1. A distinctive and pervasive quality or character; air; atmosphere. 2. A subtle emanation from and enveloping living persons and things, viewed by mystics as consisting of the essence of the individual.
1. Closely intimate or personal. 2. A close friend or associate. 3. Having fair knowledge; acquainted.
1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. 2. The spiritual apprehension of divine truths, or of realities beyond the reach of sensible experience or logical proof.
1. Imagination or fantasy, esp. as exercised in a capricious manner. 2. A mental image or conception. 3. An idea or opinion with little foundation; illusion. 4. A caprice; whim. 5. A sudden or irrational liking for a person or thing. fancy"s, Fancy"s, fancies.
1. Personal liberty, as opposed to bondage. 2. Liberation or deliverance from fate or necessity. 3. The state or power of being able to act without hindrance or restraint, liberty of action. 4. Exemption from an unpleasant or onerous condition. 5. The quality of being able to conceive and execute boldly. Freedom, Freedom"s.
1. Settled securely, permanently and unconditionally. 2. Placed or settled in a secure position or condition; installed. 3. Brought about or set up or accepted; especially long established. established.
1. Suggested by fancy; imaginary, unreal. 2. Led by fancy rather than by reason and experience; whimsical.
1. The act, power or property of appealing, alluring, enticing or inviting. 2. A thing or feature which draws by appealing to desires, tastes, etc. 3. The action of a body or substance in drawing to itself, by some physical force, another to which it is not materially attached; the force thus exercised. attractions.
1. Touchstone; a very smooth, fine-grained, black or dark-coloured variety of quartz or jasper (also called basanite), used for testing the quality of gold and silver alloys by the colour of the streak produced by rubbing them upon it; a piece of such stone used for this purpose. 2. *fig.* That which serves to test or try the genuineness or value of anything; a test, criterion.
abandon ::: 1. To give oneself up, devote oneself to (a person or thing); to yield oneself without restraint. 2. To withdraw one"s support or help from, especially in spite of duty, allegiance, or responsibility; desert: leave behind. 3. To give up; discontinue; withdraw from. abandons, abandoned, abandoning.
"A basis can be created for a subjective illusion-consciousness which is yet part of Being, if we accept in the sense of an illusory subjective world-awareness the account of sleep and dream creation given to us in the Upanishads. For the affirmation there is that Brahman as Self is fourfold; the Self is Brahman and all that is is the Brahman, but all that is is the Self seen by the Self in four states of its being. In the pure self-status neither consciousness nor unconsciousness as we conceive it can be affirmed about Brahman; it is a state of superconscience absorbed in its self-existence, in a self-silence or a self-ecstasy, or else it is the status of a free Superconscient containing or basing everything but involved in nothing. But there is also a luminous status of sleep-self, a massed consciousness which is the origin of cosmic existence; this state of deep sleep in which yet there is the presence of an omnipotent Intelligence is the seed state or causal condition from which emerges the cosmos; — this and the dream-self which is the continent of all subtle, subjective or supraphysical experience, and the self of waking which is the support of all physical experience, can be taken as the whole field of Maya.” The Life Divine
aberrations ::: 1. Deviations or divergences from a direct, prescribed, or ordinary course or mode of action, esp. moral or proper.
able to be heard; heard or perceptible by the ear; loud enough to be heard.
absolute ::: adj. 1. Free from all imperfection or deficiency; complete, finished; perfect, consummate. 2. Of degree: Complete, entire; in the fullest sense. 3. Having ultimate power, governing totally; unlimited by a constitution or the concurrent authority of a parliament; arbitrary, despotic. 4. Existing without relation to any other being; self-existent; self-sufficing. 5. Capable of being thought or conceived by itself alone; unconditioned. 6. Considered independently of its being subjective or objective. n. 7. Something that is not dependent upon external conditions for existence or for its specific nature, size, etc. (opposed to relative). Absolute, Absolute"s, absolutes, absoluteness.
absolve ::: 1. To free from guilt, blame or their consequences; discharge (from obligations, liabilities, etc.). 2. To set free, release. 3. To clear off, discharge, acquit oneself of (a task, etc.); to perform completely, accomplish, finish. absolves, absolved.
abusing ::: using improperly, misusing; perverting, or misemploying; taking a bad advantage of.
abysmal ::: 1. Of, pertaining to, or resembling an abyss; fathomless; deep-sunken. 2. Extremely or hopelessly bad or severe.
accept ::: 1. To take or receive (a thing offered) willingly, or with consenting mind; to receive (a thing or person) with favour or approval. 2. To take formally (what is offered) with contemplation of its consequences and obligations; to take upon oneself, to undertake as a responsibility. 3. To agree or consent to. 4. To regard as true or sound; believe. accepts, accepted, accepting.
access ::: 1. The ability, right, or permission to approach, enter, speak with, or use; admittance. 2. A way or means of approach; an entrance, channel, passage, or doorway.
accomplished ::: fulfilled, completed, finished, perfected. accomplishing.
accord ::: agreement or harmonious correspondence of things or their properties, as of colours or tints. Of sounds: Agreement in pitch and tone; harmony.
accursed ::: lying under a curse or anathema; ill fated; doomed to perdition or misery.
achieve ::: 1. To bring to a successful end, to carry out successfully (an enterprise); to accomplish, perform. 2. To succeed in gaining, to acquire by effort, to obtain, win. achieves, achieved, achieving.
achievement ::: something accomplished, esp. by superior ability, special effort, great courage, etc. achievements.
acolyte ::: an attendant or junior assistant in any ceremony or operation; a novice; follower. acolytes.
::: "A cosmic Will and Wisdom observant of the ascending march of the soul"s consciousness and experience as it emerges out of subconscient Matter and climbs to its own luminous divinity fixes the norm and constantly enlarges the lines of the law — or, let us say, since law is a too mechanical conception, — the truth of Karma.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
acrid ::: bitterly irritating to the feelings; of bitter and irritating temper or manner; sharp, biting, caustic.
adept ::: one who is completely versed (in something); thoroughly proficient; well-skilled; expert. adepts.
"A divine Force is at work and will choose at each moment what has to be done or has not to be done, what has to be momentarily or permanently taken up, momentarily or permanently abandoned. For provided we do not substitute for that our desire or our ego, and to that end the soul must be always awake, always on guard, alive to the divine guidance, resistant to the undivine misleading from within or without us, that Force is sufficient and alone competent and she will lead us to the fulfilment along ways and by means too large, too inward, too complex for the mind to follow, much less to dictate. It is an arduous and difficult and dangerous way, but there is none other.” The Synthesis of Yoga
adj. 1. Beautiful. 2. Fine, bright, sunny. 3. Free from blemish, imperfection, or anything that impairs the appearance, quality, or character. 4. Of pleasing form or appearance. 5. Neither excellent nor poor; moderately or tolerably good. fairer.* *n. 6.* That which is fair (in senses of the adj.*).
adj. 1. Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty. 2. Unconstrained; unconfined. 3. Unobstructed; clear. 4. Ready or generous in using or giving; liberal; lavish. 5. Exempt from external authority, interference, restriction, etc., as a person or one"s will, thought, choice, action, etc.; independent; unrestricted. 6. Exempt or released from something specified that controls, restrains, burdens, etc. (usually followed by from or of). 7. Given readily or in profusion. freer, thought-free, world-free. *adv. *8. In a free manner; without constraints; unimpeded. v. 9. To make free; set at liberty; release from bondage, imprisonment, or restraint. 10. To disengage or clear something from an entanglement. 11. To relieve or rid of a burden, an inconvenience or an obligation. freed. set free. Released; liberated; freed.
admit ::: 1. To allow to enter, let in, receive (a person or thing). 2. Fig. To allow a matter to enter into any relation to action or thought. 3. To accept as true, or as a fact, to acknowledge, concede. 4. To allow, permit, grant. admits, admitted, admitting.
adversary ::: a person, group or force that opposes or attacks, or acts in a hostile manner; an opponent, antagonist; an enemy, foe. adversary"s.
adversity ::: the condition of adverse fortune or fate; a state opposed to well-being or prosperity; misfortune, distress, trial, or affliction.
aeons ::: ages of the universe, immeasurable periods of time; the whole duration of the world, or of the universe; eternity. aeons", aeoned, million-aeoned, (employed as an adj. by Sri Aurobindo), aeon-rings.
aesthesis ::: the perception of the external world by the senses.
"Aesthesis therefore is of the very essence of poetry, as it is of all art. But it is not the sole element and aesthesis too is not confined to a reception of poetry and art; it extends to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think or in any way experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious being. Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other things also. It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things.” Letters on Savitri
aesthete ::: a person who has or professes to have refined sensitivity toward the beauties of art or nature.
aesthetic ::: pertaining to a sense of the beautiful or pleasing; characterized by a love of beauty; tasteful, of refined taste.
"A fabulous tribe of wild, beastlike monsters, having the upper part of a human being and the lower part of a horse. They live in the woods or mountains of Elis, Arcadia, and Thessaly. They are representative of wild life, animal desires and barbarism. (M.I.) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.*
affinity ::: 1. Causal relationship or connexion (as flowing the one from the other, or having a common source). 2. A psychical or spiritual attraction believed by some sects to exist between persons.
afflatus ::: the miraculous communication of supernatural knowledge; hence also, the imparting of an over-mastering impulse, poetic or otherwise; inspiration. A creative inspiration, as that of a poet; a divine imparting of knowledge, thus it is often called divine afflatus.
age ::: n. **1. A great period or stage of the history of the Earth. 2. Hist. Any great period or portion of human history distinguished by certain characters real or mythical, as the Golden Age, the Patriarchal Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of the Reformation, the Middle Ages, the Prehistoric Age. 3. A generation or a series of generations. 4. Advanced years; old age. age"s, ages, ages". v. 5.** To grow old; to become aged.
*[Agni]. Sri Aurobindo: "Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame[Agni] is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.” *The Secret of the Veda
aide ::: an assistant or helper. aides.
air ::: 1. The transparent, invisible, inodorous, and tasteless gaseous substance which envelopes the earth. 2. *Fig. With reference to its unsubstantial or impalpable nature. 3. Outward appearance, apparent character, manner, look, style: esp. in phrases like ‘an air of absurdity"; less commonly of a thing tangible, as ‘the air of a mansion". 4. Mien or gesture (expressive of a personal quality or emotion). *air"s.
akin ::: allied by nature; having the same properties; near in nature or character.
alacananda ::: "One of the four head streams of the river Ganga in the Himalayas. According to the Vaishnavas it is the terrestrial Ganga which Shiva received upon his head as it fell from heaven. The famous shrine of Badrinath is situated on the banks of this stream. (Dow.)” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
alien ::: 1. Unlike one"s own; strange; not belonging to one; belonging to another person, place, or family. 2. Adverse; hostile. aliens.
". . . a limited consciousness growing out of nescience is the source of error, a personal attachment to the limitation and the error born of it the source of falsity, a wrong consciousness governed by the life-ego the source of evil. But it is evident that their relative existence is only a phenomenon thrown up by the cosmic Force in its drive towards evolutionary self-expression.” The Life Divine
". . . all division is intended to enrich by an experience of various sweetness of unification the joy of realised unity.” The Life Divine
allegiance ::: loyalty or devotion to some person, group, cause, or the like.
::: "All evolution is the progressive self-revelation of the One to himself in the terms of the Many out of the Inconscience through the Ignorance towards self-conscient perfection.” Essays Divine and Human **evolution"s, Evolution"s.**
allied ::: related; connected by nature, properties, or similitude; kindred.
allowed ::: 1. Permitted the occurrence or existence of. 2. Allotted, assigned, bestowed. allows.
"All phenomenal existence resolves itself into Force, into a movement of energy that assumes more or less material, more or less gross or subtle forms for self-presentation to its own experience.” The Life Divine
amateur ::: a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons.
ambit ::: a sphere of operation or influence; range, scope.
ananke ::: "In Greek mythology, personification of compelling necessity or ultimate fate to which even the gods must yield.” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
anchor ::: 1. Any of various devices dropped by a chain, cable, or rope to the bottom of a body of water for preventing or restricting the motion of a vessel or other floating object, typically having broad, hooklike arms that bury themselves in the bottom to provide a firm hold. 2. A person or thing that can be relied on for support, stability, or security; mainstay.
ancient ::: 1. Of or in time long past or early in the world"s history. 2. Dating from a remote period; of great age; of early origin. 3. Being old in wisdom and experience; venerable. Ancient.
::: "And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also self-existent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.” The Synthesis of Yoga —**cosmic forces.**
angel ::: 1. One of a class of spiritual beings; a celestial attendant of the Deity; a divine messenger of an order of spiritual beings superior to man in power. 2. A fallen or rebellious spirit once a spiritual attendant of the Divine. angel, Angels, **angels.
**Angel of the Way *Sri Aurobindo: "Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. ‘By Bhakti" says the Lord in the Gita ‘shall a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the principles of my being, then he enters into Me." Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one"s love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, [work, knowledge, love] the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover"s being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
animal ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?” *The Life Divine
another ::: adj. 1. Being one more or more of the same; further; additional. 2. Very similar to; of the same kind or category as. 3. Different; distinct; of a different period, place, or kind. pron. **4. A person other than oneself or the one specified. 5. One more; an additional one. another"s**.
antique ::: 1. Of or belonging to the past. 2. Dating from a period long ago; ancient.
apocalypse ::: 1. Any revelation or prophecy. 2. A prophetic revelation, esp. concerning a cataclysm in which the forces of good permanently triumph over the forces of evil.
apparent ::: readily seen; exposed to sight; open to view. 2. Capable of being easily perceived or understood; plain or clear; obvious; visible.
appearance ::: 1. The act or fact of coming forward into view ; becoming visible. 2. The state, condition, manner, or style in which a person or object appears; outward look or aspect. 3. Outward show or seeming; semblance. appearances.
approach ::: v. 1. To come near or nearer to; draw near. 2. To come near to a person: i.e. into personal relations; into his presence or audience; or fig. within the range of his notice or attention. 3. To come near in quality, character, time, or condition; to be nearly equal. approaches, approached, approaching.* *n. 4. Any means of access or way of passage, avenue. 5. The act of drawing near. approaches.**
apsaras ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean, robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking a form in the marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsara. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnoupurana.
arch- ::: a combining form that represents the outcome of archi- in words borrowed through Latin from Greek in the Old English period; it subsequently became a productive form added to nouns of any origin, which thus denote individuals or institutions directing or having authority over others of their class (archbishop; archdiocese; archpriest): principal. More recently, arch-1 has developed the senses "principal” (archenemy; archrival) or "prototypical” and thus exemplary or extreme (archconservative); nouns so formed are almost always pejorative. Arch-intelligence.
archivist ::: a person responsible for preserving, organizing, or servicing archival material.
argument ::: 1. A fact or statement put forth as proof or evidence; a reason; persuasive discourse, debate. 2. A process of reasoning; series of reasons.
aristocracy ::: the class to which a ruling body belongs, a patrician order; the collective body of those who form a privileged class; also used fig. of those who are superior.
arraigned ::: called (an accused person) before a court to answer the charge made against him or her by indictment, information, or complaint, or brought before a court to answer to an indictment; accused, charged with fault.
arrogant ::: 1. Having or displaying a sense of overbearing self-worth or self-importance. 2. Marked by or arising from a feeling or assumption of one"s superiority toward others.
artificer ::: 1. One who is skilful or clever in devising ways of making things; inventor. 2. A skilful or artistic worker; craftsperson. artificers.
"Art is a living harmony and beauty that must be expressed in all the movements of existence. This manifestation of beauty and harmony is part of the Divine realisation upon earth, perhaps even its greatest part.” Questions and Answers, MCW Vol. 3.
artisan ::: one skilled in an applied art; craftsperson. artisans.
art ::: v. archaic** A second person singular present indicative of be, now only poet., not in modern usage. All other references are to art as the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. Also, the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria. art"s, arts, art-parades.
assemblage ::: a number of persons gathered together; a gathering, concourse. (Less formal than assembly.)
assessed ::: evaluated (a person or thing); estimated (the quality, value, or extent of), gauged or judged.
"As there is a cosmic Self and Spirit pervading and upholding the universe and its beings, so too there is a cosmic Force that moves all things, and on this original cosmic Force depend and act many cosmic Forces that are its powers or arise as forms of its universal action.” The Life Divine
"At every turn it is the divine Reality which we can discover behind that which we are yet compelled by the nature of the superficial consciousness in which we dwell to call undivine and in a sense are right in using that apellation; for these appearances are a veil over the Divine Perfection, a veil necessary for the present, but not at all the true and complete figure.” The Life Divine
athwart ::: 1. Across from side to side; crosswise or transversely; contrary to the proper or expected course; against; crosswise. 2. Of motion; from side to side.
atmosphere ::: 1. A surrounding or pervading mood, environment, or influence. 2. The air.
atom ::: 1. A unit of matter, the smallest unit of an element, having all the characteristics of that element and consisting of a dense, central, positively charged nucleus surrounded by a system of electrons. 2. The smallest component of an element having the chemical properties of the element. 3. An extremely small part, quantity, or amount. The smallest conceivable unit of an element or of anything. atom"s, atoms, atomic.
attain ::: 1. To gain as an objective; achieve; reach, arrive at; accomplish. 2. To arrive at, as by virtue of persistence or the passage of time; To reach in the course of development. attained.
authorises ::: gives permission for, formal approval to; sanctions or approves.
awhile ::: for a short time or period.
babble ::: 1. v. To utter sounds or words imperfectly, indistinctly, or without meaning. 2.* **n. *A murmuring sound or a confusion of sounds.
babel ::: "The reference is to the mythological story of the construction of the Tower of Babel, which appears to be an attempt to explain the diversity of human languages. According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and tower ‘with its top in the heavens". God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The tower was never completed and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works Sri Aurobindo: "The legend of the Tower of Babel speaks of the diversity of tongues as a curse laid on the race; but whatever its disadvantages, and they tend more and more to be minimised by the growth of civilisation and increasing intercourse, it has been rather a blessing than a curse, a gift to mankind rather than a disability laid upon it. The purposeless exaggeration of anything is always an evil, and an excessive pullulation of varying tongues that serve no purpose in the expression of a real diversity of spirit and culture is certainly a stumbling-block rather than a help: but this excess, though it existed in the past, is hardly a possibility of the future. The tendency is rather in the opposite direction. In former times diversity of language helped to create a barrier to knowledge and sympathy, was often made the pretext even of an actual antipathy and tended to a too rigid division. The lack of sufficient interpenetration kept up both a passive want of understanding and a fruitful crop of active misunderstandings. But this was an inevitable evil of a particular stage of growth, an exaggeration of the necessity that then existed for the vigorous development of strongly individualised group-souls in the human race. These disadvantages have not yet been abolished, but with closer intercourse and the growing desire of men and nations for the knowledge of each other"s thought and spirit and personality, they have diminished and tend to diminish more and more and there is no reason why in the end they should not become inoperative.” The Human Cycle
background ::: n.** 1. The general scene or surface against which designs, patterns, or figures are represented or viewed. 2. Fig. The complex of physical, cultural, and psychological factors that serves as the environment of an event or experience; the set of conditions against which an occurrence is perceived. backgrounds. adj. 3.** Of, pertaining to, or serving as a background.
baffled ::: 1. Confused, bewildered, or perplexed. 2. Frustrated or confounded; thwarted. baffles, baffling.
balance ::: n. **1. A state of equilibrium or equipoise; mental, psychological or emotional. 2. A weighing device, especially one consisting of a rigid beam horizontally suspended by a low-friction support at its center, with identical weighing pans hung at either end, one of which holds an unknown weight while the effective weight in the other is increased by known amounts until the beam is level and motionless. 3. An undecided or uncertain state in which issues are unresolved. v. 4. To have an equality or equivalence in weight, parts, etc.; be in equilibrium. adj. 5. Being in harmonious or proper arrangement or adjustment, proportion. 6. Mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behaviour, judgement. balanced, balancing.**
bankruptcy ::: 1. A state of complete lack of some abstract property; "spiritual bankruptcy”; "moral bankruptcy”; "intellectual bankruptcy”. 2. Depleted of valuable qualities or characteristics.
baptism ::: a ceremony, trial, or experience by which one is initiated, purified, or given a name.
battalion ::: 1. An army unit typically consisting of a headquarters and two or more companies, batteries, or similar subunits. 2. A large body of organized troops in battle gear. 3. A large indefinite number of persons or things.
battened ::: thrived and prospered, especially at another"s expense; grew fat. battening
beatific ::: showing, producing, or experiencing exalted joy or blessedness.
beauty ::: the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, colour, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else, (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest). Beauty, beauty"s, Beauty"s, beauty-drenched, earth-beauty"s.
behold ::: v. 1. To perceive by the visual faculty; see. beholds. Interj. **2.** Look; see.
being ::: 1. The state or quality of having existence. 2. The totality of all things that exist. 3. One"s basic or essential nature; self. 4. All the qualities constituting one that exists; the essence. 5. A person; human being. 6. The Divine, the Supreme; God. Being, being"s, Being"s, beings, Beings, beings", earth-being"s, earth-beings, fragment-being, non-being, non-being"s, Non-Being, Non-Being"s, world-being"s.
Sri Aurobindo: "Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence.” *The Life Divine :::
"The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming. The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome of its immutable formless essence.” *The Life Divine
"What is original and eternal for ever in the Divine is the Being, what is developed in consciousness, conditions, forces, forms, etc., by the Divine Power is the Becoming. The eternal Divine is the Being; the universe in Time and all that is apparent in it is a Becoming.” Letters on Yoga
"Being and Becoming, One and Many are both true and are both the same thing: Being is one, Becomings are many; but this simply means that all Becomings are one Being who places Himself variously in the phenomenal movement of His consciousness.” The Upanishads :::
"Our whole apparent life has only a symbolic value & is good & necessary as a becoming; but all becoming has being for its goal & fulfilment & God is the only being.” *Essays Divine and Human
"Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
being, conscious ::: Sri Aurobindo: "We have to conceive one indivisible conscious being behind all our experiences. . . . That is our real self.” *The Life Divine
believed in ::: was persuaded of the truth or existence of; had faith in the reliability, honesty, benevolence, etc. of.
belong ::: 1. To be a part of or adjunct. 2. To be the property, attribute, or possession of. belongs.
beloved ::: n. 1. A person who is dearly loved. beloved"s, Beloved, Beloved"s. *adj. *2. Dearly loved.
belt ::: 1. Any encircling or transverse band, strip, or stripe characteristically distinguished from the surface it crosses. 2. An elongated region having distinctive properties or characteristics and long in proportion to its breadth. 3. A zone or district.
bench ::: 1. A long seat usually made of wood, for two or more persons. 2. A seat occupied by a person in an official capacity, esp. a judge. 3. Such a seat as a symbol of the office and dignity of an individual judge or the judiciary.
bent ::: personal inclination, propensity, tendency or aptitude.
bequeathed ::: disposed of (property, etc.) by last will; fig. handed down, passed on.
biography ::: an account of a person"s life written, composed, or produced by another.
blessing ::: 1. Something promoting or contributing to happiness, well-being, or prosperity; a boon. 2. A ceremonial prayer invoking divine protection, grace, etc.
blind ::: adj. 1. Unable to see; lacking the sense of sight; sightless. Also fig. 2. Unwilling or unable to perceive or understand. 3. Lacking all consciousness or awareness. 4. Not having or based on reason or intelligence; absolute and unquestioning. 5. Not characterized or determined by reason or control. 6. Purposeless; fortuitous, random. 7. Undiscriminating; heedless; reckless. 8. Enveloped in darkness; dark, dim, obscure. 9. Dense enough to form a screen. 10. Covered or concealed from sight; hidden from immediate view. 11. Having no openings or passages for light; (a window or door) walled up. blindest, half-blind. v. 12. To deprive of sight permanently or temporarily. 13. To make sightless momentarily; dazzle. blinded.* n. 14. A blind person, esp. as pl., those who are blind. 15. Fig.* Any thing or action intended to conceal one"s real intention; a pretence, a pretext; subterfuge.
blinded ::: 1. Sightless; deprived of sight or withheld the light from. 2. Fig. Unable or unwilling to perceive or understand, lacking in perception or foresight; deprived or destitute of spiritual light or guidance. thought-blinded.
blindfold ::: fig. With the awareness or clear thinking impaired, the mind blinded and without perception.
blinkered ::: subjective and limited, as in viewpoint or perception.
bliss ::: perfect happiness; serene joy or ecstasy. (See delight for Sri Aurobindo"s definitions.) **self-bliss, World-Bliss.
blow ::: 1. A sudden, hard stroke with a hand, fist, or weapon; a stroke. 2. A sudden attack or drastic action. 3. Fig. A sudden shock, calamity, severe disaster experienced by someone. blows.
board ::: a sheet of wood, cardboard, paper, or other material on which some games are played.
body-slave ::: a servant reserved for personal attendance or use.
bondslave ::: a person in a state of slavery; one whose person and liberty are subjected to the authority of a master. bondslaves.
persons who fashion, form, or give shape to anything.
"Brahma is the Eternal"s Personality of Existence; from him all is created, by his presence, by his power, by his impulse.” Essays Human and Divine
breaks out or from ::: bursts or springs out from restraint, confinement, or concealment. Said of persons and things material, also of fire, light, etc.
breath ::: 1. The air inhaled and exhaled in respiration. Also fig. 2. A momentary stirring of air, a slight gust. 3. Spirit or vitality; life. 4. The vapour, heat, or odour of exhaled air. Also fig. **5. A slight suggestion; hint; whisper. Breath,* *breath-fastened.**
bribe ::: something, such as money or a favour, offered or given to a person in a position of trust to influence that person"s views or conduct.
bridal ::: of, or pertaining to a bride or a marriage ceremony; nuptial. soul-bridals.
brimmed ::: referring to the upper edge or rim of anything hollow.
brim ::: the rim or uppermost edge of a hollow container or natural basin, bowl, etc.
brink ::: 1. The upper edge of a steep or vertical slope, esp. the margin of land bordering a body of water. 2. Any extreme edge; verge. 3. A crucial or critical point, esp. of a situation or state beyond which success or catastrophe occurs.
broken ::: 1. Forcibly separated into two or more pieces; fractured. 2. Crushed in spirit or temper; discouraged; overcome. 3. Incomplete. 4. Interrupted disturbed; disconnected. 5. Torn; ruptured. (Also pp. of break.)
bronze ::: 1. Any of various alloys of copper and tin in various proportions. 2. A moderate yellowish to olive brown color.
bubble ::: anything that lacks firmness, substance, or permanence.
builder ::: a person who builds. Also fig. builders, Babel-builders", master-builders.
business ::: 1. One"s rightful or proper concern or interest. 2. A specific occupation or pursuit; an action in which one is engaged.
"But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of things, which is always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the mere reason, the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and process but of their spirit.” The Human Cycle etc.
"But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power of being of this Spirit which manifests itself in all that we experience as universe. This universal Nature is not a lifeless, inert or unconscious mechanism, but informed in all its movements by the universal Spirit. The mechanism of its process is only an outward appearance and the reality is the Spirit creating or manifesting its own being by its own power of being in all that is in Nature. Soul and Nature in us too are only a dual appearance of the one existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
butt ::: a person or thing that is the object of wit, ridicule, sarcasm, contempt.
"By Force I mean not mental or vital energy but the Divine Force from above — as peace comes from above and wideness also, so does this Force (Shakti). Nothing, not even thinking or meditating can be done without some action of Force. The Force I speak of is a Force for illumination, transformation, purification, all that has to be done in the yoga, for removal of hostile forces and the wrong movements — it is also of course for external work, whether great or small in appearance does not matter — if that is part of the Divine Will. I do not mean any personal force egoistic or rajasic.” Letters on Yoga
cabbala ::: 1 A body of mystical Jewish teachings based on an interpretation of hidden meanings in the Hebrew Scriptures. Among its central doctrines are, all creation is an emanation from the Deity and the soul exists from eternity. 2. Any secret or occult doctrine or science. 3. "Esoteric system of interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures based on the assumption that every word, letter, number, and accent in them has an occult meaning. The system, oral at first, claimed great antiquity, but was really the product of the Middle Ages, arising in the 7th century and lasting into the 18th. It was popular chiefly among Jews, but spread to Christians as well. (Col. Enc.)” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
cabined ::: confined in an enclosed space like a cabin. fig. hampered, hindered, impeded, in ability to think or act.
cadence ::: 1. Balanced, rhythmic flow, as of poetry or oratory. 2. Music. A sequence of notes or chords that indicates the momentary or complete end of a composition, section, phrase, etc. 3. The flow or rhythm of events. 4. A recurrent rhythmical series; a flow, esp. the pattern in which something is experienced. 5. A slight falling in pitch of the voice in speaking or reading. cadences.
cajoles ::: persuades by flattery or promises; wheedles; coaxes.
calm ::: n. 1. Serenity; tranquillity; peace. 2. Nearly or completely motionless as a condition of no wind. Calm, Calm"s, calms, calmness. adj. 3. Not excited or agitated; composed; tranquil; 4. Without rough motion; still or nearly still. calmer, calm-lipped, stone-calm. *adv. calmly.
Sri Aurobindo: "Calm is a still unmoved condition which no disturbance can affect — it is a less negative condition than quiet.” Letters on Yoga*
"Calm is a positive tranquillity which can exist in spite of superficial disturbances.” *Letters on Yoga
"Calm is a strong and positive quietude, firm and solid — ordinary quietude is mere negation, simply the absence of disturbance.” *Letters on Yoga
"But more powerful still is the giving up of the fruit of one"s works, because that immediately destroys all causes of disturbance and brings and preserves automatically an inner calm and peace, and calm and peace are the foundation on which all else becomes perfect and secure in possession by the tranquil spirit.” Essays on the Gita
The Mother: "Calm is self-possessed strength, quiet and conscious energy, mastery of the impulses, control over the unconscious reflexes.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 14*.
candidate ::: a person or thing regarded as suitable or likely for a particular fate or position.
capital ::: 1. A town or city that is the official seat of government in a political entity, such as a state or nation. 2. Wealth in the form of money or property.
care ::: n. **1. A burdened state of mind, as that arising from heavy responsibilities; worry. 2. An object of or cause for concern. 3. Watchful oversight; charge or supervision. 4. An object or source of worry, attention, or solicitude. care, cares. v. 5. To be concerned or interested, have concern for. cares, cared.**
caricature ::: a grotesque imitation, misrepresentation or distorted image, as a drawing or description of a person which exaggerates characteristic features for comic effect.
castaway ::: a shipwrecked person. Also fig. a rejected or discarded person or thing.
cause ::: 1. A person or thing that acts, happens, or exists in such a way that some specific thing happens as a result; the producer of an effect. 2. A basis for an action or response; a reason. 3. Grounds for action; motive; justification. 4. Good or sufficient reason. 5. The principle, ideal, goal, or movement to which a person or group is dedicated. Cause.
ceiling ::: 1. An upper limit, especially as set by regulation. 2. The upper interior surface of a room.
cell ::: biology: The smallest structural unit of an organism that is capable of independent functioning, consisting of one or more nuclei, cytoplasm, and various organelles, all surrounded by a semipermeable cell membrane. cells.
cenotaphs ::: monuments erected in honour of dead persons whose remains lie elsewhere.
centuries ::: periods of 100 years.
chance ::: n. 1. The absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled: often personified or treated as a positive agency. 2. The happening of events; the way in which things happen; fortune. 3. An opportune or favourable time; opportunity. 4. Fortune; luck; fate. Chance, chances. *adj.* 5. Not planned or expected; accidental. v. 6. To happen by chance; be the case by chance.** chanced.
characters ::: 1. The combination of qualities, features and traits that distinguishes one person, group, or thing from another. 2. The marks or symbols used in writing systems such as the letters of the alphabet.
check ::: v. 1. To investigate, examine or verify as to correctness; examine carefully or in detail; to ascertain the truth about. 2. To inspect so as to determine accuracy, authenticity, quality, or other condition; test. checked.* n. *3. A person or thing that stops, limits, slows, or restrains.
chemic ::: chemical. ::: cheque ::: a written order, usually on a standard printed form, directing a bank to pay money to a person or designated bearer. cheques.
cherish ::: 1. To hold great love for someone; feel love for one. 2. To care for, protect and love —(a person). 3. To cling fondly to (a hope, idea, etc.); nurse. cherished.
child ::: 1. A person between birth and full growth. 2. A baby or infant. 3. A person who has not attained maturity. 4. One who is childish or immature. 5. An individual regarded as strongly affected by another or by a specified time, place, or circumstance. 6. Any person or thing regarded as the product or result of particular agencies, influences, etc. Child, child"s, children, Children, children"s, child-god, Child-Godhead, child-heart, child-heart"s, child-laughter, child-soul, child-sovereign, child-thought, flame-child, foster-child, God-child, King-children.
chill ::: adj. 1. Cold, often unpleasantly so; numbing. 2. Discouraging; dispiriting. 3. Unduly formal; unfriendly; unfeeling. v. 4. To lower in temperature; cool; make cold. 5. Fig. To depress (enthusiasm, etc.); discourage. chilled, chilling.
choice ::: 1. The act of choosing; selection. 2. The power, right, or liberty to choose; option. 3. A person or thing chosen or that may be chosen.
chrysoprase ::: a brittle, translucent, semiprecious chalcedony (q.v.), a variety of the silica mineral quartz. It owes its bright apple-green colour to colloidally dispersed hydrated nickel silicate. Valued in ancient times as it shone in the dark.
circumference ::: the boundary line of a circle; perimeter; figure, area, or object or the area within the boundary.
citizen ::: a person owing loyalty to and entitled by birth or naturalization to the protection of a state or nation. citizens.
clairaudience ::: the power to hear sounds said to exist beyond the reach of ordinary experiences or capacity.
clamour ::: 1. A loud uproar, as from a crowd of people. 2. A vehement expression of collective feeling or outrage. 3. A loud and persistent noise. clamours. clamouring.
clarity ::: 1. Clearness or lucidity as to perception or understanding; freedom from indistinctness or ambiguity. 2. The state or quality of being clear or transparent to the eye; pellucidity; brightness, splendour.
clear ::: 1. Not obscured or darkened; bright. 2. Free from darkness, obscurity, or cloudiness; transparent. 3. Serene; calm; untroubled. 4. Free from doubt or confusion; certain. 5. Easily perceptible to the eye or ear; distinct. 6. Easily understood; without ambiguity. 7. Free from impediment, obstruction, or hindrance; open. clearer, sun-clear, surface-clear.
climes ::: 1. Poetic: Regions or their climates; atmospheres. 2. The prevailing attitudes, standards or conditions of a group, period, or place.
clock-work ::: with machinelike regularity and precision; perfectly.
clogs ::: fig. Hampers the function or activity of; impedes.
clustering ::: a number of things of the same kind, growing or held together; a bunch. 2. A group of things or persons close together.
coalition ::: a combination or alliance, esp. a temporary one between persons, factions, states.
coeval ::: 1. Of the same era, period or age. 2. A contemporary.
coevals ::: persons belonging to the same age or generation; contemporaries.
coilas ::: (Most often spelled Kailas.) "One of the highest and most rugged mountains of the Himalayan range, located in the southwestern part of China. It is an important holy site both to the Hindus, who identify it with the paradise of Shiva and also regard it as the abode of Kubera, and to the Tibetan Buddhists, who identify it with Mount Sumeru, cosmic centre of the universe.” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
collaboration ::: co-operation; working together harmoniously, especially in a joint intellectual effort.
colonist ::: a person who settles in a new colony or moves into and helps found a colony or new country.
combatant ::: a person engaged in or prepared for a fight, struggle, or dispute. combatants.
common ::: 1. Belonging equally to or shared alike by two or more. 2. Of or relating to the community or humanity as a whole. 3. Belonging equally to or shared equally by two or more; joint. 4. Not distinguished by superior or noteworthy characteristics; average; ordinary. 5. Occurring frequently or habitually; usual. commonest.
commonalty ::: not distinguished by superior or noteworthy characteristics; average; ordinary.
common estimation or opinion generally held of a person or thing; reputation. (when capitalized often [quasi-] personified). Fame.
communality ::: a feeling or spirit of cooperation and belonging arising from common interests and goals.
communicant ::: a person who communicates, informs or imparts.
companion ::: 1. A person who accompanies or associates with another; a comrade. 2. Astronomy. The fainter of the two stars that constitute a double star. companions, companionless.
company ::: 1. A number of people gathered together; assembly. 2. A number of persons united or incorporated for joint action. companies.
complements ::: 1. Things that complete, make up a whole, or bring to perfection. 2. Things that complete each other when combined and complete the whole.
composer ::: one who composes, especially a person who composes music.
cone ::: 1. A solid whose surface is generated by a straight line, the generator, passing through a fixed point, the vertex, and moving along a fixed curve, the directrix. 2. Anything that tapers from a circular section to a point.
confidence ::: 1. Full trust or faith in a person or thing. 2. A feeling of assurance, especially of self-assurance.
conspiracies ::: evil, unlawful, treacherous or surreptitious plans formulated in secret by two or more persons; plots.
constellations ::: any of the 88 groups of stars as seen from the earth and the solar system, many of which were named by the ancient Greeks after animals, objects, or mythological persons.
continues ::: goes on with a particular action or in a particular condition; persists. continuing.
control-room ::: a room housing control equipment where certain operations are conducted.
convince ::: 1. To move by argument or evidence to belief, agreement, consent, or a course of action; persuade.
corrupt ::: 1. To destroy or subvert the honesty or integrity of. 2. To ruin morally; pervert. 3. To cause to become rotten; spoil. 4. To taint; contaminate. corrupted, corrupting.
corruption ::: moral perversion; depravity.
cosmic force ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . universal force and universal consciousness are one, — cosmic force is the operation of cosmic consciousness.” *The Life Divine
cosmic mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes, — towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.” *The Life Divine
"If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, — not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine
"There is one cosmic Mind, one cosmic Life, one cosmic Body. All the attempt of man to arrive at universal sympathy, universal love and the understanding and knowledge of the inner soul of other existences is an attempt to beat thin, breach and eventually break down by the power of the enlarging mind and heart the walls of the ego and arrive nearer to a cosmic oneness.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"[The results of the opening to the cosmic Mind:] One is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one"s mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one"s own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power. There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one.” Letters on Yoga
"The cosmic consciousness has many levels — the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live in the Intuition plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.” Letters on Yoga*
cosmic ::: of or pertaining to the cosmos and characteristic of its phenomena as forming a part of the material universe; infinite.
cosmic Self ::: Sri Aurobindo: "When one has the cosmic consciousness, one can feel the cosmic Self as one"s own self, one can feel one with other beings in the cosmos, one can feel all the forces of Nature as moving in oneself, all selves as one"s own self. There is no why except that it is so, since all is the One.” Letters on Yoga (See also Cosmic Spirit)
"Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; . . . .” *The Life Divine
"An eternal infinite self-existence is the supreme reality, but the supreme transcendent eternal Being, Self and Spirit, — an infinite Person, we may say, because his being is the essence and source of all personality, — is the reality and meaning of self-existence: so too the cosmic Self, Spirit, Being, Person is the reality and meaning of cosmic existence; the same Self, Spirit, Being or Person manifesting its multiplicity is the reality and meaning of individual existence.” The Life Divine
"But this cosmic self is spiritual in essence and in experience; it must not be confused with the collective existence, with any group soul or the life and body of a human society or even of all mankind.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"It is the Cosmic Self and Spirit that is in and behind all things and beings, from which and in which all is manifested in the universe — although it is now a manifestation in the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga*
costume ::: n. A style of dress, including garments, accessories, and hairstyle, especially as characteristic of a particular country, period, or people. costumes. *v. 2. To furnish with a mode of attire, set of garments; dress. *costuming.
councils ::: assemblies of persons summoned or convened for consultation, deliberation, or advice.
courtier ::: a person who is often in attendance at the court of a king or other royal personage.
craftsman ::: a person who practices or is highly skilled in a craft; artisan. (Here in reference to the Divine). craftsman** **(in general).
creator ::: 1. The Divine Being, creator of all things. 2. A person, force or thing that creates. Creator, creator"s, Creator"s, creators, world-creators. (Sri Aurobindo also employs creator as an adjective.)
creature ::: 1. Something created; a living being, esp. an animal. 2. A human. 3. A person who is dependent upon another; tool or puppet. creature"s, creatures, creatures".
credit ::: any deposit or sum of money against which a person may draw.
credits ::: ascribes to a person; attributes.
credulous ::: disposed to believe too readily, esp. without proper or adequate evidence; gullible.
creepered ::: covered with vines (creepers).
creepers ::: plants that spread by means of stems that creep or climb; vines.
crescent ::: the figure of the moon in its first or last quarter, resembling a segment of a ring tapering to points at the ends.
critiqued ::: judged critically, made a critical assessment of or comment on (an action, person, etc.).
crooked ::: 1. Bent, angled or winding; deformed or contorted. 2. Dishonest or unscrupulous; fraudulent; perverse.
cross ::: 1. A structure consisting essentially of an upright and a transverse piece, upon which persons were formerly put to a cruel and ignominious death by being nailed or otherwise fastened to it by their extremities. 2. A representation or delineation of a cross on any surface, varying in elaborateness from two lines crossing each other to an ornamental design painted, embroidered, carved, etc.; used as a sacred mark, symbol, badge, or the like. 3. A trouble, vexation, annoyance; misfortune, adversity; sometimes anything that thwarts or crosses. v. 4. To go or extend across; pass from one side of to the other: pass over. 5. To extend or pass through or over; intersect. 6. To encounter in passing. crosses, crossed, crossing.
crowded ::: 1. Filled near or to capacity. 2. Filled with a crowd. 3.* Fig.* packed closely together, as experiences, events; occurrences.
crowd ::: n. 1. A large number of persons gathered tightly together; a throng. 2. The masses. 3. A large number of things or people gathered or considered together; a multitude. crowds. v. 4. To press together into a confined space; assemble in large numbers. 5. To fill, occupy or cram things tightly together. 6. To advance by pressing or shoving. crowds, crowded, crowding.
crowned ::: 1. Invested with regal power; enthroned. 2. Ultimate; perfect; sovereign. 3. Having the finishing touch added to; completed worthily; brought to a successful consummation.
crown ::: n. **1. An ornament worn on the head by kings and those having sovereign power, often made of precious metal and ornamented with gems. 2. A wreath or garland for the head, awarded as a sign of victory, success, honour, etc. 3. The distinction that comes from a great achievement; reward, honour. 4. The top or summit of something, esp. of a rounded object. etc. 5. The highest or more nearly perfect state of anything. 6. An exalting or chief attribute. 7. The acme or supreme source of honour, excellence, beauty, etc. v. 8. To put a crown on the head of, symbolically vesting with royal title, powers, etc. 9. To place something on or over the head or top of. crowns, crowned.**
crucifies ::: treats with gross injustice; persecutes; torments; tortures.
crude ::: 1. In a raw or unprepared state; unrefined or natural; unfinished, coarse. 2. Lacking in intellectual subtlety, perceptivity, etc.; rudimentary; undeveloped. 3. Rough or primitive. 4. Lacking culture, refinement, tact. crudely.
cue ::: 1. A hint or suggestion. 2. The part a person is to play; a prescribed or necessary course of action.
cult ::: 1. Obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing. 2. A specific system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and deity. 3. A group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal. cults.
culture ("s) ::: the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.
cunning ::: 1. Skill or adeptness in execution or performance; dexterity. 2. Artfully subtle or shrewd. 3. Cunning implies a shrewd, often instinctive skill in concealing or disguising the real purposes of one"s actions. cunningly.
cup ::: 1. A small open container, usually with a flat bottom and a handle, used for drinking, or something resembling it. cup"s 2. *Fig.* Something that one must endure; one"s lot to be experienced or endured with pain or happiness, as these lines in Savitri:
**curled** ::: 1. Formed into a coiled or spiral shape. 2. Bent or raised the upper lip slightly on one side, as an expression of contempt or scorn. foam-curled.
curse ::: n. 1. The expression of a wish that misfortune, evil, doom, etc., befall a person, group, etc. 2. A formula or charm intended to cause such misfortune to another. 3. An evil brought or inflicted upon one. 4. The cause of evil, misfortune, or trouble. 5. A profane or obscene expression or oath. curses. v. 6. To wish harm upon; invoke evil upon. 7. To invoke supernatural powers to bring harm to (someone or something). cursed.
custom ::: 1. A habitual practice of a person or a group. 2. A common tradition or usage so long established that it has the force or validity of law. custom"s.
cycle ::: 1. An interval of time during which a characteristic, often regularly repeated event or sequence of events occurs. 2. A periodically repeated sequence of events. 3. A long period of time; an age. cycles.
cyclopean ::: pertaining to one of a race of giants having a single eye in the middle of the forehead or any of three one-eyed Titans who forged thunderbolts for Zeus.
cynic ::: 1. A person who believes all people are motivated by selfishness and whose outlook is scornfully and often habitually negative. 2. *adj. *Bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic.
date ::: 1. A particular month, day, and year at which some event happened or will happen. 2. The time or period to which any event or thing belongs; period in general. 3. The time during which something lasts; duration. dates
dawn ::: n. **1. The first appearance of daylight in the morning. 2. The beginning or rise of anything; advent. dawn"s, dawns, dawn-sheen. v. 3. To begin to be perceived; appear; occur. dawns, dawned.
deaf ::: 1. Partially or wholly lacking, or deprived of the sense of hearing. 2. Refusing to listen, heed, or be persuaded.
dealt ::: took action with respect to a thing or person (followed by with).
"Death has no reality except as a process of life. Disintegration of substance and renewal of substance, maintenance of form and change of form are the constant process of life; death is merely a rapid disintegration subservient to life"s necessity of change and variation of formal experience. Even in the death of the body there is no cessation of Life, only the material of one form of life is broken up to serve as material for other forms of life.” The Life Divine
::: "Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life and her reminder to it that it has not yet found itself. If there were no siege of death, the creature would be bound for ever in the form of an imperfect living. Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility.” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
deathless ::: 1. Not subject to termination or death; immortal. 2. Unceasing; perpetual.
deceive ::: 1. To mislead by a false appearance or statement; delude. 2. To mislead or falsely persuade others. deceives, deceived.
decimal ::: pertaining to tenths or to the number ten; proceeding by tens. decimals.
deed ::: 1. Something that is done, performed, or accomplished; an act. 2. An exploit or achievement; feat. 3. Often plural as an act or gesture, esp. as illustrative of intentions, one"s character, or the like. deeds.
deep ::: n. 1. A vast extent, as of space or time; an abyss. 2. Fig. Difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; as an unfathomable thought, idea, esp. poetic. Deep, deep"s, deeps. adj. 3. Extending far downward below a surface. 4. Having great spatial extension or penetration downward or inward from an outer surface or backward or laterally or outward from a center; sometimes used in combination. 5. Coming from or penetrating to a great depth. 6. Situated far down, in, or back. 7. Lying below the surface; not superficial; profound. 8. Of great intensity; as extreme deep happiness, deep trouble. 9. Absorbing; engrossing. 10. Grave or serious. 11. Profoundly or intensely. 12. Mysterious; obscure; difficult to penetrate or understand. 13. Low in pitch or tone. 14. Profoundly cunning, crafty or artful. 15. The central and most intense or profound part; "in the deep of night”; "in the deep of winter”. deeper, deepest, deep-browed, deep-caved, deep-concealed, deep-etched, deep-fraught, deep-guarded, deep-hid, deep-honied, deep-pooled, deep-thoughted. *adv. *16. to a great depth psychologically or profoundly.
defect ::: an imperfection that causes inadequacy or failure; a shortcoming.
defend ::: to protect (a person, place, etc.) from harm or danger; ward off an attack on. defends, defending.
delegate ::: a person authorised to act as representative for another. delegation.
delicate ::: 1. Distinguishing subtle differences. 2. Of instruments: precise, skilled, or sensitive in action or operation. 3. Marked by sensitivity of discrimination and skillful in expression, technique, etc. 4. Exquisitely or beautifully fine in texture, construction, or finish. 5. Exquisite, fine, or subtle in quality, character, construction, etc. 6. (of colour, tone, taste, etc.) Pleasantly subtle, soft, or faint.
demand ::: n. 1. A formal claim. 2. An urgent requirement or need. demands. v. 3. To ask urgently or peremptorily, to claim as just or due. 4. To require as useful, just, proper, or necessary; call for. demands, demanded, demanding.
demiurges ::: 1. A Platonic deity who orders or fashions the material world out of chaos. 2. (in Gnostic and some other philosophies) The creator of the universe, supernatural but subordinate to the Supreme Being. ::: Demiurges.
deputy ::: a person appointed to act on behalf of or represent another; agent, representative, surrogate, envoy.
derelict ::: deserted by an owner or keeper; abandoned; deserted.
desperate ::: actuated by a feeling of hopelessness; that leaves little or no room for hope; such as to be despaired of; extremely dangerous or serious.
descry ::: 1. To see (something unclear or distant) by looking carefully; discern. 2. To discover, perceive, detect. descried.
desert ::: 1. A region so arid because of little rainfall that it supports only sparse and widely spaced vegetation or no vegetation at all. 2. Any area in which few forms of life can exist because of lack of water, permanent frost, or absence of soil. 3. Any place lacking in something; desolate, barren. deserts.
destiny ::: 1. Something that is to happen or has happened to a particular person or thing; lot or fortune. 2. The predetermined, usually inevitable or irresistible, course of events. 3. The power or agency that determines the course of events. 4. *(Cap.) This power personified or represented as a goddess. *Destiny, destinies, world-destiny.
destroyer ::: a person or thing that destroys.
"Destruction is always a simultaneous or alternate element which keeps pace with creation and it is by destroying and renewing that the Master of Life does his long work of preservation. More, destruction is the first condition of progress. Inwardly, the man who does not destroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater existence. Outwardly also, the nation or community or race which shrinks too long from destroying and replacing its past forms of life, is itself destroyed, rots and perishes and out of its debris other nations, communities and races are formed. By destruction of the old giant occupants man made himself a place upon earth. By destruction of the Titans the gods maintain the continuity of the divine Law in the cosmos. Whoever prematurely attempts to get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainly against the greater will of the World-Spirit.” Essays on the Gita
detached ::: 1. Impartial or objective; disinterested; unbiased. 2. Not involved or concerned; aloof. ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Detachment means that one stands back from [imperfections and weakness of the nature, etc.] , does not identify oneself with them or get upset or troubled because they are there, but rather looks on them as something foreign to one"s true consciousness and true self, rejects them and calls in the Mother"s Force into these movements to eliminate them and bring the true consciousness and its movements there.” Letters on Yoga
diameter ::: a straight line segment passing through the center of a figure, especially of a circle or sphere, and terminating at the periphery.
dictatorship ("s) ::: absolute, imperious, or overbearing power or control.
difficult ::: 1. Hard to do or accomplish; demanding considerable effort or skill; arduous. 2. Not easily or readily done; requiring much labour, skill, or planning to be performed successfully. 3. Hard to understand or solve; perplexing, puzzling, obscure.
diligent ::: quietly and steadily persevering especially in detail or exactness while serving others.
dimension ::: 1. A property of space; extension in a given direction; extension in time. 2. Measurement in length, width and thickness; scope, importance. dimensions.
dimness ::: the quality of being dim; lacking sharpness or clarity of understanding or perception.
dire ::: 1. Causing or involving great fear or suffering; dreadful; terrible. 2. Indicating trouble, disaster, misfortune, or the like. 3. Urgent; desperate. direr.
discernment ::: **The act or process of exhibiting keen insight and keen perception; acuteness of judgement, discrimination and understanding. discernment"s.**
discern ::: to perceive by the sight or some other sense or by the intellect; see, recognize, distinguish, discriminate. discerned.
discord ::: 1. An inharmonious combination of musical tones sounded together. 2. Lack of concord or harmony between persons or things. discords.
disgrace ::: a person, act, or thing that causes shame, reproach, or dishonour, or is dishonourable or shameful.
dismissed ::: sent away; dispersed; disbanded; expelled.
displaced ::: 1. Removed or shifted (something) from its place; put out of the proper or usual place. 2. Took the place of; supplanted.
distinguishing ::: perceiving clearly by sight or other sense; discerning something as being different or distinct.
divine ::: adj. **1. Of or pertaining to God or the Supreme Being. 2. Of, relating to, emanating from, or being the expression of a deity. 3. Being in the service or worship of a deity; sacred. 4. Heavenly, celestial. 5. Supremely good or beautiful; magnificent. diviner, divinest, divinely, half-divine. v. 6. To perceive by intuition or insight. divines, divined, divining.**
divine Comedy ::: a stage-play of a light and amusing character, with a happy conclusion to its plot. Its mediaeval use for a narrative poem with an agreeable ending. (Probably taken from Italian; cf. the Divine Comedy, the great tripartite poem of Dante, called by its author La Commedia, because in the conclusion, it is prosperous, pleasant, and desirable.)
"Divine Love is of two kinds — the divine Love for the creation and the souls that are part of itself, and the love of the seeker and love for the Divine Beloved; it has both a personal and impersonal element, but the personal is free here from all lower elements or bondage to the vital and physical instincts.” Letters on Yoga
::: "Divinisation itself does not mean the destruction of the human elements; it means taking them up, showing them the way to their own perfection, raising them by purification and perfection to their full power and Ananda and that means the raising of the whole of earthly life to its full power and Ananda.” Letters on Yoga
doings ::: actions; performances; executions; deeds; proceedings; happenings; events.
dost ::: second person singular, present indicative of do.
dot ::: n. 1. A small round mark made with or as with a pen, etc.; spot; speck; point. 2. Anything relatively small or specklike. dots. *v.* 3. To scatter or intersperse (with dots or something resembling dots). 4. To stud or diversify with or as if with dots, as trees dotting the landscape. dotted, dotting.
doze ::: n. 1. A short slumber; a light or fitful sleep. v. 2. To sleep lightly or for a short period of time. dozes.
draperies ::: fig. Cloth gracefully draped and arranged in loose folds.
drain ::: v. 1. To deplete (a person or a thing) gradually, especially to the point of complete exhaustion. n. 2. A gradual depletion of energy or resources. 3. Something (a ditch, trench, waterpipe etc.) designed to carry away water. drained.
dream ::: 1. A series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. 2. A vision occurring to a person while awake. 3. A person or thing that is as pleasant, or seemingly unreal, as a dream 4. An ideal or aspiration; goal; aim. 5. A wild or vain fancy. Dream, dream"s, Dream"s, dreams, dream-brood, dream-brush, dream-built, dream-caught, dream-fact, dream-fate, dream-god"s, dream-happiness, dream-hued, dream-life, dream-light, dream-made, dream-mind, dream-notes, dream-print, dream-sculptured, dream-shores, dream-smiles, dream-splendour, dream-truth, dream-vasts, dream-white, dream-world, half-dream, self-dream, sun-dream, world-dream. *adj. 6. Of a colour: misty, dim, or cloudy. v. 7. To have an image (of) or fantasy (about) in or as if in a dream. dreams, dreamed, *dreaming.
dreamer ::: a person who dreams; a prophet; visionary. Dreamer, dreamer"s.
drive ::: v. 1. To impel; constrain; urge; compel. 2. To manoeuvre, guide or steer the progress of. 3. To impel (matter) by physical force; to cause (something) to move along by direct application of physical force; to propel, carry along. 4. To send, expel, or otherwise cause to move away or out by force or compulsion. 5. To strive vigorously and with determination toward a goal or objective. 6. To cause and guide the movement of (a vehicle, an animal, etc.). n. 7. A strong organized effort to accomplish a purpose, with energy, push or aggressiveness. 8. Impulse; impulsive force. adj. 9. Urged onward, impelled. 10. Pertaining to an inner urge that stimulates activity or inhibition. drives, drove, drov"st, driving, driven.
duel (‘s) ::: a struggle for domination between two contending persons, groups, or ideas.
dullard ::: a person regarded as mentally dull; a dolt.
dupe ::: one who unquestioningly or unwittingly serves a cause or another person.
durga ::: "In Hindu religion, the goddess who is the Energy of Shiva and the conquering and protecting aspect of the Universal Mother. She is the slayer of many demons including Mahisasura. Durga is usually depicted in painting and sculpture riding a lion, having eight or ten arms, each holding the special weapon of one or another of the gods who gave them to her for her battles with demons. (A; Enc. Br.)” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.
dusk ::: n. **1. The state or period of partial darkness between day and night; the dark part of twilight. 2. Partial darkness; shade; gloom. Dusk. adj. 3. Poetic. shady; gloomy. dusky.**
dwell ::: 1. To live or stay as a permanent resident; reside. 2. To live or continue in a given condition or state. dwells, dwellst, dwelt, dwelling
dwelling ::: 1. A place to live in; an abode. 2. The act or action of living, staying, remaining in a place for a period of time. dwellings, dwelling-place.
dynamic ::: 1. Pertaining to or characterized by energy or effective action; vigorously active; forceful; energetic. 2. Of or concerned with energy or forces that produce motion, as opposed to static.
dynamo ::: 1. An electric generator, esp. for direct current. 2. An energetic, hardworking, forceful person. dynamo"s.
"Each person follows in the world his own line of destiny which is determined by his own nature and actions — the meaning and necessity of what happens in a particular life cannot be understood except in the light of the whole course of many lives. But this can be seen by those who can get beyond the ordinary mind and feelings and see things as a whole, that even errors, misfortunes, calamities are steps in the journey, — the soul gathering experience as it passes through and beyond them until it is ripe for the transition which will carry it beyond these things to a higher consciousness and higher life.” Letters on Yoga*
"Each inner experience is perfectly real in its own way, although the values of different experiences differ greatly, but it is real with the reality of the inner self and the inner planes. It is a mistake to think that we live physically only, with the outer mind and life. We are all the time living and acting on other planes of consciousness, meeting others there and acting upon them, and what we do and feel and think there, the forces we gather, the results we prepare have an incalculable importance and effect, unknown to us, upon our outer life.” Letters on Yoga
earthy ::: 1. Of, consisting of, or resembling earth. 2. Worldly; material; pertaining to the earth.
ebb ::: n. **1. The flowing back of the tide from high to low water or the period in which this takes place. v. 2. To flow back or recede; subside, abate. ebbed, ebbing.**
eclipse ::: n. **1. A temporary or permanent dimming or cutting off of light. 2. A fall into obscurity or disuse; a decline. v. 3. To obscure; darken. eclipsed, eclipsing.**
ego ::: the "I” or self of any person; a person as thinking, feeling, and willing, and distinguishing itself from the selves of others and from objects of its thought. **ego, ego"s, egos, egoless, world-egos.
electric ::: of the nature of, pertaining to, or producing electricity.
elements ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The first ripple or vibration in causal matter creates a new and exceedingly fine and pervasive condition of matter called Akasha or Ether; more complex motion evolves out of Ether a somewhat intenser condition which is called Vayu, Air; and so by ever more complex motion with increasing intensity of condition for result, yet three other matter-states are successively developed, Agni or Fire, Apah or Water and Prithvi or Earth.” *Supplement to the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library
elite ::: the choice or best of anything considered collectively, as of a group or class of persons.
else ::: adv. 1. In a different or additional time, place, or manner. adj. 2. Other than the persons or things mentioned or implied.
elude ::: 1. To avoid or escape by speed, cleverness, trickery, etc.; evade. 2. To escape the understanding, perception, or appreciation of. eludes.
elusive ::: 1. Eluding clear perception or complete mental grasp; hard to express or define. 2. Cleverly or skilfully evasive.
elysian ::: of the nature of, or resembling, what is in Elysium the dwelling place of the blessed after death, a state or place of ideal happiness, perfect bliss.
embodiment ::: a person, being, or thing embodying a spirit, principle, etc.; incarnation. embodiments.
emperor ::: the male sovereign or supreme ruler of an empire.
embrace ::: n. 1. The act of clasping another person in the arms. Also fig. **embraces. v. 2. To take or clasp in the arms; press to the bosom. 3. To take or receive gladly or eagerly; accept willingly. 4. To include or contain. 5. To surround; enclose; entwine. 6. To take up willingly or eagerly. embraced, embracing, all-embracing.**
eminences ::: persons or things of high station, rank or repute.
emotion ::: 1. An affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness. Also abstract ‘feeling" as distinguished from the other classes of mental phenomena. 2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance. **emotion"s, emotions.
"Emotion is a good element in yoga; but emotional desire becomes easily a cause of perturbation and an obstacle. Turn your emotions towards the Divine, aspire for their purification; they will then become a help on the way and no longer a cause of suffering.” Letters on Yoga*
empire ::: 1. Imperial or imperialistic sovereignty, domination, or control. 2. A group of nations or peoples ruled over by an emperor, empress, or other powerful sovereign or government.
empiric ::: empirical, i.e. derived from, guided by, provable by or verifiable by experience or experiment.
empress ::: a female sovereign having the rank equivalent to that of an emperor.
"Emptiness is not in itself a bad condition, only if it is a sad and restless emptiness of the dissatisfied vital. In sadhana emptiness is very usually a necessary transition from one state to another. When mind and vital fall quiet and their restless movements, thoughts and desires cease, then one feels empty. This is at first often a neutral emptiness with nothing in it, nothing in it either good or bad, happy or unhappy, no impulse or movement. This neutral state is often or even usually followed by the opening to inner experience. There is also an emptiness made of peace and silence, when the peace and silence come out from the psychic within or descend from the higher consciousness above. This is not neutral, for in it there is the sense of peace, often also of wideness and freedom. There is also a happy emptiness with the sense of something close or drawing near which is not yet there, e.g. the closeness of the Mother or some other preparing experience.” Letters on Yoga*
enduring ::: lasting; continuing; durable; permanent.
enemy ::: n. 1. A hostile person, power, force or nation. 2. One who feels hatred toward, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of another; a foe. enemy"s *adj. *3. Of, relating to, or being a hostile power or force.
enigmatic ::: resembling an enigma; perplexing; mysterious.
enjoy ::: 1. To receive pleasure or satisfaction from; take delight in. 2. To find or experience pleasure for (oneself). enjoyed, enjoying.
enjoyer ::: a person who delights in having or using or experiencing something.
ensleeved ::: a word coined by Sri Aurobindo. The prefix en, occurring originally in loanwords from French, forms verbs with the general sense "to cause (a person or thing) to be in” a place, condition, or state. Hence, ensleeved in this instance is "held within a sleeve”.
entangled ::: 1. Ensnarled; intertwined; enmeshed. 2. Confused or perplexed. entangling, entanglement, star-entangled.
entreated ::: asked (a person) earnestly; beseeched; implored.
entry ::: 1. The act or an instance of entering. 2.* Something that provides access to get in or get out. Also fig. *3. Permission or right to enter; access. entry"s, entries.
epicure ::: a person who cultivates a refined taste; connoisseur.
epiphany ::: 1. An appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity. 2. A sudden intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something. epiphanies.
episode ::: 1. An incident in the course of a series of events, in a person"s life or experience, etc. 2. One of a number of loosely connected, but usually thematically related, scenes or stories constituting a literary work.
epitome ::: a person or thing that is typical of or possesses to a high degree the features of a whole class; embodiment, quintessence.
::: Equality means a quiet and unmoved mind and vital, it means not to be touched or disturbed by things that happen or things said or done to you, but to look at them with a straight look, free from the distortions created by personal feeling, and to try to understand what is behind them, why they happen, what is to be learnt from them, what is it in oneself which they are cast against and what inner profit or progress one can make out of them; it means self-mastery over the vital movements, — anger and sensitiveness and pride as well as desire and the rest, — not to let them get hold of the emotional being and disturb the inner peace, not to speak and act in the rush and impulsion of these things, always to act and speak out of a calm inner poise of the spirit.” *Letters on Yoga
::: "Erinyes, in Greek mythology, the goddesses of vengeance, usually represented as three winged maidens, with snakes in their hair. They pursued criminals, drove them mad, and tormented them in Hades. They were spirits of punishment, avenging wrongs done especially to kindred. In Roman literature they were called Furies.” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works*
errant ::: 1. Wandering in search of adventure. 2. Straying from the proper course or standards. 3. Moving in an aimless or lightly changing manner.
escort ::: one or more persons accompanying another to guide, protect, or show honour.
estate ::: 1. The situation or circumstances of one"s life. 2. Social position or rank, especially of high order. 3. A person"s total possessions (property, money etc.). 4. A landed property, usually, of considerable size. estates.
eternally ::: being without beginning or end; existing outside of time; endlessly; perpetually.
Eternal"s. Sri Aurobindo: ". . . that which is, cannot perish; it can only lose itself. All is eternal in the eternal spirit.” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
eternise ::: to make eternal; perpetuate; immortalise. eternised.
ether ::: 1. The regions of space beyond the earth"s atmosphere; the heavens. 2. The element believed in ancient and medieval civilizations to fill all space above the sphere of the moon and to compose the stars and planets. 3. A hypothetical medium formerly believed to permeate all space, and through which light and other electromagnetic radiation were thought to move. ether"s.
etheric ::: adj. Pertaining to ether, the medium supposed by the ancients to fill the upper regions of space.
". . . ethics must eventually perceive that the law of good which it seeks is the law of God.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
evanescent ::: 1. Vanishing; fading away; fleeting. 2. Tending to become imperceptible; scarcely perceptible.
::: "Even Science believes that one day death may be conquered by physical means and its reasonings are perfectly sound. There is no reason why the supramental Force should not do it. Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that there is no reason why they should not last.” Letters on Yoga
"Everything here is not perfect but all works out the cosmic Will in the course of the ages.” Letters on Yoga*
"Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence.” The Life Divine ::: "Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"Evolution takes place on the earth and therefore the earth is the proper field for progression. The beings of the other worlds do not progress from one world to another. They remain fixed to their own type.” Letters on Yoga
experience ::: 1. Knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone. 2. Philos. The totality of the cognitions given by perception; all that is perceived, understood, and remembered. **world-experience.
::: experienced
::: "Experiences are of all kinds and take all forms in the consciousness. When the consciousness undergoes, sees or feels anything spiritual or psychic or even occult, that is an experience — in the technical yogic sense, for there are of course all sorts of experiences that are not of that character.” Letters on Yoga
experiment ::: n. **1. A test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc. v. 2.* To try something new, especially in order to gain experience. experiments. adj.* experimenting.
expert ::: adj. 1. Skilled through training or practice. n. 2. A person who has extensive skill or knowledge in a particular field. experts.
exceed ::: 1. To go beyond or be greater in quantity, degree, rate, etc. 2. To go beyond the bounds or limits of. 3. To surpass; be superior to; excel. exceeds, exceeded, exceeding.
excess ::: 1. The amount or degree by which one thing exceeds another. 2. Superabundance.
execute ::: to carry out; accomplish; perform; do.
executor ::: 1. A person who carries out or performs something. 2. A person named in a will to carry out the provisions of that will. executors.
exercised ::: discharged, performed, fulfilled (functions).
exhaust ::: to use up completely; drain the resources or properties of; deplete. exhausted, exhaustless.
exile ::: n. 1. Enforced removal from one"s native country. 2. The condition or a period of living away from one"s native country. 3. A person banished or living away from his home or country; expatriate. v. 4. To expel from home or country, esp. by official decree as a punishment; banish. exiles, exiled, self-exiled.
exist ::: 1. To have being or reality; to be. 2. To be living; live. 3. To continue to be; persist. exists.
explorer ::: a person who investigates unknown regions.
external ::: 1. Of or relating chiefly to outward appearance; superficial. 2. Relating to, existing on, or coming or acting from without; exterior. 3. Pertaining to the outward or visible appearance or show. externally.
faerylike; of the nature of a faery (one of a class of supernatural beings, generally conceived as having a diminutive human form and possessing magical powers with which they intervene in human affairs); magical. faeries", faery-small.
::: **"Faith is a certitude in the soul which does not depend on reasoning, on this or that mental idea, on circumstances, on this or that passing condition of the mind or the vital or the body. It may be hidden, eclipsed, may even seem to be quenched, but it reappears again after the storm or the eclipse; it is seen burning still in the soul when one has thought that it was extinguished for ever. The mind may be a shifting sea of doubts and yet that faith may be there within and, if so, it will keep even the doubt-racked mind in the way so that it goes on in spite of itself towards its destined goal. Faith is a spiritual certitude of the spiritual, the divine, the soul"s ideal, something that clings to that even when it is not fulfilled in life, even when the immediate facts or the persistent circumstances seem to deny it.” Letters on Yoga
fate ::: 1. That which is inevitably predetermined or preordained; destiny. 2. Something that unavoidably befalls a person; fortune; lot. **fate"s, fates, fated, fate-bound, fate-driven, fate-hedged, fate-led, fate-turned, world-fate.
father. ::: 1. The Supreme Being and Creator; God. 2. The First Person of the Trinity. Father"s.
father and Son. ::: first and Second Persons of the Trinity in Christianity.
fault ::: a defect, imperfection, flaw, failing.
faultless ::: without fault, flaw, or defect; perfect. faultlessly.
::: **"Fear and anxiety are perverse forms of will. What thou fearest & ponderest over, striking that note repeatedly in thy mind, thou helpest to bring about; for, if thy will above the surface of waking repels it, it is yet what thy mind underneath is all along willing, & the subconscious mind is mightier, wider, better equipped to fulfil than thy waking force & intellect. But the spirit is stronger than both together; from fear and hope take refuge in the grandiose calm and careless mastery of the spirit.” Essays Divine and Human
feast ::: 1. A large, elaborately prepared meal, usually for many persons and often accompanied by entertainment; a banquet. 2. Something giving great pleasure or satisfaction.
ferment ::: 1. A state of agitation or of turbulent change or development. 2. A process of nature involving the addition of yeasts, moulds and certain bacteria (to liquids or solids) causing an effervescence or internal commotion, with evolution of heat, in the substance operated on, and a resulting alteration of its properties.
feudal ::: of, pertaining to, or like the feudal system (the system of civil government which prevailed in Europe during the Middle Ages, and which was based on the relation of superior and vassal arising out of the holding of lands.)
fiat ::: official sanction; authoritative permission or order; command.
fidelity ::: loyalty or devotion, as to a person or cause.
field ::: 1. A wide unbroken expanse, as of ice. 2. An area or sphere of activity. 3. A broad, level, open expanse of land; a stretch of open land, esp. one used for pasture or tillage; a plain. 4. The surface on which something is portrayed or enacted. An area of human activity or interest. 5. A piece of ground devoted to sports or contests; playing field. 6. A region of space characterized by a physical property, such as gravitational or electromagnetic force or fluid pressure. fields, field-paths, star-field, time-field, play-fields, race-fields.
figurehead ::: a person given a position of nominal leadership but having no actual authority. dwarf-figurehead.
files ::: a line of persons or things placed one behind another (distinguished from ‘rank").
fine ::: 1. Of superior quality, skill, or appearance. 2. Superior or consummate in quality. 3. Exhibiting careful and delicate artistry. 4. Characterized by refinement or elegance. 5. Subtle or precise; refined. finer, fine-curved, fine-linked.
fitting ::: 1. Appropriate or proper; suitable. 2. Used with prefixed adverbs to denote an appropriate or inappropriate fit. 3. Of a manufactured article: Of the right measure or size; made to fit, accurate in fit, well or close-fitting. close-fitting, ill-fitting.
fix ::: 1. To set or place firmly or definitely; establish. 2. Also refl. To direct one"s efforts or attention; concentrate. 3.* *To give a permanent or final form to. 4. To settle definitely; decide. fixes, fixed, fixing.**
fixed ::: 1. Securely placed or fastened or set. 2. Set or intent upon something; steadily directed (as of a person"s eyes, mind, etc.). 3. Definitely and permanently placed. 4. Not fluctuating or varying; definite. 5. Coming each year on the same calendar date. 6. Assigned to a definite place, time, etc.
flash ::: n.** 1. A brief, sudden burst of bright light. 2. A sudden thought, insight, inspiration, or vision. 3. A momentary brightness. 4. A very brief moment; instant. flashes, lightening-flash. v. 5. To move or proceed rapidly. 6. To communicate or reveal through flashes. 7. To appear or occur suddenly; come into perception. 8. To cause to flash, as powder by ignition or a sword by waving. flashes, flashed, flashing.**
flaw ::: a feature that mars the perfection of something; an imperfection, defect, or blemish.
flawless ::: having no discernible blemishes or shortcomings; perfect.
fleeting ::: 1. Passing swiftly by: Chiefly of life or time. 2. Passing or gliding swiftly away. 3. Existing for a brief period; not permanent or enduring; transitory, passing, fading.
fleshly ::: of or pertaining to the flesh or the body; bodily, corporeal, or physical.
foe ::: an adversary; an opponent; a personal enemy. foes.
follow ::: 1. To come or go after; proceed behind. 2. Lit. and fig. To move along the course of; take a path. 3. Fig. To come after in order, time, or position. 4. To occur or be evident as a consequence; result. 5. Fig. To accompany; attend. 6. To take (a person) as a guide, leader, or master; to accept the authority or example of, obey the dictates or guidance of; to adhere to, espouse the opinions, side, or cause of. 7. Fig. To go after in or as if in pursuit. 8. To accept and follow the leadership or command or guidance of. 9. To watch or trace the movements, progress, or course of. follows, followed, following. ::: following out. Proceeding; following; pursuing something to an end or conclusion.
footmark ::: a mark or trace of mud, wetness, etc., left by a person"s foot on a surface.
force ::: n. 1. Strength; energy; power; intensity. 2. Fig. An agency, influence, or source of power likened to a physical force. Force, force"s, forces, Force-compelled, Conscious-Force, earth-force, God-Force, lion-forces, Mother-Force, Nature-force, Nature-Force, serpent-force, soul-force, Soul-Forces, world-force, World-Force, world-forces. *v. 3. To compel or cause (a person, group, etc.) to do something through effort, superior strength, etc.; coerce. 4. To propel or drive despite resistance. 5. To break open (a gate, door, etc.) *forces, forced, forcing.
force, universal ::: Sri Aurobindo: "This force that we feel is the universal Force of the Divine, which, veiled or unveiled, acting directly or permitting the use of its powers by beings in the cosmos, is the one Energy that alone exists and alone makes universal or individual action possible. For this force is the Divine itself in the body of its power; all is that, power of act, power of thought and knowledge, power of mastery and enjoyment, power of love. Conscious always and in everything, in ourselves and in others, of the Master of Works possessing, inhabiting, enjoying through this Force that is himself, becoming through it all existences and all happenings, we shall have arrived at the divine union through works and achieved by that fulfilment in works all that others have gained through absolute devotion or through pure knowledge.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
". . . for doubt is the mind"s persistent assailant.” Letters on Yoga ::: "The enemy of faith is doubt, and yet doubt too is a utility and necessity, because man in his ignorance and in his progressive labour towards knowledge needs to be visited by doubt, otherwise he would remain obstinate in an ignorant belief and limited knowledge and unable to escape from his errors.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
forerunner ::: a person or thing coming in advance to herald the arrival of someone or something; guide. forerunners.
foresight ::: 1. Perception of the significance and nature of events before they have occurred. 2. Knowledge or insight gained by or as by looking forward; a view of the future; foreknowledge.
"For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is. We cannot, then, bid her the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.” The Life Divine
fortune ::: 1. The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events; luck. 2. Success, luck, prosperity. fortune"s.
fortune ::: chance personified, commonly regarded as a mythical being distributing arbitrarily or capriciously the lots of life. Fortune.
"For we have seen that universal force and universal consciousness are one, — cosmic force is the operation of cosmic consciousness.” The Life Divine*
frankincense ::: an aromatic gum resin obtained from African and Asian trees of the genus Boswellia and used chiefly as incense and in perfumes.
frequencies ::: the property or condition of occurring at frequent intervals.
frieze ::: the upper part of the wall of a room, below the cornice, esp. one that is decorated. friezes.
fringe ::: 1. A decorative border of thread, cord, or the like, usually hanging loosely from a ravelled edge or strip. 2. Anything resembling or suggesting this. 3. An outer edge; margin; periphery. fringes, fringed.
function ::: the action for which a person or thing is particularly equipped, fitted or employed.
funeral ::: adj. A ceremony or group of ceremonies held in connection with the burial or cremation of a dead person.
gandhamadan ::: "In Hindu mythology, a mountain and forest in Ilavrta, the central region of the world which contains Mount Meru. Gandhamadan dorms the division between Ilavrta and Bhadrasva, to the east of Meru. The forest of Gandhamadan is renowned for its fragrance. (Dow.; Enc. Br.)” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works.
gaol ::: a prison, esp. one for the detention of persons awaiting trial or convicted of minor offences. (A variant spelling of jail. In British official use the form with G is still current; in literary and journalistic use both the G and the J form is now admitted as correct; in the U.S. the J form is standard.) gaoled.
gas ::: 1. A substance in the gaseous state. 2. Physics. A substance possessing perfect molecular mobility and the property of indefinite expansion, as opposed to a solid or liquid.
gem ::: 1. A pearl or mineral that has been cut and polished for use as an ornament. 2. Something that is valued for its beauty or perfection. gems.
**"I certainly won"t have ‘attracted" [in place of ‘allured"] — there is an enormous difference between the force of the two words and merely ‘attracted by the Ecstasy" would take away all my ecstasy in the line — nothing so tepid can be admitted. Neither do I want ‘thrill" [in place of ‘joy"] which gives a false colour — precisely it would mean that the ecstasy was already touching him with its intensity which is far from my intention.Your statement that ‘joy" is just another word for ‘ecstasy" is surprising. ‘Comfort", ‘pleasure", ‘joy", ‘bliss", ‘rapture", ‘ecstasy" would then be all equal and exactly synonymous terms and all distinction of shades and colours of words would disappear from literature. As well say that ‘flashlight" is just another word for ‘lightning" — or that glow, gleam, glitter, sheen, blaze are all equivalents which can be employed indifferently in the same place. One can feel allured to the supreme omniscient Ecstasy and feel a nameless joy touching one without that Joy becoming itself the supreme Ecstasy. I see no loss of expressiveness by the joy coming in as a vague nameless hint of the immeasurable superior Ecstasy.” Letters on Savitri*
"If discipline of all the members of our being by purification and concentration may be described as the right arm of the body of Yoga, renunciation is its left arm. By discipline or positive practice we confirm in ourselves the truth of things, truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of love, truth of works and replace with these the falsehoods that have overgrown and perverted our nature; by renunciation we seize upon the falsehoods, pluck up their roots and cast them out of our way so that they shall no longer hamper by their persistence, their resistance or their recurrence the happy and harmonious growth of our divine living.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
"If we take this fourfold status as a figure of the Self passing from its superconscient state, where there is no subject or object, into a luminous trance in which superconscience becomes a massed consciousness out of which the subjective status of being and the objective come into emergence, then we get according to our view of things either a possible process of illusionary creation or a process of creative Self-knowledge and All-knowledge.” The Life Divine
"I have started writing about doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the ‘doubt" whether any amount of writing or of anything else can ever persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. In the first place, to write adequately would mean anything from 60 to 600 pages, but not even 6000 convincing pages would convince doubt. For doubt exists for its own sake; its very function is to doubt always and, even when convinced, to go on doubting still; it is only to persuade its entertainer to give it board and lodging that it pretends to be an honest truth-seeker. This is a lesson I have learnt from the experience both of my own mind and of the minds of others; the only way to get rid of doubt is to take discrimination as one"s detector of truth and falsehood and under its guard to open the door freely and courageously to experience.” Letters on Yoga
"I may say that the opening upwards, the ascent into the Light and the subsequent descent into the ordinary consciousness and normal human life is very common as the first decisive experience in the practice of yoga and may very well happen even without the practice of yoga in those who are destined for the spiritual change, especially if there is a dissatisfaction somewhere with the ordinary life and a seeking for something more, greater or better.” Letters on Yoga*
"Indian devotion has especially seized upon the most intimate human relations and made them stepping-stones to the supra-human. God the Guru, God the Master, God the Friend, God the Mother, God the Child, God the Self, each of these experiences — for to us they are more than merely ideas, — it has carried to its extreme possibilities.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"In Greek mythology, a giant with a hundred arms, a son of Uranus and Ge, who fought against the gods. He was hurled down by Athene and imprisoned beneath Mt. Aetna in Sicily. When he stirs, the mountain shakes; when he breathes, there is an eruption. (M.I.; Web.)” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
" . . . insincerity is always an open door for the adversary. That means there is some secret sympathy with what is perverse. And that is what is serious.” Questions and Answers 1957-58, MCW Vol. 9.
::: ". . . in such a view, the word consciousness changes its meaning. It is no longer synonymous with mentality but indicates a self-aware force of existence of which mentality is a middle term; below mentality it sinks into vital and material movements which are for us subconscient; above, it rises into the supramental which is for us the superconscient. But in all it is one and the same thing organising itself differently. This is, once more, the Indian conception of Chit which, as energy, creates the worlds.” *The Life Divine
". . . in the Veda, Lord of the hosts of delight; in later mythology, the Gandharvas are musicians of heaven, ‘beautiful, brave and melodious beings, the artists, musicians, poets and shining warriors of heaven". . . .” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works ::: *Gandharvas.
"It is not possible for the individual mind, so long as it remains shut up in its personality, to understand the workings of the Cosmic Will, for the standards made by the personal consciousness are not applicable to them. A cell in the body, if conscious, might also think that the human being and its actions are only the resultant of the relations and workings of a number of cells like itself and not the action of a unified self. It is only if one enters into the Cosmic Consciousness that one begins to see the forces at work and the lines on which they work and get a glimpse of the Cosmic Self and the Cosmic Mind and Will.” Letters on Yoga
"Mind, life and body, the soul in the succession of Time, the conscient, subconscient and superconscient, — these in their various relations and the result of their relations are cosmos and are Nature.” The Life Divine
n. 1. The body or outward appearance of a person or an animal considered separately from the face or head; figure. 2. An object, person, or part of the human body or the appearance of any of these, esp. as seen in nature. 3. The mode in which a thing exists, acts, or manifests itself; kind. 4. The structure, pattern, organization or essential nature of anything. Form, form"s, forms, Forms, form-bound, form-discoveries, form-maker, form-smitten, thought-forms. v. 5. To give form to; shape. 6.* *To take or assume form; to be formed or produced. forms, formed, many-formed, sense-formed. ::: re-form.** To form a second time, form over again.
n. 1. The point, axis, or pivot about which a body rotates. 2. A point, area, or part that is approximately in the middle of a larger area or volume. 3. A person or thing that is a focus of interest or attention. 4. A point of origin. centre"s, centres. v. 5. To focus or bring together. 6. To move towards, mark, put, or be concentrated at or as at a centre. 7. centred. Brought together to a centre, concentrated.
Navel — higher vital (proper).
"Of course, that is the real fact — death is only a shedding of the body, not a cessation of the personal existence. A man is not dead because he goes into another country and changes his clothes to suit that climate.” Letters on Yoga
". . . One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection.” On Himself
"One must go deep and find the soul, the self, the Divine Reality within us and only then can life become a true expression of what we can be instead of a blind and always repeated confused blur of the inadequate and imperfect thing we were. The choice is between remaining in the old jumble and groping about in the hope of stumbling on some discovery or standing back and seeking the Light within till we discover and can build the Godhead within and without us. "Letters on Yoga
one who is versed in or practices alchemy. Pertaining to one who studies or practises alchemy. alchemist (employed as an adj. by Sri Aurobindo).
opportunities, favourable conditions, for the easier performance of any action.
"Ordinarily we mean by it [consciousness] our first obvious idea of a mental waking consciousness such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of his bodily existence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived of his physical and superficial methods of sensation. In this sense it is plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it. But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our physical being. Not only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights and profundities which no man has yet measured or fathomed.” Letters on Yoga
"Our nature is not only mistaken in will and ignorant in knowledge but weak in power; but the Divine Force is there and will lead us if we trust in it and it will use our deficiencies and our powers for the divine purpose. If we fail in our immediate aim, it is because he has intended the failure; often our failure or ill-result is the right road to a truer issue than an immediate and complete success would have put in our reach. If we suffer, it is because something in us has to be prepared for a rarer possibility of delight. If we stumble, it is to learn in the end the secret of a more perfect walking.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Perishable and transitory delight is always the symbol of the eternal Ananda, revealed and rapidly concealed, which seeks by increasing recurrence to attach itself to some typal form of experience in material consciousness. When the particular form has been perfected to express God in the type, its delight will no longer be perishable but an eternally recurrent possession of mental beings in matter manifest in their periods & often in their moments of felicity.” Essays Divine and Human*
"Practically, therefore, all form is only an operation of consciousness impressing itself with presentations of its own workings.” The Upanishads
"Spirituality respects the freedom of the human soul, because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; and the deepest meaning of freedom is the power to expand and grow towards perfection by the law of one"s own nature, dharma.” The Human Cycle
*(Sri Aurobindo: "And finally all is lifted up and taken into the supermind and made a part of the infinitely luminous consciousness, knowledge and experience of the supramental being, the Vijnana Purusha.” The Synthesis of Yoga*) ::: Angel of the House. The guardian spirit of the home.
Sri Aurobindo: "As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As there are Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood and support it and work for its victory; as there are powers whose life is intimately bound up with the existence, the idea and the impulse of Good, so there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and the government of the life of man; — this was the significance of the contest between the Vedic Gods and their opponents, sons of Darkness and Division, figured in a later tradition as Titan and Giant and Demon, Asura, Rakshasa, Pisacha; the same tradition is found in the Zoroastrian Double Principle and the later Semitic opposition of God and his Angels on the one side and Satan and his hosts on the other, — invisible Personalities and Powers that draw man to the divine Light and Truth and Good or lure him into subjection to the undivine principle of Darkness and Falsehood and Evil.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Atheism is the shadow or dark side of the highest perception of God.” *Essays Divine and Human
Sri Aurobindo: "Birth is the first spiritual mystery of the physical universe, death is the second which gives its double point of perplexity to the mystery of birth; for life, which would otherwise be a self-evident fact of existence, becomes itself a mystery by virtue of these two which seem to be its beginning and its end and yet in a thousand ways betray themselves as neither of these things, but rather intermediate stages in an occult processus of life.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "But if the individual is a persistent reality, an eternal portion or power of the Eternal, if his growth of consciousness is the means by which the Spirit in things discloses its being, the cosmos reveals itself as a conditioned manifestation of the play of the eternal One in the being of Sachchidananda with the eternal Many.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "By aesthesis is meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and vital and even bodily, which receives a certain element in things, something that can be called their taste, Rasa, which, passing through the mind or sense or both, awakes a vital enjoyment of the taste, Bhoga, and this can again awaken us, awaken even the soul in us to something yet deeper and more fundamental than mere pleasure and enjoyment, to some form of the spirit"s delight of existence, Ananda.” *Letters on Savitri
*Sri Aurobindo: "Ego is only a faculty put forward by the discriminative mind to centralise round itself the experiences of the sense-mind and to serve as a sort of lynch-pin in the wheel which keeps together the movement. It is no more than an instrument, although it is true that so long as we are limited by our normal mentality, we are compelled by the nature of that mentality and the purpose of the instrument to mistake our ego-function for our very self.” The Upanishads
*Sri Aurobindo: "Experience is a word that covers almost all the happenings in yoga; only when something gets settled, then it is no longer an experience but part of the siddhi; e.g. peace when it comes and goes is an experience — when it is settled and goes no more it is a siddhi.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . for each individual is in himself the Eternal who has assumed name and form and supports through him the experiences of life turning on an ever-circling wheel of birth in the manifestation. The wheel is kept in motion by the desire of the individual, which becomes the effective cause of rebirth and by the mind"s turning away from the knowledge of the eternal self to the preoccupations of the temporal becoming.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Further, vision is of value because it is often a first key to inner planes of one"s own being and one"s own consciousness as distinguished from worlds or planes of the cosmic consciousness. Yoga-experience often begins with some opening of the third eye in the forehead (the centre of vision in the brows) or with some kind of beginning and extension of subtle seeing which may seem unimportant at first but is the vestibule to deeper experience.” *Letters on Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "In other words, ethics is a stage in evolution. That which is common to all stages is the urge of Sachchidananda towards self-expression. This urge is at first non-ethical, then infra-ethical in the animal, then in the intelligent animal even anti-ethical for it permits us to approve hurt done to others which we disapprove when done to ourselves. In this respect man even now is only half-ethical. And just as all below us is infra-ethical, so there may be that above us whither we shall eventually arrive, which is supra-ethical, has no need of ethics. The ethical impulse and attitude, so all-important to humanity, is a means by which it struggles out of the lower harmony and universality based upon inconscience and broken up by Life into individual discords towards a higher harmony and universality based upon conscient oneness with all existences. Arriving at that goal, this means will no longer be necessary or even possible, since the qualities and oppositions on which it depends will naturally dissolve and disappear in the final reconciliation.” The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "It [falsehood] is created by an Asuric (hostile) power which intervenes in this creation and is not only separated from the Truth and therefore limited in knowledge and open to error, but in revolt against the Truth or in the habit of seizing the Truth only to pervert it. This Power, the dark Asuric Shakti or Rakshasic Maya, puts forward its own perverted consciousness as true knowledge and its wilful distortions or reversals of the Truth as the verity of things. It is the powers and personalities of this perverted and perverting consciousness that we call hostile beings, hostile forces. Whenever these perversions created by them out of the stuff of the Ignorance are put forward as the Truth of things, that is the Falsehood, in the yogic sense, . . . .” Letters on Yoga
"Sri Aurobindo: "It has been held that ecstasy is a lower and transient passage, the peace of the Supreme is the supreme realisation, the consummate abiding experience. This may be true on the spiritual-mind plane: there the first ecstasy felt is indeed a spiritual rapture, but it can be and is very usually mingled with a supreme happiness of the vital parts taken up by the Spirit; there is an exaltation, exultation, excitement, a highest intensity of the joy of the heart and the pure inner soul-sensation that can be a splendid passage or an uplifting force but is not the ultimate permanent foundation. But in the highest ascents of the spiritual bliss there is not this vehement exaltation and excitement; there is instead an illimitable intensity of participation in an eternal ecstasy which is founded on the eternal Existence and therefore on a beatific tranquillity of eternal peace. Peace and ecstasy cease to be different and become one. The Supermind, reconciling and fusing all differences as well as all contradictions, brings out this unity; a wide calm and a deep delight of all-existence are among its first steps of self-realisation, but this calm and this delight rise together, as one state, into an increasing intensity and culminate in the eternal ecstasy, the bliss that is the Infinite.” The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "It is true that when Matter first emerges it becomes the dominant principle; it seems to be and is within its own field the basis of all things, the constituent of all things, the end of all things: but Matter itself is found to be a result of something that is not Matter, of Energy, and this Energy cannot be something self-existent and acting in the Void, but can turn out and, when deeply scrutinised, seems likely to turn out to be the action of a secret Consciousness and Being: when the spiritual knowledge and experience emerge, this becomes a certitude, — it is seen that the creative Energy in Matter is a movement of the power of the Spirit.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the supreme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind"s highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: ” See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks. Believe that all falsehood is truth in the making or truth in the breaking, all failure an effectuality concealed, all weakness strength hiding itself from its own vision, all pain a secret & violent ecstasy. If thou believest firmly & unweariedly, in the end thou wilt see & experience the All-true, Almighty & All-blissful.” Essays Divine and Human*
Sri Aurobindo: "The duality is a position taken up, a double status accepted for the operations of the self-manifestation of the being; but there is no eternal and fundamental separateness and dualism of Being and its Consciousness-Force, of the Soul and Nature.” *The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The earth is a material field of evolution. Mind and life, supermind, Sachchidananda are in principle involved there in the earth-consciousness; but only Matter is at first organized; then life descends from the life plane and gives shape and organization and activity to the life principle in Matter, creates the plant and animal; then mind descends from the mind plane, creating man. Now supermind is to descend so as to create a supramental race.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "The motion of the world works under the government of a perpetual stability. Change represents the constant shifting of apparent relations in an eternal Immutability.” The Upanishads
*Sri Aurobindo: "There are some who often or almost invariably have the contact whenever they worship, the Deity may become living to them in the picture or other image they worship, may move and act through it; others may feel him always present, outwardly, subtle-physically, abiding with them where they live or in the very room, but sometimes this is only for a period. Or they may feel the Presence with them, see it frequently in a body (but not materially except sometimes), feel its touch or embrace, converse with it constantly — that is also a kind of milana. The greatest milana is one in which one is constantly aware of the Deity abiding in oneself, in everything in the world, holding all the world in him, identical with existence and yet supremely beyond the world — but in the world too one sees, hears, feels nothing but him, so that the very senses bear witness to him alone — . . . .” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no ignorance that is not part of the Cosmic Ignorance, only in the individual it becomes a limited formation and movement, while the Cosmic Ignorance is the whole movement of world consciousness separated from the supreme Truth and acting in an inferior motion in which the Truth is perverted, diminished, mixed and clouded with falsehood and error.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life"s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleological; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.” The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above.” Letters on Yoga*
*Sri Aurobindo: "The timeless Spirit is not necessarily a blank; it may hold all in itself, but in essence, without reference to time or form or relation or circumstance, perhaps in an eternal unity. Eternity is the common term between Time and the Timeless Spirit. What is in the Timeless unmanifested, implied, essential, appears in Time in movement, or at least in design and relation, in result and circumstance. These two then are the same Eternity or the same Eternal in a double status; they are a twofold status of being and consciousness, one an eternity of immobile status, the other an eternity of motion in status.” The Life Divine ::: "The spiritual fullness of the being is eternity; . . . ” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "This truth of Karma has been always recognised in the East in one form or else in another; but to the Buddhists belongs the credit of having given to it the clearest and fullest universal enunciation and the most insistent importance. In the West too the idea has constantly recurred, but in external, in fragmentary glimpses, as the recognition of a pragmatic truth of experience, and mostly as an ordered ethical law or fatality set over against the self-will and strength of man: but it was clouded over by other ideas inconsistent with any reign of law, vague ideas of some superior caprice or of some divine jealousy, — that was a notion of the Greeks, — a blind Fate or inscrutable Necessity, Ananke, or, later, the mysterious ways of an arbitrary, though no doubt an all-wise Providence.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga *Ananke"s.
Sri Aurobindo: "To act according to a standard of Truth or a rule or law of action (dharma) or in obedience to a superior authority or to the highest principles discovered by the reason and intelligent will and not according to one"s own fancy, vital impulses and desires. In yoga obedience to the Guru or to the Divine and the law of the Truth as declared by the Guru is the foundation of discipline.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "We have distinguished a fourfold principle of divine Being creative of the universe, — Existence, Conscious-Force, Bliss and Supermind.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Yet all the time the universal forces are pouring into him without his knowing it. He is aware only of thoughts, feelings, etc., that rise to the surface and these he takes for his own. Really they come from outside in mind waves, vital waves, waves of feeling and sensation, etc., which take particular form in him and rise to the surface after they have got inside. But they do not get into his body at once. He carries about with him an environmental consciousness (called by the Theosophists the Aura) into which they first enter. If you can become conscious of this environmental self of yours, then you can catch the thought, passion, suggestion or force of illness and prevent it from entering into you. If things in you are thrown out, they often do not go altogether but take refuge in this environmental atmosphere and from there they try to get in again. Or they go to a distance outside but linger on the outskirts or even perhaps far off, waiting till they get an opportunity to attempt entrance.” *Letters on Yoga
supporting or sustaining a person or thing.
"The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech; it has to be approached through experience.” The Life Divine*
::: "The ancient Vedanta presents us with . . . the conception and experience of Brahman as the one universal and essential fact and of the nature of Brahman as Sachchidananda [Existence, Consciousness, Bliss]. In this view the essence of all life is the movement of a universal and immortal existence, the essence of all sensation and emotion is the play of a universal and self-existent delight in being, the essence of all thought and perception is the radiation of a universal and all-pervading truth, the essence of all activity is the progression of a universal and self-effecting good.” The Life Divine
the bed on which a person dies.
::: "The perfect cosmic vision & cosmic sentiment is the cure of all error & suffering; but most men succeed only in enlarging the range of their ego.” Essays Divine and Human
"The call of God is imperative and cannot be weighed against any other considerations.” Essays on the Gita*
"The call, once decisive, stands; the thing that has been born cannot eventually be stifled. Even if the force of circumstances prevents a regular pursuit or a full practical self-consecration from the first, still the mind has taken its bent and persists and returns with an ever-increasing effect upon its leading preoccupation. There is an ineluctable persistence of the inner being, and against it circumstances are in the end powerless, and no weakness in the nature can for long be an obstacle.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one"s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one"s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one"s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces — for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness — and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in ::: —the nature.” Letters on Yoga*
"The Cross is in Yoga the symbol of the soul & nature in their strong & perfect union, but because of our fall into the impurities of ignorance it has become the symbol of suffering and purification.” Essays Divine and Human*
"The Divine Force concealed in the subconscient is that which has originated and built up the worlds. At the other end in the superconscient it reveals itself as the Divine Being, Lord and Knower who has manifested Himself out of the Brahman.” The Upanishads ::: See also divine Force for additional definitions.
"The divinisation of the nature of which we speak is a metamorphosis, not a mere growth into some kind of super-humanity, but a change from the falsehood of our ignorant nature into the truth of God-nature.” The Hour of God
"The elementary state of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and expansion, some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects. Material Force modifying its first ethereal status assumes a second, called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is contact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces. A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided by a third self-modification of the primitive Force of which the principle of light, electricity, fire and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by diffusion and a first medium of permanent attractions and repulsions, termed picturesquely water or the liquid state, and a fifth of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements.” The Life Divine*
"The evil forces are perversions of the Truth by the Ignorance — in any complete transformation they must disappear and the Truth behind them be delivered.” Letters on Yoga
"The freedom of the Gita is that of the freeman, the true freedom of the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity. Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in the Divine; he is the privileged child of the mansion, bâlavat, who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of the Perfect, the All-blissful, the All-loving, the All-beautiful. The kingdom which he enjoys, râjyam samrddham, is a sweet and happy dominion of which it may be said, in the pregnant phrase of the Greek thinker, ``The kingdom is of the child."" Essays on the Gita
"The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a translation of the secret self into the terms of surface consciousness, or a subjective substitute for the true self in our surface experience. . . .”The Life Divine
The Mother: "An ‘entity" is a personality or an individuality.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15.**
The Mother: "In the physical world, of all things it is beauty that expresses best the Divine. the physical world is the world of form and the perfection of form is beauty. Beauty interprets, expresses, manifests the Eternal. Its role is to put all manifested nature in contact with the Eternal through the perfection of form, through harmony and a sense of the ideal which uplifts and leads towards something higher. On Education, MCW Vol. 12.
The Mother (to a young person): "It is very simple, as you will see. 1) The Infinite is the inexhaustible storehouse of forces. The individual is a battery, a storage cell which runs down after use. Consecration is the wire that connects the individual battery to the infinite reserve of forces. Or 2) The Infinite is the river that flows without cease; the individual is the little pond that dries up slowly in the sun. Consecration is the canal that connects the river to the pond and prevents the pond from drying up.” Some Answers from the Mother, MCW *Vol. 16.
"The other parts of our natural composition are not only mutable but perishable; but the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame.” *The Life Divine
"There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that dies and the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go out of existence, though it may change the forms through which it appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is and cannot cease to be. This opposition of is and is not, this balance of being and becoming which is the mind"s view of existence, finds its end in the realisation of the soul as the one imperishable self by whom all this universe has been extended. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new; and what is there in this to grieve at and recoil and shrink? This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body. Who can slay the immortal spirit? Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry. Eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested like the body, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed by the thought, but greater than all mind, not capable of change and modification like the life and its organs and their objects, but beyond the changes of mind and life and body, it is yet the Reality which all these strive to figure.” Essays on the Gita
the strings on an apron, used for securing it around one"s person.tie to someone"s apron strings. To make or be dependent on or dominated by someone.
"This universal aesthesis of beauty and delight does not ignore or fail to understand the differences and oppositions, the gradations, the harmony and disharmony obvious to the ordinary consciousness; but, first of all, it draws a Rasa from them and with that comes the enjoyment, Bhoga. and the touch or the mass of the Ananda. It sees that all things have their meaning, their value, their deeper or total significance which the mind does not see, for the mind is only concerned with a surface vision, surface contacts and its own surface reactions. When something expresses perfectly what it was meant to express, the completeness brings with it a sense of harmony, a sense of artistic perfection; it gives even to what is discordant a place in a system of cosmic concordances and the discords become part of a vast harmony, and wherever there is harmony, there is a sense of beauty. ” Letters on Savitri*
"To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote "His anger climbed against me in a stream", it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the Guest-House, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. What is to be done under these circumstances? The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer.” Letters on Savitri
"Vamana, the Dwarf, in Hindu mythology, one of the ten incarnations of Vishnu, born as a son of Kashyapa and Aditi. The titan King Bali had by his austerities acquired dominion of all the three worlds. To remedy this, Vishnu came to him in the form of a dwarf and begged of him as much land as he could step over in three paces. Bali complied. In two strides the dwarf covered heaven and earth, and with the third step, on Bali"s head, pushed him down to Patala, the infernal regions.” Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works
"We are not the body, but the body is still something of ourselves. With realisation the erroneous identification ceases — in certain experiences the existence of the body is not felt at all. In the full realisation the body is within us, not we in it, it is an instrumental formation in our wider being, — our consciousness exceeds but also pervades it, — it can be dissolved without our ceasing to be the self.” Letters on Yoga
"We. . . become conscious, in our physical movements, in our nervous and vital reactions, in our mental workings, of a Force greater than body, mind and life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves moving, thinking or feeling but of that moving, feeling and thinking in us. This force that we feel is the universal Force of the Divine, which, veiled or unveiled, acting directly or permitting the use of its powers by beings in the cosmos, is the one Energy that alone exists and alone makes universal or individual action possible. For this force is the Divine itself in the body of its power; all is that, power of act, power of thought and knowledge, power of mastery and enjoyment, power of love.” The Synthesis of Yoga
". . . what is this strongly separative self-experience that we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical constitution of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature — this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised, — a temporary or at least a temporal becoming; or else we conceive of ourselves as someone who supports or causes the individualisation, an immortal being perhaps but limited by its individuality. This perception and this conception constitute our ego-sense.” The Life Divine
"When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates the inner mind centres, then into the heart centre and liberates fully the psychic and emotional being, then into the navel and other vital centres and liberates the inner vital, then into the Muladhara and below and liberates the inner physical being. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation; it takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created. It integrates, harmonises, establishes a new rhythm in the nature. It can bring down too a higher and yet higher force and range of the higher nature until, if that be the aim of the sadhana, it becomes possible to bring down the supramental force and existence. All this is prepared, assisted, farthered by the work of the psychic being in the heart centre; the more it is open, in front, active, the quicker, safer, easier the working of the Force can be. The more love and bhakti and surrender grow in the heart, the more rapid and perfect becomes the evolution of the sadhana. For the descent and transformation imply at the same time an increasing contact and union with the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
"When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates the inner mind centres, then into the heart centre and liberates fully the psychic and emotional being, then into the navel and other vital centres and liberates the inner vital, then into the Muladhara and below and liberates the inner physical being. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation; it takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created.” Letters on Yoga
"Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations.” The Life Divine*
KEYS (10k)
1 Yogani
1 Saul Williams
1 Manly P. Hall
1 Joseph Campbell
1 Anonymous
1 Sri Ramakrishna
1 Sri Aurobindo
1 Saint Thomas Aquinas
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
45 Harper Lee
35 Anonymous
24 Pepper Winters
18 Percy Bysshe Shelley
15 William Cowper
14 Katy Perry
12 Stephanie Perkins
12 John Green
11 Tyler Perry
11 John Piper
10 Jasper Fforde
9 Rick Riordan
8 Horace
7 William Shakespeare
6 Toba Beta
6 Plato
6 Ovid
6 James Fenimore Cooper
6 Harper Sloan
6 E J Copperman
1:Animal is not properly and per se divided by white and black, which lie completely outside of the definition of animal ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.95.4)., #KEYS
2:Ego sum ostium. Per me si quis introierit, salvabitur: et ingredietur, et egredietur, et pascua inveniet."
(I am the dooR By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved: and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures.) ~ Anonymous, The Bible, John, 10:9,#KEYS
3:All doubts disappear when one sees God. It is one thing to hear of God, but quite a different thing to see Him. A man cannot have one hundred per cent conviction through mere hearing. But if he beholds God face to face, then he is wholly convinced. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
4:Increasing knowledge is important, but we must also remember that we already know far more than we are willing or able to apply. The human race is not wandering in darkness without guidance or direction. It is not necessary to be universally enlightened in order to live a constructive code. The conflict is in the individual. He must decide for himself the degree to which he is willing to control and re-educate his own appetites and instincts. The inducements to personality reorientation are real, evident, and undeniable. ~ Manly P. Hall, Horizon Magazine, Winter 1950, p. 16, #KEYS
5:Disciple : What part does breathing exercise - Pranayama - play in bringing about the higher consciousness?
Sri Aurobindo : It sets the Pranic - vital - currents free and removes dullness of the brain so that the higher consciousness can come down. Pranayama does not bring dullness in the brain. My own experience, on the contrary, is that brain becomes illumined. When I was practising Pranayama at Baroda, I used to do it for about five hours in the day, - three hours in the morning and two in the evening. I found that the mind began to work with great illumination and power. I used to write poetry in those days. Before the Pranayama practice, usually I wrote five to eight lines per day; and about two hundred lines in a month. After the practice I could write 200 lines within half an hour. That was not the only result. Formerly my memory was dull. But after this practice I found that when the inspiration came I could remember all the lines in their order and write them down correctly at any time. Along with these enhanced functionings I could see an electrical activity all round the brain, and I could feel that it was made up of a subtle substance. I could feel everything as the working of that substance. That was far from your carbon-dioxide!
Disciple : How is it that Pranayama develops mental capacities? What part does it play in bringing about the higher consciousness?
Sri Aurobindo : It is the Pranic - vital - currents which sustain mental activity. When these currents are changed by Pranayama, they bring about a change in the brain. The cause of dullness of the brain is some obstruction in it which does not allow the higher thought to be communicated to it. When this obstruction is removed the higher mental being is able to communicate its action easily to the brain. When the higher consciousness is attained the brain does not become dull. My experience is that it becomes illumined.
~ Sri Aurobindo, A B Purani, Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, 19-9-1926,#KEYS
6:Apotheosis ::: One of the most powerful and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus Bearer, Avalokiteshvara, "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," so called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures suffering the evils of existence. To him goes the millionfold repeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet: Om mani padme hum, "The jewel is in the lotus." To him go perhaps more prayers per minute than to any single divinity known to man; for when, during his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard. Under differing forms he traverses the ten thousand worlds, and appears in the hour of need and prayer. He reveals himself in human form with two arms, in superhuman forms with four arms, or with six, or twelve, or a thousand, and he holds in one of his left hands the lotus of the world.
Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. "When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change." This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain-through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things"; or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement) : "All beings are without self."
The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva ("he whose being is enlightenment"); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them-and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps. "He wears a garland of eight thousand rays, in which is seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty.
The color of his body is purple gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each finger tip has eighty-four thousand signet-marks, and each mark eighty-four thousand colors; each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these jewel hands he draws and embraces all beings. The halo surrounding his head is studded with five hundred Buddhas, miraculously transformed, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas, who are attended, in turn, by numberless gods. And when he puts his feet down to the ground, the flowers of diamonds and jewels that are scattered cover everything in all directions. The color of his face is gold. While in his towering crown of gems stands a Buddha, two hundred and fifty miles high." - Amitayur-Dhyana Sutra, 19; ibid., pp. 182-183. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Apotheosis,#KEYS
7:Coded Language
Whereas, breakbeats have been the missing link connecting the diasporic community to its drum woven past
Whereas the quantised drum has allowed the whirling mathematicians to calculate the ever changing distance between rock and stardom.
Whereas the velocity of the spinning vinyl, cross-faded, spun backwards, and re-released at the same given moment of recorded history , yet at a different moment in time's continuum has allowed history to catch up with the present.
We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue.
Statements, such as, "keep it real", especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or physically or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active and not representative of the individually determined is.
Furthermore, as determined by the collective consciousness of this state of being and the lessened distance between thought patterns and their secular manifestations, the role of men as listening receptacles is to be increased by a number no less than 70 percent of the current enlisted as vocal aggressors.
Motherfuckers better realize, now is the time to self-actualize
We have found evidence that hip hops standard 85 rpm when increased by a number as least half the rate of it's standard or decreased at ¾ of it's speed may be a determining factor in heightening consciousness.
Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.
Equate rhyme with reason, Sun with season
Our cyclical relationship to phenomenon has encouraged scholars to erase the centers of periods, thus symbolizing the non-linear character of cause and effect
Reject mediocrity!
Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that which as been given for you to understand.
The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the diet of an infant.
The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce and crushed pears
Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness.
The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, Ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.
Thus, in the name of:
ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AHKENATON, HATHSHEPUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN
LENNON, KHALO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITH, LOURDE, WHITMAN
BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GHANDI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA
MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GURDJIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY
DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMANINOV
ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHAWAY, HENDRIX, KUTI, DICKINSON, RIPPERTON
MARY, ISIS, THERESA, HANSBURY, TESLA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI
LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR
LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERÓN, MARLEY, MAGDALENE, COSBY
SHAKUR, THOSE WHO BURN, THOSE STILL AFLAME, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED
We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter.
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stone
Our music is our alchemy
We stand as the manifested equivalent of 3 buckets of water and a hand full of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down supply the percussion factor of forever.
If you must count to keep the beat then count.
Find you mantra and awaken your subconscious.
Curve you circles counterclockwise
Use your cipher to decipher, Coded Language, man made laws.
Climb waterfalls and trees, commune with nature, snakes and bees.
Let your children name themselves and claim themselves as the new day for today we are determined to be the channelers of these changing frequencies into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry, crafts, love, and love.
We enlist every instrument: Acoustic, electronic.
Every so-called race, gender, and sexual preference.
Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking World.
Any utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed - two rappers slain
Any utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed - two rappers slain
~ Saul Williams,#KEYS
8:How to Meditate
Deep meditation is a mental procedure that utilizes the nature of the mind to systematically bring the mind to rest. If the mind is given the opportunity, it will go to rest with no effort. That is how the mind works.
Indeed, effort is opposed to the natural process of deep meditation. The mind always seeks the path of least resistance to express itself. Most of the time this is by making more and more thoughts. But it is also possible to create a situation in the mind that turns the path of least resistance into one leading to fewer and fewer thoughts. And, very soon, no thoughts at all. This is done by using a particular thought in a particular way. The thought is called a mantra.
For our practice of deep meditation, we will use the thought - I AM. This will be our mantra.
It is for the sound that we will use I AM, not for the meaning of it.
The meaning has an obvious significance in English, and I AM has a religious meaning in the English Bible as well. But we will not use I AM for the meaning - only for the sound. We can also spell it AYAM. No meaning there, is there? Only the sound. That is what we want. If your first language is not English, you may spell the sound phonetically in your own language if you wish. No matter how we spell it, it will be the same sound. The power of the sound ...I AM... is great when thought inside. But only if we use a particular procedure. Knowing this procedure is the key to successful meditation. It is very simple. So simple that we will devote many pages here to discussing how to keep it simple, because we all have a tendency to make things more complicated. Maintaining simplicity is the key to right meditation.
Here is the procedure of deep meditation: While sitting comfortably with eyes closed, we'll just relax. We will notice thoughts, streams of thoughts. That is fine. We just let them go by without minding them. After about a minute, we gently introduce the mantra, ...I AM...
We think the mantra in a repetition very easily inside. The speed of repetition may vary, and we do not mind it. We do not intone the mantra out loud. We do not deliberately locate the mantra in any particular part of the body. Whenever we realize we are not thinking the mantra inside anymore, we come back to it easily. This may happen many times in a sitting, or only once or twice. It doesn't matter. We follow this procedure of easily coming back to the mantra when we realize we are off it for the predetermined time of our meditation session. That's it.
Very simple.
Typically, the way we will find ourselves off the mantra will be in a stream of other thoughts. This is normal. The mind is a thought machine, remember? Making thoughts is what it does. But, if we are meditating, as soon as we realize we are off into a stream of thoughts, no matter how mundane or profound, we just easily go back to the mantra.
Like that. We don't make a struggle of it. The idea is not that we have to be on the mantra all the time. That is not the objective. The objective is to easily go back to it when we realize we are off it. We just favor the mantra with our attention when we notice we are not thinking it. If we are back into a stream of other thoughts five seconds later, we don't try and force the thoughts out. Thoughts are a normal part of the deep meditation process. We just ease back to the mantra again. We favor it.
Deep meditation is a going toward, not a pushing away from. We do that every single time with the mantra when we realize we are off it - just easily favoring it. It is a gentle persuasion. No struggle. No fuss. No iron willpower or mental heroics are necessary for this practice. All such efforts are away from the simplicity of deep meditation and will reduce its effectiveness.
As we do this simple process of deep meditation, we will at some point notice a change in the character of our inner experience. The mantra may become very refined and fuzzy. This is normal. It is perfectly all right to think the mantra in a very refined and fuzzy way if this is the easiest. It should always be easy - never a struggle. Other times, we may lose track of where we are for a while, having no mantra, or stream of thoughts either. This is fine too. When we realize we have been off somewhere, we just ease back to the mantra again. If we have been very settled with the mantra being barely recognizable, we can go back to that fuzzy level of it, if it is the easiest. As the mantra refines, we are riding it inward with our attention to progressively deeper levels of inner silence in the mind. So it is normal for the mantra to become very faint and fuzzy. We cannot force this to happen. It will happen naturally as our nervous system goes through its many cycles ofinner purification stimulated by deep meditation. When the mantra refines, we just go with it. And when the mantra does not refine, we just be with it at whatever level is easy. No struggle. There is no objective to attain, except to continue the simple procedure we are describing here.
When and Where to Meditate
How long and how often do we meditate? For most people, twenty minutes is the best duration for a meditation session. It is done twice per day, once before the morning meal and day's activity, and then again before the evening meal and evening's activity.
Try to avoid meditating right after eating or right before bed.
Before meal and activity is the ideal time. It will be most effective and refreshing then. Deep meditation is a preparation for activity, and our results over time will be best if we are active between our meditation sessions. Also, meditation is not a substitute for sleep. The ideal situation is a good balance between meditation, daily activity and normal sleep at night. If we do this, our inner experience will grow naturally over time, and our outer life will become enriched by our growing inner silence.
A word on how to sit in meditation: The first priority is comfort. It is not desirable to sit in a way that distracts us from the easy procedure of meditation. So sitting in a comfortable chair with back support is a good way to meditate. Later on, or if we are already familiar, there can be an advantage to sitting with legs crossed, also with back support. But always with comfort and least distraction being the priority. If, for whatever reason, crossed legs are not feasible for us, we will do just fine meditating in our comfortable chair. There will be no loss of the benefits.
Due to commitments we may have, the ideal routine of meditation sessions will not always be possible. That is okay. Do the best you can and do not stress over it. Due to circumstances beyond our control, sometimes the only time we will have to meditate will be right after a meal, or even later in the evening near bedtime. If meditating at these times causes a little disruption in our system, we will know it soon enough and make the necessary adjustments. The main thing is that we do our best to do two meditations every day, even if it is only a short session between our commitments. Later on, we will look at the options we have to make adjustments to address varying outer circumstances, as well as inner experiences that can come up.
Before we go on, you should try a meditation. Find a comfortable place to sit where you are not likely to be interrupted and do a short meditation, say ten minutes, and see how it goes. It is a toe in the water.
Make sure to take a couple of minutes at the end sitting easily without doing the procedure of meditation. Then open your eyes slowly. Then read on here.
As you will see, the simple procedure of deep meditation and it's resulting experiences will raise some questions. We will cover many of them here.
So, now we will move into the practical aspects of deep meditation - your own experiences and initial symptoms of the growth of your own inner silence. ~ Yogani, Deep Meditation,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Carpe per diem - seize the check. ~ robin-williams, @wisdomtrove 2:The speed of time is one second per second. ~ steven-wright, @wisdomtrove 3:Focus on return on equity, not earnings per share. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 4:7 per cent of all statistics are made up on the spot. ~ steven-wright, @wisdomtrove 5:100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 6:If people spent one hour per week in Eucharistic Adoration, abortion would be ended ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 7:The First 40 hours of work per week are for survival. Everything after that is for success. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 8:Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote - evolved from within consciousness itself. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 9:Introducing & 10:I'd rather have a $10 million business making 15 per cent than a $100 million business making 5 per cent. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 11:If more than ten per cent of the population likes a painting it should be burned for it must be bad. ~ george-bernard-shaw, @wisdomtrove 12:The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 13:Excessive (population) growth may reduce output per worker, repress levels of living for the masses and engender strife ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 14:We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 15:My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 16:Seventy per cent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they got rid of their fears and worries. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 17:If youre in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 18:You shouldn't own common stocks if a 50 per cent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 19:I put a new engine in my car, but forgot to take the old one out. Now my car goes 500 miles per hour. The harmonica sounds amazing. ~ steven-wright, @wisdomtrove 20:If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it's simply a poor use of resources. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 21:Read an hour every day in your chosen field. This works out to about one book per week, fifty books per year, and will guarantee your success. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 22:With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least ten per cent of your net worth in that stock ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 23:You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 24:Clear workspace clutter. Clear computer clutter. Turn off email notifications. Check e- mail at set points in the day, only 2 to 3 times per day. ~ leo-babauta, @wisdomtrove 25:Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 26:The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 27:Every land or property owner in America would be tickled to death to pay 45 per cent of his profits, if he didn't have to pay anything if he didn't make it. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 28:Anyone who believes a growth rate in excess of 15% per annum over the long term is attainable should pursue a career in sales, but avoid one in mathematics. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 29:That 95 per cent. fail of those who start in business upon their own account seems incredible, and yet such are said to be the statistics upon the subject. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 30:Ninety per-cent of what we worry about never happens, yet we worry and worry. What a horrible way to go through life! What a horrible thing to do to your colon! ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove 31:It's not debt per say that overwhelms an individual corporation or country. Rather it is a continuous increase in debt in relation to income that causes trouble. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 32:At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world (i.e. those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 33:I got pulled over by a cop, and he said, & 34:... we cannot simply recommend love and compassion per se, for those unfold from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, and do we really want an increase in ethnocentric love? ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 35:As long as possible, I would really like to complete one marathon per year. Though my time has been slowing down as I get older, it has become a very important part of my life. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 36:I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 37:I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to the universities go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene ... They are scum. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 38:I'm not worried they're all about the investments we make. I mean, listen, this country - we've got $46,000 or $47,000 of GDP per capita. Now, we've done pretty darn well. We'll do better in the future. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 39:I type 90 words per minute on the typewriter; I type 100 words per minute on the word processor. But, of course, I don't keep that up indefinitely - every once in a while I do have to think a few seconds. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 40:Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 41:Let only individuals contribute - with sensible limits per election. Otherwise, we are well on our way to ensuring that a government of the moneyed, by the moneyed, and for the moneyed shall not perish from the earth. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 42:Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. ~ h-jackson-brown-jr, @wisdomtrove 43:Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. ~ h-jackson-brown-jr, @wisdomtrove 44:New York to Tokyo could be less than an hour. You could be traveling at 19,000 miles per hour orbitally. After we've done the space program, we will be producing supersonic planes, which will go far, far, faster than Concorde. ~ richard-branson, @wisdomtrove 45:If you read one hour per day in your field, that will translate into about one book per week. One book per week translates into about 50 books per year. 50 books per year will translate into about 500 books over the next ten years. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 46:It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 47:Every day the word & 48:In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder. ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove 49:The high income tax come pretty near passing in the Senate. Only lacked about six votes. So it won't be long now. Well, there is millions and millions that are not making it, that would be glad to give up 99 per cent if you would let 'em earn a hundred thousand or more. ~ will-rogers, @wisdomtrove 50:I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 51:Marriage is the truest goal for ninety-nine per cent of the human race, and they will live the happiest life as soon as they have learnt and are ready to abide by the eternal lesson - that we are bound to bear and forbear and that life to every one must be a compromise. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 52:One hour per day of study in your chosen field is all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you'll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do. ~ earl-nightingale, @wisdomtrove 53:Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star. ~ martin-rees, @wisdomtrove 54:AI is nowhere near human-like existence. But 99 per cent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs. For AI to squeeze humans out of the job market it needs only outperform us in the specific abilities a particular profession demands. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 55:It is unquestionably true that the investment companies have their money more conventionally invested than we do. To many people conventionality is indistinguishable from conservatism. In my view, this represents erroneous thinking. Neither a conventional nor an unconventional approach, per se, is conservative. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 56:Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were gathering. At any moment, the energies of a million hydrogen bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion... . Climbing at millions of miles per hour, an invisible fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and head out across space. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 57:In comics the reader is in complete control of the experience. They can read it at their own pace, and if there's a piece of dialogue that seems to echo something a few pages back, they can flip back and check it out, whereas the audience for a film is being dragged through the experience at the speed of 24 frames per second. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 58:Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority... Every historical event in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 59:Generally, we have translated greater output in the few hours of work per week over the last century. And that's a good trend of the future. But we do have to have a system that, as output of goods and services keeps increasing per capita, that it takes care of the people who are willing to work and really are not getting by very well with a family on a 40-hour week. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 60:The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 61:At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is& 62:How can a person deal with anxiety? You might try what one fellow did. He worried so much that he decided to hire someone to do his worrying for him. He found a man who agreed to be his hired worrier for a salary of $200,000 per year. After the man accepted the job, his first question to his boss was, "Where are you going to get $200,000 per year?" To which the man responded, "That's your worry. ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 63:It is a good principle in science not to believe any & 64:It is obvious that the performance of a stock last year or last month is no reason, per se, to either own it or to not own it now. It is obvious that an inability to "get even" in a security that has declined is of no importance. It is obvious that the inner warm glow that results from having held a winner last year is of no importance in making a decision as to whether it belongs in an optimum portfolio this year. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 65:As to the so-called Hindu idolatry - first go and learn the forms they are going through, and where it is that the worshippers are really worshipping, whether in the temple, in the image, or in the temple of their own bodies. First know for certain what they are doing - which more than ninety per cent of the revilers are thoroughly ignorant of - and then it will explain itself in the light of the Vedantic philosophy. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 66:At least three time per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? He eliminated all of the activities he used as crutches and began to focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication. Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise. Be ruthless and cut the fat. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 67:I do my best writing between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.. Almost every friend I have who is a consistently productive writer, does their best writing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. My quota is two crappy pages per day. I keep it really low so I'm not so intimidated that I never get started. I will do the gathering of interviews and research throughout the day. I'll get all my notes and materials together and then I'll do the synthesis between 10 p.m. to bed, which is usually 4 or 5 a.m. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 68:America is said to have the highest per capita boredom of any spot on earth! We know that because we have the greatest number of artificial amusements of any country. People have become so empty that they can't even entertain themselves. They have to pay other people to amuse them, to make then laugh, to try to make them feel warm and happy and comfortable for a few minutes, to try to lose that awful, frightening, hollow feeling-that terrible, dreaded feeling of being lost and alone. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 69:It's time for the wealthy to pay their fair share before the middle class becomes the forgotten class.- And it's time for the banks to give back what they were given. There are those in politics, particularly those on the conservative side, who can't get enough of telling people that the wealthy one per cent must not be taxed because doing so kills jobs. The real job-killers are corporate greed and political expediency. It's time for working people in Maine and all across the country to take back the American dream. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 70:And my advice for college graduates is don't reflexively give money to your alma mater, something particular to Americans that I find extraordinary. Take Princeton, for example - it has more money on a per capita basis than any educational institution in the history of educational institutions. There is no scenario where it can spend all the money its endowment generates every year. If there is anyone who gives a single dollar to Princeton, they have completely lost their mind. I will say that without reservation. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 71:The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 72:I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 73:Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. . . . Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 74:In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves. That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners and smiling faces; 99 per cent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 75:In the twentieth century per capita GDP was perhaps the supreme yardstick for evaluating national success. From this perspective, Singapore, each of whose citizens produces on average $56,000 worth of goods and services a year, is a more successful country than Costa Rica, whose citizens produce only $14,000 a year. But nowadays thinkers, politicians and even economists are calling to supplement or even replace GDP with GDH – gross domestic happiness. After all, what do people want? They don’t want to produce. They want to be happy. Production is important because it provides the material basis for happiness. But it is only the means, not the end. In one survey after another Costa Ricans report far higher levels of life satisfaction than Singaporeans. Would you rather be a highly productive but dissatisfied Singaporean, or a less productive but satisfied Costa Rican? ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Per ardua ad astra. ~ A C Grayling, #NFDB
2:Passed. As per usual. ~ Belle Aurora, #NFDB
3:Per aspera ad astra. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh, #NFDB
4:Ad astra per alia porci ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
5:Ad augusta, per angusta, ~ Michael Grant, #NFDB
6:Leggo per legittima difesa. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
7:Per aspera ad astra ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
8:Per Saecula Saeculorum
~ Anton Wildgans,#NFDB
9:Ciò che dai è tuo per sempre... ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
10:Per morire basta essere vivi. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
11:Profit per se is not my motive. ~ Chris Hughes, #NFDB
12:ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram ~ Virgil, #NFDB
13:I identify with the 99 per cent. ~ Peter M Brant, #NFDB
14:La trama è roba per gente morta. ~ David Shields, #NFDB
15:We are borrowing $40,000 per second. ~ Rand Paul, #NFDB
16:Carpe per diem. Seize the check. ~ Robin Williams, #NFDB
17:Katniss, gràcies per trobar-me. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
18:Per alcuni il caos è bellezza. ~ Tera Lynn Childs, #NFDB
19:Carpe per diem - seize the check. ~ Robin Williams, #NFDB
20:Khaak Per Jab Bikher Gaye Aansu
~ Adeem Hashmi,#NFDB
21:Les guerres no duren per sempre. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
22:Per tu ho faria mil vegades més. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
23:90 per cent of success is turning up. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
24:C'è gente che pagherebbe per vendersi. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
25:Dominatio per malum. Power through evil. ~ R L Stine, #NFDB
26:I don't like paying 50 per cent of tax. ~ Alan Sugar, #NFDB
27:Per lei mi piego, per te mi spezzo. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
28:Family is 100 per cent my top priority. ~ Isla Fisher, #NFDB
29:Non impariamo per la scuola, ma per la vita. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
30:prison cell upgrade: $82 per night. ~ Michael J Sandel, #NFDB
31:I funerali, avevo deciso, sono per i vivi. ~ John Green, #NFDB
32:Il tempo viene per chi lo sa aspettare ~ Matthew Thomas, #NFDB
33:Height is probably 95 per cent genetic. ~ Michael Marmot, #NFDB
34:immo et præstat gratia Dei per Christum. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
35:London's tempo is 122.86 beats per minute. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
36:Ninety-nine per cent of opening bands stink. ~ Gene Ween, #NFDB
37:Per Diem 10 dites/day Visitors’ Card 75 ~ Karl Schroeder, #NFDB
38:I don't sit down to write a song, per se. ~ Creed Bratton, #NFDB
39:I only mean forty per cent of what I say. ~ Marlon Brando, #NFDB
40:Light in every lamp, light in every mind. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
41:Motherhood informs my work 100 per cent. ~ Jessica Marais, #NFDB
42:Bisogna vivere di arte per non morire di realtà. ~ Unknown, #NFDB
43:Forse tutti siamo il diavolo per qualcuno. ~ Matthew Dicks, #NFDB
44:Ma non basta essere cattivi, per prosperare. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
45:Per Angusta Ad Agusta - through trial to triumph ~ Unknown, #NFDB
46:Santo cielo, per amore divento un idiota. ~ Gena Showalter, #NFDB
47:The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second ~ Jean Luc Godard, #NFDB
48:You decide for yourself when it will hurt. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
49:I can understand that,’ Jim said. And Tommy ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
50:Seventy per cent humidity is ideal for vocal cords. ~ Bjork, #NFDB
51:The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second. ~ Jean Luc Godard, #NFDB
52:Per aspera ad astra - През тръни към звездите ~ Ruta Sepetys, #NFDB
53:principle, per-sis tence, and compassion—three ~ John Wooden, #NFDB
54:You can only have one aim per debate. ~ Christopher Hitchens, #NFDB
55:Avrei potuto guardare nei suoi occhi per sempre. ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
56:Children ... smile as many as 400 times per day. ~ Ron Gutman, #NFDB
57:Fifty per cent of rock is having a good time. ~ Roger Daltrey, #NFDB
58:La mano per scrivere vale la mano per arare. ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
59:Perché bisogna conoscere per poter trovare. ~ Tiziano Terzani, #NFDB
60:Per perdere la testa, bisogna averne una... ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
61:Più ci cavo io per me, meno ci cavi tu per te ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
62:Ti amerò per sempre. Anche quando non potrò, ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
63:...I see the shape of the wind on the water... ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
64:solace of twenty-two per cent proof home-brew beer ~ M R Carey, #NFDB
65:Steve Nicol never gives more than 120 per cent. ~ Kevin Keegan, #NFDB
66:War is massacre. It is 100 per cent negative. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
67:Ad astra per aspera- From the mud to the stars ~ Jessica Warman, #NFDB
68:A feature film is twenty-four lies per second. ~ Michael Haneke, #NFDB
69:«Cominci a scappare e sarai in fuga per sempre» ~ Joanne Harris, #NFDB
70:I'm like a rocket - I go a hundred miles per hour. ~ Heidi Klum, #NFDB
71:the density of air is 1.2 kilograms per cubic metre, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
72:to per cent I’ll see if I can find him for you.’ I ~ Philip Kerr, #NFDB
73:Vicini ma non abbastanza per sfiorarsi davvero. ~ Paolo Giordano, #NFDB
74:I've slowed my heartbeat to three beats per minute. ~ Shane Jones, #NFDB
75:Per dominare un uomo, fa' in modo che abbia paura. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
76:Dom suggests a 5-day fast 2 to 3 times per year. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
77:Faig el que m'agradaria que els altres fessin per mi. ~ John Green, #NFDB
78:La cosa sbagliata... per un motivo giusto. ~ Gregory David Roberts, #NFDB
79:My interests are not really with television, per se. ~ Gale Harold, #NFDB
80:Un amico in un momento nero è un amico per davvero. ~ Qiu Xiaolong, #NFDB
81:Ad astra per aspera, to the stars through adversity ~ Morgan Matson, #NFDB
82:Ci vuole un gran fisico per correre dietro ai sogni ~ Stefano Benni, #NFDB
83:Focus on return on equity, not earnings per share. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
84:Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
85:La gente batte sempre le mani per le cose sbagliate. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
86:Ognuno di noi, ha bisogno di sogni per vivere. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
87:Per loro sono una bambola cresciuta troppo. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson, #NFDB
88:Val la pena esser solo, per essere sempre più solo? ~ Cesare Pavese, #NFDB
89:...and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
90:In cyberspace, 95 per cent of what you read is hearsay. ~ David Tang, #NFDB
91:I was perfectly calm, I was the anchor of the world. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
92:«Per far da papa bisogna saper far da sagrestano» – ~ Giovanni Verga, #NFDB
93:Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes better. ~ Frank E Peretti, #NFDB
94:Un libro è un ordigno per infiammare l'immaginazione. ~ Alan Bennett, #NFDB
95:I do probably 80 or 90 per cent of the cooking at home. ~ Colm Meaney, #NFDB
96:What people resist is not change per se, but loss. ~ Ronald A Heifetz, #NFDB
97:As per usual, trouble comes in several directions at once. ~ Garth Nix, #NFDB
98:Basta un attimo per perdere tutto quello che uno ha. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
99:Insegui ciò che ami o finirai per amare ciò che trovi. ~ Carlo Collodi, #NFDB
100:Semblava un cec que veiés el sol per primera vegada. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
101:Sono troppo abituato a me stesso per voler cambiare. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
102:Audax omnia perpeti
Gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas. ~ John Owen,#NFDB
103:He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life. ~ Raymond Chandler, #NFDB
104:La solitudine è per lo spirito ciò che il cibo è per il corpo. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
105:Shooting is 99 per cent luck and one per cent training ~ Abhinav Bindra, #NFDB
106:basta pensare a una perfezione per vederla in ciò che si ama. ~ Stendhal, #NFDB
107:Bisogna avere fiducia nel mondo per fare dei figli. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
108:Darei qualsiasi cosa per essere sempre il suo presente. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
109:I try to get in one, one-hour spinning class per week. ~ Robert Herjavec, #NFDB
110:Non c’è bisogno di sembrare francese per essere bella. ~ Dinah Jefferies, #NFDB
111:People in the U.S. now spend 40 minutes per day on Facebook, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
112:Per favore, un po' meno d'amore e un po' più di dignità. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
113:Ho lasciato le mie impronte sul mondo, per quanto piccole. ~ Markus Zusak, #NFDB
114:If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
115:il modo migliore per realizzare i propri sogni è svegliarsi». ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
116:Il suo dolore è per me, ma io non posso più farmene carico. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
117:Per favore, Novecento, solo le note normali, okay?”. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
118:Sia chiaro, per me ragione significa che io ho ragione. ~ Vittorio Sgarbi, #NFDB
119:Sto lavorando duro per preparare il mio prossimo errore. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
120:Uno spettro si aggira per l'Europa: lo spettro del comunismo. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
121:Viaggiamo per cercare altri luoghi, altre vite,m altre anime. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
122:95 per cent of economics is common sense made complicated, ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
123:If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
124:La vita è troppo breve per bere vini mediocri ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
125:Ninety-five per cent of my time is virtually wasted. ~ Antony Garrett Lisi, #NFDB
126:Ogni nuovo mattino uscirò per le strade cercando i colori. ~ Cesare Pavese, #NFDB
127:Where do the homeless have 90 per cent of their accidents? ~ Bob Monkhouse, #NFDB
128:100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
129:Americans now eat more than one million chickens per hour. ~ Neal D Barnard, #NFDB
130:Chi ride è malvagio solo per chi crede in ciò di cui si ride. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
131:If I can get David Haye , he will sink, one hundred per cent! ~ Tony Bellew, #NFDB
132:Per ardua ad astra. Through adversity to the stars. ~ Stephen Baxter, #NFDB
133:zoomable from a hundred miles per yard clown to about ten. ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
134:Accelerai il ritmo della corsa per fuggire da Jacob Black. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
135:L'arte è fatta per coloro che si sente indegno senza di essa. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
136:Ogni volta che tu stai per morire, sto per morire anch’io. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
137:Per sobre de tot, el meu somni és estar amb tu per sempre. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
138:Ad astra per alia porci (to the stars on the wings of a pig) ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
139:I love the NFL. I don't have a team per se, but I'm into it. ~ Noel Gallagher, #NFDB
140:Il solo essere in vita non era sufficiente per chiamarlo vivere. ~ Kiera Cass, #NFDB
141:«Injuriae per applicationem, per constructionem et per se». ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
142:Nulla è piccolo per una grande mente", sentenziò Holmes. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
143:You are allowed one stupid question per day, and that was it. ~ Brian D Meeks, #NFDB
144:Certe volte andare avanti è... l'unico modo per andare avanti ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
145:Encara que sobrevivim al col·lapse del sol, no viurem per sempre. ~ John Green, #NFDB
146:got a return on his investment of almost two votes per gallon. ~ Susan Cheever, #NFDB
147:I don't really go mountain biking per se, like a proper sport. ~ Chris Cornell, #NFDB
148:Meaning makes a great many things endurable---per haps everything. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
149:miles per hour, eighty-five, and still the sedan stayed behind ~ Margaret Coel, #NFDB
150:Non leggete per divertirvi o istruirvi, leggete per vivere. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
151:Non si ha bisogno di scalare una montagna per sapere se è alta. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
152:Ogni donna ha una maschera per tutti, tranne che per un uomo. ~ George Gissing, #NFDB
153:Se il tuo avversario ha una giusta causa per morire, tanto meglio. ~ Paul Dale, #NFDB
154:Bisogna conoscere una persona per amarla... è questo l'amore. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
155:I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
156:Most student runners here normally run about 800km per month. ~ Adharanand Finn, #NFDB
157:Per capire, mi sono distrutto. Capire è dimenticare di amare. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
158:—Per sempre —va jurar […].
—No et demano res més que això. ~ Stephenie Meyer,#NFDB
159:Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate. ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
160:Un paese ci vuole, non fosse che per il gusto di andarsene via. ~ Cesare Pavese, #NFDB
161:Well, I've never looked upon myself as being a beauty, per se. ~ Cate Blanchett, #NFDB
162:A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer, #NFDB
163:A mere 1.6% of developers earn more than $500,000 per app per month. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
164:A mi no se'm permet apostar, però, si pogués, ho faria per tu. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
165:Meat yields higher energy per gram eaten than does vegetation. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
166:My mum always told me 95 per cent of success was partnering well. ~ Marc Anthony, #NFDB
167:Per essere felici bisogna trovare varietà nella ripetizione. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
168:P.S. Non siamo stati composti per un solo strumento; né tu, né io. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
169:Spend no more than twenty minutes on Facebook per day ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
170:Tik per savo meilę jai suvokiau esąs ir pradėjau iš tikrųjų gyventi. ~ Andr Gide, #NFDB
171:Anche Dio ha il suo inferno; è il suo amore per gli uomini. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
172:È sempre più facile combattere per i propri principi che seguirli. ~ Alfred Adler, #NFDB
173:Getting picked gives you half that confidence, or 50 per cent of it ~ Glenn Frank, #NFDB
174:Le persone non sempre mandano messaggi per far sapere la verità ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
175:Read and respond to e-mail only once or twice per day. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
176:at least half of all developers make less than $500 per app per month. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
177:Between overstatement and understatement lies one hundred per cent. ~ Sten Nadolny, #NFDB
178:Chi vuole restar virtuosa non deve aver compassione per le sue mani. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
179:Güzellikler bir araya geldiğinde ortaya süper güzellik çıkar! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
180:In questo mondo non c'è posto per le cose tristi. Nessun posto. ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
181:Le bocche si chiudono quando si sta per dir qualcosa di importante. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
182:One day we shall die. But all the other days we shall be alive. ~ Per Olov Enquist, #NFDB
183:Per credere in modo differente, bisogna pensare in modo differente ~ Oliver Bowden, #NFDB
184:Per noi spunta solo quel giorno al cui sorgere siamo svegli. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
185:blue oceans were seldom the result of technological innovation per se; ~ W Chan Kim, #NFDB
186:È per smaltire un carico di nostalgia che sei andato tanto lontano! ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
187:In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
188:It is ten per cent how you draw, and ninety per cent what you draw. ~ Andrew Loomis, #NFDB
189:La gente dava la vita per scontata, quand'era scontato che fossero vivi. ~ J L Berg, #NFDB
190:Me, I'm just a hack. I'm just a schlep-per. I just do what I can do. ~ Bette Midler, #NFDB
191:.... non conta quello che desideri, ma quello che fai per ottenerlo ~ Nicolai Lilin, #NFDB
192:Per coloro che viaggiano, il tempo non esiste-esiste solo lo spazio. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
193:Protecting the human race should really come with a per diem, I swear. ~ Mira Grant, #NFDB
194:Toxicity is now a question of degree, of acceptable parts per unit. ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
195:Two per cent. is genius, and ninety-eight per cent. is hard work. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
196:Vosaltres fumeu perquè us agrada […]. Jo, en canvi, fumo per morir-me. ~ John Green, #NFDB
197:A great set point here is to read at least two books per month. 7. ~ Vishen Lakhiani, #NFDB
198:Artists aren't really people. And I'm actually 40 per cent papier mache. ~ Morrissey, #NFDB
199:How much detention did you get?
"Two weeks. One per arsehole. ~ Stephanie Perkins,#NFDB
200:La vita è troppo breve e incerta per distogliere lo sguardo. ~ J n Kalman Stef nsson, #NFDB
201:Spesso si vive come se fosse per sempre e ci si dimentica degli attimi. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
202:99.99999999999999999 per cent of every atom consists of empty space. It ~ Holly Smale, #NFDB
203:Ad astra per aspera, read the inscription. Through adversity to the stars. ~ A J Finn, #NFDB
204:Colonists of, ah, Per Ardua, meet your autonomous colonisation unit! ~ Stephen Baxter, #NFDB
205:Gli attimi, una volta persi, non si ritrovano più. Sono persi per sempre. ~ Jenny Han, #NFDB
206:Ik hoorde hoe flauw ik klonk. Als iemand die wel praat maar niets zegt. ~ Per Nilsson, #NFDB
207:Il per sempre è un'illusione... troppo comodo... noi siamo per l'adesso. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
208:It’s so obvious he’s trying to pass as a normal happy person. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
209:Tutti abbiamo una ferita segreta per riscattare la quale combattiamo. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
210:We are just about to cross the 400 parts per million threshold. ~ Christiana Figueres, #NFDB
211:You should think about your own death 3 times per day at the very least. ~ Ajahn Chah, #NFDB
212:Desitjo estar amb tu, per sempre. No en tinc prou amb tota una vida. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
213:Kids are plugged into some sort of electronic medium 44 hours per week. ~ Richard Louv, #NFDB
214:Most authors have one idea per book. Shakespeare had two per sentence. ~ Lauren Hutton, #NFDB
215:Per aspera ad astra, Papa,' I whispered. Through hardship to the stars. ~ Ruta Sepetys, #NFDB
216:Per aspera ad astra, Papa,” I whispered. Through hardship to the stars. ~ Ruta Sepetys, #NFDB
217:Per molt que la vida sigui una merda, sempre és millor que l'alternativa. ~ John Green, #NFDB
218:Se non mi ami, non importa, sono in grado di amare per tutti e due. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
219:Els escriptors som éssers ferits. Per això creiem amb una altra realitat. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
220:Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration. ~ Jonathan Sacks, #NFDB
221:I’m not even the one per cent; I’m the one per cent of the one per cent; ~ Ian McDonald, #NFDB
222:I'm not really good at skiing or snowboarding, or swimming, per se. ~ Theophilus London, #NFDB
223:Nella vita c'era la giustizia come per la campagna le cattive annate ~ Luigi Pirandello, #NFDB
224:Nuk luftohet nje fatalitet, e te arsyetosh per te eshte akoma me e kote ~ Ismail Kadare, #NFDB
225:Per te in silenzio, da qualche parte in Italia a metà degli anni Ottanta. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
226:Protecting the human race should really come with a per diem, I swear. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
227:Russia gets to charge $70 million per person for the trip and to cut the ~ Ashlee Vance, #NFDB
228:Sto cominciando a pagare. E' meglio iniziare presto, per finire in fretta. ~ Juan Rulfo, #NFDB
229:Winston Churchill - fifty per cent genius, fifty per cent bloody fool. ~ Clement Attlee, #NFDB
230:You don’t remember what you never fail to do, that is common knowledge, ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
231:Certi tesori esistono soltanto per chi batte per primo una strada nuova. ~ Gianni Rodari, #NFDB
232:Ero talmente felice che per esserlo di più avrei dovuto essere due persone. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
233:Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance. ~ Sydney J Harris, #NFDB
234:I work at home but average 15,000 to 18,000 miles per year on my Honda. ~ Cliff Martinez, #NFDB
235:le lacrime umane non cadono mai per terra, il Signore le raccoglie prima ~ Nicolai Lilin, #NFDB
236:Le persone cui viene tolta la libertà, finiscono sempre per odiare qualcuno. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
237:Nessuna regola, per quanto saggia può sostituire l'affetto e il tatto ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
238:Ninety-nine per cent of who you are is invisible and untouchable. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
239:Ogni fama è di per sè pericolosa, perchè ogni fama ci crea un sosia ~ Werner Bergengruen, #NFDB
240:Pay per click was just the beginning. The real evolution is pay per action. ~ Bill Gross, #NFDB
241:Tenere i piedi sollevati è la prima condizione per godere della lettura. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
242:Tutti prendono i limiti della loro visione per i limiti del mondo. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
243:We really try to have only one new particle per paper. ~ Patrick Blackett Baron Blackett, #NFDB
244:and, without question, first place when counting assholes per square foot. ~ John Grisham, #NFDB
245:A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000. ~ Louann Brizendine, #NFDB
246:C'era una volta una fata, che fece i prati e gli alberi per gli innamorati. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
247:Certo che per sopportarti non è che bisogna essere imbecilli, però aiuta ~ Tiziano Sclavi, #NFDB
248:Dona a chi ami ali per volare, radici per tornare e motivi per rimanere. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
249:Gli angeli non scendono dal paradiso per essere trattati come tutti gli altri. ~ J L Berg, #NFDB
250:I'm not against architecture per se, I'm just against bad architecture. ~ Jonathan Meades, #NFDB
251:It's good to play 100 per cent live - no tricks, no samples, no messing about. ~ Adam Ant, #NFDB
252:Questi uomini che stanno per uccidermi sembrano spaventati dalla mia morte. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
253:Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding. ~ Susan Cain, #NFDB
254:Un giorno, sarai abbastanza grande per iniziare a leggere di nuovo le favole. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
255:code reading detected about 80 percent more faults per hour than testing ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
256:E non sapte voi che il soffrire per la giustizia è il nostro vincere? ~ Alessandro Manzoni, #NFDB
257:I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film. ~ Sergio Leone, #NFDB
258:I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish. ~ John Updike, #NFDB
259:Jis keistas mišrūnas- protingas, bet aklas, nuoširdus, bet per daug suktas ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
260:LETTERA 5 INVITO ALLA SEMPLICITA'
Nessuno è infelice solo per il presente. ~ Seneca,#NFDB
261:Perché la capacità di meravigliarsi è necessaria per continuare a vivere. ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
262:Per una mente ben organizzata la morte non é che una nuova, grande avventura ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
263:sembra un paradosso ma per esser davvero oziosi bisogna essere efficienti ~ Tom Hodgkinson, #NFDB
264:Aveva sofferto abbastanza per poter sfruttare le cicatrici a proprio favore. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
265:Ci vuole così poco per spostare la vita in questa o in quella direzione! ~ Ir ne N mirovsky, #NFDB
266:La gente piccola dev'essere solida per poter sopravvivere fra i grandi. ~ Margaret Mitchell, #NFDB
267:Lo que importa no es la inflación per se, sino la inflación no anticipada ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
268:Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
269:Sembra un paradosso ma per essere davvero oziosi bisogna essere efficienti ~ Tom Hodgkinson, #NFDB
270:Amami, per Dio. Ho bisogno d'amore, amore, amore, fuoco, entusiasmo, vita ~ Giacomo Leopardi, #NFDB
271:Americans produce 4.4 pounds of trash per person per day, the most in the world, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
272:At 2 per cent growth a year, an economy doubles in size in just thirty years. ~ Paul Ormerod, #NFDB
273:Demi persahabatan! Demi kebaikan hati! Demi sepuluh Galleon per helai rambut-! ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
274:Doneu a un error una formulació axiomàtica, i acabarà per semblar-vos veritat. ~ Joan Fuster, #NFDB
275:I libri si dividono in due categorie: i libri per adesso e i libri per sempre. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
276:Make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it ten per cent. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
277:More people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
278:Nessun vento è favorevole per il marinaio che non sa a quale porto vuole approdare. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
279:Non esiste un vascello veloce come un libro per portarci in terre lontane. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
280:Quello che provo per lui è come un battito del cuore, leggero e costante. ~ Becky Albertalli, #NFDB
281:Sembra un paradosso ma per x esser davvero oziosi bisogna essere efficienti ~ Tom Hodgkinson, #NFDB
282:She knew logging had the highest per capita death rate of any U.S. occupation ~ Linda Holmes, #NFDB
283:Si dice che i figli siano l'unica cosa per cui vale l'espressione "per sempre". ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
284:The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered. ~ David Grann, #NFDB
285:Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
286:Bob Gruen: La gente veniva da noi per farsi mordere, non per farsi accarezzare. ~ Legs McNeil, #NFDB
287:D'inverno la montagna non era fatta per gli uomini e andava lasciata in pace ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
288:Il buon senso c'era, ma se ne stava nascosto per paura del senso comune. ~ Alessandro Manzoni, #NFDB
289:My old man was eighty-six per cent white bread and a hundred per cent asshole. ~ James Sallis, #NFDB
290:Non importa dove vai o cosa fai per distrarti, la realtà alla fine ti scova. ~ Kody Keplinger, #NFDB
291:No vaig obrir els ulls. Era massa feliç per canviar res, per petit que fos. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
292:Pay-per-view would deprive many kids of the delight of seeing the Olympics. ~ Mary Lou Retton, #NFDB
293:Però quins són els pitjors dolors? Per a mi, sempre és el dolor del moment. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
294:the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. Value innovation, not innovation per se, ~ W Chan Kim, #NFDB
295:There is, though, a strong link between income and number of babies per woman. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
296:Ti sei fatto male per il bene di coloro ai quali alla fine male si dovrà fare. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
297:A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
298:Che rimpianto, pensare che serve una vita per imparare a vivere, Oskar. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
299:Chi conta le conchiglie nella notte
per vedere che non ne manchi nessuna? ~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
300:I don't really tell a joke per se, I build up an attitude and it becomes a joke. ~ Don Rickles, #NFDB
301:I libri sono riserve di grano da ammassare per l’inverno dello spirito. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar, #NFDB
302:Lavorava per vivere; poi, sempre per vivere, poiché anche il cuore ha fame, amò. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
303:over 10 per cent of the population; two thirds of them from the armed forces. ~ Neil MacGregor, #NFDB
304:Per impadronirsi di un cinghiale ci vuole scienza di cacciatore e forza di cani. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
305:Se mi capita di essere coerente, è solo per incoerenza della mia incoerenza. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
306:There is more grace per square foot in San Francisco than any place on earth. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
307:Un uomo felice è troppo soddisfatto del presente per pensare molto al futuro ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
308:With just 23 peoplefn1 there is a 50.7 per cent of two of them sharing a birthday, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
309:As you can tell from watching the show, I'm not a strong joke writer per se. ~ Janeane Garofalo, #NFDB
310:Continua a sognare, Agnes Browne! Per il bene di tutti, continua a sognare! ~ Brendan O Carroll, #NFDB
311:Detto del Profeta
Riflessione
I Fedeli sono specchi, gli uni per gli altri. ~ Idries Shah,#NFDB
312:If it's not 100 per cent pure maple syrup, it can't be called 'pure maple syrup. ~ Nancy Greene, #NFDB
313:Il vero motivo per cui si sono estinti i dinosauri è perché nessuno li accarezzava ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
314:Non ero triste per qualcosa in particolare, piangevo per tante cose insieme. ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
315:Stavo morendo per la perdita e l'abbandono, sempre di più ogni giorno che passava. ~ Meg Rosoff, #NFDB
316:the average time spent per week on email, text, and social media is about 23 hours. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
317:We are all time travelers moving at the speed of exactly 60 minutes per hour. ~ Spider Robinson, #NFDB
318:En la guerra hi penso per mirar de comprendre-la... Si no, de què serveix? ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
319:È uno strano dolore... morire di nostalgia per qualcosa che non vivrai mai. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
320:I pacifisti applaudono i coccodrilli sperando di essere divorati per ultimi. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
321:la persona giusta non
t’intralcia
ti apre la strada
per farti andare avanti ~ Rupi Kaur,#NFDB
322:Our loves are not given, but only lent, At compound interest of cent per cent. ~ Rudyard Kipling, #NFDB
323:Per mille volte cercò gli occhi di lei, e per mille volte lei trovò i suoi. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
324:Potser els més capacitats per exercir el poder són els qui no l'han perseguit mai. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
325:regulations allow for up to ten insect fragments per thirty-one-gram serving. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
326:Solo quando abbiamo perduto tutto, capiamo ciò che ha veramente significato per noi. ~ Wulf Dorn, #NFDB
327:60,000 kilometres per second may be the practical (!) speed limit for space travel ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
328:eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business, ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
329:Fewer than half of all university professors publish as much as one article per year. ~ Derek Bok, #NFDB
330:I encourage my patients to eat huge salads and at least four fresh fruits per day. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
331:If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do? ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
332:I want to beat the world record for the number of beats per second on a drum pad. ~ Travis Barker, #NFDB
333:I was a journalist and wrote about filmmakers, but I didn't review movies per se. ~ Curtis Hanson, #NFDB
334:M'agradaria poder congelar aquest moment, just ara, aquí, i viure'l per sempre. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
335:Non sei qui per contare successi e insuccessi. Sei qui per amare ed essere amato ~ Matthew Thomas, #NFDB
336:Tutti abbiamo bisogno di sentire che c'è qualcuno per noi, e che ci siamo per qualcuno. ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB
337:Ženk neskubėdamas per triukšmą ir skubią ir nepamiršk, kokią ramybę teikia tyla. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
338:Dopo un anno di terapia,il mio psichiatra mi ha detto,"Forse la vita non è per tutti ~ Larry Brown, #NFDB
339:E s'abituava a disfarsi di tutto, per non aver più niente da perdere. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
340:In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day. ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau, #NFDB
341:Non devi farti prendere dall'autocompatimento. E' una cosa per la gente da poco. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
342:Sono uno di quelli che per capire le cose ha assolutamente bisogno di scriverle. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
343:tens of thousands per month, Apple became the electronic equivalent of a gusher. ~ Brent Schlender, #NFDB
344:What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness. ~ M C Escher, #NFDB
345:Forse essere infelice le piace così tanto che preferisce non far nulla per cambiare ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
346:high-profile tech companies) are earning only an average of $3 per hour of attention— ~ Kevin Kelly, #NFDB
347:I delivered leaflets for my dad and was paid £5 per thousand, which was slave labour. ~ Neil Oliver, #NFDB
348:If people spent one hour per week in Eucharistic Adoration, abortion would be ended ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
349:If you just enchanted one person per day, you would make a big dent in the universe. ~ Guy Kawasaki, #NFDB
350:In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny. ~ Karl Lagerfeld, #NFDB
351:It's all about the Benjamins, I got a Pay Per View and I should be on Pay Per View. ~ Adrien Broner, #NFDB
352:Light leaped out through the door, escaped from prison at 186,000 miles per second. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
353:Si regala qualcosa per il piacere di farlo,non perché qualcuno lo meriti o meno ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
354:Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964. ~ Rick Perlstein, #NFDB
355:What happens to me if this slipper fits?"
"I turn you into a handsome frog. ~ Judith McNaught,#NFDB
356:- Alice: per quanto tempo è per sempre?
- Bianconiglio: a volte, solo un secondo. ~ Lewis Carroll,#NFDB
357:A man making 550K in interest per day only moved money to engage in fiscal masturbation. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
358:At 50$ per barrel of oil we shall lose about three trillion rubles of budget income ~ Anton Siluanov, #NFDB
359:Che cosa è la morte per me? Un grado di più nella calma, e forse due nel silenzio. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
360:Continuerai cosí per sempre, non sarai mai quello che vuoi ma quello che capita. ~ Domenico Starnone, #NFDB
361:E poi, meglio non scrivere e passare per finto che scrivere e togliere ogni dubbio. ~ Tiziano Sclavi, #NFDB
362:E quale è di pazzia segno più espresso
che, per altri voler, perder se stesso? ~ Ludovico Ariosto,#NFDB
363:Era il giorno ch'al sol si scoloraro per la pietà del suo factore i rai… Antonio ~ Michael Schmicker, #NFDB
364:I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
365:In un caso e nell'altro, il premio è la bellezza, e occhi nuovi per vedere il mondo. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
366:It is cocaine," he said,—"a seven-per-cent. solution. Would you care to try it? ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
367:Per això marxo; perquè no vull esperar a morir-me per començar a buscar el Gran Potser. ~ John Green, #NFDB
368:Players are spoiled by charter airplanes, the finest hotels, a big per diem every day. ~ Chick Hearn, #NFDB
369:Ripetete il vostro nome per più di duecento volte e scoprirete che non siete nessuno. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
370:Voglio lasciarmi andare, voglio di più per me, voglio buttarmi per cadere verso l'alto. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
371:You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
372:Chi si lamenta della fatica, se sa di lavorare per la conquista della propria libertà? ~ Daniel Defoe, #NFDB
373:If you think fast food is hittin a deer att 65 miles per hr.. you might be a redneck ~ Jeff Foxworthy, #NFDB
374:- Kartais svarstau, ko mes vis laukiame.
Tyla.
- Kad būtų per vėlu, madam. ~ Alessandro Baricco,#NFDB
375:Nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur. (No one learns except by friendship.) ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
376:Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements. ~ Claude Monet, #NFDB
377:Non sperare dalla vita, per non rischiarla; considerarsi morto, per non morire. ~ Adolfo Bioy Casares, #NFDB
378:One of our energy strategies is to increase the CAFE standards to 35 miles per hour.. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
379:Per quanto noi possiamo deplorare una cosa, questo non le impedisce di essere vera. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
380:Si finisce per diventare ciò che si vede negli occhi di quelli che si desiderano. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
381:Si regala qualcosa per il piacere di farlo, non perché qualcuno lo meriti o meno. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
382:Sono poche le ragioni per dire la verità, mentre quelle per mentire sono infinite ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
383:There is nothing I need from the shop, and this is not the day for social profligacy. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
384:2005 study of British chiropractors found that 77 per cent did not seek informed consent. ~ Nick Cohen, #NFDB
385:Auto racing is boring except when a car is going at least 172 miles per hour upside down. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
386:Grazie” mormorò contro la mia bocca.
“Per cosa?”
“Per permettermi di usarti. ~ Kimberly Knight,#NFDB
387:India, under Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, accounts for 27 per cent of the world economy. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
388:Io vi dico: bisogna avere in sè il caos per poter partorire una stella danzante. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
389:It doesn't matter if you have something greater to say per say, just enjoy what you're doing. ~ Lights, #NFDB
390:La libertà è uno stato di grazia e si è liberi solo mentre si lotta per conquistarla. ~ Luis Sep lveda, #NFDB
391:L’amore. Certo, l’amore. Fuoco e fiamme per un anno, cenere per trenta. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, #NFDB
392:Les dents són per a mossegar, en principi. Ensenyar-les en un somriure és contra natura. ~ Joan Fuster, #NFDB
393:Money per se does not make you happy - it's what it enables you to do with your life. ~ Lois P Frankel, #NFDB
394:Non si diventa volgari per colpa dell'alcol: si diventa volgari perché lo si è già. ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
395:Ogni occhiata perduta, per uno che viveva di sguardi, era una perdita irrimediabile. ~ Bernard Malamud, #NFDB
396:One should avoid carrying out an experiment requiring more than 10 per cent accuracy. ~ Walther Nernst, #NFDB
397:Per noi due, casa non è un luogo. È una persona.
E noi siano finalmente a casa. ~ Stephanie Perkins,#NFDB
398:Resta vicino a chi ti vuole bene. Vivi, combatti e muori per le cose in cui credi. ~ Francesco Dimitri, #NFDB
399:Una famiglia deve, per poter sopravvivere, presentare al mondo un fronte compatto. ~ Margaret Mitchell, #NFDB
400:We must have had 99 per cent of the match. It was the other three per cent that cost us. ~ Ruud Gullit, #NFDB
401:...c'era voluta un'epidemia per far capire alla gente che le cose potevano cambiare. ~ Octavia E Butler, #NFDB
402:Esistono un’infinità di modi per suicidarsi senza morire. Una era guardarti baciarla. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
403:I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
404:La Margo mateix era —si més no una part del temps— una persona que no feia per a la Margo. ~ John Green, #NFDB
405:Lei era così, rompeva equilibri solo per vedere in quali altri modi poteva ricomporli. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
406:«Perhonen is not here anymore,» it says, with a voice made of wings and whispers. ~ Hannu Rajaniemi, #NFDB
407:Since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year. ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
408:Sto facendo studi a dimostrazione che il vino rosso è davvero la panacea per tutti i mali ~ Paul Beatty, #NFDB
409:The mining industry’s contribution to the GDP varies between 2.25 and 2.5 per cent. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
410:The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe. ~ Sean M Carroll, #NFDB
411:The storage industry produces in the neighborhood of 650 million hard drives per year. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
412:Cisco estimates that total Internet traffic currently averages 167 terabits per second. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
413:Dragon droppings?” Per asked in awe, as if that were the most fantastic part of their tale. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
414:I’m not interested in myself per se. I’m interested in myself as theme carrier, as host. ~ David Shields, #NFDB
415:In 1800, the average person consumed 5 pounds per year;7 now we average 152 pounds a year. ~ Rick Warren, #NFDB
416:La mia esistenza è stata un catalogo di cose perdute e ritrovate. Ma forse è così per tutti ~ Lucy Foley, #NFDB
417:L’arte raggiunge sempre la sua vetta là dove diviene ragione di vita per tutto un popolo. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
418:Let me drive. You wait until I get up to fifty-five miles per hour, and then jump out, ~ W Bruce Cameron, #NFDB
419:Ninety-eight per cent of actors who actually make a living do so in front of a camera. ~ Julian Fellowes, #NFDB
420:Però non accadde nulla, perché alla vita manca sempre qualcosa per essere perfetta. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
421:Se per la tua gioia hai bisogno del permesso degli altri, sei proprio un povero sciocco. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
422:Si incontreranno per tre volte, ma ogni volta sarà l’unica, e la prima, e l’ultima. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
423:Yansıma, bir güzelliği süper bir güzelliğe dönüştürmeyi dâhiyane bir şekilde bilir! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
424:Appena nati ci viene istintivo gridare, e ci mettiamo una vita per imparare ad ascoltare ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
425:At least once per year, some group of scientists will become very excited and announce that: ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
426:Did you know that New Hampshire has more hamsters per capita than any other state? ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes, #NFDB
427:First, mental illness per se is not incompatible with reliably functioning at a high level, ~ Bandy X Lee, #NFDB
428:In order to save the planet it would be necessary to kill 350,000 people per day. ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau, #NFDB
429:Io sono quello che definisco uno spirito errante per le passioni d'altri; ovvero un imbecille. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
430:La verità è una cosa meravigliosa e terribile, e per questo va trattata con grande cautela. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
431:one extra hour of study per day and you 'll be a national expert in five years or less ~ Earl Nightingale, #NFDB
432:Per il robusto un errore è informazione, per il debole un errore è solo un errore ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
433:practice one virtue for a period of two weeks, then three weeks, then one virtue per month. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
434:The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. ~ Daniel Levitin, #NFDB
435:There are hundreds of thoughts per every word spoken, and that's if they're spoken at all. ~ Markus Zusak, #NFDB
436:Al cap i a la fi, per qui ha viscut la vida, la mort no és més que la següent gran aventura. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
437:Also, that which is desirable in itself is more desirable than what is desirable per accidens. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
438:Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process. ~ Rem Koolhaas, #NFDB
439:Eliminato l'impossibile ció che resta, per improbabile che sia, deve essere la veritá ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
440:familiar with Scandinavian crime fiction – Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Karin Fossum, Håkan ~ Stieg Larsson, #NFDB
441:half of Americans belonged, and today about 70 per cent are affiliated with a local church. ~ Rodney Stark, #NFDB
442:Introducing 'Lite': the new way to spell 'Light'; but with twenty per cent fewer letters. ~ Jerry Seinfeld, #NFDB
443:Ninety-five per cent of my language problems are the fault of that stupid little midget. ~ Gianfranco Zola, #NFDB
444:Ninety nine per cent of the time, for anyone who wins or makes money, it makes them happy. ~ Brian Blessed, #NFDB
445:Quanti sono coloro che amano davvero, o che almeno si sposano per amore, a questo mondo? ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
446:Some [soccer] players suffer four or five fatal injuries per game. That's how tough they are. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
447:The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
448:They say that ninety per cent of TV is junk. But ninety per cent of everything is junk. ~ Gene Roddenberry, #NFDB
449:Vi è felicità per chi accetta il proprio destino, vi è gloria per chi combatte il proprio destino! ~ CLAMP, #NFDB
450:Così dunque la vita é rimasta un mistero. E io stesso, per me, sono ancora il primo mistero. ~ Elsa Morante, #NFDB
451:Going back to Ireland involves at least six to seven emotional breakdowns for me per day. ~ Anjelica Huston, #NFDB
452:I know that the problem isn't the dream per se. It was the way I felt afterward, once awake. ~ Emily Giffin, #NFDB
453:Il miglior mezzo per far attendere il pubblico sta nell'asserirgli che si sta per cominciare. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
454:In 2014 the average American spent 444 minutes per day—nearly 7.5 hours—in front of a screen, ~ Aziz Ansari, #NFDB
455:Io sto tra due mondi, di cui nessuno e' il mio, e per questo la mia vita e' un po' difficile. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
456:Nearly 90 per cent of the planet’s ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
457:...perche' un pretesto per tornare bisogna sempre seminarselo dietro, quando si parte. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
458:Sofia, disse l'infermiera, lo sai che cos'è la nascita? È una nave che parte per la guerra ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
459:The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. ~ Daniel J Levitin, #NFDB
460:There are 100's of thousands of Uber partners, and we are creating 50,000 jobs per month. ~ Travis Kalanick, #NFDB
461:Chi è che ha detto che le coincidenze sono solo il modo che Dio ha scelto per restare anonimo? ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
462:I believe all of us only use one tenth of our brain. I know people who use one per cent only! ~ Ridley Scott, #NFDB
463:It really is all about believing in yourself: 80 per cent mental, 20 per cent physical. ~ Victoria Pendleton, #NFDB
464:Kabul is . . .” Idris searches for the right words. “A thousand tragedies per square mile. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
465:Per capita aggravated assaults in the U.S. increased almost sevenfold between 1957 and 1993. ~ Dave Grossman, #NFDB
466:Perché nessuno possa dimenticare che non si è mai lontani abbastanza per trovarsi, mai. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
467:Per il dolore, la felicità, l'amore non ci sono segni. E questo mi sembra di rara infelicità. ~ Christa Wolf, #NFDB
468:Piccola Ophelinha,
non so se mi vuole bene, ma le scrivo esattamente per questo motivo. ~ Fernando Pessoa,#NFDB
469:(preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, behavioral psychologists say), ~ John Medina, #NFDB
470:There was always a woman with TB in Remarque’s books. Frankly I was a little fed up with it. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
471:World’s fastest 2-D camera, 100 billion frames per second, may enable new scientific discoveries ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
472:You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation. ~ Dick Dale, #NFDB
473:A director who gets $150,000 per year from a company and needs the money is not independent. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
474:A forza d'uscire per recarsi a sognare, viene il giorno in cui si esce per andarsi ad annegare. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
475:A poll earlier this year showed that 42 per cent of Americans believe we're in the End Times. ~ Andrew Denton, #NFDB
476:Even if you fly twenty times per year, you are about twice as likely to be struck by lightning. ~ Nate Silver, #NFDB
477:People who work 44 hours per week make 50 percent more than people who work 34 hours a week. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
478:Quando lei aprì gli occhi lui sentì la propria voce dire piano: "Io ti amerò per sempre. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
479:Seventy-five per cent of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species. ~ Michael Mosley, #NFDB
480:The First 40 hours of work per week are for survival. Everything after that is for success. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
481:There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California. ~ Roberto Bolano, #NFDB
482:There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
483:The scary thing is that in my lifetime, 95 per cent of the world's rhinos have been killed. ~ Mark Carwardine, #NFDB
484:Un uomo intelligente a volte è costretto a ubriacarsi per passare il tempo tra gli idioti. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
485:When working with an orchestra, you never spend more than 20 minutes per recording session. ~ Placido Domingo, #NFDB
486:At any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance ~ Tom Holt, #NFDB
487:Com més hi penso, més crec que ser jo és una forma de neurosi — bastant inconfortable, per cert. ~ Joan Fuster, #NFDB
488:«Ecco che senso ha stare insieme. Tu hai un certo potenziale. E io sono qui per farlo emergere.» ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
489:E' il tempo che hai perduto per la tua rosa che ha reso la tua rosa così importante ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
490:[...] è la mancanza di rabbia che finisce per uccidere. Mentre l'aggressività depura e guarisce. ~ Philip Roth, #NFDB
491:Guarda Momo. La Senna adora i ponti, è come una donna che va matta per i braccialetti. ~ ric Emmanuel Schmitt, #NFDB
492:I can only please one person per day. Today isn't your day, tomorrow doesn't look good either. ~ Hilary Putnam, #NFDB
493:I una trista retòrica: M'estic morint per tu,
em moriré per tu un dia qualsevol. ~ Vicent Andr s i Estell s,#NFDB
494:L'esperienza serve a valutare la vita per quel che è e non per quello che si vorrebbe che fosse ~ Emilio Lussu, #NFDB
495:Lucy constituted only 28 per cent of a half skeleton (and only about 20 per cent of a full one). ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
496:Per quanto una situazione possa sembrare disperata, c'è sempre una possibilità di soluzione. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
497:Quali che siano le lacrime che si piangono, alla fine si finisce sempre per soffiarsi il naso ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
498:Quando lei aprì gli occhi lui sentì la propria voce dire piano: "Io ti amerò per sempre". ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
499:Seventy-five per cent of being successful as an actor is pure luck. The rest is just endurance. ~ Gene Hackman, #NFDB
500:Although man is already ninety per cent water, the Prohibitionists are not yet satisfied. ~ John Kendrick Bangs, #NFDB
501:Discipleship is all about living life together rather than just one structured meeting per week. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
502:Erano queste le nostre camere della morte. Ci mancava il gas per fare le camere a gas. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
503:Essendo alla ricerca di un futuro per me stessa, mi piace sapere le possibilità degli altri. ~ Kathryn Stockett, #NFDB
504:- È uno strano dolore.
Piano.
- Morire di nostalgia per qualcosa che non vivrai mai. ~ Alessandro Baricco,#NFDB
505:If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
506:I was told I had a two per cent chance of getting pregnant, so I say she's a two per cent baby. ~ Nicole Kidman, #NFDB
507:Man seldom behaves as per his philosophies. He usually philosophizes as per his behavior. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
508:Nessuno può sconfinare in un altro - per il semplice motivo che nessuno può accedere a se stesso. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
509:Non darmi false speranza per il futuro. Soprattutto se nel profondo sai che non ne avremo uno. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
510:Non serve avere ragione, diceva il generale Baldissera, se manca l'istruzione per farla valere ~ Ignazio Silone, #NFDB
511:Si compiacque di averlo ucciso e ci credé davvero, per almeno cinque secondi. ~ Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli, #NFDB
512:«Stasera verrai? Per favore?
«Non posso essere salvato.»
«Non è quello che ti ho chiesto.» ~ Marie Sexton,#NFDB
513:Tu sei troppo importante per me, Ennis, figlio di una puttana troia. Vorrei riuscire a mollarti. ~ Annie Proulx, #NFDB
514:Twitter has 300 million active users, but 40 per cent of people just use Twitter to read not tweet. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
515:You’re probably right,’ I said, but to be honest, I had forgotten to be a Communist that night. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
516:1 per cent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
517:An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth. ~ John Pilger, #NFDB
518:Ci sforziamo di conservarci in salute per poter morir bene di radiazioni o di aria avvelenata. ~ Guido Ceronetti, #NFDB
519:Global warming could be solved by shifting three to four per cent of global GDP to pay for it. ~ Ken Livingstone, #NFDB
520:In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
521:I prefer to commit 100 per cent to a movie and make fewer films, because it takes over your life. ~ Jodie Foster, #NFDB
522:L’uomo ha bisogno di coraggio, gli occorre tantissimo coraggio per ergersi e guardare in faccia la morte. ~ Osho, #NFDB
523:Pity aims just as little at the pleasure of others as malice at the pain of others Per-Se. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
524:Ricordati, la vita è una malattia mortale, per cui bisogna godersela. Oggi stai bene? Approfittane! ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
525:~ Stephanie Perkins"Vuoi, per favore, dirmi che mi ami? Sto morendo, qui"~ Stephanie Perkins ~ Stephanie Perkins, #NFDB
526:the six heirs to the Walmart fortune have more wealth than the poorest 30 per cent of Americans. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
527:The typical eye sees the ten per cent bad of an idea and overlooks the ninety per cent good. ~ Charles Kettering, #NFDB
528:Un giorno farai per me cose che hai in odio. E' questo che vuol dire essere una famiglia. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
529:Every penny of the $7 billion going to Africa as per Obama will be stolen - corruption is rampant! ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
530:Il passato è un’indispensabile guida per chi vuol visitare il presente o immaginarsi il futuro. ~ Tiziano Terzani, #NFDB
531:I want order and taste. A well displayed meal is enhanced one hundred per cent in my eyes. ~ Marie Antoine Careme, #NFDB
532:I will take all the steps necessary to give the NHS at least another £100million per week by 2020. ~ Michael Gove, #NFDB
533:Non c'è mente più maligna di quella d'una donna per bene...eccettuata la mente d'un prete ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley, #NFDB
534:Oh, well, we did have a good day out together, you and I, that doesn't happen every day, does it? ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
535:"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
536:[...] Sono poche le ragoni per dire la verità, mentre quelle per mentire sono infinite. [...] ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
537:Statistically there's only one crocodile-related human fatality per year in the whole of Australia. ~ Steve Irwin, #NFDB
538:Statistically there’s only one crocodile-related human fatality per year in the whole of Australia. ~ Steve Irwin, #NFDB
539:Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
540:Bibliotekens förseningsavgifter är ganska dryga. Tio piskrapp per dag, och det är för pocketböcker. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
541:encrusted with glittering seashore properties the boatman said cost £400 per foot of beach frontage, ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
542:Gli sciocchi ammirano ogni cosa in un autore stimato: io leggo per me e mi piace solo quel che mi serve ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
543:I hold the world speed record downhill, in a Rover. I think it was 17 kilometers per hour, downhill. ~ Gene Cernan, #NFDB
544:I need a stimulating environment to write because my books are driven at 100 miles per hour at a time. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
545:Introducing ‘Lite’ – The new way to spell ‘Light’, but with 20 per cent fewer letters. JERRY SEINFELD ~ John Lloyd, #NFDB
546:La testa, ah sì, il male è là, è per l'insoddisfazione della testa che il corpo si sta ammalando. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
547:Non c'è mente più maligna di quella d'una donna per bene...eccettuata la mente d'un prete. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley, #NFDB
548:Of the 22 industrialized nations of the world, we're dead last in per capita giving to poor people. ~ Tony Campolo, #NFDB
549:One or more servings of cabbage per week reduces the occurrence of pancreatic cancer by 38 percent. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
550:Today, on a per capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity. ~ George Gilder, #NFDB
551:Whatever the actual total, 99.99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
552:Forse ogni poeta è condannato all'insoddisfazione. Dev'essere per colpa della luce che li abbaglia ~ Niall Williams, #NFDB
553:I don't have a burning passion to live in America per se but I would certainly like to work there. ~ Cillian Murphy, #NFDB
554:«Il sistema più efficace per rendere inoffensivi i poveri è insegnare loro a imitare i ricchi.» ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
555:I've never had a writer, and I'm proud of that. Everything I've performed has been from my own head. ~ Don Rickles, #NFDB
556:Nei piccoli paesi c’è della gente che farebbe delle miglia per venire a portarvi la cattiva nuova. ~ Giovanni Verga, #NFDB
557:Per la prima volta ha veramente afferrato la più allucinante lezione della vita: L’altro esiste. ~ James Tiptree Jr, #NFDB
558:Quando lo stesso tema si presenta per ben due volte in poco tempo, bisogna prestarvi attenzione. ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
559:Se potessi estrarre questo istante dallo scorrere del tempo e tenerci qui per sempre, lo farei. ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
560:Siamo forse Greci, per sprecare la nostra vita a discutere i limiti della nostra filosofia? ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley, #NFDB
561:The, per second great thought investment will yield the best hourly harvest of great life. ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
562:A quanto pareva, Emma era nata per essere rapita da un lykae impazzito. Il suo destino faceva schifo. ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
563:De vegades a les persones els passen coses per a les quals, en aquell moment, no estan preparades. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
564:Era senz’altro una bella maniera di morire, sacrificarmi per un’altra persona, qualcuno che amavo. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
565:Forse, capire quando non si può più cambiare nulla è la giusta punizione per chi è stato spietato. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
566:GDP per capita is between two and four times higher for China than India, depending on how you measure ~ Clay Shirky, #NFDB
567:In 2015, a petabyte of cloud storage will cost $100,000 per year, down 90% from $1 million in 2011. ~ Bruce Schneier, #NFDB
568:In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease. ~ Garrett Hardin, #NFDB
569:It is not sex per se - your identification with the body is the impediment to your spiritual growth. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
570:L'Uomo ha bisogno di ciò che ha in sé di peggiore, per raggiungere ciò che di migliore esiste in lui. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
571:People in the hostile class, which made up about 40 per cent of the population, learned not to dream. ~ Hyeonseo Lee, #NFDB
572:Per això m'agrades. […] Estàs tan ocupada sent tu que no tens ni idea de com ets de totalment insòlita. ~ John Green, #NFDB
573:quod quum naturae et legi impossibile est, possibile facit, immo et præstat gratia Dei per Christum. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
574:Real estate contributes about 5 per cent toIndia’s GDP Market size of real estate in India (USD billion) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
575:Seven hundred and fifty miles per hour. Eight hundred. Eight hundred and three. Fast. Very fast.” The ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
576:Soltanto il vero amore potrà condurmi al matrimonio, ragion per cui credo proprio che resterò zitella! ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
577:The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world—an average of 89 per 100 people, ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
578:Una volta che rifiutate la paura, diverrete il perfetto candidato per ricevere e riflettere la verità. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
579:Where the guests at a gathering are well-acquainted, they eat 20 per cent more than they otherwise would. ~ E W Howe, #NFDB
580:Avevo ragione. Per noi due, casa non è un luogo. È una persona.
E noi siano finalmente a casa. ~ Stephanie Perkins,#NFDB
581:Barley, where it succeeds, yields a larger weight of feed per acre than any other small grain crop. ~ David F Houston, #NFDB
582:Come amiamo amar le cose per conto di altri! Come amiamo che altri amino le cose tramite i nostri occhi ~ John Irving, #NFDB
583:Hemp is Earth's number-one biomass resource; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in four months. ~ Jack Herer, #NFDB
584:How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se? ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
585:I have long believed that what most affects a child is not the divorce, per se, but how it is handled ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
586:La fede nella vita è credere che il panorama esista e che dietro la nebbia ci sia un posto per te. ~ Katherine Pancol, #NFDB
587:La peggior cosa che potrebbe capitare a chiunque sarebbe di non essere usati per qualcosa da qualcuno ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
588:Lo sai perché le formiche se la cavano sempre?"
mi chiese per l'ennesima volta. "Perché co-operano ~ Kurt Vonnegut,#NFDB
589:Quindi, vi prego, non lasciate che sia un libro a far si che qualcuno si senta capito per la prima volta. ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
590:That's basically what I did every weekend when I was a kid, just go and see two movies per weekend. ~ David Krumholtz, #NFDB
591:Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you do is for yourself And there isn't one.
~ Wei Wu Wei,#NFDB
592:80 per cent of people who care about politics and national issues fall in the ‘taking sides’ category. ~ Chetan Bhagat, #NFDB
593:All pain is per se and especially in excess, destructive and ultimately fatal in its nature and effects. ~ James Young, #NFDB
594:Certe volte per andare avanti bisogna fare um passo indietro. Sempre se hai l'umiltà di riconoscerlo. ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
595:Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
596:Cose che per qualcuno sono di nessuna importanza, per altri possono essere terribili come la morte. ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
597:Dius que no ets especial perquè el món no et coneix, però això és un insult per a mi. Jo sí que et conec. ~ John Green, #NFDB
598:La maggior parte delle persone si ammala per non saper esprimere quello che vede e quello che pensa. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
599:Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
600:No one owns you. One hundred per cent of the stock in your personal corporation belongs to you. ~ George Matthew Adams, #NFDB
601:Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
602:Per anni ho aspettato che la mia vita cambiasse, invece ora so che era lei ad aspettare che cambiassi io. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
603:Per favore, non guardi così fissamente quelle ragazzine. Vuole che tutti si accorgano che siamo preti? ~ Stefano Benni, #NFDB
604:Per mi el plaer consistia en veure com les nostres cordes es creuaven, se separaven i es tornaven a unir. ~ John Green, #NFDB
605:- Però per què em dius tot això? Jo odio el meu passat! L'odio!
- Perquè ell és tu i tu ets ell. ~ Ir ne N mirovsky,#NFDB
606:Quando morì, io mi accorsi ad un tratto che non piangevo per lui, ma per tutte le cose che aveva fatto. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
607:Qui soffriamo dolore e pena qui c'incontriamo per separarci ancora; solo in cielo non ci divideremo più ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
608:Steak has only 6.4 grams of protein per 100 calories and broccoli has 11.1 grams, almost twice as much. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
609:T'estimo […]. És una excusa molt pobre per justificar el que estic fent, però no deixa de ser certa. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
610:Where are the people who don't have goals headed? Those 97 per cent end up working for the three percent. ~ Shiv Khera, #NFDB
611:A cup at Starbucks isn't really that expensive when you consider what Victoria's Secret charges per cup. ~ Ashley Purdy, #NFDB
612:A prolonged and massive increase in aggregate wealth per capita has taken place over several centuries. ~ Robert Gilpin, #NFDB
613:Avrebbe voluto pregare per qualcosa che di sicuro il Dio della vedova Chegwidden avrebbe disapprovato. ~ Winston Graham, #NFDB
614:between 1973 and 2011, the median hourly wage barely changed, growing by just 0.1 percent per year. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
615:Era uno di quegli esseri bizzarri che il Creatore inventa per capriccio e di cui spezza subito lo stampo. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
616:Ho sognato di essere vecchio. E tu, tu mi eri accanto. Per sempre giovane, in mano una tazza di stelle. ~ Joanne Harris, #NFDB
617:Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent? ~ Saul Bellow, #NFDB
618:Non c'è niente di più doloroso per la mente umana di un improvviso, assoluto cambiamento. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
619:When you use the term 'cost per lead' you make marketing a cost center. Instead say 'investment per lead.' ~ Jon Miller, #NFDB
620:Ci vuole molta energia per inventarsi un presente quando il futuro sembra più una minaccia che una speranza ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
621:È inutile, inoltre, imbarcarsi in una potenziale follia solo per evitare di essere gli ultimi a compierla. ~ Leon R Kass, #NFDB
622:Els grans botxins no se’n surten sense els petits. Se’n necessiten molts per a fer la feina bruta. ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
623:Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth. ~ Michael Haneke, #NFDB
624:In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. ~ Daniel Levitin, #NFDB
625:It takes Rs. 10 per kms in Ahmedabad by auto- rickshaw, but it took us only Rs. 7 per kms to reach Mars. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
626:La vecchiaia è un posto dove vivi di ricordi.
Per questo, quando sei giovane, vivi creandotene di belli. ~ Fabio Volo,#NFDB
627:Lezione importante' erano parole in codice per 'dolore provocato da qualcuno senza chiedere scusa'. ~ Jennifer A Nielsen, #NFDB
628:Mantenere: a dieci anni era il mio verbo preferito. Comportava la promessa di tenere per mano, mantenere. ~ Erri De Luca, #NFDB
629:Ma ormai avevo imparato a fare le domande degli adulti, in cui si chiede una cosa per saperne un'altra. ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
630:Noi siamo la nostra storia, la raccontiamo per rimanere vivi o mantenere in vita quelli che raccontiamo ~ Niall Williams, #NFDB
631:Per il tuo bene è un argomento persuasivo che alla fine riduce l'uomo ad accettare la propria distruzione. ~ Janet Frame, #NFDB
632:So are you planning on stealing all our guns, or do you think maybe you only need one per hand? - Ahmed ~ Alwyn Hamilton, #NFDB
633:Steak has only 6.4 grams of protein per 100 calories and broccoli has 11.1 grams, almost twice as much.21 ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
634:To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers. ~ Garry Disher, #NFDB
635:Across the continent since Europeans first arrived, 92 per cent of old-growth forest has been destroyed. The ~ Don Watson, #NFDB
636:Angosciarsi profondamente per le proprie disgrazie non è proprio di chi ama l'amico ma se stesso. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
637:Apparently humans share fifty per cent of their DNA with bananas. My father is a constant reminder of that. ~ Holly Smale, #NFDB
638:In the US, the 400 richest people have as much as 185 million people, over 60 per cent of the population. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
639:L'ipocrisia degli uomini? Non esageriamola. La maggior parte pensa troppo poco per pensare doppio. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar, #NFDB
640:[...] L'uomo è fatto per la guerra, non per perdere tempo a intonare "om" e blaterare di pace interiore. ~ Beth Fantaskey, #NFDB
641:Per cinque anni udì soltanto una parola gentile, ricevette una sola carezza, e non capì di che si trattava. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
642:Sì: vi sono alcuni che necessariamente smarriscono la strada, poiché per loro non esiste una strada giusta. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
643:The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year, ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
644:We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition. ~ Norman Lear, #NFDB
645:Beef also was difficult to be procured and exceedingly poor; the price nearly sixpence farthing per pound. ~ William Bligh, #NFDB
646:En människa kan leva utan syn, en blind är också människa. Men blir man inte sedd, då är man ingenting. ~ Per Olov Enquist, #NFDB
647:E quasi per sbaglio Eddie scoprì una delle grandi verità della sua infanzia: i veri mostri sono gli adulti. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
648:I'd rather have a $10 million business making 15 per cent than a $100 million business making 5 per cent. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
649:If 80,000,000 polygons per second is reality, what happens to you when you live in a world 160,000,000? ~ Howard Rheingold, #NFDB
650:In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. ~ Daniel J Levitin, #NFDB
651:Le persone iniziano a vivere per la prima volta solo quando diventano capaci di non vivere per se stesse ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
652:l'età di per sè non rende nessuno migliore e più saggio, semplicemente accentua ciò che si èsempre stati. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
653:Lui rimase a osservare per un minuto i disegni del sole che filtrava dalle lunghe e strette bifore [...]. ~ Winston Graham, #NFDB
654:Non ho mai sentito di appartenere a nessun posto, ma tu mi fai sentire come se ci fosse un posto per me. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
655:Non vuole fare altro che guardarla, non solo adesso ma per sempre, perché è più bella dell’estate. ~ J n Kalman Stef nsson, #NFDB
656:Pied Piper' came to me all at once; I wanted to do a fairy-tale movie with some edge, but not 'dark,' per se. ~ Max Landis, #NFDB
657:"Sei abile con la lingua.
Ma non conosco nessun uomo onesto
che trovi parole belle per ogni circostanza ~ Sophocles,#NFDB
658:three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
659:95 per cent of economics is common sense – made to look difficult, with the use of jargons and mathematics. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
660:Ad astra per aspera. It's the Kansas state motto," he said to Roger and me, "To the stars through adversity ~ Morgan Matson, #NFDB
661:Ah, l'Europa! Che straordinario paese!" esclamava Jack. "Ho bisogno dell'Europa, per sentirmi americano. ~ Curzio Malaparte, #NFDB
662:By the time we complete the care for the wounded soldiers, $6 trillion, that's $50,000 per American household. ~ Jill Stein, #NFDB
663:Ci fabbrichiamo storie con un capo e una coda, con una logica inventata per dare una parvenza di senso alla vita. ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB
664:Did you know that the eyes’ sensitivity to light is reduced by thirty per cent before you’ve even turned fifty? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
665:E' una pianta strana quella lì. Forte per crescere dove cresce e debole appena la metti da un'altra parte. ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
666:La vita è piena di obblighi che si adempiono, per quanta voglia si abbia di trasgredirli sfacciatamente. ~ Machado de Assis, #NFDB
667:Le risoluzioni definitive si prendono sempre e soltanto per uno stato d'animo che non è destinato a durare. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
668:Per capita availability of good, potable water is diminishing in all developed and developing countries. ~ Marq de Villiers, #NFDB
669:Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
670:Quando si ricordano persone morte, c'è sempre questa cosa per cui sembri un bastardo se non le idealizzi un po ~ John Green, #NFDB
671:Questo era il caso per il quale veniva dato un risultato, e tutto il resto bisognava trovarlo da soli. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
672:Rule of thumb: One person per square meter is a light crowd, four people per square meter is a mosh pit. 2 ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
673:Samuel Eto'o is reputedly the highest-paid player in the world at £350,000 per week - that's £5,000 a day ~ Clive Tyldesley, #NFDB
674:Siamo creature stupide e incostanti, con la memoria corta e un grandissimo talento per l'autodistruzione. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
675:Taip per visą gyvenimą mes darome žemus ir menkus poelgius, baimindamiesi tų, kurių visiškai nevertiname. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
676:The only choice permitted us is either to be servants for $7 a week or to portray them for $700 per week. ~ Hattie McDaniel, #NFDB
677:The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
678:Uno di quei crepuscoli di mezza stagione, quando per un attimo l'aria pare condensare in sé estate e autunno. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
679:By 2010, we as a species were creating more data per day than we did from the beginning of time until 2003. ~ Bruce Schneier, #NFDB
680:Gli uomini veri impazziscono per le ragazze che sanno dire di no. Gli stupidi si accontentano delle facili. ~ Marilyn Monroe, #NFDB
681:invasion of Crimea. Investors fled Russian assets, with stocks in Moscow falling by 10.8 per cent, their biggest ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
682:La pasta di cui sono fatto è di un tipo molto comune, per nulla migliore di quella di tanti altri. ~ Alicia Gim nez Bartlett, #NFDB
683:No ho feia pas per ell, per bé que ell s'ho cregués així, ans per ella mateixa, per una expansió egoista. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
684:«Non ho mai sentito di appartenere a nessun posto, ma tu mi fai sentire come se ci fosse un posto per me.» ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
685:Non stare più con la persona con cui vorresti stare significa allungare la mano di notte nel buio per cercarla. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
686:Recent research reveals that the average time spent per week on email, text, and social media is about 23 hours. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
687:«Sofia», disse l’infermiera a voce alta, «lo sai che cos'è la nascita? È una nave che parte per la guerra». ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
688:Strano come un delirio persecutorio riesca di tanto in tanto a incontrare, per quanto brevemente, la realtà. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
689:Talvolta è più offensivo essere apprezzati per i motivi sbagliati che essere disprezzati per quelli giusti. ~ David Grossman, #NFDB
690:The film [Aquarius" ] is very, very successful. We had the highest per-screen average of last week's releases. ~ Sonia Braga, #NFDB
691:Buffone: '...qui fuori c'è una notte che non vuol saperne di commuoversi né per i saggi né per i matti. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
692:Chi non aveva comprensione per la politica, perdeva per ciò stesso il diritto a ogni critica e a ogni protesta ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
693:For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
694:Harry rimase in silenzio a meditare sugli abissi nei quali le ragazze possono sprofondare per amor di vendetta. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
695:If most traders would learn to sit on their hands 50 per cent of the time, they would make a lot more money. ~ Bill Lipschutz, #NFDB
696:Il tramonto è una meravigliosa opportunità per noi di apprezzare tutte le grandi cose che il sole ci da! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
697:Nel mondo c'è molta sozzura: e questo è vero! Ma non per questo il mondo in sé è una mostruosa sozzura! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
698:Per il momento voglio crederti. Voglio crederti perché in realtà non ho scelta. Non ho una teoria migliore. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
699:prendendomi per mano [...] mi aveva fatto capire che nel mondo reale esisteva davvero un posto come quello. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
700:Siamo tutti costretti, per renderci sopportabile la realtà, a coltivare dentro di noi qualche piccola follia. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
701:Sulla via per l'inferno c'è sempre un sacco di gente, ma è comunque una via che si percorre in solitudine. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
702:The world should forget about cheap oil. The price will keep going up and some day arrive at US$100 per barrel. ~ Hugo Chavez, #NFDB
703:When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadricep. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
704:Always make new mistakes!” I actually get royalties of about $50 per year from Quotable Quotes for this one. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
705:Ciò che spaventa si dà sempre un nome, come dimostra il fatto che gli uomini ne hanno, per prudenza, due. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
706:I was not the kind of a principal player that was so in demand that eight or 10 or 12 scripts came per month. ~ Sidney Poitier, #NFDB
707:I wondered how it might affect your way of thinking, if you always had a lighthouse in the corner of your eye. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
708:La vita non è quella che si è vissuta, ma quella che si ricorda e come la si ricorda per raccontarla. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
709:Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools. ~ Jonathan Kozol, #NFDB
710:Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che' la diritta via era smarrita. ~ Dante Alighieri,#NFDB
711:si sa sempre cosa passa per la testa a un cane. […] un cane può essere felice, triste, arrabbiato o concentrato. ~ Mark Haddon, #NFDB
712:Stiamo tutti costretti, per renderci sopportabile la realtà, a coltivare dentro di noi qualche piccola follia. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
713:Fifty per cent of all marriages end in divorce. But look at the bright side: the other 50 per cent end in death. ~ Richard Jeni, #NFDB
714:Ha estratto le parole dai sogni, come si cattura una farfalla mentre vola, prendendola dolcemente per le ali. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
715:I don't want to be famous per se, but I want to write books for as long as I can. And I plan on writing a lot. ~ Amanda Hocking, #NFDB
716:In the United States, 95 per cent of income gains since the recession began have gone to the top 0.01 per cent. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
717:In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, "One laptop per child." ~ Nicholas Negroponte, #NFDB
718:Non chiedere mai scusa quando esterni un sentimento. Nel momento in cui lo fai, chiedi scusa per la verità. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
719:Organic agriculture is more about fairness and respect than it is about parts-per-billion of pesticide residues ~ Jim Hightower, #NFDB
720:Reyes cercò di immaginare il suo sapore. Dolce, per la sua aria angelica? O amaro, per i suoi occhi diabolici? ~ Gena Showalter, #NFDB
721:There had been vague threats and seductive hands and nachos and beer, but Oscar hadn't noticed an offer, per se. ~ Steve Himmer, #NFDB
722:Total violent crime in the United States 2013: (Number:1,163,146), (Rate per 100,000: 367.9). ~ Federal Bureau of Investigation, #NFDB
723:Tots aquells pensaments eren moments perdus en una vida composta d'una sèrie de tals moments finita per definició. ~ John Green, #NFDB
724:When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadricep. ~ John Medina, #NFDB
725:Allora perché non ti rassegni? Colpa della testa che non sa calmarsi, cerca di continuo un modo per funzionare. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
726:Basta guardare certe persone per diffidarne; si intuisce che sono anime nere, inquieti dietro, minacciosi davanti. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
727:Eu tenho um colar de pérolas
Enfiado para te dar:
As per'las são os meus beijos,
O fio é o meu penar. ~ Fernando Pessoa,#NFDB
728:«Il tempo non è abbastanza lungo! [...] Non è abbastanza lungo per una vita che faccia dimenticare le sue notti.» ~ Djuna Barnes, #NFDB
729:l'oppressione, l'orrore, i massacri erano terminati per sempre. Il mondo progredito non li avrebbe più tollerati. ~ Franz Werfel, #NFDB
730:Nina Torrone, a young artist whose work had caught fire and was selling for over half a million per painting. ~ Karen MacInerney, #NFDB
731:Non c'è niente di peggio di un trilocale a Rozzano che sogna di essere Versailles, per stringere il cuore. ~ Alessandro Robecchi, #NFDB
732:When the Muslims deliver the indictment of the American system, it is not the white man per se that is being doomed. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
733:C'è molta gente buona, Irina, ma è discreta. I cattivi, invece, fanno molto rumore, per questo si notano di più. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
734:Following this plan, you will consume between 50 and 100 grams of fiber (from real food, not supplements) per day. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
735:God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was. ~ Tony Kushner, #NFDB
736:Ha, some days ago the same people were one hundred per cent sure that I'd signed for Red Bull! So much for that. ~ Kimi Raikkonen, #NFDB
737:Io credo che la via per l'inferno sia lastricata di avverbi e sono pronto a salire sui tetti per gridarlo a tutti. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
738:i Siciliani non vorranno mai migliorare per la semplice ragione che credono di essere perfetti: la ~ Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, #NFDB
739:One hour three times per week in the gym is no counterbalance to all of the other behavior in those other 165 hours ~ Mark Twight, #NFDB
740:per la libertà che aveva rinunciato ai suoi oggi per i domani degli altri. Un uomo con il volto rigato di lacrime ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
741:Anche per coloro che negano le incarnazioni sovrumane, che cosa rappresenta il crocifisso?... Il saggio assassinato. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
742:developers insert an average of 1 to 3 defects per hour into their designs and 5 to 8 defects per hour into code ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
743:Evolution works only on how memory influences fitness, not for how accurately memory reflects the past per se. ~ Thomas Suddendorf, #NFDB
744:fate attenzione a coloro che sono annoiati e non appassionati alla vita, vi annoierebbero con motivi per non vivere. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
745:Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. ~ Elmore Leonard, #NFDB
746:La differenza fra sapere e vedere con i propri occhi è la stessa che c’è fra sognare di volare e volare per davvero. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
747:La letteratura è un traguardo che non risponde a generi né a temi. Avviene, e quando avviene è festa per chi legge. ~ Erri De Luca, #NFDB
748:L’insinuazione efficace è quella che riferisce fatti di per sé privi di valore, ancorché non smentibili perché veri. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
749:report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world’s plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
750:The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
751:The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. ~ William Blum, #NFDB
752:As per the age-old Customs and Central Excise Rules 1967, a person is allowed to carry only Rs 20,000 worth of gold. ~ Vayalar Ravi, #NFDB
753:Come, quando i vapori umidi e spessi
A diradar cominciansi, la spera
Del sol debilemente entra per essi.... ~ Dante Alighieri,#NFDB
754:Don’t pay more per share for a company’s stock than you’d be willing to pay if you were buying the whole company. ~ Charles D Ellis, #NFDB
755:Excessive (population) growth may reduce output per worker, repress levels of living for the masses and engender strife ~ Confucius, #NFDB
756:I bought a Yamaha-1 and I was doing 180 miles per hour home on the 405 and that's really, really crazy but I did it. ~ Nicolas Cage, #NFDB
757:Il mondo era così recente, che molte cose erano prive di nome, e per citarle bisognava indicarle col dito. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
758:LETTERA 36 CONSIGLI PER UN AMICO DI LUCILIO
La notte nasconde il sole, ma subito dopo il giorno porta via la notte. ~ Seneca,#NFDB
759:Non smetto di stupirmi per come quest'arida vita abbia improvvisamente deciso di mostrarmi il suo seno prosperoso. ~ David Grossman, #NFDB
760:normalmente i politici mentono per lo stesso motivo per cui una scimmia dondola la coda, vale a dire perché possono. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
761:We will stop 99 per cent of the attacks. But one per cent of attacks might get through and that is what I am saying. ~ Rahul Gandhi, #NFDB
762:With an operating profit margin topping 40 percent, Fanuc makes 25 percent more income per employee than Goldman Sachs, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
763:allowed Mike to go to the water closet. The rest of us all went too, as per Hogarth’s Theory of Fear-Based Urination. ~ Stuart Gibbs, #NFDB
764:Chi non è capace o pronto a lottare per la sua esistenza, costui la sempre giusta provvidenza ha già votato la rovina ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
765:I don't think Hollywood per se is supposed to be taken seriously, otherwise, dear Lord, that would be frightening. ~ Brittany Murphy, #NFDB
766:Long ago her father taught her an old formula, one that converts cricket chirps per minute into degrees Fahrenheit. ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
767:Non c’è uomo che a forza di portare una maschera, non finisca per assimilare a questa anche il suo vero volto. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
768:Non volevo venire qui. Ho girato per tutta la notte, non riuscivo a dormire… e continuavo a ritrovarmi qui. Da te. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
769:Più volte ho pensato che per quanto riguarda il suo comportamento verso gli animali, ogni uomo è un nazista. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer, #NFDB
770:We're running a war by politicians and we're running a war by political correctness as per that question [with ISIS]. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
771:You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to any of your heroes. Become what you wish to be. ~ Andy Biersack, #NFDB
772:ASCI Red was the first computer to score above one teraflop—one trillion floating point operations* per second—on ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
773:(...) Evitando per un po' di guardarla, come si evita di guardare il sole; ma, come il sole, la vedeva senza guardarla. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
774:It's fun! Just fun...I don't think of it as a cabaret act per se, I call it more of a gig, if that makes any sense ~ Frances Ruffelle, #NFDB
775:L’uomo attenderà sempre l’avvento della giustizia; e, affinché trionfi, rinuncerà alla libertà, per poi rimpiangerla. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
776:Non capisco perché la gente abbia bisogno di sentirsi rassicurata se qualcuno dice: si è per sempre. Nulla è per sempre. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
777:Non l'ho mica preso sotto la mia tutela per cinque anni solo per farlo ammazzare da uno schifoso yeti della tundra!!! ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
778:Non tutti i matti corrono per le zone pedonali e recitano la Bibbia... Ci sono anche quelli che declamano Richard Wagner. ~ Wulf Dorn, #NFDB
779:People share more than 16,000 words per day and every hour there are more than 100 million conversations about brands. ~ Jonah Berger, #NFDB
780:Per quanto uno possa fare del suo meglio, a volte è impossibile evitare che qualcuno rimanga ferito.
È la vita. ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
781:We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
782:An economy growing at 7 percent per year, can and must find the resources to improve the lives of its millions of poor. ~ Sonia Gandhi, #NFDB
783:Aš iš tavęs padariau žmogų. Bet kokį žmogų? To tėvai niekada nežino. Bent jau iš anksto; o kai sužino, būna per vėlu. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
784:...aveva dovuto credersi amato ben poco per non sentire che perderlo sarebbe stato per me il peggiore dei mali. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar, #NFDB
785:collecting 10 per cent on high incomes and lower rates on lower incomes constituted undue discrimination against wealth. ~ John Brooks, #NFDB
786:Dire che un testo virtualmente non ha limiti non significa che ogni atto interpretativo possa avere un esito felice. Per ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
787:Dovunque e comunque si manifesti l’eccellenza, subito la generale mediocrità si allea e congiura per soffocarla. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
788:E' noto che esiste un numero infinito di mondi, per il semplice fatto che esiste uno spazio infinito atto a ospitarli. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
789:È per questo che sto scrivendo.
Sono uno di quelli che per capire le cose ha assolutamente bisogno di scriverle. ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
790:guido per le strade,
ad un passo dal pianto,
vergognoso del mio sentimentalismo
e del mio possibile amore. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
791:I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it). ~ Katy Lederer, #NFDB
792:La suprema felicità della vita è essere amati per quello che si è, o meglio, essere amati a dispetto di quello che si è. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
793:Leggo, per quanto è possibile, soltanto ciò di cui ho fame, nel momento in cui ne ho fame, e allora non leggo: mi nutro. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
794:M'imagine com em veuen els altres, i em faig una mica de llàstima. Ara: si pense en ells, trobe que no n’hi ha per tant. ~ Joan Fuster, #NFDB
795:Mi si fissò invece il pensiero ch'io non ero per gli altri quel che finora , dentro di me, m'ero figurato d'essere. ~ Luigi Pirandello, #NFDB
796:Perché il mondo non è diviso tra chi è speciale e chi è normale: ciascuno ha il potenziale per essere straordinario. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
797:Una delle cose più allegre che una città possa fare quando il sole tramonta, e cioè accendere le sue luci una per una. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
798:Using the official $1 per day line, we estimate that [from 1970 to 2006] world poverty rates have fallen by 80 percent. ~ Robert Bryce, #NFDB
799:«Amore di donna per una donna... Che insana smania di sofferenza non lenita e di maternità l'ha mai portato alla mente?» ~ Djuna Barnes, #NFDB
800:Badate bene che oggi per controbattere un’accusa non è necessario provare il contrario, basta delegittimare l’accusatore. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
801:Ho imparato che il modo migliore per essere al sicuro è fare in modo che i tuoi nemici pensino di non poterti ferire ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
802:Ho tante cose in me, e ciò che sento per lei divora tutto; ho tante cose, e senza di lei non ho più nulla. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
803:Il mondo è così complicato, aggrovigliato e sovraccarico che per vederci un po' chiaro è necessario sfoltire, sfoltire. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
804:[…] Milano, un paesaccio dove per mangiare un piatto di maccheroni bisogna pensarci una settimana prima! ~ Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, #NFDB
805:My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
806:Non isperate mai veder lo cielo:
i’ vegno per menarvi a l’altra riva
ne le tenebre etterne, in caldo e ’n gelo. ~ Dante Alighieri,#NFDB
807:Of course, 85 per cent won’t be enough by itself to convict him, but it makes him someone you want to take seriously. ~ Sharon J Bolton, #NFDB
808:Recall that FLOPS are floating-point operations per second, say, how many 19-digit numbers can be multiplied each second. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
809:-Sembra che per te nulla sia un problema.
-Forse perché mi piace cercare le soluzioni, e così non ho paura dei problemi. ~ Marc Levy,#NFDB
810:Tenia la sensació d'haver-la estat esperant, però d'haver oblidat, fins ara que la veia, que havien quedat per trobar-se. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
811:There’s nothing bad about reincarnation per se, it’s basically a very good system, cost-effective and ecologically friendly. ~ Tom Holt, #NFDB
812:As the years went by, I gradually discovered that ninety-nine per cent of the things I worried about never happened. For ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
813:A survey asked married women when they most want to have sex. 84 per cent of them said right after their husband is finished. ~ Jay Leno, #NFDB
814:A typical local eats over 60 pounds of cheese a year (mostly feta)—the highest per capita cheese consumption in the world. ~ Rick Steves, #NFDB
815:Dice sul serio?” “Sul lavoro non scherzo mai”, replica duro il delegato. E nemmeno fuori dal lavoro, se è per questo. ~ Andrea Camilleri, #NFDB
816:Ecco il guaio della cultura: sei già stato dappertutto, hai visto tutto per interposta persona; ti è già successo tutto. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
817:È solo per il fatto che non può rendersi conto del perché dei suoi sentimenti che l'uomo più saggio è fanatico per la musica. ~ Stendhal, #NFDB
818:È una stanza rovinata dagli uomini nel tentativo di renderla bella per le donne. Gli uomini non sanno quello che vogliamo. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
819:He didn’t know if that was good or bad: concealed-carry people actually committed fewer felonies per year than cops did ~ John Sandford, #NFDB
820:If I could have just 1 per cent of the money spent on global armaments, no one in this world would go to bed hungry. ~ Mohamed ElBaradei, #NFDB
821:I know a lot of artists say, `If you want your song on my record, I get 50 per cent' I'd like to kick them in the face. ~ Kelly Clarkson, #NFDB
822:I once read that more millionaires per capita were created during the Great Depression than at any other time in history. ~ Harry S Dent, #NFDB
823:Nel corso delle nostre vite ci incontriamo per pura combinazione e, per un momento,i nostri cuori battono all'unisono ~ Jessica Sorensen, #NFDB
824:Non leggete, come fanno i bambini, per divertirvi, o, come fanno gli ambiziosi per istruirvi. No, leggete per vivere. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
825:The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
826:Tot el que em va ensenyar és que en aquest món hi ha dues menes d'actituds: optar per la vida i optar per la mort ~ Albert S nchez Pi ol, #NFDB
827:Vivere è come fare una lunga addizione, in cui basta aver sbagliato il totale dei primi due addendi per non uscirne più. ~ Cesare Pavese, #NFDB
828:Ci sono stati tempi in cui per me l'atto di scrivere era un piccolo atto di fede, uno sputo nell'occhio della disperazione ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
829:guido per le strade,
ad un passo dal pianto,
vergognandomi del mio sentimentalismo
e del mio possibile amore. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
830:I do not sell life insurance. I sell money. I sell dollars for pennies apiece. My dollars cost 3 cents per dollar per year. ~ Ben Feldman, #NFDB
831:It is a sign of arrogance to be mad at someone for not acting as per your advice, especially if it was unsolicited. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
832:Ma ci sono sempre degli uomini così, uomini per i quali esiste una sola donna, e che vogliono soltanto quella o niente. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
833:Nes visa tai įvyko plakant mano širdžiai; buvo vėjas, saulė ir debesys, visi jie sruvo per mano širdį ir per mano rankas. ~ Hermann Broch, #NFDB
834:Non esiste nulla che sia un problema senza un dono per te nelle mani. Tu cerchi problemi perché hai bisogno dei loro doni. ~ Richard Bach, #NFDB
835:Per avere una morte benedetta,
bisogna imparare a vivere.
Per avere una vita benedetta,
bisogna imparare a morire. ~ Dan Millman,#NFDB
836:PYTHONPATH and .pth files offer more permanent ways to modify the path — the first per user, and the second per installation. ~ Mark Lutz, #NFDB
837:Seventy per cent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they got rid of their fears and worries. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
838:Siamo così abituati a mascherarci di fronte agli altri che finiamo per farlo anche di fronte a noi stessi. ~ Fran ois de La Rochefoucauld, #NFDB
839:TRAINING FOR ANY ASPECT MEANS TO KEEP IT IN RIGHT TRACK AS PER MODERN GLOBAL RUN.NEITHER WEAKNESS NOR SOUNDNESS COUNTS NOTHING. ~ Various, #NFDB
840:TURKEYS HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR millions of years. They can fly at fast as fifty-five miles per hour and run flat out at twenty. ~ Deb Baker, #NFDB
841:Annual per capita sugar consumption in the depth of the Great Depression was sixteen pounds higher than it had been in 1920. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
842:I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer. ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
843:Il mio lutto per lui è una pozza d’acqua marina prosciugata. Tra gli scogli resta il sale asciutto, dei singhiozzi a secco. ~ Erri De Luca, #NFDB
844:Non m'illudo di essere il suo sostegno, so che si regge sulle proprie gambe: stringerla serve a me, per non andare in pezzi. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
845:Profane si rese conto che stava per vomitare. Le esibizioni di smaccato sentimentalismo gli facevano spesso quel'effetto. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
846:Se mi interesso a quello che pensano i cretini, non avrò più tempo per quello che pensano le persone intelligenti. ~ ric Emmanuel Schmitt, #NFDB
847:The fastest that human spacecraft are likely to achieve in the twenty-first century, I think, is 300 kilometres per second. ~ Kip S Thorne, #NFDB
848:Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It's just an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built. ~ Daniel Libeskind, #NFDB
849:Britain was overtaken not only in gross output but also in output per worker. It lost its lead in technological innovation. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
850:Britain was set to repeat the boom-bust cycle that led to 15 per cent. interest rates for one whole year in the early 1990s. ~ Gordon Brown, #NFDB
851:Ci addormentiamo sempre così. Lei sta talmente bene tra le mie braccia che giurerei che Dio l’abbia creata apposta per quello. ~ Kim Holden, #NFDB
852:Commit to investing at least one hour per day studying subjects that will help you move closer toward your ultimate vision. ~ Steve Siebold, #NFDB
853:El passat, per a alguns, és una maleta plena de carn humana i una bóta plena de sang; per a d’altres, una gran època… ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
854:If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.... ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
855:I find that talking about myself is often the most boring thing in the world. Sixty per cent of interviews I find mechanical. ~ Carla Bruni, #NFDB
856:It is no coincidence that 66 percent per year is the same as doubling every 18 months, which is the rate of Moore’s Law. Five ~ Kevin Kelly, #NFDB
857:- Lei non crede in niente - disse il professore.
- Oh sì, in qualche cosa. Forse in troppe, per i tempi che corrono. ~ Leonardo Sciascia,#NFDB
858:Let's hit the joke once and move on to the next joke and just keep it where we have as many jokes per square inch as possible. ~ Eric Andre, #NFDB
859:L'uomo è un animale addomesticato che per secoli ha comandato sugli altri animali con la frode, la violenza e la crudeltà ~ Charlie Chaplin, #NFDB
860:«Qual è la vostra ricetta per conservare la giovinezza, Irene?»
«Quando non si vive ci si conserva meravigliosamente». ~ John Galsworthy,#NFDB
861:Se ami davvero qualcosa, vedrai che non cercherai di mantenerlo per sempre così com’è. Devi lasciarlo libero di cambiare. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
862:The United States could dramatically reduce its carbon emissions per kilowatt-hour without raising its overall energy bill. ~ Joseph J Romm, #NFDB
863:Washington—the city with the largest per capita population of pompous, self-absorbed horse’s asses in these United States. ~ Marie Bostwick, #NFDB
864:A volte le persone sono solo delle porte, dei passaggi. Tu per me, io per te. Anche gli sconosciuti, ogni incontro è una porta. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
865:Carbon dioxide levels throughout the northern hemisphere hit 400 parts per million for the first time in human history in April, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
866:Did you know that people exhale at up to one hundred miles per hour when they sneeze? It’s why they can’t keep their eyes open. ~ Jamie Beck, #NFDB
867:E aveva imparato per esperienza che il Bisogno è un magazzino in cui si possono accumulare considerevoli scorte di crudeltà. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
868:È davvero divertente quello che sta succedendo in questa stagione! Non si vedono che coppie! La gente cammina solo per due... ~ Henrik Ibsen, #NFDB
869:I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time. ~ Will Ferrell, #NFDB
870:I make the majority of my money from Patron, but my passion is with Paul Mitchell: I spend 85 per cent of my time on it. ~ John Paul DeJoria, #NFDB
871:In Punjab’s 175-strong legislature, Muslims were given 48 per cent of the seats, Hindus 24 per cent and Sikhs 18 per cent. ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
872:I was a lawyer and I have been married to a lawyer. I think one lawyer per household is plenty. It's a good quota for us. ~ Kellyanne Conway, #NFDB
873:Jean Louise,” he said dryly, “not much more than five per cent of the South’s population ever saw a slave, much less owned one. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
874:La corsa non è il modo per andare rapidamente da un'estremità all'altra del filo. La corsa, ah, ah! é il riso del funambolo ~ Philippe Petit, #NFDB
875:Ma una forza più grande cresce dai vostri valori, e un nuovo superamento: per essa si frantuma l'uovo e il suo guscio. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
876:Nessun uomo sceglie il male perché è il male;lo scambia solo per la felicità, per il bene che cerca. (Mary Wollstonecraft) ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
877:Rinuncerei a tutto ciò che possiedo, persino alla mia anima, per te. E se questo non è amore, è la cosa migliore che ho. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick, #NFDB
878:Se penso, se mi figuro d'aver perso quest'occasione per paura o per comodo o per qualunque altro motivo, mi vengono i brividi. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
879:Assuming a fuel consumption of 8.5 litres per 100 km, daily earnings of 5 Reichsmarks and a fuel price of 3 9 Pfennigs per litre. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
880:Centenarians are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population (increasing at the rate of 75,000 people per year). ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
881:Colui che non riesce a trovare spazio per gli altri manca di comprensione, e a chi manca di comprensione tutti risultano estranei. ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
882:For both optimal health and weight loss, you must consume a diet with a high nutrient-per-calorie ratiothere are no shortcuts. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
883:Fuel efficiency is reducing the fund’s income per mile driven and the average number of miles driven per person has declined. ~ Robert Wright, #NFDB
884:I don't know that I have a fascination with witches per se - well, maybe I just have a fascination with everything that's weird. ~ Rob Zombie, #NFDB
885:If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
886:La vera solitudine è in un luogo che vive per sé e che per voi non ha traccia né voce, e dove dunque l’estraneo siete voi. ~ Luigi Pirandello, #NFDB
887:Lei frugò tra le lenzuola, quindi serrò le dita intorno al legno levigato.
«Ti amerò per sempre, Phillip». E lo pugnalò. ~ Colleen Gleason,#NFDB
888:Mi mancherai moltissimo, ma chi ha le ali non è fatto per stare chiuso in gabbia, Se lo ami devi lasciarlo libero di voltare. ~ Lucinda Riley, #NFDB
889:Per això crec que no hi ha una diferència massa essencial, a efectes del consumir, entre la filosofia i el conyac o la morfina. ~ Joan Fuster, #NFDB
890:Una volta qualcuno mi ha detto che se trasformi il tuo cuore in un'arma, prima o poi finisci per usarla contro di te. ~ Gregory David Roberts, #NFDB
891:8I ricordi veramente belli continuano a vivere e a splendere per sempre, pulsando dolorosamente assieme al tempo che passa. ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
892:Allora come adesso preferisco il libro al film, per il motivo della precedenza. Non succede che un libro sia tratto da un film. ~ Erri De Luca, #NFDB
893:[...] avevo così tanti me tra i piedi che a volte la sera uscivo, e andavo a fare un giro nel bosco per stare un po’ da solo. ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
894:...food was at least three million per cent more delicious when you ate it immediately after thinking you were going to die. ~ Joshua Donellan, #NFDB
895:I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
896:I don't think that hedge funds are bad per se. I think they're just one more financial tool. And in that sense, they're useful. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
897:If you think penguins are fat and waddle, you have never been attacked by one running at you in excess of 100 miles per hour. ~ Linus Torvalds, #NFDB
898:Im not an insecure person, per se, but I just never saw myself as the girl who walks into a place and everybody goes, Wow. ~ Margarita Levieva, #NFDB
899:I think all countries need to aim to cut the CO2 emissions per person, taking account of externalities like imports and exports. ~ Martin Rees, #NFDB
900:it took ninety years to achieve the first MIPS per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every five hours. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
901:I was not fortunate enough to run into Obama. We were at the same church per se, but I would never be there when he was there. ~ Mavis Staples, #NFDB
902:La bellezza per lei, come per tutti quelli che hanno molto sentito, non risiedeva nelle cose ma in ciò che esse simboleggiavano ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
903:Le religioni, tutte le religioni, per quanto le si rigiri, non hanno altra giustificazione di esistere all'infuori della morte. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
904:Mi dissi che forse quest'altro padre l'avevo avuto sempre lì e non me n'ero mai accorto, per quanto era ingombrante il primo. ~ Paolo Cognetti, #NFDB
905:Ninety per cent of how you learn is watching great people. When you are surrounded by good actors it lifts your performance. ~ Natalie Portman, #NFDB
906:Qualcosa in quello scambio di sguardi tra madre e figlia aveva acciuffato il cuore di Mrs Richardson come un retino per farfalle. ~ Celeste Ng, #NFDB
907:Ritirati in te stesso per quanto puoi; frequenta le persone che possono renderti migliore e accogli quelli che puoi rendere migliori. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
908:Some day, with all that the Cities could do, the available calories per person would simply fall below basic subsistence level. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
909:The child is not traumatized by a sexual event, per se; the child is traumatized by parental character pathology. Because ~ Stephen A Mitchell, #NFDB
910:The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro’s number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, ~ Charles Stross, #NFDB
911:VisiCalc took 20 hours of work per week for some people and turned it out in 15 minutes and let them become much more creative. ~ Dan Bricklin, #NFDB
912:We usually spend one hour per week on ballet but Marta Karolyi has us do a lot of compulsory floor in the morning practice. ~ Kristie Phillips, #NFDB
913:Cultivation theorists focus the majority of their research on heavy viewers, or those who watch more than four hours of TV per day. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
914:If you can either change your perspective or your response towards what you find disturbing, ninety per cent of the job is done. The ~ Om Swami, #NFDB
915:ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans—trash. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
916:I grandi non capiscono mai niente da soli ed è stancante, per i bambini, dar loro continuamente delle spiegazioni... ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
917:I l'àngel va començar a sanglotar, somicava amb una veu trencada pel dolor.
Un àngel no hauria de plorar, no feia per ell. ~ Stephenie Meyer,#NFDB
918:In Cuba you get a quarter of a chicken per month. They give you one bread per person a day. So, it makes your life really tough. ~ William Levy, #NFDB
919:in order for the MVP to be considered successful, parents and kids would have to each use the application four times per week. ~ Alistair Croll, #NFDB
920:In short, it is not information per se that leads people to make decisions, but the context in which that information is presented. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
921:It seems that we had...not a better education, per se, but perhaps more incentive to use it. They learn, but they hardly think. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
922:La ricerca delle cose perdute è intorpidita dai gesti consuetudinari, ed è per questo che costa tanta fatica trovarle. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
923:La suprema felicità della vita è la constatazione d'essere amato, e amato per se stesso; anzi diciamo meglio, malgrado se stesso. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
924:Le lacrime più amare sparse sopra le tombe
sono per le parole non dette e le azioni non fatte.
Harriet Beecher Stowe ~ Tammara Webber,#NFDB
925:Mi sono moltiplicato per sentirmi. Per sentirmi ho dovuto sentire tutto, sono straripato, non ho fatto altro che traboccarmi. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
926:Nobody can guarantee the real terms per pupil funding increase. In the Labour party's manifesto we know the figures don't add up. ~ Theresa May, #NFDB
927:People still love a well-delivered talk; the top professional speakers charge more per person than a Bruce Springsteen concert. ~ Jay Heinrichs, #NFDB
928:Si domandano consigli soltanto per non seguirli, oppure, se si seguono, è per avere qualcuno da rimproverare per averli dati. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
929:Ti fidi di chi ti è vicino?
Sei pronto a credergli per sempre?
Nessuno è quello che sembra.
Adesso stai per capirlo. ~ Ronald H Balson,#NFDB
930:We are more easily led part by part to an understanding of the whole. -Facilius per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
931:Annual per capita sugar consumption in the depth of the Great Depression was sixteen pounds higher than it had been in 1920. Candy ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
932:Avevo provato a odiare l'amore per proteggermene, ma dovevo arrendermi all'evidenza: sapevo vivere solo grazie a "Lui". ~ Mathias Malzieu, #NFDB
933:I gotta feel like what I'm giving the fans is 100 per cent and that it's game-changing. I don't just throw out microwave records. ~ Missy Elliot, #NFDB
934:I post pictures that I want to post and say what I want to say. If that's three times a day or three times per month then whatever. ~ Gigi Hadid, #NFDB
935:It isn't personal per se to document what the Republican Party leadership is doing and how they're abrogating actual leadership. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
936:Non aveva bisogno delle persone. Lei era felicissima quando aveva spazio e tempo per focalizzarsi sulle cose che le interessavano. ~ Helen Hoang, #NFDB
937:Non importa quanto lavori duro, o quanto diventi in gamba. Sarai sempre e soltanto ricordato per quell'unica scelta sbagliata. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
938:Non ti amo per noia, o per solitudine, o per capriccio. Ti amo perchè il desiderio di te è più forte di qualsiasi felicità. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
939:perché come il mondo è da un lato, in tutto e per tutto, rappresentazione, così dall'altro, in tutto e per tutto, volontà. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
940:Per tutto il tempo che concesse al destino, solo ombre e silenzi furono ciò che quel singolare palcoscenico lasciò filtrare ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
941:Polls suggest that approximately 95 per cent of the population of the United States believe they will survive their own death. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
942:A picture story just doesn't run like a film. It doesn't have 24 frames per second. It doesn't deal with this illusion of movement. ~ Ben Katchor, #NFDB
943:A recent study announced that 52 per cent of all teens who sign virginity pledges recant them within twelve months. If I'm on my game. ~ Tina Fey, #NFDB
944:Credo che a questo mondo si possa sempre scegliere come raccontare le storie tristi, e noi abbiamo optato per la versione divertente ~ John Green, #NFDB
945:Em vaig quedar pensatiu. Què passaria si em fotés un tret al cap? La bala em mataria o bé tindria un merder de por per netejar? ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
946:glanced ostentatiously at my bangle. Blood alcohol content .01%, heart rate leveling off at 72 beats per minute, time 11:42 p.m. ~ Elizabeth Bear, #NFDB
947:Hauria donat qualsevol cosa per no sentir res… Hauria desitjat arrencar-se el cor, les entranyes, tot allò que li clamava a dintre… ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
948:In conclusione, non aveva assolutamente nulla da dare alla gente. Anzi, per dirla tutta, non aveva nulla da dare nemmeno a se stesso. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
949:I think we all have a slightly gay gene inside us, don't we? It might be 0.00001 per cent as mine is, or one per cent as yours is. ~ Steve Coogan, #NFDB
950:Rimase immobile per un istante. Non gridò. Cadde dolcemente come cade un albero. Non fece neppure rumore sulla sabbia. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry, #NFDB
951:Since 1990, Oklahoma has executed more convicts on a per capita basis than any other state. No place, not even Texas, comes close. ~ John Grisham, #NFDB
952:The act of not discussing or confiding the event with another may be more damaging than having experienced the event per se. ~ James W Pennebaker, #NFDB
953:En aquell moment […], el meu món, que havia estat de cap per avall durant tant de temps, ara semblava que es posava al seu lloc. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
954:I decided right then and there to make a snickerdoodle perfume to wear, so that one day he would sniff me like that. ~ Jessica Verday, #NFDB
955:I do all of my good thinking at over 65 miles per hour. The speed limit is, luckily, the same speed as my brainstorming speed. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
956:I eat some fruit every day, but not too much and almost no processed food. I stay away from sweets, except 80 per cent chocolate. ~ Cynthia Kenyon, #NFDB
957:— Ja t'he dit que no aniria enlloc, no tinguis por. Mentre et faci feliç, em quedaré aquí.
[…] — Llavors vols dir per sempre. ~ Stephenie Meyer,#NFDB
958:Let us not forget the East Bank of the (River) Jordan, where seventy per cent of the inhabitants belong to the Palestinian nation. ~ George Habash, #NFDB
959:Ma dopotutto non è sempre l’elemento fuori posto, quello che non funziona alla perfezione, che stranamente finiamo per amare di più? ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
960:Per chi cade nella colpa, signore, il responsabile di tutte le colpe che seguono, non è sempre chi, primo, determinò la caduta? ~ Luigi Pirandello, #NFDB
961:[...] Però, ecco... magari ricordare la strada che hai fatto per arrivare a questo punto ti aiuta a camminare col cuore più leggero. ~ Zerocalcare, #NFDB
962:Per sentir parlare così bene di sé bisogna morire. Pazzesco. Non ho mai capito perché ci sia più rispetto per i morti che per i vivi. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
963:Sia ringraziato Dio per la percezione selettiva. Perchè senza di essa potremmo ritrovarci tutti quanti in un racconto di Lovecraft. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
964:sicché gli animi freddi e stanchi per l'esperienza delle cose, erano confortati vedendo il calore e le speranze dell'età verde. ~ Giacomo Leopardi, #NFDB
965:Siete ben bravi a dirmi dove son nato; io non lo so. Non tutti hanno una casa, per venire al mondo in quella; sarebbe troppo comodo. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
966:Starting in 1964, average scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests went steadily down, and per student spending went steadily up.33 ~ James T Patterson, #NFDB
967:Su niekuo ji nesutikdavo – buvo pernelyg išdidi, kad kovotų dėl pirmos vietos, ir per daug ambicinga, kad pasitenkintų antrąją. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
968:The amount of quaint, authentic, rustic charm varies inversely with the pounds per square inch of water pressure in the shower. ~ Frank Mankiewicz, #NFDB
969:Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. ~ O Henry, #NFDB
970:Andiamo avanti, non sappiamo dove. Non sappiamo niente, tranne che il cielo e la terra stanno per confondersi nel medesimo abisso. ~ Henri Barbusse, #NFDB
971:Esistono molti tipi di coraggio. Affrontare i nemici richiede notevole ardimento. Ma altrettanto ne occorre per affrontare gli amici. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
972:Even the relatively small amount of trans fats are likely to be causing around 7,000 premature deaths from heart disease per year. ~ Walter Willett, #NFDB
973:If something even remotely sexist comes out of you mouth again,' Moxie says, her eyes glinting, 'I will take a pound of flesh per word. ~ C G Drews, #NFDB
974:I'm off for two weeks, so until I get back, take the characters in this tweet and parcel them out one per day. Use this Q wisely. ~ Stephen Colbert, #NFDB
975:In 1950 the United States—with just 9.5 per cent of the world’s population—was consuming 50 per cent of the world’s raw materials. ~ Harry Harrison, #NFDB
976:La fantasia è un dono di Dio, dissi, perchè ho potuto credere, per un momento, che quelle parole fossero dirette a me. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
977:Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
978:Questa mostruosa perdita della bellezza del mondo è il nostro castigo per averne creata una superiore per mezzo dell'arte? ~ Guido Ceronetti, #NFDB
979:The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely. ~ David Sedaris, #NFDB
980:Un racconto, mi aveva detto un giorno Julian, è una lettera che l'autore scrive a se stesso per metter a nudo la propria anima. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
981:You shouldn't own common stocks if a 50 per cent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
982:I can do the equivalent of 150 miles per hour and not get stopped. I could quite happily pursue people down the motorway in my helicopter. ~ Jay Kay, #NFDB
983:It costs $30,000 to $50,000 per year to send someone to jail. You don't have to pay so much to send someone to school at Johns Hopkins. ~ John Money, #NFDB
984:La solitudine era sempre stata un luogo reale per me, come se fosse una stanza dove potevo rifugiarmi per essere davvero me stessa. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
985:People have the right not to change as per our wish, suggestion, or command, even if the change would benefit nobody but them. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
986:Per una volta concediti la possibilità di incontrare una parte diversa da te, scordati un po' chi pensi di essere e vedi che succede... ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
987:The Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, but it is noteworthy that the first Psalm is not a prayer per se but a meditation—in ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
988:TODAY SOUND KNOW HOW ABOUT EVERY AFFAIR AS PER MODERN CENTURY 24/7 TIME RUN NEED OF THE HOUR WITH ENCYCLIC HEED TO GLOBAL TRAFFIC BEGUILE. ~ Various, #NFDB
989:Voglio assolutamente continuare a sentire che un giorno morirò. Altrimenti non mi accorgo che vivo. Per questo è così la mia vita ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
990:When asked if they would like to have sex with me, 30 per cent said, “Yes”, while the other 70 per cent replied, “What, again?” ~ Silvio Berlusconi, #NFDB
991:Your total animal-product consumption (beef, poultry, fish, dairy products) should be limited to twelve ounces or less per week. Keep ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
992:Ah, voi predicate la pazienza per le cose terrene? Sono queste cose terrene che hanno troppa pazienza con voi, lingue blasfeme! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
993:Bisogna essere eroici per abitare in tempi così diversi da quelli del proprio modello: ma Don Chisciotte, per l’appunto, era un eroe. ~ Pietro Citati, #NFDB
994:Dovrei amarlo per il solo fatto che mi ha dato la vita, quando non glien'è importato niente di me per tutto il resto della vita? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
995:Essere quasi bella è per una ragazza che è stata bruttina fino ai quindici anni un piacere sconosciuto a chi è stata bella dalla culla. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
996:I llavors va recordar la llei de Maahs, terrible, molt pitjor que la de Murphy: Les coses surten bé per poder anar malament després. ~ Maite Carranza, #NFDB
997:Mi sono abituato ad amare la segretezza; mi sembra l'unica cosa che possa render misteriosa e meravigliosa la vita moderna per noi. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
998:Mi sono moltiplicato per sentirmi,
per sentirmi ho dovuto sentire tutto,
sono straripato, non ho fatto altro che traboccarmi. ~ Fernando Pessoa,#NFDB
999:People born in other countries accounted for 14.6 per cent of the population in 1910 compared with 12.9 per cent at the 2010 census. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1000:Quando le cose vanno bene e tutto fila liscio, fermatevi un attimo, per favore, e dite a voce alta: "Cosa c’è di più bello di questo? ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1001:Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on. ~ Laura Lippman, #NFDB
1002:Sa come dice la regola giornalistica: se due persone dicono di litigare per le proprie idee, sembrerà che abbiano davvero delle idee. ~ Stefano Benni, #NFDB
1003:Solo chi guarda la realtà con occhi da bambino può ancora provare stupore e meraviglia per quella cosa incredibile che si chiama Vita. ~ Haim Shapira, #NFDB
1004:Un anno è molto per i temi che corrono. In questi giorni la gente dimentica in fretta. E' come un virus, ma aiuta a sopravvivere. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
1005:È facile considerarsi per bene, quando non si ha alcun motivo per non esserlo. Bisogna innamorarsi, per capire un po’ come si è fatti. ~ John Williams, #NFDB
1006:esiste una società segreta con ramificazioni in tutto il mondo, che complotta per diffondere la voce che esiste un complotto universale. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1007:in 2012 New York’s highest court went much further, ruling that even falsely saying someone is gay is not “per se defamation. ~ Michelangelo Signorile, #NFDB
1008:Ingmar riuscì ad intrecciarsi a tal punto col filo del telefono che per liberarsi strappó il cavo e tutto l'apparecchio dalla parete. ~ Jonas Jonasson, #NFDB
1009:«In ogni tempo e in qualunque società l’atto supremo dell’anima è di darsi, di perdersi per trovarsi. Si ha solo quello che si dona.» ~ Ignazio Silone, #NFDB
1010:Kita vertus, moterys ateina į pasaulį su genetiškai nulemtu gyvenimo tikslu, tad joms nereikia jo išsikovoti per audras ir nuotykius. ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
1011:«La mezza età non esiste, Fast Eddie. È un’invenzione dei giornali e della tv, come l’alitosi. Serve per tenere la gente al suo posto». ~ Walter Tevis, #NFDB
1012:La verità reale è sempre inverosimile […]. Per rendere la verità più verosimile, bisogna assolutamente mescolarvi della menzogna. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1013:L'estimo més que res en aquest món. més que la meva pròpia vida i, per obra d'algun miracle, ella em correspon de la mateixa manera. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
1014:Right now I am a passenger on space vehicle Earth zooming about the Sun at 60,000 miles per hour somewhere in the solar system. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
1015:..............Tada ėmė brautis per mūšio lauką rėkdamas; - Vaikai, vaidinimas baigtas! Ką tik atvyko traukinys mūsų paimti! (330 psl.) ~ Andrea Cremer, #NFDB
1016:THE FINAL TOUCH
Portrait of nobody in particular
Idiots are really
one hundred per cent
when they are also
intelligent. ~ Piet Hein,#NFDB
1017:Visiting my mind is like visiting the Hermes factory. Sh*t is real. You're not going to find a chink. It's 100,000 per cent Jimi Hendrix. ~ Kanye West, #NFDB
1018:You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
1019:Any criminal act against any individual or institution in India is to be condemned. The attackers must be strongly punished as per law. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
1020:Confido che stiate uccidendo tutti i ragni che vedete. Sarà meglio per voi, perché questo è il sentiero della saggezza. Oh sì, il sentiero! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1021:every one per cent increase in the Bank of England’s base lending rate correlated with a three per cent drop in government popularity. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1022:Fece allora un ultimo sforzo per cercare nel suo cuore il luogo dove gli si erano putrefatti gli affetti, e non poté trovarlo. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
1023:I don’t want her falling in love with me as a voice on the phone while at the same time she’s trying to ditch me as a real person. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
1024:If you can’t fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours. ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
1025:La poesia deve essere concepita come un violento assalto contro le forze ignote, per ridurle a prostrarsi davanti all’uomo. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, #NFDB
1026:many people think that growth ought to be at least 3 or 4 percent per year. As noted, both history and logic show this to be illusory. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1027:Non ti fidare, ragazzo mio, di quelli che promettono di farti ricco dalla mattina alla sera. Per il solito, o sono matti o imbroglioni! ~ Carlo Collodi, #NFDB
1028:Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum illuc, unde negant redire quemquam.
Ahora él va por camino tenebroso allí, donde niegan volver a nadie. ~ Catullus,#NFDB
1029:Se sei insoddisfatto della tua vita, è perché hai occhi d’aquila per vedere le cose negative e sei quasi cieco su quelle positive. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1030:…the brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard… ~ Ben Carson, #NFDB
1031:The cost of taxpayer compliance with [the tax code] is over $80 billion per year, more than eight times the cost of the IRS budget ~ Charles O Rossotti, #NFDB
1032:The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language. ~ Erez Lieberman Aiden, #NFDB
1033:To hit 100 miles per hour, that's something. I couldn't believe it when I first saw it, but it's something I can do and think about. ~ Justin Verlander, #NFDB
1034:Vorrei che anche nella vita e non solo in strada ci fossero i segnali, per sapere quando proseguire, quando girare o dare la precedenza... ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
1035:You'll have many, many friends, but if your relationship with your mate is one hundred per cent of your heart, you'll never need a friend. ~ Bill Cosby, #NFDB
1036:Che c'è di più malinconico e profondo del veder mille oggetti per la prima ed ultima volta? Viaggiare, è nascere e morire ad ogni istante. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1037:Frattanto, possiamo ringraziare la nostra buona stella che, per qualche ora, ci ha sottratto alla insopportabile fatica dell'ozio.» ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1038:How much better might human communication be if words were as precious as diamonds? If each of us were allotted only 100 words per day? ~ Jerry Spinelli, #NFDB
1039:I just feel like history is very much alive and important and I don't, you know, I can't worry about whether people get it or not, per se. ~ Greg Proops, #NFDB
1040:Ma è un fatto provato, per quanto molto strano, che anche la cosa più orribile perde parte del suo orrore quando si ripete continuamente. ~ Michael Ende, #NFDB
1041:Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1042:Non c'è bisogno di motivi per aver paura, Momò". Questa non me la sono mai dimenticata, perché è la cosa più vera che ho mai sentito dire. ~ Romain Gary, #NFDB
1043:Non è che basti ammettere i propri errori per risolvere tutto. Che uno li ammetta o no, gli errori restano errori, da lì non si scappa ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1044:Non mostrarti mai, nemmeno per un secondo, inferiore a nessuno. [...] Vuoi dominare il mercato? Allora comportati come se lo facessi già. ~ Meghan March, #NFDB
1045:Penso che il mio piacere con lui sia così intenso e profondo perché per la prima volta il mio corpo, tra le sue mani, è un corpo ascoltato. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
1046:Scrivendo, invece, servo a qualcosa. Vi sono tanti modi per fare la politica vista come nobile impegno, dovere. Io la faccio scrivendo. ~ Oriana Fallaci, #NFDB
1047:The recommended daily requirement for hugs is: four per day for survival, eight per day for maintenance, and twelve per day for growth. ~ Virginia Satir, #NFDB
1048:Tu fai vedere al tuo sogno che veramente ci tieni a incontrarlo, senza pretendere che lui faccia tutta la strada da solo per arrivare a te. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
1049:Attention, shoppers! Discount specials on Harry Dresden’s life. Slightly used, no refunds, limit one per customer. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
1050:Che c'è?" chiesi
"Niente" rispose "Sono seduto qui a pensare a quanta strada abbia fatto e sono sopraffatto dall'amore che provo per te ~ Leylah Attar,#NFDB
1051:Di quali ricordi ci possiamo fidare? Basta solo pensarci di sfuggita per accorgersi che i ricordi sono sicuri quanto una bolla di sapone. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
1052:It wasn’t marriage per se that mattered to me but rather a life with Guy, and therefore I wasn’t in need of a big production to kick it off. ~ Kate White, #NFDB
1053:Le sfumature del suo pensiero erano un collirio per gli occhi dello spirito; studiandole, la vista interiore diventava limpida e forte. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
1054:— Mira —vaig dir—. T'estimo més que res en aquest món. No en tens prou?
— Sí, en tinc prou —va respondre somrient—. Prou per sempre. ~ Stephenie Meyer,#NFDB
1055:Non voglio spaventarti, ma non stento affatto a vederti morire nobilmente, in un modo o nell'altro, per una causa indicibilmente ignobile. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
1056:Per said reluctantly. Being the grandson of Frans Ringholm afforded him a special status within the group, and in a weak moment he had ~ Camilla L ckberg, #NFDB
1057:Sono fatta così: devo immaginare sempre il peggio, per poter sviluppare gli anticorpi con cui affrontarlo qualora si dimostrasse vero. ~ Daniel Glattauer, #NFDB
1058:The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. ~ Robert Benchley, quoted by James Thurber in The Bermudian (November 1950)., #NFDB
1059:Che cosa vede una camera? si chiese. Voglio dire, che cosa vede per davvero? E fin dove? Anche dentro la testa? Anche giù dentro il cuore? ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
1060:Ci tenevamo per mano mentre percorrevamo il sentiero di pan di zenzero dentro la foresta, col sangue che ci gocciolava dalle dita. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson, #NFDB
1061:Cosa sono io per te chiede
io gli metto le mani in grembo
e bisbiglio tu
sei ogni speranza
che io abbia mai avuto
fatta persona ~ Rupi Kaur,#NFDB
1062:E quando rimani incastrato in questo ingranaggio, per non deludere, la prima bugia chiama la seconda, e poi vai avanti tutta la vita... ~ Emmanuel Carr re, #NFDB
1063:Era quello che aveva immaginato così spesso. Non proprio uguale, in
realtà, ma per una volta decise di non fare caso alle imperfezioni ~ Paolo Giordano,#NFDB
1064:Ero all’apice di qualcosa, ma volevo anche che questo qualcosa durasse per sempre, perché sapevo di avere raggiunto un punto di non ritorno. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
1065:Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world. ~ Michael Parenti, #NFDB
1066:Gli aveva salvato la vita. Senza dubbio Xhex, gli aveva restituito il suo futuro prima ancora che lui si rendesse conto che stava per perderlo. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
1067:How do you avoid overconfidence? By telling yourself at least a few times per year, 'The market is much smarter than I will ever be. ~ William J Bernstein, #NFDB
1068:Ninety-eight per cent of laughter is nothing to do with jokes, which do not deserve to bear the weight of all the funny stuff in the world. ~ Arthur Smith, #NFDB
1069:Un uomo che c'è. È uno sguardo. Uno sguardo dietro a tutto. È un modo di guardarti in silenzio che significa tutto per me. Significa che c'è. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
1070:Danes have relatively short working weeks, and get free health care and a university education on top of five weeks of paid holiday per year. ~ Meik Wiking, #NFDB
1071:I'm as skeptical as anyone would be about celebrities and causes - and I will dare to say to you that I don't think of myself as a celebrity per se. ~ Bono, #NFDB
1072:it would take the average American only eleven hours of labor per week to produce as much as he or she produced in forty hours in 1950. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
1073:La necessità di non prendere scorciatoie - di non accontentarsi di un uomo inferiore - era l'unico motivo per cui aveva deciso di sposarlo ~ Matthew Thomas, #NFDB
1074:Non aspetti il giovane a filosofare, né il vecchio di filosofare si stanchi: nessuno è troppo giovane o troppo vecchio per la salute dell’anima. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
1075:On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children's BMX bikes than in any other city in the world. ~ Jess Walter, #NFDB
1076:One life per year. It seemed so moderate a price... until you looked back and realized you could fill a movie theater with your victims. ~ Kelley Armstrong, #NFDB
1077:Per chi?», había gritado el hincha al borde de la locura. «Per chi?». ¿A quién? ¿A quién le estás pasando el balón, Albertini? ¡Si no hay nadie ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1078:Perciò, ti prego non odiarmi, io sono una persona imperfetta. Molto più di quanto tu non immagini. E proprio per questo non devi odiarmi. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1079:Per una volta, per una volta soltanto, vorrei sapere cosa si prova ad essere trovati invece che cercare in continuazione qualcuno che non c'è. ~ Fabio Volo, #NFDB
1080:Pro-Tip: Ask for one clear action per panel. Don't ask your artist to do two, three, or more things in a shot. You want those? Add more panels. ~ Dan Slott, #NFDB
1081:Quando decidi di non dire qualcosa devi continuare a non dirlo. Basta poco, penso. Basta poco per trasformare la tua vita in una menzogna. ~ Louise Doughty, #NFDB
1082:Tan segur com que passa el temps, la història es va repetint, i mentre l'home sigui home, la història és l'últim lloc on buscarà per aprendre. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
1083:The brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard. ~ Benjamin Carson, #NFDB
1084:The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, but 39 countries have longer life expectancies. ~ Hans Rosling, #NFDB
1085:Currently, oil use in the developed world averages 14 barrels per person per year. In the developing world, it is only 3 barrels per person. ~ Daniel Yergin, #NFDB
1086:I contadini dappertutto nel mondo sono fondamentalmente gli stessi. Lasciateci dire che la chiave per la pace si trova vicino alla terra. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, #NFDB
1087:I nichilisti odiano i pessimisti: chiunque conosca la verità del dolore intralcia i loro piani per l'incremento dell'infelicità del mondo. ~ Guido Ceronetti, #NFDB
1088:La gente è venuta in questo paese per cercare soldi o libertà. Se non hai i soldi, ti aggrappi ancora più rabbiosamente alle tue libertà. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
1089:Ogni falsità è una maschera, e per quanto la maschera sia ben fatta, si arriva sempre, con un po' di attenzione, a distinguerla dal volto. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1090:Per un genitore è più facile ignorarti o fingere che tutto vada bene, così può fare quello che vuole e convincersi che vada bene anche a te. ~ Sophie Jordan, #NFDB
1091:Read an hour every day in your chosen field. This works out to about one book per week, fifty books per year, and will guarantee your success. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
1092:Se ti spaventa, le dai il potere di controllarti. Prendila, usala per tagliare la gola a tuo fratello e restituisci l’onore al tuo sangue. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1093:Stavo lì seduta. A pensare. E più pensavo, collegando tra loro i diversi episodi della mia vita, più sentivo che il cuore stava per abbandonarmi ~ Jay Asher, #NFDB
1094:Tanto per cominciare, vorrei dire che sebbene genitori, mariti, figli, amanti e mariti siano tutti una gran bella cosa, non sono cani. ~ Elizabeth von Arnim, #NFDB
1095:The reality is sobering: in the United States one in three girls will become pregnant before age 20, totaling more than 750,000 girls per year. ~ Jane Fonda, #NFDB
1096:There's an old adage that for every second too fast per mile in the first half of the race, you'll run at least 2 seconds slower at the end. ~ Jeff Galloway, #NFDB
1097:There was no "decision" per se to re-position myself. I simply decided that I wanted to write a book that would help people influence others. ~ Guy Kawasaki, #NFDB
1098:You have to be totally one hundred per cent committed to act. I do value everyone else's advice, but ultimately I have to listen to myself. ~ Dakota Fanning, #NFDB
1099:A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker”—in ~ Erik Brynjolfsson, #NFDB
1100:C'era una volta... le fiabe non cominciano così per niente, Will. Ma il "poi vissero per sempre felici e contenti" ce lo si deve guadagnare. ~ Cornelia Funke, #NFDB
1101:Did we put our kids in 0.5-mile-per-gallon (mpg) tanks and 17 feet per gallon aircraft carriers because we failed to put them in 32-mpg cars? ~ Hunter Lovins, #NFDB
1102:Era come se lei si fosse nascosta in un luogo lungo e stretto e il suo corpo si fosse spontaneamente affusolato, per adattarsi allo spazio. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1103:« È una mia vecchia massima che, una volta escluso l’impossibile, ciò che resta, per quanto improbabile, non può essere che la verità ». ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1104:Except for events that carry great weight, it is not experience per se, but how they match expectations, that governs their emotional impact ~ Albert Bandura, #NFDB
1105:HP’s Telework Calculator‡ shows a savings of almost $10,000 per year for an SUV driver who spends an hour a day commuting ten miles round trip. ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
1106:If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it's simply a poor use of resources. ~ Tim Ferriss, #NFDB
1107:Il mondo straniero, che per i genitori significa alterità, per i figli rappresenta identità. Ciò che disorienta i genitori, unisce i figli. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1108:I write for a certain sphere of readers in the United States who on average watch seven and a half hours of multichannel television per day. ~ Jerzy Kosinski, #NFDB
1109:«Perché sei qui, Zarek?»
L'uomo le asciugò le lacrime sul volto. «Sono qui per raccogliere la mia rosa, se vorrà venire a casa con me.» ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
1110:Servono le sventure per scavare certe miniere misteriose nascoste nell'intelligenza umana; serve la pressione per far esplodere la polvere. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1111:The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
1112:When I'm in the movie, I'm entirely in the movie. When I'm on the set, I'm 200 per cent there; when I'm at home, I'm 200 per cent at home. ~ Juliette Binoche, #NFDB
1113:With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least ten per cent of your net worth in that stock ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
1114:According to a 2008 study by the National Sleep Foundation, American adults now get two hours less sleep per night than the average in 1960. ~ Kelly McGonigal, #NFDB
1115:A person working 45 hours per week averages 44% more income than someone working 40 hours per week. That's 44% more income for 13% more time. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
1116:Certi libri vanno assaporati lentamente, altri divorati in un sol boccone. E solo alcuni, pochi, vanno masticati per digerirli completamente. ~ Cornelia Funke, #NFDB
1117:Ci sono molti che non vogliono dormire per paura degli incubi. Purtroppo, ci sono molti che non vogliono svegliarsi per la stessa paura. ~ Richelle E Goodrich, #NFDB
1118:Dopo un po' chiuse gli occhi e stava quasi per precipitare nelle oscurità del sonno, quando lui disse: «Nulla è reale, eccetto i sogni e l'amore.» ~ N M Kelby, #NFDB
1119:E' strano, ma quando si ha paura di qualcosa, e si darebbe tutto per rallentare il tempo, quest'ultimo ha la spiacevole abitudine di accelerare. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
1120:for a typical inkjet printer, the real-life cost of ink ran from 5 cents per page for black-and-white to around 30 cents per page for photos. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
1121:Gambling in the mark has been the great indoor sport of the capitalists for months, and consequently food has increased by 25 to 100 per cent. ~ Agnes Smedley, #NFDB
1122:I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses. ~ Charles Stross, #NFDB
1123:Il fatto semplice è che il mondo gira.
Puoi sederti e girare con il mondo o puoi alzarti in piedi per protestare e venire catapultato fuori. ~ Stephen King,#NFDB
1124:In other words, economic development should be judged and measured by the per capita real income of the bottom 50 per cent of the population. ~ Muhammad Yunus, #NFDB
1125:It's really cool when a guy tips 20 per cent quickly and effortlessly so that when the check comes, he opens it and signs his name and done. ~ Danica McKellar, #NFDB
1126:jobs are fundamentally linked to time. Whether you make $500k per year or $8 per hour, your earning capacity at a job is linked to your time. ~ Taylor Pearson, #NFDB
1127:Mi spieghi, per favore, cosa intende per razza. Perché per me è un concetto scientificamente indefinibile e quindi privo di valore teorico. ~ Jonathan Littell, #NFDB
1128:Quindi era finita. Era andato avanti. Di già. Davvero non significava nulla per lui. Era davvero finita. Avevano dei piani. Lui è Joshua. Insieme ~ N R Walker, #NFDB
1129:That means that at least 42 per cent of the population hardly masters the basic skills required for further learning including vocational training ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1130:They are suffering from ‘no-mobile phobia’, which has been given the name nomophobia and could affect up to 53 per cent of mobile-phone users. ~ Sara Maitland, #NFDB
1131:Today, banking assets (that is, loans) in the world’s major economies are equivalent to around 150 per cent of those countries’ combined GDP. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1132:Una realtà non ci fu data e non c'è, dobbiamo farcela noi: non sarà mai una per tutti e per sempre ma di continuo e infinitamente mutabile. ~ Luigi Pirandello, #NFDB
1133:.. una volta che sai cos'è la cosa che vuoi che sia vera, l'istinto è un mezzo molto utile per metterti nelle condizioni di sapere che è vera, ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1134:Come parole ripetute fino a quando diventano senza senso. Ripetete il vostro nome per più di duecento volte, e scoprirete che non siete nessuno. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1135:I never would have been able to tithe the first million dollars I ever made if I had not tithed my first salary, which was $1.50 per week. ~ John D Rockefeller, #NFDB
1136:It's not that girls are delusional, per se. It's just that they have this subtle ability to warp actual circumstances into something different. ~ Rebecca Serle, #NFDB
1137:La morte sa dove viviamo noi tutti, baby. Tutto ciò che possiamo fare è tenerci per mano finché non viene a bussare. Se tu ci stai, io ci sto, okay? ~ Amy Lane, #NFDB
1138:Non forzare mai gli altri a fare spazio per te nella loro vita, perché se conoscono davvero il tuo valore, saranno loro a creare uno spazio per te. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1139:Poe —ho deia ell mateix— era artificial per naturalesa. La majoria de nosaltres, pobres!, intentem ser, o aparèixer, naturals a força d'artifici. ~ Joan Fuster, #NFDB
1140:Racquetball is the only sport where simultaneously you can be looking at the ball and it'll hit you in the back of the head at 90 miles per hour. ~ Brian Regan, #NFDB
1141:The main principle of this book is that for both optimal health and weight loss, you must consume a diet with a high nutrient-per-calorie ratio. ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
1142:Ti amo, mia bella ragazza. Per sempre." "Sempre?" She asked. Cracking a smile, he brushed his finger softly across her lips. "Always and forever ~ J M Darhower, #NFDB
1143:Verrà il tempo in cui l’uomo non dovrà più uccidere per mangiare, ed anche l’uccisione di un solo animale sarà considerato un grave delitto ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
1144:You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1145:Following the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, $3 per gallon gasoline became common and our nation has come under considerable strain. ~ Paul Gillmor, #NFDB
1146:I don't know if I've ever had a muse per se. I would say that the woman I'm inspired by exists more in my sketchbooks. She exists in my head. ~ Erdem Moral oglu, #NFDB
1147:I have adapted the whole book [Candid] into tweets of 140 characters, and these are being sent out daily, at the rate of eight tweets per day . ~ Mark Ravenhill, #NFDB
1148:I recommend six fresh fruits and eight total servings of vegetables per day, including two servings of cruciferous vegetables (at least one raw). ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
1149:Le cose che voi cercate, Montag, sono su questa terra, ma il solo modo per cui l’uomo medio potrà vederne il novantanove per cento sarà un libro. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1150:per guadagnarsi la vita ogni artigiano deve curare con attenzione la manutenzione dei propri attrezzi e saperli usare con la massima abilità. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB
1151:Per ore, accoccolati sui talloni, a occhi semichiusi, quegli esclusi dalla felicità barattavano la dura realtà con qualche grammo di sogno. ~ Dominique Lapierre, #NFDB
1152:Si l'únic requisit per creure que una cosa existeix és que ningú hagi demostrat que no existeix, es podria afirmar l'existència de qualsevol cosa. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
1153:Sono ricordi da trattare con delicatezza per non sporcarli o gualcirli, come oggetti fragili che rischiano di rompersi se li maneggi troppo a lungo ~ Lucy Foley, #NFDB
1154:... the fibrous tongue is actually the strongest muscle per inch in the body; if it were the size of a biceps, you could pick up a car with it. ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
1155:the number of models per square foot here on South Beach was higher than anywhere else in the world and that commercial and film shoots were common. ~ Wendy Wax, #NFDB
1156:Today we produce only 60,000 to 70,000 engineers per year, 40 percent of whom are foreigners, while China produces over 400,000 engineers per year. ~ Ben Carson, #NFDB
1157:At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
1158:A volte penso che dovrei mettermi a dieta, poi penso che se dimagrissi sarei sempre tesa per la paura di ingrassare, invece così sono tranquilla. ~ Stefano Benni, #NFDB
1159:If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it's simply a poor use of resources. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1160:La legge è fatta esclusivamente per lo sfruttamento di coloro che non la capiscano, o ai quali la brutale necessità non permette di rispettarla. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
1161:Le parole esistono, come esistono le montagne, la terra e il cielo. Le parole esistono per essere usate, per farci sbagliare, per farci cadere. ~ Silvia Avallone, #NFDB
1162:l'imbecillità lucida di una signora terrorizzata dal numero 13, non per superstizione ma perché le sembrava un numero rimasto incompleto ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
1163:Lui rispose con un aforisma, sufficientemente per essere criptico: "L'uomo è gioia per l'uomo". Lei pensò cupamente: "L'uomo è lupo per l'uomo". ~ Lena Andersson, #NFDB
1164:Ma se non ti piacciono nemmeno, le poesie. La voce di Tessa gorgoglió per un risolino di sollievo. No. Ma tu mi fai venire voglia di scriverne. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1165:Non c'è nulla di antico sotto il sole.
Tutto accade per la prima volta, ma in un modo eterno.
Chi legge le mie parole sta inventandole. ~ Jorge Luis Borges,#NFDB
1166:Quando Monsieur Perdu quardava i libri, non vedeva solo storie, il loro prezzo e un pronto soccorso per l'anima. Vedeva la libertà su ali di carta. ~ Nina George, #NFDB
1167:Si sente urlare dal campo, bambine di nove anni che si caricano psicologicamente per vincere. Il calcio professionale per bambini è duro. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson, #NFDB
1168:The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1169:While I don't like violent programs per se, I do like good storytelling, which made me a fan of shows like Breaking Bad and American Horror Story. ~ Hank Stuever, #NFDB
1170:Alcune cose entrano nelle nostre vite per lo spazio di un respiro. E dobbiamo lasciarle andare, per
consentire loro di illuminare un altro cielo ~ Ren e Ahdieh,#NFDB
1171:Altri, come lui, proprio prima della mia nascita, avevano patito pene di ogni sorta per consentire a noi di provare soltanto piccoli dispiaceri. ~ Patrick Modiano, #NFDB
1172:c'era una volta un ragazzo che amava una ragazza, e la sua risata era una domanda a cui lui avrebbe voluto rispondere per il resto della sua vita. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
1173:«Chissà se le stelle, per esprimere un desiderio, aspettano che cada la Terra». Era una donna così. Aveva il dono divino di ribaltare il senso comune. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1174:Competition on value must revolve around results. The results that matter are patient outcomes per unit of cost at the medical condition level. ~ Michael E Porter, #NFDB
1175:E da loro appresi un insegnamento prezioso: per quanto piccolo e insignificante tu possa essere, nulla vieta che la tua follia sia tra le più grandi. ~ Sam Savage, #NFDB
1176:Fine. We can act like we’re fuckups idling about. As per our usual. But if we cap a god, I’m telling everyone I know! Two words: Press. Conference. ~ Kresley Cole, #NFDB
1177:Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
1178:Ho chiuso il buco tra i denti, MaMaLu, eppure il mio vero amore non ha avuto bisogno di quello spazio per entrarmi nel cuore. È sempre stato dentro ~ Leylah Attar, #NFDB
1179:I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language. ~ Aberjhani, #NFDB
1180:I will not go a day without coconut oil. I personally take four tablespoons per day, either on my salads, in my cooking or in my cups of green tea. ~ Miranda Kerr, #NFDB
1181:La persona della quale parlerò e così sciocca che, a volte, per strada, sorridere gli altri. Nessuno le ricambia il sorriso neppure la vedono. ~ Clarice Lispector, #NFDB
1182:Non ho mai conosciuto una persona intelligente che amasse per davvero o avesse fiducia nel prossimo. Al massimo ha provato compassione. ~ Manuel V zquez Montalb n, #NFDB
1183:«Perché dovresti voler essere mio amico?»
«Per lo stesso motivo per cui chiunque vuole essere amico di qualcuno», risponde. «Perché mi piaci.» ~ Kristin Harmel,#NFDB
1184:Quant pot valdre la vida humana si recordem que fa poc morien milions de persones per causes no naturals? Estem plens d’odi i de prejudicis. ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
1185:Se la cosa cominciava, avrei colpito per primo".
"Se la cosa cominciava", lo corresse Bruenor, "avresti concimato il buco in cui eri nascosto! ~ R A Salvatore,#NFDB
1186:Se un uomo non è a conoscenza dell'esistenza della luna, che cosa può fare la luna per lui, tranne continuare a inviare le sue luci su di lui ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1187:A volte i piccoli sogni avevano grandezza, pensò con dignità.
A volte, i piccoli sogni erano tutto quello di cui aveva bisogno una persona per vivere ~ Amy Lane,#NFDB
1188:If liturgy forms us by conforming us to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), then why are Christians so often conformed to the world (per Rom. 12:2)? ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
1189:Oklahoma has the highest female incarceration rate in the country, and nearly thirty per cent of female inmates in the state have parents who did time. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1190:Over the 210 years I have examined stock returns, the real return on a broadly diversified portfolio of stocks has averaged 6.6 percent per year. ~ Jeremy J Siegel, #NFDB
1191:Proverò e riproverò. Non mi darò mai per vinto. Guarda laggiù, sulla brughiera. C'è un altro presagio. Lo terrò a mente. C'è sempre un altro arcobaleno. ~ Don Rosa, #NFDB
1192:Se c'era una cosa che stava imparando da tutta quella faccenda era quanto fosse facile perdere tutto ciò che pensavi sarebbe stato tuo per sempre ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1193:Sono stati i sei mesi più belli di tutta la mia vita" gli dissi.
Seguì un lungo silenzio.
"Guarda caso, Clark, è stato lo stesso anche per me. ~ Jojo Moyes,#NFDB
1194:The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
1195:The carriage could only clop along at about ten miles per hour, which only accentuated Imogene’s excitement. She urged it onward: "Fly, horse, fly! ~ Hunter Murphy, #NFDB
1196:The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline. ~ Al Gore, #NFDB
1197:Today, India consumes about 682 watts per capita, far lesser than developed nations. As India develops, it will definitely require a lot more energy. ~ Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
1198:Volgevo le spalle alla luce e la faccia agli oggetti da essa illuminati, per cui la faccia vedeva le cose luminose, ma non era luminosa. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
1199:According to a recent study by Friskies, cats drive almost 15 percent of all Web traffic. There are about 30 million Google searches per month for “cat. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1200:Chi è pronto a dar via le proprie libertà fondamentali per comprarsi briciole di temporanea sicurezza, non merita né la libertà né la sicurezza. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
1201:Ci vuole forza per spingere più in là il vuoto.
Per tenere a distanza il silenzio.
Per arrivare all'alba. [...] Basta che non c'è mai silenzio. ~ Zerocalcare,#NFDB
1202:He reaches me and hold the back of my head, his lips brushing my ear. ‘No restraints. One-hundred-and-fifty miles per hour. You and me, sweetheart. ~ Krista Ritchie, #NFDB
1203:He sank into an apathy of heat and dust and sweat, and joined the morose ten per cent of men in South Fast Asia Command whose wives had let them down. ~ Nevil Shute, #NFDB
1204:I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct. ~ Steig Larsson, #NFDB
1205:In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
1206:la mortalità è la storia più romantica mai raccontata. Una sola possibilità per fare tutto quello che vorresti. Poi, come per magia, si passa oltre... ~ Lauren Kate, #NFDB
1207:Ma che cos’è la storia? È un dar principio a lavori secolari per riuscire a poco a poco a risolvere il mistero della morte e a vincerla un giorno. ~ Boris Pasternak, #NFDB
1208:Mademoiselle, se non è sposata, vuol dire che nessuno del mio sesso è stato abbastanza eloquente: per scelta e non per necessità, si resta nubili. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
1209:Mi fa piacere che sia femmina. E spero che sarà una stupida... è la cosa migliore per una bambina, a questo mondo, una bella e piccola stupida. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1210:Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.” “Yes, sir. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1211:Non c'è roccia su cui l'anima mortale possa naufragare che non contenga qualche delicato viticcio di gentilezza umana che lotta per sopravvivere. ~ Jacqueline Carey, #NFDB
1212:The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
1213:Unborn children can experience pain even more so than adults as the baby has more pain receptors per square inch than at any other time in its life. ~ Sam Brownback, #NFDB
1214:According to the Institute for International Economics, trade barriers cost American consumers $80 billion a year or more than $1,200 per family. ~ Walter E Williams, #NFDB
1215:And check this out: If every American had one meat-free day per week, it would be the same as taking eight million cars off American roads in a year. ~ Kathy Freston, #NFDB
1216:A team using the information provided by pay-per-use should be able to do a more effective job than a team relying for feedback only on license revenues. ~ Kent Beck, #NFDB
1217:Che un gatto possa cambiarsi in leone, i prefetti di polizia non credono possibile; eppure capita, ed è per l'appunto il miracolo del popolo di Parigi. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1218:Fifty yards away. The muzzle velocity of a M16 is 3,100 feet per second. Three feet in a yard, which means he has two-thirds of a second left on Earth. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
1219:Ho la sensazione che tu preferisca struggerti per qualcuno con cui non potrai mai stare piuttosto che provare a stare con qualcuno con cui potresti ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1220:I libri non sono un passatempo. Parlano di altre vite. Di altri mondi. Altro che far passare il tempo, Sir Kevin; non so cosa darei per averne di più. ~ Alan Bennett, #NFDB
1221:Il vero luogo natio è quello dove per la prima volta si è posato uno sguardo consapevole su se stessi: la mia prima patria sono stati i libri. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar, #NFDB
1222:I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
1223:La sua vita era ancora troppo breve, per sapere che non c'è cosa più imminente dell'impossibile, e che quanto dobbiamo sempre prevedere è l'imprevisto. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1224:Mi fanno impazzire i libri che quando hai finito di leggerli vorresti che l'autore fosse il tuo migliore amico, per telefonargli ogni volta che ti va. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
1225:Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perseverance. ~ Geoff Dyer, #NFDB
1226:«Non voglio innamorarmi di te.» disse. «Non posso permettermelo, e non lo farò.»
«Non importa. Io ti amerò abbastanza per tutti e due.» sussurrò Rhage. ~ J R Ward,#NFDB
1227:Our brains are too slow to register that every concrete object is winking in and out of existence at the quantum level thousands of times per second. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1228:Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
1229:Roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide per year, yet history tells us that more than 90% of them are gone from the shelf a year later. ~ Martin Lindstrom, #NFDB
1230:Stack Overflow’s content is created voluntarily by people who use the site. A staggering 5,000 answers to questions are generated per day by site members. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
1231:the economy of China will become twice the size of the U.S. economy in 2025 if both countries’ per capita income continues to grow at recent rates. ~ Jeremy J Siegel, #NFDB
1232:The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1233:There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
1234:The selection rate is less than three per cent. Most of us can’t crack these tests, basic probability. But who will drill it into our parents’ heads? ~ Chetan Bhagat, #NFDB
1235:E poi amavo la scrittura di chi ti fa affacciare da ogni rigo per guardare di sotto e sentire la vertigine della profondità, la nerezza dell'inferno. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
1236:I don’t have a hostile disposition toward humankind per se. In fact, I feel quite warmly toward humankind. It’s individual humans I have trouble with. ~ Robert Wright, #NFDB
1237:if you look at humanity's per-capita energy use today, it's as thought each human being has twenty-three servants for him or her, every hour of every day ~ Leif Wenar, #NFDB
1238:In the United States, government spending rose from 7.5 per cent of GDP in 1913, to 27 per cent in 1960, to 30 per cent in 2000, to 41 per cent in 2011. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
1239:Kalkoenen leggen tegenwoordig hondertwintig eieren per jaar en kippen meer dan driehonderd. Dat is twee tot drie keer zo veel als in de natuur. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
1240:Longbow archers can fire eight to ten arrows per minute. In physics terms, a longbow archer is an arrow generator with a frequency of 150 millihertz. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
1241:Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1242:Nel buio e nelle ombre dove vivevano i segreti, quello era il luogo in cui Julian sopravviveva. Era così che era riuscito per anni ad andare avanti. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1243:[...] Popæus Sabinus [...] maximisque provinciis per quatuor et viginti annos impositus; nullam ob eximiam artem , sed quod par negotiis , neque supra erat. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
1244:[...] Se non esiste la prospettiva di una vita decente, per i nascituri, ebbene, alla coniglia è concesso di risucchiarli nel proprio corpo, non nati. ~ Richard Adams, #NFDB
1245:The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se. ~ June Jordan, #NFDB
1246:Acting per se, like all art, is a process of abstracting, of retaining only significant detail. But in impersonation any detail can be significant. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
1247:American mothers with a college degree, for example, spend roughly 4.5 hours more per week on child care than mothers with no education beyond high school. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1248:Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession. ~ Selima Hill, #NFDB
1249:If you don’t have cancer and you do a therapeutic fast 1 to 3 times per year, you could purge any precancerous cells that may be living in your body. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1250:I'm not looking forward to a specific person per se; I'm just excited to meet everyone. I respect greatness and I'm just going to soak in anyone I meet. ~ Arian Foster, #NFDB
1251:Non mi fu mai dato di vedere un animale in cordoglio di sé.
Un uccelletto cadrà morto di gelo giù dal ramo senza aver provato mai pena per se stesso. ~ D H Lawrence,#NFDB
1252:Prendetevi pure tutta la vita. Perché i defunti che un tempo abbiamo amato, li amiamo per sempre. La loro mancanza ci accompagna fino agli ultimi giorni. ~ Nina George, #NFDB
1253:...that if I let myself go, did not always slow me down by thinking so much beforehand I could achieve many things I would never have dreamt possible!! ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
1254:The globalisation of food (or production of any commodity) is not the enemy per se, although it could and should certainly be more rationally planned. ~ Leigh Phillips, #NFDB
1255:(Though, sadly, both Larry and Sergey, who take only $1 per year in salary, declined my offer to raise their salaries by 10 percent … to $1.10 per year.) ~ Laszlo Bock, #NFDB
1256:Alla S inserisca ‘sconosciuto in confidenza’, quando capita di confidarsi di più con una persona incontrata per caso in treno che con la propria famiglia. ~ Nina George, #NFDB
1257:A Nampara, nonostante tutti i vincoli che doveva rispettare, era libera; e lavorava insieme a persone cui si era affezionata e per un uomo che adorava. ~ Winston Graham, #NFDB
1258:Em fa por la foscor. Abans em pensava que de la foscor en podia sortir qualsevol cosa, per això em feia por. Ara em fa por perquè sé que no hi ha res. ~ Hiromi Kawakami, #NFDB
1259:He could have her, and every other woman in the place. He could have the entire bar, if he wanted it. It would only cost him about ten words per person. ~ Charles Soule, #NFDB
1260:If you drive at precisely twenty-nine miles per hour, the rumble strips play ‘Jerusalem’ on the car tires. Listen.” Mary slowed to the correct speed and ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
1261:I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
1262:I libri sono per me una casa. I libri non fanno una casa, sono una casa, nel senso che, così come apri una porta, apri un libro e ci entri. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
1263:In flight a bumblebee flaps its wings 200 times per second (which equals 12,000 rpm), roughly equivalent to the speed of a high-revving motorbike engine. ~ Dave Goulson, #NFDB
1264:It said, Qui facit per alium facit per se.
Greenmantle knew the proverb.
He who does a thing by the agency of another does it himself. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,#NFDB
1265:It was as if gravity was suspended. It was like dancing, I thought, although I had never danced in my whole life. We were never to walk like that again. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
1266:La sua memoria è adesso un manoscritto a inchiostro simpatico, lo sfoglio pagina per pagina e ci passo la fiamma vicino perché le si riveli. ~ Donatella Di Pietrantonio, #NFDB
1267:Per qualche ragione che non capiva, era finalmente sola, in modo perfetto, come soli non si è mai - o di rado, pensò, in qualche abbraccio da'amore ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
1268:There are more than three hundred trillion cells in the human body. Counting ten cells per second, it would take more than a million years to count them all. ~ Ben Bova, #NFDB
1269:Anche per chi abbia già conseguito una compiuta conoscenza, la cosa più importante è proprio l’essere in grado di servirsi delle sue cognizioni con prontezza. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
1270:A volte sono depresso e non apro bocca per giorni. In quei casi, non deve pensare che sia di cattivo umore. Basta lasciarmi stare e presto mi passa. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
1271:Ebbi l'impressione che si dibattesse per trovare, dall'interno della gabbia in cui si era chiusa, un modo d'essere tutto suo che però le restava oscuro. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
1272:Hold on to your hats, ladies!’ cried Jasper Dash. ‘You’re in for a wild ride! This futuristic buggy can attain speeds of up to thirty-five miles per hour! ~ M T Anderson, #NFDB
1273:la vanità cerca l'applauso degli altri per costruirci sopra un'alta opinione di sé, è presupposto della superbia che quella esista fin da principio ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1274:Per il candore e la semplicità della sua vita, c'è chi lo giudica un angelo; è una pietosa esagerazione, poiché non c'è uomo che sia esente da colpa. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
1275:Robert morente, creava il silenzio. Io, destinata alla vita, prestai ascolto a un silenzio che avrebbe richiesto un'esistenza intera per trovare le parole. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
1276:There's no question that natural gas is a lot better than coal or oil, in the sense that natural gas produces less carbon per unit of energy produced. ~ Katharine Hayhoe, #NFDB
1277:Vivere in una casa piena di gente innamorata è la migliore garanzia della sua esistenza. E forse non è una cosa per tutti.
-La mia fuga più dolce- ~ Chelsea M Cameron,#NFDB
1278:Charlie Rhodes: la persona che ero stato troppo giovane per apprezzare, troppo distratto per tenermi stretto, ma troppo innamorato per riuscire a dimenticare. ~ Cardeno C, #NFDB
1279:Gnostics should practice meditation for at least 4 to 6 hours per day; practicing in the morning, the afternoon and almost the whole night until dawn... ~ Samael Aun Weor, #NFDB
1280:La meritocrazia e il clima mediterraneo sono di necessità incompatibili. È il prezzo che paghiamo per avere il miglior olio d'oliva d mondo, immagino. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
1281:Most of my painting is done sitting in a chair with a book. I'd say it's 80 per cent sitting and reading, 10 per cent eating and ten per cent painting. ~ Susan Rothenberg, #NFDB
1282:Obviously you have to make a profit to put out a newspaper. I'm not an idiot. But when the margins are in excess of 25 per cent you're talking about greed. ~ Carl Hiaasen, #NFDB
1283:Quando eravamo soli potevamo parlare per ore o starcene semplicemente a leggere un libro, ciascuno con il proprio ipod, senza per questo sentirci distanti. ~ Gayle Forman, #NFDB
1284:Stare senza di lui per due mesi era stato come sopravvivere alla siccità e poter bere solo adesso un piccolo sorso d'acqua. Ne volevo di più. Molto di più ~ Audrey Carlan, #NFDB
1285:then found a coffee shop that finally allowed Mike to go to the water closet. The rest of us all went too, as per Hogarth’s Theory of Fear-Based Urination. ~ Stuart Gibbs, #NFDB
1286:There were twenty-five million people in Yemen and at least thirteen million guns—after the United States, it was, per capita the world’s most armed nation. ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
1287:Your customers are bombarded with more than three thousand commercial messages per day, and unless we are bold in our calls to action, we will be ignored. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
1288:According to a poll of 2005, 42 per cent of the Russian people, and 60 per cent of those over 60 years of age, wanted the return of a ‘leader like Stalin’. ~ Orlando Figes, #NFDB
1289:Bisogna che gli uomini possano essere felici. Ogni cosa ha un senso solo perché gli uomini siano felici. Non è solo per questo che le cose hanno un senso? ~ Elio Vittorini, #NFDB
1290:Ci dev'essere qualcosa di speciale nei libri, delle cose che non possiamo immaginare, per convincere una donna a restare in una casa che brucia. È evidente! ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1291:«È un buon segno piangere per un romanzo» mi assicurò Miss Frost.
«Un buon segno?»
«Significa che hai più cuore della maggior parte dei tuoi coetanei.» ~ John Irving,#NFDB
1292:Faccio dire agli altri quello che non posso dire altrettanto bene, sia per insufficienza del mio linguaggio sia per insufficienza del mio sentimento. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
1293:Guai a coloro, dissi, che si servono dell'influenza che hanno su di un cuore per rapirgli le semplici gioie che esso sa procurare a se stesso! ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1294:I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth.
- Blanche Scene II ~ Tennessee Williams,#NFDB
1295:Make sure people get educated, help out with health emergencies. Those things, the government should do. That's 96 per cent of the economy, those two sectors. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
1296:News flash, horses poop about fifty pounds of manure a day. That’s per horse. Of course cows poop about three times that, so we have it easy by comparison. ~ Susan Mallery, #NFDB
1297:Taigi mes galime išnykti per dvi dienas ar pratempti dar tūkstantį metų. Mes patys nežinome, kas bus, todėl dauguma žmonių tiesiog numojo į viską ranka. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1298:The person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time, other things being equal, has a greater chance of having significant ideas. ~ J P Guilford, #NFDB
1299:The stumbling block isn't the certainty effect per se. It's the way that smart people are influenced by mere words, by the way the choices are framed. ~ William Poundstone, #NFDB
1300:Tutti sentono. Tutti pensano. Però non tutti sentono con il pensiero o pensano con l'emozione. Per questo le persone sono molte e gli artisti sono pochi. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1301:We have rigged the latest election. 93.5 per cent have voted for Lukashenko. But they say it is not a European outcome. We have made it 86 per cent. ~ Alexander Lukashenko, #NFDB
1302:And from 1966, under Regulation Q, there was a ceiling of 5.5 per cent on their deposit rates, a quarter of a per cent more than banks were allowed to pay. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1303:E se dobbiamo dare amore per sentimentalismo, è indifferente se lo riserviamo alle piccole sembianze del calamaio o alla grande indifferenza delle stelle. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1304:It [1991 Federal budget] contains almost 190,000 accounts. At a rate of one per minute, eight hours a day, it would take over a year to reflect upon these! ~ Richard Darman, #NFDB
1305:...Non intendevano aggredirmi, ma se Zane avesse continuato a saltellare qua e là come una versione punk di Tigro avrei potuto sparargli per sbaglio... ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
1306:On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds. ~ K Eric Drexler, #NFDB
1307:Quel ch'è più arduo ad accettarsi, riguardo al passare del tempo, è che le persone che un tempo contavano tanto per noi siano adesso chiuse fra due parentesi. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1308:The chances of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of your being robbed by your own government? That's easy: 100 per cent. ~ Joseph Sobran, #NFDB
1309:their social influence (how many people followed them and what their influence was) in order to optimize attention and influence per dollar. Done at the scale ~ Kevin Kelly, #NFDB
1310:The mere holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent, or employer, or ruler ~ Samuel Morse, #NFDB
1311:There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers. ~ David Ogilvy, #NFDB
1312:Uma pessoa nunca é boa ou ruim per se, o que significa que amá-las ou odiá-las tem necessariamente em sua base um elemento subjetivo e talvez ilusionista. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1313:when someone looks in a certain direction as they process a question or as they answer it, is that they are thinking—it is not per se indicative of deception. ~ Joe Navarro, #NFDB
1314:Working mothers do an hour more per day than working fathers do and working mothers do on average an hour more per day with the kids than working fathers do. ~ James Levine, #NFDB
1315:a machine that could process and store data at a cost of only $2 per digit. (Atanasoff’s machine could handle three thousand digits and cost about $6,000.) ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1316:Anyone who believes a growth rate in excess of 15% per annum over the long term is attainable should pursue a career in sales, but avoid one in mathematics. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
1317:A person is never good or bad per se, which means that loving or hating them necessarily has at its basis a subjective, and perhaps illusionistic, element. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1318:Ci abbiamo messo tutto questo tempo per capire che uno degli scopi della vita umana, indipendentemente da chi la controlla, è amare chi cerca di essere amato ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1319:Cities have more “image of God” per square inch than anywhere else, and so we must not idealize the country as somehow a more spiritual place than the city. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
1320:Dio illumina la mente e splende in essa. Non si può conoscere Dio per mezzo della mente, si può solo rivolgere la mente all'interno e fondersi con Dio. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
1321:Egli la guardava, come l'uomo guarda il fiore da lui strappato e appassito, in cui riconosce con difficoltà la bellezza per la quale l'ha strappato e rovinato. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1322:Greece is a particular worry for regulators as Athens says deferred tax assets represent 30-40 per cent of the core tier one capital in the country’s main banks. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1323:Hi ha moltes maneres de coratge […]. S'ha de ser molt valent per enfrontar-se amb els enemics, però s'ha de ser igual de valent per enfrontar-se amb els amics. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
1324:L'esperienza le aveva insegnato che il futuro le avrebbe riservato più tempo di quanto fosse tollerabile per lamentarsi degli errori commessi in passato. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
1325:Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same! ~ Fernando J Corbato, #NFDB
1326:That 95 per cent. fail of those who start in business upon their own account seems incredible, and yet such are said to be the statistics upon the subject. ~ Andrew Carnegie, #NFDB
1327:The moral man is he who is opposed to injustice per se, opposed to injustice wherever he finds it; the moral man looks for injustice first of all in himself. ~ Bayard Rustin, #NFDB
1328:Tiny and I are sitting with a table full of Drama People, and they are discussing Tiny Dancer, all of them speaking more words per minute than I speak in a day. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1329:a century-long suction of power to the capital has turned Britain into an extraordinarily centralised country. Ninety-five per cent of taxes are raised in London, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1330:Daniel Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The organized Mind is smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written. ~ Daniel Gilbert, #NFDB
1331:Essere stati amati tanto profondamente ci protegge per sempre, anche quando la persona che ci ha amato non c’è più. È una cosa che ci resta dentro, nella pelle. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
1332:Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about. ~ Kara Walker, #NFDB
1333:In 1860, sixty-three per cent of the couples married in Great Britain had families of four or more children; in 1925 only twenty per cent had more than four. ~ Thomas Malthus, #NFDB
1334:In early 2011, 1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. ~ Kathryn Edin, #NFDB
1335:La maturità," ci dice Bokonon, "è un'amara delusione per la quale non esiste rimedio, a meno che la risata non possa essere considerata un rimedio a qualcosa. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1336:Morfar hade sagt att varenda människa hade några speciella egenskaper som ingen annan hade. Och om man bara använde dem så kunde man försätta berg. ~ Per Olov Enquist, #NFDB
1337:Nella maggioranza dei casi, gli uomini, e sia pure i farabutti, sono molto piú ingenui e semplici di come li giudichiamo noi. E noi per primi siamo cosí. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1338:Non esisteva un modo delicato per separare Jules ed Emma. Il solo gesto di dividerli sarebbe stato un atto di violenza, uno squarcio nella stoffa nel mondo. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1339:Per capita health care cost in the United States surpasses that of most other developed countries. Despite this, U.S. costs are rising at comparable rates. ~ Michael E Porter, #NFDB
1340:Perché la pioggia ti bagni con dolcezza, perché ci sia sempre una stanza calda a ripararti dal vento, perché la vita sia per te un abbraccio o una carezza. ~ Banana Yoshimoto, #NFDB
1341:Per essere felici bisogna eliminare due cose: il timore di un male futuro e il ricordo di un male passato; questo non ci riguarda più, quello non ci riguarda ancora. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1342:...rileggere un libro amato è come tornare in un luogo sacro in cui nulla è cambiato, esperienza per noi ovviamente impossibile perché il mondo cambia sempre. ~ John Williams, #NFDB
1343:«Signori, i pinguini sono malcontenti del nuovo regime, perché, anche se ne traggono profitto, è naturale per gli uomini lamentarsi della propria condizione. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
1344:The hardware business is all about per-unit manufacturing cost and functionality. The services business is less asset-intensive and more dependent on people. ~ Anne M Mulcahy, #NFDB
1345:The Spanish PM rang me to say: 'I have the support of only 4 per cent of the people.' I said, 'Crikey, that's even less than think Elvis Presley is still alive.' ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB
1346:The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions. ~ Tom Hodgkinson, #NFDB
1347:As recently as 2011, the government regarded 8 per cent annual growth as a quasi-mystical threshold, below which society would descend into chaos and the Communist ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1348:A third of our kids, after we spend more per student than any country in the world other than a couple rounding errors, 30 percent are college- and/or career-ready. ~ Jeb Bush, #NFDB
1349:China will be the world’s largest economy when its per capita income reaches 25 percent of that of the United States, which is forecast to occur around 2016. ~ Jeremy J Siegel, #NFDB
1350:Eppure le donne – le donne che valevano qualcosa – mi spaventavano perché finivano col volere la mia anima, e io volevo tenere per me quello che ne restava. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1351:if the global output and the income to which it gives rise were equally divided,each individual in the world would have an income of about 760 euros per month ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
1352:If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947. ~ Mike Davis, #NFDB
1353:Guarda il cielo. Non troverai mai un arcobaleno se stai guardando per terra.
Look up to the sky. You'll never find rainbows if you’re looking down. ~ Charlie Chaplin,#NFDB
1354:In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1355:Mai no som infinitament lluny d'aquells qui odiem. Per la mateixa raó, doncs, podríem creure que mai no serem absolutament a prop d'aquells qui estimem. ~ Albert S nchez Pi ol, #NFDB
1356:Maston: I have devised another whose projectile can knock down eight hundred men and two hundred horses at a single blow.
Tartelet: That's four men per horse. ~ Jules Verne,#NFDB
1357:Nella vita va tutto alla cazzo, è tutto un gran casino sconclusionato finché non trovi qualcuno che ti aiuta a dare un senso alle cose, per quanto fugacemente. ~ Matthew Quick, #NFDB
1358:Per tutte le ragazze dal cuore di marzapane (e intendo proprio tutte le ragazze del mondo. L'emozione è sempre la stessa, a quattordici anni come a quarantuno): ~ Kerstin Gier, #NFDB
1359:Se ci troviamo con un desiderio che nulla in questo mondo è in grado di soddisfare, la spiegazione più probabile è che ci noi siamo stati fatti per un altro mondo. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1360:she had been perfectly agreeable until I showed my face. That’s how it is with that kind of madness. Ninety-nine per cent of the time they seem perfectly sane. ~ Peter Lovesey, #NFDB
1361:Since 1986, America’s GDP per capita has increased by 59 percent. The country’s net worth has grown by 90 percent. Corporate profits have soared by 283 percent. ~ Yascha Mounk, #NFDB
1362:Stava scoprendo che un libro tira l'altro; ovunque si voltava si aprivano nuove porte e le giornate erano sempre troppo corte per leggere quanto avrebbe voluto. ~ Alan Bennett, #NFDB
1363:They read in an airline magazine that they can manage their whole supply chain in the cloud for $499 per year, and suddenly that’s the main company initiative. When ~ Gene Kim, #NFDB
1364:To wonder where the mind goes after the brain decays is as silly as asking where the 70-miles-per-hour have gone after a speeding auto has crashed into a tree. ~ Frank Zindler, #NFDB
1365:Alle sembianze il Padre, alle amene sembianze eterno regno diè alle genti; e per virili imprese, per dotta lira o canto, virtù non luce in disadorno ammanto. ~ Giacomo Leopardi, #NFDB
1366:Bisognerebbe chiarire una volta per tutte perché "un momento brutto" può andare avanti per mesi, mentre un momento di grazia dura sempre e soltanto un momento. ~ David Grossman, #NFDB
1367:«Che sciocchi che sono questi mortali» sussurrò.
Ma anche lui ci era passato. L'amore rendeva ciechi e stupidi. Era lo stesso per gli umani e per gli dèi. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,#NFDB
1368:Ed era stato così che mi ero resa conto di amarlo. Quando avevo smesso di sentirmi sconsolata ogni volta che il sole se ne andava per lasciare il posto alla notte ~ Robin Black, #NFDB
1369:Lei li guardò per un lungo momento senza parlare, poi disse: "Tornate indietro". Le rosse figure esitarono. Lei fece un passo avanti e sbottò: "Oppure restate". ~ Alan Campbell, #NFDB
1370:Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes). ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
1371:Mi rendo conto che lo ha fatto per se stesso: nessun uomo vuole guardare in faccia una donna con le guance rigate di lacrime, sapendo di esserne il responsabile. ~ Alice Feeney, #NFDB
1372:Non c’è via maestra per la scienza, e solo hanno una probabilità di raggiungerne le vette luminose coloro che non temono di affaticarsi a salirne i ripidi sentieri. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1373:People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
1374:Per Jamie era troppo, ma non si ritrasse. Rimase sveglio a lungo, circondato dal profumo di Mark e dolorosamente consapevole del peso di lui tra le sue braccia. ~ Jay Northcote, #NFDB
1375:The brain of a psychopath is different from most, I've weighed up my chances. Eighty per cent genetics, twenty per cent environment. Me. One hundred per cent fucked. ~ Ali Land, #NFDB
1376:the chance of an average developing-country person being an entrepreneur is more than twice that for a developed-country person (30 per cent vs. 12.8 per cent). ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
1377:Una delle tante insidie dell'infanzia è che non è necessario capire per soffrire. Ma quando arriva l'età della ragione, le ferite non possono essere sanate. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
1378:Camille, non hai mai la sensazione che stia per accadere qualcosa di orribile e che tu non possa fare niente per evitarlo? La sensazione di poter solo aspettare? ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
1379:Ciò di cui non mi rendevo conto era che voler mettere alla prova il desiderio non è altro che un sotterfugio per ottenere ciò che vogliamo senza poterlo ammettere. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
1380:Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
1381:Exercising in the aerobic zone of 55-75 per cent of maximum heart rate should feel quite comfortable, and leave you feeling refreshed and energised after workouts. ~ Mark Sisson, #NFDB
1382:no less than 99.5 per cent of the world’s habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in practical terms completely—off limits to us. It ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1383:Non c'è niente di male nell'essere arrabbiato: nessuno te lo proibisce. Ma ti ci vuole una quantità tremenda di energia per continuare a fare finta di non esserlo. ~ Ethan Hawke, #NFDB
1384:Per quanto Henry Crawford abbia trovato sgradevole sua suocera, quella di Maria Rushworth lo è molto di più. Oggi ho visto abbastanza per essere grato della mia. ~ Carrie Bebris, #NFDB
1385:Quinn gave her a warm smile that belied the master/servant nature of their relationship. “Gabrielle, possiamo avere due Coca Lights, per favore? Grazie.” Gabrielle ~ J T Ellison, #NFDB
1386:Si nasce e si crepa e nel mezzo ci si ammazza di fatica per perdere tempo facendo finta di guadagnarlo, e questo è tutto quello che ho voglia di dire sugli uomini. ~ Fred Vargas, #NFDB
1387:That is a disparity of nearly twelve percentage points, or, put another way, you have a 23 per cent better chance of being acquitted in the Crown Court.16 ~ The Secret Barrister, #NFDB
1388:The motto I live by is "you can't out-train bad nutrition". You've got to just eat healthy. So like 90 per cent of it is diet, 10 per cent of it is working out. ~ Scott Eastwood, #NFDB
1389:The truth of the matter is that although not all Muslims are terrorists, unfortunately, in today's world, most of the terrorists - 99 per cent - are Muslim. ~ Shohreh Aghdashloo, #NFDB
1390:Tu, in quanto prodotto della tua società socialista, sei abituato a enormi sprechi. Io, tuttavia, sono ancora per la libera impresa. 'Risparmiare è guadagnare... ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
1391:We have lost all our big Australian industries and icons, including Qantas when it sold 25 per cent of its shares and a controlling interest to British Airways. ~ Pauline Hanson, #NFDB
1392:Wild Salmon SIDEKICKS: Alaskan halibut, canned albacore tuna, sardines, herring, trout, sea bass, oysters, and clams TRY TO EAT: fish two to four times per week ~ Steven G Pratt, #NFDB
1393:Ci ritrovammo tutti a bordo per un consiglio di guerra. La mia proposta di sopravvivere un altro paio di giorni nutrendoci di patelle fu immediatamente bocciata. ~ Gerald Durrell, #NFDB
1394:I had neglected to provide myself with books, and as we crept along at the dull rate of four miles per hour, I soon felt the foul fiend Ennui coming upon me ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
1395:It's not debt per say that overwhelms an individual corporation or country. Rather it is a continuous increase in debt in relation to income that causes trouble. ~ Warren Buffett, #NFDB
1396:Ma, oltre a conoscere teoria e pratica, c'è un terzo fattore necessario per diventare maestro in qualunque arte: non deve esserci niente al mondo di più importante. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1397:Non bisogna ragionare sulla natura per enunciati privi di riscontro oggettivo e formulazioni di principi teorici, ma in base a ciò che l’esperienza sensibile richiede. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
1398:Non importa quanto uno si creda un gran fico, prima o poi si imbatterà in qualcuno che, nel suo stesso campo, gli aprirà - per così dire - un altro buco del culo. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1399:[...] non so come comunicarti qualcosa dell'assoluto eterno indomabile incondizionato inarrestabile irrazionale razionalissimo costante infinito amore che ho per te. ~ Sarah Kane, #NFDB
1400:One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year. ~ Clayton Christensen, #NFDB
1401:Quando la gentilezza, anche per pochi secondi, abbandona una persona, noi cominciamo a temere quella persona, come se fosse stata la ragione ad averla abbandonata. ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
1402:Quando si spense la seconda lampadina, entrambi si girarono a guardarla, per un attimo. Sembrava quando si aspettano le stelle cadenti, nelle notti d'estate. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
1403:- Quindi se ne andò davvero? Lasciò da sola la sua rosa?
- All'epoca non lo sapeva, ma lasciarla fu il primo passo di un viaggio per tornare da lei. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry,#NFDB
1404:The average person can speak about 150 words per minute, but the average mind can understand about 350 words per minute—that is a 200-word per minute boredom factor. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1405:The more you research the science of depression, the more you realise it is still more characterised by what we don’t know than what we do. It is 90 per cent mystery. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
1406:Un uomo che ha guai finanziari è un uomo costretto tutto il tempo ad avere idee per trovare denaro. Non abbiate timore. Quando un individuo deve cavarsela, se la caverà ~ Colette, #NFDB
1407:When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour. ~ Ben Kingsley, #NFDB
1408:When your organization is growing 300 percent per year, you might have to promote people before they’re ready and then swap them out if they sink rather than swim. ~ Reid Hoffman, #NFDB
1409:During Hell Week, each candidate sleeps only about four total hours but runs more than two hundred miles and does physical training for more than twenty hours per day. ~ Mark Owen, #NFDB
1410:Gli animali della terra esistono per se stessi. Non sono stati fatti per gli umani, così come i negri non sono stati fatti per i bianchi, né le donne per gli uomini ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
1411:Gli bastò un interrogatorio insidioso, prima a lui e poi alla madre, per constatare un'ennesima volta che i sintomi dell'amore sono gli stessi del colera. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
1412:Have you ever noticed that, though we breed, raise, and kill ten billion animals per year, most of us never see even a single part of the process of meat production? ~ Melanie Joy, #NFDB
1413:I can assure you that buying leases for x and selling them for 5x or 10x is a lot more profitable than trying to produce gas at $5 or $6 per million cubic feet. ~ Aubrey McClendon, #NFDB
1414:La felicità assomiglia a delle vacanze in riva al mare in un'estate piovosa, dove solo l'ultima giornata è stata bella, e questo è sufficiente per rimpiangerle. ~ Ir ne N mirovsky, #NFDB
1415:La vita non è fatta solo di doveri, di nobili sogni. È fatta anche di piaceri. E il solo compenso per l'assenza di certi piaceri è illuderci d'avere una missione. ~ Oriana Fallaci, #NFDB
1416:The caravan headed for the sky; it steered straight onward. Now, at last, Per Hansa had time to look about him and rejoice in what he saw... All he saw was beautiful ~ O E R lvaag, #NFDB
1417:The guards stood shoulder to shoulder: six Levites per day on the east, four per day on the north and on the south, and two at a time at the storehouse. At the ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
1418:Adesso che son qui, ad analizzarmi, sono colto da un dubbio: che io forse abbia amato tanto la sigaretta per poter riversare su di essa la colpa della mia incapacità? ~ Italo Svevo, #NFDB
1419:Age, per se, may claim tenderness and pity, but not respect; that only comes when the years have brought humanity and wisdom and the experience that worketh hope. ~ Margaret Deland, #NFDB
1420:An acre of windy prairie could produce between $4,000 and 10,000 worth of electricity per year - which is far more than the value of the land's crop of corn or wheat. ~ Denis Hayes, #NFDB
1421:Dubito che Clary non pensi di poter morire: credo solo che, proprio come sei sempre stata tu, anche lei sia convinta che esistano cose per cui vale la pena farlo. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1422:Le parole che hanno avvelenato il cuore di un figlio, pronunciate per meschinità o per ignoranza, si sedimentano nella memoria e lasciano un marchio indelebile. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
1423:One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year. ~ Clayton M Christensen, #NFDB
1424:Per un istante le sue palpebre fluttuarono e Ben vide, o credette di vedere, la Susan che aveva visto per la prima volta al parco a leggere il suo libro. Era finita. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1425:Principalmente non si mangia mai da soli.
Il cibo è determinante alla comunicazione tra le persone. Il cibo e la famiglia, per questo ne ho fatto un simbolo. ~ Banana Yoshimoto,#NFDB
1426:The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly. ~ Bjorn Lomborg, #NFDB
1427:Almost 70 per cent of your fitness battle is won the day you realise what your body needs and when. I've made my own diets, and I decide for myself what works for me. ~ Arjun Rampal, #NFDB
1428:Aveva un sorriso forzato e si stava scervellando per trovare qualcosa da dire, senza rinvenire altro nella sua povera zucca che Kleenex usati e pezzi di bigiotteria. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1429:Esistono alcuni uomini che entrano nella vita di una donna e la mandano all'aria per sempre. Joseph Morelli l'ha fatto a me - non per sempre, ma di tanto in tanto. ~ Janet Evanovich, #NFDB
1430:[...] Fu in quell'occasione che mi convinsi che niente potesse fermarla, e che anzi ogni sua disobbedienza avesse sbocchi che per la meraviglia toglievano il fiato. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
1431:indigenous population you ask? Well, 40 per cent of the toerags live in poverty and a packet of fish fingers will cost you eight and a half quid. What a fucking result. ~ John Niven, #NFDB
1432:La loro vicinanza non si sarebbe spezzata, ma flessa e distesa per assumere una nuova forma. Avrebbe dovuto imparare a conviverci. Un giorno. Ma adesso non ancora. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
1433:La vendetta era qualcosa che Zarek conosceva fin troppo bene. In suo nome aveva perfino venduto l'anima. Poteva biasimare il demone per aver fatto la stessa cosa? ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1434:Motherhood had primed me to anticipate unlikely worst-case scenarios, and I tried to reassure myself that my internal disaster sensor was on overdrive, as per usual. ~ Camille Pag n, #NFDB
1435:Ho personalmente sezionato la lingua, e benché non abbia trovato muscoli specifici per i pettegolezzi, questo sembra lo scopo principale di quell'organo-almeno a corte. ~ Karen Essex, #NFDB
1436:[la vendetta] è il solo farmaco che ci sia contro il dolore, tutto quello che si è trovato per non impazzire, è la droga con cui ci rendono capaci di combattere. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
1437:Ma voglio morire come un fottuto fuoco d'artificio, compare. Non ho scelto questa vita per poi spegnermi come un lumino, non ho fatto anni di galera per morire da coglione. ~ Wu Ming, #NFDB
1438:Mio padre dice sempre che, se fossimo pronti a riconoscere le nostre mancanze come lo siamo a scusarci per qualcun altro, la società farebbe realmente dei progressi. ~ Helen Simonson, #NFDB
1439:Non v'è contributo migliore di un fermo proposito per tranquillizzare la mente, di un obiettivo, cioè, su cui l'anima fissi il suo sguardo intellettivo. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
1440:Quella nave, pensò lo scrittore, si chiamava vecchiaia. Nessuno in particolare desiderava salirvi, ma le cabine erano piene. Anche il pontile d’attracco se per questo. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1441:Se ne andò lasciando aperta la porta - camminava un po' di sbieco, come se dovesse infilarsi in uno spazio stretto e lo facesse per fuggire da ogni cosa che era. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
1442:the frame that has traditionally been used in the United States—miles per gallon—provides very poor guidance to the decisions of both individuals and policy makers. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1443:The IMF has lowered its forecast for China’s economy this year from 7.1 per cent growth to 6.8 per cent, in large part because of the slowdown in property and investment. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1444:Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents. ~ John Crowe Ransom, #NFDB
1445:typically a cup of brewed coffee is 1.3–1.5 per cent dissolved coffee and the rest is water. With espresso, the ratio may be closer to 8–12 per cent dissolved coffee. ~ James Hoffman, #NFDB
1446:Uno va dal prossimo perché cerca se stesso, e l'altro perché vorrebbe perdersi. Il vostro cattivo amore per voi stessi fa della solitudine una prigione per voi. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1447:Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950. Since ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
1448:Fino ad oggi gli uomini e le loro opere sono stati un flagello per i pianeti. La natura reagisce ai flagelli: li elimina o li assorbe per incorporarli nel suo sistema. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1449:I owe my sucess in one per cent to my talent, in ten per cent to luck, and in ninety per cent to hard word. Work, work, and more work is the secret to success. ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski, #NFDB
1450:Le donne romantiche, riflettei: non pensano mai al male che fanno in quella loro forsennata ricerca di esperienze forti. In quella loro infatuazione per la libertà.! ~ Patrick McGrath, #NFDB
1451:Mentre l'ultimo velo le si alzava dagli occhi, decise che se Lucas era gay allora lei si sarebbe sottoposta a un'operazione per cambiare sesso. Ne valeva la pena. ~ Josephine Angelini, #NFDB
1452:No tinc altra autoritat que aquesta: la d'haver-me apassionat, fins a l'obsessió, per la vida i el destí del meu poble. Potser és l'única passió noble que reconec en mi. ~ Joan Fuster, #NFDB
1453:Se sei un uomo di qualità, fonda la tua dimora, ama la tua sposa con passione, rendila felice per tutta la vita. Una donna dal cuore felice controlla l'energia vitale ~ Christian Jacq, #NFDB
1454:Si perse in quelle iridi verdi e le sembrò di averlo conosciuto in un'altra vita, e di averlo atteso fino ad allora per trovare lo scopo dell'esistenza nel suo sguardo ~ Ryan Winfield, #NFDB
1455:We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous. ~ George Will, #NFDB
1456:Yağmur, doğanın sanatıdır; şemsiye, insanın sanatıdır! Yağmurlu bir havada şemsiyenle dolaştığında iki farklı sanatın birleşimi olan bir süper sanatla dolaşırsın! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1457:Addendum: Some selected examples of SCP-1442-1, once decrypted: hello i like your logo i'm est. 1984/$324 per share/Boston HQ you? you bought 2.6% of me why do you like me? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1458:Gente in fuga dallo spavento che ha lasciato dietro di sé... le capitano cose strane, alcune tristemente crudeli ed altre così belle da riaccendere per sempre la fede. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1459:I don't believe in capital per se or a priori but I do occasionally believe in personal capital vis-a- vis psychic energy exchange. I use the word "capital" only poetically. ~ Kool A D, #NFDB
1460:Il mondo moderno è un disastro per chi si diletta a scrivere haiku: quante sillabe ci sono in «generatore elettrico»? Nove? Non ci starebbe neanche nel secondo verso. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
1461:Mia madre non voleva che i libri cadessero nelle mie mani. Non aveva previsto che io potessi cadere nei libri, che mi infilassi dentro di loro per stare al sicuro. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
1462:Per tutta risposta Mosè smise di bere quel nettare russo per guardarlo bene in faccia.
"Ciao vecchio finocchio", lo salutò. E poi ricominciò a bere e ad ubriacarsi. ~ Gerald Durrell,#NFDB
1463:Pickups, S.U.V.'s, vans and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon. Converting those should be our first priority. ~ Andy Grove, #NFDB
1464:The issue of power is not bound to power per se, but often depends on the people themselves, to what extent they unconsciously encourage this power and its structures. ~ Mitra Farahani, #NFDB
1465:A volte si deve semplicemente aver pazienza. Se una cosa non va, bisogna lasciarla perdere per un po'. Si dà così alla vita spazio perchè trovi da sola una via d'uscita. ~ Kader Abdolah, #NFDB
1466:E quel che è peggio, è che le gride ci sono, stampate, per gastigarli: e non già gride senza costrutto; fatte benissimo [...]. E dice: sia chi si sia, vili e plebi. ~ Alessandro Manzoni, #NFDB
1467:He that sells upon Credit expects to lose 5 per Cent. By bad Debts; therefore he charges, on all he sells upon Credit, an Advance that shall make up that Deficiency. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
1468:I'm self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900 per cent, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes. ~ Bjork, #NFDB
1469:I'm self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900 per cent, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes. ~ Bj rk, #NFDB
1470:In fact, the average unbanked family with an annual income of around $25,000 spends about $2,400 per year, almost 10 percent of its income, on financial transactions. ~ Mehrsa Baradaran, #NFDB
1471:La forza dell'eremita si misura non tanto da quanto lontano è andato a stare, ma dalla poca distanza che gli basta per staccarsi dalla città, senza mai perderla di vista ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1472:[...] lei, che Ross conosceva tanto bene, che non aveva niente di particolare, nessun vestito carino, né cipria né trucchi, che non aveva alcun segreto per lui. [...]". ~ Winston Graham, #NFDB
1473:No he estat tan feliç en tota la meva vida. No vaig sentir tanta joia […] ni quan vares dir «Sí, ho vull» i em vaig adonar que, d'alguna manera, et tindria per sempre. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
1474:Non so come feci quel giorno a tornare a Canville-la-Rocque; ci sono degli automatismi per la guida; ci sono degli automatismi, a quanto pare, più o meno per tutto. ~ Michel Houellebecq, #NFDB
1475:Spesso, per portarci alla perdizione, i ministri delle tenebre ci dicono il vero; ci seducono con oneste inezie per precipitarci poi a tradimento nei mali estremi. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1476:There are evil circumstances and environments, not evil per se. But here I sense the actions of a truly darkened mind. Wallander reached for Svedberg’s pocket calendar ~ Henning Mankell, #NFDB
1477:The reason we tend to support Republicans is they're taking us toward the cliff at only 70 miles per hour miles an hour and the Democrats are taking us 100 miles an hour. ~ Charles Koch, #NFDB
1478:Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it's always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude. ~ Martin McDonagh, #NFDB
1479:...you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember. ~ Per Petterson, #NFDB
1480:A ogni buon conto, il mio consiglio a chiunque desideri ritrovare se stesso è di rimanere esattamente dov'è. Altrimenti rischia davvero di perdersi una volta per tutte. ~ Jostein Gaarder, #NFDB
1481:Era la desigualtat el que feia que els estudis fossin molt penosos per a alguns (per a mi, per exemple), gairebé una diversió per a d'altres (per al Pietro, per exemple) ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
1482:for myself, the past per se holds little interest, and the present offers only the profound malaise of a culture increasingly devoid of the protocols of self-reflection. ~ Patricia Hampl, #NFDB
1483:In this time of national crises...per haps we would do well to spend a few minutes in considering projects which grace and embellish the earth, instead of shaking it. ~ Hubert H Humphrey, #NFDB
1484:It has been conservatively estimated that Victoria wrote an average of two and a half thousand words per day during her reign, a total of approximately sixty million words. ~ Julia Baird, #NFDB
1485:Maybe it was just my imagination, but before Alex went down the ladder, she gave me a look like You okay? Or maybe she was just wondering why I was so weird, as per usual. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1486:Mille anni di guerra, disse Antonio Setzu. Questo furono per noi i romani, mille anni di guerra. Non quotidiana, per fortuna. Con pause anche lunghe di pace.
(pag. 97) ~ Sergio Atzeni,#NFDB
1487:Non c'è niente di più pericoloso [...] che sottovalutare il proprio avversario, ignorare la sua logica e, tanto per negargli ogni singola ragione, definirlo un «pazzo». ~ Tiziano Terzani, #NFDB
1488:Penso che dovremmo essere uomini prima di essere sudditi. Non è da augurarsi che l'uomo coltivi il rispetto per le leggi ma piuttosto che rispetti ciò che è giusto. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1489:È senza dubbio una disgrazia per un uomo che deve procurarsi da vivere, nascere con una natura realmente nobile. Un animo elevato condurrà un uomo all’ospizio di mendicità. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
1490:I'm not an activist per se, but I have strong feelings about things. People can jump on celebrities for being ill-informed or naive, but I've got a right to say what I believe ~ Ed Harris, #NFDB
1491:«La gente si innamora del proprio dolore al punto che non riesce più ad abbandonarlo. Lo stesso vale per le storie che racconta. Siamo noi stessi a tenerci in trappola». ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
1492:Look at the figure for salt per 100g • More than 1.5g salt is high (0.6g sodium) • 0.3g -1.5g salt is medium (0.1-0.6g sodium) • Less than 0.3g salt is low (0.1g sodium) (NHS) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1493:Ma adesso era chiaro, lei aveva ragione e io torto. Nino non fuggiva affatto da suo padre per paura di diventare come lui, Nino era già suo padre e non voleva ammetterlo. ~ Elena Ferrante, #NFDB
1494:Qui està disposat a morir per un ideal, està, en el fons, igualment disposat a matar per l’ideal. Totes les doctrines que comencen amb uns màrtirs acaben amb una inquisició. ~ Joan Fuster, #NFDB
1495:Rebecca non disse nulla, ma si buttò fra le braccia di Jasper Gwyn, il solo posto al mondo in cui, aveva deciso, sarebbe stato giusto piangere e non smettere per ore. ~ Alessandro Baricco, #NFDB
1496:The price of imported oil in the US doubled between summer 2003 and summer 2005, reducing consumers' purchasing power by more than 1 per cent of gross domestic product. ~ Martin Feldstein, #NFDB
1497:a prosperous country with higher wage rates per unit of time may have lower labor costs per unit of output than a Third World country where workers are not paid nearly as much. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1498:Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a snob. I don’t have a problem with Applebee’s per se. But I think we can all agree, as a civilized society, that lives shouldn’t change there. ~ Matthew Norman, #NFDB
1499:Due artisti nella stessa casa potrebbero essere troppi. Qualcuno deve occuparsi dell’aspetto pratico delle cose, eh, Willie? Ci vuole gente di tutti i tipi per fare il mondo. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
1500:E' curioso a vedere che quasi tutti gli uomini che valgono molto hanno le maniere semplici; e che quasi sempre le maniere semplici sono prese per indizio di poco valore. ~ Giacomo Leopardi, #NFDB
3170 Integral Yoga
1231 Poetry
300 Occultism
254 Philosophy
185 Christianity
170 Fiction
130 Yoga
92 Psychology
73 Mysticism
38 Science
34 Hinduism
30 Philsophy
23 Education
22 Mythology
21 Kabbalah
20 Theosophy
17 Sufism
16 Integral Theory
13 Buddhism
8 Cybernetics
7 Zen
6 Baha i Faith
2 Taoism
1 Thelema
1 Alchemy
1660 The Mother
1468 Sri Aurobindo
976 Satprem
519 Nolini Kanta Gupta
159 Walt Whitman
138 Aleister Crowley
136 William Wordsworth
103 H P Lovecraft
91 Carl Jung
81 Omar Khayyam
73 Percy Bysshe Shelley
68 James George Frazer
66 Jalaluddin Rumi
63 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
62 Friedrich Nietzsche
60 Plotinus
57 Sri Ramakrishna
55 Robert Browning
50 John Keats
43 Jorge Luis Borges
41 William Butler Yeats
37 Swami Krishnananda
34 Swami Vivekananda
34 Saint Augustine of Hippo
33 A B Purani
32 Friedrich Schiller
31 Lucretius
30 Ralph Waldo Emerson
30 Rabindranath Tagore
29 Saint Teresa of Avila
29 Hakim Sanai
29 Aldous Huxley
28 Anonymous
27 Saint John of Climacus
25 Rudolf Steiner
24 Farid ud-Din Attar
23 Hafiz
23 Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
22 Vyasa
22 Rainer Maria Rilke
22 Franz Bardon
21 Rabbi Moses Luzzatto
21 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
18 Aristotle
17 Edgar Allan Poe
15 Nirodbaran
14 Ovid
12 Sarmad
12 Plato
12 Paul Richard
11 Peter J Carroll
11 George Van Vrekhem
10 Sri Ramana Maharshi
9 Li Bai
9 Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
8 Saadi
8 Norbert Wiener
8 Kabir
8 Joseph Campbell
8 Ibn Arabi
7 Mansur al-Hallaj
7 Jordan Peterson
7 Henry David Thoreau
7 Baha u llah
7 Alice Bailey
6 Thubten Chodron
6 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
6 Saint John of the Cross
6 Bokar Rinpoche
6 Al-Ghazali
5 Patanjali
5 Hsuan Chueh of Yung Chia
4 Solomon ibn Gabirol
4 Saint Francis of Assisi
4 Namdev
4 Matsuo Basho
3 R Buckminster Fuller
3 Ramprasad
3 Mirabai
3 Lewis Carroll
3 Ken Wilber
3 Jetsun Milarepa
2 Saint Hildegard von Bingen
2 Saint Clare of Assisi
2 Mahendranath Gupta
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 Jean Gebser
2 Jayadeva
2 Jacopone da Todi
2 Italo Calvino
2 H. P. Lovecraft
2 Hakuin
2 Genpo Roshi
2 Dadu Dayal
2 Chuang Tzu
2 Bulleh Shah
2 Allama Muhammad Iqbal
722 Record of Yoga
184 Prayers And Meditations
150 Whitman - Poems
144 The Synthesis Of Yoga
141 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
136 Wordsworth - Poems
120 Agenda Vol 01
108 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
103 Lovecraft - Poems
103 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
91 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
88 Agenda Vol 13
85 Magick Without Tears
82 Agenda Vol 08
78 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
76 Agenda Vol 03
75 Agenda Vol 10
73 Shelley - Poems
71 Agenda Vol 12
70 Agenda Vol 04
68 The Golden Bough
65 Agenda Vol 07
64 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
62 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
62 Agenda Vol 02
60 Agenda Vol 09
60 Agenda Vol 06
59 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
57 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
56 The Life Divine
56 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
56 Agenda Vol 11
55 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
55 Browning - Poems
55 Agenda Vol 05
50 Questions And Answers 1956
50 Letters On Yoga III
50 Keats - Poems
49 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
48 Liber ABA
48 Letters On Yoga II
47 Savitri
47 Letters On Yoga IV
41 Yeats - Poems
39 Questions And Answers 1953
38 Mysterium Coniunctionis
37 The Study and Practice of Yoga
37 Questions And Answers 1955
35 Questions And Answers 1954
33 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
32 Words Of Long Ago
32 Schiller - Poems
32 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
31 Of The Nature Of Things
30 Essays On The Gita
30 Emerson - Poems
29 The Perennial Philosophy
28 Tagore - Poems
27 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
27 The Bible
26 Letters On Poetry And Art
25 Letters On Yoga I
25 Labyrinths
25 Essays Divine And Human
24 Words Of The Mother II
24 The Practice of Psycho therapy
24 The Human Cycle
24 The Divine Comedy
23 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
22 Vishnu Purana
22 The Future of Man
22 Rilke - Poems
22 Collected Poems
22 City of God
21 On Education
21 General Principles of Kabbalah
20 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
20 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
19 The Way of Perfection
19 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
18 Poetics
18 Borges - Poems
17 On the Way to Supermanhood
16 Poe - Poems
16 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
16 Let Me Explain
16 Bhakti-Yoga
15 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
15 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
15 Isha Upanishad
14 The Secret Of The Veda
14 The Phenomenon of Man
14 Some Answers From The Mother
14 Metamorphoses
14 Aion
13 Vedic and Philological Studies
13 Twilight of the Idols
13 Theosophy
13 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
13 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
13 Faust
12 Talks
12 Raja-Yoga
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
12 Initiation Into Hermetics
11 Preparing for the Miraculous
11 Liber Null
11 Hymn of the Universe
11 Dark Night of the Soul
10 The Problems of Philosophy
10 The Practice of Magical Evocation
10 The Interior Castle or The Mansions
10 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
10 Kena and Other Upanishads
10 Hafiz - Poems
10 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
9 The Integral Yoga
9 Song of Myself
9 Rumi - Poems
9 Li Bai - Poems
9 Crowley - Poems
9 Anonymous - Poems
9 5.1.01 - Ilion
8 Words Of The Mother III
8 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
8 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
8 Goethe - Poems
8 Cybernetics
7 Walden
7 Maps of Meaning
7 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
6 Words Of The Mother I
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Blue Cliff Records
6 The Alchemy of Happiness
6 Tara - The Feminine Divine
6 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
5 The Red Book Liber Novus
5 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
5 Arabi - Poems
4 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
4 Songs of Kabir
4 Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin
4 Basho - Poems
4 Amrita Gita
3 Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit
3 The Lotus Sutra
3 The Book of Certitude
3 Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Milarepa - Poems
3 Alice in Wonderland
3 Agenda Vol 1
2 The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 The Essentials of Education
2 The Castle of Crossed Destinies
2 Symposium
2 Selected Fictions
2 Notes On The Way
2 Mansur al-Hallaj - Poems
2 God Exists
2 Chuang Tzu - Poems
2 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E
00.00 - Publishers Note B, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Like a perfume that rises straight upward without wavering,
My love goes to Thee..]
00.00 - Publishers Note, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Mother has graciously permitted the use of her sketch of the author as a frontispiece to the book.
13 January 1971
0 0.01 - Introduction, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
- and it is terribly disturbing for all those who still climb trees in the old, millennial way. perhaps it is even a heresy. Unless it is some cerebral disorder? A first man in his little clearing had to have a great deal of courage. Even this little clearing was no longer so sure. A first man is a perpetual question. What am I, then, in the midst of all that? And where is my law? What is the law? And what if there were no more laws? ... It is terrifying. Mathematics - out of order. Astronomy and biology, too, are beginning to respond to mysterious influences. A tiny point huddled in the center of the world's great clearing. But what is all this, what if I were 'mad'? And then, claws all around, a lot of claws against this uncommon creature. A first man ... is very much alone. He is quite unbearable for the pre-human 'reason.' And the surrounding tribes growled like red monkies in the twilight of Guiana.
One day, we were like this first man in the great, stridulant night of the Oyapock. Our heart was beating with the rediscovery of a very ancient mystery - suddenly, it was absolutely new to be a man amidst the diorite cascades and the pretty red and black coral snakes slithering beneath the leaves. It was even more extraordinary to be a man than our old confirmed tribes, with their infallible equations and imprescriptible biologies, could ever have dreamed. It was an absolutely uncertain 'quantum' that delightfully eluded whatever one thought of it, including perhaps what even the scholars thought of it. It flowed otherwise, it felt otherwise. It lived in a kind of flawless continuity with the sap of the giant balata trees, the cry of the macaws and the scintillating water of a little fountain. It 'understood' in a very different way. To understand was to be in everything. Just a quiver, and one was in the skin of a little iguana in distress. The skin of the world was very vast.
To be a man after rediscovering a million years was mysteriously like being something still other than man, a strange, unfinished possibility that could also be all kinds of other things. It was not in the dictionary, it was fluid and boundless - it had become a man through habit, but in truth, it was formidably virgin, as if all the old laws belonged to laggard barbarians. Then other moons began whirring through the skies to the cry of macaws at sunset, another rhythm was born that was strangely in tune with the rhythm of all, making one single flow of the world, and there we went, lightly, as if the body had never had any weight other than that of our human thought; and the stars were so near, even the giant airplanes roaring overhead seemed vain artifices beneath smiling galaxies. A man was the overwhelming Possible. He was even the great discoverer of the Possible.
Never had this precarious invention had any other aim through millions of species than to discover that which surpassed his own species, perhaps the means to change his species - a light and lawless species. After rediscovering a million years in the great, rhythmic night, a man was still something to be invented. It was the invention of himself, where all was not yet said and done.
And then, and then ... a singular air, an incurable lightness, was beginning to fill his lungs. And what if we were a fable? And what are the means?
--
Would Matter and Spirit meet, then, in a third PHYSIOLOGICAL position that would perhaps be at last the position of Man rediscovered, the something that had for so long fought and suffered in quest of becoming its own species? She was the great Possible at the beginning of man. Mother is our fable come true. 'All is possible' was her first open sesame.
Yes, She was in the midst of a spiritual 'horde,' for the pioneer of a new species must always fight against the best of the old: the best is the obstacle, the snare that traps us in its old golden mire.
--
'Something else' is ominous, perilous, disrupting - it is quite unbearable for all those who resemble the old beast. The story of the Pondicherry 'Ashram' is the story of an old clan ferociously clinging to its 'spiritual' privileges, as others clung to the muscles that had made them kings among the great apes. It is armed with all the piousness and all the reasonableness that had made logical man so 'infallible' among his less cerebral brothers. The spiritual brain is probably the worst obstacle to the new species, as were the muscles of the old orangutan for this fragile stranger who no longer climbed so well in the trees and sat, pensive, at the center of a little, uncertain clearing.
There is nothing more pious than the old species. There is nothing more legal. Mother was searching for the path of the new species as much against all the virtues of the old as against all its vices or laws. For, in truth, 'Something Else' ... is something else.
We landed there, one day in February 1954, having emerged from our Guianese forest and a certain number of dead-end peripluses; we had knocked upon all the doors of the old world before reaching that point of absolute impossibility where it was truly necessary to embark into something else or once and for all put a bullet through the brain of this slightly su perior ape. The first thing that struck us was this exotic Notre Dame with its burning incense sticks, its effigies and its prostrations in immaculate white: a Church. We nearly jumped into the first train out that very evening, bound straight for the Himalayas, or the devil. But we remained near Mother for nineteen years. What was it, then, that could have held us there? We had not left Guiana to become a little saint in white or to enter some new religion. 'I did not come upon earth to found an ashram; that would have been a poor aim indeed,' She wrote in 1934. What did all this mean, then, this 'Ashram' that was already registered as the owner of a great spiritual business, and this fragile, little silhouette at the center of all these zealous worship pers? In truth, there is no better way to smother someone than to worship him: he chokes beneath the weight of worship, which moreover gives the worship per claim to ownership. 'Why do you want to worship?' She exclaimed. 'You have but to become! It is the laziness to become that makes one worship.' She wanted so much to make them
become this 'something else,' but it was far easier to worship and quiescently remain what one was.
--
She were making fun of us, then loving us in secret), She told us, 'I have the feeling that ALL we have lived, ALL we have known, ALL we have done is a perfect illusion ... When I had the spiritual ex perience that material life is an illusion, personally I found that so marvelously beautiful and happy that it was one of the most beautiful ex periences of my life, but now it is the entire spiritual structure as we have lived it that is becoming an illusion! - Not the same illusion, but an illusion far worse. And I am no baby: I have been here for forty-seven years now!' Yes, She was eighty-three years old then. And that day, we ceased being 'the enemy of our own conception of the Divine,' for this entire Divine was shattered to pieces - and we met Mother, at last. This mystery we call
Mother, for She never ceased being a mystery right to her ninety-fifth year, and to this day still, challenges us from the other side of a wall of invisibility and keeps us floundering fully in the mystery - with a smile. She always smiles. But the mystery is not solved.
--
This fabulous discovery is the whole story of the AGENDA. What is the passage? How is the path to the new species hewed open? ... Then suddenly, there, on the other side of this old millennial habit - a habit, nothing more than a habit! - of being like a man endowed with time and space and disease: an entire geometry, perfectly implacable and 'scientific' and medical; on the other side ... none of that at all! An illusion, a fantastic medical and scientific and genetic illusion:
death does not exist, time does not exist, disease does not exist, nor do 'scar' and 'far' - another way of being IN A BODY. For so many millions of years we have lived in a habit and put our own thoughts of the world and of Matter into equations. No more laws! Matter is FREE. It can create a little lizard, a chipmunk or a parrot - but it has created enough parrots. Now it is SOMETHING
--
Mother is the story of the free Earth. Free from its spiritual and scientific parrots. Free from its little ashrams as well - for there is nothing more persistent than those particular parrots.
Day after day, for seventeen years, She sat with us to tell us of her impossible odyssey. Ah, how well we now understand why She needed such an 'outlaw' and an incorrigible heretic like us to comprehend a little bit of her impossible odyssey into 'nothing.' And how well we now understand her infinite patience with us, despite all our revolts, which ultimately were only the revolts of the old species against itself. The final revolt. 'It is not a revolt against the British government which any one can easily do. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature!' Sri Aurobindo had proclaimed fifty years earlier. She listened to our grievances, we went away and we returned. We wanted no more of it and we wanted still more. It was infernal and sublime, impossible and the sole possibility in this old, asphyxiating world. It was the only place one could go to in this barbedwired, mechanized world, where Cincinnati is just as crowded and polluted as Hong Kong. The new species is the last free place in the general Prison. It is the last hope for the earth. How we listened to her little faltering voice that seemed to return from afar, afar, after having crossed spaces and seas of the mind to let its little drops of pure, crystalline words fall upon us, words that make you see. We listened to the future, we touched the other thing. It was incomprehensible and yet filled with another comprehension. It eluded us on all sides, and yet it was dazzlingly obvious. The 'other species' was really radically other, and yet it was vibrating within, absolutely recognizable, as if it were THAT we had been seeking from age to age, THAT we had been invoking through all our illuminations, one after another, in Thebes as in Eleusis as everywhere we have toiled and grieved in the skin of a man. It was for THAT we were here, for that supreme Possible in the skin of a man at last. And then her voice grew more and more frail, her breath began gasping as though She had to traverse greater and greater distances to meet us. She was so alone to beat against the walls of the old prison. Many claws were out all around. Oh, we would so quickly have cut ourself free from all this fiasco to fly away with Her into the world's future. She was so tiny, stooped over, as if crushed beneath the 'spiritual' burden that all the old surrounding species kept heaping upon her. They didn't believe, no. For them, She was ninety-five years old + so many days. Can someone become a new species all alone? They even grumbled at Her: they had had enough of this unbearable Ray that was bringing their sordid affairs into the daylight. The Ashram was slowly closing over Her. The old world wanted to make a new, golden little Church, nice and quiet. No, no one wanted TO
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The warning seems to have fallen, in the modern age, on unheeding ears. For the modern mind, being pre-eminently and uncompromisingly scientific, can entertain no doubt as to the perfect competency of science and the scientific method to seize and unveil any secret of Nature. If, it is argued, mysticism is a secret, if there is at all a truth and reality in it, then it is and must be amenable to the rules and regulations of science; for science is the revealer of Nature's secrecies.
But what is not recognised in this view of things is that there are secrecies and secrecies. The material secrecies of Nature are of one category, the mystic secrecies are of another. The two are not only disparate but incommensurable. Any man with a mind and understanding of average culture can see and handle the 'scientific' forces, but not the mystic forces.
--
The mystic truth has to be approached through the heart. "In the heart is established the Truth," says the Upanishad: it is there that is seated eternally the soul, the real being, who appears no bigger than the thumb. Even if the mind is utilised as an instrument of knowledge, the heart must be there behind as the guide and inspiration. It is precisely because, as I have just mentioned, Gargi sought to shoot uplike "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself" of which Shakespeare speaksthrough the mind alone to the highest truth that Yajnavalkya had to pull her up and give the warning that she risked losing her head if she persisted in her questioning endlessly.
For true knowledge comes of, and means, identity of being. All other knowledge may be an apprehension of things but not comprehension. In the former, the knower stands apart from the object and so can envisage only the outskirts, the contour, the surface nature; the mind is capable of this alone. But comprehension means an embracing and penetration which is possible when the knower identifies himself with the object. And when we are so identified we not merely know the object, but becoming it in our consciousness, we love it and live it.
--
For it must be understood that the heart, the mystic heart, is not the external thing which is the seat of emotion or passion; it is the secret heart that is behind, the inner heartantarhdaya of the Upanishadwhich is the centre of the individual consciousness, where all the divergent lines of that consciousness meet and from where they take their rise. That is what the Upanishad means when it says that the heart has a hundred channels which feed the human vehicle. That is the source, the fount and origin, the very substance of the true personality. Mystic knowledge the true mystic knowledge which saves and fulfilsbegins with the awakening or the entrance into this real being. This being is pure and luminous and blissful and sovereignly real, because it is a portion, a spark of the Divine Consciousness and Nature: a contact and communion with it brings automatically into play the light and the truth that are its substance. At the same time it is an uprising flame that reaches out naturally to higher domains of consciousness and manifests them through its translucid dynamism.
The knowledge that is obtained without the heart's instrumentation or co-o peration is liable to be what the Gita describes as Asuric. First of all, from the point of view of knowledge itself, it would be, as I have already said, egocentric, a product and agent of one's limited and isolated self, easily put at the service of desire and passion. This knowledge, whether rationalistic or occult, is, as it were, hard and dry in its constitution, and oftener than not, negative and destructivewi thering and blasting in its career like the desert simoom.
00.01 - The Mother on Savitri, #Sweet Mother - Harmonies of Light, #unset, #Integral Yoga
On the 18th January 1960; when a young sadhak met the Mother for a personal interview, She said to him: "I shall give you something special; be prepared." The next day, when he again met Her, She spoke in French first about how to kindle the psychic Flame and then in this connection started speaking about Sri Aurobindo`s great epic Savitri and continued to speak at length.
The sadhak, after returning from the Mother, wanted to note down immediately what She had said, but he could not do so because he felt a great hesitation due to his sense of incapacity to transcribe exactly the Mother`s own words.
After nearly seven years, however, he felt a strong urge to note down what the Mother had spoken; so in 1967 he wrote down from memory a report in French. The report was seen by the Mother and a few corrections were made by her. To another sadhak who asked Her permission to read this report She wrote: "Years ago I have spoken at length about it [Savitri] to Mona Sarkar and he has noted in French what I said. Some time back I have seen what he has written and found it correct on the whole."(4.12.1967)
On a few other occasion also, the Mother had spoken to the same sadhak on the value of reading Savitri which he had noted down afterwards. These notes have been added at the end of the main report. A few members of the Ashram had privately read this report in French, but afterwards there were many requests for its English version. A translation was therefore made in November 1967. A proposal was made to the Mother in 1972 for its publication and it was submitted to Her for approval. The Mother wanted to check the translation before permitting its publication but could check only a portion of it.
Do you read Savitri?
--
Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to meditate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs. For him who wishes to follow this path, it is a concrete help as though the Lord himself were taking you by the hand and leading you to the destined goal. And then, every question, however personal it may be, has its answer here, every difficulty finds its solution herein; indeed there is everything that is necessary for doing the Yoga.
*He has crammed the whole universe in a single book.* It is a marvellous work, magnificent and of an incomparable perfection.
You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me, *I am impelled to launch on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still, I do not know how far I shall succeed. I pray for help.* And you know what it was? It was - before beginning, I warn you in advance - it was His way of speaking, so full of divine humility and modesty. He never... *asserted Himself*. And the day He actually began it, He told me: *I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.* And once having started, He wrote page after page without intermission, as though it were a thing already complete up there and He had only to transcribe it in ink down here on these pages.
In truth, the entire form of Savitri has descended "en masse" from the highest region and Sri Aurobindo with His genius only arranged the lines - in a su perb and magnificent style. Sometimes entire lines were revealed and He has left them intact; He worked hard, untiringly, so that the inspiration could come from the highest possible summit. And what a work He has created! Yes, it is a true creation in itself. It is an unequalled work. Everything is there, and it is put in such a simple, such a clear form; verses perfectly harmonious, limpid and eternally true. My child, I have read so many things, but I have never come across anything which could be compared with Savitri. I have studied the best works in Greek, Latin, English and of course French literature, also in German and all the great creations of the West and the East, including the great epics; but I repeat it, I have not found anywhere anything comparable with Savitri. All these literary works seems to me empty, flat, hollow, without any deep reality - apart from a few rare exceptions, and these too represent only a small fraction of what Savitri is. What grandeur, what amplitude, what reality: it is something immortal and eternal He has created. I tell you once again there is nothing like in it the whole world. Even if one puts aside the vision of the reality, that is, the essential substance which is the heart of the inspiration, and considers only the lines in themselves, one will find them unique, of the highest classical kind. What He has created is something man cannot imagine. For, everything is there, everything.
It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide to Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practice Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. Surely, if one sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one will reach finally the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge, and I repeat this, the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound, which is OM.
--
These are ex periences lived by Him, realities, supracosmic truths. He ex perienced all these as one ex periences joy or sorrow, physically. He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighborhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery to brea the the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like Him. He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. It is something that has never happened before, He is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown, so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Su permind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is His whole Yoga of transformation, and this Yoga appears now for the first time in the earth-consciousness.
And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it, for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual ex periences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, - it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.
--
My child, every day you are going to read Savitri; read pro perly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is through the heart. I tell you, if you try to really concentrate with this aspiration you can light the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness; as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness; as if Savitri were a being, a real guide. I tell you, whoever, wanting to practice Yoga, tries sincerely and feels the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practice it anywhere. For him Savitri alone will be the guide, for all that he needs he will find Savitri. If he remains very quiet when before a difficulty, or when he does not know where to turn to go forward and how to overcome obstacles, for all these hesitations and incertitudes which overwhelm us at every moment, he will have the necessary indications, and the necessary concrete help. If he remains very calm, open, if he aspires sincerely, always he will be as if lead by the hand. If he has faith, the will to give himself and essential sincerity he will reach the final goal.
Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, Tapasya, Sadhana, everything, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo reveals there for us. This is the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble. - 5 November 1967
00.02 - Mystic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We can make a distinction here between two types of expression which we have put together indiscriminately, figures and symbols. Figures, we may say, are those that are constructed by the rational mind, the intellect; they are mere metaphors and similes and are not organically related to the thing ex perienced, but put round it as a robe that can be dropped or changed without affecting the ex perience itself. Thus, for example, when the Upanishad says, tmnam rathinam viddhi (Know that the soul is the master of the chariot who sits within it) or indriyi haynhu (The senses, they say, are the horses), we have here only a comparison or analogy that is common and natural to the poetic manner. The particular figure or simile used is not inevitable to the idea or ex perience that it seeks to express, its part and parcel. On the other hand, take this Upanishadic perception: hirayamayena patrea satyasyphitam mukham (The face of the Truth lies hidden under the golden orb). Here the symbol is not mere analogy or comparison, a figure; it is one with the very substance of the ex perience the two cannot be separated. Or when the Vedas speak of the kindling of the Fire, the rushing of the waters or the rise of the Dawn, the images though taken from the material world, are not used for the sake of mere comparison, but they are the embodiments, the living forms of truths ex perienced in another world.
When a Mystic refers to the Solar Light or to the Fire the light, for example, that struck down Saul and transformed him into Saint Paul or the burning bush that visited Moses, it is not the physical or material object that he means and yet it is that in a way. It is the materialization of something that is fundamentally not material: some movement in an inner consciousness precipitates itself into the region of the senses and takes from out of the material the form commensurable with its nature that it finds there.
--
Thus there is a great diversity of symbols. At the one end is the mere metaphor or simile or allegory ('figure', as we have called it) and at the other end is the symbol identical with the thing symbolized. And upon this inner character of the symbol depends also to a large extent its range and scope. There are symbols which are universal and intimately ingrained in the human consciousness itself. Mankind has used them in all ages and climes almost in the same sense and significance. There are others that are limited to peoples and ages. They are made out of forms that are of local and temporal interest and importance. Their significances vary according to time and place. Finally, there are symbols which are true of the individual consciousness only; they depend on personal peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, on one's environment and upbringing and education.
Man being an embodied soul, his external consciousness (what the Upanishad calls jgrat) is the milieu in which his soul-ex periences naturally manifest and find their play. It is the forms and movements of that consciousness which clo the and give a concrete habitation and name to perceptions on the subtler ranges of the inner existence. If the ex periences on these planes are to be presented to the conscious memory and to the brain-mind and made communicable to others through speech, this is the inevitable and natural process. Symbols are a translation in mental and sensual (and vocal) terms of ex periences that are beyond the mind and the sense and the speech and yet throw a kind of echoing vibrations upon these lesser levels.
***
0 0.02 - Topographical Note, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
From the time of Sri Aurobindo's departure (1950) until 1957, we have only a few notes and fragments or rare statements noted from memory. These are the only landmarks of this period, along with Mother's Questions and Answers from her talks at the Ashram Playground. A few of these conversations have been reproduced here insofar as they mark stages of the Supramental
Action.
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Algeria and in France or of her current ex periences; and gradually, She opened the mind of the rebellious and materialistic Westerner that we were and made us understand the laws of the worlds, the play of forces, the working of past lives - especially this latter, which was an important factor in the difficulties with which we were struggling at that time and which periodically made us abscond.
Mother would be seated in this rather medieval-looking chair with its high, carved back, her feet on a little tabouret, while we sat on the floor, on a slightly faded carpet, conquered and seduced, revolted and never satisfied - but nevertheless, very interested. Treasures, never noted down, were lost until, with the cunning of the Sioux, we succeeded in making Mother consent to the presence of a tape recorder. But even then, and for a long time thereafter, She carefully made us erase or delete in our notes all that concerned Her rather too personally - sometimes we disobeyed Her.
But finally we were able to convince Her of the value inherent in keeping a chronicle of the route.
--
From 1960, the Agenda took its final shape arid grew for thirteen years, until May 1973, filling thirteen volumes in all (some six thousand pages), with a change of setting in March 1962 at the time of the Great Turning in Mother's yoga when She permanently retired to her room upstairs, as had Sri Aurobindo in 1926. The interviews then took place high up in this large room carpeted in golden wool, like a ship's stateroom, amidst the rustling of the Cop per Pod tree and the cawing of crows. Mother would sit in a low rosewood chair, her face turned towards Sri Aurobindo's tomb, as though She were wearing down the distance separating that world from our own. Her voice had become like that of a child, one could hear her laughter. She always laughed, this Mother. And then her long silences. Until the day the disciples closed her door on us. It was May 19, 1973. We did not want to believe it. She was alone, just as we were suddenly alone. Slowly, painfully, we had to discover the why of this rupture. We understood nothing of the jealousies of the old species, we did not yet realize that they were becoming the 'owners' of Mother - of the Ashram, of Auroville, of
Sri Aurobindo, of everything - and that the new world was going to be denatured into a new
0 0.03 - 1951-1957. Notes and Fragments, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The lack of the earth's receptivity and the behavior of Sri Aurobindo's disciples 1 are largely responsible for what happened to his body. But one thing is certain: the great misfortune that has just beset us in no way affects the truth of his teaching. All he said is perfectly true and remains so.
Time and the course of events will make this abundantly clear.
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
My suggestion is that the dog is a symbol of the keen sight of Intuition, the unfailing perception of direct knowledge. With this clue the Upanishadic story becomes quite sensible and clear and not mere abracadabra. To the aspirant for Knowledge came first a purified power of direct understanding, an Intuition of fundamental value, and this brought others of the same species in its train. They were all linked together organically that is the significance of the circle, and formed a rhythmic utterance and expression of the supreme truth (Om). It is also to be noted that they came and met at dawn to chant, the Truth. Dawn is the opening and awakening of the consciousness to truths that come from above and beyond.
It may be asked why the dog has been chosen as the symbol of Intuition. In the Vedas, the cow and the horse also play a large part; even the donkey and the frog have their own assigned roles. These objects are taken from the environment of ordinary life, and are those that are most familiar to the external consciousness, through which the inner ex periences have to express themselves, if they are to be expressed at all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly speaking, however, symbols are not chosen in a subtle or spiritual ex perience, that is to say, they are not arbitrarily selected and constructed by the conscious intelligence. They form part of a dramatization (to use a term of the Freudian psychology of dreams), a psychological alchemy, whose method and process and rationale are very obscure, which can be penetrated only by the vision of a third eye.
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From the psychological standpoint, the four oblations are movements or reactions of consciousness in its urge towards the utterance and expression of Divine Truth. Like some other elements in the cosmic play, these also form a quartetcaturvyha and work together for a common purpose in view of a perfect and all-round result.
Svh is the offering and invocation. One must dedicate everything to the Divine, cast all one has or does into the Fire of Aspiration that blazes up towards the Most High, and through the tongue of that one-pointed flame call on the Divinity.
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Of the three fires one is the upholderhe who gives the firm foundation, the stable house where the Sacrifice is performed and Truth realised; the second is the Knower, often called in the Veda jtaved, who guides and directs; and the third the Doer, the effective Power, the driving Energyvaivnara.
V. The Five Great Elements
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Water represents the next rung the vital world, the world life-force (pra). Physiologically also we know that water is the element forming three-fourths of the constituents of a living body and that dead and dry are synonymous terms; it is the medium in which the living cells dwell and through which they draw their sustenance. Water is the veritable sap of lifeit is the emblem of life itself. The principle it represents is that of movement, continuity, perpetuity.
Fire represents the Heart. It is that which gives the inner motive to the forces of life, it is the secret inspiration and aspiration that drive the movements of life. It is the heat of consciousness, the ardour of our central being that lives in the Truth and accepts nothing, nothing but the Truth. It is the pure and primal energy of our divine essence, driving ever upward and onward life's course of evolution.
Air is Mind, the world of thought, of conscious formation; it is where life-movements are taken up and given a shape or articulate formula for an organised expression. The forms here have not, however, the concrete rigidity of Matter, but are pliant and variable and fluidin fact, they are more in the nature of possibilities, rather than actualities. The Vedic Maruts are thought-gods, and lndra (the Luminous Mind), their king, is called the Fashioner of perfect forms.
Ether or Space is the infinitude of the Spirit, the limitless Presence that dwells in and yet transcends the body, the life the heart and the mind.
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The Science of the Five Agnis (Fires), as propounded by Pravahan, explains and illustrates the process of the birth of the body, the passage of the soul into earth existence. It describes the advent of the child, the building of the physical form of the human being. The process is conceived of as a sacrifice, the usual symbol with the Vedic Rishis for the expression of their vision and perception of universal processes of Nature, physical and psychological. Here, the child IS said to be the final fruit of the sacrifice, the different stages in the process being: (i) Soma, (ii) Rain, (iii) Food, (iv) Semen, (v) Child. Soma means Rasaphysically the principle of water, psychologically the 'principle of delightand symbolises and constitutes the very soul and substance of life. Now it is said that these five principles the fundamental and constituent elementsare born out of the sacrifice, through the oblation or offering to the five Agnis. The first Agni is Heaven or the Sky-God, and by offering to it one's faith and one's ardent desire, one calls into manifestation Soma or Rasa or Water, the basic principle of life. This water is next offered to the second Agni, the Rain-God, who sends down Rain. Rain, again, is offered to the third Agni, the Earth, who brings forth Food. Food is, in its turn, offered to the fourth Agni, the Father or Male, who elaborates in himself the generating fluid.
Finally, this fluid is offered to the fifth Agni, the Mother or the Female, who delivers the Child.
The biological process, described in what may seem to be crude and mediaeval terms, really reflects or echoes a more subtle and psychological process. The images used form perhaps part of the current popular notion about the matter, but the esoteric sense goes beyond the outer symbols. The sky seems to be the far and tenuous region where the soul rests and awaits its next birthit is the region of Soma, the own Home of Bliss and Immortality. Now when the time or call comes, the soul stirs and journeys down that is the Rain. Next, it enters the earth atmosphere and clothes itself with the earth consciousness. Then it waits and calls for the formation of the material body, first by the contri bution of the father and then by that of the mother; when these two unite and the material body is formed, the soul incarnates.
Apart from the question whether the biological phenomenon described is really a symbol and a cloak for another order of reality, and even taking it at its face value, what is to be noted here is the idea of a cosmic cycle, and a cosmic cycle that proceeds through the principle of sacrifice. If it is asked what there is wonderful or particularly spiritual in this rather naf description of a very commonplace happening that gives it an honoured place in the Upanishads, the answer is that it is wonderful to see how the Upanishadic Rishi takes from an event its local, temporal and personal colour and incorporates it in a global movement, a cosmic cycle, as a limb of the Universal Brahman. The Upanishads contain passages which a puritanical mentality may perhaps describe as 'pornographic'; these have in fact been put by some on the Index expurgatorius. But the ancients saw these matters with other eyes and through another consciousness.
We have, in modern times, a movement towards a more conscious and courageous, knowledge of things that were taboo to puritan ages. Not to shut one's eyes to the lower, darker and hidden strands of our nature, but to bring them out into the light of day and to face them is the best way of dealing with such elements, which otherwise, if they are repressed, exert an unhealthy influence on the mind and nature. The Upanishadic view runs on the same lines, but, with the unveiling and the natural and not merely naturalisticdelineation of these under-worlds (concerning sex and food), it endows them with a perspective sub specie aeternitatis. The sexual function, for example, is easily equated to the double movement of ascent and descent that is secreted in nature, or to the combined action of Purusha and Prakriti in the cosmic Play, or again to the hidden fount of Delight that holds and moves the universe. In this view there is nothing merely secular and profane, but all is woven into the cosmic spiritual whole; and man is taught to consider and to mould all his movementsof soul and mind and bodyin the light and rhythm of that integral Reality.11
The central secret of the transfigured consciousness lies, as we have already indicated, in the mystic rite or law of Sacrifice. It is the one basic, fundamental, universal Law that upholds and explains the cosmic movement, conformity to which brings to the thrice-bound human being release and freedom. Sacrifice consists essentially of two elements or processes: (i) The offering or self giving of the lower reality to the higher, and, as a consequence, an answering movement of (ii) the descent of the higher into the lower. The lower offered to the higher means the lower sublimated and integrated into the higher; and the descent of the higher into the lower means the incarnation of the former and the fulfilment of the latter. The Gita elaborates the same idea when it says that by Sacrifice men increase the gods and the gods increase men and by so increasing each other they attain the supreme Good. Nothing is, nothing is done, for its own sake, for an egocentric satisfaction; all, even movements relating to food and to sex should be dedicated to the Cosmic BeingVisva Purusha and that alone received which comes from Him.
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Now, this is the All, the Universal. One has to realise it and possess in one's consciousness. And that can be done only in one way: one has to identify oneself with it, be one with it, become it. Thus by losing one's individuality one lives the life universal; the small lean separate life is enlarged and moulded in the rhythm of the Rich and the Vast. It is thus that man shares in the consciousness and energy that inspire and move and sustain the cosmos. The Upanishad most emphatically enjoins that one must not decry this cosmic godhead or deny any of its elements, not even such as are a taboo to the puritan mind. It is in and through an unimpaired global consciousness that one attains the All-Life and lives uninterruptedly and perennially: Sarvamanveti jyok jvati.
Still the Upanishad says this is not the final end. There is yet a higher status of reality and consciousness to which one has to rise. For beyond the Cosmos lies the Transcendent. The Upanishad expresses this truth and ex perience in various symbols. The cosmic reality, we have seen, is often conceived as a septenary, a unity of seven elements, principles and worlds. Further to give it its full complex value, it is considered not as a simple septet, but a threefold heptad the whole gamut, as it were, consisting of 21 notes or syllables. The Upanishad says, this number does not exhaust the entire range; I for there is yet a 22nd place. This is the world beyond the Sun, griefless and deathless, the supreme Selfhood. The Veda I also sometimes speaks of the integral reality as being represented by the number 100 which is 99 + I; in other words, 99 represents the cosmic or universal, the unity being the reality beyond, the Transcendent.
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It would be interesting to know what the five ranges or levels or movements of consciousness exactly are that make up the Universal Brahman described in this passage. It is the mystic knowledge, the Upanishad says, of the secret delight in thingsmadhuvidy. The five ranges are the five fundamental principles of delightimmortalities, the Veda would say that form the inner core of the pyramid of creation. They form a rising tier and are ruled respectively by the godsAgni, Indra, Varuna, Soma and Brahmawith their emanations and instrumental personalities the Vasus, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Maruts and the Sadhyas. We suggest that these refer to the five well-known levels of being, the modes or nodi of consciousness or something very much like them. The Upanishad speaks elsewhere of the five sheaths. The six Chakras of Tantric system lie in the same line. The first and the basic mode is the physical and the ascent from the physical: Agni and the Vasus are always intimately connected with the earth and -the earth-principles (it can be compared with the Muladhara of the Tantras). Next, second in the line of ascent is the Vital, the centre of power and dynamism of which the Rudras are the deities and Indra the presiding God (cf. Swadhishthana of the Tantras the navel centre). Indra, in the Vedas, has two aspects, one of knowledge and vision and the other of dynamic force and drive. In the first aspect he is more often considered as the Lord of the Mind, of the Luminous Mind. In the present passage, Indra is taken in his second aspect and instead of the Maruts with whom he is usually invoked has the Rudras as his agents and associates.
The third in the line of ascension is the region of Varuna and the Adityas, that is to say, of the large Mind and its lights perhaps it can be connected with Tantric Ajnachakra. The fourth is the domain of Soma and the Marutsthis seems to be the inner heart, the fount of delight and keen and sweeping aspirations the Anahata of the Tantras. The fifth is the region of the crown of the head, the domain of Brahma and the Sadhyas: it is the Overmind status from where comes the descending inflatus, the creative Maya of Brahma. And when you go beyond, you pass into the ultimate status of the Sun, the reality absolute, the Transcendent which is indescribable, unseizable, indeterminate, indeterminable, incommensurable; and once there, one never returns, neverna ca punarvartate na ca punarvartate.
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In Yajnavalkya's enumeration, however, it is to be noted, first of all, that he stresses on the number three. The principle of triplicity is of very wide application: it permeates all fields of consciousness and is evidently based upon a fundamental fact of reality. It seems to embody a truth of synthesis and comprehension, points to the order and harmony that reigns in the cosmos, the spheric music. The metaphysical, that is to say, the original principles that constitute existence are the well-known triplets: (i) the su perior: Sat, Chit, Ananda; and (ii) the inferior: Body, Life and Mindthis being a reflection or translation or concretisation of the former. We can see also here how the dual principle comes in, the twin godhead or the two gods to which Yajnavalkya refers. The same principle is found in the conception of Ardhanarishwara, Male and Female, Purusha-Prakriti. The Upanishad says 14 yet again that the One original Purusha was not pleased at being alone, so for a companion he created out of himself the original Female. The dual principle signifies creation, the manifesting activity of the Reality. But what is this one and a half to which Yajnavalkya refers? It simply means that the other created out of the one is not a wholly separate, independent entity: it is not an integer by itself, as in the Manichean system, but that it is a portion, a fraction of the One. And in the end, in the ultimate analysis, or rather synthesis, there is but one single undivided and indivisible unity. The thousands and hundreds, very often mentioned also in the Rig Veda, are not simply multiplications of the One, a graphic description of its many-sidedness; it indicates also the absolute fullness, the complete completeness (prasya pram) of the Reality. It includes and comprehends all and is a rounded totality, a full circle. The hundred-gated and the thousand-pillared cities of which the ancient Rishis chanted are formations and embodiments of consciousness human and divine, are realities whole and entire englobing all the layers and grades of consciousness.
Besides this metaphysics there is also an occult aspect in numerology of which Pythagoras was a well-known adept and in which the Vedic Rishis too seem to take special delight. The multiplication of numbers represents in a general way the principle of emanation. The One has divided and subdivided itself, but not in a haphazard way: it is not like the chaotic pulverisation of a piece of stone by hammer-blows. The process of division and subdivision follows a pattern almost as neat and methodical as a genealogical tree. That is to say, the emanations form a hierarchy. At the top, the apex of the pyramid, stands the one supreme Godhead. That Godhead is biune in respect of manifestation the Divine and his creative Power. This two-in-one reality may be considered, according to one view of creation, as dividing into three forms or aspects the well-known Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra of Hindu mythology. These may be termed the first or primary emanations.
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Man, however, is an epitome of creation. He embraces and incarnates the entire gamut of consciousness and comprises in him all beings from the highest Divinity to the lowest jinn or elf. And yet each human being in his true personality is a lineal descendant of one or other typal aspect or original personality of the one supreme Reality; and his individual character is all the more pronounced and well-defined the more organised and developed is the being. The psychic being in man is thus a direct descent, an immediate emanation along a definite line of devolution of the supreme consciousness. We may now understand and explain easily why one chooses a particular Ishta, an ideal god, what is the drive that pushes one to become a worship per of Siva or Vishnu or any other deity. It is not any rational understanding, a weighing of pros and cons and then a resultant conclusion that leads one to choose a path of religion or spirituality. It is the soul's natural call to the God, the type of being and consciousness of which it is a spark, from which it has descended, it is the secret affinity the spiritual blood-relation as it were that determines the choice and adherence. And it is this that we name Faith. And the exclusiveness and violence and bitterness which attend such adherence and which go "by the "name of partisanship, sectarianism, fanaticism etc., a;e a deformation in the ignorance on the physico-vital plane of the secret loyalty to one's source and origin. Of course, the pattern or law is not so simple and rigid, but it gives a token or typal pattern. For it must not be forgotten that the supreme source or the original is one and indivisible and in the highest integration consciousness is global and not exclusive. And the human being that attains such a status is not bound or wholly limited to one particular formation: its personality is based on the truth of im personality. And yet the two can go together: an individual can be im personal in consciousness and yet personal in becoming and true to type.
The number of gods depends on the level of consciousness on which we stand. On this material plane there are as many gods as there are bodies or individual forms (adhar). And on the supreme height there is only one God without a second. In between there are gradations of types and sub-types whose number and function vary according to the aspect of consciousness that reveals itself.
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The first boon regards the individual, that is to say, the individual identity and integrity. It asks for the maintenance of that individuality so that it may be saved from the dissolution that Death brings about. Death, of course, means the dissolution of the body, but it represents also dissolution pure and simple. Indeed death is a process which does not stop with the physical phenomenon, but continues even after; for with the body gone, the other elements of the individual organism, the vital and the mental too gradually fall off, fade and dissolve. Nachiketas wishes to secure from Death the safety and preservation of the earthly personality, the particular organisation of mind and vital based upon a recognisable physical frame. That is the first necessity for the aspiring mortalfor, it is said, the body is the first instrument for the working out of one's life ideal. But man's true personality, the real individuality lies beyond, beyond the body, beyond the life, beyond the mind, beyond the triple region that Death lords it over. That is the divine world, the Heaven of the immortals, beyond death and beyond sorrow and grief. It is the hearth secreted in the inner heart where burns the Divine Fire, the God of Life Everlasting. And this is the nodus that binds together the threefold status of the manifested existence, the body, the life and the mind. This triplicity is the structure of name and form built out of the bricks of ex perience, the kiln, as it were, within which burns the Divine Agni, man's true soul. This soul can be reached only when one exceeds the bounds and limitations of the triple cord and ex periences one's communion and identity with all souls and all existence. Agni is the secret divinity within, within the individual and within the world; he is the Immanent Divine, the cosmic godhead that holds together and marshals all the elements and components, all the principles that make up the manifest universe. He it is that has entered into the world and created facets of his own reality in multiple forms: and it is he that lies secret in the human being as the immortal soul through all its adventure of life and death in the series of incarnations in terrestrial evolution. The adoration and realisation of this Immanent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore, Agni, the master of the psychic being, is called jtaveds, he who knows the births, all the transmigrations from life to life.
The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature of that thing? What is there outside creation, outside manifestation, outside Maya, to use a latter day term? Is there existence or non-existence (utter dissolution or extinctionDeath in his supreme and absolute status)? King Yama did not choose to answer immediately and even endeavoured to dissuade Nachiketas from pursuing the question over which people were confounded, as he said. Evidently it was a much discussed problem in those days. Buddha was asked the same question and he evaded it, saying that the pragmatic man should attend to practical and immediate realities and not, waste time and energy in discussing things ultimate and beyond that have hardly any relation to the present and the actual.
But Yama did answer and unveil the mystery and impart the supreme secret knowledge the knowledge of the Transcendent Brahman: it is out of the transcendent reality that the immanent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Mastersarvabhtntartm, antarymis called brahmajam, born of the Brahman. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and ex perience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brahman, there is a definite line along which the human consciousness (or unconsciousness, as it is at present) is to ascend and evolve. The first step is to learn to distinguish between the Good and the Pleasurable (reya and preya). The line of pleasure leads to the external, the su perficial, the false: while the other path leads towards the inner and the higher truth. So the second step is the gradual withdrawal of the consciousness from the physical and the sensual and even the mental preoccupation and focussing it upon what is certain and permanent. In the midst of the death-ridden consciousness in the heart of all that is unstable and fleetingone has to look for Agni, the eternal godhead, the Immortal in mortality, the Timeless in time through whom lies the passage to Immortality beyond Time.
Man has two souls corresponding to his double status. In the inferior, the soul looks downward and is involved in the current of Im permanence and Ignorance, it tastes of grief and sorrow and suffers death and dissolution: in the higher it looks upward and communes and joins with the Eternal (the cosmic) and then with the Absolute (the transcendent). The lower is a reflection of the higher, the higher comes down in a diminished and hence tarnished light. The message is that of deliverance, the deliverance and reintegration of the lower soul out of its bondage of worldly ignorant life into the freedom and immortality first of its higher and then of its highest status. It is true, however, that the Upanishad does not make a trenchant distinction between the cosmic and the transcendent and often it speaks of both in the same breath, as it were. For in fact they are realities involved in each other and interwoven. Indeed the triple status, including the Individual, forms one single totality and the three do not exclude or cancel each other; on the contrary, they combine and may be said to enhance each other's reality. The Transcendence expresses or deploys itself in the cosmoshe goes abroad,sa paryagt: and the cosmic individualises, concretises itself in the particular and the personal. The one single spiritual reality holds itself, aspects itself in a threefold manner.
The teaching of Yama in brief may be said to be the gospel of immortality and it consists of the knowledge of triple immortality. And who else can be the best teacher of immortality than Death himself, as Nachiketas pointedly said? The first immortality is that of the physical existence and consciousness, the preservation of the personal identity, the individual name and formthis being in itself as expression and embodiment and instrument of the Inner Reality. This inner reality enshrines the second immortality the eternity and continuity of the soul's life through its incarnations in time, the divine Agni lit for ever and ever growing in flaming consciousness. And the third and final immortality is in the being and consciousness beyond time, beyond all relativities, the absolute and self-existent delight.
Rig Veda, X. 14-11, 12.
00.04 - The Beautiful in the Upanishads, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Only, to some perhaps the beauty may not appear as evident and apparent. The Spirit of beauty that resides in the Upanishadic consciousness is more retiring and reticent. It dwells in its own privacy, in its own home, as it were, and therefore chooses to be bare and austere, simple and sheer. Beauty means usually the beauty of form, even if it be not always the decorative, ornamental and sumptuous form. The early Vedas aimed at the perfect form (surpaktnum), the faultless expression, the integral and complete embodiment; the gods they envisaged and invoked were gleaming powers carved out of harmony and beauty and figured close to our modes of apprehension (spyan). But the Upanishads came to lay stress upon what is beyond the form, what the eye cannot see nor the vision reflect:
na sandi tihati rpamasya
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The perception of beauty in the Upanishadic consciousness is something elemental-of concentrated essence. It silhouettes the main contour, outlines the primordial gestures. Pregnant and pulsating with the burden of beauty, the mantra here reduces its external expression to a minimum. The body is bare and unadorned, and even in its nakedness, it has not the emphatic and vehement musculature of an athlete; rather it tends to be slim and slender and yet vibrant with the inner nervous vigour and glow. What can be more bare and brief and full to the brim of a self-gathered luminous energy than, for example:
yat prena na praiti yena pra
--
Art at its highest tends to become also the simplest and the most unconventional; and it is then the highest art, precisely because it does not aim at being artistic. The aesthetic motive is totally absent in the Upanishads; the sense of beauty is there, but it is attendant upon and involved in a dee per strand of consciousness. That consciousness seeks consciousness itself, the fullness of consciousness, the awareness and possession of the Truth and Reality,the one thing which, if known, gives the knowledge of all else. And this consciousness of the Truth is also Delight, the perfect Bliss, the Immortality where the whole universe resolves itself into its original state of rasa, that is to say, of essential and inalienable harmony and beauty.
***
00.05 - A Vedic Conception of the Poet, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
'Kavi' is an invariable epithet of the gods. The Vedas mean by this attri bute to bring out a most fundamental character, an inalienable dharma of the heavenly host. All the gods are poets; and a human being can become a poet only in so far as he attains to the nature and status of a god. Who is then a kavi? The Poet is he who by his poetic power raises forms of beauty in heavenkavi kavitv divi rpam sajat.1Thus the essence of poetic power is to fashion divine Beauty, to reveal heavenly forms. What is this Heaven whose forms the Poet discovers and embodies? HeavenDyaushas a very definite connotation in the Veda. It means the luminous or divine Mind 2the mind purified of its obscurity and limitations, due to subjection to the external senses, thus opening to the higher Light, receiving and recording faithfully the dee per and vaster movements and vibrations of the Truth, giving them a form, a perfect body of the right thought and the right word. Indra is the lord of this world and he can be approached only with an enkindled intelligence, ddhay man,3a faultless understanding, sumedh. He is the supreme Artisan of the poetic power,Tash, the maker of perfect forms, surpa ktnum.4 All the gods turn towards Indra and become gods and poets, attain their Great Names of Supreme Beauty.5 Indra is also the master of the senses, indriyas, who are his hosts. It is through this mind and the senses that the poetic creation has to be manifested. The mind spreads out wide the Poet's weaving;6 the poet is the priest who calls down and works out the right thinking in the sacrificial labour of creation.7 But that creation is made in and through the inner mind and the inner senses that are alive to the subtle formation of a vaster knowledge.8 The poet envisages the golden forms fashioned out of the very profundity of the consciousness.9 For the substance, the material on which the Poet works, is Truth. The seat of the Truth the poets guard, they uphold the supreme secret Names.10 The poet has the expressive utterance, the creative word; the poet is a poet by his poetic creation-the shape faultlessly wrought out that unveils and holds the Truth.11The form of beauty is the body of the Truth.
The poet is a trinity in himself. A triune consciousness forms his personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara. He has the direct vision, the luminous intelligence, the immediate perception.12 A subtle and profound and penetrating consciousness is his,nigam, pracetas; his is the eye of the Sun,srya caku.13 He secures an increased being through his effulgent understanding.14 In the second place, the Poet is not only Seer but Doer; he is knower as well as creator. He has a dynamic knowledge and his vision itself is power, ncak;15 he is the Seer-Will,kavikratu.16 He has the blazing radiance of the Sun and is supremely potent in his self-Iuminousness.17 The Sun is the light and the energy of the Truth. Even like the Sun the Poet gives birth to the Truth, srya satyasava, satyya satyaprasavya. But the Poet as Power is not only the revealer or creator,savit, he is also the builder or fashioner,ta, and he is the organiser,vedh is personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavaya satyadrara, of the Truth.18 As Savita he manifests the Truth, as Tashta he gives a perfected body and form to the Truth, and as Vedha he maintains the Truth in its dynamic working. The effective marshalling and organisation of the Truth is what is called Ritam, the Right; it is also called Dharma,19 the Law or the Rhythm, the ordered movement and invincible execution of the Truth. The Poet pursues the Path of the Right;20 it is he who lays out the Path for the march of the Truth, the progress of the Sacrifice.21 He is like a fast steed well-yoked, pressing forward;22 he is the charger that moves straight and unswerving and carries us beyond 23into the world of felicity.
Indeed delight is the third and the supremely intimate element of the poetic personality. Dear and delightful is the poet, dear and delightful his works, priya, priyi His hand is dripping with sweetness,kavir hi madhuhastya.24 The Poet-God shines in his pristine beauty and is showering delight.25 He is filled with utter ecstasy so that he may rise to the very source of the luminous Energy.26? Pure is the Divine Joy and it enters and purifies all forms as it moves to the seat of the Immortals.27Indeed this sparkling Delight is the Poet-Seer and it is that that brings forth the creative word, the utterance of Indra.28
The solar vision of the Poet encompasses in its might the wide Earth and Heaven, fuses them in supreme Delight in the womb of the Truth.29 The Earth is lifted up and given in marriage to Heaven in the home of Truth, for the creation and expression of the Truth in its varied beauty,cru citram.
--
Where then is the birth of the Poets? Ask it of the Masters. The Poets have seized and mastered the Mind, they have the perfect working and they fashion the Heaven.
On this Earth they hold everywhere in themselves all the secrets. They make Earth and Heaven move together, so that they may realise their heroic strength. They measure them with their rhythmic measurings, they hold in their controlled grasp the vast and great twins, and unite them and establish between them the mid-world of Delight for the perfect poise.30
All the gods are poetstheir forms are perfect, surpa, suda, their Names full of beauty,cru devasya nma.31 This means also that the gods embody the different powers that constitute the poetic consciousness. Agni is the Seer-Will, the creative vision of the Poet the luminous energy born of an ex perience by identity with the Truth. Indra is the Idea-Form, the architectonic conception of the work or achievement. Mitra and Varuna are the large harmony, the vast cadence and sweep of movement. The Aswins, the Divine Riders, represent the intense zest of well-yoked Life-Energy. Soma is Rasa, Ananda, the Supreme Bliss and Delight.
The Vedic Poet is doubtless the poet of Life, the architect of Divinity in man, of Heaven upon earth. But what is true of Life is fundamentally true of Art tooat least true of the Art as it was conceived by the ancient seers and as it found expression at their hands.32
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
It is ironic that a period of the most tremendous technological advancement known to recorded history should also be labeled the Age of Anxiety. Reams have been written about modern man's frenzied search for his soul-and, indeed, his doubt that he even has one at a time when, like castles built on sand, so many of his cherished theories, long mistaken for verities, are crumbling about his bewildered brain.
The age-old advice, "Know thyself," is more im perative than ever. The tempo of science has accelerated to such a degree that today's discoveries frequently make yesterday's equations obsolescent almost before they can be chalked up on a blackboard. Small wonder, then that every other hospital bed is occupied by a mental patient. Man was not constructed to spend his life at a crossroads, one of which leads he knows not where, and the other to threatened annihilation of his species.
--
For this reason I am especially pleased to be writing an introduction to a new edition of A Garden of Pomegranates. I feel that never, perhaps, was the need more urgent for just such a roadmap as the Qabalistic system provides. It should be equally useful to any who chooses to follow it, whether he be Jew, Christian or Buddhist, Deist, Theosophist, agnostic or atheist.
The Qabalah is a trustworthy guide, leading to a comprehension both of the Universe and one's own Self. Sages have long taught that Man is a miniature of the Universe, containing within himself the diverse elements of that macrocosm of which he is the microcosm. Within the Qabalah is a glyph called the Tree of Life which is at once a symbolic map of the Universe in its major aspects, and also of its smaller counterpart, Man.
--
Fortunately many scientists in the field of psycho therapy are beginning to sense this correlation. In Francis G. Wickes' The Inner World of Choice reference is made to "the existence in every person of a galaxy of potentialities for growth marked by a succession of personalogical evolution and interaction with environments." She points out that man is not only an individual particle but "also a part of the human stream, governed by a Self greater than his own individual self."
The Book of the Law states simply, "Every man and every woman is a star." This is a startling thought for those who considered a star a heavenly body, but a declaration subject to proof by anyone who will venture into the realm of his own Unconscious. This realm, he will learn if he persists, is not hemmed in by the boundaries of his physical body but is one with the boundless reaches of outer space.
Those who, armed with the tools provided by the Qabalah, have made the journey within and crossed beyond the barriers of illusion, have returned with an impressive quantity of knowledge which conforms strictly to the definition of "science" in Winston's College Dictionary: "Science: a body of knowledge, general truths of particular facts, obtained and shown to be correct by accurate observation and thinking; knowledge condensed, arranged and systematized with reference to general truths and laws."
--
For example, Keser is called "The Admirable or the Hidden Intelligence; it is the Primal Glory, for no created being can attain to its essence." This seems perfectly all right; the meaning at first sight seems to fit the significance of Keser as the first emanation from Ain Soph. But there are half a dozen other similar attri butions that would have served equally well. For instance, it could have been called the "Occult Intelligence" usually attri buted to the seventh Path or Sephirah, for surely Keser is secret in a way to be said of no other Sephirah. And what about the "Absolute or perfect Intelligence." That would have been even more explicit and appropriate, being applicable to Keser far more than to any other of the Paths. Similarly, there is one attri buted to the 16th Path and called "The Eternal or Triumphant Intelligence," so-called because it is the pleasure of the Glory, beyond which is no Glory like to it, and it is called also the Paradise prepared for the Righteous." Any of these several would have done equally well. Much is true of so many of the other attri butions in this particular area-that is the so-called Intelligences of the Sepher Yetzirah. I do not think that their use or current arbitrary usage stands up to serious examination or criticism.
A good many attri butions in other symbolic areas, I feel are subject to the same criticism. The Egyptian Gods have been used with a good deal of carelessness, and without sufficient explanation of motives in assigning them as I did. In a recent edition of Crowley's masterpiece Liber 777 (which au fond is less a reflection of Crowley's mind as a recent critic claimed than a tabulation of some of the material given piecemeal in the Golden Dawn knowledge lectures), he gives for the first time brief explanations of the motives for his attri butions. I too should have been far more explicit in the explanations I used in the case of some of the Gods whose names were used many times, most inadequately, where several paths were concerned. While it is true that the religious coloring of the Egyptian Gods differed from time to time during Egypt's turbulent history, nonetheless a word or two about just that one single point could have served a useful purpose.
--
I began the study of the Qabalah at an early age. Two books I read then have played unconsciously a prominent part in the writing of my own book. One of these was "Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception" by Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones), which I must have first read around 1926. The other was "An Introduction to the Tarot" by Paul Foster Case, published in the early 1920's. It is now out of print, su perseded by later versions of the same topic. But as I now glance through this slender book, I perceive how profoundly even the format of his book had influenced me, though in these two instances there was not a trace of plagiarism. It had not consciously occurred to me until recently that I owed so much to them. Since Paul Case passed away about a decade or so ago, this gives me the opportunity to thank him, overtly, wherever he may now be.
By the middle of 1926 I had become aware of the work of Aleister Crowley, for whom I have a tremendous respect. I studied as many of his writings as I could gain access to, making copious notes, and later acted for several years as his secretary, having joined him in Paris on October 12, 1928, a memorable day in my life.
--
The importance of the book to me was and is five-fold. 1) It provided a yardstick by which to measure my personal progress in the understanding of the Qabalah. 2) Therefore it can have an equivalent value to the modern student. 3) It serves as a theoretical introduction to the Qabalistic foundation of the magical work of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 4) It throws considerable light on the occasionally obscure writings of Aleister Crowley. 5) It is dedicated to Crowley, who was the Ankh-af-na-Khonsu mentioned in The Book of the Law -a dedication which served both as a token of personal loyalty and devotion to Crowley, but was also a gesture of my spiritual independence from him.
In his profound investigation into the origins and basic nature of man, Robert Ardrey in African Genesis recently made a shocking statement. Although man has begun the conquest of outer space, the ignorance of his own nature, says Ardrey, "has become institutionalized, universalized and sanctified." He further states that were a brotherhood of man to be formed today, "its only possible common bond would be ignorance of what man is."
--
May everyone who reads this new edition of A Garden of Pomegranates be encouraged and inspired to light his own candle of inner vision and begin his journey into the boundless space that lies within himself. Then, through realization of his true identity, each student can become a lamp unto his own path. And more. Awareness of the Truth of his being will rip asunder the veil of unknowing that has heretofore enshrouded the star he already is, permitting the brilliance of his light to illumine the darkness of that part of the Universe in which he abides.
0.00a - Participants in the Evening Talks, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
FIRST perIOD OF TALKS
1923-1926
--
SECOND perIOD OF TALKS
1938-1943
000 - Humans in Universe, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
their perimeters the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, Aral, China, Arabian, Red,
Baltic, and North seas: altogether their area was historically thought of only as a flat
--
world constitutes less than 17 percent of the subsequently-discovered-to-be-
spherical Planet Earth's surface. All the great empires of written history before A.D.
--
000.102 How did this pervading historical concept become outdated? What
changed the terrestrial conceptionings adopted by the leaders of the world's power
--
science and technology. The military took command of all the highest performance
materials, brains, instruments, and tools of production.
--
chemical structuring produces ever more powerful and incisive performances perpound of physical matter employed.
000.112 Structures are complexes of visible or invisible physical events
--
pounds per square inch ultimate. But masonry has low tensional coherence; it can
withstand only 50 pounds per square inch tensing. Stone-Age-derived masonry is a
thousand times more effective in its resistance to compression than to tension.
--
strength per weight than wood, steel made possible even more powerful watertight,
air-containing vessels than did wood, even though steel by itself does not float.
--
and faster. Finally humans developed so much strength per weight of materials
capability that they accomplished "vertol" jet plane flight and vertical space-vehicle
blastoffs. Since then human scientists developing ever greater strength per weight
of material have gone on to carry ever greater useful loads in vertical takeoff
--
overwhelming structural strength has become entirely invisible. Fully 99 percent of
humanity has as yet no idea that this increase in tensile capability has come about or
--
now converts the ever-increasing work capacity per pound of materials invested
primarily to yield monetary profits for the government-subsidized private-enterprise
--
000.121 During this 10-year period we can also phase out all further use of fossil
fuels and atomic energy, since the retooled world industry and individual energy
--
revolution by design science? Less than one percent of humanity now knows that
the option exists; 99 percent of humanity cannot understand the mathematical
language of science. The people who make up that 99 percent do not know that all
that science has ever found out is that the Universe consists of the most reliable
--
000.125 The fact that 99 percent of humanity does not understand nature is the
prime reason for humanity's failure to exercise its option to attain universally
--
000.126 Nature's continuous self-regeneration is 100 percent efficient, neither
gaining nor losing any energy. Nature is not employing the three dimensional,
--
000.130 At present 99 percent of humanity is misinformed in believing in the
Malthusian concept of the fundamental inadequacy of life support, and so they have
misused their minds to develop only personal and partisan advantages, intellectual
cunning, and selfishness. Intellectual cunning has concentrated on how to divorcemoney from true life-support wealth; second, cunning has learned how to make
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
About his parents Sri Ramakrishna once said: "My mother was the personification of rectitude and gentleness. She did not know much about the ways of the world; innocent of the art of concealment, she would say what was in her mind. People loved her for her open-heartedness. My father, an orthodox brahmin, never accepted gifts from the sudras. He spent much of his time in worship and meditation, and in repeating God's name and chanting His glories. Whenever in his daily prayers he invoked the Goddess Gayatri, his chest flushed and tears rolled down his cheeks. He spent his leisure hours making garlands for the Family Deity, Raghuvir."
Khudiram Chattopadhyaya and Chandra Devi, the parents of Sri Ramakrishna, were married in 1799. At that time Khudiram was living in his ancestral village of Dereypore, not far from Kamarpukur. Their first son, Ramkumar, was born in 1805, and their first daughter, Katyayani, in 1810. In 1814 Khudiram was ordered by his landlord to bear false witness in court against a neighbour. When he refused to do so, the landlord brought a false case against him and deprived him of his ancestral pro perty. Thus dispossessed, he arrived, at the invitation of another landlord, in the quiet village of Kamarpukur, where he was given a dwelling and about an acre of fertile land. The crops from this little pro perty were enough to meet his family's simple needs. Here he lived in simplicity, dignity, and contentment.
--
Gadadhar was now permitted to worship Raghuvir. Thus began his first training in meditation. He so gave his heart and soul to the worship that the stone image very soon appeared to him as the living Lord of the Universe. His tendency to lose himself in contemplation was first noticed at this time. Behind his boyish light-heartedness was seen a deepening of his spiritual nature.
About this time, on the Sivaratri night, consecrated to the worship of Siva, a dramatic performance was arranged. The principal actor, who was to play the part of Siva, suddenly fell ill, and Gadadhar was persuaded to act in his place. While friends were dressing him for the role of Siva — smearing his body with ashes, matting his locks, placing a trident in his hand and a string of rudraksha beads around his neck — the boy appeared to become absent-minded. He approached the stage with slow and measured step, supported by his friends. He looked the living image of Siva. The audience loudly applauded what it took to be his skill as an actor, but it was soon discovered that he was really lost in meditation. His countenance was radiant and tears flowed from his eyes. He was lost to the outer world. The effect of this scene on the audience was tremendous. The people felt blessed as by a vision of Siva Himself. The performance had to be stopped, and the boy's mood lasted till the following morning.
Gadadhar himself now organized a dramatic company with his young friends. The stage was set in the mango orchard. The themes were selected from the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Gadadhar knew by heart almost all the roles, having heard them from professional actors. His favourite theme was the Vrindavan episode of Krishna's life, depicting those exquisite love-stories of Krishna and the milkmaids and the cowherd boys. Gadadhar would play the parts of Radha or Krishna and would often lose himself in the character he was portraying. His natural feminine grace heightened the dramatic effect. The mango orchard would ring with the loud kirtan of the boys. Lost in song and merry-making, Gadadhar became indifferent to the routine of school.
--
At the age of sixteen Gadadhar was summoned to Calcutta by his elder brother Ramkumar, who wished assistance in his priestly duties. Ramkumar had opened a Sanskrit academy to supplement his income, and it was his intention gradually to turn his younger brother's mind to education. Gadadhar applied himself heart and soul to his new duty as family priest to a number of Calcutta families. His worship was very different from that of the professional priests. He spent hours decorating the images and singing hymns and devotional songs; he performed with love the other duties of his office. People were impressed with his ardour. But to his studies he paid scant attention.
Ramkumar did not at first oppose the ways of his tem peramental brother. He wanted Gadadhar to become used to the conditions of city life. But one day he decided to warn the boy about his indifference to the world. After all, in the near future Gadadhar must, as a householder, earn his livelihood through the performance of his brahminical duties; and these required a thorough knowledge of Hindu law, astrology, and kindred subjects. He gently admonished Gadadhar and asked him to pay more attention to his studies. But the boy replied spiritedly: "Brother, what shall I do with a mere bread-winning education? I would rather acquire that wisdom which will illumine my heart and give me satisfaction for ever."
--- BREAD-WINNING EDUCATION
--
Hindu society during the eighteenth century had been passing through a period of decadence. It was the twilight of the Mussalman rule. There were anarchy and confusion in all spheres. Su perstitious practices dominated the religious life of the people. Rites and rituals passed for the essence of spirituality. Greedy priests became the custodians of heaven. True philosophy was supplanted by dogmatic opinions. The pundits took delight in vain polemics.
In 1757 English traders laid the foundation of British rule in India. Gradually the Government was systematized and lawlessness suppressed. The Hindus were much impressed by the military power and political acumen of the new rulers. In the wake of the merchants came the English educators, and social reformers, and Christian missionaries — all bearing a culture completely alien to the Hindu mind. In different parts of the country educational institutions were set up and Christian churches established. Hindu young men were offered the heady wine of the Western culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and they drank it to the very dregs.
The first effect of the draught on the educated Hindus was a complete effacement from their minds of the time-honoured beliefs and traditions of Hindu society. They came to believe that there was no transcendental Truth; The world perceived by the senses was all that existed. God and religion were illusions of the untutored mind. True knowledge could be derived only from the analysis of nature. So atheism and agnosticism became the fashion of the day. The youth of India, taught in English schools, took malicious delight in openly breaking the customs and traditions of their society. They would do away with the caste-system and remove the discriminatory laws about food. Social reform, the spread of secular education, widow remarriage, abolition of early marriage — they considered these the panacea for the degenerate condition of Hindu society.
The Christian missionaries gave the finishing touch to the process of transformation. They ridiculed as relics of a barbarous age the images and rituals of the Hindu religion. They tried to persuade India that the teachings of her saints and seers were the cause of her downfall, that her Vedas, Puranas, and other scriptures were filled with su perstition. Christianity, they maintained, had given the white races position and power in this world and assurance of happiness in the next; therefore Christianity was the best of all religions. Many intelligent young Hindus became converted. The man in the street was confused. The majority of the educated grew materialistic in their mental outlook. Everyone living near Calcutta or the other strong-holds of Western culture, even those who attempted to cling to the orthodox traditions of Hindu society, became infected by the new uncertainties and the new beliefs.
But the soul of India was to be resuscitated through a spiritual awakening. We hear the first call of this renascence in the spirited retort of the young Gadadhar: "Brother, what shall I do with a mere bread-winning education?"
--
corners of the temple compound are two nahabats, or music towers, from which music flows at different times of day, especially at sunup, noon, and sundown, when the worship is performed in the temples. Three sides of the paved courtyard — all except the west — are lined with rooms set apart for kitchens, store-rooms, dining-rooms, and quarters for the temple staff and guests. The chamber in the northwest angle, just beyond the last of the Siva temples, is of special interest to us; for here Sri Ramakrishna was to spend a considerable part of his life. To the west of this chamber is a semicircular porch overlooking the river. In front of the porch runs a foot-path, north and south, and beyond the path is a large garden and, below the garden, the Ganges. The orchard to the north of the buildings contains the Panchavati, the banyan, and the bel-tree, associated with Sri Ramakrishna's spiritual practices. Outside and to the north of the temple compound pro per is the kuthi, or bungalow, used by members of Rani Rasmani's family visiting the garden. And north of the temple garden, separated from it by a high wall, is a powder-magazine belonging to the British Government.
--- SIVA
--
At this time there came to Dakshineswar a youth of sixteen, destined to play an important role in Sri Ramakrishna's life. Hriday, a distant nephew2 of Sri Ramakrishna, hailed from Sihore, a village not far from Kamarpukur, and had been his boyhood friend. Clever, exceptionally energetic, and endowed with great presence of mind, he moved, as will be seen later, like a shadow about his uncle and was always ready to help him, even at the sacrifice of his personal comfort. He was destined to be a mute witness of many of the spiritual ex periences of Sri Ramakrishna and the caretaker of his body during the stormy days of his spiritual practice. Hriday came to Dakshineswar in search of a job, and Sri Ramakrishna was glad to see him.
Unable to resist the persuasion of Mathur Babu, Sri Ramakrishna at last entered the temple service, on condition that Hriday should be asked to assist him. His first duty was to dress and decorate the image of Kali.
One day the priest of the Radhakanta temple accidentally dropped the image of Krishna on the floor, breaking one of its legs. The pundits advised the Rani to install a new image, since the worship of an image with a broken limb was against the scriptural injunctions. But the Rani was fond of the image, and she asked Sri Ramakrishna's opinion. In an abstracted mood, he said: "This solution is ridiculous. If a son-in-law of the Rani broke his leg, would she discard him and put another in his place? Wouldn't she rather arrange for his treatment? Why should she not do the same thing in this case too? Let the image be repaired and worshipped as before." It was a simple, straightforward solution and was accepted by the Rani. Sri Ramakrishna himself mended the break. The priest was dismissed for his carelessness, and at Mathur Babu's earnest request Sri Ramakrishna accepted the office of priest in the Radhakanta temple.
--
Born in an orthodox brahmin family, Sri Ramakrishna knew the formalities of worship, its rites and rituals. The innumerable gods and goddesses of the Hindu religion are the human aspects of the indescribable and incomprehensible Spirit, as conceived by the finite human mind. They understand and appreciate human love and emotion, help men to realize their secular and spiritual ideals, and ultimately enable men to attain liberation from the miseries of phenomenal life. The Source of light, intelligence, wisdom, and strength is the One alone from whom comes the fulfilment of desire. Yet, as long as a man is bound by his human limitations, he cannot but worship God through human forms. He must use human symbols. Therefore Hinduism asks the devotees to look on God as the ideal father, the ideal mother, the ideal husband, the ideal son, or the ideal friend. But the name ultimately leads to the Nameless, the form to the Formless, the word to the Silence, the emotion to the serene realization of Peace in Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. The gods gradually merge in the one God. But until that realization is achieved, the devotee cannot dissociate human factors from his worship. Therefore the Deity is bathed and clothed and decked with ornaments. He is fed and put to sleep. He is propitiated with hymns, songs, and prayers. And there are appropriate rites connected with all these functions. For instance, to secure for himself external purity, the priest bathes himself in holy water and puts on a holy cloth. He purifies the mind and the sense-organs by appropriate meditations. He fortifies the place of worship against evil forces by drawing around it circles of fire and water. He awakens the different spiritual centres of the body and invokes the Supreme Spirit in his heart. Then he transfers the Supreme Spirit to the image before him and worships the image, regarding it no longer as clay or stone, but as the embodiment of Spirit, throbbing with Life and Consciousness. After the worship the Supreme Spirit is recalled from the image to Its true sanctuary, the heart of the priest. The real devotee knows the absurdity of worshipping the Transcendental Reality with material articles — clothing That which pervades the whole universe and the beyond, putting on a pedestal That which cannot be limited by space, feeding That which is disembodied and incorporeal, singing before That whose glory the music of the spheres tries vainly to proclaim. But through these rites the devotee aspires to go ultimately beyond rites and rituals, forms and names, words and praise, and to realize God as the All- pervading Consciousness.
Hindu priests are thoroughly acquainted with the rites of worship, but few of them are aware of their underlying significance. They move their hands and limbs mechanically, in obedience to the letter of the scriptures, and repeat the holy mantras like parrots. But from the very beginning the inner meaning of these rites was revealed to Sri Ramakrishna. As he sat facing the image, a strange transformation came over his mind. While going through the prescribed ceremonies, he would actually find himself encircled by a wall of fire protecting him and the place of worship from unspiritual vibrations, or he would feel the rising of the mystic Kundalini through the different centres of the body. The glow on his face, his deep absorption, and the intense atmosphere of the temple impressed everyone who saw him worship the Deity.
--
Yet this was only a foretaste of the intense ex periences to come. The first glimpse of the Divine Mother made him the more eager for Her uninterrupted vision. He wanted to see Her both in meditation and with eyes open. But the Mother began to play a teasing game of hide-and-seek with him, intensifying both his joy and his suffering. Weeping bitterly during the moments of separation from Her, he would pass into a trance and then find Her standing before him, smiling, talking, consoling, bidding him be of good cheer, and instructing him. During this period of spiritual practice he had many uncommon ex periences. When he sat to meditate, he would hear strange clicking sounds in the joints of his legs, as if someone were locking them up, one after the other, to keep him motionless; and at the conclusion of his meditation he would again hear the same sounds, this time unlocking them and leaving him free to move about. He would see flashes like a swarm of fire-flies floating before his eyes, or a sea of deep mist around him, with luminous waves of molten silver. Again, from a sea of translucent mist he would behold the Mother rising, first Her feet, then Her waist, body, face, and head, finally Her whole person; he would feel Her breath and hear Her voice. Worshipping in the temple, sometimes he would become exalted, sometimes he would remain motionless as stone, sometimes he would almost collapse from excessive emotion. Many of his actions, contrary to all tradition, seemed sacrilegious to the people. He would take a flower and touch it to his own head, body, and feet, and then offer it to the Goddess. Or, like a drunkard, he would reel to the throne of the Mother, touch Her chin by way of showing his affection for Her, and sing, talk, joke, laugh, and dance. Or he would take a morsel of food from the plate and hold it to Her mouth, begging Her to eat it, and would not be satisfied till he was convinced that She had really eaten. After the Mother had been put to sleep at night, from his own room he would hear Her ascending to the up per storey of the temple with the light steps of a happy girl, Her anklets jingling. Then he would discover Her standing with flowing hair. Her black form silhouetted against the sky of the night, looking at the Ganges or at the distant lights of Calcutta.
Naturally the temple officials took him for an insane person. His worldly well-wishers brought him to skilled physicians; but no-medicine could cure his malady. Many a time he doubted his sanity himself. For he had been sailing across an uncharted sea, with no earthly guide to direct him. His only haven of security was the Divine Mother Herself. To Her he would pray: "I do not know what these things are. I am ignorant of mantras and the scriptures. Teach me, Mother, how to realize Thee. Who else can help me? Art Thou not my only refuge and guide?" And the sustaining presence of the Mother never failed him in his distress or doubt. Even those who criticized his conduct were greatly impressed with his purity, guilelessness, truthfulness, integrity, and holiness. They felt an uplifting influence in his presence.
It is said that samadhi, or trance, no more than opens the portal of the spiritual realm. Sri Ramakrishna felt an unquenchable desire to enjoy God in various ways. For his meditation he built a place in the northern wooded section of the temple garden. With Hriday's help he planted there five sacred trees. The spot, known as the Panchavati, became the scene of many of his visions.
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Sri Ramakrishna has described the incident: "The Divine Mother revealed to me in the Kali temple that it was She who had become everything. She showed me that everything was full of Consciousness. The image was Consciousness, the altar was Consciousness, the water-vessels were Consciousness, the door-sill was Consciousness, the marble floor was Consciousness — all was Consciousness. I found everything inside the room soaked, as it were, in Bliss — the Bliss of God. I saw a wicked man in front of the Kali temple; but in him also I saw the power of the Divine Mother vibrating. That was why I fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to the Divine Mother. I clearly perceived that all this was the Divine Mother — even the cat. The manager of the temple garden wrote to Mathur Babu saying that I was feeding the cat with the offering intended for the Divine Mother. But Mathur Babu had insight into the state of my mind. He wrote back to the manager: 'Let him do whatever he likes. You must not say anything to him.'"
One of the painful ailments from which Sri Ramakrishna suffered at this time was a burning sensation in his body, and he was cured by a strange vision. During worship in the temple, following the scriptural injunctions, he would imagine the presence of the "sinner" in himself and the destruction of this "sinner". One day he was meditating in the Panchavati, when he saw come out of him a red-eyed man of black complexion, reeling like a drunkard. Soon there emerged from him another person, of serene countenance, wearing the ochre cloth of a sannyasi and carrying in his hand a trident. The second person attacked the first and killed him with the trident. Thereafter Sri Ramakrishna was free of his pain.
About this time he began to worship God by assuming the attitude of a servant toward his master. He imitated the mood of Hanuman, the monkey chieftain of the Ramayana, the ideal servant of Rama and traditional model for this self-effacing form of devotion. When he meditated on Hanuman his movements and his way of life began to resemble those of a monkey. His eyes became restless. He lived on fruits and roots. With his cloth tied around his waist, a portion of it hanging in the form of a tail, he jumped from place to place instead of walking. And after a short while he was blessed with a vision of Sita, the divine consort of Rama, who entered his body and disappeared there with the words, "I bequeath to you my smile."
Mathur had faith in the sincerity of Sri Ramakrishna's spiritual zeal, but began now to doubt his sanity. He had watched him jumping about like a monkey. One day, when Rani Rasmani was listening to Sri Ramakrishna's singing in the temple, the young priest abruptly turned and slapped her. Apparently listening to his song, she had actually been thinking of a law-suit. She accepted the punishment as though the Divine Mother Herself had imposed it; but Mathur was distressed. He begged Sri Ramakrishna to keep his feelings under control and to heed the conventions of society. God Himself, he argued, follows laws. God never permitted, for instance, flowers of two colours to grow on the same stalk. The following day Sri Ramakrishna presented Mathur Babu with two hibiscus flowers growing on the same stalk, one red and one white.
Mathur and Rani Rasmani began to ascribe the mental ailment of Sri Ramakrishna in part, at least, to his observance of rigid continence. Thinking that a natural life would relax the tension of his nerves, they engineered a plan with two women of ill fame. But as soon as the women entered his room, Sri Ramakrishna beheld in them the manifestation of the Divine Mother of the Universe and went into samadhi uttering Her name.
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But in a few months his health showed improvement, and he recovered to some extent his natural buoyancy of spirit. His happy mother was encouraged to think it might be a good time to arrange his marriage. The boy was now twenty-three years old. A wife would bring him back to earth. And she was delighted when her son welcomed her suggestion. perhaps he saw in it the finger of God.
Saradamani, a little girl of five, lived in the neighbouring village of Jayrambati. Even at this age she had been praying to God to make her character as stainless and fragrant as the white tuberose. Looking at the full moon, she would say: "O God, there are dark spots even on the moon. But make my character spotless." It was she who was selected as the bride for Sri Ramakrishna.
The marriage ceremony was duly performed. Such early marriage in India is in the nature of a betrothal, the marriage being consummated when the girl attains puberty. But in this case the marriage remained for ever unconsummated. Sri Ramakrishna lived at Kamarpukur about a year and a half and then returned to Dakshineswar.
Hardly had he crossed the threshold of the Kali temple when he found himself again in the whirlwind. His madness reappeared tenfold. The same meditation and prayer, the same ecstatic moods, the same burning sensation, the same weeping, the same sleeplessness, the same indifference to the body and the outside world, the same divine delirium. He subjected himself to fresh disciplines in order to eradicate greed and lust, the two great impediments to spiritual progress. With a rupee in one hand and some earth in the other, he would reflect on the comparative value of these two for the realization of God, and finding them equally worthless he would toss them, with equal indifference, into the Ganges. Women he regarded as the manifestations of the Divine Mother. Never even in a dream did he feel the impulses of lust. And to root out of his mind the idea of caste su periority, he cleaned a pariahs house with his long and neglected hair. When he would sit in meditation, birds would perch on his head and peck in his hair for grains of food. Snakes would crawl over his body, and neither would be aware of the other. Sleep left him altogether. Day and night, visions flitted before him. He saw the sannyasi who had previously killed the "sinner" in him again coming out of his body, threatening him with the trident, and ordering him to concentrate on God. Or the same sannyasi would visit distant places, following a luminous path, and bring him reports of what was happening there. Sri Ramakrishna used to say later that in the case of an advanced devotee the mind itself becomes the guru, living and moving like an embodied being.
Rani Rasmani, the foundress of the temple garden, passed away in 1861. After her death her son-in-law Mathur became the sole executor of the estate. He placed himself and his resources at the disposal of Sri Ramakrishna and began to look after his physical comfort. Sri Ramakrishna later spoke of him as one of his five "suppliers of stores" appointed by the Divine Mother. Whenever a desire arose in his mind, Mathur fulfilled it without hesitation.
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Sri Ramakrishna welcomed the visitor with great respect, described to her his ex periences and visions, and told her of people's belief that these were symptoms of madness. She listened to him attentively and said: "My son, everyone in this world is mad. Some are mad for money, some for creature comforts, some for name and fame; and you are mad for God." She assured him that he was passing through the almost unknown spiritual ex perience described in the scriptures as mahabhava, the most exalted rapture of divine love. She told him that this extreme exaltation had been described as manifesting itself through nineteen physical symptoms, including the shedding of tears, a tremor of the body, horripilation, perspiration, and a burning sensation. The Bhakti scriptures, she declared, had recorded only two instances of the ex perience, namely, those of Sri Radha and Sri Chaitanya.
Very soon a tender relationship sprang up between Sri Ramakrishna and the Brahmani, she looking upon him as the Baby Krishna, and he upon her as mother. Day after day she watched his ecstasy during the kirtan and meditation, his samadhi, his mad yearning; and she recognized in him a power to transmit spirituality to others. She came to the conclusion that such things were not possible for an ordinary devotee, not even for a highly developed soul. Only an Incarnation of God was capable of such spiritual manifestations. She proclaimed openly that Sri Ramakrishna, like Sri Chaitanya, was an Incarnation of God.
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Two famous pundits of the time were invited: Vaishnavcharan, the leader of the Vaishnava society, and Gauri. The first to arrive was Vaishnavcharan, with a distinguished company of scholars and devotees. The Brahmani, like a proud mother, proclaimed her view before him and supported it with quotations from the scriptures. As the pundits discussed the deep theological question, Sri Ramakrishna, perfectly indifferent to everything happening around him, sat in their midst like a child, immersed in his own thoughts, sometimes smiling, sometimes chewing a pinch of spices from a pouch, or again saying to Vaishnavcharan with a nudge: "Look here. Sometimes I feel like this, too." Presently Vaishnavcharan arose to declare himself in total agreement with the view of the Brahmani. He declared that Sri Ramakrishna had undoubtedly ex perienced mahabhava and that this was the certain sign of the rare manifestation of God in a man. The people assembled
there, especially the officers of the temple garden, were struck dumb. Sri Rama- krishna said to Mathur, like a boy: "Just fancy, he too says so! Well, I am glad to learn that after all it is not a disease."
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Sri Ramakrishna set himself to the task of practising the disciplines of Tantra; and at the bidding of the Divine Mother Herself he accepted the Brahmani as his guru. He performed profound and delicate ceremonies in the Panchavati and under the bel-tree at the northern extremity of the temple compound. He practised all the disciplines of the sixty-four principal Tantra books, and it took him never more than three days to achieve the result promised in any one of them. After the observance of a few preliminary rites, he would be overwhelmed with a strange divine fervour and would go into samadhi, where his mind would dwell in exaltation. Evil ceased to exist for him. The word "carnal" lost its meaning. The whole world and everything in it appeared as the lila, the sport, of Siva and Sakti. He beheld held everywhere manifest the power and beauty of the Mother; the whole world, animate and inanimate, appeared to him as pervaded with Chit, Consciousness, and with Ananda, Bliss.
He saw in a vision the Ultimate Cause of the universe as a huge luminous triangle giving birth every moment to an infinite number of worlds. He heard the Anahata Sabda, the great sound Om, of which the innumerable sounds of the universe are only so many echoes. He acquired the eight su pernatural powers of yoga, which make a man almost omnipotent, and these he spurned as of no value whatsoever to the Spirit. He had a vision of the divine Maya, the inscrutable Power of God, by which the universe is created and sustained, and into which it is finally absorbed. In this vision he saw a woman of exquisite beauty, about to become a mother, emerging from the Ganges and slowly approaching the Panchavati. Presently she gave birth to a child and began to nurse it tenderly. A moment later she assumed a terrible aspect, seized the child with her grim jaws, and crushed it. Swallowing it, she re-entered the waters of the Ganges.
But the most remarkable ex perience during this period was the awakening of the Kundalini Sakti, the "Serpent Power". He actually saw the Power, at first lying asleep at the bottom of the spinal column, then waking up and ascending along the mystic Sushumna canal and through its six centres, or lotuses, to the Sahasrara, the thousand-petalled lotus in the top of the head. He further saw that as the Kundalini went upward the different lotuses bloomed. And this phenomenon was accompanied by visions and trances. Later on he described to his disciples and devotees the various movements of the Kundalini: the fishlike, birdlike, monkeylike, and so on. The awaken- ing of the Kundalini is the beginning of spiritual consciousness, and its union with Siva in the Sahasrara, ending in samadhi, is the consummation of the Tantrik disciplines.
About this time it was revealed to him that in a short while many devotees would seek his guidance.
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There are three kinds of formal devotion: tamasic, rajasic, and sattvic. If a person, while showing devotion, to God, is actuated by malevolence, arrogance, jealousy, or anger, then his devotion is tamasic, since it is influenced by tamas, the quality of inertia. If he worships God from a desire for fame or wealth, or from any other worldly ambition, then his devotion is rajasic, since it is influenced by rajas, the quality of activity. But if a person loves God without any thought of material gain, if he performs his duties to please God alone and maintains toward all created beings the attitude of friendship, then his devotion is called sattvic, since it is influenced by sattva, the quality of harmony. But the highest devotion transcends the three gunas, or qualities, being a spontaneous, uninterrupted inclination of the mind toward God, the Inner Soul of all beings; and it wells up in the heart of a true devotee as soon as he hears the name of God or mention of God's attributes. A devotee possessed of this love would not accept the happiness of heaven if it were offered him. His one desire is to love God under all conditions — in pleasure and pain, life and death, honour and dishonour, pros perity and adversity.
There are two stages of bhakti. The first is known as vaidhi-bhakti, or love of God qualified by scriptural injunctions. For the devotees of this stage are prescribed regular and methodical worship, hymns, prayers, the repetition of God's name, and the chanting of His glories. This lower bhakti in course of time matures into para-bhakti, or supreme devotion, known also as prema, the most intense form of divine love. Divine love is an end in itself. It exists potentially in all human hearts, but in the case of bound creatures it is misdirected to earthly objects.
To develop the devotee's love for God, Vaishnavism humanizes God. God is to be regarded as the devotee's Parent, Master, Friend, Child, Husband, or Sweetheart, each succeeding relationship representing an intensification of love. These bhavas, or attitudes toward God, are known as santa, dasya, sakhya, vatsalya, and madhur. The rishis of the Vedas, Hanuman, the cow-herd boys of Vrindavan, Rama's mother Kausalya, and Radhika, Krishna's sweetheart, exhibited, respectively, the most perfect examples of these forms. In the ascending scale the-glories of God are gradually forgotten and the devotee realizes more and more the intimacy of divine communion. Finally he regards himself as the mistress of his Beloved, and no artificial barrier remains to separate him from his Ideal. No social or moral obligation can bind to the earth his soaring spirit. He ex periences perfect union with the Godhead. Unlike the Vedantist, who strives to transcend all varieties of the subject-object relationship, a devotee of the Vaishnava path wishes to retain both his own individuality and the personality of God. To him God is not an intangible Absolute, but the Purushottama, the Supreme person.
While practising the discipline of the madhur bhava, the male devotee often regards himself as a woman, in order to develop the most intense form of love for Sri Krishna, the only purusha, or man, in the universe. This assumption of the attitude of the opposite sex has a deep psychological significance. It is a matter of common ex perience that an idea may be cultivated to such an intense degree that every idea alien to it is driven from the mind. This peculiarity of the mind may be utilized for the subjugation of the lower desires and the development of the spiritual nature. Now, the idea which is the basis of all desires and passions in a man is the conviction of his indissoluble association with a male body. If he can inoculate himself thoroughly with the idea that he is a woman, he can get rid of the desires peculiar to his male body. Again, the idea that he is a woman may in turn be made to give way to another higher idea, namely, that he is neither man nor woman, but the Im personal Spirit. The Im personal Spirit alone can enjoy real communion with the Im personal God. Hence the highest est realization of the Vaishnava draws close to the transcendental ex perience of the Vedantist.
A beautiful expression of the Vaishnava worship of God through love is to be found in the Vrindavan episode of the Bhagavata. The gopis, or milk-maids, of Vrindavan regarded the six-year-old Krishna as their Beloved. They sought no personal gain or happiness from this love. They surrendered to Krishna their bodies, minds, and souls. Of all the gopis, Radhika, or Radha, because of her intense love for Him, was the closest to Krishna. She manifested mahabhava and was united with her Beloved. This union represents, through sensuous language, a su persensuous ex perience.
Sri Chaitanya, also known as Gauranga, Gora, or Nimai, born in Bengal in 1485 and regarded as an Incarnation of God, is a great prophet of the Vaishnava religion. Chaitanya declared the chanting of God's name to be the most efficacious spiritual discipline for the Kaliyuga.
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One day Jatadhari requested Sri Ramakrishna to keep the image and bade him adieu with tearful eyes. He declared that Ramlala had fulfilled his innermost prayer and that he now had no more need of formal worship. A few days later Sri Ramakrishna was blessed through Ramlala with a vision of Ramachandra, whereby he realized that the Rama of the Ramayana, the son of Dasaratha, pervades the whole universe as Spirit and Consciousness; that He is its Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer; that, in still another aspect, He is the transcendental Brahman, without form, attribute, or name.
While worshipping Ramlala as the Divine Child, Sri Ramakrishna's heart became filled with motherly tenderness, and he began to regard himself as a woman. His speech and gestures changed. He began to move freely with the ladies of Mathur's family, who now looked upon him as one of their own sex. During this time he worshipped the Divine Mother as Her companion or handmaid.
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The love of Radha is the precursor of the resplendent vision of Sri Krishna, and Sri Ramakrishna soon ex perienced that vision. The enchanting ing form of Krishna appeared to him and merged in his person. He became Krishna; he totally forgot his own individuality and the world; he saw Krishna in himself and in the universe. Thus he attained to the fulfilment of the worship of the personal God. He drank from the fountain of Immortal Bliss. The agony of his heart vanished forever. He realized Amrita, Immortality, beyond the shadow of death.
One day, listening to a recitation of the Bhagavata on the verandah of the Radhakanta temple, he fell into a divine mood and saw the enchanting form of Krishna. He perceived the luminous rays issuing from Krishna's Lotus Feet in the form of a stout rope, which touched first the Bhagavata and then his own chest, connecting all three — God, the scripture, and the devotee. "After this vision", he used to say, "I came to realize that Bhagavan, Bhakta, and Bhagavata — God, Devotee, and Scripture — are in reality one and the same."
--- VEDANTA
The Brahmani was the enthusiastic teacher and astonished beholder of Sri Ramakrishna in his spiritual progress. She became proud of the achievements of her unique pupil. But the pupil himself was not permitted to rest; his destiny beckoned him forward. His Divine Mother would allow him no respite till he had left behind the entire realm of duality with its visions, ex periences, and ecstatic dreams. But for the new ascent the old tender guides would not suffice. The Brahmani, on whom he had depended for, three years, saw her son escape from her to follow the command of a teacher with masculine strength, a sterner mien, a gnarled physique, and a virile voice. The new guru was a wandering monk, the sturdy Totapuri, whom Sri Ramakrishna learnt to address affectionately as Nangta, the "Naked One", because of his total renunciation of all earthly objects and attachments, including even a piece of wearing cloth.
Totapuri was the bearer of a philosophy new to Sri Ramakrishna, the non-dualistic Vedanta philosophy, whose conclusions Totapuri had ex perienced in his own life. This ancient Hindu system designates the Ultimate Reality as Brahman, also described as Satchidananda, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Brahman is the only Real Existence. In It there is no time, no space, no causality, no multiplicity. But through maya, Its inscrutable Power, time, space, and causality are created and the One appears to break into the many. The eternal Spirit appears as a manifold of individuals endowed with form and subject to the conditions of time. The Immortal becomes a victim of birth and death. The Changeless undergoes change. The sinless Pure Soul, hypnotized by Its own maya, ex periences the joys of heaven and the pains of hell. But these ex periences based on the duality of the subject-object relationship are unreal. Even the vision of a personal God
is, ultimately speaking, as illusory as the ex perience of any other object. Man attains his liberation, therefore, by piercing the veil of maya and rediscovering his total identity with Brahman. Knowing himself to be one with the Universal Spirit, he realizes ineffable Peace. Only then does he go beyond the fiction of birth and death; only then does he become immortal. 'And this is the ultimate goal of all religions — to dehypnotize the soul now hypnotized by its own ignorance.
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Totapuri arrived at the Dakshineswar temple garden toward the end of 1864. perhaps born in the Punjab, he was the head of a monastery in that province of India and claimed leadership of seven hundred sannyasis. Trained from early youth in the disciplines of the Advaita Vedanta, he looked upon the world as an illusion. The gods and goddesses of the dualistic worship were to him mere fantasies of the deluded mind. Prayers, ceremonies, rites, and rituals had nothing to do with true religion, and about these he was utterly indifferent. Exercising self-exertion and unshakable will-power, he had liberated himself from attachment to the sense-objects of the relative universe. For forty years he had practised austere discipline on the bank of the sacred Narmada and had finally realized his identity with the Absolute. Thenceforward he roamed in the world as an unfettered soul, a lion free from the cage. Clad in a loin-cloth, he spent his days under the canopy of the sky alike in storm and sunshine, feeding his body on the slender pittance of alms. He had been visiting the estuary of the Ganges. On his return journey along the bank of the sacred river, led by the inscrutable Divine Will, he stopped at Dakshineswar.
Totapuri, discovering at once that Sri Ramakrishna was prepared to be a student of Vedanta, asked to initiate him into its mysteries. With the permission of the Divine Mother, Sri Ramakrishna agreed to the proposal. But Totapuri explained that only a sannyasi could receive the teaching of Vedanta. Sri Ramakrishna agreed to renounce the world, but with the stipulation that the ceremony of his initiation into the monastic order be performed in secret, to spare the feelings of his old mother, who had been living with him at Dakshineswar.
On the appointed day, in the small hours of the morning, a fire was lighted in the Panchavati. Totapuri and Sri Ramakrishna sat before it. The flame played on their faces. "Ramakrishna was a small brown man with a short beard and beautiful eyes, long dark eyes, full of light, obliquely set and slightly veiled, never very wide open, but seeing half-closed a great distance both outwardly and inwardly. His mouth was open over his white teeth in a bewitching smile, at once affectionate and mischievous. Of medium height, he was thin to emaciation and extremely delicate. His tem perament was high-strung, for he was su persensitive to all the winds of joy and sorrow, both moral and physical. He was indeed a living reflection of all that happened before the mirror of his eyes, a two-sided mirror, turned both out and in." (Romain Rolland, Prophets of the New India, pp. 38-9.) Facing him, the other rose like a rock. He was very tall and robust, a sturdy and tough oak. His constitution and mind were of iron. He was the strong leader of men.
In the burning flame before him Sri Ramakrishna performed the rituals of destroying his attachment to relatives, friends, body, mind, sense-organs, ego, and the world. The leaping flame swallowed it all, making the initiate free and pure. The sacred thread and the tuft of hair were consigned to the fire, completing his severance from caste, sex, and society. Last of all he burnt in that fire, with all that is holy as his witness, his desire for enjoyment here and hereafter. He uttered the sacred mantras giving assurance of safety and fearlessness to all beings, who were only manifestations of his own Self. The rites completed, the disciple received from the guru the loin-cloth and ochre robe, the emblems of his new life.
The teacher and the disciple repaired to the meditation room near by. Totapuri began to impart to Sri Ramakrishna the great truths of Vedanta.
"Brahman", he said, "is the only Reality, ever pure, ever illumined, ever free, beyond the limits of time, space, and causation. Though apparently divided by names and forms through the inscrutable power of maya, that enchantress who makes the impossible possible, Brahman is really One and undivided. When a seeker merges in the beatitude of samadhi, he does not perceive time and space or name and form, the offspring of maya. Whatever is within the domain of maya is unreal. Give it up. Destroy the prison-house of name and form and rush out of it with the strength of a lion. Dive deep in search of the Self and realize It through samadhi. You will find the world of name and form vanishing into void, and the puny ego dissolving in Brahman-Consciousness. You will realize your identity with Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute." Quoting the Upanishad, Totapuri said: "That knowledge is shallow by which one sees or hears or knows another
. What is shallow is worthless and can never give real felicity. But the Knowledge by which one does not see another or hear another or know another, which is beyond duality, is great, and through such Knowledge one attains the Infinite Bliss. How can the mind and senses grasp That which shines in the heart of all as the Eternal Subject?"
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Totapuri had no idea of the struggles of ordinary men in the toils of passion and desire. Having maintained all through life the guilelessness of a child, he laughed at the idea of a man's being led astray by the senses. He was convinced that the world was maya and had only to be denounced to vanish for ever. A born non-dualist, he had no faith in a personal God. He did not believe in the terrible aspect of Kali, much less in Her benign aspect. Music and the chanting of God's holy name were to him only so much nonsense. He ridiculed the spending of emotion on the worship of a personal God.
--- KALI AND MAYA
Sri Ramakrishna, on the other hand, though fully aware, like his guru, that the world is an illusory appearance, instead of slighting maya, like an orthodox monist, acknowledged its power in the relative life. He was all love and reverence for maya, perceiving in it a mysterious and majestic expression of Divinity. To him maya itself was God, for everything was God. It was one of the faces of Brahman. What he had realized on the heights of the transcendental plane, he also found here below, everywhere about him, under the mysterious garb of names and forms. And this garb was a perfectly transparent sheath, through which he recognized the glory of the Divine Immanence. Maya, the mighty weaver of the garb, is none other than Kali, the Divine Mother. She is the primordial Divine Energy, Sakti, and She can no more be distinguished from the Supreme Brahman than can the power of burning be distinguished from fire. She projects the world and again withdraws it. She spins it as the spider spins its web. She is the Mother of the Universe, identical with the Brahman of Vedanta, and with the Atman of Yoga. As eternal Lawgiver, She makes and unmakes laws; it is by Her im perious will that karma yields its fruit. She ensnares men with illusion and again releases them from bondage with a look of Her benign eyes. She is the supreme Mistress of the cosmic play, and all objects, animate and inanimate, dance by Her will. Even those who realize the Absolute in nirvikalpa samadhi are under Her jurisdiction as long as they still live on the relative plane.
Thus, after nirvikalpa samadhi, Sri Ramakrishna realized maya in an altogether new role. The binding aspect of Kali vanished from before his vision. She no longer obscured his understanding. The world became the glorious manifestation of the Divine Mother. Maya became Brahman. The Transcendental Itself broke through the Immanent. Sri Ramakrishna discovered that maya o perates in the relative world in two ways, and he termed these "avidyamaya" and "vidyamaya". Avidyamaya represents the dark forces of creation: sensuous desires, evil passions, greed, lust, cruelty, and so on. It sustains the world system on the lower planes. It is responsible for the round of man's birth and death. It must be fought and vanquished. But vidyamaya is the higher force of creation: the spiritual virtues, the enlightening qualities, kindness, purity, love, devotion. Vidyamaya elevates man to the higher planes of consciousness. With the help of vidyamaya the devotee rids himself of avidyamaya; he then becomes mayatita, free of maya. The two aspects of maya are the two forces of creation, the two powers of Kali; and She stands beyond them both. She is like the effulgent sun, bringing into existence and shining through and standing behind the clouds of different colours and shapes, conjuring up wonderful forms in the blue autumn heaven.
The Divine Mother asked Sri Ramakrishna not to be lost in the featureless Absolute but to remain, in bhavamukha, on the threshold of relative consciousness, the border line between the Absolute and the Relative. He was to keep himself at the "sixth centre" of Tantra, from which he could see not only the glory of the seventh, but also the divine manifestations of the Kundalini in the lower centres. He gently oscillated back and forth across the dividing line. Ecstatic devotion to the Divine Mother alternated with serene absorption in the Ocean of Absolute Unity. He thus bridged the gulf between the personal and the Im personal, the immanent and the transcendent aspects of Reality. This is a unique ex perience in the recorded spiritual history of the world.
--- TOTAPURI'S LESSON
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"When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive — neither creating nor preserving nor destroying —, I call Him Brahman or Purusha, the Im personal God. When I think of Him as active — creating, preserving, and destroying —, I call Him Sakti or Maya or Prakriti, the personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The personal and the Im personal are the same thing, like milk and its whiteness, the diamond and its lustre, the snake and its wriggling motion. It is impossible to conceive of the one without the other. The Divine Mother and Brahman are one."
After the departure of Totapuri, Sri Ramakrishna remained for six months in a state of absolute identity with Brahman. "For six months at a stretch", he said, "I remained in that state from which ordinary men can never return; generally the body falls off, after three weeks, like a sere leaf. I was not conscious of day and night. Flies would enter my mouth and nostrils just as they do a dead body's, but I did not feel them. My hair became matted with dust."
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From now on Sri Ramakrishna began to seek the company of devotees and holy men. He had gone through the storm and stress of spiritual disciplines and visions. Now he realized an inner calmness and appeared to others as a normal person. But he could not bear the company of worldly people or listen to their talk. Fortunately the holy atmosphere of Dakshineswar and the liberality of Mathur attracted monks and holy men from all parts of the country. Sadhus of all denominations — monists and dualists, Vaishnavas and Vedantists, Saktas and worship pers of Rama — flocked there in ever increasing numbers. Ascetics and visionaries came to seek Sri Ramakrishna's advice. Vaishnavas had come during the period of his Vaishnava sadhana, and Tantriks when he practised the disciplines of Tantra. Vedantists began to arrive after the departure of Totapuri. In the room of Sri Ramakrishna, who was then in bed with dysentery, the Vedantists engaged in scriptural discussions, and, forgetting his own physical suffering, he solved their doubts by referring directly to his own ex periences. Many of the visitors were genuine spiritual souls, the unseen pillars of Hinduism, and their spiritual lives were quickened in no small measure by the sage of Dakshineswar. Sri Ramakrishna in turn learnt from them anecdotes concerning the ways and the conduct of holy men, which he subsequently narrated to his devotees and disciples. At his request Mathur provided him with large stores of food-stuffs, clothes, and so forth, for distribution among the wandering monks.
"Sri Ramakrishna had not read books, yet he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of religions and religious philosophies. This he acquired from his contacts with innumerable holy men and scholars. He had a unique power of assimilation; through meditation he made this knowledge a part of his being. Once, when he was asked by a disciple about the source of his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge, he replied; "I have not read; but I have heard the learned. I have made a garland of their knowledge, wearing it round my neck, and I have given it as an offering at the feet of the Mother."
Sri Ramakrishna used to say that when the flower blooms the bees come to it for honey of their own accord. Now many souls began to visit Dakshineswar to satisfy their spiritual hunger. He, the devotee and aspirant, became the Master. Gauri, the great scholar who had been one of the first to proclaim Sri Ramakrishna an Incarnation of God, paid the Master a visit in 1870 and with the Master's blessings renounced the world. Narayan Shastri, another great pundit, who had mastered the six systems of Hindu philosophy and had been offered a lucrative post by the Maharaja of Jaipur, met the Master and recognized in him one who had realized in life those ideals which he himself had encountered merely in books. Sri Ramakrishna initiated Narayan Shastri, at his earnest request, into the life of sannyas. Pundit Padmalochan, the court pundit of the Maharaja of Burdwan, well known for his scholarship in both the Vedanta and the Nyaya systems of philosophy, accepted the Master as an Incarnation of God. Krishnakishore, a Vedantist scholar, became devoted to the Master. And there arrived Viswanath Upadhyaya, who was to become a favourite devotee; Sri Ramakrishna always addressed him as "Captain". He was a high officer of the King of Nepal and had received the title of Colonel in recognition of his merit. A scholar of the Gita, the Bhagavata, and the Vedanta philosophy, he daily performed the worship of his Chosen Deity with great devotion. "I have read the Vedas and the other scriptures", he said. "I have also met a good many monks and devotees in different places. But it is in Sri Ramakrishna's presence that my spiritual yearnings have been fulfilled. To me he seems to be the embodiment of the truths of the scriptures."
The Knowledge of Brahman in nirvikalpa samadhi had convinced Sri Ramakrishna that the gods of the different religions are but so many readings of the Absolute, and that the Ultimate Reality could never be expressed by human tongue. He understood that all religions lead their devotees by differing paths to one and the same goal. Now he became eager to explore some of the alien religions; for with him understanding meant actual ex perience.
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Toward the end of 1866 he began to practise the disciplines of Islam. Under the direction of his Mussalman guru he abandoned himself to his new sadhana. He dressed as a Mussalman and repeated the name of Allah. His prayers took the form of the Islamic devotions. He forgot the Hindu gods and goddesses — even Kali — and gave up visiting the temples. He took up his residence outside the temple precincts. After three days he saw the vision of a radiant figure, perhaps Mohammed. This figure gently approached him and finally lost himself in Sri Ramakrishna. Thus he realized the Mussalman God. Thence he passed into communion with Brahman. The mighty river of Islam also led him back to the Ocean of the Absolute.
--- CHRISTIANITY
Eight years later, some time in November 1874, Sri Ramakrishna was seized with an irresistible desire to learn the truth of the Christian religion. He began to listen to readings from the Bible, by Sambhu Charan Mallick, a gentleman of Calcutta and a devotee of the Master. Sri Ramakrishna became fascinated by the life and teachings of Jesus. One day he was seated in the parlour of Jadu Mallick's garden house (This expression is used throughout to translate the Bengali word denoting a rich man's country house set in a garden.) at Dakshineswar, when his eyes became fixed on a painting of the Madonna and Child. Intently watching it, he became gradually overwhelmed with divine emotion. The figures in the picture took on life, and the rays of light emanating from them entered his soul. The effect of this ex perience was stronger than that of the vision of Mohammed. In dismay he cried out, "O Mother! What are You doing to me?" And, breaking through the barriers of creed and religion, he entered a new realm of ecstasy. Christ possessed his soul. For three days he did not set foot in the Kali temple. On the fourth day, in the afternoon, as he was walking in the Panchavati, he saw coming toward him a person with beautiful large eyes, serene countenance, and fair skin. As the two faced each other, a voice rang out in the depths of Sri Ramakrishna's soul: "Behold the Christ, who shed His heart's blood for the redemption of the world, who suffered a sea of anguish for love of men. It is He, the Master Yogi, who is in eternal union with God. It is Jesus, Love Incarnate." The Son of Man embraced the Son of the Divine Mother and merged in him. Sri Ramakrishna krishna realized his identity with Christ, as he had already realized his identity with Kali, Rama, Hanuman, Radha, Krishna, Brahman, and Mohammed. The Master went into samadhi and communed with the Brahman with attributes. Thus he ex perienced the truth that Christianity, too, was a path leading to God-Consciousness. Till the last moment of his life he believed that Christ was an Incarnation of God. But Christ, for him, was not the only Incarnation; there were others — Buddha, for instance, and Krishna.
--- ATTITUDE TOWARD DIFFERENT RELIGIONS
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On January 27, 1868, Mathur Babu with a party of some one hundred and twenty-five persons set out on a pilgrimage to the sacred places of northern India. At Vaidyanath in Behar, when the Master saw the inhabitants of a village reduced by poverty and starvation to mere skeletons, he requested his rich patron to feed the people and give each a piece of cloth. Mathur demurred at the added expense. The Master declared bitterly that he would not go on to Benares, but would live with the poor and share their miseries. He actually left Mathur and sat down with the villagers. Whereupon Mathur had to yield. On another occasion, two years later, Sri Ramakrishna showed a similar sentiment for the poor and needy. He accompanied Mathur on a tour to one of the latter's estates at the time of the collection of rents. For two years the harvests had failed and the tenants were in a state of extreme poverty. The Master asked Mathur to remit their rents, distribute help to them, and in addition give the hungry people a sumptuous feast. When Mathur grumbled, the Master said: "You are only the steward of the Divine Mother. They are the Mother's tenants. You must spend the Mother's money. When they are suffering, how can you refuse to help them? You must help them." Again Mathur had to give in. Sri Ramakrishna's sympathy for the poor sprang from his perception of God in all created beings. His sentiment was not that of the humanist or philanthropist. To him the service of man was the same as the worship of God.
The party entered holy Benares by boat along the Ganges. When Sri Ramakrishna's eyes fell on this city of Siva, where had accumulated for ages the devotion and piety of countless worship pers, he saw it to be made of gold, as the scriptures declare. He was visibly moved. During his stay in the city he treated every particle of its earth with utmost respect. At the Manikarnika Ghat, the great cremation ground of the city, he actually saw Siva, with ash-covered body and tawny matted hair, serenely approaching each funeral pyre and breathing into the ears of the corpses the mantra of liberation; and then the Divine Mother removing from the dead their bonds. Thus he realized the significance of the scriptural statement that anyone dying in Benares attains salvation through the grace of Siva. He paid a visit to Trailanga Swami, the celebrated monk, whom he later declared to be a real paramahamsa, a veritable image of Siva.
Sri Ramakrishna visited Allahabad, at the confluence of the Ganges and the Jamuna, and then proceeded to Vrindavan and Mathura, hallowed by the legends, songs, and dramas about Krishna and the gopis. Here he had numerous visions and his heart overflowed with divine emotion. He wept and said: "O Krishna! Everything here is as it was in the olden days. You alone are absent." He visited the great woman saint, Gangamayi, regarded by Vaishnava devotees as the reincarnation of an intimate attendant of Radha. She was sixty years old and had frequent trances. She spoke of Sri Ramakrishna as an incarnation of Radha. With great difficulty he was persuaded to leave her.
On the return journey Mathur wanted to visit Gaya, but Sri Ramakrishna declined to go. He recalled his father's vision at Gaya before his own birth and felt that in the temple of Vishnu he would become permanently absorbed in God. Mathur, honouring the Master's wish, returned with his party to Calcutta.
From Vrindavan the Master had brought a handful of dust. Part of this he scattered in the Panchavati; the rest he buried in the little hut where he had practised meditation. "Now this place", he said, "is as sacred as Vrindavan."
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Totapuri, coming to know of the Master's marriage, had once remarked: "What does it matter? He alone is firmly established in the Knowledge of Brahman who can adhere to his spirit of discrimination and renunciation even while living with his wife. He alone has attained the supreme illumination who can look on man and woman alike as Brahman. A man with the idea of sex may be a good aspirant, but he is still far from the goal." Sri Ramakrishna and his wife lived together at Dakshineswar, but their minds always soared above the worldly plane. A few months after Sarada Devi's arrival Sri Ramakrishna arranged, on an auspicious day, a special worship of Kali, the Divine Mother. Instead of an image of the Deity, he placed on the seat the living image, Sarada Devi herself. The worship per and the worshipped went into deep samadhi and in the transcendental plane their souls were united. After several hours Sri Ramakrishna came down again to the relative plane, sang a hymn to the Great Goddess, and surrendered, at the feet of the living image, himself, his rosary, and the fruit of his life-long sadhana. This is known in Tantra as the Shorasi Puja, the "Adoration of Woman". Sri Ramakrishna realized the significance of the great statement of the Upanishad: "O Lord, Thou art the woman. Thou art the man; Thou art the boy. Thou art the girl; Thou art the old, tottering on their crutches. Thou pervadest the universe in its multiple forms."
By his marriage Sri Ramakrishna admitted the great value of marriage in man's spiritual evolution, and by adhering to his monastic vows he demonstrated the im perative necessity of self-control, purity, and continence, in the realization of God. By this unique spiritual relationship with his wife he proved that husband and wife can live together as spiritual companions. Thus his life is a synthesis of the ways of life of the householder and the monk.
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In the nirvikalpa samadhi Sri Ramakrishna had realized that Brahman alone is real and the world illusory. By keeping his mind six months on the plane of the non-dual Brahman, he had attained to the state of the vijnani, the knower of Truth in a special and very rich sense, who sees Brahman not only in himself and in the transcendental Absolute, but in everything of the world. In this state of vijnana, sometimes, bereft of body-consciousness, he would regard himself as one with Brahman; sometimes, conscious of the dual world, he would regard himself as God's devotee, servant, or child. In order to enable the Master to work for the welfare of humanity, the Divine Mother had kept in him a trace of ego, which he described — according to his mood — as the "ego of Knowledge", the "ego of Devotion", the "ego of a child", or the "ego of a servant". In any case this ego of the Master, consumed by the fire of the Knowledge of Brahman, was an appearance only, like a burnt string. He often referred to this ego as the "ripe ego" in contrast with the ego of the bound soul, which he described as the "unripe" or "green" ego. The ego of the bound soul identifies itself with the body, relatives, possessions, and the world; but the "ripe ego", illumined by Divine Knowledge, knows the body, relatives, possessions, and the world to be unreal and establishes a relationship of love with God alone. Through this "ripe ego" Sri Ramakrishna dealt with the world and his wife. One day, while stroking his feet, Sarada Devi asked the Master, "What do you think of me?" Quick came the answer: "The Mother who is worshipped in the temple is the mother who has given birth to my body and is now living in the nahabat, and it is She again who is stroking my feet at this moment. Indeed, I always look on you as the personification of the Blissful Mother Kali."
Sarada Devi, in the company of her husband, had rare spiritual ex periences. She said: "I have no words to describe my wonderful exaltation of spirit as I watched him in his different moods. Under the influence of divine emotion he would sometimes talk on abstruse subjects, sometimes laugh, sometimes weep, and sometimes become perfectly motionless in samadhi. This would continue throughout the night. There was such an extraordinary divine presence in him that now and then I would shake with fear and wonder how the night would pass. Months went by in this way. Then one day he discovered that I had to keep awake the whole night lest, during my sleep, he should go into samadhi — for it might happen at any moment —, and so he asked me to sleep in the nahabat."
--- SUMMARY OF THE MASTER'S SPIRITUAL EX perIENCES
We have now come to the end of Sri Ramakrishna's sadhana, the period of his spiritual discipline. As a result of his su persensuous ex periences he reached certain conclusions regarding himself and spirituality in general. His conclusions about himself may be summarized as follows:
First, he was an Incarnation of God, a specially commissioned person, whose spiritual ex periences were for the benefit of humanity. Whereas it takes an ordinary man a whole life's struggle to realize one or two phases of God, he had in a few years realized God in all His phases.
Second, he knew that he had always been a free soul, that the various disciplines through which he had passed were really not necessary for his own liberation but were solely for the benefit of others. Thus the terms liberation and bondage were not applicable to him. As long as there are beings who consider themselves bound. God must come down to earth as an Incarnation to free them from bondage, just as a magistrate must visit any part of his district in which there is trouble.
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Second, the three great systems of thought known as Dualism, Qualified Non-dualism, and Absolute Non-dualism — Dvaita, Visishtadvaita, and Advaita — he perceived to represent three stages in man's progress toward the Ultimate Reality. They were not contradictory but complementary and suited to different tem peraments. For the ordinary man with strong attachment to the senses, a dualistic form of religion, prescribing a certain amount of material support, such as music and other symbols, is useful. A man of God-realization transcends the idea of worldly duties, but the ordinary mortal must perform his duties, striving to be unattached and to surrender the results to God. The mind can comprehend and describe the range of thought and ex perience up to the Visishtadvaita, and no further. The Advaita, the last word in spiritual ex perience, is something to be felt in samadhi. for it transcends mind and speech. From the highest standpoint, the Absolute and Its manifestation are equally real — the Lord's Name, His Abode, and the Lord Himself are of the same spiritual Essence. Everything is Spirit, the difference being only in form.
Third, Sri Ramakrishna realized the wish of the Divine Mother that through him She should found a new Order, consisting of those who would uphold the universal doctrines illustrated in his life.
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During this period Sri Ramakrishna suffered several bereavements. The first was the death of a nephew named Akshay. After the young man's death Sri Ramakrishna said: "Akshay died before my very eyes. But it did not affect me in the least. I stood by and watched a man die. It was like a sword being drawn from its scabbard. I enjoyed the scene, and laughed and sang and danced over it. They removed the body and cremated it. But the next day as I stood there (pointing to the southeast verandah of his room), I felt a racking pain for the loss of Akshay, as if somebody were squeezing my heart like a wet towel. I wondered at it and thought that the Mother was teaching me a lesson. I was not much concerned even with my own body — much less with a relative. But if such was my pain at the loss of a nephew, how much more must be the grief of the householders at the loss of their near and dear ones!" In 1871 Mathur died, and some five years later Sambhu Mallick — who, after Mathur's passing away, had taken care of the Master's comfort. In 1873 died his elder brother Rameswar, and in 1876, his beloved mother. These bereavements left their imprint on the tender human heart of Sri Ramakrishna, albeit he had realized the immortality of the soul and the illusoriness of birth and death.
In March 1875, about a year before the death of his mother, the Master met Keshab Chandra Sen. The meeting was a momentous event for both Sri Ramakrishna and Keshab. Here the Master for the first time came into actual, contact with a worthy representative of modern India.
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Gradually other Brahmo leaders began to feel Sri Ramakrishna's influence. But they were by no means uncritical admirers of the Master. They particularly disapproved of his ascetic renunciation and condemnation of "woman and gold".1 They measured him according to their own ideals of the householder's life. Some could not understand his samadhi and described it as a nervous malady. Yet they could not resist his magnetic personality.
Among the Brahmo leaders who knew the Master closely were Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, Vijaykrishna Goswami, Trailokyanath Sannyal, and Shivanath Shastri.
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Shivanath vehemently criticized the Master for his other-worldly attitude toward his wife. He writes: "Ramakrishna was practically separated from his wife, who lived in her village home. One day when I was complaining to some friends about the virtual widowhood of his wife, he drew me to one side and whis pered in my ear: 'Why do you complain? It is no longer possible; it is all dead and gone.' Another day as I was inveighing against this part of his teaching, and also declaring that our program of work in the Brahmo Samaj includes women, that ours is a social and domestic religion, and that we want to give education and social liberty to women, the saint became very much excited, as was his way when anything against his settled conviction was asserted — a trait we so much liked in him — and exclaimed, 'Go, thou fool, go and perish in the pit that your women will dig for you.' Then he glared at me and said: 'What does a gardener do with a young plant? Does he not surround it with a fence, to protect it from goats and cattle? And when the young plant has grown up into a tree and it can no longer be injured by cattle, does he not remove the fence and let the tree grow freely?' I replied, 'Yes, that is the custom with gardeners.' Then he remarked, 'Do the same in your spiritual life; become strong, be full-grown; then you may seek them.' To which I replied, 'I don't agree with you in thinking that women's work is like that of cattle, destructive; they are our associates and hel pers in our spiritual struggles and social progress' — a view with which he could not agree, and he marked his dissent by shaking his head. Then referring to the lateness of the hour he jocularly remarked, 'It is time for you to depart; take care, do not be late; otherwise your woman will not admit you into her room.' This evoked hearty laughter."
Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, the right-hand man of Keshab and an accomplished Brahmo preacher in Europe and America, bitterly criticized Sri Ramakrishna's use of uncultured language and also his austere attitude toward his wife. But he could not escape the spell of the Master's personality. In the course of an article about Sri Ramakrishna, Pratap wrote in the "Theistic Quarterly Review": "What is there in common between him and me? I, a Europeanized, civilized, self-centred, semi-sceptical, so-called educated reasoner, and he, a poor, illiterate, unpolished, half-idolatrous, friendless Hindu devotee? Why should I sit long hours to attend to him, I, who have listened to Disraeli and Fawcett, Stanley and Max Muller, and a whole host of European scholars and divines? . . . And it is not I only, but dozens like me, who do the same. . . . He worships Siva, he worships Kali, he worships Rama, he worships Krishna, and is a confirmed advocate of Vedantic doctrines. . . . He is an idolater, yet is a faithful and most devoted meditator on the perfections of the One Formless, Absolute, Infinite Deity. . . . His religion is ecstasy, his worship means transcendental insight, his whole nature burns day and night with a permanent fire and fever of a strange faith and feeling. . . . So long as he is spared to us, gladly shall we sit at his feet to learn from him the sublime precepts of purity, unworldliness, spirituality, and inebriation in the love of God. . . . He, by his childlike bhakti, by his strong conceptions of an ever-ready Motherhood, helped to unfold it [God as our Mother] in our minds wonderfully. . . . By associating with him we learnt to realize better the divine attributes as scattered over the three hundred and thirty millions of deities of mythological India, the gods of the Puranas."
The Brahmo leaders received much inspiration from their contact with Sri Ramakrishna. It broadened their religious views and kindled in their hearts the yearning for God-realization; it made them understand and appreciate the rituals and symbols of Hindu religion, convinced them of the manifestation of God in diverse forms, and deepened their thoughts about the harmony of religions. The Master, too, was impressed by the sincerity of many of the Brahmo devotees. He told them about his own realizations and explained to them the essence of his teachings, such as the necessity of renunciation, sincerity in the pursuit of one's own course of discipline, faith in God, the performance of one's duties without thought of results, and discrimination between the Real and the unreal.
This contact with the educated and progressive Bengalis opened Sri Ramakrishna's eyes to a new realm of thought. Born and brought up in a simple village, without any formal education, and taught by the orthodox holy men of India in religious life, he had had no opportunity to study the influence of modernism on the thoughts and lives of the Hindus. He could not pro perly estimate the result of the impact of Western education on Indian culture. He was a Hindu of the Hindus, renunciation being to him the only means to the realization of God in life. From the Brahmos he learnt that the new generation of India made a compromise between God and the world. Educated young men were influenced more by the Western philosophers than by their own prophets. But Sri Ramakrishna was not dismayed, for he saw in this, too, the hand of God. And though he expounded to the Brahmos all his ideas about God and austere religious disciplines, yet he bade them accept from his teachings only as much as suited their tastes and tem peraments.
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Contact with the Brahmos increased Sri Ramakrishna's longing to encounter aspirants who would be able to follow his teachings in their purest form. "There was no limit", he once declared, "to the longing I felt at that time. During the day-time I somehow managed to control it. The secular talk of the worldly-minded was galling to me, and I would look wistfully to the day when my own beloved companions would come. I hoped to find solace in conversing with them and relating to them my own realizations. Every little incident would remind me of them, and thoughts of them wholly engrossed me. I was already arranging in my mind what I should say to one and give to another, and so on. But when the day would come to a close I would not be able to curb my feelings. The thought that another day had gone by, and they had not come, oppressed me. When, during the evening service, the temples rang with the sound of bells and conch-shells, I would climb to the roof of the kuthi in the garden and, writhing in anguish of heart, cry at the top of my voice: 'Come, my children! Oh, where are you? I cannot bear to live without you.' A mother never longed so intensely for the sight of her child, nor a friend for his companions, nor a lover for his sweetheart, as I longed for them. Oh, it was indescribable! Shortly after this period of yearning the devotees1 began to come."
In the year 1879 occasional writings about Sri Ramakrishna by the Brahmos, in the Brahmo magazines, began to attract his future disciples from the educated middle-class Bengalis, and they continued to come till 1884. But others, too, came, feeling the subtle power of his attraction. They were an ever shifting crowd of people of all castes and creeds: Hindus and Brahmos, Vaishnavas and Saktas, the educated with university degrees and the illiterate, old and young, maharajas and beggars, journalists and artists, pundits and devotees, philosophers and the worldly-minded, jnanis and yogis, men of action and men of faith, virtuous women and prostitutes, office-holders and vagabonds, philanthropists and self-seekers, dramatists and drunkards, builders-up and pullers-down. He gave to them all, without stint, from his illimitable store of realization. No one went away empty-handed. He taught them the lofty .knowledge of the Vedanta and the soul
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^The word is generally used in the text to denote one devoted to God, a worship per of the personal God, or a follower of the path of love. A devotee of Sri Ramakrishna is one who is devoted to Sri Ramakrishna and follows his teachings. The word "disciple", when used in connexion with Sri Ramakrishna, refers to one who had been initiated into spiritual life by Sri Ramakrishna and who regarded him as his guru.
--- THE MASTER'S METHOD OF TEACHING
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To those who became his intimate disciples the Master was a friend, companion, and playmate. Even the chores of religious discipline would be lightened in his presence. The devotees would be so inebriated with pure joy in his company that they would have no time to ask themselves whether he was an Incarnation, a perfect soul, or a yogi. His very presence was a great teaching; words were su perfluous. In later years his disciples remarked that while they were with him they would regard him as a comrade, but afterwards would tremble to think of their frivolities in the presence of such a great person. They had convincing proof that the Master could, by his mere wish, kindle in their hearts the love of God and give them His vision.
Through all this fun and frolic, this merriment and frivolity, he always kept before them the shining ideal of God-Consciousness and the path of renunciation. He prescribed ascents steep or graded according to the powers of the climber. He permitted no compromise with the basic principles of purity. An aspirant had to keep his body, mind, senses, and soul unspotted; had to have a sincere love for God and an ever mounting spirit of yearning. The rest would be done by the Mother.
His disciples were of two kinds: the householders, and the young men, some of whom were later to become monks. There was also a small group of women devotees.
--
For the householders Sri Ramakrishna did not prescribe the hard path of total renunciation. He wanted them to discharge their obligations to their families. Their renunciation was to be mental. Spiritual life could not be acquired by flying away from responsibilities. A married couple should live like brother and sister after the birth of one or two children, devoting their time to spiritual talk and contemplation. He encouraged the householders, saying that their life was, in a way, easier than that of the monk, since it was more advantageous to fight the enemy from inside a fortress than in an open field. He insisted, however, on their repairing into solitude every now and then to strengthen their devotion and faith in God through prayer, japa, and meditation. He prescribed for them the companionship of sadhus. He asked them to perform their worldly duties with one hand, while holding to God with the other, and to pray to God to make their duties fewer and fewer so that in the end they might cling to Him with both hands. He would discourage in both the householders and the celibate youths any lukewarmness in their spiritual struggles. He would not ask them to follow indiscriminately the ideal of non-resistance, which ultimately makes a coward of the unwary.
--- FUTURE MONKS
--
Bhavanath Chatterji visited the Master while he was still in his teens. His parents and relatives regarded Sri Ramakrishna as an insane person and tried their utmost to prevent him from becoming intimate with the Master. But the young boy was very stubborn and often spent nights at Dakshineswar. He was greatly attached to Narendra, and the Master encouraged their friendship. The very sight of him often awakened Sri Ramakrishna's spiritual emotion.
--- BALARAM BOSE
--
Mahendranath Gupta, better known as "M.", arrived at Dakshineswar in March 1882. He belonged to the Brahmo Samaj and was headmaster of the Vidyasagar High School at Syambazar, Calcutta. At the very first sight the Master recognized him as one of his "marked" disciples. Mahendra recorded in his diary Sri Ramakrishna's conversations with his devotees. These are the first directly recorded words, in the spiritual history of the world, of a man recognized as belonging in the class of Buddha and Christ. The present volume is a translation of this diary. Mahendra was instrumental, through his personal contacts, in spreading the Master's message among many young and aspiring souls.
--- NAG MAHASHAY
--
Girish Chandra Ghosh was a born rebel against God, a sceptic, a Bohemian, a drunkard. He was the greatest Bengali dramatist of his time, the father of the modem Bengali stage. Like other young men he had imbibed all the vices of the West. He had plunged into a life of dissipation and had become convinced that religion was only a fraud. Materialistic philosophy he justified as enabling one to get at least a little fun out of life. But a series of reverses shocked him and he became eager to solve the riddle of life. He had heard people say that in spiritual life the help of a guru was im perative and that the guru was to be regarded as God Himself. But Girish was too well acquainted with human nature to see perfection in a man. His first meeting with Sri Ramakrishna did not impress him at all. He returned home feeling as if he had seen a freak at a circus; for the Master, in a semi-conscious mood, had inquired whether it was evening, though the lamps were burning in the room. But their paths often crossed, and Girish could not avoid further encounters. The Master attended a performance in Girish's Star Theatre. On this occasion, too, Girish found nothing impressive about him. One day, however, Girish happened to see the Master dancing and singing with the devotees. He felt the contagion and wanted to join them, but restrained himself for fear of ridicule. Another day Sri Ramakrishna was about to give him spiritual instruction, when Girish said: "I don't want to listen to instructions. I have myself written many instructions. They are of no use to me. Please help me in a more tangible way If you can." This pleased the Master and he asked Girish to cultivate faith.
As time passed, Girish began to learn that the guru is the one who silently unfolds the disciple's inner life. He became a steadfast devotee of the Master. He often loaded the Master with insults, drank in his presence, and took liberties which astounded the other devotees. But the Master knew that at heart Girish was tender, faithful, and sincere. He would not allow Girish to give up the theatre. And when a devotee asked him to tell Girish to give up drinking, he sternly replied: "That is none of your business. He who has taken charge of him will look after him. Girish is a devotee of heroic type. I tell you, drinking will not affect him." The Master knew that mere words could not induce a man to break deep-rooted habits, but that the silent influence of love worked miracles. Therefore he never asked him to give up alcohol, with the result that Girish himself eventually broke the habit. Sri Ramakrishna had strengthened Girish's resolution by allowing him to feel that he was absolutely free.
One day Girish felt depressed because he was unable to submit to any routine of spiritual discipline. In an exalted mood the Master said to him: "All right, give me your power of attorney. Henceforth I assume responsibility for you. You need not do anything." Girish heaved a sigh of relief. He felt happy to think that Sri Ramakrishna had assumed his spiritual responsibilities. But poor Girish could not then realize that He also, on his part, had to give up his freedom and make of himself a puppet in Sri Ramakrishna's hands. The Master began to discipline him according to this new attitude. One day Girish said about a trifling matter, "Yes, I shall do this." "No, no!" the Master corrected him. "You must not speak in that egotistic manner. You should say, 'God willing, I shall do it.'" Girish understood. Thenceforth he tried to give up all idea of personal responsibility and surrender himself to the Divine Will. His mind began to dwell constantly on Sri Ramakrishna. This unconscious meditation in time chastened his turbulent spirit.
The householder devotees generally visited Sri Ramakrishna on Sunday afternoons and other holidays. Thus a brotherhood was gradually formed, and the Master encouraged their fraternal feeling. Now and then he would accept an invitation to a devotee's home, where other devotees would also be invited. Kirtan would be arranged and they would spend hours in dance and devotional music. The Master would go into trances or open his heart in religious discourses and in the narration of his own spiritual ex periences. Many people who could not go to Dakshineswar participated in these meetings and felt blessed. Such an occasion would be concluded with a sumptuous feast.
--
The Europeanized Kristodas Pal did not approve of the Master's emphasis on renunciation and said; "Sir, this cant of renunciation has almost ruined the country. It is for this reason that the Indians are a subject nation today. Doing good to others, bringing education to the door of the ignorant, and above all, improving the material conditions of the country — these should be our duty now. The cry of religion and renunciation would, on the contrary, only weaken us. You should advise the young men of Bengal to resort only to such acts as will uplift the country." Sri Ramakrishna gave him a searching look and found no divine light within, "You man of poor understanding!" Sri Ramakrishna said sharply. "You dare to slight in these terms renunciation and piety, which our scriptures describe as the greatest of all virtues! After reading two pages of English you think you have come to know the world! You appear to think you are omniscient. Well, have you seen those tiny crabs that are born in the Ganges just when the rains set in? In this big universe you are even less significant than one of those small creatures. How dare you talk of helping the world? The Lord will look to that. You haven't the power in you to do it." After a pause the Master continued: "Can you explain to me how you can work for others? I know what you mean by helping them. To feed a number of persons, to treat them when they are sick, to construct a road or dig a well — isn't that all? These, are good deeds, no doubt, but how trifling in comparison with the vastness of the universe! How far can a man advance in this line? How many people can you save from famine? Malaria has ruined a whole province; what could you do to stop its onslaught? God alone looks after the world. Let a man first realize Him. Let a man get the authority from God and be endowed with His power; then, and then alone, may he think of doing good to others. A man should first be purged of all egotism. Then alone will the Blissful Mother ask him to work for the world." Sri Ramakrishna mistrusted philanthropy that presumed to pose as charity. He warned people against it. He saw in most acts of philanthropy nothing but egotism, vanity, a desire for glory, a barren excitement to kill the boredom of life, or an attempt to soothe a guilty conscience. True charity, he taught, is the result of love of God — service to man in a spirit of worship.
--- MONASTIC DISCIPLES
--
The first of these young men to come to the Master was Latu. Born of obscure parents, in Behar, he came to Calcutta in search of work and was engaged by Ramchandra Dutta as house-boy. Learning of the saintly Sri Ramakrishna, he visited the Master at Dakshineswar and was deeply touched by his cordiality. When he was about to leave, the Master asked him to take some money and return home in a boat or carriage. But Latu declared he had a few pennies and jingled the coins in his pocket. Sri Ramakrishna later requested Ram to allow Latu to stay with him permanently. Under Sri Ramakrishna's guidance Latu made great progress in meditation and was blessed with ecstatic visions, but all the efforts of the Master to give him a smattering of education failed. Latu was very fond of kirtan and other devotional songs but remained all his life illiterate.
--- RAKHAL
--
As he read in college the rationalistic Western philosophers of the nineteenth century, his boyhood faith in God and religion was unsettled. He would not accept religion on mere faith; he wanted demonstration of God. But very soon his passionate nature discovered that mere Universal Reason was cold and bloodless. His emotional nature, dissatisfied with a mere abstraction, required a concrete support to help him in the hours of temptation. He wanted an external power, a guru, who by embodying perfection in the flesh would still the commotion of his soul. Attracted by the magnetic personality of Keshab, he joined the Brahmo Samaj and became a singer in its choir. But in the Samaj he did not find the guru who could say that he had seen God.
In a state of mental conflict and torture of soul, Narendra came to Sri Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar. He was then eighteen years of age and had been in college two years. He entered the Master's room accompanied by some light-hearted friends. At Sri Ramakrishna's request he sang a few songs, pouring his whole soul into them, and the Master went into samadhi. A few minutes later Sri Ramakrishna suddenly left his seat, took Narendra by the hand, and led him to the screened verandah north of his room. They were alone. Addressing Narendra most tenderly, as if he were a friend of long acquaintance, the Master said: "Ah! You have come very late. Why have you been so unkind as to make me wait all these days? My ears are tired of hearing the futile words of worldly men. Oh, how I have longed to pour my spirit into the heart of someone fitted to receive my message!" He talked thus, sobbing all the time. Then, standing before Narendra with folded hands, he addressed him as Narayana, born on earth to remove the misery of humanity. Grasping Narendra's hand, he asked him to come again, alone, and very soon. Narendra was startled. "What is this I have come to see?" he said to himself. "He must be stark mad. Why, I am the son of Viswanath Dutta. How dare he speak this way to me?"
--
During his second visit, about a month later, suddenly, at the touch of the Master, Narendra felt overwhelmed and saw the walls of the room and everything around him whirling and vanishing. "What are you doing to me?" he cried in terror. "I have my father and mother at home." He saw his own ego and the whole universe almost swallowed in a nameless void. With a laugh the Master easily restored him. Narendra thought he might have been hypnotized, but he could not understand how a monomaniac could cast a spell over the mind of a strong person like himself. He returned home more confused than ever, resolved to be henceforth on his guard before this strange man.
But during his third visit Narendra fared no better. This time, at the Master's touch, he lost consciousness entirely. While he was still in that state, Sri Ramakrishna questioned him concerning his spiritual antecedents and whereabouts, his mission in this world, and the duration of his mortal life. The answers confirmed what the Master himself had known and inferred. Among other things, he came to know that Narendra was a sage who had already attained perfection, and that the day he learnt his real nature he would give up his body in yoga, by an act of will.
A few more meetings completely removed from Narendra's mind the last traces of the notion that Sri Ramakrishna might be a monomaniac or wily hypnotist. His integrity, purity, renunciation, and unselfishness were beyond question. But Narendra could not accept a man, an im perfect mortal, as his guru. As a member of the Brahmo Samaj, he could not believe that a human intermediary was necessary between man and God. Moreover, he openly laughed at Sri Ramakrishna's visions as hallucinations. Yet in the secret chamber of his heart he bore a great love for the Master.
--
The Master wanted to train Narendra in the teachings of the non-dualistic Vedanta philosophy. But Narendra, because of his Brahmo upbringing, considered it wholly blasphemous to look on man as one with his Creator. One day at the temple garden he laughingly said to a friend: "How silly! This jug is God! This cup is God! Whatever we see is God! And we too are God! Nothing could be more absurd." Sri Ramakrishna came out of his room and gently touched him. Spellbound, he immediately perceived that everything in the world was indeed God. A new universe opened around him. Returning home in a dazed state, he found there too that the food, the plate, the eater himself, the people around him, were all God. When he walked in the street, he saw that the cabs, the horses, the streams of people, the buildings, were all Brahman. He could hardly go about his day's business. His parents became anxious about him and thought him ill. And when the intensity of the ex perience abated a little, he saw the world as a dream. Walking in the public square, he would strike his head against the iron railings to know whether they were real. It took him a number of days to recover his normal self. He had a foretaste of the great ex periences yet to come and realized that the words of the Vedanta were true.
At the beginning of 1884 Narendra's father suddenly died of heart-failure, leaving the family in a state of utmost poverty. There were six or seven mouths to feed at home. Creditors were knocking at the door. Relatives who had accepted his father's unstinted kindness now became enemies, some even bringing suit to deprive Narendra of his ancestral home. Actually starving and barefoot, Narendra searched for a job, but without success. He began to doubt whether anywhere in the world there was such a thing as unselfish sympathy. Two rich women made evil proposals to him and promised to put an end to his distress; but he refused them with contempt.
--
This was a very rich and significant ex perience for Narendra. It taught him that Sakti, the Divine Power, cannot be ignored in the world and that in the relative plane the need of worshipping a personal God is im perative. Sri Ramakrishna was overjoyed with the conversion. The next day, sitting almost on Narendra's lap, he said to a devotee, pointing first to himself, then to Narendra: "I see I am this, and again that. Really I feel no difference. A stick floating in the Ganges seems to divide the water; But in reality the water is one. Do you see my point? Well, whatever is, is the Mother — isn't that so?" In later years Narendra would say: "Sri Ramakrishna was the only person who, from the time he met me, believed in me uniformly throughout. Even my mother and brothers did not. It was his unwavering trust and love for me that bound me to him for ever. He alone knew how to love. Worldly people, only make a show of love for selfish ends.
--- TARAK
--
Jogindranath came of an aristocratic brahmin family of Dakshineswar. His father and relatives shared the popular mistrust of Sri Ramakrishna's sanity. At a very early age the boy developed religious tendencies, spending two or three hours daily in meditation, and his meeting with Sri Ramakrishna deepened his desire for the realization of God. He had a perfect horror of marriage. But at the earnest request of his mother he had had to yield, and he now believed that his spiritual future was doomed. So he kept himself away from the Master.
Sri Ramakrishna employed a ruse to bring Jogindra to him. As soon as the disciple entered the room, the Master rushed forward to meet the young man. Catching hold of the disciple's hand, he said: "What if you have married? Haven't I too married? What is there to be afraid of in that?" Touching his own chest he said: "If this [meaning himself] is propitious, then even a hundred thousand marriages cannot injure you. If you desire to lead a householder's life, then bring your wife here one day, and I shall see that she becomes a real companion in your spiritual progress. But if you want to lead a monastic life, then I shall eat up your attachment to the world." Jogin was dumbfounded at these words. He received new strength, and his spirit of renunciation was re-established.
--
The Master knew Hari's passion for Vedanta. But he did not wish any of his disciples to become a dry ascetic or a mere bookworm. So he asked Hari to practise Vedanta in life by giving up the unreal and following the Real. "But it is not so easy", Sri Ramakrishna said, "to realize the illusoriness of the world. Study alone does not help one very much. The grace of God is required. Mere personal effort is futile. A man is a tiny creature after all, with very limited powers. But he can achieve the impossible if he prays to God for His grace." Whereupon the Master sang a song in praise of grace. Hari was profoundly moved and shed tears. Later in life Hari achieved a wonderful synthesis of the ideals of the personal God and the Im personal Truth.
--- GANGADHAR
--
Kaliprasad visited the Master toward the end of 1883. Given to the practice of meditation and the study of the scriptures. Kali was particularly interested in yoga. Feeling the need of a guru in spiritual life, he came to the Master and was accepted as a disciple. The young boy possessed a rational mind and often felt sceptical about the personal God. The Master said to him: "Your doubts will soon disappear. Others, too, have passed through such a state of mind. Look at Naren. He now weeps at the names of Radha and Krishna." Kali began to see visions of gods and goddesses. Very soon these disappeared and in meditation he ex perienced vastness, infinity, and the other attributes of the Im personal Brahman.
--- SUBODH
--
She spent about two months in uninterrupted communion with God, the Baby Gopala never leaving her for a moment. Then the intensity of her vision was lessened; had it not been, her body would have perished. The Master spoke highly of her exalted spiritual condition and said that such vision of God was a rare thing for ordinary mortals. The fun-loving Master one day confronted the critical Narendranath with this simple-minded woman. No two could have presented a more striking contrast. The Master knew of Narendra's lofty contempt for all visions, and he asked the old lady to narrate her ex periences to Narendra. With great hesitation she told him her story. Now and then she interrupted her maternal chatter to ask Narendra: "My son, I am a poor ignorant woman. I don't understand anything. You are so learned. Now tell me if these visions of Gopala are true." As Narendra listened to the story he was profoundly moved. He said, "Yes, mother, they are quite true." Behind his cynicism Narendra, too, possessed a heart full of love and tenderness.
--- THE MARCH OF EVENTS
--
In April 1885 the Master's throat became inflamed. Prolonged conversation or absorption in samadhi, making the blood flow into the throat, would aggravate the pain. Yet when the annual Vaishnava festival was celebrated at Panihati, Sri Ramakrishna attended it against the doctor's advice. With a group of disciples he spent himself in music, dance, and ecstasy. The illness took a turn for the worse and was diagnosed as "clergyman's sore throat". The patient was cautioned against conversation and ecstasies. Though he followed the physician's directions regarding medicine and diet, he could neither control his trances nor withhold from seekers the solace of his advice. Sometimes, like a sulky child, he would complain to the Mother about the crowds, who gave him no rest day or night. He was overheard to say to Her; "Why do You bring here all these worthless people, who are like milk diluted with five times its own quantity of water? My eyes are almost destroyed with blowing the fire to dry up the water. My health is gone. It is beyond my strength. Do it Yourself, if You want it done. This (pointing to his own body) is but a perforated drum, and if you go on beating it day in and day out, how long will it last?"
But his large heart never turned anyone away. He said, "Let me be condemned to be born over and over again, even in the form of a dog, if I can be of help to a single soul." And he bore the pain, singing cheerfully, "Let the body be preoccupied with illness, but, O mind, dwell for ever in God's Bliss!"
--
It was at Cossipore that the curtain fell on the varied activities of the Master's life on the physical plane. His soul lingered in the body eight months more. It was the period of his great Passion, a constant crucifixion of the body and the triumphant revelation of the Soul. Here one sees the humanity and divinity of the Master passing and repassing across a thin border line. Every minute of those eight months was suffused with touching tenderness of heart and breath-taking elevation of spirit. Every word he uttered was full of pathos and sublimity.
It took the group only a few days to become adjusted to the new environment. The Holy Mother, assisted by Sri Ramakrishna's niece, Lakshmi Devi, and a few woman devotees, took charge of the cooking for the Master and his attendants. Surendra willingly bore the major portion of the expenses, other householders contributing according to their means. Twelve disciples were constant attendants of the Master: Narendra, Rakhal, Baburam, Niranjan, Jogin, Latu, Tarak, the-elder Gopal, Kali, Sashi, Sarat, and the younger Gopal. Sarada, Harish, Hari, Gangadhar, and Tulasi visited the Master from time to time and practised sadhana at home. Narendra, preparing for his law examination, brought his books to the garden house in order to continue his studies during the infrequent spare moments. He encouraged his brother disciples to intensify their meditation, scriptural studies, and other spiritual disciplines. They all forgot their relatives and their
--
"I shall make the whole thing public before I go", the Master had said some time before. On January 1, 1886, he felt better and came down to the garden for a little stroll. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. Some thirty lay disciples were in the hall or sitting about under the trees. Sri Ramakrishna said to Girish, "Well, Girish, what have you seen in me, that you proclaim me before everybody as an Incarnation of God?" Girish was not the man to be taken by surprise. He knelt before the Master and said, with folded hands, "What can an insignificant person like myself say about the One whose glory even sages like Vyasa and Valmiki could not adequately measure?" The Master was profoundly moved. He said: "What more shall I say? I bless you all. Be illumined!" He fell into a spiritual mood. Hearing these words the devotees, one and all, became overwhelmed with emotion. They rushed to him and fell at his feet. He touched them all, and each received an appropriate benediction. Each of them, at the touch of the Master, ex perienced ineffable bliss. Some laughed, some wept, some sat down to meditate, some began to pray. Some saw light, some had visions of their Chosen Ideals, and some felt within their bodies the rush of spiritual power.
Narendra, consumed with a terrific fever for realization, complained to the Master that all the others had attained peace and that he alone was dissatisfied. The Master asked what he wanted. Narendra begged for samadhi, so that he might altogether forget the world for three or four days at a time. "You are a fool", the Master rebuked him. "There is a state even higher than that. Isn't it you who sing, 'All that exists art Thou'? First of all settle your family affairs and then come to me. You will ex perience a state even higher than samadhi."
--
The words were tender and touching. Like a mother he caressed Narendra and Rakhal, gently stroking their faces. He said in a half whis per to M., "Had this body been allowed to last a little longer, many more souls would have been illumined." He paused a moment and then said: "But Mother has ordained otherwise. She will take me away lest, finding me guileless and foolish, people should take advantage of me and persuade me to bestow on them the rare gifts of spirituality." A few minutes later he touched his chest and said: "Here are two beings. One is She and the other is Her devotee. It is the latter who broke his arm, and it is he again who is now ill. Do you understand me?" After a pause he added: "Alas! To whom shall I tell all this? Who will understand me?" "Pain", he consoled them again, 'is unavoidable as long as there is a body. The Lord takes on the body for the sake of His devotees."
Yet one is not sure whether the Master's soul actually was tortured by this agonizing disease. At least during his moments of spiritual exaltation — which became almost constant during the closing days of his life on earth — he lost all consciousness of the body, of illness and suffering. One of his attendants (Latu, later known as Swami Adbhutananda.) said later on: "While Sri Ramakrishna lay sick he never actually suffered pain. He would often say: 'O mind! Forget the body, forget the sickness, and remain merged in Bliss.' No, he did not really suffer. At times he would be in a state when the thrill of joy was clearly manifested in his body. Even when he could not speak he would let us know in some way that there was no suffering, and this fact was clearly evident to all who watched him. People who did not understand him thought that his suffering was very great. What spiritual joy he transmitted to us at that time! Could such a thing have been possible if he had 'been suffering physically? It was during this period that he taught us again these truths: 'Brahman is always unattached. The three gunas are in It, but It is unaffected by them, just as the wind carries odour yet remains odourless.' 'Brahman is Infinite Being, Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Bliss. In It there exist no delusion, no misery, no disease, no death, no growth, no decay.' 'The Transcendental Being and the being within are one and the same. There is one indivisible Absolute Existence.'"
The Holy Mother secretly went to a Siva temple across the Ganges to intercede with the Deity for the Master's recovery. In a revelation she was told to prepare herself for the inevitable end.
--
After another long period Narendra regained full consciousness. Bathed in peace, he went to the Master, who said: "Now the Mother has shown you everything. But this revelation will remain under lock and key, and I shall keep the key. When you have accomplished the Mother's work you will find the treasure again."
Some days later, Narendra being alone with the Master, Sri Ramakrishna looked at him and went into samadhi. Narendra felt the penetration of a subtle force and lost all outer consciousness. Regaining presently the normal mood, he found the Master weeping.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
FRATER perDURABO
(Aleister Crowley)
--
(OPPOSITE: Photo of FRATER perDURABO on his ass.)
COMMENTARY (Title Page)
--
persion, so as to correspond with the title, "Breaks"
and "Lies".
--
be pertinent with regard to the question of secrecy.
It has become difficult for me to take this matter
--
THOUGHT OF FRATER perDURABO WHICH
THOUGHT IS ITSELF UNTRUE. . . .' One of
--
Line 8 emphasises the importance of performing
both.
--
impressions, come to its perfection, is Pan.
Receive a thousand lovers; thou shalt bear but One
--
But the Seventh men called perDURABO; for
enduring unto The End, at The End was Naught
--
of the Infinite who initiate periods. they are called
Dinosaurs because of their seeming to be terrible
--
perversion of other legends. Especially of Dionysus:
compare the account of Christ before Herod/Pilate in
--
(8) O, the last letter of perdurabo, is Naught.
[25]
--
This I persisteth not, posteth not through genera-
tions, changeth momently, finally is dead.
--
Identity is perfect; therefore the w of Identity is
but a lie. For there is no subject, and there is no
--
"The Glow-Worm" may perhaps be translated as
"a little light in the darkness", though there may be a
--
and perfect cosmogony of Liber Legis.
Chaos and Babalon are Chokmah and Binah, but
--
This chapter is perfectly clear to anyone who has
studied the career of an Adept.
--
perDURABO, and laughed.
But those disciples nearest to him wept, seeing the
--
it safe to act like FRATER perDURABO.
But though FRATER perDURABO laughed
openly, He also at the same time wept secretly;
--
Paragraph 1, however, is Frater perdurabo's formula-
tion of his perception of the Universal Joke, also
described in Chapter 34. All individual existence is
tragic. perception of this fact is the essence of comedy.
"Household Gods" is an attempt to write pure comedy.
--
the Master of the Temple the opposite perception occurs
simultaneously, and that he himself is beyond both of
--
As man loses his personality in physical love, so
does the magician annihilate his divine personality in
that which is beyond.
--
THAT which hath no person, which is beyond the
changing, even beyond changelessness, what hast
--
poured forth blood. Men smote me; then, per-
ceiving that I was but a Pure Fool, they let me
--
they serve, and because they can have no personal
interest in the affairs of those whom they serve.
--
perhaps be defined as the Ultimate Reality.
IT is apparently a more exalted thing than THAT.
--
Thus spoke FRATER perDURABO as he leapt
from rock to rock of the moraine without ever
--
It is perhaps the Sun, the exoteric object of worship
of all sensible cults; it is not to be confused with other
--
which it was the origin. FRATER perDURABO
perceived this truth, or rather the first half of it, comedy,
at breakfast at "Au Chien qui Fume".
--
IN UNO per NOMEN SEPTEM IN UNO
ARARITA.
--
This chapter gives the real and perfect Ritual of the
Hexagram.
--
a high figure as 50 per cent.
The same is true of moral and spiritual conditions.
--
How then distinguish the inglorious and perfect
HIMOG from the inglorious man of earth?
--
rather, with the task of getting rid of his personality;
this, and not criticism of his holy Guru, should be the
--
In V.V.V.V.V. is the Great Work perfect.
Therefore none is that pertaineth not to V.V.V.V.V.
In any may he manifest; yet in one hath he chosen
--
through the colleagues of FRATER per-
DURABO.
--
when necessary, to the pro per persons, though in no
case to anyone below the grade of Exempt Adept. The
person enquiring into such matters is politely requested
to work, and not to ask questions about matters which
--
Microprosopus and Macroprosopus, i.e. performing the Great
Work.
--
perfect mistress, but a nagging wife.
"White is white" is the lash of the overseer: "white
--
the best Popes have been Atheists, but perhaps the
greatest of them once remarked, "Quantum nobis
--
perfection is easily attained soon ceases to amuse,
although in the beginning its fascination is so violent.
--
ping-pong and diabolo. Those games in which per-
fection is impossible never cease to attract.
--
Dharana destroys the perceptions (Sanna).
Dhyana destroys the tendencies (Sankhara).
--
This chapter is perfectly simple, and needs no
comment whatsoever.
--
no Ego, and speak only in the third person, regard
these as ignorant, on account of their assumption of
--
Frater perdurabo followed in his youth.
This chapter should be read in connection with "The
--
himself. he permits himself for a moment the pleasure
of feeling his wounds; and, turning upon his generation,
--
the red rag" is a phrase for to talk aimlessly and per-
sistently, while it is notorious that a red cloth will excite
--
So wrote not FRATER perDURABO, but the
Imp Crowley in his Name.
--
FRATER perDURABO?
[122]
--
For not until the PLACE is perfected by a T saith
he PLACET.
--
"place" is perfected by "t"-as it were, Yoni by Lingam
-we get the word "placet", meaning "it pleases".
--
perDURABO, O Lamp in The Abyss? Thou hast
the Keystone of the Royal Arch; yet the
--
The Self-mastery of percivale became the Self-
masturbatery of the Bourgeois.
--
I paragraph 1 the real chastity of percivale or
Parsifal, a chastity which did not prevent his dipping
--
DONI and DIN, perceiving me inspired,
Conceived their task was finished: they retired.
--
this Lily is all perfume; in this Lily is all music.
And it enfolded me."
--
is like Nepthys for perfection.
Also there are little meringues with cream and
--
end, nourishes the worker, leaves no seed, is per-
fect in itself.
--
that of Horus, a sign specially revealed by him per-
sonally, at the Equinox of the Gods. (It is the flame
--
FRATER perDURABO is of the Sanhedrim of the
Sabbath, say men; He is the Old Goat himself,
--
But FRATER perDURABO is nothing but AN
EYE; what eye none knoweth.
--
FRATER perDURABO.
[150]
--
piety of Frater perdurabo, who was frequently
refreshed by hearing the anthems in this chief of the
--
Intellectual and moral perception of truth often, one might almost say usually,
precedes spiritual and physical perceptions. One would be foolish to claim
initiation unless it were complete on every plane.
--
Asana. there is perhaps a sardonic reference to rigor mortis, and certainly
one conceives the half-humorous attitude of the ex pert towards the beginner.
--
third person plural of the present tense of Latin words of the Third and
Fourth Conjugations.
--
first and second persons. Cf. Liber LXV, Chapter III, vv. 21-24, and
FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam:
--
The third person plural must be used, because he has now perceived himself
to be a bundle of impressions. For this is the point on the Path of Gimel when
--
which clings around it, but perhaps the ivy keeps it
from going mad.
--
perhaps.
O!
--
No = Nihilism; Yes = Monism, and all dogmatic systems; perhaps =
Pyrrhonism and Agnosticism; O! = The system of Liber Legis. (See Chapter 0.)
--
perhaps, the flux of these.
O!, Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
--
complete, mayst thou perceive THAT Will which
moved it first. [There is no first or last.}
--
"O FRATER perDURABO, how unworthy are
these sentiments!"
--
The last bitter sentence is terribly true; the personal
liberty of the Russian is immensely greater than that of
--
"There is no I, no joy, no permanence"?
Witch-moon of blood, eternal ebb and flow
--
The Adept has performed the Great Work; He has
reduced the Many to Naught; as a consequence, he
--
Only through devotion to FRATER perDURABO
may this book be understood.
--
or because that it feels that it needs exercise. perfectly
unconscious, perfectly indifferent, it obeys the laws of
Cohesion and of Gravitation.
--
lust of result, he is every way perfect."
Paragraphs 1 and 2. By "devotion to Frater per-
durabo" is not meant sycophancy, but intelligent
--
The chapter is perfectly simple and needs no com-
ment.
--
This word {Alpha-Iota-Theta-Eta-Rho} (Aethyr) is therefore a perfect hierogly
ph
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
They therefore have the value of almost stenographic records. In Appendix A are given several conversations which took place in the absence of M., but of which he received a first-hand record from persons concerned. The conversations will bring before the reader's mind an intimate picture of the Master's eventful life from March 1882 to April 24, 1886, only a few months before his passing away. During this period he came in contact chiefly with English-educated Benglis; from among them he selected his disciples and the bearers of his message, and with them he shared his rich spiritual ex periences.
I have made a literal translation, omitting only a few pages of no particular interest to English-speaking readers. Often literary grace has been sacrificed for the sake of literal translation. No translation can do full justice to the original. This difficulty is all the more felt in the present work, whose contents are of a deep mystical nature and describe the inner ex periences of a great seer. Human language is an altogether inadequate vehicle to express su persensuous perception. Sri Ramakrishna was almost illiterate. He never clothed his thoughts in formal language. His words sought to convey his direct realization of Truth. His conversation was in a village patois. Therein lies its charm. In order to explain to his listeners an abstruse philosophy, he, like Christ before him, used with telling effect homely parables and illustrations, culled from his observation of the daily life around him.
The reader will find mentioned in this work many visions and ex periences that fall outside the ken of physical science and even psychology. With the development of modern knowledge the border line between the natural and the su pernatural is ever shifting its position. Genuine mystical ex periences are not as suspect now as they were half a century ago. The words of Sri Ramakrishna have already exerted a tremendous influence in the land of his birth. Savants of Europe have found in his words the ring of universal truth.
--
He was an educationist all his life both in a spiritual and in a secular sense. After he passed out of College, he took up work as headmaster in a number of schools in succession Narail High School, City School, Ripon College School, Metropolitan School, Aryan School, Oriental School, Oriental Seminary and Model School. The causes of his migration from school to school were that he could not get on with some of the managements on grounds of principles and that often his spiritual mood drew him away to places of pilgrimage for long periods. He worked with some of the most noted public men of the time like Iswar Chandra Vidysgar and Surendranath Banerjee. The latter appointed him as a professor in the City and Ripon Colleges where he taught subjects like English, philosophy, history and economics. In his later days he took over the Morton School, and he spent his time in the staircase room of the third floor of it, administering the school and preaching the message of the Master. He was much respected in educational circles where he was usually referred to as Rector Mahashay. A teacher who had worked under him writes thus in warm appreciation of his teaching methods: "Only when I worked with him in school could I appreciate what a great educationist he was. He would come down to the level of his students when teaching, though he himself was so learned, so talented. Ordinarily teachers confine their instruction to what is given in books without much thought as to whether the student can accept it or not. But M., would first of all gauge how much the student could take in and by what means. He would employ aids to teaching like maps, pictures and diagrams, so that his students could learn by seeing. Thirty years ago (from 1953) when the question of imparting education through the medium of the mother tongue was being discussed, M. had already employed Bengali as the medium of instruction in the Morton School." (M The Apostle and the Evangelist by Swami Nityatmananda Part I. P. 15.)
Imparting secular education was, however, only his profession ; his main concern was with the spiritual regeneration of man a calling for which Destiny seems to have chosen him. From his childhood he was deeply pious, and he used to be moved very much by Sdhus, temples and Durga Puja celebrations. The piety and eloquence of the great Brahmo leader of the times, Keshab Chander Sen, elicited a powerful response from the impressionable mind of Mahendra Nath, as it did in the case of many an idealistic young man of Calcutta, and prepared him to receive the great Light that was to dawn on him with the coming of Sri Ramakrishna into his life.
--
It did not take much time for M. to become very intimate with the Master, or for the Master to recognise in this disciple a divinely commissioned partner in the fulfilment of his spiritual mission. When M. was reading out the Chaitanya Bhagavata, the Master discovered that he had been, in a previous birth, a disciple and companion of the great Vaishnava Teacher, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and the Master even saw him 'with his naked eye' participating in the ecstatic mass-singing of the Lord's name under the leadership of that Divine personality. So the Master told M, "You are my own, of the same substance as the father and the son," indicating thereby that M. was one of the chosen few and a part and parcel of his Divine mission.
There was an urge in M. to abandon the household life and become a Sannysin. When he communicated this idea to the Master, he forbade him saying," Mother has told me that you have to do a little of Her work you will have to teach Bhagavata, the word of God to humanity. The Mother keeps a Bhagavata Pandit with a bondage in the world!"
--
Though his children received pro per attention from him, his real family, both during the Master's lifetime and after, consisted of saints, devotees, Sannysins and spiritual aspirants. His life exemplifies the Master's teaching that an ideal householder must be like a good maidservant of a family, loving and caring pro perly for the children of the house, but knowing always that her real home and children are elsewhere. During the Master's lifetime he spent all his Sundays and other holidays with him and his devotees, and besides listening to the holy talks and devotional music, practised meditation both on the personal and the Im personal aspects of God under the direct guidance of the Master. In the pages of the Gospel the reader gets a picture of M.'s spiritual relationship with the Master how from a hazy belief in the Im personal God of the Brahmos, he was step by step brought to accept both personality and Im personality as the two aspects of the same Non-dual Being, how he was convinced of the manifestation of that Being as Gods, Goddesses and as Incarnations, and how he was established in a life that was both of a Jnni and of a Bhakta. This Jnni-Bhakta outlook and way of living became so dominant a feature of his life that Swami Raghavananda, who was very closely associated with him during his last six years, remarks: "Among those who lived with M. in latter days, some felt that he always lived in this constant and conscious union with God even with open eyes (i.e., even in waking consciousness)." (Swami Raghavananda's article on M. in Prabuddha Bharata vol. XXXVII. P. 442.)
Besides undergoing spiritual disciplines at the feet of the Master, M. used to go to holy places during the Master's lifetime itself and afterwards too as a part of his Sdhan.
--
The life of Sdhan and holy association that he started on at the feet of the Master, he continued all through his life. He has for this reason been most appropriately described as a Grihastha-Sannysi (householder-Sannysin). Though he was forbidden by the Master to become a Sannysin, his reverence for the Sannysa ideal was whole-hearted and was without any reservation. So after Sri Ramakrishna's passing away, while several of the Master's householder devotees considered the young Sannysin disciples of the Master as inex perienced and inconsequential, M. stood by them with the firm faith that the Master's life and message were going to be perpetuated only through them. Swami Vivekananda wrote from America in a letter to the inmates of the Math: "When Sri Thkur (Master) left the body, every one gave us up as a few unripe urchins. But M. and a few others did not leave us in the lurch. We cannot repay our debt to them." (Swami Raghavananda's article on M. in Prabuddha Bharata vol. XXX P. 442.)
M. spent his weekends and holidays with the monastic brethren who, after the Master's demise, had formed themselves into an Order with a Math at Baranagore, and participated in the intense life of devotion and meditation that they followed. At other times he would retire to Dakshineswar or some garden in the city and spend several days in spiritual practice taking simple self-cooked food. In order to feel that he was one with all mankind he often used to go out of his home at dead of night, and like a wandering Sannysin, sleep with the waifs on some open verandah or footpath on the road.
--
While many educated people heard Sri Ramakrishna's talks, it was given to this illustrious personage alone to leave a graphic and exact account of them for posterity, with details like date, hour, place, names and particulars about participants. Humanity owes this great book to the ingrained habit of diary-keeping with which M. was endowed.
Even as a boy of about thirteen, while he was a student in the 3rd class of the Hare School, he was in the habit of keeping a diary. "Today on rising," he wrote in his diary, "I greeted my father and mother, prostrating on the ground before them" (Swami Nityatmananda's 'M The Apostle and the Evangelist' Part I. P 29.) At another place he wrote, "Today, while on my way to school, I visited, as usual, the temples of Kli, the Mother at Tharitharia, and of Mother Sitala, and paid my obeisance to them." About twenty-five years after, when he met the Great Master in the spring of 1882, it was the same instinct of a born diary-writer that made him begin his book, 'unique in the literature of hagiography', with the memorable words: "When hearing the name of Hari or Rma once, you shed tears and your hair stands on end, then you may know for certain that you do not have to perform devotions such as Sandhya any more."
In addition to this instinct for diary-keeping, M. had great endowments contri buting to success in this line. Writes Swami Nityatmananda who lived in close association with M., in his book entitled M - The Apostle and Evangelist: "M.'s prodigious memory combined with his extraordinary power of imagination completely annihilated the distance of time and place for him. Even after the lapse of half a century he could always visualise vividly, scenes from the life of Sri Ramakrishna. Su perb too was his power to portray pictures by words."
--
During the Master's lifetime M. does not seem to have revealed the contents of his diary to any one. There is an unconfirmed tradition that when the Master saw him taking notes, he expressed apprehension at the possibility of his utilising these to publicise him like Keshab Sen; for the Great Master was so full of the spirit of renunciation and humility that he disliked being lionised. It must be for this reason that no one knew about this precious diary of M. for a decade until he brought out selections from it as a pamphlet in English in 1897 with the Holy Mother's blessings and permission. The Holy Mother, being very much pleased to hear parts of the diary read to her in Bengali, wrote to M.: "When I heard the Kathmrita, (Bengali name of the book) I felt as if it was he, the Master, who was saying all that." ( Ibid Part I. P 37.)
The two pamphlets in English entitled the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna appeared in October and November 1897. They drew the spontaneous acclamation of Swami Vivekananda, who wrote on 24th November of that year from Dehra Dun to M.:"Many many thanks for your second leaflet. It is indeed wonderful. The move is quite original, and never was the life of a Great Teacher brought before the public untarnished by the writer's mind, as you are doing. The language also is beyond all praise, so fresh, so pointed, and withal so plain and easy. I cannot express in adequate terms how I have enjoyed them. I am really in a transport when I read them. Strange, isn't it? Our Teacher and Lord was so original, and each one of us will have to be original or nothing.
--
It looks as if M. was brought to the world by the Great Master to record his words and transmit them to posterity. Swami Sivananda, a direct disciple of the Master and the second President of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, says on this topic: "Whenever there was an interesting talk, the Master would call Master Mahashay if he was not in the room, and then draw his attention to the holy words spoken. We did not know then why the Master did so. Now we can realise that this action of the Master had an important significance, for it was reserved for Master Mahashay to give to the world at large the sayings of the Master." ( Vednta Kesari Vol. XIX P 141.) Thanks to M., we get, unlike in the case of the great teachers of the past, a faithful record with date, time, exact report of conversations, description of concerned men and places, references to contemporary events and personalities and a hundred other details for the last four years of the Master's life (1882-'86), so that no one can doubt the historicity of the Master and his teachings at any time in the future.
M. was, in every respect, a true missionary of Sri Ramakrishna right from his first acquaintance with him in 1882. As a school teacher, it was a practice with him to direct to the Master such of his students as had a true spiritual disposition. Though himself prohibited by the Master to take to monastic life, he encouraged all spiritually inclined young men he came across in his later life to join the monastic Order. Swami Vijnanananda, a direct Sannysin disciple of the Master and a President of the Ramakrishna Order, once remarked to M.: "By enquiry, I have come to the conclusion that eighty percent and more of the Sannysins have embraced the monastic life after reading the Kathmrita (Bengali name of the book) and coming in contact with you." ( M
The Apostle and the Evangelist by Swami Nityatmananda Part I, P 37.)
In 1905 he retired from the active life of a Professor and devoted his remaining twenty-seven years exclusively to the preaching of the life and message of the Great Master. He bought the Morton Institution from its original proprietors and shifted it to a commodious four-storeyed house at 50 Amherst Street, where it flourished under his management as one of the most efficient educational institutions in Calcutta. He generally occupied a staircase room at the top of it, cooking his own meal which consisted only of milk and rice without variation, and attended to all his personal needs himself. His dress also was the simplest possible. It was his conviction that limitation of personal wants to the minimum is an important aid to holy living. About one hour in the morning he would spend in inspecting the classes of the school, and then retire to his staircase room to pour over his diary and live in the divine atmosphere of the earthly days of the Great Master, unless devotees and admirers had already gathered in his room seeking his holy company.
In appearance, M. looked a Vedic Rishi. Tall and stately in bearing, he had a strong and well-built body, an unusually broad chest, high forehead and arms extending to the knees. His complexion was fair and his prominent eyes were always tinged with the expression of the divine love that filled his heart. Adorned with a silvery beard that flowed luxuriantly down his chest, and a shining face radiating the serenity and gravity of holiness, M. was as imposing and majestic as he was handsome and engaging in appearance. Humorous, sweet-tongued and eloquent when situations required, this great Maharishi of our age lived only to sing the glory of Sri Ramakrishna day and night.
--
Though a much-sought-after spiritual guide, an educationist of repute, and a contemporary and close associate of illustrious personages like Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Keshab Chander Sen and Iswar Chander Vidysgar, he was always moved by the noble humanity of a lover of God, which consists in respecting the personalities of all as receptacles of the Divine Spirit. So he taught without the consciousness of a teacher, and no bar of su periority stood in the way of his doing the humblest service to his students and devotees. "He was a commission of love," writes his close devotee, Swami Raghavananda, "and yet his soft and sweet words would pierce the stoniest heart, make the worldly-minded weep and repent and turn Godwards."
( Prabuddha Bharata Vol. XXXVII P 499.)
0.00 - The Wellspring of Reality, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
As Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, pointed out, the consequence of its single-tagging is that the rose becomes reflexively considered by man only as a red, white, or pink device for paying tribute to a beautiful girl, a thoughtful hostess, or last night's deceased acquaintance. The tagging of the complex biological process under the single title rose tends to detour human curiosity from further differentiation of its integral organic o perations as well as from consideration of its interecological functionings aboard our planet. We don't know what a rose is, nor what may be its essential and unique cosmic function. Thus for long have we inadvertently deferred potential discovery of the essential roles in Universe that are performed complementarily by many, if not most, of the phenomena we ex perience.
But, goaded by youth, we older ones are now taking second looks at almost everything. And that promises many ultimately favorable surprises. The oldsters do have vast ex perience banks not available to the youth. Their memory banks, integrated and reviewed, may readily disclose generalized principles of eminent importance.
The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case.
The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization. It makes no difference of what material either the fulcrum or the lever consists-wood, steel, or reinforced concrete. Nor do the special-case sizes of the lever and fulcrum, or of the load pried at one end, or the work applied at the lever's other end in any way alter either the principle or the mathematical regularity of the ratios of physical work advantage that are provided at progressive fulcrum-to-load increments of distance outward from the fulcrum in the opposite direction along the lever's arm at which theo perating effort is applied.
Mind is the weightless and uniquely human faculty that surveys the ever larger inventory of special-case ex periences stored in the brain bank and, seeking to identify their intercomplementary significance, from time to time discovers one of the rare scientifically generalizable principles running consistently through all the relevant ex perience set. The thoughts that discover these principles are weightless and tentative and may also be eternal. They suggest eternity but do not prove it, even though there have been no ex periences thus far that imply exceptions to their persistence. It seems also to follow that the more ex periences we have, the more chances there are that the mind may discover, on the one hand, additional generalized principles or, on the other hand, exceptions that disqualify one or another of the already catalogued principles that, having heretofore held "true" without contradiction for a long time, had been tentatively conceded to be demonstrating eternal persistence of behavior. Mind's relentless reviewing of the comprehensive brain bank's storage of all our special-case ex periences tends both to progressive enlargement and definitive refinement of the catalogue of generalized principles that interaccommodatively govern all transactions of Universe.
It follows that the more specialized society becomes, the less attention does it pay to the discoveries of the mind, which are intuitively beamed toward the brain, there to be received only if the switches are "on." Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of the all-powerful generalized principles. Again we see how society's perverse fixation on specialization leads to its extinction. We are so specialized that one man discovers empirically how to release the energy of the atom, while another, unbeknownst to him, is ordered by his political factotum to make an atomic bomb by use of the secretly and anonymously published data. That gives much expedient employment, which solves the politician's momentary problem, but requires that the politicians keep on preparing for further warring with other political states to keep their respective peoples employed. It is also mistakenly assumed that employment is the only means by which humans can earn the right to live, for politicians have yet to discover how much wealth is available for distribution. All this is rationalized on the now scientifically discredited premise that there can never be enough life support for all. Thus humanity's specialization leads only toward warring and such devastating tools, both, visible and invisible, as ultimately to destroy all Earthians.
Only a comprehensive switch from the narrowing specialization and toward an evermore inclusive and refining comprehension by all humanity-regarding all the factors governing omnicontinuing life aboard our spaceship Earth-can bring about reorientation from the self-extinction-bound human trending, and do so within the critical time remaining before we have passed the point of chemical process irretrievability.
--
We are able to assert that this rationally coordinating system bridge has been established between science and the humanities because we have made adequate ex perimental testing of it in a computerized world-resource-use-exploration system, which by virtue of the pro per inclusion of all the parameters-as guaranteed by the synergetic start with Universe and the progressive differentiation out of all the parts-has demonstrated a number of alternate ways in which it is eminently feasible not only to provide full life support for all humans but also to permit all humans' individual enjoyment of all the Earth without anyone profiting at the expense of another and without any individuals interfering with others.
While it takes but meager search to discover that many well-known concepts are false, it takes considerable search and even more careful examination of one's own personal ex periences and inadvertently spontaneous reflexing to discover that there are many popularly and even professionally unknown, yet nonetheless fundamental, concepts to hold true in all cases and that already have been discovered by other as yet obscure individuals. That is to say that many scientific generalizations have been discovered but have not come to the attention of what we call the educated world at large, thereafter to be incorporated tardily within the formal education processes, and even more tardily, in the ongoing political-economic affairs of everyday life. Knowledge of the existence and comprehensive significance of these as yet popularly unrecognized natural laws often is requisite to the solution of many of the as yet unsolved problems now confronting society. Lack of knowledge of the solution's existence often leaves humanity confounded when it need not be.
Intellectually advantaged with no more than the child's facile, lucid eagerness to understand constructively and usefully the major transformational events of our own times, it probably is synergetically advantageous to review swiftly the most comprehensive inventory of the most powerful human environment transforming events of our totally known and reasonably extended history. This is especially useful in winnowing out and understanding the most significant of the metaphysical revolutions now recognized as swiftly tending to reconstitute history. By such a comprehensively schematic review, we might identify also the unprecedented and possibly heretofore overlooked pivotal revolutionary events not only of today but also of those trending to be central to tomorrow's most cataclysmic changes.
--
There could be produced a synergetic understanding of humanity's cosmic functioning, which, until now, had been both undiscovered and unpredictable due to our deliberate and exclusive preoccupation only with the separate statistics of separate events. As a typical consequence of the latter, we observe our society's persistent increase of educational and employment specialization despite the already mentioned, well-documented scientific disclosure that the extinctions of biological species are always occasioned by overspecialization. Specialization's preoccupation with parts deliberately forfeits the opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by synergy.
Today's news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. The insistence by reporters upon having advance "releases" of what, for instance, convocation speakers are supposedly going to say but in fact have not yet said, automatically discredits the value of the largely prefabricated news. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated events of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for purposes either of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity's tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes.
Furthermore, today's hy perspecialization in socioeconomic functioning has come to preclude important popular philosophic considerations of the synergetic significance of, for instance, such historically important events as the discovery within the general region of ex perimental inquiry known as virology that the as-yet popularly assumed validity of the concepts of animate and inanimate phenomena have been ex perimentally invalidated. Atoms and crystal complexes of atoms were held to be obviously inanimate; the protoplasmic cells of biological phenomena were held to be obviously animate. It was deemed to be common sense that warm- blooded, moist, and soft-skinned humans were clearly not to be confused with hard, cold granite or steel objects. A clear-cut threshold between animate and inanimate was therefore assumed to exist as a fundamental dichotomy of all physical phenomena. This seemingly placed life exclusively within the bounds of the physical.
The supposed location of the threshold between animate and inanimate was methodically narrowed down by ex perimental science until it was confined specifically within the domain of virology. Virologists have been too busy, for instance, with their DNA-RNA genetic code isolatings, to find time to see the synergetic significance to society of the fact that they have found that no physical threshold does in fact exist between animate and inanimate. The possibility of its existence vanished because the supposedly unique physical qualities of both animate and inanimate have persisted right across yesterday's supposed threshold in both directions to permeate one another's-previously perceived to be exclusive- domains. Subsequently, what was animate has become foggier and foggier, and what is inanimate clearer and clearer. All organisms consist physically and in entirety of inherently inanimate atoms. The inanimate alone is not only omnipresent but is alone ex perimentally demonstrable. Belated news of the elimination of this threshold must be interpreted to mean that whatever life may be, it has not been isolated and thereby identified as residual in the biological cell, as had been supposed by the false assumption that there was a separate physical phenomenoncalled animate within which life existed. No life per se has been isolated. The threshold between animate and inanimate has vanished. Those chemists who are preoccupied in synthesizing the particular atomically structured molecules identified as the prime constituents of humanly employed organisms will, even if they are chemically successful, be as remote from creating life as are automobile manufacturers from creating the human drivers of their automobiles. Only the physical connections and development complexes of distinctly "nonlife" atoms into molecules, into cells, into animals, has been and will be discovered. The genetic coding of the design controls of organic systems offers no more explanation of life than did the specifications of the designs of the telephone system's apparatus and o peration explain the nature of the life that communicates weightlessly to life over the only physically ponderable telephone system. Whatever else life may be, we know it is weightless. At the moment of death, no weight is lost. All the chemicals, including the chemist's life ingredients, are present, but life has vanished. The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic.
It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand.
--
Science's self-assumed responsibility has been self-limited to disclosure to society only of the separate, supposedly physical (because separately weighable) atomic component isolations data. Synergetic integrity would require the scientists to announce that in reality what had been identified heretofore as physical is entirely metaphysical-because synergetically weightless. Metaphysical has been science's designation for all weightless phenomena such as thought. But science has made no ex perimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected-like it or not-life is but a dream.Science has found no up or down directions of Universe, yet scientists are personally so ill-coordinated that they all still personally and sensorially see "solids" going up or down-as, for instance, they see the Sun "going down." Sensorially disconnected from their theoretically evolved information, scientists discern no need on their part to suggest any educational reforms to correct the misconceiving that science has tolerated for half a millennium.
Society depends upon its scientists for just such educational reform guidance.
Where else might society turn for advice? Unguided by science, society is allowed to go right on filling its childrens' brain banks with large inventories of competence-devastating misinformation. In order to emerge from its massive ignorance, society will probably have to rely exclusively upon its individuals' own minds to survey the pertinent ex perimental data-as do all great scientist-artists. This, in effect, is what the intuition of world-around youth is beginning to do. Mind can see that reality is evoluting into weightless metaphysics. The wellspring of reality is the family of weightless generalized principles.
It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.
0.00 - To the Reader, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The reader is requested to note that Sri Aurobindo is not responsible for these records as he had no opportunity to see them. So, it is not as if Sri Aurobindo said exactly these things but that I remember him to have said them. All I can say is that I have tried to be as faithful in recording them as I was humanly capable. That does not minimise my personal responsibility which I fully accept.
A. B. PURANI
0.01f - FOREWARD, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is
always something more to be seen. After all, do we not judge
the perfection of an animal, or the supremacy of a thinking being,
by the penetration and synthetic power of their gaze ? To try to
--
indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon
everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious
--
science, perhaps inevitably, imagined that we could observe
phenomena in themselves, as they would take place in our
--
the way things are distributed objectively, and perception reaches
its apogee. The landscape lights up and yields its secrets. He sees.
--
It is not necessary to be a man to perceive surrounding things
and forces ' in the round '. All the animals have reached this point
--
Man, the centre of perspective, is at the same time the centre of
construction of the universe. And by expediency no less than by
--
that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive.
The child has to learn to separate out the images which assail
--
nature certain absolute stages of perfection and growth, without
upsetting the physical unity of the world ;
A sense of movement, capable of perceiving the irresistible
developments hidden in extreme slowness extreme agitation
--
homogeneous and coherent perspective of our general extended
ex perience of man. A whole which unfolds.
--
and personal. Yet inasmuch as they are based on arduous investi-
gation and sustained reflection, they give an idea, by means of
--
I hope I shall persuade the reader that such an attempt is
possible, and that the preservation of courage and the joy of
0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
object:0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality
author class:A B Purani
--
The question which Arjuna asks Sri Krishna in the Gita (second chapter) occurs pertinently to many about all spiritual personalities: "What is the language of one whose understanding is poised? How does he speak, how sit, how walk?" Men want to know the outer signs of the inner attainment, the way in which a spiritual person differs outwardly from other men. But all the tests which the Gita enumerates are inner and therefore invisible to the outer view. It is true also that the inner or the spiritual is the essential and the outer derives its value and form from the inner. But the transformation about which Sri Aurobindo writes in his books has to take place in nature, because according to him the divine Reality has to manifest itself in nature. So, all the parts of nature including the physical and the external are to be transformed. In his own case the very physical became the transparent mould of the Spirit as a result of his intense Sadhana. This is borne out by the impression created on the minds of sensitive outsiders like Sj. K. M. Munshi who was deeply impressed by his radiating presence when he met him after nearly forty years.
The Evening Talks collected here may afford to the outside world a glimpse of his external personality and give the seeker some idea of its richness, its many-sidedness, its uniqueness. One can also form some notion of Sri Aurobindo's personality from the books in which the height, the universal sweep and clear vision of his integral ideal and thought can be seen. His writings are, in a sense, the best representative of his mental personality. The versatile nature of his genius, the penetrating power of his intellect, his extraordinary power of expression, his intense sincerity, his utter singleness of purpose all these can be easily felt by any earnest student of his works. He may discover even in the realm of mind that Sri Aurobindo brings the unlimited into the limited. Another side of his dynamic personality is represented by the Ashram as an institution. But the outer, if one may use the phrase, the human side of his personality, is unknown to the outside world because from 1910 to 1950 a span of forty years he led a life of outer retirement. No doubt, many knew about his staying at Pondicherry and practising some kind of very special Yoga to the mystery of which they had no access. To some, perhaps, he was living a life of enviable solitude enjoying the luxury of a spiritual endeavour. Many regretted his retirement as a great loss to the world because they could not see any external activity on his part which could be regarded as 'public', 'altruistic' or 'beneficial'. Even some of his admirers thought that he was after some kind of personal salvation which would have very little significance for mankind in general. His outward non-participation in public life was construed by many as lack of love for humanity.
But those who knew him during the days of the national awakening from 1900 to 1910 could not have these doubts. And even these initial misunderstandings and false notions of others began to evaporate with the growth of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from 1927 onwards. The large number of books published by the Ashram also tended to remove the idea of the other-worldliness of his Yoga and the absence of any good by it to mankind.
This period of outer retirement was one of intense Sadhana and of intellectual activity it was also one during which he acted on external events, though he was not dedicated outwardly to a public cause. About his own retirement he writes: "But this did not mean, as most people supposed, that he [Sri Aurobindo] had retired into some height of spiritual ex perience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness, but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to base life on the Spirit and give it a spiritual meaning. In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened, whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action; for it is part of the ex perience of those who have advanced in yoga that besides the ordinary forces and activities of the mind and life and body in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can and do act from behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in spiritual consciousness, though all do not care to possess or, possessing, to use it and this power is greater than any other and more effective. It was this force which, as soon as he attained to it, he used at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces."[1]
Twice he found it necessary to go out of his way to make public pronouncements on important world-issues, which shows distinctly that renunciation of life is not a part of his Yoga. "The first was in relation to the Second World War. At the beginning he did not actively concern himself with it, but when it appeared as if Hitler would crush all the forces opposed to him and Nazism dominate the world, he began to intervene."[2]
--
Over and above Sadhana, writing work and rendering spiritual help to the world during his apparent retirement there were plenty of other activities of which the outside world has no knowledge. Many prominent as well as less known persons sought and obtained interviews with him during these years. Thus, among well-known persons may be mentioned C.R. Das, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sarala Devi, Dr. Munje, Khasirao Jadhav, Tagore, Sylvain Levy. The great national poet of Tamil Nadu, S. Subramanya Bharati, was in contact with Sri Aurobindo for some years during his stay at Pondicherry; so was V.V.S. Aiyar. The famous V. Ramaswamy Aiyangar Va Ra of Tamil literature[3] stayed with Sri Aurobindo for nearly three years and was influenced by him. Some of these facts have been already mentioned in The Life of Sri Aurobindo.
Jung has admitted that there is an element of mystery, something that baffles the reason, in human personality. One finds that the greater the personality the greater is the complexity. And this is especially so with regard to spiritual personalities whom the Gita calls Vibhutis and Avatars.
Sri Aurobindo has explained the mystery of personality in some of his writings. Ordinarily by personality we mean something which can be described as "a pattern of being marked out by a settled combination of fixed qualities, a determined character.... In one view personality is regarded as a fixed structure of recognisable qualities expressing a power of being"; another idea regards " personality as a flux of self-expressive or sensitive and responsive being.... But flux of nature and fixity of nature" which some call character "are two aspects of being neither of which, nor indeed both together, can be a definition of personality.... But besides this flux and this fixity there is also a third and occult element, the person behind of whom the personality is a self-expression; the person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the present act of his long drama of manifested existence. But the person is larger than his personality, and it may happen that this inner largeness overflows into the surface formation; the result is a self-expression of being which can no longer be described by fixed qualities, normalities of mood, exact lineaments, or marked out by structural limits."[4]
The gospel of the Su permind which Sri Aurobindo brought to man envisages a new level of consciousness beyond Mind. When this level is attained it imposes a complete and radical reintegration of the human personality. Sri Aurobindo was not merely the exponent but the embodiment of the new, dynamic truth of the Su permind. While exploring and sounding the tremendous possibilities of human personality in his intense spiritual Sadhana, he has shown us that practically there are no limits to its expansion and ascent. It can reach in its growth what appears to man at present as a 'divine' status. It goes without saying that this attainment is not an easy task; there are conditions to be fulfilled for the transformation from the human to the divine.
The Gita in its chapters on the Vibhuti and the Avatar takes in general the same position. It shows that the present formula of our nature, and therefore the mental personality of man, is not final. A Vibhuti embodies in a human manifestation a certain divine quality and thus demonstrates the possibility of overcoming the limits of ordinary human personality. The Vibhuti the embodiment of a divine quality or power, and the Avatar the divine incarnation, are not to be looked upon as supraphysical miracles thrown at humanity without regard to the process of evolution; they are, in fact, indications of human possibility, a sign that points to the goal of evolution.
In his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo says about the Avatar: "He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of divine life, the divine personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth."[5]
"He comes as the divine power and love which calls men to itself, so that they may take refuge in that and no longer in the insufficiency of their human wills and the strife of their human fear, wrath and passion, and liberated from all this unquiet and suffering may live in the calm and bliss of the Divine."[6]
"The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what are the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, im personal, universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the divine love. He comes as the divine personality which shall fill the consciousness of the human being and replace the limited egoistic personality, so that it shall be liberated out of ego into infinity and universality, out of birth into immortality."[7]
It is clear that Sri Aurobindo interpreted the traditional idea of the Vibhuti and the Avatar in terms of the evolutionary possibilities of man. But more directly he has worked out the idea of the 'gnostic individual' in his masterpiece The Life Divine. He says: "A supramental gnostic individual will be a spiritual person, but not a personality in the sense of a pattern of being marked out by a settled combination of fixed qualities, a determined character; he cannot be that since he is a conscious expression of the universal and the transcendent." Describing the gnostic individual he says: "We feel ourselves in the presence of a light of consciousness, a potency, a sea of energy, can distinguish and describe its free waves of action and quality, but not fix itself; and yet there is an impression of personality, the presence of a powerful being, a strong, high or beautiful recognisable Someone, a person, not a limited creature of Nature but a Self or Soul, a Purusha."[8]
One feels that he was describing the feeling of some of us, his disciples, with regard to him in his inimitable way.
This transformation of the human personality into the Divine perhaps even the mere connection of the human with the Divine is probably regarded as a chimera by the modern mind. To the modern mind it would appear as the apotheosis of a human personality which is against its idea of equality of men. Its difficulty is partly due to the notion that the Divine is unlimited and illimitable while a ' personality', however high and grand, seems to demand imposition, or assumption, of limitation. In this connection Sri Aurobindo said during an evening talk that no human manifestation can be illimitable and unlimited, but the manifestation in the limited should reflect the unlimited, the Transcendent Beyond.
This possibility of the human touching and manifesting the Divine has been realised during the course of human history whenever a great spiritual Light has appeared on earth. One of the purposes of this book is to show how Sri Aurobindo himself reflected the unlimited Beyond in his own self.
Greatness is magnetic and in a sense contagious. Wherever manifested, greatness is claimed by humanity as something that reveals the possibility of the race. The highest utility of greatness is not merely to attract us but to inspire us to follow it and rise to our own highest spiritual stature. To the majority of men Truth remains abstract, im personal and far unless it is seen and felt concretely in a human personality. A man never knows a truth actively except through a person and by embodying it in his own personality. Some glimpse of the Truth-Consciousness which Sri Aurobindo embodied may be caught in these Evening Talks.
***
0.01 - Letters from the Mother to Her Son, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
complete state of rest made of perfect peace, absolute silence
and total immobility, while the consciousness remains perfectly
awake; or else I enter into an internal activity of one or more
--
and which, needless to say, is also perfectly conscious. So I can
say, in all truth, that I never lose consciousness throughout the
--
way to perpetuate the human race. I have never denied this, but
I wish to add that there is nothing to fear in this respect; if it is
Nature's plan to perpetuate the human race, she will always find
as many people as she needs to carry out her plan. The earth
--
ideal resting place. True, I think that it could provide a perfect
place of cure for the restless - even if one seeks diversions there
--
is carried out not for a personal end but in a selfless way for
the realisation of an ideal. The life we lead here is as far from
--
sense. But perhaps we see it this way simply because nearness
makes us see all the details. From a distance the details fade and
0.01 - Life and Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HERE are two necessities of Nature's workings which seem always to intervene in the greater forms of human activity, whether these belong to our ordinary fields of movement or seek those exceptional spheres and fulfilments which appear to us high and divine. Every such form tends towards a harmonised complexity and totality which again breaks apart into various channels of special effort and tendency, only to unite once more in a larger and more puissant synthesis. Secondly, development into forms is an im perative rule of effective manifestation; yet all truth and practice too strictly formulated becomes old and loses much, if not all, of its virtue; it must be constantly renovated by fresh streams of the spirit revivifying the dead or dying vehicle and changing it, if it is to acquire a new life. To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality. We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are being subjected to a supreme test and given their opportunity of rebirth. The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, ex perimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence. Indian Yoga, in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the secret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and utilities. But it has first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface
The Conditions of the Synthesis
the profoundest reason of its being in that general truth and that unceasing aim of Nature which it represents, and find by virtue of this new self-knowledge and self-appreciation its own recovered and larger synthesis. Reorganising itself, it will enter more easily and powerfully into the reorganised life of the race which its processes claim to lead within into the most secret penetralia and upward to the highest altitudes of existence and personality.
In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self- perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and - highest condition of victory in that effort - a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises selfconscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained.
Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compressing one's evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few months of bodily existence. A given system of Yoga, then, can be no more than a selection or a compression, into narrower but more energetic forms of intensity, of the general methods which are already being used loosely, largely, in a leisurely movement, with a profuser apparent waste of material and energy but with a more complete combination by the great
--
Rajayoga, for instance, depends on this perception and ex perience that our inner elements, combinations, functions, forces, can be separated or dissolved, can be new-combined and set to novel and formerly impossible workings or can be transformed and resolved into a new general synthesis by fixed internal processes. Hathayoga similarly depends on this perception and ex perience that the vital forces and functions to which our life is normally subjected and whose ordinary o perations seem set and indispensable, can be mastered and the o perations changed or suspended with results that would otherwise be impossible and that seem miraculous to those who have not seized the rationale of their process. And if in some other of its forms this character of Yoga is less apparent, because they are more intuitive and less mechanical, nearer, like the Yoga of Devotion, to a su pernal ecstasy or, like the Yoga of Knowledge, to a su pernal infinity of consciousness and being, yet they too start from the use of some principal faculty in us by ways and for ends not contemplated in its everyday spontaneous workings. All methods grouped under the common name of Yoga are special psychological processes founded on a fixed truth of Nature and developing, out of normal functions, powers and results which were always latent but which her ordinary movements do not easily or do not often manifest.
But as in physical knowledge the multiplication of scientific processes has its disadvantages, as that tends, for instance, to develop a victorious artificiality which overwhelms our natural human life under a load of machinery and to purchase certain forms of freedom and mastery at the price of an increased servitude, so the preoccupation with Yogic processes and their exceptional results may have its disadvantages and losses. The
--
God. Therefore we see in India that a sharp incompatibility has been created between life in the world and spiritual growth and perfection, and although the tradition and ideal of a victorious harmony between the inner attraction and the outer demand remains, it is little or else very im perfectly exemplified. In fact, when a man turns his vision and energy inward and enters on the path of Yoga, he is popularly supposed to be lost inevitably to the great stream of our collective existence and the secular effort of humanity. So strongly has the idea prevailed, so much has it been emphasised by prevalent philosophies and religions that to escape from life is now commonly considered as not only the necessary condition, but the general object of Yoga. No synthesis of Yoga can be satisfying which does not, in its aim, reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer activities and ex periences in the divine consummation of both. For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower. To avoid the life which is given him for the realisation of that possibility, can never be either the indispensable condition or the whole and ultimate object of his supreme endeavour or of his most powerful means of self-fulfilment. It can only be a temporary necessity under certain conditions or a specialised extreme effort imposed on the individual so as to prepare a greater general possibility for the race. The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious
Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: "All life is Yoga."
0.02 - II - The Home of the Guru, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Guru-griha-vsa staying in the home of the Guru is a very old Indian ideal maintained by seekers through the ages. The Aranyakas the ancient teachings in the forest-groves are perhaps the oldest records of the institution. It was not for education in the modern sense of the term that men went to live with the Guru; for the Guru is not a 'teacher'. The Guru is one who is 'enlightened', who is a seer, a Rishi, one who has the vision of and has lived the Truth. He has, thus, the knowledge of the goal of human life and has learnt true values in life by living the Truth. He can impart both these to the willing seeker. In ancient times seekers went to the Guru with many questions, difficulties and doubts but also with earnestness. Their questions were preliminary to the quest.
The Master, the Guru, set at rest the puzzled human mind by his illuminating answers, perhaps even more by his silent consciousness, so that it might be able to pursue unham pered the path of realisation of the Truth. Those ancient discourses answer the mind of man today even across the ages. They have rightly acquired as everything of the past does a certain sanctity. But sometimes that very reverence prevents men from pro perly evaluating, and living in, the present. This happens when the mind instead of seeking the Spirit looks at the form. For instance, it is not necessary for such discourses that they take place in forest-groves in order to be highly spiritual. Wherever the Master is, there is Light. And guru-griha the house of the Master can be his private dwelling place. So much was this feeling a part of Sri Aurobindo's nature and so particular was he to maintain the personal character of his work that during the first few years after 1923 he did not like his house to be called an 'Ashram', as the word had acquired the sense of a public institution to the modern mind. But there was no doubt that the flower of Divinity had blossomed in him; and disciples, like bees seeking honey, came to him. It is no exaggeration to say that these Evening Talks were to the small company of disciples what the Aranyakas were to the ancient seekers. Seeking the Light, they came to the dwelling place of their Guru, the greatest seer of the age, and found it their spiritual home the home of their parents, for the Mother, his companion in the great mission, had come. And these spiritual parents bestowed upon the disciples freely of their Light, their Consciousness, their Power and their Grace. The modern reader may find that the form of these discourses differs from those of the past but it was bound to be so for the simple reason that the times have changed and the problems that puzzle the modern mind are so different. Even though the disciples may be very im perfect representations of what he aimed at in them, still they are his creations. It is in order to repay, in however infinitesimal a degree, the debt which we owe to him that the effort is made to partake of the joy of his company the Evening Talks with a larger public.
***
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I ask you to discard all obstinacy and to be perfectly sincere.
Go and see with no preconceived idea.
--
Rahukal: an inauspicious period each day, according to local su perstition.
Solignum: a wood preservative that deters white ants (termites).
--
The cause of reserve in asking is that a person is full
of desires. If he expresses all his demands - which he
--
The one that is done in the most perfect spirit of consecration.
20 August 1932
--
"One must know how to soar in an immutable confidence; in the sure flight is perfect knowledge."9 I don't
understand this sentence. How can one soar? What is
--
was a bit perplexed as to how to apply Sweet Mother's
words to the letter. I started following Her advice. I
--
another reason for my perplexity.
I am afraid that in trying too hard to stick to the "letter", you
--
back at the rate of Rs. 8 per month. I have already told
him that Mother approves neither of marriage - far less
--
Sadhak: Yes, if the other person is receptive. Suppose I have difficultes in my work. There is no way of
communicating with Mother. I can't find the solution.
--
not to mention. Either the person you are speaking to does
not understand at all and takes you for a fool suffering from
--
When I read a novel or anything in print I clearly understand, say, eighty per cent. But when someone speaks,
I have great difficulty in following him. I miss more than
--
credit, less perhaps than you would give an ordinary building
contractor who, in your eyes, seems to know his job and have
--
honest, which would also be the remedy for No. 3. But perhaps
of all the remedies, this one (I mean being honest, sincere and
--
pendulum and now the clock is working perfectly all right.
I believe in the su periority of the inner vision over the outer
--
of X's apartment, perhaps more than a year ago.) My formation
was so living, so real, so active, that I made the mistake of
--
In this way there can be no clash of personalities between
him and you. It is only a matter of obedience to me.
--
done for any of these personal considerations. The thing to be
done should be considered in itself, independent of all personal
questions. If the thing is right and good, one should do it. If not,
--
It is a pity! perhaps you are a bit tired. I hope you are sleeping
well. I would like you to go to bed earlier. Is all this work after
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The progressive self-manifestation of Nature in man, termed in modern language his evolution, must necessarily depend upon three successive elements. There is that which is already evolved; there is that which, still im perfect, still partly fluid, is persistently in the stage of conscious evolution; and there is that which is to be evolved and may perhaps be already
10
--
Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies and realisations, and the Life-Energy which is our means of existence in a material body and the basis there even of our mental and spiritual activities. She has successfully achieved a certain stability of her constant material movement which is at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in humanity. This is what is meant by the fable in the Aitareya Upanishad which tells us that the gods rejected the animal forms successively offered to them by the Divine Self and only when man was produced, cried out, "This indeed is perfectly made," and consented to enter in. She has effected also a working compromise between the inertia of matter and the active Life that lives in and feeds on it, by which not only is vital existence sustained, but the fullest developments of mentality are rendered possible. This equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed
The Three Steps of Nature
--
If, then, this inferior equilibrium is the basis and first means of the higher movements which the universal Power contemplates and if it constitutes the vehicle in which the Divine here seeks to reveal Itself, if the Indian saying is true that the body is the instrument provided for the fulfilment of the right law of our nature, then any final recoil from the physical life must be a turning away from the completeness of the divine Wisdom and a renunciation of its aim in earthly manifestation. Such a refusal may be, owing to some secret law of their development, the right attitude for certain individuals, but never the aim intended for mankind. It can be, therefore, no integral Yoga which ignores the body or makes its annulment or its rejection indispensable to a perfect spirituality. Rather, the perfecting of the body also should be the last triumph of the Spirit and to make the bodily life also divine must be God's final seal upon His work in the universe. The obstacle which the physical presents to the spiritual is no argument for the rejection of the physical; for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. A supreme difficulty is Nature's indication to us of a supreme conquest to be won and an ultimate problem to be solved; it is not a warning of an inextricable snare to be shunned or of an enemy too strong for us from whom we must flee.
Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there for a great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment. The great part assigned to this element in the universal scheme is powerfully emphasised by the catholic wisdom of the Upanishads. "As the spokes of a wheel in its nave, so in the Life-Energy is all established, the triple knowledge and the Sacrifice and the power of the strong and the purity of the wise. Under the control of the LifeEnergy is all this that is established in the triple heaven."2 It is therefore no integral Yoga that kills these vital energies, forces them into a nerveless quiescence or roots them out as the source
--
If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as her base and first instrument, it is our mental life that she is evolving as her immediate next aim and su perior instrument. This in her ordinary exaltations is the lofty preoccupying thought in her; this, except in her periods of exhaustion and recoil into a reposeful and recu perating obscurity, is her constant pursuit wherever she can get free from the trammels of her first vital and physical realisations. For here in man we have a distinction which is of the utmost importance. He has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the im perfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason. Mind in man is first emmeshed in the life of the body, where in the plant it is entirely involved and in animals always imprisoned. It accepts this life as not only the first but the whole condition of its activities and serves its needs as if they were the entire aim of existence. But the bodily life in man is a base, not the aim, his first condition and not his last determinant. In the just idea of the ancients man is essentially the thinker, the Manu, the mental being who leads the life and the body,3 not the animal who is led by them. The true human existence, therefore, only begins when the intellectual mentality emerges out of the material and we begin more and more to live in the mind independent of the nervous and physical obsession and in the measure of that liberty are able to accept rightly and rightly to use the life of the body. For freedom and not a skilful subjection is the true means of mastery. A free, not a compulsory acceptance of the conditions, the enlarged and sublimated conditions of our physical being, is the high human ideal. But beyond this intellectual mentality is the divine.
The mental life thus evolving in man is not, indeed, a
--
Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life seems to create, frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the human elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to describe genius as a form of insanity, a result of degeneration, a pathological morbidity of Nature. The phenomena which are used to justify this exaggeration, when taken not separately, but in connection with all other relevant data, point to a different truth. Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall be prepared for those more puissant, direct and rapid faculties which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine mind. It is not, then, a freak, an inexplicable phenomenon, but a perfectly natural next step in the right line of her evolution.
She has harmonised the bodily life with the material mind, she is harmonising it with the play of the intellectual mentality; for that, although it tends to a depression of the full animal and vital vigour, need not produce active disturbances. And she is shooting yet beyond in the attempt to reach a still higher level.
--
We may perhaps, if we consider all the circumstances, come
14
--
to this conclusion that mental life, far from being a recent appearance in man, is the swift repetition in him of a previous achievement from which the Energy in the race had undergone one of her deplorable recoils. The savage is perhaps not so much the first forefa ther of civilised man as the degenerate descendant of a previous civilisation. For if the actuality of intellectual achievement is unevenly distributed, the capacity is spread everywhere. It has been seen that in individual cases even the racial type considered by us the lowest, the negro fresh from the perennial barbarism of Central Africa, is capable, without admixture of blood, without waiting for future generations, of the intellectual culture, if not yet of the intellectual accomplishment of the dominant European. Even in the mass men seem to need, in favourable circumstances, only a few generations to cover ground that ought apparently to be measured in the terms of millenniums. Either, then, man by his privilege as a mental being is exempt from the full burden of the tardy laws of evolution or else he already represents and with helpful conditions and in the right stimulating atmosphere can always display a high level of material capacity for the activities of the intellectual life.
It is not mental incapacity, but the long rejection or seclusion from opportunity and withdrawal of the awakening impulse that creates the savage. Barbarism is an intermediate sleep, not an original darkness.
--
Yoga, the inner instrument.4 And Indian tradition asserts that this which is to be manifested is not a new term in human ex perience, but has been developed before and has even governed humanity in certain periods of its development. In any case, in order to be known it must at one time have been partly developed.
And if since then Nature has sunk back from her achievement, the reason must always be found in some unrealised harmony, some insufficiency of the intellectual and material basis to which she has now returned, some over-specialisation of the higher to the detriment of the lower existence.
--
Do such psychological conceptions correspond to anything real and possible? All Yoga asserts them as its ultimate ex perience and supreme aim. They form the governing principles of our highest possible state of consciousness, our widest possible range of existence. There is, we say, a harmony of supreme faculties, corresponding roughly to the psychological faculties of revelation, inspiration and intuition, yet acting not in the intuitive reason or the divine mind, but on a still higher plane, which see Truth directly face to face, or rather live in the truth of things both universal and transcendent and are its formulation and luminous activity. And these faculties are the light of a conscious existence su perseding the egoistic and itself both cosmic and transcendent, the nature of which is Bliss. These are obviously divine and, as man is at present apparently constituted, su perhuman states of consciousness and activity. A trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight7 is, indeed, the metaphysical description of the supreme Atman, the self-formulation, to our awakened knowledge, of the Unknowable whether conceived as a pure Im personality or as a cosmic personality manifesting the universe. But in Yoga they are regarded also in their psychological aspects as states of subjective existence to which our waking consciousness is now alien, but which dwell in us in a su perconscious plane and to which, therefore, we may always ascend.
For, as is indicated by the name, causal body (karan.a), as opposed to the two others which are instruments (karan.a), this crowning manifestation is also the source and effective power of all that in the actual evolution has preceded it. Our mental activities are, indeed, a derivation, selection and, so long as they are divided from the truth that is secretly their source, a deformation of the divine knowledge. Our sensations and emotions have the same relation to the Bliss, our vital forces and actions to the aspect of Will or Force assumed by the divine consciousness, our physical being to the pure essence of that Bliss and
--
we are the terrestrial summit may be considered, in a sense, as an inverse manifestation, by which these supreme Powers in their unity and their diversity use, develop and perfect the im perfect substance and activities of Matter, of Life and of Mind so that they, the inferior modes, may express in mutable relativity an increasing harmony of the divine and eternal states from which they are born. If this be the truth of the universe, then the goal of evolution is also its cause, it is that which is immanent in its elements and out of them is liberated. But the liberation is surely im perfect if it is only an escape and there is no return upon the containing substance and activities to exalt and transform them.
The immanence itself would have no credible reason for being if it did not end in such a transfiguration. But if human mind can become capable of the glories of the divine Light, human emotion and sensibility can be transformed into the mould and assume the measure and movement of the supreme Bliss, human action not only represent but feel itself to be the motion of a divine and non-egoistic Force and the physical substance of our being sufficiently partake of the purity of the su pernal essence, sufficiently unify plasticity and durable constancy to support and prolong these highest ex periences and agencies, then all the long labour of Nature will end in a crowning justification and her evolutions reveal their profound significance.
--
The ultimate knowledge is that which perceives and accepts God in the universe as well as beyond the universe; the integral Yoga is that which, having found the Transcendent, can return upon the universe and possess it, retaining the power freely to descend
The Three Steps of Nature
--
We perceive, then, these three steps in Nature, a bodily life which is the basis of our existence here in the material world, a mental life into which we emerge and by which we raise the bodily to higher uses and enlarge it into a greater completeness, and a divine existence which is at once the goal of the other two and returns upon them to liberate them into their highest possibilities. Regarding none of them as either beyond our reach or below our nature and the destruction of none of them as essential to the ultimate attainment, we accept this liberation and fulfilment as part at least and a large and important part of the aim of Yoga.
0.03 - III - The Evening Sittings, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo was never a social man in the current sense of the term and definitely he was not a man of the crowd. This was due to his grave tem perament, not to any feeling of su periority or to repulsion for men. At Baroda there was an Officers' Club which was patronised by the Maharajah and though Sri Aurobindo enrolled himself as a member he hardly went to the Club even on special occasions. He rather liked a small congenial circle of friends and spent most of his evenings with them whenever he was free and not occupied with his studies or other works. After Baroda when he went to Calcutta there was hardly any time in the storm and stress of revolutionary politics to permit him to lead a 'social life'. What little time he could spare from his incessant activities was spent in the house of Raja Subodh Mallick or at the Grey Street house. In the Karmayogin office he used to sit after the office hours till late chatting with a few persons or trying automatic writing. Strange dictations used to be received sometimes: one of them was the following: "Moni [Suresh Chakravarty] will bomb Sir Edward Grey when he will come as the Viceroy of India." In later years at Pondicherry there used to be a joke that Sir Edward took such a fright at the prospect of Moni's bombing him that he never came to India!
After Sri Aurobindo had come to Pondicherry from Chandernagore, he entered upon an intense period of Sadhana and for a few months he refused to receive anyone. After a time he used to sit down to talk in the evening and on some days tried automatic writing. Yogic Sadhan, a small book, was the result. In 1913 Sri Aurobindo moved to Rue Franois Martin No. 41 where he used to receive visitors at fixed times. This was generally in the morning between 9 and 10.30.
But, over and above newcomers, some local people and the few inmates of the house used to have informal talks with Sri Aurobindo in the evening. In the beginning the inmates used to go out for playing football, and during their absence known local individuals would come in and wait for Sri Aurobindo. Afterwards regular meditations began at about 4 p.m. in which practically all the inmates participated. After the meditation all of the members and those who were permitted shared in the evening sitting. This was a very informal gathering depending entirely upon Sri Aurobindo's leisure.
When Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved to No. 9 Rue de la Marine in 1922 the same routine of informal evening sittings after meditation continued. I came to Pondicherry for Sadhana in the beginning of 1923. I kept notes of the important talks I had with the four or five disciples who were already there. Besides, I used to take detailed notes of the Evening Talks which we all had with the Master. They were not intended by him to be noted down. I took them down because of the importance I felt about everything connected with him, no matter how insignificant to the outer view. I also felt that everything he did would acquire for those who would come to know his mission a very great significance.
--
He came dressed as usual in dhoti, part of which was used by him to cover the up per part of his body. Very rarely he came out with chaddar or shawl and then it was "in deference to the climate" as he sometimes put it. At times for minutes he would be gazing at the sky from a small opening at the top of the grass-curtains that covered the verandah upstairs in No. 9, Rue de la Marine. How much were these sittings dependent on him may be gathered from the fact that there were days when more than three-fourths of the time passed in complete silence without any outer suggestion from him, or there was only an abrupt "Yes" or "No" to all attempts at drawing him out in conversation. And even when he participated in the talk one always felt that his voice was that of one who does not let his whole being flow into his words; there was a reserve and what was left unsaid was perhaps more than what was spoken. What was spoken was what he felt necessary to speak.
Very often some news-item in the daily newspa per, town-gossip, or some interesting letter received either by him or by a disciple, or a question from one of the gathering, occasionally some remark or query from himself would set the ball rolling for the talk. The whole thing was so informal that one could never predict the turn the conversation would take. The whole house therefore was in a mood to enjoy the freshness and the delight of meeting the unexpected. There were peals of laughter and light talk, jokes and criticism which might be called personal, there was seriousness and earnestness in abundance.
These sittings, in fact, furnished Sri Aurobindo with an occasion to admit and feel the outer atmosphere and that of the group living with him. It brought to him the much-needed direct contact of the mental and vital make-up of the disciples, enabling him to act on the atmosphere in general and on the individual in particular. He could thus help to remould their mental make-up by removing the limitations of their minds and opinions, and correct tem peramental tendencies and formations. Thus, these sittings contributed at least partly to the creation of an atmosphere amenable to the working of the Higher Consciousness. Far more important than the actual talk and its content was the personal contact, the influence of the Master, and the divine atmosphere he emanated; for through his outer personality it was the Divine Consciousness that he allowed to act. All along behind the outer manifestation that appeared human, there was the influence and presence of the Divine.
What was talked in the small group informally was not intended by Sri Aurobindo to be the independent expression of his views on the subjects, events or the persons discussed. Very often what he said was in answer to the spiritual need of the individual or of the collective atmosphere. It was like a spiritual remedy meant to produce certain spiritual results, not a philosophical or metaphysical pronouncement on questions, events or movements. The net result of some talks very often was to point out to the disciple the inherent incapacity of the human intellect and its secondary place in the search for the ultimate Reality.
But there were occasions when he did give his independent, personal views on some problems, on events or other subjects. Even then it was never an authoritarian pronouncement. Most often it appeared to be a logically worked out and almost inevitable conclusion expressed quite im personally though with firm and sincere conviction. This im personality was such a prominent trait of his personality! Even in such matters as dispatching a letter or a telegram it would not be a command from him to a disciple to carry out the task. Most often during his usual passage to the dining room he would stop on the way, drop in on the company of four or five disciples and, holding out the letter or the telegram, would say in the most amiable and yet the most im personal way: "I suppose this has to be sent." And it would be for someone in the group instantly to volunteer and take it. The expression he very often used was "It was done" or "It happened", not "I did."
From 1918 to 1922, we gathered at No. 41, Rue Franois Martin, called the Guest House, upstairs, on a broad verandah into which four rooms opened and whose main piece of furniture was a small table 3' x 1' covered with a blue cotton cloth. That is where Sri Aurobindo used to sit in a hard wooden chair behind the table with a few chairs in front for the visitors or for the disciples.
--
Then, on 23 November 1938, I got up at 2 o'clock to prepare hot water for the Mother's early bath because the 24th was Darshan day. Between 2.20 and 2.30 the Mother rang the bell. I ran up the staircase to be told about an accident that had happened to Sri Aurobindo's thigh and to be asked to fetch the doctor. This accident brought about a change in his complete retirement, and rendered him available to those who had to attend on him. This opened out a long period of 12 years during which his retirement was modified owing to circumstances, inner and outer, that made it possible for him to have direct physical contacts with the world outside.
The long period of the Second World War with all its vicissitudes passed through these years. It was a priceless ex perience to see how he devoted his energies to the task of saving humanity from the threatened reign of Nazism. It was a practical lesson of solid work done for humanity without any thought of return or reward, without even letting humanity know what he was doing for it! Thus he lived the Divine and showed us how the Divine cares for the world, how He comes down and works for man. I shall never forget how he who was at one time in his own words "not merely a non-co-o perator but an enemy of British Im perialism" bestowed such anxious care on the health of Churchill, listening carefully to the health-bulletins! It was the work of the Divine, it was the Divine's work for the world.
There were no formal evening sittings during these years, but what appeared to me important in our informal talks was recorded and has been incorporated in this book.
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
later became one of her personal attendants. She began writing
to the Mother at the age of seventeen.
--
a perpetual renewal of force comes from communion
with the Infinite.
--
Your reply to the doctor was very good and you are perfectly
right. One should never talk about others - it is always useless
--
disappeared. perhaps they are all good! And perhaps this
revolt, discontent, discouragement and bad tem per are
--
and having confidence - all of these are bad perhaps.
Because I see that they have disappeared, at least for the
--
to recover, do not recover. perhaps it is the same for physical
diseases?
--
supramental beauty is something much higher and more perfect;
it is a beauty untainted by any ugliness and it does not need the
--
to manifest, this perfect beauty will express itself quite naturally
and spontaneously in all forms.
--
any kind of perfection. I don't think this is the result you want
to obtain!
--
if another person had made something more beautiful
than I had.
--
I mean that instead of living in the perceptions of the senseorgans, which are exclusively occupied with outward things,
you should concentrate in the inner being, which has a life
--
is, 2 rupees, 9 1/2 annas per yard. This evening X and
I dyed the big ten-yard piece. But it was not successful:
--
For years I was perfectly satisfied with two saris a year - but I
am proud of the beautiful things my dear children make for me
--
but simply aspire with calm and perseverance for the light to
reappear. My love is always with you to help you go through
--
The period around August 15, Sri Aurobindo's birthday.
Series Three - To "My little smile"
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
NATURE, then, is an evolution or progressive self-manifestation of an eternal and secret existence, with three successive forms as her three steps of ascent. And we have consequently as the condition of all our activities these three mutually interdependent possibilities, the bodily life, the mental existence and the veiled spiritual being which is in the involution the cause of the others and in the evolution their result. Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental, it is Nature's aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily existence, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities.
For man, the head of terrestrial Nature, the sole earthly frame in which her full evolution is possible, is a triple birth. He has been given a living frame in which the body is the vessel and life the dynamic means of a divine manifestation. His activity is centred in a progressive mind which aims at perfecting itself as well as the house in which it dwells and the means of life that it uses, and is capable of awaking by a progressive self-realisation to its own true nature as a form of the Spirit. He culminates in what he always really was, the illumined and beatific spirit which is intended at last to irradiate life and mind with its now concealed splendours.
Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in humanity, the whole method and aim of our existence must work by the interaction of these three elements in the being. As a result of their separate formulation in Nature, man has open to him a choice between three kinds of life, the ordinary material existence, a life of mental activity and progress and the unchanging spiritual beatitude. But he can, as he progresses, combine these three forms, resolve their discords into a harmonious rhythm and so create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect Man.
In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic and governing impulse.
The characteristic energy of bodily Life is not so much in progress as in persistence, not so much in individual selfenlargement as in self-repetition. There is, indeed, in physical Nature a progression from type to type, from the vegetable to the animal, from the animal to man; for even in inanimate Matter Mind is at work. But once a type is marked off physically, the chief immediate preoccupation of the terrestrial Mother seems to be to keep it in being by a constant reproduction. For Life always seeks immortality; but since individual form is im permanent and only the idea of a form is permanent in the consciousness that creates the universe, - for there it does not perish, - such constant reproduction is the only possible material immortality.
Self-preservation, self-repetition, self-multiplication are necessarily, then, the predominant instincts of all material existence.
--
The characteristic energy of pure Mind is change, and the more our mentality acquires elevation and organisation, the more this law of Mind assumes the aspect of a continual enlargement, improvement and better arrangement of its gains and so of a continual passage from a smaller and simpler to a larger and more complex perfection. For Mind, unlike bodily life, is infinite in its field, elastic in its expansion, easily variable in its formations. Change, then, self-enlargement and selfimprovement are its pro per instincts. Mind too moves in cycles, but these are ever-enlarging spirals. Its faith is perfectibility, its watchword is progress.
The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the im perfections and limitations of the forms and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life.
In each of these forms Nature acts both individually and collectively; for the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single form and in the group-existence, whether family, clan and nation or groupings dependent on less physical principles or the supreme group of all, our collective humanity. Man also may seek his own individual good from any or all of these spheres of activity, or identify himself in them with the collectivity and live for it, or, rising to a truer perception of this complex universe, harmonise the individual realisation with the collective aim. For as it is the right relation of the soul with the Supreme, while it is in the universe, neither to assert egoistically its separate being nor to blot itself out in the Indefinable, but to realise its unity with the Divine and the world and unite them in the individual, so the right relation of the individual with the collectivity is neither to pursue egoistically his own material or mental progress or spiritual salvation without regard to his fellows, nor for the sake of the community to suppress or maim his pro per development, but to sum up in himself all its best and completest possibilities and pour them out by thought, action and all other means on his surroundings so that the whole race may approach nearer to the attainment of its supreme personalities.
It follows that the object of the material life must be to fulfil, above all things, the vital aim of Nature. The whole aim of the material man is to live, to pass from birth to death with as much comfort or enjoyment as may be on the way, but anyhow to live.
--
The mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman,1 is ever a dreamer. A dream of perfect beauty, perfect conduct, perfect Truth, whether seeking new forms of the Eternal or revitalising the old, is the very soul of pure mentality. But it knows not how to deal with the resistance of Matter. There it is ham pered and inefficient, works by bungling ex periments and has either to withdraw from the struggle or submit to the grey actuality. Or else, by studying the material life and accepting the conditions of the contest, it may succeed, but only in imposing temporarily some artificial system which infinite Nature either rends and casts aside or disfigures out of recognition or by withdrawing her assent leaves as the corpse of a dead ideal. Few and far between have been those realisations of the dreamer in Man which the world has gladly accepted, looks back to with a fond memory and seeks, in its elements, to cherish.
1 Who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of abstractions, the Brilliant.
--
That highest thing, the spiritual existence, is concerned with what is eternal but not therefore entirely aloof from the transient. For the spiritual man the mind's dream of perfect beauty is realised in an eternal love, beauty and delight that has no dependence and is equal behind all objective appearances; its dream of perfect Truth in the supreme, self-existent, self-apparent and eternal Verity which never varies, but explains and is the secret of all variations and the goal of all progress; its dream of perfect action in the omnipotent and self-guiding Law that is inherent for ever in all things and translates itself here in the rhythm of the worlds. What is fugitive vision or constant effort of creation in the brilliant Self is an eternally existing Reality in the Self that knows2 and is the Lord.
But if it is often difficult for the mental life to accommodate itself to the dully resistant material activity, how much more difficult must it seem for the spiritual existence to live on in a world that appears full not of the Truth but of every lie and illusion, not of Love and Beauty but of an encompassing discord and ugliness, not of the Law of Truth but of victorious selfishness and sin? Therefore the spiritual life tends easily in the saint and Sannyasin to withdraw from the material existence and reject it either wholly and physically or in the spirit. It sees this world as the kingdom of evil or of ignorance and the eternal and divine either in a far-off heaven or beyond where there is no world and no life. It separates itself inwardly, if not also physically, from the world's impurities; it asserts the spiritual reality in a spotless isolation. This withdrawal renders an invaluable service to the material life itself by forcing it to regard and even to bow down to something that is the direct negation of its own petty ideals, sordid cares and egoistic self-content.
--
But the spiritual life, like the mental, may thus make use of this outward existence for the benefit of the individual with a perfect indifference to any collective uplifting of the merely symbolic world which it uses. Since the Eternal is for ever the same in all things and all things the same to the Eternal, since the exact mode of action and the result are of no importance compared with the working out in oneself of the one great realisation, this spiritual indifference accepts no matter what environment, no matter what action, dispassionately, prepared to retire as soon as its own supreme end is realised. It is so that many have understood the ideal of the Gita. Or else the inner love and bliss may pour itself out on the world in good deeds, in service, in compassion, the inner Truth in the giving of knowledge, without therefore attempting the transformation of a world which must by its inalienable nature remain a battlefield of the dualities, of sin and virtue, of truth and error, of joy and suffering.
But if Progress also is one of the chief terms of worldexistence and a progressive manifestation of the Divine the true sense of Nature, this limitation also is invalid. It is possible for the spiritual life in the world, and it is its real mission, to change the material life into its own image, the image of the Divine. Therefore, besides the great solitaries who have sought and attained their self-liberation, we have the great spiritual teachers who have also liberated others and, supreme of all, the great dynamic souls who, feeling themselves stronger in the might of the Spirit than all the forces of the material life banded together, have thrown themselves upon the world, grappled with it in a loving wrestle and striven to compel its consent to its own transfiguration. Ordinarily, the effort is concentrated on a mental and moral change in humanity, but it may extend itself also to the alteration of the forms of our life and its institutions so that they too may be a better mould for the inpourings of the Spirit. These attempts have been the supreme landmarks in the progressive development of human ideals and the divine preparation of the race. Every one of them, whatever its outward results, has left Earth more capable of Heaven and quickened in its tardy movements the evolutionary Yoga of Nature.
--
The schools of Indian Yoga lent themselves to the compromise. Individual perfection or liberation was made the aim, seclusion of some kind from the ordinary activities the condition, the renunciation of life the culmination. The teacher gave his knowledge only to a small circle of disciples. Or if a wider movement was attempted, it was still the release of the individual soul that remained the aim. The pact with an immobile society was, for the most part, observed.
The utility of the compromise in the then actual state of the world cannot be doubted. It secured in India a society which lent itself to the preservation and the worship of spirituality, a country apart in which as in a fortress the highest spiritual ideal could maintain itself in its most absolute purity unoverpowered by the siege of the forces around it. But it was a compromise, not an absolute victory. The material life lost the divine impulse to growth, the spiritual preserved by isolation its height and purity, but sacrificed its full power and serviceableness to the world. Therefore, in the divine Providence the country of the Yogins and the Sannyasins has been forced into a strict and im perative contact with the very element it had rejected, the element of the progressive Mind, so that it might recover what was now wanting to it.
We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God's intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others.
Therefore from a concrete view of human life in its threefold potentialities we come to the same conclusion that we had drawn from an observation of Nature in her general workings and the three steps of her evolution. And we begin to perceive a complete aim for our synthesis of Yoga.
Spirit is the crown of universal existence; Matter is its basis; Mind is the link between the two. Spirit is that which is eternal; Mind and Matter are its workings. Spirit is that which is concealed and has to be revealed; mind and body are the means by which it seeks to reveal itself. Spirit is the image of the Lord of the Yoga; mind and body are the means He has provided for reproducing that image in phenomenal existence. All Nature is an attempt at a progressive revelation of the concealed Truth, a more and more successful reproduction of the divine image.
But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution, Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her faculties. While she develops the spiritual life with difficulty and has constantly to fall back from it for the sake of her lower realisations, the sublimated force, the concentrated method of Yoga can attain directly and carry with it the perfection of the mind and even, if she will, the perfection of the body. Nature seeks the Divine in her own symbols: Yoga goes beyond Nature to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent and can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat of the Omnipotent.
But their aim is one in the end. The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression.
The ages when that is accomplished, are the legendary Satya or Krita3 Yugas, the ages of the Truth manifested in the symbol, of the great work done when Nature in mankind, illumined, satisfied and blissful, rests in the culmination of her endeavour.
0.04 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
sensitive perhaps - (of this I am not sure as I have not followed
other bullocks so closely). The truth is that they dislike and distrust the present driver, and not without reason. When they were
--
so on. I am not submitting all this to have permission
to do like that for our cattle. But I am tempted to beg
you for your kind gracious permission to use this kind of
necklace which I am enclosing herewith for our darling
--
If you are pleased to permit, as it is only for a day, I
have no objection. He works very satisfactorily. Awaiting
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For the contact of the human and individual consciousness with the divine is the very essence of Yoga. Yoga is the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality. The contact may take place at any point of the complex and intricately organised consciousness which we call our personality. It may be effected in the physical through the body; in the vital through the action of
Bhakta, the devotee or lover of God; Bhagavan, God, the Lord of Love and Delight.
--
Self. Hathayoga selects the body and the vital functionings as its instruments of perfection and realisation; its concern is with the gross body. Rajayoga selects the mental being in its different parts as its lever-power; it concentrates on the subtle body. The triple Path of Works, of Love and of Knowledge uses some part of the mental being, will, heart or intellect as a starting-point and seeks by its conversion to arrive at the liberating Truth,
Beatitude and Infinity which are the nature of the spiritual life.
--
For it is calculated on the amount of vital or dynamic force necessary to drive the physical engine during the normal span of human life and to perform more or less adequately the various workings demanded of it by the individual life inhabiting this frame and the world-environment by which it is conditioned.
34
--
Nature the equilibrium is based upon the individualisation of a limited quantity and force of the Prana; more than that the individual is by personal and hereditary habit unable to bear, use or control. In Hathayoga, the equilibrium opens a door to the universalisation of the individual vitality by admitting into the body, containing, using and controlling a much less fixed and limited action of the universal energy.
The chief processes of Hathayoga are asana and pran.ayama.
--
Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal o perations. In the ancient tradition of Hathayoga it has always been supposed that this conquest could be pushed so far even as to conquer to a great extent the force of gravitation. By various subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hathayogin next contrives to keep the body free from all impurities and the nervous system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are his most important instruments. These are called pran.ayama, the control of the breath or vital power; for breathing is the chief physical functioning of the vital forces. Pranayama, for the Hathayogin, serves a double purpose. First, it completes the perfection of the body. The vitality is liberated from many of the ordinary necessities of physical Nature; robust health, prolonged youth, often an extraordinary longevity are attained.
On the other hand, Pranayama awakens the coiled-up serpent of the Pranic dynamism in the vital sheath and opens to the Yogin fields of consciousness, ranges of ex perience, abnormal faculties denied to the ordinary human life while it puissantly intensifies such normal powers and faculties as he already possesses.
--
The results of Hathayoga are thus striking to the eye and impose easily on the vulgar or physical mind. And yet at the end we may ask what we have gained at the end of all this stupendous labour. The object of physical Nature, the preservation of the mere physical life, its highest perfection, even in a certain sense the capacity of a greater enjoyment of physical living have been carried out on an abnormal scale. But the weakness of Hathayoga is that its laborious and difficult processes make so great a demand on the time and energy and impose so complete a severance from the ordinary life of men that the utilisation of its results for the life of the world becomes either impracticable or is extraordinarily restricted. If in return for this loss we gain another life in another world within, the mental, the dynamic, these results could have been acquired through other systems, through Rajayoga, through Tantra, by much less laborious methods and held on much less exacting terms. On the other hand the physical results, increased vitality, prolonged youth, health, longevity are of small avail if they must be held by us as misers of ourselves, apart from the common life, for their own sake, not utilised, not thrown into the common sum of the world's activities. Hathayoga attains large results, but at an exorbitant price and to very little purpose.
Rajayoga takes a higher flight. It aims at the liberation and perfection not of the bodily, but of the mental being, the control of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness. It fixes its eyes on the citta, that stuff of mental consciousness in which all these activities arise, and it seeks, even as Hathayoga with its physical material, first to purify and to tranquillise. The normal state of man is a condition of trouble and disorder, a kingdom either at war with itself or badly governed; for the lord, the Purusha, is subjected to his ministers, the faculties, subjected even to his subjects, the instruments of sensation, emotion, action, enjoyment. Swarajya, self-rule, must be substituted for this subjection.
First, therefore, the powers of order must be helped to overcome
--
This is the first step only. Afterwards, the ordinary activities of the mind and sense must be entirely quieted in order that the soul may be free to ascend to higher states of consciousness and acquire the foundation for a perfect freedom and self-mastery.
But Rajayoga does not forget that the disabilities of the ordinary mind proceed largely from its subjection to the reactions of the nervous system and the body. It adopts therefore from the Hathayogic system its devices of asana and pran.ayama, but reduces their multiple and elaborate forms in each case to one simplest and most directly effective process sufficient for its own immediate object. Thus it gets rid of the Hathayogic complexity and cumbrousness while it utilises the swift and powerful efficacy of its methods for the control of the body and the vital functions and for the awakening of that internal dynamism, full of a latent su pernormal faculty, typified in Yogic terminology by the kun.d.alin, the coiled and sleeping serpent of Energy within. This done, the system proceeds to the perfect quieting of the restless mind and its elevation to a higher plane through concentration of mental force by the successive stages which lead to the utmost inner concentration or ingathered state of the consciousness which is called Samadhi.
By Samadhi, in which the mind acquires the capacity of withdrawing from its limited waking activities into freer and higher states of consciousness, Rajayoga serves a double purpose. It compasses a pure mental action liberated from the confusions of the outer consciousness and passes thence to the higher supra-mental planes on which the individual soul enters into its true spiritual existence. But also it acquires the capacity of that free and concentrated energising of consciousness on
--
We perceive that as Hathayoga, dealing with the life and body, aims at the su pernormal perfection of the physical life and its capacities and goes beyond it into the domain of the mental life, so Rajayoga, o perating with the mind, aims at a su pernormal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the mental life and goes beyond it into the domain of the spiritual existence.
But the weakness of the system lies in its excessive reliance on abnormal states of trance. This limitation leads first to a certain aloofness from the physical life which is our foundation and the sphere into which we have to bring our mental and spiritual gains. Especially is the spiritual life, in this system, too much associated with the state of Samadhi. Our object is to make the spiritual life and its ex periences fully active and fully utilisable in the waking state and even in the normal use of the functions.
--
Rajayoga in that it does not occupy itself with the elaborate training of the whole mental system as the condition of perfection, but seizes on certain central principles, the intellect, the heart, the will, and seeks to convert their normal o perations by turning them away from their ordinary and external preoccupations and activities and concentrating them on the Divine. It
38
--
differs also in this, - and here from the point of view of an integral Yoga there seems to be a defect, - that it is indifferent to mental and bodily perfection and aims only at purity as a condition of the divine realisation. A second defect is that as actually practised it chooses one of the three parallel paths exclusively and almost in antagonism to the others instead of effecting a synthetic harmony of the intellect, the heart and the will in an integral divine realisation.
The Path of Knowledge aims at the realisation of the unique and supreme Self. It proceeds by the method of intellectual reflection, vicara, to right discrimination, viveka. It observes and distinguishes the different elements of our apparent or phenomenal being and rejecting identification with each of them arrives at their exclusion and separation in one common term as constituents of Prakriti, of phenomenal Nature, creations of
Maya, the phenomenal consciousness. So it is able to arrive at its right identification with the pure and unique Self which is not mutable or perishable, not determinable by any phenomenon or combination of phenomena. From this point the path, as ordinarily followed, leads to the rejection of the phenomenal worlds from the consciousness as an illusion and the final immergence without return of the individual soul in the Supreme.
But this exclusive consummation is not the sole or inevitable result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and with a less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realisation of the supreme Self not only in one's own being but in all beings and, finally, the realisation of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realisation a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into activities of the divine consciousness utilisable for the perception of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect
The Systems of Yoga
--
and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualisation and to the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.
The Path of Devotion aims at the enjoyment of the supreme
Love and Bliss and utilises normally the conception of the supreme Lord in His personality as the divine Lover and enjoyer of the universe. The world is then realised as a play of the
Lord, with our human life as its final stage, pursued through the different phases of self-concealment and self-revelation. The principle of Bhakti Yoga is to utilise all the normal relations of human life into which emotion enters and apply them no longer to transient worldly relations, but to the joy of the All-Loving, the All-Beautiful and the All-Blissful. Worship and meditation are used only for the preparation and increase of intensity of the divine relationship. And this Yoga is catholic in its use of all emotional relations, so that even enmity and opposition to God, considered as an intense, impatient and perverse form of Love, is conceived as a possible means of realisation and salvation.
This path, too, as ordinarily practised, leads away from worldexistence to an absorption, of another kind than the Monist's, in the Transcendent and Supra-cosmic.
--
Devotion may be so used as to lead to the elevation of the whole range of human emotion, sensation and aesthetic perception to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards love and joy in our humanity.
The Path of Works aims at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Will. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so
--
But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
We can see also that in the integral view of things these three paths are one. Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect
Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which is known; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His being. It is in this triple path that we come most readily to the absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings and in the entire cosmic manifestation.
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
received it, perhaps without even being aware of it.
Love from your mother.
--
you closer to me and gives you the perception and joy of my
presence is good. You should judge things in the light of this
--
My mother was perfectly right and I have always been very
grateful to her for having taught me the discipline and the necessity of self-forgetfulness through concentration on what one
--
For you I want consciousness, knowledge, artistic capacity, selfmastery in peace and perfect equality, and the happiness that is
the result of spiritual realisation. Is this too grand and vast a
--
beautiful or useful have always been persons who have known
how to discipline themselves.
--
a perfect realisation and in the Divine's omnipotence to achieve
it. The Force and Consciousness are always with you, as well as
--
I want all that to go away and I want you to be perfectly
healthy. For that, you must follow a physical discipline: sleep
--
the path, but with perseverance the victory is sure.
Love from your mother.
--
the good influences and reject persistently the bad ones.
Love from your mother.
--
On the first path, there is no question of personal incapacity,
since our help and protection are always there. Indeed, you must
--
in yourself; but persist in your will to overcome it and it will
suddenly give way.
--
the Ashram for a period of eight years. The following
letters were written while he was away.)
--
support you, to guide you. By doing your work with conscientiousness, honesty and perseverance, you will feel my presence
closer and closer to you.
--
yourself fall into darkness. persist, and one day you will realise
that I am close to you to console you and help you, and then the
--
that perseverance in study and the acceptance of a discipline of
work and order in life will be a powerful help to you in renewing
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This system is the way of the Tantra. Owing to certain of its developments Tantra has fallen into discredit with those who are not Tantrics; and especially owing to the developments of its left-hand path, the Vama Marga, which not content with exceeding the duality of virtue and sin and instead of replacing them by spontaneous rightness of action seemed, sometimes, to make a method of self-indulgence, a method of unrestrained social immorality. Nevertheless, in its origin, Tantra was a great and puissant system founded upon ideas which were at least partially true. Even its twofold division into the right-hand and left-hand paths, Dakshina Marga and Vama Marga, started from a certain profound perception. In the ancient symbolic sense of the words Dakshina and Vama, it was the distinction between the way of Knowledge and the way of Ananda, - Nature in man liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities and Nature in man
The Synthesis of the Systems
--
Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method, its Tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his discipline, - mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and conquered. But in the end, as is the general tendency of Prakriti, Tantric Yoga largely lost its principle in its machinery and became a thing of formulae and occult mechanism still powerful when rightly used but fallen from the clarity of their original intention.
We have in this central Tantric conception one side of the truth, the worship of the Energy, the Shakti, as the sole effective force for all attainment. We get the other extreme in the Vedantic conception of the Shakti as a power of Illusion and in the search after the silent inactive Purusha as the means of liberation from the deceptions created by the active Energy. But in the integral conception the Conscious Soul is the Lord, the Nature-Soul is his executive Energy. Purusha is of the nature of Sat, the being of conscious self-existence pure and infinite; Shakti or Prakriti is of the nature of Chit, - it is power of the Purusha's self-conscious existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed
--
God Himself, the real person in us, becomes the sadhaka of the sadhana1 as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the
Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces
Sadhana, the practice by which perfection, siddhi, is attained; sadhaka, the Yogin who seeks by that practice the siddhi.
46
--
There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the tem perament of the individual in whom it o perates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of
Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but
--
Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive ex perience we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the more or less distorted or im perfect figure of some element or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of the human forefa thers fashioning the gods as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every ex perience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner ex perience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in
Nature, in the other it becomes swift and self-conscious and the instrument confesses the hand of the Master. All life is a Yoga of Nature seeking to manifest God within itself. Yoga marks the stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering up and concentration of the movements dis persed and loosely combined in the lower evolution.
--
By this integral realisation and liberation, the perfect harmony of the results of Knowledge, Love and Works. For there is attained the complete release from ego and identification in being with the One in all and beyond all. But since the attaining consciousness is not limited by its attainment, we win also the unity in Beatitude and the harmonised diversity in Love, so that all relations of the play remain possible to us even while we retain on the heights of our being the eternal oneness with the
Beloved. And by a similar wideness, being capable of a freedom in spirit that embraces life and does not depend upon withdrawal from life, we are able to become without egoism, bondage or reaction the channel in our mind and body for a divine action poured out freely upon the world.
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. An integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine
Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its
Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right
--
functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ananda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ananda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga.
perfection includes perfection of mind and body, so that the highest results of Rajayoga and Hathayoga should be contained in the widest formula of the synthesis finally to be effected by mankind. At any rate a full development of the general mental and physical faculties and ex periences attainable by humanity through Yoga must be included in the scope of the integral method. Nor would these have any raison d'etre unless employed for an integral mental and physical life. Such a mental and physical life would be in its nature a translation of the spiritual existence into its right mental and physical values. Thus we would arrive at a synthesis of the three degrees of Nature and of the three modes of human existence which she has evolved or is evolving. We would include in the scope of our liberated being and perfected modes of activity the material life, our base, and the mental life, our intermediate instrument.
Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection embraces the realisation of ourselves in being, in life and in love through others as well as through ourselves, the extension of our liberty and of its results in others would be the inevitable outcome as well as the broadest utility of our liberation and perfection. And the constant and inherent attempt of such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately complete generalisation in mankind.
The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect
50
--
The widest synthesis of perfection possible to thought is the sole effort entirely worthy of those whose dedicated vision perceives that God dwells concealed in humanity.
0.06 - INTRODUCTION, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
And the second night, or purification, pertains to those who are already
proficient, occurring at the time when God desires to bring them to the state
--
Divine union of perfection of love, if God takes not its hand and purges it not in that
dark fire.'3
--
the state of the perfect, which is that of the Divine union of the soul with
God. 4
--
Spiritual persons, we are told, do not enter the second night immediately
after leaving the first; on the contrary, they generally pass a long time, even years,
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Is there no means of uniting my will with Yours? perhaps
You have no special will, for You want nothing.
I know perfectly well what I want or rather what the divine Will
is, and it is that which will triumph in time.
--
One must persist without getting discouraged, and first of all
refuse to recognise the body as one's "self". Indeed, what would
--
in the world and that everything is in perpetual change.
I do not understand a phrase in Your Prayers: "and that
--
It is in a calm and persevering will that this can be accomplished.
May my whole being be only that love which wants to
--
Yes, there is the Truth of perfect union with the Divine in an
identity of consciousness and will.
--
be perfect.
Series Six - To a Young Sadhak
--
psychic being works with perseverance and ardour to make the
union an accomplished fact, but it never complains, and knows
--
A love which is sufficiently strong can make a person the
slave of the beloved.
--
The person I love belongs to me.
This is a very ugly love, quite egoistic.
--
It is not this person or that who attracts you... it is the eternal
feminine in the lower nature which attracts the eternal masculine in the lower nature and creates an illusion in the mind; it
--
It is better not to think of this personal nature as mine;
not to identify myself with it is the best remedy I can
--
You must abstain from thinking about a person when you cannot
think anything good about him.
--
Without perseverance one never attains anything.
Because a thing is difficult it does not mean that one should give
--
If you persevere you are sure to succeed; as for my help you may
rest assured it is always with you, and one never calls in vain.
--
Confidence in the Divine I do not lack, but it is perhaps
my ego which unceasingly says that I cannot accomplish
--
if, instead of expressing their advice under cleverly perverted
forms, they were to speak of things as they are, it would come
--
A yogi ought to accept and digest all dirt with a perfect
equality.
--
wrong sides of the same thing and always indicate an attachment. One must persistently turn away one's thought from its
object.
--
One has only to persist with a calm confidence and the vital will
stop going on strike.
--
one does it. It is difficult to keep one's mind perfectly quiet; it
is better to engage it in studies than in silly ideas or unhealthy
--
In the mind also there are perversions. It is a rather poor and
unrefined vital which can take pleasure in such things!
0.07 - DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
Exposition of the stanzas describing the method followed by the soul in its journey upon the spiritual road to the attainment of the perfect union of love with God, to the extent that is possible in this life. Likewise are described the pro perties belonging to the soul that has attained to the said perfection, according as they are contained in the same stanzas.
PROLOGUE
--
Begins the exposition of the stanzas which treat of the way and manner which the soul follows upon the road of the union of love with God. Before we enter upon the exposition of these stanzas, it is well to understand here that the soul that utters them is now in the state of perfection, which is the union of love with God, having already passed through severe trials and straits, by means of spiritual exercise in the narrow way of eternal life whereof Our Saviour speaks in the Gospel, along which way the soul ordinarily passes in order to reach this high and happy union with God. Since this road (as the Lord Himself says likewise) is so strait, and since there are so few that enter by it,19 the soul considers it a great happiness and good chance to have passed along it to the said perfection of love, as it sings in this first stanza, calling this strait road with full propriety 'dark night,' as will be explained hereafter in the lines of the said stanza. The soul, then, rejoicing at having passed along this narrow road whence so many blessings have come to it, speaks after this manner.
BOOK THE FIRST
0.07 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo's personal attendants.1
To talk of surrender is easy, very easy indeed. To think of
--
the needed instrument, the perfect servant."
27 March 1936
--
heart may I have your lotus feet permanently installed
on a throne of love.
--
frightened and would like to hear from you personally
if you are not merely ex perimenting with us? Praying to
--
compassion and solicitude and love which I do not deserve. And yet, although I feel a personal tie with you
which I expect is psychic, I still do not feel that I want
--
so, Mother? perhaps you do not approve of my tone;
perhaps you are dissatisfied with my disability; possibly
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How can one make one's psychic personality grow?
It is through all the ex periences of life that the psychic personality forms, grows, develops and finally becomes a complete,
conscious and free being.
--
seen nor perceived nor felt, save on truly exceptional occasions.
In order to strengthen the contact and aid, if possible, the
development of the conscious psychic personality, one should,
while concentrating, turn towards it, aspire to know it and feel
--
possible, to cultivate a perfect sincerity in all the activities of
one's being - these are the essential conditions for the growth
--
to convince it that its perception and understanding are too
limited for it truly to be able to know and that it judges only
--
For you must never forget that the outer person is only the
form and symbol of an eternal Reality, and through the physical
--
if you persist in the effort. You begin by remembering your
dreams, then gradually you remain more and more conscious
--
If you persist in your will and your effort, you are sure to
learn how to come and find me at night during your sleep and
--
by aspiration and by calm and persistent effort.
(1) Concentrate your thought on the will to come and find
--
takes a certain time and you must persist in the effort.
25 September 1959
--
Moreover, the same event may be very good for one person
and at the same time very bad for another. These estimations are
--
ourselves and advance towards perfection, our circumstances
also improve.
--
During this period the Mother stood for a while every morning on a balcony facing
the street and gazed at the sadhaks assembled below.
--
body, but of all that surrounds us as well - all that we perceive
with our senses. It is a sort of apparatus for recording and transmission which is open to all the contacts and shocks coming
--
it is the perfectly effective remedy for the fatigue, tension and
exhaustion arising from that internal over-activity and noise
--
even a different personality of my being; and by concentrating
on the photo, one enters into relation with that special aspect or
different personality which the photo has captured and whose
image it conveys.
--
Because the photo catches only the image of a moment, an instant of a person's appearance and of what that appearance
can reveal of a passing psychological condition and fragmentary soul-state. Even if the photograph is taken under the best
--
moment, it cannot in any way reproduce the whole personality.
5 November 1959
--
and transform him for their personal use into the supreme God.
In the individual evolution, one must develop in oneself
--
We are still only in a period of preparation.
18 December 1959
--
the Divine through perfect, total and eternal love.
In the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the two combine
0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
storeroom of words, clothe themselves effortlessly, automatically, with the words needed to make themselves perceptible
even in the material house.
--
The central knot of desires is the sense of separate personality;
it is the ego. With the disappearance of the ego, the desires
--
And thus identified with the Divine, it becomes His perfect
instrument in the world.
--
to apply it with an unfailing perseverance that does not shrink
from any obstacle, any difficulty. It is a long and minute work
--
obtain a perceptible result.
31 July 1960
--
it. But there are many persons who, without giving anything,
Words of the Mother - I, CWM, Vol. 13, p. 29.
--
the need of the moment, so that each person may be able to find
in them either the force or the knowledge that will help him to
--
assimilation, and during this period of assimilation the progress
of the more developed parts seems to be interrupted. This is
--
ecstasy because one is in contact with one's personal
Divine. How to approach the Transcendent Divine?
--
personal divine", you would know perfectly well "how to approach the Transcendent Divine". For the two are identical; it is
only the mode of approach that differs: one is through the heart,
--
Sri Aurobindo tells us: "God in his perfection embraces everything; we also must become all-embracing."
There is a lot of misunderstanding among the young
--
Is it possible to love You perfectly, absolutely, before
finding the psychic being within us?
--
love. As for perfect love, it exists only in the Divine.
26 April 1961
01.01 - A Yoga of the Art of Life, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When Sri Aurobindo said, Our Yoga is not for ourselves but for humanity, many heaved a sigh of relief and thought that the great soul was after all not entirely lost to the world, his was not one more name added to the long list of Sannyasins that India has been producing age after age without much profit either to herself or to the human society (or even perhaps to their own selves). People understood his Yoga to be a modern one, dedicated to the service of humanity. If service to humanity was not the very sum and substance of his spirituality, it was, at least, the fruitful end and consummation. His Yoga was a sort of art to explore and harness certain unseen powers that can better and ameliorate human life in a more successful way than mere rational scientific methods can hope to do.
Sri Aurobindo saw that the very core of his teaching was being missed by this common interpretation of his saying. So he changed his words and said, Our Yoga is not for humanity but for the Divine. But I am afraid this change of front, this volte-face, as it seemed, was not welcomed in many quarters; for thereby all hope of having him back for the work of the country or the world appeared to be totally lost and he came to be looked upon again as an irrevocable metaphysical dreamer, aloof from physical things and barren, even like the Immutable Brahman.
--
Here is the very heart of the mystery, the master-key to the problem. The advent of the su perhuman or divine race, however stupendous or miraculous the phenomenon may appear to be, can become a thing of practical actuality, precisely because it is no human agency that has undertaken it but the Divine himself in his supreme potency and wisdom and love. The descent of the Divine into the ordinary human nature in order to purify and transform it and be lodged there is the whole secret of the sadhana in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. The sadhaka has only to be quiet and silent, calmly aspiring, open and acquiescent and receptive to the one Force; he need not and should not try to do things by his independent personal effort, but get them done or let them be done for him in the dedicated consciousness by the Divine Master and Guide. All other Yogas or spiritual disciplines in the past envisaged an ascent of the consciousness, its sublimation into the consciousness of the Spirit and its fusion and dissolution there in the end. The descent of the Divine Consciousness to prepare its definitive home in the dynamic and pragmatic human nature, if considered at all, was not the main theme of the past efforts and achievements. Furthermore, the descent spoken of here is the descent, not of a divine consciousness for there are many varieties of divine consciousness but of the Divine's own consciousness, of the Divine himself with his Shakti. For it is that that is directly working out this evolutionary transformation of the age.
It is not my purpose here to enter into details as to the exact meaning of the descent, how it happens and what are its lines of activity and the results brought about. For it is indeed an actual descent that happens: the Divine Light leans down first into the mind and begins its purificatory work therealthough it is always the inner heart which first recognises the Divine Presence and gives its assent to the Divine action for the mind, the higher mind that is to say, is the summit of the ordinary human consciousness and receives more easily and readily the Radiances that descend. From the Mind the Light filters into the denser regions of the emotions and desires, of life activity and vital dynamism; finally, it gets into brute Matter itself, the hard and obscure rock of the physical body, for that too has to be illumined and made the very form and figure of the Light su pernal. The Divine in his descending Grace is the Master-Architect who is building slowly and surely the many-chambered and many-storeyed edifice that is human nature and human life into the mould of the Divine Truth in its perfect play and supreme expression. But this is a matter which can be closely considered when one is already well within the mystery of the path and has acquired the elementary essentials of an initiate.
Another question that troubles and perplexes the ordinary human mind is as to the time when the thing will be done. Is it now or a millennium hence or at some astronomical distance in future, like the cooling of the sun, as someone has suggested for an analogy. In view of the magnitude of the work one might with reason say that the whole eternity is there before us, and a century or even a millennium should not be grudged to such a labour for it is nothing less than an undoing of untold millenniums in the past and the building of a far-flung futurity. However, as we have said, since it is the Divine's own work and since Yoga means a concentrated and involved process of action, effectuating in a minute what would perhaps take years to accomplish in the natural course, one can expect the work to be done sooner rather than later. Indeed, the ideal is one of here and nowhere upon this earth of material existence and now in this life, in this very bodynot hereafter or elsewhere. How long exactly that will mean, depends on many factors, but a few decades on this side or the other do not matter very much.
As to the extent of realisation, we say again that that is not a matter of primary consideration. It is not the quantity but the substance that counts. Even if it were a small nucleus it would be sufficient, at least for the beginning, provided it is the real, the genuine thing
--
From a certain point of view, from the point of view of essentials and inner realities, it would appear that spirituality is, at least, the basis of the arts, if not the highest art. If art is meant to express the soul of things, and since the true soul of things is the divine element in them, then certainly spirituality, the discipline of coming in conscious contact with the Spirit, the Divine, must be accorded the regal seat in the hierarchy of the arts. Also, spirituality is the greatest and the most difficult of the arts; for it is the art of life. To make of life a perfect work of beauty, pure in its lines, faultless in its rhythm, replete with strength, iridescent: with light, vibrant with delightan embodiment of the Divine, in a wordis the highest ideal of spirituality; viewed the spirituality that Sri Aurobindo practisesis the ne plus ultra of artistic creation
The Gita, II. 40
01.01 - Sri Aurobindo - The Age of Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Someone has written to this effect: "This is not the age of Sri Aurobindo. His ideal of a divine life upon earth mayor may not be true; at any rate it is not of today or even of tomorrow. Humanity will take some time before it reaches that stage or its possibility. What we are concerned with here and now is something perhaps less great, less spiritual, but more urgent and more practical. The problem is not to run away with one's soul, but to maintain its earthly tenement, to keep body and soul together: one has to live first, live materially before one can hope to live spiritually."
Well, the view expressed in these words is not a new revelation. It has been the cry of suffering humanity through the ages. Man has borne his cross since the beginning of his creation through want and privation, through disease and bereavement, through all manner of turmoil and tribulation, and yetmirabile dictuat the same time, in the very midst of those conditions, he has been aspiring and yearning for something else, ignoring the present, looking into the beyond. It is not the pros perous and the more happily placed in life who find it more easy to turn to the higher life, it is not the wealthiest who has the greatest opportunity to pursue a spiritual idea. On the contrary, spiritual leaders have thought and ex perienced otherwise.
Apart from the well-recognised fact that only in distress does the normal man think of God and non-worldly things, the real matter, however, is that the inner life is a thing apart and follows its own line of movement, does not depend upon, is not subservient to, the kind of outer life that one may happen to live under. The Bible says indeed, "Blessed are the poor, blessed are they that mourn"... But the Upanishad declares, on the other hand, that even as one lies happily on a royal couch, bathes and anoints himself with all the perfumes of the world, has attendants all around and always to serve him, even so, one can be full of the divine consciousness from the crown of the head to the tip of his toe-nail. In fact, a poor or a pros perous life is in no direct or even indirect ratio to a spiritual life. All the miseries and immediate needs of a physical life do not and cannot detain or delay one from following the path of the ideal; nor can all your riches be a burden to your soul and overwhelm it, if it chooses to walk onit can not only walk, but soar and fly with all that knapsack on its back.
If one were to be busy about reforming the world and when that was done then alone to turn to other-worldly things, in that case, one would never take the turn, for the world will never be reformed totally or even considerably in that way. It is not that reformers have for the first time appeared on the earth in the present age. Men have attempted social, political, economic and moral reforms from times immemorial. But that has not barred the spiritual attempt or minimised its importance. To say that because an ideal is apparently too high or too great for the present age, it must be kept in cold storage is to set a premium on the present nature of humanity arid eternise it: that would bind the world to its old moorings and never give it the opportunity to be free and go out into the high seas of larger and greater realisations.
The ideal or perhaps one should say the policy of Real-politick is the thing needed in this world. To achieve something actually in the physical and material field, even a lesser something, is worth much more than speculating on high flaunting chimeras and indulging in day-dreams. Yes, but what is this something that has to be achieved in the material world? It is always an ideal. Even procuring food for each and every person, clothing and housing all is not less an ideal for all its concern about actuality. Only there are ideals and ideals; some are nearer to the earth, some seem to be in the background. But the mystery is that it is not always the ideal nearest to the earth which is the easiest to achieve or the first thing to be done first. Do we not see before our very eye show some very simple innocent social and economic changes are difficult to carry outthey bring in their train quite disproportionately gestures and movements of violence and revolution? That is because we seek to cure the symptoms and not touch the root of the disease. For even the most innocent-looking social, economic or political abuse has at its base far-reaching attitudes and life-urgeseven a spiritual outlook that have to be sought out and tackled first, if the attempt at reform is to be permanently and wholly successful. Even in mundane matters we do not dig deep enough, or rise high enough.
Indeed, looking from a standpoint that views the working of the forces that act and achieve and not the external facts and events and arrangements aloneone finds that things that are achieved on the material plane are first developed and matured and made ready behind the veil and at a given moment burst out and manifest themselves often unexpectedly and suddenly like a chick out of the shell or the young butterfly out of the cocoon. The Gita points to that truth of Nature when it says: "These beings have already been killed by Me." It is not that a long or strenuous physical planning and preparation alone or in the largest measure brings about a physical realisation. The dee per we go within, the farther we are away from the surface, the nearer we come to the roots and sources of things even most su perficial. The spiritual view sees and declares that it is the Brahmic consciousness that holds, inspires, builds up Matter, the physical body and form of Brahman.
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The New Man will be Master and not slave. He will be master, first, of himself and then of the world. Man as he actually is, is but a slave. He has no personal voice or choice; the determining soul, the Ishwara, in him is sleep-bound and hushed. He is a mere plaything in the hands of nature and circumstances. Therefore it is that Science has become his supreme Dharmashastra; for science seeks to teach us the moods of Nature and the methods of propitiating her. Our actual ideal of man is that of the cleverest slave. But the New Man will have found himself and by and according to his inner will, mould and create his world. He will not be in awe of Nature and in an attitude of perpetual apprehension and hesitation, but will ground himself on a secret harmony and union that will declare him as the lord. We will recognise the New Man by his very gait and manner, by a certain kingly ease and dominion in every shade of his expression.
Not that this sovereign power will have anything to do with aggression or over-bearingness. It will not be a power that feels itself only by creating an eternal opponentErbfeindby coming in constant clash with a rival that seeks to gain victory by subjugating. It will not be Nietzschean "will to power," which is, at best, a supreme Asuric power. It will rather be a Divine Power, for the strength it will exert and the victory it will achieve will not come from the egoit is the ego which requires an object outside and against to feel and affirm itself but it will come from a higher personal self which is one with the cosmic soul and therefore with other personal souls. The Asura, in spite of, or rather, because of his aggressive vehemence betrays a lack of the sovereign power that is calm and at ease and self-sufficient. The Devic power does not assert hut simply accomplishes; the forces of the world act not as its opponent but as its instrument. Thus the New Man shall affirm his individual sovereignty and do so to perfection by expressing through it his unity with the cosmic powers, with the infinite godhead. And by being Swarat, Self-Master, he will become Samrat, world-master.
This mastery will be effected not merely in will, but in mind and heart also. For the New Man will know not by the intellect which is egocentric and therefore limited, not by ratiocination which is an indirect and doubtful process, but by direct vision, an inner communion, a soul revelation. The new knowledge will be vast and profound and creative, based as it will be upon the reality of things and not upon their shadows. Truth will shine through every ex perience and every utterance"a truth shall have its seat on our speech and mind and hearing", so have the Vedas said. The mind and intellect will not be active and constructive agents but the luminous channel of a self-luminous knowledge. And the heart too which is now the field of passion and egoism will be cleared of its noise and obscurity; a serener sky will shed its pure warmth and translucent glow. The knot will be rent asunderbhidyate hridaya granthih and the vast and mighty streams of another ocean will flow through. We will love not merely those to whom we are akin but God's creatures, one and all; we will love not with the yearning and hunger of a mortal but with the wide and intense Rasa that lies in the divine identity of souls.
01.01 - The One Thing Needful, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The realisation of the Divine is the one thing needful and the rest is desirable only in so far as it helps or leads towards that or when it is realised, extends and manifests the realisation. Manifestation and organisation of the whole life for the divine work, - first, the sadhana personal and collective necessary for the realisation and a common life of God-realised men, secondly, for help to the world to move towards that, and to live in the Light - is the whole meaning and purpose of my Yoga. But the realisation is the first need and it is that round which all the rest moves, for apart from it all the rest would have no meaning.
Yoga is directed towards God, not towards man. If a divine supramental consciousness and power can be brought down and established in the material world, that obviously would mean an immense change for the earth including humanity and its life. But the effect on humanity would only be one result of the change; it cannot be the object of the sadhana. The object of the sadhana can only be to live in the divine consciousness and to manifest it in life.
--
... 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.
01.01 - The Symbol Dawn, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
persuaded the inert black quietude
--
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
1.26
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Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;
Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm
--
Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts,
The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.
--
Hard is it to persuade earth-nature's change;
Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch:
--
Too great to impart the peril and the pain,
In her torn depths she kept the grief to come.
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The first contact that one has with this static supra-reality is through the higher ranges of the mind: a direct and closer communion is established through a plane which is just above the mind the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it. The Overmind dissolves or transcends the ego-consciousness which limits the being to its individualised formation bounded by an outward and narrow frame or sheath of mind, life and body; it reveals the universal Self and Spirit, the cosmic godhead and its myriad forces throwing up myriad forms; the world-existence there appears as a play of ever-shifting veils upon the face of one ineffable reality, as a mysterious cycle of perpetual creation and destructionit is the overwhelming vision given by Sri Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita. At the same time, the initial and most intense ex perience which this cosmic consciousness brings is the extreme relativity, contingency and transitoriness of the whole flux, and a necessity seems logically and psychologically im perative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness.
This has been the highest consummation, the supreme goal which the purest spiritual ex perience and the deepest aspiration of the human consciousness generally sought to attain. But in this view, the world or creation or Nature came in the end to be looked upon as fundamentally a product of Ignorance: ignorance and suffering and incapacity and death were declared to be the very hallmark of things terrestrial. The Light that dwells above and beyond can be made to shed for a while some kind of lustre upon the mortal darkness but never altogether to remove or change itto live in the full light, to be in and of the Light means to pass beyond. Not that there have not been other strands and types of spiritual ex periences and aspirations, but the one we are considering has always struck the major chord and dominated and drowned all the rest.
--
The Upanishads speak of a solar and a lunar Path in the spiritual consciousness. perhaps they have some reference to these two linesone through the Mayic consciousness of the Overmind enters into the static Bliss, ecstatic Nihil, and the other mounts still farther to the solar status which is a mass, a sea, an infinity of that light and ecstasy but which can at the same time express and embody itself as the creative Truth-consciousness (srya svitr ).
In the Su permind things exist in their perfect spiritual reality; each is consciously the divine reality in its transcendent essence, its cosmic extension, its, spiritual individuality; the diversity of a manifested existence is there, but the mutually exclusive separativeness has not yet arisen. The ego, the knot of separativity, appears at a later and lower stage of involution; what is here is indivisible nexus of individualising centres of the one eternal truth of being. Where Su permind and Overmind meet, one can see the multiple godheads, each distinct in his own truth and beauty and power and yet all together forming the one supreme consciousness infinitely composite and inalienably integral. But stepping back into Su permind one sees something moreOneness gathering into itself all diversity, not destroying it, but annulling and forbidding the separative consciousness that is the beginning of Ignorance. The first shadow of the Illusory Consciousness, the initial possibility of the movement of Ignorance comes in when the supramental light enters the penumbra of the mental sphere. The movement of Su permind is the movement of light without obscurity, straight, unwavering, unswerving, absolute. The Force here contains and holds in their oneness of Reality the manifold but not separated lines of essential and unalloyed truth: its march is the inevitable progression of each one assured truth entering into and upholding every other and therefore its creation, play or action admits of no trial or stumble or groping or deviation; for each truth rests on all others and on that which harmonises them all and does not act as a Power diverging from and even competing with other Powers of being. In the Overmind commences the play of divergent possibilities the simple, direct, united and absolute certainties of the supramental consciousness retire, as it were, a step behind and begin to work themselves out through the interaction first of separately individualised and then of contrary and contradictory forces. In the Overmind there is a conscious underlying Unity but yet each Power, Truth, Aspect of that Unity is encouraged to work out its possibilities as if it were sufficient to itself and the others are used by it for its own enhancement until in the denser and darker reaches below Overmind this turns out a thing of blind conflict and battle and, as it would appear, of chance survival. Creation or manifestation originally means the concretisation or devolution of the powers of Conscious Being into a play of united diversity; but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Divine Consciousness. Creation as it descends' towards the Ignorance becomes an involution of the Spirit through Mind and Life into Matter; evolution is a movement backward, a return journey from Matter towards the Spirit: it is the unravelling, the gradual disclosure and deliverance of the Spirit, the ascension and revelation of the involved consciousness through a series of awakeningsMatter awakening into Life, Life awakening into Mind and Mind now seeking to awaken into something beyond the Mind, into a power of conscious Spirit.
The apparent or actual result of the movement of Nescienceof Involutionhas been an increasing negation of the Spirit, but its hidden purpose is ultimately to embody the Spirit in Matter, to express here below in cosmic Time-Space the splendours of the timeless Reality. The material body came into existence bringing with it inevitably, as it seemed, mortality; it appeared even to be fashioned out of mortality, in order that in this very frame and field of mortality, Immortality, the eternal Spirit Consciousness which is the secret truth and reality in Time itself as well as behind it, might be established and that the Divine might be possessed, or rather, possess itself not in one unvarying mode of the static consciousness, as it does even now behind the cosmic play, but in the play itself and in the multiple mode of the terrestrial existence.
--
An organ in the human being has been especially developed to become the effective instrument of this accelerated Yogic process the self-consciousness which I referred to as being the distinctive characteristic of man is a function of this organ. It is his soul, his psychic being; originally it is the spark of the Divine Consciousness which came down and became involved in Matter and has been endeavouring ever since to release itself through the upward march of evolution. It is this which presses on continually as the stimulus to the evolutionary movement; and in man it has attained sufficient growth and power and has come so far to the front from behind the veil that it can now lead and mould his external consciousness. It is also the channel through which the Divine Consciousness can flow down into the inferior levels of human nature. It is the being no bigger than the thumb ever seated within the heart, spoken of in the Upanishads. It is likewise the basis of true individuality and personal identity. It is again the reflection or expression in evolutionary Nature of one's essential selfjivtman that is above, an eternal portion of the Divine, one with the Divine and yet not dissolved and lost in it. The psychic being is thus on the one hand in direct contact with the Divine and the higher consciousness, and on the other it is the secret upholder and controller' (bhart, antarymin) of the inferior consciousness, the hidden nucleus round which the body and the life and the mind of the individual are built up and organised.
The first decisive step in Yoga is taken when one becomes conscious of the psychic being, or, looked at from the other side, when the psychic being comes forward and takes possession of the external being, begins to initiate and influence the movements of the mind and life and body and gradually free them from the ordinary round of ignorant nature. The awakening of the psychic being means, as I have said, not only a deepening and heightening of the consciousness and its release from the obscurity and limitation of the inferior Prakriti, confined to the lower threefold status, into what is behind and beyond; it means also a return of the dee per and higher consciousness upon the lower hemisphere and a consequent purification and illumination and regeneration of the latter. Finally, when the psychic being is in full self-possession and power, it can be the vehicle of the direct supramental consciousness which will then be able to act freely and absolutely for the entire transformation of the external nature, its transfiguration into a perfect body of the Truth-consciousness in a word, its divinisation.
This then is the supreme secret, not the renunciation and annulment, but the transformation of the ordinary human nature : first of all, its psychicisation, that is to say, making it move and live and be in communion and identification with the light of the psychic being, and, secondly, through the soul and the ensouled mind and life and body, to open out into the supramental consciousness and let it come down here below and work and achieve.
--
Now, with regard to the time that the present stage of evolution is likely to take for its fulfilment, one can presume that since or if the specific urge and stress has manifested and come up to the front, this very fact would show that the problem has become a problem of actuality, and even that it can be dealt with as if it had to be solved now or never. We have said that in man, with man's self-consciousness or the consciousness of the psychic being as the instrument, evolution has attained the capacity of a swift and concentrated process, which is the process of Yoga; the process will become swifter and more concentrated, the more that instrument grows and gathers power and is infused with the divine afflatus. In fact, evolution has been such a process of gradual acceleration in tempo from the very beginning. The earliest stage, for example, the stage of dead Matter, of the play of the mere chemical forces was a very, very long one; it took millions and millions of years to come to the point when the manifestation of life became possible. But the period of elementary life, as manifested in the plant world that followed, although it too lasted a good many millions of years, was much briefer than the preceding periodit ended with the advent of the first animal form. The age of animal life, again, has been very much shorter than that of the plant life before man came upon earth. And man is already more than a million or two years oldit is fully time that a higher order of being should be created out of him.
The Dhammapada, I. 1
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is the world that Sri Aurobindo sees and creates? Poetry is after all passion. By passion I do not mean the fury of emotion nor the fume of sentimentalism, but what lies behind at their source, what lends them the force they have the sense of the "grandly real," the vivid and pulsating truth. What then is the thing that Sri Aurobindo has visualised, has endowed with a throbbing life and made a poignant reality? Victor Hugo said: Attachez Dieu au gibet, vous avez la croixTie God to the gibbet, you have the cross. Even so, infuse passion into a thing most prosaic, you create sublime poetry out of it. What is the dead matter that has found life and glows and vibrates in Sri Aurobindo's passion? It is something which appears to many poetically intractable, not amenable to aesthetic treatment, not usually, that is to say, nor in the supreme manner. Sri Aurobindo has thrown such a material into his poetic fervour and created a sheer beauty, a stupendous reality out of it. Herein lies the greatness of his achievement. Philosophy, however divine, and in spite of Milton, has been regarded by poets as "harsh and crabbed" and as such unfit for poetic delineation. Not a few poets indeed foundered upon this rock. A poet in his own way is a philosopher, but a philosopher chanting out his philosophy in sheer poetry has been one of the rarest spectacles.1 I can think of only one instance just now where a philosopher has almost succeeded being a great poet I am referring to Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura. Neither Shakespeare nor Homer had anything like philosophy in their poetic creation. And in spite of some inclination to philosophy and philosophical ideas Virgil and Milton were not philosophers either. Dante sought perhaps consciously and deliberately to philosophise in his Paradiso I Did he? The less Dante then is he. For it is his Inferno, where he is a passionate visionary, and not his Paradiso (where he has put in more thought-power) that marks the nee plus ultra of his poetic achievement.
And yet what can be more poetic in essence than philosophy, if by philosophy we mean, as it should mean, spiritual truth and spiritual realisation? What else can give the full breath, the integral force to poetic inspiration if it is not the problem of existence itself, of God, Soul and Immortality, things that touch, that are at the very root of life and reality? What can most concern man, what can strike the deepest fount in him, unless it is the mystery of his own being, the why and the whither of it all? But mankind has been taught and trained to live merely or mostly on earth, and poetry has been treated as the expression of human joys and sorrows the tears in mortal things of which Virgil spoke. The savour of earth, the thrill of the flesh has been too sweet for us and we have forgotten other sweetnesses. It is always the human element that we seek in poetry, but we fail to recognise that what we obtain in this way is humanity in its lower degrees, its surface formulations, at its minimum magnitude.
--
Out of his being; I perceived the Law,
The Truth, the Vast,
--
Could limit His perfection, peace nor storm.
He is, we cannot say; for Nothing too
--
The heart and its urges, the vital and its surges, the physical impulsesit is these of which the poets sang in their infinite variations. But the mind pro per, that is to say, the higher reflective ideative mind, was not given the right of citizenship in the domain of poetry. I am not forgetting the so-called Metaphysicals. The element of metaphysics among the Metaphysicals has already been called into question. There is here, no doubt, some theology, a good dose of mental cleverness or conceit, but a modern intellectual or rather rational intelligence is something other, something more than that. Even the metaphysics that was commandeered here had more or less a decorative value, it could not be taken into the pith and substance of poetic truth and beauty. It was a decoration, but not unoften a drag. I referred to the Upanishads, but these strike quite a different, almost an opposite line in this connection. They are in a sense truly metaphysical: they bypass the mind and the mental powers, get hold of a higher mode of consciousness, make a direct contact with truth and beauty and reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness, to have brought into play the power of the rational intellect and used it in support of the spiritual ex perience. That is not to say that he was the very first person, the originator who initiated the movement; but at least this seems to be true that in him and his au thentic followers the movement came to the forefront of human consciousness and attained the proportions of a major member of man's psychological constitution. We may remember here that Socrates, who started a similar movement of rationalisation in his own way in Europe, was almost a contemporary of the Buddha.
Poetry as an expression of thought-power, poetry weighted with intelligence and rationalised knowledge that seems to me to be the end and drive, the secret sense of all the mystery of modern technique. The combination is risky, but not impossible. In the spiritual domain the Gita achieved this miracle to a considerable degree. Still, the power of intelligence and reason shown by Vyasa is of a special order: it is a sublimated function of the faculty, something aloof and other-worldly"introvert", a modern mind would term it that is to say, something a priori, standing in its own au thenticity and self-sufficiency. A modern intelligence would be more scientific, let us use the word, more matter-of-fact and sense-based: the mental light should not be confined in its ivory tower, however high that may be, but brought down and placed at the service of our perception and appreciation and explanation of things human and terrestrial; made immanent in the mundane and the ephemeral, as they are commonly called. This is not an impossibility. Sri Aurobindo seems to have done the thing. In him we find the three terms of human consciousness arriving at an absolute fusion and his poetry is a wonderful example of that fusion. The three terms are the spiritual, the intellectual or philosophical and the physical or sensational. The intellectual, or more generally, the mental, is the intermediary, the Paraclete, as he himself will call it later on in a poem9 magnificently exemplifying the point we are trying to make out the agent who negotiates, bridges and harmonises the two other firmaments usually supposed to be antagonistic and incompatible.
Indeed it would be wrong to associate any cold ascetic nudity to the spiritual body of Sri Aurobindo. His poetry is philosophic, abstract, no doubt, but every philosophy has its practice, every abstract thing its concrete application,even as the soul has its body; and the fusion, not mere union, of the two is very characteristic in him. The deepest and unseizable flights of thought he knows how to clo the with a Kalidasian richness of imagery, or a Keatsean gusto of sensuousness:
--
That persevered into eternity.11
And what an amount of tenderness he has poured into his little poem on childhood, a perfect piece of chiselled crystal, pure and translucent and gleaming with the clear lines of a summer sky:
O thou golden image,
--
And here, let me point out, the capital difference between the European or rather the Hellenic spirit and the Indian spirit. It is the Indian spirit to take stand upon divinity and thence to embrace and mould what is earthly and human. The Greek spirit took its stand pre-eminently on earth and what belongs to earth. In Europe Dante's was a soul spiritualised more than perhaps any other and yet his is not a Hindu soul. The utmost that he could say after all the ex perience of the tragedy of mortality was:
Io no piangeva, sidentro impietrai13
--
However spiritual a soul, Dante is yet bound to the earth, he has dominated perhaps but not conquered.
The Greek sings of the humanity of man, the Indian the divinity of man. It is the Hellenic spirit that has very largely moulded our taste and we have forgotten that an equally poetic world exists in the domain of spiritual life, even in its very severity, as in that of earthly life and its sweetness. And as we are passionate about the earthly life, even so Sri Aurobindo has made a passion of the spiritual life. Poetry after all has a mission; the phrase "Art for Art's sake" may be made to mean anything. Poetry is not merely what is pleasing, not even what is merely touching and moving but what is at the same time, inspiring, invigorating, elevating. Truth is indeed beauty but it is not always the beauty that captivates the eye or the mere aesthetic sense.
And because our Vedic poets always looked beyond humanity, beyond earth, therefore could they make divine poetry of humanity and what is of earth. Therefore it was that they were pervadingly so grandiose and sublime and puissant. The heroic, the epic was their natural element and they could not but express themselves in the grand manner Sri Aurobindo has the same outlook and it is why we find in him the ring of the old-world manner.
Mark the stately march, the fullness of voice, the wealth of imagery, the vigour of movement of these lines:
--
through the Valley of peril
Flows? But the diamond shines on the cliff-side,
01.02 - The Creative Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The cosmic soul is true. But that truth is borne out, effectuated only by the truth of the individual soul. When the individual soul becomes itself fully and integrally, by that very fact it becomes also the cosmic soul. The individuals are the channels through which flows the Universal and the Infinite in its multiple emphasis. Each is a particular figure, aspectBhava, a particular angle of vision of All. The vision is entire and the figure perfect if it is not refracted by the lower and denser parts of our being. And for that the individual must first come to itself and shine in its opal clarity and translucency.
Not to do what others do, but what your soul impels you to do. Not to be others but your own self. Not to be anything but the very cosmic and infinite divinity of your soul. Therein lies your highest freedom and perfect delight. And there you are supremely creative. Each soul has a consortPrakriti, Naturewhich it creates out of its own rib. And in this field of infinite creativity the soul lives, moves and has its being.
***
01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These new oblivious personalities
And keeps still lurking in our conscious acts
--
Well might he find in her his perfect shrine.
3.29
01.02 - The Object of the Integral Yoga, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Matter. Our object is not to remove all "limitations" on the expansion of the ego or to give a free field and make unlimited room for the fulfilment of the ideas of the human mind or the desires of the ego-centred life-force. None of us are here to "do as we like", or to create a world in which we shall at last be able to do as we like; we are here to do what the Divine wills and to create a world in which the Divine Will can manifest its truth no longer deformed by human ignorance or perverted and mistranslated by vital desire. The work which the sadhak of the supramental Yoga has to do is not his own work for which he can lay down his own conditions, but the work of the Divine which he has to do according to the conditions laid down by the Divine. Our Yoga is not for our own sake but for the sake of the Divine. It is not our own personal manifestation that we are to seek, the manifestation of the individual ego freed from all bounds and from all bonds, but the manifestation of the Divine. Of that manifestation our own spiritual liberation, perfection, fullness is to be a result and a part, but not in any egoistic sense or for any ego-centred or self-seeking purpose.
This liberation, perfection, fullness too must not be pursued for our own sake, but for the sake of the Divine.
This Yoga demands a total dedication of the life to the aspiration for the discovery and embodiment of the Divine Truth and to nothing else whatever. To divide your life between the Divine and some outward aim and activity that has nothing to do with the search for the Truth is inadmissible. The least thing of that kind would make success in the Yoga impossible.
You must go inside yourself and enter into a complete dedication to the spiritual life. All clinging to mental preferences must fall away from you, all insistence on vital aims and interests and attachments must be put away, all egoistic clinging to family, friends, country must disappear if you want to succeed in Yoga. Whatever has to come as outgoing energy or action, must proceed from the Truth once discovered and not from the lower mental or vital motives, from the Divine Will and not from personal choice or the preferences of the ego.
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Is there not a fundamental difference, difference not merely with regard to the poetic personality, but with regard to the very stuff of consciousness? There is direct vision here, the fullness of light, the native rhythm and substance of revelation, as if
In the dead wall closing from a wider self,
--
It is not merely by addressing the beloved as your goddess that you can attain this mysticism; the Elizabethan did that in merry abundance,ad nauseam.A finer tem per, a more delicate touch, a more subtle sensitiveness and a kind of artistic wizardry are necessary to tune the body into a rhythm of the spirit. The other line of mysticism is common enough, viz., to express the spirit in terms and rhythms of the flesh. Tagore did that liberally, the Vaishnava poets did nothing but that, the Song of Solomon is an exquisite example of that procedure. There is here, however, a difference in degrees which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the earthly and the sensuous are meant as the name and form, as the body to render concrete, living and vibrant, near and intimate what otherwise would perhaps be vague and abstract, afar, aloof. But this mundane or human appearance has a value in so far as it is a support, a pointer or symbol of the spiritual import. And the mysticism lies precisely in the play of the two, a hide-and-seek between them. On the other hand, as I said, the greater portion of Vaishnava poetry, like a precious and beautiful casket, no doubt, hides the spiritual import: not the pure significance but the sign and symbol are luxuriously elaborated, they are placed in the foreground in all magnificence: as if it was their very purpose to conceal the real meaning. When the Vaishnava poet says,
O love, what more shall I, shall Radha speak,
--
But first let us go to the fans et origo, be acquainted with the very genuine article in its purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. I do not know of any other ideal exemplar than the Upanishad. Thus,
There the sun shines not and the moon has no
--
Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and unpoetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath and love and, like Seneca and Aurelius, gave himself up to moralising and philosophising, delving 'into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian,atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the content, the manner has made a whole difference. There was an idealism, a clarity of vision and an intensity of perception, which however scientific apparently, gave his creation a note, an accent, an atmosphere high, tense, aloof, ascetic, at times bordering on the supra-sensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reactionit is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual consciousness, yet it is something on the way towards that.
There have been other philosophical poets, a good number of them since thennot merely rationally philosophical, as was the vogue in the eighteenth century, but metaphysically philosophical, that is to say, inquiring not merely into the phenomenal but also into the labyrinths of the noumenal, investigating not only what meets the senses, but also things that are behind or beyond. Amidst the earlier efflorescence of this movement the most outstanding philosopher poet is of course Dante, the Dante of Paradiso, a philosopher in the mediaeval manner and to the extent a lesser poet, according to some. Goe the is another, almost in the grand modern manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo some kind of martyrdom because of it. And Shelley, the supremely lyric singer, has had a very rich undertone of thought-content genuinely metaphysical. And Browning and Arnold and Hardyindeed, if we come to the more moderns, we have to cite the whole host of them, none can be excepted.
We left out the Metaphysicals, for they can be grouped as a set apart. They are not so much metaphysical as theological, religious. They have a brain-content stirring with theological problems and speculations, replete with scintillating conceits and intricate fancies. perhaps it is because of this philosophical burden, this intellectual bias that the Metaphysicals went into obscurity for about two centuries and it is precisely because of that that they are slowly coming out to the forefront and assuming a special value with the moderns. For the modern mind is characteristically thoughtful, introspective"introvert"and philosophical; even the exact physical sciences of today are rounded off in the end with metaphysics.
The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imaginationremember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. perceptions, ex periences, realisationsof whatever order or world they may beexpressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistencea definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic ex periences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all ex periences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the submental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his ex perience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
--
This, I say, is something different from the religious and even from the mystic. It is away from the merely religious, because it is naked of the vesture of humanity (in spite of a human face that masks it at times) ; it is something more than the merely mystic, for it does not stop being a signpost or an indication to the Beyond, but is itself the presence and embodiment of the Beyond. The mystic gives us, we can say, the magic of the Infinite; what I term the spiritual, the spiritual pro per, gives in addition the logic of the Infinite. At least this is what distinguishes modern spiritual consciousness from the ancient, that is, Upanishadic spiritual consciousness. The Upanishad gives expression to the spiritual consciousness in its original and pristine purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. It did not buttress itself with any logic. It is the record of fundamental ex periences and there was no question of any logical exposition. But, as I have said, the modern mind requires and demands a logical element in its perceptions and presentations. Also it must needs be a different kind of logic that can satisfy and satisfy wholly the dee per and subtler movements of a modern consciousness. For the philosophical poet of an earlier age, when he had recourse to logic, it was the logic of the finite that always gave him the frame, unless he threw the whole thing overboard and leaped straight into the occult, the illogical and the a logical, like Blake, for instance. Let me illustrate and compare a little. When the older poet explains indriyani hayan ahuh, it is an allegory he resorts to, it is the logic of the finite he marshals to point to the infinite and the beyond. The stress of reason is apparent and effective too, but the pattern is what we are normally familiar with the movement, we can say, is almost Aristotelian in its rigour. Now let us turn to the following:
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme. ||26.15||
--
This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the infinite pro per to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attri bute of the attri buteless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual pro per may be considered as prajghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunarMoon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).
To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return and a progressive approach to the spiritual source of poetic inspiration, which was also the original, though somewhat veiled, source from the very beginning. The movement has followed devious waysstrongly negative at timeseven like man's life and consciousness in general of which it is an organic member; but the ultimate end and drift seems to have been always that ideal and principle even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues. The poet's ideal in the dawn of the world was, as the Vedic Rishi sang, to raise things of beauty in heaven by his poetic power,kavi kavitv divi rpam sajat. Even a Satanic poet, the inaugurator, in a way, of modernism and modernistic consciousness, Charles Baudelaire, thus admonishes his spirit:
--
Poetry, actually however, has been, by and large, a profane and mundane affair: for it expresses the normal man's perceptions and feelings and ex periences, human loves and hates and desires and ambitions. True. And yet there has also always been an attempt, a tendency to deal with them in such a way as can bring calm and puritykatharsisnot trouble and confusion. That has been the purpose of all Art from the ancient days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses., man is gradually growing into the mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of transformation. The first and original transformation happened with religious poetry. The religious, one may say, is the profane inside out; that is to say, the religious man has almost the same tone and tem per, the same urges and passions, only turned Godward. Religious poetry too marks a new turn and development of human speech, in taking the name of God human tongue acquires a new plasticity and flavour that transform or give a new modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in another class of poetic creation, viz., the allegory. Allegory or parable is the stage when the higher and inner realities are expressed wholly in the modes and manner, in the form and character of the normal and external, when moral, religious or spiritual truths are expressed in the terms and figures of the profane life. The higher or the inner ideal is like a loose clothing upon the ordinary consciousness, it does not fit closely or fuse. In the religious, however, the first step is taken for a mingling and fusion. The mystic is the beginning of a real fusion and a considerable ascension of the lower into the higher. The philosopher poet follows another line for the same katharsisinstead of uplifting emotions and sensibility, he proceeds by thought-power, by the ideas and principles that lie behind all movements and give a pattern to all things existing. The mystic can be of either type, the religious mystic or the philosopher mystic, although often the two are welded together and cannot be very well separated. Let us illustrate a little:
The spacious firmament on high,
01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is Reason, the faculty that is said to be the proud privilege of man, the sovereign instrument he alone possesses for the purpose of knowing? What is the value of knowledge that Reason gives? For it is the manner of knowing, the particular faculty or instrument by which we know, that determines the nature and content of knowledge. Reason is the collecting of available sense- perceptions and a certain mode of working upon them. It has three component elements that have been defined as observation, classification and deduction. Now, the very composition of Reason shows that it cannot be a perfect instrument of knowledge; the limitations are the inherent limitations of the component elements. As regards observation there is a two-fold limitation. First, observation is a relative term and variable quantity. One observes through the prism of one's own observing faculty, through the bias of one's own personality and no two persons can have absolutely the same manner of observation. So Science has recognised the necessity of personal equation and has created an imaginary observer, a "mean man" as the standard of reference. And this already takes us far away from the truth, from the reality. Secondly, observation is limited by its scope. All the facts of the world, all sense- perceptions possible and actual cannot be included within any observation however large, however collective it may be. We have to go always upon a limited amount of data, we are able to construct only a partial and sketchy view of the surface of existence. And then it is these few and doubtful facts that Reason seeks to arrange and classify. That classification may hold good for certain immediate ends, for a temporary understanding of the world and its forces, either in order to satisfy our curiosity or to gain some practical utility. For when we want to consider the world only in its immediate relation to us, a few and even doubtful facts are sufficient the more immediate the relation, the more immaterial the doubtfulness and insufficiency of facts. We may quite confidently go a step in darkness, but to walk a mile we do require light and certainty. Our scientific classification has a background of uncertainty, if not, of falsity; and our deduction also, even while correct within a very narrow range of space and time, cannot escape the fundamental vices of observation and classification upon which it is based.
It might be said, however, that the guarantee or sanction of Reason does not lie in the extent of its application, nor can its subjective nature (or ego-centric predication, as philosophers would term it) vitiate the validity of its conclusions. There is, in fact, an inherent unity and harmony between Reason and Reality. If we know a little of Reality, we know the whole; if we know the subjective, we know also the objective. As in the part, so in the whole; as it is within, so it is without. If you say that I will die, you need not wait for my actual death to have the proof of your statement. The generalising power inherent in Reason is the guarantee of the certitude to which it leads. Reason is valid, as it does not betray us. If it were such as anti-intellectuals make it out to be, we would be making nothing but false steps, would always remain entangled in contradictions. The very success of Reason is proof of its being a reliable and perfect instrument for the knowledge of Truth and Reality. It is beside the mark to prove otherwise, simply by analysing the nature of Reason and showing the fundamental deficiencies of that nature. It is rather to the credit of Reason that being as it is, it is none the less a successful and trustworthy agent.
Now the question is, does Reason never fail? Is it such a perfect instrument as intellectualists think it to be? There is ground for serious misgivings. Reason says, for example, that the earth revolves round the sun: and reason, it is argued, is right, for we see that all the facts are conformableto it, even facts that were hitherto unknown and are now coming into our ken. But the difficulty is that Reason did not say that always in the past and may not say that always in the future. The old astronomers could explain the universe by holding quite a contrary theory and could fit into it all their astronomical data. A future scientist may come and explain the matter in quite a different way from either. It is only a choice of workable theories that Reason seems to offer; we do not know the fact itself, apart perhaps from exactly the amount that immediate sense- perception gives to each of us. Or again, if we take an example of another category, we may ask, does God exist? A candid Rationalist would say that he does not know although he has his own opinion about the matter. Evidently, Reason cannot solve all the problems that it meets; it can judge only truths that are of a certain type.
It may be answered that Reason is a faculty which gives us progressive knowledge of the reality, but as a knowing instrument it is perfect, at least it is the only instrument at our disposal; even if it gives a false, incomplete or blurred image of the reality, it has the means and capacity of correcting and completing itself. It offers theories, no doubt; but what are theories? They are simply the gradually increasing adaptation of the knowing subject to the object to be known, the evolving revelation of reality to our perception of it. Reason is the power which carries on that process of adaptation and revelation; we can safely rely upon Reason and trust It to carry on its work with increasing success.
But in knowledge it is precisely finality that we seek for and no mere progressive, asymptotic, rapprochement ad infinitum. No less than the Practical Reason, the Theoretical Reason also demands a categorical im perative, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason cannot do that, it must be regarded as inefficient. It is poor consolation to man that Reason is gradually finding out the truth or that it is trying to grapple with the problems of God, Soul and Immortality and will one day pronounce its verdict. Whether we have or have not any other instrument of knowledge is a different question altogether. But in the meanwhile Reason stands condemned by the evidence of its own limitation.
It may be retorted that if Reason is condemned, it is condemned by itself and by no other authority. All argumentation against Reason is a function of Reason itself. The deficiencies of Reason we find out by the rational faculty alone. If Reason was to die, it is because it consents to commit suicide; there is no other power that kills it. But to this our answer is that Reason has this miraculous power of self-destruction; or, to put it philosophically, Reason is, at best, an organ of self-criticism and perhaps the organ par excellence for that purpose. But criticism is one thing and creation another. And whether we know or act, it is fundamentally a process of creation; at least, without this element of creation there can be no knowledge, no act. In knowledge there is a luminous creativity, Revelation or Categorical Im perative which Reason does not and cannot supply but vaguely strains to seize. For that element we have to search elsewhere, not in Reason.
Does this mean that real knowledge is irrational or against Reason? Not so necessarily. There is a su per-rational power for knowledge and Reason may either be a channel or an obstacle. If we take our stand upon Reason and then proceed to know, if we take the forms and categories of Reason as the inviolable schemata of knowledge, then indeed Reason becomes an obstacle to that su per-rational power. If, on the other hand, Reason does not offer any set-form from beforehand, does not insist upon its own conditions, is passive and simply receives and reflects what is given to it, then it becomes a luminous and sure channel for that higher and real knowledge.
The fact is that Reason is a lower manifestation of knowledge, it is an attempt to express on the mental level a power that exceeds it. It is the section of a vast and unitarian Consciousness-Power; the section may be necessary under certain conditions and circumstances, but unless it is viewed in its relation to the ensemble, unless it gives up its exclusive absolutism, it will be perforce arbitrary and misleading. It would still remain helpful and useful, but its help and use would be always limited in scope and temporary in effectivity.
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01.03 - Sri Aurobindo and his School, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Evidently the eminent politician and his school of activism are labouring under a Himalayan confusion: when they speak of Sri Aurobindo, they really have in their mind some of the old schools of spiritual discipline. But one of the marked aspects of Sri Aurobindo's teaching and practice has been precisely his insistence on putting aside the inert and life-shunning quietism, illusionism, asceticism and monasticism of a latter-day and decadent India. These ideals are perhaps as much obstacles in his way as in the way of the activistic school. Only Sri Aurobindo has not had the temerity to say that it is a weakness to seek refuge in contemplation or to suggest that a Buddha was a weakling or a Shankara a poltroon.
This much as regards what Sri Aurobindo is not doing; let us now turn and try to understand what he is doing. The distinguished man of action speaks of conquering Nature and fighting her. Adopting this war-like imagery, we can affirm that Sri Aurobindo's work is just such a battle and conquest. But the question is, what is nature and what is the kind of conquest that is sought, how are we to fight and what are the required arms and implements? A good general should foresee all this, frame his plan of campaign accordingly and then only take the field. The above-mentioned leader proposes ceaseless and unselfish action as the way to fight and conquer Nature. He who speaks thus does not know and cannot mean what he says.
--
Sri Aurobindo's sadhana starts from the perception of a Power that is beyond the ordinary nature yet is its inevitable master, a fulcrum, as we have said, outside the earth. For what is required first is the discovery and manifestation of a new soul-consciousness in man which will bring about by the very pressure and working out of its self-rule an absolute reversal of man's nature. It is the Asuras who are now holding sway over humanity, for man has allowed himself so long to be built in the image of the Asura; to dislodge the Asuras, the Gods in their sovereign might have to be forged in the human being and brought into play. It is a stupendous task, some would say impossible; but it is very far removed from quietism or passivism. Sri Aurobindo is in retirement, but it is a retirement only from the outward field of present physical activities and their apparent actualities, not from the true forces and action of life. It is the retreat necessary to one who has to go back into himself to conquer a new plane of creative power,an entrance right into the world of basic forces, of fundamental realities, into the flaming heart of things where all actualities are born and take their first shape. It is the discovery of a power-house of tremendous energism and of the means of putting it at the service of earthly life.
And, pro perly speaking, it is not at all a school, least of all a mere school of thought, that is growing round Sri Aurobindo. It is rather the nucleus of a new life that is to come. Quite naturally it has almost insignificant proportions at present to the outward eye, for the work is still of the nature of ex periment and trial in very restricted limits, something in the nature of what is done in a laboratory when a new power has been discovered, but has still to be perfectly formulated in its process. And it is quite a mistake to suppose that there is a vigorous propaganda carried on in its behalf or that there is a large demand for recruits. Only the few, who possess the call within and are impelled by the spirit of the future, have a chance of serving this high attempt and great realisation and standing among its first instruments and pioneer workers.
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01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A strength of the original permanence
Entangled in the moment and its flow,
--
The form deceives, the person is a mask;
Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.
--
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent.
--
A pure perception lent its lucent joy:
Its intimate vision waited not to think;
--
He saw the perfect in their starry homes
Wearing the glory of a deathless form,
--
A knowledge which became what it perceived,
Replaced the separated sense and heart
--
And carves a personality out of mud,
The sorrow by which Nature's hunger is fed,
--
Strong periods of illumination came:
Lightnings of glory after glory burned,
--
Overleaping with a sole and perilous bound
The high black wall hiding su perconscience,
--
Managed in the deep perspectives of the soul,
And the realism of its illusive art,
--
A secret sense awoke that could perceive
A Presence and a Greatness everywhere.
--
Seeking its own perfect form in souls and things.
Life kept no more a dull and meaningless shape.
01.03 - Yoga and the Ordinary Life, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Mental quiet and happiness they can get, but it can never be permanent or secure. But the spiritual consciousness is all light, peace, power and bliss. If one can live entirely in it, there is no question; these things become naturally and securely his.
But even if he can live partly in it or keep himself constantly open to it, he receives enough of this spiritual light and peace and strength and happiness to carry him securely through all the shocks of life. What one gains by opening to this spiritual consciousness, depends on what one seeks from it; if it is peace, one gets peace; if it is light or knowledge, one lives in a great light and receives a knowledge dee per and truer than any the normal mind of man can acquire; if it [is] strength or power, one gets a spiritual strength for the inner life or Yogic power to govern the outer work and action; if it is happiness, one enters into a beatitude far greater than any joy or happiness that the ordinary human life can give.
01.04 - Motives for Seeking the Divine, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
- one may regard the Supreme not as the Divine but as one's highest Self and seek fulfilment of one's being in that highest Self; but one need not envisage it as a self of bliss, ecstasy, Ananda - one may envisage it as a self of freedom, vastness, knowledge, tranquillity, strength, calm, perfection - perhaps too calm for a ripple of anything so disturbing as joy to enter. So even if it is for something to be gained that one approaches the Divine, it is not a fact that one can approach Him or seek union only for the sake of Ananda and nothing else.
That involves something which throws all your reasoning out of gear. For these are aspects of the Divine Nature, powers of it, states of his being, - but the Divine Himself is something absolute, someone self-existent, not limited by his aspects, - wonderful and ineffable, not existing by them, but they existing because of him. It follows that if he attracts by his aspects, all the more he can attract by his very absolute selfness which is sweeter, mightier, profounder than any aspect. His peace, rapture, light, freedom, beauty are marvellous and ineffable, because he is himself magically, mysteriously, transcendently marvellous and ineffable. He can then be sought after for his wonderful and ineffable self and not only for the sake of one aspect or another of him. The only thing needed for that is, first, to arrive at a point when the psychic being feels this pull of the Divine in himself and, secondly, to arrive at the point when the mind, vital and each thing else begins to feel too that that was what it was wanting and the surface hunt after Ananda or what else was only an excuse for drawing the nature towards that supreme magnet.
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Divine will bring Ananda, therefore it must be for the Ananda that we seek the union, is not true and has no force. One who loves a queen may know that if she returns his love it will bring him power, position, riches and yet it need not be for the power, position, riches that he seeks her love. He may love her for herself and could love her equally if she were not a queen; he might have no hope of any return whatever and yet love her, adore her, live for her, die for her simply because she is she. That has happened and men have loved women without any hope of enjoyment or result, loved steadily, passionately after age has come and beauty has gone. Patriots do not love their country only when she is rich, powerful, great and has much to give them; their love for country has been most ardent, passionate, absolute when the country was poor, degraded, miserable, having nothing to give but loss, wounds, torture, imprisonment, death as the wages of her service; yet even knowing that they would never see her free, men have lived, served and died for her - for her own sake, not for what she could give. Men have loved Truth for her own sake and for what they could seek or find of her, accepted poverty, persecution, death itself; they have been content even to seek for her always, not finding, and yet never given up the search.
That means what? That men, country, Truth and other things besides can be loved for their own sake and not for anything else, not for any circumstance or attendant quality or resulting enjoyment, but for something absolute that is either in them or behind their appearance and circumstance. The Divine is more than a man or woman, a stretch of land or a creed, opinion, discovery or principle. He is the person beyond all persons, the
Home and Country of all souls, the Truth of which truths are only im perfect figures. And can He then not be loved and sought for his own sake, as and more than these have been by men even in their lesser selves and nature?
01.04 - Sri Aurobindos Gita, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Arrived so far, we now find, if we look back, a change in the whole perspective. Karma and even Karmayoga, which hitherto seemed to be the pivot of the Gita's teaching, retire somewhat into the background and present a diminished stature and value. The centre of gravity has shifted to the conception of the Divine Nature, to the Lord's own status, to the consciousness above the three Gunas, to absolute consecration of each limb of man's humanity to the Supreme Purusha for his descent and incarnation and play in and upon this human world.
The higher secret of the Gita lies really in the later chapters, the earlier chapters being a preparation and passage to it orpartial and practical application. This has to be pointed out, since there is a notion current which seeks to limit the Gita's effective teaching to the earlier part, neglecting or even discarding the later portion.
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But although Reason has been and is useful for the practical, we may say almost, the manual aspect of life, life itself it leaves unexplained and uncomprehended. For life is mobility, a continuous flow that has nowhere any gap or stop and things have in reality no isolated or separate existence, they merge and mingle into one another and form an indissoluble whole. Therefore the forms and categories that Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and progresses with discoveries and inventionsdevices for artfully manipulating naturehas been essentially and pre-eminently mechanical in its structure and outlook. It has become more and more efficient perhaps, but less and less soul-inspired, less and less-endowed with the free-flowing sap of organic growth and vitality.
So instead of the rational principle, the new age wants the principle of Nature or Life. Even as regards knowledge Reason is not the only, nor the best instrument. For animals have pro perly no reason; the nature-principle of knowledge in the animal is Instinct the faculty that acts so faultlessly, so marvellously where Reason can only pause and be perplexed. This is not to say that man is to or can go back to this primitive and animal function; but certainly he can replace it by something akin which is as natural and yet purified and self-consciousillumined instinct, we may say or Intuition, as Bergson terms it. And Nietzsche's definition of the Su perman has also a similar orientation and significance; for, according to him, the Su perman is man who has outgrown his Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions determined by Reason for a special purpose. The Su perman is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "human, all too human"who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom.
This then is the mantra of the new ageLife with Intuition as its guide and not Reason and mechanical efficiency, not Man but Su perman. The right mantra has been found, the principle itself is irreproachable. But the interpretation, the application, does not seem to have been always happy. For, Nietzsche's conception of the Su perman is full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long been adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche asks us, on the other hand, to deify the vital man. According to him the su perman is he who has (1) the supreme sense of the ego, (2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who lives dangerously. All this means an Asura, that is to say, one who has, it may be, dominion over his animal and vital impulsions in order, of course, that he may best gratify them but who has not purified them. Purification does not necessarily mean, annihilation but it does mean sublimation and transformation. So if you have to transcend man, you have to transcend egoism also. For a conscious egoism is the very characteristic of man and by increasing your sense of egoism you do not su persede man but simply aggrandise your humanity, fashion it on a larger, a titanic scale. And then the will to power is not the only will that requires fulfilment, there is also the will to knowledge and the will to love. In man these three fundamental constitutive elements coexist, although they do it, more often than not, at the expense of each other and in a state of continual disharmony. The su perman, if he is to be the man "who has surmounted himself", must embody a poise of being in which all the three find a fusion and harmonya perfect synthesis. Again, to live dangerously may be heroic, but it is not divine. To live dangerously means to have eternal opponents, that is to say, to live ever on the same level with the forces you want to dominate. To have the sense that one has to fight and control means that one is not as yet the sovereign lord, for one has to strive and strain and attain. The supreme lord is he who is perfectly equanimous with himself and with the world. He has not to batter things into a shape in order to create. He creates means, he manifests. He wills and he achieves"God said 'let there be light' and there was light."
As a matter of fact, the su perman is not, as Nietzsche thinks him to be, the highest embodiment of the biological force of Nature, not even as modified and refined by the aesthetic and aristocratic virtues of which the higher reaches of humanity seem capable. For that is after all humanity only accentuated in certain other fundamentally human modes of existence. It does not carry far enough the process of surmounting. In reality it is not a surmounting but a new channelling. Instead of the ethical and intellectual man, we get the vital and aesthetic man. It may be a change but not a transfiguration.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I said that the supreme artist is su perconscious: his consciousness withdraws from the normal mental consciousness and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that su perior consciousness the artist's mentalityhis ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions, in other words, his normal psychological make-upserves as a channel, an instrument, a medium for transcription. Now, there are two stages, or rather two lines of activity in the processus, for they may be overlapping and practically simultaneous. First, there is the withdrawal and the in-gathering of consciousness and then its reappearance into expression. The consciousness retires into a secret or subtle worldWords-worth's "recollected in tranquillity"and comes back with the riches gathered or transmuted there. But the purity of the gold thus garnered and stalled in the artistry of words and sounds or lines and colours depends altogether upon the purity of the channel through which it has to pass. The mental vehicle receives and records and it can do so to perfection if it is perfectly in tune with what it has to receive and record; otherwise the transcription becomes mixed and blurred, a faint or confused echo, a poor show. The supreme creators are precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the ex periences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording mentality, suffuses it with its own glow and puissance, indeed resolves it into its own substance, as it were. And the difference between the two, the secret norm and the recording form, determines the scale of the artist's creative value. It happens often that the obstruction of a too critically observant and self-conscious brain-mind successfully blocks up the flow of something supremely beautiful that wanted to come down and waited for an opportunity.
Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their inspiration: they look upon themselves more or less as mere instruments of something or some Power that is beyond them, beyond their normal consciousness attached to the brain-mind, that controls them and which they cannot control. This perception has been given shape in myths and legends. Goddess Saraswati or the Muses are, however, for them not a mere metaphor but concrete realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrumentnothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plateis illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubla Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines, the rest having gone completely out of his memory; in other words, the poem was ready-composed somewhere else, but the transmitting or recording instrument was faulty and failed him. Indeed, it is a common ex perience to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory.
Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the intermediary is relative, and there are infinite grades of it. Even when the larger waves that play in it in the normal waking state are quieted down, smaller ripples of unconscious or half-conscious habitual formations are thrown up and they are sufficient to cause the scattering and dis persal of the pure light from above.
The absolute passivity is attainable, perhaps, only by the Yogi. And in this sense the supreme poet is a Yogi, for in his consciousness the higher, dee per, subtler or other modes of ex periences pass through and are recorded with the minimum aberration or diffraction.
But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless channel? Conscious artistry, as we have said, means to be conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general ex perience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the artist dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not conscious at allhe does not know how he has created, the sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poetsShakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes and limits the original impulsion. The art here becomes consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versificationalthough here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry.
The three or four major orders I speak of in reference to conscious artistry are exampled characteristically in the history of the evolution of Greek poetry. It must be remembered, however, at the very outset that the Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and self-controlled and pregnant with a reasoned thought-content clothed in polished phrasing. We feel here that the artist knew what he was about and was exercising a conscious control over his instruments and materials, unlike his predecessor who seemed to be completely carried away by the onrush of the poetic enthousiasmos. Sophocles, in spite of his artistic perfection or perhaps because of it, appears to be just a little, one remove, away from the purity of the central inspiration there is a veil, although a thin transparent veil, yet a veil between which intervenes. With the third of the Brotherhood, Euripides, we slide lower downwe arrive at a predominantly mental transcription of an ex perience or inner conception; but something of the major breath continues, an aura, a rhythm that maintains the inner contact and thus saves the poetry. In a subsequent age, in Theocritus, for example, poetry became truly very much 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', so much of virtuosity and precocity entered into it; in other words, the poet then was an excessively self-conscious artist. That seems to be the general trend of all literature.
But should there be an inherent incompatibility between spontaneous creation and self-consciousness? As we have seen, a harmony and fusion can and do happen of the su perconscious and the normally conscious in the Yogi. Likewise, an artist also can be wakeful and transparent enough so that he is conscious on both the levels simultaneouslyabove, he is conscious of the source and origin of his inspiration, and on the level plain he is conscious of the working of the instrument, how the vehicle transcribes and embodies what comes from elsewhere. The poet's consciousness becomes then divalent as it werethere is a sense of absolute passivity in respect of the receiving apparatus and coupled and immisced with it there is also the sense of dynamism, of conscious agency as in his secret being he is the master of his apparatus and one with the Inspirerin other words, the poet is both a seer (kavih) and a creator or doer (poits).
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The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness in fact, of all artistic consciousness has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Natureagainst God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the triflingtins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sicklehe is still a prophet, a violent one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and fundamental qualitiessuch as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it beautifully and powerfully; but the modus o perandi was not such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.
Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of Homo Faber, has been a necessity; it has to serve a purpose and it has done admirably its work. Only we have to put it in its pro per place. The salvation of an extremely self-conscious age lies in an exceeding and not in a further enhancement or an exclusive concentration of the self-consciousness, nor, of course, in a falling back into the original unconsciousness. It is this shift in the poise of consciousness that has been presaged and prepared by the conscious, the scientific artists of today. Their task is to forge an instrument for a type of poetic or artistic creation completely new, unfamiliar, almost revolutionary which the older mould would find it impossible to render adequately. The yearning of the human consciousness was not to rest satisfied with the familiar and the ordinary, the pressure was for the discovery of other strands, secret stores of truth and reality and beauty. The first discovery was that of the great Unconscious, the dark and mysterious and all-powerful subconscient. Many of our poets and artists have been influenced by this power, some even sought to enter into that region and become its denizens. But artistic inspiration is an emanation of Light; whatever may be the field of its play, it can have its origin only in the higher spheres, if it is to be truly beautiful and not merely curious and scientific.
That is what is wanted at present in the artistic world the true inspiration, the breath from higher altitudes. And here comes the role of the mystic, the Yogi. The sense of evolution, the march of human consciousness demands and prophesies that the future poet has to be a mysticin him will be fulfilled the travail of man's conscious working. The self-conscious craftsman, the tireless ex perimenter with his adventurous analytic mind has sharpened his instrument, made it supple and elastic, tem pered, refined and enriched it; that is comparable to what we call the aspiration or call from below. Now the Grace must descend and fulfil. And when one rises into this higher consciousness beyond the brain and mind, when one lives there habitually, one knows the why and the how of things, one becomes a perfectly conscious o perator and still retains all spontaneity and freshness and wonder and magic that are usually associated with inconscience and irreflection. As there is a spontaneity of instinct, there is likewise also a spontaneity of vision: a child is spontaneous in its movements, even so a seer. Not only so, the higher spontaneity is more spontaneous, for the higher consciousness means not only awareness but the free and untrammelled activity and expression of the truth and reality it is.
Genius had to be generally more or less unconscious in the past, because the instrument was not ready, was clogged as it were with its own lower grade movements; the higher inspiration had very often to bypass it, or rob it of its serviceable materials without its knowledge, in an almost clandestine way. Wherever it was awake and vigilant, we have seen it causing a diminution in the poetic potential. And yet even so, it was being prepared for a greater role, a higher destiny it is to fulfil in the future. A conscious and full participation of a refined and transparent and enriched instrument in the delivery of su perconscious truth and beauty will surely mean not only a new but the very acme of aesthetic creation. We thus foresee the age of spiritual art in which the sense of creative beauty in man will find its culmination. Such an art was only an exception, something secondary or even tertiary, kept in the background, suggested here and there as a novel strain, called "mystic" to express its unfamiliar nature-unless, of course, it was openly and obviously scriptural and religious.
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But the evolutionary urge, as I have said, has always been to bring down or instil more and more light and self-consciousness into the depths of the heart too: and the first result has been an intellectualisation, a rationalisation of the consciousness, a movement of scientific observation and criticism which very naturally leads to a desiccation of the poetic enthusiasm and fervour. But a period of transcendence is in gestation. All efforts of modern poets and craftsmen, even those that seem apparently queer, bizarre and futile, are at bottom a travail for this transcendence, including those that seem contradictory to it.
Whether the original and true source of the poet's inspiration lies deep within or high above, all depends upon the mediating instrument the mind (in its most general sense) and speech for a successful transcription. Man's ever-growing consciousness demanded also a conscious development and remoulding of these two factors. A growth, a heightening and deepening of the consciousness meant inevitably a movement towards the spiritual element in things. And that means, we have said, a twofold change in the future poet's make-up. First as regards the substance. The revolutionary shift that we notice in modern poets towards a completely new domain of subject-matter is a signpost that more is meant than what is expressed. The su perficialities and futilities that are dealt with do not in their outward form give the real trend of things. In and through all these major and constant preoccupation of our poets is "the pain of the present and the passion for the future": they are, as already stated, more prophets than poets, but prophets for the moment crying in the wildernessalthough some have chosen the path of denial and revolt. They are all looking ahead or beyond or deep down, always yearning for another truth and reality which will explain, justify and transmute the present calvary of human living. Such an acute tension of consciousness has necessitated an overhauling of the vehicle of expression too, the creation of a mode of expressing the inexpressible. For that is indeed what human consciousness and craft are aiming at in the present stage of man's evolution. For everything, almost everything that can be normally expressed has been expressed and in a variety of ways as much as is possible: that is the history of man's aesthetic creativity. Now the eye probes into the unexpressed world; for the artist too the Upanishadic problem has cropped up:
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A greater personality sometimes
Possesses us which yet we know is ours:
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Yet seems to perish with its mortal frame.
Assured of the Apocalypse to be,
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Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind,
Uplifts its lonely tongue of conscious fire
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A perilous life her gain, a struggling joy;
A Thought that can conceive but hardly knows
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The pure perfection her marred nature needs,
A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire.
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And perish from the earth where he was king.
He is ignorant of the meaning of his life,
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Like a thought persisting in a wide emptiness.
As if an unintelligible phrase
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It wears to the perishable creature's eyes
The grandeur of a useless miracle;
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Reconstitute the perfect word, unite
The Alpha and the Omega in one sound;
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In objects wrought, in the persons she conceives,
Dreaming she chases her idea of him,
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A creature made of perishable stuff,
In the pattern she has set for him he moves,
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The Absolute, the perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
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The Absolute, the perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He has built a million figures of his power;
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The Absolute, the perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
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An unattained perfection calls to him
From distant boundaries in the Unseen:
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Dares not to affront the far-off perilous main.
He in a petty coastal traffic plies,
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And perishable products of hard toil
And transient splendours won and lost by the days.
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To evoke a person in the im personal Void,
With the Truth-Light strike earth's massive roots of trance,
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The spirit of the age demands this new gospel. Mankind needs and awaits a fresh revelation. The world and life are not an illusion or a lesser reality: they are, if taken rightly, as real as the pure Spirit itself. Indeed, Spirit and Flesh, Consciousness and Matter are not antinomies; to consider them as such is itself an illusion. In fact, they are only two poles or modes or aspects of the same reality. To separate or divide them is a one-sided concentration or abstraction on the part of the human mind. The fulfilment of the Spirit is in its expression through Matter; human life too reaches its highest term, its summum bonum, in embodying the spiritual consciousness here on earth and not dissolving itself in the Transcendence. That is the new Dispensation which answers to the deepest aspiration in man and towards which he has been travelling through the ages in the course of the evolution of his consciousness. Many, however, are the prophets and sages who have set this ideal before humanity and more and more insistently and clearly as we come nearer to the age we live in. But none or very few have expressed it with such beauty and charm and compelling persuasion. It would be carping criticism to point out-as some, purists one may call them, have done-that in poetising and aesthetising the spiritual truth and reality, in trying to make it human and terrestrial, he has diminished and diluted the original substance, in endeavouring to render the diamond iridescent, he has turned it into a baser alloy. Tagore's is a poetic soul, it must be admitted; and it is not necessary that one should find in his ideas and ex periences and utterances the cent per cent accuracy and inevitability of a Yogic consciousness. Still his major perceptions, those that count, stand and are borne out by the highest spiritual realisation.
Tagore is no inventor or innovator when he posits Spirit as Beauty, the spiritual consciousness as the ardent rhythm of ecstasy. This ex perience is the very core of Vaishnavism and for which Tagore is sometimes called a Neo-Vaishnava. The Vaishnava sees the world pulsating in glamorous beauty as the Lila (Play) of the Lord, and the Lord, God himself, is nothing but Love and Beauty. Still Tagore is not all Vaishnava or merely a Vaishnava; he is in addition a modern (the carping voice will say, there comes the dilution and adulteration)in the sense that problems exist for himsocial, political, economic, national, humanitarianwhich have to be faced and solved: these are not merely mundane, but woven into the texture of the fundamental problem of human destiny, of Soul and Spirit and God. A Vaishnava was, in spite of his acceptance of the world, an introvert, to use a modern psychological phrase, not necessarily in the pejorative sense, but in the neutral scientific sense. He looks upon the universe' and human life as the play of the Lord, as an actuality and not mere illusion indeed; but he does not participate or even take interest in the dynamic working out of the world process, he does not care to know, has no need of knowing that there is a terrestrial purpose and a diviner fulfilment of the mortal life upon earth. The Vaishnava dwells more or less absorbed in the Vaikuntha of his inner consciousness; the outer world, although real, is only a symbolic shadowplay to which he can but be a witness-real, is only a nothing more.
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Tagore was a poet; this poetic power of his he put in the service of the great cause for the divine uplift of humanity. Naturally, it goes without saying, his poetry did not preach or propagandize the truths for which he stoodhe had a fine and powerful weapon in his prose to do the work, even then in a poetic way but to sing them. And he sang them not in their philosophical bareness, like a Lucretius, or in their sheer transcendental austerity like some of the Upanishadic Rishis, but in and through human values and earthly norms. The especial aroma of Tagore's poetry lies exactly here, as he himself says, in the note of unboundedness in things bounded that it describes. A mundane, profane sensuousness, Kalidasian in richness and sweetness, is matched or counterpointed by a simple haunting note imbedded or trailing somewhere behind, a lyric cry persevering into eternity, the nostalgic cry of the still small voice.2
Thus, on the one hand, the Eternity, the Infinity, the Spirit is brought nearer home to us in its embodied symbols and living vehicles and vivid formulations, it becomes easily available to mortals, even like the father to his son, to use a Vedic phrase; on the other hand, earthly things, mere humanities are uplifted and suffused with a "light that never was, on sea or land."
01.05 - The Nietzschean Antichrist, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Nietzsche as the apostle of force is a name now familiar to all the world. The hero, the warrior who never tamely accepts suffering and submission and defeat under any condition but fights always and fights to conquersuch is the ideal man, according to Nietzsche,the champion of strength, of greatness, of mightiness. The dominating personality infused with the supreme "will to power"he is Ubermensch, the Su perman. Sentiment does not move the mountains, emotion diffuses itself only in vague aspiration. The motive power, the creative fiat does not dwell in the heart but somewhere higher. The way of the Cross, the path of love and charity and pity does not lead to the kingdom of Heaven. The world has tried it for the last twenty centuries of its Christian civilisation and the result is that we are still living in a luxuriant abundance of misery and sordidness and littleness. This is how Nietzsche thinks and feels. He finds no virtue in the old rgimes and he revolts from them. He wants a speedy and radical remedy and teaches that by violence only the Kingdom of Heaven can be seized. For, to Nietzsche the world is only a clash of forces and the Su perman therefore is one who is the embodiment of the greatest force. Nietzsche does not care for the good, it is the great that moves him. The good, the moral is of man, conventional and has only a fictitious value. The great, the non-moral is, on the other hand, divine. That only has a value of its own. The good is nothing but a sort of makeshift arrangement which man makes for himself in order to live commodiously and which changes according to his tem perament. But the great is one with the Supreme Wisdom and is absolute and im perative. The good cannot create the great; it is the great that makes for the good. This is what he really means when he says, "They say that a good cause sanctifies war but I tell thee it is a good war that sanctifies all cause." For the goodness of your cause you judge by your personal predilections, by your false conventionalities, by a standard that you set up in your ignoranceBut a good war, the output of strength in any cause is in itself a cause of salvation. For thereby you are the champion of that ultimate verity which conduces to the ultimate good. Do not shrink, he would say, to be even like the cyclone and the avalanche, destructive, indeed, but grand and puissant and therefore truer emblems of the BeyondJenseitsthan the weak, the little, the pitiful that do not dare to destroy and by that very fact cannot hope to create.
This is the Nietzsche we all know. But there is another aspect of his which the world has yet been slow to recognise. For, at bottom, Nietzsche is not all storm and fury. If his Su perman is a Destroying Angel, he is none the less an angel. If he is endowed with a supreme sense of strength and power, there is also secreted in the core of his heart a sense of the beautiful that illumines his somewhat sombre aspect. For although Nietzsche is by birth a Slavo-Teuton, by culture and education he is pre-eminently Hellenic. His earliest works are on the subject of Greek tragedy and form what he describes as an "Apollonian dream." And to this dream, to this Greek aesthetic sense more than to any thing else he sacrifices justice and pity and charity. To him the weak and the miserable, the sick and the maimed are a sort of blot, a kind of ulcer on the beautiful face of humanity. The herd that wallow in suffering and relish suffering disfigure the aspect of the world and should therefore be relentlessly mowed out of existence. By being pitiful to them we give our tacit assent to their persistence. And it is precisely because of this that Nietzsche has a horror of Christianity. For compassion gives indulgence to all the ugliness of the world and thus renders that ugliness a necessary and indispensable element of existence. To protect the weak, to sympathise with the lowly brings about more of weakness and more of lowliness. Nietzsche has an aristocratic taste par excellencewhat he aims at is health and vigour and beauty. But above all it is an aristocracy of the spirit, an aristocracy endowed with all the richness and beauty of the soul that Nietzsche wants to establish. The beggar of the street is the symbol of ugliness, of the poverty of the spirit. And the so-called aristocrat, die millionaire of today is as poor and ugly as any helpless le per. The soul of either of them is made of the same dirty, sickly stuff. The tattered rags, the crouching heart, the effeminate nerve, the unenlightened soul are the standing ugliness of the world and they have no place in the ideal, the perfect humanity. Humanity, according to Nietzsche, is made in order to be beautiful, to conceive the beautiful, to create the beautiful. Nietzsche's Su perman has its perfect image in a Grecian statue of Zeus cut out in white marble-Olympian grandeur shedding in every lineament Apollonian beauty and Dionysian vigour.
The real secret of Nietzsche's philosophy is not an adoration of brute force, of blind irrational joy in fighting and killing. Far from it, Nietzsche has no kinship with Treitschke or Bernhard. What Nietzsche wanted was a world purged of littleness and ugliness, a humanity, not of saints, perhaps, but of heroes, lofty in their ideal, great in their achievement, majestic in their empirea race of titanic gods breathing the glory of heaven itself.
***
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is no perfect answer to our hopes;
There are blind voiceless doors that have no key;
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The moulds of form and person are undone:
The ineffable Wideness knows him for its own.
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The fixed immovable peripheries
Effaced themselves beneath the Incarnate's tread.
--
Her perilous arcanes and hooded Powers
Confessed the advent of a mastering Mind
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The perfect rhythm now only sometimes dreamed
An answer brought to the torn earth's hungry need
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A mighty oneness its perpetual theme,
It caught the soul's faint scattered utterances,
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Communism is the synthesis of collectivism and individualism. The past ages of society were characterised more or less by a severe collectivism. In ancient Greece, more so in Sparta and in Rome, the individual had, pro perly speaking, no separate existence of his own; he was merged in the State or Nation. The individual was considered only as a limb of the collective being, had to live and labour for the common weal. The value attached to each person was strictly in reference to the output that the group to which he belonged received from him. Apart from this service for the general unit the body politicany personal endeavour and achievement, if not absolutely discouraged and repressed, was given a very secondary place of merit. The summum bonum of the individual was to sacrifice at the altar of the res publica, the bonum publicum. In India, the position and function of the State or Nation was taken up by the society. Here too social institutions were so constituted and men were so bred and brought up that individuality had neither the occasion nor the incentive to express itself, it was a thing that remained, in the Kalidasian phrase, an object for the ear onlysrutau sthita. Those who sought at all an individual aim and purpose, as perhaps the Sannyasins, were put outside the gate of law and society. Within the society, in actual life and action, it was a sin and a crime or at least a gross im perfection to have any self-regarding motive or impulse; personal preference was the last thing to be considered, virtue consisted precisely in sacrificing one's own taste and inclination for the sake of that which the society exacts and sanctions.
Against this tyranny of the group, this absolute rule of the collective will, the human mind rose in revolt and the result was Individualism. For whatever may be the truth and necessity of the Collective, the Individual is no less true and necessary. The individual has his own law and urge of being and his own secret godhead. The collective godhead derides the individual godhead at its peril. The first movement of the reaction, however, was a run to the other extremity; a stern collectivism gave birth to an intransigent individualism. The individual is sacred and inviolable, cost what it may. It does not matter what sort of individuality one seeks, it is enough if the thing is there. So the doctrine of individualism has come to set a premium on egoism and on forces that are disruptive of all social bonds. Each and every individual has the inherent right, which is also a duty, to follow his own impetus and impulse. Society is nothing but the battle ground for competing individualities the strongest survive and the weakest go to the wall. Association and co-o peration are instruments that the individual may use and utilise for his own growth and development but in the main they act as deterrents rather than as aids to the expression and expansion of his characteristic being. In reality, however, if we probe sufficiently deep into the matter we find that there is no such thing as corporate life and activity; what appears as such is only a camouflage for rigorous competition; at the best, there maybe only an offensive and defensive alliancehumanity fights against nature, and within humanity itself group fights against group and in the last analysis, within the group, the individual fights against the individual. This is the ultimate Law-the Dharma of creation.
Now, what such an uncompromising individualism fails to recognise is that individuality and ego are not the same thing, that the individual may have his individuality intact and entire and yet sacrifice his ego, that the soul of man is a much greater thing than his vital being. It is simply ignoring the fact and denying the truth to say that man is only a fighting animal and not a loving god, that the self within the individual realises itself only through competition and not co-o peration. It is an error to conceive of society as a mere parallelogram of forces, to suppose that it has risen simply out of the struggle of individual interests and continues to remain by that struggle. Struggle is only one aspect of the thing, a particular form at a particular stage, a temporary manifestation due to a particular system and a particular habit and training. It would be nearer the truth to say that society came into being with the demand of the individual soul to unite with the individual soul, with the stress of an Over-soul to express itself in a multitude of forms, diverse yet linked together and organised in perfect harmony. Only, the stress for union manifested itself first on the material plane as struggle: but this is meant to be corrected and transcended and is being continually corrected and transcended by a secret harmony, a real commonality and brotherhood and unity. The individual is not so self-centred as the individualists make him to be, his individuality has a much vaster orbit and fulfils itself only by fulfilling others. The scientists have begun to discover other instincts in man than those of struggle and competition; they now place at the origin of social grouping an instinct which they name the herd-instinct: but this is only a formulation in lower terms, a translation on the vital plane of a higher truth and reality the fundamental oneness and accord of individuals and their spiritual impulsion to unite.
However, individualism has given us a truth and a formula which collectivism ignored. Self-determination is a thing which has come to stay. Each and every individual is free, absolutely free and shall freely follow his own line of growth and development and fulfilment. No extraneous power shall choose and fix what is good or evil for him, nor coerce and exploit him for its own benefit. But that does not necessarily mean that collectivism has no truth in it; collectivism also, as much as individualism, has a lesson for us and we should see whether we can harmonise the two. Collectivism signifies that the individual should not look to himself alone, should not be shut up in his freedom but expand himself and envelop others in a wider freedom, see other creatures in himself and himself in other creatures, as the Gita says. Collectivism demands that the individual need not and should not exhaust himself entirely in securing and enjoying his personal freedom, but that he can and should work for the salvation of others; the truth it upholds is this that the individual is from a certain point of view only a part of the group and by ignoring the latter it ignores itself in the end.
Now, a spiritual communism embraces individualism and collectivism, fuses them in a higher truth, establishes them in an intimate and absolute harmony. The individual is the centre, the group is the circumference and the two form one whore circle. The individual by fulfilling the truth of his real individuality fulfils also the truth of a commonality. There are no different laws for the two. The individuals do not stand apart from and against one another, the dharma of one does not clash with the dharma of the other. The ripples in the bosom of the sea, however distinct and discrete in appearance, form but a single mass, all follow the same law of hydrodynamics that the mother sea incarnates. Stars and planets and nebulae, each separate heavenly body has its characteristic form and nature and function and yet all fulfil the same law of gravitation and beat the measure of the silent symphony of spaces. Individualities are the freedoms of the collective being and collectivity the concentration of individual beings. The same soul looking inward appears as the individual being and looking outward appears as the collective being.
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The individual must find himself and establish his secret god-head, and then only, when such free and integral individualities meet and reciprocate and coalesce, can the community they form have a living reality and a permanent potency. On the other hand, unless individuals come together and through the interchange of each other's soul and substance' enhance the communal Godhead, the separate individual godheads also will not manifest in their supreme and sovereign powers.
If society, that is to say, community, be the fieldkshetra for the individual to live, move and have its being, then we must begin at the very outset with the community itself, at least, with a nucleus that will go to form such a thing. The fear that the untimely grouping together of immature souls may crush out individuality and dig its own grave has, no doubt, sufficient justification behind it to deter one from the attempt; but neither can we be certain that souls nursed and nourished in solitary cells, absolutely apart from any mellowing and broadening influence of the outside world will ever reach to that stage of perfect maturity when they will suddenly and spontaneously break open their cells and recognise in one another the communal brother-self.
As a matter of fact, the individual is not and cannot be such an isolated thing as our egoistic sense would like to have it. The sharp angularities of the individual are being, at every moment, chastened by the very primary conditions of life; and to fail to recognise this is the blindest form of ignorance. It is no easy task to draw exactly the line of distinction between our individual being and our social or communal being. In actual life they are so blended together that in trying to extricate them from each other, we but tear and lacerate them both. The highest wisdom is to take the two together as they are, and by a gradual purifying processboth internal and external, internal in thought and knowledge and will, external in life and actionrestore them to their respective truth and lawSatyam and Ritam.
The individual who leads a severely individual life from the very beginning, whose outlook of the world has been fashioned by that conception, can hardly, if at all, enter at the end the communal life. He must perforce be either a vagabond or a recluse: But the recluse is not an integral man, nor the vagabond an ideal personality. The individual need not be too chaste and shy to associate with others and to give and take as freely and fully as he can. Individuality is not necessarily curtailed or mutilated in this process, but there is this other greater possibility of its getting enlarged and enhanced. Rather it is when you shut yourself up in your own self, that you stick to only one line of your personality, to a single phase of your self and thus limit and diminish yourself; the breadth and height and depth of your self, the cubic completeness of your personality you can attain only through a multiple and variegated stress by which you come in contact with the world and things.
So first the individual and then the commune is not the natural nor the ideal principle. On the other hand, first the commune and then the individual would appear to be an equally defective principle. For first a commune means an organisation, its laws and rules and regulations, its injunctions and prohibitions; all which signifies or comes to signify that every individual is not free to enter its fold and that whoever enters must know how to dovetail himself therein and thus crush down the very life-power whose enhancement and efflorescence is sought. First a commune means necessarily a creed, a dogma, a set form of being and living indelibly marked out from beforehand. The individual has there no choice of finding and developing the particular creed or dogma or mode of being and living, from out of his own self, along his particular line of natural growth; all that is imposed upon him and he has to accept and make it his own by trial and effort and self-torture. Even if the commune be a contractual association, the members having joined together in a common cause to a common end, by voluntarily sacrificing a portion of their personal choice and freedom, even then it is not the ideal thing; the collective soul will be diminished in exact proportion as each individual soul has had to be diminished, be that voluntary or otherwise. That commune is plenary and entire which ensures plenitude and entirety to each of its individuals.
Now how to escape the dilemma? Only if we take the commune and the individual togetheren bloc, as has already been suggested. This means that the commune should be at the beginning a subtle and supple thing, without form and even without name, it should be no more than the circumambient aura the sukshma deha that plays around a group of individuals who meet and unite and move together by a secret affinity, along a common path towards a common goal. As each individual develops and defines himself, the commune also takes a more and more concrete shape; and when at the last stage the individual rises to the full height of his godhead, takes possession of his integral divinity, the commune also establishes its solid empire, vivid and vibrant in form and name.
01.06 - Vivekananda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A personal reminiscence. A young man in prison, accused of conspiracy and waging war against the British Empire. If convicted he might have to suffer the extreme penalty, at least, transportation to the Andamans. The case is dragging on for long months. And the young man is in a solitary cell. He cannot always keep up his spirits high. Moments of sadness and gloom and despair come and almost overwhelm him. Who was there to console and cheer him up? Vivekananda. Vivekananda's speeches, From Colombo to Almora, came, as a godsend, into the hands of the young man. Invariably, when the period of despondency came he used to open the book, read a few pages, read them over again, and the cloud was there no longer. Instead there was hope and courage and faith and future and light and air.
Such is Vivekananda, the embodiment of Fearlessnessabh, the Upanishadic word, the mantra, he was so fond of. The life and vision of Vivekananda can be indeed summed up in the mighty phrase of the Upanishads, nyam tm balahnena labhya. 'This soul no weakling can attain.' Strength! More strength! Strength evermore! One remembers the motto of Danton, the famous leader in the French Revolution:De l'audance, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!
The gospel of strength that Vivekananda spread was very characteristic of the man. For it is not mere physical or nervous bravery, although that too is indispensable, and it is something more than moral courage. In the speeches referred to, the subject-matter (as well as the manner to a large extent) is philosophical, metaphysical, even abstract in outlook and treatment: they are not a call to arms, like the French National Anthem, for example; they are not merely an ethical exhortation, a moral lesson either. They speak of the inner spirit, the divine in man, the supreme realities that lie beyond. And yet the words are permeated through and through with a vibration life-giving and heroic-not so much in the explicit and apparent meaning as in the style and manner and atmosphere: it is catching, even or precisely when he refers, for example, to these passages in the Vedas and the Upanishads, magnificent in their poetic beauty, sublime in their spiritual truth,nec plus ultra, one can say, in the grand style supreme:
Yasyaite himavanto mahitv
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The consciousness that breathed out these mighty words, these heavenly sounds was in itself mighty and heavenly and it is that that touches you, penetrates you, vibrates in you a kindred chord, "awakening in you someone dead" till thenmrtam kcana bodhayant. More than the matter, the thing that was said, was the personality, the being who embodied the truth expressed, the living consciousness behind the words and the speech that set fire to your soul. Indeed it was the soul that Vivekananda could awaken and stir in you. Any orator, any speaker with some kind of belief, even if it is for the moment, in what he says, by the sheer force of assertion, can convince your mind and draw your acquiescence and adhesion. A leader of men, self-confident and bold and fiery, can carry you off your feet and make you do brave things. But that is a lower degree of character and nature, ephemeral and su perficial, that is touched in you thereby. The spiritual leader, the Guide, goes straight to the spirit in youit is the call of the deep unto the deep. That was what Vivekananda meant when he said that Brahman is asleep in you, awaken it, you are the Brahman, awaken it, you are free and almighty. It is the spirit consciousness Sachchidananda that is the real man in you and that is supremely mighty and invincible and free absolutely. The courage and fearlessness that Vivekananda gave you was the natural attri bute of the lordship of your spiritual reality. Vivekananda spoke and roused the Atman in man.
Vivekananda spoke to the Atman in man, he spoke to the Atman of the world, and he spoke specially to the Atman of India. India had a large place in Vivekananda's consciousness: for the future of humanity and the world is wedded to India's future. India has a great mission, it has a spiritual, rather the spiritual work to do. Here is India's work as Vivekananda conceived it in a nutshell:
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"Man is higher than all animals, than all angels: none is greater than man. Even the Devas will have to come down again and attain to salvation though a human body. Man alone attains to perfection, not even the Devas." Indeed, men are gods upon earth, come down here below to perfect themselves and perfect the worldonly, they have to be conscious of themselves. They do not know what they are, they have to be actually and sovereignly what they are really and potentially. This then is the life-work of everyone:
"First, let us be Gods, and then help others to be Gods.
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perfected humanity:
"Manifest the divinity within you, and everything will be
01.07 - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Vivekananda Walter Hilton: The Scale of perfection
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsBlaise Pascal (1623-1662)
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But the pressure upon his dynamic and heated brain the fiery zeal in his mindwas already proving too much and he was advised medically to take complete rest. Thereupon followed what was known as Pascal's mundane lifea period of distraction and dissipation; but this did not last long nor was it of a serious nature. The inner fire could brook no delay, it was eager and impatient to englobe other fields and domains. Indeed, it turned to its own field the heart. Pascal became initiated into the mystery of Faith and Grace. Still he had to pass through a terrible period of dejection and despair: the life of the world had given him no rest or relaxation, it served only to fill his cup of misery to the brim. But the hour of final relief was not long postponed: the Grace came to him, even as it came to Moses or St. Paul as a sudden flare of fire which burnt up the Dark Night and opened out the portals of Morning Glory.
Pascal's place in the evolution of European culture and consciousness is of considerable significance and importance. He came at a critical time, on the mounting tide of rationalism and scepticism, in an age when the tone and tem per of human mentality were influenced and fashioned by Montaigne and Rochefoucauld, by Bacon and Hobbes. Pascal himself, born in such an atmosphere of doubt and disbelief and disillusionment, had sucked in a full dose of that poison; yet he survived and found the Rock of Ages, became the clarion of Faith against Denial. What a spectacle it was! This is what one wrote just a quarter of a century after the death of Pascal:
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About doubt, Pascal says that the perfect doubter, the Pyrrhonian as he is called, is a fiction. Pascal asks:
"What will men do in such a state? Will he doubt everything?... Will he doubt whether he doubts ? Will he doubt whether he exists?. . . In fact there has never been a perfectly effective Pyrrhonian."6
The process of conversion of the doubting mind, of the dry intellectual reason as propounded and perhaps practised by Pascal is also a characteristic mark of his nature and genius. It is explained in his famous letter on "bet" or "game of chance" (Le Pari). Here is how he puts the issue to the doubting mind (I am giving the substance, not his words): let us say then that in the world we are playing a game of chance. How do the chances stand? What are the gains and losses if God does not exist? What 'are the gains and losses if God does exist? If God exists, by accepting and reaching him what do we gain? All that man cares forhappiness, felicity. And what do we lose? We lose the world of misery. If, on the other 'hand, God does not exist, by believing him to exist, we lose nothing, we are not more miserable than what we are. If, however, God exists and we do not believe him, we gain this world of misery but we lose all that is worth having. Thus Pascal concludes that even from the standpoint of mere gain and loss, belief in God is more advantageous than unbelief. This is how he applied to metaphysics the mathematics of probability.
One is not sure if such reasoning is convincing to the intellect; but perhaps it is a necessary stage in conversion. At least we can conclude that Pascal had to pass through such a stage; and it indicates the difficulty his brain had to undergo, the tension or even the torture he made it pass through. It is true, from Reason Pascal went over to Faith, even while giving Reason its due. Still it seems the two were not perfectly synthetised or fused in him. There was a gap between that was not thoroughly bridged. Pascal did not possess the higher, intuitive, luminous mind that mediates successfully between the physical discursive ratiocinative brain-mind and the vision of faith: it is because deep in his consciousness there lay this chasm. Indeed,Pascal's abyss (l' abme de Pascal) is a well-known legend. Pascal, it appears, used to have very often the vision of an abyss about to open before him and he shuddered at the prospect of falling into it. It seems to us to be an ex perience of the Infinity the Infinity to which he was so much attracted and of which he wrote so beautifully (L'infiniment grand et l'infiniment petit)but into which he could not evidently jump overboard unreservedly. This produced a dichotomy, a lack of integration of personality, Jung would say. Pascal's brain was cold, firm, almost rigid; his heart was volcanic, the faith he had was a fire: it lacked something of the pure light and burned with a lurid glare.
And the reason is his metaphysics. It is the Jansenist conception of God and human nature that inspired and coloured all his ex perience and consciousness. According to it, as according to the Calvinist conception, man is a corrupt being, corroded to the core, original sin has branded his very soul. Only Grace saves him and releases him. The order of sin and the order of Grace are distinct and disparate worlds and yet they complement each other and need each other. Greatness and misery are intertwined, united, unified with each other in him. Here is an echo of the Manichean position which also involves an abyss. But even then God's grace is not a free agent, as Jesuits declare; there is a predestination that guides and controls it. This was one of the main subjects he treated in his famous open letters (Les Provinciales) that brought him renown almost overnight. Eternal hell is a possible prospect that faces the Jansenist. That was why a Night always over-shadowed the Day in Pascal's soul.
Man then, according to Pascal, is by nature a sinful thing. He can lay no claim to noble virtue as his own: all in him is vile, he is a lump of dirt and filth. Even the greatest has his full share of this taint. The greatest, the saintliest, and the meanest, the most sinful, all meet, all are equal on this common platform; all have the same feet of clay. Man is as miserable a creature as a beast, as much a part and product of Nature as a plant. Only there is this difference that an animal or a tree is unconscious, while man knows that he is miserable. This knowledge or perception makes him more miserable, but that is his real and only greatness there is no other. His thought, his self-consciousness, and his sorrow and repentance and contrition for what he is that is the only good partMary's part that has been given to him. Here are Pascal's own words on the subject:
"The greatness of man is great in this that he knows he is miserable. A tree does not know that it is miserable.
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Pascal's faith had not the calm, tranquil, serene, luminous and happy self-possession of an Indian Rishi. It was ardent and impatient, fiery and vehement. It had to be so perhaps, since it was to stand against his steely brain (and a gloomy vital or life force) as a counterpoise, even as an antidote. This tension and schism brought about, at least contri buted to his neuras thenia and physical infirmity. But whatever the effect upon his inner consciousness and spiritual achievement, his power of expression, his literary style acquired by that a special quality which is his great gift to the French language. If one speaks of Pascal, one has to speak of his language also; for he was one of the great masters who created the French prose. His prose was a wonderful blend of clarity, precision, serried logic and warmth, colour, life, movement, plasticity.
A translation cannot give any idea of the Pascalian style; but an inner echo of the same can perhaps be caught from the thought movement of these characteristic sayings of his with which we conclude:
"Contradiction is not a mark of falsehood, nor is uncontradiction a mark of truth."8
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Vivekananda Walter Hilton: The Scale of perfection
01.07 - The Bases of Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Any real reconstruction of society, any permanent reformation of the world presupposes a real reconstruction, a permanent reformation of human nature. Otherwise any amount of casting and recasting the mere machineries would not bring about any appreciable result, but leave the thing as it is. Change the laws as much as you like, but if you do not change the nature of man, the world will not change. For it is man that makes laws and not laws that make man. Laws express at best the demand which man feels within himself. A truth must realise itself in human nature before it can be codified. You may certainly legalise an ideal, but that does not necessarily mean realising it. The realisation must come first in nature and character, then it is naturally translated into laws and institutions. A man lives the laws of his soul and being and not the law given him by the shastras. He violates the shastras, modifies them, utilises them according to the greater im perative of his Swabhava.
The French Revolution wanted to remould human society and its ideal was liberty, equality and fraternity. It pulled down the old machinery and set up a new one in its stead. And the result? "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" remained always in effect a cry in the wilderness. Another wave of idealism is now running over the earth and the Bolshevists are its most fiercely practical exponents. Instead of dealing merely with the political machinery, the Socialistic Revolution tries to break and remake, above all, the social machinery. But judged from the results as yet attained and the tendencies at work, few are the reasons to hope but many to fear the worst. Even education does not seem to promise us anything better. Which nation was better educatedin the sense we understood and still commonly understand the wordthan Germany?
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It is this persuasion which, has led many spiritual souls, siddhas, to declare that theirs is not the kingdom upon this earth, but that the kingdom of Heaven is within. And it is why great lovers of humanity have sought not to eradicate but only to mitigate, as far as possible, the ills of life. Earth and life, it is said, contain in their last analysis certain ugly and loathsome realities which are an inevitable and inexorable part of their substance and to eliminate one means to annihilate the other. What can be done is to throw a veil over the nether regions in human nature, to put a ban on their urges and velleities and to create opportunities to make social arrangements so that the higher impulses only find free play while the lower impulses, for want of scope and indulgence, may fall down to a harmless level. This is what the Reformists hope and want and no more. Life is based upon animality, the soul is encased in an earth-sheathman needs must procreate, man needs must seek food. But what human effort can achieve is to set up barriers and limitations and form channels and openings, which will restrain these impulses, allow them a necessary modicum of play and which for the greater part will serve to encourage and enhance the nobler urges in man. Of course, there will remain always the possibility of the whole scaffolding coming down with a crash and the aboriginal in man running riot in his nudity. But we have to accept the chance and make the best of what materials we have in hand.
No doubt this is a most dismal kind of pessimism. But it is the logical conclusion of all optimism that bases itself upon a particular view of human nature. If we question that pessimism, we have to question the very grounds of our optimism also. As a matter of fact, all our idealism has been so long infructuous and will be so in the future, if we do not shift our foundation and start from a different IntuitionWeltanschauung.
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The Divine Nature only can permanently reform the vital nature that is ours. Neither laws and institutions, which are the results of that vital nature, nor ideas and ideals which are often a mere revolt from and more often an auxiliary to it, can comm and the power to regenerate society. If it is thought improbable for any group of men to attain to that God Nature, then there is hardly any hope for mankind. But improbable or probable, that is the only way which man has to try and test, and there is none other.
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01.08 - A Theory of Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Yoga, then, comes at this stage and offers the solution in its power of what we may call Transubstantiation. That is to say, here the mere form is not changed, nor the functions restrained, regulated and purified, but the very substance of the instincts is transmuted. The power of conscious control is a power of the human will, i.e. of an individual personal will and therefore necessarily limited both in intent and extent. It is a power complementary to the power of Nature, it may guide and fashion the latter according to a new pattern, but cannot change the basic substance, the stuff of Nature. To that end yoga seeks a power that transcends the human will, brings into play the su pernal puissance of a Divine Will.
This is the real meaning and sense of the moral struggle in man, the continuous endeavour towards a transvaluation of the primary and aboriginal instincts and impulses. Looked at from one end, from below up the ascending line, man's ethical and spiritual ideals are a dissimulation and sublimation of the animal impulsions. But this is becauseas we see, if we look from the other end, from above down the descending lineman is not all instinct, he is not a mere blind instrument in the hands of Nature forces. He has in him another source, an opposite pole of being from which other impulsions flow and continually modify the structure of the lower levels. If the animal is the foundation of his nature, the divine is its summit. If the bodily demands form his manifest reality, the demands of the spirit enshrine his higher reality. And if as regards the former he is a slave, as regards the latter he is the Master. It is by the interaction of these double forces that his whole nature has been and is being fashioned. Man does not and cannot give carte blanche to his vital, inclinations, since there is a pressure upon them of higher forces coming down from his mental and spiritual levels. It is these latter which have deviated him from the direct line of the pure animal life.
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of perfection
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsWalter Hilton: The Scale of perfection
Walter Hilton: The Scale of perfection
From the twentieth century back to the fourteenth is a far cry: a far cry indeed from the modern scientific illumination to mediaeval su perstition, from logical positivists and mathematical rationalists to visionary mystics, from Russell and Huxley to Ruysbroeck and Hilton. The mystic lore, the Holy Writ, the mediaeval sage says, echoing almost the very words of the Eastern Masters, "may not be got by study nor through man's travail only, but principally by the grace of the Holy Ghost." As for the men living and moving in the worldly way, there are "so mickle din and crying in their heart and vain thoughts and fleshly desires" that it is impossible for them to listen or understand the still small voice. It is the pure soul touched by the Grace that alone "seeth soothfastness of Holy Writ wonderly shewed and opened, above study and travail and reason of man's kindly (i.e. natural) wit."
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Close the senses. Turn within. And then go forward, that is to say, more and more inward. In that direction lies your itinerary, the journey of your consciousness. The sense-ridden secular man, who goes by his physical eye, has marked in his own way the steps of his forward march and progress. His knowledge and his power grew as he proceeded in his survey from larger masses of physical objects to their component molecules and from molecules to their component atoms and from atoms once more into electrons and protons or energy-points pure and simple, or otherwise as, in another direction, he extended his gaze from earth to the solar system, from the solar system to other starry systems, to far-off galaxies and I from galaxies to spaces beyond. The record of this double-track march to infinityas perceived or conceived by the physical sensesis marvellous, no doubt. The mystic offers the spectacle of a still more marvellous march to another kind of infinity.
Here is the Augustinian mantra taken as the motto of The Scale of perfection: We ascend the ascending grades in our heart and we sing the song of ascension1. The journey's end is heavenly Jerusalem, the House of the Lord. The steps of this inner ascension are easily visible, not surely to the outer eye of the sense-burdened man, but to the "ghostly seeing" of the aspirant which is hazy in the beginning but slowly clears as he advances. The first step is the withdrawal from the outer senses and looking and seeing within. "Turn home again in thyself, and hold thee within and beg no more without." The immediate result is a darkness and a restless darknessit is a painful night. The outer objects of attraction and interest have been discarded, but the inner attachments and passions surge there still. If, however, one continues and persists, refuses to be drawn out, the turmoil settles down and the darkness begins to thin and wear away. One must not lose heart, one must have patience and perseverance. So when the outward world is no more-there and its call also no longer awakes any echo in us, then comes the stage of "restful darkness" or "light-some darkness". But it is still the dark Night of the soul. The outer light is gone and the inner light is not yet visible: the night, the desert, the great Nought, stretches between these two lights. But the true seeker goes through and comes out of the tunnel. And there is happiness at the end. "The seeking is travaillous, but the finding is blissful." When one steps out of the Night, enters into the deepest layer of the being, one stands face to face to one's soul, the very image of God, the perfect God-man, the Christ within. That is the third degree of our inner ascension, the entry into the deepest, purest and happiest statein which one becomes what he truly is; one finds the Christ there and dwells in love and union with him. But there is still a further step to take, and that is real ascension. For till now it has been a going within, from the outward to the inner and the inmost; now one has to go upward, transcend. Within the body, in life, however deep you may go, even if you find your soul and your union with Jesus whose tabernacle is your soul, still there is bound to remain a shadow of the sinful prison-house; the perfect bliss and purity without any earthly taint, the completeness and the crowning of the purgation and transfiguration can come only when you go beyond, leaving altogether the earthly form and worldly vesture and soar into Heaven itself and be in the company of the Trinity. "Into myself, and after... above myself by overpassing only into Him." At the same time it is pointed out, this mediaeval mystic has the common sense to see that the going in and going above of which one speaks must not be understood in a literal way, it is a figure of speech. The movement of the mystic is psychological"ghostly", it is saidnot physical or carnal.
This spiritual march or progress can also be described as a growing into the likeness of the Lord. His true self, his own image is implanted within us; he is there in the profoundest depth of our being as Jesus, our beloved and our soul rests in him in utmost bliss. We are aware neither of Jesus nor of his spouse, our soul, because of the obsession of the flesh, the turmoil raised by the senses, the blindness of pride and egoism. All that constitutes the first or old Adam, the image of Nought, the body of death which means at bottom the "false misruled love in to thyself." This self-love is the mother of sin, is sin itself. What it has to be replaced by is charity that is the true meaning of Christian charity, forgetfulness of self. "What is sin but a wanting and a forbearing of God." And the whole task, the discipline consists in "the shaping of Christ in you, the casting of sin through Christ." Who then is Christ, what is he? This knowledge you get as you advance from your sense-bound perception towards the inner and inmost seeing. As your outer nature gets purified, you approach gradually your soul, the scales fall off from your eyes too and you have the knowledge and "ghostly vision." Here too there are three degrees; first, you start with faith the senses can do nothing better than have faith; next, you rise to imagination which gives a sort of indirect touch or inkling of the truth; finally, you have the "understanding", the direct vision. "If he first trow it, he shall afterwards through grace feel it, and finally understand it."
It is never possible for man, weak and bound as he is, to reject the thraldom of his flesh, he can never purify himself wholly by his own unaided strength. God in his infinite mercy sent his own son, an emanation created out of his substancehis embodied loveas a human being to suffer along with men and take upon himself the burden of their sins. God the Son lived upon earth as man and died as man. Sin therefore has no longer its final or definitive hold upon mankind. Man has been made potentially free, pure and worthy of salvation. This is the mystery of Christ, of God the Son. But there is a further mystery. Christ not only lived for all men for all time, whether they know him, recognise him or not; but he still lives, he still chooses his beloved and his beloved chooses him, there is a conscious acceptance on either side. This is the function of the Holy Ghost, the redeeming power of Love active in him who accepts it and who is accepted by it, the dynamic Christ-Consciousness in the true Christian.
Indeed, the kernel of the mystic discipline and its whole bearingconsists in one and only one principle: to love Jhesu. All roads lead to Rome: all preparations, all trials lead to one realisation, love of God, God as a living person close to us, our friend and lover and master. The Christian mystic speaks almost in the terms of the Gita: Rise above your senses, give up your ego-hood, be meek and humble, it is Jesus within you, who embraces your soul: it is he who does everything for you and in you, give yourself up wholly into his hands. He will deliver you.
The characteristic then of the path is a one-pointed concentration. Great stress is laid upon "oneliness", "onedness":that is to say, a perfect and complete withdrawal from the outside and the world; an unmixed solitude is required for the true ex perience and realisation to come. "A full forsaking in will of the soul for the love of Him, and a living of the heart to Him. This asks He, for this gave He." The rigorous exclusion, the uncompromising asceticism, the voluntary self-torture, the cruel dark night and the arid desert are necessary conditions that lead to the "onlyness of soul", what another prophet (Isaiah, XXIV, 16) describes as "My privity to me". In that secreted solitude, the "onlistead"the graphic language of the author calls itis found "that dignity and that ghostly fairness which a soul had by kind and shall have by grace." The utter beauty of the soul and its absolute love for her deity within her (which has the fair name of Jhesu), the exclusive concentration of the whole of the being upon one point, the divine core, the manifest Grace of God, justifies the annihilation of the world and life's manifold existence. Indeed, the image of the Beloved is always within, from the beginning to the end. It is that that keeps one up in the terrible struggle with one's nature and the world. The image depends upon the consciousness which we have at the moment, that is to say, upon the stage or the degree we have ascended to. At the outset, when we can only look through the senses, when the flesh is our master, we give the image a crude form and character; but even that helps. Gradually, as we rise, with the clearing of our nature, the image too slowly regains its original and true shape. Finally, in the inmost soul we find Jesus as he truly is: "an unchangeable being, a sovereign might, a sovereign soothfastness, sovereign goodness, a blessed life and endless bliss." Does not the Gita too say: "As one approaches Me, so do I appear to him."Ye yath mm prapadyante.
Indeed, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the Eastern and Western approach to Divine Love, the Christian and the Vaishnava, for example. Indian spirituality, whatever its outer form or credal formulation, has always a background of utter unity. This unity, again, is threefold or triune and is expressed in those great Upanishadic phrases,mahvkyas,(1) the transcendental unity: the One alone exists, there is nothing else than theOneekamevdvityam; (2) the cosmic unity: all existence is one, whatever exists is that One, thereare no separate existences:sarvam khalvidam brahma neha nnsti kincaa; (3) That One is I, you too are that One:so' ham, tattvamasi; this may be called the individual unity. As I have said, all spiritual ex periences in India, of whatever school or line, take for granted or are fundamentally based upon this sense of absolute unity or identity. Schools of dualism or pluralism, who do not apparently admit in their tenets this extreme monism, are still permeated in many ways with that sense and in some form or other take cognizance of the truth of it. The Christian doctrine too says indeed, 'I and my Father in Heaven are one', but this is not identity, but union; besides, the human soul is not admitted into this identity, nor the world soul. The world, we have seen, according to the Christian discipline has to be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but a resolution, not the rejection of what is totally foreign and extraneous, but a resolution of the external into its inner and inmost substance, of the effect into its original cause. Brahman is in the world, Brahman is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brahmansi, pravttiit has to be rolled back into its, cause and substance if it is to regain its pure nature (that is the process of nivitti). Likewise, the individual being in the world, "I", is the transcendent being itself and when it withdraws, it withdraws itself and the whole world with it and merges into the Absolute. Even the Maya of the Mayavadin, although it is viewed as something not inherent in Brahman but su perimposed upon Brahman, still, has been accepted as a peculiar power of Brahman itself. The Christian doctrine keeps the individual being separate practically, as an associate or at the most as an image of God. The love for one's neighbour, charity, which the Christian discipline enjoins is one's love for one's kind, because of affinity of nature and quality: it does not dissolve the two into an integral unity and absolute identity, where we love because we are one, because we are the One. The highest culmination of love, the very basis of love, according to the Indian conception, is a transcendence of love, love trans-muted into Bliss. The Upanishad says, where one has become the utter unity, who loves whom? To explain further our point, we take two examples referred to in the book we are considering. The true Christian, it is said, loves the sinner too, he is permitted to dislike sin, for he has to reject it, but he must separate from sin the sinner and love him. Why? Because the sinner too can change and become his brother in spirit, one loves the sinner because there is the possibility of his changing and becoming a true Christian. It is why the orthodox Christian, even such an enlightened and holy person as this mediaeval Canon, considers the non-Christian, the non-baptised as impure and potentially and fundamentally sinners. That is also why the Church, the physical organisation, is worshipped as Christ's very body and outside the Church lies the pagan world which has neither religion nor true spirituality nor salvation. Of course, all this may be symbolic and it is symbolic in a sense. If Christianity is taken to mean true spirituality, and the Church is equated with the collective embodiment of that spirituality, all that is claimed on their behalf stands justified. But that is an ideal, a hypothetical standpoint and can hardly be borne out by facts. However, to come back to our subject, let us ow take the second example. Of Christ himself, it is said, he not only did not dislike or had any aversion for Judas, but that he positively loved the traitor with a true and sincere love. He knew that the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and had betrayed, the Son of Man continued to love him. It was no make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said, the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is God's servant. And who knows even a Judas would not change in the end? Many who come to scoff do remain to pray. But it can be asked, 'Does God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality, one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no difference between the Brahmin and the cow and the elephant. It is his own self he finds in every person and every objectsarvabhtsthitam yo mm bhajati ekatvamsthitah"he has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings."2
This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of manone level or mode of his being and consciousness purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity.
The conception of original sin is a cardinal factor in Christian discipline. The conception, of sinfulness is the very motive-power that drives the aspirant. "Seek tensely," it is said, "sorrow and sigh deep, mourn still, and stoop low till thine eye water for anguish and for pain." Remorse and grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier tem peraments, like the present one, for example, who show an unusual balance, a sturdy common sense even in the midst of their darkest nights, who have chalked out as much of the sunlit path as is possible in this line. Thus this old-world mystic says: it is true one must see and admit one's sinfulness, the grosser and apparent and more violent ones as well as all the subtle varieties of it that are in you or rise up in you or come from the Enemy. They pursue you till the very end of your journey. Still you need not feel overwhelmed or completely des perate. Once you recognise the sin in you, even the bare fact of recognition means for you half the victory. The mystic says, "It is no sin as thou feelest them." The day Jesus gave himself away on the Cross, since that very day you are free, potentially free from the bondage of sin. Once you give your adherence to Him, the Enemies are rendered powerless. "They tease the soul, but they harm not the soul". Or again, as the mystic graphically phrases it: "This soul is not borne in this image of sin as a sick man, though he feel it; but he beareth it." The best way of dealing with one's enemies is not to struggle and "strive with them." The aspirant, the lover of Jesus, must remember: "He is through grace reformed to the likeness of God ('in the privy substance of his soul within') though he neither feel it nor see it."
01.09 - The Parting of the Way, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We say, then, that man is distinguished from the animal by his having consciousness as it has, but added to it the consciousness of self. Man acts and feels and knows as much as the animal does; but also he knows that he acts, he knows that he feels, he knows that he knowsand this is a thing the animal cannot do. It is the awakening of the sense of self in every mode of being that characterises man, and it is owing to this consciousness of an ego behind, of a permanent unit of reference, which has modified even the functions of knowing and feeling and acting, has refashioned them in a mould which is not quite that of the animal, in spite of a general similarity.
So the humanity of man consists in his consciousness of the self or ego. Is there no other higher mode of consciousness? Or is self-consciousness the acme, the utmost limit to which consciousness can raise itself? If it is so, then we are bound to conclude that humanity will remain eternally human in its fundamental nature; the only progress, if progress at all we choose to call it, will consist perhaps in accentuating this consciousness of the self and in expressing it through a greater variety of stresses, through a richer combination of its colour and light and shade and rhythm. But also, this may not be sothere may be the possibility of a further step, a transcending of the consciousness of the self. It seems unnatural and improbable that having risen from un-consciousness to self-consciousness through a series of continuous marches, Nature should suddenly stop and consider what she had achieved to be her final end. Has Nature become bankrupt of her creative genius, exhausted of her upward drive? Has she to remain content with only a clever manipulation, a mere shuffling and re-arranging of the materials already produced?
As a matter of fact it is not so. The glimpses of a higher form of consciousness we can see even now present in self-consciousness. We have spoken of the different stages of evolution as if they were separate and distinct and incommensurate entities. They may be described as such for the purpose of a logical understanding, but in reality they form a single progressive continuum in which one level gradually fuses into another. And as the higher level takes up the law of the lower and evolves out of it a characteristic function, even so the law of the higher level with its characteristic function is already involved and envisaged in the law of the lower level and its characteristic function. It cannot be asserted positively that because man's special virtue is self-consciousness, animals cannot have that quality on any account. We do see, if we care to observe closely and dispassionately, that animals of the higher order, as they approach the level of humanity, show more and more evident signs of something which is very much akin to, if not identical with the human characteristic of self-consciousness.
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The inflatus of something vast and transcendent, something which escapes all our familiar schemes of cognisance and yet is insistent with a translucent reality of its own, we do feel sometimes within us invading and enveloping our individuality, lifting up our sense of self and transmuting our personality into a reality which can hardly be called merely human. All this life of ego-bound rationality then melts away and opens out the passage for a life of vision and power. Thus it is the poet has felt when he says, "there is this incalculable element in human life influencing us from the mystery which envelops our being, and when reason is satisfied, there is something dee per than Reason which makes us still uncertain of truth. Above the human reason there is a transcendental sphere to which the spirit of men sometimes rises, and the will may be forged there at a lordly smithy and made the unbreakable pivot."(A.E.)
This passage from the self-conscient to the su per-conscient does not imply merely a shifting of the focus of consciousness. The transmutation of consciousness involves a purer illumination, a surer power and a wider compass; it involves also a fundamental change in the very mode of being and living. It gives quite a different life-intuition and a different life-power. The change in the motif brings about a new form altogether, a re-casting and re-shaping and re-energising of the external materials as well. As the lift from mere consciousness to self-consciousness meant all the difference between an animal and a man, so the lift again from self-consciousness to su per-consciousness will mean the difference of a whole world between man and the divine creature that is to be.
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This then, it seems to us, is the immediate problem that Nature has set before herself. She is now at the parting of the ways. She has done with man as an essentially human being, she has brought out the fundamental possibilities of humanity and perfected it, so far as perfection may be attained within the cadre by which she chose to limit herself; she is now looking forward to another kind of ex periment the evolving of another life, another being out of her entrails, that will be greater than the humanity we know today, that will be su perior even to the supreme that has yet been actualised.
Nature has marched from the unconscious to the sub-conscious, from the sub-conscious to the conscious and from the conscious to the self-conscious; she has to rise yet again from the self-conscious to the su per-conscious. The mineral gave place to the plant, the plant gave place to the animal and the animal gave place to man; let man give place to and bring out the divine.
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A Theory of Yoga Principle and personality
01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Walter Hilton: The Scale of perfection Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsWilliam Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.. . . If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
Such is to be the ideal, the perfect, the spiritual man. Have we here the progenitor of the Nietzschean Su perman? Both smell almost the same sulphurous atmosphere. But that also seems to lie in the direction to which the whole world is galloping in its evolutionary course. Humanity in its agelong travail has passed through the agony, one might say, of two extreme and opposite ex periences, which are epitomised in the classic phrasing of Sri Aurobindo as: (1) the Denial of the Materialist and (2) the Refusal of the Ascetic.1 Neither, however, the Spirit alone nor the body alone is man's reality; neither only the earth here nor only the heaven there embodies man's destiny. Both have to be claimed, both have to belivedubhayameva samrt, as the old sage, Yajnavalkya, declared.
The earliest dream of humanity is also the last fulfilment. The Vedic Rishis sang of the marriage of heaven and earthHeaven is my father and this Earth my mother. And Blake and Nietzsche are fiery apostles of that dream and ideal in an age crippled with doubt, falsehood, smallness, crookedness, impotence, colossal ignorance.
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But the process, Monsieur Thibon rightly asserts, must begin with the individual and within the individual. Man must "turn within, feel alive within himself", re-establish his living contact with God, the source and origin from which he has cut himself off. Man must learn to subordinate having to being. Each individual must be himself, a free and spontaneous expression. Upon such individual , upon individuals grouped naturally in smaller collectivities and not upon unformed or ill-formed wholesale masses can a perfect human society be raised and will be raised. Monsieur Thibon insistsand very rightlyupon the variety and diversity of individual and local growths in a unified humanity and not a dead uniformity of regimented oneness. He declares, as the reviewer of the London Times succinctly puts it: "Let us abolish our insensate worship of number. Let us repeal the law of majorities. Let us work for the unity that draws together instead of idolizing the multiplicity that disintegrates. Let us understand that it is not enough for each to have a place; what matters is that each should be in his right place. For the atomized society let us substitute an organic society, one in which every man will be free to do what he alone is qualified and able to do."
So far so good. For it is not far enough. The being or becoming that is demanded in fulfilment of the divine advent in humanity must go to the very roots of life and nature, must seize God in his highest and sovereign status. No prejudice of the past, no notion of our mental habits must seek to impose its law. Thus, for example, in the matter of redeeming the senses by the influx of the higher light, our author seems to consider that the senses will remain more or less as they are, only they will be controlled, guided, used by the higher light. And he seems to think that even the sex relation (even the institution of marriage) may continue to remain, but sublimated, submitted to the laws of the Higher Order. This, according to us, is a dangerous compromise and is simply the imposition of the lower law upon the higher. Our view of the total transformation and divinisation of the Lower is altogether different. The Highest must come down wholly and inhabit in the Lowest, the Lowest must give up altogether its own norms and lift itself into the substance and form too of the Highest.
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Walter Hilton: The Scale of perfection Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
stick to one thing till the end. perhaps that is why we
are not able to go beyond a mediocre average. Or is it
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of personal work.
19 July 1961
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by renunciation or by perfect satisfaction of desire that
one can have the total ex perience of God.2 But isn't
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"Only by perfect renunciation of desire or by perfect satisfaction of desire can the
utter embrace of God be ex perienced, for in both ways the essential precondition is
effected, - desire perishes."
Thoughts and Aphorisms, in SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 89.
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especially perry Mason - there is always a courtroom
scene in which the lawyer perry Mason seems certain
to lose his case; his client is accused of murder, all the
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lawyer perry Mason changes the situation. Throughout
the story there are mysteries, and the trial is like the
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It means that what you do should not be done with a personal,
egoistic aim, for success, for glory, for gain, for material profit or
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thinks it will be the opposite. It is true that our performance is not up to the mark. I hope and I pray to You
that the performance this evening may be at its best.
Sweet Mother, take our actions and guide us. You told
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the 2nd December performance. You should not listen to people
who only know how to criticise. Exaggerated criticism is not an
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I am very lazy and I lack the fervour and perseverance to continue on the chosen path. I am like a flame
that is roused by the wind and rises upwards, but falls
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repeat it after him. This is done a hundred times. personally, I don't like this ceremony. I find it empty of feeling.
I don't like Sri Aurobindo's name to be invoked without
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in silence, each in his own way, for the departed person,
as was done before. That is my opinion.
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than I was before; but all the same I am quite far, perhaps
very far, from the Ideal You have given us. This does not
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Yes, you must persevere with courage and sincerity. You are sure
to succeed one day.
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Full or perfect Divine incarnation.
Power of the Spirit.
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also make a persevering effort.
26 October 1962
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valid example of even one person who takes part in so
many activities and maintains a fairly high standard -
one single person in the whole world?"
Do not forget - all of you who are here - that we want to
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and that the outer person is merely a pretext.
27 January 1963
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Besides, who is perfectly disinterested? One should not pretend to be what one is not. It is better to be frank than hypocritical.
12 April 1963
--
is just as pernicious as any other desire.
11 May 1963
--
a mode of the Eternal. But each can be perverted and become
bad due to the selfish falsehood of human nature which prevents
--
practise the yoga of integral perfection.
7 June 1963
--
Before criticising others, it is better to be sure that one is perfectly
sincere oneself.
--
each person here in the Ashram represents a particular
human difficulty, and that this difficulty will be mastered
--
boys is atavistic, but it remains to ask You what we captains should do about it. personally, I think it is better to
close one's eyes to it, but there are others who prefer to
--
main thing is to have tact and sufficient inner perception to
intervene when necessary or to close one's eyes when it is
--
It is not bolder you should be, but persistent and persevering.
27 July 1963
--
I told her that blaming oneself was perhaps not always
saintly or healthy.
--
above the mind. All I can tell you, which perhaps will put you
on the right track, is that behind law there is a spirit of order
--
at least try to discipline one activity, and persist until one succeeds.
13 October 1963
--
Divine without desiring a personal result from what one does.
Certainly at the beginning, when the Divine is only a word or
--
For each person the way differs in its details, but sincerity
and perseverance are equally indispensable for all.
6 May 1964
--
If one continues with persistence, this becomes very interesting and gets easier and easier.
20 May 1964
--
Ecstasy belongs to the perfected yogi.
Joy belongs to the desireless man.
--
the condition of each person and his link with the whole.
8 July 1964
--
and a tireless perseverance.
In any case, you should never pretend to be more perfect
than you are, and still less should you be satisfied with false
--
strongest - on the contrary. As the individuality perfects itself,
the power of the ego diminishes, and indeed it is by perfecting
himself that the individual arrives at that state of divinisation
--
The perception that some progress has been made should
come spontaneously, by the sudden and unexpected awareness
--
Gandhi, but only for a fortnight. Then a period of chaos
in the Government will follow. After that, a young man
--
seem to be interested in Him (which is perhaps worse).
That is indeed an indication of complete inertia. Sri Aurobindo
--
Because of the rhythm of the universal forces, a person is supposed to have a special receptivity on his birthday each year.
He can therefore take advantage of this receptivity by making good resolutions and fresh progress on the path of his
--
possible in the beginning, it follows that personal effort is necessary."17
16 December 1964
--
loss for human society if persons endowed with an exceptional capacity to serve mankind, such as a gifted
doctor or barrister, come to stay here in the Ashram
for their own salvation? They could perhaps serve the
Divine better by serving men and the world!"
--
will perhaps help to enlighten your thought.
"It is equally ignorant and one thousand miles away from
--
It is impossible to say, because for each person it is different.
It depends on the part of one's being that awakens first and
--
And no one can tell about another person.
10 March 1965
--
Through regular, persevering, obstinate, unflagging exercise - I
mean exercise of concentration and will.
--
and incapacity to express the divine perfection.
The two states of consciousness should be simultaneous and
--
Do I have perfect knowledge? What in me is judging? Do I have
the divine consciousness? Am I completely disinterested in this
--
men will perceive it only when their consciousness has become
enlightened.
--
are followed with persistence and sincerity.
Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931, CWM, Vol. 3, p. 133.
It is best for each person to find his own path, but for this
the aspiration must be ardent, the will unshakable, the patience
--
Does every person who comes to earth have a definite goal he must achieve in this life, and does he achieve
it unconsciously in spite of himself?
--
And for both, you must want it with sincerity and persistence.
5 January 1966
--
Formerly, You were very strict about permitting people to come and live in the Ashram. Now it is no longer
so. Why?
--
Poor boy! Now you are perplexed...
Well, all three are true, but on different planes, and to understand something of the problem one has to reach the domain
--
this calm and indifference through a very intense sadhana resulting in a perfect equality for which good and bad, pleasant
and unpleasant no longer exist. But in that case, mental activity
--
By wanting to do so, with persistence and obstinacy. By doing every day a mental exercise of reading, organisation and
development.
--
on, You reply to X that You have given me permission
because You learned from me that he approves of my
--
in order to attain some perfection, to make progress, for all sorts
of reasons.
--
I don't know - believe in the Divine? One thirsts for a certain perfection, perhaps even to transcend oneself, to arrive at
something higher than what one is; if one is a philanthropist,
--
more become. A Something that is more perfect than all the
perfections, more beautiful than all the beauties, more marvellous than all the marvels, so that even the totality of all that
--
But perhaps it is just because certain individuals and certain
departments are spending extravagantly that there is a financial
--
this must be accompanied by a sustained, ardent, persevering
aspiration and a boundless patience.
--
passes quickly. But there are periods when I feel that I
Series Ten - To a Young Captain
--
from one life to another, become richer and form the psychic personality behind the surface personality. But then
how does the psychic, weighed down by these vibrations
--
what remains, what lasts. And so with that, one has a perception
- a little vague, a little blurred - of the people who were there,
--
Aurobindo's Action. He said that had there been an enlightened person like Vivekananda, the work could have
been done better, but that Mother has to do Her work
--
my "business" was - all I knew was that I had to concentrate on myself in order to perfect myself more and
more. Was that correct? Mother, what actually is my
--
Certainly, the most important occupation is to develop and perfect oneself, but that can be done very well, and even better, while
working. It is for you to know what work it is that most interests
you, the one that opens for you a path towards perfection. It
may be something apparently very modest; it is not the apparent
01.10 - Nicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley: The perennial Philosophy
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsNicholas Berdyaev: God Made Human
--
Nicholas Berdyaev is an ardent worker, as a Russian is naturally expected to be, in the cause of the spiritual rehabilitation of mankind. He is a Christian, a neo-Christian: some of his conclusions are old-world truths and bear repetition and insistence; others are of a more limited, conditional and even doubtful nature. His conception of the value of human person, the dignity and the high reality he gives to it, can never be too welcome in a world where the individual seems to have gone the way of vanished empires and kings and princes. But even more important and interesting is the view he underlines that the true person is a spiritual being, that is to say, it is quite other than the empirical ego that man normally is"not this that one worships" as the Upanishads too declare. Further, in his spiritual being man, the individual, is not simply a portion or a fraction; he is, on the contrary, an integer, a complete whole, a creative focus; the true individual is a microcosm yet holding in it and imaging the macrocosm. Only perhaps greater stress is laid upon the aspect of creativity or activism. An Eastern sage, a Vedantin, would look for the true spiritual reality behind the flux of forces: Prakriti or Energy is only the executive will of the Purusha, the Conscious Being. The personality in Nature is a formulation and emanation of the transcendent im personality.
There is another aspect of personality as viewed by Berdyaev which involves a bias of the more orthodox Christian faith: the Christ is inseparable from the Cross. So he says: "There is no such thing as personality if there is no capacity for suffering. Suffering is inherent in God too, if he is a personality, and not merely an abstract idea. God shares in the sufferings of men. He yearns for responsive love. There are divine as well as human passions and therefore divine or creative personality must always suffer to the end of time. A condition of anguish and distress is inherent in it." The view is logically enforced upon the Christian, it is said, if he is to accept incarnation, God becoming flesh. Flesh cannot but be weak. This very weakness, so human, is and must be specially characteristic of God also, if he is one with man and his lover and saviour.
Eastern spirituality does not view sorrow and sufferingevilas an integral part of the Divine Consciousness. It is born out of the Divine, no doubt, as nothing can be outside the Divine, but it is a local and temporal formation; it is a disposition consequent upon certain conditions and with the absence or elimination of those conditions, this disposition too disappears. God and the Divine Consciousness can only be purity, light, immortality and delight. The compassion that a Buddha feels for the suffering humanity is not at all a feeling of suffering; pain or any such normal human reaction does not enter into its composition; it is the movement of a transcendent consciousness which is beyond and purified of the normal reactions, yet overarching them and entering into them as a soothing and illumining and vivifying presence. The healer knows and understands the pain and suffering of his patient but is not touched by them; he need not contract the illness of his patient in order to be in sympathy with him. The Divine the Soulcan be in flesh and yet not smirched with its mire; the flesh is not essentially or irrevocably the ooze it is under certain given conditions. The divine physical body is composed of radiant matter and one can speak of it even as of the soul that weapons cannot pierce it nor can fire burn it.
--
William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley: The perennial Philosophy
01.10 - Principle and Personality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.10 - Principle and personality
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Principle and personality
It is asked of us why do we preach a man and not purely and solely a principle. Our ideal being avowedly the establishment and reign of a new principle of world-order and not gathering recruits for the camp of a sectarian teacher, it seems all the more inconsistent, if not thoroughly ruinous for our cause, that we should lay stress upon a particular individual and incur the danger of overshadowing the universal truths upon which we seek to build human society. Now, it is not that we are unconscious or oblivious of the many evils attendant upon the system of preaching a man the history of the rise and decay of many sects and societies is there to give us sufficient warning; and yet if we cannot entirely give the go-by to personalities and stick to mere and bare principles, it is because we have clear reasons for it, because we are not unconscious or oblivious either of the evils that beset the system of preaching the principle alone.
Religious bodies that are formed through the bhakti and puja for one man, social reconstructions forced by the will and power of a single individual, have already in the inception this grain of incapacity and disease and death that they are not an integrally self-conscious creation, they are not, as a whole, intelligent and wide awake and therefore constantly responsive to the truths and ideals and realities for which they exist, for which at least, their founder intended them to exist. The light at the apex is the only light and the entire structure is but the shadow of that light; the whole thing has the aspect of a dark mass galvanised into red-hot activity by the passing touch of a dynamo. Immediately however the solitary light fails and the dynamo stops, there is nothing but the original darkness and inertiatoma asit tamasa gudham agre.
Man, however great and puissant he may be, is a perishable thing. People who gather or are gathered round a man and cling to him through the tie of a personal relation must fall off and scatter when the man passes away and the personal tie loses its hold. What remains is a memory, a gradually fading memory. But memory is hardly a creative force, it is a dead, at best, a moribund thing; the real creative power is Presence. So when the great man's presence, the power that crystallises is gone, the whole edifice crumbles and vanishes into air or remains a mere name.
Love and admiration for a mahapurusha is not enough, even faith in his gospel is of little avail, nor can actual participation, consecrated work and labour in his cause save the situation; it is only when the principles, the bare realities for which the mahapurusha stands are in the open forum and men have the full and free opportunity of testing and assimilating them, it is only when individuals thus become living embodiments of those principles and realities that we do create a thing universal and permanent, as universal and permanent as earthly things may be. Principles only can embrace and unify the whole of humanity; a particular personality shall always create division and limitation. By placing the man in front, we erect a wall between the Principle and men at large. It is the principles, on the contrary, that should be given the place of honour: our attempt should be to keep back personalities and make as little use of them as possible. Let the principles work and create in their freedom and power, untrammelled by the limitations of any mere human vessel.
We are quite familiar with this cry so rampant in our democratic ageprinciples and no personalities! And although we admit the justice of it, yet we cannot ignore the trenchant one-sidedness which it involves. It is perhaps only a reaction, a swing to the opposite extreme of a mentality given too much to personalities, as the case generally has been in the past. It may be necessary, as a corrective, but it belongs only to a temporary stage. Since, however, we are after a universal ideal, we must also have an integral method. We shall have to curb many of our susceptibilities, diminish many of our apprehensions and soberly strike a balance between opposite extremes.
We do not speak like politicians or banias; but the very truth of the matter demands such a policy or line of action. It is very well to talk of principles and principles alone, but what are principles unless they take life and form in a particular individual? They are airy nothings, notions in the brain of logicians and metaphysicians, fit subjects for discussion in the academy, but they are devoid of that vital urge which makes them creative agencies. We have long lines of philosophers, especially European, who most scrupulously avoided all touch of personalities, whose utmost care was to keep principles pure and unsullied; and the upshot was that those principles remained principles only, barren and infructuous, some thing like, in the strong and puissant phrase of BaudelaireLa froide majest de la femme strile. And on the contrary, we have had other peoples, much addicted to personalitiesespecially in Asiawho did not care so much for abstract principles as for concrete embodiments; and what has been the result here? None can say that they did not produce anything or produced only still-born things. They produced living creaturesephemeral, some might say, but creatures that lived and moved and had their days.
But, it may be asked, what is the necessity, what is the purpose in making it all a one man show? Granting that principles require personalities for their fructuation and vital functioning, what remains to be envisaged is not one personality but a plural personality, the people at large, as many individuals of the human race as can be consciously imbued with those principles. When principles are made part and parcel of, are concentrated in a single solitary personality, they get "cribbed and cabined," they are vitiated by the idiosyncrasies of the man, they come to have a narrower field of application; they are emptied of the general verities they contain and finally cease to have any effect.
The thing, however, is that what you call principles do not drop from heaven in their virgin purity and all at once lay hold of mankind en masse. It is always through a particular individual that a great principle manifests itself. Principles do not live in the general mind of man and even if they live, they live secreted and unconscious; it is only a puissant personality, who has lived the principle, that can bring it forward into life and action, can awaken, like the Vedic Dawn, what was dead in allmritam kanchana bodhayanti. Men in general are by themselves 'inert and indifferent; they have little leisure or inclination to seek, from any inner urge of their own, for principles and primal truths; they become conscious of these only when expressed and embodied in some great and rare soul. An Avatar, a Messiah or a Prophet is the centre, the focus through which a Truth and Law first dawns and then radiates and spreads abroad. The little lamps are all lighted by the sparks that the great torch scatters.
And yet we yield to none in our demand for holding forth the principles always and ever before the wide open gaze of all. The principle is there to make people self-knowing and self-guiding; and the man is also there to illustrate that principle, to serve as the hope and prophecy of achievement. The living soul is there to touch your soul, if you require the touch; and the principle is there by which to test and testify. For, we do not ask anybody to be a mere automaton, a blind devotee, a soul without individual choice and initiative. On the contrary, we insist on each and every individual to find his own soul and stand on his own Truththis is the fundamental principle we declare, the only creedif creed it be that we ask people to note and freely follow. We ask all people to be fully self-dependent and self-illumined, for only thus can a real and solid reconstruction of human nature and society be possible; we do not wish that they should bow down ungrudgingly to anything, be it a principle or a personality. In this respect we claim the very first rank of iconoclasts and anarchists. And along with that, if we still choose to remain an idol-lover and a hero-worship per, it is because we recognise that our mind, human as it is, being not a simple equation but a complex paradox, the idol or the hero symbolises for us and for those who so will, the very iconoclasm and anarchism and perhaps other more positive things as wellwhich we behold within and seek to manifest.
The world is full of ikons and archons; we cannot escape them, even if we try the world itself being a great ikon and as great an archon. Those who swear by principles, swear always by some personality or other, if not by a living creature then by a lifeless book, if not by Religion then by Science, if not by the East then by the West, if not by Buddha or Christ then by Bentham or Voltaire. Only they do it unwittingly they change one set of personalities for another and believe they have rejected them all. The veils of Maya are a thousand-fold tangle and you think you have entirely escaped her when you have only run away from one fold to fall into another. The wise do not attempt to reject and negate Maya, but consciously accept herfreedom lies in a knowing affirmation. So we too have accepted and affirmed an icon, but we have done it consciously and knowingly; we are not bound by our idol, we see the truth of it, and we serve and utilise it as best as we may.
***
01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The perennial Philosophy
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsAldous Huxley: The perennial Philosophy
Aldous Huxley: The perennial Philosophy
This latest work of Aldous Huxley is a collection of sayings of sages and saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The sayings are arranged under several heads such as "That art Thou", "The Nature of the Ground", "Divine Incarnation", "Self-Knowledge", "Silence", "Faith" etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents and also of the "Neo-Brahmin's" own personal preoccupation. There is also a running commentary, rather a note on each saying, meant to elucidate and explain, naturally from the compiler's standpoint, what is obviously addressed to the initiate.
A similar compilation was published in the Arya, called The Eternal Wisdom (Les Paroles ternelles, in French) a portion of which appeared later on in book-form: that was more elaborate, the contents were arranged in such a way that no comments were needed, they were self-explanatory, divided as they were in chapters and sections and subsections with pro per headings, the whole thing put in a logical and organised sequence. Huxley's compilation begins under the title of the Upanishadic text "That art Thou" with this saying of Eckhart: "The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without". It will be interesting to note that the Arya compilation too starts with the same idea under the title "The God of All; the God who is in All", the first quotation being from Philolaus, "The Universe is a Unity".The Eternal Wisdom has an introduction called "The Song of Wisdom" which begins with this saying from the Book of Wisdom: "We fight to win sublime Wisdom; therefore men call us warriors".
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A modern society or people cannot have religion, that is to say, credal religion, as the basis of its organized collective life. It was mediaeval society and people that were organized on that line. Indeed mediaevalism means nothing more and nothing lessthan that. But whatever the need and justification in the past, the principle is an anachronism under modern conditions. It was needed, perhaps, to keep alive a truth which goes into the very roots of human life and its deepest aspiration; and it was needed also for a dynamic application of that truth on a larger scale and in smaller details, on the mass of mankind and in its day to day life. That was the aim of the Church Militant and the Khilafat; that was the spirit, although in a more Sattwic way, behind the Buddhistic evangelism or even Hindu colonization.
The truth behind a credal religion is the aspiration towards the realization of the Divine, some ultimate reality that gives a permanent meaning and value to the human life, to the existence lodged in this 'sphere of sorrow' here below. Credal paraphernalia were necessary to express or buttress this core of spiritual truth when mankind, in the mass, had not attained a certain level of enlightenment in the mind and a certain degree of development in its life-relations. The modern age is modern precisely because it had attained to a necessary extent this mental enlightenment and this life development. So the scheme or scaffolding that was required in the past is no longer unavoidable and can have either no reality at all or only a modified utility.
A modern people is a composite entity, especially with regard to its religious affiliation. Not religion, but culture is the basis of modern collective life, national or social. Culture includes in its grain that fineness of tem perament which appreciates all truths behind all forms, even when there is a personal allegiance to one particular form.
In India, it is well known, the diversity of affiliations is colossal, sui generis. Two major affiliations have today almost cut the country into two; and des perate remedies are suggested which are worse than the malady itself, as they may kill the patient outright. If it is so, it is, I repeat, the mediaeval spirit that is at:, the bottom of the trouble.
--
In India the spirit of renascence came very late, late almost by three centuries; and even then it could not flood the whole of the continent in all its nooks and corners, psychological and physical. There were any number of pockets (to use a current military phrase) left behind which guarded the spirit of the past and offered persistent and obdurate resistance. perhaps, such a dispensation was needed in India and inevitable also; inevitable, because the religious spirit is closest to India's soul and is its most direct expression and cannot be uprooted so easily; needed, because India's and the world's future demands it and depends upon it.
Only, the religious spirit has to be bathed and purified and enlightened by the spirit of the renascence: that is to say, one must learn and understand and realize that Spirit is the thing the one thing needfulTamevaikam jnatha; 'religions' are its names and forms, appliances and decorations. Let us have by all means the religious spirit, the fundamental ex perience that is the inmost truth of all religions, that is the matter of our soul; but in our mind and life and body let there be a luminous catholicity, let these organs and instruments be trained to see and compare and appreciate the variety, the numberless facets which the one Spirit naturally presents to the human consciousness. Ekam sat viprh bahudh vadanti. It is an ancient truth that man discovered even in his earliest seekings; but it still awaits an adequate expression and application in life.
--
However, coming to historical times, we see wave after wave of the most heterogeneous and disparate elementsSakas and Huns and Greeks, each bringing its quota of exotic materialenter into the oceanic Indian life and culture, lose their separate foreign identity and become part and parcel of the common whole. Even so,a single unitary body was formed out of such varied and shifting materialsnot in the political, but in a socio-religious sense. For a catholic religious spirit, not being solely doctrinal and personal, admitted and embraced in its supple and wide texture almost an infinite variety of approaches to the Divine, of forms and norms of apprehending the Beyond. It has been called Hinduism: it is a vast synthesis of multiple affiliations. It expresses the characteristic genius of India and hence Hinduism and Indianism came to be looked upon as synonymous terms. And the same could be defined also as Vedic religion and culture, for its invariable basis the bed-rock on which it stood firm and erectwas the Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages. But there had already risen a voice of dissidence and discord that of Buddha, not so much, perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a vital schism. The denial of the Vedas by itself, perhaps, would not be serious, but it became so, as it was symptomatic of a dee per divergence. Denying the Vedas, the Buddhistic spirit denied life. It was quite a new thing in the Indian consciousness and spiritual discipline. And it left such a stamp there that even today it stands as the dominant character of the Indian outlook. However, India's synthetic genius rose to the occasion and knew how to bridge the chasm, close up the fissure, and present again a body whole and entire. Buddha became one of the Avataras: the discipline of Nirvana and Maya was reserved as the last duty to be performed at the end of life, as the culmination of a full-length span of action and achievement; the way to Moksha lay through Dharma and Artha and Kama, Sannyasa had to be built upon Brahmacharya and Garhasthya. The integral ideal was epitomized by Kalidasa in his famous lines about the character of the Raghus:
They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in youth they pursued the objects of life; when old they took to spiritual austerities, and in the end they died united with the higher consciousness.
--
History abounds in instances of racial and cultural immixture. Indeed, all major human groupings of today are invariably composite formations. Excepting, perhaps, some primitiveaboriginal tribes there are no pure races existent. The Briton, the Dane, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman have combined to form the British; a Frenchman has a Gaul, a Roman, a Frank in him; and a Spaniard's blood would show an Iberian, a Latin, a Gothic, a Moorish element in it. And much more than a people, a culture in modern times has been a veritable cockpit of multifarious and even incongruous elements. There are instances also in which a perfect fusion could not be accomplished, and one element had to be rejected or crushed out. The complete disappearance of the Aztecs and Mayas in South America, the decadence of the Red Indians in North America, of the Negroes in Africa as a result of a fierce clash with European peoples and European culture illustrate the point.
Nature, on the whole, has solved the problem of blood fusion and mental fusion of different peoples, although on a smaller scale. India today presents the problem on a larger scale and on a higher or dee per level. The demand is for a spiritual fusion and unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is the true bed-rock of unitysince, at bottom, it means identityit is on this plane that mankind has not yet been able to really meet and coalesce. India's genius has been precisely working in the line of a perfect solution of this supreme problem.
Islam comes with a full-fledged spiritual soul and a mental and vital formation commensurable with that inner being and consciousness. It comes with a dynamic spirit, a warrior mood, that aims at conquering the physical world for the Lord, a tem perament which Indian spirituality had not, or had lost long before, if she had anything of it. This was, perhaps, what Vivekananda meant when he spoke graphically of a Hindu soul with a Muslim body. The Islamic dispensation, however, brings with it not only something complementary, but also something contradictory, if not for anything else, at least for the strong individuality which does not easily yield to assimilation. Still, in spite of great odds, the process of assimilation was going on slowly and surely. But of late it appears to have come to a dead halt; difficulties have been presented which seem insu perable.
If religious toleration were enough, if that made up man's highest and largest achievement, then Nature need not have attempted to go beyond cultural fusion; a liberal culture is the surest basis for a catholic religious spirit. But such a spirit of toleration and catholicity, although it bespeaks a widened consciousness, does not always enshrine a profundity of being. Nobody is more tolerant and catholic than a dilettante, but an ardent spiritual soul is different.
To be loyal to one's line of self-fulfilment, to follow one's self-law, swadharma, wholly and absolutelywithout this no spiritual life is possible and yet not to come into clash with other lines and loyalties, nay more, to be in positive harmony with them, is a problem which has not been really solved. It was solved, perhaps, in the consciousness of a Ramakrishna, a few individuals here and there, but it has always remained a source of conflict and disharmony in the general mind even in the field of spirituality. The clash of spiritual or religious loyalties has taken such an acute form in India today, they have been carried to the bitter extreme, in order, we venture to say, that the final synthesis might be absolute and irrevocable. This is India's mission to work out, and this is the lesson which she brings to the world.
The solution can come, first, by going to the true religion of the Spirit, by being truly spiritual and not merely religious, for, as we have said, real unity lies only in and through the Spirit, since Spirit is one and indivisible; secondly, by bringing down somethinga great part, indeed, if not the wholeof this puissant and marvellous Spirit into our life of emotions and sensations and activities.
--
It is precisely strong nuclei that are needed (even, perhaps, one strong nucleus is sufficient) where the single and integrated spiritual consciousness is an accomplished and established fact: that acts inevitably as a solvent drawing in and assimilating or transforming and re-creating as much, of the surroundings as its own degree and nature of achievement inevitably demand.
India did not and could not stop at mere cultural fusionwhich was a supreme gift of the Moguls. She did not and could not stop at another momentous cultural fusion brought about by the European impact. She aimed at something more. Nature demanded of her that she should discover a greater secret of human unity and through progressive ex periments apply and establish it in fact. Christianity did not raise this problem of the greater synthesis, for the Christian peoples were more culture-minded than religious-minded. It was left for an Asiatic people to set the problem and for India to work out the solution.
--
Principle and personality Three Degrees of Social Organisation
01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Aldous Huxley: The perennial Philosophy T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Poets and MysticsGoe the
--
A perfect face amid barbarian faces,
A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme,
Traveller with calm, inimitable paces,
--
The year 1949 has just celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great force of light that was Goethe. We too remember him on the occasion, and will try to present in a few words, as we see it, the fundamental ex perience, the major Intuition that stirred this human soul, the lesson he brought to mankind. Goe the was a great poet. He showed how a language, perhaps least poetical by nature, can be moulded to embody the great beauty of great poetry. He made the German language sing, even as the sun's ray made the stone of Memnon sing when falling upon it. Goe the was a man of consummate culture. Truly and almost literally it could be said of him that nothing human he considered foreign to his inquiring mind. And Goe the was a man of great wisdom. His observation and judgment on thingsno matter to whatever realm they belonghave an arresting appropriateness, a happy and revealing insight. But above all, he was an aspiring soulaspiring to know and be in touch with the hidden Divinity in man and the world.
Goe the and the Problem of Evil
--
One view considers Evil as coeval with Good: the Prince of Evil is God's peer, equal to him in all ways, absolutely separate, independent and self-existent. Light and Darkness are eternal principles living side by side, possessing equal reality. For, although it is permissible to the individual to pass out of the Darkness and enter into Light, the Darkness itself does not disappear: it remains and maintains its domain, and even it is said that some human beings are meant eternally for this domain. That is the Manichean principle and that also is fundamentally the dualistic conception of chit-achit in some Indian systems (although the principle of chit or light is usually given a higher position and priority of excellence).
The Christian too accepts the dual principle, but does not give equal status to the two. Satan is there, an eternal reality: it is anti-God, it seeks to oppose God, frustrate his work. It is the great tempter whose task it is to persuade, to inspire man to remain always an earthly creature and never turn to know or live in God. Now the crucial question that arises is, what is the necessity of this Antagonist in God's scheme of creation? What is the meaning of this struggle and battle? God could have created, if he had chosen, a world without Evil. The orthodox Christi an answer is that in that case one could not have fully appreciated the true value and glory of God's presence. It is to manifest and proclaim the great victory that the strife and combat has been arranged in which Man triumphs in the end and God's work stands vindicated. The place of Satan is always Hell, but he cannot drag down a soul into his pit to hold it there eternally (although according to one doctrine there are or may be certain eternally damned souls).
Goe the carries the process of convergence and even harmony of the two powers a little further and shows that although they are contrary apparently, they are not contradictory principles in essence. For, Satan is, after all, God's servant, even a very obedient servant; he is an instrument in the hand of the Almighty to work out His purpose. The purpose is to help and lead man, although in a devious way, towards a greater understanding, a nearer approach to Himself.
--
Satan is jealous of man who is God's favourite. He tells God that his partiality to man is misplaced. God has put into man a little of his light (reason and intelligence and something more perhaps), but to what purpose? Man tries to soar, he thinks he flies high and wide, but in fact he is and will be an insect that "lies always in the grass and sings its old song in the grass." God answers that whatever the perplexity in which man now is, in the end he will come out and reach the Light with a greater and richer ex perience of it. Satan smiles in return and says he will prove otherwise. Given a free hand, he can do whatever he likes with man: "Dust shall he eat and with a relish." God willingly agrees to the challenge: there is no harm in Satan's trying his hand. Indeed, Satan will prove to be a good companion to man; for man is normally prone to inertia and sinks into repose and rest and stagnation. Satan will be the goad, the force that drives towards ceaseless activity. For activity is life, and without activity no progress.
Thus, as sanctioned by God, there is a competition, a wager between man and Satan. The pact between the parties is this that, on the one hand, Satan will serve man here in life upon earth, and on the other hand, in return, man will have to serve Satan there, on the other side of life. That is to say, Satan will give the whole world to man to enjoy, man will have to give Satan only his soul. Man in his ignorance says he does not care for his soul, does not know of a there or elsewhere: he will be satisfied if he gets what he wants upon earth. That, evidently, is the demand of what is familiarly known as life-force (lan vital): the utmost fulfilment of the life-force is what man stands for, although the full significance of the movement may not be clear to him or even to Satan at the moment. For life-force does not necessarily drag man down, as its grand finale as it were, into hellhowever much Satan might wish it to be so. In what way, we shall see presently. Now Satan promises man all that he would desire and even more: he would give him his fill so' that he will ask for no more. Man takes up the challenge and declares that his hunger is insatiable, whatever Satan can bring to it, it will take in and press on: satisfaction and satiety will never come in his way. Satan thinks he knows better, for he is armed with a master weapon to lay man low and make him cry halt!
--
Satan proposes to lead man down into hell through a sure means, nothing more sure, according to him, viz., love for a woman and a woman's love in return. Nothing like that to make man earth-bound or hell-bound and force out of him the nostalgic cry, "Time must have a stop." A most simple, primal and primeval lyric love will most suit Satan's purpose. Hence the Margaret episode. Love=Passion=Lust=Hell; that is the inevitable equation sequence, and through which runs the magic thread of infatuation. And that charm is invincible. Satan did succeed and was within an ace, as they say, of the final and definitive triumph: but that was not to be, for he left out of account an incalculable element. Love, even human love has, at least can have, a wonderful power, the potency of reversing the natural decree and bring about a su pernatural intervention. Human love can at a crucial momentin extremiscall down the Divine Grace, which means God's love for man. And the soul meant for perdition and about to be seized and carried away by Satan finds itself suddenly free and lifted up and borne by Heaven's messengers. Human Jove is divine love itself in earthly form and figure and whatever its apparent aberrations it is in soul and substance that thing. Satan is hoisted with his own petard. That is God's irony.
But Goethe's Satan seems to know or feel something of his fate. He knows his function and the limit too of his function. He speaks of the doomsday for people, but it is his doomsday also, he says in mystic terms. Yes, it is his doomsday, for it is the day of man's liberation. Satan has to release man from the pact that stands cancelled. The soul of man cannot be sold, even if he wanted it.
--
The angels weave the symphony that is creation. They represent the various notes and rhythmsin their higher and purer degrees that make up the grand harmony of the spheres. It is magnificent, this music that moves the cosmos, and wonderful the glory of God manifest therein. But is it absolutely perfect? Is there nowhere any flaw in it? There is a doubting voice that enters a dissenting note. That is Satan, the Antagonist, the Evil One. Man is the weakest link in the chain of the apparently all- perfect harmony. And Satan boldly proposes to snap it if God only let him do so. He can prove to God that the true nature of his creation is not cosmos but chaos not a harmony in peace and light, but a confusion, a Walpurgis Night. God acquiesces in the play of this apparent breach and proves in the end that it is part of a wider scheme, a vaster harmony. Evil is rounded off by Grace.
The total eradication of Evil from the world and human nature and the remoulding of a terrestrial life in the substance and pattern of the Highest Good that is beyond all dualities is a conception which it was not for Goe the to envisage. In the order of reality or existence, first there is the consciousness of division, of trenchant separation in which Good is equated with not-evil and evil with not-good. This is the outlook of individualised consciousness. Next, as the consciousness grows and envelops the whole existence, good and evil are both embraced and are found to form a secret and magic harmony. That is the universal or cosmic consciousness. And Goethe's genius seems to be an outflowering of something of this status of consciousness. But there is still a higher status, the status of transcendence in which evil is not simply embraced but dissolved and even transmuted into a supreme reality of which it is an aberration, a reflection or projection, a lower formulation. That is the mystery of a spiritual realisation to which Goe the aspired perhaps, but had not the necessary initiation to enter into.
***
Aldous Huxley: The perennial Philosophy T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
01.12 - Three Degrees of Social Organisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It might be objected here however that actually in the history of humanity the conception of Duty has been no less pugnacious than that of Right. In certain ages and among certain peoples, for example, it was considered the im perative duty of the faithful to kill or convert by force or otherwise as many as possible belonging to other faiths: it was the mission of the good shepherd to burn the impious and the heretic. In recent times, it was a sense of high and solemn duty that perpetrated what has been termed "purges"brutalities undertaken, it appears, to purify and preserve the integrity of a particular ideological, social or racial aggregate. But the real name of such a spirit is not duty but fanaticism. And there is a considerable difference between the two. Fanaticism may be defined as duty running away with itself; but what we are concerned with here is not the aberration of duty, but duty pro per self-poised.
One might claim also on behalf of the doctrine of Right that the right kind of Right brings no harm, it is as already stated another name for liberty, for the privilege of living and it includes the obligation to let live. One can do what one likes provided one does not infringe on an equal right of others to do the same. The measure of one's liberty is equal to the measure of others' liberty.
--
What is required is not therefore an external delimitation of frontiers between unit and unit, but an inner outlook of nature and a poise of character. And this can be cultivated and brought into action by learning to live by the sense of duty. Even then, even the sense of duty, we have to admit, is not enough. For if it leads or is capable of leading into an aberration, we must have something else to check and control it, some other higher and more potent principle. Indeed, both the conceptions of Duty and Right belong to the domain of mental ideal, although one is usually more aggressive and militant (Rajasic) and the other tends to be more tolerant and considerate (sattwic): neither can give an absolute certainty of poise, a clear guarantee of perfect harmony.
Indian wisdom has found this other, a fairer terma tertium quid,the mystic factor, sought for by so many philosophers on so many counts. That is the very well- known, the very familiar termDharma. What is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature.
We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. Consciousness at Its origin and in its primitive formulation is dominated by the principle of inertia (tamas); in that state things have mostly an undifferentiated collective existence, they helplessly move about acted upon by forces outside them. A rise in growth and evolution brings about differentiation, specialisation, organisation. And this means consciousness of oneself of the distinct and separate existence of each and everyone, in other words, self-assertion, the claim, the right of each individual unit to be itself, to become itself first and foremost. It is a necessary development; for it signifies the growth of self consciousness in the units out of a mass unconsciousness or semi-consciousness. It is the expression of rajas, the mode of dynamism, of strife and struggle, it is the corrective of tamas.
In the earliest and primitive society men lived totally in a mass consciousness. Their life was a blind obedienceobedience to the chief the patriarch or pater familiasobedience to the laws and customs of the collectivity to which one belonged. It was called duty; it was called even dharma, but evidently on a lower level, in an inferior formulation. In reality it was more of the nature of the mechanical functioning of an automaton than the exercise of conscious will and deliberate choice, which is the very soul of the conception of duty.
The conception of Right had to appear in order to bring out the principle of individuality, of personal freedom and fulfilment. For, a true healthy collectivity is the association and organisation of free and self-determinate units. The growth of independent individuality naturally means at first clash and rivalry, and a violently competitive society is the result. It is only at this stage that the conception of duty can fruitfully come in and develop in man and his society the mode of Sattwa, which is that of light and wisdom, of toleration and harmony. Then only a society is sought to be moulded on the principle of co-ordination and co-o peration.
Still, the conception of duty cannot finally and definitively solve the problem. It cannot arrive at a perfect harmonisation of the conflicting claims of individual units; for, duty, as I have already said, is a child of mental idealism, and although the mind can exercise some kind of control over life-forces, it cannot altogether eliminate the seeds of conflict that lie imbedded in the very nature of life. It is for this reason that there is an element of constraint in duty; it is, as the poet says, the "stern daughter of the Voice of God". One has to compel oneself, one has to use force on oneself to carry out one's dutythere is a feeling somehow of its being a bitter pill. The cult of duty means rajas controlled and coerced by Sattwa, not the transcendence of rajas. This leads us to the high and supreme conception of Dharma, which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one has to obey: it is the law of self-nature that one inevitably follows, it is easy, spontaneous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic, the path of Dharma is of the gods, godly (cf. Virabhava and Divyabhava of the Tantras).
The principle of Dharma then inculcates that each individual must, in order to act, find out his truth of being, his true soul and inmost consciousness: one must entirely and integrally merge oneself into that, be identified with it in such a manner that all acts and feelings and thoughts, in fact all movements, inner and outerspontaneously and irrepressibly well out of that fount and origin. The individual souls, being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature, never collide or haltna me thate na tas thatuh but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony.
The future society of man is envisaged as something of like nature. When the mortal being will have found his immortal soul and divine self, then each one will be able to give full and free expression to his self-nature (swabhava); then indeed the utmost sweep of dynamism in each and all will not cause clash or conflict; on the contrary, each will increase the other and there will be a global increment and fulfilmentparasparam bhavayantah. The division and conflict, the stress and strain that belong to the very nature of the inferior level of being and consciousness will then have been transcended. It is only thus that a diviner humanity can be born and replace all the other moulds and types that can never lead to anything final and absolutely satisfactory.
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Into the world of perpetual solitude,. . . .
Internal darkness, deprivation
--
Moves perpetually in its stillness. 14
But, alas!
--
Our poet is too self-conscious, he himself feels that he has not the perfect voice. A Homer, even a Milton possesses a unity of tone and a wholeness of perception which are denied to the modern. To the modern, however, the old masters are not subtle enough, broad enough, psychological enough, let us say the word, spiritual enough. And yet the poetic inspiration, more than the religious urge, needs the injunction not to be busy with too many things, but to be centred upon the one thing needful, viz., to create poetically and not to discourse philosophically or preach prophetically. Not that it is impossible for the poet to swallow the philosopher and the prophet, metabolising them into the substance of his bone and marrow, of "the trilling wire in his blood", as Eliot graphically expresses. That perhaps is the consummation towards which poetry is tending. But at present, in Eliot, at least, the strands remain distinct, each with its own tem per and rhythm, not fused and moulded into a single streamlined form of beauty. Our poet flies high, very high indeed at times, often or often he flies low, not disdaining the perilous limit of bathos. perhaps it is all wilful, it is a mannerism which he cherishes. The mannerism may explain his psychology and enshrine his philosophy. But the poet, the magician is to be looked for elsewhere. In the present collection of poems it is the philosophical, exegetical, discursive Eliot who dominates: although the high lights of the subject-matter may be its justification. Still even if we have here doldrums like
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence
--
which make one wish to have more of the kind. perhaps his previous works contained lines more memorable, for example, those justly famous
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I speak of Roerich as a Western soul, but more precisely perhaps he is a soul of the mid-region (as also in another sense we shall see subsequently) intermediary between the East and the West. His external make-up had all the characteristic elements of the Western culture, but his mind and tem perament, his inner soul was oriental. And yet it was not the calm luminous staticancientsoul that an Indian or a Chinese sage is; it is a nomad soul, newly awakened, young and fresh and ardent, something primitive, pulsating with the unspoilt green sap of life something in the manner of Whitman. And that makes him all the more representative of the young and ardent West yearning for the light that was never on sea or land.
Is it not strange that one should look to the East for the light? There is a light indeed that dwells in the setting suns, but that is the inferior light, the light that moves level with the earth, pins us down to the normal and ordinary life and consciousness: it" leads into the Night, into Nihil, pralaya. It is the light of the morning sun that man looks up to in his forward march, the sun that rises in the East whom the Vedic Rishi invoked in these magnificent lines:
--
All elemental personalities have something of the unconventional and irrational in them. And Roerich is one such in his own way. The truths and realities that he envisages and seeks to realise on earth are elemental and fundamental, although apparently simple and commonplace.
***
0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
to perceive a result.
18 January 1967
--
and perfected in the course of many earthly lives and form the
psychic being. When the psychic being is fully formed, it is aware
of the consciousness of the soul and manifests it perfectly.
1 February 1967
--
must persistently eliminate from your consciousness the effect
produced by their influence.
--
between periods of estrangement and embrace, of ecstasy
and despair, the Divine too will be farther from you or
--
I want to overcome a difficulty: it is that when I perceive
faults or weaknesses in myself, something tries to justify
--
But of course, for the first to be perfect, the second must be
present.
--
I have begun to see that both the personal effort of the
sadhak and its result depend on the Divine Grace.
--
But perhaps in these two cases, the slowness is not the same.
20 July 1967
--
time to do all that You do? perhaps physical time does
not exist for You!
--
Spontaneity in feelings and action comes from a permanent contact with the psychic, which brings order into the thoughts and
automatically controls the vital impulses.
--
Wealth should not be a personal pro perty and should be at
the disposal of the Divine for the welfare of all.
--
When Mother says that wealth should not be a personal
pro perty, I understand that what should come is more
--
should be used for the progress of the earth, this person will
be developed enough inwardly to receive the knowledge of how
--
Beyond the creation lies the perfect Oneness, but potentially it
contains duality since the Mahashakti will manifest for the needs
--
in the perfect Oneness, everything exists at the same
time, simultaneously. This cannot be understood, it must
--
Consciousness in its purity is perfect and infallible.
2 April 1968
--
with pure Being it is quite unconscious. Very few persons are
conscious of this relation. It is usually the result of Yoga.
--
It is beyond all personal effort.
27 May 1968
--
Only the Supreme Lord is perfectly sincere.
And when the ego is abolished, only the Supreme Lord
--
But there comes a time when the ascent becomes a perfect
repose.
--
If the universe is one, shouldn't the liberation of one single person on earth have the power to liberate everyone?
Oneness means identity in origin; but in the manifestation each
--
the path. But isn't a person who is not advancing towards
the Divine also the Divine?
--
But the capacity to perceive and receive it and the habit of
distorting it differ with each one.
--
"A knowledge which became what it perceived,
Replaced the separated sense and heart
--
Can one say, Mother, that perfect receptivity comes only
with constant union with the Divine?
--
time it is perfect purity.
This is what we should strive for.
--
The human pleasure of possessing is a perversion of
what, Mother?
All pleasure is a perversion, by egoistic limitation, of the Ananda
which is the purpose of the universal manifestation.
--
To have the perception of the Presence, the participation of feeling is indispensable, and when sensation collaborates, then the
perception becomes concrete and tangible.
--
In its essential truth, but one usually keeps the perception of the
illusory appearance at the same time.
--
Is the perception of the illusory appearance automatic
for the yogi?
--
automatic perception of the outer world; but this perception is
more complete than the ordinary one, as if it revealed something
0.12 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You are born for a spiritual and conscious life - but perhaps
you are still too young to have the will to realise it.
--
It is a long and meticulous work that requires much perseverance, but the result is worth the trouble, for it brings not
only mastery but also the possibility of the transformation and
--
ask it to remain perfectly quiet and silent so that your body
can rest pro perly. A little concentration for that, before going to
--
The possibilities are different for each person: there are as many
cases as there are persons. But each one can learn which conditions are best for his rest.
You can become conscious of your nights and your sleep
--
the divine command and to add nothing personal to it.
It must be said that this is not easy. Only he who no longer
0.13 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
and has the form, the appearance of the person's body. If one
person dreams of another, it means that both have met at night,
--
What is the difference between persons who have
developed their consciousness and those who have not?
--
asking for permission, because they sensed that it would not be
given.
--
If the departed one is a person one loves, one should concentrate one's love on him in peace and calm, for that is what
can most help the one who has departed.
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At this perilous hour when egoisms are at odds and asserting
themselves, the only safety lies in taking refuge in Thee!
--
their small personal egoism and turn exclusively to the Divine
for help and light. The wisdom of men is ignorant. Only the
--
It is by perfecting our faith in the Divine Grace that we shall
be able to conquer the defeatism of the subconscient.
--
Total union and the perfect manifestation of the Divine are the
sole means of putting an end to the suffering and misery of the
--
It is only in perfect union with the Divine that the consciousness
can emerge into the eternal delight. And this conscious union is
--
the person one chooses to love.
(3) Those who consecrate their life to the service of humanity through some activity done not for personal satisfaction
but truly to be useful to others without calculation and without
expecting any personal gain from their work.
(4) Those who give themselves entirely to the Divine and
--
attained its progressive perfection.
8 January 1972
--
That is why I said "progressive perfection", because the
manifestation of the consciousness of detail is infinite and unending.
--
The first condition is not to have one's own personal interest as
a goal.
The first qualities needed are boldness, courage and perseverance.
And then to be conscious that one knows nothing compared
--
come from the absence of personal desires.
One could take as a programme:
--
Sincerity, humility, perseverance and an insatiable thirst for
progress are essential for a happy and fruitful life. Above all, one
--
towards an increasing perfection, we shall be well on the way to
overcoming the inevitability of death.
--
It is only by giving ourselves entirely to the Divine in perfect
trust and gratitude that the difficulties will be overcome.
--
"Supreme Lord, perfect Consciousness, You alone know
truly what we are, what we can do, what progress we must make
--
(2) To ceaselessly perfect the functioning of this instrument.
(3) To make this instrument increasingly receptive and obedient to the Divine.
--
Supreme Lord, perfection that we must become, perfection that
we must manifest.
0 1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
object:0_1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?
author class:The Mother
--
There are other great personalities of the Divine Mother, but they were more difficult to bring down and have not stood out in front with so much prominence in the evolution of the earth-spirit. There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental realization,most of all one who is her personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda1 which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divines Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of all the other Powers of the universe.
Sri Aurobindo, The Mother
(A disciple:) Sweet Mother, what is this personality and when will It manifest?
My answer is ready.
--
You asked, What is this personality and when will She come? Here is my answer (Mother reads):
She has come, bringing with Her a splendor of power and love, an intensity of divine joy heretofore unknown to the Earth. The physical atmosphere has been completely changed by her descent, permeated with new and marvelous possibilities.
But if She is ever to reside and act here, She has to find at least a minimal receptivity, at least one human being with the required vital and physical qualities, a kind of su per-Parsifal gifted with an innate and integral purity, yet possessing at the same time a body strong enough and poised enough to bear unwaveringly the intensity of the Ananda She brings.
Thus far, She has not found what is needed. Men remain obstinately men and do not want to or are unable to become su permen. All they can receive and express is a love at their own dimension: a human lovewhereas the supreme bliss of divine Ananda eludes their perception.
At times, finding the world unready to receive Her, She contemplates withdrawing. But how cruel a loss this would be!
--
I met a man (I was perhaps 20 or 21 at the time), an Indian who had come to Europe and who told me of the Gita. There was a French translation of it (a rather poor one, I must say) which he advised me to read, and then he gave me the key (HIS key, it was his key). He said, Read the Gita (this translation of the Gita which really wasnt worth much but it was the only one available at the timein those days I wouldnt have understood anything in other languages; and besides, the English translations were just as bad and well, Sri Aurobindo hadnt done his yet!). He said, Read the Gita knowing that Krishna is the symbol of the immanent God, the God within. That was all. Read it with THAT knowledgewith the knowledge that Krishna represents the immanent God, the God within you. Well, within a month, the whole thing was done!
So some of you people have been here since the time you were toddlerseverything has been explained to you, the whole thing has been served to you on a silver platter (not only with words, but through psychic aid and in every possible way), you have been put on the path of this inner discovery and then you just go on drifting along: When it comes, it will come.If you even spare it that much thought!
--
It is very clear. So it is not I who can make Her stay. And I certainly cannot ask Her to stay for egotistical reasons. Moreover, all these Aspects, all these personalities manifest constantly but they never manifest for personal reason. Not one of them has ever thought of helping my bodybesides, I dont ask them to because that is not their purpose. But it is more than obvious that if the people around me were receptive, She could permanently manifest since they could receive Herand this would help my body enormously because all these vibrations would run through it. But She never gets even a chance to manifestnot a single one. She only meets people who dont even feel Her when Shes there! They dont even notice Her, theyre not even aware of her presence. So how can She manifest in these conditions? Im not going to ask Her, Please come and change my body. We dont have that kind of relationship! Furthermore, the body itself wouldnt agree. It never thinks of itself, it never pays attention to itself, and besides, it is only through the work that it can be transformed.
Yes, certainly had there been any receptivity when She came down and had She been able to manifest with the power with which She came But I can tell you one thing: even before Her coming, when, with Sri Aurobindo, I had begun going down (for the Yoga) from the mental plane to the vital plane, when we brought our yoga down from the mental plane into the vital plane, in less than a month (I was forty years old at the time I didnt seem very old, I looked less than forty, but I was forty anyway), after no more than a month of this yoga, I looked exactly like an 18 year old! And someone who knew me and had stayed with me in Japan5 came here, and when he saw me, he could scarcely believe his eyes! He said, But my god, is it you? I said, Of course!
0 1955-03-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother, once more I come to ask you for Mahakalis1 intervention. After a period when everything seemed much better, I again awake to impossible mornings when I live badly, very badly, far from you, incapable of calling you and, whats more, of feeling your Presence or your help.
I dont know what mud is stirring about in me, but everything is obscured, and I cannot dissociate myself from these vital waves.
0 1955-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
perhaps being far away from the Ashram for a while will help you feel the special atmosphere that exists here and that cannot be found anywhere else to the same extent.
In any event, my blessings will always be with you to help you find, at long last, this inner Presence which alone gives joy and stability.
0 1955-06-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother, I cannot say that it is a nostalgia for the outside world that is drawing me backwards nor some attachment to a personal form of life, nor even some vital desire seeking its own satisfaction. That old world no longer attracts me, and I do not see at all what I would do there. Yet something is standing in my way.
If only I could see a distinct error blocking my path which I could clearly attack But I feel that I am not responsible, that it is not my personal fault if I remain without aspiration, stagnating. I feel like a battlefield of contending forces that are beyond me and against which I can do NOTHING. Oh Mother, it is not an excuse for a lack of will, or at least I dont think so I profoundly feel like a helpless toy, totally helpless.
If the divine force, if your grace, does not intervene to shatter this obscure resistance that is drawing me downwards in spite of myself, I dont know what will become of me Mother, I am not blackmailing you, I am only expressing my helplessness, my anguish.
0 1955-09-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I have friends in Bangalore whom I would like to join for two or three weeks, perhaps more, perhaps less, however long it may take to confront this vital with its own freedom. I need a vital activity, to move, to sail, for example, to have friends etc. The need I am feeling is exactly that which I sought to satisfy in the past through my long boat journeys along the coast of Brittany. It is a kind of thirst for space and movement.
Otherwise, Mother, there is this block before me that is obscuring all the rest and taking away my taste for everything. I would like to leave, Mother, but not in revolt; may it be an ex perience to go through that receives your approval. I would not like to be cut off from you by your displeasure or your condemnation, for this would seem to me terrible and leave me no other recourse but to plunge into the worst excesses in order to forget.
0 1955-10-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
1) To prostrate oneself at His feet in a surrender of all pride, with a perfect HUMILITY.
2) To unfold ones being before Him, to open entirely ones body from head to toe, as one opens a book, spreading open ones centers so as to make all their movements visible in a total SINCERITY that allows nothing to remain hidden.
--
Generally, when these movements are made in the right way, they are followed by a perfect identification, a dissolution of the ego, bringing about a sublime felicity.
***
0 1956-03-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Note written by Mother in French. At this period, Mother's back was already bent. This straightening of her back seems to be the first physiological effect of the 'Supramental Manifestation' of February 29, which is perhaps the reason why Mother noted down the ex perience under the name 'Agenda of the Supramental Action on Earth.' It was the first time Mother gave a title to what would become this fabulous document of 13 volumes. The ex perience took place during a 'translation class' when, twice a week, Mother would translate the works of Sri Aurobindo into French before a group of disciples.
AGENDA OF THE SUPRAMENTAL ACTION ON EARTH
0 1956-03-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Almost a total straightening, along with a very clear perception of the new force and power in the cells of the body.
Mother appeared on her balcony daily at about 6 a.m. to give a few moments of meditation to her disciples before the beginning of the day's work.
0 1956-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother, two months ago I had a clear mental perception of what was asked of me: to spend the rest of my life here. This is the source of my difficulties and of the inner hell I have been living through ever since. Each time I try to emerge, there is this image that rises up in me: your-whole-life and this casts me into a violent conflict. When I came here, I thought of staying for two or three years; for me the Ashram was a means of realization, not an end.
I understand now that as long as my whole being has not ACCEPTED that it must finish its life here, there is no way out nor any recovery possible. Through my mental force alone, this acceptance is impossible; I have been turning infernally in circles these past two months, and the mind is in league with the vital. Therefore, a force greater than mine must help me accept that my way is here. I need you, Mother, for without you I am lost. I need you to tell me that the Truth of my being is indeed here and that I am truly ready to follow this path. Mother, I beseech you, help me to see the truth of my being, give me some sign that my way is here and not elsewhere. I beg of you, Mother, help me to know.
I also had a very clear sensation that you were abandoning me, that you had no further interest in me and I could just as well do as I pleased. perhaps you cannot forgive some of my inner rebellions which have been so very violent? Am I totally guilty? Is it true that you are abandoning me?
I am broken and battered in the depths of my being as I was in my flesh in the concentration camps. Will the divine grace take pity on me? Can you, do you want to help me? Alone I can do nothing. I am in an absolute solitude, even beyond all rebellion, at my very end.
0 1956-04-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The difficulties of the past weeks have taught me that as soon as one strays from the true consciousness, in however trifling a way, anything may happen, any excess, any aberration, any imbalance and I have felt very dangerous things prowling about me. Mother, you told me in regard to Patrick1 that the law of the manifestation was a law of freedom, even the freedom to choose wrongly. This evening, it has been my very deep perception that this freedom is virtually always a freedom to choose wrongly. I harbor a great fear of losing the true consciousness once again. I have become aware of how fragile everything in me is and that very little would be enough to carry me away.
Therefore, Sweet Mother, I come to ask a great grace of you, from the depths of my heart: take my freedom into your hands. Prevent me from falling back, far away from you. I place this freedom in your hands. Keep me safe, Mother, protect me. Grant me the grace of watching over me and of taking me in your hands completely, like a child whose steps are unsure. I no longer want this Freedom. It is you I want, the Truth of my being. Mother, as a grace, I implore you to free me from my freedom to choose wrongly.
0 1956-05-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Those who are ready within, who are open and in touch with the higher forces, those who have had a more or less direct personal contact with the Supramental Light and Consciousness, are capable of feeling the difference in the earth atmosphere.
But for this only like can know like. Only the Supramental Consciousness in an individual can perceive the Supramental acting in the earth atmosphere. Those who, for whatever reason, have developed this perception can see it. But those who are not even remotely conscious of their inner beings, who would be quite at a loss to say what their souls look like, are certainly not ready to perceive the difference in the earth atmosphere. They still have quite a way to go for that. Because, for those whose consciousness is more or less exclusively centered in the outer beingmental, vital and physicalthings need to have an absurd or unexpected appearance to be noticeable. And then they call it a miracle.
But we do not call a miracle the constant miracle of the forces that intervene to change circumstances and human natures and which have very far-reaching consequences, for we see only the appearance, and this appearance seems quite natural. But in truth, if you were to reflect upon the least thing that happens, you would be forced to acknowledge that it is miraculous.
--
Look. If all of you who have heard of this, not once but perhaps hundreds of times, who have spoken of it yourselves, thought about it, hoped for it, wanted it (there are some people who have come here only for this, to receive the Supramental Force and to be transformed into su permen, this has been their goal) then how is it that you were ALL such strangers to this Force that when it came, you did not even feel it?!
Can you solve that problem for me? If you find the solution to this problem, you will have the solution to the difficulty.
--
Individually, each ones goal was to make himself ready, to enter into a more or less intimate individual relationship with this Force, so as to help the process; or else, if he could not help, at least be ready to recognize and be open to the Force when it would manifest. Then instead of being an alien element in a world in which your OWN inner capacity remains unmanifest, you suddenly become THAT, you enter directly, fully, into the very atmosphere: the Force is there, all around you, permeating you.
If you had had a little inner contact, you would have recognized it immediately, dont you think so?
0 1956-09-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
My friends keep telling me that I am not ready and that, like R,1 whom they knew, I should go and spend some time in society. They say that my idea of going to the Himalayas is absurd, and they advise me to return to Brazil for a few years to stay with W W is an elderly American millionaire the only good rich man I knowwho wanted to make me an heir, as it were, to his financial affairs and who treats me rather like a son. He was quite disappointed when I came back to India. My friends tell me that if I have to go through a period in the outside world, the best way to do it is to remain near someone who is fond of me, while at the same time ensuring a material independence for the future.
These questions of money do not interest me. In fact, nothing interests me except this something I feel within me. The only question for me is to know whether I am truly ready for the Yoga, or if my failings are not the sign of some immaturity. Mother, you alone can tell me what is right.
--
But perhaps you have felt this way because you had left your work in the Ashram for an entirely personal, that is, necessarily egoistical reason, and egoism always isolates one from the great current of universal forces. That is why, too, you no longer clearly perceive my love and my help which nevertheless are always with you.
You asked me what I see and whether your difficulties will not reappear upon your return to the Ashram. It may well be. If you return as you still are at present, it may be that after a very short period it will all begin again. That is why I am going to propose something to you but to accept it you will have to be heroic and very determined in your consecration to my work.
This possibility appeared to me while reading what you wrote about your sojourn in Brazil with W, the only good rich man you have known. Here is my proposal, which I express to you quite plainly, spontaneously, as it presented itself to me.
--
That which you would not do for yourself personally, would you not do it for the divine cause?
Go to Brazil, to this good rich man, make him understand the importance of our work, the extent to which his fortune would be used to the utmost for the good of all and for the earths salvation were he to put it, even partially, at the disposal of our action. Win this victory over the power of money, and by so doing you will be freed from all your personal difficulties. Then you can return here with no apprehension, and you will be ready for the transformation.
Reflect upon this, take your time, tell me very frankly how you feel about it and whether it appears to you, as it does to me, to be a door opening onto a path that will bring you back, free and strong at last to me.
0 1956-10-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
And what is the Ashram? (I dont even mean in terms of the Universeon Earth only.) A speck. And why should this speck receive exceptional treatment? perhaps if people here had realized the su permind. But are they so exceptional as to expect exceptional treatment?
As Sri Aurobindo says, people see God as a magnified man: he is the Demiurge, Jehovahwhat I call the Lord of Falsehood.
0 1956-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Oneidentity with the Origin, which imparts an absolute serenity and perfect detachment to the action.
The otheridentity with the supreme Grace, which obliterates and abolishes all errors committed in the action by whomsoever and whatsoever and which annuls all the consequences of these errors.
And the moment I perceived this, I saw that my third attitude in action, which is the will for progress for the whole earth as well as for each particular individual, was not the height of my being.
***
--
No, it is exactly the opposite of what you are saying. It is not that the Divine in his divinity is opposed to his own manifested selfHe is very far beyond, beyond the necessity for Grace; He perceives his unique and exclusive responsibility, and that it is He and He alone who must change in His Manifestation so that all may change.
***
0 1956-10-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
So far, your whole life has revolved around yourself; all you have done, even the apparently most disinterested or least egoistic act, has been done with a view to your own personal growth or illumination. It is time to live for something other than yourself, something other than your own individuality.
Open a new chapter in your existence. Live, no longer for your own realization or the realization of your ideal, however exalted it may be, but to serve an eternal work that transcends your individuality on all sides.
0 1956-12-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Mother, perhaps it would be good if I told you what is happening within me, as sincerely as I can:
I feel that this Truth of my being, this self most intensely felt, is independent from any form or institution. As far back as I can reach in my consciousness, this thing has been there; it was what drove me at an early age to liberate myself from my family, my religion, my country, a profession, marriage or society in general. I feel this thing to be a kind of absolute freedom, and I have been feeling within me this same profound drive for more than a year. Is this need for freedom wrong? And yet is it not because of this that the best in me has blossomed?
0 1957-01-18, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
You told me one day that I could be useful to you. Then, by chance, I came across this passage from Sri Aurobindo the other day: Everyone has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which God offers him to take or refuse.
Could you tell me, as a favor, what this particular thing is in me which may be useful to you and serve you? If I could only know what my real work is in this world All the conflicting impulses in me stem from my being like an unemployed force, like a being whose place has not yet been determined.
0 1957-04-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
So what is to be done? I intend asking your permission to leave as soon as the book is finished (I am determined to finish it, for it will rid me of the past it represents). I expect nothing from the world, except a bit of external space, in the absence of another space.
Signed: Bernard
0 1957-04-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The book is finished.1 I would like to give it to you personally, if it would not disturb you, whenever you wish.
Your child,
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
She clearly remembered where her room was, but each time she set out to go there, either the staircase disappeared or things were so changed that she could no longer find her way! So she went here and there, up and down, searched, went in and out but it was impossible to find the way to her room! Since all of this assumed a physical appearanceas I said, a very familiar and very common appearance, as is always the case in these symbolic visions there was somewhere (how shall I put it?) the hotels administrative office and a woman who seemed to be the manager, who had all the keys and who knew where everyone was staying. So the daughter went to this person and asked her, Could you show me the way to my room?But of course! Easily! Everyone around the manager looked at her as if to say, How can you say that? However, she got up, and with authority asked for a key the key to the daughters roomsaying, I shall take you there. And off she went along all kinds of paths, but all so complicated, so bizarre! The daughter was following along behind her very attentively, you see, so as not to lose sight of her. But just as they should have come to the place where the daughters room was supposed to be, suddenly the manageress (let us call her the manageress), both the manageress and her key vanished! And the sense of this vanishing was so acute that at the same time, everything vanished!
So to help you understand this enigma, let me tell you that the mother is physical Nature as she is, and the daughter is the new creation. The manageress is the worlds organizing mental consciousness as Nature has developed it thus far, that is, the most advanced organizing sense to have manifested in the present state of material Nature. This is the key to the vision.
--
So, the best way to use these meditations (and they are going to increase, since we are now also going to replace the distributions with short meditations) is to go deep within yourselves, as far as you can, and find the place where you can feel, perceive and perhaps even create an atmosphere of oneness wherein a force of order and organization can put each element in its true place, and out of the chaos existing at this hour, make a new, harmonious world surge forth.
The Supramental Manifestation, (Cent. Ed. XVI, pp. 33-36.)
0 1957-10-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I come to ask your permission to leave India. For more than a year now, I have been fighting not to leave, but this seems to be the wrong strategy.
There is no question of my abandoning the path and I remain convinced that the only goal in life is spiritual. But I need things to help me along the way: I am not yet ripe enough to depend upon inner strength alone. And when I speak of the forest or a boat, it is not only for the sake of adventure or the feeling of space, but also because they mean a discipline. Outer constraints and difficulties help me, they force me to remain concentrated around that which is best in me. In a sense, life here is too easy. Yet it is also too hard, for one must depend on ones own discipline I do not yet have that strength, I need to be helped by outer circumstances. The very difficulty of life in the outside world helps me to be disciplined, for it forces me to concentrate all my vital strength in effort. Here, this vital part is unemployed, so it acts foolishly, it strains at the leash.
0 1957-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
One of the very first results of the supramental manifestation was to give the body a freedom and an autonomy it has never before known. And when I say freedom, I dont mean some psychological perception or an inner state of consciousness, but something else and far betterit is a new phenomenon in the body, in the cells of the body. For the first time, the cells themselves have felt that they are free, that they have the power to decide. When the new vibrations came and combined with the old ones, I felt it at once and it showed me that a new world was really taking birth.
In its normal state, the body always feels that it is not its own master: illnesses invade it without its really being able to resist thema thousand factors impose themselves or exert pressure upon it. Its sole power is the power to defend itself, to react. Once the illness has got in, it can fight and overcome iteven modern medicine has acknowledged that the body is cured only when it decides to get cured; it is not the drugs per se that heal, for if the ailment is temporarily suppressed by a drug without the bodys will, it grows up again elsewhere in some other form until the body itself has decided to be cured. But this implies only a defensive power, the power to react against an invading enemyit is not true freedom.
But with the supramental manifestation, something new has taken place in the body: it feels it is its own master, autonomous, with its two feet solidly on the ground, as it were. This gives a physical impression of the whole being suddenly drawing itself up, with its head lifted high I am my own master.
We live perennially with a burden on our shoulders, something that bows our heads down, and we feel pulled, led by all kinds of external forces, we dont know by whom or what, nor where tothis is what men call Fate, Destiny. When you do yoga, one of the first ex periences the ex perience of the kundalini, as it is called here in Indiais precisely one in which the consciousness rises, breaks through this hard lid, here, at the crown of the head, and at last you emerge into the Light. Then you see, you know, you decide and you realizedifficulties may still remain, but truly speaking one is above them. Well, as a result of the supramental manifestation, it is THIS ex perience that came into the body. The body straightened its head up and felt its freedom, its independence.
During the flu epidemic, for example, I spent every day in the midst of people who were germ carriers. And one day, I clearly felt that the body had decided not to catch this flu. It asserted its autonomy. You see, it was not a question of the higher Will deciding, no. It didnt take place in the highest consciousness: the body itself decided. When you are way above in your consciousness, you see things, you know things; but in actual fact, once you descend again into matter, it is like water running through sand. In this respect, things have changed, the body has a DIRECT power, independent of any outer intervention. Even though it is barely visible, I consider this to be a very important result.
0 1957-11-12, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
To conclude, a final recommendation: never pose as an examiner. For while it is good to remember constantly that perhaps one is passing a very important test, it is, on the other hand, extremely dangerous to imagine oneself entrusted with applying tests to others, for that is an open door to the most absurd and harmful vanities. It is not an ignorant human will that decides these things but the Supreme Wisdom.
***
0 1957-12-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Sweet Mother, this is what is rising from my soul: I feel in me something unemployed, something seeking to express itself in life. I want to be like a knight, your knight, and go off in search of a treasure that I could bring back to you. The world has lost all sense of the wonderful, all beauty of Adventure, this quest known to the knights of the Middle Ages. It is this that calls so relentlessly within me, this need for a quest in the world and for a beautiful Adventure which at the same time would be an adventure of the soul. How I wish that the two things, inner and outer, be JOINED, that the joy of action, of the open road and the quest help the souls blossoming, that they be like a prayer of the soul expressed in life. The knights of the Middle Ages knew this. perhaps it is all childish and absurd in the midst of this 20th century, but this is what I feel, this that is summoning me to leavenot anything base, not anything mediocre, only a need for something in me to be fulfilled. If only I could bring you back a beautiful treasure!
After that, perhaps I would be ri per to accept the everyday life of the Ashram, and know how to give myself better.
Mother, I feel all this very strongly; I need your help to follow the true path of my being and fulfill this new outer cycle, should you see that it has to be fulfilled. I feel so strongly that something remains for me to DO. Guide me, Sweet Mother.
0 1957-12-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
This physical consciousness records all it sees, all your reactions, your thoughts, all the factswithout preference, without prejudice, without personal will. Nothing escapes it. Its work is almost mechanical. Therefore I know what to tell or to ask you according to the integral truth of your being and its present possibilities. Ordinarily, in the normal man, the physical consciousness does not see things as they are, for three reasons: because of ignorance, because of preference, and because of an egoistic will. You color what you see, eliminate what displeases you. In short, you see only what you desire to see.
Now, I recently had a very striking ex perience: a discrepancy occurred between my physical consciousness and the consciousness of the world. In some instances decisions made in the Light and the Truth produced unexpected results, upheavals in the consciousness of others that were neither foreseen nor desired, and I did not understand. No matter how hard I tried, I could not understand and I emphasize this word understand. At last, I had to leave my highest consciousness and pull myself down into the physical consciousness to find out what was happening. And there, in my head, I saw what appeared to be a little cell bursting, and suddenly I understood: the recording had been defective. The physical consciousness had neglected to register certain of your lower reactions. It could not have been through preference or through personal will (these things were eliminated from my consciousness long, long ago). But I saw that this most material consciousness was already completely permeated with the transforming supramental truth, and it could no longer follow the rhythm of normal life. It was much more attuned to the true consciousness than to the world! I couldnt possibly blame it for lagging behind; on the contrary, it was in front, too far ahead! There was a discrepancy between the rhythm of the transformation of my being and the worlds own rhythm. The supramental action on the world is slow, it does not act directlyit acts by infiltration, by traversing the successive layers, and the results are slow to come about. So I had to pull myself violently down in order to wait for the others.
One must at times know how not to know.
This ex perience showed me once more the necessity to be perfectly humble before the Lord. It is not enough merely to rise to the heights, to the ethereal planes of consciousness: these planes have also to descend into matter and illuminate it. Otherwise, nothing is really done. One must have the patience to establish the communication between the high and the low. I am like a tempest, a hurricaneif I listened to myself, I would tear into the future, and everything would go flying! But then, there would no longer be any communication with the rest.
One must have the patience to wait.
Humility, a perfect humility, is the condition for all realization. The mind is so cocksure. It thinks it knows everything, understands everything. And if ever it acts through idealism to serve a cause that appears noble to it, it becomes even more arrogant more intransigent, and it is almost impossible to make it see that there might be something still higher beyond its noble conceptions and its great altruistic or other ideals. Humility is the only remedy. I am not speaking of humility as conceived by certain religions, with this God that belittles his creatures and only likes to see them down on their knees. When I was a child, this kind of humility revolted me, and I refused to believe in a God that wants to belittle his creatures. I dont mean that kind of humility, but rather the recognition that one does not know, that one knows nothing, and that there may be something beyond what presently appears to us as the truest, the most noble or disinterested. True humility consists in constantly referring oneself to the Lord, in placing all before Him. When I receive a blow (and there are quite a few of them in my sadhana), my immediate, spontaneous reaction, like a spring, is to throw myself before Him and to say, Thou, Lord. Without this humility, I would never have been able to realize anything. And I say I only to make myself understood, but in fact I means the Lord through this body, his instrument. When you begin living THIS kind of humility, it means you are drawing nearer to the realization. It is the condition, the starting point.
***
0 1958-01-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Then, from the supreme Reality came this command: Awaken, O Nature, to the joy of collaboration. And suddenly, all Nature rushed forth in an immense bounding of joy, saying, I accept! I will collaborate! And at the same time, there came a calm, an absolute tranquillity, to allow this receptacle, this body, to receive and contain without breaking and without losing anything of the Joy of Nature that was rushing forth in a movement of grateful recognition like an overwhelming flood. She accepted, she sawwith all eternity before her that this supramental consciousness would fulfill her more perfectly and impart a still greater force to her movement and more richness, more possibilities to her play.
And suddenly, as if resounding from every corner of the earth, I heard these great notes which are sometimes heard in the subtle physicalra ther like those of Beethovens Concerto in Dwhich come at moments of great progress, as though fifty orchestras were bursting forth all at once without a single discordant note, to sound the joy of this new communion of Nature and Spirit, the meeting of old friends who, after a long separation, find each other once more.
--
And the radiant felicity of this splendor was perceived in a perfect peace.
Such was the birth of this years message.
--
I have one thing to add: we must not misinterpret the meaning of this ex perience and imagine that henceforth everything will take place without difficulties or always in accordance with our personal desires. It is not at this level. It does not mean that when we do not want it to rain, it will not rain! Or when we want some event to take place in the world, it will immediately take place, or that all difficulties will be abolished and everything will be like a fairy tale. It is not like that. It is something more profound. Nature has accepted into her play of forces the newly manifested Force and has included it in her movements. But as always, the movements of Nature take place on a scale infinitely surpassing the human scale and invisible to the ordinary human consciousness. It is more of an inner, psychological possibility that has been born in the world than a spectacular change in earthly events.
I mention this because you might be tempted to believe that fairy tales are going to be realized upon earth. The time has not yet come.
0 1958-01-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
It is quite evident that for some reason or otheror perhaps for no reason at all the Supreme has changed His mind about it.
***
0 1958-02-03a, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I have received a long letter from Swami,1 who in essence says that I should be able to realize what I have to realize right here with you, but he does not refuse to take me with him should I persist in my intention.
Mother, I am placing all this in your hands, sincerely.
--
A Sannyasi, or wandering monk, whom Satprem would join a few weeks later in Ceylon, on February 27, and who would initiate him as a Sannyasi. Unfortunately, almost all the correspondence from this period has been lost.
***
0 1958-02-03b - The Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The supramental world exists in a permanent way, and I am there permanently in a supramental body. I had proof of this today when my earthly consciousness went there and consciously remained there between two and three oclock in the afternoon: I now know that for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relationship what is missing is an intermediate zone between the existing physical world and the supramental world as it exists. This zone has yet to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world, and it is being built. When formerly I used to speak of the new world that is being created, I was speaking of this intermediate zone. And similarly, when I am on this side that is, in the realm of the physical consciousness and I see the supramental power, the supramental light and substance constantly permeating matter, I am seeing and participating in the construction of this zone.
I found myself upon an immense ship, which is the symbolic representation of the place where this work is being carried out. This ship, as big as a city, is thoroughly organized, and it had certainly already been functioning for quite some time, for its organization was fully developed. It is the place where people destined for the supramental life are being trained. These people (or at least a part of their being) had already undergone a supramental transformation because the ship itself and all that was aboard was neither material nor subtle-physical, neither vital nor mental: it was a supramental substance. This substance itself was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance nearest the physical world, the first to manifest. The light was a blend of red and gold, forming a uniform substance of luminous orange. Everything was like that the light was like that, the people were like thateverything had this color, in varying shades, however, which enabled things to be distinguished from one another. The overall impression was of a shadowless world: there were shades, but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order; everything worked smoothly and silently. At the same time, I could see all the details of the education, the training in all domains by which the people on board were being prepared.
This immense ship had just arrived at the shore of the supramental world, and a first batch of people destined to become the future inhabitants of the supramental world were about to disembark. Everything was arranged for this first landing. A certain number of very tall beings were posted on the wharf. They were not human beings and never before had they been men. Nor were they permanent inhabitants of the supramental world. They had been delegated from above and posted there to control and su pervise the landing. I was in charge of all this since the beginning and throughout. I myself had prepared all the groups. I was standing on the bridge of the ship, calling the groups forward one by one and having them disembark on the shore. The tall beings posted there seemed to be reviewing those who were disembarking, allowing those who were ready to go ashore and sending back those who were not and who had to continue their training aboard the ship. While standing there watching everyone, that part of my consciousness coming from here became extremely interested: it wanted to see, to identify all the people, to see how they had changed and to find out who had been taken immediately as well as those who had to remain and continue their training. After awhile, as I was observing, I began to feel pulled backwards and that my body was being awakened by a consciousness or a person from here1and in my consciousness, I protested: No, no, not yet! Not yet! I want to see whos there! I was watching all this and noting it with intense interest It went on like that until, suddenly, the clock here began striking three, which violently jerked me back. There was the sensation of a sudden fall into my body. I came back with a shock, but since I had been called back very suddenly, all my memory was still intact. I remained quiet and still until I could bring back the whole ex perience and preserve it.
The nature of objects on this ship was not that which we know upon earth; for example, the clothes were not made of cloth, and this thing that resembled cloth was not manufacturedit was a part of the body, made of the same substance that took on different forms. It had a kind of plasticity. When a change had to be made, it was done not by artificial and outer means but by an inner working, by a working of the consciousness that gave the substance its form or appearance. Life created its own forms. There was ONE SINGLE substance in all things; it changed the nature of its vibration according to the needs or uses.
Those who were sent back for more training were not of a uniform color; their bodies seemed to have patches of a grayish opacity, a substance resembling the earth substance. They were dull, as though they had not been wholly permeated by the light or wholly transformed. They were not like this all over, but in places.
The tall beings on the shore were not of the same color, at least they did not have this orange tint; they were paler, more transparent. Except for a part of their bodies, only the outline of their forms could be seen. They were very tall, they did not seem to have a skeletal structure, and they could take on any form according to their needs. Only from their waists to their feet did they have a permanent density, which was not felt in the rest of their body. Their color was much more pallid and contained very little red, it verged rather on gold or even white. The parts of whitish light were translucid; they were not absolutely transparent, but less dense, more subtle than the orange substance.
Just as I was called back, when I was saying, Not yet , I had a quick glimpse of myself, of my form in the supramental world. I was a mixture of what these tall beings were and the beings aboard the ship. The top part of myself, especially my head, was a mere silhouette of a whitish color with an orange fringe. The more it approached the feet, the more the color resembled that of the people on the ship, or in other words, orange; the more it went up towards the top, the more translucid and white it was, and the red faded. The head was only a silhouette with a brilliant sun at its center; from it issued rays of light which were the action of the will.
--
When I came back, along with the memory of the ex perience, I knew that the supramental world was permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and that only a missing link is needed to allow the consciousness and the substance to connectand it is this link that is being built. At that time, my impression (an impression which remained rather long, almost the whole day) was of an extreme relativityno, not exactly that, but an impression that the relationship between this world and the other completely changes the criterion by which things are to be evaluated or judged. This criterion had nothing mental about it, and it gave the strange inner feeling that so many things we consider good or bad are not really so. It was very clear that everything depended upon the capacity of things and upon their ability to express the supramental world or be in relationship with it. It was so completely different, at times even so opposite to our ordinary way of looking at things! I recall one little thing that we usually consider bad actually how funny it was to see that it is something excellent! And other things that we consider important were really quite unimportant there! Whether it was like this or like that made no difference. What is very obvious is that our appreciation of what is divine or not divine is incorrect. I even laughed at certain things Our usual feeling about what is anti-divine seems artificial, based upon something untrue, unliving (besides, what we call life here appeared lifeless in comparison with that world); in any event, this feeling should be based upon our relationship between the two worlds and according to whether things make this relationship easier or more difficult. This would thus completely change our evaluation of what brings us nearer to the Divine or what takes us away from Him. With people, too, I saw that what helps them or prevents them from becoming supramental is very different from what our ordinary moral notions imagine. I felt just how ridiculous we are.
(Then Mother speaks to the children)
0 1958-03-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
As for me, I am totally out of my element in this new life, as though I were uprooted from myself. I am living in the temple, in the midst of pujas,1 with white ashes on my forehead, barefoot dressed like a Hindu, sleeping on cement at night, eating impossible curries, with some good sunburns to complete the cooking. And there I am, clinging to you, for if you were not there I would collapse, so absurd would it all be. You are the only realityhow many times have I repeated this to myself, like a litany! Apart from this, I am holding up quite well physically. But inside and outside, nothing is left but you. I need you, thats all. Mother, this world is so horrifyingly empty. I really feel that I would evaporate if you werent there. Well, no doubt I had to go through this ex perience perhaps I will be able to extract some book from it that will be of use to you. We are like children who need a lot of pictures in order to understand, and a few good kicks to realize our complete stupidity.
Swami must soon take to the road again, through Ceylon, towards March 20 or 25. So I shall go wandering with him until May; towards the beginning of May, he will return to India. I hope to have learned my lesson by then, and to have learned it well. Inwardly, I have understood that there is only you but its these problem children on the surface who must be made to toe the line once and for all.
0 1958-04-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I was waiting for things to be well established in me before writing you again. An important change has occurred: it seems that something in me has clickedwhat Sri Aurobindo calls the central will, perhapsand I am living literally in the obsession of divine realization. This is what I want, nothing else, it is the only goal in life, and at last I have understood (not with the head) that the outer realization in the world will be the consequence of the inner realization. So thousands of times a day, I repeat, Mother, I want to be your instrument, ever more conscious, I want to express your truth, your light. I want to be what you want, as you want, when you want. There is in me now a kind of need for perfection, a will to abolish this ego, a real understanding that to become your instrument means at the same time to find the perfect plenitude of ones personality. So I am living in an almost constant state of aspiration, I feel your force constantly, or nearly so, and if I am distracted a few minutes, I ex perience a void, an uneasiness that calls me back to you.
And at the same time, I saw that it is you who is doing everything, you who aspires in me, you who wants the progress, and that all I myself am in this affair is a screen, a resisting obstacle. O Mother, break this screen that I may be wholly transparent before you, that your transforming force may purify all the secret recesses in my being, that nothing may remain but you and you alone. O Mother, may all my being be a living expression of your light, your truth.
Mother, from the depths of my being, I offer you a sole prayer: may I become your more and more perfect instrument, a sword of light in your hands. Oh, to get out of this ego that belittles everything, diminishes everything, to emerge from it! All is falsehood in it.
And I, who understood nothing of love, am beginning to suspect who Satprem is. Mother, your grace is infinite, it has accompanied me everywhere in my life.
--
P.S. My system is not in perfect condition due to this absurdly spiced food, and the river water that is used for everything.
***
0 1958-05-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I know that the ex perience I had the other day is new and that I was the first person on earth to have it. But it is the only thing that is true. All the rest
I began my sadhana at birth, without knowing that I was doing it. I have continued it throughout my whole life, which means for almost eighty years (even though for perhaps the first three or four years of my life it was only something stirring about in unconsciousness). But I began a deliberate, conscious sadhana at about the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, upon prepared ground. I am now more than eighty years old: I have thought of nothing but that, I have wanted nothing but that, I had no other interest in life, and not for a single minute have I ever forgotten that it was THAT that I wanted. There were not periods of remembering and forgetting: it was continuous, unceasing, day and night, from the age of twenty-four and I had this ex perience for the first time about a week ago! So, I say that people who are in a hurry, people who are impatient, are arrogant fools.
It is a hard path. I try to make it as comfortable as possible, but nevertheless, it is a hard path. And it is obvious that it cannot be otherwise. You are beaten and battered until you understand. Until you are in that state in which all bodies are your body. But at that point, you begin to laugh! You were upset by this, hurt by that, you suffered from this or that but now, how laughable it all seems! And not only the head, but the body too finds it laughable!
--
Consequently, if you do not remember having had the ex perience, you are left in the same condition as before, but with the difference that now you know, you can know, that these material laws do not correspond to the truth thats all. They do not at all correspond to the truth, so consequently, if you want to be faithful to your aspiration, you must in no way legitimize all that. Rather, you must say that it is an infirmity from which we are suffering for the moment, for an intermediate periodit is an infirmity and an ignorance for it really is an ignorance (this is not just a word): it is ignorance, it is not the thing as it is, even in regard to our present material bodies. Therefore, we will not legitimize anything. What we say is thisit is an infirmity which has to be endured for the time being, until we get out of it, but we do NOT ACKNOWLEDGE all this as a concrete reality. It does NOT have a concrete reality, it has a false realitywhat we call concrete reality is a false reality.
And the proof I have the proof because I ex perienced it myselfis that from the minute you are in the other consciousness, the true consciousness, all these things which appear so real, so concrete, change INSTANTLY. There are a number of things, certain material conditions of my bodymaterial that changed instantly. It did not last long enough for everything to change, but some things changed and never returned, they remained changed. In other words, if that consciousness were kept constantly, it would be a perpetual miracle (what we would call a miracle from our ordinary point of view), a fantastic and perpetual miracle! But from the supramental point of view, it would not be a miracle at all, it would be the most normal of things.
Therefore, if we do not want to oppose the supramental action by an obscure, inert and obstinate resistance, we have to admit once and for all that none of these things should be legitimized.
0 1958-05-11 - the ship that said OM, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Something quite curious took place during a recent meditation. I no longer recall when exactly, but it was at a time when there were many visitors, for the courtyard was full. After perhaps no more than a few minutes, I suddenly heard a distinct voice, coming from my right, say OM, like that. And then a second time, OM. What an impact it had upon me! I felt an emotion here (gesture towards the heart) as I have not felt for years and years and years. And all, all, all was filled with light, with forceit was absolutely marvelous. It was an invocation, and during the whole meditation the Presence was resplendent.
I said to myself, Who could have done that? I was not sure if only I had heard it, so I asked. The reply was, But it was the ship leaving! There was actually a ship which had left during the night3that is in support of those who said it was a ship. But for me, it was SOMEONE because I felt someone there and I thought, Oh! If someone, in the ardor of his soul, said that in this what I could call an atheistic silence. Because people here are so afraid of following tradition, of being the slaves of the old things, that they cast out anything closely or remotely resembling religion.
0 1958-05-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Actually, when I myself am perfect, I believe that all the rest will become perfect automatically. But it does not seem possible to become perfect without there being a beginning of realization from the other side. So it proceeds like that, bumping from one side to the other, and we go stumbling along like a drunken man!
***
0 1958-05-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
This again belongs to the dualities that Sri Aurobindo speaks of in (The Synthesis of Yoga, these dualities that are being reabsorbed. I dont know if he spoke of this particular one; I dont think so, but its the same thing. Its again a certain way of seeing. He has written of the personal-Im personal duality, Ishwara-Shakti, Purusha-Prakriti but there is still one more: Divine and anti-divine.
***
0 1958-06-06 - Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Its all the same thing, but the word realization can be reserved for something that is durable, that does not wear off. Because everything on earth fades awayeverything fades away, nothing remains. In this sense, there has never been any realization, for everything fades away. Nothing is ever permanent. And I know for myself: I am doing the sadhana at a gallop, as it were; never are two ex periences identical nor do they recur in the same way. As soon as something is established, the next thing begins immediately. It may appear to fade away, but it doesnt fade away; rather, it is the basis upon which the next thing is built.
***
--
In the first ex perience [of 1910], the consciousness was established in the psychic depths of the being, and from that poise issued the feeling of no longer doing anything but what the Divine wantedit was the consciousness that the divine Will was all-powerful and that there was no longer any personal will, although there was still some mental activity and everything had to be made silent. In 1914, it was silenced, and the consciousness was established above the head. Here (the heart) and here (above the head), the connection is constant.
Does one exclude the other?
--
As for the latest ex perience,1 I cant say for sure that no one has ever had it, because someone like Ramakrishna, individuals like that, could have had it. But I am not sure, for when I had this ex perience (not of the divine Presence, which I had already felt in the cells for a long time, but the ex perience that the Divine ALONE is acting in the body, that He has BECOME the body, yet all the while retaining his character of divine omniscience and omnipotence) well, the whole time it remained actively like that, it was absolutely impossible to have the LEAST disorder in the body, and not only in the body, but IN ALL THE SURROUNDING MATTER. It was as if every object obeyed without even needing to decide to obey: it was automatic. There was a divine harmony in EVERYTHING (it took place in my bathroom upstairs, certainly to demonstrate that it exists in the most trivial things), in everything, constantly. So if that is established in a permanent way, there CAN NO LONGER be illness it is impossible. There can no longer be accidents, there can no longer be illness, there can no longer be disorders, and everything should harmonize (probably in a progressive way) just as that was harmonized: all the objects in the bathroom were full of a joyful enthusiasmeverything obeyed, everything!
As it was the first ex perience, it started to fade slightly when I began having contact with people; but I really had the feeling that it was a first ex perience, new upon earth. For I have ex perienced an absolute identity of the will with the divine Will ever since 1910, it has never left me. It isnt that, its SOMETHING ELSE. It is MATTER BECOMING THE DIVINE. And it really came with the feeling that this thing was happening for the first time upon earth. It is difficult to say for sure, but Ramakrishna died of cancer, and now that I have had the ex perience, I know in an ABSOLUTE way that this is impossible. If he had decided to go because the Divine wanted him to go, it would have been an orderly departure, in total harmony and with a total will, whereas this illness is a means of disorder.
--
Its action will be somewhat similar to what is described in the Last Judgment, which is an entirely symbolic expression of something that makes us discern between what belongs to the world of falsehood which is destined to disappear and what belongs to this same world of ignorance and inertia but is transformable. One will go to one side and the other to the other side. All that is transformable will be permeated more and more with this new substance and this new consciousness to such an extent that it will rise towards it and serve as a link between the two but all that belongs incorrigibly to falsehood and ignorance will disappear. This was also prophesied in the Gita: among what we call the hostile or anti-divine forces, those capable of being transformed will be uplifted and go off towards the new consciousness, whereas all that is irrevocably in darkness or belongs to an evil will shall be destroyed and vanish from the Universe. And a whole part of humanity that has responded to these forces rather too zealously will certainly vanish with them. And this is what was expressed in this concept of the Last Judgment.
May 1, 1958.
0 1958-07-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Something I have never said completely. On the one hand, there is the attitude of those in yesterday evenings film2: God is everything, God is everywhere, God is in he who smites you (as Sri Aurobindo wroteGod made me good with a blow, shall I tell Him: O Mighty One, I forgive you your harm and cruelty but do not do it again!), an attitude which, if extended to its ultimate conclusion, accepts the world as it is: the world is the perfect expression of the divine Will. On the other hand, there is the attitude of progress and transformation. But for that, you must recognize that there are things in the world which are not as they should be.
In The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo says that this idea of good and bad, of pure and impure, is a notion needed for action; but the purists, such as Chaitanya, Ramakrishna and others, do not agree. They do not agree that it is indispensable for action. They simply say: your acceptance of action as a necessary thing is contrary to your perception of the Divine in all things.
How can the two be reconciled?
--
But this crystal clear vision Sri Aurobindo had, where everything is in its place, where contradictions no longer existthey never soared to that height. This was the thing, this really crystalline, perfect supramental vision, even from the standpoint of understanding and knowledge. They never went that far.
***
0 1958-07-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
This morning I asked myself the question, is money truly under Natures control? I shall have to see Because for me personally, she always gives everything in abundance.
When I was young, I was as poor as a turkey, as poor as could be! As an artist, I sometimes had to go out in society (as artists are forced to do). I had lacquered boots that were cracked and I painted them so it wouldnt show! This is to tell you the state I was inpoor as a turkey. So one day, in a shop window, I saw a very pretty petticoat much in fashion then, with lace, ribbons, etc. (It was the fashion in those days to have long skirts which trailed on the floor, and I didnt have a petticoat which could go with such things I didnt care, it didnt matter to me in the least, but since Nature had told me I would always have everything I needed, I wanted to make an ex periment.) So I said, Well, I would very much like to have a petticoat to go with those skirts. I got five of them! They came from every direction!
--
But it only happened like that once. And as for Ganesh, that was the end of it. So then I asked Nature. It took her a long time to accept to collaborate. But as for the money, I shall have to ask her about it; because for me personally, it is still going on. I think, Hmm, wouldnt it be nice to have a wristwatch like that. And I get twenty of them! I say to myself, Well, if I had that and I get thirty of them! Things come in from every side, without my even uttering a word I dont even ask, they just come.
The first time I came here and spoke with Sri Aurobindo about what was needed for the Work, he told me (he also wrote it to me) that for the secure achievement of the Work we would need three powers: one was the power over health, the second was the power over government, and the third was the power over money.
--
For the last, for money, he told me, I still dont know exactly what it depends on. Then one day I entered into trance with this idea in mind, and after a certain journey I came to a place like a subterranean grotto (which means that it is in the subconscient, or perhaps even in the inconscient) which was the source, the place and the power over money. I was about to enter into this grotto (a kind of inner cave) when I saw, coiled and upright, an immense serpent, like an all black python, formidable, as big as a seven-story house, who said, You cannot pass!Why not? Let me pass!Myself, I would let you pass, but if I did, they would immediately destroy me.Who, then, is this they?They are the asuric4 powers who rule over money. They have put me here to guard the entrance, precisely so that you may not enter.And what is it that would give one the power to enter? Then he told me something like this: I heard (that is, he himself had no special knowledge, but it was something he had heard from his masters, those who ruled over him), I heard that he who will have a total power over the human sexual impulses (not merely in himself, but a universal power that is, a power enabling him to control this everywhere, among all men) will have the right to enter. In other words, these forces would not be able to prevent him from entering.
A personal realization is very easy, it is nothing at all; a personal realization is one thing, but the power to control it among all men that is, to control or master such movements at will, everywhereis quite another. I dont believe that this condition has been fulfilled. If what the serpent said is true and if this is really what will vanquish these hostile forces that rule over money, well then, it has not been fulfilled.
It has been fulfilled to a certain extent but its negligible. It is conditional, limited: in one case, it works; in another, it doesnt. It is quite problematic. And naturally, where terrestrial things are involved (I dont say universal, but in any case terrestrial), when it is something involving the earth, it must be complete; there cannot be any approximations.
--
perhaps it is a kind of it can hardly be called an intuition, but a kind of divination of this idea that made people speak of selling ones soul to the devil for money, of money being an evil force, which produces this shrinking on the part of all those who want to lead a spiritual life but as for that, they shrink from everything, not only from money!
perhaps it would not be necessary to have this power over all men, but in any event, it should be great enough to act upon the mass. It is likely that once a certain movement has been mastered to some degree, what the mass does or doesnt do (this whole human mass that has barely, barely emerged into even the mental consciousness) will become quite irrelevant. You see, the mass is still under the great rule of Nature. I am referring to mental humanity, predominantly mental, which developed the mind but misused it and immediately set out on the wrong pathfirst thing.
There is nothing to say since the first thing done by the divine forces which emanated for the Creation was to take the wrong path!6 That is the origin, the seed of this marvelous spirit of independence the negation of surrender, in other words. Man said, I have the power to think; I will do with it what I want, and no one has the right to intervene. I am free, I am an independent being, IN-DE-PEN-DENT! So thats how things stand: we are all independent beings!
But yesterday, in fact, I was looking (with all these mantras and these prayers and this whole vibration that has descended into the atmosphere, creating a state of constant calling in the atmosphere), and I remembered the old movements and how everything now has changed! I was also thinking of the old disciplines, one of which is to say, I am That.7 People were told to sit in meditation and repeat, I am That, to reach an identification. And it all seemed to me so obsolete, so childish, but at the same time a part of the whole. I looked, and it seemed so absurd to sit in meditation and say, I am That! I, what is this I who is That; what is this I, where is it? I was trying to find it, and I saw a tiny, microscopic point (to see it would almost require some gigantic instrument), a tiny, obscure point in an im-men-sity of Light, and that little point was the body. At the same timeit was absolutely simultaneous I saw the Presence of the Supreme as a very, very, very, VERY immense Being, within which was I in an attitude of (I was only a sensation, you see), an attitude (gesture of surrender) like this. There were no limits, yet at the same time, one felt the joy of being permeated, enveloped and of being able to widen, widen, widen indefinitelyto widen the whole being, from the highest consciousness to the most material consciousness. And then, at the same time, to look at this body and to see every cell, every atom vibrating with a divine, radiant Presence with all its Consciousness, all its Power, all its Will, all its Loveall, all, really and a joy! An extraordinary joy. And one did not disturb the other, nothing was contradictory and everything was felt at the same time. That was when I said, But truly! This body had to have the training it has had for more than seventy years to be able to bear all that without starting to cry out or dance or leap up or whatever it might be! No, it was calm (it was exultant, but it was very calm), and it remained in control of its movements and its words. In spite of the fact that it was really living in another world, it could apparently act normal due to this strenuous training in self-control by the REASONby the reasonover the whole being, which has tamed it and given it such a great cohesive power that I can BE in the ex perience, I can LIVE this ex perience, and at the same time respond with the most amiable of smiles to the most idiotic questions!
And then, it always ends in the same way, by a canticle to the action of the grace: O, Lord! You are truly marvelous! All the ex periences I have needed to pass through You have given to me, all the things I needed to do to make this body ready You have made me do, and always with the feeling that it was You who was making me do itand with the universal disapproval of all the right-minded humanity!
0 1958-07-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The Divine is everywhere, in everything. We should never forget itnot for a second should we forget it. He is everywhere, in everything; and in an unconscious but spontaneous, therefore sincere, way, all that exists below the mental manifestation is divine, without mixture; in other words, it exists spontaneously and in harmony with its nature. It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally, he is much more conscious! Theres no question about it, its a fact, although what we call consciousness (what we call it, that is, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and mentalize things. It is not the true consciousness, but its what men call consciousness. So according to the human mode, it is obvious that man is much more conscious than the animal, but the human brings in sin and perversion which do not exist outside of this state we call consciouswhich in fact is not conscious but merely consists in mentalizing things and in having the ability to objectify them.
It is an ascending curve, but a curve that swerves away from the Divine. So naturally, one has to climb much higher to find a higher Divine, since it is a conscious Divine, whereas the others are divine spontaneously and instinctively, without being conscious of it. All our moral notions of good and evil, all of that, are what we have thrown over the creation with our distorted and perverted consciousness. It is we who have invented it.
We are the distorting intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the gods.
0 1958-08-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
So the door had to be opened and I felt and said, Lord, may your will be done. I opened the door and behind it was Z1 in the same clothes he wears when he drives, and he was leaning against one of those big tractor tiresor perhaps he was holding it at the same time. I was so dumbfounded that I woke up. It took me a little while to be able to understand what it might mean, and afterwards Even now, I still dont know What was I? Was I India, or was I the world? I dont know. And what did Z represent? It was as im perative and clear, as positive and absolute as could be: the certitude that destruction was behind the door, that it was inevitable. And it had the form of those great Tartar or Mongol invaders, those people who came from the North and invaded India, who pillaged everything Thats what it was like. But what Z was doing there I dont know. What does he represent? The first impulse was to tell Abhay Singh, Forbid him to drive the tractor.
(Pavitra:) What was he holding in his hands, Mother?
--
What could it represent, he, and the tractor? I dont know It was not personal, you see I mean this body. It had nothing to do with that.
(Pavitra:) The industrialization of India?
0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
My ex perience is that, individually, we are in relationship with that aspect of the Divine which is not necessarily the most in conformity with our natures, but which is the most essential for our development or the most necessary for our action. For me, it was always a question of action because, personally, individually, each aspiration for personal development had its own form, its own spontaneous expression, so I did not use any formula. But as soon as there was the least little difficulty in action, it sprang forth. Only long afterwards did I notice that it was formulated in a certain way I would utter it without even knowing what the words were. But it came like this: Dieu de bont et de misricorde. It was as if I wanted to eliminate from action all aspects that were not this one. And it lasted for I dont know, more than twenty or twenty-five years of my life. It came spontaneously.
Just recently one day, the contact became entirely physical, the whole body was in great exaltation, and I noticed that other lines were spontaneously being added to this Dieu de bont et de misricorde, and I noted them down. It was a springing forth of states of consciousness not words.
0 1958-10-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
It was so strong, so strong that it was really inexpressible. The negative ex perience of no longer being an individual, or in other words, the dissolution of the ego, took place a long time ago and still takes place quite often: the ego completely vanishes. But this was a positive ex perience of being not just the universe in its totality, but something elseineffable, yet concrete, absolutely concrete! Unutterable1and yet utterly concrete: the divine person beyond the Im personal.
The ex perience lasted for only a few minutes. And I knew, then, that all our words all our words are empty. But circumstances were such that I had to speak
0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
For people here in the Ashram, my work is not the same. It is more like a kind of atmosphere that extends everywherea very conscious atmospherewhich I let work for each one according to his need. I dont have a special action for each person, unless something requires my special attention. When I would tune into you while you were travelling, I clearly saw your image appear before me, as though you were looking at me, but now that you have returned here, I no longer see it. Rather, I receive a sensation or an impression; and as these sensations and impressions are innumerable, its rather like one element among many. It no longer imposes itself in such an entirely distinct way nor does it appear before me in the same manner, as a clear image of yourself, as though you wanted to know something.
As soon as I am alone, I enter into a very deep concentration,a state of consciousness, a kind of universal activity. Is it deep? What is it? It is far beyond all the mental regions, far, far beyond, and it is constant. As soon as I am alone or resting somewhere, thats how it is.
--
In the outer, practical domain, I might suddenly think of someone, so I know that this person is calling or thinking of me. When you left on your trip, I created a special link-up so that if ever, at any moment, you called me for anything, I would know it instantly, and I remained attentive and alert. But I do that only in exceptional cases. Generally speaking, when I havent made this special link-up, things keep coming in and coming in and coming in and coming in, and the answer goes out automatically, here or there or there or therehundreds and hundreds of things that I dont keep in my memory because then it would really be frightful. I dont keep these things in my consciousness; it is rather a work that is done automatically.
When you asked me if X4 were thinking of me, I consulted my atmosphere and saw that it was true, that even many times a day Xs thoughts were coming. So I know that he is concentrating on me, or something: it simply passes through me, and I answer automatically. But I dont particularly pay attention to X, unless you ask me a question about him, in which case I deliberately tune into him, then observe and determine whether its like this or like that. Whereas this vision the other day was something that thrust itself on me; I was in another region altogether, in my inner contemplation, my concentrationa very strong concentrationwhen I was forced to enter into contact with this being whose vision I had and who was obviously a very powerful being. After telling me what he had to tell me, he went away in a very peculiar way, not at all suddenly as most people appear and disappear, not at all like that. When I first saw him, there was a living form the being himself was there but upon leaving (probably to see the effect, to find out whether he had truly succeeded in making himself understood), he left behind a kind of image of himself. Afterwards, this image blurred and it left only a silhouette, an outline, then it disappeared altogether leaving only an impression. That was the last thing I saw. So I kept the impression and analyzed it to find out exactly what was involved; all this was filed away, and then it was over. I began my concentration once again.
--
Naturally, the reception is always incomplete or partially modified; when it passes through the individuality, it becomes narrowed, a personal thing. It seems impossible for each one to have a consciousness vast enough to see the thing in its entirety.
You said that our way of receiving your work or becoming conscious of it does not exclusively depend upon us. What do you mean?
It depends upon the progress in the consciousness. The more the action is supramentalized, the more its reception is IMPOSED upon the consciousness of each one. The actions progress makes it more and more perceptible IN SPITE OF each ones condition. The milieu obviously limits and altersdistortswhat it receives, but the quality of the Work acts upon this receptivity and imposes itself on it in a more and more efficient and im perious way.
There is an interdependence between the individual progress and the collective progress, between that which works and that which is worked upon. It proceeds like this (gesture of intermeshing), and as one progresses, the other progresses. The progress above not only hastens the progress below but brings the two nearer together, thus changing the distance in the relationship; that is, the distance will not remain the same, the ratio between the progress here and the progress above wont always be identical.
--
(Shortly afterwards, concerning the ex perience of Wednesday, October 1: the divine person beyond the Im personal)
Before, I always had the negative ex perience of the disappearance of the ego, of the oneness of Creation, where everything implying separation disappearedan ex perience that, personally, I would call negative. Last Wednesday, while I was speaking (and thats why at the end I could no longer find my words), I seemed suddenly to have left this negative phenomenon and entered into the positive ex perience: the ex perience of BEING the Supreme Lord, the ex perience that nothing exists but the Supreme Lordall is the Supreme Lord, there is nothing else. And at that moment, the feeling of this infinite power that has no limit, that nothing can limit, was so overwhelming that all the functions of the body, of this mental machine that summons up words, all this was I could no longer speak French. perhaps the words could have come to me in Englishprobably, because it was easier for Sri Aurobindo to express himself in English, and thats how it must have happened: it was the part embodied in Sri Aurobindo (the part of the Supreme that was embodied in Sri Aurobindo for its manifestation) that had the ex perience. This is what joined back with the Origin and caused the ex perience I was well aware of it. And that is probably why its transcription through English words would have been easier than through French words (for at these moments, such activities are purely mechanical, rather like automatic machines). And naturally the ex perience left something behind. It left the sense of a power that can no longer be qualified,5 really. And it was there yesterday evening.
The difficultyits not even a difficulty, its just a kind of precaution that is taken (automatically, in fact) in order to For example, the volume of Force that was to be expressed in the voice was too great for the speech organ. So I had to be a little attentive that is, there had to be a kind of filtering in the outermost expression, otherwise the voice would have cracked. But this isnt done through the will and reason, its automatic. Yet I feel that the capacity of Matter to contain and express is increasing with phenomenal speed. But its progressive, it cant be done instantly. There have often been people whose outer form broke because the Force was too strong; well, I clearly see that it is being dosed out. After all, this is exclusively the concern of the Supreme Lord, I dont bother about itits not my concern and I dont bother about itHe makes the necessary adjustments. Thus it comes progressively, little by little, so that no fundamental disequilibrium occurs. It gives the impression that ones head is swelling so tremendously it will burst! But then if there is a moment of stillness, it adapts; gradually, it adapts.
0 1958-10-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Certain relationships are entirely within me, entirely. It is not a relationship between individuals, but a relationship between states of beingwhich means that with the same individual there may be many different relationships. If it were a single whole but I am still not sure if there is a single person with whom the relationship is global.
So there are parts which are entirely within me, entirely there is no difference; they are myself. There are other parts with which I am conscious of an exchangea very familiar, very intimate exchange. And there are parts outside of me with which I still have relationships, not exactly as with strangers but merely as acquaintances; it is still necessary to observe their reactions in order to do the correct thing. And the ratio between these different parts is naturally different depending upon the different individuals.
--
Difficulties are sent to us exclusively to make the realization more perfect.
Each time we try to realize something and we encounter a resistance or an obstacle, or even a failurewhat appears to be a failurewe should know, we should NEVER forget, that it is exclusively, absolutely, to make the realization more perfect.
So this habit of cringing, of being discouraged or even feeling ill at ease or abusing oneself, saying, There, Ive done it again All this is absolute foolishness.
Rather, simply say, We do not know how to do things as they should be done, well then, let them be done for us and come what may! If we could only see how everything that looks like a difficulty, an error, a failure or an obstacle is simply there to help us make the realization more perfect.
Once we know this, everything becomes easy.
0 1958-10-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
We always come back to the same thing: the absolute necessity for perfect sincerity, perfect honesty and a sense of the dignity of all we do so that we may do it as it should be done.
If we could truly, perfectly know all the details of the ceremony of life, the worship of the Lord in physical life, it would be wonderfulto know, and no longer to err, never again to err. To perform the ceremony as perfectly as an initiation.
To know life utterly Oh, there is a very interesting thing in this regard! And its strange, but this particular knowledge reminds me of one of my Sutras1 (which I read out, but no one understood or understood only vaguely, like that):
--
There is ones position in the universal hierarchy, which is something ineluctableit is the eternal lawand there is the development in the manifestation, which is an education; it is progressive and done from within the being. What is remarkable is that to become a perfect being, this positionwhatever it is, decreed since all eternity, a part of the eternal Truthmust manifest with the greatest possible perfection as a result of evolutionary growth. It is the junction, the union of the two, the eternal position and the evolutionary realization, that will make the total and perfect being, and the manifestation as the Lord has willed it since the beginning of all eternity (which has no beginning at all! ).
And for the cycle to be complete, one cannot stop on the way at any plane, not even the highest spiritual plane nor the plane closest to matter (like the occult plane in the vital, for example). One must descend right into matter, and this perfection in manifestation must be a material perfection, or otherwise the cycle is not completewhich explains why those who want to flee in order to realize the divine Will are in error. What must be done is exactly the opposite! The two must be combined in a perfect way. This is why all the honest sciences, the sciences that are practiced sincerely, honestly, exclusively with a will to know, are difficult pathsyet such sure paths for the total realization.
It brings up very interesting things. (What I am going to say now is very personal and consequently cannot be used, but it may be kept anyway:)
There are two parallel things that, from the eternal and supreme point of view, are of identical importance, in that both are equally essential for the realization to be a true realization.
On the one hand, there is what Sri Aurobindowho, as the Avatar, represented the supreme Consciousness and Will on earthdeclared me to be, that is, the supreme universal Mother; and on the other hand, there is what I am realizing in my body through the integral sadhana.2 I could be the supreme Mother and not do any sadhana, and as a matter of fact, as long as Sri Aurobindo was in his body, it was he who did the sadhana, and I received the effects. These effects were automatically established in the outer being, but he was the one doing it, not II was merely the bridge between his sadhana and the world. Only when he left his body was I forced to take up the sadhana myself; not only did I have to do what I was doing beforebeing a bridge between his sadhana and the world but I had to carry on the sadhana myself. When he left, he turned over to me the responsibility for what he himself had been doing in his body, and I had to do it. So there are both these things. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other (I dont mean successively in time, but it depends on the moment), and they are trying to combine in a total and perfect realization: the eternal, ineffable and immutable Consciousness of the Executrice of the Supreme, and the consciousness of the Sadhak of the integral Yoga who strives in an ascending effort towards an ever increasing progression.
To this has been added a growing initiation into the supramental realization which is (I understand it well now) the perfect union of what comes from above and what comes from below, or in other words, the eternal position and the evolutionary realization.
Then and this becomes rather amusing like lifes play Depending upon each ones nature and position and bias, and because human beings are very limited, very partial and incapable of a global vision, there are those who believe, who have faith, or to whom the eternal Mother is revealed through Grace, who have this kind of relationship with the eternal Mother and there are those who themselves are plunged in sadhana, who have the consciousness of a developed sadhak, and thereby have the same relationship with me as one has with what they generally call a realized soul. Such persons consider me the prototype of the Guru teaching a new way, but the others dont have this relationship of sadhak to Guru (I am taking the two extremes, but of course there are all the possibilities in between), they are only in contact with the eternal Mother and, in the simplicity of their hearts, they expect Her to do everything for them. If they were perfect in this attitude, the eternal Mother would do everything for themas a matter of fact, She does do everything, but as they arent perfect, they cannot receive it totally. But the two paths are very different, the two kinds of relationships are very different; and as we all live according to the law of external things, in a material body, there is a kind of annoyance, an almost irritated misunderstanding, between those who follow this path (not consciously and intentionally, but spontaneously), who have this relationship of the child to the Mother, and those who have this other relationship of the sadhak to the Guru. So it creates a whole play, with an infinite diversity of shades.
But all this is still in suspense, on the way to realization, moving forward progressively; therefore, unless we are able to see the outcome, we cant understand a thing. We get confused. Only when we see the outcome, the final realization, only when we have TOUCHED there, will everything be understood then it will be as clear and as simple as can be. But meanwhile, my relationships with different people are very funny, utterly amusing!
Those who have what I would call the more outer relationship compared to the other (although it is not really so)the relationship of yoga, of sadhanaconsider the others su perstitious; and the others, who have faith OI perception, or the Grace to have understood what Sri Aurobindo meant ( perhaps even before knowing what he said, but in any event, after he said it), discard the others as ignorant unbelievers! And there are all the gradations in between, so it really becomes quite funny!
It opens up extraordinary horizons; once you have understood this, you have the keyyou have the key to many, many things: the different positions of each of the different saints, the different realizations and it resolves all the incoherencies of the various manifestations on earth.
For example, this question of PowerTHE Powerover Matter. Those who perceive me as the eternal, universal Mother and Sri Aurobindo as the Avatar are surprised that our power is not absolute. They are surprised that we have not merely to say, Let it be thus for it to be thus. This is because, in the integral realization, the union of the two is essential: a union of the power that proceeds from the eternal position and the power that proceeds from the sadhana through evolutionary growth. Similarly, how is it that those who have reached even the summits of yogic knowledge (I was thinking of Swami) need to resort to beings like gods or demigods to be able to realize things?Because they have indeed united with certain higher forces and entities, but it was not decreed since the beginning of time that they were this particular being. They were not born as this or that, but through evolution they united with a latent possibility in themselves. Each one carries the Eternal within himself, but one can join Him only when one has realized the complete union of the latent Eternal with the eternal Eternal.
And this explains everything, absolutely everything: how it works, how it functions in the world.3 I was saying to myself, But I have no powers, I have no powers! Several days ago, I said, But after all, I KNOW WHO is there, I know, yet how is it that ? There, up to there (the level of the head), it is all-powerful, nothing can resist but here it is ineffective. So those who have faith, even an ignorant but real faith (it can be ignorant but nevertheless it is real), say, What! How can you have no powers? Because the sadhana is not yet over.
0 1958-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
10) When an abyss separates the true being from the physical being, Nature immediately fills it with all the hostile suggestions, of which the most deadly is fear and the most pernicious, doubt.
I wrote that before reading Sri Aurobindos aphorism on the sentinels of Nature.1 I found it very interesting and I said to myself, Well! Thats exactly what came to me!
--
'If mankind only caught a glimpse of what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust and scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature to forbid the turning away of our feet from less ordinary pastures.'
Cent. Ed. Vol. XVII, p. 79
0 1958-11-02, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
All this together constitutes one collective entity, and the individual is lost in it. If I had to deal with this person or that person individually, it would be different. But all together, taking them all together as a collective entity, well, its not brilliant.
Mother is referring to the Ashram as a collectivity.
0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
There is the whole Chaldean tradition, and there is also the Vedic tradition, and there was very certainly a tradition anterior to both that split into two branches. Well, all these occult ex periences have been the same. Only the description differs depending upon the country and the language. The story of creation is not told from a metaphysical or psychological point of view, but from an objective point of view, and this story is as real as our stories of historical periods. Of course, its not the only way of seeing, but it is just as legitimate a way as the others, and in any event, it recognizes the concrete reality of all these divine beings. Even now, the ex periences of Western occultists and those of Eastern occultists exhibit great similarities. The only difference is in the way they are expressed, but the manipulation of the forces is the same.
I learned all this through Theon. Probably, he was I dont know if he was Russian or Polish (a Russian or Polish Jew), he never said who he really was or where he was born, nor his age nor anything.
--
So personally, I am convinced that there was indeed a tradition anterior to both these traditions containing a knowledge very close to an integral knowledge. Certainly, there is a similarity in the ex periences. When I came here and told Sri Aurobindo certain things I knew from the occult standpoint, he always said that it conformed to the Vedic tradition. And as for certain occult practices, he told me that they were entirely tantric and I knew nothing at that time, absolutely nothing, neither the Vedas nor the Tantras.
So very probably there was a tradition anterior to both. I have recollections (for me, these are always things I have LIVED), very clear, very distinct recollections of a time that was certainly VERY anterior to the Vedic times and to the Cabala, to the Chaldean tradition.
--
All these regions, all these realms are filled with beings who exist separately in their own realms, and if you are awake and conscious on a given plane for example, if while going out of a more material body you awaken on some higher planeyou can have the same relationship with the things and people of that plane as with the things and people of the material world. In other words, there exists an entirely objective relationship that has nothing to do with your own idea of things. Naturally, the resemblance becomes greater and greater as you draw nearer the physical world, the material world, and there is even a moment when one region can act directly upon the other. In any case, in what Sri Aurobindo calls the kingdoms of the overmind, you find a concrete reality entirely independent of your personal ex perience; whenever you come back to it, you again find the same things, with some differences that may have occurred DURING YOUR ABSENCE. And your relationships with the beings there are identical to those you have with physical beings, except that they are more flexible, more supple and more direct (for example, there is a capacity to change the outer form, the visible form, according to your inner state), but you can make an appointment with someone, come to the meeting and again find the same being, with only certain differences that may have occurred during your absence but it is absolutely concrete, with absolutely concrete results.
However, you must have at least a little ex perience of these things to understand them. Otherwise, if you are convinced that all this is just human fancy or mental formations, if you believe that these gods have such and such a form because men have imagined them to be like that, or that they have such and such defects or qualities because men have envisioned it that wayas with all those who say God is created in the image of man and exists only in human thoughtall such people wont understand, it will seem absolutely ridiculous to them, a kind of madness. You must live a little, touch the subject a little to know how concrete it is.
--
But if you transposed this to France, to the West, unless you frequent occult circles, people would look at you with And behind your back, they would say, That person is cracked!
***
0 1958-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I found my message for the 1st of January It was quite unforeseen. Yesterday morning, I thought, All the same, I have to find my message, but what? I was absolutely like that, neutral, nothing. Then yesterday evening at the class (of Friday, November 7) I noticed that these children who had had a whole week to prepare their questions on the text had not found a single one! A terrible lethargy! A total lack of interest. And when I had finished speaking, I thought to myself, But what IS there in these people who are interested in nothing but their personal little affairs? So I began descending into their mental atmosphere, in search of the little light, of that which responds And it literally pulled me downwards as into a hole, but in such a material way; my hand, which was on the arm of the chair, began slipping down, my other hand went like this (to the ground), my head, too! I thought it was going to touch my knees!
And I had the impression It was not an impression I saw it. I was descending into a crevasse between two steep rocks, rocks that appeared to be made of something harder than basalt, BLACK, but metallic at the same time, with such sharp edgesit seemed that a mere touch would lacerate you. It appeared endless and bottomless, and it kept getting narrower, narrower and narrower, narrower and narrower, like a funnel, so narrow that there was almost no more roomnot even for the consciousness to pass through. And the bottom was invisible, a black hole. And it went down, down, down, like that, without air, without light, except for a sort of glimmer that enabled me to make out the rock edges. They seemed to be cut so steeply, so sharply Finally, when my head began touching my knees, I asked myself, But what is there at the bottom of this this hole?
--
Yes, it was not a willed ex perience, for I had not decided I would do this. It did not correspond to an inner attitude. In a meditation, one can decide, I will meditate on this or on that or on something else I will do this or that. For meditations, I usually have a kind of inner (or higher) perception of what has to be done, and I do it. But it was not that way. I had decided: nothing, to decide nothing, to be like that (gesture of turning upwards).
And then it happened.
--
And so, physically, the body followed. My body has been taught to express the inner ex perience to a certain extent. In the body there is the body-force or the body-form or the body-spirit (according to the different schools, it bears a different name), and this is what leaves the body last when one dies, usually taking a period of seven days to leave.2 With special training, it can acquire a conscious lifeindependent and consciousto such a degree that not only in a state of trance (in trance, it frequently happens that one can speak and move if one is slightly trained or educated), but even in a cataleptic state it can produce sounds and even make the body move. Thus, through training, the body begins to have somnambulistic capacitiesnot an ordinary somnambulism, but it can live an autonomous life.3 This is what took place, yesterday evening it was like that I had gone out of my body, but my body was participating. And then I was pulled downwards: my hand, which had been on the arm of the chair, slipped down, then the other hand, then my head was almost touching my knees! (The consciousness was elsewhere, I saw it from outsideit was not that I didnt know what I was doing, I saw it from outside.) So I said, In any case, this has to stop somewhere because if it continues, my head (laughing) is going to be on the ground! And I thought, But what is there at the bottom of this hole?
Scarcely had these words been formulated when there I was, at the bottom of the hole! And it was absolutely as if a tremendous, almighty spring were there, and then (Mother hits the table) vrrrm! I was cast out of the abyss into a vastness. My body immediately sat straight up, head on high, following the movement. If someone had been watching, this is what he would have seen: in a single bound, vrrrm! Straight up, to the maximum, my head on high.
And I followed all this without objectifying it in the least; I was not aware of what it was nor of what was happening, nor of any explanation at all, nothing: it was like that. I was living it, thats all. The ex perience was absolutely spontaneous. And after this rather painful descent, phew!there was a kind of su per-comfort. I cant explain it otherwise, an ease,4 but an ease to the utmost. A perfect immobility in a sense of eternity but with an extraordinary INTENSITY of movement and life! An inner intensity, unmanifested; it was within, self-contained. And motionless (had there been an outside, it would have been motionless in relation to that) and it was in a life so immeasurable that it can only be expressed metaphorically as infinite. And with an intensity, a POWER, a force and a peace the peace of eternity. A silence, a calm. A POWER capable of of EVERYTHING. Everything.
And I was not imagining nor objectifying it; I was living it with easewith a great ease. And it lasted until the end of the meditation. When it gradually began fading, I stopped the meditation and left.
--
I dont think I am mistaken, for there was such a su perabundant feeling of power, of warmth, of gold It was not fluid, it was like a powdering. And each of these things (they cannot be called specks or fragments, nor even points, unless you understand it in the mathematical sense, a point that occupies no space) was something equivalent to a mathematical point, but like living gold, a powdering of warm gold. I cannot say it was sparkling, I cannot say it was dark, nor was it made of light, either: a multitude of tiny points of gold, nothing but that. They seemed to be touching my eyes, my face and with such an inherent power and warmthit was a splendor! And then, at the same time, the feeling of a plenitude, the PEACE of omnipotence It was rich, it was full. It was movement at its ultimate, infinitely swifter than all one can imagine, and at the same time it was absolute peace, perfect tranquillity.
(Mother resumes her message)
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
And this almighty spring is the perfect image of what is happeningwhat must happen, what will happenFOR EVERYONE: suddenly, one is cast forth into the vast.
***
0 1958-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Truly speaking, perhaps one is never rid of the hostile forces as long as one has not permanently emerged into the Light, above the lower hemisphere. There, the term hostile forces loses its meaning; they become only forces of progress, they force you to progress. But to see things in this way, you have to get out of the lower hemisphere, for below, they are very real in their opposition to the divine plan.
It was said in the ancient traditions that one could not live for more than twenty days in this higher state without leaving ones body and returning to the supreme Origin. Now this is no longer true.
It is precisely this state of perfect Harmony beyond all attacks that will become possible with the supramental realization. It is what all those who are destined for the supramental transformation will realize. The hostile forces know it well; in the supramental world, they will automatically disappear. Having no more utility, they will be dissolved without our having to do anything, simply through the presence of the supramental force. So now they are being unleashed with a fury in a negation of everything, everything.
The link between the two worlds has not yet been built, but it is in the process of being built; this was the meaning of the ex perience of February 3 1958, 1: to build a link between the two worlds. For both worlds are indeed therenot one above the other, but within each other, in two different dimensions. Only, there is no communication between them; they overlap, as it were, without being connected. In the ex perience of February 3, I saw certain people from here (and from elsewhere) who already belong to the supramental world in a part of their being, but there is no connection, no link. But now the hour has come in universal history for this link to be built.
--
The quality or the kind of relationship I had with the Supreme at that moment was entirely different from the one we have hereeven the identification had a different quality. One can very well understand that all the lower movements are different but this identification by which the Supreme governs and lives in us was the summit of our ex perience herewell, the way He governs and lives is different depending on whether we are in this hemisphere here or in the supramental life. And at that moment (the ex perience of November 13), what made the ex perience so intense was that I came to perceive vaguely both these states of consciousness at once. It was almost as if the Supreme Himself were different, or our ex perience of Him. And yet, in both cases, it was a contact with the Supreme. It is probably how we perceive Him or the way in which we translate it that differs, but the fact is that the quality of the ex perience is different.
In the other hemisphere, there is an intensity and a plenitude which are translated by a power different from the one here. How can I formulate it?I cannot.
--
Meanwhile, we should acknowledge that we dont have the key, it is not yet in our hands. Or rather, we know quite well where it is, and there is only one thing to do: the perfect surrender Sri Aurobindo speaks of, the total surrender to the divine Will whatever happens, even in the dark of night.
There is night and sun, night and sun, and night again, many nights, but one must cling to this will for surrender, cling as through a storm, and put everything into the hands of the Supreme Lord. Until the day when the Sun shall shine forever, the day of total Victory.
0 1958-11-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I had two visions which are certainly related to this. The most recent one was yesterday, and it concerned a past life in India. It is something that took place in India about one thousand years ago, perhaps a little more (I am not yet sure about this). And it contains both things. Its strange, both things together the origin of the power of realization in this life and the obstacle to be conquered.
I had the last vision yesterday evening. You were much taller than you are now; you were wearing the orange robe, and you were backed up against a door of bronze, a bronze door like the door of a temple or a palace but at the same time it was symbolic (it was a fact, it actually took place like this, but at the same time it was symbolic). And unfortunately, it didnt last because I was disturbed. But it contained the key.
I was VERY HAPPY with the vision, for there was a great POWER, though it was rather terrible. But it was magnificent. When I saw that, I This vision was given to me because I had concentrated with a will to find the solution, a true solution, an enduring and permanent solution that is, I had this spontaneous gratitude which goes out to the Grace when it brings some effective help. Only, what followed was interrupted by someone who came to call me and that cut it short, but it will return.
But now I KNOWbefore I did not know. The other morning I saw, and I was told very clearly that it was a karma1 to be worked out; so then I told you, but at the time I didnt know what it was.
--
Karma: positive (or negative) consequences of actions performed in past lives (every action is endowed with a self- perpetuating dynamism).
A temple-island in southern India where Satprem became a sannyasi.
0 1958-11-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Even at a very young age, I had a kind of intuition of my destiny. I felt that something in me had to be exhausted, or that I had to exhaust myself. I dont know, as though I had to descend into the depths of the night to find the thing. I thought it was the concentration camps. perhaps this was still not deep enough Do you see any meaning in all this?
It can hardly be formulated; these are merely impressions that follow one another. I know that when you thought of leaving with Swami,1 I saw that a door was opening, that it was the truth, that this was IT.
--
Generally, when the hour has come for a karma to be overcome and absorbed in the Grace, the image or the knowledge or the ex perience of the exact facts that are the origin of the karma come to me, and I can then perform the cleansing action.
For the time being, it is not yet there.
--
Yes, thats it (silence) That is the knot of karma: that sensation, that perception, that is the knot of karma.
My perception is that I have something to do, I dont know what, and only afterwards
But do you feel it as something to do physically?
0 1958-11-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Basically, the vast majority of men are like prisoners with all the doors and all the windows shut, so they suffocate (which is quite natural), but they have with them the key that opens the doors and the windows, and they dont use it Certainly, there is a period when they dont know that they have the key, but even long after they do know it, long after they have been told, they hesitate to use it and doubt that it has the power to open the doors and windows, or even that it may be advisable to open them. And even once they feel that After all, it might be a good thing, a fear pursues them: What is going to happen once all these doors and these windows open? They become afraidafraid of losing themselves in this light and in this freedom. They want to remain what they call themselves. They love their falsehood and their slavery. Something in them loves it and remains clinging to it. They feel that without their limits, they would no longer exist.
That is why the journey is so long, so difficult. For if one would truly consent no longer to be, everything would become so easy, so swift, so luminous, so joyousthough perhaps not in the way men conceive of joy and ease. At heart, there are very few beings who are not enamored of struggle. There are very few who would consent to having no darkness or who can conceive of light as anything other than the opposite of obscurity: Without shadow, there would be no painting. Without struggle, there would be no victory. Without suffering, there would be no joy. That is what they think, and as long as they think like that, they are not yet born to the spirit.
***
0 1958-11-27 - Intermediaries and Immediacy, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
For example, one thing had always appeared unimportant to me in actionintermediaries between the spiritualized individual being, the conscious soul, and the Supreme. According to my personal ex perience, it had always seemed to me that if one is exclusively turned towards the Supreme in all ones actions and expresses Him directly, whatever is to be done is done automatically. For example, if you are always open and if at each second you consciously want to express only what the Supreme Lord wants to be expressed, it is done automatically. But with all that I have learned about pujas, about certain scriptures and certain rituals as well, the necessity for a process has become very clear to me. Its the same as in physical life; in physical life, everything needs a process, as we know, and it is the knowledge of processes that constitutes physical science. Similarly, in a more occult working, the knowledge and especially the RESPECT for the process seem to be much more important than I had first thought.
And when I studied this, when I looked at this science of processes, of intermediaries, suddenly I clearly understood the working of karma, which I had not understood before. I had worked and intervened quite often to change someones karma, but sometimes I had to wait, without exactly knowing why the result was not immediate. I simply used to wait without worrying about the reasons for this slowness or delay. Thats how it was. And generally it ended, as I said, with the exact vision of the karmas source, its initial cause; and scarcely would I have this vision when the Power would come, and the thing would be dissolved. But I didnt bother about finding out why it was like that.
0 1958-12-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
If you want, I can return to the Ashram and throw myself headlong into the work in order to forget all this. There is a lot of work with Herberts things to correct, the revision of The Synthesis of Yoga, your old Questions and Answers and the Dhammapada, and perhaps you would accept to take up our work together again?
Otherwise, if you consider it preferable to wait, I could go join Swami in Rameswaram, discarding all my little personal reactions towards him. And I would try my best to find again the Light of the first time and return to you stronger. I dont know. I will do what you say. All this really has to change. I dont know, moreover, whether Swami wishes to have me.
Mother, I need you, I need you. Forgive me and tell me what I should do.
--
I have just received your letter which I read with all my love, the love that understands and effaces. When you return here, you will always be very welcome, and we shall certainly take up our work together again. I shall be happy, and it is very much needed. But first of all, it will be good for you to go to Rameswaram. I know that you will be welcome there. Stay there as long as necessary to find and consolidate your ex perience. Afterwards, come back here, stronger and better armed, to face a new period of outer and inner work. At the end of the labor is the Victory.
With all my confident love.
0 1958-12-15 - tantric mantra - 125,000, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
At the new moon, when I felt very down, he gave me the first tantric mantraa mantra to Durga. For a period of 41 days, I must repeat it 125,000 times and go every morning to the Temple, stand before Parvati and recite this mantra within me for at least one hour. Then I must go to the sanctuary of Shiva and recite another mantra for half an hour. Practically speaking, I have to repeat constantly within me the mantra to Durga in a silent concentration, whatever I may be doing on the outside. In these conditions, it is difficult to think of you and this has created a slight conflict in me, but I believe that your Grace is acting through Swami and through Durga, whom I am invoking all the time I remember what you told me about the necessity for intermediaries and I am obeying Swami unreservedly.
Mother, things are far from being what they were the first time in Rameswaram, and I am living through certain moments that are hell the enemy seems to have been unleashed with an extraordinary violence. It comes in waves, and after it recedes, I am literally SHATTEREDphysically, mentally and vitally drained. This morning, while going to the temple, I lived through one of these moments. All this suffering that suddenly sweeps down upon me is horrible. Yes, I had the feeling of being BACKED UP AGAINST A WALL, exactly as in your vision I was up against a wall. I was walking among these immense arcades of sculptured granite and I could see myself walking, very small, all alone, alone, ravaged with pain, filled with a nameless despair, for nowhere was there a way out. The sea was nearby and I could have thrown myself into it; otherwise, there was only the sanctuary of Parvati but there was no more Africa to flee to, everything closed in all around me, and I kept repeating, Why? Why? This much suffering was truly inhuman, as if my last twenty years of nightmare were crashing down upon me. I gritted my teeth and went to the sanctuary to say my mantra. The pain in me was so strong that I broke into a cold sweat and almost fainted. Then it subsided. Yet even now I feel completely battered.
I clearly see that the hour has come: either I will perish right here, or else I will emerge from this COMPLETELY changed. But something has to change. Mother, you are with me, I know, and you are protecting me, you love me I have only you, only you, you are my Mother. If these moments of utter darkness return and they are bound to return for everything to be exorcised and conqueredprotect me in spite of myself. Mother, may your Grace not abandon me. I want to be done with all these old phantoms, I want to be born anew in your Light; it has to beotherwise I can no longer go on.
Mother, I believe I understand something of all that you yourself are suffering, and the crucifixion of the Divine in Matter is a real crucifixion. In this moment of consciousness, I offer you all my trials and little sufferings. I would like to triumph so that it be your triumph, one weight less upon your heart.
0 1958-12-24, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Swami told me that the mantra to Durga is intended to pierce through into the subconscient. To complement this work, he does his pujas to Kali, and finally one of his friends, X, the High Priest of the temple in Rameswaram (who presided over my initiation and has great occult powers), has undertaken to say a very powerful mantra over me daily, for a period of eight days, to extirpate the dark forces from my subconscious. The o peration already began four days ago. While reciting his mantra, he holds a glass of water in his hand, then he makes me drink it. It seems that on the eighth day, if the enemy has been trapped, this water turns yellow then the o peration is over and the poisoned water is thrown out. (I tell you all this because I prefer that you know.) In any event, I like X very much, he is a very luminous, very good man. If I am not delivered after all this!
In truth, I believe only in the Grace. My mantra and all the rest seem to me only little tricks to try to win over your Grace.
--
I have received your letter of the 24th. You did well to write, not because I was worried, but I like to receive news for it fixes my work by giving me useful material details. I am glad that X is doing something for you. I like this man and I was counting upon him. I hope he will succeed. perhaps his work will be useful here, too for I have serious reasons to believe that this time occult and even definite magic practices aimed directly against my body have been mixed in with the attacks. This has complicated things somewhat, so as yet I have not resumed any of my usual activities I am still upstairs resting, but in reality fighting. Yesterday, the Christmas distribution took place without me, and it is likely that it will be the same for January 1st. The work, too, has been completely interrupted. And I do not yet know how long this will last.
Keep me posted on the result of Xs action; it interests me very much
0 1958-12-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
It seems to me that everything has changed since I have understood that it is not a personal battle, and that I can serve. Your grace is everywhere, everywhere.
***
--
I have just now received your letter of the 28th. On that day I definitely felt that there was a decisive change in the situation and I understood right away that you had spoken to Swami and also that what I had written to you gave you the opportunity to take a great step. I am very happy and can say with certitude that the worst is over. However, from several points of view, I infinitely appreciate Xs offer. And although I do not think it necessary, or even desirable, that they both come here (it would create a veritable revolution and perhaps even a panic among the ashramites), I am sure that their intervention in Rameswaram itself would not only be useful but most effective
Yes, everything has changed since you now understand that your battle is not only a personal battle and that by winning it, it is a real service you are rendering to the Divine Work.
Happy New Year, my dear child! I am sure it will bring us a decisive victory.
0 1958 12 - Floor 1, young girl, we shall kill the young princess - black tent, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Two or three days after I retired to my room upstairs,1 early in the night I fell into a very heavy sleep and found myself out of the body much more materially than I do usually. This degree of density in which you can see the material surroundings exactly as they are. The part that was out seemed to be under a spell and only half conscious. When I found myself at the first floor where everything was absolutely black, I wanted to go up again, but then I discovered that my hand was held by a young girl whom I could not see in the darkness but whose contact was very familiar. She pulled me by the hand telling me laughingly, No, come, come down with me, we shall kill the young princess. I could not understand what she meant by this young princess and, rather unwillingly, I followed her to see what it was. Arriving in the anteroom which is at the top of the staircase leading to the ground floor, my attention was drawn in the midst of all this total obscurity to the white figure of Kamala2 standing in the middle of the passage between the hall and Sri Aurobindos room. She was as it were in full light while everything else was black. Then I saw on her face such an expression of intense anxiety that to comfort her I said, I am coming back. The sound of my voice shook off from me the semi-trance in which I was before and suddenly I thought, Where am I going? and I pushed away from me the dark figure who was pulling me and in whom, while she was running down the steps, I recognized a young girl who lived with Sri Aurobindo and me for many years and died five years back. This girl during her life was under the most diabolical influence. And then I saw very distinctly (as through the walls of the staircase) down below a small black tent which could scarcely be perceived in the surrounding darkness and standing in the middle of the tent the figure of a man, head and face shaved (like the sannyasin or the Buddhist monks) covered from head to foot with a knitted outfit following tightly the form of his body which was tall and slim. No other cloth or garment could give an indication as to who he could be. He was standing in front of a black pot placed on a dark red fire which was throwing its reddish glow on him. He had his right arm stretched over the pot, holding between two fingers a thin gold chain which looked like one of mine and was unnaturally visible and bright. Shaking gently the chain he was chanting some words which translated in my mind, She must die the young princess, she must pay for all she has done, she must die the young princess.
Then I suddenly realized that it was I the young Princess and as I burst into laughter, I found myself awake in my bed.
--
Mother withdrew on December 9. In fact, She had been unwell for already more than a month before withdrawing. On November 26, the last 'Wednesday class' took place at the playground; on November 28 the last 'Friday class', on December 6, the last 'Translation class'; on December 1, the end of Mother's tennis and the last visit to the playground. On December 9, She again went down for the meditation around the Samadhi. From December 10, Mother remained in her room for one month. A great period had come to an end. Henceforth, She would only go out of the Ashram building on rare occasions.
A disciple
0 1959-01-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
This is to tell you that a knot has very perceptibly come undone in me, for no apparent reason; suddenly, I was breathing easily.
And it happened just as I was despairing of ever getting out of it. I seemed to be touching a kind of fundamental bedrock, so painful, so suffering, and full of revolt because of too much suffering. And I saw that all my efforts, all the meditations, aspirations, mantras, were only covering up this suffering bedrock without touching it. I saw this fundamental thing in me very clearly, a poignant knot, ever ready for an absolute negation. I saw it and I said to you, Mother, only your grace can remove this. I said this to you in the temple that morning, in total despair. And then, the knot was undone. Xs action contri buted a lot, with your grace acting through him. But truly, I have traversed a veritable hell this last while.
--
His action upon you is to continue for another five days, after which he is positive that you will be entirely saved. According to him, it is indeed a magic attack originating in Pondicherry, and perhaps even from someone in the Ashram!! He told me that this evil person would finally be forced to appear before you I am learning many interesting things from him.
Mother, by way of expressing to you my gratitude, I want to work now to open myself totally to your Light and become truly an egoless instrument, your conscious instrument. Mother, you are the sole Reality.
0 1959-01-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
In this regard, perhaps you know that X is the tenth in the line of Bhaskaraya (my spelling of this name is perhaps not correct), the great Tantric of whom you had a vision, who could comm and the coming of Kali along with all her warriors. It is from X that Swami received his initiation.
Your last letter gave us great pleasure, knowing that you have finally recovered physically. But we deeply hope that you will not again take up the countless activities that formerly consumed all your timeso many people come to you egoistically, for prestige, to be able to say that they are on familiar terms with you. You know this, of course
--
I am taking advantage of this situation to work. I have chosen the articles for the Bulletin. They are as follows: 1) Message. 2) To keep silent. 3) Can there be intermediary states between man and su per-man? 4) The Anti-Divine. 5) What is the role of the spirit? 6) Karma (I have touched this one up to make it less personal). 7) The Worship of the Supreme in Matter. Now I would like to prepare the first twelve Aphorisms3 for printing. But as you have not yet revised the last two, I am sending them to you. Could you do them when you have finished what you are doing for the Bulletin? It is not urgent, take your time. Do not disturb your real work for this in any way. For, in my eyes, this work of inner liberation is much more important.
You will find in this letter a little money. I thought you might need it for your stamps, etc.
0 1959-01-21, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Here is what X told me: I have received a message from my guru.1 In my vision, the Mother was there, next to my guru, and she was smiling. My guru told me that your present difficulties are a period of testing, but I could already give you the first stage of tantric initiation and that for you, the three stages of initiation could be done in an accelerated way.
I will therefore give you initiation this Friday or Saturday, on the day of the full moon or the day before. This first stage will last three months during which you will have to repeat 1 lakh2 times the mantra that I will give you. At the end of three months, I will come to see you in Pondicherryor you will come here for a fortnight, and as soon as I have received the message from my guru, I will give you the second stage that will last three months as well. At the end of these three months, you will receive the full initiation. X warned me that the first stage I am to receive provokes attacks and tests but that all this disappears with the second stage. Forewarned is forearmed. For what reason I do not know, but X told me that the particular nature of my initiation should remain secret and that he will say nothing about it to Swami, and he added (in speaking of the speed of the process), But you will not be less than the Swami. (!!) There, I wanted you to knowbesides, you were present in Xs vision. All this happened at a time when I was in the most des perate crisis I have ever known. Sweet Mother, there is no end to expressing my gratitude to you, and yet with the least trial, I am reduced to nothing. Why have you so much grace for me?
0 1959-01-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
So X will to do a special work for you for eleven days, and if at the end of this period the suffering still persists, he will send me to Pondicherry to deliver something directly into your hands. I, too, would like very much to do something to alleviate your suffering.
By a special grace, X gave me both stages of the tantric initiation at the same time, although they are normally separated by several years; then if all goes well, he will give me the full initiation in 6 months. I have thus received a mantra, along with the power of realizing it. X told me that a realization should come at the beginning of the fifth month if I repeat the mantra strictly according to his instructions, but he again told me that the hostile forces would do all they could to prevent me from saying my mantra: mental suggestions and even illness. X has understood that I have work at the Ashram, and he has exempted me from the outer forms (pujas and other rituals), but nevertheless I must repeat my mantra very accurately every day (3,333 times, that is, a little more than 3 hours uninterrupted in the mornings, and more than 2 hours in the evening). I must therefore organize myself in such a way as to get up very early in the morning in Pondicherry, for in no case will your work suffer.
0 1959-01-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
As for my return to Pondicherry, I would like you yourself to decide. I am anxious to see you again, but I also think that it is not necessary to rush things, and the Darshan periods are heavy for you.
In principle, X will have finished his purging of me on February 6. So after that date I will do what you wish.
--
P.S. All the old Questions and Answers will also have to be revised with you, perhaps not in their entirety, but certain problems need clarification. What a grace to be able to work with you!
***
0 1959-03-10 - vital dagger, vital mass, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
For example, I saw one of them trying to incite anger in someone so that this person would deliver a blowa spiritual blow. And this formation had a dagger in his hand (a vital dagger, you see, it was a vital being: gray and slimy, horrible), he was holding a very sharp dagger which he was flaunting, saying, When a person has done something like that (pretending that someone had done an unforgivable thing), this is what he deserves and the scenario was complete: the being rushed forward, vitally, with his dagger.
I, who know the consequences of these things, stopped him just in time I gave him a blow. Then I had enough of all this and it was over, I cleaned the place out. It was almost a physical cleaning, for I had my hands clasped together (I was in a semitrance) and I threw them apart in an abrupt movement, left and right, powerfully, as if to sweep something away, and frrt! immediately everything was gone.
0 1959-03-26 - Lord of Death, Lord of Falsehood, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Integral Yoga
(Concerning Satprem's most recent peregrinations and his fundamental rebelliousness, which periodically makes him take to the road)
Behind the Titan attacking us particularly now, there is something else. This Titan has been delegated by someone else. He has been there since my birth, was born with me. I felt him when I was very young, but only gradually, as I became conscious of myself, did I understand WHO he was and what was behind him.
--- Grep of noun per
alligator snapper
american copper
american creeper
aper
art paper
asp viper
asper
backslapper
bad temper
bagpiper
barkeeper
bartramian sandpiper
bay-leaved caper
bean caper
beats per minute
beekeeper
beeper
bell pepper
belly flopper
belly whopper
betel pepper
big dipper
bird pepper
bits per inch
bits per second
black pepper
blister copper
blooper
blotting paper
blueprint paper
bodice ripper
bond paper
bookkeeper
brothel keeper
brown creeper
bumper
butcher paper
california lady's slipper
caliper
calliper
camper
canary creeper
candy striper
canine distemper
caper
capros aper
carbon paper
card sharper
cardsharper
carper
carpet slipper
carpet sweeper
cartridge paper
casper
cayenne pepper
charge per unit
cherry pepper
chili pepper
chilli pepper
chimneysweeper
chopper
cigarette paper
claim jumper
clapper
clipper
clodhopper
clothes hamper
clustered lady's slipper
commercial paper
common caper
common juniper
common lady's-slipper
common pepper
common viper
computer paper
cone pepper
construction paper
conversation stopper
cooper
copper
count per minute
cowper
crapper
creeper
creeping juniper
crepe paper
crimper
cropper
crupper
cupper
curlew sandpiper
cycle per second
damper
developer
devil worshiper
diaper
diary keeper
dipper
distemper
dnieper
dock-walloper
doorkeeper
doorstopper
double dipper
draper
drawing paper
drooping juniper
dropper
dumper
dust wrapper
dwarf juniper
earning per share
eavesdropper
emerald creeper
emery paper
equine distemper
european creeper
european sandpiper
exam paper
examination paper
eye dropper
fairy-slipper
filter paper
fixer-upper
flapper
flipper
flypaper
food hamper
force per unit area
frank cooper
froghopper
gaboon viper
gamekeeper
gary cooper
gatekeeper
genus piper
gerard kuiper
gerard peter kuiper
giant potato creeper
gigacycle per second
globe pepper
goalkeeper
good temper
gossiper
graph paper
grasshopper
gray snapper
greaseproof paper
green paper
green pepper
greenskeeper
grey snapper
grim reaper
groundkeeper
groundskeeper
grouper
guinea pepper
gulper
hamper
handicapper
harper
hawaiian honeycreeper
helper
hero worshiper
hero worshipper
high stepper
historical paper
hog snapper
honeycreeper
hoper
hopper
horned viper
hot pepper
hotelkeeper
housekeeper
idol worshiper
ill temper
india paper
innkeeper
inside caliper
interloper
jack the ripper
jalapeno pepper
james fenimore cooper
jasper
java pepper
jumper
juniper
karl popper
keeper
kidnaper
kidnapper
kilocycle per second
kilometers per hour
kilometres per hour
kipper
kraft paper
kuiper
ladies' slipper
lady's slipper
lady-slipper
laid paper
landscaper
large yellow lady's slipper
last supper
leafhopper
leaper
least sandpiper
ledger paper
leper
letter paper
lighthouse keeper
limper
linen paper
linendraper
lisper
litmus paper
little dipper
lockkeeper
long-horned grasshopper
long pepper
looper
lopper
lord's supper
lumper
madagascar pepper
mangrove snapper
manifold paper
manila paper
manilla paper
mapper
market keeper
masking paper
megacycle per second
melagueta pepper
mexican juniper
micrometer caliper
migratory grasshopper
miles per gallon
miles per hour
million floating point operations per second
million instructions per second
minesweeper
mopper
moss-trooper
mountain lady's slipper
mudskipper
music paper
mutton snapper
name dropper
negro pepper
netkeeper
newspaper
nipper
notepaper
odd-leg caliper
oilpaper
order paper
outside caliper
pad of paper
paper
parachute jumper
paratrooper
party pooper
passover supper
pauper
pea-souper
peacekeeper
pectoral sandpiper
peeper
pepper
per capita income
per centum
per diem
peradventure
perambulation
perambulator
peramelidae
perboric acid
perca
perca flavescens
perca fluviatilis
percale
perceiver
percent
percent sign
percentage
percentage point
percentage sign
percentile
percept
perceptibility
perception
perceptiveness
perceptivity
perceptual constancy
perceptual experience
perch
percher
percheron
perching bird
perchlorate
perchloric acid
perchloride
perchloromethane
percidae
perciformes
percina
percina tanasi
percipient
percival lowell
percoid
percoid fish
percoidea
percoidean
percolate
percolation
percolator
percomorphi
percophidae
percussion
percussion cap
percussion instrument
percussion section
percussionist
percussive instrument
percussor
percy
percy aldridge grainger
percy bysshe shelley
percy grainger
perdicidae
perdicinae
perdition
perdix
perdix perdix
perdurability
pere david's deer
pere jacques marquette
peregrination
peregrine
peregrine falcon
perejil
perennation
perennial
perennial pea
perennial ragweed
perennial ryegrass
perennial salt marsh aster
pereskia
pereskia aculeata
perestroika
perfect
perfect game
perfect gas
perfect participle
perfect pitch
perfect tense
perfecta
perfecter
perfectibility
perfection
perfectionism
perfectionist
perfective
perfective aspect
perfective tense
perfidiousness
perfidy
perfluorocarbon
perfoliate leaf
perforated eardrum
perforating vein
perforation
performance
performance bond
performance capability
performer
performing
performing artist
performing arts
perfume
perfumer
perfumery
perfusion
pergamum
pergola
peri
periactin
perianth
periapsis
periarterial plexus
periarteritis
periarteritis nodosa
pericallis
pericallis cruenta
pericallis hybrida
pericardial cavity
pericardial sac
pericardial space
pericardial vein
pericarditis
pericardium
pericarp
pericementoclasia
periclase
pericles
peridinian
peridiniidae
peridinium
peridium
peridot
peridotite
perigee
perigon
perigone
perigonium
perihelion
perijove
peril
perilla
perilla frutescens crispa
perilousness
perilune
perilymph
perimeter
perimysium
perinatologist
perinatology
perineal artery
perineotomy
perineum
perineurium
period
period of play
period of time
period piece
periodic acid
periodic apnea of the newborn
periodic breathing
periodic edema
periodic event
periodic law
periodic motion
periodic movement
periodic sentence
periodic table
periodical
periodical cicada
periodicity
periodontal disease
periodontia
periodontics
periodontist
periodontitis
periophthalmus
periosteum
peripatetic
peripateticism
peripatidae
peripatopsidae
peripatopsis
peripatus
peripeteia
peripetia
peripety
peripheral
peripheral device
peripheral nervous system
peripheral vision
periphery
periphrasis
periplaneta
periplaneta americana
periplaneta australasiae
periploca
periploca graeca
periscope
periselene
perishability
perishable
perishableness
perisher
perisoreus
perisoreus canadensis
perisoreus canadensis capitalis
perisperm
perissodactyl
perissodactyl mammal
perissodactyla
peristalsis
peristediinae
peristedion
peristedion miniatum
peristome
peristyle
perithecium
perithelium
peritoneal cavity
peritoneal inflammation
peritoneum
peritonitis
peritonsillar abscess
peritrate
periwig
periwinkle
periwinkle plant derivative
perjurer
perjury
perk
perkiness
perleche
perm
permafrost
permalloy
permanence
permanency
permanent
permanent injunction
permanent magnet
permanent press
permanent tooth
permanent wave
permanganate
permanganate of potash
permanganic acid
permeability
permeableness
permeation
permian
permian period
permic
permissibility
permission
permissive waste
permissiveness
permit
permutability
permutableness
permutation
pernambuco
pernambuco wood
pernicious anaemia
pernicious anemia
perniciousness
pernio
pernis
pernis apivorus
pernod
pernyi moth
perodicticus
perodicticus potto
perognathus
perognathus flavescens
perognathus flavus
perognathus hispidus
peromyscus
peromyscus eremicus
peromyscus gossypinus
peromyscus leucopus
peromyscus maniculatus
peron
peroneal vein
peroneus
peronospora
peronospora destructor
peronospora hyoscyami
peronospora tabacina
peronosporaceae
peronosporales
peroration
peroxidase
peroxide
peroxide blond
peroxide blonde
perpendicular
perpendicular style
perpendicularity
perpetration
perpetrator
perpetual calendar
perpetual motion
perpetual motion machine
perpetual warrant
perpetuation
perpetuity
perphenazine
perplexity
perquisite
perry
perry mason
persea
persea americana
persea borbonia
persecution
persecutor
persephone
persepolis
perseus
perseverance
perseveration
pershing
persia
persian
persian cat
persian deity
persian empire
persian gulf
persian gulf illness
persian gulf war
persian iris
persian lamb
persian lilac
persian melon
persian violet
persian walnut
persiflage
persimmon
persimmon tree
persistence
persistency
person
person agreement
person hour
person of color
person of colour
persona
persona grata
persona non grata
personableness
personage
personal
personal appeal
personal business
personal care
personal chattel
personal check
personal cheque
personal computer
personal credit line
personal digital assistant
personal effects
personal equation
personal estate
personal expense
personal foul
personal identification number
personal identity
personal income
personal judgement
personal judgment
personal letter
personal line of credit
personal loan
personal magnetism
personal manner
personal matters
personal memory
personal organiser
personal organizer
personal pronoun
personal property
personal relation
personal relationship
personal representative
personality
personality assessment
personality disorder
personality inventory
personality test
personalty
personation
personhood
personification
personnel
personnel carrier
personnel casualty
personnel department
personnel office
personnel pouch
persoonia
perspective
perspex
perspicaciousness
perspicacity
perspicuity
perspicuousness
perspiration
perspirer
persuader
persuasion
persuasiveness
pertainym
perth
pertinacity
pertinence
pertinency
pertness
perturbation
pertusaria
pertusariaceae
pertussis
peru
peruke
perusal
perusing
perutz
peruvian
peruvian balsam
peruvian bark
peruvian cotton
peruvian current
peruvian lily
peruvian mastic tree
peruvian monetary unit
pervaporation
pervasion
pervasiveness
perverseness
perversion
perversity
pervert
perviousness
peter cooper
phone tapper
photographic paper
piano damper
piece of paper
pied piper
piper
pit viper
plant hopper
planthopper
plumber's helper
pole jumper
popper
position paper
pounds per square inch
quick temper
rag paper
ram's-head lady's slipper
raper
rapper
reaper
record-keeper
red-backed sandpiper
red juniper
red pepper
red snapper
revolutions per minute
rice paper
ripper
rock hopper
rolling paper
romper
roofing paper
roper
saloon keeper
sand hopper
sand viper
sandhopper
sandpaper
sandpiper
sapper
scalper
scamper
scauper
schlepper
school newspaper
school paper
score paper
scorekeeper
scorper
scraper
scrapper
scratch paper
scupper
shaper
sharecropper
sharper
sheet of paper
shipper
shlepper
shopkeeper
shopper
short-horned grasshopper
short temper
show-stopper
showstopper
showy lady's-slipper
showy lady slipper
shrimper
simper
sinoper
sipper
sir karl raimund popper
ski jumper
skinny-dipper
skipper
skyscraper
slapper
sleeper
slip of paper
slipper
snapper
sniper
snooper
spirit rapper
spotted sandpiper
spring peeper
squareflipper square flipper
stage whisper
stamper
state trooper
station keeper
steeper
stepper
stomper
stooper
stopper
storekeeper
storm trooper
strapper
street sweeper
striper
stripper
stumper
sun worshiper
super
supper
sweeper
sweet pepper
syrian bean caper
tabasco pepper
tamper
taper
tapper
tar paper
tavern keeper
temper
term paper
test paper
thigh-slapper
timekeeper
tipper
tissue paper
toilet paper
tollkeeper
toper
topper
tracing paper
tramper
transfer paper
trapper
tree creeper
treehopper
trillion floating point operations per second
tripper
trooper
trouper
true pepper
trumpet creeper
tub-thumper
typewriter paper
typing paper
upland sandpiper
upper
usurper
vamper
venus' slipper
venus's slipper
vernier caliper
vesper
viper
virginia creeper
wall creeper
wall pepper
walloper
wallpaper
waste paper
wax paper
weeper
whimper
whipper
whippersnapper
whisper
white paper
white pepper
whooper
whopper
wicket-keeper
william cowper
windscreen wiper
windshield wiper
wiper
wire stripper
wiretapper
wood-creeper
woodcreeper
words per minute
worshiper
worshipper
wove paper
wrapper
wrapping paper
writing paper
yellow lady's slipper
yellow lady-slipper
yellowtail snapper
zapper
zipper
zoo keeper