shastra

0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
yet some kind of shastra or scientific method of the synthetic
Yoga.

01.07 - The Bases of Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Any real reconstruction of society, any permanent reformation of the world presupposes a real reconstruction, a permanent reformation of human nature. Otherwise any amount of casting and recasting the mere machineries would not bring about any appreciable result, but leave the thing as it is. Change the laws as much as you like, but if you do not change the nature of man, the world will not change. For it is man that makes laws and not laws that make man. Laws express at best the demand which man feels within himself. A truth must realise itself in human nature before it can be codified. You may certainly legalise an ideal, but that does not necessarily mean realising it. The realisation must come first in nature and character, then it is naturally translated into laws and institutions. A man lives the laws of his soul and being and not the law given him by the shastras. He violates the shastras, modifies them, utilises them according to the greater imperative of his Swabhava.
The French Revolution wanted to remould human society and its ideal was liberty, equality and fraternity. It pulled down the old machinery and set up a new one in its stead. And the result? "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" remained always in effect a cry in the wilderness. 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?

0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
and the shastra of the Brahmins is corrupt and dying. Law released into freedom is the
liberator. Not the Pundit, but the Yogin, not monasticism, but the inner renunciation of

0 1959-01-14, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This morning, X told me that he would be most happy to continue his action upon you if it would help your work; he has continued it anyway, even after knowing that the malefic influence was expelled from the Ashram. By the way, X told me that this evil spirit is continuing to circle around the Ashram, but beyond its borders. Therefore, if you agree, it would be necessary for him to come to Pondicherry one of these days to come to grips directly with the evil one and finish him off in such a way that he can no longer come to disturb the sadhaks, or your work, upon the slightest pretext. Then X could force this spirit to appear before him, and thereby free the atmosphere from its influence. Anyway, this trip to Pondicherry would not take place in the near future, and it would be easy to give him an official excuse: seminars on the Tantra shastra that will interest all the Sanskritists at the Ashram. Moreover, Xs work would be done quietly in his room when he does his daily puja. From here, from Rameswaram, it is rather difficult to attract Pondicherrys atmosphere and do the work with precision. Of course, nothing will be done without your express consent. Swami is writing you on his own to tell you of the revelation that X received from his [deceased] guru concerning your experience and the schemings of certain Ashram members.
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.

04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It may be that for most men the physical life is of first and primary importance and they look upon the spiritual life, 'if ever they do, as a secondary pursuit; even as children consider food and play as the one thing needful, study or mental exercise quite a secondary or tertiary affair occupying a small side corner. This is because the taste for the higher life belongs to a more developed consciousness, not because it is something really dependent and derivative. Indeed, we do in fact see peopleindividually or collectively (like the early Christians, for example)suddenly becoming conscious of the burning reality of the Spirit, in the midst of and in spite of the most adverse and all-engrossing outer physical conditions, and follow it caring nothing. So the Christ directs: Follow Me, let the dead bury their dead; and the Indian shastra enjoins: Yadahareva virajet tadahareva pravrajet the day you feel unattached, that very day go out of the world and away.
To the spiritual seeker the higher values are the first things that come first: to the ordinary man it is otherwise, lower values come first and claim topmost priority. To the experience of the spiritual seeker one should give greater value, for he has the experience of both the values, while the ordinary man knows only of one variety. Naturally, as we have said, there is synthesis, a fusion of the two values; but that is elsewhere for the present, not actually here and now.

10.01 - A Dream, #Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Harimohon was about to ask something when, all of a sudden, he saw that there was neither Sri Krishna nor the ascetic, neither the tiger nor any hill. He found himself living in a well-to-do quarter of a town; he possessed much wealth, a family and children. Every day he was giving alms in charity to the Brahmins and to the beggars; he was regularly repeating the Divine Name three times a day; observing all the rites and rituals prescribed in the shastras, he was following the path shown by Raghunandan, and was leading the life of an ideal father, an ideal husb and and an ideal son.
But the next moment he saw to his dismay that the residents of the locality he was living in had neither mutual good-will nor any happiness; they considered the mechanical observance of social conventions the highest virtue. Instead of the ecstatic feeling that had been his in the beginning, he now had a feeling of suffering. It seemed to him as if he had been very thirsty but, lacking water, had been eating dust,only dust, infinite dust. He ran away from that place and went to another locality. There, in front of a grand mansion, a huge crowd had gathered; words of blessing were on every ones lips. Advancing he saw Tinkari Sheel seated on a verandah, distributing large amounts of money to the crowd; no one was going away empty-handed. Harimohon chuckled and thought, What is this dream? Tinkari Sheel is giving alms! Then he looked into Tinkaris mind. He saw that thousands of dissatisfactions and evil impulses such as greed, jealousy, passion, selfishness were all astir there. For the sake of virtuous appearance and fame, out of vanity, Tinkari had kept them suppressed, kept them starving, instead of driving them away from within.

1.007 - Initial Steps in Yoga Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Dirghakala is a protracted period of practice. Nairantarya is practice without remission of effort; that means to say, it has to be done every day at the same time. The third condition is that we must have great love for it. We must have immense affection for our practice. We know how much affection a novelist has for his own work; how much affection an artist has for the painting that he does; how much affection a musician has for his ragas. Every artisan, every engineer, every artist, and every professional has immense affection for his own or her own profession. One cannot have disgust for a profession and then succeed in it; nor should one take to it as a kind of suffering or pain. Suppose an artist feels, "Oh, this painting is a great torture and suffering for me," then a good painting will not come forth, because there is no love for it. So, the practice of yoga will yield fruits only if we have a real love for the practice; and if we have love for it, it will also have love for us. When we protect it, it will protect us. It is said in the yoga shastras that yoga will protect us like a mother it will feed us and take care of us, protect us in every direction at all times, visibly as well as invisibly. Sa tu drghakla nairantarya satkra sevita dhabhmi (I.14) then we get established. .
To come to the first point once again, the maximum time possible for sitting should be selected. I do not say that it will be a common directive for everyone. It may vary from person to person according to circumstances, occasions, etc., but under the prevailing conditions one can choose the maximum period possible. For certain types of professionals or workers in social life, sitting for more than half an hour may be impossible. Well okay, we shall take it for granted sit only for half an hour, or I would say even for fifteen minutes, but let it be a regular feature. Sit for fifteen minutes every day, and later on, perhaps after a few years of sitting like this, conditions will change automatically.

1.01 - Our Demand and Need from the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the Gita there is very little that is merely local or temporal and its spirit is so large, profound and universal that even this little can easily be universalised without the sense of the teaching suffering any diminution or violation; rather by giving an ampler scope to it than belonged to the country and epoch, the teaching gains in depth, truth and power. Often indeed the Gita itself suggests the wider scope that can in this way be given to an idea in itself local or limited. Thus it dwells on the ancient Indian system and idea of sacrifice as an interchange between gods and men, - a system and idea which have long been practically obsolete in India itself and are no longer real to the general human mind; but we find here a sense so entirely subtle, figurative and symbolic given to the word "sacrifice" and the conception of the gods is so little local or mythological, so entirely cosmic and philosophical that we can easily accept both as expressive of a practical fact of psychology and general law of Nature and so apply them to the modern conceptions of interchange between life and life and of ethical sacrifice and self-giving as to widen and deepen these and cast over them a more spiritual aspect and the light of a profounder and more far-reaching Truth. Equally the idea of action according to the shastra, the fourfold order of society, the allusion to the relative position of the four orders or the comparative spiritual disabilities of Shudras and women seem at first sight local and temporal, and, if they are too much pressed in their literal sense, narrow so much at least of the teaching, deprive it of its universality and spiritual depth and limit its validity for mankind at large. But if we look behind to the spirit and sense and not at the local name and temporal institution, we see that here too the sense is deep and true and the spirit philosophical, spiritual and universal. By shastra we perceive that the Gita means the law imposed on itself by humanity as a substitute for the purely egoistic action of the natural unregenerate man and a control on his tendency to seek in the satisfaction of his desire the standard and aim of his life. We see too that the fourfold order of society is merely the concrete form of a spiritual truth which is itself independent of the form; it rests on the conception of right works as a rightly ordered
Our Demand and Need from the Gita

1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The tendency of the conventional age of society is to fix, to arrange firmly, to formalise, to erect a system of rigid grades and hierarchies, to stereotype religion, to bind education and training to a traditional and unchangeable form, to subject thought to infallible authorities, to cast a stamp of finality on what seems to it the finished life of man. The conventional period of society has its golden age when the spirit and thought that inspired its forms are confined but yet living, not yet altogether walled in, not yet stifled to death and petrified by the growing hardness of the structure in which they are cased. That golden age is often very beautiful and attractive to the distant view of posterity by its precise order, symmetry, fine social architecture, the admirable subordination of its parts to a general and noble plan. Thus at one time the modern litterateur, artist or thinker looked back often with admiration and with something like longing to the mediaeval age of Europe; he forgot in its distant appearance of poetry, nobility, spirituality the much folly, ignorance, iniquity, cruelty and oppression of those harsh ages, the suffering and revolt that simmered below these fine surfaces, the misery and squalor that was hidden behind that splendid faade. So too the Hindu orthodox idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the shastra, and that is his golden age,a nobler one than the European in which the apparent gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin gold-leaf covering it, but still of an alloyed metal, not the true Satya Yuga. In these conventional periods of society there is much indeed that is really fine and sound and helpful to human progress, but still they are its copper age and not the true golden; they are the age when the Truth we strive to arrive at is not realised, not accomplished,4 but the exiguity of it eked out or its full appearance imitated by an artistic form, and what we have of the reality has begun to fossilise and is doomed to be lost in a hard mass of rule and order and convention.
For always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes. It attempts indeed to return, to revive the form, to modify it, anyhow to survive and even to make the form survive; but the time-tendency is too strong. This is visible in the history of religion; the efforts of the saints and religious reformers become progressively more scattered, brief and superficial in their actual effects, however strong and vital the impulse. We see this recession in the growing darkness and weakness of India in her last millennium; the constant effort of the most powerful spiritual personalities kept the soul of the people alive but failed to resuscitate the ancient free force and truth and vigour or permanently revivify a conventionalised and stagnating society; in a generation or two the iron grip of that conventionalism has always fallen on the new movement and annexed the names of its founders. We see it in Europe in the repeated moral tragedy of ecclesiasticism and Catholic monasticism. Then there arrives a period when the gulf between the convention and the truth becomes intolerable and the men of intellectual power arise, the great swallowers of formulas, who, rejecting robustly or fiercely or with the calm light of reason symbol and type and convention, strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek by the individual reason, moral sense or emotional desire the Truth that society has lost or buried in its whited sepulchres. It is then that the individualistic age of religion and thought and society is created; the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external freedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that preceded it into the idea that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming vainly that perfection can be determined by machinery, but still a necessary passage to the subjective period of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of his deeper self and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation.

1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:The supreme shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every thinking and living being. The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances, becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite. All life, all thought, all energising of the faculties, all experiences passive or active, become thenceforward so many shocks which disintegrate the teguments of the soul and remove the obstacles to the inevitable efflorescence. He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite. He has received the divine touch without which there is no awakening, no opening of the spirit; but once it is received, attainment is sure, whether conquered swiftly in the course of one human life or pursued patiently through many stadia of the cycle of existence in the manifested universe.
3:Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as potential knowledge in the unfolding soul of the creature. So also all perfection of which the outer man is capable, is only a realising of the eternal perfection of the Spirit within him. We know the Divine and become the Divine, because we are That already in our secret nature. All teaching is a revealing, all becoming is an unfolding. Self-attainment is the secret; self-knowledge and an increasing consciousness are the means and the process.
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6:But usually the representative influence occupies a much larger place in the life of the Sadhaka. If the Yoga is guided by a received written shastra, -- some Word from the past which embodies the experience of former Yogins, -- it may be practised either by personal effort alone or with the aid of a Guru. The spiritual knowledge is then gained through meditation on the truths that are taught and it is made living and conscious by their realisation in the personal experience; the Yoga proceeds by the results of prescribed methods taught in a Scripture or a tradition and reinforced and illumined by the instructions of the Master. This is a narrower practice, but safe and effective within its limits, because it follows a well-beaten track to a long familiar goal.
7:For the Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide, catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one Scripture or by several successively, -- if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be a good part of his development to include in its material a richly varied experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past. But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the written Truth, -- sabdabrahmativartate -- beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, -- srotaryasya srutasya ca. For he is not the Sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a Sadhaka of the Infinite.
8:Another kind of shastra is not Scripture, but a statement of the science and methods, the effective principles and way of working of the path of Yoga which the Sadhaka elects to follow. Each path has its shastra, either written or traditional, passing from mouth to mouth through a long line of Teachers. In India a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to the written or traditional teaching. All the lines of the Yoga are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher who has received the shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the disciple along the immemorial tracks. One often even hears the objection urged against a new practice, a new Yogic teaching, the adoption of a new formula, "It is not according to the shastra." But neither in fact nor in the actual practice of the Yogins is there really any such entire rigidity of an iron door shut against new truth, fresh revelation, widened experience. The written or traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner. Its importance and utility are therefore immense. But a great freedom of variation and development is always practicable. Even so highly scientific a system as Rajayoga can be practised on other lines than the organised method of Patanjali. Each of the three paths, trimarga 51, breaks into many bypaths which meet again at the goal. The general knowledge on which the Yoga depends is fixed, but the order, the succession, the devices, the forms must be allowed to vary, for the needs and particular impulsions of the individual nature have to be satisfied even while the general truths remain firm and constant.
9:An integral and synthetic Yoga needs especially not to be bound by any written or traditional shastra; for while it embraces the knowledge received from the past, it seeks to organise it anew for the present and the future. An absolute liberty of experience and of the restatement of knowledge in new terms and new combinations is the condition of its self-formation. Seeking to embrace all life in itself, it is in the position not of a pilgrim following the highroad to his destination, but, to that extent at least, of a path-finder hewing his way through a virgin forest. For Yoga has long diverged from life and the ancient systems which sought to embrace it, such as those of our Vedic forefa thers, are far away from us, expressed in terms which are no longer accessible, thrown into forms which are no longer applicable. Since then mankind has moved forward on the current of eternal Time and the same problem has to be approached from a new starting-point.
10:By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. Therefore the shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and type of the individual's acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man. Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must necessarily express itself by an increasing richness of variety in its forms, said once that the perfect state of that essential unity would come when each man had his own religion, when not bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each mall is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation.
11:Meanwhile certain general lines have to be formed which may help to guide the thought and practice of the Sadhaka. But these must take, as much as possible, forms of general truths, general statements of principle, the most powerful broad directions of effort and development rather than a fixed system which has to be followed as a routine. All shastra is the outcome of past experience and a help to future experience. It is an aid and a partial guide. It puts up signposts, gives the names of the main roads and the already explored directions, so that the traveller may know whither and by what paths he is proceeding.
12:The rest depends on personal effort and experience and upon the power of the Guide.
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18:As the supreme shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every man, so its supreme Guide and Teacher is the inner Guide, the World-Teacher, jagad-guru, secret within us. It is he who destroys our darkness by the resplendent light of his knowledge; that light becomes within us the increasing glory of his own self-revelation. He discloses progressively in us his own nature of freedom, bliss, love, power, immortal being. He sets above us his divine example as our ideal and transforms the lower existence into a reflection of that which it contemplates. By the inpouring of his own influence and presence into us he enables the individual being to attain to identity with the universal and transcendent.
19:What is his method and his system? He has no method and every method. His system is a natural organisation of the highest processes and movements of which the nature is capable. Applying themselves even to the pettiest details and to the actions the most insignificant in their appearance with as much care and thoroughness as to the greatest, they in the end lift all into the Light and transform all. For in his Yoga there is nothing too small to be used and nothing too great to be attempted. As the servant and disciple of the Master has no business with pride or egoism because all is done for him from above, so also he has no right to despond because of his personal deficiencies or the stumblings of his nature. For the Force that works in him is impersonal -- or superpersonal-and infinite.

1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For this discovery by individual free-thought of universal laws of which the individual is almost a by-product and by which he must necessarily be governed, this attempt actually to govern the social life of humanity in conscious accordance with the mechanism of these laws seems to lead logically to the suppression of that very individual freedom which made the discovery and the attempt at all possible. In seeking the truth and law of his own being the individual seems to have discovered a truth and law which is not of his own individual being at all, but of the collectivity, the pack, the hive, the mass. The result to which this points and to which it still seems irresistibly to be driving us is a new ordering of society by a rigid economic or governmental Socialism in which the individual, deprived again of his freedom in his own interest and that of humanity, must have his whole life and action determined for him at every step and in every point from birth to old age by the well-ordered mechanism of the State.1 We might then have a curious new version, with very important differences, of the old Asiatic or even of the old Indian order of society. In place of the religio-ethical sanction there will be a scientific and rational or naturalistic motive and rule; instead of the Brahmin shastrakara the scientific, administrative and economic expert. In the place of the King himself observing the law and compelling with the aid and consent of the society all to tread without deviation the line marked out for them, the line of the Dharma, there will stand the collectivist State similarly guided and empowered. Instead of a hierarchical arrangement of classes each with its powers, privileges and duties there will be established an initial equality of education and opportunity, ultimately perhaps with a subsequent determination of function by experts who shall know us better than ourselves and choose for us our work and quality. Marriage, generation and the education of the child may be fixed by the scientific State as of old by the shastra. For each man there will be a long stage of work for the State superintended by collectivist authorities and perhaps in the end a period of liberation, not for action but for enjoyment of leisure and personal self-improvement, answering to the Vanaprastha and Sannyasa Asramas of the old Aryan society. The rigidity of such a social state would greatly surpass that of its Asiatic forerunner; for there at least there were for the rebel, the innovator two important concessions. There was for the individual the freedom of an early Sannyasa, a renunciation of the social for the free spiritual life, and there was for the group the liberty to form a sub-society governed by new conceptions like the Sikh or the Vaishnava. But neither of these violent departures from the norm could be tolerated by a strictly economic and rigorously scientific and unitarian society. Obviously, too, there would grow up a fixed system of social morality and custom and a body of socialistic doctrine which one could not be allowed to question practically, and perhaps not even intellectually, since that would soon shatter or else undermine the system. Thus we should have a new typal order based upon purely economic capacity and function, guakarma, and rapidly petrifying by the inhibition of individual liberty into a system of rationalistic conventions. And quite certainly this static order would at long last be broken by a new individualist age of revolt, led probably by the principles of an extreme philosophical Anarchism.
On the other hand, there are in operation forces which seem likely to frustrate or modify this development before it can reach its menaced consummation. In the first place, rationalistic and physical Science has overpassed itself and must before long be overtaken by a mounting flood of psychological and psychic knowledge which cannot fail to compel quite a new view of the human being and open a new vista before mankind. At the same time the Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end; novel ideas are sweeping over the world and are being accepted with a significant rapidity, ideas inevitably subversive of any premature typal order of economic rationalism, dynamic ideas such as Nietzsches Will-to-live, Bergsons exaltation of Intuition above intellect or the latest German philosophical tendency to acknowledge a suprarational faculty and a suprarational order of truths. Already another mental poise is beginning to settle and conceptions are on the way to apply themselves in the field of practice which promise to give the succession of the individualistic age of society not to a new typal order, but to a subjective age which may well be a great and momentous passage to a very different goal. It may be doubted whether we are not already in the morning twilight of a new period of the human cycle.

1.035 - The Recitation of Mantra, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
In Indian tradition, we have the mantras which are also associated with certain factors other than merely a combination of words, one aspect of which is what is known as chandas. This a peculiar feature of the formation of a mantra. A chandas is a particular method of combining words according to a rule called ghana shastra, which is known in mystical circles in India. A particular word, when it is combined with another particular word, produces a particular effect. Rhetoricians are well acquainted with this subject. Great novelists and poets in India, especially those endowed with special genius and charged with divine power, such as Kalidasa, followed this technique of ghana shastra, and knowing the power of words, composed their poems or their works in such a way that they follow the rules of accepted rhetoric. Ordinary literature is not acquainted with this secret of Sanskrit literature. The greatness of a poet can be judged from the way he starts the work. How does he start the work? What is the word that he uses in the beginning? It is the belief among great writers in India that the initial phrases at the commencement of the work tell upon the nature of the entire work that is to follow.
This system of the combination of particular words with other words of the requisite character is followed in the composition of a mantra, which literally means, 'that which protects a person who thinks of it'. Mananat trayate iti mantrah a mantra is that which protects us when we chant it. It protects us like armour, like a shield that we wear in a war, by generating in us a resisting power against any kind of influence which is extraneous in nature, and which is unwanted for the purpose on hand. Chandas is the peculiar chemical combination of the letters, we may say. Particular chemical substances produce special results or effects when they are combined with certain types of other chemical components. But when they are mixed together, they may create a third force altogether.
A mixture that is chemically produced, like hydrogen and oxygen for instance, is not merely an arithmetical combination of two elements, because when the two are combined, some peculiar effect is produced which is not apparently present in either of the components. For instance, water is produced by a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, but we will not find the character of water either in hydrogen or in oxygen. The water that is the effect of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen in a certain proportion is a new effect altogether, and we cannot, by analysis, discover the essence of water in its original causes. Likewise, the words of a mantra, the components of a mantra, have special forces present or inherent in them, and when the words are combined in the requisite proportion and in the manner mentioned in the chandas shastra, they produce a third kind of effect which is the purpose or intention of the mantra, and that effect is called the devata. We may say that water is the devata of hydrogen and oxygen it is the deity. That is the intention. That is the purpose. That is what we require. That is what we are aiming at and want.
The mantra, when it is chanted, generates a force which is the object of the realisation of the sadhaka. A mantra has a chandas, or the combining feature, which is the determining factor of the particular shape that the effect takes, and so the mantra determines the deity, and vice versa. So we have a deity, or the aim or the goal of the mantra, and the chandas of the mantra, as well as another thing altogether, namely, the discoverer of the mantra has some say in this matter. The discoverer of the mantra is called the rishi of the mantra. A rishi is a seer of the mantra not merely a composer like a writer, or an author, or a poet but a seer into the truth of a mantra, to whom the mantra, in its truth, has been revealed in his meditations; and so the will of the seer also is present there. So, according to our tradition, when we chant a mantra we remember the rishi of the mantra, the chandas of the mantra, and the deity of the mantra. Rishis, chandas, devata these three are always remembered before the mantra is chanted, so that we have the grace of these divine precedents of the sacred mantra that we are going to chant, because these are the causes behind the action that the mantra takes.
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Likewise, we cannot wrench the subtle body from the physical body by effort; it will mean death if that is attempted. It has to be healthily detracted from its attachment to the physical body, and pinpointed towards the universal object which is God, which the chanting of pranava is supposed to do, as the yoga shastras tell us. We are not in a state of vibration that is appreciably harmonious, usually speaking, because we have attachments to particular objects. Any kind of special concern that the mind has with the particularised objects of sense prevents the subtle body from being in a state of harmony with itself. There is non-alignment of itself with the universal objective. The alignment can be effected only by producing in the subtle body a condition which is akin to the condition of universality. As we know, the universal is the most general of all beings, and nothing can be more harmonious than the universal.
Thus, the purpose of the recitation of pranava or mantra is to produce a condition in the subtle body the vehicle of the mind which is sympathetic in nature with the universal objective of harmony. What is harmony? It is equal attention paid to every structure, and every component of the structure of one's being. It cannot be done easily and, therefore, we take to the method of the chanting of mantra. The mantra, pranava, is supposed to be the king of mantras because the various parts of the soundbox in our vocal system that ordinarily operate in the chanting of any mantra, or the utterance of any word of any language, take part in the utterance of Om. The entire soundbox vibrates from the bottom to the top, and so it is believed in many mystical circles that Om is inclusive of every language. Every word conceivable is included in it in a very potential latent form, and because it is thus the most general of all symbols conceivable, it is the best designation of God, Who is the greatest of universals.

1.03 - Bloodstream Sermon, #The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, #Bodhidharma, #Buddhism
who recite a few sutras or shastras24 and think it's the Dharma are
fools. Unless you see your mind, reciting so much prose is useless.
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Even if you can explain thousands of sutras and shastras,37
unless you see your own nature yours is the teaching of a mortal,
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thousands of sutras and shastras only amount to a dear mind.
Understanding comes in midsentence. W hat good are doctrines?

1.03 - The Human Disciple, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
and firm obedience to the best principles of the time and society in which he has lived and the religion and ethics to which he has been brought up. He is egoistic like other men, but with the purer or sattwic egoism which regards the moral law and society and the claims of others and not only or predominantly his own interests, desires and passions. He has lived and guided himself by the shastra, the moral and social code. The thought which preoccupies him, the standard which he obeys is the dharma, that collective Indian conception of the religious, social and moral rule of conduct, and especially the rule of the station and function to which he belongs, he the Kshatriya, the highminded, self-governed, chivalrous prince and warrior and leader of Aryan men. Following always this rule, conscious of virtue and right dealing he has travelled so far and finds suddenly that it has led him to become the protagonist of a terrific and unparalleled slaughter, a monstrous civil war involving all the cultured Aryan nations which must lead to the complete destruction of the flower of their manhood and threatens their ordered civilisation with chaos and collapse.
It is typical again of the pragmatic man that it is through his sensations that he awakens to the meaning of his action. He has asked his friend and charioteer to place him between the two armies, not with any profounder idea, but with the proud intention of viewing and looking in the face these myriads of the champions of unrighteousness whom he has to meet and conquer and slay "in this holiday of fight" so that the right may prevail.

1.052 - Yoga Practice - A Series of Positive Steps, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
This philosophy of the twofold character of an object is vastly emphasised in the Tantra shastra, where nothing in this world is to be regarded as evil, unnecessary, useless or meaningless everything has a meaning of its own. And, the seed of this philosophy is recognised in a sutra of Patanjali himself: bhogpavargrtham dyam (II.18). The drisya, or the object, is for two purposes: for our enjoyment and bondage, and, under different conditions, also for our freedom.
Thus, a thing in this world is neither good nor bad. We cannot make any remark about any object in this world wholly, unlimitedly or unconditionally; all remarks about things are conditional. Things are useful, helpful and contri butory to the freedom of the soul under a given set of circumstances, but they are the opposite under a different set of circumstances. Not knowing this fact, the mind flitters from one thing to another thing. This is the character of what is known as rajas the principle of diversity and distraction. The remedy for this illness of distraction of the mind is austerity, or self-restraint. The great goal of yoga that has been described all this time will remain merely a will-o-the-wisp and will not be accessible to the mind if the condition necessary for the entry of consciousness into the supreme goal of yoga namely, freedom from distraction is not fulfilled.
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It is mentioned in the Yoga shastras that the essence of yoga is self-restraint, no doubt, but this is precisely the difficulty in understanding what yoga is, because we cannot know what self-restraint is unless we know what the self is which we are going to restrain. Which is the self that we are going to restrain? Whose self? Our self? On the one side, we say the goal of life is Self-realisation the realisation, the experience, the attunement of ones self with the Self. On the other side, we say we must restrain it, control it, subjugate it, overcome it, etc. There are degrees of self, and the significance behind the mandate on self-control is with reference to the degrees that are perceivable or experienceable in selfhood. The whole universe is nothing but Self there is nothing else in it. Even the so-called objects are a part of the Self in some form or the other. They may be a false self or a real self that is a different matter, but they are a self nevertheless.
In the Vedanta shastras and yoga scriptures we are told that there are at least three types of self: the external, the personal and the Absolute. We are not concerned here with the Absolute Self. This is not the Self that we are going to restrain. It is, on the other hand, the Self that we are going to realise. That is the goal the Absolute Self which is unrelated to any other factor or condition, which stands on its own right and which is called the Infinite, the Eternal, and so on. But the self that is to be restrained is that peculiar feature in consciousness which will not fulfil the conditions of absoluteness at any time. It is always relative. It is the relative self that is to be subjected to restraint for the sake of the realisation of the Absolute Self. The aim of life is the Absolute, and not the relative. The experience of the relative, the attachment of the mind in respect of the relative, and the exclusive emphasis on the importance of relativity in things is the obstructing factor in ones enterprise towards the realisation of the Absolute Self.
The external self is that atmosphere that we create around us which we regard as part of our life and to which we get attached in some manner or the other. This is also a self. A family is a self, for example, to mention a small instance. The head of the family regards the family as his own self, though it is not true that the family is his self. He has got an attachment to the members of the family. The attachment is a movement of his own consciousness in respect of those objects around him known as the members of the family. This permeating of his consciousness around that atmosphere known as the family creates a false, externalised self in his experience. This social self, we may call it, is the external self, inasmuch as this externalised, social self is not the real Self. Because it is conditioned by certain factors which are subject to change, it has to be restrained. That is one of the necessities of self-restraint.

1.053 - A Very Important Sadhana, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
All meditation is freedom from distraction by directing the energy in one specified manner, and it is also freedom from every other motive, purpose or incentive. Since the senses are accustomed to contemplation on objects and will not so easily yield to this advice, another suggestion is given namely, a daily practice of sacred study, or svadhyaya. If you cannot do japa or meditation, or cannot concentrate the mind in any way, then take to study not of any book at random from the library, but of a specific sacred text which is supposed to be a moksha shastra, the study of which will generate aspiration in the mind towards the liberation of the soul.
A daily recitation with the understanding of the meaning of such hymns as the Purusha Sukta from the Veda, for instance, is a great svadhyaya, as Vachaspati Mishra, the commentator on the Yoga Sutras, mentions. Also, the Satarudriya which we chant daily in the temple without perhaps knowing its meaning is a great meditation if it is properly understood and recited with a proper devout attitude of mind. Vachaspati Mishra specifically refers to two great hymns of the Veda the Purusha Sukta and the Satarudriya which he says are highly purifying, not only from the point of view of their being conducive to meditation or concentration of mind, but also in other purifying processes which will take place in the body and the whole system due to the chanting of these mantras. These Veda mantras are immense potencies, like atom bombs, and to handle them and to energise the system with their forces is a spiritual practice by itself. This is one suggestion.

1.075 - Self-Control, Study and Devotion to God, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The scriptures are supposed to contain all the knowledge that is necessary for the realisation of the Self. It is a spiritual text that we are supposed to study, which is meant by the word svadhyaya. It is not any kind of book. A holy scripture is supposed to be a moksha shastra. A scripture which expounds the nature of, as well as the means to, the liberation of the soul is called a moksha shastra. This is to be studied. All the ways and means to the liberation of the Self should be expounded in the scripture; and the glorious nature of the ideal of perfection, God-realisation that also is to be expounded in it. The means and the end should be delineated in great detail. Such is the text to be resorted to in svadhyaya. By a gradual and daily habituation of oneself to such a study, there is a purification brought about automatically. Inasmuch as it is nothing but meditation that we are practising in a different way, it is supposed to bring us in contact with the ideal.
Samdhisiddhi varapraidhnt (II.45): The mind gets inclined to samadhi by the love of God. There is an inclination of our entire being to self-absorption, due to the daily adoration of God. Inasmuch as God is universal omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent a surrender of oneself to God, a daily adoration of God, a worship of God, and a daily thought and feeling and will directed to God will naturally compel the mind to adopt characters which are of the nature of this ideal. There will be, therefore, a mood generated in the mind to sink into itself, rather than move out of itself. Distractions will cease. The contemplation on the nature of the All-pervading Being is supposed to be the best form of meditation, inclusive of every other means. All objects of meditation are comprehended here, included here. This is the ocean of all things.

1.078 - Kumbhaka and Concentration of Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
This cessation of the breath can be brought about in many ways. Though the yoga shastras speak of several types of pranayama or kumbhaka, Patanjali concerns himself with only four types which are actually not four, really speaking. They are only one, mentioned in four different ways. Bhya bhyantara stambha vtti (II.50) are the terms used in the sutra. Bahya is external; abhyantara is internal; stambha is sudden retention; vritti is the process. The external retention is what is known as bahya vritti,the internal retention is what is known as abhyantara vritti, and the sudden retentionis what is known as stambha vritti.
These vrittis, or the processes of the movement of the prana, are measured across different parameters, as enumerated through the other terms in the sutra, dea kla sakhybhi (II.50), for calculating the retention of the breath. The prana can be stopped by way of retention after exhalation. This was referred to in an earlier sutra where a particular method of breathing was prescribed as a way of bringing about peace of mind when the mind is very much disturbed. That sutra is in the Samadhi Pada: pracchardana vidhrabhy v prasya (I.34). Pracchardana is expulsion; vidharana is retention. The expulsion and the retention of the breath are supposed to be one of the means of bringing about composure of mind.
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There are various views or opinions expressed by the yoga shastras and by adepts in yoga in regard to this proportion. Proportion means the time that we take to inhale, the time that we retain the breath for, and the time that we take to exhale. This is what is called proportion that is the ratio. While there are many different opinions in regard to this, the usually accepted one is that if we take one second to inhale, we must take four seconds to retain, and two seconds to exhale. One is to four is to two that is the proportion maintained. This is not a standard prescription for all people, but the usually accepted method. It does not mean that the number should be four in retention at the very beginning itself. As it was pointed out previously, there should be no retention at all in the earlier stages; there should be only deep inhalation and exhalation. For some days and months perhaps, we may have to practise only inhalation and exhalation without retention. Later on, when retention is introduced, it should not be in this ratio of one to four to two, as it is a more advanced practice. There should be only a comfortable retention, to the extent possible, even if the ratio is not maintained.
But the suggestion given in this term kala is that a ratio is maintained, and that ratio can be modified according to ones convenience, level of evolution, the extent of practice, etc. This has to be done with the guidance of a Guru. One should not meddle with the prana without knowing what happens. Thus, the ratio that is associated with the processes of inhalation, retention and exhalation is what is meant by the term kala.

1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
26:The older religions erected their rule of the wise, their dicta of Manu or Confucius, a complex shastra in which they attempted to combine the social rule and moral law with the declaration of certain eternal principles of our highest nature in some kind of uniting amalgam. All three were treated on the same ground as equally the expression of everlasting verities, sanatana dharma. But two of these elements are evolutionary and valid for a time, mental constructions, human readings of the will of the Eternal; the third, attached and subdued to certain social and moral formulas, had to share the fortunes of its forms. Either the shastra grows obsolete and has to be progressively changed or finally cast away or else it stands as a rigid barrier to the self-development of the individual and the race. The shastra erects a collective and external standard; it ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable elements of a secret spiritual force within him. But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable. The unrestrained indulgence of his outer impulses leads to anarchy and dissolution, but the suppression and coercion of his soul's freedom by a fixed and mechanical rule spells stagnation or an inner death. Not this coercion or determination from outside, but the free discovery of his highest spirit and the truth of an eternal movement is the supreme thing that he has to discover.
27:The higher ethical law is discovered by the individual in his mind and will and psychic sense and then extended to the race. The supreme law also must be discovered by the individual in his spirit. Then only, through a spiritual influence and not by the mental idea, can it be extended to others. A moral law can be imposed as a rule or an ideal on numbers of men who have not attained that level of consciousness or that fineness of mind and will and psychic sense in which it can become a reality to them and a living force. As an ideal it can be revered without any need of practice. As a rule it can be observed in its outsides even if the inner sense is missed altogether. The supramental and spiritual life cannot be mechanised in this way, it cannot be turned into a mental ideal or an external rule. It has its own great lines, but these must be made real, must be the workings of an active Power felt in the individual's consciousness and the transcriptions of an eternal Truth powerful to transform mind, life and body. And because it is thus real, effective, imperative, the generalisation of the supramental consciousness and the spiritual life is the sole force that can lead to individual and collective perfection in earth's highest creatures. Only by our coming into constant touch with the divine Consciousness and its absolute Truth can some form of the conscious Divine, the dynamic Absolute, take up our earth-existence and transform its strife, stumbling, sufferings and falsities into an image of the supreme Light, Power and Ananda.

1.07 - The Ideal Law of Social Development, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But within this general nature and general destiny of mankind each individual human being has to follow the common aim on the lines of his own nature and to arrive at his possible perfection by a growth from within. So only can the race itself attain to anything profound, living and deep-rooted. It cannot be done brutally, heavily, mechanically in the mass; the group self has no true right to regard the individual as if he were only a cell of its body, a stone of its edifice, a passive instrument of its collective life and growth. Humanity is not so constituted. We miss the divine reality in man and the secret of the human birth if we do not see that each individual man is that Self and sums up all human potentiality in his own being. That potentiality he has to find, develop, work out from within. No State or legislator or reformer can cut him rigorously into a perfect pattern; no Church or priest can give him a mechanical salvation; no order, no class life or ideal, no nation, no civilisation or creed or ethical, social or religious shastra can be allowed to say to him permanently, In this way of mine and thus far shalt thou act and grow and in no other way and no farther shall thy growth be permitted. These things may help him temporarily or they may curb and he grows in proportion as he can use them and then exceed them, train and teach his individuality by them, but assert it always in the end in its divine freedom. Always he is the traveller of the cycles and his road is forward.
True, his life and growth are for the sake of the world, but he can help the world by his life and growth only in proportion as he can be more and more freely and widely his own real self. True, he has to use the ideals, disciplines, systems of cooperation which he finds upon his path; but he can only use them well, in their right way and to their right purpose if they are to his life means towards something beyond them and not burdens to be borne by him for their own sake or despotic controls to be obeyed by him as their slave or subject; for though laws and disciplines strive to be the tyrants of the human soul, their only purpose is to be its instruments and servants and when their use is over they have to be rejected and broken. True it is, too, that he has to gather in his material from the minds and lives of his fellow-men around him and to make the most of the experience of humanitys past ages and not confine himself in a narrow mentality; but this he can only do successfully by making all this his own through assimilation of it to the principle of his own nature and through its subservience to the forward call of his enlarging future. The liberty claimed by the struggling human mind for the individual is no mere egoistic challenge and revolt, however egoistically or with one-sided exaggeration and misapplication it may sometimes be advanced; it is the divine instinct within him, the law of the Self, its claim to have room and the one primary condition for its natural self-unfolding.

1.08 - Attendants, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
I am firmly convinced that through the ages he has been closely connected with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, otherwise how could he have been selected as Sri Aurobindo's personal attendant, even as a young man, as soon as he arrived? When he came to see Sri Aurobindo for the first time, he lay prostrate at his feet for an hour, all bathed in happy tears! And when he was leaving, Sri Aurobindo asked one of his older companions to bring him back with him! It is he who first accepted Sri Aurobindo as the Divine Father and called him Father, accepted the Mother as the Divine Mother and began to call her Mother. When he offered to wash the 'Father's' clothes, Sri Aurobindo warned him that he would be mocked at, but that did not deter him. He had gone without food and sleep, had not moved from his place lest the Master should need something or should even have to wait a minute more. To serve Sri Aurobindo was in one way quite easy, for he would never make any demands on us, was content with the main necessities being met and would never express any displeasure if we failed him. This very easiness kept us alert, for one who didn't ask for more than the bare minimum, needed a careful, vigilant watch so that he could be given a little more comfort and ease. Champaklal kept that vigilant eye always. He was more familiar with Sri Aurobindo's nature and temperament by love and long experience and felt his needs on his very pulse. If he saw that Sri Aurobindo needed some side pillows, he got them made; if his footstool was a bit high or low, he adjusted it to the required height. He put a time-piece by his side, for he knew that Sri Aurobindo was in the habit of frequently seeing the time. Such small things that would pass unnoticed because our imaginative perception was perhaps dull, were caught by his sensitive insight and he tried to make "happy and comfortable" the life of the impersonal Brahman. Sri Aurobindo, when he sat on the edge of the bed and had to wait long for the Mother's arrival, seemed to feel drowsy; his body would lean backwards and would then right itself. Still, he would not ask for any assistance but this, not from any sense of egoism. He would put up with any inconvenience but if we offered him some help, he did not refuse it. We simply looked on without knowing how to meet the situation, but Champaklal rose to the occasion: he made a pile of pillows to serve as his back-rest and to prevent them from tumbling down, supported them from behind. To observe economy due to the War, the Mother advised us not to change Sri Aurobindo's bed-sheets too often, but if there was a tiny stain on an otherwise clean white sheet, Champaklal would hesitate to use it, saying, "How can we use anything unclean for the Lord?" His making the bed was a sight worth seeing. I wonder if even an expert housewife would do it so perfectly! The bed-sheet had not the slightest crease anywhere, it shone with a marble smoothness. In everything his aim was to be flawless. Thus it put others who had to work with him into a very difficult corner. He claimed to have acquired this thoroughness under the apprenticeship of the Mother. I sometimes got my share of rebuke from him if I was not tidy or clean enough: "You are a doctor and you still don't wash your hands?" he would say. The fact in his case was that over and above his own training he belonged to a very orthodox Brahmin family and had meticulously observed all the practices ordained by the shastras and enjoined upon the children by his orthodox priest-father. We were quite modern people having our own ideas of things, so sometimes clash and conflict would arise. Besides, he was in some parts sensitive like a child. We had to be very careful not to upset him and to spare his feelings as much as we could. He could not understand jokes or any round-about manner. He told me that Sri Aurobindo had once spoken about this to the Mother. It was just after he had settled here. His father wrote a letter to Sri Aurobindo saying that Champaklal's marriage had been fixed; he had only to go, undergo the marriage ceremony and then come back. Sri Aurobindo gravely said, "I suppose we have to send back Champaklal." He was much perturbed to hear it. Then Sri Aurobindo added, "He doesn't understand jokes." He knew, however, how to get things done by the Divine, blessings written on a book, for instance, an autograph on a photo. If asked by Champaklal, Sri Aurobindo would not refuse. The Mother too has to accede to the wishes of her bhakta, her "most faithful child".
One day he conceived the idea of getting Sri Aurobindo's footprints; but how was he to do it without troubling him in any way or without informing him in advance? He had a brain-wave. He kept a white sheet of paper and pencil ready. As soon as Sri Aurobindo sat on the chair, he pushed the sheet of paper under his feet and asked, "May I draw your footprint?" Sri Aurobindo not only consented but later wrote "Love and Blessings" on the drawing. Let us not forget, by the way, that Champaklal is an artist. Whenever he saw Sri Aurobindo in what seemed to him statuesque poses his heart would go into rapture and he would call us to share his joy. He would exclaim, "Ah, if a photograph could be taken of this marvellous pose!" The Mother has said that he has "a natural talent already developed to an unusual degree". On one of his birthdays he painted two lotuses, white and red, and offered the pictures to the Mother. She was very pleased and said she would take them to Sri Aurobindo and ask him to write something. He wrote under the painting of the white lotus: Aditi, The Divine Mother. And the Mother wrote on the other: The Avatar. But she forbade Champaklal to show them to anyone, for people would not understand what they meant.

1.096 - Powers that Accrue in the Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
It is not the intention of the Yoga shastra to describe what powers come to a yogi when he concentrates or practises samyama, as these are temptations and sidetracking issues. But anyhow, for the purpose of giving an idea of the greatness of the practice, and also to give some sort of an enthusiasm to the practitioners, the Yoga Sutra has gone into some detail as to the nature of these powers.
Our main point is samyama. There is no use merely counting the number of rich persons in the world and trying to find out the means by which they have become rich. Well, that may be a good science as a kind of theoretical pursuit, but what do we gain by knowing how many rich people are there in this world and how they have become rich? We will not become rich by knowing these methods, because it is a science by itself and not merely a historical study or a survey that we make statistically. The science is a more important aspect of the matter than merely a statement of the consequences or results that follow by the pursuit of the science. What is the science? That is samyama, the subject that we have been studying all along. How are we able to concentrate the mind? For this purpose the author has taken great pains in some of the sutras to explain how the mind can be made to agree, wholeheartedly, with the pursuit of yoga, and how distractions can be eliminated. It is this that is the intention of the sutras, right from those which dealt with the nirodha parinama, etc., onwards.

1.098 - The Transformation from Human to Divine, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Likewise is our puny understanding of the higher achievements of which yoga speaks. We have subtle peculiarities in our nature, and that particular weakness is what is to be subjugated and sublimated in yoga. This has been mentioned again and again in the sutras of Patanjali, in various manners, various ways, at different stages. Though there are many stages which each individual has to experience, each for oneself, adepts have classified them into certain groups. The language of the system of Patanjali tells us that there are four important conditions of utter transformation; and these are given specific names in the Yoga shastras.
When one steps over the ordinary human level and places ones feet on the next higher level, that condition is called prathama kalpita. It is a peculiar term which implies an experience of a first form of enlightenment. The first enlightenment that comes through yoga is called prathama kalpita. The next stage of enlightenment is called madhu bhumika, which literally means very sweet, like honey. Very exquisite is the experience, very delicious; that is what the word madhu actually means here madhu bhumika. The third transformation is called prajna jyotis. There is a flash of the supernal light of the purusha, or the Absolute. We begin to enter into the daylight of the Eternal. And the last stage is supposed to be the borderl and of the communion of the individual with the Absolute, the Universal. That is called atikranta bhavaniya, which surpasses all comprehension. No thought can understand or imagine what it is. Even the highest stretch of imagination cannot conceive what it is. Therefore, it is designated as atikranta bhavaniya.
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But in yoga, something different happens. We are not pushing aside certain aspects of our personality and presenting only certain predominant features for the purpose of objective experience. The entire thing is stirred up into action, because the purpose of yoga is to liberate the soul from the total bondage to which it is subject in the form of phenomenal experience. Therefore, we have to face everything, every day, at one stroke. This happens, says the Yoga shastra, at a particular stage not in the very advanced stage of prajna jyotis or atikranta bhavaniya, where we have completely mastered everything and we know things very well, nor when nothing has happened and we are just at the rudimentary, beginning stage of practice. These difficulties start when we are about to transcend the first level this is what the Yoga shastra tells us. When we have entered the stage called prathama kalpita and we are about to rise to the next one, namely, the madhu bhumika, then there is this dramatic encounter of the meditating consciousness with everything blessed on earth or in heaven.
What is it that we are going to encounter? It is not easy for anyone to detail these before they come. But, generally speaking, they are supposed to be the forms taken by ones own weaknesses. Every person has some weakness, which is smothered and stifled by the apparent personality that one puts forth in human society. But that weakness still persists. It is kept there in ambush, waiting for favourable conditions to manifest. These weaknesses are those which pertain to the senses and the ego. The senses vehemently assert the reality of an external object. This is the peculiar weakness of the senses, and whatever arguments we put forth before them, they are of no avail. And the ego has a peculiar feature of affirming itself as an isolated individual. It will oppose any attempt at communion, which is the thing that we want to achieve in yoga, because communion is losing of personality, which is what is very painful to the ego.
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gt (III.52). The sutra tells that we will be invited as a guest by the realms of being when we advance in the stages of yoga. There are various realms of existence which we have to pierce and pass through. And, every realm is inhabited by certain denizens. Just as when we go to a new country, the citizens there may welcome us as a friend Come, dear friend, be seated, and so on the citizens, or the inhabitants of the different realms, says the Yoga shastra, will welcome us, and we are likely to mistake this for an achievement of yoga which it is not. We are likely to get caught up in the atmosphere of that particular realm, because that atmosphere is nothing but what the senses seek and what the ego would like. They become very intense in their presentations, according to the intensity of the practice. Therefore, the sutra tells us that we should not accept these invitations. Otherwise, we will be once again in the same trouble from which we wanted to escape through the practice of yoga. Whatever be the perceptions, whatever be the delights that may present themselves, they have to be ignored by the practicant.
Here, there is another interesting feature which one can notice. These experiences of encounter, or the presentations of delight or invitations, etc., which the sutra mentions, are not necessarily super-physical. They can also be physical. That is, even in this very physical world we may have such experiences, if our practice is intense enough. We will not be able to discover the secret behind the experiences in our life, and may like to pass them over as casual occurrences of the social life of a person. The experiences that we pass through in life even in this physical life, in this very life itself may be the reactions of our practice. The denizens which the sutra speaks of may press themselves forward through the physical counterparts of this very existence itself. They need not necessarily be ethereal beings as the Puranas speak of, such as Indra, etc.
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In yoga, we are not facing crows and cows and trees and persons. We are facing the whole cosmos in front of us. One has to be prepared for the consequences before one actually enters into this arduous enterprise; this is a great caution meted out to us by the Yoga shastra. When this vision is kept up clearly, continuously, without break, we will be able to understand even the meaning of the oppositions and impediments that come before us. And when they are detected, they cease to be impediments they become friends. The dismal look that may appear to be there at the beginning will put on a new face altogether, and a new contour. The darkness will be dispelled, and light will manifest itself. These are hard things for the mind to grasp.
At a stage where we are about to transfer ourselves from the first level to the second level, direct guidance of a competent master is necessary. This is the usual tradition of the Yoga shastra. When we are highly advanced and can grasp all the meanings for ourselves, we may be able to stand on our own feet; that is true. But there is a particular stage we reach when we have not been endowed with that perception of the meaning behind things, when we have lifted our feet from the ground of the earth and we have not yet reached the summits of the heavens. In the middle of the atmosphere where we are hanging, we will find ourselves helpless. There, the need of a Guru is necessary.

1.1.03 - Man, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The shastras use the same word for man and the one divine and universal Being - Purusha - as if to lay stress upon the oneness of humanity with God. Nara and Narayana are the eternal couple, who, though they are two, are one, eternally different, eternally the same. Narayana, say the scholiasts, is he who dwells in the waters, but I rather think it means he who is the essence and sum of all humanity. Wherever there is a man, there there is Narayana; for the two cannot be separated. I think sometimes that when Christ spoke of himself as the Son of Man, he really meant the son of the Purusha, and almost find myself imagining that anthropos is only the clumsy Greek equivalent, the literal and ignorant translation of some Syrian word which corresponded to our Purusha.
Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that man is full of divine possibilities - he is not merely a term in physical evolution, but himself the field of a spiritual evolution which with him began and in him will end. It was only when man was made, that the gods were satisfied - they who had rejected

1.107 - The Bestowal of a Divine Gift, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
When there is a chidra, or a little loophole in the meditative effort which means when we are not meditating these vrittis will come up. Now we are ready, they will say. You have forgotten us, so we are up. And nobody can do anything at that time, because the starved emotions and the frustrated desires have a strength of their own. They are not weaklings. To avoid this problem of having to confront unforeseen vrittis at a later stage, the Yoga shastras prescribe very graduated ascents, even in the earlier stages of yoga. We are not supposed to jump up in great enthusiasm, as if we are going to catch God in a few days. It is this kind of enthusiasm that leads to such problems.
We have to move gradually, with a tremendous caution with regard to our strengths and weaknesses. It is something like striking a balance sheet. The profit and loss account is struck with great care, and we know where we stand financially at the end of any particular year. Likewise, it is necessary to strike a psychological balance sheet of our life almost every day, towards the end of the day, we may say, and find out where we stand in spiritual life. It is no use imagining that we are seekers and yogins everyone can imagine that. Our actual condition will be known only to us. Many a time there are very difficult situations inwardly which cannot be explained, nor can they be observed by other people; only we can know. But, due to being busy in extraneous activities, and sometimes due to an incorrect idea of ones own strength, which may not be a real strength a kind of wrong estimation of oneself one may be led into erroneous corners and slacken the effort at concentration.

1.11 - Works and Sacrifice, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
vanities, sentiments and preferences; but even otherwise, even at the purest, still we obey a choice of our nature, and if our nature were different and the gun.as acted on our intelligence and will in some other combination, we would not accept the shastra, but live according to our pleasure or our intellectual notions or else break free from the social law to live the life of the solitary or the ascetic. We cannot become impersonal by obeying something outside ourselves, for we cannot so get outside ourselves; we can only do it by rising to the highest in ourselves, into our free Soul and Self which is the same and one in all and has therefore no personal interests, to the Divine in our being who possesses
Himself transcendent of cosmos and is therefore not bound by

1.14 - The Suprarational Beauty, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We see this in the history of the development of literary and artistic criticism. In its earliest stages the appreciation of beauty is instinctive, natural, inborn, a response of the aesthetic sensitiveness of the soul which does not attempt to give any account of itself to the thinking intelligence. When the rational intelligence applies itself to this task, it is not satisfied with recording faithfully the nature of the response and the thing it has felt, but it attempts to analyse, to lay down what is necessary in order to create a just aesthetic gratification, it prepares a grammar of technique, an artistic law and canon of construction, a sort of mechanical rule of process for the creation of beauty, a fixed code or shastra. This brings in the long reign of academic criticism superficial, technical, artificial, governed by the false idea that technique, of which alone critical reason can give an entirely adequate account, is the most important part of creation and that to every art there can correspond an exhaustive science which will tell us how the thing is done and give us the whole secret and process of its doing. A time comes when the creator of beauty revolts and declares the charter of his own freedom, generally in the shape of a new law or principle of creation, and this freedom once vindicated begins to widen itself and to carry with it the critical reason out of all its familiar bounds. A more developed appreciation emerges which begins to seek for new principles of criticism, to search for the soul of the work itself and explain the form in relation to the soul or to study the creator himself or the spirit, nature and ideas of the age he lived in and so to arrive at a right understanding of his work. The intellect has begun to see that its highest business is not to lay down laws for the creator of beauty, but to help us to understand himself and his work, not only its form and elements but the mind from which it sprang and the impressions its effects create in the mind that receives. Here criticism is on its right road, but on a road to a consummation in which the rational understanding is overpassed and a higher faculty opens, suprarational in its origin and nature.
For the conscious appreciation of beauty reaches its height of enlightenment and enjoyment not by analysis of the beauty enjoyed or even by a right and intelligent understanding of it,these things are only a preliminary clarifying of our first unenlightened sense of the beautiful,but by an exaltation of the soul in which it opens itself entirely to the light and power and joy of the creation. The soul of beauty in us identifies itself with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation. Criticism reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right description of this response; it must become itself inspired, intuitive, revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the action of the rational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect itself; it may explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process, the inner cause, essence, mechanism of the defects and limitations of the work as well as of its qualities. For the intuitive intelligence when it has been sufficiently trained and developed, can take up always the work of the intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than the power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope. There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen and precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence.

1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
we know all the methods for attaining Nirvana; realizing the cosmic Spirit; finding the soul; conquering gravity, hunger, cold, sleep and illnesses; leaving one's body at will; or prolonging life. Everyone can achieve these feats; the way is well charted, and the stages have been described by the seers or the Hindu shastras for thousands of years. It is merely a question of discipline and patience and proper timing. But the transformation is something no one has ever done, an entirely unknown journey, like traveling through a country that does not yet exist. Perhaps it is something equivalent to what happened when the first mental forms began to emerge in the world of Matter and Life.
How could the first semi-animal organism that received these mental vibrations understand and describe what was happening to it, and,

1.2.04 - Sincerity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is difficult for the ordinary Christian to be of a piece, because the teachings of Christ are on quite another plane from the consciousness of the intellectual and vital man trained by the education and society of Europe - the latter, even as a minister or priest, has never been called upon to practise what he preached in entire earnest. But it is difficult for the human nature anywhere to think, feel and act from one centre of true faith, belief or vision. The average Hindu considers the spiritual life the highest, reveres the Sannyasi, is moved by the Bhakta; but if one of the family circle leaves the world for spiritual life, what tears, arguments, remonstrances, lamentations! It is almost worse than if he had died a natural death. It is not conscious mental insincerity - they will argue like Pandits and go to shastra to prove you in the wrong; it is unconsciousness, a vital insincerity which
54

1.21 - The Spiritual Aim and Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For nothing can be more fatal to religion than for its spiritual element to be crushed or formalised out of existence by its outward aids and forms and machinery. The falsehood of the old social use of religion is shown by its effects. History has exhibited more than once the coincidence of the greatest religious fervour and piety with darkest ignorance, with an obscure squalor and long vegetative stagnancy of the mass of human life, with the unquestioned reign of cruelty, injustice and oppression, or with an organisation of the most ordinary, unaspiring and unraised existence hardly relieved by some touches of intellectual or halfspiritual light on the surface,the end of all this a widespread revolt that turned first of all against the established religion as the key-stone of a regnant falsehood, evil and ignorance. It is another sign when the too scrupulously exact observation of a socio-religious system and its rites and forms, which by the very fact of this misplaced importance begin to lose their sense and true religious value, becomes the law and most prominent aim of religion rather than any spiritual growth of the individual and the race. And a great sign too of this failure is when the individual is obliged to flee from society in order to find room for his spiritual growth; when, finding human life given over to the unregenerated mind, life and body and the place of spiritual freedom occupied by the bonds of form, by Church and shastra, by some law of the Ignorance, he is obliged to break away from all these to seek for growth into the spirit in the monastery, on the mountain-top, in the cavern, in the desert and the forest. When there is that division between life and the spirit, sentence of condemnation is passed upon human life. Either it is left to circle in its routine or it is decried as worthless and unreal, a vanity of vanities, and loses that confidence in itself and inner faith in the value of its terrestrial aims, raddh, without which it cannot come to anything. For the spirit of man must strain towards the heights; when it loses its tension of endeavour, the race must become immobile and stagnant or even sink towards darkness and the dust. Even where life rejects the spirit or the spirit rejects life, there may be a self-affirmation of the inner being; there may even be a glorious crop of saints and hermits in a forcing-soil of spirituality, but unless the race, the society, the nation is moved towards the spiritualisation of life or moves forward led by the light of an ideal, the end must be littleness, weakness and stagnation. Or the race has to turn to the intellect for rescue, for some hope or new ideal, and arrive by a circle through an age of rationalism at a fresh effort towards the restatement of spiritual truth and a new attempt to spiritualise human life.
The true and full spiritual aim in society will regard man not as a mind, a life and a body, but as a soul incarnated for a divine fulfilment upon earth, not only in heavens beyond, which after all it need not have left if it had no divine business here in the world of physical, vital and mental nature. It will therefore regard the life, mind and body neither as ends in themselves, sufficient for their own satisfaction, nor as mortal members full of disease which have only to be dropped off for the rescued spirit to flee away into its own pure regions, but as first instruments of the soul, the yet imperfect instruments of an unseized diviner purpose. It will believe in their destiny and help them to believe in themselves, but for that very reason in their highest and not only in their lowest or lower possibilities. Their destiny will be, in its view, to spiritualise themselves so as to grow into visible members of the spirit, lucid means of its manifestation, themselves spiritual, illumined, more and more conscious and perfect. For, accepting the truth of mans soul as a thing entirely divine in its essence, it will accept also the possibility of his whole being becoming divine in spite of Natures first patent contradictions of this possibility, her darkened denials of this ultimate certitude, and even with these as a necessary earthly starting-point. And as it will regard man the individual, it will regard too man the collectivity as a soul-form of the Infinite, a collective soul myriadly embodied upon earth for a divine fulfilment in its manifold relations and its multitudinous activities. Therefore it will hold sacred all the different parts of mans life which correspond to the parts of his being, all his physical, vital, dynamic, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, intellectual, psychic evolution, and see in them instruments for a growth towards a diviner living. It will regard every human society, nation, people or other organic aggregate from the same standpoint, sub-souls, as it were, means of a complex manifestation and self-fulfilment of the Spirit, the divine Reality, the conscious Infinite in man upon earth. The possible godhead of man because he is inwardly of one being with God will be its one solitary creed and dogma.

1955-10-19 - The rhythms of time - The lotus of knowledge and perfection - Potential knowledge - The teguments of the soul - Shastra and the Gurus direct teaching - He who chooses the Infinite..., #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1955-10-19 - The rhythms of time - The lotus of knowledge and perfection - Potential knowledge - The teguments of the soul - shastra and the Gurus direct teaching - He who chooses the Infinite...
class:chapter
--
Mother, here it is said: There is first the knowledge of the truths, principles First the shastra must be known; but to know the shastra it is said: The supreme shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart So to know the shastra, first a long process of Yoga is necessary. (Laughter)
Yes. According to the usual formula, it is like that. It cant be learnt overnight, no, nobody believes that, I suppose! Only Sri Aurobindo has made I dont know, we havent yet read it today he has made a distinction; he says no, a little further on he speaks ofwe shall see this next timehe speaks of the Guru no the more powerful word of the living Guru; it comes later.

1955-10-26 - The Divine and the universal Teacher - The power of the Word - The Creative Word, the mantra - Sound, music in other worlds - The domains of pure form, colour and ideas, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What had been conceived by the scholars in the written shastras; that is, what is written here
Of the old traditions? Yes. But Sri Aurobindo also says that there is no reason for it not to change, for things not to be added, changed. He says he himself answers your question.

1969 10 01? - 166, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
166The double law of sin and virtue is imposed on us because we have not that ideal life and knowledge within which guides the soul spontaneously and infallibly to its self-fulfilment. The law of sin and virtue ceases for us when the sun of God shines upon the soul in truth and love with its unveiled splendour. Moses is replaced by Christ, the shastra by the Veda.1
Do you think this idea of sin and virtue has done humanity any good?
--
shastra: Scriptures; Veda: Knowledge.
***

1969 10 13, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
172Law cannot save the world, therefore Moses ordinances are dead for humanity and the shastra of the Brahmins is corrupt and dying. Law released into freedom is the liberator. Not the Pundit, but the Yogin; not monasticism, but the inner renunciation of desire and ignorance and egoism.
This is irrefutably clear and it is exactly what we are trying to do. But human nature is rebellious and finds it difficult to win freedom at the price of renouncing desire and ignorance and egoism.

1970 03 03, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
364This is not according to my shastra1 or my Science, say the men of rule, formalists. Fool! is God then only a book that there should be nothing true and good except what is written?
365By which standard shall I walk, the word that God speaks to me, saying, This is My will, O my servant, or the rules that men who are dead, have written? Nay, if I have to fear and obey any, I will fear and obey God rather and not the pages of a book or the frown of a Pandit.
--
367Act according to the shastra rather than thy self-will and desire; so shalt thou grow stronger to control the ravener in thee; but act according to God rather than the shastra; so shalt thou reach to His highest which is far above rule and limit.
368The Law is for the bound and those whose eyes are sealed; if they walk not by it, they will stumble; but thou who art free in Krishna or hast seen his living light, walk holding the hand of thy Friend and by the lamp of eternal Veda.

1.hcyc - In my early years, I set out to acquire learning (from The Song of Enlightenment), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by International Institute for the Translation of Buddhist Texts Original Language Chinese In my early years, I set out to acquire learning, And I studied commentaries and inquired into Sutras and shastras. Distinguishing among terms and characteristics, I didn't know how to stop. Entering the sea to count the sands I exhausted myself in vain. But the Thus Come One reprimanded this folly: What benefit is there in counting other's treasures?! Unsuccessful all along, I felt I had practiced in vain. Many years I wasted as a transient, like dust in the wind. [bk1sm.gif] -- from Song of Enlightenment: By Great Master Yung Chia of the T'ang Dynasty, Edited by Tripitaka Master Hua / Translated by International Institute for the Translation of Buddhist Texts <

2.01 - The Object of Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:The traditional systems, whatever their other differences, all proceed on the belief or the perception that the Eternal and Absolute can only be or at least can only inhabit a pure transcendent state of non-cosmic existence or else a non-existence. All cosmic existence or all that we call existence is a state of ignorance. Even the highest individual perfection, even the blissful cosmic condition is no better than a supreme ignorance. All that is individual, all that is cosmic has to be austerely renounced by the seeker of the absolute Truth. The supreme quiescent Self or else the absolute Nihil is the sole Truth, the only object of spiritual knowledge. The state of knowledge, the consciousness other than this temporal that we must attain is Nirvana, an extinction of ego, a cessation of all mental, vital and physical activities, of all activities whatsoever, a supreme illumined quiescence, the pure bliss of an impersonal tranquillity self-absorbed and ineffable. The means are meditation, concentration excluding all things else, a total loss of the mind in its object. Action is permissible only in the first stages of the search in order to purify the seeker and make him morally and temperamentally a fit vessel for the knowledge. Even this action must either be confined to the performance of the rites of worship and the prescribed duties of life rigorously ordained by the Hindu shastra or, as in the Buddhistic discipline, must be guided along the eight-fold path to the supreme practice of the works of compassion which lead towards the practical annihilation of self in the good of others. In the end, in any severe and pure Jnanayoga, all works must be abandoned for an entire quiescence. Action may prepare salvation, it cannot give it. Any continued adherence to action is incompatible with the highest progress and may be an insuperable obstacle to the attainment of the spiritual goal. The supreme state of quiescence is the very opposite of action and cannot be attained by those who persist in works. And even devotion, love, worship are disciplines for the unripe soul, are at best the best methods of the Ignorance. For they are offered to something other, higher and greater than ourselves; but in the supreme knowledge there can be no such thing, since there is either only one self or no self at all and therefore either no one to do the worship and offer the love and devotion or no one to receive it. Even thought-activity must disappear in the sole consciousness of identity or of nothingness and by its own quiescence bring about the quiescence of the whole nature. The absolute Identical alone must remain or else the eternal Nihil.
3:This pure Jnanayoga comes by the intellect, although it ends in the transcendence of the intellect and its workings. The thinker in us separates himself from all the rest of what we phenomenally are, rejects the heart, draws back from the life and the senses, separates from the body that he may arrive at his own exclusive fulfilment in that which is beyond even himself and his function. There is a truth that underlies, as there is an experience that seems to justify, this attitude. There is an Essence that is in its nature a quiescence, a supreme of Silence in the Being that is beyond its own development and mutations, immutable and therefore superior to all activities of which it is at most a Witness. And in the hierarchy of our psychological functions the Thought is in a way nearest to this Self, nearest at least to its aspect of the all-conscious knower who regards all activities but can stand back from them all. The heart, will and other powers in us are fundamentally active, turn naturally towards action, find through it their fulfilment, -although they also may automatically arrive at a certain quiescence by fullness of satisfaction in their activities or else by a reverse process of exhaustion through perpetual disappointment and dissatisfaction. The thought too is an active power, but is more capable of arriving at quiescence by its own conscious choice and will. The thought is more easily content with the illumined intellectual perception of this silent Witness Self that is higher than all our activities and, that immobile Spirit once seen, is ready, deeming its mission of truth-finding accomplished, to fall at rest arid become itself immobile. For in its most characteristic movement it is itself apt to be a disinterested witness, judge, observer of things more than an eager participant and passionate labourer in the work and can arrive very readily at a spiritual or philosophic calm and detached aloofness. And since men are mental beings, thought, if not truly their best and highest, is at least their most constant, normal and effective means for enlightening their ignorance. Armed with its functions of gathering and reflection, meditation, fixed contemplation, the absorbed dwelling of the mind on its object, sravana, manana, hididhyasana, it stands at our tops as an indispensable aid to our realisation of that which we pursue, and it is not surprising that it should claim to be the leader of the journey and the only available guide or at least the direct and innermost door of the temple.

2.01 - The Yoga and Its Objects, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
for the liberated man, the shastra and surrender not only of the fruits of the work but of the work itself to God. The virtue of the
shastra is that it sets up a standard outside ourselves, different from our personal desires, reasonings, passions and prejudices, outside our selfishness and self-will, by living up to which in the right spirit we can not only acquire self-control but by reducing even the sattwic ahankara to a minimum prepare ourselves for liberation. In the old days the shastra was the Vedic Dharma based upon a profound knowledge of man's psychology and the laws of the world, revealing man to himself and showing him how to live according to his nature; afterwards it was the law of the Smritis which tried to do the same thing more roughly by classifying men according to the general classes of which the
Vedas speak, the caturvarn.ya; today it is little more than blind mechanical custom and habitual social observance, a thing not sattwic but tamasic, not a preparatory discipline for liberation, but a mere bondage.
Even the highest shastra can be misused for the purposes of egoism, the egoism of virtue and the egoism of prejudice and personal opinion. At its best it is a great means towards the preparation of liberation. It is sabda-brahma. But we must not be satisfied with mere preparation, we must, as soon as our eyes are opened, hasten on to actual freedom. The liberated soul and the sadhak of liberation who has surrendered even his actions to God, gets beyond the highest shastra, sabdabrahmativartate.
The best foundation for the surrender of action is the realisation that Prakriti is doing all our actions at God's comm and and God through our svabhava determines the action. From that moment the action belongs to him, it is not yours nor the responsibility yours; there is indeed no responsibility, no bondage of
--
which you can travel widely to all parts of the world and are admitted to the freedom of the infinite. All that you need are the ship, the steering-wheel, the compass, the motive-power and a skilful captain. Your ship is the Brahmavidya, faith is your steering-wheel, self-surrender your compass, the motive-power is she who makes, directs and destroys the worlds at God's comm and and God himself is your captain. But he has his own way of working and his own time for everything. Watch his way and wait for his time. Understand also the importance of accepting the shastra and submitting to the Guru and do not do like the Europeans who insist on the freedom of the individual intellect to follow its own fancies and preferences which it calls reasonings, even before it is trained to discern or fit to reason. It is much the fashion nowadays to indulge in metaphysical discussions and philosophical subtleties about Maya and Adwaita and put them in the forefront, making them take the place of spiritual experience. Do not follow that fashion or confuse yourself and waste time on the way by questionings which will be amply and luminously answered when the divine knowledge of the vijnana awakes in you. Metaphysical knowledge has its place, but as a handmaid to spiritual experience, showing it the way sometimes but much more dependent on it and living upon its bounty. By itself it is mere pan.d.itya, a dry and barren thing and more often a stumbling-block than a help. Having accepted this path, follow its shastra without unnecessary doubt and questioning, keeping the mind plastic to the light of the higher knowledge, gripping firmly what is experienced, waiting for light where things are dark to you, taking without pride what help you can from the living guides who have already trod the path, always patient, never hastening to narrow conclusions, but waiting for a more complete experience and a fuller light, relying on the Jagadguru who helps you from within.
It is necessary to say something about the Mayavada and the modern teachings about the Adwaita because they are much in the air at the present moment and, penetrated with ideas from European rationalism and agnosticism for which Shankara would have been astonished to find himself made responsible,

2.02 - On Letters, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The ideal relation between man and woman in this Yoga you cannot at present understand. You have, first, to make yourself fit for it. Your own ideas of married life and shastra etc., are dangerous and if you follow these ideas there is every chance of your fall from the Yoga. All of them are mental constructions. The first thing in a case where both man and woman are aspirants is to help each other in Sadhana. They must exchange their forces and help each other to rise into the Higher Consciousness.
Secondly, there is the question of love. What most people call 'love' is a superficial thing and mostly bound up with the vital craving of lust. That has to be completely rejected.
--
The talk turned on the content of a letter by a sadhika who said in her letter that her husband was trying to justify the lower sexual impulse by quoting shastra and also by saying that Sadhana ought to be done through Bhoga enjoyment. He also complained that Sri Aurobindo's Yoga was more rigorous than even the path of Sannyas. He argued: "What is the use of a relation between man and woman if there is no sexual enjoyment?"
Sri Aurobindo: Tell her that the true relation between man and woman cannot be understood by them. They must advance a great deal before they can understand it. It is no use trying to understand it intellectually.

2.05 - Apotheosis, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
Nagarjuna, Madhyamika shastra.
"What is immortal and what is mortal are harmoniously blended, for they

2.06 - Works Devotion and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
to an active ethical righteousness in order to satisfy the fixed law, the shastra, the external dispensation; they perform the ceremonial symbol of the outer communion. But their object is to secure after the mortal pleasure and pain of earthly life the bliss of heavenly worlds, a greater happiness than earth can give but still a personal and mundane enjoyment though in a larger world than the field of this limited and suffering terrestrial nature. And to that to which they aspire, they attain by faith and right endeavour; for material existence and earthly activities are not the whole scope of our personal becoming or the whole formula of the cosmos. Other worlds there are of a larger felicity, svargalokam visalam. Thus the Vedic ritualist of old learned the exoteric sense of the triple Veda, purified himself from sin, drank the wine of communion with the gods and sought by sacrifice and good deeds the rewards of heaven. This firm belief in a
Beyond and this seeking of a diviner world secures to the soul in its passing the strength to attain to the joys of heaven on which its faith and seeking were centred: but the return to mortal existence imposes itself because the true aim of that existence has not been found and realised. Here and not elsewhere the highest Godhead has to be found, the soul's divine nature developed out of the imperfect physical human nature and through unity with God and man and universe the whole large truth of being discovered and lived and made visibly wonderful. That completes the long cycle of our becoming and admits us to a supreme result; that is the opportunity given to the soul by the human birth and, until that is accomplished, it cannot cease. The God-lover advances constantly towards this ultimate necessity of our birth in cosmos through a concentrated love and adoration by which he makes the supreme and universal Divine the whole object of his living - not either egoistic terrestrial satisfaction or the celestial worlds - and the whole object of his thought and his seeing. To see nothing but the Divine, to be at every moment in union with him, to love him in all creatures and have the delight of him in all things is the whole condition of his spiritual existence. His Godvision does not divorce him from life, nor does he miss anything of the fullness of life; for God himself becomes the spontaneous

2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: There are certain lakshanas signs given by the shastras by which one can judge.
Sri Aurobindo: What shastras? One can't believe in all that is said in the shastras.
Mother: Besides, that may be all right for Indians; what about the Europeans? You can't say that they have not realised any truth.

22.08 - The Golden Chain, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That is the thing I wanted to tell you In the Upanishads there is a story. Once Narada - I suppose it is Narada - went to a Rishi to get initiation. The Rishi asked him: 'What have you learnt? What have you learnt in your life of a student now that you come to me?' Narada began to narrate all the vidyas that he had learnt during his education as a brahmachari,- all the shastras, even Dhanurvidya, all kinds of learnings. Then the Rishi said: 'All that is apara vidya, the inferior knowledge. Do you know Brahman?' 'No, sir, I do not know.' 'That is the thing to be known. Once that one thing is known, everything else is known.'
So I tell you, that one thing needful you have acquired, you have not to attempt to get it. You are fortunate, you are lucky, we are all very lucky; Mother called us here and She has given it of Her own Love, infinite Love, unasked, unconditionally. Whatever you are in your outward character and activities, that is not affected at all by the outer nature; it remains as it is, pure, unsullied.

2.2.4 - Taittiriya Upanishad, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
pronounce the shastra. With OM the priest officiating at the
sacrifice sayeth the response. With OM Brahma beginneth creation (or With OM the chief priest giveth sanction). With OM

2.24 - The Message of the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
of his life and action. His tamasic, material, sensational mind subject to inertia and fear and ignorance either obeys partly the compulsion of its environment and partly the spasmodic impulses of its desires or finds a protection in the routine following of a dull customary intelligence. The rajasic mind of desire struggles with the world in which it lives and tries to possess always new things, to command, battle, conquer, create, destroy, accumulate. Always it goes forward tossed between success and failure, joy and sorrow, exultation or despair. But in all, whatever law it may seem to admit, it follows really only the law of the lower self and ego, the restless, untired, self-devouring and alldevouring mind of the Asuric and Rakshasic nature. The sattwic intelligence surmounts partly this state, sees that a better law than that of desire and ego must be followed and erects and imposes on itself a social, an ethical, a religious rule, a Dharma, a shastra. This is as high as the ordinary mind of man can go, to erect an ideal or practical rule for the guidance of the mind and will and as faithfully as possible observe it in life and conduct.
This sattwic mind must be developed to its highest point where it succeeds in putting away the mixture of ego motive altogether and observes the Dharma for its own sake as an impersonal social, ethical or religious ideal, the thing disinterestedly to be done solely because it is right, kartavyam karma.

2.4.1 - Human Relations and the Spiritual Life, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are many kinds of truth and in the shastra you will find all kinds, some seeming in conflict with others. Service to parents is part of family and social duty. It has nothing to do in itself with Yoga. Yoga is truth not of family or society, but of spiritual life, and in spiritual life the seeking for the Divine takes precedence of everything.
If we ask you to remain still with your father and mother, it is not from the point of view of Truth, but of charity. Four of their children have already left them to come to the Asram; it would be too hard a blow if you also left them now. As you have remained with them so long, you might remain a little longer. Even while in the family, you can prepare yourself for the spiritual life, by remembering the Divine in all you do and by doing it as a sacrifice for the sake of the Divine.

3.2.02 - The Veda and the Upanishads, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This picture of Vedic society [a completely pastoral life, without priests or warriors] could easily be challenged. The householder may have lit daily the fire on the household altar, but when he wanted to offer a sacrifice he did it with the aid of sacrificial priests who knew the ritual. Sometimes the Rishi himself performed the sacrifice for the householder. He was not a priest by profession, however, for he might have any occupation in the society. Besides, in a large sacrifice there were many versed in the Vedic rites who performed different functions. In the very first verse of the Rig Veda Agni is described as being himself the Purohit, the priest representative of the householder sacrificer, Yajamana, as the Ritwik, the one who saw to the arrangement of the rites, the Hota who invoked the Gods and gave the offering, and in other hymns he is spoken of as the priest of the purification, the priest of the lustration etc. All this has obviously an esoteric sense but it testifies to the habitual presence of a number of priests at any large sacrifice. So we cannot say that there were no priests in the Vedic age. There does not seem to have been any priestly caste until later times when the four castes came definitely into being. But the Brahmins were not predominantly priests but rather scholars and intellectuals with a religious authority derived from birth and from knowledge of the scriptures and the books of the social law, shastra. The function of priesthood has never been highly honoured in India and it would therefore be incorrect to speak of priestcraft or any rule by priests or ecclesiastics at any time in Indian history.
As for the warriors, there are in the Rig Veda two or three hymns describing a great battle which the scholars declare to have been the fight of one king against ten allied kings, and besides that, the hymns are full of images of war and battle. These too have an esoteric meaning, but they indicate a state of things in which war and battle must have been frequent; so we cannot say that there were no warriors.

3.2.2 - Sleep, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
According to the old Ayurvedic shastra sleep by day impairs the vitality; but there are conditions in which the rule may not apply. It is however true that these [sexual] dreams do easily occur during sleep by day and the dreams themselves come in a state of deep subconscient relaxation, tamasic inertia when the system can be touched by any subconscient suggestion or influence.
***

3 - Commentaries and Annotated Translations, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
codes, shastras, a regulated and written system.
dvm^. From the root Edv^ conveying the idea of active, rapid
--
therefore the Dwapara is the age of codification, ritual, shastra,
external appliances to maintain the failing internal spirituality;
--
ritualist and shastrakara to preserve the knowledge and practice
of the dharma by the aid of the intellect and abhyasa, customary
--
trouble, dana, yajna and shastra break down and are replaced
by calculated liberality, empty ritual and tamasic social forms

4.1 - Jnana, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
166. The double law of sin & virtue is imposed on us because we have not that ideal life & knowledge within which guides the soul spontaneously & infallibly to its self-fulfilment. The law of sin & virtue ceases for us when the sun of God shines upon the soul in truth & love with its unveiled splendour. Moses is replaced by Christ, the shastra by the Veda.
167. God within is leading us always aright even when we are in the bonds of the ignorance; but then, though the goal is sure, it is attained by circlings & deviations.
--
172. Law cannot save the world, therefore Moses' ordinances are dead for humanity & the shastra of the Brahmins is corrupt
Jnana

4.2 - Karma, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
363. This is not according to my shastra or my Science, say the men of rule, formalists. Fool! is God then only a book that there should be nothing true & good except what is written?
364. By which standard shall I walk, the word that God speaks to me, saying "This is My will, O my servant," or the rules that men who are dead, have written? Nay, if I have to fear & obey any, I will fear & obey God rather & not the pages of a book or the frown of a Pandit.
--
366. Act according to the shastra rather than thy self-will & desire; so shalt thou grow stronger to control the ravener in thee; but act according to God rather than the shastra; so shalt thou reach to His highest which is far above rule & limit.
367. The Law is for the bound & those whose eyes are sealed; if they walk not by it, they will stumble; but thou who art free in Krishna or hast seen his living light, walk holding the hand of thy Friend & by the lamp of eternal Veda.

5.4.01 - Notes on Root-Sounds, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
going, walking .. walk, path, road .. entrance .. method, shastra, treatise .. suns passage, solstitial points, rotation, period .. final emancipation
to come, approach etc. , , , , (horse .. custom)
--
shastra.
wheel

BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
their shastras and Puranas, probably the latter, and in their modern translation moreover, which is
disfigured out of all recognition, by the Orientalists. It is to their philosophical systems that one has to
--
(6.) MANTRIKA-SAKTI. The force or power of letters, speech or music. The Mantra shastra has for
its subject-matter this force in all its manifestations......... The influence of melody is one of its

Diamond Sutra 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Shravasti: This was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Kaushala. In his Maha Prajnaparamita shastra, Nagarjuna says the city had a population of 900,000, and it overshadowed even Magadhas capital of Rajagriha during the fifth century B.C. Today, its ruins can be visited twenty kilometers west of the town of Balrampur on the train line between Lucknow and Gorakhpur. Some commentators say the citys name came from that of its founder, King Shravasta. Others say the name was derived from the sage Savattha, who lived there before the city was built.
Anathapindada Garden in Jeta Forest: During the Buddhas day, there was a wealthy merchant in Shravasti named Sudatta. Since he often helped the unfortunate, he was called Anathapindada (the Benefactor). One day, while visiting his sons prospective in-laws in Rajagriha, Sudatta had the good fortune of hearing the Buddha speak and was so affected by what he heard that he invited the Bhagavan to Shravasti. But when Sudatta returned to find a suitable residence for the Buddha and his disciples, the only place that seemed to him sufficiently spacious and serene was the forested preserve of Crown Prince Jeta, two kilometers southwest of the city. When Sudatta inquired about buying it, the prince joked, Ill sell you whatever portion you can cover with gold. Taking the prince at his word, Sudatta went home and brought back enough gold to cover an area of two hundred acres that became known as Anathapindada Garden. Overcome by Sudattas sincerity, the prince donated the entire forest to the Buddhas congregation, and together the two men built a vihara, or monastery, where the Buddha could live and preach whenever he visited. These events are said to have occurred in the fourth year of the Buddhas ministry, or in 428 B.C. Altogether, the Buddha spent twenty-five rainy seasons at Jeta Vihara and delivered many of his most important sermons there. He also performed a series of miracles in Shravasti that were unique in his career, and it was also in Shravasti that he refuted the teachings of the leaders of other spiritual sects.
--
Crossed his legs: To sit cross-legged is to assume the meditation posture whereby ones circulation of energy is more easily and more powerfully focused. In addition to crossing ones legs, ones back is also aligned and ones gaze is fixed on the space before ones body. According to the Maha Prajnaparamita shastra, There are five reasons to sit cross-legged. First, it is the best way to relax the body. Second, it prevents the body from becoming tired. Third, it is not discussed in the texts of heretics. Fourth, it instills respect from others. And fifth, it is praised by all sages. (30)
Chiang Wei-nung says, Unfortunate suffering beings, the rich as well as the poor, spend their lives working for food and clothes. No matter what kind of job they do, they all work for food. They get up in the morning and hurry into the city to work. Working for food is important. But when your work is done, you should return to your own place. The problem with most people is that for the sake of food and clothes they run around like beggars and eventually forget who they are and no longer return to their own place. When your work is done, dont involve yourself in what doesnt concern you. Thus, the Buddha sits down and focuses on the thought before him.

DS2, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Ting Fu-pao says, According to Vasubandhus Bodhicitta Utpadana shastra, In order to
cultivate good karma and seek enlightenment, bodhisattvas do not renounce the phenomenal world.

DS3, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The Maha Prajnaparamita shastra says, Those who are created by the combination of the
skandhas [form, sensation, perception, volition, and cognition] are called beings.
--
The Maha Prajnaparamita shastra says, Nirvana is the ultimate dharma beyond which there is
no other dharma. But there are two kinds. The first is incomplete nirvana. The second is complete

DS4, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
paramitas, or perfections. The Maha Prajnaparamita shastra discusses all six. This sutra only
mentions charity to avoid being verbose and for the sake of simplicity. Charity here represents all

Jaap Sahib Text (Guru Gobind Singh), #Jaap Sahib, #unset, #Zen
None can comprehend thee completely through millions of Smritis, Puranas and shastras.86.
MUDHBHAR CHHUND. TAV PARSAD (BY YOUR GRACE)

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
DR. SATYENDRA: But there are certain signs, lakshanas, in the shastras by
which we can judge.
SRI AUROBINDO: What shastras? One can't believe all that is said in them.
THE MOTHER: Besides, that may be all right for Indians. What about Europeans? You can't say they have not realised any Truth. (Turning to Sri Aurobindo) Isn't that so?
--
SATYENDRA: We use the terms Padartha Vijnana or Padartha shastra for Science.
SRI AUROBINDO: shastra is much more appropriate here than Vijnana.
295

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
DR. MANILAL: Why? It is in the shastra. (Laughter)
PURANI: Everything in the shastra is true?
DR. MANILAL: Otherwise why should it be stated?
--
DR. MANILAL: According to our Jain shastra, there are three or four signs,
Sir, by which gods can be recognised. Their feet don't touch the ground,

The Coming Race Contents, #The Coming Race, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the law given him by the shastras. He
*
--
violates the shastras, modifies them, utilises
them according to the greater imperative of

the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
13) It is useless to grow pale ever the holy Scriptures end the sacred shastras without a spirit of discrimination exempt from all passions. No spiritual progress can be made without discrimination and renunciation ~ Ramakrishna
14) For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. ~ Corinthians

Verses of Vemana, #is Book, #unset, #Zen
With this vile mouth defiled with spittle let us not read the shastras or Veda. Consider are they not thereby defiled.
526
--
Are not all they who read the whole shastras on a level with those who do not read them, if from the mouth of the teacher they learn not true application (enjoyment)? Hear this word openly declared to the world!
910

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