parts of the being

01.01 - The One Thing Needful, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
... 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 another 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.

0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
So each one must find something that acts on himself, individually. I am only speaking of the action on the physical plane, because mentally, vitally, in all the inner parts of the being, the aspiration is always, always spontaneous. I am referring only to the physical plane.
The physical seems to be more open to something that is repetitious for example, the music we play on Sundays, which has three series of combined mantras. The first is that of Chandi, addressed to the universal Mother:

0 1962-06-02, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then someone came. There are symbolic people in these dreams; they seem to be made up of various parts of the beings of those around me, people who have a particular relationship with me and bring a particular help to the Work. They are symbolic characters and always the same: one of them is tall and thin, some are small, there are young ones, old ones. I cant say its this person or that person, but rather that something IN this or that person is represented in these characters. And one of them is like a big brotherhe helps out in certain circumstances; if theres a boat, for instance, the big brother steers it. So he came up to me and said, Yes, I know the method, and began to try. Stop, for heavens sake! I said. Youll spoil everything; to make it work I have to say: I WANT TO GO THERE. When he began trying to bring me across with his own methods, the water grew muddy again and I started to sink! No no no! I protested. Dont do that, thats notit at all! THAT has to (although I wasnt formulating it to myself, what I meant was the sense of a certain higher Will) THAT has to say: I WANT TO GO THERE; then it works.
After that, the experience changed, other things happened. But what I have just related is certainly part and parcel of that experience the other day [the two rooms, one inside the other], because the two were coexistent.1

0 1962-09-05, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats it. And then illnesses related to colloidal disorders (blood, for example, is a colloidal fluid): when the component elements cease to combine in the normal and natural way. Both are newly recognized causes of illness. And they usually (I dont say in every case) result from what is called an inner discrepancy; that is, when the different parts of the being have not reached the same level of development, things of that nature may crop up.
With very few exceptions, these illnesses are not found to originate from germs, microbes or bacteria. They are frequently classified as mental illnesses, nervous disorders, etc., and they result from that inner discrepancy.

0 1964-08-11, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You cant imagine how, as you go forward and as all that Consciousness, in fact, grows more and more alive, true and constant, how at first you feel you are a rotten bundle of insincerity, hypocrisy, lack of faith, doubt, stupidity. Because as (how can I explain?) as the balance changes between the parts of the being and as the luminous part increases, the rest grows more and more inadequate and intolerable. Then you are really utterly disgusted (there was a time when it used to hurt me, long agonot so long ago, but anyway long enough, a few years ago), and more and more there is the movement (a very spontaneous and simple movement, very complete): I cant do anything about it. Its impossible, I cant, its such a colossal work that its impossibleLord, do it for me. And when you do this with the simplicity of a child (gesture of offering), really like this, you know, really convinced that you cannot do it, Its not possible, Ill never be able to do itdo it for me, its wonderful! Oh, He does it, mon petit, youre dumbfounded afterwards: How come! There are lots of things that prrt! vanish and never come back againfinished. After a time, you wonder, How can that be?! It was there. Just like that, prrt! in a second.
But as long as there is personal effort, its oof! its like the man who rolls his barrel uphill, and down it rolls again every minute.

0 1965-02-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there is something interesting here. I have noticed this: if you try EVERY SECOND to discern the impulse of your action, how difficult it is! To discern whether it comes from the ego, whether it comes from darkness, whether it comes from the Light. And when you want to express as purely as possible what exclusively comes from the Supreme, you have to work at it every second and it is there was a time (not so long ago) when I used to consider it was materially practically impossiblenot in the main lines or in the great movements that come from the higher parts of the being, but in all that is purely material, absolutely material. And all of a sudden, at the beginning of this year, with this Salute to the advent of the Truth5 there came a sort of very sharp inner sense, very sharp, very precise, and so QUIET, So quiet, which gave the power to clearly see the origin of a material impulse or a material reaction, EVEN IN VERY SMALL THINGS. It was very interesting. So I studied carefully, and it has become almost automatic.
Previously it took an inner discomfort, a feeling of some friction to make me aware that it wasnt the true thing; but now it isnt like that: it is seen BEFOREHAND in the space of half a second.

0 1965-04-17, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The transition between the two appears really possible only through the entry the conscious and willed entryof a supramentalized consciousness into a body that we could call an improved physical body, in other words, the human physical body as it is now, but improved: the improvement produced, for instance, by a TRUE physical training, not in its present exaggerated form but in its true sense. Its something I have seen fairly clearly: in an evolution (physical training is developing very fast nowadays, its not even half a century since it started), in evolution, that physical training will bring an improvement, that is, a suppleness, a balance, an endurance, and a harmony; these are the four qualitiessuppleness (plasticity), balance between the various parts of the being, endurance, and harmony of the body that will make it a more supple instrument for the supramentalized consciousness.
So the transition: a conscious and willed utilization by a supramentalized consciousness of a body prepared in that way. This body must be brought to the peak of its development and of the utilization of the cells in order to be yes, consciously impregnated with the supreme forces (which is being done here [in Mother] at the moment), and this to the utmost of its capacities. And if the consciousness that inhabits that body, that animates that body, has the required qualities in sufficient amount, it should normally be able to utilize that body to the utmost of its capacity of transformation, with the result that the waste caused by the death of decomposing cells should be reduced to a minimumto what extent? Thats precisely what still belongs to the unknown.

0 1965-06-09, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have a whole mantra [besides the main Mantra], I told you, for years now, and it is extremely complete: it applies to all necessities and all occasions, its a long series. But for some time it has become very spontaneous, too, and very self-living: when I want to see quite concretely where someone stands (someone meditating in front of me, for instance), I recite the mantra (within, of course) and I watch the reactions, because the mantra deals with the surrender of all the parts of the being and all the modes of life: its very complete. So according to the reactions [in Mothers centers], I see very clearly. The other day, when X came, I did it (it was the first time I had done it with him), I did it, and when I came to a certain point (Mother smiles) he couldnt bear it! He sort of stiffened, bowed to me and got up. Before that, he had remained very silent, very quiet. But that (Mother laughs) You see, I invoke the Lord and ask Him to manifest His various ways of being or realizations (its not taken in a mental sense, not at all), but when I said I say many things, but up to that point he had been quiet, silent, still, and at one point (because it comes in a logical succession), I said, Manifest Your Knowledgehe felt uneasy, as if he felt he was being thrown out of himself! So I tried to calm that down, but he couldnt bear itafter five minutes, he got up and left. A real unease; because, as for me, I am inside people (I am everywhere, of course), I feel just as if it took place in my own body.
***

0 1965-07-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, thats right. But Sri Aurobindo said it to me. I asked him several times how it was that people (who consciously, outwardly, would rather have pleasant things and favorable events) are constantly attracting and attracting unpleasant things, even terrible catastrophes. I know some women (men too, but they are fewer), women who spend their time imagining the worst: they have children they imagine that each of them will meet with the worst catastrophes; someone goes away by caroh, the car will have an accident; they take the trainoh, the train will derail; and so forth. Well, thats why. Thats what Sri Aurobindo explained so well: all those parts of the being are terribly tamasic and it is the violence of the shock that awakens something in them; and that is why they attract those things as though instinctively. The Chinese, for example, have an extremely tamasic vital and an insensate physical: its sensation is totally blunted they are the ones who invented the most frightful forms of torture. It is because they need something extreme in order to feel, otherwise they dont feel. There was a Chinese who had a sort of anthrax, I think, in the middle of the back (generally an extremely sensitive spot, it seems), and because of his heart they couldnt put him to sleep to operate on him, so they were a bit worried. They operated without anesthesiahe was awake, he didnt move, didnt shout, didnt say anything, they were filled with admiration for his courage; then they asked him what he had felt: Oh, yes, I felt some scraping in my back! Thats how it is. Thats what creates the necessity of catastrophesof unexpected catastrophes: the thing that gives you a shock to wake you up.
What you are saying here about those morbid and diseased imaginations, I said it myself not long ago: the imagination is instantly defeatist and catastrophic.

0 1966-03-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It corresponds to the experience of absolute freedom one has in the higher parts of the being when one has become completely independent of the body. But the remarkable point (I lay great stress on this) is that its the consciousness OF THE BODY that has those experiences and its a body thats still visibly here (!)
Of course, there is nothing left of what gives human beings trust of life. There doesnt seem to be any support from the outward world left; there is only the supreme Will. To put it into ordinary words, well, the body feels it lives only because the supreme Lord wants it to live, otherwise it wouldnt be able to live.

0 1968-06-15, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What I dont know yet, whats not very clear, is what will be the fate of this residue? To peoples ordinary thought, its what they call death, that is to say, the rejection of the cells that werent able to enter this plastic state of consciousness. But the way the work is being done, there is no categorical division [into groups of conscious or unconscious cells in Mothers body]: there are imperceptible (almost) states of variations between the different parts of the being. So you wonder, Where? What? When? How? Whats going to happen? Its increasingly becoming a problem.
The whole inner functioning is becoming more and more the result of that conscious action and conscious will; with, even, in part (at least in part) clearly the true functioning already. You understand, the impression is of a remnant, but the remnant isnt something thats rejected: its something which hesitates, lags behind, has difficulty and triesit would be only too pleased: if, for instance, there is in one spot a perceptible disorder, a pain, the body no longer starts fidgeting, worrying, wanting medicine or doctors or interventions, no, not at all; it asks it goes, O Lord, like that. Thats all. And it waits. And generally, in the space of a few seconds, the pain goes away.

0 1968-09-21, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like this: the body is absolutely convinced that there is only one Willone Consciousness, one Will. Consequently, whatever happens is part of that Consciousness and that Will. Thats how it is, you understand. So it cant get angry. It has one spontaneous tendency: let the aspiration be more intense, the surrender more complete, the trust more total. It gets formulated like this: ThatThat which is everything and is oneis nevertheless, despite all appearances, it is nevertheless the Supreme Goodness, the Supreme Beauty, the Supreme Harmony everything reaches out towards That. That is it. And we too reach out towards That. There, thats the bodys philosophy. But not in the manner of the other parts of the being: quite spontaneous, and with a sort of indisputability.
(silence)

0 1969-05-03, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This body was accustomed to having experiences under the psychics influence, in its adoration for the Supreme Conscious Truthin adoration. Its whole joy was there, it was fully satisfied. But since that time, it has had experienceswhich the other parts of the being had IN THEIR OWN WAY, but now this way this physical way is so concrete! So concrete and tangible. The body can say, I have SEEN the Supreme Consciousness, like people in the past who said, I have seen God.This body doesnt believe in God it believes in something much better than God! (laughter)
There. Is that all? Do you have anything to ask?

0 1971-07-10, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is the only part. The other parts of the being can be transformed, can transform their consciousness while remaining what they are but the physical body needs to change.
I dont know whether its a passing experience or a final one that I dont know. Well see.

02.10 - Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is a call for all the parts of the being to precipitate to the very foundation of the being, coalesce and evoke a wild and weird, doleful and discordant symphonya painful cry. Unrealised dreams, that had faded into oblivion, are now like possessed beings and hang like bats on darkling branches:they are about to begin their phantom dance. Even so, the body, the material precipitate into which they gather, gives them a basic unity. These elements with their ardour and zeal kindle a common Fire. There is a divine Flame, Agni, burning within the flesh, burning brighter and brighter, making the bones whiter and whiter, as it were the purificatory Flame,Pvaka, of which the Vedic Rishis spoke, Master of the House, ghapati, dwelling in the inner heart of the human being, impelling it to rise to purer and larger Truth. But here our modern poet replaces the Heart by the Liver and makes of this organ the central altar of human aspiration and inspiration. We may remember in this connection that the French poet Baudelaire gave a similar high position and functionto the other collateral organ, the spleen. The modern Bengali poet considers that man's consciousness, even his poetic inspiration, is soaked in the secretion of that bilious organ. For man's destiny here upon earth is not delight but grief, not sweetness but gall and bitterness; there is no consolation, no satisfaction here; there is only thirst, no generosity but narrowness, no consideration for others, but a huge sinister egoism.
The cry of our poet is a cry literally deprifundis, a deep cavernous voice surging, spectral and yet sirenlike, out of the unfathomed underground abysses.

07.10 - Diseases and Accidents, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Not necessarily, to be sure. Illnesses are, as I have told you, generally a dislocation among the different parts of the being, a kind of disharmony. It may well be that the body has not followed the movement of progress, it might have lagged behind while the other parts have, on the contrary, made progress. In that case there is an unbalance, a breaking of harmony and that produces an illness, I mean, in the body, for the mind and the vital also might remain all right. There are many people who have been ill for years, suffering from terrible and incurable diseases, and still maintained their mental power marvellously clear and active and continuing to make progress in that domain. There was a French poet, a very good poet, named Sully Prudhomme; he was mortally ill and it was during that time that he wrote his most beautiful poems. He was always in a very good humour, charming, smiling, pleasant to everyone even while his body was going to bits. You may remember how the great Louis XIV used to joke and laugh, while, in his last days, his body was being lacerated and given over to leeches by his doctors and surgeons. It depends upon individual and individual. For there are people of the other type who get thoroughly disturbed from head to foot if there is the slightest bodily indisposition. Each one has his own combination of the elements.
There is of course a relation between the mind and the body, quite a close relation. In most cases it is the mind that makes the body ill, at least it is the most important factor in the illness. I have said, there are people who keep their mind clear although their body suffers. But it is very rare and very difficult to keep the body healthy when the mind suffers or is un-balanced. It is not impossible, but very, very exceptional. For I explained to you that it is the mind which is the master of the body, the body is an obedient and obliging servant. Unfortunately, one does not usually know how to make use of one's mind, not only so, one makes bad use of it and as bad as possible. The mind possesses a considerable power of formation and of direct action on the body. It is precisely this power which is used by people to make their body ill. As soon as there is something which does not go well, the mind begins to worry about it, makes formations of coming catastrophes, indulges in all kinds of imaginary dangers ahead. Now, instead of thus letting the mind run amuck and play havoc, if the same energy were used for a better purpose, if good formations were made, namely, giving self-confidence to the body, telling it that there is nothing to be anxious about, it is only a passing unease and so on, in that case, the body would be put in a right condition of receptivity and the illness pass away quietly even as it came. That is how the mind is to be taught to give good suggestions to the body and not to throw mud into it. Marvellous results follow if you do it properly.

08.22 - Regarding the Body, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The fatigue of the body comes from an inner disharmony. There may be many other apparent reasons, but all amount to that fundamental circumstance viz. a want of balance among the different parts of the being. That may occur on a day when, for example, you had a lot of energy and you spent too much. But such is usually not the case with children. They spend and go on spending till they are not able to do any more. A child is very active till the last moment when it drops dead asleep. A minute before it was moving about, running, shouting, all on a sudden it falls down into deep sleep. And that is how they grow and gain strength. So the trouble does not lie in spending. Spending is easily repaired by necessary rest. Fatigue and lethargy come from a different source.
People think they have only to continue to do what they do everyday, perform the same work, with the same state of consciousness regularly and everything will be all right. But things do not happen that way. All on a sudden in the midst of the regular movement, you do not know why or how, a part of your beingsome feeling, or thoughtmakes a progress, discovers a new thing, receives a light or a higher impulsion. That part shoots ahead, as it were, and goes forward: the other parts remain behind. That brings about a disharmony and it is quite sufficient to cause fatigue, even much fatigue. Truly, however, this is not fatigue, but a desire to keep quiet, to concentrate, to remain within oneself and build a new harmony between the disparate parts. And such a state or period is quite necessary which is a period of assimilation of what one has learnt, of harmonisation of all the limbs.

10.03 - Life in and Through Death, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The injunction is: you must die to the world if you want the life Eternal. Even so you must die to yourself if you want the Divine. The existing life which your ego has built up is a life of ignorance, misery and decadence. Death is indeed the natural and inevitable consequence; but this is a death in ignorance and bondage, it does not lead you to liberation and freedom. The dying that liberates is a conscious, deliberate movement of intelligence and will; dying to the world means withdrawing yourself from the world and turning within. Dying to yourself means withdrawing from your egohood and turning to the self, the being that is beyond. This withdrawal is to be done constantly and consistently in all the parts of the being. The mind is to move away from its thoughts, the vital from its desires and impulses and the body from its hunger and thirst. The first result of this withdrawal is a division of the being, an inner passive part and an outer active part. The inner part becomes gradually a mere witness and the outer part a mere mechanical functioning. When the withdrawal is so complete that the outer being or the world has no effect upon the inner, does not raise any ripple in it by its touch or contiguity then is accomplished the real death. Then it is said the outer existence, the material life does not continue long, it comes sooner or later to a dead stop. Thus the inner being is liberated completely and is freed into the life beyond, the Divine Existence, the Brahman. It is said that when each and every seed of the various elements that compose the being, that sprouts into the luxuriant tree of material life, when each and every seed is burnt up by the heat of mounting 'tapas', the force of aspiring consciousness, then there is no more chance or possibility of an ignorant earthly life, one is then naturally born into the Life of the Eternal. That is the final, the supreme death which is laya or pralaya.
To live away from life and consequently away from death is one thing, comparatively easy; but to live in life and consequently in death is another thing, somewhat more difficult. To withdraw oneself from the field of death and retire in the immutability beyond or some form of it is what was attempted in the ancient days. But there has been side by side always a growing tendency in man to stay here in this vale of tears under the shadow of death, to live dangerously and face the Evil and conquer it here itself; for death is not a mere negation an annihilation of the reality, it is only a mask put over the reality or is its obverse. Tear off or remove the disguise, you will see the smiling radiant Godhead behind.

1.01 - Two Powers Alone, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
4:The surrender must be total and seize all the parts of the being. It is not enough that the psychic should respond and the higher mental accept or even the inner vital submit and the inner physical consciousness feel the influence. There must be in no part of the being, even the most external, anything that makes a reserve, anything that hides behind doubts, confusions and subterfuges, anything that revolts or refuses.
5:If part of the being surrenders, but another part reserves itself, follows its own way or makes its own conditions, then each time that that happens, you are yourself pushing the divine Grace away from you.

1.02.2.2 - Self-Realisation, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
perfectly in all parts of the being what is understood by the
intellect and seen by the inner perception.

1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The first thing this working of the Higher Power does is to establish Shanti, peace, in all the parts of the being and an opening above. This peace is not mere mental Shanti, it is hill of power and, whatever action takes place in it, Samata, equality, is its basis, and the Shanti and Samata are never disturbed. What comes from above is peace, power and joy. It also brings about changes in various parts of our nature so that they can bear the pressure of the Higher Power.
Knowledge also progressively develops showing all in our being that is to be thrown out and what is to be retained. In fact, knowledge and guidance both come and you have constantly to consent to the guidance. The progress may be more in one direction than in another. But it is the Higher Power that works. The rest is a matter of experience and the movement of the Shakti.
--
Sri Aurobindo: Peace, of course, is the first condition of any Yoga and it must not be only mental peace. It must be deeper still, it must pervade all the parts of the being and it must descend from Above.
What is your idea of Kartavyam Karma?

1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is by enlightening, streng thening and purifying the vital, and not by weakening it, that one can contri bute to the true progress of the being. To deprive oneself of sensations is therefore as harmful as depriving oneself of food. But just as the choice of food must be made wisely and solely for the growth and proper functioning of the body, so too the choice of sensations and their control should be made with a very scientific austerity and solely for the growth and perfection of the vital, of this highly dynamic instrument, which is as essential for progress as all the other parts of the being.
It is by educating the vital, by making it more refined, more sensitive, more subtle and, one should almost say, more elegant, in the best sense of the word, that one can overcome its violence and brutality, which are in fact a form of crudity and ignorance, of lack of taste.

1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In these matters it is not the thinking mind but the vital being - the life-force and the desire nature - or some part of it at least, that usually determines men's action and their choice - when it is not some outward necessity or pressure that compels or mainly influences the decision. The mind is only an interpreting, justifying and devising agent. By your taking up the sadhana this part of your vital being has had a pressure put upon it from above and within which has discouraged its old turn of desires and tendencies, its past grooves, those which would have decided its direction before; this vital has, as is often one first result, fallen silent and neutral. It is no longer strongly moved towards the ordinary life; it has not yet received from or through the psychic centre and the higher mental will a sufficient illumination and impulse to take up a new vital movement and run vigorously on the road to a new life. That is the reason for the listlessness of which you speak and the mistiness of the future. Men do not know themselves and have not learned to distinguish these different parts of the being which are usually lumped together as mind; they do not understand their own states and actions, or, if at all, then only on the surface. It is part of the foundation of Yoga to become conscious of the complexity of the nature, see the different forces that move it and get over it a control of directing knowledge.
The remedy can only come from the parts of the being that are already turned towards the Light. To call in the light of the divine consciousness, bring the psychic being to the front and kindle a flame of aspiration which will awaken spiritually the outer mind and set on fire the vital being, is the way out. It is usually a psychic awakening or a series of strong experiences by which the sadhak comes out of this intermediary no man's land of the quiescent vital (few can avoid altogether this passage through a neutral vital indifference) into the full dynamic course of the spiritual movement.
It is not absolutely necessary to abandon the ordinary life in order to seek after the Light or to practise Yoga. This is usually

11.09 - Towards the Immortal Body, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This then is the first necessity, one should awake in the central psychic being and then awaken the same psychic being in all the parts of the being that are now apparently soulless. With that consciousness in front one must face the question set by death and dissolution. Now, to start on the way one must get rid of all fear of deathone must not be afraid of it in the least or shrink from it even a jot or tittle. The attitude of perfect indifference must be there not only in the mind but also in the vital and in the body itself. All has to be in a block, solidly calm and stilludsnaseated above the contingencies.
The consciousness, the consciousness of every element must be of absolute passivity and integral neutrality: one must in every limb leave it to the Divine to make the decision whether to continue or not to continue, must be equally happy in either case. No thought or movement of such a kind should be there that because immortality is the ideal to be achieved, therefore one must or can seek for it, try for it, that it is not wrong to make an effort towards it: instead one must learn to be absolutely indifferent, the supreme indifference taught by the Gita. And it must be a true indifference, with no arrire pense, no notion in the background that as I am indifferent, as I do not care for gain and loss, therefore I shall automatically attain the desired immortality. In fact, this I does not attain immortality. This 'I in whatever form is the very negation of immortality, it is mortality. As we have said, it is the immortal in the mortal that becomes the immortal, that is to say, manifests and embodies its immortality.

1.12 - Sleep and Dreams, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sleep is the school one must pass through if one knows how to learn ones lesson there, so that the inner being may become independent of the physical form, conscious in its own right and master of its own life. There are entire parts of the being that need this immobility and semi-consciousness of the outer being, of the body, in order to be able to lead their own life independently.
It is another school for another result, but it is still a school.

1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Along with its beauty, we are also discovering the limits of the illumined mind: illumined poetry produces streams of images and revelatory words (because vision, and even hearing, often open at this stage), almost an avalanche of luxuriant, sometimes incoherent images, as if the consciousness were hard put to contain the flood of light and unaccustomed intensity; it is overwhelmed. Enthusiasm easily changes into exhilaration, and if the rest of the being has not been sufficiently prepared and purified, any of the lower parts can seize hold of the descending light and force and use them for their own ends; this is a frequent snare. Whenever the lower parts of the being, especially the vital, seize upon the luminous flood, they harden it, dramatize it, distort it. There is still power, but compelling and hard while the essence of the illumined mind is joy. Here we could cite the names of many poets and creative geniuses. 193 Furthermore, the substance of the illumined mind is not truly transparent, but only translucent; its light is diffused, somewhat as if it could feel the truth everywhere without concretely touching it; hence the frequent instances of incoherence and vagueness. It is only the beginning of a new birth. Before going higher, more purification is necessary, and above all more peace, more natural equilibrium, and more silence. The higher we ascend in consciousness, the sturdier the equilibrium required.
191 - Letters, 3rd Series, 124

1.2.07 - Surrender, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It depends on what is meant by absolute surrender - the experience of it in some part of the being or the fact of it in all parts of the being. The former may easily come at any time; it is the latter that takes time to complete.
The absolute surrender must be not only an experience in meditation, but a fact governing all the life, all the thoughts, feelings, actions. Till then the use of one's own will and effort is necessary, but an effort in which also there is the spirit of surrender, calling
--
On the other hand, there are some people who start with a genuine and dynamic will for a total surrender. It is those who are governed by the psychic or are governed by a clear and enlightened mental will which having once accepted surrender as the law of the sadhana will stand no nonsense about it and insists on the other parts of the being following its direction. Here there is still effort, but it is so ready and spontaneous and has so much the sense of a greater Force behind it that the sadhak hardly feels that he is making an effort at all. In the contrary case of a will in mind or vital to retain self-will, a reluctance to give up your independent movement, there must be struggle and endeavour until the wall between the instrument in front and the Divinity behind or above is broken. No rule can be laid down which applies without distinction to everybody - the variations in human nature are too great to be covered by a single trenchant rule.
It is not possible to get rid of the stress on personal effort at once - and not always desirable; for personal effort is better than tamasic inertia.
--
It is only the more mechanical parts of the being that can truly say they are helpless: the physical (material) consciousness, especially, is inert in its nature and moved either by the mental and vital or by the higher forces. But one has always the power to put the mental will or vital push at the service of the Divine.
One cannot be sure of the immediate result, for the obstruction of the lower Nature or the pressure of the adverse forces can often act successfully for a time, even for a long time, against

1.2.08 - Faith, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But prayer by itself does not usually bring that at once - only if there is a burning faith at the centre or a complete faith in all the parts of the being. That does not mean that those whose faith is not so strong or surrender complete cannot arrive, but usually they have to go at first by small steps and to face the difficulties of their nature until by perseverance or tapasya they make a sufficient opening. Even a faltering faith and a slow and partial surrender have their force and their result, otherwise only the rare few could do sadhana at all. What I mean by the central faith is a faith in the soul or the central being behind, a faith which is there even when the mind doubts and the vital despairs and the physical wants to collapse, and after the attack is over, reappears and pushes on the path again. It may be strong and bright, it may be pale and in appearance weak, but if it persists each time in going on, it is the real thing. Fits of despair and darkness are a tradition in the path of sadhana - in all Yogas oriental and occidental they seem to have been the rule. I know all about them myself - but my experience has led me to the perception that they are an unnecessary tradition and could be dispensed with if one chose. That is why whenever they come in you or others I try to lift up before them the gospel of faith.
If still they come, one has only to get through them as soon as possible and get back into the sun. Your dream of the sea was a perfectly true one - in the end the storm and swell do not prevent the arrival of the state of Grace in the sadhak and with it the arrival of the Grace itself. That I suppose is what something in you is always asking for - the suprarational miracle of Grace, something that is impatient of the demand for tapasya and selfperfection and long labour. Well, it can come, it has come to several here after years upon years of blank failure and difficulty or terrible internal struggles. But it comes usually in that way - as opposed to a slowly developing Grace - after much difficulty and not at once. If you go on asking for it in spite of the apparent failure of response, it is sure to come.

1.3.01 - Peace The Basis of the Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Equanimity and peace in all conditions in all parts of the being is the first foundation of the Yogic status. Either Light (bringing with it knowledge) or Force (bringing strength and dynamism of many kinds) or Ananda (bringing love and joy of existence) can come next according to the trend of the nature. But peace is the first condition without which nothing else can be stable.
The first thing that you have to bring down is a positive, complete and enduring peace from above - that is the only foundation on which the rest can be done, i.e. the development of the higher consciousness, force, knowledge, love, Ananda.
--
Peace is the true remedy; distraction by hard work is only a temporary relief - although a certain amount of work is necessary for the proper balance of the different parts of the being. To feel the peace above or about your head is a first step; you have to get connected with it and it must descend into you and fill your mind and life and body and surround you so that you live in it - for this peace is one sign of the Divine's presence with you, and once you have it all the rest will begin to come.
Truth in speech and truth in thought are very important.

1.4.03 - The Guru, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yes [surrender to the formless Divine would leave parts of the being subject to the gunas and ego] - because only the static parts would be free in formlessness, the active nature would be still in the play of the gunas. Many think they are free from ego because they get the sense of the formless Existence, they do not see that the egoistic element remains in their action just as before.
Other Gurus

1914 05 16p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And the individual work to be carried on simultaneously with the collective work is to become aware and take possession of all the activities and parts of the being, the definitive establishment of consciousness in the highest point, making possible both the prescribed action and the constant communion with Thee. The joys of perfect union cannot come until what has to be done is done.
First, union must be preached to all, afterwards work; but for those who have realised the union, every moment of their life must be an integral expression of Thy will through them.

1916 06 07p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Gradually the vital being grew accustomed to find harmony in the intensest action as it had in passive surrender. And once this harmony was sufficiently established, there was light again in all the parts of the being, and the consciousness of what had happened became complete.
Now in the heart of action the vital being has discovered the perception of Infinity and Eternity. It can perceive Thy Supreme Beauty and live it in all sensations and all forms. Even in its every sensation, extended, active, fully developed to feel contrary sensations at the same time, always it perceives Thee.

1929-04-21 - Visions, seeing and interpretation - Dreams and dreaml and - Dreamless sleep - Visions and formulation - Surrender, passive and of the will - Meditation and progress - Entering the spiritual life, a plunge into the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now the procedure to deal with dreams and the dreamland. First become consciousconscious of your dreams. Observe the relation between them and the happenings of your waking hours. If you remember your night, you will be able to trace back very often the condition of your day to the condition of your night. In sleep some action or other is always going on in your mental or vital or other plane; things happen there and they govern your waking consciousness. For instance, some are very anxious to perfect themselves and make a great effort during the day. They go to sleep and, when they rise the next day, they find no trace of the gains of their previous days effort; they have to go over the same ground once again. This means that the effort and whatever achievement there was belonged to the more superficial or wakeful parts of the being, but there were deeper and dormant parts that were not touched. In sleep you fell into the grip of these unconscious regions and they opened and swallowed all that you had laboriously built up in your conscious hours.
Be conscious! Be conscious of the night as well as of the day. First you have to get consciousness, afterwards, control. You who remember your dreams may have had this experience that, even while dreaming, you knew it was a dream; you knew that it was an experience that did not belong to the material world. When once you know, you can act there in the same way as in the material world; even in the dreaming, you can exercise your conscious will and change the whole course of your dream-experience.

1929-06-02 - Divine love and its manifestation - Part of the vital being in Divine love, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Where is the manifestation of Divine love intended to stop? Is it to be confined to some unreal or immaterial region? Divine love plunges its manifestation upon earth down into the most material matter. It does not indeed find itself in the selfish distortions of the human consciousness; but the vital in itself is as important an element in Divine love as it is in the whole of the manifested universe. There is no possibility of movement and progress without the mediation of the vital; but because this Power of Nature has been so badly distorted, some prefer to believe that it has to be pulled out altogether and thrown away. But it is only through the vital that matter can be touched by the transforming power of the Spirit. If the vital is not there to infuse its dynamism and living force, matter will remain dead; for the higher parts of the being will not come into contact with earth, will not be concretised in life, and they will depart unsatisfied and disappear.
The Divine love of which I speak is a Love that manifests here upon this physical earth, in matter, but it must be pure of its human distortions, if it is to incarnate. The vital is an indispensable agent in this as in all manifestation. But as has happened always, the adverse powers have put their hold on this most precious thing. It is the energy of the vital that enters into dull and insensitive matter and makes it responsive and alive. But the adverse forces have distorted it; they have turned it into a field of violence and selfishness and desire and every kind of ugliness and prevented it from taking part in the divine work. The one thing to be done is to change it, not to suppress its movement or destroy it. For without it no intensity is possible anywhere. The vital is in its very nature that in us which can give itself away. Just because it is that which has always the impulse and the strength to take, it is also that which is capable of giving itself to the utmost; because it knows how to possess, it knows also how to abandon itself without reserve. The true vital movement is the most beautiful and magnificent of movements; but it has been twisted and turned into the most ugly, the most distorted, the most repulsive. Wherever into a human story of love, there has entered even an atom of pure love and it has been allowed to manifest without too much distortion, we find a true and beautiful thing. And if the movement does not last, it is because it is not conscious of its own aim and seeking; it has not the knowledge that it is not the union of one being with another that it is seeking after but the union of all beings with the Divine.

1929-06-16 - Illness and Yoga - Subtle body (nervous envelope) - Fear and illness, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The origin of an illness may be in the mind; it may be in the vital; it may be in any of the parts of the being. One and the same illness may be due to a variety of causes; it may spring in different cases from different sources of disharmony. And there may be too an appearance of illness where there is no real illness at all. In that case, if you are sufficiently conscious, you will see that there is just a friction somewhere, some halting in the movement, and by setting it right you will be cured at once. This kind of malady has no truth in it, even when it seems to have physical effects. It is half made up of imagination and has not the same grip on matter as a true illness.
In short, the sources of an illness are manifold and intricate; each can have a multitude of causes, but always it indicates where is the weak part in the being.

1950-12-25 - Christmas - festival of Light - Energy and mental growth - Meditation and concentration - The Mother of Dreams - Playing a game well, and energy, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Meditation is a purely mental activity, it interests only the mental being. One can concentrate while meditating but this is a mental concentration; one can get a silence but it is a purely mental silence, and the other parts of the being are kept immobile and inactive so as not to disturb the meditation. You may pass twenty hours of the day in meditation and for the remaining four hours you will be an altogether ordinary man because only the mind has been occupied the rest of the being, the vital and the physical, is kept under pressure so that it may not disturb. In meditation nothing is directly done for the other parts of the being.
Certainly this indirect action can have an effect, but I have known in my life people whose capacity for meditation was remarkable but who, when not in meditation, were quite ordinary men, even at times ill-natured people, who would become furious if their meditation was disturbed. For they had learnt to master only their mind, not the rest of their being.

1950-12-30 - Perfect and progress. Dynamic equilibrium. True sincerity., #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Is not perfection the fulfilment of the Divine in all the parts of the being?
No, what you are thinking of is again a rung in progress and not perfection.

1951-02-19 - Exteriorisation- clairvoyance, fainting, etc - Somnambulism - Tartini - childrens dreams - Nightmares - gurus protection - Mind and vital roam during sleep, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You are speaking of a somnambulist? But that is quite another thing. This means that the part which goes out (whether a part of the mind or a part of the vital) is so strongly attached to the body, or rather that the body is so attached to this part, that when this part decides to do something the body follows it automatically. In your inner being you decide to do a certain thing and your body is so closely tied to your inner being that without thinking of it, without wanting to do so, without making any effort, it follows and does the same thing. Note that in this matter, the physical body has capacities it would not have in the ordinary waking condition. For instance, it is well known that one can walk in dangerous places where one would find it rather difficult to walk in the waking state. The body follows the consciousness of the inner being and its own consciousness is asleep for the body has a consciousness. All the parts of the being, including the most material, have an independent consciousness. Hence when you go to sleep dead tired, when your physical body needs rest absolutely, your physical consciousness sleeps, while the consciousness of your subtle physical body or your vital or of your mind does not sleep, it continues its activity; but your physical consciousness is separated from the body, it is asleep in a state of unconsciousness, and then the part which does not sleep, which is active, uses the body without the physical consciousness as intermediary and makes it do things directly. That is how one becomes a somnambulist. According to my experience, the waking consciousness goes to sleep for some reason or other (usually due to fatigue), but the inner being is awake, and the body is so tied to it that it follows it automatically. That is why you do fantastic things, because you do not see them physically, you see them in a different way.
It is said that somnambulism is due to serious preoccupations and cares. Is this true? Tartini composed a sonata in this state, and when he got up in the morning, he wrote down the whole thing.

1951-03-08 - Silencing the mind - changing the nature - Reincarnation- choice - Psychic, higher beings gods incarnating - Incarnation of vital beings - the Lord of Falsehood - Hitler - Possession and madness, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Try to make them understand, as one does with a child who does not understand, by all kinds of means: pictures, explanations, symbols. Make them understand the necessity of union and harmony with the other parts of the being; reason with them, try to make them conscious of their acts and the consequences of these. Above all, be very patient, do not tire of repeating the same things.
In this work, can the mind be of help?

1951-03-19 - Mental worlds and their beings - Understanding in silence - Psychic world- its characteristics - True experiences and mental formations - twelve senses, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The substance of the psychic world is a substance proper to it, with its own psychic characteristics: a sense of immortality, a complete receptivity to the divine influence, an entire submission to this influence by which it is wholly impregnated. It is this exactly which distinguishes the psychic from the other parts of the being. When, for instance, I speak of organising the mind and the vital around the psychic centre, I do not mean that they become psychic; they remain the mind and the vital, but they are organised around the psychic as an army is organised around its leaderit does not become the leader, it obeys him, doesnt it? Well, it is the same thing here; the vital and the mind are organised around the psychic, they receive orders from the psychic and carry them out as well as they can. But their substance does not become psychic substance as a consequence. They can be under the influence of the psychic and assume its nature more or less but not its substance.
You said that our body can become receptive to forces which are concentrated in certain places or in certain countries. But can we have this physical sensation without a preliminary preparation of the consciousness? Or is it truly a spontaneous sensation like heat, cold or goose-flesh, for example?2

1951-03-22 - Relativity- time - Consciousness - psychic Witness - The twelve senses - water-divining - Instinct in animals - story of Mothers cat, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When one is conscious of the different parts of the being, what part is it which is conscious?
It is probably not always the same. Usually the work of becoming aware ought to be done by the psychic, but it is rarely the psychic. More often it is a part of the mind, more or less enlightened, which has acquired the capacity to stand back a little and look at the rest. But you know it well: if you are conscious in your mind, one part of the mind says one thing and the other replies, and there is an endless discussion between the two parts. Many people have these dialogues in their mind.

1951-03-31 - Physical ailment and mental disorder - Curing an illness spiritually - Receptivity of the body - The subtle-physical- illness accidents - Curing sunstroke and other disorders, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It depends on the part. The method is almost the same for all parts of the being. To begin with, the first condition: to remain as quiet as possible. You may notice that in the different parts of your being, when something comes and you do not receive it, this produces a shrinking there is something which hardens in the vital, the mind or the body. There is a stiffening and this hurts, one feels a mental, vital or physical pain. So, the first thing is to put ones will and relax this shrinking, as one does a twitching nerve or a cramped muscle; you must learn how to relax, be able to relieve this tension in whatever part of the being it may be.
The method of relaxing the contraction may be different in the mind, the vital or the body, but logically it is the same thing. Once you have relaxed the tension, you see first if the disagreeable effect ceases, which would prove that it was a small momentary resistance, but if the pain continues and if it is indeed necessary to increase the receptivity in order to be able to receive what is helpful, what should be received, you must, after having relaxed this contraction, begin trying to widen yourselfyou feel you are widening yourself. There are many methods. Some find it very useful to imagine they are floating on water with a plank under their back. Then they widen themselves, widen, until they become the vast liquid mass. Others make an effort to identify themselves with the sky and the stars, so they widen, widen themselves, identifying themselves more and more with the sky. Others again dont need these pictures; they can become conscious of their consciousness, enlarge their consciousness more and more until it becomes unlimited. One can enlarge it till it becomes vast as the earth and even the universe. When one does that one becomes really receptive. As I have said, it is a question of training. In any case, from an immediate point of view, when something comes and one feels that it is too strong, that it gives a headache, that one cant bear it, the method is just the same, you must act upon the contraction. One can act through thought, by calling the peace, tranquillity (the feeling of peace takes away much of the difficulty) like this: Peace, peace, peace tranquillity calm. Many discomforts, even physical, like all these contractions of the solar plexus, which are so unpleasant and give you at times nausea, the sensation of being suffocated, of not being able to brea the again, can disappear thus. It is the nervous centre which is affected, it gets affected very easily. As soon as there is something which affects the solar plexus, you must say, Calm calm calm, become more and more calm until the tension is destroyed.

1951-04-21 - Sri Aurobindos letter on conditions for doing yoga - Aspiration, tapasya, surrender - The lower vital - old habits - obsession - Sri Aurobindo on choice and the double life - The old fiasco - inner realisation and outer change, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Is it the same thing, the same work, to be conscious that the nature must be changed and to master the different parts of the being?
One precedes the other. First of all one must be conscious, then control, and by continuing the mastery one changes ones character. Changing the character is what comes last. One must control bad habits, the old habits, for a very long time for them to drop off and the character to change.

1951-04-26 - Irrevocable transformation - The divine Shakti - glad submission - Rejection, integral - Consecration - total self-forgetfulness - work, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That is well understood. It is not enough to have a positive movement, there must also be the negative movement of rejection. For you cannot attain a stable transformation as long as you harbour in your being elements which oppose it. If you keep obscurities within you, they may for a time remain silent and immobile, so well that you attach no importance to them, and one day they will wake up again and your transformation wont be able to resist them. Not only is the positive movement of self-giving necessary but also the negative movement of rejection of everything in you that opposes this giving. You must not leave things like that, buried somewhere, in such a way that at the first opportunity they wake up and undo all your work. There are parts of the being which know very well how to do this, there are elements of the vital which are extraordinary from this point of view: they keep quiet, hide in a corner, remain so absolutely silent and motionless that you think they dont exist; so you are no longer on your guard, you are satisfied with your transformation and your surrender, you think everything is going well, and then, suddenly, one fine day, without warning, the thing jumps up like a jack-in-the-box and makes you commit all the stupidities in the world. And it is the stronger for having remained repressedrepressed and closed tight in a cornerit has remained as though buried so as not to draw your attention, it has kept very, very quiet, and the moment you are not expecting it, it springs up and you tell yourself, Oh! What was the good of all my transformation? That thing was there, and so it happened. It is just like that, these things remain there and hide themselves so well, that if you do not go looking for them with a well-lit lantern, you will not know they are there till the day they come out and demolish all your work in one minute.
Does this happen even if one has a great aspiration?

1953-03-25, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If you have perfect sincerity, you are sure of victory. It is infinitely difficult. Sincerity consists in making all the elements of the being, all the movements (whether outer or inner), all the parts of the being, all of them, have one single will to belong to the Divine, to live only for the Divine, to will only what the Divine wills, to express only the divine Will, to have no other source of energy than that of the Divine.
And you find that there is not a day, not an hour, not a minute when you do not need to intensify, rectify your sincerity atotal refusal to deceive the Divine. The first thing is not to deceive oneself. One knows one cannot deceive the Divine; even the cleverest of the Asuras cannot deceive the Divine. But even when one has understood that, one sees that quite often in ones life, in the course of the day, one tries to deceive oneself without even knowing it, spontaneously and almost automatically. One always gives favourable explanations for all that one does, for ones words, for ones acts. That is what happens first. I am not speaking of obvious things like quarrelling and saying, It is the other ones fault, I am speaking of the very tiny things of daily life.

1953-05-06, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because you do not dream always at the same place. It is not always the same part of your being that dreams and it is not at the same place that you dream. If you were in conscious, direct, continuous communication with all the parts of your being, you would remember all your dreams. But very few parts of the being are in communication.
For example, you have a dream in the subtle physical, that is to say, quite close to the physical. Generally, these dreams occur in the early hours of the morning, that is between four and five oclock, at the end of the sleep. If you do not make a sudden movement when you wake up, if you remain very quiet, very still and a little attentivequietly attentive and concentrated, you will remember them, for the communication between the subtle physical and the physical is establishedvery rarely is there no communication.

1953-07-22, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Good. We say then that there is an imbalance between the different parts of the being, disharmony in their working. That is what I have just told you. And then there are internal conflicts. These are quarrels. There are internal quarrels among the different parts of yourself. Supposing there is an organ (it happens very often) that needs rest and there is another that wants action, and both at the same time. How are you going to manage it? They begin to quarrel. If you do what one wants, the other protests! And so you have to find a middle term to put them in harmony. And then, at times, if you add to the physical the vital and mental (I do not speak of the speculative mind or the independent vital, I am speaking of the mental and vital parts of the body, because there is a physical vital and a physical mind; there is a physical mind and this physical mind is the worst of all, it is that which goes on all the time and you have the utmost difficulty in stopping it: it goes on and on and on); well, if there is a dispute between them, between the mind, the vital and the physical, you have a battlefield, and this battlefield can become the cause of all possible illnesses. They fight violently. One wants something, the other does not, they quarrel and you are in a kind of internal whirlwind. That can give you feveryou do get it usuallyor else you are seized by an inner shivering and you have no longer any control. For the most important of all causes for bodily illness is that the body begins to get restless; it trembles and the trembling increases more and more, more and more and you feel that you will never be able to re-establish the balance, it eludes you. Then in that case you must know what the dispute is about, the reason of the dispute and find out how to reconcile the people within you.
All these are functional imbalances.

1953-09-09, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But to tell the truth, I do not believe that much progress can be made if the two do not agree, if one pulls one way and the other another. It will always be difficult. And generally it is better if the mind is converted first, for it is the mind that must have the power to organise the other parts of the being.
(Mother stops and suddenly looks at the disciples.) Someone here has just sent a mental formation that has taken, if you like, the shape of a blue paper on which something was written. It dropped down whirling, and dropped upon one of you. So I would like to know if anyone has all of a sudden received some sensational answer? Nobody? I could not spot who it was among you, for it fell twirling. Too bad. But it dropped upon one of you. It was some blue paper, it took the form of a blue paper and there was a very interesting answer upon it. Nobody received anything? Didnt some idea all of a sudden enter your head? No?

1953-10-07, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You may have a physical aspiration also; that the body may feel the need to acquire a kind of equipoise in which all the parts of the being will be well balanced, and that you may have the power to hold off illness at a distance or overcome it fast when it enters trickily, and that the body may always function normally, harmoniously, in perfect health. That is a physical aspiration.
A spiritual aspiration means having an intense need to unite with the Divine, to give oneself totally to the Divine, not to live outside the divine Consciousness so that the Divine may be everything for you in your integral being, and you feel the need of a constant communion with Him, of the sense of his presence, of his guidance in all that you do, and of his harmonising all the movements of the being. That is a spiritual aspiration.

1953-11-18, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It happens only to the extent the progress of these parts has brought them close to the psychic, that is, to the extent the progress lies in putting all the parts of the being successively under the psychic influence. For all that is under the psychic influence and identified with the psychic continues, and it is that alone which continues. But if the psychic is made the centre of ones life and consciousness, and if the whole being is organised around it, the whole being passes under the psychic influence, becomes united with it, and can continueif it is necessary for it to continue. Indeed, if the physical body could be given the same movement the same movements of progress and the same capacity to ascend that the psychic being haswell, it wouldnt be necessary for it to decompose. But that indeed is the difficulty.
And only that which is in contact with the psychic lasts, and only what can last can remember, for the rest disappears, is again dissolved into small pieces and utilised elsewhereas the body is dissolved again to dust and used elsewhere. It goes back to the earth, plants use the soil, men eat the plants. It is in this way that it goes on. And then it returns to the earth and begins again. Thats the way Nature progresses. In order to progress she makes a heap of forms, then, when that seems no longer important or necessary to her, she demolishes them, takes up all the elements again, chemical or other, and reconstitutes something else, and so it goes on changing all the time, coming and going. And she finds that very good, for she sees very far, her work extends over centuries, and a small human life is nothing, just a breath in eternity. So she takes up, shapes; she takes a certain time, its fun for her, she finds it very good; and then, when it is no longer so good, she demolishes itshe takes up, mixes everything, begins another form, makes something else. And so perhaps with this process which is evidently very slow, finally the whole of matter progresses. It is possiblealways in this way, intermingling, breaking up, remixing, breaking up again. Essentially, it is as though one made a heap of small objects and then destroyed them, remade something from the dust, remade other toys, and again broke them, and remade others out of that. Each time one adds something so that it mixes well. And then, one day, perhaps all that will produce something. In any case, she is in no hurry. And when we are in a hurry, she says: Why are you in such a haste? It is sure to happen one day. You dont need to worry, it will surely come. Wait quietly. Then we tell her: But it is not I who am waiting!Ah! thats because you call I that thing which comes and goes away. If you were to call consciousness the one, eternal and divine consciousness if you were to call that I, then you would see everything, you would witness everything. Nobody prevents you from doing it! It is only because you identify yourself with this (indicating the body). You have only to stop identifying yourself with that.

1953-12-23, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Intermediary? But you see, if one does it by a methodical discipline, generally one is obliged to pass from one plane to another: one wakes up in a particular plane, and then there one enters a sort of sleep and wakes up in another plane, and so on. And if one does it this way, then one remembers, for one does it with ones conscious will and witnesses the working these movements for quietening the being, precisely, in order to enter somewhere and see what is happening there, and the movement of taking notes of what is happening and preparing oneself for another higher opening, all this establishes conscious contact between the different parts of the being, and then one can have experiences without forgetting anything, and even at will.
But there are some rather uneducated people, for instance, who suddenly develop a faculty and have a direct experience somewhere in the higher mind or the psychic being or in some other part of the being. There are many reasons for this: it may be the result of former lives, it may be a phenomenon of consciousness of this life, it could be many things. In any case, for it to be fully useful, it should be done with the will to use it for ones progress and become conscious of the different parts of the being in order to be able to do what one ought to do to the best of ones ability. For instance, I have known people who were absolutely ignorant and uneducated but had a gift of vision, and a remarkable gift: they were put into trance and saw marvellously and described things they knew how to see and describe all they saw whilst they were seeing it. But when they came out of that condition, they were absolutely ordinary beings without any education and intelligence. Yet that was a marvellous gift. That means there are beings who can make the greatest progress from the spiritual point of view, and even the intellectual, and who yet are apparently and in their outer life quite ordinary. There are others I have known some who had an absolutely marvellous spiritual realisation, who lived constantly in the divine Presence and yet never had a vision in all their life! And they used to complain about it. It is a question of temperament, destiny, and probably of the work one has to do, for evidently one cant do everythingphysically it is impossible. Consequently one must choose.
When the body falls ill, do the mind and vital also fall ill?
Not necessarily. Illness (I have explained this to you) comes usually from a dislocation between the different parts of the being, from a sort of disharmony. Well, it can very well happen that the body has not followed a certain movement of progress, for instance, that it has remained behind, and that, on the other hand, the other parts of the being have progressed, and so that disequilibrium, that rupture of harmony creates the illness, and the mind may be in a very fine state and the vital also. There are people who have been ill for yearswith terrible, incurable diseasesand who have kept their mental capacity marvellously clear and progressed mentally. There is a French poet (a very good poet) called Sully Prudhomme; he was mortally ill; and it was then that he wrote his most beautiful poems. He remained charming, amiable, smilingamiable with everyone, and yet his body was going to pieces. That depends on people. There are others stillas soon as they feel the least bit ill, everything is upset from top to bottom they are then good for nothing. For each one the combination is different.
It is said there is a relation between the body and the mind. If the mind is not quite all right, then what?

1954-05-19 - Affection and love - Psychic vision Divine - Love and receptivity - Get out of the ego, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The body in its natural state likes equilibrium, likes harmony; it is the other parts of the being which spoil everything.
Mother, how can one prevent the mind from intervening?

1954-09-15 - Parts of the being - Thoughts and impulses - The subconscient - Precise vocabulary - The Grace and difficulties, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1954-09-15 - parts of the being - Thoughts and impulses - The subconscient - Precise vocabulary - The Grace and difficulties
class:chapter

1954-09-22 - The supramental creation - Rajasic eagerness - Silence from above - Aspiration and rejection - Effort, individuality and ego - Aspiration and desire, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That is, the first step is the identification, and then, once you can keep this identification, the psychic govern the rest of the nature and life. It becomes the master of existence. So this is what we mean by the psychic coming in front. It is that which govern, directs, even organises the life, organises the consciousness, the different parts of the being. When this happen, the work goes very fast. Very fast, well relatively very fast.
In the human consciousness everything is very slow. When we compare the time that is necessary to realise something with the average length of human existence, it seems interminable. But happily there comes a time when one escapes from this notion, when one begin to feel no longer according to human measures. As soon as one is truly in touch with the psychic, one loses this kind of narrowness and of agony also, this agony which is so bad: I must be quick, I must be quick, there is not much time, I must hurry, there is not much time. One does things very badly or doesnt do them at all any more. But as soon as there is a contact with the psychic, then indeed this disappears; one begin to be a little more vast and calm and peaceful, and to live in eternity.

1954-11-03 - Body opening to the Divine - Concentration in the heart - The army of the Divine - The knot of the ego -Streng thening ones will, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, yes! First of all there are many different parts of the being and each one can open in its own way, you see; the mental opening and the vital opening are very different in nature and the physical opening is still more different.
What is the physical opening?
--
Knot? Oh! It is an image, you see. But it is something that clings to you and holds you as tightly as a well-made rope knot. And so it is always said that in order to progress truly the first thing to do is to cut the knot of the ego. It is very expressive and makes a good image, doesnt it?one is tied up, one is shut up in oneself, bound as in a prison by knots which tie up all the parts of the being together; it is this which produces a cohesion. But at the same time it is a limitation, a limiting. You cannot receive all the forces you would like to, because you are enclosed in this shell made of a heap of knots in the rope thats tying you.
Sweet Mother, how can we cut the knot of the ego?

1954-12-15 - Many witnesses inside oneself - Children in the Ashram - Trance and the waking consciousness - Ascetic methods - Education, spontaneous effort - Spiritual experience, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In all the parts of the being there is one side which can do this: put itself at the back, remain quiet and look, without participating. This is what is called the witness. One has many witnesses inside oneself, and often one is a witness without even being aware of it. And if you develop this, it always gives you the possibility of being quiet and not being affected by things. One detaches oneself from them, looks at them as at a dramatic scene, without participating in it. This does not change things very much.
Sweet Mother, here we have the opportunity of learning many things; however, we don't use this opportunity.

1954-12-22 - Possession by hostile forces - Purity and morality - Faith in the final success -Drawing back from the path, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It depends on the degree of the possession. Usually it is something progressive. First there is an influence under which one comes, and comes in a fragmentary way, not even totally in his being, but in certain parts and for a time. This is the first stage. The second: the influence becomes permanent and there is one part of the being which deteriorates, which is constantly under this influence and expresses it. After this, the being which has cast this influence tries to enter that part. Then, usually, this produces a conflict, a kind of inner battle. People have fits, sometimes even nervous morbid fits. In trying to resist, the two parts of the being come constantly into conflict, and this produces great imbalance, even physical imbalance. But if one doesnt know how to resist and doesnt succeed in shaking off the hold, then gradually the being that has seized upon a part of the person acts like an octopus and spreads its tentacles like that, slowly and everywhere; and finally it is a total possession. At the moment of the total possession, either the possessed person becomes completely unbalanced or he becomes a kind of monster and his psychic being leaves him.
These cases are extremely rare, fortunately. Usually, in the human being the psychic is strong enough to be able to resist, and the most frequent case is that of constant conflict between the two parts, until the psychic being, if it is strong enough and knows how to lean on a greater strength than its own, is capable of rejecting this influence and freeing itself. It is only in an extreme case of a total possession that the psychic being goes away. But these are extremely rare cases, extremely rare. It sometimes happen that a child is still-born, that is, just at the moment of birth it dies or a few minutes later, or an hour or two later, you see, just at that time. In these cases it happens that it is the psychic being which has decided not to use this body. But if, for example, the doctor who is looking after the case is a clever man or the nurse a clever person and they can bring back life into the body by artificial respiration or such means, most often it is a hostile being which gets hold of this body. There have been cases like that, children who seemed to be dead, that is, the psychic being had left the body, and before it had died completely, a vital being had entered and taken its place. Such cases have been known. And these beings are demo. In life they become veritable demo. There are not many of them.

1955-02-09 - Desire is contagious - Primitive form of love - the artists delight - Psychic need, mind as an instrument - How the psychic being expresses itself - Distinguishing the parts of ones being - The psychic guides - Illness - Mothers vision, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have met people who used to think themselves extremely intelligent, by the way, who thought they knew a lot, and when I spoke to them about the different parts of the being they looked at me like this (gesture) and asked me, But what are you speaking about? They did not understand at all. I am speaking of people who have the reputation of being intelligent. They dont understand at all. For them it is just the consciousness; it is the consciousness It is my consciousness and then there is the neighbours consciousness; and again there are things which do not have any consciousness. And then I asked them whether animals had a consciousness; so they began to scratch their heads and said, Perhaps it is we who put our consciousness in the animal when we look at it, like that
Sweet Mother, when the psychic being will be able to manifest itself perfectly, will it have any need of the mind?
It will not be able to manifest perfectly unless all the parts of the being collaborate. But I dont think that the mind was fashioned with the intention of making it disappear. It is a part of the general structure.
Your body, you see, if it were without a mind it would be quite at a loss. It would perhaps be more like a plant than a body. There is nothing that you do from morning to evening in which the mind does not have its action.
--
And then there remains the poor physical The poor physical being has been accused of all the misdeeds. In the days of old it was always said that it was impossible, one could do nothing with something so inert, so obscure, so little receptive. But if it too was surrendered to the psychic it also would do the right thing in the right way, and then it would have a stability, a quietude, an exactness in its movements which the other parts of the being dont have, a precision in the execution which one cant have without a body. You have only to see when the body is just a little out of order, when it is ill, how many things you can no longer do, even with a strong will, a great concentration of the vital and the mind. Even when one has the precise knowledge of what ought to be done, if the body is out of order one can no longer do it. Even I mean, even an activity which is not purely physical, as for instance, writing something.
If your brain is a little unwellfever, coldit is very difficult to make it work properly. There is lassitude and something vague, a difficulty in catching things with precision; there occur even very strange phenomena, ideas get mixed up before one is able to express them, things enter into conflict and contradict each other; instead of joining together and coming in this way (gesture); you see, they begin to do this (gesture), so then it creates a disorder. So one tries to catch this one and it escapes. One goes to look for that one, hop! It runs away. And all this just because there is fever which has disturbed things a little, or a cold, you know, what is called a cold in the head, which has slightly disturbed the functioning. If you rise above it, you are absolutely lucid, you are fully conscious, have complete lucidity. Even if you are extremely ill, it makes no difference. Up there you know everything perfectly, you see everything perfectly, you understand everything perfectly, there is no change.

1955-03-02 - Right spirit, aspiration and desire - Sleep and yogic repose, how to sleep - Remembering dreams - Concentration and outer activity - Mother opens the door inside everyone - Sleep, a school for inner knowledge - Source of energy, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sleep can be a very active means of concentration and inner knowledge. Sleep is the school one has to go through, if one knows how to learn his lesson there, so that the inner being may be independent of the physical form, conscious in itself and master of its own life. There are entire parts of the being which need this immobility and semi-consciousness of the outer being, of the body, in order to be able to live their own life, independently.
Only, people dont know, they sleep because they sleep, as they eat, as they liveby a kind of instinct, a semi-conscious impulse. They dont even ask themselves the question. You are asking the question now: Why does one sleep? But there are millions and millions of beings who sleep without ever having asked themselves the question why one sleeps. They sleep because they feel sleepy, they eat because they are hungry, and they do foolish things because their instincts push them, without thinking, without reasoning; but for those who know, sleep is a school, an excellent school for something other than the school of waking hours.

1955-04-06 - Freuds psychoanalysis, the subliminal being - The psychic and the subliminal - True psychology - Changing the lower nature - Faith in different parts of the being - Psychic contact established in all in the Ashram, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1955-04-06 - Freuds psychoanalysis, the subliminal being - The psychic and the subliminal - True psychology - Changing the lower nature - Faith in different parts of the being - Psychic contact established in all in the Ashram
class:chapter

1955-05-25 - Religion and reason - true role and field - an obstacle to or minister of the Spirit - developing and meaning - Learning how to live, the elite - Reason controls and organises life - Nature is infrarational, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is an obstacle if you want to use it as judge and master. But it is not an obstacle if you use it as an instrument, like all the other parts of the being. It is an excellent instrument on condition that it remains an instrument and doesnt want to become the master who decides and judges. It is a power of judgment which, in its field, is absolutely right. But as soon as it goes beyond its domain, it cannot understand, it has no discernment any longer.
So if the reason understands this and keeps quiet, with the attitude of an instrument and not of master and judge, it is perfect. But for this the growing consciousness must already be developed enough in a suprarational domain to be able to act on the reason from above and make it understand the thing, because that domain is not a part of reason. So naturally it denies it unless there is a part of the consciousness which is sufficiently developed to be able to put something upon it that will make it understand. All depends on the degree of development of the individuals consciousness. It is a purely individual question.
--
It is rather a state than a domain. In the physical it is possible to have a suprarational domain, in the vital it is possible to have a suprarational domain, in the mind too it is possible to have a suprarational domain, and there are suprarational regions which lie beyond all these domains. In a certain part of the consciousness and of life it is rather a state than a region. It is a mode of being. It is something which goes beyond the state of ordinary consciousness. But even physically it can be experienced, vitally also. Suddenly one may feel that one is in contact with something surpassing all rational regions and it is there, in the vital itself, it is an influence acting from above. Otherwise it would be absolutely impossible to hope for the transformation of the lower parts of the beingei ther mental or vital or physical; they could never be transformed if they were incapable of receiving into themselves the suprarational influence; and it is here, it is to be found, to be discovered.
Sweet Mother, here Sri Aurobindo has written: On one side it (the reason) is an enlightenernot always the chief enlightener
Yes, this is what we said, that in the rational domain thats what gives the true judgment, the true guidance. This is what we call an enlightener: one who gives light. When you are not sure of something, when you are in darkness, in a confusion, if you call to reason, it can guide you very well, make you see clearly where you were in darkness; therefore it is an enlightener. Now, minister of the Spirit means precisely what he was asking, that is, that it can be transformed into an instrument for revealing the spiritual reality in the lower parts of the being; minister of the Spirit thats what it means; a minister is an instrument of something, you see, it means the instrument of the Spirit. And it can prepare the paths for the coming of the rule of the Spirit, precisely make the being balanced and peaceful, right in its judgments, right in its way of acting, so that being in a state of luminous equilibrium, it becomes capable of receiving the Spirit.
A being who is in a whirlwind of darkness is obviously not ready to receive the Spirit. But when by the use of reason one has managed to organise his being logically and reasonably, in a balanced and wise wayreason is essentially an instrument of wisdomwell, this is an excellent preparation for going beyond, on condition that one knows that it is not a culmination, that it is only a preparation. It is like a base, you see; people who have spiritual experiences, who have a contact with the higher worlds and are not ready in the lower domains, have a lot of trouble, because they have to fight constantly against a heap of elements which are neither organised nor purified nor classified; and each one pulls its own way, there are impulses and preferences and desires, and so this light which has come from above has to organise all this; whereas if the reason had worked to begin with and made the place at least a habitable one, when the Spirit came it would have been more easily installed.

1955-06-22 - Awakening the Yoga-shakti - The thousand-petalled lotus- Reading, how far a help for yoga - Simple and complicated combinations in men, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother reads from Lights on Yoga, "Planes and parts of the being".
How can one awaken his Yogashakti?
--
Yes. The composition is completely different, otherwise everybody would be the same. There are not two beings with an identical combination; between the different parts of the being and the composition of these parts the proportion is different in each individual. There are people, primitive men, people like the yet undeveloped races or the degenerated ones whose combinations are fairly simple; they are still complicated, but comparatively simple. And there are people absolutely at the top of the human ladder, the elite of humanity; their combinations become so complicated that a very special discernment is needed to find the relations between all these things.
There are beings who carry in themselves thousands of different personalities, and then each one has its own rhythm and alternation, and there is a kind of combination; sometimes there are inner conflicts, and there is a play of activities which are rhythmic and with alternations of certain parts which come to the front and then go back and again come to the front. But when one takes all that, it makes such complicated combinations that some people truly find it difficult to understand what is going on in themselves; and yet these are the ones most capable of a complete, coordinated, conscious, organised action; but their organisation is infinitely more complicated than that of primitive or undeveloped men who have two or three impulses and four or five ideas, and who can arrange all this very easily in themselves and seem to be very co-ordinated and logical because there is not very much to organise. But there are people truly like a multitude, and so that gives them a plasticity, a fluidity of action and an extraordinary complexity of perception, and these people are capable of understanding a considerable number of things, as though they had at their disposal a veritable army which they move according to circumstance and need; and all this is inside them. So when these people, with the help of yoga, the discipline of yoga, succeed in centralising all these beings around the central light of the divine Presence, they become powerful entities, precisely because of their complexity. So long as this is not organised they often give the impression of an incoherence, they are almost incomprehensible, one cant manage to understand why they are like that, they are so complex. But when they have organised all these beings, that is, put each one in its place around the divine centre, then truly they are terrific, for they have the capacity of understanding almost everything and doing almost everything because of the multitude of entities they contain, of which they are constituted. And the nearer one is to the top of the ladder, the more it is like that, and consequently the more difficult it is to organise ones being; because when you have about a dozen elements, you can quickly compass and organise them, but when you have thousands of them, it is difficult.

1955-06-29 - The true vital and true physical - Time and Space - The psychics memory of former lives - The psychic organises ones life - The psychics knowledge and direction, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother reads from Lights on Yoga, "Planes and parts of the being".
Sweet Mother, has the vital nature of man come out from his true vital being?

1955-07-06 - The psychic and the central being or jivatman - Unity and multiplicity in the Divine - Having experiences and the ego - Mental, vital and physical exteriorisation - Imagination has a formative power - The function of the imagination, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother reads from Lights on Yoga, "Planes and parts of the being".
Sweet Mother, here it is written: Finally the soul or psychic being retires into the psychic world to rest there till a new birth is close. Then, Mother, what happens to the central being afterwards?

1955-07-13 - Cosmic spirit and cosmic consciousness - The wall of ignorance, unity and separation - Aspiration to understand, to know, to be - The Divine is in the essence of ones being - Realising desires through the imaginaton, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother reads from Lights on Yoga, "Planes and parts of the being".
Now then!

1955-08-03 - Nothing is impossible in principle - Psychic contact and psychic influence - Occult powers, adverse influences; magic - Magic, occultism and Yogic powers -Hypnotism and its effects, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is because this inmost soul, that is, the central psychic being, influences the superficial parts of the consciousness (superficial in comparison with it: mental parts, vital parts). The purest mind, the highest vital, the emotive being the soul influences them, influences them to an extent where one has the impression of entering into contact with it through these parts of the being. So people take these parts for the soul and that is why he says the inmost soul, that is, the central soul, the real soul.
For very often, when one touches certain parts of the mind which are under the psychic influence and full of light and the joy of that light, or when one touches certain very pure and very high parts of the emotive being which has the most generous, most unselfish emotions, one also has the impression of being in contact with ones soul. But this is not the true soul, it is not the soul in its very essence. These are parts of the being under its influence and manifesting something of it. So, very often people enter into contact with these parts and this gives them illuminations, great joy, revelations, and they feel they have found their soul. But it is only the part of the being under its influence, one part or another, for Exactly what happens is that one touches these things, has experiences, and then it gets veiled, and one wonders, How is it that I touched my soul and now have fallen back into this state of ignorance and inconscience! But thats because one had not touched ones soul, one had touched those parts of the being which are under the influence of the soul and manifest something of it, but are not it.
I have already said many times that when one enters consciously into contact with ones soul and the union is established, it is over, it can no longer be undone, it is something permanent, constant, which resists everything, and which, at any moment whatever, if referred to can be found; whereas the other thingsone can have very fine experiences, and then it gets veiled again, and one tells oneself, How does that happen? I saw my soul and now I dont find it any more! It was not the soul one had seen. And these things are very beautiful and give you very impressive experiences, but this is not the contact with the psychic being itself.

1955-12-28 - Aspiration in different parts of the being - Enthusiasm and gratitude - Aspiration is in all beings - Unlimited power of good, evil has a limit - Progress in the parts of the being - Significance of a dream, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1955-12-28 - Aspiration in different parts of the being - Enthusiasm and gratitude - Aspiration is in all beings - Unlimited power of good, evil has a limit - Progress in the parts of the being - Significance of a dream
class:chapter

1956-01-04 - Integral idea of the Divine - All things attracted by the Divine - Bad things not in place - Integral yoga - Moving idea-force, ideas - Consequences of manifestation - Work of Spirit via Nature - Change consciousness, change world, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Not quite. An integral yoga is one which comprises all the parts of the being and all the activities of the being. But the activities of one being are not as powerful as the activities of another; and the integrality of one being is not as total as the integrality of another. You dont understand?
If all your being, as it is, participates in the yoga, it becomes for you an integral yoga. But your participation may be very poor and mediocre pared with that of someone else, and the number of elements of consciousness which you contain may be very small pared with the elements of consciousness contained in another person. And yet your yoga is integral for you, that is, it is done in all the parts and all the activities of your being.

1956-01-11 - Desire and self-deception - Giving all one is and has - Sincerity, more powerful than will - Joy of progress Definition of youth, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The bargaining is everywhere, in all the parts of the being. It is always give and take, from the highest spiritual experiences to the tiniest little material needs. There is not one in a thousand who gives without bargaining.
And the beauty of the story I told youmoreover, there are many others like it hereis just this, that when the old woman gave, she didnt know that it was Shiva. She gave to the sing beggar, for the joy of doing good, of giving, not because he was a god and she hoped to have salvation or some knowledge in exchange.

1956-02-15 - Nature and the Master of Nature - Conscious intelligence - Theory of the Gita, not the whole truth - Surrender to the Lord - Change of nature, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, as he says, this may be useful, that is, instead of causing a confusion between the different parts of the being, this helps you to distinguish between what is higher and what is lower, what is turned towards the Divine and what is turned towards matter. It is a psychologically useful conception, but, in fact, thats all there is to it. Things are not like that.
Sri Aurobindo writes: Nature,not as she is in her divine Truth, the conscious Power of the Eternal, but as she appears to us in the Ignorance,is executive Force, mechanical in her steps, not consciously intelligent to our experiences of her, although all her works are instinct with an absolute intelligence.

1956-06-06 - Sign or indication from books of revelation - Spiritualised mind - Stages of sadhana - Reversal of consciousness - Organisation around central Presence - Boredom, most common human malady, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But then, suddenlyperhaps because one is sufficiently prepared, perhaps simply because the time has come, and it has been so decreedsuddenly, when such an experience occurs, its result in the part of the being where it takes place is a complete reversal of consciousness. It is a very clear, very concrete phenomenon. The best way of describing it is this: a complete reversal. And then the relation of the consciousness with the other parts of the being and with the outer world is as if completely changed. Absolutely like an overturning. And that reversal no longer comes back to the same old place, the consciousness no longer returns to its former positionSri Aurobindo would say status. Once this has happened in any part of the being, this part of the being is stabilised.
And until that happens, it comes and goes, comes and goes, one advances and then has the impression of marking time, and one advances again and then marks time again, and sometimes one feels as though one were going backwards, and it is interminable and indeed it is interminable. It may last for years and years and years. But when this reversal of consciousness takes place, whether in the mind or a part of the mind, whether in the vital or a part of the vital, or even in the physical consciousness itself and in the body-consciousness, once this is established, it is over; you no longer go back, you do not ever return to what you were before. And this is the true indication that you have taken a step forward definitively. And before this, there are only preparations.

1956-08-01 - Value of worship - Spiritual realisation and the integral yoga - Symbols, translation of experience into form - Sincerity, fundamental virtue - Intensity of aspiration, with anguish or joy - The divine Grace, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When that is not there, the aspiration may come from different parts of the being; it may come mainly from the mind or mainly from the vital or even from the physical, or it may come from all the three togetherit may come from all kinds of combinations. But in general, for the intensity to be there, the vital must be present. It is the vital which gives the intensity; and as the vital is at the same time the seat of most of the difficulties, obstacles, contradictions, it is the friction between the intensity of the aspiration and the intensity of the difficulty which creates this anguish.
This is no reason to stop ones aspiration.

1956-09-19 - Power, predominant quality of vital being - The Divine, the psychic being, the Supermind - How to come out of the physical consciousness - Look life in the face - Ordinary love and Divine love, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo says that the vital part, the vital being is the greatest obstacle because it is unregenerate, and that there would be a possibility of transforming it if it surrendered entirely to Love and Knowledge; but as its predominant quality is force, energy, power, it does not like to submit to other parts of the being, and this justifies its refusal to submit itself, for those virtues in their essence are as high as the others. That is why it has neither the same power nor the same capacities, for it is not developed, it has not surrendered, and this is what causes the dilemma: it does not submit because it has this power, and this power cannot be utilised because it is not surrendered. So, how to get out of that? The vital, if it were surrendered, would be a very powerful help, extremely useful, it would make the whole process go much more rapidly. But because it feels its own power, it refuses to submit to the others; and because it does not submit, its power cannot be utilised. So, what is to be done? Sri Aurobindo states the problemhe is going to solve it afterwards; if we continue reading, after a while he will tell us how to solve this problem but he states it first so that we may fully understand the situation.
If the vital were a mediocre being without definite qualities, there would be no difficulty in its surrendering, but it would be altogether useless. But, on the contrary, the vital is a sort of stronghold of energy and powerof all powers. Yet generally this power is diverted; it is no longer at the service of the Divine, it is at the service of the vital itself for its own satisfaction. So, as long as it is like that, it cannot be used.

1956-10-24 - Taking a new body - Different cases of incarnation - Departure of soul from body, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If we take the best instance, of someone who has unified his being completely around the divine Presence within him, who is now only one will, one consciousness, this person will have grouped around his central psychic being a fully developed and organised mind, an absolutely surrendered and collaborating vital and an obedient, docile and supple physical being. This physical being, as it is fully developed, will have a subtle bodywhat Sri Aurobindo calls the true physicalwhich will infinitely surpass the limits of its body and have enough suppleness, plasticity, balance to be able to adhere to the inner parts of the being and follow the movement of the soul in its I dont want to say in its ascent, but in its peregrinations outside the body. What the soul will do, where it will goit all depends on what it has decided before leaving the body. And this capacity to keep around itself the being that has been fully organised and unified in its physical life, will allow it to really choose what it wants to do. And this also represents a very different field of possibilities, from sing consciously from one body into another, directly there are instances in which one of these fully conscious and fully developed beings has slowly prepared another being capable of receiving and assimilating it, and in order not to stop its material work when it leaves one body, it goes and joins another psychic being, merges with it, combines with it in another physical body; that is an extreme case, extremely rare also, but one which forms part of an altogether traditional occult knowledgeto the instance at the other extreme, where the soul having finished its bodily experience, wants to assimilate it in repose and prepare for another physical existence later, sometimes much later. And so this is what happens, among many other possibilities: it leaves in each domainin the subtle physical, in the vital, in the mental domain the corresponding beings; it leaves them with a sort of link between them, but each one keeps its independent existence, and it itself goes into the zone, the reality, the world of the psychic proper, and enters into a blissful repose for assimilation, until it has assimilated (laughing), as described in this paper, all its good deeds, digested all its good deeds, and is ready to begin a new experience. And then, if its work has been well done and the parts or sheaths of its being which it has left in their different domains have acted as they should there, when it descends again, it will put on one after another all these parts which lived with it in a former life, and with this wealth of knowledge and experience it will prepare to enter a new body. This may be after hundreds or thousands of years, for in those domains all that is organised is no longer necessarily subject to the deposition which here we call death. As soon as a vital being is fully harmonised, it becomes immortal. What dissolves it and breaks it up are all the disorders within it and all the tendencies towards destruction and deposition; but if it is fully harmonised and organised and, so to say, divinised, it becomes immortal. It is the same thing for the mind. And even in the subtle physical, beings who are fully developed and have been impregnated with spiritual forces do not necessarily dissolve after death. They may continue to act or may take a beneficial rest in certain elements of Nature like watergenerally it is in some liquid, in water or the sap of treesor it may be, as described here (laughing), in the clouds. But they may also remain active and continue to act on the more material elements of physical Nature.
I have given you here a certain number of examples; I tell you, I could talk to you for hours and there would always be new examples to give! But this covers the subject broadly and opens the door to imagination.

1956-12-19 - Preconceived mental ideas - Process of creation - Destructive power of bad thoughts - To be perfectly sincere, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there are others more subtle which are difficult to discern. For instance, so long as you have sympathies and antipathies, quite naturally and as it were spontaneously you will have a favourable perception of what is sympathetic to you and an unfavourable perception of whator whomyou dislike. And there too the lack of sincerity will be flagrant. However, you may deceive yourself and not perceive that you are being insincere. Then in that case, you have, as it were, the collaboration of mental insincerity. For it is true that there are insincerities of slightly different types according to the state of being or the parts of the being. Only, the origin of these insincerities is always a similar movement arising from desire and the seeking of personal endsfrom egoism, from the combination of all the limitations arising from egoism and all the deformations arising from desire.
In fact, as long as the ego is there, one cannot say that a being is perfectly sincere, even though he is striving to become sincere. One must pass beyond the ego, give oneself up totally to the divine Will, surrender without reserve and without calculation then one can be perfectly sincere, but not before.

1957-02-13 - Suffering, pain and pleasure - Illness and its cure, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The secret is to emerge from the ego, get out of its prison, unite ourselves with the Divine, merge into Him, not to allow anything to separate us from Him. Then, once one has discovered this secret and realises it in ones being, pain loses its justification and suffering disappears. It is an all-powerful remedy, not only in the deeper parts of the being, in the soul, in the spiritual consciousness, but also in life and in the body.
There is no illness, no disorder which can resist the discovery of this secret and the putting of it into practice, not only in the higher parts of the being but in the cells of the body.
If one knows how to teach the cells the splendour that lies within them, if one knows how to make them understand the reality which makes them exist, gives them being, then they too enter the total harmony, and the physical disorder which causes the illness vanishes as do all other disorders of the being.

1957-06-19 - Causes of illness Fear and illness - Minds working, faith and illness, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We have often said that illnesses are always the result of a disturbance of equilibrium, but this disturbance can occur in completely different states of being. For the ordinary man whose consciousness is centred in the physical, outer life, it is a purely physical disturbance of equilibrium, of the functioning of the different organs. But when behind this purely superficial life, an inner life is being fashioned, the causes of illness change; they always become the expression of a disequilibrium between the different parts of the being: between the inner progress or effort and the outer resistances or conditions of ones life, ones body.
Even from the ordinary external point of view, it has been recognised for a very long time that it is a fall in the resistance of the vitality due to immediate moral causes which is always at the origin of an illness. When one is in a normal state of equilibrium and lives in a normal physical harmony, the body has a capacity of resistance, it has within it an atmosphere strong enough to resist illnesses: its most material substance emanates subtle vibrations which have the strength to resist illnesses, even diseases which are called contagiousin fact, all vibrations are contagious, but still, certain diseases are considered as especially contagious. Well, a man who, even from the purely external point of view, is in a state in which his organs function harmoniously and an adequate psychological balance prevails, has at the same time enough resistance for the contagion not to affect him. But if for some reason or other he loses this equilibrium or is weakened by depression, dissatisfaction, moral difficulties or undue fatigue, for instance, this reduces the normal resistance of the body and he is open to the disease. But if we consider someone who is doing yoga, then it is altogether different, in the sense that the causes of disequilibrium are of a different nature and the illness usually becomes the expression of an inner difficulty which has to be overcome.

1958-02-12 - Psychic progress from life to life - The earth, the place of progress, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Otherwise, in ordinary people in whom the psychic form is not fully developed and organised, when the psychic leaves the body, the mental and vital forms may persist for a certain time if the death has been particularly peaceful and concentrated, but if a man dies suddenly and in a state of passion, with numerous attachments, well, the different parts of the being are dispersed and live for a shorter or longer time their own life in their own domain, then disappear.
The centre of organisation and transformation is always the presence of the psychic in the body. Therefore, it is a very big mistake to believe that the progress continues or even, as some believe, that it is more complete and rapid in the periods of transition between two physical lives; in general, there is no progress at all, for the psychic enters into a state of rest and the other parts, after a more or less ephemeral life in their own domain, are dissolved.

1958-04-09 - The eyes of the soul - Perceiving the soul, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Things are not so clear-cut and separate as they are in speaking; that is just why it is quite difficult to see very distinctly and clearly in oneself the different parts of the being, unless one has had a very long training and a long discipline of study and observation. There are no watertight compartments between the soul and the mind, the vital and even the physical. There is an infiltration of the soul into the mind. In some people it is even quite considerable, it is perceptible. So, the part of the mind which has a kind of sensibility, of subtle contact with the psychic being, is capable of feeling the presence of the soul in others.
Those who have the ability to enter to a certain extent into the consciousness of others to the point of being able to see or feel directly their thought, their mental activity, who can enter the mental atmosphere of others without needing to use words to make themselves understood, can easily differentiate between someone whose soul is active and someone whose soul is asleep. The activity of the soul gives a special colouring to the mental activityit is lighter, more comprehensive and luminousso that can be felt. For instance, by looking into someones eyes you can say with some certainty that this person has a living soul or that you dont see his soul in his eyes. Many people can feelmany, I mean among evolved peoplecan say that. But naturally, to know exactly how far somebodys soul is awake and active, how far it rules the being, is the master, one must have the psychic consciousness oneself, for that alone can judge definitively. But it is not altogether impossible to have that sort of inner vibration which makes you say, Oh! This person has a soul.

1958-05-21 - Mental honesty, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It would seem that in the ordinary psychological constitution of man, the almost constant function of the mind is to give an acceptable explanation of what goes on in the desire-being, the vital, the most material parts of the mind and the subtlest parts of the body. There is a kind of general complicity in all the parts of the being to give an explanation and even a comfortable justification for everything we do, in order to avoid as far as possible the painful impressions left by the mistakes we commit and undesirable movements. For instance, unless one has undergone or taken up a special training, whatever one does, the mind gives itself a favourable enough explanation of it, so that one is not troubled. Only under the pressure of outer reactions or circumstances or movements coming from other people, does one gradually consent to look less favourably at what one is and does, and begins to ask oneself whether things could not be better than they are.
Spontaneously, the first movement is what is known as self-defense. One puts oneself on ones guard and quite spontaneously one wants a justification for the smallest things, absolutely insignificant thingsit is a normal attitude in life.

1958 10 17, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For a very long time in life, until one possesses anything resembling Knowledge, it is indispensable that reason be the master, otherwise one is the plaything of ones impulses, ones fancies, ones more or less disordered emotional imaginings, and one is in danger of being very far removed not merely from wisdom but even from the knowledge needed for conducting oneself acceptably. But when one has managed to control all the lower parts of the being with the help of reason, which is the apex of ordinary human intelligence, then if one wants to go beyond this point, if one wants to liberate oneself from ordinary life, from ordinary thought, from the ordinary vision of things, one must, if I may say so, stand upon the head of reason, not trampling it down disdainfully, but using it as a stepping stone to something higher, something beyond it, to attain to something which concerns itself very little with the decrees of reason; something which can allow itself to be irrational because it is a higher irrationality, with a higher light; something which is beyond ordinary knowledge and which receives its inspirations from above, from high above, from the divine Wisdom.
That is what this means.

1965 12 26?, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This corresponds to the experience of absolute freedom one has in the higher parts of the being when one is no longer at all dependent on the body. But what is remarkable I insist strongly on thisis that the consciousness of the body has these experiences and it is a body which is still visibly here!
Obviously, there is nothing left of what gives confidence in life to human beings. Apparently there is no longer any support from the outer world, there is nothing but the supreme Will. To translate this into plain words, well, the body has the feeling that it lives only because the supreme Lord wants it to live, otherwise it could not live.

2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Richness in Sadhana can be attained even without any previous preparation. There comes a time in Sadhana when the various parts of the being attain to their fulfilment from within of course, this is true within certain limits.
A disciple mentioned the difficulty of the vital impulse to act.

2.04 - Concentration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:Along with purity and as a help to bring it about, concentration. Purity and concentration are indeed two aspects, feminine and masculine, passive and active, of the same status of being; purity is the condition in which concentration becomes entire, rightly effective, omnipotent; by concentration purity does its works and without it would only lead to a state of peaceful quiescence and eternal repose. Their opposites are also closely connected; for we have seen that impurity is a confusion of Dharmas, a lax, mixed and mutually entangled action of the different parts of the being; and this confusion proceeds from an absence of right concentration of its knowledge on its energies in the embodied Soul. The fault of our nature is first an inert subjection to the impacts of things303 as they come in upon the mind pell-mell without order or control and then a haphazard imperfect concentration managed fitfully, irregularly with a more or less chance emphasis on this or on that object according as they happen to interest, not the higher soul or the judging and discerning intellect, but the restless, leaping, fickle, easily tired, easily distracted lower mind which is the chief enemy of our progress. In such a condition purity, the right working of the functions, the clear, unstained and luminous order of the being is an impossibility; the various workings, given over to the chances of the environment and external influences, must necessarily run into each other and clog, divert, distract, pervert. Equally, without purity the complete, equal, flexible concentration of the being in right thought, right will, right feeling or secure status of spiritual experience is not possible. Therefore the two must proceed together, each helping the victory of the other, until we arrive at that eternal calm from which may proceed some partial image in the human being of the eternal, omnipotent and omniscient activity.
2:But in the path of knowledge as it is practised in India concentration is used in a special and more limited sense. It means that removal of the thought from all distracting activities of the mind and that concentration of it on the idea of the One by which the soul rises out of the phenomenal into the one Reality. It is by the thought that we dissipate ourselves in the phenomenal; it is by the gathering back of the thought into itself that we must draw ourselves back into the real. Concentration has three powers by which this aim can be effected. By concentration on anything whatsoever we are able to know that thing, to make it deliver up its concealed secrets; we must use this power to know not things, buttheone Thing-in-itself. By concentration again the whole will can be gathered up for the acquisition of that which is still ungrasped, still beyond us; this power, if it is sufficiently trained, sufficiently single-minded, sufficiently sincere, sure of itself, faithful to itself alone, absolute in faith, we can use for the acquisition of any object whatsoever; but we ought to use it not for the acquisition of the many objects which the world offers to us, but to grasp spiritually that one object worthy of pursuit which is also the one subject worthy of knowledge. By concentration of our whole being on one status of itself, we can become whatever we choose; we can become, for instance, even if we were before a mass of weaknesses and fear, a mass instead of strength and courage, or we can become all a great purity, holiness and peace or a single universal soul of Love; but we ought, it is said, to use this power to become not even these things, high as they may be in comparison with what we now are, but rather to become that which is above all things and free from all action and attributes, the pure and absolute Being. All else, all other concentration can only be valuable for preparation, for previous steps, for a gradual training of the dissolute and self-dissipating thought, will and being towards their grand and unique object.

2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Two things are necessary in this Yoga: balance and a strong hold on the earth. By balance I mean the different parts of the being adjusted to one another, or some steadiness, a quiet poise somewhere in the man, not an unsteady inner condition.
A strong mental being is also very necessary. Otherwise, when the experiences come the man turns upside down. In India, our mental development I mean the outer man's development is not at all proportionate. There is the psychic being ready in many cases, there is the aspiration for spiritual life and faith also. But reason, intelligence the dynamic mind are very crude. That is why I hesitate sometimes to give the Yoga.
--
Sri Aurobindo: By Supramentalising is meant the process by which one allows the Supramental to come and take hold of the several parts of the being; complete Supramentalisation takes place when the Supramental takes hold of all the parts down to the physical body.
Disciple: I also attach the same meaning to the term.
--
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, but no one can do the surrender for another man; each must make his own surrender. And surrender is not easy. If one can surrender unconditionally and sarva bhvena in all the parts of the being, as the Gita says then there is nothing more to be done. But can a man do it? You can't do it by merely saying, "I surrender." It must become real; that is Sadhana.
Disciple: But then would the idea of surrender to the Guru alone be sufficient?
--
Disciple: When all the parts of the being are opened to the Truth, does the struggle with the hostile forces become more acute?
Sri Aurobindo: That depends on the work that is done before the opening; that is to say, one must have worked out to some extent the impurities in the nature before the opening. All this one must have done consciously.
--
Sri Aurobindo: I have often told of them. Those go through who have the central sincerity. It does not mean that the sincerity is there in all the parts of the being. In that sense no one is entirely ready. But if the central sincerity is there it is possible to establish it in all the parts of the being.
The second thing necessary is a certain receptivity in the being, what we call the opening up of all the planes to the Higher Power.

2.1.01 - The Parts of the Being, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:2.1.01 - The parts of the being
author class:Sri Aurobindo
--
The parts of the being and the Planes of Consciousness
Section One
--
The parts of the being
Men Do Not Know Themselves
--
The remedy can only come from the parts of the being that are already turned towards the Light. To call in the light of the
Divine Consciousness from above, to bring the psychic being to the front and kindle a flame of aspiration which will awaken spiritually the outer mind and set on fire the vital being, is the way out.
--
The parts of the being
manomayah. purus.ah. pran.a-sarra-neta, then it is more difficult

2.1.02 - Classification of the Parts of the Being, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:2.1.02 - Classification of the parts of the being
author class:Sri Aurobindo
--
Classification of the parts of the being
Different Categories in Different Systems
--
3. Prajna, Taijasa etc. are a different classification and have to do, not with the different parts of the being, but with three different states (waking, dream, sleep - gross, subtle, causal).
I think one ought not to try to relate these different things to each other - as that may lead to confusion. They belong to different categories - and to a different order of experiences.
--
Classification of the parts of the being
of what is seen and experienced, disparate pragmatic purposes and therefore a difference in the paths surveyed, cut out or followed; the systems vary, each constructs its own schema and technique.
--
Classification of the parts of the being
will, feeling, emotion, sensation and physical contact. So, proceeding from intuition to a greater overmind height, there is a new conversion and we look at and experience everything from the overmind consciousness and through a mind, heart, vital and body surcharged with the overmind thought, sight, will, feeling, sensation, play of force and contact. But the last conversion is the supramental, for once there, once the nature is supramentalised, we are beyond the Ignorance and conversion of consciousness is no longer needed, though a farther divine progression, even an infinite development is still possible.

2.13 - On Psychology, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: I want to know the distinction between the various psychological parts of the being:
The mental mental proper, mental vital, and mental physical.

2.1.3 - Wrong Movements of the Vital, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As for the other thing it is the struggle between the mind and psychic which see the right thing to do and the restless vital. It is not something wrong in the head, on the contrary the head is getting more and more to see what is right; it is only that the vital restlessness is not dominated by the mind and wants to follow its own feeling. That happens to everybody so long as the vital is not properly under our control. Even in ordinary circumstances and in ordinary life the vital is always carrying away the being to do what the mind disapproves, but there it is felt to be something normal, especially as the vital very usually persuades the mind to find arguments and justify its mistakes. You have to persist until the understanding mind and psychic in you become normally stronger than this part of the vital that does not want to be quiet and concentrated or see things rightly. Then you will not be so much troubled by this disagreement between two parts of the being.
***

2.1.4 - The Lower Vital Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The cardinal defect, that which has been always standing in the way and is now isolated in an extreme prominence, is seated or at least is at present concentrated in the lower vital being. I mean that part of the vital-physical nature with its petty and obstinate egoism which actuates the external human personality,that which supports its surface thoughts and dominates its habitual ways of feeling, character and action. I am not concerned here with the other parts of the being and I do not speak of anything in the higher mind, the psychic self or the higher and larger vital nature; for when the lower vital rises, these are pushed into the background, if not covered over for the time, by this lower vital being and this external personality. Whatever there may be in these higher parts, aspiration to the Truth, devotion or will to conquer the obstacles and the hostile forces, it cannot become integral, it cannot remain unmixed or unspoilt or continue to be effective so long as the lower vital and the external personality have not accepted the Light and consented to change.
It was inevitable that in the course of the sadhana these inferior parts of the nature should be brought forward in order that like the rest of the being they may make the crucial choice and either accept or refuse transformation. My whole work depends upon this movement; it is the decisive ordeal of this Yoga. For the physical consciousness and the material life cannot change if this does not change. Nothing that may have been done before, no inner illumination, experience, power or Ananda, is of any eventual value if this is not done. If the little external personality is to persist in retaining its obscure and limited, its petty and ignoble, its selfish and false and stupid human consciousness, this amounts to a flat negation of the work and the Sadhana. I have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco, a partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the law of the external nature. If, then, any sadhaka refuses in practice to admit this change, or if he refuses even to admit the necessity for any change of his lower vital being and his habitual external personality, I am entitled to conclude that, whatever his professions, he has not accepted either myself or my Yoga.

2.2.02 - Becoming Conscious in Work, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Noit is only if it [turning inwards during work] is an inner absorption that it would come in the way. But what I mean is a sort of stepping backward into something silent and observant within which is not involved in the action, yet sees and can shed its light upon it. There are then two parts of the being, one inner looking at and witnessing and knowing, the other executive and instrumental and doing. This gives not only freedom but power and in this inner being one can get into touch with the Divine not through mental activity but through the substance of the being, by a certain inward touch, perception, reception, receiving also the right inspiration or intuition of the work.
***

2.2.03 - The Psychic Being, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As for the psychic not being in front, that cannot be brought about all at once; the other parts of the being must be prepared for the change and the veil between must become thinner and thinner. It is for that experiences come and there is the working on the inner mind and vital and physical as well as on the outer nature.
What do you mean by a personal vital? What people call personality is a formation. There is no unchangeable vital personality.
--
It appears the Maharshi at the time supposed that by the psychic being I meant the enlightened ego! But people do not understand what I mean by the psychic being, because the word psychic has been used in English to mean anything of the inner mental, inner vital or inner physical or anything abnormal or occult or even the more subtle movements of the outer being, all in a jumble - also occult phenomena are often called psychic. The distinction between these different parts of the being is unknown. Even in India the old knowledge of the Upanishads in which they are distinguished has been lost. The Jivatman, psychic being (purus.o antaratma), the manomaya purus.a, the pran.amaya purus.a are all confused together.
The antaratman is the soul, the portion of the Divine that is at the inmost basis of the evolving individual and supports the mind and life and body which are the instrumental parts of nature through which it tries to grow from the material Inconscience towards the divine Light and Immortality which are its proper being. The limitations of its instruments impose upon it an acceptance of the lower movements and a compromise between soul and nature which retard this movement even while it gets its means of advance from that interchange. The psychic being is the soul-form or soul-personality developing through this evolution and passing from life to life till all is ready for the higher evolution beyond the Ignorance.
--
The moral of the condition you describe is not that Yoga should not be done but that you have to go on steadily healing the rift between the two parts of the being. The division is very usual, almost universal in human nature, and the following of the lower impulse in spite of the contrary will in the higher parts happens to almost everybody. It is the phenomenon noted by
Arjuna in his question to Krishna, "Why does one do evil, even though one wishes not to do it, as if compelled to it by force?", and expressed sententiously by Ovid, "video meliora proboque,

2.22 - 1941-1943, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: That is the central faith which one is required to have in this Yoga. If one can make that faith living in all the parts of the being then it would be quite all right. But the body says, "I have pain, I am suffering." It gets that power of ignorant ideas from the Inconscient. After completing the work in the Inconscient, the higher ranges of the Supramental consciousness would be brought down.
Disciple: There is a proposal for introducing The Life Divine as part of the course in Indian philosophy at the University level.

2.25 - The Triple Transformation, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Moreover, the necessity of working out the change separately in each part of the being in its own nature and character compels the consciousness to descend into each in turn and act there according to its state and its possibility. If the work were done from above, from some spiritual height, there might be a sublimation or uplifting or the creation of a new structure compelled by the sheer force of the influence from above: but this change might not be accepted as native to itself by the lower being; it would not be a total growth, an integral evolution, but a partial and imposed formation, affecting or liberating some parts of the being, suppressing others or leaving them as they were; a creation from outside the normal nature, by imposition upon it, it could be durable in its entirety only as long as there was a maintenance of the creating influence. A descent of consciousness into the lower levels is therefore necessary, but in this way also it is difficult to work out the full power of the higher principle; there is a modification, dilution, diminution which keeps up an imperfection and limitation in the results: the light of a greater knowledge comes down but gets blurred and modified, its significance misinterpreted or its truth mixed with mental and vital error, or the force, the power to fulfil itself is not commensurate with its light. A light and power of the overmind working in its own full right and in its own sphere is one thing, the same light working in the obscurity of the physical consciousness and under its conditions is something quite different and, owing to dilution and mixture, far inferior in its knowledge and force and results. A mutilated power, a partial effect or hampered movement is the consequence.
This is indeed the reason of the slow and difficult emergence of the Consciousness-Force in Nature: for mind and life have to descend into Matter and suit themselves to its conditions; changed and diminished by the obscurity and reluctant inertia of the substance and force in which they work, they are not able to make a complete transformation of their material into a fit instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their real and native power. The life consciousness is unable to effectuate the greatness and felicity of its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material existence; its impetus fails it, its force of effectuation is inferior to the truth of its conceptions, the form betrays the life intuition within it which it tries to render into terms of life being. The mind is unable to achieve its high ideas in the medium of life or matter without deductions and compromises which deprive them of their divinity; its clarities of knowledge and will are not matched by its force to mould this inferior substance to obey and express it: on the contrary, its own powers get affected, its will is divided, its knowledge confused and clouded by the turbidities of life and the incomprehension of Matter.

2.26 - The Ascent towards Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But this highest condition is difficult and must evidently take long to bring about; for the participation and consent of the Purusha to the transition is not sufficient, there must be also the consent and participation of the Prakriti. It is not only the central thought and will that have to acquiesce, but all the parts of our being must assent and surrender to the law of the spiritual Truth; all has to learn to obey the government of the conscious Divine Power in the members. There are obstinate difficulties in our being born of its evolutionary constitution which militate against this assent. For some of these parts are still subject to the inconscience and subconscience and to the lower automatism of habit or so-called law of the nature, - mechanical habit of mind, habit of life, habit of instinct, habit of personality, habit of character, the ingrained mental, vital, physical needs, impulses, desires of the natural man, the old functionings of all kinds that are rooted there so deep that it would seem as if we had to dig to abysmal foundations in order to get them out: these parts refuse to give up their response to the lower law founded in the Inconscient; they continually send up to the conscious mind and life the old reactions and seek to reaffirm them there as the eternal rule of Nature. Other parts of the being are less obscure and mechanical and rooted in inconscience, but all are imperfect and attached to their imperfection and have their own obstinate reactions; the vital part is wedded to the law of selfaffirmation and desire, the mind is attached to its own formed movements, and both are willingly obedient to the inferior law of the Ignorance. And yet the law of participation and the law of surrender are imperative; at each step of the transition the assent of the Purusha is needed and there must be too the consent of each part of the nature to the action of the higher power for its change. There must be then a conscious self-direction of the mental being in us towards this change, this substitution of Supernature for the old nature, this transcendence. The rule of conscious obedience to the higher truth of the spirit, the surrender of the whole being to the light and power that come from the Supernature, is a second condition which has to be accomplished slowly and with difficulty by the being itself before the supramental transformation can become at all possible.
It follows that the psychic and the spiritual transformation must be far advanced, even as complete as may be, before there can be any beginning of the third and consummating supramental change; for it is only by this double transmutation that the self-will of the Ignorance can be totally altered into a spiritual obedience to the remoulding truth and will of the greater Consciousness of the Infinite. A long, difficult stage of constant effort, energism, austerity of the personal will, tapasya, has ordinarily to be traversed before a more decisive stage can be reached in which a state of self-giving of all the being to the Supreme Being and the Supreme Nature can become total and absolute. There has to be a preliminary stage of seeking and effort with a central offering or self-giving of the heart and soul and mind to the Highest and a later mediate stage of total conscious reliance on its greater Power aiding the personal endeavour; that integral reliance again must grow into a final complete abandonment of oneself in every part and every movement to the working of the higher Truth in the nature.
The totality of this abandonment can only come if the psychic change has been complete or the spiritual transformation has reached a very high state of achievement. For it implies a giving up by the mind of all its moulds, ideas, mental formations, of all opinion, of all its habits of intellectual observation and judgment to be replaced first by an intuitive and then by an overmind or supramental functioning which inaugurates the action of a direct Truth-consciousness, Truth-sight, Truth-discernment, a new consciousness which is in all its ways quite foreign to our mind's present nature. There is demanded too a similar giving up by the vital of its cherished desires, emotions, feelings, impulses, grooves of sensation, forceful mechanism of action and reaction to be replaced by a luminous, desireless, free and yet automatically self-determining force, the force of a centralised universal and impersonal knowledge, power, delight of which the life must become an instrument and an epiphany, but of which it has at present no inkling and no sense of its greater joy and strength for fulfilment. Our physical part has to give up its instincts, needs, blind conservative attachments, settled grooves of nature, its doubt and disbelief in all that is beyond itself, its faith in the inevitability of the fixed functionings of the physical mind, the physical life and the body, that they may be replaced by a new power which establishes its own greater law and functioning in form and force of Matter. Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscient in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of the Spirit. These things cannot be done so long as either mind, life or physical consciousness are the leading powers of being or have any dominance. The admission of such a change can only be brought about by a full emergence of the soul and inner being, the dominance of the psychic and spiritual will and a long working of their light and power on the parts of the being, a psychic and spiritual remoulding of the whole nature.
A unification of the entire being by a breaking down of the wall between the inner and outer nature, - a shifting of the position and centration of the consciousness from the outer to the inner self, a firm foundation on this new basis, a habitual action from this inner self and its will and vision and an opening up of the individual into the cosmic consciousness, - is another necessary condition for the supramental change. It would be chimerical to hope that the supreme Truth-consciousness can establish itself in the narrow formulation of our surface mind and heart and life, however turned towards spirituality. All the inner centres must have burst open and released into action their capacities; the psychic entity must be unveiled and in control. If this first change establishing the being in the inner and larger, a Yogic in place of an ordinary consciousness has not been done, the greater transmutation is impossible. Moreover the individual must have sufficiently universalised himself, he must have recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a cosmic mentality, enlarged and vivified his individual life into the immediate sense and direct experience of the dynamic motion of the universal life, opened up the communications of his body with the forces of universal Nature, before he can be capable of a change which transcends the present cosmic formulation and lifts him beyond the lower hemisphere of universality into a consciousness belonging to its spiritual upper hemisphere. Besides he must have already become aware of what is now to him superconscient; he must be already a being conscious of the higher spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Ananda, penetrated by its descending influences, new-made by a spiritual change. It is possible for the spiritual opening to take place and its action to proceed before the psychic is far advanced or complete; for the spiritual influence from above can awaken, assist and complete the psychic transmutation: all that is necessary is that there should be a sufficient stress of the psychic entity for the spiritual higher overture to take place. But the third, the supramental change does not admit of any premature descent of the highest Light; for it can only commence when the supramental Force begins to act directly, and this it does not do if the nature is not ready. For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme Force and the capacity of the ordinary nature; the inferior nature would either be unable to bear or, bearing, unable to respond and receive or, receiving, unable to assimilate. Till Nature is ready, the supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of overmind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially responsive.
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But even this intervention of a new dynamic principle and this powerful imposition may take long to succeed; for the lower parts of the being have their own rights and, if they are to be truly transformed, they must be made to consent to their own transformation. This is difficult to bring about because the natural propensity of each part of us is to prefer its own selflaw, its dharma, however inferior, to a superior law or dharma which it feels to be not its own; it clings to its own consciousness or unconsciousness, its own impulsions and reactions, its own dynamisation of being, its own way of the delight of existence.
It clings to them all the more obstinately if that way be a contradiction of delight, a way of darkness and sorrow and pain and suffering; for that too has acquired its own perverse and opposite taste, rasa, its pleasure of darkness and sorrow, its sadistic or masochistic interest in pain and suffering. Even if this part of our being seeks better things, it is often obliged to follow the worse because they are its own, natural to its energy, natural to its substance. A complete and radical change can only be brought about by bringing in persistently the spiritual light and intimate experience of the spiritual truth, power, bliss into the recalcitrant elements until they too recognise that their own way of fulfilment lies there, that they are themselves a diminished power of the spirit and can recover by this new way of being their own truth and integral nature. This illumination is constantly opposed by the Forces of the lower nature and still more by the adverse Forces that live and reign by the world's imperfections and have laid down their formidable foundation on the black rock of the Inconscience.
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The intricacy, the interwoven action of these powers and parts of the being is so great that it may almost be said that in this change nothing is accomplished until all is accomplished. There is a tide and ebb, the forces of the old nature receding and again partially occupying their old dominions, effectuating a slow retreat with rear-line actions and return attacks and aggressions, the higher influx occupying each time more conquered territory but imperfectly sure of sovereignty so long as anything is left that has not become part of its luminous regime.
A third complexity is brought in by the power of the consciousness to live in more than one status at a time; especially, a difficulty is created by the division of our being into an inner and an outer or surface nature and the farther intricacy of a secret circumconscient or environmental consciousness in which are determined our unseen connections with the world outside us. In the spiritual opening, it is the awakened inner being that readily receives and assimilates the higher influences and puts on the higher nature; the external surface self, more entirely moulded by the forces of the Ignorance and Inconscience, is slower to awake, slower to receive, slower to assimilate. There is therefore a long stage in which the inner being is sufficiently transformed but the outer is still involved in a mixed and difficult movement of imperfect change. This disparity repeats itself at each step of the ascent; for in each change the inner being follows more readily, the outer limps after, reluctant or else incompetent in spite of its aspiration and desire: this necessitates a constantly repeated labour of assumption, adaptation, orientation, a labour reproduced in new terms always but always the same in principle. But even when the outer and the inner nature of the individual are unified in a harmonised spiritual consciousness, that still more external but occult part of him in which his being mixes with the being of the outside world and through which the outside world invades his consciousness remains a field of imperfection. There is necessarily a commerce here between disparate influences: the inner spiritual influence is met by quite opposite influences strong in their control of the present world-order; the new spiritual consciousness has to bear the shock of the dominant and established unspiritualised powers of the Ignorance. This creates a difficulty which is of capital importance in all stages of the spiritual evolution and its urge towards a change of the nature.

2.3.04 - The Mother's Force, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is not a question of mental wish but of capacity and whether all the parts of the being are ready and can retain it. If everybody were containing the constant action of the Mother's force, the sadhana would be finished by now and the siddhi complete.
7 August 1933
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- to become clearly conscious in all parts of the being takes
6 July 1933 time.
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What I have to see is that my consciousness supports the working of the Mother's Force in me. For example, if my being constantly supported the Mother's work, there would hardly be any halt in sadhana due to the tamas in me; the tamasic inertia would get transformed into peace without rising up and darkening the other parts of the being.
The Mother's Force
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First the Mother organises the inner parts of the being; then she begins to work on the outer being. Does this mean that when the inner parts are brought under control, then she begins to work on the physical nature?
It is the usual course, but some work is always being done in the inner parts at all times, because they are interdependent.

2.3.05 - The Lower Nature or Lower Hemisphere, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It cannot be explained accurately in a few words; but roughly thoughts are of the mind, emotions are of the heart, desires are of the vital. On the surface they are all mixed together, but behind they come from separate parts of the being.
The Adhara

2.3.08 - The Mother's Help in Difficulties, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the forces of the Ignorance that begin to lay siege and then make a mass attack. Every time such an attack can be defeated and cast out, there is a clearance in the Adhar, a new field gained for the Mother in the mind, vital or physical or the adjacent parts of the being. That the place in the vital occupied by the Mother is increasing is shown by the fact that you are now offering a strong resistance to these sieges that used formerly to overpower you altogether.
In the afternoon all my problems started coming to the front. I felt that they had become too big a burden for me to bear. Then

2.3.10 - The Subconscient and the Inconscient, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Subliminal is a general term used for all the parts of the being which are not on the waking surface. Subconscient is very often used in the same sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word, I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it. The inner mental, vital, physical, the psychic are not subconscious in this sense, but they can be spoken of as subliminal.
What he [a correspondent] has written about the subconscient and the outer nature is true. But the role of subliminal forces cannot be said to be small, since from there come all the greater aspirations, ideals, strivings towards a better self and better humanity without which man would be only a thinking animal - as also most of the art, poetry, philosophy, thirst for knowledge which relieve if they do not yet dispel the ignorance.

2.3.1 - Ego and Its Forms, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Ego in Different parts of the being
It [the ego] rises because it is its nature to do so; it wants to keep hold of the being which it considers its property and field of expression.
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Ego, whatever its basis, can reproduce itself in different parts of the being, e.g. a vital ego, a mental ego, but fundamentally it is one.
***
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For many sadhaks there is a first stage governed by the mind or higher vital in which they go on very well, because in the mind and higher vital there are elements that are strong enough to control the rest while the first experiences or first progress is made. But a time comes when the sadhak has to deal with the lower parts of the being, then all the vital difficulties arise. If the early progress or experiences have engendered pride or ego or if there is a serious flaw somewhere, then they are unable to deal with these so long as the ego is not removed or broken or the flaw mended. X developed a pride of self-righteousness that stood in his way altogether; he has also the flaw of a narrow obstinate mind that sticks to its own ideas as if they alone were right the instances you give of his conduct are illustrations of this defect. That is why here he quarrels with everyone thinking that he is right and they are very bad and mischievous, cannot see his own faults and mistakes and when he is not heard by the Mother or myself feels hurt and offended because we do not support his saintliness and righteousness against the wicked who oppress him. He is a good and clever worker but he cannot progress in sadhana so long as he keeps this stiffness and ego.
***

2.3.2 - Desire, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is not necessary to be a Sannyasi to have this inner freedom; it is only necessary to be sincere. There are many who say, I have no attachment, but it is a self-deception. Therefore one must examine oneself very closely and strictly and see what is left of desire or attachment and reject it. This is difficult for the ordinary consciousness and never wholly achieved by it, even if things are outwardly given up; it is easy if the higher consciousness is there in all the parts of the being, provided one opens all ones movements to its Light.
***
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The vital always wants the things of ordinary life, sex, rich food, enjoyments of all kinds; it does not get full satisfaction out of them, but it feels dissatisfied without them. The only way to get rid of it is to reject desire of these things from the vital itself and to have only the aspiration for the Divine in all parts of the being.
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2.4.01 - Divine Love, Psychic Love and Human Love, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The influence of the love for the Divine when it takes hold of any part is to turn it towards the Divineas you describe it concentration on the Mother and in the end all is gathered and harmonised around this central turn of the being. The difficulty is with the mechanical parts of the being in which the old thoughts go on recurring by habit. If the concentration continues to grow, this becomes a thing of little importance at the circumference of the mind and in the end drops away to be replaced by things that belong to the new consciousness.
***
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And first about human love in the sadhana. The souls turning through love to the Divine must be through a love that is essentially divine, but as the instrument of expression at first is a human nature, it takes the forms of human love and bhakti. It is only as the consciousness deepens, heightens and changes that that greater eternal love can grow in it and openly transform the human into the divine. But in human love itself there are several kinds of motive-forces. There is a psychic human love which rises from deep within and is the result of the meeting of the inner being with that which calls it towards a divine joy and union; it is, once it becomes aware of itself, something lasting, self-existent, not dependent upon external satisfactions, not capable of diminution by external causes, not self-regarding, not prone to demand or bargain but giving itself simply and spontaneously, not moved to or broken by misunderstandings, disappointments, strife and anger, but pressing always straight towards the inner union. It is this psychic love that is closest to the divine and it is therefore the right and best way of love and bhakti. But that does not mean that the other parts of the being, the vital and physical included, are not to be used as means of expression or that they are not to share in the full play and the whole meaning of love, even of divine love. On the contrary, they are a means and can be a great part of the complete expression of divine love,provided they have the right and not the wrong movement. There are in the vital itself two kinds of love,one full of joy and confidence and abandon, generous, unbargaining, ungrudging and very absolute in its dedication and this is akin to the psychic and well-fitted to be its complement and a means of expression of the divine love. And neither does the psychic love or the divine love despise a physical means of expression wherever that is pure and right and possible: it does not depend upon that, it does not diminish, revolt or go out like a snuffed candle when it is deprived of any such means; but when it can use it, it does so with joy and gratitude. Physical means can be and are used in the approach to divine love and worship; they have not been allowed merely as a concession to human weakness, nor is it the fact that in the psychic way there is no place for such things. On the contrary they are one means of approaching the Divine and receiving the Light and materialising the psychic contact, and so long as it is done in the right spirit and they are used for the true purpose they have their place. It is only if they are misused or the approach is not right because tainted by indifference and inertia, or revolt or hostility, or some gross desire, that they are out of place and can have a contrary effect.
But there is another way of vital love which is more usually the way of human nature and that is a way of ego and desire. It is full of vital craving, desire and demand; its continuance depends upon the satisfaction of its demands; if it does not get what it craves, or even imagines that it is not being treated as it deserves for it is full of imaginations, misunderstandings, jealousies, misinterpretationsit at once turns to sorrow, wounded feeling, revolt, pride, anger, all kinds of disorder, finally cessation and departure. A love of this kind is in its very nature ephemeral and unreliable and it cannot be made a foundation for divine love. There has been too much of this kind in the relations of the sadhaks with the Motherapproaching her, I suppose, as a human mother with all the reactions of the lower vital nature. For a long time it was perforce tolerated and this was the concession made to human weaknesseven accepted in the beginning as a thing too prominent in the human being not to be there to some extent but to be transformed by degrees; but too often, it has refused to transform itself and has made itself a source of confusion, disorder, asiddhi, sometimes complete disaster. It is for this reason that we discourage this lower vital way of human love and would like people to reject and eliminate these elements as soon as may be from their nature. Love should be a flowering of joy and union and confidence and self-giving and Ananda,but this lower vital way is only a source of suffering, trouble, disappointment, disillusion and disunion. Even a slight element of it shakes the foundations of peace and replaces the movement towards Ananda by a fall towards sorrow, discontent and Nirananda.

2.4.02 - Bhakti, Devotion, Worship, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As for not having it [contact] always, it is because there are parts of the being that are still unconscious or perhaps states of unconsciousness come. For instance, people write letters to each other, but they are quite unconscious that they are exchanging forces in doing so. You have become conscious of it, because of the development of your inner consciousness by Yogaand yet there are likely to be times when you still write from the external awareness only, and then you will see the words only without being aware of what is behind. So owing to the development of the inner consciousness, you are able to understand what contacts are and get the true contact, but at times the external consciousness may be stronger than the inner one, then you are no longer (for the time being) able to get the contact.
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3.01 - Sincerity, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To be sincere, all the parts of the being must be united in their aspiration for the Divine not that one part wants and others refuse or revolt.
To be sincere in the aspiration to want the Divine for the Divines sake, not for fame or name or prestige or power or any satisfaction of vanity.

3.1.2 - Levels of the Physical Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As for the vital physical readmitting the forces of disturbance, it is not always because it wants; it may happen also because in spite of itself certain impacts or suggestions revive the old vibrations and the habit of responding has been so strong in it that it responds in spite of itself, and for a time it is unable to recover its balance. This happens in all parts of the being, but it is especially true of the physical partsphysical mind yielding to habitual thoughts, physical vital yielding to habitual desires and impulsions etc., body yielding to habitual sensations, illnesses etc. etc. Often sadhaks write, But I dont want these things, even my vital and body feel uncomfortable and wish them away, then why do they come? It is because of this long established habit of response which is too strong for the yet too quiescent and passive will (if it can be called will) of rejection in the part affected. It is especially true of the physical parts because a passive quiescence, a habit of being driven by forces is their very nature, unless they are controlled from above or made to share in the idea and will of the higher parts.
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3.2.08 - Bhakti Yoga and Vaishnavism, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Radha is the personification of the absolute love for the Divine, total and integral in all parts of the being from the highest spiritual to the physical, bringing the absolute self-giving and total consecration of all the being and calling down into the body and the most material Nature the supreme Ananda.
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3.2.3 - Dreams, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The dream about X and going to the Mother was an experience of something that took place on the vital plane. Things happen there that have some connection with the nature and life here, but they happen differently because there it is not the physical beings that meet, but the vital beings of people. One can gather what is the nature of ones own inner vital beingwhich is often very different from the physical personality that acts in front in the body. By the acting of the consciousness in these dreams the inner parts of the being begin to be more active and have more influence on the outer nature. Your inner vital being seems from the dream experiences that you have related to be very strong, faithful, clear-minded, resolute, able to deal with the hostile forces and their activities in the right way and do the right thing.
The sensation of going somewhere means that part of the consciousness is going into some other plane than the physical. The men you saw and also the vision that came afterwards belonged to these supraphysical worlds. The vision seems to be symbolic of something from above, but of what is not quite clear from the details. Gold is the colour of the Truth that comes from above.

3.2.4 - Sex, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is one of the aims of the Yoga to centralise and harmonise all the parts of the beingnot around the ego as is done in ordinary life, but around first the psychic being and then the central being in its station above the heador else round a nexus of the two. It is the thing that was preparing in you. The consciousness was moving to take its station above the head. But in the meanwhile it has gone down into the physical and the first result has been a relaxation and diffusion which has given an opening to the old movements to recur. When a movement like that happens [an attraction to women], there is generally a good reason for it, something that has to be dealt with in the physical consciousness. Instead of getting upset or discouraged, one has to observe from this point of view and see what has to be done.
There is no sense in getting discouraged like this because things recur. They always do. In a transformation such as we have undertaken, movements are not got rid of once for all. They go down from one level of the nature to the other and it is only when one has got them out of the physical and subconscient that one can say Now that is done. If these recurrences were to be taken as a proof of failure, there are few in the Asram who should not be pronounced as failures. I dont think more than 2 or 3 have got over some sex-trouble; it lasts in one form or another even when people are advancedas they say here. It is because sex is one of the strongest things in mans nature and cannot be overcome till one has got the sex out of the subconscient. Why then consider your case as if it were unique or build on it the idea of personal impossibility or unfitness? It is no use indulging the idea of giving up. You cant give up. So the only thing to do is to recover yourself, look at these things with detachment and push forward to the realisation of the self that was coming.
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Rejection of the Sex-Impulse from the Various parts of the being
The sex-impulse is the chief difficulty in your way and, if that were got rid of, it would make the ground clear for the sadhana in you to take a much fuller course. If it persists, it is because some part of your being still clings to it and your mind and will have remained divided and found some kind of half-justification for the continuance. The first thing is for the mind and also the higher vital to withdraw their consent altogether; if that is done, it becomes only a mechanical return from outside on the physical and finally only an active memory which will disappear when it is able to find no welcome in any part of the nature.
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There is no reason for you to be depressed or discouraged. The defects of the nature of which you speak are habits of the lower vital and the external being; if you recognise them fully and frankly and detect them and reject whenever they act or try to act upon you, they will in time disappear. The sexual desires show that the subconscient still retains the old impressions, movements and impulses; make the conscious parts of the being entirely free and aspire and will for the higher consciousness to come fully into the subconscient so that even in sleep and dream something in you may be aware and on guard and reject these things when they try to take form at that time.
***

3.3.1 - Illness and Health, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By will [to get rid of illness] I meant this that there is something in the body that accepts the illness and has certain reactions that make this acceptance effectiveso there must always be a contrary will in the conscious parts of the being to get rid of this most physical acceptance.
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3.4.1 - The Subconscient and the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Until they [the material and subconscient parts of the being] aspire or at least assent fully to the aspiration and will of the higher being, there can be no lasting change in them.
***
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The subconscient is a thing of habits and memories and repeats persistently or whenever it can old suppressed reactions, reflexes, mental, vital or physical responses. It must be trained by a still more persistent insistence of the higher parts of the being to give up its old responses and take on the new and true ones.
***

4.02 - Difficulties, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The difficulties are always due to a resistance, some part or several parts of the being refusing to receive the force, the consciousness and the light put upon them and revolting against the divine influence. It is rare that somebody can surrender entirely to the Divines Will without having to face one or another of these difficulties. But to keep steady ones aspiration and to look at oneself with an absolute sincerity are the sure means to overcome all obstacles.
Surely all these troubles come from a resistance somewhere, something that opposes the work of transformation.

4.1.1.04 - Foundations of the Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Self and begins to work in the Adhara. This is what you felt as a pressure; its coming through the top of the head, the forehead and eyes and nose meant that it was working to open the mental centres - especially the two higher centres of thought and will and vision in the inner mental being. These two centres are called the thousand-petalled lotus and the ajna-cakra between the eyebrows. Thirdly, by this working the inner parts of the being are opened and freed; you are liberated from the limitations of the ordinary personal mind, vital and physical and become aware of a wider consciousness in which you can be more capable of the needed transformation. But that is necessarily a matter of time and long working and you are only taking the first steps in this way.
When one goes into the inner being, the tendency is to go entirely inside and lose consciousness of the outside world - this is what people call Samadhi. But it is also necessary to be able to have the same experiences (of the Self, the workings in the inner consciousness etc.) in the waking state. The best rule for you will be to allow the entire going inside only when you are alone and not likely to be disturbed, and at other times to accustom yourself to have these experiences with the physical consciousness awake and participating in them or at least aware of them. You did therefore quite right in stopping the complete going inside while you were at X's place. There was no harm in having these experiences there or anywhere, but there should be nothing to draw the attention of others - especially of those who are not in the Yoga or in the atmosphere.

4.1.2 - The Difficulties of Human Nature, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are usually in the human being two different tendencies in two parts of the being, one psychic or mental supported by the psychic which seeks the better way and higher things, the other whose main seat is in the vital part of the being which is full of the life-instincts and life-desires, which is attached to or turns towards the things of the lower nature and is subject to the passions, anger, sex etc. If the higher part is dominant, then the lower is kept under control and does not give much trouble. But often the latter is supported by outer forces and powers of the lower Nature in the universe and sometimes these intrude and give the coarse part of the being a separate personality and independence of its own. This may be the explanation of the dream of the ugly monster and of the resistance of this other personality. If it be so, then this must be regarded not as part of oneself but as a foreign element to the true being. It is only by a persistent choice of the dictates of the higher and a persistent rejection of the other that the latter loses ground and finally recedes. This should be met as calmly as possible without allowing the mind to be troubled by any fall or failurewith a quiet constant vigilance and resolute will.
***
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You must remember that your being is not one simple whole, all of one kind, of one piece, but complex, made up of many things. There are the inner parts of the being which are easily conscious of the Truth and Divine,when these come forward, then all is well. There is the external being which is full of past ignorance and defect and weakness, but has begun to change. It is not yet sufficiently changed or changed in all its parts. When any part that is partly changed opens strongly to the peace and force, then all the rest become either quite quiet or not very active and you are aware of the peace and force and at ease or else aware only vaguely of confusion etc. somewhere. But when something ignorant comes up from below or is a little prominent (or else some old movement of consciousness that was thrown out returns and clouds you), then you feel the peace, the force as something alien to you or non-existent or outside you or at a distance. If you keep the quiet persistently, then this instability will begin to decrease, the Mothers Force will get in everywhere and, though there will still be much to do, there will be a firm foundation for what has to be done.
***
It is different parts of the being that have these different movements. It is, as you say, something in you, something in the vital that has the insincerity or the attraction to the wrong confused condition; but this you should not regard as yourself, but as part of the old nature which has to be transformed. So it is something in the physical that has the obscurity and the unconsciousness; but this too you should not look at as yourself, but as something formed in the exterior nature which has to be changed and will be changed. The real you is the inner being, the soul, the psychic being, that which calls the peace and the quiet and the working of the force.
***
--
Aspiration and will to change are not so very far from each other, and if one has either, it is usually enough for going through,provided of course it maintains itself. The opposition in certain parts of the being exists in every sadhak and can be very obstinate. Sincerity comes by having first the constant central aspiration or will, next, the honesty to see and avow the refusal in parts of the being, finally, the intention of seeing it through even there, however difficult it may be. You have admitted certain things changed in you, so you can no longer pretend that you have made no progress at all.
The peculiarity you note is pretty universalit is one part of the being which believes and speaks the right and beautiful things; it is another which doubts and says just the opposite. I get communications for instance from X in which for several pages he writes wise and perfect things about the sadhanasuddenly without transition he drops into his physical mind and peevishly and complainingly sayswell, things ignorant and quite incompatible with all that wisdom. X is not insincere when he does tha the is simply giving voice to two parts of his nature. Nobody can understand himself or human nature if he does not perceive the multipersonality of the human being. To get all parts into harmony, that is the difficult thing.
--
The thing is that it is unavoidable in the course of the sadhana that some parts of the being should be less open, less advanced, as yet less aware of the Peace and Force, less intimate to them than others. These parts have to be worked upon, and changed, but this can be done smoothly only if you are detached from them, able to regard them as not your very self, even though a part of the nature you have to change. Then when they appear with their defects, you will not be upset, not carried away by their movements, lost to the sense of the Peace and Force; you will be able to work on them (or rather let the Force work) as one would on a machine that has to be repaired or a work that has defects and has to be done better this time. If you identify yourself with these parts, then it is very troublesome. The work will still be done, the change made, but with delay, with bad upsettings, in a painful and not in a smooth way. That is why we always tell people to be calm and detached and look upon these things not as their true selves but as an outer part that has to be worked upon quietly until it is what it should be.
***

4.1.4 - Resistances, Sufferings and Falls, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is a wrong idea to get disgusted with doing the right thing because you cannot do it absolutely now. It has to be done by a progressive movement. In everyone there is something that resists, until the ignorant parts of the being are transformed. That is no reason for giving up. It is sufficient if there is something behind that feels and can respond even if it is very much covered by the obscure external nature. It is that in you which feels the Force above the head and the atmosphere of quietness, and it is through that that it will be done whatever the amount of the external resistance.
***

4.2.1 - The Right Attitude towards Difficulties, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is no contradiction between my former statements about the sunlit path and what I have said about the difficult and unpleasant passages which the Yoga has to pass through in its normal development in the way of human nature. The sunlit path can be followed by those who are able to practise surrender, first a central surrender and afterwards a more complete self-giving in all the parts of the being. If they can achieve and preserve the attitude of the central surrender, if they can rely wholly on the Divine and accept cheerfully whatever comes to them from the Divine, then their path becomes sunlit and may even be straightforward and easy. They will not escape all difficulties, no seeker can, but they will be able to meet them without pain and despondency,as indeed the Gita recommends that Yoga should be practised, anirviacetas,trusting in the inner guidance and perceiving it more and more or else in the outer guidance of the Guru. It can also be followed even when one feels no light and no guidance if there is or if one can acquire a bright settled faith and happy bhakti or has the nature of the spiritual optimist and the firm belief or feeling that all that is done by the Divine is done for the best even when we cannot understand his action. But all have not this nature, most are very far from it, and the complete or even the central surrender is not easy to get and to keep it always is hard enough for our human nature. When these things are not there, the liberty of the soul is not attained and we have instead to undergo the law or fulfil a hard and difficult discipline.
That law is imposed on us by the Ignorance which is the nature of all our parts; our physical being is obviously a mass of ignorance, the vital is full of ignorant desires and passions, the mind is also an instrument of Ignorance struggling towards some kind of imperfect and mostly inferior and external knowledge. The path of the seeker proceeds through this ignorance; for a long time he can find no light of solid experience or realisation, only the hopes and ideas and beliefs of the mind which do not give the true spiritual seeing; or he gets glimpses of light or periods of light but the light often goes out and the luminous periods are followed by frequent or long periods of darkness. There are constant fluctuations, persistent disappointments, innumerable falls and failures. No path of Yoga is really easy or free from these difficulties or fluctuations; the way of bhakti is supposed to be the easiest, but still we find constant complaints that one is always seeking but never finding and even at the best there is a constant ebb and tide, milana and viraha, joy and weeping, ecstasy and despair. If one has the faith or in the absence of faith the will to go through, one passes on and enters into the joy and light of the divine realisation. If one gets some habit of true surrender, then all this is not necessary; one can enter into the sunlit way. Or if one can get some touch of what is called pure bhakti, uddh bhakti, then whatever happens that is enough; the way becomes easy, or if it does not, still this is a sufficient start to support us to the end without the sufferings and falls that happen so often to the ignorant seeker.

4.2.3 - Vigilance, Resolution, Will and the Divine Help, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These things [the removal of vital demand and ego] cannot be done in that way [by a direct higher action]. For transformation to be genuine, the difficulty has to be rejected by all the parts of the being. The Force can only help or enable them to do that, but it cannot replace this necessary action by a summary process. Your mind and inner being must impart their will to the whole.
***

4.2.4.03 - The Psychic Fire, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The central fire is in the psychic being, but it can be lit in all the parts of the being.

4.2.4.06 - Agni and the Psychic Fire, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All that [fire in the heart and elsewhere] is simply the burning of the Agni in various parts of the being. It prepares it for transformation. But the coming forward of the psychic is another matter and its signs are psychological.
Agni is the psychic fire - it is not the Divine Presence. If the psychic is active and open, the Presence may be felt - it is not necessary for that that it should be in the front. Also it may be in the front, but the Divine Presence in the heart may not be felt as yet, there may be only the aspiration, bhakti, self-giving. There is no fixed law about these things - it develops differently in different natures.

4.24 - The supramental Sense, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
First, the phenomena of the psychical sense and mind lose the fragmentariness and incoherence or else difficult regulation and often quite artificial order which pursues them even more than it pursues our more normal mental activities of the surface, and they become the harmonious play of the universal inner mind and soul in us, assume their true law and right forms and relations and reveal their just significances. Even on the mental plane one can get by the spiritualising of the mind at some realisation of soul oneness, but it is never really complete, at least in its application, and does not acquire this real and entire law, form, relation, complete and unfailing truth and accuracy of its significances. And, secondly, the activity of the psychical consciousness loses all character of abnormality, of an exceptional, irregular and even a perilously supernormal action, often bringing a loss of hold upon life and a disturbance or an injury to other parts of the being. It not only acquires its own right order within itself but its right relation with the physical life on one side and with the spiritual truth of being on the other and the whole becomes a harmonious manifestation of the embodied spirit. It is always the originating supermind that contains within itself the true values, significances and relations of the other parts of our being and its unfolding is the condition of the integral possession of our self and nature.
The complete transformation comes on us by a certain change, not merely of the poise or level of our regarding conscious self or even of its law and character, but also of the whole substance of our conscious being. Till that is done, the supramental consciousness manifests above the mental and psychical atmosphere of being, -- in which the physical has already become a subordinate and to a large extent a dependent method of our self's expression, -- and it sends down its power, light, and influence into it to illumine it and transfigure. But only when the substance of the lower consciousness has been changed, filled potently, wonderfully transformed, swallowed up as it were into the greater energy and sense of being, mahan, brhat, of which it is a derivation and projection, do we have the perfected, entire and constant supramental consciousness. The substance, the conscious ether of being in which the mental or psychic consciousness and sense live and see and feel and experience is something subtler, freer, more plastic than that of the physical mind and sense. As long as we are dominated by the latter, psychical phenomena may seem to us less real, hallucinatory even, but the more we acclimatise ourselves to the psychical and to the ether of being which it inhabits, the more we begin to see the greater truth and to sense the more spiritually concrete substance of all to which its larger and freer mode of experience bears witness. Even, the physical may come to seem to itself unreal and hallucinatory -- but this is an exaggeration and new misleading exclusiveness due to a shifting of the centre and a change of action of the mind and sense -- or else may seem at any rate less powerfully real. When, however, the psychical and physical experiences are well combined in their true balance, we live at once in two complementary worlds of our being each with its own reality, but the psychical revealing all that is behind the physical, the soul view and experience taking precedence and enlightening and explaining the physical view and experience. The supramental transformation again changes the whole substance of our consciousness; it brings in an ether of greater being, consciousness, sense, life, which convicts the psychical also of insufficiency and makes it appear by itself an incomplete reality and only a partial truth of all that we are and become and witness.

4.2.5 - Dealing with Depression and Despondency, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Why do you indulge in these exaggerated feelings of remorse and despair when these things come up from the subconscient? They do not help and make it more, not less difficult to eliminate what comes. Such returns of an old nature that is long expelled from the conscious parts of the being always happen in sadhana. It does not at all mean that the nature is unchangeable. Try to recover the inner quietude, draw back from these movements and look at them calmly, reducing them to their true proportions. Your true nature is that in which you have peace and ananda and the love of the Divine. This other is only a fringe of the outer personality which in spite of these returns is destined to drop away as the true being extends and increases.
***

4.3.1 - The Hostile Forces and the Difficulties of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are almost always some parts of the being that are either unwilling or feel an incapacity for the effort demanded of them. It is the psychic and the mind and the higher vital usually that join together for the Yoga for if these three do not join, it is difficult to do any Yoga at all beyond getting a few experiences from time to time. But in the lower vital there is almost always something recalcitrant and there is much of the physical that is too obscure. If the sadhak were left to himself this could be remedied without much difficulty, but it is here that the hostility in the universal (lower) forces comes inthey want to keep their reign over the being. The result is an exacerbation of the resistance of the lower vital and an exaggeration of the obstruction (inertia, passive resistance) in the physical which then admit these suggestions of self-destruction, depression or despair.
***

4.3.2 - Attacks by the Hostile Forces, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These [thoughts of unfitness for Yoga] are the usual suggestions that come when there is the attack of the hostile forces. You should know that they have no value and reject. The spiritual perfection, the full transformation of the nature is not a thing that can come without long and steady endeavour. Movements like these have many refuges in different parts of the being and it is not till they are driven out of all and out of the environmental consciousness that one can be free from their recurrence. One must learn to be inflexible, fixed in ones aim and not discouraged by the recurring difficulties of the nature, for they have been long ingrained in the vital and physical of the human being and they are also in the play of the universal forcesso if it takes long to get them out, as it does even with the best sadhaks, that is no proof that one is not fit for the sadhana. Reject all that and go on steadilyaim always at getting more of the higher consciousness down, that is the cure for all these things.
***

4.3.3 - Dealing with Hostile Attacks, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If the faith and surrender are complete in all parts of the being then there can be no attack. If there is a strong central faith and surrender at all times, then there can be attacks but the attacks will have no chance of success.
***

4.4.3.03 - Preparatory Experiences and Descent, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
is there an essential purity in which all parts of the being can
share. Or, even if the exterior being does not share actively in

4.4.5.02 - Descent and Psychic Experiences, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
above the head, which descends as the higher parts of the being
open to it. The experience of faith, love or aspiration come from
--
that the subconscious parts of the being can be changed entirely.
Before that only a certain control can be established.

7.01 - The Soul (the Psychic), #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The centre of the human being is the psychic which is the dwelling-place of the immanent Divine. Unification means organisation and harmonisation of all the parts of the being (mental, vital and physical) around this centre, so that all the activities of the being may be the correct expression of the will of the
Divine Presence.
--
The psychic can observe with regret the stupidity of the other parts of the being, but by its very nature it is impossible for it to be depressed.
22 March 1934

r1913 12 15, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The final condition of yesterday was continued in the morning with some modification; receptive telepathy was allowed to recover its activity & a sort of vijnanamaya thought-perception allowed. The object seems to be to stamp on the manasa parts of the being the realisation that all is intended, even what is most adverse & least understood, as a step in the siddhi, all brought about by the Master of existence, even when seeming to be brought about by inimical Powers, & all therefore to be received with submission. This state of realisation, however, can only be final if it persists when the Mahakali tapas is active.
The Ananda of cold is being increased by repeated & continued exposure to cold wind with the bare body. Only an almost subliminal part of the nervous system persists in the sanskara of discomfort & the reaction of rheum in the nose. This rheum just succeeds, so far, in materialising itself, but is unable to lay hold on the system. The discomfort of exposure to solar heat is also sinking down towards the subliminal Prakriti.

r1914 05 01, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The intellectuality in the whole adhara has finally accepted subjection of the lower prakriti to the ideal nature; only it awaits light of perfect discrimination in the nervous & tapasic parts of the being( ). The external intellectuality on the contrary made a violent attack on the whole system, partly obscuring the Krishnadarshana, disturbing samata a little occasionally, shaking the faith especially in the bodily siddhi, but not prevailing against the dasya & Mahakali tapas. It is evident therefore that the era of successful relapse in the siddhi is drawing to a close & the safety of the gains (satir dhannm) is more & more assured. Obstruction of progress is as yet still potent.
The 1 seems to have been the prefixed date for the following results. (1) the final subjective rejection of the intellectuality in favour of the ideality; (2) the removal of the obstacle to the constant manifestation of perceptive vijnanamaya thought, articulate vijnanamaya thought, free anandamaya vani, conversion of tapasic into luminous movements; (3) the definite faith in the power of dharma-karma; (4) the cessation of the dominance of relapse in the subjectivity, examples Br. [Biren,] Richard, X1 etc.

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, the mind can feel just like the other parts of the being
and feeling is the beginning of being conscious. (After a pause) Why do you

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