grew for thirteen years, until May 1973, filling thirteen volumes in all (some six thousand pages), with a change of setting in March 1962 at the time of the Great Turning in Mother's yoga when She permanently retired to her room upstairs, as had Sri Aurobindo in 1926. The interviews then took place high up in this large room carpeted in golden wool, like a ship's stateroom, amidst the rustling of the Copper Pod tree and the cawing of crows. Mother would sit in a low rosewood chair, her face turned towards Sri Aurobindo's tomb, as though She were wearing down the distance separating that world from our own. Her voice had become like that of a child, one could hear her laughter. She always laughed, this Mother. And then her long silences. Until the day the disciples closed her door on us. It was May 19, 1973. We did not want to believe it. She was alone, just as we were suddenly alone. Slowly, painfully, we had to discover the why of this rupture. We understood nothing of the jealousies of the old species, we did not yet realize that they were becoming the 'owners' of Mother - of the Ashram, of Auroville, of
Sri Aurobindo, of everything - and that the new world was going to be denatured into a new
0 0.03 - 1951-1957. Notes and Fragments, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:0_0.03 - 1951-1957. notes and Fragments
class:chapter
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A certain rationalistic critic divides the Upanishadic symbols into three categoriesthose that are rational and can be easily understood by the mind; those that are not understood by the mind and yet do not go against reason, having nothing inherently irrational in them and may be simply called non-rational; those that seem to be quite irrational, for they go frankly against all canons of logic and common sense. As an example of the last, the irrational type, the critic cites a story from the Chhndogya, which may be rendered thus:
There was an aspirant, a student who was seeking after knowledge. One day there appeared to him a white dog. Soon, other dogs followed and addressed their predecessor: "O Lord, sing to our Food, for we desire to eat." The white dog answered, "Come to me at dawn here in this very place." The aspirant waited. The dogs, like singer-priests, circled round in a ring. Then they sat and cried aloud; they cried out," Om We eat and Om we drink, may the gods bring here our food."
Now, before any explanation is attempted it is important to bear in mind that the Upanishads speak of things experienced not merely thought, reasoned or argued and that these experiences belong to a world and consciousness other than that of the mind and the senses. One should naturally expect here a different language and mode of expression than that which is appropriate to mental and physical things. For example, the world of dreams was once supposed to be a sheer chaos, a mass of meaningless confusion; but now it is held to be quite otherwise. Psychological scientists have discovered a methodeven a very well-defined and strict methodin the madness of that domain. It is an ordered, organised, significant world; but its terminology has to be understood, its code deciphered. It is not a jargon, but a foreign language that must be learnt and mastered.
In the same way, the world of spiritual experiences is also something methodical, well-organized, significant. It may not be and is not the rational world of the mind and the sense; but it need not, for that reason, be devoid of meaning, mere fancifulness or a child's imagination running riot. Here also the right key has to be found, the grammar and vocabulary of that language mastered. And as the best way to have complete mastery of a language is to live among the people who speak it, so, in the matter of spiritual language, the best and the only way to learn it is to go and live in its native country.
Now, as regards the interpretation of the story cited, should not a suspicion arise naturally at the very outset that the dog of the story is not a dog but represents something else? First, a significant epithet is given to itwhite; secondly, although it asks for food, it says that Om is its food and Om is its drink. In the Vedas we have some references to dogs. Yama has twin dogs that "guard the path and have powerful vision." They are his messengers, "they move widely and delight in power and possess the vast strength." The Vedic Rishis pray to them for Power and Bliss and for the vision of the Sun1. There is also the Hound of Heaven, Sarama, who comes down and discovers the luminous cows stolen and hidden by the Panis in their dark caves; she is the path-finder for Indra, the deliverer.
My suggestion is that the dog is a symbol of the keen sight of Intuition, the unfailing perception of direct knowledge. With this clue the Upanishadic story becomes quite sensible and clear and not mere abracadabra. To the aspirant for Knowledge came first a purified power of direct understanding, an Intuition of fundamental value, and this brought others of the same species in its train. They were all linked together organically that is the significance of the circle, and formed a rhythmic utterance and expression of the supreme truth (Om). It is also to be noted that they came and met at dawn to chant, the Truth. Dawn is the opening and awakening of the consciousness to truths that come from above and beyond.
It may be asked why the dog has been chosen as the symbol of Intuition. In the Vedas, the cow and the horse also play a large part; even the donkey and the frog have their own assigned roles. These objects are taken from the environment of ordinary life, and are those that are most familiar to the external consciousness, through which the inner experiences have to express themselves, if they are to be expressed at all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly speaking, however, symbols are not chosen in a subtle or spiritual experience, that is to say, they are not arbitrarily selected and constructed by the conscious intelligence. They form part of a dramatization (to use a term of the Freudian psychology of dreams), a psychological alchemy, whose method and process and rationale are very obscure, which can be penetrated only by the vision of a third eye.
I. The Several Lights
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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 Atman 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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The Gods are the formations or particularisations of the Truth-consciousness, the multiple individualisations of the One spirit. The Pitris are the Divine Fathers, that is to say, souls that once laboured and realised here below, and now have passed beyond. They dwell in a nother world, not too far removed from the earth, and from there, with the force of their Realisation, lend a more concrete help and guidance to the destiny that is being worked out upon earth. They are forces and formations of consciousness in an intermediate region between Here and There (antarika), and serve to bring men and gods nearer to each other, inasmuch as they belong to both the categories, being a divinised humanity or a humanised divinity. Each fixation of the Truth-consciousness in an earthly mould is a thing of joy to the Pitris; it is the Svadh or food by which they live and grow, for it is the consolidation and also the resultant of their own realisation. The achievements of the sons are more easily and securely reared and grounded upon those of the forefa thers, whose formative powers we have to invoke, so that we may pass on to the realisation, the firm embodiment of higher and greater destinies.
III. The Path of the Fathers and the Path of the Gods
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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 human 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 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.
Of the three fires one is the upholderhe who gives the firm foundation, the stable house where the Sacrifice is performed and Truth realised; the second is the Knower, often called in the Veda jtaved, who guides and directs; and the third the Doer, the effective Power, the driving Energyvaivnara.
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Fire represents the Heart. It is that which gives the inner motive to the forces of life, it is the secret inspiration and aspiration that drive the movements of life. It is the heat of consciousness, the ardour of our central being that lives in the Truth and accepts nothing, nothing but the Truth. It is the pure and primal energy of our divine essence, driving ever upward and onward life's course of evolution.
Air is Mind, the world of thought, of conscious formation; it is where life-movements are taken up and given a shape or articulate formula for an organised expression. The forms here have not, however, the concrete rigidity of Matter, but are pliant and variable and fluidin fact, they are more in the nature of possibilities, rather than actualities. The Vedic Maruts are thought-gods, and lndra (the Luminous Mind), their king, is called the Fashioner of perfect forms.
Ether or Space is the infinitude of the Spirit, the limitless Presence that dwells in and yet transcends the body, the life the heart and the mind.
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The biological process, described in what may seem to be crude and mediaeval terms, really reflects or echoes a more subtle and psychological process. The images used form perhaps part of the current popular notion about the matter, but the esoteric sense goes beyond the outer symbols. The sky seems to be the far and tenuous region where the soul rests and awaits its next birthit is the region of Soma, the own Home of Bliss and Immortality. Now when the time or call comes, the soul stirs and journeys down that is the Rain. Next, it enters the earth atmosphere and clothes itself with the earth consciousness. Then it waits and calls for the formation of the material body, first by the contri bution of the father and then by that of the mother; when these two unite and the material body is formed, the soul incarnates.
Apart from the question whether the biological phenomenon described is really a symbol and a cloak for a nother order of reality, and even taking it at its face value, what is to be noted here is the idea of a cosmic cycle, and a cosmic cycle that proceeds through the principle of sacrifice. If it is asked what there is wonderful or particularly spiritual in this rather naf description of a very commonplace happening that gives it an honoured place in the Upanishads, the answer is that it is wonderful to see how the Upanishadic Rishi takes from an event its local, temporal and personal colour and incorporates it in a global movement, a cosmic cycle, as a limb of the Universal Brahman. The Upanishads contain passages which a puritanical mentality may perhaps describe as 'pornographic'; these have in fact been put by some on the Index expurgatorius. But the ancients saw these matters with other eyes and through a nother consciousness.
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 human 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.
VII. The Cosmic and the Transcendental
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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: Sarvamanveti 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.
Elsewhere the Upanishad describes more graphically this truth and the experience of it. It is said there that the sun has fivewe note the familiar fivemovements of rising and setting: (i) from East to West, (ii) from South to North, (iii) from West to East, (iv) from North to South and (v) from abovefrom the Zenithdownward. These are the five normal and apparent movements. But there is a sixth one; rather it is not a movement, but a status, where the sun neither rises nor sets, but is always visible fixed in the same position.
Some Western and Westernised scholars have tried to show that the phenomenon described here is an exclusively natural phenomenon, actually visible in the polar region where the sun never sets for six months and moves in a circle whose plane is parallel to the plane of the horizon on the summer solstice and is gradually inclined as the sun regresses towards the equinox (on which day just half the solar disc is visible above the horizon). The sun may be said there to move in the direction East-South-West-North and again East. Indeed the Upanishad mentions the positions of the sun in that order and gives a character to each successive station. The Ray from the East is red, symbolising the Rik, the Southern Ray is white, symbolising the Yajur, the Western Ray is black symbolising the Atharva. The natural phenomenon, however, might have been or might not have been before the mind's eye of the Rishi, but the symbolism, the esotericism of it is clear enough in the way the Rishi speaks of it. Also, apart from the first four movements (which it is already sufficiently difficult to identify completely with what is visible), the fifth movement, as a separate descending movement from above appears to be a foreign element in the context. And although, with regard to the sixth movement or status, the sun is visible as such exactly from the point of the North Pole for a while, the ring of the Rishi's utterance is unmistakably spiritual, it can not but refer to a fact of inner consciousness that is at least what the physical fact conveys to the Rishi and what he seeks to convey and express primarily.
Now this is what is sought to be conveyed and expressed. The five movements of the sun here also are nothing but the five smas and they refer to the cycle of the Cosmic or Universal Brahman. The sixth status where all movements cease, where there is no rising and setting, no ebb and flow, no waxing and waning, where there is the immutable, the ever-same unity, is very evidently the Transcendental Brahman. It is That to which the Vedic Rishi refers when he prays for a constant and fixed vision of the eternal Sunjyok ca sryam drie.
It would be interesting to know what the five ranges or levels or movements of consciousness exactly are that make up the Universal Brahman described in this passage. It is the mystic knowledge, the Upanishad says, of the secret delight in thingsmadhuvidy. The five ranges are the five fundamental principles of delightimmortalities, the Veda would say that form the inner core of the pyramid of creation. They form a rising tier and are ruled respectively by the godsAgni, Indra, Varuna, Soma and Brahmawith their emanations and instrumental personalities the Vasus, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Maruts and the Sadhyas. We suggest that these refer to the five well-known levels of being, the modes or nodi of consciousness or something very much like them. The Upanishad speaks elsewhere of the five sheaths. The six Chakras of Tantric system lie in the same line. The first and the basic mode is the physical and the ascent from the physical: Agni and the Vasus are always intimately connected with the earth and -the earth-principles (it can be compared with the Muladhara of the Tantras). Next, second in the line of ascent is the Vital, the centre of power and dynamism of which the Rudras are the deities and Indra the presiding God (cf. Swadhishthana of the Tantras the navel centre). Indra, in the Vedas, has two aspects, one of knowledge and vision and the other of dynamic force and drive. In the first aspect he is more often considered as the Lord of the Mind, of the Luminous Mind. In the present passage, Indra is taken in his second aspect and instead of the Maruts with whom he is usually invoked has the Rudras as his agents and associates.
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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 human 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 emanation. 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 emanations 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 emanations.
Now, each one of them in its turn has its own emanations the eleven Rudriyas are familiar. These are secondary and there are tertiary and other graded emanations 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 human 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 emanation 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 human 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.
--
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 Immanent 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 human 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 Immanent 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 human 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 Brahman: it is out of the transcendent reality that the immanent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Mastersarvabhtntartm, antarymis called brahmajam, born of the Brahman. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and experience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brahman, there is a definite line along which the human 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 permanent. 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 Impermanence 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.
--
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
There the sun shines not, nor the moon, nor the stars; these lightnings too there shine not; how then this fire! That shines and therefore all shine in its wake; by the sheen of That, all this shines.
Only, to some perhaps the beauty may not appear as evident and apparent. The Spirit of beauty that resides in the Upanishadic consciousness is more retiring and reticent. It dwells in its own privacy, in its own home, as it were, and therefore chooses to be bare and austere, simple and sheer. Beauty means usually the beauty of form, even if it be not always the decorative, ornamental and sumptuous form. The early Vedas aimed at the perfect form (surpaktnum), the faultless expression, the integral and complete embodiment; the gods they envisaged and invoked were gleaming powers carved out of harmony and beauty and figured close to our modes of apprehension (spyan). But the Upanishads came to lay stress upon what is beyond the form, what the eye can not see nor the vision reflect:
na sandi tihati rpamasya
--
Its figure does not lie in the field of vision, none can see it with the eye
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
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And what else is the true character, the soul of beauty than light and delight? "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." And a thing of joy is a thing of light. Joy is the radiance rippling over a thing of beauty. Beauty is always radiant: the charm, the loveliness of an object is but the glow of light that it emanates. And it would not be a very incorrect mensuration to measure the degree of beauty by the degree of light radiated. The diamond is not only a thing of value, but a thing of beauty also, because of the concentrated and undimmed light that it enshrines within itself. A dark, dull and dismal thing, devoid of interest and attraction becomes aesthetically precious and significant as soon as the artist presents it in terms of the values of light. The entire art of painting is nothing but the expression of beauty, in and through the modalities of light.
And where there is light, there is cheer and joy. Rasamaya and jyotirmayaare thus the two conjoint characteristics fundamental to the nature of the ultimate reality. Sometimes these two are named as the 'solar and the lunar aspect. The solar aspect refers obviously to the Light, that is to say, to the Truth; the lunar aspect refers to the rasa (Soma), to Immortality, to Beauty proper,
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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
--
That which lives not by Life, but which makes Life liveThat is Brahman.
or,
--
Art at its highest tends to become also the simplest and the most unconventional; and it is then the highest art, precisely because it does not aim at being artistic. The aesthetic motive is totally absent in the Upanishads; the sense of beauty is there, but it is attendant upon and involved in a deeper strand of consciousness. That consciousness seeks consciousness itself, the fullness of consciousness, the awareness and possession of the Truth and Reality,the one thing which, if known, gives the knowledge of all else. And this consciousness of the Truth is also Delight, the perfect Bliss, the Immortality where the whole universe resolves itself into its original state of rasa, that is to say, of essential and inalienable harmony and beauty.
***
00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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
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The Poet creates forms of beauty in Heaven; but these forms are not made out of the void. It is the Earth that is raised to Heaven and transmuted into divine truth forms. The union of Earth and Heaven is the source of the Joy, the Ananda, that the Poet unseals and distributes. Heaven and Earth join and meet in the world of Delight; between them they press out Soma, the drink of the gods.
The Mind and the Body are held together by means of the Life, the mid-world. The Divine Mind by raising the body-consciousness into itself gathers up too, by that act, the delight of life and releases the fountain of immortal Bliss. That is the work and achievement of the gods as poets.
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
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.
--
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 human stream, governed by a Self greater than his own individual self."
The Book of the Law states simply, "Every man and every woman 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."
Over and over their findings have been confirmed, proving the Qabalah contains within it not only the elements of the science itself but the method with which to pursue it.
When planning to visit a foreign country, the wise traveler will first familiarize himself with its language. In studying music, chemistry or calculus, a specific terminology is essential to the understanding of each subject. So a new set of symbols is necessary when undertaking a study of the Universe, whether within or without. The Qabalah provides such a set in unexcelled fashion.
But the Qabalah is more. It also lays the foundation on which rests a nother archaic science- Magic. not to be confused with the conjurer's sleight-of-hand, Magic has been defined by Aleister Crowley as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will." Dion Fortune qualifies this nicely with an added clause, "changes in consciousness."
The Qabalah reveals the nature of certain physical and psychological phenomena. Once these are apprehended, understood and correlated, the student can use the principles of Magic to exercise control over life's conditions and circumstances not otherwise possible. In short. Magic provides the practical application of the theories supplied by the Qabalah.
It serves yet a nother vital function. In addition to the advantages to be gained from its philosophical application, the ancients discovered a very practical use for the literal Qabalah.
Each letter of the Qabalistic alphabet has a number, color, many symbols and a Tarot card attri buted 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 Roman 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.
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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 emanation 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 can not 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.
--
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.
Some modern Nature-worshippers and members of the newly-washed and redeemed witch-cult have complimented me on this closing chapter which I entitled 'The Ladder." I am pleased about this. For a very long time I was not at all familiar with the topic of witchcraft. I had avoided it entirely, not being attracted to its literature in any way. In fact, I only became slightly conversant with its theme and literature just a few years ago, after reading "The Anatomy of Eve" written by Dr. Leopold Stein, a Jungian analyst. In the middle of his study of four cases, he included a most informative chapter on the subject. This served to stimulate me to wider reading in that area.
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.
000 - Humans in Universe, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
facility introduced by the cipher. The cipher was not only an essential tool in the
work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, but it also brought about
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of world wealth. Ships could carry cargoes that overland caravans could not.
000.106 In 1600 the East India Company was founded as a private enterprise by
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political ideologies have since adopted a prime philosophy that says: "You may not
like our political system, but we are convinced that we have the fairest, most
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them from sinking vertically into Earth's center. Stone buildings could not float on
water. But nature had invented low-weight wood of high self-cohering tensile
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humans but not for floating heavy cargoes. Thus the high tensile strength of wood,
combined with the human discovery of the intertrussing principles of structuring
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air-containing vessels than did wood, even though steel by itself does not float.
000.117 The technology of metallurgy began developing metal alloys of ever
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of which the world power structures do not yet have dawning awareness. We can
state that as a consequence of the myriad of more-with-less, invisible, technological
--
000.124 Why does not the public itself demand realization of its option for a
revolution by design science? Less than one percent of humanity now knows that
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language of science. The people who make up that 99 percent do not know that all
that science has ever found out is that the Universe consists of the most reliable
--
000.125 The fact that 99 percent of humanity does not understand nature is the
prime reason for humanity's failure to exercise its option to attain universally
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language of science. Fortunately, however, nature is not using the strictly
imaginary, awkward, and unrealistic coordinate system adopted by and taught by
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gaining nor losing any energy. Nature is not employing the three dimensional,
omniinterperpendicular, parallel frame of the XYZ axial coordinates of academic
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gram/centimeter/second weight/area/time exponents. Nature does not operate in
parallel. She operates in radiational divergence and gravitational convergence. She
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right to live. The hydrogen atom does not have to compromise its function potential
by first "earning a living" before it can function directly as a hydrogen atom.
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revolution and will enter a new and-lasting epoch of physical success for all. If not,
it will be curtains for all humanity within this century.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
SOME notED MEN
KRISTODAS PAL
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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."
Khudiram Chattopadhyaya and Chandra Devi, the parents of Sri Ramakrishna, were married in 1799. At that time Khudiram was living in his ancestral village of Dereypore, not far from Kamarpukur. Their first son, Ramkumar, was born in 1805, and their first daughter, Katyayani, in 1810. In 1814 Khudiram was ordered by his landlord to bear false witness in court against a neighbour. When he refused to do so, the landlord brought a false case against him and deprived him of his ancestral property. Thus dispossessed, he arrived, at the invitation of a nother landlord, in the quiet village of Kamarpukur, where he was given a dwelling and about an acre of fertile land. The crops from this little property were enough to meet his family's simple needs. Here he lived in simplicity, dignity, and contentment.
Ten years after his coming to Kamarpukur, Khudiram made a pilgrimage on foot to Rameswar, at the southern extremity of India. Two years later was born his second son, whom he named Rameswar. Again in 1835, at the age of sixty, he made a pilgrimage, this time to Gaya. Here, from ancient times, Hindus have come from the four corners of India to discharge their duties to their departed ancestors by offering them food and drink at the sacred footprint of the Lord Vishnu. At this holy place Khudiram had a dream in which the Lord Vishnu promised to he born as his son. And Chandra Devi, too, in front of the Siva temple at Kamarpukur, had a vision indicating the birth of a divine child. Upon his return the husband found that she had conceived.
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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.
About this time, on the Sivaratri night, consecrated to the worship of Siva, a dramatic performance was arranged. The principal actor, who was to play the part of Siva, suddenly fell ill, and Gadadhar was persuaded to act in his place. While friends were dressing him for the role of Siva — smearing his body with ashes, matting his locks, placing a trident in his hand and a string of rudraksha beads around his neck — the boy appeared to become absent-minded. He approached the stage with slow and measured step, supported by his friends. He looked the living image of Siva. The audience loudly applauded what it took to be his skill as an actor, but it was soon discovered that he was really lost in meditation. His countenance was radiant and tears flowed from his eyes. He was lost to the outer world. The effect of this scene on the audience was tremendous. The people felt blessed as by a vision of Siva Himself. The performance had to be stopped, and the boy's mood lasted till the following morning.
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Ramkumar did not at first oppose the ways of his temperamental brother. He wanted Gadadhar to become used to the conditions of city life. But one day he decided to warn the boy about his indifference to the world. After all, in the near future Gadadhar must, as a householder, earn his livelihood through the performance of his brahminical duties; and these required a thorough knowledge of Hindu law, astrology, and kindred subjects. He gently admonished Gadadhar and asked him to pay more attention to his studies. But the boy replied spiritedly: "Brother, what shall I do with a mere bread-winning education? I would rather acquire that wisdom which will illumine my heart and give me satisfaction for ever."
--- BREAD-WINNING EDUCATION
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When Ramkumar reprimanded Gadadhar for neglecting a "bread-winning education", the inner voice of the boy reminded him that the legacy of his ancestors — the legacy of Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Sankara, Ramanuja, Chaitanya — was not worldly security but the Knowledge of God. And these noble sages were the true representatives of Hindu society. Each of them was seated, as it were, on the crest of the wave that followed each successive trough in the tumultuous course of Indian national life. All demonstrated that the life current of India is spirituality. This truth was revealed to Gadadhar through that inner vision which scans past and future in one sweep, unobstructed by the barriers of time and space. But he was unaware of the history of the profound change that had taken place in the land of his birth during the previous one hundred years.
Hindu society during the eighteenth century had been passing through a period of decadence. It was the twilight of the Mussalman rule. There were anarchy and confusion in all spheres. Superstitious practices dominated the religious life of the people. Rites and rituals passed for the essence of spirituality. Greedy priests became the custodians of heaven. True philosophy was supplanted by dogmatic opinions. The pundits took delight in vain polemics.
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At that time there lived in Calcutta a rich widow named Rani Rasmani, 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.
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Sri Ramakrishna — henceforth we shall call Gadadhar by this familiar name —1 came to the temple garden with his elder brother Ramkumar, who was appointed priest of the Kali temple. Sri Ramakrishna did not at first approve of Ramkumar's working for the sudra Rasmani. The example of their orthodox father was still fresh in Sri Ramakrishna's mind. He objected also to the eating of the cooked offerings of the temple, since, according to orthodox Hindu custom, such food can be offered to the Deity only in the house of a brahmin. But the holy atmosphere of the temple grounds, the solitude of the surrounding wood, the loving care of his brother, the respect shown him by Rani Rasmani and Mathur Babu, the living presence of the Goddess Kali in the temple, and; above all, the proximity of the sacred Ganges, which Sri Ramakrishna always held in the highest respect, gradually overcame his disapproval, and he began to feel at home.
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 woman 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.
One day the priest of the Radhakanta temple accidentally dropped the image of Krishna on the floor, breaking one of its legs. The pundits advised the Rani to install a new image, since the worship of an image with a broken limb was against the scriptural injunctions. But the Rani was fond of the image, and she asked Sri Ramakrishna's opinion. In an abstracted mood, he said: "This solution is ridiculous. If a son-in-law of the Rani broke his leg, would she discard him and put a nother in his place? Wouldn't she rather arrange for his treatment? Why should she not do the same thing in this case too? Let the image be repaired and worshipped as before." It was a simple, straightforward solution and was accepted by the Rani. Sri Ramakrishna himself mended the break. The priest was dismissed for his carelessness, and at Mathur Babu's earnest request Sri Ramakrishna accepted the office of priest in the Radhakanta temple.
^No definite information is available as to the origin of this name. Most probably it was given by Mathur Babu, as Ramlal, Sri Ramakrishna's nephew, has said, quoting the authority of his uncle himself.
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And, indeed, he soon discovered what a strange Goddess he had chosen to serve. He became gradually enmeshed in the web of Her all-pervading presence. To the ignorant She is, to be sure, the image of destruction; but he found in Her the benign, all-loving Mother. Her neck is encircled with a garland of heads, and Her waist with a girdle of human arms, and two of Her hands hold weapons of death, and Her eyes dart a glance of fire; but, strangely enough, Ramakrishna felt in Her breath the soothing touch of tender love and saw in Her the Seed of Immortality. She stands on the bosom of Her Consort, Siva; it is because She is the Sakti, the Power, inseparable from the Absolute. She is surrounded by jackals and other unholy creatures, the denizens of the cremation ground. But is not the Ultimate Reality above holiness and unholiness? She appears to be reeling under the spell of wine. But who would create this mad world unless under the influence of a divine drunkenness? She is the highest symbol of all the forces of nature, the synthesis of their antinomies, the Ultimate Divine in the form of woman. She now became to Sri Ramakrishna the only Reality, and the world became an unsubstantial shadow. Into Her worship he poured his soul. Before him She stood as the transparent portal to the shrine of Ineffable Reality.
The worship in the temple intensified Sri Ramakrishna's yearning for a living vision of the Mother of the Universe. He began to spend in meditation the time not actually employed in the temple service; and for this purpose he selected an extremely solitary place. A deep jungle, thick with underbrush and prickly plants, lay to the north of the temples. Used at one time as a burial ground, it was shunned by people even during the day-time for fear of ghosts. There Sri Ramakrishna began to spend the whole night in meditation, returning to his room only in the morning with eyes swollen as though from much weeping. While meditating, he would lay aside his cloth and his brahminical thread. Explaining this strange conduct, he once said to Hriday: "Don't you know that when one thinks of God one should be freed from all ties? From our very birth we have the eight fetters of hatred, shame, lineage, pride of good conduct, fear, secretiveness, caste, and grief. The sacred thread reminds me that I am a brahmin and therefore superior to all. When calling on the Mother one has to set aside all such ideas." Hriday thought his uncle was becoming insane.
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.
But he did not have to wait very long. He has thus described his first vision of the Mother: "I felt as if my heart were being squeezed like a wet towel. I was overpowered with a great restlessness and a fear that it might not be my lot to realize Her in this life. I could not bear the separation from Her any longer. Life seemed to be not worth living. Suddenly my glance fell on the sword that was kept in the Mother's temple. I determined to put an end to my life. When I jumped up like a madman and seized it, suddenly the blessed Mother revealed Herself. The buildings with their different parts, the temple, and everything else vanished from my sight, leaving no trace whatsoever, and in their stead I saw a limitless, infinite, effulgent Ocean of Consciousness. As far as the eye could see, the shining billows were madly rushing at me from all sides with a terrific noise, to swallow me up! I was panting for breath. I was caught in the rush
and collapsed, unconscious. What was happening in the outside world I did not know; but within me there was a steady flow of undiluted bliss, altogether new, and I felt the presence of the Divine Mother." On his lips when he regained consciousness of the world was the word "Mother".
--- GOD-INTOXICATED STATE
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.
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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 a nother 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.
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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 human 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."
A garbled report of Sri Ramakrishna's failing health, indifference to worldly life, and various abnormal activities reached Kamarpukur and filled the heart of his poor mother with anguish. At her repeated request he returned to his village for a change of air. But his boyhood friends did not interest him any more. A divine fever was consuming him. He spent a great part of the day and night in one of the cremation grounds, in meditation. The place reminded him of the impermanence of the human body, of human hopes and achievements. It also reminded him of Kali, the Goddess of destruction.
--- MARRIAGE AND AFTER
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Very soon a tender relationship sprang up between Sri Ramakrishna and the Brahmani, 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 Brahmani 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 Brahmani 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 natmandir in front of the Kali temple.
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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."
When, a few days later, Pundit Gauri arrived, a nother meeting was held, and he agreed with the view of the Brahmani and Vaishnavcharan. To Sri Ramakrishna's remark that Vaishnavcharan had declared him to be an Avatar, Gauri replied: "Is that all he has to say about you? Then he has said very little. I am fully convinced that you are that Mine of Spiritual Power, only a small fraction of which descends on earth, from time to time, in the form of an Incarnation."
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"Well," Sri Ramakrishna said, "it is you who say so; but, believe me, I know nothing about it."
Thus the insane priest was by verdict of the great scholars of the day proclaimed a Divine Incarnation. His visions were not the result of an over-heated brain; they had precedent in spiritual history. And how did the proclamation affect Sri Ramakrishna himself? He remained the simple child of the Mother that he had been since the first day of his life. Years later, when two of his householder disciples openly spoke of him as a Divine Incarnation and the matter was reported to him, he said with a touch of sarcasm: "Do they think they will enhance my glory that way? One of them is an actor on the stage and the other a physician. What do they know about Incarnations? Why, years ago pundits like Gauri and Vaishnavcharan declared me to be an Avatar. They were great scholars and knew what they said. But that did not make any change in my mind."
Sri Ramakrishna was a learner all his life. He often used to quote a proverb to his disciples: "Friend, the more I live the more I learn." When the excitement created by the Brahmani's declaration was over, he set himself to the task of practising spiritual disciplines according to the traditional methods laid down in the Tantra and Vaishnava scriptures. Hitherto he had pursued his spiritual ideal according to the promptings of his own mind and heart. Now he accepted the Brahmani as his guru and set foot on the traditional highways.
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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 woman 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 woman. Every part of a woman'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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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.
There are two stages of bhakti. The first is known as vaidhi-bhakti, or love of God qualified by scriptural injunctions. For the devotees of this stage are prescribed regular and methodical worship, hymns, prayers, the repetition of God's name, and the chanting of His glories. This lower bhakti in course of time matures into para-bhakti, or supreme devotion, known also as prema, the most intense form of divine love. Divine love is an end in itself. It exists potentially in all human hearts, but in the case of bound creatures it is misdirected to earthly objects.
To develop the devotee's love for God, Vaishnavism humanizes God. God is to be regarded as the devotee's Parent, Master, Friend, Child, Husband, or Sweetheart, each succeeding relationship representing an intensification of love. These bhavas, or attitudes toward God, are known as santa, dasya, sakhya, vatsalya, and madhur. The rishis of the Vedas, Hanuman, the cow-herd boys of Vrindavan, Rama's mother Kausalya, and Radhika, Krishna's sweetheart, exhibited, respectively, the most perfect examples of these forms. In the ascending scale the-glories of God are gradually forgotten and the devotee realizes more and more the intimacy of divine communion. Finally he regards himself as the mistress of his Beloved, and no artificial barrier remains to separate him from his Ideal. No social or moral obligation can bind to the earth his soaring spirit. He experiences perfect union with the Godhead. Unlike the Vedantist, who strives to transcend all varieties of the subject-object relationship, a devotee of the Vaishnava path wishes to retain both his own individuality and the personality of God. To him God is not an intangible Absolute, but the Purushottama, the Supreme Person.
While practising the discipline of the madhur bhava, the male devotee often regards himself as a woman, in order to develop the most intense form of love for Sri Krishna, the only purusha, or man, in the universe. This assumption of the attitude of the opposite sex has a deep psychological significance. It is a matter of common experience that an idea may be cultivated to such an intense degree that every idea alien to it is driven from the mind. This peculiarity of the mind may be utilized for the subjugation of the lower desires and the development of the spiritual nature. Now, the idea which is the basis of all desires and passions in a man is the conviction of his indissoluble association with a male body. If he can inoculate himself thoroughly with the idea that he is a woman, he can get rid of the desires peculiar to his male body. Again, the idea that he is a woman may in turn be made to give way to a nother higher idea, namely, that he is neither man nor woman, but the Impersonal Spirit. The Impersonal Spirit alone can enjoy real communion with the Impersonal God. Hence the highest est realization of the Vaishnava draws close to the transcendental experience of the Vedantist.
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The Brahmani was the enthusiastic teacher and astonished beholder of Sri Ramakrishna in his spiritual progress. She became proud of the achievements of her unique pupil. But the pupil himself was not permitted to rest; his destiny beckoned him forward. His Divine Mother would allow him no respite till he had left behind the entire realm of duality with its visions, experiences, and ecstatic dreams. But for the new ascent the old tender guides would not suffice. The Brahmani, on whom he had depended for, three years, saw her son escape from her to follow the command of a teacher with masculine strength, a sterner mien, a gnarled physique, and a virile voice. The new guru was a wandering monk, the sturdy Totapuri, whom Sri Ramakrishna learnt to address affectionately as Nangta, the "Naked One", because of his total renunciation of all earthly objects and attachments, including even a piece of wearing cloth.
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 Brahman, also described as Satchidananda, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Brahman 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, hyp notized 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
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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 Brahman, 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 Brahman 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 Brahman 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.
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Totapuri arrived at the Dakshineswar temple garden toward the end of 1864. Perhaps born in the Punjab, he was the head of a monastery in that province of India and claimed leadership of seven hundred sannyasis. Trained from early youth in the disciplines of the Advaita Vedanta, he looked upon the world as an illusion. The gods and goddesses of the dualistic worship were to him mere fantasies of the deluded mind. Prayers, ceremonies, rites, and rituals had nothing to do with true religion, and about these he was utterly indifferent. Exercising self-exertion and unshakable will-power, he had liberated himself from attachment to the sense-objects of the relative universe. For forty years he had practised austere discipline on the bank of the sacred Narmada and had finally realized his identity with the Absolute. Thenceforward he roamed in the world as an unfettered soul, a lion free from the cage. Clad in a loin-cloth, he spent his days under the canopy of the sky alike in storm and sunshine, feeding his body on the slender pittance of alms. He had been visiting the estuary of the Ganges. On his return journey along the bank of the sacred river, led by the inscrutable Divine Will, he stopped at Dakshineswar.
Totapuri, discovering at once that Sri Ramakrishna was prepared to be a student of Vedanta, asked to initiate him into its mysteries. With the permission of the Divine Mother, Sri Ramakrishna agreed to the proposal. But Totapuri explained that only a sannyasi could receive the teaching of Vedanta. Sri Ramakrishna agreed to renounce the world, but with the stipulation that the ceremony of his initiation into the monastic order be performed in secret, to spare the feelings of his old mother, who had been living with him at Dakshineswar.
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"Brahman", he said, "is the only Reality, ever pure, ever illumined, ever free, beyond the limits of time, space, and causation. Though apparently divided by names and forms through the inscrutable power of maya, that enchantress who makes the impossible possible, Brahman is really One and undivided. When a seeker merges in the beatitude of samadhi, he does not perceive time and space or name and form, the offspring of maya. Whatever is within the domain of maya is unreal. Give it up. Destroy the prison-house of name and form and rush out of it with the strength of a lion. Dive deep in search of the Self and realize It through samadhi. You will find the world of name and form vanishing into void, and the puny ego dissolving in Brahman-Consciousness. You will realize your identity with Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute." Quoting the Upanishad, Totapuri said: "That knowledge is shallow by which one sees or hears or knows a nother
. What is shallow is worthless and can never give real felicity. But the Knowledge by which one does not see a nother or hear a nother or know a nother, which is beyond duality, is great, and through such Knowledge one attains the Infinite Bliss. How can the mind and senses grasp That which shines in the heart of all as the Eternal Subject?"
Totapuri asked the disciple to withdraw his mind from all objects of the relative world, including the gods and goddesses, and to concentrate on the Absolute. But the task was not easy even for Sri Ramakrishna. He found it impossible to take his mind beyond Kali, the Divine Mother of the Universe. "After the initiation", Sri Ramakrishna once said, describing the event, "Nangta began to teach me the various conclusions of the Advaita Vedanta and asked me to withdraw the mind completely from all objects and dive deep into the Atman. But in spite of all my attempts I could not altogether cross the realm of name and form and bring my mind to the unconditioned state. I had no difficulty in taking the mind from all the objects of the world. But the radiant and too familiar figure of the Blissful Mother, the Embodiment of the essence of Pure Consciousness, appeared before me as a living reality. Her bewitching smile prevented me from passing into the Great Beyond. Again and again I tried, but She stood in my way every time. In despair I said to Nangta: 'It is hopeless. I can not raise my mind to the unconditioned state and come face to face with Atman.' He grew excited and sharply said: 'What? You can't do it? But you have to.' He cast his eyes around. Finding a piece of glass he took it up and stuck it between my eyebrows. 'Concentrate the mind on this point!' he thundered. Then with stern determination I again sat to meditate. As soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared before me, I used my discrimination as a sword and with it clove Her in two. The last barrier fell. My spirit at once soared beyond the relative plane and I lost myself in samadhi."
Sri Ramakrishna remained completely absorbed in samadhi for three days. "Is it really true?" Totapuri cried out in astonishment. "Is it possible that he has attained in a single day what it took me forty years of strenuous practice to achieve? Great God! It is nothing short of a miracle!" With the help of Totapuri, Sri Ramakrishna's mind finally came down to the relative plane.
Totapuri, a monk of the most orthodox type, never stayed at a place more than three days. But he remained at Dakshineswar eleven months. He too had something to learn.
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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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 immanent 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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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 Brahman. The body stood in the way. He became incensed with its demands. 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 Brahman 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.
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"When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive — neither creating nor preserving nor destroying —, I call Him Brahman or Purusha, the Impersonal God. When I think of Him as active — creating, preserving, and destroying —, I call Him Sakti or Maya or Prakriti, the Personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The Personal and the Impersonal are the same thing, like milk and its whiteness, the diamond and its lustre, the snake and its wriggling motion. It is impossible to conceive of the one without the other. The Divine Mother and Brahman are one."
After the departure of Totapuri, Sri Ramakrishna remained for six months in a state of absolute identity with Brahman. "For six months at a stretch", he said, "I remained in that state from which ordinary men can never return; generally the body falls off, after three weeks, like a sere leaf. I was not conscious of day and night. Flies would enter my mouth and nostrils just as they do a dead body's, but I did not feel them. My hair became matted with dust."
His body would not have survived but for the kindly attention of a monk who happened to be at Dakshineswar at that time and who somehow realized that for the good of humanity Sri Ramakrishna's body must be preserved. He tried various means, even physical violence, to recall the fleeing soul to the prison-house of the body, and during the resultant fleeting moments of consciousness he would push a few morsels of food down Sri Ramakrishna's throat. Presently Sri Ramakrishna received the command of the Divine Mother to remain on the threshold of relative consciousness. Soon there-after after he was afflicted with a serious attack of dysentery. Day and night the pain tortured him, and his mind gradually came down to the physical plane.
--- COMPANY OF HOLY MEN AND DEVOTEES
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, a nother 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."
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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 gentleman 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 de noting 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 emanating 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, Hanuman, Radha, Krishna, Brahman, and Mohammed. The Master went into samadhi and communed with the Brahman 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
Sri Ramakrishna accepted the divinity of Buddha and used to point out the similarity of his teachings to those of the Upanishads. He also showed great respect for the Tirthankaras, who founded Jainism, and for the ten Gurus of Sikhism. But he did not speak of them as Divine Incarnations. He was heard to say that the Gurus of Sikhism were the reincarnations of King Janaka of ancient India. He kept in his room at Dakshineswar a small statue of Tirthankara Mahavira and a picture of Christ, before which incense was burnt morning and evening.
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 a nother the Mussalmans 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."
--- PILGRIMAGE
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 a nother 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 humanist 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.
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In the nirvikalpa samadhi Sri Ramakrishna had realized that Brahman alone is real and the world illusory. By keeping his mind six months on the plane of the non-dual Brahman, he had attained to the state of the vijnani, the knower of Truth in a special and very rich sense, who sees Brahman not only in himself and in the transcendental Absolute, but in everything of the world. In this state of vijnana, sometimes, bereft of body-consciousness, he would regard himself as one with Brahman; sometimes, conscious of the dual world, he would regard himself as God's devotee, servant, or child. In order to enable the Master to work for the welfare of humanity, the Divine Mother had kept in him a trace of ego, which he described — according to his mood — as the "ego of Knowledge", the "ego of Devotion", the "ego of a child", or the "ego of a servant". In any case this ego of the Master, consumed by the fire of the Knowledge of Brahman, was an appearance only, like a burnt string. He often referred to this ego as the "ripe ego" in contrast with the ego of the bound soul, which he described as the "unripe" or "green" ego. The ego of the bound soul identifies itself with the body, relatives, possessions, and the world; but the "ripe ego", illumined by Divine Knowledge, knows the body, relatives, possessions, and the world to be unreal and establishes a relationship of love with God alone. Through this "ripe ego" Sri Ramakrishna dealt with the world and his wife. One day, while stroking his feet, Sarada Devi asked the Master, "What do you think of me?" Quick came the answer: "The Mother who is worshipped in the temple is the mother who has given birth to my body and is now living in the nahabat, and it is She again who is stroking my feet at this moment. Indeed, I always look on you as the personification of the Blissful Mother Kali."
Sarada Devi, in the company of her husband, had rare spiritual experiences. She said: "I have no words to describe my wonderful exaltation of spirit as I watched him in his different moods. Under the influence of divine emotion he would sometimes talk on abstruse subjects, sometimes laugh, sometimes weep, and sometimes become perfectly motionless in samadhi. This would continue throughout the night. There was such an extraordinary divine presence in him that now and then I would shake with fear and wonder how the night would pass. Months went by in this way. Then one day he discovered that I had to keep awake the whole night lest, during my sleep, he should go into samadhi — for it might happen at any moment —, and so he asked me to sleep in the nahabat."
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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.
Third, he came to foresee the time of his death. His words with respect to this matter were literally fulfilled.
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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 human 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.
Keshab possessed a complex nature. When passing through a great moral crisis, he spent much of his time in solitude and felt that he heard the voice of God, When a devotional form of worship was introduced into the Brahmo Samaj, he spent hours in singing kirtan with his followers. He visited England land in 1870 and impressed the English people with his musical voice, his simple English, and his spiritual fervour. He was entertained by Queen Victoria. Returning to India, he founded centres of the Brahmo Samaj in various parts of the country. not unlike a professor of comparative religion in a European university, he began to discover, about the time of his first contact with Sri Ramakrishna, the harmony of religions. He became sympathetic toward the Hindu gods and goddesses, explaining them in a liberal fashion. Further, he believed that he was called by God to dictate to the world God's newly revealed law, the New Dispensation, the Navavidhan.
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 emancipation 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 mo notonously 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 mo notheistic. 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
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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.
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Gradually other Brahmo leaders began to feel Sri Ramakrishna's influence. But they were by no means uncritical admirers of the Master. They particularly disapproved of his ascetic renunciation and condemnation of "woman and gold".1 They measured him according to their own ideals of the householder's life. Some could not understand his samadhi and described it as a nervous malady. Yet they could not resist his magnetic personality.
Among the Brahmo leaders who knew the Master closely were Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, Vijaykrishna Goswami, Trailokyanath Sannyal, and Shivanath Shastri.
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.' A nother 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 woman 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 permanent fire and fever of a strange faith and feeling. . . . So long as he is spared to us, gladly shall we sit at his feet to learn from him the sublime precepts of purity, unworldliness, spirituality, and inebriation in the love of God. . . . He, by his childlike bhakti, by his strong conceptions of an ever-ready Motherhood, helped to unfold it [God as our Mother] in our minds wonderfully. . . . By associating with him we learnt to realize better the divine attributes as scattered over the three hundred and thirty millions of deities of mythological India, the gods of the Puranas."
The Brahmo leaders received much inspiration from their contact with Sri Ramakrishna. It broadened their religious views and kindled in their 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 performance 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 "woman 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 "woman", 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 woman, or womankind 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 womankind by accepting a woman 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 a nother, and so on. But when the day would come to a close I would not be able to curb my feelings. The thought that a nother 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 can not 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
-melting love of the Purana. Twenty hours out of twenty-four he would speak without out rest or respite. He gave to all his sympathy and enlightenment, and he touched them with that strange power of the soul which could not but melt even the most hardened. And people understood him according to their powers of comprehension.
^The word is generally used in the text to de note one devoted to God, a worshipper of the Personal God, or a follower of the path of love. A devotee of Sri Ramakrishna is one who is devoted to Sri Ramakrishna and follows his teachings. The word "disciple", when used in connexion with Sri Ramakrishna, refers to one who had been initiated into spiritual life by Sri Ramakrishna and who regarded him as his guru.
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But he remained as ever the willing instrument in the hand of God, the child of the Divine Mother, totally untouched by the idea of being a teacher. He used to say that three ideas — that he was a guru, a father, and a master — pricked his flesh like thorns. Yet he was an extraordinary teacher. He stirred his disciples' hearts more by a subtle influence than by actions or words. He never claimed to be the founder of a religion or the organizer of a sect. Yet he was a religious dynamo. He was the verifier of all religions and creeds. He was like an expert gardener, who prepares the soil and removes the weeds, knowing that the plants will grow because of the inherent power of the seeds, producing each its appropriate flowers and fruits. He never thrust his ideas on anybody. He understood people's limitations and worked on the principle that what is good for one may be bad for a nother. He had the unusual power of knowing the devotees' minds, even their inmost souls, at the first sight. He accepted disciples with the full knowledge of their past tendencies and future possibilities. The life of evil did not frighten him, nor did religious squeamishness raise anybody in his estimation. He saw in everything the unerring finger of the Divine Mother. Even the light that leads astray was to him the light from God.
To those who became his intimate disciples the Master was a friend, companion, and playmate. Even the chores of religious discipline would be lightened in his presence. The devotees would be so inebriated with pure joy in his company that they would have no time to ask themselves whether he was an Incarnation, a perfect soul, or a yogi. His very presence was a great teaching; words were superfluous. In later years his disciples remarked that while they were with him they would regard him as a comrade, but afterwards would tremble to think of their frivolities in the presence of such a great person. They had convincing proof that the Master could, by his mere wish, kindle in their hearts the love of God and give them His vision.
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For the householders Sri Ramakrishna did not prescribe the hard path of total renunciation. He wanted them to discharge their obligations to their families. Their renunciation was to be mental. Spiritual life could not be acquired by flying away from responsibilities. A married couple should live like brother and sister after the birth of one or two children, devoting their time to spiritual talk and contemplation. He encouraged the householders, saying that their life was, in a way, easier than that of the monk, since it was more advantageous to fight the enemy from inside a fortress than in an open field. He insisted, however, on their repairing into solitude every now and then to strengthen their devotion and faith in God through prayer, japa, and meditation. He prescribed for them the companionship of sadhus. He asked them to perform their worldly duties with one hand, while holding to God with the other, and to pray to God to make their duties fewer and fewer so that in the end they might cling to Him with both hands. He would discourage in both the householders and the celibate youths any lukewarmness in their spiritual struggles. He would not ask them to follow indiscriminately the ideal of non-resistance, which ultimately makes a coward of the unwary.
--- FUTURE MONKS
But to the young men destined to be monks he pointed out the steep path of renunciation, both external and internal. They must take the vow of absolute continence and eschew all thought of greed and lust. By the practice of continence, aspirants develop a subtle nerve through which they understand the deeper mysteries of God. For them self-control is final, imperative, and absolute. The sannyasis are teachers of men, and their lives should be totally free from blemish. They must not even look at a picture which may awaken their animal passions. The Master selected his future monks from young men untouched by "woman and gold" and plastic enough to be cast in his spiritual mould. When teaching them the path of renunciation and discrimination, he would not allow the householders to be anywhere near them.
--- 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 can not 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.
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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.
--- KEDAR
Kedarnath Chatterji was endowed with a spiritual temperament and had tried various paths of religion, some not very commendable. When he met the Master at Dakshineswar he understood the true meaning of religion. It is said that the Master, weary of instructing devotees who were coming to him in great numbers for guidance, once prayed to the Goddess Kali: "Mother, I am tired of speaking to people. Please give power to Kedar, Girish, Ram, Vijay, and Mahendra to give them the preliminary instruction, so that just a little teaching from me will be enough." He was aware, however, of Kedar's lingering attachment to worldly things and often warned him about it.
--- HARISH
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.
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Durgacharan Nag, also known as Nag Mahashay, was the ideal householder among the lay disciples of Sri Ramakrishna. He was the embodiment of the Master's ideal of life in the world, unstained by worldliness. In spite of his intense desire to become a sannyasi, Sri Ramakrishna asked him to live in the world in the spirit of a monk, and the disciple truly carried out this injunction. He was born of a poor family and even during his boyhood often sacrificed everything to lessen the sufferings of the needy. He had married at an early age and after his wife's death had married a second time to obey his father's command. But he once said to his wife: "Love on the physical level never lasts. He is indeed blessed who can give his love to God with his whole heart. Even a little attachment to the body endures for several births. So do not be attached to this cage of bone and flesh. Take shelter at the feet of the Mother and think of Her alone. Thus your life here and hereafter will be ennobled." The Master spoke of him as a "blazing light". He received every word of Sri Ramakrishna in dead earnest. One day he heard the Master saying that it was difficult for doctors, lawyers, and brokers to make much progress in spirituality. Of doctors he said, "If the mind clings to the tiny drops of medicine, how can it conceive of the Infinite?" That was the end of Durgacharan's medical practice and he threw his chest of medicines into the Ganges. Sri Ramakrishna assured him that he would not lack simple food and clothing. He bade him serve holy men. On being asked where he would find real holy men, the Master said that the sadhus themselves would seek his company. No sannyasi could have lived a more austere life than Durgacharan.
--- GIRISH GHOSH
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 human 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 performance 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. A nother 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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To spread his message to the four corners of the earth Sri Ramakrishna needed a strong instrument. With his frail body and delicate limbs he could not make great journeys across wide spaces. And such an instrument was found in Narendranath Dutta, his beloved Naren, later known to the world as Swami Vivekananda. Even before meeting Narendranath, the Master had seen him in a vision as a sage, immersed in the meditation of the Absolute, who at Sri Ramakrishna's request had agreed to take human birth to assist him in his work.
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.
In a state of mental conflict and torture of soul, Narendra came to Sri Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar. He was then eighteen years of age and had been in college two years. He entered the Master's room accompanied by some light-hearted friends. At Sri Ramakrishna's request he sang a few songs, pouring his whole soul into them, and the Master went into samadhi. A few minutes later Sri Ramakrishna suddenly left his seat, took Narendra by the hand, and led him to the screened verandah north of his room. They were alone. Addressing Narendra most tenderly, as if he were a friend of long acquaintance, the Master said: "Ah! You have come very late. Why have you been so unkind as to make me wait all these days? My ears are tired of hearing the futile words of worldly men. Oh, how I have longed to pour my spirit into the heart of someone fitted to receive my message!" He talked thus, sobbing all the time. Then, standing before Narendra with folded hands, he addressed him as Narayana, born on earth to remove the misery of humanity. Grasping Narendra's hand, he asked him to come again, alone, and very soon. Narendra was startled. "What is this I have come to see?" he said to himself. "He must be stark mad. Why, I am the son of Viswanath Dutta. How dare he speak this way to me?"
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 monomaniac, 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 hyp notized, but he could not understand how a monomaniac 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 monomaniac or wily hyp notist. 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 human 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 Brahman. 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.
--
One day, soon after, Narendra requested Sri Ramakrishna to pray to the Divine Mother to remove his poverty. Sri Ramakrishna bade him pray to Her himself, for She would certainly listen to his prayer. Narendra entered the shrine of Kali. As he stood before the image of the Mother, he beheld Her as a living Goddess, ready to give wisdom and liberation. Unable to ask Her for petty worldly things, he prayed only for knowledge and renunciation, love and liberation. The Master rebuked him for his failure to ask the Divine Mother to remove his poverty and sent him back to the temple. But Narendra, standing in Her presence, again forgot the purpose of his coming. Thrice he went to the temple at the bidding of the Master, and thrice he returned, having forgotten in Her presence why he had come. He was wondering about it when it suddenly flashed in his mind that this was all the work of Sri Ramakrishna; so now he asked the Master himself to remove his poverty, and was assured that his family would not lack simple food and clothing.
This was a very rich and significant experience for Narendra. It taught him that Sakti, the Divine Power, can not be ignored in the world and that in the relative plane the need of worshipping a Personal God is imperative. Sri Ramakrishna was overjoyed with the conversion. The next day, sitting almost on Narendra's lap, he said to a devotee, pointing first to himself, then to Narendra: "I see I am this, and again that. Really I feel no difference. A stick floating in the Ganges seems to divide the water; But in reality the water is one. Do you see my point? Well, whatever is, is the Mother — isn't that so?" In later years Narendra would say: "Sri Ramakrishna was the only person who, from the time he met me, believed in me uniformly throughout. Even my mother and brothers did not. It was his unwavering trust and love for me that bound me to him for ever. He alone knew how to love. Worldly people, only make a show of love for selfish ends.
--- TARAK
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Baburam Ghosh came to Dakshineswar accompanied by Rakhal, his classmate. The Master, as was often his custom, examined the boy's physiognomy and was satisfied about his latent spirituality. At the age of eight Baburam had thought of leading a life of renunciation, in the company of a monk, in a hut shut out from the public view by a thick wall of trees. The very sight of the Panchavati awakened in his heart that dream of boyhood. Baburam was tender in body and soul. The Master used to say that he was pure to his very bones. One day Hazra in his usual mischievous fashion advised Baburam and some of the other young boys to ask Sri Ramakrishna for some spiritual powers and not waste their life in mere gaiety and merriment. The Master, scenting mischief, called Baburam to his side and said: "What can you ask of me? Isn't everything that I have already yours? Yes, everything I have earned in the shape of realizations is for the sake of you all. So get rid of the idea of begging, which alienates by creating a distance. Rather realize your kinship with me and gain the key to all the treasures.
--- NIRANJAN
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
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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 can not 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.
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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
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With his woman devotees Sri Ramakrishna established a very sweet relationship. He himself embodied the tender traits of a woman: he had dwelt on the highest plane of Truth, where there is not even the slightest trace of sex; and his innate purity evoked only the noblest emotion in men and women alike. His woman devotees often said: "We seldom looked on Sri Ramakrishna as a member of the male sex. We regarded him as one of us. We never felt any constraint before him. He was our best confidant." They loved him as their child, their friend, and their teacher. In spiritual discipline he advised them to renounce lust and greed and especially warned them not to fall into the snares of men.
--- GOPAL MA
Unsurpassed among the woman devotees of the Master in the richness of her devotion and spiritual experiences was Aghoremani Devi, an orthodox brahmin woman. Widowed at an early age, she had dedicated herself completely to spiritual pursuits. Gopala, the Baby Krishna, was her Ideal Deity, whom she worshipped following the vatsalya attitude of the Vaishnava religion, regarding Him as her own child. Through Him she satisfied her unassuaged maternal love, cooking for Him, feeding Him, bathing Him, and putting Him to bed. This sweet intimacy with Gopala won her the sobriquet of Gopal Ma, or Gopala's Mother. For forty years she had lived on the bank of the Ganges in a small, bare room, her only companions being a threadbare copy of the Ramayana and a bag containing her rosary. At the age of sixty, in 1884, she visited Sri Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar. During the second visit, as soon as the Master saw her, he said: "Oh, you have come! Give me something to eat." With great hesitation she gave him some ordinary sweets that she had purchased for him on the way. The Master ate them with relish and asked her to bring him simple curries or sweets prepared by her own hands. Gopal Ma thought him a queer kind of monk, for, instead of talking of God, he always asked for food. She did not want to visit him again, but an irresistible attraction brought her back to the temple garden; She carried with her some simple curries that she had cooked herself.
One early morning at three o'clock, about a year later, Gopal Ma was about to finish her daily devotions, when she was startled to find Sri Ramakrishna sitting on her left, with his right hand clenched, like the hand of the image of Gopala. She was amazed and caught hold of the hand, whereupon the figure vanished and in its place appeared the real Gopala, her Ideal Deity. She cried aloud with joy. Gopala begged her for butter. She pleaded her poverty and gave Him some dry coconut candies. Gopala, sat on her lap, snatched away her rosary, jumped on her shoulders, and moved all about the room. As soon as the day broke she hastened to Dakshineswar like an insane woman. Of course Gopala accompanied her, resting His head on her shoulder. She clearly saw His tiny ruddy feet hanging over her breast. She entered Sri Ramakrishna's room. The Master had fallen into samadhi. Like a child, he sat on her lap, and she began to feed him with butter, cream, and other delicacies. After some time he regained consciousness and returned to his bed. But the mind of Gopala's Mother was still roaming in a nother plane. She was steeped in bliss. She saw Gopala frequently entering the Master's body and again coming out of it. When she returned to her hut, still in a dazed condition, Gopala accompanied her.
She spent about two months in uninterrupted communion with God, the Baby Gopala never leaving her for a moment. Then the intensity of her vision was lessened; had it not been, her body would have perished. The Master spoke highly of her exalted spiritual condition and said that such vision of God was a rare thing for ordinary mortals. The fun-loving Master one day confronted the critical Narendranath with this simple-minded woman. No two could have presented a more striking contrast. The Master knew of Narendra's lofty contempt for all visions, and he asked the old lady to narrate her experiences to Narendra. With great hesitation she told him her story. Now and then she interrupted her maternal chatter to ask Narendra: "My son, I am a poor ignorant woman. I don't understand anything. You are so learned. Now tell me if these visions of Gopala are true." As Narendra listened to the story he was profoundly moved. He said, "Yes, mother, they are quite true." Behind his cynicism Narendra, too, possessed a heart full of love and tenderness.
--- THE MARCH OF EVENTS
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The young disciples destined to be monks, Sri Ramakrishna invited on week-days, when the householders were not present. The training of the householders and of the future monks had to proceed along entirely different lines. Since M. generally visited the Master on week-ends, the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna does not contain much mention of the future monastic disciples.
Finally, there was a handful of fortunate disciples, householders as well as youngsters, who were privileged to spend nights with the Master in his room. They would see him get up early in the morning and walk up and down the room, singing in his sweet voice and tenderly communing with the Mother.
--
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 human body and mind. He also distinctly found that in the phenomenal world God manifests Himself, in an inscrutable way, through diverse human 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 human relationship with God would appear to him more appealing than the all-effacing Knowledge of Brahman. Many a time he would pray: "Mother, don't make me unconscious through the Knowledge of Brahman. 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 Brahman! 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
--
supernatural cause to a natural phenomenon. They believed that the Master's body, a material thing, was subject, like all other material things, to physical laws. Growth, development, decay, and death were laws of nature to which the Master's body could not but respond. But though holding differing views, they all believed that it was to him alone that they must look for the attainment of their spiritual goal.
In spite of the physician's efforts and the prayers and nursing of the devotees, the illness rapidly progressed. The pain sometimes appeared to be unbearable. The Master lived only on liquid food, and his frail body was becoming a mere skeleton. Yet his face always radiated joy, and he continued to welcome the visitors pouring in to receive his blessing. When certain zealous devotees tried to keep the visitors away, they were told by Girish, "You can not succeed in it; he has been born for this very purpose — to sacrifice himself for the redemption of others."
--
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
--
Among the attendants Sashi was the embodiment of service. He did not practise meditation, japa, or any of the other disciplines followed by his brother devotees. He was convinced that service to the guru was the only religion for him. He forgot food and rest and was ever ready at the Master's bedside.
Pundit Shashadhar one day suggested to the Master that the latter could remove the illness by concentrating his mind on the throat, the scriptures having declared that yogis had power to cure themselves in that way. The Master rebuked the pundit. "For a scholar like you to make such a proposal!" he said. "How can I withdraw the mind from the Lotus Feet of God and turn it to this worthless cage of flesh and blood?" "For our sake at least", begged Narendra and the other disciples. "But", replied Sri Ramakrishna, do you think I enjoy this suffering? I wish to recover, but that depends on the Mother."
--
A few hours later the Master said to Narendra: "I said to Her: 'Mother, I can not swallow food because of my pain. Make it possible for me to eat a little.' She pointed you all out to me and said: 'What? You are eating enough through all these mouths. Isn't that so?' I was ashamed and could not utter a nother word." This dashed all the hopes of the devotees for the Master's recovery.
"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 Master did not hide the fact that he wished to make Narendra his spiritual heir. Narendra was to continue the work after Sri Ramakrishna's passing. Sri Ramakrishna said to him: "I leave these young men in your charge. See that they develop their spirituality and do not return home." One day he asked the boys, in preparation for a monastic life, to beg their food from door to door without thought of caste. They hailed the Master's order and went out with begging-bowls. A few days later he gave the ochre cloth of the sannyasi to each of them, including Girish, who was now second to none in his spirit of renunciation. Thus the Master himself laid the foundation of the future Ramakrishna Order of monks.
Sri Ramakrishna was sinking day by day. His diet was reduced to a minimum and he found it almost impossible to swallow. He whispered to M.: "I am bearing all this cheerfully, for otherwise you would be weeping. If you all say that it is better that the body should go rather than suffer this torture, I am willing." The next morning he said to his depressed disciples seated near the bed: "Do you know what I see? I see that God alone has become everything. Men and animals are only frameworks covered with skin, and it is He who is moving through their heads and limbs. I see that it is God Himself who has become the block, the executioner, and the victim for the sacrifice.' He fainted with emotion. Regaining partial consciousness, he said: "Now I have no pain. I am very well." Looking at Latu he said: "There sits Latu resting his head on the palm of his hand. To me it is the Lord who is seated in that posture."
--
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: 'Brahman is always unattached. The three gunas are in It, but It is unaffected by them, just as the wind carries odour yet remains odourless.' 'Brahman 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.
One day when Narendra was on the ground floor, meditating, the Master was lying awake in his bed upstairs. In the depths of his meditation Narendra felt as though a lamp were burning at the back of his head. Suddenly he lost consciousness. It was the yearned-for, all-effacing experience of nirvikalpa samadhi, when the embodied soul realizes its unity with the Absolute. After a very long time he regained partial consciousness but was unable to find his body. He could see only his head. "Where is my body?" he cried. The elder Gopal entered the room and said, "Why, it is here, Naren!" But Narendra could not find it. Gopal, frightened, ran upstairs to the Master. Sri Ramakrishna only said: "Let him stay that way for a time. He has worried me long enough."
After a nother long period Narendra regained full consciousness. Bathed in peace, he went to the Master, who said: "Now the Mother has shown you everything. But this revelation will remain under lock and key, and I shall keep the key. When you have accomplished the Mother's work you will find the treasure again."
--
Sri Ramakrishna said to him: "Today I have given you my all and I am now only a poor fakir, possessing nothing. By this power you will do immense good in the world, and not until it is accomplished will you return." Henceforth the Master lived in the disciple.
Doubt, however, dies hard. After one or two days Narendra said to himself, "If in the midst of this racking physical pain he declares his Godhead, then only shall I accept him as an Incarnation of God." He was alone by the bedside of the Master. It was a passing thought, but the Master smiled. Gathering his remaining strength, he distinctly said, "He who was Rama and Krishna is now, in this body, Ramakrishna — but not in your Vedantic sense." Narendra was stricken with shame.
--- MAHASAMADHI
--
Dr. Sarkar arrived the following noon and pronounced that life had departed not more than half an hour before. At five o'clock the Masters body was brought downstairs, laid on a cot, dressed in ochre clothes, and decorated with sandal-paste and flowers. A procession was formed. The passers-by wept as the body was taken to the cremation ground at the Baranagore Ghat on the Ganges.
While the devotees were returning to the garden house, carrying the urn with the sacred ashes, a calm resignation came to their souls and they cried, "Victory unto the Guru!"
The Holy Mother was weeping in her room, not for her husband, but because she felt that Mother Kali had left her. As she was about to put on the marks of a Hindu widow, in a moment of revelation she heard the words of faith, "I have only passed from one room to a nother."
0.00 - Publishers Note C, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:0.00 - Publishers note C
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Publishers note
Publishers note
The Fifth Volume concludes the first collected edition of the published works of Sri Nolini Kanta Gupta. His more recent as well as unpublished writings await publication.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
own Commentary gives occasion for a few notes. We
have so much material by Crowley himself about this
--
respectively with a note of interrogation and a mark of
exclamation. The other chapters contain sometimes a
--
initiation. Given these I do not hesitate to claim that
in none other of my writings have I given so pro-
--
these chapters bothered me. I could not write it. I
invoked Dionysus with particular fervour, but still
--
not realise that there was anything in the O.T.O.
beyond a convenient compendium of the more
--
language'. I said that I could not have done so
because I did not know it. He went to the book-
shelves; taking out a copy of THE BOOK OF LIES, he
--
instantly flashed upon me. The entire symbolism not
only of Free Masonry but of many other traditions
--
not-GOD
nothing is.
nothing Becomes.
nothing is not.
The First Triad which is GOD
--
COMMENTARY (The Chapter that is not a Chapter)
This chapter, numbered 0, corresponds to the Negative,
--
The notes of interrogation and exclamation on the previous
pages are the other two veils.
--
explained in the note, but it also refers to KTEIS PHALLOS
and SPERMA, and is the exclamation of wonder or ecstasy,
--
notE
(1) Silence. Nuit, O; Hadit; Ra-Hoor-Khuit, I.
--
not-Being, the three possible modes of conceiving the universe.
The statement, nothing is not , technically equivalent to
Something Is, is fully explained in the essay called Berashith.
--
It will be noticed that this cosmogony is very complete; the
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
--
notE
(2) The Unbroken, absorbing all, is called Darkness.
--
Line 7 balances line 5. It will be notice that the
phraseology of these two lines is so conceived that the
--
It is now seen that this Hawk is not Solar, but
Mercurial; hence the words, the Cry of the Hawk, the
--
notE
(3) Fourteen letters. Quid Voles Illud Fac. Q.V.I.F.
--
notE
(4) They cause all men to worship it.
--
To all impressions thus. Let them not overcome thee;
yet let them breed within thee. The least of the
--
just as the artist, seeing an object, does not worship it,
but breeds a masterpiece from it. This process is
--
That is not which is.
The only Word is Silence.
The only Meaning of that Word is not.
Thoughts are false.
--
In line 1, Being is identified with not-Being.
In line 2, Speech with Silence.
--
statement, that that which can be thought is not true.
In line 5, we come to an important statement, an
--
Father and Son are not really two, but one; their unity
being the Holy Ghost, the semen; the human form is a
--
Triad by virtue of its Phallic nature; for not only is
Amoun a Phallic God, and Jupiter the Father of All,
--
Temple; and he spake not.
The Ash thereof was burnt up by the Magus into
--
Of all this did the Ipsissimus know nothing.
[22]
--
better to say, he recognises it as nothing, in that positive
sense of the word, which is only intelligible in
--
Seven(6) are these Six that live not in the City of the
Pyramids, under the Night of Pan.
--
they have attained. If it were not so, they would be
called "six" in its bad sense of mere intellect.
--
of his doctrine. The reference to their "living not" is
to be found in Liber 418.
--
the end". The allusion is explained in the note.
Siddartha, or Gotama, was the name of the last
--
notES
(5) Masters of the Temple, whose grade has the
--
(6) These are not eight, as apparent; for Lao-tzu
counts as 0.
--
This I persisteth not, posteth not through genera-
tions, changeth momently, finally is dead.
--
Answer not, O silent one! For THERE is no "where-
fore", no "because".
The name of THAT is not known; the Pronoun
interprets, that is , misinterprets, It.
--
it is not so. They are called Brother and Sister,
but it is not so. They are called Husband and
Wife, but it is not so.
The reflection of All is Pan: the Night of Pan is the
--
a part, that is, a falsehood, of THAT which is not?
Yet THAT which is not neither is nor is not That
which is!
--
Womb! for I may not endure the rapture.
In this utterance of falsehood upon falsehood, whose
--
which I uttered not were true.
Blessed, unutterably blessed, is this last of the
--
notES
(9) 1001 = 11{Sigma}. The Petals of the Sahas-
--
For there is not Thou upon That Path: thou hast
become The Way.
--
Last came those that wept because they could not
see the Joke, and those that laughed lest they
should be thought not to see the Joke, and thought
it safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.
--
I am not I; I am but an hollow tube to bring down
Fire from Heaven.
--
In love the individuality is slain; who loves not love?
Love death therefore, and long eagerly for it.
--
Amen. Motion is relative: there is nothing that is
still.
--
Thus and not otherwise I came to the Temple of the
Graal.
--
notE
(11) This chapter must be read in connection with
--
Man returneth not again; the stream floweth not
uphill; the old life is no more; there is a new life
that is not his.
Yet that life is of his very essence; it is more He
--
Let this go free, even as It will; thou art not its
master, but the vehicle of It.
--
though not altogether so the Frater P.
[49]
--
Be not caught within that web, O child of Freedom!
Be not entangled in the universal lie, O child of
Truth!
--
It is not necessary to understand; it is enough to
adore.
--
Let us create nothing but GOD!
That which causes us to create is our true father and
--
create nothing that is not GOD.
[52]
--
But thou canst not get out by the way thou camest
in. The Way out is THE WAY.
--
Besides the explanation in the note, O is the Yoni;
T, the Lingam; and U, the Hierophant; the 5th card
--
The rest of the chapter is clear, for the note.
notES
(12) O = {character?}, "The Devil of the Sabbath". U = 8,
--
of Udgita, see the Upanishads. O, nothing or Nuit.
[57]
--
does not mislead as speech does.
Also, Speech is a symptom of Thought.
--
notE
(14) The secret sense of these words is to be sought in
--
But the vulgarians conceive of nothing beyond the
creator, and therefore call him The First.
--
notE
(15) In nature the Tortoise has 6 members at angels
--
was none that did not instantly obey his bidding.
In the whole system of ten million times ten million
--
Love taketh no heed of that which is not and of that
which is.
--
The wings of love droop not with time, nor slacken
for life or for death.
--
not-self, so that Love breedeth All and None in
One.
Is it not so?...No?...
Then thou art not lost in love; speak not of love.
Love Alway Yieldeth: Love Alway Hardeneth.
--
note the introduction of the name of the Beloved in
acrostic in line 15.
--
note that the word Laylah is the Arabic for "Night".
The author begins to identify the Beloved with the
--
notE
(16) I.e. the truth that he hath slept.
--
into motion. These IT does alway, for time is not.
So that IT does neither of these things. IT does
--
doeth itself through thee. not until then is that
which is done well done.
--
A mantra is not being properly said as long as the
man knows he is saying it. The same applies to all other
--
This Eagle is burnt up in the Great Fire; yet not a
feather is scorched. This Eagle is swallowed up
in the Great Sea; yet not a feather is wetted. so
flieth He in the air, and lighteth upon the earth at
--
that is Ass-headed did he dare not speak.
[76]
--
The secrets of his order were, however, not lost, and
are still being communicated to the worthy by his
--
Grand Master did not speak.
The Eagle may be identified, though not too closely,
with the Hawk previously spoken of.
--
of all sensible cults; it is not to be confused with other
objects of the mystic aviary, such as the swan, phoenix,
--
notE
(17) His initials I.B.M. are the initials of the Three
--
The title is explained in the note.
The chapter needs no explanation; it is a definite
--
notE
(18) This chapter was written to clarify {Chi-epsilon-psi-
--
I do not give myself wholly up.
Take me, who will!
--
a second's notice; otherwise, the practice would only
be ordinary mind-wandering.
--
Let him then repeat the signs of L.V.X. but not the
signs of N.O.X.; for it is not he that shall arise in
the Sign of Isis Rejoicing.
--
It is thinkable that A is not-A; to reverse this is but
to revert to the normal.
--
the one colour that it is not.
This Law, Reason, Time, Space, all Limitation blinds
--
which they are not; it is that which they throw off
as repungnant.
--
Then are they all glorious who seem not to be glorious,
as the HIMOG is All-glorious Within?
--
Distinguish not!
But thyself Ex-tinguish: HIMOG art thou, and
--
God is really so, since we can see nothing of him but
his imperfections. :It may be yonder beggar is a King."
But these considerations are not to trouble such mind
as the Chela may possess; let him occupy himself,
--
this, and not criticism of his holy Guru, should be the
occupation of his days and nights.
notE
(19) HIMOG is a notariqon of the words Holy
Illuminated Man of God.
--
Therefore none is that pertaineth not to V.V.V.V.V.
In any may he manifest; yet in one hath he chosen
--
seek by experiment, and not by Questionings.
[92]
--
the title is only partially explained i the note; it
means that the statements in this chapter are to be
--
to work, and not to ask questions about matters which
in no way concern him.
--
notE
(20) I.e. food suitable for Americans.
--
inhabitants, not of this desert; their abode is not this universe.
They come from the Great Sea, Binah, the City of the Pyramids.
--
described as a camel, not because of the con notation of the French
form of this word, but because "camel" is in hebrew Gimel, and
--
ideas, though cognate, are not identical, and "Phoenix"
is the more accurate symbol.
--
5 notes.
The more necessary anything appears to my mind,
--
not concern himself with facts; he does not care whether
a thing is true or not: he uses truth and falsehood in-
discriminately, to serve his ends. Slaves consider him
--
The allusion in the title is not quite clear, though it
may be connected with the penultimate paragraph.
--
Neglect not the dawn-meditation!
The first plovers' eggs fetch the highest prices; the
--
Neglect not the dawn-meditation!
early to bed and early to rise
--
Neglect not the dawn-meditation!
[106]
--
notE
(22) "The mome raths outgrabe"-Lewis Carroll.
--
This does not agree very well with the common or orthodox
theogony of Chapter 11; but it is to be explained by the
--
It will be noticed that the figure, or sigil, of BABALON
is a seal upon a ring, and this ring is upon the forefinger
--
It will be noticed that this seal, except for the absence of
a border, is the official seal of the A.'.A.'. Compare Chapter
--
"Then why do you not worship Me?"
"Because I am real and your are only imaginary."
--
The Stag-beetle must not be identified with the one
in Chapter 16. It is a merely literary touch.
--
6 and 7 it will be noticed that the identification of the
Soldier with the Hunchback has reached such a pitch
--
Work! and THE GREAT WORK is not so far
beyond!
--
The fourscore-and-eleven books do not, we think,
refer to the ninety-one chapters of this little master-
--
sistently, while it is notorious that a red cloth will excite
the rage of a bull.
--
phallus, for it is not only a source of water, but highly
elastic, while the reference to the seasons alludes to the well-
--
that "lives and moves and has its being". note this phrase,
which is highly significant; the word "lives" excluding the
--
notES
(23) L=30, O=70, V=6, E=5=111.
--
O my darling! We should not have spent Ninety
Pounds in that Three Weeks in Paris!...Slash the
--
in paragraph 2, not only is the Divine Unity destroyed
but Daath, instead of being the Child of Chokmah and
--
is impossible, owing (paragraph 4) to his not having
made proper arrangements to recover the original
--
The number 90 is the last paragraph is not merely
fact, but symbolism; 90 being the number of Tzaddi,
--
So wrote not FRATER PERDURABO, but the
Imp Crowley in his Name.
--
harlot whom he loveth not. For it is LAYLAH that
he loveth...................................
--
Thus argued he, the Wise One, not mindful that all
place is wrong.
For not until the PLACE is perfected by a T saith
he PLACET.
--
should not be One except in so far as it is Two.
I am glad that LAYLAH is afar; no doubt clouds
--
There is nothing movable or immovable under the
firmament of heaven on which I may write the
--
Haggai, a notorious Hebrew prophet, is a Second
Officer in a Chapter of the Royal Arch Masons.
--
If, as I am not, I were free to choose,
How Buddhahood would battle with The Booze!
--
does not agree with Doctor Pangloss, that "all is for
the best in the best of all possible worlds". Nor does the
--
the code is not changed because it is too hard, but
because if is fulfilled.
--
is the one thing that he will not and can not do!
[130]
--
The title is explained in the note.
The number of the chapter may refer to the letter
--
Parsifal, a chastity which did not prevent his dipping
the point of the sacred lance into the Holy Grail, is
--
notE
(27) Chapter so called because Amfortas was
--
The word Naught-y suggests not only that the problem is sexual, but does not
really
--
Now AIN means nothing, and thus the replacing of AIN by OIN means the
completion of the Yoni by the Lingam, which is followed by the complete dissolu
--
referred to in the note; for the eye of Horus (see 777, Col.
XXI, line 10, "the blind
--
Horus does not; or, if it does so, breeds, according to Turkish tradition, a Me
ssiah.
--
notE
(28) Oe = Island, a common symbol of Nibbana.
--
notE
(33) Twig? = dost thou understand? Also the Phoenix
--
Who told thee, man, that LAYLAH is not Nuit, nd
I hadit?
--
Think me not fallen because I love LAYLAH, and
lack LAYLAH.
--
Was not she a silly slut
To sell her bed to lie upon dirt?"
--
"No!" I replied, "h would not do so, BUT
Think of his woe if Laperouse were shut!
--
although one may not wish to exercise it: the author
would readily die in defence of the right of Englishmen
to play football, or of his own right not to play it.
(As a great poet has expressed it: "We don't want to
--
GOD are not worth even her blemishes.
Al-lah is only sixty-six; but LAYLAH counteth
--
notES
(34) Laylah is the Arabic for night.
--
Paragraph 4 is a practical counsel to mystics not
to break up their dryness by relaxing their austerities.
--
Was not Mohammed forsaken in Mecca, and Jesus
in Gethsemane?
--
Sail I not toward LAYLAH within seven days?
Be not sad at heart, O prophet; the babble of the
apes will presently begin.
--
vincing their hearers. (3) Their food was not equal to
that obtainable at Rumpelmayer's. (4) In a few days
--
not that Word equal to Cheth, that is Cancer.
whose Sigil is {Cancer}?
--
But FRATER PERDURABO is nothing but AN
EYE; what eye none knoweth.
--
proceed to not.
Sanhedrim, a body of 70 men. An Eye. Eye in
--
(It does not.) it were only to make hash
Of that most "high" and that most holy game,
--
not imagine that any single ides, however high, however
holy (or even however insignificant!!), can escape the
--
Bite not, Zelator dear, but bide! Ten days didst
thou go with water in thy belly? Thou shalt go
--
Initiation is not a simple phenomenon. Any given initiation must take place
on several planes, and is not always conferred on all of these simultaneously.
Intellectual and moral perception of truth often, one might almost say usually,
--
of all that we call life, in a way in which what we call death is not. 3, silv
er,
--
Unt is not only the Hindustani for Camel, but the usual termination of the
third person plural of the present tense of Latin words of the Third and
--
notES
(36) Death is said by the Arabs to ride a Camel. The Path of Gimel (which
--
When notHING became conscious, it made a bad
bargain.
--
not.
Still, the first step is not so far away:-
The Mauretania sails on Saturday!
--
The title is explained in the note, but also alludes to
paragraph 1, the plover's egg being often contemporary
--
that time and thought which gold could not have bought,
or torture wrested.
--
notE
(38) These eggs being speckled, resemble the wander-
--
How? not by speed, nor strength, nor power to stay,
But by the Silence that succeeds the Neigh!
--
path of the Sun. The question, How? not by their own virtues, but by the
silence which results when they are all done with.
--
this chapter, Laylah is herself not devoid of "Devil", but,
as she habitually remarks, on being addressed in terms
--
The text need no comment, but it will be noticed that it is
much shorter that the title.
--
the Tarot is not only this, but represents equally the
Magickal Path.
--
reminds the student that the universe is not to be
contemplated as a phenomenon in time.
--
The chapter is a rebuke to those who can see nothing
but sorrow and evil in the universe.
The Buddhist analysis may be true, but not for
men of courage. The plea that "love is sorrow", because
--
to insist upon his virility, since otherwise he could not
employ the remedy.
--
notES
(39) ISVD, the foundation scil. of the universe = 80
--
I am not an Anarchist in your sense of the word:
your brain is too dense for any known explosive
--
I am not an Anarchist in your sense of the word:
fancy a Policeman let loose on Society!
--
not daring to drink cocoa, lest their animal passions
should be aroused (as Olivia Haddon assures my
--
Brooding on blood-thirst-these are not so strange
And fierce as life's unfailing shower. These die,
--
In now annihilating nothingness.
This chapter is called Imperial Purple
--
Ay! shall he not do so? he knows that the Many is
Naught; and having Naught, enjoys that Naught
--
are not correlatives or phases of some one deeper
Absence-of-Idea; they are not aspects of some
further Light: they are They!
--
notE
(41) {Pi-Upsilon} = PG = Pig without an I = Blind Pig.
--
sun is not for him, nor the flowers, nor the voices
of the birds; for he is past beyond all these. Yea,
--
the avalanche does not fall because it is tired of staying
on the mountain, or in order to crush the Alps below it,
--
durabo" is not meant sycophancy, but intelligent
reference and imaginative sympathy. Put your mind
--
health is not robust.
All other thoughts are surely symptoms of disease.
--
Any yet again! Do we not find that the most robust
of men express no thoughts at all? They eat, drink,
--
Is not its name ABRAHADABRA?
I. the unsullied ever-flowing air.
--
He, Spirit; Yod, Fire; Mem, Water. But the order is not good;
Lamed is not satisfactory for Earth, and Yod too spiritualised a
form of Fire. (But see Book 4, part III.)
Paragraphs 1-6. Out of nothing, nothing is made. The word
Nihil is taken to affirm that the universe is nothing, and that is
now to be analysed. The order of the element is that of Jeheshua.
--
is nothing; but here is an hundred thousand
pounds.
--
I shall avenge myself by writing nothing in this
chapter.
--
not write even a reasonably decent lie.
[188]
--
(But note that a good Qabalist can not err. "In Him
all is right." 89 is Body-that which annoys-and
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
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., one of the intimate disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, was present during all the conversations recorded in the main body of the book and noted them down in his diary.
They therefore have the value of almost stenographic records. In Appendix A are given several conversations which took place in the absence of M., but of which he received a first-hand record from persons concerned. The conversations will bring before the reader's mind an intimate picture of the Master's eventful life from March 1882 to April 24, 1886, only a few months before his passing away. During this period he came in contact chiefly with English-educated Benglis; from among them he selected his disciples and the bearers of his message, and with them he shared his rich spiritual experiences.
--
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 human 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.
--
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 Nityatmananda 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 a nother 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.
It did not take much time for M. to become very intimate with the Master, or for the Master to recognise in this disciple a divinely commissioned partner in the fulfilment of his spiritual mission. When M. was reading out the Chaitanya Bhagavata, the Master discovered that he had been, in a previous birth, a disciple and companion of the great Vaishnava Teacher, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and the Master even saw him 'with his naked eye' participating in the ecstatic mass-singing of the Lord's name under the leadership of that Divine personality. So the Master told M, "You are my own, of the same substance as the father and the son," indicating thereby that M. was one of the chosen few and a part and parcel of his Divine mission.
There was an urge in M. to abandon the household life and become a Sannysin. When he communicated this idea to the Master, he forbade him saying," Mother has told me that you have to do a little of Her work you will have to teach Bhagavata, the word of God to humanity. The Mother keeps a Bhagavata Pandit with a bondage in the world!"
--
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.)
--
The life of Sdhan and holy association that he started on at the feet of the Master, he continued all through his life. He has for this reason been most appropriately described as a Grihastha-Sannysi (householder-Sannysin). Though he was forbidden by the Master to become a Sannysin, his reverence for the Sannysa ideal was whole-hearted and was without any reservation. So after Sri Ramakrishna's passing away, while several of the Master's householder devotees considered the young Sannysin disciples of the Master as inexperienced and inconsequential, M. stood by them with the firm faith that the Master's life and message were going to be perpetuated only through them. Swami Vivekananda wrote from America in a letter to the inmates of the Math: "When Sri Thkur (Master) left the body, every one gave us up as a few unripe urchins. But M. and a few others did not leave us in the lurch. We can not repay our debt to them." (Swami Raghavananda's article on M. in Prabuddha Bharata vol. XXX P. 442.)
M. spent his weekends and holidays with the monastic brethren who, after the Master's demise, had formed themselves into an Order with a Math at Baranagore, and 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.
This brings us to the circumstances that led to the writing and publication of this monumental work, which has made M. one of the immortals in hagiographic literature.
--
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 Nityatmananda's 'M The Apostle and the Evangelist' Part I. P 29.) At a nother 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."
In addition to this instinct for diary-keeping, M. had great endowments contri buting to success in this line. Writes Swami Nityatmananda who lived in close association with M., in his book entitled M - The Apostle and Evangelist: "M.'s prodigious memory combined with his extraordinary power of imagination completely annihilated the distance of time and place for him. Even after the lapse of half a century he could always visualise vividly, scenes from the life of Sri Ramakrishna. Superb too was his power to portray pictures by words."
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 emanating 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 can not 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.)
--
It looks as if M. was brought to the world by the Great Master to record his words and transmit them to posterity. Swami Sivananda, a direct disciple of the Master and the second President of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, says on this topic: "Whenever there was an interesting talk, the Master would call Master Mahashay if he was not in the room, and then draw his attention to the holy words spoken. We did not know then why the Master did so. Now we can realise that this action of the Master had an important significance, for it was reserved for Master Mahashay to give to the world at large the sayings of the Master." ( Vednta Kesari Vol. XIX P 141.) Thanks to M., we get, unlike in the case of the great teachers of the past, a faithful record with date, time, exact report of conversations, description of concerned men and places, references to contemporary events and personalities and a hundred other details for the last four years of the Master's life (1882-'86), so that no one can doubt the historicity of the Master and his teachings at any time in the future.
M. was, in every respect, a true missionary of Sri Ramakrishna right from his first acquaintance with him in 1882. As a school teacher, it was a practice with him to direct to the Master such of his students as had a true spiritual disposition. Though himself prohibited by the Master to take to monastic life, he encouraged all spiritually inclined young men he came across in his later life to join the monastic Order. Swami Vijnanananda, a direct Sannysin disciple of the Master and a President of the Ramakrishna Order, once remarked to M.: "By enquiry, I have come to the conclusion that eighty percent and more of the Sannysins have embraced the monastic life after reading the Kathmrita (Bengali name of the book) and coming in contact with you." ( M
0.00 - The Wellspring of Reality, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
We are not seeking a license to ramble wordily. We are intent only upon being adequately concise. General systems science discloses the existence of minimum sets of variable factors that uniquely govern each and every system. Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions. Let us not make the error of inadequacy in examining our most comprehensive inventory of experience and thoughts regarding the evoluting affairs of all humanity.
There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity. With this objective, we set out on our review of the spectrum of significant experiences and seek therein for the greatest meanings as well as for the family of generalized principles governing the realization of their optimum significance to humanity aboard our Sun circling planet Earth.
We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.
Holding within their definition, we define Universe as the aggregate of allhumanity's consciously apprehended and communicated, nonsimultaneous, and only partially overlapping experiences. An aggregate of finites is finite. Universe is a finite but nonsimultaneously conceptual scenario.
--
Such packages consist of complexedly interrelated and not as-yet differentially analyzed phenomena which, as initially unit cognitions, are potentially re-experienceable. A rose, for instance, grows. has thorns, blossoms, and fragrance, but often is stored in the brain only under the single word-rose.
As Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, 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 human 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.
--
Mind is the weightless and uniquely human faculty that surveys the ever larger inventory of special-case experiences stored in the brain bank and, seeking to identify their intercomplementary significance, from time to time discovers one of the rare scientifically generalizable principles running consistently through all the relevant experience set. The thoughts that discover these principles are weightless and tentative and may also be eternal. They suggest eternity but do not prove it, even though there have been no experiences thus far that imply exceptions to their persistence. It seems also to follow that the more experiences we have, the more chances there are that the mind may discover, on the one hand, additional generalized principles or, on the other hand, exceptions that disqualify one or a nother of the already catalogued principles that, having heretofore held "true" without contradiction for a long time, had been tentatively conceded to be demonstrating eternal persistence of behavior. Mind's relentless reviewing of the comprehensive brain bank's storage of all our special-case experiences tends both to progressive enlargement and definitive refinement of the catalogue of generalized principles that interaccommodatively govern all transactions of Universe.
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 a nother, 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 humans 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 humanity's specialization leads only toward warring and such devastating tools, both, visible and invisible, as ultimately to destroy all Earthians.
--
We are able to assert that this rationally coordinating system bridge has been established between science and the humanities 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 humans but also to permit all humans' individual enjoyment of all the Earth without anyone profiting at the expense of a nother 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 humanity 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 human 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.
It is synergetically reasonable to assume that relativistic evaluation of any of the separate drives of art, science, education, economics, and ideology, and their complexedly interacting trends within our own times, may be had only through the most comprehensive historical sweep of which we are capable.
--
Today's news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. The insistence by reporters upon having advance "releases" of what, for instance, convocation speakers are supposedly going to say but in fact have not yet said, automatically discredits the value of the largely prefabricated news. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated events of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for purposes either of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity's tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes.
Furthermore, today's hyperspecialization in socioeconomic functioning has come to preclude important popular philosophic considerations of the synergetic significance of, for instance, such historically important events as the discovery within the general region of experimental inquiry known as virology that the as-yet popularly assumed validity of the concepts of animate and inanimate phenomena have been experimentally invalidated. Atoms and crystal complexes of atoms were held to be obviously inanimate; the protoplasmic cells of biological phenomena were held to be obviously animate. It was deemed to be common sense that warm- blooded, moist, and soft-skinned humans were clearly not to be confused with hard, cold granite or steel objects. A clear-cut threshold between animate and inanimate was therefore assumed to exist as a fundamental dichotomy of all physical phenomena. This seemingly placed life exclusively within the bounds of the physical.
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 a nother'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 humanly employed organisms will, even if they are chemically successful, be as remote from creating life as are automobile manufacturers from creating the human 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.
--
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.
0.00 - To the Reader, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The reader is requested to note that Sri Aurobindo is not responsible for these records as he had no opportunity to see them. So, it is not as if Sri Aurobindo said exactly these things but that I remember him to have said them. All I can say is that I have tried to be as faithful in recording them as I was humanly capable. That does not minimise my personal responsibility which I fully accept.
A. B. PURANI
0.01f - FOREWARD, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
if not ultimately, at least essentially. Fuller being is closer union :
such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us empha-
--
always something more to be seen. After all, do we not judge
the perfection of an animal, or the supremacy of a thinking being,
--
see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-
indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon
--
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 ?
--
valleys) from which, not only his vision, but things themselves
radiate? In that event the subjective viewpoint coincides with
--
It is not necessary to be a man to perceive surrounding things
and forces ' in the round '. All the animals have reached this point
--
nature at which the convergent lines are not only visual but
structural. The following pages will do no more than verify and
--
This phrase is not chosen at random, but for three reasons.
First to assert that man, in nature, is a genuine fact falling (at
--
So please do not expect a final explanation of things here, nor
a metaphysical system. Neither do I want any misunderstanding
--
the dawn of life, or life in the Palaeozoic era, I do not forget that
there would be a cosmic contradiction in imagining a man as
--
appearance of thought on earth. I do not pretend to describe
them as they really were, but rather as we must picture them to
--
What I depict is not the past in itself, but as it must appear to an
observer standing on the advanced peak where evolution has
--
discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes,
and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised
--
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, #Integral Yoga
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. A nother side of his dynamic personality is represented by the Ashram as an institution. But the outer, if one may use the phrase, the human 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 humanity.
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]
Twice he found it necessary to go out of his way to make public pronouncements on important world-issues, which shows distinctly that renunciation of life is not a part of his Yoga. "The first was in relation to the Second World War. At the beginning he did not actively concern himself with it, but when it appeared as if Hitler would crush all the forces opposed to him and Nazism dominate the world, he began to intervene."[2]
The second was with regard to Sir Stafford Cripps' proposal for the transfer of power to India.
--
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 human 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 human 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 human 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 human manifestation a certain divine quality and thus demonstrates the possibility of overcoming the limits of ordinary human 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 humanity without regard to the process of evolution; they are, in fact, indications of human 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 permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth."[5]
--
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 can not 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 human personality into the Divine perhaps even the mere connection of the human 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 human 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 demand imposition, or assumption, of limitation. In this connection Sri Aurobindo said during an evening talk that no human manifestation can be illimitable and unlimited, but the manifestation in the limited should reflect the unlimited, the Transcendent Beyond.
This possibility of the human touching and manifesting the Divine has been realised during the course of human 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 humanity 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 human 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
It is true that for a long time I have not slept in the usual
sense of the word.1 That is to say, at no time do I fall into
--
had not slept for several months.
the inconscience which is the sign of ordinary sleep. But I do
--
I shall not endeavour to reply to your opinion on the "conversations" although there are certain points which you do not seem
to have fully grasped; but I suppose that a second reading later
--
mention. I found it rather dull, but apart from that not too bad.
But the Mukerjee quoted there must have lived for many years
--
westernised; otherwise he would not give Gandhi and Tagore
as the two most popular figures in India. On the contrary it
--
does not go beyond the understanding of the Western mind.
India has far greater geniuses than these and in the most
--
does not care for international glory.
4 August 1931
--
I wish to add that there is nothing to fear in this respect; if it is
Nature's plan to perpetuate the human race, she will always find
--
it is certainly not confined to the small states of central Europe.
What you have described is pretty much the state of the whole
--
Do not start thinking I am a pessimist. I certainly do not
like things as they are. I do not believe, however, that they are
worse than they have been many times before. But I want them
--
is carried out not for a personal end but in a selfless way for
the realisation of an ideal. The life we lead here is as far from
--
legal technicalities; but it goes without saying that I do not own
them. I think I have already explained the situation to you and
--
"manage" everything, but not because I really own them. You
will readily understand why I am telling you all this; it is so you
--
which is certainly not unfounded. In their ignorant unconsciousness men set moving forces they are not even aware of and soon
these forces get more and more out of their control and bring
--
Even here, in this poor little nook, we have not escaped the
general malady. For three or four days the forces at work were
--
It may be that life on earth has always been a chaos - whatever the Bible may say, the Light has not yet made its appearance.
Let us hope that it will not be long in coming.
23 August 1936
--
I gave in 1912, I think. It is a bit out-of-date, but I did not
want to dampen their enthusiasm. I had entitled it "The Central
--
human will there are forces at work whose origin is not human
and which move consciously towards certain ends. The play of
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 human 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 humanity. 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 human powers and utilities. But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
The Conditions of the Synthesis
--
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 human life under a load of machinery and to purchase certain forms of freedom and mastery at the price of an increased servitude, so the preoccupation with Yogic processes and their exceptional results may have its disadvantages and losses. The
--
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 demand 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 humanity. 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 human 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, #Integral Yoga
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 human 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 human 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
Sin belongs to the world and not to yoga.
By his way of thinking, feeling, acting, each one emanates vibrations which constitute his own atmosphere and quite naturally
--
You are expecting those who are working with you to be geniuses. It is not quite fair.
I have seen your chit for washing soap. You got the last one on
--
X has started a new notebook; but it seems to me that he had
not finished the previous one.
I do not see at all the need of changing the notebook every
month. Will you see if indeed the previous book is finished or
--
In future I will be obliged to ask for the finished notebook
before I can sanction a new one. That is to say, each time that
a notebook is to be renewed the finished notebook must be sent
up to me at the same time as the chit for the new one.
I do not see the need of leaving a blank page at the beginning.
Y is complaining that cement dust falls in the cattle-feed when
--
How is it that you have not spoken to me about the bakery
kneading table for two days? If it is not repaired at once, we
shall have no bread to eat. The work must be done immediately.
I am not feeling comfortable about the dining room. It is not by
merely saying: " nothing will happen" that an accident can be
--
P.S. Naturally I am not expecting you to go tonight but
tomorrow morning.
--
that bench. The mason was not injured. The incident
reminded Z that 1:30 to 3:30 P.M. on Thursdays is
--
It is always better not to remember such superstitions. It is the
suggestion that acts in these cases - most often a suggestion
--
thing may not happen. Do you realise our responsibility and
WHAT IT MEANS if something serious happens?
--
I have noticed that even in cases where Mother knows
our needs, She waits to be asked before granting them.
not exact in all cases and especially not with everybody.
My explanation, based on my own experience, is this:
--
It is not quite that. In each case there is, probably, a special
reason. What is constant is a difference of appreciation in the
--
with "gris entretien". I had informed the stores not to
issue gris entretien except for Sri Aurobindo's room.
But who is responsible for having given the paint? Was not the
fact that the "gris entretien" must be kept for the doors and windows in Sri Aurobindo's room only, told to those in charge?(!)
--
A rule is a rule and I do not see why my stool escaped the rule,
unless a chit signed by me could be produced.
--
On the outside cover of a notebook used by X, there
was a table of Rahukal, giving the inauspicious hours
--
a treatment!! I prefer not to think of what will come out of so
much unconsciousness and carelessness.
--
he described - but is it really necessary? This is not what heals.
Healing comes not from the head but from the heart.
To understand is good, but to will is better.
--
Weep if you like, but do not worry. After the rain the sun shines
more bright.
--
Peace, peace, my child; do not torment yourself.
The sadhak's prayer is composed of extracts from several prayers of the Mother in
--
But what was this darkness? I could not recognise myself
during the last four hours. I was stiff, I was burning with
--
I trust that X is not truly provoking. I would not like it at
all. Each one has his faults and must never forget it when he
--
It is always better not to show too much what I have written,
as I am not dealing with everybody in the same way, and what
I can say to one I would not say to a nother.
Guard against all individual decision (which can be arbitrary).
--
as it does not correspond to any wrong thought or feeling, the
body consciousness being most often and in almost everybody
--
reproach in what I was saying, because there was nothing of
the kind in my intention. I was giving expression to an amused
--
Why do I do something in dream which I would not do
in the waking consciousness?
The movement comes from a subconscient layer which is not
allowed to express itself in the daytime.
--
The concentration can be kept constantly but not by mental
decision.
--
But why should I not say that according to my estimate,
it is 30 days' work?
--
after week. I like better to count largely and not to be disappointed.
Mother, what is the proper attitude? If I hear suggestion
--
There is no contradiction in stating what you think. I am not
expecting you to be a prophet and that your thought should be
--
that the carpenter was going, not gone, and I calculated
that by the time I came out and closed the door, he
--
I am feeling tired today. I have not exerted myself,
nor have I economised on sleep or rest. I was also getting
--
I am not astonished. You have reached a point of inner progress
when you can no more get into fits of anger without feeling the
--
found, with some discomfort, that not a single one is closing
properly. Unless you are a Hercules and a wrestler you have no
--
suppose, but this goodwill would certainly not stand any strong
gust of wind!
--
is not so nice." I replied: "I know at least one reason. It is
because you are not with the workmen all the time. This
morning you were missing from your post from 9:30 to
--
I wait. If the inconvenience caused by not having this
thing comes up again or increases, I ask for it.
--
two: ask for nothing at all and see what happens.
Give me an infallible method.
--
have lost the "spirit". I was not referring to the things given at
the "stores", and I was most surprised to see that you did not
ask for anything on the first. You would do well to ask strictly
--
hope this new marriage will not make him irregular.
Should we give him the money? If you think it is necessary,
I shall not say No.
6 July 1933
--
the tape is not indispensable. But there is a dissatisfaction
somewhere in my being. I can't pinpoint this recalcitrant
--
this, for example: "I do not want to receive a measuring-tape.
I earnestly hope that Mother will not disgrace me by giving
me one, for it would cover me with shame and embarrassment.
--
but difficult to execute. If the desire had not been there insisting
on immediate realisation, the project could have been examined
--
know nothing, I can do nothing, I am good for nothing.
Having recognised this, I have lost all joy in action.
--
but truly speaking it does not count for much. I believe rather
in the influence of atmospheres. Each one has around him an
--
although, of course, it is not the only explanation!
30 October 1933
--
someone.) I regret having lost my temper while pronouncing these last sentences. I have noticed that even
when I am conscious, if I open my mouth I lose my selfcontrol. I get angrier and angrier from one sentence to
--
The conclusion is therefore obvious: it would be better not to
open your mouth. In certain cases, as in this one, it is wiser to
--
vessels used for cooking are very large, the top of the fireplaces should not be much higher than ground level. This must
be checked while the kitchen is being repaired. The top of
the fire-places should not be more than fifty centimetres above
ground, so that the vessels can be raised and lowered without
--
me little time - not enough for a tour of all the centres.
What should I do, Sweet Mother? I call for Your help.
--
An exercise: If you notice that your voice is rising,
stop speaking immediately; call upon Sweet Mother to
--
I decided to be brave and not tell You about it, but the
pain has grown sharper since yesterday.
It was not at all clever to have said nothing about it. If you had
told me immediately, you would already have been cured.
--
Sadhak: That is nothing. He isn't interested in occult
powers; it isn't His aim.
--
the solution. This is not unusual. It has happened several
times.
--
Sadhak: Yes, we are not all under a hallucination!
Mr. Z: Are you sure it isn't a hallucination?
--
It would have been better not to say the things I have marked in
red pencil. This falls under the "powers" that it would be better
--
is inaccurate? This is very serious - you should not put words
into his mouth which he didn't say. You must report things
--
exactly as you heard them, and when you are not sure you must
say so.
--
Why do you want an outward sign of my love? Are you not
satisfied with knowing it is there?
--
your aspiration. But I did not have that particular point in mind
- I was speaking in a much more general way. All of you, in
--
It seems that the notice about the holidays has been circulated
only in French. I don't think you should do this, for it would
--
These things need to be considered carefully, not lightly as one
discusses a play or the pronunciation of French.
--
shall discuss the matter quietly. When will you learn not to lose
courage and confidence at the slightest setback, when things are
--
things you have not said, but which I know. The trouble might
be summed up thus:
--
Now I propose this - to put up a notice which X could
draft along the following lines:
--
am giving them three weeks' advance notice: as of July 1st the
number of workmen will be reduced by... (give the exact figure).
--
Before displaying the notice you will speak to the workers
(masons, carpenters, painters, coolies, etc.) whom you positively
want to keep and tell them that the notice which is going to be
put up is not meant for them and that in any event we want
to retain their services, so they do not have to look for work
elsewhere. To avoid any possible misunderstanding, it would be
--
- but this is not an ordinary pendulum since it works by rotary
movement.) I answered, as I always do, "Do as you think best."
--
vision and this belief is based not merely on theoretical knowledge but on the thousands of examples I have come across in
the course of a life which is already long. Unfortunately I am
--
doubt is not an experiment, and that outer circumstances will
always conspire to justify these doubts, and this for a reason
--
I have nothing else to add except this. When the question
of distempering X's rooms arose, I looked very carefully several
--
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.
--
do not very clearly see my intention, you must enquire about it;
if you do not grasp my formation in a very precise way, you must
ask me to explain it to you. When I do not do so, it is because I
think you are receptive enough for the formation to act and fulfil
--
That is not exactly what I said. I said that a feeling of danger
should always be taken seriously when one is responsible for
--
the state of things, and that one should not say, "It is nothing"
unless one is ten times sure it is nothing.
22 August 1934
--
is not above reproach. The good materials get spoiled
under a pile of useless things, because one can not take
--
and order which causes all this waste. Certainly, if there is not
enough room to keep things in order and separate, the good
--
X sent me a mason with a dismissal note this morning. Later, I learnt from X that the mason had laughed
when X told him he was not satisfied with the work he
had done. How should one determine a worker's fate in
--
identification. But it is not very easy to do and there are other
means of knowing besides reasoning - intuition, for example
--
I know that I was not obliged to give Y an explanation for my decision. In his expression, the question was
there, but I could easily have ignored it. Why did I show
--
of effort. No. 2 wants to conquer the difficulty, not run away
from it. I suggest that for the time being you avoid contact with
--
must tell him that it is not right. I followed the second
suggestion.
--
No, it is not correct - and I see that you have not understood the
implications of my remark the other day. If you see something
--
aware. Do not withdraw from me when You see me sad.
O Sweet Mother, I assure You, I promise You, that with
--
Yes, it is correct as an analysis, but a thing ought not to be
done for any of these personal considerations. The thing to be
--
questions. If the thing is right and good, one should do it. If not,
one should refrain from doing it.
--
did not have the power to dominate the other man's will.
So you should have the nails removed.
--
Mother who decided not to have them removed.
Yes, I hoped that his will could be made to yield on this point,
--
and so the formation did not have a power of truth sufficient to
dissolve X's counter-formation. (This is true "occultism".)
--
thing is good or not, because my vision is limited.
I never said that you should be the judge. I agree to be the judge
--
If You had said to me, "Removing the nails is nothing, is
it?", I would have replied, " nothing much." And if You
had said, "What! Removing the nails for nothing and
damaging the wall?", I would have replied, "Senseless."
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.
--
would not need to get information from anyone. But this is not
the case, and this is why I consult the people around me, because
they are able to move about. I do not want them to answer me
by echoing what they imagine - wrongly - to be what I think. I
--
You wrote to me, "It is precisely because your refusal had no real cause that it did not have the power
to dominate the other man's will. So you should get the
--
the argument I gave X to make him accept the nails was not
true enough to have the power to overcome the hostility of his
--
would not have found it so difficult and you would not have put
it in the same way.
--
several times if necessary; ponder every word so that you understand exactly what I am saying and nothing else.
20 July 1935
--
As a general rule, it is better not to repeat to someone what
someone else has said, for there is always a risk of creating
--
are still not open. You must open them all, for I am there and I
am waiting.
--
So you should behave as if nothing had happened and welcome
him back. I hope that Y too will not make any unnecessary
remarks.
--
I am not at all displeased. But what a strange idea to let yourself
be upset by such little things! What about the Yoga?
--
I know nothing about the matter. X has not written to me.
But one thing is certain: you give far too much importance
--
In the present conditions I think it would be better not to
persist in your attempt at friendly relations with him, for it only
--
the work, I am still not convinced of it. My impression is that
one always says far more than is necessary and that it is not with
words that good work gets done.
--
upset and depressed because a fellow-worker did not
follow his advice.)
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
displayed, if not constantly, then occasionally or with some regularity of recurrence, in primary formations or in others more developed and, it may well be, even in some, however rare, that are near to the highest possible realisation of our present humanity. For the march of Nature is not drilled to a regular and mechanical forward stepping. She reaches constantly beyond herself even at the cost of subsequent deplorable retreats.
She has rushes; she has splendid and mighty outbursts; she has immense realisations. She storms sometimes passionately forward hoping to take the kingdom of heaven by violence.
--
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 humanity. 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 demand 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
--
of noxious activities. Their purification, not their destruction, - their transformation, control and utilisation is the aim in view with which they have been created and developed in us.
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 human 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 human 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.
--
common possession. In actual appearance it would seem as if it were only developed to the fullest in individuals and as if there were great numbers and even the majority in whom it is either a small and ill-organised part of their normal nature or not evolved at all or latent and not easily made active.
Certainly, the mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature; it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. The sign is that the fine and full equilibrium of vitality and matter, the sane, robust, long-lived human body is ordinarily found only in races or classes of men who reject the effort of thought, its disturbances, its tensions, or think only with the material mind.
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 human 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.
She has harmonised the bodily life with the material mind, she is harmonising it with the play of the intellectual mentality; for that, although it tends to a depression of the full animal and vital vigour, need not produce active disturbances. And she is shooting yet beyond in the attempt to reach a still higher level.
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.
--
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
--
towards ideal social and economic conditions, by the labour of Science towards an improved health, longevity and sound physique in civilised humanity, 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 demands 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.
--
Mind is not the last term of evolution, not an ultimate aim, but, like body, an instrument. It is even so termed in the language of
16
--
Yoga, the inner instrument.4 And Indian tradition asserts that this which is to be manifested is not a new term in human experience, but has been developed before and has even governed humanity 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.
--
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, superhuman states of consciousness and activity. A trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight7 is, indeed, the metaphysical description of the supreme Atman, 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
--
The immanence itself would have no credible reason for being if it did not end in such a transfiguration. But if human mind can become capable of the glories of the divine Light, human emotion and sensibility can be transformed into the mould and assume the measure and movement of the supreme Bliss, human 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.
So dazzling is even a glimpse of this supreme existence and so absorbing its attraction that, once seen, we feel readily justified in neglecting all else for its pursuit. Even, by an opposite exaggeration to that which sees all things in Mind and the mental life as an exclusive ideal, Mind comes to be regarded as an unworthy deformation and a supreme obstacle, the source of an illusory universe, a negation of the Truth and itself to be denied and all its works and results annulled if we desire the final liberation. But this is a half-truth which errs by regarding only the actual limitations of Mind and ignores its divine intention.
--
Wisdom exists at all, the faculty of Mind also must have some high use and destiny. That use must depend on its place in the ascent and in the return and that destiny must be a fulfilment and transfiguration, not a rooting out or an annulling.
We perceive, then, these three steps in Nature, a bodily life which is the basis of our existence here in the material world, a mental life into which we emerge and by which we raise the bodily to higher uses and enlarge it into a greater completeness, and a divine existence which is at once the goal of the other two and returns upon them to liberate them into their highest possibilities. Regarding none of them as either beyond our reach or below our nature and the destruction of none of them as essential to the ultimate attainment, we accept this liberation and fulfilment as part at least and a large and important part of the aim of Yoga.
0.03 - III - The Evening Sittings, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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.
--
When Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved to No. 9 Rue de la Marine in 1922 the same routine of informal evening sittings after meditation continued. I came to Pondicherry for Sadhana in the beginning of 1923. I kept notes of the important talks I had with the four or five disciples who were already there. Besides, I used to take detailed notes of the Evening Talks which we all had with the Master. They were not intended by him to be noted down. I took them down because of the importance I felt about everything connected with him, no matter how insignificant to the outer view. I also felt that everything he did would acquire for those who would come to know his mission a very great significance.
As years passed the evening sittings went on changing their time and often those disciples who came from outside for a temporary stay for Sadhana were allowed to join them. And, as the number of sadhaks practising the Yoga increased, the evening sittings also became more full, and the small verandah upstairs in the main building was found insufficient. Members of the household would gather every day at the fixed time with some sense of expectancy and start chatting in low tones. Sri Aurobindo used to come last and it was after his coming that the session would really commence.
He came dressed as usual in dhoti, part of which was used by him to cover the upper part of his body. Very rarely he came out with chaddar or shawl and then it was "in deference to the climate" as he sometimes put it. At times for minutes he would be gazing at the sky from a small opening at the top of the grass-curtains that covered the verandah upstairs in No. 9, Rue de la Marine. How much were these sittings dependent on him may be gathered from the fact that there were days when more than three-fourths of the time passed in complete silence without any outer suggestion from him, or there was only an abrupt "Yes" or "No" to all attempts at drawing him out in conversation. And even when he participated in the talk one always felt that his voice was that of one who does not let his whole being flow into his words; there was a reserve and what was left unsaid was perhaps more than what was spoken. What was spoken was what he felt necessary to speak.
Very often some news-item in the daily newspaper, town-gossip, or some interesting letter received either by him or by a disciple, or a question from one of the gathering, occasionally some remark or query from himself would set the ball rolling for the talk. The whole thing was so informal that one could never predict the turn the conversation would take. The whole house therefore was in a mood to enjoy the freshness and the delight of meeting the unexpected. There were peals of laughter and light talk, jokes and criticism which might be called personal, there was seriousness and earnestness in abundance.
--
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 human intellect and its secondary place in the search for the ultimate Reality.
But there were occasions when he did give his independent, personal views on some problems, on events or other subjects. Even then it was never an authoritarian pronouncement. Most often it appeared to be a logically worked out and almost inevitable conclusion expressed quite impersonally though with firm and sincere conviction. This impersonality was such a prominent trait of his personality! Even in such matters as dispatching a letter or a telegram it would not be a command from him to a disciple to carry out the task. Most often during his usual passage to the dining room he would stop on the way, drop in on the company of four or five disciples and, holding out the letter or the telegram, would say in the most amiable and yet the most impersonal way: "I suppose this has to be sent." And it would be for someone in the group instantly to volunteer and take it. The expression he very often used was "It was done" or "It happened", not "I did."
From 1918 to 1922, we gathered at No. 41, Rue Franois Martin, called the Guest House, upstairs, on a broad verandah into which four rooms opened and whose main piece of furniture was a small table 3' x 1' covered with a blue cotton cloth. That is where Sri Aurobindo used to sit in a hard wooden chair behind the table with a few chairs in front for the visitors or for the disciples.
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You must not lose patience or courage; everything will turn
out all right.
--
known is nothing compared to the one - much deeper and
completer - which you will come to know.
--
Also it would be better not to get angry, and if it happens, it
is better to forget your anger quickly; and if that isn't possible,
--
You should not listen to the criticism of people without taste
or sufficient education.
--
Do not attach too much importance to all these things;
they are the imaginations of a child who knows nothing of
life, of its misery and ugliness. For life is not as it is portrayed
in novels; day-to-day existence is full of sufferings great and
--
But this is not the only way to get rid of it. Opening to the Light
and Consciousness from above and allowing them to replace the
--
But my mind does not have tamas; it is always active
and runs here and there like a madman.
--
I have noticed that in X's presence I dare not do certain things, such as talk in a loud voice or other impolite
things of this kind.
--
nothing to do with her and it is not good to talk about
these things to people because they can not do anything
--
- and least of all about their difficulties; it is uncharitable because it does not help them to overcome the difficulties. As
for doctors, the rule is that they should not talk about their
patients, and the doctor ought to know better. I hope you are
--
You must not exaggerate. Certainly there are movements of vanity - rather childish besides - but they are not the only ones.
I am quite sure that while you were listening to the music, you
--
see one's faults and weaknesses clearly, but one should not see
only them, for that too would be one-sided. One should also
--
feelings and I don't want to deceive You. I have nothing
good to tell You. I have a hoard of bad, ugly, foolish and
--
Today I was sad all day, I could not smile. You will
receive many such things to read. But if You become
--
No, my child, I was not "serious" and I smiled at you as usual;
it was you who had such a sad little face and it is probably your
--
confessions are not so terrible as all that, no matter what you
may think of them. And as soon as you tell me all the things that
--
My Mother, today it seems to me that my mind is not
calm enough to write anything to You. Today I worked
--
You must not accept depression, never, and still less these
suggestions, so stupid and false, that I could ask you to go away!
--
are you not my little daughter? - and you will always have a
place by my side, in my love and protection.
--
I was not paying attention, but at one moment it came
to me that I would have to write all this to Mother and
--
It is not so terrible - the mind likes to be busy with something
always, and making up stories (even when one knows that these
stories are not true) is one of the most innocent pursuits of
this restless mind. Of course, it must become calm and quiet
--
understand: you are dissatisfied not because I fail to give you all
that you need, but because I give you more, far more than you
--
am still not regular, so how can I hope for Your help?
I don't understand what you mean. My help is always with
--
and receive it. And it is certainly not by being rebellious and
discontented that you will be able to do so.
--
Be careful, child, do not open the door to depression, discouragement and revolt - this leads far, far away from consciousness and makes you sink into the depths of obscurity
where happiness can no longer enter. Your great strength was
--
more the confident child you were, do not brood over your faults
and difficulties - it is your smile that will chase them away.
--
I have often noticed that when I wake up from sleep,
there is a kind of noise in my head, as if many people
were talking at once and I can understand nothing of
what they say. And I feel as if this noise has been going on
--
Once again, do not worry; what should disappear will disappear;
only what is good will remain.
--
I know that You will not like it, but I have to say that
it is better to put me aside. I am quite hopeless. Again for
--
because Your help is always with me. But I do not know
when I will open myself to You. I am as hard as a stone.
--
You would not tell me that I am rebelling, I do not like
to hear that.
I do not know, Mother, why I have written all these
things. Mother, please do not be angry with me, I have
nobody except You.
--
You wrote this one day in my notebook. But all the
things I have written about to You up to now have not
disappeared. Perhaps they are all good! And perhaps this
--
And if there is nothing bad in me, why are we taking
so much trouble? It would be better to remain quiet because "what should disappear will disappear; only what
--
Mother, I know that You will not like all these things
I have written, but what can I do? I have to write all this
--
I am not angry because what you write here means nothing
- I pity you, that's all. Did I tell you that it would disappear
--
He gave me a lecture. He did not say so but I think You
asked him to come to my room.
--
is necessary? Am I not here with You? Am I so far
away? Then why should I have to listen to the advice of
--
You wrote to me once in this notebook (December 16th),
with regard to Your help: "It is up to you to open yourself
and receive it. And it is certainly not by being rebellious
and discontented that you will be able to do so."
--
It is not enough to tell them, you must want them to disappear.
Mother, today I am sad. I don't know why but I even
--
And yet it is quite natural; how can you not be sad when you
turn your back on your soul, and that simply out of pride!
--
please. Will You not save me from them?
With all my will I want to save you, but you must allow me to
--
Am I not Your child? Yes, I know that I am a naughty
child, but what can I do? Naughty or not, in any case I
am Yours.
--
In the psychological domain, only the patients who do not want
to recover, do not recover. Perhaps it is the same for physical
diseases?
--
diseases? I understand nothing of it.
Psychological diseases are diseases of the thoughts and feelings,
--
I understand absolutely nothing of what you mean to say. You
seem to be saying that I like to see you suffer; but this is so
--
depressed that they are best able to rob you. You must not listen
to them - you must reject the wicked suggestions and become
--
am not what I was before.
I did not mean anything by not writing "my child" on the
little note I sent you this afternoon. I was in a big hurry and
I wrote as few words as possible. Of course I miss the time
--
be near me, and trusting and simple enough not to put a false
interpretation on all I do. Who has poured this poison of doubt
--
But now I find nothing to say and I don't know what
to write. As for what I have written: since You told me
--
But when I have nothing to write to You, what can
I write (in order, as You said, to keep the contact with
--
When you have nothing else to tell me, tell me at what time
you got up - (like this, for example: this morning I woke up
--
dressed, then went to collect my notebook from X's
window (I always go there). Then at about 6:30 I
--
Why not, my little smile? You can learn to say the same things
in different ways; this is an excellent exercise to learn how
--
I have noticed that X has not stopped his bad habit.
I hate him...
--
Mother, I have nothing new to tell You.
You are a beautiful and skilful worker, my little smile, and I am
--
Did you notice the date today - 3.3.33?
Do you know that this happens only once in eleven years?
--
it is a beauty untainted by any ugliness and it does not need the
proximity of ugliness in order to look beautiful.
--
do not wear them very often.
9 March 1933
--
It means the consciousness that is not filled with the activities and influences of ordinary life, but is concentrated in an
aspiration towards the divine light, force, knowledge, joy.
--
Then use Coué's method5 and repeat, "I am not tired, I can not
be tired because I am protected!"
--
Little smile, you must not go on working to the point of fatigue.
10 June 1933
--
You are right; nothing is better than to realise our most beautiful
dreams and nothing makes us stronger and happier!
11 June 1933
--
cut or not. Because if it is well cut, I can cut other things
without any hesitation.
--
you mean by "all day"? I hope it is not more than nine hours,
because that was already a long stretch and ought not to be
increased.
--
result may not appear immediately, but one day or a nother a
disinterested action bears its fruit.
--
You must not get into the habit of going to bed late like that.
It is not good - you will quickly spoil your eyesight, and that
would be the end of your beautiful embroideries. The nerves
--
I have nothing else to write to You. The only news I
have to give You is about my work.
--
but I saw that the sari was not quite straight. So now
I have only to undo this work - which took me three
--
I do not feel that I am working; I just play like a
child all day with the marvellous playthings my Mother
--
think of not increasing my work unnecessarily; there are not
many like you.
--
"How are you?" Y asked me. I had nothing to say, so I
asked, "And how are you?" She told me, "This time I
--
angry with me, they did not sit with me. I was very hurt
because they did not sit with me.
Do not torment yourself, my little smile; all this has come to
teach you that on these occasions, after having had the joy of
--
I am not angry with X. I always try to keep silent;
so I speak only about important things, with her as well
--
I have noticed that when I am concentrated, or
rather when I try to concentrate, I can not smile at anyone and if I try to smile I feel as if I were smiling
--
Mother, is it good or bad not to be able to speak like
that? I want to know, because if it is not good I don't
want it; I will go on speaking as before.
--
You must not worry - it does not help towards the realisation
of the promises; and also you must be patient. In this physical
--
then he said, "You are the Mother's child, not Sri Aurobindo's." (It was just a joke, because I can read Your
handwriting but not Sri Aurobindo's.)
Don't you believe that when one is a child of the Mother,
--
to write. I have nothing to say.
That is enough; all I ask is that we exchange a little "bonjour"7
--
I didn't notice it, so it can't be anything much. That is probably
why you looked so grave at Pranam this morning. You should
--
My dear little child, why were you weeping so much this morning at Pranam? I was so sorry I could not comfort you. Won't you
tell me about your sorrow so that I may remove it if possible?
--
sari is nothing compared to the one X is preparing.
That is not true; each has its own particular beauty and style.
The bird-of-paradise is a very beautiful sari.
--
I can not say whether it is the most beautiful or not. Each of
the embroidered saris has its own beauty; but it is true that this
--
I assure you that I do not deliberately give blows.
Series Three - To "My little smile"
--
want them. I shall not rest until You come into my heart
and live there eternally.
--
Today I have nothing to write. As usual I worked
all day.
--
You will not have to go far to seize me, for I am already in your
heart and as soon as your eyes are opened you will see me there;
--
I am speaking of your inner eyes, not the physical ones.
"Turn your faculty of feeling inward instead of letting it
--
returning it to you in this notebook.
27 February 1934
--
I simply asked whether you wanted to speak, so as not to insist
unnecessarily. You were mistaken if you thought I was showing
--
I dyed the big ten-yard piece. But it was not successful:
the dyeing is irregular: some places are dark and some
--
do this sari," and X will have worked for nothing. That is why I
told you to ask him for the drawing yourself. He has just today
--
You must not be afraid. If you see something that frightens
you or you have an unpleasant feeling, you must call me and the
thing will disappear. When you are awake, surely you are not
afraid of an approaching thunder-cloud; why should it frighten
--
Put yourself in my arms without fear and be sure that nothing can harm you. My force and my protection are always with
you.
--
sari to a lace gown. It is not a question of number or of need.
For years I was perfectly satisfied with two saris a year - but I
--
already there) I do not feel it. What is it that is closed?
My heart? Or something else? I don't understand all this.
--
do not yet have in me what I should have.
And I always ask You for silence and peace (as I
--
steadier. Remain confident, do not torment yourself - in this
way you will hasten its coming.
--
the consciousness. You must not let this upset you too much,
but simply aspire with calm and perseverance for the light to
--
saris all these days? It is certainly not because I dislike wearing
them - quite the contrary. But they are rather heavy and warm
--
Don't pretend to be silly when you are not. not only was I
not angry, but I had not the slightest intention of looking angry.
I only looked straight into your soul, trying to reestablish
--
Beware of false pride - it leads only to ruin. And do not
belittle the Divine's love, because without it nothing is worth
living for.
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
NATURE, then, is an evolution or progressive self-manifestation of an eternal and secret existence, with three successive forms as her three steps of ascent. And we have consequently as the condition of all our activities these three mutually interdependent possibilities, the bodily life, the mental existence and the veiled spiritual being which is in the involution the cause of the others and in the evolution their result. Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental, it is Nature's aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily existence, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities.
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.
--
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 impermanent and only the idea of a form is permanent 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.
--
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 madman. 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 human 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.
--
The mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman,1 is ever a dreamer. A dream of perfect beauty, perfect conduct, perfect Truth, whether seeking new forms of the Eternal or revitalising the old, is the very soul of pure mentality. But it knows not how to deal with the resistance of Matter. There it is hampered and inefficient, works by bungling experiments and has either to withdraw from the struggle or submit to the grey actuality. Or else, by studying the material life and accepting the conditions of the contest, it may succeed, but only in imposing temporarily some artificial system which infinite Nature either rends and casts aside or disfigures out of recognition or by withdrawing her assent leaves as the corpse of a dead ideal. Few and far between have been those realisations of the dreamer in Man which the world has gladly accepted, looks back to with a fond memory and seeks, in its elements, to cherish.
1 Who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of abstractions, the Brilliant.
--
When the gulf between actual life and the temperament of the thinker is too great, we see as the result a sort of withdrawing of the Mind from life in order to act with a greater freedom in its own sphere. The poet living among his brilliant visions, the artist absorbed in his art, the philosopher thinking out the problems of the intellect in his solitary chamber, the scientist, the scholar caring only for their studies and their experiments, were often in former days, are even now not unoften the Sannyasins of the intellect. To the work they have done for humanity, all its past bears record.
But such seclusion is justified only by some special activity.
--
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 work in the world of so supreme a power as spiritual force can not be thus limited. The spiritual life also can return upon the material and use it as a means of its own greater fullness. Refusing to be blinded by the dualities, the appearances, it can seek in all appearances whatsoever the vision of the same Lord, the same eternal Truth, Beauty, Love, Delight. The
--
The utility of the compromise in the then actual state of the world can not be doubted. It secured in India a society which lent itself to the preservation and the worship of spirituality, a country apart in which as in a fortress the highest spiritual ideal could maintain itself in its most absolute purity unoverpowered by the siege of the forces around it. But it was a compromise, not an absolute victory. The material life lost the divine impulse to growth, the spiritual preserved by isolation its height and purity, but sacrificed its full power and serviceableness to the world. Therefore, in the divine Providence the country of the Yogins and the Sannyasins has been forced into a strict and imperative contact with the very element it had rejected, the element of the progressive Mind, so that it might recover what was now wanting to it.
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 human 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.
0.04 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the ropes will be removed. Those ropes are not tight;
they are loose, so it is no hardship to the bullocks.
--
them. The ropes may not be tight, but most probably they will
spoil the nose of the bullocks. There again it seems to me that it
--
The coolie did not come last night. He simply put the
feeding tubs before the bullocks and went away. He is
not working satisfactorily. He does not keep things clean.
As there is no better man I am trying to get on with
--
man is not an expert and moreover he has something of a brute
around him. You will have to look carefully after him, for I do
--
The bullocks are not mischievous. On the contrary, they are
very good and peaceful creatures, but very sensitive - unusually
sensitive perhaps - (of this I am not sure as I have not followed
other bullocks so closely). The truth is that they dislike and distrust the present driver, and not without reason. When they were
working under the previous one they were happy and cheerful
--
It seems to me that, at least for a time, it would be better not to
try to turn out much work every day, as Ojas may truly need rest.
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
--
become old very soon. That is why I do not wish them to be
given that work.
--
so on. I am not submitting all this to have permission
to do like that for our cattle. But I am tempted to beg
--
the horns; it is so ugly! And I think you must be careful not to
take out Ra in the street that day as usually children run after
--
Is not 19 trips too much for the bullocks? It seems to me that
they are not getting much rest.
8 June 1933
--
the ground, he did not know.
I do not see what a chess problem has to do either with work or
with sadhana. Is X here to solve chess problems? He could do it
--
cuttings, beside the feeding tub. Ra did not take the feed
as he wanted her to. This was her mistake. When I ran
and questioned him he did not care to answer. Servants
tell me that he has beaten Ra like that with a sandal
--
was dismissed some two days back, not for the crime
of theft but for some rash dragging of a cart and thus
--
Certainly not.
If you are pleased to permit, as it is only for a day, I
--
This boy has been dismissed by my orders and will not be
given work in the Ashram.
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Therefore by some it is supposed that this is not only the highest but also the one true or exclusively preferable object of Yoga.
Yet it is always through something which she has formed in her evolution that Nature thus overpasses her evolution. It is the individual heart that by sublimating its highest and purest emotions attains to the transcendent Bliss or the ineffable Nirvana, the individual mind that by converting its ordinary functionings into a knowledge beyond mentality knows its oneness with the
--
The results of Hathayoga are thus striking to the eye and impose easily on the vulgar or physical mind. And yet at the end we may ask what we have gained at the end of all this stupendous labour. The object of physical Nature, the preservation of the mere physical life, its highest perfection, even in a certain sense the capacity of a greater enjoyment of physical living have been carried out on an abnormal scale. But the weakness of Hathayoga is that its laborious and difficult processes make so great a demand on the time and energy and impose so complete a severance from the ordinary life of men that the utilisation of its results for the life of the world becomes either impracticable or is extraordinarily restricted. If in return for this loss we gain a nother life in a nother world within, the mental, the dynamic, these results could have been acquired through other systems, through Rajayoga, through Tantra, by much less laborious methods and held on much less exacting terms. On the other hand the physical results, increased vitality, prolonged youth, health, longevity are of small avail if they must be held by us as misers of ourselves, apart from the common life, for their own sake, not utilised, not thrown into the common sum of the world's activities. Hathayoga attains large results, but at an exorbitant price and to very little purpose.
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
--
But Rajayoga does not forget that the disabilities of the ordinary mind proceed largely from its subjection to the reactions of the nervous system and the body. It adopts therefore from the Hathayogic system its devices of asana and pran.ayama, but reduces their multiple and elaborate forms in each case to one simplest and most directly effective process sufficient for its own immediate object. Thus it gets rid of the Hathayogic complexity and cumbrousness while it utilises the swift and powerful efficacy of its methods for the control of the body and the vital functions and for the awakening of that internal dynamism, full of a latent supernormal faculty, typified in Yogic terminology by the kun.d.alin, the coiled and sleeping serpent of Energy within. This done, the system proceeds to the perfect quieting of the restless mind and its elevation to a higher plane through concentration of mental force by the successive stages which lead to the utmost inner concentration or ingathered state of the consciousness which is called Samadhi.
By Samadhi, in which the mind acquires the capacity of withdrawing from its limited waking activities into freer and higher states of consciousness, Rajayoga serves a double purpose. It compasses a pure mental action liberated from the confusions of the outer consciousness and passes thence to the higher supra-mental planes on which the individual soul enters into its true spiritual existence. But also it acquires the capacity of that free and concentrated energising of consciousness on
--
Rajayoga aimed not only at Swarajya, self-rule or subjective empire, the entire control by the subjective consciousness of all the states and activities proper to its own domain, but included
Samrajya as well, outward empire, the control by the subjective consciousness of its outer activities and environment.
--
Rajayoga in that it does not occupy itself with the elaborate training of the whole mental system as the condition of perfection, but seizes on certain central principles, the intellect, the heart, the will, and seeks to convert their normal operations by turning them away from their ordinary and external preoccupations and activities and concentrating them on the Divine. It
38
--
Maya, the phenomenal consciousness. So it is able to arrive at its right identification with the pure and unique Self which is not mutable or perishable, not determinable by any phenomenon or combination of phenomena. From this point the path, as ordinarily followed, leads to the rejection of the phenomenal worlds from the consciousness as an illusion and the final immergence without return of the individual soul in the Supreme.
But this exclusive consummation is not the sole or inevitable result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and with a less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realisation of the supreme Self not only in one's own being but in all beings and, finally, the realisation of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realisation a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into activities of the divine consciousness utilisable for the perception of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect
The Systems of Yoga
--
But, here too, the exclusive result is not inevitable. The Yoga itself provides a first corrective by not confining the play of divine love to the relation between the supreme Soul and the individual, but extending it to a common feeling and mutual worship between the devotees themselves united in the same realisation of the supreme Love and Bliss. It provides a yet more general corrective in the realisation of the divine object of Love in all beings not only human but animal, easily extended to all forms whatsoever. We can see how this larger application of the Yoga of
Devotion may be so used as to lead to the elevation of the whole range of human emotion, sensation and aesthetic perception to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards love and joy in our humanity.
--
But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
We can see also that in the integral view of things these three paths are one. Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
uneasy. I also felt that he is not very happy with me. I
had a sort of bad feeling at that time. Why did I feel
--
because its desires and preferences are not satisfied. All that has
no true reality.
--
The disturbance still has not disappeared. I am in
a worse state than before. There is something wrong in
--
doing nothing.
18 December 1933
--
I am always with you, my child, so it is not only possible but
quite easy to feel my presence constantly.
--
Why this question? You have done nothing wrong and I am
not in the least displeased with you. Did I look very serious
--
and blindness of this poor world, but there was surely nothing
concerning you.
--
that it is not I who am working, so I say "we". I am
your child.
--
I do not want the vulgar joy of the world. Take me
into your heart. Take me into your arms.
--
You should not speak to others about what I write or say to
you, because they become jealous and their jealousy creates a
--
Do not distress yourself, it is the result of these last few days of
sickness. It will pass - but you must eat well regularly and sleep
well too, taking care not to go to bed too late.
Very lovingly.
--
I do not want a life without energy.
Very good - then you must acquire energy, and after all, it is
--
No, all is not sad and gloomy, neither the trees nor the sky
nor the sea; everything is full of the divine Presence and is only
--
Certainly I do not love you in the way you conceive of as
love; and I do see how it could be otherwise. You first have to
--
with those whose contact does not veil my presence. This is the
important point which should never be forgotten. All that leads
--
because your nerves are not very strong. You should eat more,
sleep longer, take some exercise in the open air, etc.
--
of knowledge which are indispensable to a man if he does not
want to be ignorant and uncultured.
--
vital, for if peace is not imposed on it by a power greater than
its own, the vital will never accept it.
--
inner discipline, one can achieve nothing in life, either spiritually
or materially. All those who have been able to create something
--
I hope you do not show my letters to anyone. It is better to
keep them to yourself; otherwise, if you show them, all the force
--
Purify me. Dispel the shadows. I will not revolt any
more.
--
My child, all my love is always with you; do not push it away.
1 September 1934
--
to you. But if you are not sick, you must eat; if you do not eat
regularly, your brain will waste away and you will lose your
--
It grieves me when you do not eat regularly. Do you want
to grieve your mother who loves you and wants only your own
--
that I am not sick; it was a cloud, you know. Now I
am going to the dining-room. My mother, I want to be
--
gone. Now you must not allow them to come back and for that
the best thing is to remain always cradled in my arms, protected
--
You are quite mistaken, I am not at all displeased with you. Only
I am worried because you always have a headache and because
--
cure you - but you too must want to be cured. Do not torment
yourself and always nestle in my arms so as to receive my love
--
I am not unhappy. All that is a falsehood.
Mother, stay with your little child.
--
do not even trust in me? Yet my love is always with you.
1 November 1934
--
is not always reasonable and that is why he has a headache and
a stomachache.
--
must do and especially what you must not do.
Love from your mother.
--
Do not forget that I am always with you and do only what
you could do in front of me without feeling ashamed. I mean
that you must never do what you would not dare to do in my
physical presence, for I am always with you.
--
cured. It is your body that does not feel very strong and is sad
because it does not have a sound balance of health. The best
cure is plenty of open-air exercise and abundant food.
--
I feel very tired; some part in me is not happy. I don't
know whether it is inside me or outside; something feels
--
You must not worry about these alternations. When the
psychic being comes to the surface, it brings its own joy with
--
again. But above all you must not believe the suggestions of incapacity and failure; they come from an adverse source and ought
not to be given any credence. Certainly there are difficulties on
--
within myself, not just now but over the past two years,
I find nothing. Sometimes I feel: "Why all these efforts?
They will be fruitless." You told me to open my heart
and all will be well; but you know, mother, nothing stays
in me.
--
No, it is not to console you that I told you that you have
made progress. The progress is undeniable even though it may
--
one, and you should not expect to reap its fruits after only three
or four years. It takes much longer than that. But you are young,
you have all of life before you; you need not be impatient.
You say that you are often depressed. It is the vital being
that gets depressed when its desires are not satisfied.
In ordinary life, one has to struggle to satisfy one's desires;
here one struggles not to do so. Actually, whatever path one
follows, success always comes to those who are strong, courageous, enduring. And you know that here our force and our help
--
feeling which does not conform to the truth.
Love from your mother.
--
see whether I want this life or not? Mother, if you don't
know what my path is, then who does?
--
Do not lose heart and do not be impatient; these things take
a long time to disappear. You know, don't you, that our force,
--
me, but I can not receive them. I am not asking you to
tell me what to do - you have told me to be patient
--
leave the Ashram? I want to go forward - not to revolt
against you, no, not at all. But I want to be sure of my
path.
--
I am not at all angry; but since you have decided to leave, I
can not detain you either, or do anything that might deprive you
--
You tell me in your letter: "Mother, I do not want the world,
not because I am afraid of my duty but because I want you." I
--
the inner help, not on an outer and superficial help.
I am telling you all this so that you may not be disappointed
once again after returning here.
--
However, I do not think it would be wise to come to
Pondicherry in February, for once you are here you might again
--
If you do not mind these two dangers, you can come.
With my love and blessings.
--
Do not torment yourself, my child, and remain as quiet as you
can; do not yield to the temptation to give up the struggle and let
yourself fall into darkness. Persist, and one day you will realise
--
It is the very first proposition that is wrong, I am not displeased
with you - so all that follows can not be correct.
--
I pray, please do not be vexed by my letter. I on my
part can bear anything except your displeasure. I feel
--
I am not vexed, I am not displeased - this impression of yours
is quite false and imaginary - it may be the result of a bad
--
Do not torment yourself, my dear child, and fear nothing; my
grace will always be with you and never fail you. Moreover, there
is no reason to believe that you will not succeed in this life; on the
contrary, I see in you the signs of a vocation. And since you have
--
Your going away will not help in the least. Exterior means are
useless; it is the "inside" that must change. Keep your resolution
--
You need not worry and must continue as you are doing except,
perhaps, that you must not allow your superficial and somewhat
too light exterior being to interfere and spoil your endeavour, as
--
does not allow any upsetting or depression to interfere with your
progress. The sincerity of the aspiration is the assurance of the
--
I don't find your expression melodramatic and there is nothing
to pardon. I know that it is from lack of energy that you can not
--
You find it difficult to open because you have not yet made
the resolution to allow my will, and not your own, to govern
your life. As soon as you have understood the need for this,
--
You did not reply to my last letter. Do you mean
that it isn't necessary to make the vital peaceful?
I did not answer because what I say seems to have no effect. If
you would express clearly, in a precise way, the nature of the
--
It is the same tiredness as that of the muscles when they do not
work enough. Inactivity is just as tiring as over-activity. not to
work enough is just as bad as working too much.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: Do not accept it when it comes and do not
believe what it says. Do not act according to its indications.
Then it will not be difficult to stop it.
And when Sri Aurobindo tells you something, the first thing
--
No, my dear little child, I am not displeased - why should I
be? I understand your difficulties and I know your goodwill;
--
come, you should not think that I am displeased, but on the
contrary that I am always with you, supporting you, protecting
--
Do not allow yourself to be dominated by vain imaginations.
The peace is there in the depths of your heart; concentrate there
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Y THE very nature of the principal Yogic schools, each covering in its operations a part of the complex human integer and attempting to bring out its highest possibilities, it will appear that a synthesis of all of them largely conceived and applied might well result in an integral Yoga. But they are so disparate in their tendencies, so highly specialised and elaborated in their forms, so long confirmed in the mutual opposition of their ideas and methods that we do not easily find how we can arrive at their right union.
An undiscriminating combination in block would not be a synthesis, but a confusion. Nor would a successive practice of each of them in turn be easy in the short span of our human life and with our limited energies, to say nothing of the waste of labour implied in so cumbrous a process. Sometimes, indeed,
Hathayoga and Rajayoga are thus successively practised. And in a recent unique example, in the life of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, we see a colossal spiritual capacity first driving straight to the divine realisation, taking, as it were, the kingdom of heaven by violence, and then seizing upon one Yogic method after a nother and extracting the substance out of it with an incredible rapidity, always to return to the heart of the whole matter, the realisation and possession of God by the power of love, by the extension of inborn spirituality into various experience and by the spontaneous play of an intuitive knowledge. Such an example can not be generalised. Its object also was special and temporal, to exemplify in the great and decisive experience of a master-soul the truth, now most necessary to humanity, towards which a world long divided into jarring sects and schools is with difficulty labouring, that all sects are forms and fragments of a single integral truth and all disciplines labour in their different ways towards one supreme experience. To know, be and possess
--
Nature; but it is a Yoga apart, not a synthesis of other schools.
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
--
If, however, we leave aside, here also, the actual methods and practices and seek for the central principle, we find, first, that Tantra expressly differentiates itself from the Vedic methods of Yoga. In a sense, all the schools we have hitherto examined are Vedantic in their principle; their force is in knowledge, their method is knowledge, though it is not always discernment by the intellect, but may be, instead, the knowledge of the heart expressed in love and faith or a knowledge in the will working out through action. In all of them the lord of the Yoga is the Purusha, the Conscious Soul that knows, observes, attracts, governs. But in Tantra it is rather Prakriti, the Nature-Soul, the Energy, the
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.
--
- and Yoga is nothing but practical psychology, - is the conception of Nature from which we have to start. It is the selffulfilment of the Purusha through his Energy. But the movement of Nature is twofold, higher and lower, or, as we may choose to term it, divine and undivine. The distinction exists indeed for practical purposes only; for there is nothing that is not divine, and in a larger view it is as meaningless, verbally, as the distinction between natural and supernatural, for all things that are are natural. All things are in Nature and all things are in God.
But, for practical purposes, there is a real distinction. The lower
Nature, that which we know and are and must remain so long as the faith in us is not changed, acts through limitation and division, is of the nature of Ignorance and culminates in the life of the ego; but the higher Nature, that to which we aspire, acts by unification and transcendence of limitation, is of the nature of Knowledge and culminates in the life divine. The passage from the lower to the higher is the aim of Yoga; and this passage
The Synthesis of the Systems
--
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
--
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
The Synthesis of the Systems
--
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
48
--
the relative consciousness; not only realisation of unity in the
Self, but of unity in the infinite diversity of activities, worlds and creatures.
Therefore, also, an integral liberation. not only the freedom born of unbroken contact and identification of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sayujya-mukti, by which it can become free2 even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the salokya-mukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of
Sachchidananda; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by the transformation of this lower being into the human image of the Divine, sadharmya-mukti, and the complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, universal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe.
By this integral realisation and liberation, the perfect harmony of the results of Knowledge, Love and Works. For there is attained the complete release from ego and identification in being with the One in all and beyond all. But since the attaining consciousness is not limited by its attainment, we win also the unity in Beatitude and the harmonised diversity in Love, so that all relations of the play remain possible to us even while we retain on the heights of our being the eternal oneness with the
Beloved. And by a similar wideness, being capable of a freedom in spirit that embraces life and does not depend upon withdrawal from life, we are able to become without egoism, bondage or reaction the channel in our mind and body for a divine action poured out freely upon the world.
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine
Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its
--
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 humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human 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 humanity 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 human 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.
0.06 - INTRODUCTION, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
Active Night has left the senses and faculties well prepared, though not completely
prepared, for the reception of Divine influences and illuminations in greater
--
Divine union of perfection of love, if God takes not its hand and purges it not in that
dark fire.'3
--
proficients, who have not yet acquired mature habits of spirituality and who
therefore still conduct themselves as children. The imperfections are examined one
--
Cross as a consummate spiritual master. And this not only for the objective value of
his observations, but because, even in spite of himself, he betrays the sublimity of
--
Spiritual persons, we are told, do not enter the second night immediately
after leaving the first; on the contrary, they generally pass a long time, even years,
--
This contemplation is not only dark, but also secret (Chapter xvii), and in
Chapter xviii is compared to the 'staircase' of the poem. This comparison suggests to
--
Flame of Love, they are not so completely knit into one whole as is this great double
treatise. They lose both in flexibility and in substance through the closeness with
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I hope and believe Your work does not depend upon
human beings.
No, it does not depend at all upon human beings. What has to
be done will be done despite all possible resistances.
--
You have no special will, for You want nothing.
I know perfectly well what I want or rather what the divine Will
--
with the law of the truth of things, and not arbitrarily through
a mental decision.
--
world and the men living there that do not want it!
What does the Divine want of me?
--
soon as I try to do so, I find nothing but this body, which
is like a lair of banal thoughts and lawless desires.
--
I have not said "conscious of the Divine Presence", I have said
"conscious"; that means one does not live in total ignorance of
what happens within oneself.
--
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
--
any enjoyment; I myself too do not want any.
It is good to be above all enjoyments the world can give, but
--
My physical mind is not yet convinced that human life
is capable of overcoming all suffering and even death.
--
divine life nothing is impossible.
Is it strange that one should become disgusted with this
--
I do not understand a phrase in Your Prayers: "and that
all are equal - infinitesimal grains of dust or identical
--
do not leave, I pray, any distance between You and me.
I too do not want any distance between us. But the relation must
be a true one, that is, based on union in the divine consciousness.
--
My dear Mother, I do not say that I love You and belong
to You, I must prove it in my actions; without that these
--
my heart; I could not bear to lose You.
There is no question of losing me. We carry in ourselves an
--
Ask X, he will tell you that the Presence is not a matter of faith
or of mental imagination, it is a fact, absolutely concrete and
--
It is not a question of convincing your heart, you must get the
experience of this presence and then you will become aware
--
me; for if you were not always present in my consciousness you
would not be able to think of me. So you may be sure of my
presence. I add my blessings.
--
to be near me you must climb up close beside me, and not expect
me to come down so far.
--
have You intimately, and that I must not expect You
to come down here. But Mother, You are so great and
--
our two planes. I dare not dream of the moment I shall
be at your side; You will always be higher, and I shall
--
My beloved Mother, is it not possible to meet You on
some other plane than the physical? I don't mean by
leaving the body; even when in the body, is it not possible
to meet on some other higher plane?
--
even when your physical eyes do not see me? I don't think so, for
if it were so, you would not complain of separation, you would
know, on the contrary, that there is no separation and that in
--
next birth may not be useless like this one.
This is all nonsense; we have not to busy ourselves with the next
life, but with this one which offers us, till our very last breath,
--
of integral realisation ceases; so long as one is alive, nothing is
impossible.
--
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.
--
I have not the least intention of keeping you away from me; I
wanted only to remind you that you are not alone in the Ashram
and that I have to divide my time among all those who have need
--
Because I stopped the pranam for two days, you should not
think that I was not with you. Wherever you work, physically
near or far, I am always with you in your work and in your
--
Life will no longer have any attraction for me if I do not
feel that You are with me.
--
Do not leave my heart empty, Mother.
I am always in your heart.
--
The psychic being is not asleep. It is the connection with it which
is not well established because the mind makes too much noise
and the vital is too restless.
--
the outer consciousness and the psychic consciousness is not
well established. He in whom this contact is well established is
--
It is not the psychic being which suffers, it is the mind, the vital
and the ordinary consciousness of ignorant man.
--
If you are vexed by what I tell you, it proves that you do not
wish to progress, and consequently that it is not necessary for
me to make you aware of what is to be changed in you.
--
I have not the least intention in the world to push you into a
corner, and if I had not the full assurance that you can overcome
all these difficulties, I would not even have mentioned them. It
is no good telling someone, "You have such and such a fault",
if it does not help him to correct it.
This morning I was thinking I would get a nother blow
--
Fear nothing: the Divine always answers every sincere aspiration
and never refuses what is offered to Him whole-heartedly; thus
--
Beloved Mother, how to master this lethargy that overcomes me? I do not live, Mother, I just exist in some way.
Mother, I must find something which can divert me.
It is certainly not with such a state of mind that you can hope
to find the Divine Presence. Far from seeking to fill your heart
--
Of each one is asked only what he has, what he is, nothing more,
but also nothing less.
You are right to want to create the emptiness in you; for you will
--
If I find some solace in books, how can I say that nothing sustains me and that I am plunged in the divine life
through an absolute emptiness?
--
This does not depend upon any outer circumstance but on your
inner state. It happens because you live in a very superficial
--
It is certainly not by becoming morose and melancholy that one
draws near the Divine. One must always keep in one's heart an
--
move away from me. The Divine is not sad and to realise the
Divine you must reject far from yourself all sadness and all
--
between You and me like a frightening abyss. I am not
satisfied; from where does this dissatisfaction come?
--
Indeed, nothing brings more happiness than a pure and disinterested love.
The true divine love is above all quarrels. It is the experience of
--
It is in your soul that the calmness can be found and it is by contagion that it spreads through your being. It is not steady because
the sovereignty of your soul is not yet definitively established
over all the being.
I don't see anything wrong in not being sentimental; nothing is
further from true love, the divine love, than sentimentality.
--
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.
I don't experience a violent and uncontrollable love for
--
You speak here of vital love, but certainly not of psychic love
and still less of the Divine Love.
--
The Ashram is not a place for being in love with anyone. If you
want to lapse into such a stupidity, you may do so elsewhere,
--
It is not this person or that who attracts you... it is the eternal
feminine in the lower nature which attracts the eternal masculine in the lower nature and creates an illusion in the mind; it
--
My beloved Mother, the whole day I thought of nothing
else except that red rose which signifies "Human passions changed into love for the Divine". I want to know
--
preferable not to live in the sensations but to consider them as
something outside ourselves, like the clothes we wear.
Be courageous and do not think of yourself so much. It is because
you make your little ego the centre of your preoccupation that
--
Certainly it is always better not to be too busy with oneself.
An excessive depreciation is no better than an excessive praise.
True humility lies in not judging oneself and in letting the Divine
determine our real worth.
--
that we have done nothing in comparison with what remains to
be done.
--
The best thing is not to think oneself either great or small, very
important or very insignificant; for we are nothing in ourselves.
We must want to be only what the divine Will wants of us.
--
It is better not to think of this personal nature as mine;
not to identify myself with it is the best remedy I can
--
nothing of all this is the right attitude. So long as you oscillate between wanting to transform yourself and not wanting to
transform yourself - making an effort to progress and becoming indifferent to all effort through fatigue - the true attitude
will not be there. All your observations should lead you to one
certainty, that by oneself one is nothing and can do nothing.
Only the Divine is the life of our life, the consciousness of our
--
Concentration does not mean meditation; on the contrary, concentration is a state one must be in continuously, whatever the
outer activity. By concentration I mean that all the energy, all the
--
Or, better still, not to have thought at all but contemplated the
Divine Grace.
--
talking. It is not work but useless talk which takes us away from
the Divine.
All depends not on what one does but on the attitude behind the
action.
--
one has not reached this state, there are actions which are more
helpful for the contact with the Divine.
The yogic life does not depend on what one does but on how
one does it; I mean it is not so much the action which counts
as the attitude, the spirit in which one acts. To know how to
--
It is not the work, any work, in itself which can bring you
close to me. It is the spirit in which it is done that is important.
--
physical plane. If your heart were not willing to submit to the
strict discipline of beating regularly and constantly, you would
--
It is not that there is a dearth of people without work in the
Ashram; but those who are without work are certainly so because they do not like to work; and for that disease it is very
difficult to find a remedy - it is called laziness...
--
Because a thing is difficult it does not mean that one should give
it up; on the contrary, the more difficult a thing is, the greater
--
You would be wrong to get disturbed; nothing is done arbitrarily,
and things get realised only when they are the expression of an
--
Do not worry, only keep in you always the will to do things well.
Why accept the idea of being weak? It is this which is bad.
--
Confidence in the Divine I do not lack, but it is perhaps
my ego which unceasingly says that I can not accomplish
--
disappears giving place to the calm assurance that nothing is
impossible.
--
only my whole being does not accept it.
If you repeat it with sufficient constancy, the recalcitrant part
--
remember that the conditions of our life are not quite ordinary
conditions, and keep your trust in the Divine Power to organise
--
2nd: One loses confidence, begins to criticise, is not satisfied.
3rd: One revolts and sinks into falsehood.
Do not grieve. Always the same battle must be won several
times, especially when it is waged against the hostile forces.
--
It is not impossible, but it is easier for them to find a human
instrument.
--
Yes, on condition that the "peace" is not that of a hardening but
of a conscious force.
Mother, I do not quite understand what a peace of
"hardening" means.
--
This is not at all correct; the experience of all recluses, all ascetics, proves indisputably the contrary. The difficulty comes
from oneself, from one's own nature, and one takes it along
--
overcome one's lower nature. And is this not easier here, with
a concrete and tangible help, than all alone, without anyone to
--
This does not depend so much on outer conditions, but above
all on the inner state.
--
No, this is wrong! It is true of the ordinary life but not of a yogi.
Sweet Mother, if my company is not good for others,
should I not dissociate myself from everyone?
It would be much better to dissociate yourself from the tendency
--
of knowledge must be added to these sentiments. For, to communicate peace and joy to others is not so easy, and unless one
has within oneself an unshakable peace and joy, there is a great
--
My heart is full of compassion for others and I am not
insensible to their suffering, but what's the good of this
--
It is just when one is innocent that one ought to be most indifferent to ill-treatment, because there is nothing to blame oneself
for and one has the approbation of one's conscience to console
--
It would be much better for you not to busy yourself with what
others say.
--
I do not know of anything more foolish than these quarrels in
which everybody is in the wrong. And is there anything more
--
proud of it and not despise it.
Why imagine always that one is ill or is going to be ill and thus
--
Do as you like, this is not of much importance; but what is
important is to cast off fear. It is fear which makes one fall ill
--
One must never lose hope or faith - there is nothing incurable,
and no limit can be set to the power of the Divine.
--
Evidently, this creates an atmosphere in which food predominates; this is not very conducive to spiritual life.
XI
--
accepts no impulse which has not been first sanctioned by the
mind, when no desire, no passion arises unless the mind thinks
--
Certainly not; quite on the contrary, to be able to conquer the desires of the vital one must have an excellent physical equilibrium
and sound health.
--
realisation here below. Does it not follow that intellectual culture is indispensable for rising above the mind to
find there the true knowledge?
--
never lose sight of the fact that this is not a source of knowledge and that it is not in this way that one can draw close
to knowledge. Naturally, this does not hold good for The Life
Divine...
--
It is not the work that is of importance but the spirit in which
one does it. It is difficult to keep one's mind perfectly quiet; it
--
and if it is not given enough work to occupy it, it begins to
become restless. So I think it is better to choose one's books
--
and in all its details, it is better not to take it up at all. It is
a great mistake to think that a little superficial and incomplete
--
know and in fact know nothing.
It is very difficult to choose games which are useful and beneficial
--
I have just finished Salammbô;2 I did not find any ideal
character in it.
It is not a book of ideas; it is only for the beauty of its form and
style that it is remarkable.
--
It is not with severity but with self-mastery that children are
controlled.
--
be respectable. X is not the only one to say that you use violence
to make yourself obeyed; nothing is less respectable. You must
first control yourself and never use brute force to impose your
--
expect to control others, above all, children, who feel it immediately when someone is not master of himself?
The students can not learn their lessons even when they
0.07 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
surrender in all its complexity is not so easy, it is not so
easy at all. But to achieve even the beginning of a genuine
--
There is an old Hindu belief that one should not lie down
or sleep with one's head towards the North. Has it got
--
experience goes, I do not attach much importance to that belief.
24 March 1936
--
I am getting tired of taking and taking, and giving nothing in return. It is almost indecent. But, then, I do not
know what I can do unless it is to pray to you to deliver
--
turn my head some day, if it is not turned already! But,
I know, it is only to give her confidence.
--
(In his notebook the sadhak drew a simple pencil sketch
of a foot extended to touch a lotus.) Please excuse me
--
still, O my Shining Light, the way is not clear to me. And
how shall I be ever able to climb to your dizzying heights
--
be happy - nothing can please me more than that.
Most affectionately.
--
I sometimes wish you had not been so invariably kind
and gracious to me. For it makes it still more hard for
--
It is not as a Guru that I love and bless, it is as the Mother who
asks nothing in return for what she gives.
9 July 1939
--
the love of the Mother who does not ask for anything
in return. That is all right for you, for yours is a selffulfilled life. But I have yet to achieve everything, yet to
--
I do not see anybody in the world more qualified than Sri
Aurobindo to lead you to the feet of the Mahashakti.
--
you aspire, the way is Love and the goal too is Love" - is it not
the best answer to your letter?...
--
I do not deserve one iota of the kindness you show to
me. What shall I say to you, you whose very nature is an
--
I know not except by Her lotus-feet. That is the reason
why my eyes seek Her in your lotus-feet, and my heart
--
if you are not merely experimenting with us? Praying to
be excused.
--
Well - the best thing you could do is not to listen to what
people say; it would save you from many falls of consciousness.
--
you do not expect me to justify my love in front of the foolish
ignorance of such interpretations. Whether you believe or doubt,
--
yours is not at all irreducible. I am sure that one day you will
find this out.
--
that I am forgiving. Love does not forgive, it understands and
cures.
--
resistance, you must not make more delay than when you have
to pull out a bad tooth.
--
compassion and solicitude and love which I do not deserve. And yet, although I feel a personal tie with you
which I expect is psychic, I still do not feel that I want
this Yoga very badly. I still do not feel about this ideal
the way I used to feel for the old ideal of liberation. The
--
very cold. I still do not feel at home here. I do not know
what I should do. And time waits for no one. Please
--
meant to reassure me, did not reassure me.2 Why is that
so, Mother? Perhaps you do not approve of my tone;
perhaps you are dissatisfied with my disability; possibly
you are getting tired of me altogether. If so, I would not
be surprised, I would not blame you. For I am myself
tired of the problem called me.
If it is not going to make any difference to your
love and kindness, as you assure me it won't, I would
--
It does not displease me in the least. If I did not answer to
what you wrote about it the other day, it is because I did not
attach much importance to it. My sentence meant simply that
--
I can add today that I am not at all tired of the "problem
called me" and that I remain convinced that it will be solved
--
whole being around your highest consciousness and do not let
your mind work at random. Doubt is not a sport to indulge in
Series Seven - To a Sadhak
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This process of development goes on tirelessly through innumerable lives, and if one is not conscious of it, it is because
one is not conscious of one's psychic being - for that is the
indispensable starting-point. Through interiorisation and concentration one has to enter into conscious contact with one's
--
ultimately nothing but energy condensed.
Our yoga being integral, all these various forms or kinds of
--
them the appearance of a power or an action they do not possess in themselves. Hence the necessity of never being afraid and
of recognising them for what they are - a deceptive appearance.
--
better than we what is good for us and what we truly need, not
only for our spiritual progress but also for our material wellbeing, the health of our body and the proper functioning of all
--
Naturally, this is not the opinion of the ego, which thinks
it knows better than anyone else what it needs, and claims for
--
according to its desires, which are blind, and not according to
truth.
--
For the desires are not the expression of needs but of preferences.
19 September 1959
--
understand nothing of the Divine, neither what He does nor how
He does it and still less why He does it. To know something of
--
the difficulties and sufferings of the path are not real, but a
creation of human ignorance, and that as soon as one gets out
--
In thinking of me, you must think not only of the outer
person. but of what she represents, what stands behind her.
--
during your sleep, and not only can you control your dreams
but you can guide and organise your activities during sleep.
--
There is nothing that can truly be called luck. What men call
luck are the effects of causes they do not know.
Nor is there anything that in itself is good or bad luck;
--
Then my body, completely passive, is nothing but a channel
through which the Lord passes His forces freely and pours upon
--
beforehand, not while I am there, because any activity lessens
the receptivity.
--
The physical consciousness is not only the consciousness of our
body, but of all that surrounds us as well - all that we perceive
--
a complete silence into which fall, drop by drop, the notes of
the music whose sound alone remains; and with the sound all
--
To read my books is not difficult because they are written in the
simplest language, almost the spoken language. To get help from
--
reacting or participating, then one can notice the effect that the
music produces on the feelings and emotions; and if it produces
--
It goes without saying that all this is not done in a day,
nor even in a year. This mastery, in whatever domain it may be,
--
leading one's life properly, not to speak of "mastery", which is
truly something exceptional on earth.
--
see, feel and study, this Nature that has been our familiar environment since our birth upon earth, is not the only one. There
is a vital nature, a mental nature, and so on. It is this that, for
--
who do not belong to the ordinary humanity, have a conscious
and organised overmind being and overmind life, and still fewer
--
regions he receives the light of the Truth. These faculties are not
a direct expression of the supreme Truth, but a transcription, an
--
realm of knowledge, since this supramental being has not yet
manifested on earth.
0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo says: "Yoga is nothing but practical psychology."1 What does this sentence mean? The whole
paragraph is not clear to me.
Because you know nothing about psychology. Study psychology
and you will understand what he means.
--
others, Mother? What good is life if the Divine does not
want us? I believe that in truth the Divine has chosen us
--
You have said that I do not think well. How can one
develop one's thought?
You must read with much attention and concentration, not
novels or dramas, but books that make you think. You must
--
My dear child, I have just read your good letter. Fear nothing:
those who are sincere in their aspiration will remain here and
--
that the Divine belongs to us exclusively (and not that
we belong to Him). Why?
--
The soul and the psychic being are not exactly the same thing,
although their essence is the same.
--
to apply it with an unfailing perseverance that does not shrink
from any obstacle, any difficulty. It is a long and minute work
--
conscience is not the voice of the soul. What is it then?
The voice of the ordinary conscience is an ethical voice, a moral
--
all moral and ethical notions; it bathes in the Divine Light and
manifests it, but it can truly govern the whole being only when
--
they are not worthy of meditating in Sri Aurobindo's room.
26 September 1960
--
the call is really there or not? And as for our soul, would
it not always choose Yoga?
Sri Aurobindo means that one should not mistake a mental
ambition or a vital caprice for the spiritual call - for that alone
--
and sets out on the path; it does not allow itself to be deceived by
any ambition, pride or desire, and so long as it does not receive
the Divine command to take up the path, it waits patiently,
--
To receive the divine grace, not only must one have a great
aspiration, but also a sincere humility and an absolute trust.
--
It is because an individual is not made up all of one piece, but
of many different entities which are sometimes even contrary to
--
You. I know that it is not possible to have a complete
conception of the Divine at this stage.
--
My reply contained the answer to your question, for I understood very well that you were not claiming anything, but had
expressed yourself poorly.
--
It is not the world of delight that has come down, but only the
supramental Light, Consciousness and Force.
--
If you are speaking of calendars with photographs, it is preferable to cut out the photos, and if you do not want to keep them,
give them to X who makes good use of them.
--
It is effective, but not very practical for the work!
27 May 1963
01.01 - A Yoga of the Art of Life, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Publishers note Natures Own Yoga
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part OneA Yoga of the Art of Life
--
When Sri Aurobindo said, Our Yoga is not for ourselves but for humanity, many heaved a sigh of relief and thought that the great soul was after all not entirely lost to the world, his was not one more name added to the long list of Sannyasins that India has been producing age after age without much profit either to herself or to the human society (or even perhaps to their own selves). People understood his Yoga to be a modern one, dedicated to the service of humanity. If service to humanity was not the very sum and substance of his spirituality, it was, at least, the fruitful end and consummation. His Yoga was a sort of art to explore and harness certain unseen powers that can better and ameliorate human life in a more successful way than mere rational scientific methods can hope to do.
Sri Aurobindo saw that the very core of his teaching was being missed by this common interpretation of his saying. So he changed his words and said, Our Yoga is not for humanity but for the Divine. But I am afraid this change of front, this volte-face, as it seemed, was not welcomed in many 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 Brahman.
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 humanity. This is the service he means to render to humanity, 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 human life.
Here also one must guard against certain misconceptions that are likely to occur. The transformation of human life does not necessarily mean that the entire humanity will be changed into a race of gods or divine beings; it means the evolution or appearance on earth of a superior type of humanity, even as man evolved out of animality as a superior type of animality, not that the entire animal kingdom was changed into humanity.
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 human 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 superhuman 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 human 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 human 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 human 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 human 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 human nature and human 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.
A nother question that troubles and perplexes the ordinary human 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 body not 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
Swalpamapyasya dharmasya tryate mahato bhayt1
Now, if it is asked what is the proof of it all, how can one be sure that one is not running after a mirage, a chimera? We can only answer with the adage; the proof of the pudding is in the eating thereof
III
--
From a certain point of view, from the point of view of essentials and inner realities, it would appear that spirituality is, at least, the basis of the arts, if not the highest art. If art is meant to express the soul of things, and since the true soul of things is the divine element in them, then certainly spirituality, the discipline of coming in conscious contact with the Spirit, the Divine, must be accorded the regal seat in the hierarchy of the arts. Also, spirituality is the greatest and the most difficult of the arts; for it is the art of life. To make of life a perfect work of beauty, pure in its lines, faultless in its rhythm, replete with strength, iridescent: with light, vibrant with delightan embodiment of the Divine, in a wordis the highest ideal of spirituality; viewed the spirituality that Sri Aurobindo practisesis the ne plus ultra of artistic creation
The Gita, II. 40
--
Publishers note Natures Own Yoga
01.01 - Sri Aurobindo - The Age of Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Someone has written to this effect: "This is not the age of Sri Aurobindo. His ideal of a divine life upon earth mayor may not be true; at any rate it is not of today or even of tomorrow. Humanity will take some time before it reaches that stage or its possibility. What we are concerned with here and now is something perhaps less great, less spiritual, but more urgent and more practical. The problem is not to run away with one's soul, but to maintain its earthly tenement, to keep body and soul together: one has to live first, live materially before one can hope to live spiritually."
Well, the view expressed in these words is not a new revelation. It has been the cry of suffering humanity 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 can not 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 humanity 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.
The ideal or perhaps one should say the policy of Real-politick is the thing needed in this world. To achieve something actually in the physical and material field, even a lesser something, is worth much more than speculating on high flaunting chimeras and indulging in day-dreams. Yes, but what is this something that has to be achieved in the material world? It is always an ideal. Even procuring food for each and every person, clothing and housing all is not less an ideal for all its concern about actuality. Only there are ideals and ideals; some are nearer to the earth, some seem to be in the background. But the mystery is that it is not always the ideal nearest to the earth which is the easiest to achieve or the first thing to be done first. Do we not see before our very eye show some very simple innocent social and economic changes are difficult to carry outthey bring in their train quite disproportionately gestures and movements of violence and revolution? That is because we seek to cure the symptoms and not touch the root of the disease. For even the most innocent-looking social, economic or political abuse has at its base far-reaching attitudes and life-urgeseven a spiritual outlook that have to be sought out and tackled first, if the attempt at reform is to be permanently and wholly successful. Even in mundane matters we do not dig deep enough, or rise high enough.
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 Brahman.
The highest ideal, the very highest which God and Nature and Man have in view, is not and can not 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 human 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 human 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.
***
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Although we may not know it, the New Man the divine race of humanity is already among us. It may be in our next neighbour, in our nearest brother, even in myself. Only a thin veil covers it. It marches just behind the line. It waits for an occasion to throw off the veil and place itself in the forefront. We are living in strenuous times in which age-long institutions are going down and new-forces rearing their heads, old habits are being cast off and new impulsions acquired. In every sphere of life, we see the urgent demand for a recasting, a fresh valuation of things. From the base to the summit, from the economic and political life to the artistic and spiritual, humanity is being shaken to bring out a new expression and articulation. There is the hidden surge of a Power, the secret stress of a Spirit that can no longer suffer to remain in the shade and behind the mask, but wills to come out in the broad daylight and be recognised in its plenary virtues.
That Power, that Spirit has been growing and gathering its strength during all the millenniums that humanity has lived through. On the momentous day when man appeared on 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.
--
A nother humanity is rising out of the present human 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 k not will be rent asunderbhidyate hridaya granthih and the vast and mighty streams of a nother 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 humanity, 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 a nother but in and through one a nother. It will be, if you like, a he notheistic hierarchy in which everyone will be the greatest, since everyone is all and all everyone simultaneously.
The New Humanity 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 demanded. 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.
--
Publishers note The Creative Soul
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 human beings because they are full of desire for things that can not last and they lose them or, even if they get, it brings disappointment and can not 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 humanity is a mental mistranslation of the Truth - these things can not 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 demands 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 humanity and its life. But the effect on humanity would only be one result of the change; it can not 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.
... the principle of this Yoga is not perfection of the human nature as it is but a psychic and spiritual transformation of all the parts of the being through the action of an inner consciousness and then of a higher consciousness which works on them, throws out the old movements or changes them into the image of its own and so transmutes lower into higher nature. It is not so much the perfection of the intellect as a transcendence of it, a transformation of the mind, the substitution of a larger greater principle of knowledge - and so with all the rest of the being.
This is a slow and difficult process; the road is long and it is hard to establish even the necessary basis. The old existing nature resists and obstructs and difficulties rise one after a nother and repeatedly till they are overcome. It is therefore necessary to be sure that this is the path to which one is called before one finally decides to tread it.
01.01 - The Symbol Dawn, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Between the first and the last nothingness,
Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,
--
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.
--
Here where one knows not even the step in front
And Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,
--
Could not uphold its claim on time-born eyes;
Too mystic-real for space-tenancy
--
Visited her heart like a sweet alien note.
2.4
Time's message of brief light was not for her.
2.5
--
But long could keep not its gold heavenly hue
Or stand upon this brittle earthly base.
--
At first life grieved not in her burdened breast:
On the lap of earth's original somnolence
--
But knew not why it was there nor whence it came.
2.30
--
The unassisted brain found not its past.
2.31
--
That saw grief's timeless depths but not life's goal.
2.36
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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 superman 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 principlesmana 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, Atman, Brahman, Sachchidananda, Nirvana, the One without a second, the Zero without a first.
The first contact that one has with this static supra-reality is through the higher ranges of the mind: a direct and closer communion is established through a plane which is just above the mind the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it. The Overmind dissolves or transcends the ego-consciousness which limits the being to its individualised formation bounded by an outward and narrow frame or sheath of mind, life and body; it reveals the universal Self and Spirit, the cosmic godhead and its myriad forces throwing up myriad forms; the world-existence there appears as a play of ever-shifting veils upon the face of one ineffable reality, as a mysterious cycle of perpetual creation and destructionit is the overwhelming vision given by Sri Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita. At the same time, the initial and most intense experience which this cosmic consciousness brings is the extreme relativity, contingency and transitoriness of the whole flux, and a necessity seems logically and psychologically imperative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness.
This has been the highest consummation, the supreme goal which the purest spiritual experience and the deepest aspiration of the human consciousness generally sought to attain. But in this view, the world or creation or Nature came in the end to be looked upon as fundamentally a product of Ignorance: ignorance and suffering and incapacity and death were declared to be the very hallmark of things terrestrial. The Light that dwells above and beyond can be made to shed for a while some kind of lustre upon the mortal darkness but never altogether to remove or change itto live in the full light, to be in and of the Light means to pass beyond. not that there have not been other strands and types of spiritual experiences and aspirations, but the one we are considering has always struck the major chord and dominated and drowned all the rest.
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 Brahman, 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
--
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 k not 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.
II
--
An organ in the human 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 human 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 selfjivtman 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.
This then is the supreme secret, not the renunciation and annulment, but the transformation of the ordinary human nature : first of all, its psychicisation, that is to say, making it move and live and be in communion and identification with the light of the psychic being, and, secondly, through the soul and the ensouled mind and life and body, to open out into the supramental consciousness and let it come down here below and work and achieve.
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 humanity 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 can not 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 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.
***
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 human 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 human element that we seek in poetry, but we fail to recognise that what we obtain in this way is humanity 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 a nother 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 human, too human, as the mad prophet would say? In them it is the human significance, the human 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 human 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 human 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:
--
King, not in vain. I knew the tedious bars
That I had fled,
--
Who was not anyone nor had a form,
Nor yet was formless. Neither hate nor love
--
He is, we can not say; for nothing too
Is His conception of Himself unguessed.
--
Light is not, nor our darkness, nor these bright
Thunderings,
--
He dwells within us all who dwells not in
Aught that is.5
--
To humanise the Divine, that is what we all wish to do; for the Divine is too lofty for us and we can not look full into his face. We cry and supplicate to Rudra, "O dire Lord, show us that other form of thine that is benign and humane". All earthly imageries we lavish upon the Divine so that he may appear to us not as something far and distant and foreign, but, quite near, among us, as one of us. We take recourse to human symbolism often, because we wish to palliate or hide the rigours of a supreme experience, not because we have no adequate terms for it. The same human or earthly terms could be used differently if we had a different consciousness. Thus the Vedic Rishis sought not to humanise the Divine, their purpose was rather to divinise the human. And their allegorical language, although rich in terrestrial figures, does not carry the impress and atmosphere of mere humanity and earthliness. For in reality the symbol is not merely the symbol. It is mere symbol in regard to the truth so long as we take our stand on the lower plane when we have to look at the truth through the symbol; but if we view it from the higher plane, from truth itself, it is no longer mere symbol but the very truth bodied forth. Whatever there is of symbolism on earth and its beauties, in sense and its enjoyments, is then transfigured into the expression of the truth, of the divinity itself. We then no longer speak in human language but in the language of the gods.
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 human 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.. . .
--
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 commandeered 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 human 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 human and terrestrial; made immanent 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 human 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.
Indeed it would be wrong to associate any cold ascetic nudity to the spiritual body of Sri Aurobindo. His poetry is philosophic, abstract, no doubt, but every philosophy has its practice, every abstract thing its concrete application,even as the soul has its body; and the fusion, not mere union, of the two is very characteristic in him. The deepest and unseizable flights of thought he knows how to clo the with a Kalidasian richness of imagery, or a Keatsean gusto of sensuousness:
. . . . .O flowers, O delight on the tree-tops burning!
--
And it would be wrong too to suppose that there is want of sympathy in Sri Aurobindo for ordinary humanity, 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.
--
A song not master of its note, a cry
That persevered into eternity.11
--
And yet, I should say, in all this it is not mere the human that is of supreme interest, but something which even in being human yet transcends it.
And here, let me point out, the capital difference between the European or rather the Hellenic spirit and the Indian spirit. It is the Indian spirit to take stand upon divinity and thence to embrace and mould what is earthly and human. The Greek spirit took its stand pre-eminently on earth and what belongs to earth. In Europe Dante's was a soul spiritualised more than perhaps any other and yet his is not a Hindu soul. The utmost that he could say after all the experience of the tragedy of mortality was:
Io no piangeva, sidentro impietrai13
I grieve not, into a stone I grew within.
We have in Sri Aurobindo a passage parallel in sentiment, if not of equal poetic value, which will bear out the contrast:
My mind within grew holy, calm and still
--
However spiritual a soul, Dante is yet bound to the earth, he has dominated perhaps but not conquered.
The Greek sings of the humanity of man, the Indian the divinity of man. It is the Hellenic spirit that has very largely moulded our taste and we have forgotten that an equally poetic world exists in the domain of spiritual life, even in its very severity, as in that of 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 humanity, beyond earth, therefore could they make divine poetry of humanity 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:
--
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."
--
it can not be said that Aurobindo shows any organic adaptation to music and melody. His thought is profound; his technical devices are commendable; but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there. Aurobindo is not a nother Tagore or Iqbal, or even Sarojini Naidu."The Times Literary Supplement, July 8, 1944.
***
01.02 - The Creative Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The difference between living organism and dead matter is that while the former is endowed with creative activity, the latter has only passive receptivity. Life adds, synthetises, new-createsgives more than what it receives; matter only sums up, gathers, reflects, gives just what it receives. Life is living, glad and green through its creative genius. Creation in some form or other must be the core of everything that seeks vitality and growth, vigour and delight. not only so, but a thing in order to be real must possess a creative function. We consider a shadow or an echo unreal precisely because they do not create but merely image or repeat, they do not bring out anything new but simply reflect what is given. The whole of existence is real because it is eternally creative.
So the problem that concerns man, the riddle that humanity 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 humanity 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 demand 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 demands 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 can not become a Kalidasa; for that matter Kalidasa can not 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 demands 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.
not to do what others do, but what your soul impels you to do. not to be others but your own self. not to be anything but the very cosmic and infinite divinity of your soul. Therein lies your highest freedom and perfect delight. And there you are supremely creative. Each soul has a consortPrakriti, Naturewhich it creates out of its own rib. And in this field of infinite creativity the soul lives, moves and has its being.
***
01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Her soul's debate with embodied nothingness
Must be wrestled out on a dangerous dim background:
--
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.
3.33
--
Where life is not exposed to sorrowful change,
Remembered beauty death-claimed lids ignore
--
That will not suffer long too glad a note.
4.8
--
But not to submit and suffer was she born;
To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.
--
Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.
4.20
--
Her head she bowed not to the stark decree
Baring her helpless heart to destiny's stroke.
--
Asked not from mortal frailty pain's relief,
Patched not with failure bargain or compromise.
4.31
--
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
01.02 - The Object of the Integral Yoga, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
... the object of the Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine's sake alone, to be turned in our nature into nature of the Divine and in our will and works and life to be the instrument of the Divine. Its object is not to be a great Yogi or a superman (although that may come) or to grab at the Divine for the sake of the ego's power, pride or pleasure.
It is not for salvation though liberation comes by it and all else may come; but these must not be our objects. The Divine alone is our object.
To come to this Yoga merely with the idea of being a superman would be an act of vital egoism which would defeat its own object. Those who put this object in the front of their preoccupations invariably come to grief, spiritually and otherwise. The aim of this Yoga is, first, to enter into the divine consciousness by merging into it the separative ego (incidentally, in doing so one finds one's true individual self which is not the limited, vain and selfish human ego but a portion of the Divine) and, secondly, to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth to transform mind, life and body. All else can be only a result of these two aims, not the primary object of the Yoga.
The only creation for which there is any place here is the supramental, the bringing of the divine Truth down on the earth, not only into the mind and vital but into the body and into
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 human 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 human 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.
This Yoga demands a total dedication of the life to the aspiration for the discovery and embodiment of the Divine Truth and to nothing else whatever. To divide your life between the Divine and some outward aim and activity that has nothing to do with the search for the Truth is inadmissible. The least thing of that kind would make success in the Yoga impossible.
You must go inside yourself and enter into a complete dedication to the spiritual life. All clinging to mental preferences must fall away from you, all insistence on vital aims and interests and attachments must be put away, all egoistic clinging to family, friends, country must disappear if you want to succeed in Yoga. Whatever has to come as outgoing energy or action, must proceed from the Truth once discovered and not from the lower mental or vital motives, from the Divine Will and not from personal choice or the preferences of the ego.
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I would like to make a distinction between mystic poetry and spiritual poetry. To equate mysticism and spirituality is not always happy or even correct. Thus, when Tagore sings:
Who comes along singing and steering his boat?
--
is just on the borderland: it has succeeded in leaving behind the mystic domain, but has not yet entered the city of the Spiritat the most, it has turned the corner and approached the gate. Listen now,
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
--
Is there not a fundamental difference, difference not merely with regard to the poetic personality, but with regard to the very stuff of consciousness? There is direct vision here, the fullness of light, the native rhythm and substance of revelation, as if
In the dead wall closing from a wider self,
--
It is not merely by addressing the beloved as your goddess that you can attain this mysticism; the Elizabethan did that in merry abundance,ad nauseam.A finer temper, a more delicate touch, a more subtle sensitiveness and a kind of artistic wizardry are necessary to tune the body into a rhythm of the spirit. The other line of mysticism is common enough, viz., to express the spirit in terms and rhythms of the flesh. Tagore did that liberally, the Vaishnava poets did nothing but that, the Song of Solomon is an exquisite example of that procedure. There is here, however, a difference in degrees which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the earthly and the sensuous are meant as the name and form, as the body to render concrete, living and vibrant, near and intimate what otherwise would perhaps be vague and abstract, afar, aloof. But this mundane or human appearance has a value in so far as it is a support, a pointer or symbol of the spiritual import. And the mysticism lies precisely in the play of the two, a hide-and-seek between them. On the other hand, as I said, the greater portion of Vaishnava poetry, like a precious and beautiful casket, no doubt, hides the spiritual import: not the pure significance but the sign and symbol are luxuriously elaborated, they are placed in the foreground in all magnificence: as if it was their very purpose to conceal the real meaning. When the Vaishnava poet says,
O love, what more shall I, shall Radha speak,
--
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
--
are not satiated; I have rested bosom upon bosom
for thousands
of aeons and yet my heart is not soothed.. . .
they all give a very beautiful, a very poignant experience of love, but one does not know if it is love human or divine, if it is soul's love or mere bodily love.
The famous Song of Solomon too is not on a different footing, when the poet cries:
Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse;
--
one can explain that it is the Christ calling the Church or God appealing to the human soul or one can simply find in it nothing more than a man pining for his woman. 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
--
I do not know if this is not mysticism, what else is. Neither is religious poetry true mysticism (or true spirituality). I find more mysticism in
Come, let us run
--
But how shall body not seem a hollow space
When the soul bears eternity's embrace?12
--
But first let us go to the fans et origo, be acquainted with the very genuine article in its purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. I do not know of any other ideal exemplar than the Upanishad. Thus,
There the sun shines not and the moon has no
splendour and the stars are blind; there these
lightnings flash not, nor any earthly fire. For all
that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness
--
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 human 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 can not 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 then not 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 a nother, 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 key note 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 can not be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
The philosophical trend in poetry has an interesting history with a significant role: it has acted as a force of purification, of sublimation, of katharsis. As man has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into an increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic creation too: the thinker, the philosopher remains in the background at the outset, he looks out; peers through chinks and holes from time to time; later he comes to the forefront, assumes a major role in man's creative activity.
Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mentalwhich is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activitiesserves as the Paraclete, the Intercessor; it takes up the lower functionings of the consciousness, which are intense in their own way, but narrow and turbid, and gives, by purifying and enlarging, a wider frame, a more luminous pattern, a more subtly articulated , form for the higher, vaster and deeper realities, truths and harmonies to express and manifest. In the old-world spiritual and mystic poets, this intervening medium was overlooked for evident reasons, for human reason or even intelligence is a double-edged instrument, it can make as well as mar, it has a light that most often and naturally shuts off other higher lights beyond it. So it was bypassed, some kind of direct and immediate contact was sought to be established between the normal and the transcendental. The result was, as I have pointed out, a pure spiritual poetry, on the one hand, as in the Upanishads, or, on the other, religious poetry of various grades and denominations that spoke of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides. But all these were very simple beginnings. The moderns go in for something more radical and totalitarian. The rationalising element instead of being an additional or subordinate or contri buting factor, must itself give its norm and form, its own substance and manner to the creative activity. Such is the present-day demand.
The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he referred all that to the other world, thought of gods and goddesses, of after-death and other where. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.
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,
--
This, I say, is something different from the religious and even from the mystic. It is away from the merely religious, because it is naked of the vesture of humanity (in spite of a human face that masks it at times) ; it is something more than the merely mystic, for it does not stop being a signpost or an indication to the Beyond, but is itself the presence and embodiment of the Beyond. The mystic gives us, we can say, the magic of the Infinite; what I term the spiritual, the spiritual proper, gives in addition the logic of the Infinite. At least this is what distinguishes modern spiritual consciousness from the ancient, that is, Upanishadic spiritual consciousness. The Upanishad gives expression to the spiritual consciousness in its original and pristine purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. It did not buttress itself with any logic. It is the record of fundamental experiences and there was no question of any logical exposition. But, as I have said, the modern mind requires and demands a logical element in its perceptions and presentations. Also it must needs be a different kind of logic that can satisfy and satisfy wholly the deeper and subtler movements of a modern consciousness. For the philosophical poet of an earlier age, when he had recourse to logic, it was the logic of the finite that always gave him the frame, unless he threw the whole thing overboard and leaped straight into the occult, the illogical and the a logical, like Blake, for instance. Let me illustrate and compare a little. When the older poet explains indriyani hayan ahuh, it is an allegory he resorts to, it is the logic of the finite he marshals to point to the infinite and the beyond. The stress of reason is apparent and effective too, but the pattern is what we are normally familiar with the movement, we can say, is almost Aristotelian in its rigour. Now let us turn to the following:
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme. ||26.15||
--
Here we have a pattern of thought-movement that does not seem to follow the lineaments of the normal brain-mind consciousness, although it too has a basis there: our customary line of reasoning receives a sudden shock, as it were, and then is shaken, moved, lifted up, transportedgradually or suddenly, according to the temperament of the listener. Besides, we have here the peculiar modern tone, which, for want of a better term, may be described as scientific. The impressimprimaturof Science is its rational coherence, justifying or justified by sense data, by physical experience, which gives us the pattern or model of an inexorable natural law. Here too we feel we are in the domain of such natural law but lifted on to a higher level.
This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the infinite proper to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attri bute of the attri buteless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual proper may be considered as prajghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunarMoon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).
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:
--
not a senseless, trancd thing,
But divine melodious truth;
--
Poetry, actually however, has been, by and large, a profane and mundane affair: for it expresses the normal man's perceptions and feelings and experiences, human loves and hates and desires and ambitions. True. And yet there has also always been an attempt, a tendency to deal with them in such a way as can bring calm and puritykatharsis not trouble and confusion. That has been the purpose of all Art from the ancient days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses., man is gradually growing into the mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of transformation. The first and original transformation happened with religious poetry. The religious, one may say, is the profane inside out; that is to say, the religious man has almost the same tone and temper, the same urges and passions, only turned Godward. Religious poetry too marks a new turn and development of human speech, in taking the name of God human tongue acquires a new plasticity and flavour that transform or give a new modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in a nother 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 a nother 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 can not be very well separated. Let us illustrate a little:
The spacious firmament on high,
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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 can not 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 can not 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, can not 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.
Now the question is, does Reason never fail? Is it such a perfect instrument as intellectualists think it to be? There is ground for serious misgivings. Reason says, for example, that the earth revolves round the sun: and reason, it is argued, is right, for we see that all the facts are conformableto it, even facts that were hitherto unknown and are now coming into our ken. But the difficulty is that Reason did not say that always in the past and may not say that always in the future. The old astronomers could explain the universe by holding quite a contrary theory and could fit into it all their astronomical data. A future scientist may come and explain the matter in quite a different way from either. It is only a choice of workable theories that Reason seems to offer; we do not know the fact itself, apart perhaps from exactly the amount that immediate sense-perception gives to each of us. Or again, if we take an example of a nother category, we may ask, does God exist? A candid Rationalist would say that he does not know although he has his own opinion about the matter. Evidently, Reason can not solve all the problems that it meets; it can judge only truths that are of a certain type.
It may be answered that Reason is a faculty which gives us progressive knowledge of the reality, but as a knowing instrument it is perfect, at least it is the only instrument at our disposal; even if it gives a false, incomplete or blurred image of the reality, it has the means and capacity of correcting and completing itself. It offers theories, no doubt; but what are theories? They are simply the gradually increasing adaptation of the knowing subject to the object to be known, the evolving revelation of reality to our perception of it. Reason is the power which carries on that process of adaptation and revelation; we can safely rely upon Reason and trust It to carry on its work with increasing success.
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 demands a categorical imperative, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason can not 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 a nother. 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 can not supply but vaguely strains to seize. For that element we have to search elsewhere, not in Reason.
Does this mean that real knowledge is irrational or against Reason? not so necessarily. There is a super-rational power for knowledge and Reason may either be a channel or an obstacle. If we take our stand upon Reason and then proceed to know, if we take the forms and categories of Reason as the inviolable schemata of knowledge, then indeed Reason becomes an obstacle to that super-rational power. If, on the other hand, Reason does not offer any set-form from beforehand, does not insist upon its own conditions, is passive and simply receives and reflects what is given to it, then it becomes a luminous and sure channel for that higher and real knowledge.
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
A considerable amount of vague misunderstanding and misapprehension seems to exist in the minds of a certain section of our people as to what Sri Aurobindo is doing in his retirement at Pondicherry. On the other hand, a very precise exposition, an exact formula of what he is not doing has been curiously furnished by a well-known patriot in his indictment of what he chooses to call the Pondicherry School of contemplation. But he has arrived at this formula by openly and fearlessly affirming what does not exist; for the things that Sri Aurobindo is accused of doing are just the things that he is not doing. In the first place, Sri Aurobindo is not doing peaceful contemplation; in the second place, he is not doing active propaganda either; in the third place, he is not doing prnyma or even dhyna in the ordinary sense of the word; and, lastly, he is not proclaiming or following the maxim that although action may be tolerated as good, his particular brand of Yoga is something higher and better.
Evidently the eminent politician and his school of activism are labouring under a Himalayan confusion: when they speak of Sri Aurobindo, they really have in their mind some of the old schools of spiritual discipline. But one of the marked aspects of Sri Aurobindo's teaching and practice has been precisely his insistence on putting aside the inert and life-shunning quietism, illusionism, asceticism and monasticism of a latter-day and decadent India. These ideals are perhaps as much obstacles in his way as in the way of the activistic school. Only Sri Aurobindo has not had the temerity to say that it is a weakness to seek refuge in contemplation or to suggest that a Buddha was a weakling or a Shankara a poltroon.
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 can not 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 human 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. Human nature and human 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 a nother 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 humanity, 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 human 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 demand 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.
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01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This bodily appearance is not all;
The form deceives, the person is a mask;
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Its intimate vision waited not to think;
It enveloped all Nature in a single glance,
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Into a silent self where world was not
And looked beyond into a nameless vast.
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There knowledge needs not words to embody Idea;
Idea, seeking a house in boundlessness,
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Asks not in thought's carved brilliant cell to rest
Whose single window's clipped outlook on things
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There came not form or any mounting voice;
There only were Silence and the Absolute.
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As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,
Replace the titan will for ever to climb,
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The universe was not now this senseless whirl
Borne round inert on an immense machine;
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Upheld to a Light it could not always hold,
It left mind's distance from the Truth supreme
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Forms he descried our mortal eyes see not.
His wide eyes bodied viewless entities,
--
His acts betrayed not the interior flame.
This forged the greatness of his front to earth.
01.03 - Yoga and the Ordinary Life, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the Yoga practised here the aim is to rise to a higher consciousness and to live out of the higher consciousness alone, not with the ordinary motives. This means a change of life as well as a change of consciousness. But all are not so circumstanced that they can cut loose from the ordinary life; they accept it therefore as a field of experience and self-training in the earlier stages of the sadhana. But they must take care to look at it as a field of experience only and to get free from the ordinary desires, attachments and ideas which usually go with it; otherwise it becomes a drag and hindrance on their sadhana. When one is not compelled by circumstances there is no necessity to continue the ordinary life.
It is not helpful to abandon the ordinary life before the being is ready for the full spiritual life. To do so means to precipitate a struggle between the different elements and exasperate it to a point of intensity which the nature is not ready to bear. The vital elements in you have partly to be met by the discipline and experience of life, while keeping the spiritual aim in view and trying to govern life by it progressively in the spirit of Karmayoga.
The best way to prepare oneself for the spiritual life when one has to live in the ordinary occupations and surroundings is to cultivate an entire equality and detachment and the samata of the Gita with the faith that the Divine is there and the Divine Will at work in all things even though at present under the conditions of a world of Ignorance. Beyond this are the Light and Ananda towards which life is working, but the best way for their advent and foundation in the individual being and nature is to grow in this spiritual equality. That would also solve your difficulty about things unpleasant and disagreeable. All unpleasantness should be faced with this spirit of samata.
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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.
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I must say in view of something you seem to have said to your father that it is not the object of the one to be a great man or the object of the other to be a great Yogin. The ideal of human life is to establish over the whole being the control of a clear, strong and rational mind and a right and rational will, to master the emotional, vital and physical being, create a harmony of the whole and develop the capacities whatever they are and fulfil them in life. In the terms of Hindu thought, it is to enthrone the rule of the purified and sattwic buddhi, follow the dharma, fulfilling one's own svadharma and doing the work proper to one's capacities, and satisfy kama and artha under the control of the buddhi and the dharma. The object of the divine life, on the other hand, is to realise one's highest self or to realise
God and to put the whole being into harmony with the truth of the highest self or the law of the divine nature, to find one's own divine capacities great or small and fulfil them in life as a sacrifice to the highest or as a true instrument of the divine
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The spiritual life (adhyatma jvana), the religious life (dharma jvana) and the ordinary human life of which morality is a part are three quite different things and one must know which one desires and not confuse the three together. The ordinary life is that of the average human consciousness separated from its own true self and from the Divine and led by the common habits of the mind, life and body which are the laws of the Ignorance.
The religious life is a movement of the same ignorant human consciousness, turning or trying to turn away from the earth towards the Divine but as yet without knowledge and led by the dogmatic tenets and rules of some sect or creed which claims to have found the way out of the bonds of the earth-consciousness into some beatific Beyond. The religious life may be the first approach to the spiritual, but very often it is only a turning about in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices or set ideas and forms without any issue. The spiritual life, on the contrary, proceeds directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a greater consciousness in which one finds one's true being and comes first into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine. For the spiritual seeker this change of consciousness is the one thing he seeks and nothing else matters.
Morality is a part of the ordinary life; it is an attempt to govern the outward conduct by certain mental rules or to form the character by these rules in the image of a certain mental ideal. The spiritual life goes beyond the mind; it enters into the deeper consciousness of the Spirit and acts out of the truth of the Spirit.
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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 can not 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
Him is not the proper attitude; but if it were absolutely forbidden to seek Him for these things, most people in the world would not turn towards Him at all. I suppose therefore it is allowed so that they may make a beginning - if they have faith, they may get what they ask for and think it a good thing to go on and then one day they may suddenly stumble upon the idea that this is after all not quite the one thing to do and that there are better ways and a better spirit in which one can approach the
Divine. If they do not get what they want and still come to the
Divine and trust in Him, well, that shows they are getting ready.
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But of course that is not the spiritual life, it is only a sort of elementary religious approach. For the spiritual life to give and not to demand is the rule. The sadhak however can ask for the
Divine Force to aid him in keeping his health or recovering it if he does that as part of his sadhana so that his body may be able and fit for the spiritual life and a capable instrument for the
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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,
- one may regard the Supreme not as the Divine but as one's highest Self and seek fulfilment of one's being in that highest Self; but one need not envisage it as a self of bliss, ecstasy, Ananda - one may envisage it as a self of freedom, vastness, knowledge, tranquillity, strength, calm, perfection - perhaps too calm for a ripple of anything so disturbing as joy to enter. So even if it is for something to be gained that one approaches the Divine, it is not a fact that one can approach Him or seek union only for the sake of Ananda and nothing else.
That involves something which throws all your reasoning out of gear. For these are aspects of the Divine Nature, powers of it, states of his being, - but the Divine Himself is something absolute, someone self-existent, not limited by his aspects, - wonderful and ineffable, not existing by them, but they existing because of him. It follows that if he attracts by his aspects, all the more he can attract by his very absolute selfness which is sweeter, mightier, profounder than any aspect. His peace, rapture, light, freedom, beauty are marvellous and ineffable, because he is himself magically, mysteriously, transcendently marvellous and ineffable. He can then be sought after for his wonderful and ineffable self and not only for the sake of one aspect or a nother of him. The only thing needed for that is, first, to arrive at a point when the psychic being feels this pull of the Divine in himself and, secondly, to arrive at the point when the mind, vital and each thing else begins to feel too that that was what it was wanting and the surface hunt after Ananda or what else was only an excuse for drawing the nature towards that supreme magnet.
Your argument that because we know the union with the
Divine will bring Ananda, therefore it must be for the Ananda that we seek the union, is not true and has no force. One who loves a queen may know that if she returns his love it will bring him power, position, riches and yet it need not be for the power, position, riches that he seeks her love. He may love her for herself and could love her equally if she were not a queen; he might have no hope of any return whatever and yet love her, adore her, live for her, die for her simply because she is she. That has happened and men have loved women without any hope of enjoyment or result, loved steadily, passionately after age has come and beauty has gone. Patriots do not love their country only when she is rich, powerful, great and has much to give them; their love for country has been most ardent, passionate, absolute when the country was poor, degraded, miserable, having nothing to give but loss, wounds, torture, imprisonment, death as the wages of her service; yet even knowing that they would never see her free, men have lived, served and died for her - for her own sake, not for what she could give. Men have loved Truth for her own sake and for what they could seek or find of her, accepted poverty, persecution, death itself; they have been content even to seek for her always, not finding, and yet never given up the search.
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 woman, 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 can not be otherwise, because it is it and
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I have written all that only to explain what we mean when we speak of seeking the Divine for himself and not for anything else - so far as it is explicable. Explicable or not, it is one of the most dominant facts of spiritual experience. The call to selfgiving is only an expression of this fact. But this does not mean that I object to your asking for Ananda. Ask for that by all means, so long as to ask for it is a need of any part of your being
- for these are the things that lead on towards the Divine so long as the absolute inner call that is there all the time does not push itself to the surface. But it is really that that has drawn from the beginning and is there behind - it is the categorical spiritual imperative, the absolute need of the soul for the Divine.
I am not saying that there is to be no Ananda. The selfgiving itself is a profound Ananda and what it brings, carries in its wake an inexpressible Ananda - and it is brought by this method sooner than by any other, so that one can say almost,
"A self-less self-giving is the best policy." Only one does not do it out of policy. Ananda is the result, but it is done not for the result, but for the self-giving itself and for the Divine himself - a subtle distinction, it may seem to the mind, but very real.
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 (Brahman) 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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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
All movementswhe ther of thought or of life, whether in the individual or in the massproceed from a fundamental intuition which lies in the background as the logical presupposition, the psychological motive and the spiritual force. A certain attitude of the soul, a certain angle of vision is what is posited first; all other thingsall thoughts and feelings and activities are but necessary attempts to express, to demonstrate, to realise on the conscious and dynamic levels, in the outer world, the truth which has thus already been seized in some secret core of our being. The intuition may not, of course, be present to the conscious mind, it may not be ostensibly sought for, one may even deny the existence of such a preconceived notion and proceed to establish truth on a tabula rasa; none the less it is this hidden bias that judges, this secret consciousness that formulates, this unknown power that fashions.
Now, what is the intuition that lies behind the movements of the new age? What is the intimate realisation, the underlying view-point which is guiding and modelling all our efforts and achievementsour science and art, our poetry and philosophy, our religion and society? For, there is such a common and fundamental note which is being voiced forth by the human spirit through all the multitude of its present-day activities.
A new impulse is there, no one can deny, and it has vast possibilities before it, that also one need not hesitate to accept. But in order that we may best fructuate what has been spontaneously sown, we must first recognise it, be luminously conscious of it and develop it along its proper line of growth. For, also certain it is that this new impulse or intuition, however true and strong in itself, is still groping and erring and miscarrying; it is still wasting much of its energy in tentative things, in mere experiments, in even clear failures. The fact is that the intuition has not yet become an enlightened one, it is still moving, as we shall presently explain, in the dark vital regions of man. And vitalism is naturally and closely affianced to pragmatism, that is to say, the mere vital impulse seeks immediately to execute itself, it looks for external effects, for changes in the form, in the machinery only. Thus it is that we see in art and literature discussions centred upon the scheme of composition, as whether the new poetry should be lyrical or dramatic, popular or aristocratic, metrical or free of metre, and in practical life we talk of remodelling the state by new methods of representation and governance, of purging society by bills and legislation, of reforming humanity by a business pact.
All this may be good and necessary, but there is the danger of leaving altogether out of account the one thing needful. We must then pause and turn back, look behind the apparent impulsion that effectuates to the Will that drives, behind the ideas and ideals of the mind to the soul that informs and inspires; we must carry ourselves up the stream and concentrate upon the original source, the creative intuition that lies hidden somewhere. And then only all the new stirrings that we feel in our 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 humanists. 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 Humanism, Nietzsche has posited the Superman and in face of Reason Bergson has posited Intuition.
The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Humanism 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 humanity 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 humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been a nother 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 human 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 human attri bute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man is not bound by his humanity 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 Superman into which man is asked or is being impelled to grow?
Reason is insufficient and unsatisfactory because, as Bergson explains, it does not and can not 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 can not 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 a nother and form an indissoluble whole. Therefore the forms and categories that Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and progresses with discoveries and inventionsdevices for artfully manipulating naturehas been essentially and pre-eminently mechanical in its structure and outlook. It has become more and more efficient perhaps, but less and less soul-inspired, less and less-endowed with the free-flowing sap of organic growth and vitality.
So instead of the rational principle, the new age wants the principle of Nature or Life. Even as regards knowledge Reason is not the only, nor the best instrument. For animals have properly no reason; the nature-principle of knowledge in the animal is Instinct the faculty that acts so faultlessly, so marvellously where Reason can only pause and be perplexed. This is not to say that man is to or can go back to this primitive and animal function; but certainly he can replace it by something akin which is as natural and yet purified and self-consciousillumined instinct, we may say or Intuition, as Bergson terms it. And Nietzsche's definition of the Superman has also a similar orientation and significance; for, according to him, the Superman is man who has outgrown his Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions determined by Reason for a special purpose. The Superman is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "human, all too human"who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom.
This then is the mantra of the new ageLife with Intuition as its guide and not Reason and mechanical efficiency, not Man but Superman. 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 Superman 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 superman 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 humanity, 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 superman, 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 superman 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 humanity seem capable. For that is after all humanity only accentuated in certain other fundamentally human 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 humanity 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 human activities of today. Only, the truth is being interpreted, as we have said, in terms of vital life. The intellectual and physical man gave us one aspect of the reality, but neither is the vital and psychical man the complete reality. The one acquisition of this shifting of the viewpoint has been that we are now in touch with the natural and deeper movement of humanity and not as before merely with its artificial scaffolding. The Alexandrine civilisation of humanity, in Nietzsche's phrase, was a sort of divagation from nature, it was following a loop away from the direct path of natural evolution. And the new Renaissance of today has precisely corrected this aberration of humanity and brought it again in a line with the natural cosmic order.
Certainly this does not go far enough into the motive of the change. The cosmic order does not mean mentalised vitalism which is also in its turn a section of the integral reality. It means the order of the spirit, it means the transfiguration of the physical, the vital and the intellectual into the supernal Substance, Power and Light of that Spirit. The real transcendence of humanity is not the transcendence of one or other of its levels but the total transcendence to an altogether different status and the transmutation of humanity in the mould of that status not a Nietzschean Titan nor a Bergsonian Dionysus but the tranquil vision and delight and dynamism of the Spirit the incarnation of a god-head.
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01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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 a nother order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the artist's mentalityhis ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions, in other words, his normal psychological make-upserves as a channel, an instrument, a medium for transcription. Now, there are two stages, or rather two lines of activity in the processus, for they may be overlapping and practically simultaneous. First, there is the withdrawal and the in-gathering of consciousness and then its reappearance into expression. The consciousness retires into a secret or subtle worldWords-worth's "recollected in tranquillity"and comes back with the riches gathered or transmuted there. But the purity of the gold thus garnered and stalled in the artistry of words and sounds or lines and colours depends altogether upon the purity of the channel through which it has to pass. The mental vehicle receives and records and it can do so to perfection if it is perfectly in tune with what it has to receive and record; otherwise the transcription becomes mixed and blurred, a faint or confused echo, a poor show. The supreme creators are precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording mentality, suffuses it with its own glow and puissance, indeed resolves it into its own substance, as it were. And the difference between the two, the secret norm and the recording form, determines the scale of the artist's creative value. It happens often that the obstruction of a too critically observant and self-conscious brain-mind successfully blocks up the flow of something supremely beautiful that wanted to come down and waited for an opportunity.
Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their inspiration: they look upon themselves more or less as mere instruments of something or some Power that is beyond them, beyond their normal consciousness attached to the brain-mind, that controls them and which they can not control. This perception has been given shape in myths and legends. Goddess Saraswati or the Muses are, however, for them not a mere metaphor but concrete realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrument nothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plateis illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubla Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines, the rest having gone completely out of his memory; in other words, the poem was ready-composed somewhere else, but the transmitting or recording instrument was faulty and failed him. Indeed, it is a common experience to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory.
Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the intermediary is relative, and there are infinite grades of it. Even when the larger waves that play in it in the normal waking state are quieted down, smaller ripples of unconscious or half-conscious habitual formations are thrown up and they are sufficient to cause the scattering and dispersal of the pure light from above.
The absolute passivity is attainable, perhaps, only by the Yogi. And in this sense the supreme poet is a Yogi, for in his consciousness the higher, deeper, subtler or other modes of experiences pass through and are recorded with the minimum aberration or diffraction.
But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless channel? Conscious artistry, as we have said, means to be conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general experience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the artist dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not conscious at allhe does not know how he has created, the sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poetsShakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes and limits the original impulsion. The art here becomes consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versificationalthough here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry.
The three or four major orders I speak of in reference to conscious artistry are exampled characteristically in the history of the evolution of Greek poetry. It must be remembered, however, at the very outset that the Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and self-controlled and pregnant with a reasoned thought-content clothed in polished phrasing. We feel here that the artist knew what he was about and was exercising a conscious control over his instruments and materials, unlike his predecessor who seemed to be completely carried away by the onrush of the poetic enthousiasmos. Sophocles, in spite of his artistic perfection or perhaps because of it, appears to be just a little, one remove, away from the purity of the central inspiration there is a veil, although a thin transparent veil, yet a veil between which intervenes. With the third of the Brotherhood, Euripides, we slide lower downwe arrive at a predominantly mental transcription of an experience or inner conception; but something of the major breath continues, an aura, a rhythm that maintains the inner contact and thus saves the poetry. In a subsequent age, in Theocritus, for example, poetry became truly very much 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', so much of virtuosity and precocity entered into it; in other words, the poet then was an excessively self-conscious artist. That seems to be the general trend of all literature.
But should there be an inherent incompatibility between spontaneous creation and self-consciousness? As we have seen, a harmony and fusion can and do happen of the superconscious and the normally conscious in the Yogi. Likewise, an artist also can be wakeful and transparent enough so that he is conscious on both the levels simultaneouslyabove, he is conscious of the source and origin of his inspiration, and on the level plain he is conscious of the working of the instrument, how the vehicle transcribes and embodies what comes from elsewhere. The poet's consciousness becomes then divalent as it werethere is a sense of absolute passivity in respect of the receiving apparatus and coupled and immisced with it there is also the sense of dynamism, of conscious agency as in his secret being he is the master of his apparatus and one with the Inspirerin other words, the poet is both a seer (kavih) and a creator or doer (poits).
not only so, the future development of the poetic consciousness seems inevitably to lead to such a consummation in which the creative and the critical faculties will not be separate but form part of one and indivisible movement. Historically, human consciousness has grown from unconsciousness to consciousness and from consciousness to self-consciousness; man's creative and artistic genius too has moved pari passu in the same direction. The earliest and primitive poets were mostly unconscious, that is to say, they wrote or said things as they came to them spontaneously, without effort, without reflection, they do not seem to know the whence and wherefore and whither of it all, they know only that the wind bloweth as it listeth. That was when man had not yet eaten the fruit of knowledge, was still in the innocence of childhood. But as he grew up and progressed, he became more and more conscious, capable of exerting and exercising a deliberate will and initiating a purposive action, not only in the external practical field but also in the psychological domain. If the earlier group is called "primitives", the later one, that of conscious artists, usually goes by the name of "classicists." Modern creators have gone one step 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 can not 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 can not be helped, we can not comm and the tide to roll back, Canute-like. The feature has to be accepted and a remedy and new orientation discovered.
The modern critical self-consciousness in the artist originated with the Romantics. The very essence of Romanticism is curiosity the scientist's pleasure in analysing, observing, experimenting, changing the conditions of our reactions, mental or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarm and constitutes almost the whole of Valry's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate and willed at every step and turn.
The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness in fact, of all artistic consciousness has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at 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 craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.
Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of Homo Faber, has been a necessity; it has to serve a purpose and it has done admirably its work. Only we have to put it in its proper place. The salvation of an extremely self-conscious age lies in an exceeding and not in a further enhancement or an exclusive concentration of the self-consciousness, nor, of course, in a falling back into the original unconsciousness. It is this shift in the poise of consciousness that has been presaged and prepared by the conscious, the scientific artists of today. Their task is to forge an instrument for a type of poetic or artistic creation completely new, unfamiliar, almost revolutionary which the older mould would find it impossible to render adequately. The yearning of the human consciousness was not to rest satisfied with the familiar and the ordinary, the pressure was for the discovery of other strands, secret stores of truth and reality and beauty. The first discovery was that of the great Unconscious, the dark and mysterious and all-powerful subconscient. Many of our poets and artists have been influenced by this power, some even sought to enter into that region and become its denizens. But artistic inspiration is an emanation of Light; whatever may be the field of its play, it can have its origin only in the higher spheres, if it is to be truly beautiful and not merely curious and scientific.
That is what is wanted at present in the artistic world the true inspiration, the breath from higher altitudes. And here comes the role of the mystic, the Yogi. The sense of evolution, the march of human consciousness demands and prophesies that the future poet has to be a mysticin him will be fulfilled the travail of man's conscious working. The self-conscious craftsman, the tireless experimenter with his adventurous analytic mind has sharpened his instrument, made it supple and elastic, tempered, refined and enriched it; that is comparable to what we call the aspiration or call from below. Now the Grace must descend and fulfil. And when one rises into this higher consciousness beyond the brain and mind, when one lives there habitually, one knows the why and the how of things, one becomes a perfectly conscious operator and still retains all spontaneity and freshness and wonder and magic that are usually associated with inconscience and irreflection. As there is a spontaneity of instinct, there is likewise also a spontaneity of vision: a child is spontaneous in its movements, even so a seer. not only so, the higher spontaneity is more spontaneous, for the higher consciousness means not only awareness but the free and untrammelled activity and expression of the truth and reality it is.
Genius had to be generally more or less unconscious in the past, because the instrument was not ready, was clogged as it were with its own lower grade movements; the higher inspiration had very often to bypass it, or rob it of its serviceable materials without its knowledge, in an almost clandestine way. Wherever it was awake and vigilant, we have seen it causing a diminution in the poetic potential. And yet even so, it was being prepared for a greater role, a higher destiny it is to fulfil in the future. A conscious and full 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 a nother 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.
But the evolutionary urge, as I have said, has always been to bring down or instil more and more light and self-consciousness into the depths of the heart too: and the first result has been an intellectualisation, a rationalisation of the consciousness, a movement of scientific observation and criticism which very naturally leads to a desiccation of the poetic enthusiasm and fervour. But a period of transcendence is in gestation. All efforts of modern poets and craftsmen, even those that seem apparently queer, bizarre and futile, are at bottom a travail for this transcendence, including those that seem contradictory to it.
Whether the original and true source of the poet's inspiration lies deep within or high above, all depends upon the mediating instrument the mind (in its most general sense) and speech for a successful transcription. Man's ever-growing consciousness demanded also a conscious development and remoulding of these two factors. A growth, a heightening and deepening of the consciousness meant inevitably a movement towards the spiritual element in things. And that means, we have said, a twofold change in the future poet's make-up. First as regards the substance. The revolutionary shift that we notice in modern poets towards a completely new domain of subject-matter is a signpost that more is meant than what is expressed. The superficialities and futilities that are dealt with do not in their outward form give the real trend of things. In and through all these major and constant preoccupation of our poets is "the pain of the present and the passion for the future": they are, as already stated, more prophets than poets, but prophets for the moment crying in the wildernessalthough some have chosen the path of denial and revolt. They are all looking ahead or beyond or deep down, always yearning for a nother truth and reality which will explain, justify and transmute the present calvary of human living. Such an acute tension of consciousness has necessitated an overhauling of the vehicle of expression too, the creation of a mode of expressing the inexpressible. For that is indeed what human consciousness and craft are aiming at in the present stage of man's evolution. For everything, almost everything that can be normally expressed has been expressed and in a variety of ways as much as is possible: that is the history of man's aesthetic creativity. Now the eye probes into the unexpressed world; for the artist too the Upanishadic problem has cropped up:
By whom impelled does the mind fall to its target, what is the agent that is behind the eye and sees through the eyes, what is the hearing and what the speech that their respective sense organs do not and can not convey and record adequately or at all?
Like the modern scientist the artist or craftsman too of today has become a philosopher, even a mystic philosopher. The subtler and higher ranges of consciousness are now the object of inquiry and investigation and expression and revelation for the scientist as well as for the artist. The external sense-objects, the phenomenal movements are symbols and signposts, graphs and pointer-readings of facts and realities that lie hidden, behind or beyond. The artist and the scientist are occult alchemists. What to make of this, for example:
--
Well, it is sheer incantation. It is word-weaving, rhythm plaiting, thought-wringing in order to pass beyond these frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton, or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently shifted to a higher, a deeper degree. We may be speaking of tins and tinsel, bones and dust, filth and misery, of the underworld of ignorance and ugliness,
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
--
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 human nature and consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One:
Une Ide, uneForme, Un tre
--
I And therefore it is not so irremediable as it appears to be. For the miracle happens and is an inevitable natural phenomenon, and that is why
Par l'opration d'un mystrevengeur
--
Heaven and Earth are not incommensurables, divinity and humanity function as one reality, towards one purpose and end: cruel heaven, miserable humanity? Well, this is how they appear to the poet's eye:
Le Ciel! Couvercle noir de la grande marmite
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A deathbound littleness is not all we are:
Immortal our forgotten vastnesses
--
The truth mind could not know unveils its face,
We hear what mortal ears have never heard,
--
It is and acts unseen as if it were not;
It follows the line of sempiternal birth,
--
It reckons not the moments and the hours;
Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,
--
In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,
Our very being seems to us questionable,
--
And meets, not understanding why it came
Or for what reason is the suffering here,
--
And conscious of the high things not yet won,
Ever she nurses in her sleepless breast
--
The sweetness of a love that knows not death,
The radiance of a truth for ever sure.
--
Of which she feels the force but not the sense;
A few rare intimations come as guides,
--
Then is she moved to all that she is not
And stretches arms to what was never hers.
--
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.
For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:
--
He sees imagined garments, not a face.
Armed with a limited precarious strength,
--
He knows not what he shall achieve or when;
He knows not whether at last he shall survive,
Or end like the mastodon and the sloth
--
These heed not the deceiving outward play,
They turn not to the moment's busy tramp,
But listen with the still patience of the Unborn
--
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.
A Consciousness that knows not its own truth,
A vagrant hunter of misleading dawns,
--
They reckon not our virtue and our sin;
They bend not to the voices that implore,
They hold no traffic with error and its reign;
--
And yet without them cosmos could not be.
Impervious to desire and doom and hope,
--
Mute, pure, they share not in the evil done;
Else might their strength be marred and could not save.
Alive to the truth that dwells in God's extremes,
--
The immortal sees not as we vainly see.
He looks on hidden aspects and screened powers,
--
We whirl not here upon a casual globe
Abandoned to a task beyond our force;
--
When nothing we can see but drift and bale,
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.
--
For nothing here is utterly what it seems;
It is a dream-fact vision of a truth
Which but for the dream would not be wholly true,
A phenomenon stands out significant
--
We know not how shall run the drama's course;
Our uttered sentences veil in their thought.
--
Works out her meanings she seems not to know
And serves her secret purpose in long Time.
--
Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.
He in a petty coastal traffic plies,
--
He hazards not the new and the unseen.
But now he hears the sound of larger seas.
--
Venturing not yet to cross oceans unnamed
And journey into a dream of distances
--
That knows him not and can not know itself:
The surface symbol of his goalless quest
--
Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,
He carries her sealed orders in his breast.
--
Whoever leaves her, he will not depart
To repose without her in the Unknowable.
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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 human solidarity, the living consciousness of the Divine, one and indivisible. When the Gospel of Power had all but hyp notised men's minds, and Superman 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 human temperament, and grief and frustration and death and decay were taken as a matter of course to be the inevitable order of earthlylifebhasmantam idam shariramhe continued to sing the song of the Rishis that Ananda and Immortality are the breath of things, the birth right of human beings. When Modernism declared with a certitude never tobe contested that Matter is Brahman, Tagore said with the voice of one who knows that Spirit is Brahman.
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 a nother 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 human 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 human 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:
Mine is not the deliverance achieved through mere renunciation. Mine rather the freedom that tastes itself in a thousand associations.1
The spirit of the age demands 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 human mind. The fulfilment of the Spirit is in its expression through Matter; human 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 humanity 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 human 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, humanitarianwhich have to be faced and solved: these are not merely mundane, but woven into the texture of the fundamental problem of human 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 human 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.
A modern idealist of the type of a reformer would not be satisfied with that role. If he is merely a moralist reformer, he will revolt against the "witness business", calling it a laissez-faire mentality of bygone days. A spiritual reformer would ask for morea dynamic union with the Divine Will and Consciousness, not merely a passive enjoyment in the Bliss, so that he may be a luminous power or agent for the expression of divine values in things mundane.
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 humanity 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 can not 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 humanity. 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 human 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
Thus, on the one hand, the Eternity, the Infinity, the Spirit is brought nearer home to us in its embodied symbols and living vehicles and vivid formulations, it becomes easily available to mortals, even like the father to his son, to use a Vedic phrase; on the other hand, earthly things, mere humanities are uplifted and suffused with a "light that never was, on sea or land."
--
"Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight."Gitanjali,73.
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:
--
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.
Sri Aurobindo: "Ahana", Collected Poems & Plays, Vol. 2
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 Superman. 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 Superman 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 can not 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 can not hope to create.
This is the Nietzsche we all know. But there is a nother aspect of his which the world has yet been slow to recognise. For, at bottom, Nietzsche is not all storm and fury. If his Superman 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 humanity. 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 humanity. Humanity, according to Nietzsche, is made in order to be beautiful, to conceive the beautiful, to create the beautiful. Nietzsche's Superman 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.
The real secret of Nietzsche's philosophy is not an adoration of brute force, of blind irrational joy in fighting and killing. Far from it, Nietzsche has no kinship with Treitschke or Bernhard. What Nietzsche wanted was a world purged of littleness and ugliness, a humanity, not of saints, perhaps, but of heroes, lofty in their ideal, great in their achievement, majestic in their empirea race of titanic gods breathing the glory of heaven itself.
***
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The body's rules bound not the spirit's powers:
When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in;
He dared to live when breath and thought were still.
--
He could recover the luminous marginal notes
Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll,
--
There are thrills of the flesh, but not the soul's desire.
Here even the highest rapture Time can give
--
Could not restrain the swift arisen God:
Abolished were the scripts of destiny.
--
In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,
The light began of the Trinity supreme.
--
The meaning it had held but could not voice;
The perfect rhythm now only sometimes dreamed
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Communism is the synthesis of collectivism and individualism. The past ages of society were characterised more or less by a severe collectivism. In ancient Greece, more so in Sparta and in Rome, the individual had, properly speaking, no separate existence of his own; he was merged in the State or Nation. The individual was considered only as a limb of the collective being, had to live and labour for the common weal. The value attached to each person was strictly in reference to the output that the group to which he belonged received from him. Apart from this service for the general unit the body politicany personal endeavour and achievement, if not absolutely discouraged and repressed, was given a very secondary place of merit. The summum bonum of the individual was to sacrifice at the altar of the res publica, the bonum publicum. In India, the position and function of the State or Nation was taken up by the society. Here too social institutions were so constituted and men were so bred and brought up that individuality had neither the occasion nor the incentive to express itself, it was a thing that remained, in the Kalidasian phrase, an object for the ear onlysrutau sthita. Those who sought at all an individual aim and purpose, as perhaps the Sannyasins, were put outside the gate of law and society. Within the society, in actual life and action, it was a sin and a crime or at least a gross imperfection to have any self-regarding motive or impulse; personal preference was the last thing to be considered, virtue consisted precisely in sacrificing one's own taste and inclination for the sake of that which the society exacts and sanctions.
Against this tyranny of the group, this absolute rule of the collective will, the human mind rose in revolt and the result was Individualism. For whatever may be the truth and necessity of the Collective, the Individual is no less true and necessary. The individual has his own law and urge of being and his own secret godhead. The collective godhead derides the individual godhead at its peril. The first movement of the reaction, however, was a run to the other extremity; a stern collectivism gave birth to an intransigent individualism. The individual is sacred and inviolable, cost what it may. It does not matter what sort of individuality one seeks, it is enough if the thing is there. So the doctrine of individualism has come to set a premium on egoism and on forces that are disruptive of all social bonds. Each and every individual has the inherent right, which is also a duty, to follow his own impetus and impulse. Society is nothing but the battle ground for competing individualities the strongest survive and the weakest go to the wall. Association and co-operation are instruments that the individual may use and utilise for his own growth and development but in the main they act as deterrents rather than as aids to the expression and expansion of his characteristic being. In reality, however, if we probe sufficiently deep into the matter we find that there is no such thing as corporate life and activity; what appears as such is only a camouflage for rigorous competition; at the best, there maybe only an offensive and defensive alliancehumanity fights against nature, and within humanity itself group fights against group and in the last analysis, within the group, the individual fights against the individual. This is the ultimate Law-the Dharma of creation.
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 demand 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 demands 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.
Now, a spiritual communism embraces individualism and collectivism, fuses them in a higher truth, establishes them in an intimate and absolute harmony. The individual is the centre, the group is the circumference and the two form one whore circle. The individual by fulfilling the truth of his real individuality fulfils also the truth of a commonality. There are no different laws for the two. The individuals do not stand apart from and against one a nother, the dharma of one does not clash with the dharma of the other. The ripples in the bosom of the sea, however distinct and discrete in appearance, form but a single mass, all follow the same law of hydrodynamics that the mother sea incarnates. Stars and planets and nebulae, each separate heavenly body has its characteristic form and nature and function and yet all fulfil the same law of gravitation and beat the measure of the silent symphony of spaces. Individualities are the freedoms of the collective being and collectivity the concentration of individual beings. The same soul looking inward appears as the individual being and looking outward appears as the collective being.
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 a nother 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.
A commune, further, is not only a product or final achievement; it is also a process, an instrument to bring about the desired end. A group of individuals come to have a common self and a common life-intuition in and through the commune; and in and through the commune does each individual progress to the realisation of his deepest self and the awakening of his inmost life-intuition.
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 permanent 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 a nother the communal brother-self.
As a matter of fact, the individual is not and can not be such an isolated thing as our egoistic sense would like to have it. The sharp angularities of the individual are being, at every moment, chastened by the very primary conditions of life; and to fail to recognise this is the blindest form of ignorance. It is no easy task to draw exactly the line of distinction between our individual being and our social or communal being. In actual life they are so blended together that in trying to extricate them from each other, we but tear and lacerate them both. The highest wisdom is to take the two together as they are, and by a gradual purifying processboth internal and external, internal in thought and knowledge and will, external in life and actionrestore them to their respective truth and lawSatyam and Ritam.
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.
Now how to escape the dilemma? Only if we take the commune and the individual togetheren bloc, as has already been suggested. This means that the commune should be at the beginning a subtle and supple thing, without form and even without name, it should be no more than the circumambient aura the sukshma deha that plays around a group of individuals who meet and unite and move together by a secret affinity, along a common path towards a common goal. As each individual develops and defines himself, the commune also takes a more and more concrete shape; and when at the last stage the individual rises to the full height of his godhead, takes possession of his integral divinity, the commune also establishes its solid empire, vivid and vibrant in form and name.
01.06 - Vivekananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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
--
There the' sun shines not, nor the moon nor the stars
or agam,
--
Then existence was not nor non-existence, the midworld was not nor the Ether nor what is beyond.
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 Brahman is asleep in you, awaken it, you are the Brahman, 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 attri bute of the lordship of your spiritual reality. Vivekananda spoke and roused the Atman in man.
--
"If I do not find bliss in the life of the spirit, shall I seek satisfaction in the life of the senses? If I can not get nectar, shall I fall back upon ditch water?"
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 human 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.
--
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:
"The dwelling-place of the Jivatman, this body, is a veritable means of work, and he who converts this into an infernal den is guilty, and he who neglects it is also to blame."
01.07 - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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.
Pascal's place in the evolution of European culture and consciousness is of considerable significance and importance. He came at a critical time, on the mounting tide of rationalism and scepticism, in an age when the tone and temper of human mentality were influenced and fashioned by Montaigne and Rochefoucauld, by Bacon and Hobbes. Pascal himself, born in such an atmosphere of doubt and disbelief and disillusionment, had sucked in a full dose of that poison; yet he survived and found the Rock of Ages, became the clarion of Faith against Denial. What a spectacle it was! This is what one wrote just a quarter of a century after the death of Pascal:
--
In his inquiry into truth and certitude Pascal takes his stand upon what he calls the geometrical method, the only valid method, according to him, in the sphere of reason. The characteristic of this method is that it takes for granted certain fundamental principles and realitiescalled axioms and postulates or definitionsand proceeds to other truths that are infallibly and inevitably deduced from them, that are inherent and implied in them. There is no use or necessity in trying to demonstrate these fundamentals also; that will only land us into confusion and muddle. They have to be simply accepted, they do not require demonstration, it is they that demonstrate others. Such, for instance, are space, time, number, the reality of which it is foolishness and pedantry to I seek to prove. There is then an order of truths that do not i require to be proved. We are referring only to the order of I physical truths. But there is a nother order, Pascal says, equally I valid and veritable, the order of the Spirit. Here we have a nother set of fundamentals that have to be accepted and taken for granted, matrix of other truths and realities. It can also be called the order of the Heart. Reason posits physical fundamentals; it does not know of the fundamentals of the Heart which are beyond its reach; such are God, Soul, Immortality which are evident only to Faith.
But Faith and Reason, according to Pascal, are not contraries nor irreconcilables. Because the things of faith are beyond reason, it is not that they are irrational. Here is what Pascal says about the function and limitation of reason:
"The last movement of reason is to know that there is an infinity of things that are beyond it. It must be a very weak reason if it does not arrive there."2
"One must know where one should doubt, where one should submit."3
"Two excesses are equally dangerous: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason."4
He goes farther and adopting a positive attitude says:
"We know truth not by reason alone, but by the heart also: it is in the latter way that we know the first principles, and in vain does reasoning, that has no part in it, attempt to combat them... The heart feels... and the reason demon strates afterwards... Principles are felt, propositions are deduced. . . . "5
About doubt, Pascal says that the perfect doubter, the Pyrrhonian as he is called, is a fiction. Pascal asks:
--
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 human 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.
--
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.
A translation can not give any idea of the Pascalian style; but an inner echo of the same can perhaps be caught from the thought movement of these characteristic sayings of his with which we conclude:
"Contradiction is not a mark of falsehood, nor is uncontradiction a mark of truth."8
"The infinite distance of the body from the mind images the distance infinitely more infinite of the mind from Charity (Divine Grace, Faith)."9
"The heart has its reasons which Reason knows not... I say, the heart loves the universal being naturally, and itself also naturally, according to which so ever it gives itself. And it hardens itself against the one or the other according to its choice. You have rejected one and preserved the other. Is it by the reason that you love ?"10
"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 permanent reformation of the world presupposes a real reconstruction, a permanent reformation of human 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 demand which man feels within himself. A truth must realise itself in human 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 human 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. A nother 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 Germany?
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 human life and society do not seem to be any the more worthy for it.
Are we then to say that human 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 humanity 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 human 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-sheathman needs must procreate, man needs must seek food. But what human 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 human 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 can not but obey the laws that guide them. Of these three strata which form the human 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 demands 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 human 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 substance not 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.
01.08 - A Theory of Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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 can not 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.
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Secondly, there is the line of Substitution. Here the mind does not stand in an antagonistic and protestant mood to combat and repress the impulse, but seeks to divert it into other channels, use it to other purposes which do not demand equal sacrifice, may even, on the other hand, be considered by the conscious mind as worthy of human pursuit. Thus the energy that normally would seek sexual gratification might find its outlet in the cultivation of art and literature. It is a common thing in novels to find the heroine disappointed in love taking finally to works of charity and beneficence and thus forgetting her disappointment. A nother variety of this is what is known as "drowning one's sorrow in drinking."
Thirdly, there is the line of Sublimationit is when the natural impulse is neither repressed nor diverted but lifted up into a higher modality. The thing is given a new sense and a new value which serve to remove the stigma usually attached to it and thus allow its free indulgence. Instances of carnal love sublimated into spiritual union, of passion transmuted into devotion (Bhakti) are common enough to illustrate the point.
The human 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 human 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 human will, i.e. of an individual personal will and therefore necessarily limited both in intent and extent. It is a power complementary to the power of Nature, it may guide and fashion the latter according to a new pattern, but can not change the basic substance, the stuff of Nature. To that end yoga seeks a power that transcends the human will, brings into play the supernal puissance of a Divine Will.
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 lineman is not all instinct, he is not a mere blind instrument in the hands of Nature forces. He has in him a nother 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 demands form his manifest reality, the demands 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 can not 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 a nother 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 a nother 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 said not 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 emanation created out of his substancehis embodied loveas a human 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 a nother 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 human 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. Brahman is in the world, Brahman is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brahmansi, 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 Brahman but superimposed upon Brahman, still, has been accepted as a peculiar power of Brahman 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 a nother 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 human 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 humanity.
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 a nother 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!
Indeed, there are one or two points, notes for the guidance of the aspirant, which I would like to mention here for their striking appositeness and simple "soothfastness." First of all with regard to the restless enthusiasm and eagerness of a novice, here is the advice given: "The fervour is so mickle in outward showing, is not only for mickleness of love that they have; but it is for littleness and weakness of their souls, that they may not bear a little touching of God.. afterward when love hath boiled out all the uncleanliness, then is the love clear and standeth still, and then is both the body and the soul mickle more in peace, and yet hath the self soul mickle more love than it had before, though it shew less outward." And again: "without any fervour outward shewed, and the less it thinketh that it loveth or seeth God, the nearer it nigheth" ('it' naturally refers to the soul). The statement is beautifully self-luminous, no explanation is required. A nother hurdle that an aspirant has to face often in the passage through the Dark Night is that you are left all alone, that you are deserted by your God, that the Grace no longer favours you. Here is however the truth of the matter; "when I fall down to my frailty, then Grace withdraweth: for my falling is cause there-of, and not his fleeing." In fact, the Grace never withdraws, it is we who withdraw and think otherwise. One more difficulty that troubles the beginner especially is with regard to the false light. The being of darkness comes in the form of the angel of light, imitates the tone of the still small voice; how to recognise, how to distinguish the two? The false light, the "feigned sun" is always found "atwixt two black rainy clouds" : they are "highing" of oneself and "lowing" of others. When you feel flattered and elated, beware it is the siren voice tempting you. The true light brings you soothing peace and meekness: the other light brings always a trail of darknessf you are soothfast and sincere you will discover it if not near you, somewhere at a distance lurking.
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
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 can not 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 can not 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 permanent 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 humanity 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 humanity will remain eternally human 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 a nother. 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 can not be asserted positively that because man's special virtue is self-consciousness, animals can not 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 humanity, show more and more evident signs of something which is very much akin to, if not identical with the human characteristic of self-consciousness.
So, in man also, especially of that order which forms the crown of humanityin poets and artists and seers and great men of actioncan be observed a certain characteristic form of consciousness, which is something other than, greater than the consciousness of the mere self. It is difficult as yet to characterise definitely what that thing is. It is the awakening of the self to something which is beyond itselfit is the cosmic self, the oversoul, the universal being; it is God, it is Turiya, it is sachchidanandain so many ways the thing has been sought to be envisaged and expressed. The consciousness of that level has also a great variety of names given to it Intuition, Revelation, cosmic consciousness, God-consciousness. It is to be noted here, however, that the thing we are referring to, is not the Absolute, the Infinite, the One without a second. It is not, that is to say, the supreme Reality the Brahmanin its static being, in its undivided and indivisible unity; it is the dynamic Brahman, that status of the supreme Reality where creation, the diversity of Becoming takes rise, it is the Truth-worldRitam the domain of typal realities. The distinction is necessary, as there does seem to be such a level of consciousness intermediary, again, between man and the Absolute, between self-consciousness and the supreme consciousness. The simplest thing would be to give that intermediate level of consciousness a negative namesince being as yet human we can not foresee exactly its composition and function the super-consciousness.
The inflatus of something vast and transcendent, something which escapes all our familiar schemes of cognisance and yet is insistent with a translucent reality of its own, we do feel sometimes within us invading and enveloping our individuality, lifting up our sense of self and transmuting our personality into a reality which can hardly be called merely human. All this life of ego-bound rationality then melts away and opens out the passage for a life of vision and power. Thus it is the poet has felt when he says, "there is this incalculable element in human life influencing us from the mystery which envelops our being, and when reason is satisfied, there is something deeper than Reason which makes us still uncertain of truth. Above the human reason there is a transcendental sphere to which the spirit of men sometimes rises, and the will may be forged there at a lordly smithy and made the unbreakable pivot."(A.E.)
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.
01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The ideal was Blake's. It will not sound so revolting if we understand what the poet meant by Hell. Hell, he explains, is simply the body, the Energy of Lifehell, because body and life on earth were so considered by the orthodox Christianity. The Christian ideal demands an absolute denial and rejection of life. Fulfilment is elsewhere, in heaven alone. That is, as we know, the ideal of the ascetic. The life of the spirit (in heaven) is a thing away from and stands against the life of the flesh (on earth). In the face of this discipline, countering it, Blake posited a union, a marriage of the two, considered incompatibles and incommensurables. Enfant terrible that he was, he took an infinite delight in a spirit of contradiction and went on expatiating on the glory of the misalliance. He declared a new apocalypse and said that Lucifer, the one called Satan, was the real God, the so-called Messiah the fake one: the apparent Milton spoke in praise of God and in dispraise of Satan, but the real, the esoteric Milton glorified Satan, who is the true God and minimised or caricatured the counterfeit or shadow God. Here is Blakean Bible in a nutshell:
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.
--
But the process, Monsieur Thibon rightly asserts, must begin with the individual and within the individual. Man must "turn within, feel alive within himself", re-establish his living contact with God, the source and origin from which he has cut himself off. Man must learn to subordinate having to being. Each individual must be himself, a free and spontaneous expression. Upon such individual , upon individuals grouped naturally in smaller collectivities and not upon unformed or ill-formed wholesale masses can a perfect human society be raised and will be raised. Monsieur Thibon insistsand very rightlyupon the variety and diversity of individual and local growths in a unified humanity and not a dead uniformity of regimented oneness. He declares, as the reviewer of the London Times succinctly puts it: "Let us abolish our insensate worship of number. Let us repeal the law of majorities. Let us work for the unity that draws together instead of idolizing the multiplicity that disintegrates. Let us understand that it is not enough for each to have a place; what matters is that each should be in his right place. For the atomized society let us substitute an organic society, one in which every man will be free to do what he alone is qualified and able to do."
So far so good. For it is not far enough. The being or becoming that is demanded in fulfilment of the divine advent in humanity 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 demanded 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
dream. As I could not tell it to You at the Playground, I
am going to tell You now.
--
them. They will not harm you." I walked through them
quite confidently. not one of them disturbed me nor
did I disturb them. When I reached the Playground, I
--
not felt their presence till then, I was not in the least
alarmed. I took them off one by one and threw them
--
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.
With my blessings.
--
are not able to go beyond a mediocre average. Or is it
because of our lack of solid concentration?
--
problem is not solved. How can we create an interest in
them for each thing and every day?
--
This is not good; the collective work should not suffer because
of personal work.
--
to be eager to receive Your blessings, but why do I not
have that feeling?
--
a dark corner, something that does not want to change and is
afraid of the Light.
--
Today I did not have that feeling of apprehension
about coming to You, but I was in a passive state. I
--
The first point is not to place oneself in thought, feeling or
action at the centre of the universe so that it exists only in terms
--
What he writes ought not to be taken separately; it is always
part of a whole which is a synthesis of all opposites.
--
I understand nothing about them. What are these two
things and how can one experience them?
--
I have noticed one thing: When I sit for a few minutes and make an effort to concentrate before going
to sleep, the next day I wake up quite early and am
--
finish one of his books, I feel that I have gained nothing,
learned nothing new - that it was a waste of time.
It is not absolutely useless. You probably had a great deal of
tamas in your mind, and the mental acrobatics of the author
--
I have noticed something which applies to all of us;
it is that we take part in as many items as possible in the
2nd December programme.3 Would it not be better to
choose one or two items and give a very good demonstration in them, rather than to do several in a mediocre way?
--
has to be very sincere so as not to deceive oneself.
4 November 1961
--
For a long time I have noticed that I am rather shy.
I always have an inferiority complex. I think I am afraid
--
to the Divine, you would not care at all about the appreciation
of others.
--
Mental formations are not enough, of course!
It means that what you do should not be done with a personal,
egoistic aim, for success, for glory, for gain, for material profit or
--
impels you and His will that supports you - not just a mental
knowledge, but the sincerity of a state of consciousness and the
--
thinks it will be the opposite. It is true that our performance is not up to the mark. I hope and I pray to You
that the performance this evening may be at its best.
--
the 2nd December performance. You should not listen to people
who only know how to criticise. Exaggerated criticism is not an
aid to progress.
--
to any ceremony, whatever it may be, and yet do not depend
on it.
--
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.
They keep their energy for the task and leave the glory of the
--
very far, from the Ideal You have given us. This does not
discourage me, for I have full confidence in You.
--
practical? And so on. It is a subject on which it is not
easy to find a solution satisfactory enough for everyone,
--
It is impossible. Each one has his own taste and his own temperament. nothing can be done without discipline - the whole of
life is a discipline.
--
come when there will be nothing but unmixed harmony,
joy and peace?
--
had not given Her darshan to Z. But now I am afraid
that Mother may be angry at my audacity in writing such
--
I read your letter and I was not at all angry. But Z was not at all
ready for a darshan.
--
Sometimes I have the impression that our leaders do not
seem to have the sort of backbone displayed by Kennedy
--
of India? I reply: "Certainly not", and I advise you to keep silent
and remain calm.
--
It is all right, my children, but it is not enough to pray; you must
also make a persevering effort.
--
Do not forget - all of you who are here - that we want to
realise something which does not yet exist upon earth; so it is
absurd to seek elsewhere for an example of what we want to do.
--
soul, not all the whims of the mind and vital.
The freedom I speak of is an austere truth which strives to
--
one does not understand.
5 January 1963
--
have not taken the trouble to quiet down begin to fidget restlessly
and produce what is called a dream, but it is nothing more than
disorderly activity. It has no meaning and can serve only one
--
Besides, who is perfectly disinterested? One should not pretend to be what one is not. It is better to be frank than hypocritical.
12 April 1963
--
I have often noticed that the work we do is done
much better and more quickly than if it were done by
--
Why not?
There are hundreds of proofs to the contrary.
--
that nothing could ever discourage him. For even after
having lost both legs in an accident, he vowed that he
--
It is not a dream, but the result of the preceding meditation and
of your aspiration.
--
That happens when he has not taken care to organise his conscious being around the psychic centre, which is the Truth of his
being.
--
A few days ago I noticed something very odd in
the children of Group A2: the boys don't want to work
--
upon earth to fulfil a mission? That is not my conception
- what are beggars and people like that doing?
--
Things are not so cut and dried as the mind thinks and even
desires in order to simplify the problem.
--
inexpressible joy, but this experience does not last very
The Mother underlined the phrase "in his lifetime".
--
preferable not to see.
15 July 1963
--
Would it not be better to have a basic discipline here
instead of so much freedom, a freedom we are not able
to profit by?
--
Why do I hesitate to ask You for money? What prevents me from doing so? Am I still not intimate enough
with You, or is there a nother reason? I do not understand
myself.
--
It is not bolder you should be, but persistent and persevering.
27 July 1963
--
That is an easy answer which one gives when one will not or
can not take the trouble to understand.
--
for She does not like her children to beg.
To ask from me is not begging and you may do so whenever
you really need something. But at the same time, you must be
prepared not to receive it and not to get upset if I fail to give it.
In this case, I said that you should be given some incense, but
I am not sure if it has been done. It is X who keeps it and you
should ask him for it.
--
But he did not explain.
It is a pity he did not explain his thought, because I don't know
what he wanted to say - probably he wanted to caution you
--
is not in contact with one's psychic being, it would be better to
strive always to do as well as possible and be as good as one
--
I told her that blaming oneself was perhaps not always
saintly or healthy.
--
When something goes wrong, one must always find the reason in oneself, not superficially but deep inside oneself, and not
in order to uselessly bewail the fault, but to cure it by calling to
--
that it is not due to any fault of hers that he is inconstant and
fickle - it is his nature to be like that and he acts according to
--
No, unless there are serious reasons for doing so. I am not
speaking of the outward act - whether one eats here or there
--
I am very happy, but I am not satisfied. Often I am
Series Ten - To a Young Captain
--
True happiness does not depend on the external circumstances
of life. One can obtain true happiness and keep it constantly
--
and his limits - that is why he does not change.
24 September 1963
--
I am not properly prepared for the 1st December
performance,11 and, what is more, I don't feel at all
--
liberator. not the Pundit, but the Yogin, not monasticism, but the inner renunciation of
desire and ignorance and egoism."
--
a long time, especially since I have been receiving your notebook
and correcting it.
--
single sentence a day - it did not have to be long, but it ought
to have been free from mistakes - alas!
--
One would think that even if you read your notebook when
I return it to you, you do not study it and try to use it as a means
to make progress.
To discipline one's life is not easy, even for those who are
strong, severe with themselves, courageous and enduring.
--
First of all, what has been reported is not correct. Secondly, the
advice is adapted to each case and can not be made a general
--
(Written by the Mother at the beginning of a notebook
containing quotations from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri)
--
has not made the most out of what is given to us.
That proves that life is too easy here and that for the most part
--
I have kept your notebook in the hope of finding time to read and
correct it. But the weeks go by and I see that it is impossible. I
--
you not to send it again until it is possible for me to start looking
at it once more. Continue your translation of the Aphorisms; I
--
The first condition is to decide not to live for oneself any more,
but to live exclusively for the Divine.
--
at most an idea and not an experience, the whole thing remains
purely mental. But if one makes a sincere and repeated effort, one
--
is better for me not to have it, all right, I accept Your
decision without complaint.
--
it, you may do so, knowing that it will not help you in any way
to make progress - that it will only give your body the illusion
--
inertia, tamas; it is the vital which brings in a dominant note of
rajas, activity. That is why, as a general rule, the intrusion of the
--
practises it. There are desireless men who are not pursuing any
yoga.
--
I was not speaking of external things and mental faculties! True
love is in the soul (all the rest is vital attraction or mental and
physical attachment, nothing else) and the soul (the psychic being) knows instinctively what the other needs to receive and is
always ready to give it to him.
--
Just as there are tangible and concrete bodily exercises and disciplines for physical culture, is there not
something tangible and concrete for the progress of the
--
This means that you are not yet ready for a spiritual discipline
and that you must wait until life has moulded you a little more
--
People often say that our food does not contain
enough vitamins and protein. The doctors claim that this
--
to find such a body that we need not speak of it.
Apart from that, one must act for the best and not attach
too much importance to it.
--
devoting all my time to work. But my logic does not
accept this. Where does this idea come from and why?
--
does not seem to be evident at all. Moreover, there are many
different kinds of sensitivity: some stem from weakness, others
--
governs the development of the individual, but the most developed individualities are not necessarily those in whom the ego is
strongest - on the contrary. As the individuality perfects itself,
--
It is always preferable not to try to assess the progress one is making because it does not help one to make it - on the contrary.
Aspiration for progress, if it is SINCERE, is sure to have an effect.
--
I put my question badly last time. I did not mean
the progress one has made, that is to say, the results of
the past, but the state one is in. I do not want to assess
the ground I have covered, but to know whether I am
--
to create a tamasic dullness, which should not be mistaken for
mental silence.
--
The very fact of being mistaken proves that one is not sincere
in some part of the being. For the psychic being knows and is
not mistaken; but more often than not, we do not listen to what
it says because it speaks without violence or insistence - it is a
--
progress. nothing exists for you outside the Ashram.
Isn't this a kind of isolation, a form of egoism?"
--
can it be awakened? What blows does it need? It is not
that this part is against the Divine - it does not even
seem to be interested in Him (which is perhaps worse).
--
slow down the divine action, not out of ill-will but in order to
be sure that nothing is forgotten or neglected in the haste to
reach the goal. Few are ready for a total consecration. Many
--
"If you can not make God love you, make Him fight you. If He will not give you the
embrace of the lover, compel Him to give you the embrace of the wrestler."
--
strange that he is not yet recognised, at least as a supreme
creator, a pure artist, a poet par excellence! So I tell myself that my judgments, my appreciations are influenced
by my devotion for the Master - and not everyone is
Series Ten - To a Young Captain
devoted. I do not think this is true. But then, why are
men's hearts not yet enchanted by His Words?
Who can understand Sri Aurobindo? He is as vast as the universe
--
It is not during meditation that one must learn to be silent,
because the very fact of trying makes a noise.
--
"If there is not a complete surrender, then it is not possible to adopt the baby cat attitude, - it becomes mere tamasic
passivity calling itself surrender. If a complete surrender is not
possible in the beginning, it follows that personal effort is necessary."17
--
So long as you are making an effort, it is not meditation and
there is not much use in prolonging this state.
To obtain mental silence, one must learn to relax, to let
--
This is only a hint, nothing more, about how to take the
first steps on the path.
--
atmosphere of the Ashram is not pure enough to be invulnerable
to falsehood.
--
Somebody asked me this question: "Is it not a great
loss for human society if persons endowed with an exceptional capacity to serve mankind, such as a gifted
--
does not believe in salvation; for us salvation is a meaningless
word. We are here to prepare the transformation of the earth
--
of ego. So long as that basis is not established, a sadhak is only
an ignorant and imperfect human being struggling with the evils
--
refers to in order to be sure of not going astray, until one is ready
for a nother more important and conclusive experience.
The real landmarks on the way are the spontaneous experiences, not those that come from a mental formation and are
always unreliable.
--
It is very important to take note of one's experiences and
remember them. To construct a system of development is secondary and sometimes harmful.
--
these lapses do not recur.
This is a minimum, a very small beginning - and it should
--
are not necessary in the yoga?
Good habits are indispensable so long as one acts out of habit.
--
to obey nothing but the one supreme impulse, the Will of the
Supreme.
--
anything, you are not on this path."20 But doesn't all
renunciation begin when one is on the path?
--
Everything else has lost all value and is not worth seeking, so
there is no longer any question of renouncing it because it is no
--
As long as union with the Divine is not the thing for which
one lives, one is not yet on the path.
21 April 1965
--
well that they would not?21
The Divine often advises or tries to guide man,
--
to Him. Either they do not hear Him or do not believe Him.
Men always complain of not being helped, but the truth is
that they refuse the help which is always with them.
--
of a benevolent God? Would he not also participate in
this new realisation?
--
complementary, not successive and contradictory, and this too is
possible only when the seat of consciousness is beyond the mind
--
can not judge, I do not have the elements needed for a true
judgment; therefore I will not judge, I will keep quiet."
19 May 1965
--
is not indispensable that he should have opinions, and still less
that he should air them.
--
It has nothing to do with punishment; it is the natural and
normal consequence of an error, shortcoming or fault which
--
Those who have a supramentalised body will not be subject to
the law of aging; consequently the question of age will not arise
for them.
--
that in order not to feel pain one must, so to speak, cut
the nerve that conveys this sensation to the brain. How
--
I did not say "cut the nerve" - that would be a surgical operation! I said, cut the conscious connection with the brain.
It is an occult operation, certainly more difficult than the
--
salvation. But not till the Time-Spirit in man is ready, can the
inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality.
--
Prime Minister and the Army Chief of Staff, was not our
Government's acceptance of the cease-fire the best that
--
They could not do otherwise.
29 September 1965
--
Because it is not a question of merit but of Grace.
6 October 1965
--
We know that we should not do certain things and
we do not really want to do them, but still we do them.
Why does this happen? How can we avoid it?
--
Mother, I do not understand what You mean by the
formation of a hierarchicised group.
--
it does not have all the members necessary to constitute the
hierarchy and certain functions or intermediaries are missing.
--
consciousness which does not have contact with the inner states
of being. You have to go out of this external consciousness and
--
that most are not at all ready for the new life, nor even ready to
prepare for the new life. And to tell the truth, they would do far
--
answer is not sure. Can You tell me where I am and how
I can progress on this path?
--
yoga, even if you do not know it; and by the very fact that you
are living here, you are helped in your yoga to the utmost of
--
your sleep, for in those places you are sure not to meet us. Try,
and you will see the result.
--
for those of us who are not yet awake, who are still unconscious? What is the explanation for this opportunity,
this good fortune we have been granted?
--
them nothing would ever stir; and also they are indispensable
for moulding the character of those who want to progress.
--
is that You are not very pleased with the questions I ask
You every Wednesday. Is this true?
--
falsehood, and I am not interested in it.
If it is from the moral point of view, morality is a shield
--
of view and from Your answer I conclude that the American action is not at all justifiable. But, Mother, isn't the
world in danger of being swallowed by the Communists
--
Communist ideal have the opposite opinion, not to mention
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
have an opinion but a total vision of everything as a whole
--
seriously is not considerable...
But the Divine Grace is infinite!
--
do so here. The only thing that one has outside, but does not
have here, is the moral constraint of an external discipline.
--
decided not to go. In any case I doubted that You would
approve of this proposal, but all the same I had the
--
accept the invitation... I do not want, then, to deprive you of
this experience and I say to you: "You may go."
--
One final note on this famous affair of the invitation which has created a lot of misunderstandings
everywhere.
Mother, I do not understand You! On one occasion
You say to me: "You may go. This decision is final";
--
Truly, I understand nothing about all this except
that You are not enthusiastic about my going. But why
all this complication? I don't know what X thinks of me,
--
like going. I WILL not GO. This is my final decision.
This famous chapter is closed.
--
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
--
can practise yoga for that, but that is not believing. To believe is
to have the faith that there can not be a world without the Divine,
--
Divine. And not just a "belief", not something one has thought
out or been taught, nothing like that: faith. A faith that is a living
knowledge, not an acquired one, that the existence of the world
is enough to prove the Divine. Without the Divine, no world.
--
"Divine" not in the sense of "purpose" or "goal" or "end", not
that sort of thing: the world as it is proves the Divine. Because
--
- 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
can not... it is impossible not to believe. It is like those people
(this is fantastic!), those people who study Nature, really study it
--
exists can not express it. And there is nothing but That. And it
is not a Something floating in nothingness: there is nothing but
That.
--
our aspirations are not tainted by vital desire, though
they may seem right to our common sense?
It is a question of inner sincerity. Common sense is not a judge
because it is a mental function of a rather inferior order.
--
only to imagine that the thing one wants to do will not be done,
and if this imagination creates the least uneasiness, then one can
--
Work does not go on twenty-four hours a day.
There is room for many other activities which have their
--
Your reply explains nothing, for isn't it You who
orders these expenditures?
--
they deserve it or not.
The Grace does not recognise the right of suffering to exist
and abolishes it.
--
It is said that nothing is in us, everything comes from
outside. It is also said elsewhere that our vision of the
--
But all this is a mental approximation of the Truth. It is not
the Truth itself.
--
I ask the first to make an effort to establish not only a psychic
relation (which is always there even when they are not conscious
of it) but also a mental and vital relation, which makes the outer
--
am not making much progress. I am still in the rut of
old petty habits which do not allow me to be free.
The character can change and must change, but it is a long
--
of all this, I have not quite understood its significance.
Is it necessary that it should have a significance?
--
The psychic does not retain things in their totality - it decants,
it gradually decants the vibrations.
--
He would not ask such a question if he had ever had a
psychic memory, because when one has one, it is quite evident.
--
we are not conscious of it. Only danger makes us recall
Your Presence so that we may have Your protection. But
--
it was very strong, even though we were not conscious
Series Ten - To a Young Captain
--
You did not feel the danger because I did not want you to
feel it.
--
After all these years I have found the forgotten notebook, and I
reply:
The Divine does not see things as men do and has no need
to punish or reward.
--
may be something apparently very modest; it is not the apparent
importance of a work which gives it its real value for the yoga.
--
a hope. It is not that I don't believe in reincarnation, but
this idea comes back to my mind very often. Mother, is
--
truth, it is not of capital importance, and it is far more important
to concentrate on the future, on the consciousness to be acquired
--
sad. I tell myself that it is not an ordinary illness, that
it is an experience leading towards physical transformation. But when I think of Your suffering body, I am
sad. And then, is this not part of the Sacrifice of the
Supreme spoken of by Sri Aurobindo? Are we worthy of
--
to be different. Or am I not conscious of my prayers?
Or is everything done for me, for my good, in spite of
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 human 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 emanation of the transcendent impersonality.
There is a nother 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 human 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 can not but be weak. This very weakness, so human, 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 humanity is not at all a feeling of suffering; pain or any such normal human 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 can not 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 human 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 can not 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 permanent, as universal and permanent as earthly things may be. Principles only can embrace and unify the whole of humanity; 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 human 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 can not 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 demands 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 human 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 demand 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 human 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, human 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 can not 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 a nother 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 a nother. 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
This latest work of Aldous Huxley is a collection of sayings of sages and saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The sayings are arranged under several heads such as "That art Thou", "The Nature of the Ground", "Divine Incarnation", "Self-Knowledge", "Silence", "Faith" etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents and also of the "Neo-Brahmin's" own personal preoccupation. There is also a running commentary, rather a note on each saying, meant to elucidate and explain, naturally from the compiler's standpoint, what is obviously addressed to the initiate.
A similar compilation was published in the Arya, called The Eternal Wisdom (Les Paroles ternelles, in French) a portion of which appeared later on in book-form: that was more elaborate, the contents were arranged in such a way that no comments were needed, they were self-explanatory, divided as they were in chapters and sections and subsections with proper headings, the whole thing put in a logical and organised sequence. Huxley's compilation begins under the title of the Upanishadic text "That art Thou" with this saying of Eckhart: "The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without". It will be interesting to note that the Arya compilation too starts with the same idea under the title "The God of All; the God who is in All", the first quotation being from Philolaus, "The Universe is a Unity".The Eternal Wisdom has an introduction called "The Song of Wisdom" which begins with this saying from the Book of Wisdom: "We fight to win sublime Wisdom; therefore men call us warriors".
Huxley gives only one quotation from Sri Aurobindo under the heading "God in the World". Here it is:
--
"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."
The neatness of the commentary can not be improved upon. Only with regard to the "ironical ring" of which Huxley speaks, it has just to be pointed out, as he himself seems to understand, that the "we" referred to in the phrase does not mean humanity in general that 'splashes about in the lower ooze' but those who have a sufficiently developed inner spiritual life.
There is a quotation from Lao Tzu put under the heading "Grace and Free Will": "It was when the Great Way declined that human kindness and morality arose".
We fear Mr. Huxley has completely missed the point of the cryptic sentence. He seems to take it as meaning that human 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 human mental knowledge: it is man's humanity that clouds the Divine and to reach the' Divine one must reject the human 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 can not 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:
"'Listen to this!' shouted Monkey. 'After all the trouble we had getting here from China, and after you specially ordered that we were to be given the scriptures, Ananda and Kasyapa made a fraudulent delivery of goods. They gave us blank copies to take away; I ask you, what is the good of that to us?' 'You needn't shout,' said the Buddha, smiling. 'As a matter of fact, it is such blank scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I quite see that the people of China are too foolish and ignorant to believe this, so there is nothing for it but to give them copies with some writing on.' "
A sage can smile and smile delightfully! The parable illustrates the well-known Biblical phrase, 'the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life'. The monkey is symbolical of the ignorant, arrogant, fussy human mind. There is a nother Buddhistic story about the monkey quoted in the book and it is as delightful; but being somewhat long, we can not reproduce it here. It tells how the mind-monkey is terribly agile, quick, clever, competent, moving lightning-fast, imagining that it can easily go to the end of the world, to Paradise itself, to Brahmic status. But alas! when he thought he was speeding straight like a rocket or an arrow and arrive right at the target, he found that he was spinning like a top at the same spot, and what he very likely took to be the very fragrance of the topmost supreme heaven was nothing but the aroma of his own urine.
***
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A modern society or people can not 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 human 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 permanent meaning and value to the human 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.
In India, it is well known, the diversity of affiliations is colossal, sui generis. Two major affiliations have today almost cut the country into two; and desperate remedies are suggested which are worse than the malady itself, as they may kill the patient outright. If it is so, it is, I repeat, the mediaeval spirit that is at:, the bottom of the trouble.
--
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 humanistic 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 can not be uprooted so easily; needed, because India's and the world's future demands 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 human 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.
--
The first extremes that met in India and fought and gradually coalesced to form a single cultural and social whole were, as is well known, the Aryan and the non-Aryan. Indeed, the geologists tell us, the land itself is divided into two parts structurally quite different and distinct, the Deccan plateau and the Himalayan ranges with the Indo-Gangetic plain: the former is formed out of the most ancient and stable and, on the whole, horizontally bedded rocks of the earth, while the latter is of comparatively recent origin, formed out of a more flexible and weaker belt (the Himalayan region consisting of a colossal flexing and crumpling of strata). The disparity is so much that a certain group of geologists hold that the Deccan plateau did not at all form part of the Asiatic continent, but had drifted and dashed into it:in fact the Himalayas are the result of this mighty impact. The usual division of an Aryan and a Dravidian race may be due to a memory of the clash of the two continents and their races.
However, coming to historical times, we see wave after wave of the most heterogeneous and disparate elementsSakas and Huns and Greeks, each bringing its quota of exotic materialenter into the oceanic Indian life and culture, lose their separate foreign identity and become part and parcel of the common whole. Even so,a single unitary body was formed out of such varied and shifting materials not in the political, but in a socio-religious sense. For a catholic religious spirit, not being solely doctrinal and personal, admitted and embraced in its supple and wide texture almost an infinite variety of approaches to the Divine, of forms and norms of apprehending the Beyond. It has been called Hinduism: it is a vast synthesis of multiple affiliations. It expresses the characteristic genius of India and hence Hinduism and Indianism came to be looked upon as synonymous terms. And the same could be defined also as Vedic religion and culture, for its invariable basis the bed-rock on which it stood firm and erectwas the Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages. But there had already risen a voice of dissidence and discord that of Buddha, not so much, perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a vital schism. The denial of the Vedas by itself, perhaps, would not be serious, but it became so, as it was symptomatic of a deeper divergence. Denying the Vedas, the Buddhistic spirit denied life. It was quite a new thing in the Indian consciousness and spiritual discipline. And it left such a stamp there that even today it stands as the dominant character of the Indian outlook. However, India's synthetic genius rose to the occasion and knew how to bridge the chasm, close up the fissure, and present again a body whole and entire. Buddha became one of the Avataras: the discipline of Nirvana and Maya was reserved as the last duty to be performed at the end of life, as the culmination of a full-length span of action and achievement; the way to Moksha lay through Dharma and Artha and Kama, Sannyasa had to be built upon Brahmacharya and Garhasthya. The integral ideal was epitomized by Kalidasa in his famous lines about the character of the Raghus:
They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in youth they pursued the objects of life; when old they took to spiritual austerities, and in the end they died united with the higher consciousness.
Only this process of integration was not done in a day, it took some centuries and had to pass through some unpleasant intermediary stages.
And still this was not the lastit could not be the lastanti thesis that had to be synthetized. The dialectical movement led to a more serious and fiercer contradiction. The Buddhistic schism was after all a division brought about from within: it could be said that the two terms of the antinomy belonged to the same genus and were commensurable. The idea or experience of Asat and Maya was not unknown to the Upanishads, only it had not there the exclusive stress which the later developments gave it. Hence quite a different, an altogether foreign body was imported into what was or had come to be a homogeneous entity, and in a considerable mass.
Unlike the previous irruptions that merged and were lost in the general life and consciousness, Islam entered as a leaven that maintained its integrity and revolutionized Indian life and culture by infusing into its tone a Semitic accent. After the Islamic impact India could not be what she was beforea change became inevitable even in the major note. It was a psychological cataclysm almost on a par with the geological one that formed her body; but the spirit behind which created the body was working automatically, inexorably towards the greater and more difficult synthesis demanded by the situation. Only the thing is to be done now consciously, not through an unconscious process of laissez-faire as on the inferior stages of evolution in the past. And that is the true genesis of the present conflict.
History abounds in instances of racial and cultural immixture. Indeed, all major human groupings of today are invariably composite formations. Excepting, perhaps, some primitiveaboriginal tribes there are no pure races existent. The Briton, the Dane, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman have combined to form the British; a Frenchman has a Gaul, a Roman, a Frank in him; and a Spaniard's blood would show an Iberian, a Latin, a Gothic, a Moorish element in it. And much more than a people, a culture in modern times has been a veritable cockpit of multifarious and even incongruous elements. There are instances also in which a perfect fusion could not be accomplished, and one element had to be rejected or crushed out. The complete disappearance of the Aztecs and Mayas in South America, the decadence of the Red Indians in North America, of the Negroes in Africa as a result of a fierce clash with European peoples and European culture illustrate the point.
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 demand 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.
The solution can come, first, by going to the true religion of the Spirit, by being truly spiritual and not merely religious, for, as we have said, real unity lies only in and through the Spirit, since Spirit is one and indivisible; secondly, by bringing down somethinga great part, indeed, if not the wholeof this puissant and marvellous Spirit into our life of emotions and sensations and activities.
If it is said that this is an ideal for the few only, not for the mass, our answer to that is the answer of the GitaYad yad acharati sreshthah. Let the few then practise and achieve the ideal: the mass will have to follow as far as it is possible and necessary. It is the very character of the evolutionary system of Nature, as expressed in the principle of symbiosis, that any considerable change in one place (in one species) is accompanied by a corresponding change in the same direction in other contiguous places (in other associated species) in order that the poise and balance of the system may be maintained.
It is precisely strong nuclei that are needed (even, perhaps, one strong nucleus is sufficient) where the single and integrated spiritual consciousness is an accomplished and established fact: that acts inevitably as a solvent drawing in and assimilating or transforming and re-creating as much, of the surroundings as its own degree and nature of achievement inevitably demand.
India did not and could not stop at mere cultural fusionwhich was a supreme gift of the Moguls. She did not and could not stop at a nother momentous cultural fusion brought about by the European impact. She aimed at something more. Nature demanded of her that she should discover a greater secret of human unity and through progressive experiments apply and establish it in fact. Christianity did not raise this problem of the greater synthesis, for the Christian peoples were more culture-minded than religious-minded. It was left for an Asiatic people to set the problem and for India to work out the solution.
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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 human 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 German 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 human 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 human 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 human 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 can not 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
--
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 demand 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 Human 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 woman and a woman'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 human love has, at least can have, a wonderful power, the potency of reversing the natural decree and bring about a supernatural intervention. Human 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. Human 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 can not be sold, even if he wanted it.
--
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 human 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.
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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 human 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, human 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 a nother 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 human 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 demanding 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 humanity 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 a nother 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.
Here is the crux of the question. The dictum of utilitarian philosophers is a golden rule which is easy to formulate but not so to execute. For the line of demarcation between one's own rights and the equal rights of others is so undefinable and variable that a title suit is inevitable in each case. In asserting and establishing and even maintaining one's rights there is always the possibilityalmost the certaintyof encroaching upon others' rights.
What is required is not therefore an external delimitation of frontiers between unit and unit, but an inner outlook of nature and a poise of character. And this can be cultivated and brought into action by learning to live by the sense of duty. Even then, even the sense of duty, we have to admit, is not enough. For if it leads or is capable of leading into an aberration, we must have something else to check and control it, some other higher and more potent principle. Indeed, both the conceptions of Duty and Right belong to the domain of mental ideal, although one is usually more aggressive and militant (Rajasic) and the other tends to be more tolerant and considerate (sattwic): neither can give an absolute certainty of poise, a clear guarantee of perfect harmony.
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.
--
Still, the conception of duty can not finally and definitively solve the problem. It can not 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 can not 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 can not 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 humanity can be born and replace all the other moulds and types that can never lead to anything final and absolutely satisfactory.
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01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
--
not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
--
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
not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Descend lower, descend only
--
Yes, that is the condition demanded, an entire vacuity in which nothing moves. That is the real Dark Night of the Soul. It is then only that the Grace leans down and descends, then only beams in the sweet Light of lights. Eliot has expressed the experience in these lines of rare beauty and sincerity :
Time and the bell have buried the day,
--
Eliot's is a very Christian soul, but we must remember at the same time that he is nothing if not modern. And this modernism gives all the warp and woof woven upon that inner core. How is it characterised? First of all, an intellectualism that requires a reasoned and rational synthesis of all experiences. A nother poet, a great poet of the soul's Dark Night was, as we all know, Francis Thompson: it was in his case not merely the soul's night, darkness extended even to life, he lived the Dark Night actually and physically. His haunting, weird lines, seize within their grip our brain and mind and very flesh
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,5
--
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 can not expect that indulgence. God meets him only halfway, he has to work up himself the other half. He has laid so many demands and conditions: the k nots in his case are not cut asunder but slowly disengaged.
The modern temper is especially partial to harmony: it can not 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 demand accord are Life and Death, Time and Eternity. Indeed, the problem of Time hangs heavy on the human 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.
--
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 immanence. 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:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
--
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
--
There must be a beginning, an affirmation. The other side of nature is not merely transcended and excluded, it must be taken up too, given some place, its proper place in the totality, in the higher synthesis:
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
--
not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.9
--
Now, a modern poet is modern, because he is doubly attracted and attached to things of this world and this mundane life, in spite of all his need and urge to go beyond for the larger truth and the higher reality. Apart from the natural link with which we are born, there is this other fascination which the poor miserable things, all the little superficialities, trivialities especially have for the modern mind in view of their possible sense and significance and right of existence. These too have a magic of their own, not merely a black magic:
..... our losses, the torn seine,
--
It is true the movement towards transcendence is stronger and apparent in our poet, but the other kindred point-of home and time-is not forgotten. So he says:
.History may be servitude,
--
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:
The dance along the artery
--
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 a nother pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.17
we have also high flights like the lines I have already quoted:
--
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
--
Here the poet is almost grimly tense, concentrated and has not allowed himself to be dissipated by thinkings and arguments, has confined himself wholly to a living experience. That is because the poet has since then moved up and sought a more rarefied air, a more even and smooth temper. The utter and absolute poetic ring of the Inferno is difficult to maintain in the Paradiso, unless and until the poet transforms himself wholly into the Rishi, like the poet of the Gita or the Upanishads.
"East Coker"
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 a nother 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 Whitman. 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. . . .
It is not a mere notion or superstition, it is an occult reality that gives sanctity to a particular place or region. The saintly soul has always been also a pilgrim, physically, to holy places, even to one single holy place, if he so chooses. The puritan poet may say tauntingly:
Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek In Golgotha him dead who lives in heaven
--
Roerich discovered and elaborated his own technique to reveal that which is secret, express that which is not expressed or expressible. First of all, he is symbolical and allegorical: secondly, the choice of his symbols and allegories is hieratic, that is to say, the subject-matter refers to objects and events connected with saints and legends, shrines and enchanted places, hidden treasures, spirits and angels, etc. etc.; thirdly, the manner or style of execution is what we may term pantomimic, in other words, concrete, graphic, dramatic, even melodramatic. He has a special predilection for geometrical patterns the artistic effect of whichbalance, regularity, fixity, soliditywas greatly utilised by the French painter Czanne and poet Mallarm who seem to have influenced Roerich to a considerable degree. But this Northerner had not the reticence, the suavity, the tonic unity of the classicist, nor the normality and clarity of the Latin temperament. The prophet, the priest in him was the stronger element and made use of the artist as the rites andceremoniesmudras and chakrasof his vocation demanded. Indeed, he stands as the hierophant of a new cultural religion and his paintings and utterances are, as it were, gestures that accompany a holy ceremonial.
A Russian artist (Monsieur Benois) has stressed upon the primitivealmost aboriginalelement in Roerich and was not happy over it. Well, as has been pointed out by other prophets and thinkers, man today happens to be so sophisticated, artificial, material, cerebral that a [all-back seems to be necessary for him to take a new leap forward on to a higher ground. The pure aesthete is a closed system, with a consciousness immured in an ivory tower; but man is something more. A curious paradox. Man can reach the highest, realise the integral truth when he takes his leap, not from the relatively higher levels of his consciousness his intellectual and aesthetic and even moral status but when he can do so from his lower levels, when the physico-vital element in him serves as the springing-board. The decent and the beautiful the classic grace and aristocracyform one aspect of man, the aspect of "light"; but the aspect of energy and power lies precisely in him where the aboriginal and the barbarian find also a lodging. Man as a mental being is naturally sattwic, but prone to passivity and weakness; his physico-vital reactions, on the other hand, are obscure and crude, simple and vehement, but they have life and energy and creative power, they are there to be trained and transfigured, made effective instruments of a higher illumination.
All elemental personalities have something of the unconventional and irrational in them. And Roerich is one such in his own way. The truths and realities that he envisages and seeks to realise on 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
2) When you wake up, do not make any sudden
movement of the head and keep still for a few minutes, with a concentration to remember what happened
--
your aspirations. Naturally, this does not mean that he
gives way to the fancies of your outer nature - I am
--
"The Dawn that does not pass away"3 - what spiritual
state does this marvellous dawn represent?
--
is not on the human scale.
One moment of the Lord probably means many years for
--
spite of this experience my whole being is not offered to
You. What stupidity! How can I change this?
--
around the central aspiration. If this unification is not done, we
carry this division within us.
--
accord is accepted; what is not in accord is refused, rejected or
transformed.
--
do nothing imperfect, incorrect or wrong? What is the
way to do it, Divine Mother?
--
which has not yet understood that it is nobler and loftier to
recognise one's faults in order to correct them, than to conceal
them in the hope that they will not be noticed.
As for all psychological problems, here too sincerity, a total
--
Yes, the two states are complementary, but that does not necessarily mean that they are simultaneous. Most often, "to live for
Thee" comes first and if the being is unified and sincere, "to live
--
receive a small part of it because I am not receptive
enough.
--
because it is not receptive, when it could live in beatitude if it
would open to the Divine Love.
--
But perhaps in these two cases, the slowness is not the same.
20 July 1967
--
It is not an absolute rule - far from it - but the case is quite
frequent in India where the belief in frequent reincarnations is
--
and feels quite concretely that it does not itself live and act, but
that only the Supreme Lord exists and that He alone lives and
--
If I did say this (probably not quite in these words), it could only
refer to a universal family open to all differences and even all
--
which is formed in this life and is not yet under the rule and
influence of the psychic. As soon as one is united with one's
--
Because most people, when they hear the word "unity", understand uniformity and nothing can be further from the truth.
25 September 1967
--
and virtuous, are not paying what they owe according
to their accounts. One of them refuses to speak to me
--
Kali's force is necessary only for those who are not yet open to
Divine Love. For one who is open to Divine Love, nothing more
is needed.
--
Whatever the past may have been, it is not time that is needed
to establish contact with the Divine, but sincerity of aspiration.
--
and glory. not only are they unnecessary, they are useless and
an obstacle to realisation.
--
- and because they have not yet been converted to the Divine
Influence, though the work has begun.
--
Wealth should not be a personal property and should be at
the disposal of the Divine for the welfare of all.
--
When Mother says that wealth should not be a personal
property, I understand that what should come is more
--
have this knowledge. But yesterday I tried to note down
what You had said:
--
These words do not apply to the physical world as it is at present.
The explanation is only an approximation. Still, one can
--
Yes, the land itself has a consciousness, even though this consciousness is not intellectualised and can not express itself.
21 March 1968
--
one wakes up, it is the waking being that is not conscious of the
activities of the night.
--
It is not a paradox.
It is the same phenomenon as for the Divine who is at the
--
but whom it could never reach if it did not carry him in itself.
One must go beyond notions of space and Matter to be able
to understand.
--
Your Grace has brought them to my notice so that the
next step may be taken.
--
According to my experience, one should not try to destroy or
to eliminate. One should concentrate all one's effort on building up and strengthening the true consciousness, which will
--
The very notion of good and bad is completely changed.
One can say very simply that all that leads to the Divine is
--
Are they not two ways of saying the same thing? - certainly
two ways of doing the same thing.
--
it does not make any clamour.
5 June 1968
--
Without sincerity nothing can be done. With total sincerity
everything is possible.
--
which we do not know) is the first effect of the divine influence
on the inconscient.
--
Besides, although he has not taken up a nother physical
body, the Buddha himself has returned to work in the earthatmosphere.
--
the path. But isn't a person who is not advancing towards
the Divine also the Divine?
--
Immunity does not come automatically from transformation.
One has to cut off all connection with the manifested world
--
It does not go away, but enters the subconscient and continues
to act.
--
Yes, there comes a time when nothing, absolutely nothing is
outside the yoga and the Divine's Presence is felt and found in
--
In its summit gleam where Night is not nor Sleep,
The light began of the Trinity supreme."16
--
Speed is not necessarily a sign of superiority.
These "instantaneous" conversions are most often the result
--
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?
--
"None can reach heaven who has not passed through
hell."18
--
divine protection and for them the passage is not difficult.
29 November 1968
"His failure is not failure whom God leads"19
Because it is part of the play?
--
failure. It is the human mind that wants one thing and does not
want a nother. In the divine plan each thing has its place and its
importance. So it is not success that matters. What matters is to
be a docile and if possible a conscious instrument of the Divine
--
work is achieved, it is not unusual for the ego to accept its own
dissolution .
--
of ignorance, negligence or absent-mindedness that we do not
feel it. But each time that we are attentive and concentrated, we
--
yoga is not an escape from the physical consciousness but a
divinisation of that consciousness.
0.12 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
lost the habit and I do not even go to the Samadhi very
regularly. I do not understand the true value of these
things. Should one do them regularly or only when one
--
does not last more than two days. What do You think I
should do so that I do well what I have decided to do? I
--
It is the same for everybody as long as one has not consciously
unified the whole of one's being around the psychic centre.
--
It is a long and meticulous work that requires much perseverance, but the result is worth the trouble, for it brings not
only mastery but also the possibility of the transformation and
--
You wrote to me that it is not easy to come in contact
with the psychic being. Why do You consider it difficult?
--
I said " not easy" because the contact is not spontaneous - it
is voluntary. The psychic being always has an influence on the
--
I have seen that I am not able to force my physical
body to do a little better than my actual capacity. I would
--
to do what it could not do before. But its capacity for progress
is much slower than the vital desire for progress and the mental
--
It is not a theory to be discussed - it is an indisputable
experience for one who has had it.
--
It is not by thinking that one can be in contact with Nature, for
Nature does not think.
But if one deeply feels the beauty of Nature and communes
--
enlightened mind, are only palliatives and not a true cure.
Blessings.
--
that is why most people do not talk.
But your mind seems to remain in your body, so you must
--
forces of Nature, and that is not very wise.
Blessings.
--
the divine command and to add nothing personal to it.
It must be said that this is not easy. Only he who no longer
has any ego can do it correctly.
--
Without knowledge and intelligence, one is not a man but
an animal in human form.
0.13 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Should one give money to beggars or not?
In a well-organized society, there should not be any beggars.
But as long as there are, do as you feel.
There are good reasons both for doing it and for not doing
it.
--
But all that is not even the shadow of love nor even its
deformation.
These are all mental and vital, sentimental or sexual activities, and nothing more.
Blessings.
--
of aspiration, luminous and calm, has nothing to do with the
vibration of desire, which is passionate, dark and often violent.
Selfishness means wanting everything for oneself, understanding nothing but oneself, caring for others only insofar
as they are necessary or important to oneself. In French, selfrealisation (réalisation du Soi) means discovering the divine
--
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
--
usually do not ask their children to come back to them.
Blessings.
--
I do not think that there are more accidents here than elsewhere.
Certainly there ought to be less. But for that, the children who
--
developed their consciousness and those who have not?
Those who have done it and done it well become conscious; the
--
asking for permission, because they sensed that it would not be
given.
--
that one must not rely on one's ego but on the psychic.
Mother, will you explain this to me?
It so happens that we are not in an age when men have been left
to their own means. The Divine has sent down His Consciousness to give them light. All who are able to do so should profit
--
countries and even in our own if we did not read newspapers? At least we get some idea from them, don't we?
Or would it be better not to read them at all?
Series Thirteen - To a Student
I did not say that you must not read newspapers. I said that you
must not blindly believe everything you read; you should know
that the truth is altogether different.
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
itself for the new manifestation, but the human body is not
plastic enough and offers resistance; this is why the number of
--
Grant that nothing in us may be an obstacle to the fulfilment
of Thy Will.
--
movements and the judge of all that you should or should not
do, and to strive to submit your external nature to its decisions.
--
Communications from the psychic do not come in a mental
form. They are not ideas or reasonings. They have their own
character quite distinct from the mind, something like a feeling
--
on the grounds that others are not transformed. But that is
the stronghold of bad will, for each one's duty is to transform
--
(3) Those who consecrate their life to the service of humanity through some activity done not for personal satisfaction
but truly to be useful to others without calculation and without
--
Do not live to be happy, live to serve the Divine, and the
happiness you enjoy will exceed all expectation.
--
The first condition is not to have one's own personal interest as
a goal.
--
And then to be conscious that one knows nothing compared
to what one ought to know, that one can do nothing compared
to what one ought to do, that one is nothing compared to what
one ought to be.
--
in one's nature, to know what one does not yet know, to be able
to do what one is not yet able to do.
One must constantly progress in the light and peace that
--
To learn constantly, not just intellectually but psychologically,
to progress in regard to character, to cultivate our qualities and
--
of the supramental world. And not only did he announce this
manifestation but he also embodied in part the supramental
--
that we do not rely exclusively on the Divine for the help we
need.
--
Thus, the purpose and goal of life is not suffering and struggle
but an all-powerful and happy realisation.
--
So completely blind are they that they would not hesitate
to make the Divine a slave of their ego, if such a thing were
--
Lord, we implore You, grant that nothing in us may reject Your
Presence and that we may become what You want us to be; grant
0 1952-08-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Only when men shall depend exclusively upon the Divine and upon nothing else will the incarnate god no longer need to die for them.2
note written by Mother in French.
note written by Mother in French
***
0 1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
There are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother, but they were more difficult to bring down and have not stood out in front with so much prominence in the evolution of the earth-spirit. There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental realization,most of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda1 which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divines Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of all the other Powers of the universe.
Sri Aurobindo, The Mother
--
Thus far, She has not found what is needed. Men remain obstinately men and do not want to or are unable to become supermen. All they can receive and express is a love at their own dimension: a human lovewhereas the supreme bliss of divine Ananda eludes their perception.
At times, finding the world unready to receive Her, She contemplates withdrawing. But how cruel a loss this would be!
--
Mother, even if we have not previously succeeded, cant we still try?
What? (the disciple repeats his question) Oh! You can always try!
--
There were repercussions the world over. But I dont believe that a single one of you noticed it you can not even tell me when it happened, can you?
When did it happen?
--
But there was a formidable battle with the Inconscient, for when I saw that the level of receptivity was not what it should have been, I blamed the Inconscient and tried to wage the battle there.
I dont say it was ineffectual, but between the result obtained and the result hoped for, there was a considerable difference. But as I said, you who are all so near, so steeped in this atmosphere who among you noticed anything?You simply went on with your little lives as usual.
I think it was in 1946, Mother, because you told us so many things at that time.
--
Mother, there is not even one single man?
I dont know.
--
Oh! But you see, from an occult standpoint, it is a selection. From an external standpoint you could say that there are people in the world who are far superior to you (and I would not disagree!), but from an occult standpoint, it is a selection. There are It can be said that without a doubt the majority of young people here have come because it was promised them that they would be present at the Hour of Realization but they just dont remember it! (Mother laughs) I have already said several times that when you come down on earth, you fall on your head, which leaves you a little dazed! (laughter) Its a pity, but after all, you dont have to remain dazed all your lives, do you? You should go deep within yourselves and there find the immortal consciousness then you can see very well, you can very clearly remember the circumstances in which you you aspired to be here for the Hour of the Works realization.
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.
The first condition was: nothing more to do with your family Well, we are a long way from that! But I repeat that it only happened because of the war and not because we stopped seeing the need to cut all family ties; on the contrary, this is an indispensable condition because as long as you hang on to all these cords which bind you to ordinary life, which make you a slave to the ordinary life, how can you possibly belong to the Divine alone? What childishness! It is simply not possible. If you have ever taken the trouble to read over the early ashram rules, you would find that even friendships were considered dangerous and undesirable We made every effort to create an atmosphere in which only ONE thing counted: the Life Divine.
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 demands a far greater effort on the disciples part than before.
--
I dont know to whom I was mentioning this today (I think it was for a Birthday3 No, I dont know now. It was to someone who told me he was 18 years old. I said that between the ages of 18 and 20, I had attained a constant and conscious union with the Divine Presence and that I had done this ALL ALONE, without ANYONES help, not even books. When a little later I chanced upon Vivekanandas Raja Yoga, it really seemed so wonderful to me that someone could explain something to me! And it helped me realize in only a few months what would have otherwise taken years.
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 immanent God, the God within. That was all. Read it with THAT knowledgewith the knowledge that Krishna represents the immanent God, the God within you. Well, within a month, the whole thing was done!
--
But Im not at all discouraged, I just find it rather laughable. Only there are other far more serious things; for example, when you try to deceive yourselves that is not so pretty. One should not mix up cats and kings. You should call a cat a cat and a king a king and human instinct, human instinctand not speak about things divine when they are utterly human, nor pretend to have supramental experiences when you are living in a blatantly ordinary consciousness.
If you look at yourselves straight in the face and you see what you are, then if by chance you should resolve to But what really astounds me is that you dont even seem to feel an intense NEED to do this! But how can we know? Because you DO know, you have been told over and over again, it has been drummed into your heads. You KNOW that you have a divine consciousness within you. And yet you can go on sleeping night after night, playing day after day, doing your lessons ad infinitum and still not be not have a BURNING desire and will to come into contact with yourselves!With yourselves, yes, the you just there, inside (motion towards the center of the chest) Really, its beyond me!
As soon as I found outand no one told me, I found out through an experienceas soon as I found out that there was a discovery to be made within myself, well, it became THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in the world. It took precedence over everything else!
And when, as I told you, I chanced upon a book or an individual that could give me just a little clue and tell me, Here. If you do such and such, you will find your pathwell I charged into it like a cyclone and nothing could have stopped me.
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
--
It is very clear. So it is not I who can make Her stay. And I certainly can not 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 permanently 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 manifest not 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!
--
(Mother gets up to go, but while leaving, She says to the children around her:) If you had made just one little decision to try to feel your psychic being, my time would not have been wasted.
Ananda: Divine Joy.
0 1955-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother, for more than a year now I have been near you and nothing, no really significant inner experience, no sign has come that allows me to feel I have progressed or merely to show me that I am on the right path. I can not even say I am happy.
I am not so absurdly pretentious as to blame the divine, nor yourself and I remain quite convinced that all this is my own fault. Undoubtedly I have not known how to surrender totally in some part of myself, or I do not aspire enough or know how to open myself as needed. Also, I should rely entirely upon the divine to take care of my progress and not be concerned about the absence of experiences. I have therefore asked myself why I am so far away from the true attitude, the genuine opening, and I see two main reasons: on the one hand, the difficulties inherent in my own nature, and on the other, the outer conditions of this sadhana. These conditions do not seem to be conducive to helping me overcome the difficulties in my own nature.
I feel that I am turning in circles and taking one step backward for each one forward. Furthermore, instead of helping me draw nearer to the divine consciousness, my work in the Ashram (the very fact of working for to change work, even if I felt like it, would not change the overall situation), diverts me from this divine consciousness, or at least keeps me in a superficial consciousness from which I am unable to unglue myself as long as I am busy writing letters, doing translations, corrections or classes.1 I know its my own fault, that I should know how to be detached from my work and do it by relying upon a deeper consciousness, but what can be done? Unless I receive the grace, I can not remember the essential thing as long as the outer part of my being is active.
When I am not immediately engrossed in work, I have to confront a thousand little temptations and daily difficulties that come from my contact with other beings and a life that does indeed remain in life. Here, even more, there is the feeling of an impossible struggle, and all these little difficulties seem to gnaw away at me; scarcely has one hole been filled when a nother opens up, or the same one reappears, and there is never any real victoryone has constantly to begin everything again. Finally, it seems to me that I really live only one hour a day, during the evening distribution at the playground.2 It is scarcely a life and scarcely a sadhana!
Consequently, I understand much better now why in the traditional yogas one settled all these difficulties once and for all by escaping from the world, without bothering to transform a life that seems so untransformable.
I am not now going to renounce Sri Aurobindos Yoga, Mother, for my whole life is based upon it, but I believe I should employ other meanswhich is why I am writing you this letter.
By continuing this daily little ant-like struggle and by having to confront the same desires, the same distractions every day, it seems to me I am wasting my energy in vain. Sri Aurobindos Yoga, which is meant to include life, is so difficult that one should come to it only after having already established the solid base of a concrete divine realization. That is why I want to ask you if I should not withdraw for a certain time, to Almora,3 for example, to Brewsters place,4 to live in solitude, silence, meditation, far away from people, work and temptations, until a beginning of Light and Realization is concretized in me. Once this solid base is acquired, it would be easier for me to resume my work and the struggle here for the true transformation of the outer being. But to want to transform this outer being without having fully illumined the inner being seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse, or at least condemning myself to a pitiless and endless battle in which the best of my forces are fruitlessly consumed.
In all sincerity, I must say that when I was at Brewsters place in Almora, I felt very near to that state in which the Light must surge forth. I quite understand the imperfection of this process, which involves fleeing from difficulties, but this would only be a stage, a strategic retreat, as it were.
Mother, this is not a vital desire seeking to divert me from the sadhana, for my life has no other meaning than to seek the divine, but it seems to be the only solution that could bring about some progress and get me out of this lukewarm slump in which I have been living day after day. I can not be satisfied living merely one hour a day, when I see you.
I know that you do not like to write, Mother, but couldnt you say in a few words if you approve of my project or what I should do? In spite of all my rebellions and discouragements and resistances, I am your child. O Mother, help me!
Signed: Bernard
--
For a long time, Satprem took care of the correspondence with the outside, along with Pavitra, not to mention editing the Ashram Bulletin as well as Mother's writings and talks, translating Sri Aurobindo's works into French, and conducting classes at the Ashram's 'International Centre of Education.'
Every evening at the Playground, the disciples passed before Mother one by one to receive symbolically some food.
0 1955-06-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother, I can not say that it is a nostalgia for the outside world that is drawing me backwards nor some attachment to a personal form of life, nor even some vital desire seeking its own satisfaction. That old world no longer attracts me, and I do not see at all what I would do there. Yet something is standing in my way.
If only I could see a distinct error blocking my path which I could clearly attack But I feel that I am not responsible, that it is not my personal fault if I remain without aspiration, stagnating. I feel like a battlefield of contending forces that are beyond me and against which I can do notHING. Oh Mother, it is not an excuse for a lack of will, or at least I dont think so I profoundly feel like a helpless toy, totally helpless.
If the divine force, if your grace, does not intervene to shatter this obscure resistance that is drawing me downwards in spite of myself, I dont know what will become of me Mother, I am not blackmailing you, I am only expressing my helplessness, my anguish.
During the day, I live more or less calmly in my little morass, but as evening and the moment to meet you draw near, then the forces pinning me to the ground begin raging beneath your pressure, and I feel at times an unbearable tearing that burns and constricts in my throat like tears that can not be shed. Afterwards, Truth regains possession of me but the following day it all begins again.
Mother, it is an impossible, absurd, unlivable life. I feel as though I have no hand in this cruel little game. Oh Mother, why doesnt your grace trust that deep part in me which knows so well that you are the Truth? Deliver me from these evil forces since, profoundly, it is you and you alone I want. Give me the aspiration and strength I do not have. If you do not do this Yoga for me, I feel I shall never have the strength to go on.
There is something that must be SHATTERED: can it not be done once and for all without lingering on indefinitely? Mother, I am your child.
Signed: Bernard
--
Your case is not unique; there are others (and among the best and the most faithful) who are likewise a veritable battlefield for the forces opposing the advent of the truth. They feel powerless in this battle, sorrowful witnesses, victims without the strength to fight, for this is taking place in that part of the physical consciousness where the supramental forces are not yet fully active, although I am confident they soon will be. Meanwhile, the only remedy is to endure, to go through this suffering and to await patiently the hour of liberation.
While reading your prayer, I too prayed that it be heard.
0 1955-09-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
No matter where I concentrate, in my heart, above my head, between my eyes, I bang everywhere into an unyielding wall; I no longer know which way to turn, what I must do, say, pray in order to be freed from all this at last. Mother, I know that I am not making all the effort I should, but help me to make this effort, I implore your grace. I need so much to find at last this solid rock upon which to lean, this space of light where finally I may seek refuge. Mother, open the psychic being in me, open me to your sole Light which I need so much. Without your grace, I can only turn in circles, hopelessly. O Mother, may I live in you.
Your child,
0 1955-09-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother suddenly everything seems to have crystallizedall the little revolts, the little tensions, the ill will and petty vital demandsforming a single block of open, determined resistance. I have become conscious that from the beginning of my sadhana, the mind has led the gamewith the psychic behind and has held me in leash, helped muzzle all contrary movements, but at no time, or only rarely, has the vital submitted or opened to the higher influence. The rare times when the vital participated, I felt a great progress. But now, I find myself in front of this solid mass that says No and is not at all convinced of what the mind has been imposing upon it for almost two years now.
Mother, I am sufficiently awakened not to rebel against your Light and to understand that the vital is but one part of my being, but I have come to the conclusion that the only way of convincing this vital is not to force or stifle it, but to let it go through its own experience so it may understand by itself that it can not be satisfied in this way. I feel the need to leave the Ashram for a while to see how I can get along away from here and to realize, no doubt, that one can really brea the only here.
I have friends in Bangalore whom I would like to join for two or three weeks, perhaps more, perhaps less, however long it may take to confront this vital with its own freedom. I need a vital activity, to move, to sail, for example, to have friends etc. The need I am feeling is exactly that which I sought to satisfy in the past through my long boat journeys along the coast of Brittany. It is a kind of thirst for space and movement.
Otherwise, Mother, there is this block before me that is obscuring all the rest and taking away my taste for everything. I would like to leave, Mother, but not in revolt; may it be an experience to go through that receives your approval. I would not like to be cut off from you by your displeasure or your condemnation, for this would seem to me terrible and leave me no other recourse but to plunge into the worst excesses in order to forget.
Mother, I would like you to forgive me, to understand me and, above all, not to deprive me of your Love. I would like you to tell me if I may leave for a few weeks and how you feel about it. It seems to me that I am profoundly your child, in spite of all this??
Signed: Bernard
0 1955-10-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
note written by Mother in French.
The three images of total self-giving to the Divine:
--
2) To unfold ones being before Him, to open entirely ones body from head to toe, as one opens a book, spreading open ones centers so as to make all their movements visible in a total SINCERITY that allows nothing to remain hidden.
3) To nestle in His arms, to melt in Him in a tender and absolute CONFIDENCE.
--
1) May Your Will be done and not mine.
2) As You will, as You will
0 1956-03-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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 1956-03-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
note written by Mother in French.
(Upon awakening)
0 1956-03-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
note written by Mother in French.
The age of Capitalism and business is drawing to a close.
But the age of Communism, too, will pass. For Communism as it is preached is not constructive, it is a weapon to combat plutocracy. But when the battle is over and the armies are disbanded for want of employment, then Communism, having no more utility, will be transformed into something else that will express a higher truth.
We know this truth, and we are working for it so that it may reign upon earth.
0 1956-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother, two months ago I had a clear mental perception of what was asked of me: to spend the rest of my life here. This is the source of my difficulties and of the inner hell I have been living through ever since. Each time I try to emerge, there is this image that rises up in me: your-whole-life and this casts me into a violent conflict. When I came here, I thought of staying for two or three years; for me the Ashram was a means of realization, not an end.
I understand now that as long as my whole being has not ACCEPTED that it must finish its life here, there is no way out nor any recovery possible. Through my mental force alone, this acceptance is impossible; I have been turning infernally in circles these past two months, and the mind is in league with the vital. Therefore, a force greater than mine must help me accept that my way is here. I need you, Mother, for without you I am lost. I need you to tell me that the Truth of my being is indeed here and that I am truly ready to follow this path. Mother, I beseech you, help me to see the truth of my being, give me some sign that my way is here and not elsewhere. I beg of you, Mother, help me to know.
I also had a very clear sensation that you were abandoning me, that you had no further interest in me and I could just as well do as I pleased. Perhaps you can not forgive some of my inner rebellions which have been so very violent? Am I totally guilty? Is it true that you are abandoning me?
I am broken and battered in the depths of my being as I was in my flesh in the concentration camps. Will the divine grace take pity on me? Can you, do you want to help me? Alone I can do nothing. I am in an absolute solitude, even beyond all rebellion, at my very end.
Yet I love you in spite of all that I am.
--
My child, I have not abandoned you, and I am ready to forget, to efface all revolt.
My help is always with you.
0 1956-05-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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 a nother the advent of the superman. 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)
--
But for this only like can know like. Only the Supramental Consciousness in an individual can perceive the Supramental acting in the earth atmosphere. Those who, for whatever reason, have developed this perception can see it. But those who are not even remotely conscious of their inner beings, who would be quite at a loss to say what their souls look like, are certainly not ready to perceive the difference in the earth atmosphere. They still have quite a way to go for that. Because, for those whose consciousness is more or less exclusively centered in the outer beingmental, vital and physicalthings need to have an absurd or unexpected appearance to be noticeable. And then they call it a miracle.
But we do not call a miracle the constant miracle of the forces that intervene to change circumstances and human natures and which have very far-reaching consequences, for we see only the appearance, and this appearance seems quite natural. But in truth, if you were to reflect upon the least thing that happens, you would be forced to acknowledge that it is miraculous.
It is simply because you do not reflect upon it and assume things to be as they are, what they are, unquestioningly; otherwise you would have quite a number of opportunities everyday to say to yourself, But look! That is absolutely amazing! How did it happen?
Quite simply, the habit of a purely superficial way of seeing.
--
Well, its the same thing. People take the train to come herethere were about a hundred and fifty more people than usual1simply because they want to benefit. But this may be exactly why they have not benefited from it! Because This [the supramental consciousness] has not come to make people benefit in any way whatsoever!
They ask if their inner difficulties will be easier to overcome.
--
No! not only in the case of something new: in every case, there is always this idea of benefiting. However, that is the best way to get nothing.
Who are you trying to fool? The Divine? That is hardly possible.
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.
The number of disciples is increasing now day by day. What does this indicate?
--
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 superman!
No?
--
Look. If all of you who have heard of this, not once but perhaps hundreds of times, who have spoken of it yourselves, thought about it, hoped for it, wanted it (there are some people who have come here only for this, to receive the Supramental Force and to be transformed into supermen, this has been their goal) then how is it that you were ALL such strangers to this Force that when it came, you did not even feel it?!
Can you solve that problem for me? If you find the solution to this problem, you will have the solution to the difficulty.
I am not speaking of people from outside who have never thought about it, who have never felt concerned and who do not even know that there may be something like the Supermind to receive, in fact. I am speaking of people who have built their lives upon this aspiration (and I dont doubt their sincerity for a minute), who have workedsome of them for thirty years, some for thirty-five, others somewhat lessall the while saying, When the supermind comes When the supermind comes That was their refrain: When the supermind comes Consequently, they were really in the best possible frame of mind, one could not have dreamt of a better predisposition. How is it, then, that their inner preparation was so lets just say incomplete, that they did not feel the Vibration immediately, as soon as it came, through a shock of identity?
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 unmanifest, 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 people not 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.
--
I hasten to tell you that some did recognize it, but they were so few But as for those who ask these questions, who even took the trouble to come here, who took the train to gulp this down as you gulp down a soft drink, how can they possibly feel anything whatsoever if they have not prepared themselves at all? Yet they are already speaking of profiting: We want to benefit from it
After all, if they have even a tiny bit of sincerity ( not too much, its tiring!), a tiny bit of sincerity, it is quite possible (I am joking), it is quite possible that they might get a few good kicks to make them go faster! It is possible. In fact, I think thats what will happen.
But really, this attitude this rather overly commercial attitude, is usually not very profitable. If you have difficulties and you sincerely aspire, it is likely that the difficulties will diminish. Let us hope so.
(Turning to the disciple) So you may tell them this: be sincere and you will be helped.
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?
--
I dont care what words you use. I do not essentially insist upon my words, but I explain them to you, and its better to agree on words beforehand, for otherwise theres no end to explanations.
But now, you may reply to those people who are asking these insidious questions that the best way to receive anything whatsoever is not to pull, but to give. If they want to give themselves to the new life, well, the new life will enter into them.
But if they want to pull the new life into themselves, they will close the door with their egoism. Thats all.
0 1956-07-29, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
note written by Mother in French.
O Thou who art always therepresent in all I do, all I am not for repose do I aspire, but for THY INTEGRAL VICTORY.
0 1956-08-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
note written by Mother in English.
My Lord, through me thou hast challenged the world and all the adverse forces have risen in protest.1
0 1956-09-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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)
--
A light, not like the golden light of the Supermind: rather a kind of phosphorescence. I felt that had it been night, it would have been physically visible.
And it was denser than my physical body: the physical body seemed to me almost unrealas though crumblylike sand running through your fingers.
--
I did not have the experience, I did not look at it: I WAS it.
And it radiated from me: myriads of little sparks that were penetrating everybody I saw them enter into each one of those present.
0 1956-09-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Scarcely has a moment gone by since I left that I have not thought of you, but I wanted to wait for things to be clear and settled in me before writing, for you obviously have other things to do than listen to platonic declarations.
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.
I feel a bit lost, cut off from you. The idea of going to the Himalayas is absurd and I am abandoning it. My friends tell me that I may remain with them as long as I wish, but this is hardly a solution; I dont even feel like writing a book any longer nothing seems to appeal to me except the trees in this garden and the music that fills a large part of my days. There is no solution other than the Ashram or Brazil. You alone can tell me what to do.
I KNOW that ultimately my place is near you, but is that my place at present, after all these failings? Spontaneously, it is you I want, you alone who represent the light and all that is real in this world; I can love no one but you nor be interested in anything but this thing within me, but will it not all begin again once I have returned to the Ashram? You alone know the stage I am at, what is good for me, what is possible.
Sweet Mother, may I still ask for your Love, your help? For without your help, nothing is possible, and without your love, nothing has any meaning.
I feel that I am your child in spite of all my contradictions and failings. I love you.
--
For my part, there has been no cut and I have not been severe My feelings can not change, for they are based upon something other than outer circumstances.
But perhaps you have felt this way because you had left your work in the Ashram for an entirely personal, that is, necessarily egoistical reason, and egoism always isolates one from the great current of universal forces. That is why, too, you no longer clearly perceive my love and my help which nevertheless are always with you.
You asked me what I see and whether your difficulties will not reappear upon your return to the Ashram. It may well be. If you return as you still are at present, it may be that after a very short period it will all begin again. That is why I am going to propose something to you but to accept it you will have to be heroic and very determined in your consecration to my work.
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.
--
That which you would not do for yourself personally, would you not do it for the divine cause?
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.
0 1956-10-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Z asked me, Why didnt you stop it?1 I replied, Probably because I am not omnipotent! Then he insisted: No, thats not it. I make no distinction between your will and the divine will and I know that you dont either. So why didnt you stop it?
And suddenly, I understood.
It was because I hadnt thought of it. It hadnt even grazed my consciousness. The divine will is not at all like that, it is not a will: it is a VISION, a global vision, that sees and No, it does not guide (to guide suggests something outside, but nothing is outside), a creative vision, as it were; yet even then, the word create does not here have the meaning we generally attri bute to it.
And what is the Ashram? (I dont even mean in terms of the Universeon Earth only.) A speck. And why should this speck receive exceptional treatment? Perhaps if people here had realized the supermind. But are they so exceptional as to expect exceptional treatment?
--
Arbitrariness. But the Divine is not like that!
People say, I gave everything, I sacrificed everything. In exchange, I expect exceptional conditionseverything should be beautiful, harmonious, easy.
But the divine vision is global. The people in the Ashram do not want this strike but what about the others? They are ignorant, mean, full of ill will, etc., but in their own way they are following a path, and why should they be deprived of the Grace? By the fact that their action is against the Ashram? It is certainly a Grace.
I said that I had not even thought of intervening. When things threatened to turn bad, I simply applied a force so that it wouldnt become too serious.
Complete surrender It is not a matter of giving what is small to something greater nor of losing ones will in the divine will; it is a matter of ANNULLING ones will in something that is of a nother nature.
What comes to replace this human will?
0 1956-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
And the moment I perceived this, I saw that my third attitude in action, which is the will for progress for the whole earth as well as for each particular individual, was not the height of my being.
***
--
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.
--
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.
***
0 1956-10-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I am facing the same difficulties as before my departure to Hyderabad, and I have made the same mistakes. The main reason for this state is that, on the one hand, words and ideas seem to have lost all power over me, and on the other, the vital elan which led me thus far is dead. So upon what shall my faith rest? I still have some faith, of course, but it has become totally ABSTRACT. The vital does not cooperate, so I feel all withered, suspended in a void, nothing seems to give me direction anymore. There is no rebelliousness in me, but rather a void.
In this state, I am ceaselessly thinking of my forest in Guiana or of my travels through Africa and the ardor that filled me with life in those days. I seem to need to have my goal before me and to walk towards it. Outer difficulties also seem to help me resolve my inner problems: there is a kind of need in me for the elements the sea, the forest, the desert for a milieu with which I can wrestle and through which I can grow. Here, I seem to lack a dynamic point of leverage. Here, in the everyday routine, everything seems to be falling apart in me. Should I not return to my forest in Guiana?
Mother, I implore you, in the name of whatever led me to you in the first place, give me the strength to do WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. You who see and who can, decide for me. You are my Mother. Whatever my shortcomings, my difficulties, I feel I am so deeply your child.
0 1956-12-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother, what can I do with my life? I feel absolutely alone, in a void. What hope remains since I have not been able to integrate into the Ashram? I am goalless. I am from nowhere. I am good for nothing.
I have wanted to remain near you, and I love you, but there is something in me that does not accept an Ashram ending. There is a need in me to DO, to act. But what? What? Have I something to do in this life?
For years I have dreamed of going to Chinese Turkestan. Should I head in that direction? Or towards Africa?
I dont see a thing, nothing. Oh Mother, I turn towards you in this void that is stifling me. Hear my prayer. Tell me what I must do. Give me a sign. Mother, you are my sole recourse, for who else would show me the path to be taken, who else but you would love me? Or is my fate to go off into the night?
Forgive me, Mother, for loving you so poorly, for giving myself so badly. Mother, you are my only hope, all the rest in me is utter despair.
0 1956-12-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I feel that this Truth of my being, this self most intensely felt, is independent from any form or institution. As far back as I can reach in my consciousness, this thing has been there; it was what drove me at an early age to liberate myself from my family, my religion, my country, a profession, marriage or society in general. I feel this thing to be a kind of absolute freedom, and I have been feeling within me this same profound drive for more than a year. Is this need for freedom wrong? And yet is it not because of this that the best in me has blossomed?
This is actually what is happening in me: I never really accepted the W solution, and the solution of Somalil and doesnt appeal to me. But I feel drawn by the idea of Turkestan, as I already told you, and this is why:
0 1957-01-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
It is not a crucified
but a glorified body
0 1957-01-18, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The conflict that is tearing me apart is between this shadowy part of a past that does not want to die, and the new light. I wonder if, rather than escaping to some desert, it would not be wiser to resolve this conflict by objectify it, by writing this book I spoke to you about.
But I would like to know whether it is really useful for me to write this book, or whether it is not just some inferior task, a makeshift.
You told me one day that I could be useful to you. Then, by chance, I came across this passage from Sri Aurobindo the other day: Everyone has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which God offers him to take or refuse.
Could you tell me, as a favor, what this particular thing is in me which may be useful to you and serve you? If I could only know what my real work is in this world All the conflicting impulses in me stem from my being like an unemployed force, like a being whose place has not yet been determined.
What do you see in me, Mother? Is it through writing that I shall achieve what is to be achievedor does all this still belong to a nether world? But if so, then of what use am I? If I were good at something, it would give me some air to breathe.
0 1957-04-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
For I SEE that, were I to give in now, I would be done forthere would be no alternative but to live out the rest of my days in the Ashram. But everything in me rebels at this idea. The idea of winding up as General Secretary of the Ashram, like Pavitra, makes my skin crawl. It is absurd, and I apologize for speaking this way, Mother, for I admire Pavitra but I cant help it, I cant do it, I do not want to end up like that.
For more than a year now, I have been hyp notized by the idea that if I give in, I will be condemned to remain here. Once more, forgive me for speaking so absurdly, for of course I know it is not a condemnation; and yet a part of me feels that it would be.
Thus I am so tense that I do not even want to close my eyes to meditate for fear of yielding. And I fall into all kinds of errors that horrify me, simply because the pressure is too strong at times, and I literally suffocate. Mother, I am not cut out to be a disciple.
I realize that all the progress I was able to make during the first two years has been lost and I am just as before, worse than beforeas if all my strength were in ruin, all faith in myself undoneso much so that at times I curse myself for having come here at all.
--
So what is to be done? I intend asking your permission to leave as soon as the book is finished (I am determined to finish it, for it will rid me of the past it represents). I expect nothing from the world, except a bit of external space, in the absence of a nother space.
Signed: Bernard
--
I read your letter yesterday, and here is the answer that immediately came to me. I add to it the assurance that nothing has changed, nor can change, in my relationship with you, and that you are and always will be my child for that is the truth of your being.
Here is what I wrote:
--
in the universe, there are notthere can not betwo similar destinies.
each ones destiny is inevitably fulfilled, but the nearer one is to the Divine, the more does this destiny assume its divine qualities.
I am saying all this so that you do not hyp notize yourself further with some imaginary and groundless possibility.
I am with you always.
0 1957-04-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The book is finished.1 I would like to give it to you personally, if it would not disturb you, whenever you wish.
Your child,
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Its symbolism was very clear, though of quite a familiar nature, as it were, and because of its very familiarity, unmistakable in its realism Were I to tell you all the details, you would probably not even be able to follow: it was rather intricate. It was a kind of (how can I express it?)an immense hotel where all the terrestrial possibilities were lodged in different apartments. And it was all in a constant state of transformation: parts or entire wings of the building were suddenly torn down and rebuilt while people were still living in them, such that if you went off somewhere within the immense hotel itself, you ran the risk of no longer finding your room when you wanted to return to it, for it might have been torn down and was being rebuilt according to a nother plan! It was orderly, it was organized yet there was this fantastic chaos which I mentioned. And all this was a symbola symbol that certainly applies to what Sri Aurobindo has written here1 regarding the necessity for the transformation of the body, the type of transformation that has to take place for life to become a divine life.
It went something like this: somewhere, in the center of this enormous edifice, there was a room reservedas it seemed in the story for a mother and her daughter. The mother was a lady, an elderly lady, a very influential matron who had a great deal of authority and her own views concerning the entire organization. Her daughter seemed to have a power of movement and activity enabling her to be everywhere at once while at the same time remaining in her room, which was well, a bit more than a roomit was a kind of apartment which, above all, had the characteristic of being very central. But she was constantly arguing with her mother. The mother wanted to keep things just as they were, with their usual rhythm, which precisely meant the habit of tearing down one thing to rebuild a nother, then again tearing down that to build still a nother, thus giving the building an appearance of frightful confusion. But the daughter did not like this, and she had a nother plan. Most of all, she wanted to bring something completely new into the organization: a kind of super-organization that would render all this confusion unnecessary. Finally, as it was impossible for them to reach an understanding, the daughter left the room to go on a kind of general inspection She went out, looked everything over, and then wanted to return to her room to decide upon some final measures. But this is where something rather peculiar began happening.
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 woman 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.
--
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 human 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 human collectivityto group together, band together, unite around a common ideal, a common action, a common realization but in an absolutely artificial way. In contrast to this, Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true communitywhat he terms a gnostic or supramental communitycan be based only upon the INNER REALIZATION of each one of its members, each realizing his real, concrete oneness and identity with all the other members of the community; that is, each one should not feel himself a member connected to all the others in an arbitrary way, but that all are one within himself. For each one, the others should be as much himself as his own body not in a mental and artificial way, but through a fact of consciousness, by an inner realization.
(silence)
0 1957-07-18, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
If I must have some new experience outside, this one has the advantage of being short-termed and not far away from India, and it is also in an interesting milieu. The only disadvantage is that I would have to pay for the trip as far as Kabul. But I dont want to do anything that displeases you or of which you do not really approve. In the event you might feel this to be a worthwhile experience, I would have to leave by the beginning of August.
I place this in your hands, sincerely.
0 1957-09-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Had I not come as you are, I would never have been able to be close to you and tell you:
Become what I am.
0 1957-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I come to ask your permission to leave India. For more than a year now, I have been fighting not to leave, but this seems to be the wrong strategy.
There is no question of my abandoning the path and I remain convinced that the only goal in life is spiritual. But I need things to help me along the way: I am not yet ripe enough to depend upon inner strength alone. And when I speak of the forest or a boat, it is not only for the sake of adventure or the feeling of space, but also because they mean a discipline. Outer constraints and difficulties help me, they force me to remain concentrated around that which is best in me. In a sense, life here is too easy. Yet it is also too hard, for one must depend on ones own discipline I do not yet have that strength, I need to be helped by outer circumstances. The very difficulty of life in the outside world helps me to be disciplined, for it forces me to concentrate all my vital strength in effort. Here, this vital part is unemployed, so it acts foolishly, it strains at the leash.
I doubt that a new experience outside can really resolve things, but I believe it might help me make it to the next stage and consolidate my inner life. And if you wish, I would return in a year or two.
--
It is not because I am unhappy with the Ashram that I want to leave, but because I am unhappy with myself and because I want to master myself through other means.
I give you so little love, but I have tried my best, and my departure is not a betrayal.
Your child,
--
This is not an answer, but a comment.
There is a joy to which you still seem completely closed: it is the joy of SERVING.
0 1957-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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.
--
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, #Integral Yoga
I need a practical method corresponding to my present possibilities and to results of which I am presently capable. I feel that my efforts are dispersed by concentrating sometimes here, sometimes therea feeling of not knowing exactly what to do to break through and get out of all this. Would you point out some particular concentration to which I could adhere, a particular method that I would stick to?
I am well aware that a supple attitude is recommended in the Yoga, yet for the time being, it seems to me that one well-defined method would help me hold on1this practical aspect would help me. I will do it methodically, obstinately, until it cracks for good.
0 1957-11-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The integral yoga is made up of an uninterrupted series of tests that you must pass through without any advance notice, thereby forcing you to be always vigilant and attentive.
Three groups of examiners conduct these tests. Apparently they have nothing in common and their methods are so different, at times even so seemingly contradictory, that they do not appear to work towards the same goal, and yet they complete one a nother, they work together for a common aim and each is indispensable for the integral result.
These three categories of tests are: those conducted by the forces of Nature, those conducted by the spiritual and divine forces, and those conducted by the hostile forces. This latter category is the most deceptive in its appearance, and a constant state of vigilance, sincerity and humility is required so as not to be caught by surprise or unprepared.
The most commonplace circumstances, people, the everyday events of life, the most seemingly insignificant things, all belong to one or a nother of these three categories of examiners. In this considerably complex organization of tests, those events generally considered the most important in life are really the easiest of all examinations to pass, for they find you prepared and on your guard. One stumbles more easily over the little pebbles on the path, for they attract no attention.
--
But do not imagine that those who are tested are on one side and those who test on the other; depending upon the times and circumstances, we are both examiners and examined, and it may even happen that simultaneously, at the very same moment, we are the examined and the examiner. And whatever benefits we derive depend, in both quality and quantity, upon the intensity of our aspiration and the alertness of our consciousness.
To conclude, a final recommendation: never pose as an examiner. For while it is good to remember constantly that perhaps one is passing a very important test, it is, on the other hand, extremely dangerous to imagine oneself entrusted with applying tests to others, for that is an open door to the most absurd and harmful vanities. It is not an ignorant human will that decides these things but the Supreme Wisdom.
***
0 1957-12-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Sweet Mother, this is what is rising from my soul: I feel in me something unemployed, something seeking to express itself in life. I want to be like a knight, your knight, and go off in search of a treasure that I could bring back to you. The world has lost all sense of the wonderful, all beauty of Adventure, this quest known to the knights of the Middle Ages. It is this that calls so relentlessly within me, this need for a quest in the world and for a beautiful Adventure which at the same time would be an adventure of the soul. How I wish that the two things, inner and outer, be JOINED, that the joy of action, of the open road and the quest help the souls blossoming, that they be like a prayer of the soul expressed in life. The knights of the Middle Ages knew this. Perhaps it is all childish and absurd in the midst of this 20th century, but this is what I feel, this that is summoning me to leave not anything base, not anything mediocre, only a need for something in me to be fulfilled. If only I could bring you back a beautiful treasure!
After that, perhaps I would be riper to accept the everyday life of the Ashram, and know how to give myself better.
0 1957-12-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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.
One must at times know how not to know.
This experience showed me once more the necessity to be perfectly humble before the Lord. It is not enough merely to rise to the heights, to the ethereal planes of consciousness: these planes have also to descend into matter and illuminate it. Otherwise, nothing is really done. One must have the patience to establish the communication between the high and the low. I am like a tempest, a hurricaneif I listened to myself, I would tear into the future, and everything would go flying! But then, there would no longer be any communication with the rest.
One must have the patience to wait.
Humility, a perfect humility, is the condition for all realization. The mind is so cocksure. It thinks it knows everything, understands everything. And if ever it acts through idealism to serve a cause that appears noble to it, it becomes even more arrogant more intransigent, and it is almost impossible to make it see that there might be something still higher beyond its noble conceptions and its great altruistic or other ideals. Humility is the only remedy. I am not speaking of humility as conceived by certain religions, with this God that belittles his creatures and only likes to see them down on their knees. When I was a child, this kind of humility revolted me, and I refused to believe in a God that wants to belittle his creatures. I dont mean that kind of humility, but rather the recognition that one does not know, that one knows nothing, and that there may be something beyond what presently appears to us as the truest, the most noble or disinterested. True humility consists in constantly referring oneself to the Lord, in placing all before Him. When I receive a blow (and there are quite a few of them in my sadhana), my immediate, spontaneous reaction, like a spring, is to throw myself before Him and to say, Thou, Lord. Without this humility, I would never have been able to realize anything. And I say I only to make myself understood, but in fact I means the Lord through this body, his instrument. When you begin living THIS kind of humility, it means you are drawing nearer to the realization. It is the condition, the starting point.
***
0 1958-01-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
There is nothing to explain. It is an experience, something that took place, and when it took place, I noted it down; and it so happens that it occurred just as I remembered that I had to write something for the new year (which at that time was the following year, that is, the year beginning today). When I remembered that I had to write something not because of that, but simultaneouslythis experience came, and when I noted it down, I realized that it was the message for this year!
(Mother reads the notation of her experience)
During one of our classes (October 30, 1957), I spoke of the limitless abundance of Nature, this tireless Creatrice who takes the multitude of forms, mixes them together, separates them again and reforms them, again undoes them, again destroys them, in order to move on to ever new combinations. As I said, it is a huge cauldron. Things get churned up in it and somehow something emerges; if its defective, it is thrown back in and something else is taken out One form, two forms or a hundred forms make no difference to her, there are thousands upon thousands of formsand one year, a hundred years, a thousand years, millions of years, what difference does it make? Eternity lies before her! She quite obviously enjoys herself and is in no hurry. If you speak to her of pressing on or of rushing through some part of her work or other, her reply is always the same: But what for? Why? Arent you enjoying it?
--
Nature suddenly understood. She understood that this newborn Consciousness does not seek to reject her, but wants to embrace her entirely. She understood that this new spirituality does not stand apart from life, does not timorously recoil before the awesome richness of her movement, but on the contrary wants to integrate all her facets. She understood that the supramental consciousness is not there to diminish her but to make her complete.
Then, from the supreme Reality came this command: Awaken, O Nature, to the joy of collaboration. And suddenly, all Nature rushed forth in an immense bounding of joy, saying, I accept! I will collaborate! And at the same time, there came a calm, an absolute tranquillity, to allow this receptacle, this body, to receive and contain without breaking and without losing anything of the Joy of Nature that was rushing forth in a movement of grateful recognition like an overwhelming flood. She accepted, she sawwith all eternity before her that this supramental consciousness would fulfill her more perfectly and impart a still greater force to her movement and more richness, more possibilities to her play.
And suddenly, as if resounding from every corner of the earth, I heard these great notes which are sometimes heard in the subtle physicalra ther like those of Beethovens Concerto in Dwhich come at moments of great progress, as though fifty orchestras were bursting forth all at once without a single discordant note, to sound the joy of this new communion of Nature and Spirit, the meeting of old friends who, after a long separation, find each other once more.
Then came these words: O Nature, Material Mother, thou hast said that thou wilt collaborate, and there is no limit to the splendor of this collaboration.
--
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 human scale and invisible to the ordinary human 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.
(silence)
--
The miracles that are taking place are not what could be called literary miracles, for they do not take place as in storybooks. They are visible only to a very profound vision of thingsvery profound, very comprehensive, very vast.
(silence)
0 1958-01-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
It is an error to confuse Joy and Felicity. They are two very different things. not only are their vibrations different, but their colors are different. The color of Felicity is blue, a clear silvery blue (the blue of the Ashram flag), very luminous and transparent. And it has a passive and fresh quality that refreshes and rejuvenates.
Whereas Joy is a golden rose color, a pale gold with a tinge of red, a very pale red. It is active, warm, fortifying, intensifying. The first is sweetness, the second is tenderness.
--
The diamond light of Bliss has the power to melt all hostile forces. nothing can resist it. No consciousness, no being, no hostile will can draw near it without immediately being dissolved, for it is the Divine light in its pure creative power.
***
0 1958-01-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
note written by Mother in English (with a touch of irony so reminiscent of Sri Aurobindo).
(Concerning Pakistan)
0 1958-02-03a, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I would like to tell you that I am staying, very simply, for something in me wants this, but I am afraid to make a decision that I may not be able to keep. A force other than mine is needed. In short, you have to do the willing for me, to utter a word that would help me understand truly that I must stay here. Grant me the grace of helping and enlightening me. I would like to decide without preference, in obedience to the sole Truth and in accordance with my real possibilities.
I have received a long letter from Swami,1 who in essence says that I should be able to realize what I have to realize right here with you, but he does not refuse to take me with him should I persist in my intention.
Mother, I am placing all this in your hands, sincerely.
0 1958-02-03b - The Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Between the beings of the supramental world and men, there exists approximately the same gap as between men and animals. Sometime ago, I had the experience of identification with animal life, and it is a fact that animals do not understand us; their consciousness is so constituted that we elude them almost entirely. And yet I have known domestic animalscats and dogs, but especially catswho made an almost yogic effort of consciousness to understand us. But generally, when they watch us living and acting, they dont understand, they dont SEE US as we are and they suffer because of us. We are a constant enigma to them Only a very tiny part of their consciousness is linked to us. And it is the same for us when we try to look at the supramental world. Only when the link of consciousness has been built shall we see itand even then, only that part of our being which has undergone the transformation will be capable of seeing it as it isotherwise the two worlds would remain as separate as the animal world and the human world.
The experience I had on February 3 proves this. Before, I had had an individual, subjective contact with the supramental world, whereas on February 3, I went strolling there in a concrete wayas concretely as I used to go strolling in Paris in times pastin a world that EXISTS IN ITSELF, beyond all subjectivity.
--
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 human beings and never before had they been men. Nor were they permanent 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.
The tall beings on the shore were not of the same color, at least they did not have this orange tint; they were paler, more transparent. Except for a part of their bodies, only the outline of their forms could be seen. They were very tall, they did not seem to have a skeletal structure, and they could take on any form according to their needs. Only from their waists to their feet did they have a permanent density, which was not felt in the rest of their body. Their color was much more pallid and contained very little red, it verged rather on gold or even white. The parts of whitish light were translucid; they were not absolutely transparent, but less dense, more subtle than the orange substance.
Just as I was called back, when I was saying, not yet , I had a quick glimpse of myself, of my form in the supramental world. I was a mixture of what these tall beings were and the beings aboard the ship. The top part of myself, especially my head, was a mere silhouette of a whitish color with an orange fringe. The more it approached the feet, the more the color resembled that of the people on the ship, or in other words, orange; the more it went up towards the top, the more translucid and white it was, and the red faded. The head was only a silhouette with a brilliant sun at its center; from it issued rays of light which were the action of the will.
As for the people I saw aboard ship, I recognized them all. Some were here in the Ashram, some came from elsewhere, but I knew them as well. I saw everyone, but as I realized that I would not remember everyone when I came back, I decided not to give any names. Besides, it is unnecessary. Three or four faces were very clearly visible, and when I saw them, I understood the feeling that I have had here, on earth, while looking into their eyes: there was such an extraordinary joy On the whole, the people were young; there were very few children, and their ages were around fourteen or fifteen, but certainly not below ten or twelve (I did not stay long enough to see all the details). There were no very old people, with the exception of a few. Most of the people who had gone ashore were of a middle ageagain, except for a few. Several times before this experience, certain individual cases had already been examined at a place where people capable of being supramentalized are examined; I had then had a few surprises which I had noted I even told some people. But those whom I disembarked today I saw very distinctly. They were of a middle age, neither young children nor elderly people, with only a few rare exceptions, and this quite corresponded to what I expected. I decided not to say anything, not to give any names. As I did not stay until the end, it would be impossible for me to draw an exact picture, for it was neither absolutely clear nor complete. I do not want to say things to some and not say them to others.
What I can say is that the criterion or the judgment was based EXCLUSIVELY on the substance constituting the peoplewhe ther they belonged completely to the supramental world or not, whether they were made of this very special substance. The criterion adopted was neither moral nor psychological. It is likely that their bodily substance was the result of an inner law or an inner movement which, at that time, was not in question. At least it is quite clear that the values are different.
When I came back, along with the memory of the experience, I knew that the supramental world was permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and that only a missing link is needed to allow the consciousness and the substance to connectand it is this link that is being built. At that time, my impression (an impression which remained rather long, almost the whole day) was of an extreme relativityno, not exactly that, but an impression that the relationship between this world and the other completely changes the criterion by which things are to be evaluated or judged. This criterion had nothing mental about it, and it gave the strange inner feeling that so many things we consider good or bad are not really so. It was very clear that everything depended upon the capacity of things and upon their ability to express the supramental world or be in relationship with it. It was so completely different, at times even so opposite to our ordinary way of looking at things! I recall one little thing that we usually consider bad actually how funny it was to see that it is something excellent! And other things that we consider important were really quite unimportant there! Whether it was like this or like that made no difference. What is very obvious is that our appreciation of what is divine or not divine is incorrect. I even laughed at certain things Our usual feeling about what is anti-divine seems artificial, based upon something untrue, unliving (besides, what we call life here appeared lifeless in comparison with that world); in any event, this feeling should be based upon our relationship between the two worlds and according to whether things make this relationship easier or more difficult. This would thus completely change our evaluation of what brings us nearer to the Divine or what takes us away from Him. With people, too, I saw that what helps them or prevents them from becoming supramental is very different from what our ordinary moral notions imagine. I felt just how ridiculous we are.
(Then Mother speaks to the children)
--
But one thing and I wish to stress this point to youwhich now seems to me to be the most essential difference between our world and the supramental world (and it is only after having gone there consciously, with the consciousness that ordinarily works here, that this difference appeared to me in what might be called its enormity): everything here, except for what happens within and at a very deep level, seemed absolutely artificial to me. not one of the values of ordinary physical life is based upon truth. Just as we have to buy cloth, sew it together, then put it on our backs in order to dress ourselves, likewise we have to take things from outside and then put them inside our bodies in order to feed ourselves. For everything, our life is artificial.
A true, sincere, spontaneous life, as in the supramental world, is a springing forth of things through the fact of conscious will, a power over substance that shapes this substance according to what we decide it should be. And he who has this power and this knowledge can obtain whatever he wants, whereas he who does not has no artificial means of getting what he desires.
In ordinary life, EVERYTHING is artificial. Depending upon the chance of your birth or circumstances, you have a more or less high position or a more or less comfortable life, not because it is the spontaneous, natural and sincere expression of your way of being and of your inner need, but because the fortuity of lifes circumstances has placed you in contact with these things. An absolutely worthless man may be in a very high position, and a man who might have marvelous capacities of creation and organization may find himself toiling in a quite limited and inferior position, whereas he would be a wholly useful individual if the world were sincere.
It is this artificiality, this insincerity, this complete lack of truth that appeared so shocking to me that one wonders how, in a world as false as this one, we can arrive at any truthful evaluation of things.
--
When I invited you on a voyage into the unknown, a voyage of adventure,2 I did not know just how true were my words! And I can promise those who are ready to embark upon this adventure that they will make some very astonishing discoveries.
Indeed, one of the people near Mother had pulled Her out of the experience.
0 1958-02-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Last night, I had the vision of what this supramental world could become if men were not sufficiently prepared. The confusion existing at present upon earth is nothing in comparison to what could take place. Imagine that every powerful will has the power to transform matter as it likes! If the sense of collective oneness did not grow in proportion to the development of power, the resulting conflict would be yet more acute and chaotic than our material conflicts.
***
0 1958-02-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
These surface things are not dramatic. More and more, they seem to me like soap bubbles, especially since February 3.
Some people come to see me in utter despair, in tears, in what they call terrible moral suffering; when I see them like that I slightly shift the needle in that part of my consciousness containing all of you, and when they leave, they are completely relieved. It is just like a compass needle I slightly shift the needle in my consciousness, and its over. Naturally, through habit, it returns later on. But these are mere soap bubbles.
0 1958-03-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Since my departure, I have been feeling your Force continually, almost constantly. And I feel an infinite gratitude that you are there, and that this thread from you to me keeps me anchored to something in this world. Simply knowing that you exist, that you are there, that I have a goal, a centerfills me with infinite gratitude. On a street in Madras, the day after I left, I suddenly had a poignant experience: I felt that if that were not in me, I would fall to pieces on the sidewalk, I would crumble, nothing would be left, nothing. And this experience remains. Like a litany, something keeps repeating almost incessantly, I need you, need you, I have only you, you alone in the world. You are all my present, all my future, I have only you Mother, I am living in a state of need, like hunger.
On the way, I stopped at J and Es place. They are living like native fishermen, in loincloths, in a coconut grove by the sea. The place is exceedingly beautiful, and the sea full of rainbow-hued coral. And suddenly, within twenty-four hours, I realized an old dreamor rather, I purged myself of an old and tenacious dream: that of living on a Pacific island as a simple fisherman. And all at once, I saw, in a flash, that this kind of life totally lacks a center. You float in a nowhere. It plunges you into some kind of higher inertia, an illumined inertia, and you lose all true substance.
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.
--
To your question, I reply: I do not think of you, I feel you; you are with me, I am with you, in the light
Your place has remained vacant here; you alone can fill it, and it awaits your return, when the moment comes.
0 1958-04-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I was waiting for things to be well established in me before writing you again. An important change has occurred: it seems that something in me has clickedwhat Sri Aurobindo calls the central will, perhapsand I am living literally in the obsession of divine realization. This is what I want, nothing else, it is the only goal in life, and at last I have understood ( not with the head) that the outer realization in the world will be the consequence of the inner realization. So thousands of times a day, I repeat, Mother, I want to be your instrument, ever more conscious, I want to express your truth, your light. I want to be what you want, as you want, when you want. There is in me now a kind of need for perfection, a will to abolish this ego, a real understanding that to become your instrument means at the same time to find the perfect plenitude of ones personality. So I am living in an almost constant state of aspiration, I feel your force constantly, or nearly so, and if I am distracted a few minutes, I experience a void, an uneasiness that calls me back to you.
And at the same time, I saw that it is you who is doing everything, you who aspires in me, you who wants the progress, and that all I myself am in this affair is a screen, a resisting obstacle. O Mother, break this screen that I may be wholly transparent before you, that your transforming force may purify all the secret recesses in my being, that nothing may remain but you and you alone. O Mother, may all my being be a living expression of your light, your truth.
Mother, from the depths of my being, I offer you a sole prayer: may I become your more and more perfect instrument, a sword of light in your hands. Oh, to get out of this ego that belittles everything, diminishes everything, to emerge from it! All is falsehood in it.
And I, who understood nothing of love, am beginning to suspect who Satprem is. Mother, your grace is infinite, it has accompanied me everywhere in my life.
We are still in Kataragama, and we shall only go up to northern Ceylon, to Jaffna, around the 15th, then return to India towards the beginning of May if the visa problems are settled. Only in India, at the temple of Rameswaram, can I receive the orange robe. I am living here as a sannyasi, but dressed in white, like a Hindu. It is a stark life, nothing more. I have seen however, that truth does not lie in starkness but in a change of consciousness. (Desire always finds a means to entrench itself in very small details and in very petty and stupid, though well-rooted, avidities.)
Mother, I am seeing all the mean pettiness that obstructs your divine work. Destroy my smallness and take me unto you. May I be sincere, integrally sincere.
--
P.S. My system is not in perfect condition due to this absurdly spiced food, and the river water that is used for everything.
***
0 1958-05-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
To do the divine Will I have been doing the sadhana for a long time, and I can say that not a day has passed that I have not done the Divines Will. But I didnt know what it was! I was living in all the inner realms, from the subtle physical to the highest regions, yet I didnt know what it was I always had to listen, to refer things, to pay attention. Now, no morebliss! There are no more problems, and everything is done in such harmony! Even if I had to leave my body, I would be in bliss! And it would happen in the best possible way.
Only now am I beginning to understand what Sri Aurobindo has written in The Synthesis of Yoga! And the human mind, the physical mind, appears so stupid, so stupid!
0 1958-05-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
This morning, I suddenly looked at my body (usually, I dont look at it I am inside it, working), I looked at my body and said to myself, Lets see, what would a witness say about this body?the witness Sri Aurobindo speaks of in The Synthesis of Yoga. nothing very remarkable. So I formulated it like this (Mother reads a written note):
This body has neither the uncontested authority of a god nor the imperturbable calm of the sage.
--
Is it not due to the bodys unconsciousness?
No. From the minute it is conscious, it is conscious of its own falsehood! It is conscious of this law, of that law, of this third law that fourth law, this tenth laweverything is a law. We are subject to physical laws: this will produce such and such a result if you do that, this will happen, etc. Oh! It reeks! I know it well. I know it very well. These laws reek of falsehood. In the body, we have no faith in the divine Grace, none, none, none, none! Those who have not undergone a tapasya2 as I have, say, Yes, all these inner moral things, feelings, psychology, all that is very good; we want the Divine and we are ready to But all the same, material facts are material facts, they have their concrete reality, after all an illness is an illness, food is food, and everything you do has a consequence, and when you are bah, bah, bah, bah, bah!
We must understand that this isnt trueit isnt true, its a falsehood, all this is sheer falsehood. It is not TRUE, it is not true!
If only we would accept the Supreme inside our bodies, if we had the experience I had a few days ago3: the supreme Knowledge in action along with the complete abolition of all consequences, past and future. Each second has its own eternity and its own law, which is a law of absolute truth.
When I had this experience, I understood that only a month ago I was still uttering mountain-sized imbecilities. And I laughed to the point of almost approving those who say, But all the same, the Supreme does not decide the number of sugar cubes you put in your coffee! That would be to project your own way of being onto the Supreme. But this is an Himalayan imbecility! It is a stupidity, the minds pretentious stupidity projecting itself onto the divine life and imagining that the divine life conforms to its own projection.
The Supreme does not decide: He knows. The Supreme does not want: He sees. And it is so for each thousandth of a second, eternally. Thats all. And it is the only true condition.
I know that the experience I had the other day is new and that I was the first person on earth to have it. But it is the only thing that is true. All the rest
I began my sadhana at birth, without knowing that I was doing it. I have continued it throughout my whole life, which means for almost eighty years (even though for perhaps the first three or four years of my life it was only something stirring about in unconsciousness). But I began a deliberate, conscious sadhana at about the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, upon prepared ground. I am now more than eighty years old: I have thought of nothing but that, I have wanted nothing but that, I had no other interest in life, and not for a single minute have I ever forgotten that it was THAT that I wanted. There were not periods of remembering and forgetting: it was continuous, unceasing, day and night, from the age of twenty-four and I had this experience for the first time about a week ago! So, I say that people who are in a hurry, people who are impatient, are arrogant fools.
It is a hard path. I try to make it as comfortable as possible, but nevertheless, it is a hard path. And it is obvious that it can not be otherwise. You are beaten and battered until you understand. Until you are in that state in which all bodies are your body. But at that point, you begin to laugh! You were upset by this, hurt by that, you suffered from this or that but now, how laughable it all seems! And not only the head, but the body too finds it laughable!
(silence)
--
From the positive point of view, I am convinced that we agree upon the result to be obtained, that is, an integral and unreserved consecrationin love, knowledge and actionto the Supreme AND TO HIS WORK. I say to the Supreme and to his work because consecration to the Supreme alone is not enough. Now we are here for the supramental realization, this is what is expected of us, but to reach it, our consecration to it must be total, unreserved absolutely integral. I believe you have understood thisin other words, that you have the will to realize it.
From the negative point of view I mean the difficulties to be overcomeone of the most serious obstacles is that the ignorant and falsifying outer consciousness, the ordinary consciousness legitimizes all the so-called physical laws, causes, effects and consequences, all that science has discovered physically and materially. All this is an unquestionable reality to the consciousness, a reality that remains independent and absolute even in the face of the eternal divine Reality.
--
Consequently, if you do not remember having had the experience, you are left in the same condition as before, but with the difference that now you know, you can know, that these material laws do not correspond to the truth thats all. They do not at all correspond to the truth, so consequently, if you want to be faithful to your aspiration, you must in no way legitimize all that. Rather, you must say that it is an infirmity from which we are suffering for the moment, for an intermediate periodit is an infirmity and an ignorance for it really is an ignorance (this is not just a word): it is ignorance, it is not the thing as it is, even in regard to our present material bodies. Therefore, we will not legitimize anything. What we say is thisit is an infirmity which has to be endured for the time being, until we get out of it, but we do not ACKNOWLEDGE all this as a concrete reality. It does not have a concrete reality, it has a false realitywhat we call concrete reality is a false reality.
And the proof I have the proof because I experienced it myselfis that from the minute you are in the other consciousness, the true consciousness, all these things which appear so real, so concrete, change INSTANTLY. There are a number of things, certain material conditions of my bodymaterial that changed instantly. It did not last long enough for everything to change, but some things changed and never returned, they remained changed. In other words, if that consciousness were kept constantly, it would be a perpetual miracle (what we would call a miracle from our ordinary point of view), a fantastic and perpetual miracle! But from the supramental point of view, it would not be a miracle at all, it would be the most normal of things.
Therefore, if we do not want to oppose the supramental action by an obscure, inert and obstinate resistance, we have to admit once and for all that none of these things should be legitimized.
This last sentence was later added by Mother in writing.
0 1958-05-11 - the ship that said OM, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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.
It was very strange, because my first reaction was one of bewilderment: how is it that someone I was really bewildered for a fraction, not even the fraction of a second. And then
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!
0 1958-05-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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 1958-05-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I have noticed that in at least ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it is an excuse people give to themselves. I have seen that practically, in the case of almost all the people who write to me saying, I am being violently attacked by hostile forces, its an excuse they are giving. It means that certain things in their nature do not want to yield, so they put all the blame on the hostile forces.
As a matter of fact, my tendency is more and more towards something in which the role of these hostile forces will be reduced to that of an examinerwhich means that they are there to test the sincerity of your spiritual quest. These elements have a reality in their action and for the workthis is their great reality but when you go beyond a certain region, it all grows dim to such a degree that it is no longer so well defined, so distinct. In the occult world, or rather if you look at the world from the occult point of view, these hostile forces are very real, their action is very real, quite concrete, and their attitude towards the divine realization is positively hostile; but as soon as you go beyond this region and enter into the spiritual world where there is no longer anything but the Divine in all things, and where there is nothing undivine, then these hostile forces become part of the total play and can no longer be called hostile forces: it is only an attitude that they have adoptedor more precisely, it is only an attitude adopted by the Divine in his play.
This again belongs to the dualities that Sri Aurobindo speaks of in (The Synthesis of Yoga, these dualities that are being reabsorbed. I dont know if he spoke of this particular one; I dont think so, but its the same thing. Its again a certain way of seeing. He has written of the Personal-Impersonal duality, Ishwara-Shakti, Purusha-Prakriti but there is still one more: Divine and anti-divine.
0 1958-06-06 - Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Its all the same thing, but the word realization can be reserved for something that is durable, that does not wear off. Because everything on earth fades awayeverything fades away, nothing remains. In this sense, there has never been any realization, for everything fades away. nothing is ever permanent. And I know for myself: I am doing the sadhana at a gallop, as it were; never are two experiences identical nor do they recur in the same way. As soon as something is established, the next thing begins immediately. It may appear to fade away, but it doesnt fade away; rather, it is the basis upon which the next thing is built.
***
--
They exist simultaneously; its the same thing. When you start becoming truly conscious, you realize that it depends upon the kinds of activities you have to do. When you do a certain kind of work, it is in the heart that the Force gathers to radiate outwards, and when you do a nother kind of work, it is above the head that the Force concentrates to radiate outwards, but the two are not separate: the center of activity is here or there depending upon what you have to do.
As for the latest experience,1 I cant say for sure that no one has ever had it, because someone like Ramakrishna, individuals like that, could have had it. But I am not sure, for when I had this experience ( not of the divine Presence, which I had already felt in the cells for a long time, but the experience that the Divine ALONE is acting in the body, that He has BECOME the body, yet all the while retaining his character of divine omniscience and omnipotence) well, the whole time it remained actively like that, it was absolutely impossible to have the LEAST disorder in the body, and not only in the body, but IN ALL THE SURROUNDING MATTER. It was as if every object obeyed without even needing to decide to obey: it was automatic. There was a divine harmony in EVERYTHING (it took place in my bathroom upstairs, certainly to demonstrate that it exists in the most trivial things), in everything, constantly. So if that is established in a permanent way, there CAN NO LONGER be illness it is impossible. There can no longer be accidents, there can no longer be illness, there can no longer be disorders, and everything should harmonize (probably in a progressive way) just as that was harmonized: all the objects in the bathroom were full of a joyful enthusiasmeverything obeyed, everything!
As it was the first experience, it started to fade slightly when I began having contact with people; but I really had the feeling that it was a first experience, new upon earth. For I have experienced an absolute identity of the will with the divine Will ever since 1910, it has never left me. It isnt that, its SOMETHING ELSE. It is MATTER BECOMING THE DIVINE. And it really came with the feeling that this thing was happening for the first time upon earth. It is difficult to say for sure, but Ramakrishna died of cancer, and now that I have had the experience, I know in an ABSOLUTE way that this is impossible. If he had decided to go because the Divine wanted him to go, it would have been an orderly departure, in total harmony and with a total will, whereas this illness is a means of disorder.
--
It is likely that the greatest resistance will be in the most conscious beings due to a lack of mental receptivity, due to the mind itself which wants things to continue (as Sri Aurobindo has written) according to its own mode of ignorance. So-called inert matter is much more easily responsive, much moreit does not resist. And I am convinced that among plants, for example, or among animals, the response will be much quicker than among men. It will be more difficult to act upon a very organized mind; beings who live in an entirely crystallized, organized mental consciousness are as hard as stone! It resists. According to my experience, what is unconscious will certainly follow more easily. It was a delight to see the water from the tap, the mouthwash in the bottle, the glass, the spongeit all had such an air of joy and consent! There is much less ego, you see, it is not a conscious ego.
The ego becomes more and more conscious and resistant as the being develops. Very primitive, very simple beings, little children will respond first, because they dont have an organized ego. But these big people! People who have worked on themselves, who have mastered themselves, who are organized, who have an ego made of steel, it will be difficult for them.
0 1958-06-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
note written by Mother in English.
Do not ask questions about the details of the material existence of this body: they are in themselves of no interest and must not attract attention.
Throughout all this life, knowingly or unknowingly, I have been what the Lord wanted me to be, I have done what the Lord wanted me to do. That alone matters.
0 1958-07-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Something I have never said completely. On the one hand, there is the attitude of those in yesterday evenings film2: God is everything, God is everywhere, God is in he who smites you (as Sri Aurobindo wroteGod made me good with a blow, shall I tell Him: O Mighty One, I forgive you your harm and cruelty but do not do it again!), an attitude which, if extended to its ultimate conclusion, accepts the world as it is: the world is the perfect expression of the divine Will. On the other hand, there is the attitude of progress and transformation. But for that, you must recognize that there are things in the world which are not as they should be.
In The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo says that this idea of good and bad, of pure and impure, is a notion needed for action; but the purists, such as Chaitanya, Ramakrishna and others, do not agree. They do not agree that it is indispensable for action. They simply say: your acceptance of action as a necessary thing is contrary to your perception of the Divine in all things.
How can the two be reconciled?
I recall that once I tried to speak of this, but no one followed me, no one understood, so I did not insist. I left it open and never pursued it further, for they could not decipher anything or find any meaning in what I was saying. But now I could give a very simple answer: Let the Supreme do the work. It is He who has to progress, not you!
Ramdas does not at all consider that the world as it is, is good.
No, but I know all these people, I know them thoroughly! I know Chaitanya, Ramakrishna and Ramdas thoroughly. They are utterly familiar to me. It doesnt bother them. These are people who live with a certain feeling, who have an entirely concrete experience and live in this experience, but they dont care at all if their formation they have not even crystallized it, they leave it like that, vaguecontains things that are mutually contradictory, because, in appearance, they reconcile them. They do not raise any questions, they do not have the need for an absolutely clear vision; their feeling is absolutely clear, and thats enough for them. Ramakrishna was like that; he said the most contradictory things without being bothered in the least, and they are all exactly and equally true.
But this crystal clear vision Sri Aurobindo had, where everything is in its place, where contradictions no longer existthey never soared to that height. This was the thing, this really crystalline, perfect supramental vision, even from the standpoint of understanding and knowledge. They never went that far.
--
Each element, let us say each individual element (even though it is not exactly like that), is in its place according to whether the Grace acts on the individual or on the collectivity.
When the Grace acts on the collectivity, each thing, each element, each principle, is put in its place as the result of a karmic logic in the universal movement. This is what gives us the impression of disorder and confusion as we see it.
--
And then, there is a super-grace, as it were, which works in a few exceptional cases, which places you not according to what you are but according to what you are to become, which means that the universal cosmic position is ahead of the individuals progress.
And it is then that you should keep silent and fall on your knees.
0 1958-07-05, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I have just explained to Z my program for getting out of the present difficulties,1 and I think if he has not concluded that I am totally mad, it is because he has an immense respect for me! But as always in these cases, there is such a joy in me, such an exultation: all the cells are dancing. I understand why people begin singing, dancing, etc. It takes a formidable power to remain like that (gesture of solidity): there is such a desire in the throat to sing!
***
0 1958-07-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
And it is always like that. I never ask for anything, but if by chance I say to myself, Hmm, wouldnt it be nice to have that, mountains of them pour in! So last year, I made an experiment, I told Nature, Listen, my little one, you say that you will collaborate, you told me I would never lack anything. Well then, to put it on a level of feelings, it would really be fun, it would give me joy (in the style of Krishnas joy), to have A LOT of money to do everything I feel like doing. Its not that I want to increase things for myself, no; you give me more than I need. But to have some fun, to be able to give freely, to do things freely, to spend freely I am asking you to give me a crore of rupees1 for my birthday!
She didnt do a thing! nothing, absolutely nothing: a complete refusal. Did she refuse or was she unable to? It may be that I always saw that money was under the control of an asuric force. (I am speaking of currency, cash; I dont want to do business. When I try to do business, it generally succeeds very well, but I dont mean that. I am speaking of cash.) I never asked her that question.
You see, this is how it happened: theres this Ganesh2 We had a meditation (this was more than thirty years ago) in the room where Prosperity3 is now distributed. There were eight or ten of us, I believe. We used to make sentences with flowers; I arranged the flowers, and each one made a sentence with the different flowers I had put there. And one day when the subject of prosperity or wealth came up, I thought (they always say that Ganesh is the god of money, of fortune, of the worlds wealth), I thought, Isnt this whole story of the god with an elephant trunk merely a lot of human imagination? Thereupon, we meditated. And who should I see walk in and park himself in front of me but a living being, absolutely alive and luminous, with a trunk that long and smiling! So then, in my meditation, I said, Ah! So its true that you exist!Of course I exist! And you may ask me for whatever you wish, from a monetary standpoint, of course, and I will give it to you!
--
Then the war and all the difficulties came, bringing a tremendous increase of people and expenditure (the war cost a fortuneanything at all cost ten times more than before), and suddenly, finished, nothing more. not exactly nothing, but a thin little trickle. And when I asked, it didnt come. So one day, I put the question to Ganesh through his image (! ), I asked him, What about your promise?I cant do it, its too much for me; my means are too limited!Ah! I said to myself (laughing), What bad luck! And I no longer counted on him.
Once someone even asked Santa Claus! A young Muslim girl who had a special liking for Father Christmas I dont know why, as it was not part of her religion! Without saying a word to me, she called on Santa Claus and told him, Mother doesnt believe in you; you should give Her a gift to prove to Her that you exist. You can give it to Her for Christmas. And it happened! She was quite proud.
But it only happened like that once. And as for Ganesh, that was the end of it. So then I asked Nature. It took her a long time to accept to collaborate. But as for the money, I shall have to ask her about it; because for me personally, it is still going on. I think, Hmm, wouldnt it be nice to have a wristwatch like that. And I get twenty of them! I say to myself, Well, if I had that and I get thirty of them! Things come in from every side, without my even uttering a word I dont even ask, they just come.
--
Health naturally depends upon the sadhana; but even that is not so sure: there are other factors. As for the second, the power over government, Sri Aurobindo looked at it, studied it, considered it very carefully, and finally he told me, There is only one way to have that power: it is TO BE the government. One can influence individuals, one can transmit the will to them, but their hands are tied. In a government, there is no one individual, nor even several who is all-powerful and who can decide things. One must be the government oneself and give it the desired orientation.
For the last, for money, he told me, I still dont know exactly what it depends on. Then one day I entered into trance with this idea in mind, and after a certain journey I came to a place like a subterranean grotto (which means that it is in the subconscient, or perhaps even in the inconscient) which was the source, the place and the power over money. I was about to enter into this grotto (a kind of inner cave) when I saw, coiled and upright, an immense serpent, like an all black python, formidable, as big as a seven-story house, who said, You can not pass!Why not? Let me pass!Myself, I would let you pass, but if I did, they would immediately destroy me.Who, then, is this they?They are the asuric4 powers who rule over money. They have put me here to guard the entrance, precisely so that you may not enter.And what is it that would give one the power to enter? Then he told me something like this: I heard (that is, he himself had no special knowledge, but it was something he had heard from his masters, those who ruled over him), I heard that he who will have a total power over the human sexual impulses ( not merely in himself, but a universal power that is, a power enabling him to control this everywhere, among all men) will have the right to enter. In other words, these forces would not be able to prevent him from entering.
A personal realization is very easy, it is nothing at all; a personal realization is one thing, but the power to control it among all men that is, to control or master such movements at will, everywhereis quite a nother. I dont believe that this condition has been fulfilled. If what the serpent said is true and if this is really what will vanquish these hostile forces that rule over money, well then, it has not been fulfilled.
It has been fulfilled to a certain extent but its negligible. It is conditional, limited: in one case, it works; in a nother, it doesnt. It is quite problematic. And naturally, where terrestrial things are involved (I dont say universal, but in any case terrestrial), when it is something involving the earth, it must be complete; there can not be any approximations.
--
You see, the human 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.
So considering all that, Sri Aurobindo came to the conclusion that only the supramental power (Mother brings down her hands) as he said, will be able to rule over everything. And when that happens, it will be all overincluding Nature. For a long time, Nature rebelled (I have written about it often). She used to say, Why are you in such a hurry? It will be done one day. But then last year, there was that extraordinary experience.5 And it was because of that experience that I told her, Well, now that we agree, give me some proof; I am asking you for some proofdo it for me. She didnt budge, absolutely nothing.
Perhaps it is a kind of it can hardly be called an intuition, but a kind of divination of this idea that made people speak of selling ones soul to the devil for money, of money being an evil force, which produces this shrinking on the part of all those who want to lead a spiritual life but as for that, they shrink from everything, not only from money!
Perhaps it would not be necessary to have this power over all men, but in any event, it should be great enough to act upon the mass. It is likely that once a certain movement has been mastered to some degree, what the mass does or doesnt do (this whole human mass that has barely, barely emerged into even the mental consciousness) will become quite irrelevant. You see, the mass is still under the great rule of Nature. I am referring to mental humanity, predominantly mental, which developed the mind but misused it and immediately set out on the wrong pathfirst thing.
There is nothing to say since the first thing done by the divine forces which emanated 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 a nother 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 humanity!
0 1958-07-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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.
Truly, the human species is at a point in the spiral which is not very pretty.
But isnt a dog more conscious, more evolved than a tiger, or higher in the spiral that is, nearer the Divine?
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 it not 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 human mode, it is obvious that man is much more conscious than the animal, but the human 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.
We are the distorting intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the gods.
0 1958-07-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
But instead of using the energy in this way, they immediately throw it out. They start stirring about, reacting, working, speaking They feel full of energy and they throw it all out! They cant keep anything. So naturally, since the energy was not sent to be wasted like that but for an inner use, they feel absolutely flat, run down. And it is universal. They dont know, they do not know how to make this movementto turn within, to use the energy ( not to keep it, it doesnt keep), to use it to repair the damage done to the body and to go deeply within to find the reason for this accident or illness, and there to change it by an aspiration, an inner transformation. Instead of that, right away they start speaking, stirring about, reacting, doing this or that!
In fact, the immense majority of human beings feel they are living only when they waste their energy. Otherwise, it does not seem to them to be life.
not to waste energy means to utilize it towards the ends for which it was given. If energy is given for the transformation, for the sublimation of the being, it must be used for that; if energy is given to restore something that has been disrupted in the body, it must be used for that.
Naturally, if a special work is given to someone along with the energy to do this work, its very good as long as it is being used towards the end for which it was given.
0 1958-07-23, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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, #Integral Yoga
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.
***
0 1958-08-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
In the cells, both things are there. The body is convinced of the divine Presence everywhere, that all is the Divineit lives in that; and at the same time, it shrinks from certain contacts! I saw that this morning, both things at once, and I said, Lord, I know nothing at all!
There (gesture above the head), everything has been resolved, I could write books on how to resolve this or that, how the synthesis is made, etc., but here (the body) I live this synthesis stumblingly. The two coexist, but it is still not THAT (gesture, hands clasped together, pointing upwards).
(silence)
What problems come up! If there were a plague or cholera, for example, would the supramental Force in the cells, the supramental realization, be able to restore order out of the disorder that allows the epidemic to be? I dont mean on an individual levelindividually, if you are in a certain consciousness, you can remain untouched I am not speaking of that, I am speaking impersonally, as it were.
We know nothing. We believe we know, but as soon as it is a question of that (the body), we know nothing. As soon as we are in the subtle physical, we know everything, we live in bliss but here, we know nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing.
***
0 1958-08-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
If human love came forth unalloyed, it would be all-powerful. Unfortunately, in human love, there is as much SELF love as love for the beloved; it is not a love that makes you forget yourself.
Evidently the gods of the Puranas are a good deal worse than human 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 1958-08-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
No, it came up to here (gesture to the top of the head). It seemed to be a tractor tire, but it did not have the heavy tread that tractor tires have.
(Abhay Singh:) There are tractor tires that have no tread.
--
What could it represent, he, and the tractor? I dont know It was not personal, you see I mean this body. It had nothing to do with that.
(Pavitra:) The industrialization of India?
0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
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.
Just recently one day, the contact became entirely physical, the whole body was in great exaltation, and I noticed that other lines were spontaneously being added to this Dieu de bont et de misricorde, and I noted them down. It was a springing forth of states of consciousness not words.
Seigneur, Dieu de bont et de misricorde
--
Like a triumph. But I didnt write that one down because I did not want to spoil my impression.
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:
--
It will simply spring forth in a flash, all of a sudden, and it will be very powerful. Only power can do something. Love vanishes like water running through sand: people remain beatific and nothing moves! No, power is neededlike Shiva, stirring, churning
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.
--
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.
--
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 need not 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.
0 1958-10-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
It was so strong, so strong that it was really inexpressible. The negative experience of no longer being an individual, or in other words, the dissolution of the ego, took place a long time ago and still takes place quite often: the ego completely vanishes. But this was a positive experience of being not just the universe in its totality, but something elseineffable, yet concrete, absolutely concrete! Unutterable1and yet utterly concrete: the divine Person beyond the Impersonal.
The experience lasted for only a few minutes. And I knew, then, that all our words all our words are empty. But circumstances were such that I had to speak
Later, Mother added: 'Because I do not say everything; when I am in that state, there is a lethargy of expression!
***
0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
It must be strong enough to pull me from my concentration or my activity. If I knew when you concentrate or do your puja,1 I could tune into you, and shell I would know more; otherwise, my inner life is too l am not at all passive inwardly, you see, I am very active, so I dont usually receive your vibrations unless they impose themselves strongly or unless I have decided beforeh and to be attentive to what is coming from someone or other. If I know that at a given moment something is going to happen, then I open a door, as it were. But its difficult to speak of these things.
When you left on your journey,2 for example, I made a specie! concentration for all to go well so that nothing untoward happen to you. I even made a formation and asked for a constant, special help over you. Then I renewed my concentration every day, which is how I came to notice that you were invoking me very regulary. I Saw you everyday, everyday, with a very regular precision. It was something that imposed itself on me, but it imposed itself only because l had initially made a formation to follow you.
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.
--
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 a nother 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.
You said that our way of receiving your work or becoming conscious of it does not exclusively depend upon us. What do you mean?
It depends upon the progress in the consciousness. The more the action is supramentalized, the more its reception is IMPOSED upon the consciousness of each one. The actions progress makes it more and more perceptible IN SPITE OF each ones condition. The milieu obviously limits and altersdistortswhat it receives, but the quality of the Work acts upon this receptivity and imposes itself on it in a more and more efficient and imperious way.
There is an interdependence between the individual progress and the collective progress, between that which works and that which is worked upon. It proceeds like this (gesture of intermeshing), and as one progresses, the other progresses. The progress above not only hastens the progress below but brings the two nearer together, thus changing the distance in the relationship; that is, the distance will not remain the same, the ratio between the progress here and the progress above wont always be identical.
The progress above follows a certain trajectory, and in some cases the distance increases, in others it decreases (although on the whole, the distance remains relatively unchanged), but my feeling is that the collective receptivity will increase as the action becomes increasingly supramentalized. And the need for an individual receptivitywith all its distortions and alterations and limitationswill decrease in importance as the supramental influence increasingly imposes its power. This influence will impose itself in such a way that it will no longer be subject to the defects in receptivity.
--
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.
Only, one must be careful to keep the sense of the Unmanifest sufficiently present so that the various things the elements, the cells and all thathave time to adapt. The sense of the Unmanifest, or in other words, to step back into the Unmanifest.6 This is what all those who have had experiences have done; they always believed that there was no possibility of adaptation, so they left their bodies and went off.
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Money is meant to circulate. What should remain constant is the progressive movement of an increase in the earths productionan ever-expanding progressive movement to increase the earths production and improve existence on earth. It is the material improvement of terrestrial life and the growth of the earths production that must go on expanding, enlarging, and not this silly paper or this inert metal that is amassed and lifeless.
Money is not meant to generate money; money should generate an increase in production, an improvement in the conditions of life and a progress in human consciousness. This is its true use. What I call an improvement in consciousness, a progress in consciousness, is everything that education in all its forms can provide not as its generally understood, but as we understand it here: education in art, education in from the education of the body, from the most material progress, to the spiritual education and progress through yoga; the whole spectrum, everything that leads humanity towards its future realization. Money should serve to augment that and to augment the material base for the earths progress, the best use of what the earth can giveits intelligent utilization, not the utilization that wastes and loses energies. The use that allows energies to be replenished.
In the universe there is an inexhaustible source of energy that asks only to be replenished; if you know how to go about it, it is replenished. Instead of draining life and the energies of our earth and making of it something parched and inert, we must know the practical exercise for replenishing the energy constantly. And these are not just words; I know how its to be done, and science is in the process of thoroughly finding outit has found out most admirably. But instead of using it to satisfy human passions, instead of using what science has found so that men may destroy each other more effectively than they are presently doing, it must be used to enrich the earth: to enrich the earth, to make the earth richer and richer, more active, generous, productive and to make all life grow towards its maximum efficiency. This is the true use of money. And if its not used like that, its a vicea short circuit and a vice.
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.
Puja: ceremony , invocation or evocation of a god (in this case, a tantric ritual ).
0 1958-10-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
When I am not in my body, I have all kinds of contacts with people, contacts of different types. And its not a thing decided in advance, it is not willed, it is not even thought out; it is simply observed.
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.
***
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Rather, simply say, We do not know how to do things as they should be done, well then, let them be done for us and come what may! If we could only see how everything that looks like a difficulty, an error, a failure or an obstacle is simply there to help us make the realization more perfect.
Once we know this, everything becomes easy.
0 1958-10-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
And for the cycle to be complete, one can not 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 can not be used, but it may be kept anyway:)
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On the one hand, there is what Sri Aurobindowho, as the Avatar, represented the supreme Consciousness and Will on earthdeclared me to be, that is, the supreme universal Mother; and on the other hand, there is what I am realizing in my body through the integral sadhana.2 I could be the supreme Mother and not do any sadhana, and as a matter of fact, as long as Sri Aurobindo was in his body, it was he who did the sadhana, and I received the effects. These effects were automatically established in the outer being, but he was the one doing it, not II was merely the bridge between his sadhana and the world. Only when he left his body was I forced to take up the sadhana myself; not only did I have to do what I was doing beforebeing a bridge between his sadhana and the world but I had to carry on the sadhana myself. When he left, he turned over to me the responsibility for what he himself had been doing in his body, and I had to do it. So there are both these things. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other (I dont mean successively in time, but it depends on the moment), and they are trying to combine in a total and perfect realization: the eternal, ineffable and immutable Consciousness of the Executrice of the Supreme, and the consciousness of the Sadhak of the integral Yoga who strives in an ascending effort towards an ever increasing progression.
To this has been added a growing initiation into the supramental realization which is (I understand it well now) the perfect union of what comes from above and what comes from below, or in other words, the eternal position and the evolutionary realization.
--
Those who have what I would call the more outer relationship compared to the other (although it is not really so)the relationship of yoga, of sadhanaconsider the others superstitious; and the others, who have faith OI perception, or the Grace to have understood what Sri Aurobindo meant (perhaps even before knowing what he said, but in any event, after he said it), discard the others as ignorant unbelievers! And there are all the gradations in between, so it really becomes quite funny!
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.
And this explains everything, absolutely everything: how it works, how it functions in the world.3 I was saying to myself, But I have no powers, I have no powers! Several days ago, I said, But after all, I KNOW WHO is there, I know, yet how is it that ? There, up to there (the level of the head), it is all-powerful, nothing can resist but here it is ineffective. So those who have faith, even an ignorant but real faith (it can be ignorant but nevertheless it is real), say, What! How can you have no powers? Because the sadhana is not yet over.
The Lord will possess his universe only when the universe will have consciously become the Lord.
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Mother added: 'The most beautiful part of the experience is missing... When I try to formulate something in too precise a way, all the vastness of the experience evaporates. The entire world is being revealed in all its organization down to the minutest details but everything simultaneouslyhow can that be explained? It's not possible.'
***
0 1958-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
7) But even in the event you have not made the irrevocable decision at the outset, should you have the good fortune to live during one of these unimaginable hours of universal history when the Grace is present, embodied upon earth, It will offer you, at certain exceptional moments, the renewed possibility of making a final choice that will lead you straight to the goal.
That was the message of hope.
--
There is still one more (but it is not the last):
11) Allow nothing, nowhere, to deny the truth of your being: that is sincerity.
'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 1958-10-25 - to go out of your body, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Each one is in touch with the universal expression of an aspect or a will or a mode of the Supreme, and if one aspires for this, it is this that comes, with an extraordinary plasticity. And when that happens, I even become the Witness ( not the witness in the way of the Purusha1: a witness far more infinite and eternal than the Purusha). I see what responds, why it responds, how it responds. This is how I know what people want ( not here below, nor even in their highest aspiration). I see it even when the people themselves are no longer consciousor rather, not yet conscious (for me, its no longer, but anyway ), when they are not yet conscious of this identification somewhere. Even then I see it.
Its interesting.
They do pujas to all these forces or divinities, but it is not it is not the highest Truth. What Sri Aurobindo called the true surrender, the surrender to the Supreme, is a truth higher than that of relying solely upon oneself.
And that is what always brings in complications, conflicts. I was surprised that the atmosphere [of the Ashram] is filled with conflict when he is here but that is the reason.2
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Between the outer consciousness and the deepest consciousness there are truly holeswhich are missing links between states of being and which have to be built, but they dont know how to do it. So their first reaction when they go within is panic! They feel they are falling into night, into nothingness, into non-being!
I had a Danish friend, an artist, to whom this happened. He wanted me to teach him how to go out of his body. He had interesting dreams so he thought it might be worthwhile to go there consciously. I helped him to go out but it was frightful! When he dreamed, a part of his mind indeed remained conscious, active, and a kind of link remained between this active part and his outer being, so he remembered some of his dreams, but it was only a very partial phenomenon. To go out of your body means that you must gradually pass through ALL the states of being, if you are to do it systematically. But already in the subtle physical it was almost non-individualized, and as soon as he went a bit further, there was no longer anything! It was unformed, nonexistent.
So they sit down (they are told to interiorize, to go within themselves), and they panic!Naturally they feel that they that they are disappearing: there is nothing! There is no consciousness!
Purusha: the Being or the Self that witnesses and supports the Becoming.
The occult atmosphere of tantric pujas invokes forces that do not coincide with the completely different atmosphere and the completely different attitude of the supramental yoga.
***
--- Overview of adv not
The adv not has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (1837) not, non ::: (negation of a word or group of words; "he does not speak French"; "she is not going"; "they are not friends"; "not many"; "not much"; "not at all")
--- Grep of noun not
andre maginot
barrel knot
black knot
blood knot
bowknot
bowline knot
cape forget-me-not
carnot
chinese forget-me-not
fisherman's knot
flat knot
forget-me-not
french knot
garden forget-me-not
gordian knot
granny knot
have-not
huguenot
knot
loop knot
love knot
lover's knot
lovers' knot
maginot
matthew walker knot
nicolas leonard sadi carnot
not-for-profit
nota bene
notability
notable
notary
notary public
notation
notational system
notch
note
note of hand
note payable
note receivable
note value
notebook
notebook computer
notebook entry
notecase
notechis
notechis scutatus
notemigonus
notemigonus crysoleucas
notepad
notepaper
nothing
nothingness
nothings
nothofagus
nothofagus cuninghamii
nothofagus dombeyi
nothofagus menziesii
nothofagus obliqua
nothofagus procera
nothofagus solanderi
nothofagus truncata
nothosaur
nothosauria
notice
notice board
noticeability
noticeableness
noticer
notification
notion
notions counter
notochord
notomys
notonecta
notonecta undulata
notonectidae
notophthalmus
notophthalmus viridescens
notoriety
notornis
notornis mantelli
notoryctidae
notoryctus
notoryctus typhlops
notostraca
notropis
notropis atherinoides
notropis cornutus
notturno
overhand knot
pine knot
pinot
prolonge knot
reef knot
sadi carnot
slipknot
snot
square knot
stopper knot
surgeon's knot
sword knot
topknot
touch-me-not
true lover's knot
true lovers' knot
truelove knot
weaver's knot
whatnot
windsor knot
