the Divine Love

0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
In appearance, M. looked a Vedic Rishi. Tall and stately in bearing, he had a strong and well-built body, an unusually broad chest, high forehead and arms extending to the knees. His complexion was fair and his prominent eyes were always tinged with the expression of the Divine Love that filled his heart. Adorned with a silvery beard that flowed luxuriantly down his chest, and a shining face radiating the serenity and gravity of holiness, M. was as imposing and majestic as he was handsome and engaging in appearance. Humorous, sweet-tongued and eloquent when situations required, this great Maharishi of our age lived only to sing the glory of Sri Ramakrishna day and night.
Though a very well versed scholar in the Upanishads, Git and the philosophies of the East and the West, all his discussions and teachings found their culmination in the life and the message of Sri Ramakrishna, in which he found the real explanation and illustration of all the scriptures. Both consciously and unconsciously, he was the teacher of the Kathmrita the nectarine words of the Great Master.

0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
"The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what are the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, impersonal, universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the Divine Love. He comes as the divine personality which shall fill the consciousness of the human being and replace the limited egoistic personality, so that it shall be liberated out of ego into infinity and universality, out of birth into immortality."[7]
It is clear that Sri Aurobindo interpreted the traditional idea of the Vibhuti and the Avatar in terms of the evolutionary possibilities of man. But more directly he has worked out the idea of the 'gnostic individual' in his masterpiece The Life Divine. He says: "A supramental gnostic individual will be a spiritual Person, but not a personality in the sense of a pattern of being marked out by a settled combination of fixed qualities, a determined character; he cannot be that since he is a conscious expression of the universal and the transcendent." Describing the gnostic individual he says: "We feel ourselves in the presence of a light of consciousness, a potency, a sea of energy, can distinguish and describe its free waves of action and quality, but not fix itself; and yet there is an impression of personality, the presence of a powerful being, a strong, high or beautiful recognisable Someone, a Person, not a limited creature of Nature but a Self or Soul, a Purusha."[8]

0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
do so. To revolt is to reject the Divine Love and only the Divine
Love has the power to save.

0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Love and Bliss and utilises normally the conception of the supreme Lord in His personality as the Divine Lover and enjoyer of the universe. The world is then realised as a play of the
Lord, with our human life as its final stage, pursued through the different phases of self-concealment and self-revelation. The principle of Bhakti Yoga is to utilise all the normal relations of human life into which emotion enters and apply them no longer to transient worldly relations, but to the joy of the All-Loving, the All-Beautiful and the All-Blissful. Worship and meditation are used only for the preparation and increase of intensity of the divine relationship. And this Yoga is catholic in its use of all emotional relations, so that even enmity and opposition to God, considered as an intense, impatient and perverse form of Love, is conceived as a possible means of realisation and salvation.

0.06 - INTRODUCTION, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
other guide or support, either outward or inward, than the Divine Love 'which
burned in my heart.'

0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
further from true love, the Divine Love, than sentimentality.
All will be done, Mother, but why is my heart becoming
--
and still less of the Divine Love.
The person I love belongs to me.

0.07 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
all the peace of the Divine Love and also my loving blessings.
20 August 1939

0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is only one true love - it is the Divine Love; all other loves
are diminutions, limitations and deformations of that Love. Even

01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Divine Love is a greater fire than the low smouldering fire that our secular unregenerate life is. One has to choose and declare his adhesion. Indeed, the stage of conversion, the crucial turn from the ordinary life to the spiritual life Eliot has characterised in a very striking manner. We usually say, sometimes in an outburst of grief, sometimes in a spirit of sudden disgust and renunciation that the world is dark and dismal and lonesome, the only thing to do here is to be done with it. The true renunciation, that which is deep and abiding, is not, however, so simple a thing, such a short cut. So our poet says, but the world is not dark enough, it is not lonesome enough: the world lives and moves in a superficial half-light, it is neither real death nor real life, it is death in life. It is this miserable mediocrity, the shallow uncertainty of consciousness that spells danger and ruin for the soul. Hence the poet exclaims:
. . . . Not here

0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
would open to the Divine Love.
But there is a remedy:
--
Is the Divine Love equal for all even in the manifestation?
Yes, equal and immutable.

0.13 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is only one love, the Divine Love, eternal, universal, equal
for everyone and everything.

0 1958-12-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Sweet Mother, I indeed suspect that you want to endure, to bear this struggle all alone. Oh, I think I understand a number of things about the mechanism of these attacks and their connection with me, about the Divine Love that embraces all and takes into itself the suffering and the evil of menall this overwhelms me with a sudden understanding. It seems to me that I am seeing and feeling all that you are facing, all that you are taking upon yourself for us. The suffering of the Divine in Matter has been an overwhelming revelation to meAh! I see, I want to fight, I want to be totally on your side; I am now and forever determined.
But you have enough to do with the higher beasts of prey without still having to fight the little scorpions. I beg of you, Sweet Mother, accept the help that is being offered to you, preserve your strength for the higher struggle. I quite understand that your Love can even go to the scorpions that are attacking you, but it is not forbidden to protect yourself from their venom. You have enough to do on other planes.

0 1960-07-12 - Mothers Vision - the Voice, the ashram a tiny part of myself, the Mothers Force, sparkling white light compressed - enormous formation of negative vibrations - light in evil, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I had a startling experience one day when X was doing his pujas to encircle the titans. He was in difficulty and I was about to intervene to help him when I was abruptly stopped. I was faced by a massive blackness (blacker than the blackest physical thing) and suddenly, right at its center, I saw the Divine Love shining with such a splendor I had never seen it so splendid.
And now it has become constant; each time I hear or see something ugly or horrible, or each time something ugly or horrible happens, something which is a negation of the divine life just behind is this flameso wonderful. And then the effect is annulled.

0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are two lines in the ancient traditions, two ways of explaining this. One says it is by the descent of what already exists in all its perfection that what is involved can be awakened to consciousness and evolution. Its like the old story: when what Sri Aurobindo calls the universal Mother or the Shakti (or Sachchidananda1) realized what had happened in Matter (that is, in what had created Matter) and that this involution had led to a state of Inconscience, total unconsciousness, the ancient lore says that at once the Divine Love descended straight from the Lord into Matter and began to awaken what was involved there.
Other traditions speak of the Consciousness, the divine Consciousness, instead of Love. One even finds accounts full of imagery depicting a Being of prismatic light lying in deep sleep in the cave of the Inconscient; and this Descent awakens him to an activity which is still (how to put it?) inner, an immobile activity, an activity by radiation. Countless rays issue from his body and spread throughout the Inconscient, and little by little they awaken in each thing, in each atom, as it were, the aspiration to Consciousness and the beginning of evolution.

0 1963-07-24, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To bring the Divine Love and Beauty and Ananda into the world is, indeed, the whole crown and essence of our yoga. But it has always seemed to me impossible unless there comes as its support and foundation and guard the Divine Truthwhat I call the supramental and its Divine Power.
(XXIII.753)
--
But it has always seemed to me impossible unless there comes as its support and foundation and guard the Divine Truthwhat I call the supramental and its Divine Power. Otherwise Love itself blinded by the confusions of this present consciousness may stumble in its human receptacles and, even otherwise, may find itself unrecognised, rejected or rapidly degenerating and lost in the frailty of mans inferior nature. But when it comes in the divine truth and power, Divine Love descends first as something transcendent and universal and out of that transcendence and universality it applies itself to persons according to the Divine Truth and Will, creating a vaster, greater, purer personal love than any the human mind or heart can now imagine. It is when one has felt this descent that one can be really an instrument for the birth and action of the Divine Love in the world.
(XXIII.753)

0 1967-11-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But Sri Aurobindo said (I read it two days ago, I dont know where he wrote it because it was a quotation) that if the divine Consciousness, the divine Power, the Divine Love, the Truth, were to manifest on earth too rapidly, the earth would be dissolved! It couldnt bear it brrf!
I am interpreting, but theres the idea!

0 1968-01-12, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is an error too to imagine that, although the physical sexual action is to be abandoned, yet some inward reproduction of it is part of the transformation of the sex-centre. The action of the animal sex-energy in Nature is a device for a particular purpose in the economy of the material creation in the Ignorance. But the vital excitement that accompanies it makes the most favourable opportunity and vibration in the atmosphere for the inrush of those very vital forces and beings whose whole business is to prevent the descent of the supramental Light. The pleasure attached to it is a degradation and not a true form of the divine Ananda. The true divine Ananda in the physical has a different quality and movement and substance; self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with the Divine. You have spoken of Divine Love; but Divine Love, when it touches the physical, does not awaken the gross lower vital propensities; indulgence of them would only repel it and make it withdraw again to the heights from which it is already difficult enough to draw it down into the coarseness of the material creation which it alone can transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through which it will consent to enter, the gate of the psychic being, and cast away the lower vital error.8
Sri Aurobindo

0 1968-10-30, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Here are the Light and the Divine Love which are always with you on the path, every outcome of which is only the starting point for a new stage.
Its precisely the experience Ive had these last few days (yesterday, I think), just before writing the card. We always set an end to things but there isnt any. There isnt any. The truth is, one rises like this (Mother draws a curve that reaches a point in space), but its in order to go like this (gesture of a new curve rising higher from that point on), and again like this for ever and ever.
--
Last time you asked me, Where do I stand? So when I wrote your card, I remembered your question. I thought I should write something for you about that. Then I evoked Sri Aurobindo in his portrait.1 I wrote, Here is the Light and the Divine Love which always accompany you
Which are always with you on the path

05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is the Divine Love, love proper to Maheshwari. But there is another love more intimate, close, human the love of Mahalakshmi. This is the love that comes down here upon earth and takes on an earthly quality, a terrestrial vibration. In other words, it has what we call the psychic quality that characterises the human feeling with its peculiar charm and sweetness and intensity and magic. It goes without saying that by human we do not 'mean here the gross human thing which is more animal than human, a matter of the external heart, made up of crude passion and egoistic demand, but that which is the truth of all this deviation and deformation, lying behind in the inner heart. The psychic being is a special creation in and for earth, in and for man, the earthly creature. It is, as we have said, divine Grace imbedded in Matter.
The gods are glorious beings; they are aspects and personalities of the Divine, presiding and ruling over the cosmic laws, each with his own truth and norm and dominion, although, in the higher status, all work together and harmoniously. Even then they do not possess a soul, a psychic core of being. They are forms and powers of consciousness organised round a divine truth, a typal Idea; but they do not have this exquisite presence secretly seated in the heart, which is the privilege of the terrestrial creature.

06.29 - Towards Redemption, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As I have often said, creation is the self-objectivisation of the Supreme Divine; it is the supreme consciousness putting itself lout of itself so that it may look at itself. In so doingin self-objectifying and self-dividingit scattered itself abroad: the one infinite multiplied itself into infinite atoms. Not only so, in detaching itself from itself the consciousness became the very opposite of itself: consciousness became unconsciousness, spirit became matter, delight became pain, knowledge' became ignorance, and light became darkness. Boundless universality was the essential nature of the Divine, now it got clotted into the knots of egoism upon which is based this inconscient creation. In the midst of this utter negation, this denial by the universe of its origin, the Divine Love descended and lodged itself in order to bring back the erring creation to its lost home. the Divine Love became involved and entangled in the Inconscient, became one with it; only so could she (it was indeed the Divine Mother in her Grace) suffuse the inconscient universe with her own substance and transmute it into its original nature. The first effect or visible sign of this descent or divine infusion is the emergence of the psychic or the soul element in the material body: it is the speck of consciousness imbedded in matter, inhabiting the apparently dead particle or aggregate of particles, which continually grows in and through its relation of action and reaction with its surrounding unconsciousness, and at the same time extending its light into that darkness transforms it gradually into what it was originally at its source.
The origin of creation is an individualisation the manifestation or emanation of many, as units, out of the undivided and indivisible Single. It meant freedom for each unit to choose: the individual became, so to say, a unit of freedom. The immediate result, however, was not very successful, apparently, that is to say. For the individual unit chose to follow a path exactly opposite to its origin: the individualisation happened as if an element shot out of the infinite unity and flung itself in its momentum, as far away as possible, to the other pole. That is how the one spirit became the infinite particles of inconscient matter. The purpose and problem then set was to bring back the straying elements to their source and origin. The work was long travail. It took and it is taking even now ages for the one Being who could do the thing to prepare slowly, mount the steps gradually along which creation slid down, recover the ground painfully and achieve the hidden purpose, vindicating amply the deviation and the fall. Through devious ways, long, winding, arduous marches the spirit of evolution laboured through millenniums; it was the instrument utilised by the Divine Grace.

08.34 - To Melt into the Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Opening to the Divine Love Divine
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part EightTo Melt into the Divine
--
Opening to the Divine Love Divine

08.35 - Love Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Divine Love is there in its full intensity, as a tremendous force. But most people, ninety-nine out of a hundred, feel nothing at all. What they feel is exactly in proportion to what they are, what they can receive and hold. Indeed, you are always bathed in an atmosphere vibrant with Divine Love. Sometimes, on rare occasions, for a few seconds perhaps, there is all on a sudden just the impression of something, and you say: "there, the Divine Love came to me!" Well, it is a way of saying: the true fact being that for some reason or other you happened to be just a little open and you had the perception of the thing that is always with you. The Love is there, the divine consciousness, too, is there in the same way. They are one, after all. They are there all the while; only you do not feel it or do so only spasmodically. Once in a way you find yourself, without any rhyme or reason as it were, in that happy state and you declare that the Divine Love has at last turned towards you! But, as I say, the matter is not like that. There came about an opening in you, perhaps no more than a pinpoint, and that was sufficient for the thing to rush in; for the atmosphere is surcharged with it and wherever there is a possibility of its being received, it is received. The same is true of all things divine. They are there: you do not receive or perceive them, because you are closed, shut off, blocked up. You are occupied, most of the time with other things. You are full of yourself, packed with it, and there is no room for anything else. You are not merely passively filled with yourself, but very actively, you are furiously busy with yourself. How can you notice then the marvellous things that are about you, around you? You get a glimpse unawares, perhaps when you are asleep; but it fades away soon. Man's ego is a formidable thing; the whole universe, to him, is a mere function of the ego. You are the centre and the entire creation revolves around you. Such is your vision of the universe. You do not see it as it is; you see only yourself when you look at it.
To begin, then, you must be able to come out of your ego. You will have to enter, as the first step, into something like a state of inexistence. Thereafter only will you begin to see things as they are, that is to say, from a height. If you want to see things as they truly are, you must become absolutely like a mirrorsilent, peaceful, immobile, impartial, with no preference, in a state of total receptivity. You will begin to see many things that did not seem to be there before, but only now becoming active. Well, you may very well have gone inside one of these things instead of being shut up into a minute spot in the infinite universe, which you call yourself. There are many ways by which you can come out of yourself. Anyhow that is the one thing to be done, if you wish to see the world as it is, not as it seems to be, a function of yourself.

09.05 - The Story of Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is a state of consciousness in which one experiences the Divine Love everywhere. One does not feel then a great difference between one creature and another except in their physical appearance. Even in unconsciousness and immobility, the apparently complete inertiaof the stone, for examplecan be found a dazzling light, the light of the divine Presence. There is much more aspiration than one thinks in objects that are usually called inanimate. In the stone precisely there is a spontaneous sense of what is there high above and although it cannot express it, it feels the thing and that affects it although in different ways. In the stone, in things and objects, there is a strange receptivity that comes from this Presence.
You can take what you call a precious stone and concentrate a force or forces in it. It retains them. These forces radiate afterwards very slowly, but increasingly, progressively. And if you know how to do it, you can charge it with a quantity of force quite enough to last almost indefinitely so to say. There are stones that serve as intermediaries of union, stones that serve as accumulators of energy and stones that may serve as foretellers of circumstances, they may carry messages. Therefore, as they can serve as accumulators, it means that they carry in themselves the source of the Force itself, otherwise they would not be receptive.
--
If you want to know what love is, you must love the Divine. It is a very well-known fact that in the end you become just like the thing you love. If you love the Divine, by the force of this love, little by little, you will become more and more like the Divine. And then one can identify oneself with the Divine Love and know what it is, you cannot know it in any other way.
Necessarily, the love between two human beings is always made of ignorance, misunderstanding, weakness and a terrible sense of isolation. It would be as if you wanted to gain entrance into the presence of a unique Splendour and the first thing you do is to put a screen between yourself and this Splendour and you are very much astonished that you do not have even a vague impression of it! The first thing then to do is to do away with the screen, pass through and stand in the presence of the Splendour. Then you know what it is. But if you go on piling veil after veil between yourself and That, you will never see it. You may have just a vague impression, "there is something" and that is all.
--
the Divine Love is there with all its intensity, with all its tremendous power. But most people do not feel anything. What they feel is exactly proportionate to what they are and what they are capable of receiving.
Just imagine that you are bathed in an atmosphere wholly vibrant with divine love. But you perceive nothing of it. Sometimes, rarely, all on a sudden you get the impression of something. Then you say: "Oh! Divine Love came to me!" It may seem to be an illusion, but the simple thing is that for some reason or other you were open just a little and you perceived the Thing. But it is always there.
--
"To become conscious if the Divine Love, you must abandon all other love." What is the best way of rejecting "the other love" which is so obstinate in its denial and which does not leave you easily ?
To pass throughyes, pass through and see what is behind, not to stop short at the appearance, not to rest satisfied with the external form, but to look for the principle that is behind the love, not to be satisfied until you have found the source of the feeling in you. Then the external form will fall away of itself and you will be in contact with the Divine Love that is behind everything. That is the best way. To try to reject one to find the other is very difficult, almost impossible. Because human nature is so limited, so full of contradictions and so exclusive in its movements that if you want to reject love in its lower form, that is to say, human love as human beings feel it, if you force yourself towards rejecting that, then generally you reject even the capacity to feel love and you become as it were a stone. Then sometimes you have to wait for years or even centuries for the capacity of receiving and manifesting love to reawaken in you.
Therefore the best means is, when love comes in any form whatsoever, to try to pierce through its external appearance, to find out the divine principle that is behind and that is the cause of its existence. Naturally it is full of snares and difficulties, but it is the most effective. In other words, instead of ceasing to love, because you love in the wrong way, you must cease to love in the wrong way and try to love in the right way. For example, the love between human creatures, in all its forms, the love of the parents for their children, of the children for their parents, the love between brothers, between lovers, all are tainted with ignorance and egoism and every other fault that is the common human fault. So, instead of ceasing altogether to love, which is besides very difficult, as it will simply dry up the heart and therefore serve no purpose, you must learn to love with devotion and self-giving and self-abnegation, you are to fight not against love itself but against its deformities. All forms of appropriation, the sense of possession, jealousy, all other feelings that accompany and support these root feelings are to be rejected. Instead you must not seek to possess, dominate, impose your will or caprice or desire, must not be eager to take and receive, but to give. Do not demand a return from the other, but be satisfied with your own love; do not seek your interest, your personal pleasure, the fulfilment of your own desire but rest content with your love and affection, do not ask for a response, but remain happy with loving only, nothing more.

10.02 - Beyond Vedanta, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Therefore one more step has to be taken when the Divine Love will incarnate in its integral and absolute reality upon this physical earth in a concretely material frame.
***

10.27 - Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mother said of love the same thing as I have been saying of consciousness. She says, there is only one love, the Divine Love and none other. There are various expressions of that love according to the conditions in which it manifests, to the degree or status of being but everywhere it is the same divine love behind in essence. Because of inadequate expression it becomes blurred or faint and muddy but the living fire is there below the ashes. You have simply to shake off the outer coating to allow the inner reality to shine forth in its own nature.
Love in the mind, love in the heart, love in the vital, love in the physical, love human and animal are not negations of the Divine Love, it is not that you have to reject, cut off these so-called inferior formulations of love, these do not necessarily deny or reject the Divine Love in their heart of hearts; even there in their true reality, glows the pure Divine love. To reach the Divine Love, to enjoy its divine nanda, it is not necessary to make a bonfire of these earthly goods and go beyond into the transcendent. Even here in this earthly mould the Divine Love in its full purity can be established for it is already there behind and needs only earnest evocation.
Consciousness essentially is always and everywhere the same. Its own quality is unvarying but in its expression there is growth and development, an increase in intensity and amplitude. The light that your candle gives and the light that comes from the sun are not different in quality but they differ in expression or manifestation, because of the receptacle, the seat or abode of the light. The Vedic fire was lighted on a sacred altar, that is the seat for the God from where to manifest himself. There was a regular ceremony for the preparation of the seat (Barhi) and the value and the success of the sacrifice depended largely on a proper preparation of the seat. The seat, the basic status also indicates that there is an ascending movement of the sacrifice. The sacrifice symbolises consciousness and radiant energy, mounting and travelling upward and forward; the progress or ascent of consciousness means bringing out its inherent potential strength that is behind and within and placing it in front as power of expression. As I have said, if consciousness in matter is like a light of single candle power, on the level of life it becomes a light of multiple candle power and in the mind this multiple power is again multiplied. In this way the consciousness finally attains its solar incandescence on the highest height of the being.

1.03 - On Knowledge of the World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Know, O inquirer after the divine secrets, that there are two things needful to man in this world; first of all, he needs to acquire spiritual food to preserve his heart from perishing. The aliment of the heart consists in the love and knowledge of God; for whatever is a necessity of the nature of any one, that he loves, as we have before mentioned. The ruin of the soul consists in the predominance of some other love over the love of God, which veils the Divine Love. Our refuge is in God !
The second thing needful for a man is, that the body should be preserved and tended with care, since it is the frame of the heart. As a camel is to a pilgrim, so the body is like an animal upon which the heart rides. The pilgrim is obliged to give food and water to his camel, and to treat it with attention, that he may reach the end of his journey in safety, and by its means'be successful in the [67] object for which he travels. But the attention bestowed by the pilgrim upon his camel, should be only in that proportion which is really necessary. If he should be busy with his camel day and night, and should expend all his capital in feeding it, he would not reach his destination, but would ultimately become separated from his caravan, would lose all that he possessed, and in view of the injury he had sustained, he would be the victim of unceasing regrets, and ruin would ensue. Just so is it with man in general. If he pass all his days in attending to the preservation of the body, and spend the capital of his life, in providing food and drink for the body, he will not reach the mansions of felicity, but will wander in the wilderness of destruction, without capital, penniless and a naked vagabond.

1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is the Divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born godhead within us. In the first long stage of its growth and immature existence it has leaned on earthly love, affection, tenderness, goodwill, compassion, benevolence, on all beauty and gentleness and fineness and light and strength and courage, on all that can help to refine and purify the grossness and commonness of human nature; but it knows how mixed are these human movements at their best and at their worst how fallen and stamped with the mark of ego and self-deceptive sentimental falsehood and the lower self profiting by the imitation of a soul movement. At once, emerging, it is ready and eager to break all the old ties and imperfect emotional activities and replace them by a greater spiritual Truth of love and oneness. It may still admit the human forms and movements, but on condition that they are turned towards the One alone. It accepts only the ties that are helpful, the heart's reverence for the Guru, the union of the God-seekers, a spiritual compassion for the ignorant human and animal world and its peoples, the joy and happiness and satisfaction of beauty that comes from the perception of the Divine everywhere. It plunges the nature inward towards its meeting with the immanent Divine in the heart's secret centre and, while that call is there, no reproach of egoism, no mere outward summons of altruism or duty or philanthropy or service will deceive or divert it from its sacred longing and its obedience to the attraction of the Divinity within it. It lifts the being towards a transcendent Ecstasy and is ready to shed all the downward pull of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One Highest; but it calls down also this transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and jarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the universal Ignorance. It is not attracted or misled by mental imitations or any vital misuse of these great deep-seated Truths of existence; it exposes them with its detecting search-ray and calls down the entire truth of divine Love to heal these malformations, to deliver mental, vital, physical love from their insufficiencies or their perversions and reveal to them their abounding share of the intimacy and the oneness and the ascending ecstasy and the descending rapture.
All true truths of Love and of the works of Love the psychic being accepts in their place; but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns life into a state of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.

1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the inner offering of the heart's adoration, the soul of it in the symbol, the spirit of it in the act, that is the very life of the sacrifice. If this offering is to be complete and universal, then a turning of all our emotions to the Divine is imperative. This is the intensest way of purification for the human heart, more powerful than any ethical or aesthetic catharsis could ever be by its half-power and superficial pressure. A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are burned away and the others discard their insufficiencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the Divine Love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in terrestrial Nature.
It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent it from becoming a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if they follow the call, they yet tend - when not consciously, then by automatic habit - to bring into the spiritual action their own natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Natureforces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind's and the life's falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind's ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure.
And yet even the leading of the inmost psychic being is not found sufficient until it has succeeded in raising itself out of this mass of inferior Nature to the highest spiritual levels and the divine spark and flame descended here have rejoined themselves to their original fiery Ether. For there is there no longer a spiritual consciousness still imperfect and half lost to itself in the thick sheaths of human mind, life and body, but the full spiritual consciousness in its purity, freedom and intense wideness. There, as it is the eternal Knower that becomes the Knower in us and mover and user of all knowledge, so it is the eternal All-Blissful who is the Adored attracting to himself the eternal divine portion of his being and joy that has gone out into the play of the universe, the infinite Lover pouring himself out in the multiplicity of his own manifested selves in a happy Oneness.

1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That is why no effort is too arduous, no austerity too rigorous if it can illumine, purify, perfect and transform the physical substance so that it may no longer conceal the Divine when he takes on an outer form in Matter. For then this marvellous tenderness will be able to express itself freely in the world, the Divine Love which has the power of changing life into a paradise of sweet joy.
This, you will say, is the culmination, the crown of the effort, the final victory; but what must be done in order to achieve it? What is the path to be followed and what are the first steps on the way?

1.08 - The Supreme Discovery, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How beautiful is this humble role of servant, the role of all who have been revealers and heralds of the God who is within all, of the Divine Love that animates all things.
And until we can follow their example and become true servants even as they, let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love; let us offer Him, without reserve, this marvellous instrument, our physical organism. He shall make it yield its utmost on every plane of activity.
--
If ordeal or fault has cast you down, if you have sunk into the nether depths of suffering, do not grieve for there indeed the Divine Love and the supreme blessing can reach you! Because you have passed through the crucible of purifying sorrows, the glorious ascents are yours.
You are in the wilderness: then listen to the voices of the silence. The clamour of flattering words and outer applause has gladdened your ears, but the voices of the silence will gladden your soul and awaken within you the echo of the depths, the chant of divine harmonies!

1.10 - Theodicy - Nature Makes No Mistakes, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
separated from it. the Divine Love which she poured into
it would be incarnated in the progressive succession of the

1.11 - The Kalki Avatar, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
universe was a personification of the Divine Love making
the upward climb possible, and to this end incarnating in

1.13 - Reason and Religion, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Reason has indeed a part to play in relation to this highest field of our religious being and experience, but that part is quite secondary and subordinate. It cannot lay down the law for the religious life, it cannot determine in its own right the system of divine knowledge; it cannot school and lesson the Divine Love and delight; it cannot set bounds to spiritual experience or lay its yoke upon the action of the spiritual man. Its sole legitimate sphere is to explain as best it can, in its own language and to the rational and intellectual parts of man, the truths, the experiences, the laws of our suprarational and spiritual existence. That has been the work of spiritual philosophy in the East andmuch more crudely and imperfectly doneof theology in the West, a work of great importance at moments like the present when the intellect of mankind after a long wandering is again turning towards the search for the Divine. Here there must inevitably enter a part of those operations proper to the intellect, logical reasoning, inferences from the data given by rational experience, analogies drawn from our knowledge of the apparent facts of existence, appeals even to the physical truths of science, all the apparatus of the intelligent mind in its ordinary workings. But this is the weakest part of spiritual philosophy. It convinces the rational mind only where the intellect is already predisposed to belief, and even if it convinces, it cannot give the true knowledge. Reason is safest when it is content to take the profound truths and experiences of the spiritual being and the spiritual life, just as they are given to it, and throw them into such form, order and language as will make them the most intelligible or the least unintelligible to the reasoning mind. Even then it is not quite safe, for it is apt to harden the order into an intellectual system and to present the form as if it were the essence. And, at best, it has to use a language which is not the very tongue of the suprarational truth but its inadequate translation and, since it is not the ordinary tongue either of the rational intelligence, it is open to non-understanding or misunderstanding by the ordinary reason of mankind. It is well-known to the experience of the spiritual seeker that even the highest philosophising cannot give a true inner knowledge, is not the spiritual light, does not open the gates of experience. All it can do is to address the consciousness of man through his intellect and, when it has done, to say, I have tried to give you the truth in a form and system which will make it intelligible and possible to you; if you are intellectually convinced or attracted, you can now seek the real knowledge, but you must seek it by other means which are beyond my province.
But there is another level of the religious life in which reason might seem justified in interfering more independently and entitled to assume a superior role. For as there is the suprarational life in which religious aspiration finds entirely what it seeks, so too there is also the infrarational life of the instincts, impulses, sensations, crude emotions, vital activities from which all human aspiration takes its beginning. These too feel the touch of the religious sense in man, share its needs and experience, desire its satisfactions. Religion includes this satisfaction also in its scope, and in what is usually called religion it seems even to be the greater part, sometimes to an external view almost the whole; for the supreme purity of spiritual experience does not appear or is glimpsed only through this mixed and turbid current. Much impurity, ignorance, superstition, many doubtful elements must form as the result of this contact and union of our highest tendencies with our lower ignorant nature. Here it would seem that reason has its legitimate part; here surely it can intervene to enlighten, purify, rationalise the play of the instincts and impulses. It would seem that a religious reformation, a movement to substitute a pure and rational religion for one that is largely infrarational and impure, would be a distinct advance in the religious development of humanity. To a certain extent this may be, but, owing to the peculiar nature of the religious being, its entire urge towards the suprarational, not without serious qualifications, nor can the rational mind do anything here that is of a high positive value.

1.14 - INSTRUCTION TO VAISHNAVS AND BRHMOS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Balarm's father was a Vaishnava; hence the Master also sang of the Divine Love of the gopis for their beloved Krishna:
I have not found my Krishna, O friend! How cheerless my home without Him!
--
Sri Ramakrishna sang a song describing the Divine Love of Chaitanya. Then Balarm's father, Mani Mallick, Beni Pl, and several other devotees took leave of the Master.
In the evening, devotees from Kansaritola, Calcutta, arrived. The Master danced and sang with them in a state of divine fervour. After dancing, he went into a spiritual mood and said, "I shall go part of the way myself." Kishori came forward to massage his feet, but the Master did not allow anyone to touch him.

1.15 - The Suprarational Good, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In fact ethics is not in its essence a calculation of good and evil in the action or a laboured effort to be blameless according to the standards of the world,those are only crude appearances,it is an attempt to grow into the divine nature. Its parts of purity are an aspiration towards the inalienable purity of Gods being; its parts of truth and right are a seeking after conscious unity with the law of the divine knowledge and will; its parts of sympathy and charity are a movement towards the infinity and universality of the Divine Love; its parts of strength and manhood are an edification of the divine strength and power. That is the heart of its meaning. Its high fulfilment comes when the being of the man undergoes this transfiguration; then it is not his actions that standardise his nature but his nature that gives value to his actions; then he is no longer laboriously virtuous, artificially moral, but naturally divine. Actively, too, he is fulfilled and consummated when he is not led or moved either by the infrarational impulses or the rational intelligence and will, but inspired and piloted by the divine knowledge and will made conscious in his nature. And that can only be done, first by communication of the truth of these things through the intuitive mind as it purifies itself progressively from the invasion of egoism, self-interest, desire, passion and all kinds of self-will, finally through the suprarational light and power, no longer communicated but present and in possession of his being. Such was the supreme aim of the ancient sages who had the wisdom which rational man and rational society have rejected because it was too high a truth for the comprehension of the reason and for the powers of the normal limited human will too bold and immense, too infinite an effort.
Therefore it is with the cult of Good, as with the cult of Beauty and the cult of the spiritual. Even in its first instincts it is already an obscure seeking after the divine and absolute; it aims at an absolute satisfaction, it finds its highest light and means in something beyond the reason, it is fulfilled only when it finds God, when it creates in man some image of the divine Reality. Rising from its infrarational beginnings through its intermediate dependence on the reason to a suprarational consummation, the ethical is like the aesthetic and the religious being of man a seeking after the Eternal.

1.16 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M: "Sir, what is the nature of the Divine Love transcending the three gunas?"
MASTER: "Attaining that love, the devotee sees everything full of Spirit and Consciousness. To him 'Krishna is Consciousness, and His sacred Abode is also Consciousness'. The devotee, too, is Consciousness. Everything is Consciousness. Very few people attain such love."

1.17 - The Divine Birth and Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These three are always the necessary elements of the work of the Avatar. He gives a dharma, a law of self-discipline by which to grow out of the lower into the higher life and which necessarily includes a rule of action and of relations with our fellowmen and other beings, endeavour in the eightfold path or the law of faith, love and purity or any other such revelation of the nature of the divine in life. Then because every tendency in man has its collective as well as its individual aspect, because those who follow one way are naturally drawn together into spiritual companionship and unity, he establishes the sangha, the fellowship and union of those whom his personality and his teaching unite. In Vaishnavism there is the same trio, bhagavata, bhakta, bhagavan, - the bhagavata, which is the law of the Vaishnava dispensation of adoration and love, the bhakta representing the fellowship of those in whom that law is manifest, bhagavan, the Divine Lover and
Beloved in whose being and nature the divine law of love is founded and fulfils itself. The Avatar represents this third element, the divine personality, nature and being who is the soul of the dharma and the sangha, informs them with himself, keeps them living and draws men towards the felicity and the liberation.
--
The inner fruit of the Avatar's coming is gained by those who learn from it the true nature of the divine birth and the divine works and who, growing full of him in their consciousness and taking refuge in him with their whole being, manmaya mam upasritah., purified by the realising force of their knowledge and delivered from the lower nature, attain to the divine being and divine nature, madbhavam. The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what are the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, impersonal, universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the Divine Love. He comes as the divine personality which shall fill the consciousness of the human being and replace the limited egoistic personality, so that it shall be liberated out of ego into infinity and universality, out of birth into immortality. He comes as the divine power and love which calls men to itself, so that they may take refuge in that and no longer in the insufficiency
176

12.04 - Love and Death, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As I have said, love depicted here in these plays of Sri Aurobindo is of earth, earthly, even earthy: it is not, one might say, the Divine Loveembodiment of the Supreme Ananda or Sachchidananda. And yet Love is one and indivisible, it is always and everywhere the same, essentially the Divine Lovein various moulds. And the mould in which Sri Aurobindo has cast even earthly human love is divinely noble and beautiful. Love has been uttered, as it were, by a Divine tongue and it has been transmuted, irised and is full of the redolence of heaven's delight: if it cannot claim to be the very delight of Brahman (Brahmananda) yet it is as the ancients declared, brahmnandasahodaroconsanguineous, of one blood, with Divine Delight.
***

1914 02 22p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Many a time in the day and night it seems to me that I am, or rather my consciousness is, concentrated entirely in my heart which is no longer an organ, not even a feeling, but the Divine Love, impersonal, eternal; and being this Love I feel myself living at the centre of each thing upon the entire earth, and at the same time I seem to stretch out immense, infinite arms and envelop with a boundless tenderness all beings, clasped, gathered, nestled on my breast that is vaster than the universe. Words are poor and clumsy, O divine Master, and mental transcriptions are always childish. But my aspiration to Thee is constant, and truly speaking, it is very often Thou and Thou alone who livest in this body, this imperfect means of manifesting Thee.
May all beings be happy in the peace of Thy illumination!

1914 03 20p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thou art consciousness and light, Thou art peace in the depth of all things, the Divine Love that transfigures, the knowledge that triumphs over darkness. To feel Thee and aspire to Thee one should have emerged from the immense sea of the subconscient, one should have begun to crystallise, to grow distinct so as to know oneself and then give oneself as that alone which is its own master can do. And what effort and struggle it takes to attain this crystallisation, to emerge from the amorphous state of the environment; and how much more effort and struggle yet to give oneself, to surrender once the individuality has been formed.
Few beings consent willingly to make this effort; so life with its brutal unforeseen events obliges men to make it unintentionally, for they cannot do otherwise. And little by little Thy work is accomplished despite all obstacles.

1914 08 27p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To be the Divine Love, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of beingit is for this I cry to Thee, O Lord. Let me be consumed with this love divine, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the worlds of being! Transmute me into that burning brazier so that all the atmosphere of earth may be purified with its flame.
Oh, to be Thy Love infinitely.

1929-06-02 - Divine love and its manifestation - Part of the vital being in Divine love, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What is the relation of human love to Divine love? Is the human an obstacle to the Divine Love? Or is not rather the capacity for human love an index to the capacity for Divine love? Have not great spiritual figures, such as Christ, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, been remarkably loving and affectionate by nature?
Love is one of the great universal forces; it exists by itself and its movement is free and independent of the objects in which and through which it manifests. It manifests wherever it finds a possibility for manifestation, wherever there is receptivity, wherever there is some opening for it. What you call love and think of as a personal or individual thing is only your capacity to receive and manifest this universal force. But because it is universal, it is not therefore an unconscious force; it is a supremely conscious Power. Consciously it seeks for its manifestation and realisation upon earth; consciously it chooses its instruments, awakens to its vibrations those who are capable of an answer, endeavours to realise in them that which is its eternal aim, and when the instrument is not fit, drops it and turns to look for others. Men think that they have suddenly fallen in love; they see their love come and grow and then it fadesor, it may be, endures a little longer in some who are more specially fitted for its more lasting movement. But their sense in this of a personal experience all their own was an illusion. It was a wave from the everlasting sea of universal love.
--
To manifest the Divine Love you must be capable of receiving the Divine Love. For only those can manifest it who are by their nature open to its native movement. The wider and clearer the opening in them, the more they manifest love divine in its original purity; the more it is mixed with the lower human feelings, the greater is the deformation. One who is not open to love in its essence and in its truth cannot approach the Divine. Even the seekers through knowledge come to a point beyond which if they want to go farther, they are bound to find themselves entering at the same time into love and to feel the two as one, knowledge the light of the divine union, love the very heart of knowledge. There is a place in the souls progress where they meet and you cannot distinguish one from the other. The division, the distinction between the two that you make in the beginning are a creation of the mind: once you rise to a higher level, they disappear.
Among those who have come into this world seeking to reveal the Divine here and transform earthly life, there are some who have manifested the Divine Love in a greater fullness. In some the purity of the manifestation is so great that they are misunderstood by the whole of humanity and are even accused of being hard and unloving, although the Divine Love is there. But it is in them divine and not human in its form as in its substance. For when man speaks of love, he associates it with an emotional and sentimental weakness. But the divine intensity of self-forgetfulness, the capacity of throwing oneself out entirely, making no restriction and no reservation, as a gift, asking nothing in exchange, this is little known to human beings. And when it is there unmixed with weak and sentimental emotions, they find it hard and cold; they cannot recognise in it the very highest and intensest power of love.
The manifestation of the love of the Divine in the world was the great holocaust, the supreme self-giving. The Perfect Consciousness accepted to be merged and absorbed into the unconsciousness of matter, so that consciousness might be awakened in the depths of its obscurity and little by little a Divine Power might rise in it and make the whole of this manifested universe a highest expression of the Divine Consciousness and the Divine Love. This was the supreme love, to accept the loss of the perfect condition of supreme divinity, its absolute consciousness, its infinite knowledge, to unite with unconsciousness, to dwell in the world with ignorance and darkness. And yet none perhaps would call it love; for it does not clo the itself in a superficial sentiment, it makes no demand in exchange for what it has done, no show of its sacrifice. The force of love in the world is trying to find consciousnesses that are capable of receiving this divine movement in its purity and expressing it. This race of all beings towards love, this irresistible push and seeking out in the worlds heart and in all hearts, is the impulse given by a Divine love behind the human longing and seeking. It touches millions of instruments, trying always, always failing; but this constant touch prepares these instruments and suddenly one day there will awake in them the capacity of self-giving, the capacity of loving.
The movement of love is not limited to human beings and it is perhaps less distorted in other worlds than in the human. Look at the flowers and trees. When the sun sets and all becomes silent, sit down for a moment and put yourself into communion with Nature: you will feel rising from the earth, from below the roots of the trees and mounting upward and coursing through their fibres up to the highest outstretching branches, the aspiration of an intense love and longing,a longing for something that brings light and gives happiness, for the light that is gone and they wish to have back again. There is a yearning so pure and intense that if you can feel the movement in the trees, your own being too will go up in an ardent prayer for the peace and light and love that are unmanifested here. Once you have come in contact with this large, pure and true Divine love, if you have felt it even for a short time and in its smallest form, you will realise what an abject thing human desire has made of it. It has become in human nature something low, brutal, selfish, violent, ugly, or else it is something weak and sentimental, made up of the pettiest feeling, brittle, superficial, exacting. And this baseness and brutality or this self-regarding weakness they call love!
Is our vital being to take part in the Divine Love? If it does, what is the right and correct form of participation it should take?
Where is the manifestation of Divine love intended to stop? Is it to be confined to some unreal or immaterial region? Divine love plunges its manifestation upon earth down into the most material matter. It does not indeed find itself in the selfish distortions of the human consciousness; but the vital in itself is as important an element in Divine love as it is in the whole of the manifested universe. There is no possibility of movement and progress without the mediation of the vital; but because this Power of Nature has been so badly distorted, some prefer to believe that it has to be pulled out altogether and thrown away. But it is only through the vital that matter can be touched by the transforming power of the Spirit. If the vital is not there to infuse its dynamism and living force, matter will remain dead; for the higher parts of the being will not come into contact with earth, will not be concretised in life, and they will depart unsatisfied and disappear.
--
Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The material world in its darkness and ignorance had forgotten the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep; it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, There is something that is worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love! And with the awakening to love there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace. Love cannot exist in its pure beauty, love cannot put on its native power and intense joy of fullness until there is this interchange, this fusion between the earth and the Supreme, this movement of Love from the Divine to the creation and from the creation to the Divine. This world was a world of dead matter, till Divine love descended into it and awakened it to life. Ever since it has gone in search of this divine source of life, but it has taken in its search every kind of wrong turn and mistaken way, it has wandered hither and thither in the dark. The mass of this creation has moved on its road like the blind seeking for the unknown, seeking but ignorant of what it sought. The maximum it has reached is what seems to human beings love in its highest form, its purest and most disinterested kind, like the love of the mother for the child. This human movement of love is secretly seeking for something else than what it has yet found; but it does not know where to find it, it does not even know what it is. The moment mans consciousness awakens to the Divine Love, pure, independent of all manifestation in human forms, he knows for what his heart has all the time been truly longing. That is the beginning of the Souls aspiration, that brings the awakening of the consciousness and its yearning for union with the Divine. All the forms that are of the ignorance, all the deformations it has imposed must from that moment fade and disappear and give place to one single movement of the creation answering to the Divine Love by its love for the Divine. Once the creation is conscious, awakened, opened to love for the Divine, the Divine Love pours itself without limit back into the creation. The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.
Great beings have taken birth in this world who came to bring down here something of the sovereign purity and power of Divine love. the Divine Love has thrown itself into a personal form in them that its realisation upon earth may be at once more easy and more perfect. Divine love, when manifested in a personal being, is easier to realise; it is more difficult when it is unmanifested or impersonal in its movement. A human being, awakened by this personal touch, with this personal intensity, to the consciousness of the Divine Love, will find his work and change made more easy; the union for which he seeks becomes more natural and close. And the union, the realisation will become for him, too, more full, more perfect; for the wide uniformity of a universal and impersonal Love will be lit up and vivified with the colour and beauty of all possible relations with the Divine.
***

1951-03-24 - Descent of Divine Love, of Consciousness - Earth- a symbolic formation - the Divine Presence - The psychic being and other worlds - Divine Love and Grace - Becoming consaious of Divine Love - Finding ones psychic being - Responsibility, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Perhaps the different elements constituting the stone are coordinated by the spark of love. I am sure that when the Divine Love descended into Matter, this Matter was quite unconscious, it had absolutely no form; it may even be said that forms in general are the result of the effort of Love to bring consciousness into Matter. If one of you (I have my doubts, but still) went down into the Inconscient, what is called the pure Inconscient, you would realise what it is. A stone will seem to you a marvellously conscious object in comparison. You speak disdainfully of a stone because you have just a wee bit more consciousness than it has, but the difference between the consciousness of the stone and the total Inconscient is perhaps greater than that between the stone and you. And the coming out of the Inconscient is due exclusively to the sacrifice of the Divine, to this descent of Divine Love into the Inconscient. Consequently, when I said perhaps in the stone, I could have removed the perhaps I can assert that even in the stone it is there. There would be nothing, neither stone nor metal nor any organisation of atoms without this presence of Divine Love.
Most people say there is consciousness when they begin to thinkwhen one doesnt think one is not conscious. But plants are perfectly conscious and yet they do not think. They have very precise sensations which are the expression of a consciousness, but they do not think. Animals begin to think and their reactions are much more complex. But both plants and animals are conscious. One can be conscious of a sensation without having the least thought.

1953-08-26, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The material world in its darkness and ignorance had forgotten the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep; it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed: There is something worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love! And with the awakening to love there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace.
Questions and Answers 1929-1931 (2 June 1929)
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But this kind of wish to gain by what one has or does is truly one of the ugliest things in the world. And it is one of the most widespread and it has become so widespread, that it is almost spontaneous in man. Nothing can turn its back on the Divine Love more totally than that, that wish to calculate and profit.
Do flowers love?

1954-04-14 - Love - Can a person love another truly? - Parental love, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Love another? I have said there that it is impossible. I have said that if one wants to know what love is, one must love the Divine. Then there is a chance of knowing what love is. I have said that one grows into the likeness of what one loves. So if one loves the Divine, gradually, through this effort of love, one grows more and more like the Divine, and then one can be identified with the Divine Love and know what it is, otherwise one cant.
Inevitably, love between two human beings, whatever it may be, is always made of ignorance, lack of understanding, weakness and that terrible see of separation. It is as though one wanted to enter the presence of a unique Splendour and that the first thing one did was to put a curtain, two curtains, three curtains between oneself and that Splendour, and one is quite surprised to have only a vague impression and not at all the thing itself. The first thing to do is to remove the curtains, to take them all away, to go through and find oneself in the presence of the Splendour. And then you will know what that Splendour is. But if you put veil after veil between it and yourself, you will never see it. You may have a sort of vague feeling like Oh! There is something, but that is all.

1955-11-16 - The significance of numbers - Numbers, astrology, true knowledge - Divines Love flowers for Kali puja - Desire, aspiration and progress - Determining ones approach to the Divine - Liberation is obtained through austerities - ..., #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes. But you are not told anything about the love of riches or the love of power or the love of knowledge. You are told about the Divine Love; it is not altogether the same thing. Nothing is said about enjoying ambition or desire or even aspiration; what is spoken of is the enjoying of the divine Presence. Thats completely different; there is no similarity.
I admit that I dont quite catch the meaning of your question. I think you are mixing up the Divine with growth and increase and development, no? perhaps at best with progress. But it is not the same thing. Progress is perhaps the base upon which the present world was constructed, one can take it like that; but it is not the Divine.

1956-08-15 - Protection, purification, fear - Atmosphere at the Ashram on Darshan days - Darshan messages - Significance of 15-08 - State of surrender - Divine Grace always all-powerful - Assumption of Virgin Mary - SA message of 1947-08-15, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent it from being a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if they follow the call, they yet tendwhen not consciously, then by automatic habitto bring into the spiritual action their own natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Nature-forces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that the Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the minds and the lifes falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the minds ardours and the blind enthusiasm of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure.
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, pp. 155-57

1956-09-19 - Power, predominant quality of vital being - The Divine, the psychic being, the Supermind - How to come out of the physical consciousness - Look life in the face - Ordinary love and Divine love, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To go through, to see what is behind it, not to stop at the appearance, not to be satisfied with the outer form, to look for the principle which is behind this love, and not be content until one has found the origin of the feeling in oneself. Then the outer form will crumble of itself and you will be in contact with the Divine Love which is behind all things.
That is the best way.

1960 05 18, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All who aspire for the divine perfection know that the blows which the Lord deals us in His infinite love and grace are the surest and quickest way to make us progress. And the harder the blows the more they feel the greatness of the Divine Love.
Ordinary men, on the contrary, always ask God to give them an easy, pleasant and successful life. In every personal satisfaction they see a sign of divine mercy; but if on the contrary they meet with unhappiness and misfortune in life, they complain and say to God, You do not love me.

1970 04 06, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is the most charming criticism one can make of jealousy and also the best way to cure it by overcoming the limits of the ego and by uniting with the Divine Love which is eternal and universal.
6 April 1970

1.mb - Mira is Steadfast, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by V. K. Sethi I will not be restrained now, O Rana, Despite all you do to block my path. I have torn off the veil of worldly shame; Only the company of Saints is dear to me. Merta, my parents' home, I have left for good. My surat and nirat, awakened, Now shine bright. My master has revealed to me The mirror within my own body; Now I'll sing and dance in ecstasy. Keep to your self your gems and jewelry; I have discarded them all, O Rana. My true Lord I have come to behold; None knows of this wealth within the body. I fancy not your forts and palaces Nor want silken robes wrought with gold. Mira, unadorned and unbedecked, Roams intoxicated in the Lord's love. [2594.jpg] -- from Mira: the Divine Lover (Mystics of the East Series), Translated by V. K. Sethi <

1.mb - The Beloved Comes Home, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by V. K. Sethi The one I longed for has come home; The raging fire of separation is quenched. Now I rejoice with Him, I sing in bliss. The peacocks at the cloud's roar Dance with unbound joy; I rejoice in ecstasy At the sight of my Beloved. I am absorbed in His love; My misery of wandering In the world has ended. The lily bursts into bloom At the sight of the full moon; Seeing Him, my heart blossoms in joy. Peace permeates this body of mine; His arrival has filled my home with bliss. That very Lord has become my own Who is ever the redeemer of His devotees. Mira's heart, scorched by the blaze of separation, Has become cool and refreshed; The pain of duality has vanished. [2594.jpg] -- from Mira: the Divine Lover (Mystics of the East Series), Translated by V. K. Sethi <

1.mb - The Five-Coloured Garment, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by V. K. Sethi I am infused in the Lord's hue, O friend. Pray, get my garment dyed in five colours so I may go and play in the arbour. within the alcove I will meet my Master; Shedding all falsity, I'll sing in joy. The sun will perish, so too the moon; Earth and sky will exist no more. Air and water will also go; The Eternal alone will there be. Of surat and nirat make the lamp, And let thy longing be the wick. In this lamp pour the oil from love's mart; Day and night it will keep burning bright. They write letters whose spouses are afar. My Beloved resides in my heart; I need go nowhere to search for Him. I live not with my parents, Nor with my in-laws. Ever do I live in the Word My Master blessed me with. Not mine nor thine is this house, O friend; Mira lives absorbed in the Lord's hue. [2594.jpg] -- from Mira: the Divine Lover (Mystics of the East Series), Translated by V. K. Sethi <

1.sjc - Full of Hope I Climbed the Day, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Willis Barnstone Original Language Spanish Full of hope I climbed the day while hunting the game of love, and soared so high, high above that I at last caught my prey. In order to seize the game -- the Divine Love in the sky -- I had to fly so high, high I floated unseen and became lost in that dangerous day; and so my flight fell short of height -- yet so high was my love that I at last caught my prey. Dazzled and stunned by light as I rose nearer the sun, my greatest conquest was won in the very black of night. Yet since love opened my way I leapt dark, blindly above and was so high, near my love, that at last I caught my prey. In this most exalted quest the higher I began to soar the lower I felt -- more sore and broken and depressed. I said: None can seize the prey! and groveled so low, so low that high, higher did I go, and at last I caught my prey. By strange reckoning I saw a thousand flights in one flight; for hope of heavenly light is achieved by hoping now. I hoped only for this way and was right to wait for love, and climbed so high, high above that at last I caught my prey. [1508.jpg] -- from To Touch the Sky: Poems of Mystical, Spiritual & Metaphysical Light, Translated by Willis Barnstone <

2.01 - The Yoga and Its Objects, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The surrender must be complete. Nothing must be reserved, no desire, no demand, no opinion, no idea that this must be, that cannot be, that this should be and that should not be; - all must be given. The heart must be purified of all desire, the intellect of all self-will, every duality must be renounced, the whole world seen and unseen must be recognised as one supreme expression of concealed Wisdom, Power and Bliss, and the entire being given up, as an engine is passive in the hands of the driver, for the Divine Love, Might and perfect Intelligence to do its work and fulfil its divine Lila. Ahankara must be blotted out in order that we may have, as God intends us ultimately to have, the perfect bliss, the perfect calm and knowledge and the perfect activity of
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2.04 - Concentration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
8:To arrive then at this settled divine status must be the object of our concentration. The first step in concentration must be always to accustom the discursive mind to a settled unwavering pursuit of a single course of connected thought on a single subject and this it must do undistracted by all lures and alien calls on its attention. Such concentration is common enough in our ordinary life, but it becomes more difficult when we have to do it inwardly without any outward object or action on which to keep the mind; yet this inward concentration is what the seeker of knowledge must effect309. Nor must it be merely the consecutive thought of the intellectual thinker, whose only object is to conceive and intellectually link together his conceptions. It is not, except perhaps at first, a process of reasoning that is wanted so much as a dwelling so far as possible on the fruitful essence of the idea which by the insistence of the soul's will upon it must yield up all the facets of its truth. Thus if it be the Divine Love that is the subject of concentration, it is on the essence of the idea of God as Love that the mind should concentrate in such a way that the various manifestation of the Divine Love should arise luminously, not only to the thought, but in the heart and being and vision of the Sadhaka. The thought may come first and the experience afterwards, but equally the experience may come first and the knowledge arise out of the experience. Afterwards the thing attained has to be dwelt on and more and more held till it becomes a constant experience and finally the Dharma or law of the being.
9:This is the process of concentrated meditation; but a more strenuous method is the fixing of the whole mind in concentration on the essence of the idea only, so as to reach not the thought-knowledge or the psychological experience of the subject, but the very essence of the thing behind the idea. In this process thought ceases and passes into the absorbed or ecstatic contemplation of the object or by a merging into it m an inner Samadhi. If this be the process followed, then subsequently the state into which we rise must still be called down to take possession of the lower being, to shed its light, power and bliss on our ordinary consciousness. For otherwise we may possess it, as many do, in the elevated condition or in the inward Samadhi, but we shall lose our hold of it when we awake or descend into the contacts of the world; and this truncated possession is not the aim of an integral Yoga.

2.06 - Works Devotion and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Divine, God himself comes to us and takes up our burden. To the ignorant he brings the light of the divine knowledge, to the feeble the power of the divine will, to the sinner the liberation of the divine purity, to the suffering the infinite spiritual joy and Ananda. Their weakness and the stumblings of their human strength make no difference. "This is my word of promise," cries the voice of the Godhead to Arjuna, "that he who loves me shall not perish." Previous effort and preparation, the purity and the holiness of the Brahmin, the enlightened strength of the king-sage great in works and knowledge have their value, because they make it easier for the imperfect human creature to arrive at this wide vision and self-surrender; but even without this preparation all who take refuge in the Divine Lover of man, the Vaishya once preoccupied with the narrowness of wealthgetting and the labour of production, the Shudra hampered by a thousand hard restrictions, woman shut in and stunted in her growth by the narrow circle society has drawn around her self-expansion, those too, papa-yonayah., on whom their past
Karma has imposed even the very worst of births, the outcaste, the Pariah, the Chandala, find at once the gates of God opening before them. In the spiritual life all the external distinctions of which men make so much because they appeal with an oppressive force to the outward mind, cease before the equality of the divine Light and the wide omnipotence of an impartial Power.10

2.07 - The Cup, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
84:This dew is called Love. Even as in the case of human love, the whole Universe appears perfect to the man who is under its control, so is it, and much more, with the Divine Love of which it is now spoken.
85:For human love is an excitement, and not a stilling, of the mind; and as it is bound to the individual, only leads to greater trouble in the end.

2.10 - The Vision of the World-Spirit - Time the Destroyer, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Indian spirituality knows that God is Love and Peace and calm Eternity, - the Gita which presents us with these terrible images, speaks of the Godhead who embodies himself in them as the lover and friend of all creatures. But there is too the sterner aspect of his divine government of the world which meets us from the beginning, the aspect of destruction, and to ignore it is to miss the full reality of the Divine Love and Peace and Calm and Eternity and even to throw on it an aspect of partiality and illusion, because the comforting exclusive form in which it is put is not borne out by the nature of the world in which we live. This world of our battle and labour is a fierce dangerous destructive devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward, whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil,
382

2.11 - The Modes of the Self, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Sadhaka of an integral Yoga will take an integral view of his goal and seek its integral realisation. The Divine has many essential modes of His eternal self-manifestation, possesses and finds Himself on many planes and through many poles of His being; to each mode its purpose, to each plane or pole its fulfilment both in the apex and the supreme scope of the eternal Unity. It is necessarily through the individual Self that we must arrive at the One, for that is the basis of all our experience. By Knowledge we arrive at identity with the One; for there is, m spite of the Dualist, an essential identity by which we can plunge into our Source and free ourselves from all bondage to individuality and even from all bondage to universality. Nor is the experience of that identity a gain for knowledge only or for the pure state of abstract being. The height of all our action also, we have seen, is the immersion of ourselves in the Lord through unity with the divine Will or Conscious-Power by the way of works; the height of love is the rapturous immersion of ourselves in unity of ecstatic delight with the object of our love and adoration. But again for divine works in the world the individual Self converts itself into a centre of consciousness through which the divine Will, one with the Divine Love and Light, pours itself out in the multiplicity of the universe. We arrive in the same way at our unity with all our fellow-beings through the identity of this self with the Supreme and with the self in all others. At the same time in the action of Nature we preserve by it as soul-form of the One a differentiation which enables us to preserve relations of difference in Oneness with other beings and with the Supreme Himself. The relations will necessarily be very different in essence and spirit from those which we had when we lived entirely in the Ignorance and Oneness was a mere name or a struggling aspiration of imperfect love, sympathy or yearning. Unity will be the law, difference will be simply for the various enjoyment of that unity. Neither descending again into that plane of division which clings to the separation of the ego-sense nor attached to an exclusive seeking for pure identity which cannot have to do with any play of difference, we shall embrace and reconcile the two poles of being where they meet in the infinity of the Highest.
The Self, even the individual self, is different from our personality as it is different from our mental ego-sense. Our personality is never the same; it is a constant mutation and various combination. It is not a basic consciousness, but a development of forms of consciousness, -- not a power of being, but a various play of partial powers of being, -- not the enjoyer of the self-delight of our existence, but a seeking after various notes and tones of experience which shall more or less render that delight in the mutability of relations. This also is Purusha and Brahman, but it is the mutable Purusha, the phenomenon of the Eternal, not its stable reality. The Gita makes a distinction between three Purushas who constitute the whole state and action of the divine Being, the Mutable, the Immutable and the Highest which is beyond and embraces the other two. That Highest is the Lord in whom we have to live, the supreme Self in us and in all. The Immutable is the silent, actionless, equal, unchanging self which we reach when we draw back from activity to passivity, from the play of consciousness and force and the seeking of delight to the pure and constant basis of consciousness and force and delight through which the Highest, free, secure and unattached possesses and enjoys the play. The Mutable is the substance and immediate motive of that changing flux of personality through which the relations of our cosmic life are made possible. The mental being fixed in the Mutable moves in its flux and has not possession of an eternal peace and power and self-delight; the soul fixed in the Immutable holds all these in itself but cannot act in the world; but the soul that can live in the Highest enjoys the eternal peace and power and delight and wideness of being, is not bound in its self-knowledge and self-power by character and personality or by forms of its force and habits of its consciousness and yet uses them all with a large freedom and power for the self-expression of the Divine in the world. Here again the change is not any alteration of the essential modes of the Self, but consists in our emergence into the freedom of the Highest and the right use of the divine law of our being.

2.12 - The Way and the Bhakta, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This then is the swiftest, largest and greatest way. On me, says the Godhead to the soul of man, repose all thy mind and lodge all thy understanding in me: I will lift them up bathed in the supernal blaze of the Divine Love and will and knowledge to myself from whom these things flow. Doubt not that thou shalt dwell in me above this mortal existence. The chain of the limiting earthly nature cannot hold the immortal spirit exalted by the passion, the power and the light of the eternal love, will and knowledge. No doubt, on this way too there are difficulties; for there is the lower nature with its fierce or dull downward gravitation which resists and battles against the motion of ascent and clogs the wings of the exaltation and the upward rapture.
The divine consciousness even when it has been found at first in a wonder of great moments or in calm and splendid durations, cannot at once be altogether held or called back at will; there is felt often an inability to keep the personal consciousness fixed steadily in the Divine; there are nights of long exile from the

2.16 - Oneness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The integral Yoga of knowledge has to recognise the double nature of this manifestation, -- for there is the higher nature of Sachchidananda in which He is found and the lower nature of mind, life and body in which He is veiled, -and to reconcile and unite the two in the oneness of the illumined realisation. We have not to leave them separate so that we live a sort of double life, spiritual within or above, mental and material in our active and earthly living; we have to re-view and remould the lower living in the light, force and joy of the higher reality. We have to realise Matter as a sense-created mould of Spirit, a vehicle for all manifestation of the light, force and joy of Sachchidananda in the highest conditions of terrestrial being and activity. We have to see Life as a channel for the infinite Force divine and break the barrier of a sense-created and mind-created farness and division from it so that that divine Power may take possession of and direct and change all our life-activities until our vitality transfigured ceases in the end to be the limited life-force which now supports mind and body and becomes a figure of the all-blissful conscious-force of Sachchidananda. We have similarly to change our sensational and emotional mentality into a play of the Divine Love and universal Delight; and we have to surcharge the intellect which seeks to know and will in us with the light of the divine Knowledge-Will until it is transformed into a figure of that higher and sublime activity.
This transformation cannot be complete or really executed without the awakening of the truth-mind which corresponds in the mental being to the supermind and is capable of receiving mentally its illuminations. By the opposition of Spirit and Mind without the free opening of this intermediate power the two natures, higher and lower, stand divided, and though there may be communication and influence or the catching up of the lower into the higher in a sort of luminous or ecstatic trance, there cannot be a full and perfect transfiguration of the lower nature. We may feel imperfectly by the emotional mind, we may have a sense by the sense-mind or a conception and perception by the intelligent mind of the Spirit present in Matter and all its forms, the divine Delight present in all emotion and sensation, the divine Force behind all life-activities; but the lower will still keep its own nature and limit and divide in its action and modify in its character the influence from above. Even when that influence assumes its highest, widest, intensest power, it will be irregular and disorderly in activity and perfectly realised only in calm and stillness; we shall be subject to reactions and periods of obscuration when it is withdrawn from us; we shall be apt to forget it in the stress of ordinary life and its outward touches and the siege of its dualities and to be fully possessed of it only when alone with ourselves and God or else only in moments or periods of a heightened exaltation and ecstasy. For our mentality, a restricted instrument moving in a limited field and seizing things by fragments and parcels, is necessarily shifting, restless and mutable; it can find steadiness only by limiting its field of action and fixity only by cessation and repose.

2.18 - The Soul and Its Liberation, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The state of the liberated soul is that of the Purusha who is for ever free. Its consciousness is a transcendence and an all-comprehending unity. Its self-knowledge does not get rid of all the terms of self-knowledge, but unifies and harmonises all things in God and in the divine nature. The intense religious ecstasy which knows only God and ourselves and shuts out all else, is only to it an intimate experience which prepares it for sharing in the embrace of the Divine Love and Delight around all creatures. A heavenly bliss which unites God and ourselves and the blest, but enables us to look with a remote indifference on the unblest and their sufferings is not possible to the perfect soul; for these also are its selves; free individually from suffering and ignorance, it must naturally turn to draw them also towards its freedom. On the other hand, any absorption in the relations between self and others and the world to the exclusion of God and the Beyond is still more impossible, and therefore it cannot be limited by the earth or even by the highest and most altruistic relations of man with man. Its activity or its culmination is not to efface and utterly deny itself for the sake of others, but to fulfil itself in God-possession, freedom and divine bliss that in and by its fulfilment others too may be fulfilled. For it is in God alone, by the possession of the Divine only that all the discords of life can be resolved, and therefore the raising of men towards the Divine is in the end the one effective way of helping mankind. All the other activities and realisations of our self-experience have their use and power, but in the end these crowded side-tracks or these lonely paths must circle round to converge into the wideness of the integral way by which the liberated soul transcends all, embraces all and becomes the promise and the power of the fulfilment of all in their manifested being of the Divine.
author class:Sri Aurobindo

2.20 - Nov-Dec 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: It was not written for Yogis. It acts like that in ordinary men, if there is a psychic element in it, i.e. if it is true love and not vital desire or attachment or impulse for possession. Then it acts as an awakener and uplifter. Blake accepts physical love as part of the Divine Love. The elements of love are: adoration and desire for union.
Disciple: Is such a love an unconscious seeking for the Divine? It may not bring divine fulfilment but that of love itself.

2.25 - The Higher and the Lower Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our being into the divine being, our consciousness into the divine consciousness, our energy into the divine energy, our delight of existence into the divine delight of being. And it is not only to lift ourselves into this higher consciousness, but to widen into it in all our being, because it is to be found on all the planes of our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital, physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-will, our mental soul-life a play of the Divine Love and delight, our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould of the divine substance. This God-action in us is to be realised by an opening of ourselves to the divine gnosis and divine Ananda and, in its fullness, by an ascent into and a permanent dwelling in the gnosis and the Ananda. For though we live physically on the material plane and in normal outwardgoing life the mind and soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter we shall then have a life dominated by spirit with all its circumstances moulded and determined by the purity of being, the consciousness infinite even in the finite, the divine energy, the divine joy and bliss of the spirit.
This is the goal; we have seen also what are the essentials of the method. But here we have first to consider briefly one side of the question of method which we have hitherto left untouched. In the system of an integral Yoga the principle must be that all life is a part of the Yoga; but the knowledge which we have been describing seems to be not the knowledge of what is ordinarily understood as life, but of something behind life. There are two kinds of knowledge, that which seeks to understand the apparent phenomenon of existence externally, by an approach from outside, through the intellect, -- this is the lower knowledge, the knowledge of the apparent world; secondly, the knowledge which seeks to know the truth of existence from within, in its source and reality, by spiritual realisation. Ordinarily, a sharp distinction is drawn between the two, and it is supposed that when we get to the higher knowledge, the God-knowledge, then the rest, tile world-knowledge, becomes of no concern to us: but in reality they are two sides of one seeking. All knowledge is ultimately the knowledge of God, through himself, through Nature, through her works. Mankind has first to seek this knowledge through the external life; for until its mentality is sufficiently developed, spiritual knowledge is not really possible, and in proportion as it is developed, the possibilities of spiritual knowledge become richer and fuller.

2.3.2 - Chhandogya Upanishad, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Udgitha. These are the Divine Lovers, Speech & Breath, Rik
& Sama.

2.4.01 - Divine Love, Psychic Love and Human Love, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To bring the Divine Love and Beauty and Ananda into the world is, indeed, the whole crown and essence of our Yoga. But it has always seemed to me impossible unless there comes as its support and foundation and guard the Divine Truthwhat I call the Supramental and its Divine Power. Otherwise Love itself blinded by the confusions of this present consciousness may stumble in its human receptacles and, even otherwise, may find itself unrecognised, rejected or rapidly degenerating and lost in the frailty of mans inferior nature. But when it comes in the Divine Truth and Power, Divine Love descends first as something transcendent and universal and out of that transcendence and universality it applies itself to persons according to the Divine Truth and Will, creating a vaster, greater, purer personal love than any the human mind or heart can now imagine. It is when one has felt this descent that one can be really an instrument for the birth and action of the Divine Love in the world.
***
--
The human form is naturally unable to bear the Divine Love or contain it, because it is itself a creation of the ignorance, weak and impure. It must be transformed in order to be capable of that; it must become strong and pure. First of all, it must have the strength to love the Divine alone and turn away from all other ties. But besides that a new consciousness must be created in itfirst a consciousness of pure and purifying Divine Peace from above which must take hold of all down to the most physical then in that peace an increasing inner strength pure and unegoistic then the Divine Light and Knowledge transforming all the consciousness and movements. When this has been done, then the human form can contain the Divine Love and Ananda. Till then the touches of the Divine Love and Ananda are usually momentary or brief, they cannot remain. In an impure consciousness the Divine Love if it came in would create a perturbation and possibly be attacked by a mixture which would make it impossible for it to stay. It is therefore that touches only can come.
***
I understand that it is the physical consciousness which has come up forcibly with the old vital human movements and feelings and this has clouded for the moment the sense of higher things and the aspiration for Truth and Purity that is their atmosphere. the Divine Love may not be able yet to manifest on the physical plane, humanity being what it is, as fully and freely as it would otherwise do, but that does not make it less close or intense than the human. It is there waiting to be understood and accepted and meanwhile giving all the help you can receive to raise and widen you into the consciousness in which it will be no longer possible for these difficulties and these misunderstandings to recur the state in which there is possible the full and perfect union.
***
--
I do not exactly know what you mean by the Divine Love being established down to the subconscious. What love? the souls love for the Divine? or the principle of the Divine Love and Ananda which is the highest thing that can be reached? To establish the latter down to the subconscient is a thing which would mean the entire transformation of the whole being and it cannot be done except as the result of the supramental change which is as yet far away. The other may be established even now in principle, but to make it living and complete in the whole being would mean the psychic transformation completed with the spiritual also well under way already.
***
--
If love is psychic in its nature, it always brings the sense of oneness or at least of an inner intimate closeness of being. the Divine Love is based upon oneness and the psychic derives from the Divine Love.
***
The psychic love is pure and full of self-giving without egoistic demand, but it is human and can err and suffer. the Divine Love is something much vaster and deeper and full of light and ananda.
***
--
The love which is turned towards the Divine ought not to be the usual vital feeling which men call by that name; for that is not love, but only a vital desire, an instinct of appropriation, the impulse to possess and monopolise. Not only is this not the Divine Love, but it ought not to be allowed to mix in the least degree in the Yoga. The true love for the Divine is a self-giving, free of demand, full of submission and surrender; it makes no claim, imposes no condition, strikes no bargain, indulges in no violences of jealousy or pride or anger for these things are not in its composition. In return the Divine Mother also gives herself, but freely and this represents itself in an inner givingher presence in your mind, your vital, your physical consciousness, her power re-creating you in the divine nature, taking up all the movements of your being and directing them towards perfection and fulfilment, her love enveloping you and carrying you in its arms Godwards. It is this that you must aspire to feel and possess in all your parts down to the very material, and here there is no limitation either of time or of completeness. If one truly aspires and gets it, there ought to be no room for any other claim or for any disappointed desire. And if one truly aspires, one does unfailingly get it, more and more as the purification proceeds and the nature undergoes its needed change.
Keep your love pure of all selfish claim and desire; you will find that you are getting all the love that you can bear and absorb in answer.
--
And first about human love in the sadhana. The souls turning through love to the Divine must be through a love that is essentially divine, but as the instrument of expression at first is a human nature, it takes the forms of human love and bhakti. It is only as the consciousness deepens, heightens and changes that that greater eternal love can grow in it and openly transform the human into the divine. But in human love itself there are several kinds of motive-forces. There is a psychic human love which rises from deep within and is the result of the meeting of the inner being with that which calls it towards a divine joy and union; it is, once it becomes aware of itself, something lasting, self-existent, not dependent upon external satisfactions, not capable of diminution by external causes, not self-regarding, not prone to demand or bargain but giving itself simply and spontaneously, not moved to or broken by misunderstandings, disappointments, strife and anger, but pressing always straight towards the inner union. It is this psychic love that is closest to the divine and it is therefore the right and best way of love and bhakti. But that does not mean that the other parts of the being, the vital and physical included, are not to be used as means of expression or that they are not to share in the full play and the whole meaning of love, even of divine love. On the contrary, they are a means and can be a great part of the complete expression of divine love,provided they have the right and not the wrong movement. There are in the vital itself two kinds of love,one full of joy and confidence and abandon, generous, unbargaining, ungrudging and very absolute in its dedication and this is akin to the psychic and well-fitted to be its complement and a means of expression of the Divine Love. And neither does the psychic love or the Divine Love despise a physical means of expression wherever that is pure and right and possible: it does not depend upon that, it does not diminish, revolt or go out like a snuffed candle when it is deprived of any such means; but when it can use it, it does so with joy and gratitude. Physical means can be and are used in the approach to divine love and worship; they have not been allowed merely as a concession to human weakness, nor is it the fact that in the psychic way there is no place for such things. On the contrary they are one means of approaching the Divine and receiving the Light and materialising the psychic contact, and so long as it is done in the right spirit and they are used for the true purpose they have their place. It is only if they are misused or the approach is not right because tainted by indifference and inertia, or revolt or hostility, or some gross desire, that they are out of place and can have a contrary effect.
But there is another way of vital love which is more usually the way of human nature and that is a way of ego and desire. It is full of vital craving, desire and demand; its continuance depends upon the satisfaction of its demands; if it does not get what it craves, or even imagines that it is not being treated as it deserves for it is full of imaginations, misunderstandings, jealousies, misinterpretationsit at once turns to sorrow, wounded feeling, revolt, pride, anger, all kinds of disorder, finally cessation and departure. A love of this kind is in its very nature ephemeral and unreliable and it cannot be made a foundation for divine love. There has been too much of this kind in the relations of the sadhaks with the Motherapproaching her, I suppose, as a human mother with all the reactions of the lower vital nature. For a long time it was perforce tolerated and this was the concession made to human weaknesseven accepted in the beginning as a thing too prominent in the human being not to be there to some extent but to be transformed by degrees; but too often, it has refused to transform itself and has made itself a source of confusion, disorder, asiddhi, sometimes complete disaster. It is for this reason that we discourage this lower vital way of human love and would like people to reject and eliminate these elements as soon as may be from their nature. Love should be a flowering of joy and union and confidence and self-giving and Ananda,but this lower vital way is only a source of suffering, trouble, disappointment, disillusion and disunion. Even a slight element of it shakes the foundations of peace and replaces the movement towards Ananda by a fall towards sorrow, discontent and Nirananda.
In your own case you often write in your wrong moods as if human love, even with some of these lower ingredients, were the only thing possible to you. But that is not so at all, for it contradicts your own deepest experiences. Always what your inner being has asked is Love, Bhakti, Ananda and whenever it comes to the surface it is, even if only in a first elementary form, the Divine Love which it brings with it. A basis of deep and intense calm and stillness, a great intensity of emotion and Bhakti, an inrush of Ananda, this is in these moments your repeated experience. On the other hand when you insist too much on the love which exists by external cravings, what comes is the other movementfits of despondency, sorrow, Nirananda. In stressing on the psychic basis, in wishing you to conquer this other movement, I am only pointing you to the true way of your own natureof which the psychic bhakti, the true vital love are the real moving forces, and the other is only a superficial immixture.
***
--
The Mother did not tell you that love is not an emotion, but that Divine Love is not an emotion,a very different thing to say. Human love is made up of emotion, passion and desire,all of them vital movements, therefore bound to the disabilities of the human vital nature. Emotion is an excellent and indispensable thing in human nature, in spite of all its shortcomings and dangers,just as mental ideas are excellent and indispensable things in their own field in the human stage. But our aim is to go beyond mental ideas into the light of the supramental Truth, which exists not by ideative thought but by direct vision and identity. In the same way our aim is to go beyond emotion to the height and depth and intensity of the Divine Love and there feel through the inner psychic heart an inexhaustible oneness with the Divine which the spasmodic leapings of the vital emotions cannot reach or experience.
As supramental Truth is not merely a sublimation of our mental ideas, so Divine Love is not merely a sublimation of human emotions; it is a different consciousness, with a different quality, movement and substance.
--
Divine love is of two kinds the Divine Love for the creation and the souls that are part of itself and the love of the seeker and love for the Divine Beloved; it has both a personal and impersonal element, but the personal is free here from all lower elements or bondage to the vital and physical instincts.
***

24.04 - Notes on Savitri III, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The whole thing refers to the New Creation coming down from above - now down into the psycho-vital or physico-vital or even the subtle physical plane. This New Creation is the creation of the Divine Love - the Mother's Love.
Morning Star - Venus, Goddess of Love - embodying New Creation.

3.01 - Towards the Future, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Have no fear. I now know for certain that only one love can satisfy my being: it is the love for the Divine, the Divine Love, for that alone never fails. Perhaps one day I shall find the favourable conditions and the necessary help for the achievement of the supreme realisation, the transformation and divinisation of the physical being which will change the world into a blessed place full of harmony and light, peace and beauty.
(The Clairvoyant, more and more deeply moved, remains silent, her hands clasped as if in prayer. The Poet bows respectfully to

3.02 - The Motives of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Secondly, this supreme Being is also the universal Being and our relations with the universe are all means by which we are prepared for entering into relation with him. All the emotions with which we confront the action of the universal existence upon us, are really directed towards him, in ignorance at first, but it is by directing them in growing knowledge towards him that we enter into more intimate relations with him, and all that is false and ignorant in them will fall away as we draw nearer towards unity. To all of them he answers, taking us in the stage of progress in which we are; for if we met no kind of response or help to our imperfect approach, the more perfect relations could never be established. Even as men approach him, so he accepts them and responds too by the Divine Love to their bhakti, tathaiva bhajate. Whatever form of being, whatever qualities they lend to him, through that form and those qualities he helps them to develop, encourages or governs their advance and in their straight way or their crooked draws them towards him. What they see of him is a truth, but a truth represented to them in the terms of their own being and consciousness, partially, distortedly, not in the terms of its own higher reality, not in the aspect which it assumes when we become aware of the complete Divinity. This is the justification of the cruder and more primitive elements of religion and also their sentence of transience and passing. They are justified because there is a truth of the Divine behind them and only so could that truth of the Divine be approached in that stage of the developing human consciousness and be helped forward; they are condemned, because to persist always in these crude conceptions and relations with the Divine is to miss that closer union towards which these crude beginnings are the first steps, however faltering.
All life, we have said, is a Yoga of Nature; here in this material world life is her reaching out from her first inconscience towards a return to union with the conscient Divine from whom she proceeded. In religion the mind of man, her accomplished instrument, becomes aware of her goal in him, responds to her aspiration. Even popular religion is a sort of ignorant Yoga of devotion. But it does not become what we specifically call Yoga until the motive becomes in a certain degree clairvoyant, until it sees that union is its object and that love is the principle of union, and until therefore it tries to realise love and lose its separative character in love. When that has been accomplished, then the Yoga has taken its decisive step and is sure of its fruition. Thus the motives of devotion have first to direct themselves engrossingly and predominantly towards the Divine, then to transform themselves so that they are rid of their more earthy elements and finally to take their stand in pure and perfect love. All those that cannot coexist with the perfect union of love, must eventually fall away, while only those that can form themselves into expressions of divine love and into means of enjoying divine love, can remain. For love is the one emotion in us which can be entirely motiveless and self-existent; love need have no other motive than love. For all our emotions arise either from the seeking after delight and the possession of it, or from the baffling of the search, or from the failure of the delight we have possessed or had thought to grasp; but love is that by which we can enter directly into possession of the self-existent delight of the divine Being. Divine love is indeed itself that possession and, as it were, the body of the Ananda.

3.04 - The Way of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Bhakti in itself is as wide as the heart-yearning of the soul for the Divine and as simple and straightforward as love and desire going straight towards their object. It cannot therefore be fixed down to any systematic method, cannot found itself on a psychological science like the Rajayoga, or a psycho-physical like the Hathayoga, or start from a definite intellectual process like the ordinary method of the Jnanayoga. It may employ various means or supports, and man, having in him a tendency towards order, process and system, may try to methodise his resort to these auxiliaries: but to give an account of their variations one would have to review almost all man's numberless religions upon their side of inner approach to the Deity. Really, however, the more intimate yoga of Bhakti resolves itself simply into these four movements, the desire of the Soul when it turns towards God and the straining of its emotion towards him, the pain of love and the divine return of love, the delight of love possessed and the play of that delight, and the eternal enjoyment of the Divine Lover which is the heart of celestial bliss. These are things that are at once too simple and too profound for methodising or for analysis. One can at best only say, here are these four successive elements, steps, if we may so call them, of the siddhi, and here are, largely, some of the means which it uses, and here again are some of the aspects and experiences of the sadhana of devotion. We need only trace broadly the general line they follow before we turn to consider how the way of devotion enters into a synthetic and integral Yoga, what place it takes there and how its principle affects the other principles of divine living.
All Yoga is a turning of the human mind and the human soul, not yet divine in realisation, but feeling the divine impulse and attraction in it, towards that by which it finds its greater being. Emotionally, the first form which this turning takes must be that of adoration. In ordinary religion this adoration wears the form of external worship and that again develops a most external form of ceremonial worship. This element is ordinarily necessary because the mass of men live in their physical minds, cannot realise anything except by the force of a physical symbol and cannot feel that they are living anything except by the force of a physical action. We might apply here the Tantric gradation of sadhana, which makes the way of the pasu, the herd, the animal or physical being, the lowest stage of its discipline, and say that the purely or predominantly ceremonial adoration is the first step of this lowest part of the way. It is evident that even real religion,--and Yoga is something more than religion,--only begins when this quite outward worship corresponds to something really felt within the mind, some genuine submission, awe or spiritual aspiration, to which it becomes an aid, an outward expression and also a sort of periodical or constant reminder helping to draw back the mind to it from the preoccupations of ordinary life. But so long as it is only an idea of the Godhead to which one renders reverence or homage, we have not yet got to the beginning of Yoga. The aim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this comes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin to make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, our whole life an external service and worship. It is as this change, this new soul-tendency grows, that the religion of the devotee becomes a Yoga, a growing contact and union. It does not follow that the outward worship will necessarily be dispensed with, but it will increasingly become only a physical expression or outflowing of the inner devotion and adoration, the wave of the soul throwing itself out in speech and symbolic act.
--
Consecration becomes in its fullness a devoting of all our being to the Divine; therefore also of all our thoughts and our works. Here the Yoga takes into itself the essential elements of the Yoga of works and the Yoga of knowledge, but in its own manner and with its own peculiar spirit. It is a sacrifice of life and works to the Divine, but a sacrifice of love more than a tuning of the will to the divine Will. The bhakta offers up his life and all that he is and all that he has and all that he does to the Divine. This surrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves the ordinary life of men and devotes his days solely to prayer and praise and worship or to ecstatic meditation, gives up his personal possessions and becomes the monk or the mendicant whose one only possession is the Divine, gives up all actions in life except those only which help or belong to the communion with the Divine and communion with other devotees, or at most keeps the doing{|50c-} from the secure fortress of the ascetic life of those services to men which seem peculiarly the outflowing of the divine nature of love, compassion and good. But there is the wider self-consecration, proper to any integral Yoga, which, accepting the fullness of life and the world in its entirety as the play of the Divine, offers up the whole being into his possession; it is a holding of all one is and has as belonging to him only and not to ourselves and a doing of all works as an offering to him. By this comes the complete active consecration of both the inner and the outer life, the unmutilated self-giving. There is also the consecration of the thoughts to the Divine. In its inception this is the attempt to fix the mind on the object of adoration,--for naturally the restless human mind is occupied with other objects and, even when it is directed upwards, constantly drawn away by the world,--so that in the end it habitually thinks of him and all else is only secondary and thought of only in relation to him. This is done often with the aid of a physical image or, more intimately and characteristically, of a mantra or a divine name through which the divine being is realised. There are supposed by those who systematise to be three stages of the seeking through the devotion of the mind, first, the constant hearing of the divine name, qualities and all that has been attached to them, secondly, the constant thinking on them or on the divine being or personality, thirdly, the settling and fixing of the mind on the object; and by this comes the full realisation. And by these, too, there comes when the accompanying feeling or the concentration is very intense, the Samadhi, the ecstatic trance in which the consciousness passes away from outer objects. But all this is really incidental; the one thing essential is the intense devotion of the thought in the mind to the object of adoration. Although it seems akin to the contemplation of the way of knowledge, it differs from that in its spirit. It is in its real nature not a still, but an ecstatic contemplation; it seeks not to pass into the being of the Divine, but to bring the Divine into ourselves and to lose ourselves in the deep ecstasy of his presence or of his possession; and its bliss is not the peace of unity, but the ecstasy of union. Here, too, there may be the separative self-consecration which ends in the giving up of all other thought of life for the possession of this ecstasy, eternal afterwards in planes beyond, or the comprehensive consecration in which all the thoughts are full of the Divine and even in the occupations of life every thought remembers him. As in the other Yogas, so in this, one comes to see the Divine everywhere and in all and to pour out the realisation of the Divine in all one's inner activities and outward actions. But all is supported here by the primary force of the emotional union: for it is by love that the entire self-consecration and the entire possession is accomplished, and thought and action become shapes and figures of the Divine Love which possesses the spirit and its members.
This is the ordinary movement by which what may be at first a vague adoration of some idea of the Divine takes on the hue and character and then, once entered into the path of Yoga, the inner reality and intense experience of divine love. But there is the more intimate Yoga which from the first consists in this love and attains only by the intensity of its longing without other process or method. All the rest comes, but it comes out of this, as leaf and flower out of the seed; other things are not the means of developing and fulfilling love, but the radiations of love already growing in the soul. This is the way that the soul follows when, while occupied perhaps with the normal human life, it has heard the flute of the Godhead behind the near screen of secret woodlands and no longer possesses itself, can have no satisfaction or rest till it has pursued and seized and possessed the divine fluteplayer. This is in essence the power of love itself in the heart and soul turning from earthly objects to the spiritual source of all beauty and delight. There live in this seeking all the sentiment and passion, all the moods and experiences of love concentrated on a supreme object of desire and intensified a hundredfold beyond the highest acme of intensity possible to a human love. There is the disturbance of the whole life, the illumination by an unseized vision, the unsatisfied yearning for a single object of the heart's desire, the intense impatience of all that distracts from the one preoccupation, the intense pain of the obstacles that stand in the way of possession, the perfect vision of all beauty and delight in a single form. And there are all the many moods of love, the joy of musing and absorption, the delight of the meeting and fulfilment and embrace, the pain of separation, the wrath of love, the tears of longing, the increased delight of reunion. The heart is the scene of this supreme idyll of the inner consciousness, but a heart which undergoes increasingly an intense spiritual change and becomes the radiantly unfolding lotus of the spirit. And as the intensity of its seeking is beyond the highest power of the normal human emotions, so also the delight and the final ecstasy are beyond the reach of the imagination and beyond expression by speech. For this is the delight of the Godhead that passes human understanding. Indian bhakti has given to this divine love powerful forms, poetic symbols which are not in reality so much symbols as intimate expressions of truth which can find no other expression. It uses human relations and sees a divine person, not as mere figures, but because there are divine relations of supreme Delight and Beauty with the human soul of which human relations are the imperfect but still the real type, and because that Delight and Beauty are not abstractions or qualities of a quite impalpable metaphysical entity, but the very body and form of the supreme Being. It is a living Soul to which the soul of the bhakta yearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a conception or a state of existence, but a real Being. Therefore in the possession of the divine Beloved all the life of the soul is satisfied and all the relations by which it finds and in which it expresses itself, are wholly fulfilled; therefore, too, by any and all of them can the Beloved be sought, though those which admit the greatest intensity, are always those by which he can be most intensely pursued and possessed with the profoundest ecstasy. He is sought within in the heart and therefore apart from all by an inward-gathered concentration of the being in the soul itself; but he is also seen and loved everywhere where he manifests his being. All the beauty and joy of existence is seen as his joy and beauty; he is embraced by the spirit in all beings; the ecstasy of love enjoyed pours itself out in a universal love; all existence becomes a radiation of its delight and even in its very appearances is transformed into something other than its outward appearance. The world itself is experienced as a play of the divine Delight, a Lila, and that in which the world loses itself is the heaven of beatitude of the eternal union.

3.08 - The Mystery of Love, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Divine whom we adore and our own lives there is no longer any division. So too in all happenings we have to come to see the dealings with us of the Divine Lover and take such pleasure in them that even grief and suffering and physical pain become his gifts and turn to delight and disappear finally into delight, slain by the sense of the divine contact, because the touch of his hands is the alchemist of a miraculous transformation. Some reject life because it is tainted with grief and pain, but to the God-lover grief and pain become means of meeting with him, imprints of his pressure and finally cease as soon as our union with his nature becomes too complete for these masks of the universal delight at all to conceal it. They change into the Ananda.
The Mystery of Love
--
Bhakti. It will from the beginning take into itself something of the hues of the other relations, since he follows too knowledge and works and has need of the Divine as teacher, friend and master. The growing of the love of God must carry with it in him an expansion of the knowledge of God and of the action of the divine Will in his nature and living. the Divine Lover reveals himself; he takes possession of the life. But still the essential relation will be that of love from which all things flow, love passionate, complete, seeking a hundred ways of fulfilment, every means of mutual possession, a million facets of the joy of union.
All the distinctions of the mind, all its barriers and "cannot be"s, all the cold analyses of the reason are mocked at by this love or they are only used as the tests and fields and gates of union.
--
Thus universalised, personalised, raised to its intensities, made all-occupying, all-embracing, all-fulfilling, the way of love and delight gives the supreme liberation. Its highest crest is a supracosmic union. But for love complete union is mukti; liberation has to it no other sense; and it includes all kinds of mukti together, nor are they in the end, as some would have it, merely successive to each other and therefore mutually exclusive. We have the absolute union of the divine with the human spirit, sayujya; in that reveals itself a content of all that depends here upon difference, - but there the difference is only a form of oneness, - ananda too of nearness and contact and mutual presence, sampya, salokya, ananda of mutual reflection, the thing that we call likeness, sadr.sya, and other wonderful things too for which language has as yet no name. There is nothing which is beyond the reach of the God-lover or denied to him; for he is the favourite of the Divine Lover and the self of the
Beloved.

3.1.3 - Difficulties of the Physical Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is this consciousness that has expressed itself in your letteror the obscure part of it which clings to its old attitude. It does not want to fulfil the sadhana unless it can get by it the things it wanted. It wants the satisfaction of the ego, self-fulfilment, appreciation, the granting of its desires. It measures the Divine Love by the outward favours showered upon it and looks jealously to see who gets more of these favours than itself, then says that the Divine has no love for it and assigns reasons which are either derogatory to the Divine or, as in your letter, self-depreciatory and a cause for despair. It is not in you alone that this part feels and acts like that, it is in almost everybody. If that were the only thing in you or the others, then indeed there would be no possibility of Yoga. But though it is strong, it is not the wholethere is a psychic being and a mind and heart influenced and enlightened by it which has other feelings and another vision of things and aim in sadhana. These are now covered in you by the upsurgence of this part which has to change. It is tamasic and does not want to change, does not want to believe unless it can be done by reassuring the vital ego. But there is nothing new in all thatit is part of human nature and has always been there, hampering and limiting the sadhana. Its existence is no reason for despaireveryone has it and the sadhana has to be done in spite of it, in spite of the mixture it brings till the time comes when it has to be definitely converted or rejected. It is difficult to do it, but perfectly possible. These things I know and realise and it is therefore that I insist on your persevering and encourage you to go on; it is not my statement of the position that is untrue, it is the view of it taken by this obscure part of your being that is unsound and an error.
***

3.2.06 - The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Well, if it is not, then there is another wayit is what we call the integration, the harmonisation of the being. That cannot be done from outside, it cannot be done by the mind and vital beingthey are sure to bungle their affair. It can be done only from within by the soul, the Spirit which is the centraliser, itself the centre of these radii. In all of them there is a truth that can harmonise with the true truth of the others. For there is a truth in NirvanaNirvana is nothing but the peace and freedom of the Spirit which can exist in itself, be there world or no world, world-order or world-disorder. Bhakti and the hearts call for the Divine have a truthit is the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda. The will for Tapasya has in it a truthit is the truth of the Spirits mastery over its members. The musician and poet stand for a truth, it is the truth of the expression of the Spirit through beauty. There is a truth behind the mental Affirmer; even there is a truth behind the mental doubter, the Russellian, though far behind him the truth of the denial of false forms. Even behind the two vital personalities there is a truth, the truth of the possession of the inner and outer worldsnot by the ego but by the Divine. That is the harmonisation for which our Yoga stands but it cannot be achieved by any outward arrangement, it can only be achieved by going inside and looking, willing and acting from the psychic and from the spiritual centre. For the truth of the being is there and the secret of Harmony also is there.
In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence.

3.2.08 - Bhakti Yoga and Vaishnavism, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But you will ask what of those who cannot? Well, it is for them I am putting forth all my efforts to bring down the supramental Force within a measurable time. I know that it will descend but I am seeking its near descent and, with whatever dark obstruction of the earth-nature or furious inroads of the Asuric forces seeking to prevent it, it is approaching the terrestrial soil. The supramental is not, as you imagine, something cold, hard and rocklike. It bears within it the presence of the Divine Love as well as the Divine Truth and its reign here means for those who accept it the straight and thornless path on which there is no wall or obstacle of which the ancient Rishis saw the far-off promise.
The dark path is there and there are many who make like the Christians a gospel of spiritual suffering; many hold it to be the unavoidable price of victory. It may be so under certain circumstances, as it has been in so many lives at least at the beginning, or one may choose to make it so. But then the price has to be paid with resignation, fortitude or a tenacious resilience. I admit that if borne in that way the attacks of the Dark Forces or the ordeals they impose have a meaning. After each victory gained over them, there is then a sensible advance; often they seem to show us the difficulties in ourselves which we have to overcome and to say, Here you must conquer us and here. But all the same it is a too dark and difficult way which nobody should follow on whom the necessity does not lie.
--
As for Krishna, why not approach simply and straight? The simple approach means trust. If you pray, trust that he hears. If the reply takes long in coming, trust that he knows and loves and that he is wisest in the choice of the time. Meanwhile quietly clear the ground, so that he may not have to trip over stone and jungle when he comes. That is my suggestion and I know what I am saying for whatever you may say, I know very well all human difficulties and struggles and I know of the cure. That is why I press always on the things that would minimise and shorten the struggles and difficulties,the psychic turn, faith, perfect and simple confidence and reliance. These, let me remind you, are tenets of the Vaishnava Yoga. Of course, there is the other Vaishnava way which swings between yearning and despairardent seeking and the pangs of viraha. It is that you seem to be following and I do not deny that one can arrive by that as one can by almost any way, if followed sincerely. But then those who follow it find a rasa even in viraha, in the absence and the caprice of the Divine Lover. Some of them have sung that they have followed after him all their lives but always he has slipped away from their vision and even in that they find a rasa and never cease following. But you find no rasa in it. So you cannot expect me to approve of that for you. Follow after Krishna by all means, but follow with the determination to arrive: dont do it with the expectation of failure or admit any possibility of breaking off half-way.
***

3.2.4 - Sex, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Any suggestion about Tantric practices must certainly be a trick of the vital. The sex-impulsions can be got rid of without them. They persist only because something still wants to reserve a place for them. So the best answer to the question about the sadhana (What is the place of sex in our sadhana?) is No place. One must give up the sex-satisfaction and be satisfied with the Divine Love and Ananda.
***
--
It is an error too to imagine that, although the physical sexual action is to be abandoned, yet some inward reproduction of it is part of the transformation of the sex-centre. The action of the animal sex-energy in Nature is a device for a particular purpose in the economy of the material creation in the Ignorance. But the vital excitement that accompanies it makes the most favourable opportunity and vibration in the atmosphere for the inrush of those very vital forces and beings whose whole business is to prevent the descent of the supramental Light. The pleasure attached to it is a degradation and not a true form of the divine Ananda. The true divine Ananda in the physical has a different quality and movement and substance; self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with the Divine. You have spoken of Divine Love; but Divine Love, when it touches the physical, does not awaken the gross lower vital propensities; indulgence of them would only repel it and make it withdraw again to the heights from which it is already difficult enough to draw it down into the coarseness of the material creation which it alone can transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through which it will consent to enter, the gate of the psychic being, and cast away the lower vital error.
The transformation of the sex-centre and its energy is needed for the physical siddhi; for this energy is the support in the body of all the mental, vital and physical forces of the nature. It has to be changed into a mass and a movement of intimate Light, creative Power, pure Divine Ananda. It is only the bringing down of the supramental Light, Power and Bliss into the centre that can so change it. As to the working afterwards, it is the supramental Truth and the creative vision and will of the Divine Mother that will determine it. But it will be a working of the conscious Truth, not of the Darkness and Ignorance to which sexual desire and enjoyment belong; it will be a power of preservation and free desireless radiation of the life-forces and not of their throwing out and waste. Avoid the imagination that the supramental life will be only a heightened satisfaction of the desires of the vital and the body; nothing can be a greater obstacle to the Truth in its descent than this hope of a glorification of the animal in human nature. Mind wants the supramental state to be a confirmation of its own cherished ideas and preconceptions; the vital wants it to be a glorification of its own desires; the physical wants it to be a rich prolongation of its own comforts and pleasures and habits. If it were to be that, it would be only an exaggerated and highly magnified consummation of the animal and the human nature, not a transition from the human into the Divine.
--
It [the pleasure of sex] is the reason why the vital sex-difficulty is the hardest to get rid ofeven those who have sincerely given up the more physical form are liable to the vital form of the impulse. But it is harmful because it allows a subtle infiltration of the forces that stand in the way of the sadhana. One must get rid of them if the vital is to become entirely pure and able to contain the Divine Love and Ananda.
***

4.02 - The Integral Perfection, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the integral Yoga founds itself on a conception of the spiritual being as an omnipresent existence, the fullness of which comes not essentially by a transference to other worlds or a cosmic self-extinction, but by a growth out of what we now are phenomenally into the consciousness of the omnipresent reality which we always are in the essence of our being. It substitutes for the form of religious piety its completer spiritual seeking of a divine union. It proceeds by a personal effort to a conversion through a divine influence and possession; but this divine grace, if we may so call it, is not simply a mysterious flow or touch coming from above, but the all-pervading act of a divine presence which we come to know within as the power of the highest Self and Master of our being entering into the soul and so possessing it that we not only feel it close to us and pressing upon our mortal nature, but live in its law, know that law, possess it as the whole power of our spiritualised nature. The conversion its action will effect is an integral conversion of our ethical being into the Truth and Right of the divine nature, of our intellectual into the illumination of divine knowledge, our emotional into the Divine Love and unity, our dynamic and volitional into a working of the divine power, our aesthetic into a plenary reception and a creative enjoyment of divine beauty, not excluding even in the end a divine conversion of the vital and physical being. It regards all the previous life as an involuntary and unconscious or half-conscious preparatory growing towards this change and Yoga as the voluntary and conscious effort and realisation of the change, by which all the aim of human existence in all its parts is fulfilled, even while it is transfigured. Admitting the supracosmic truth and life in worlds beyond, it admits too the terrestrial as a continued term of the one existence and a change of individual and communal life on earth as a strain of its divine meaning.
To open oneself to the supracosmic Divine is an essential. condition of this integral perfection; to unite oneself with the universal Divine is another essential condition. Here the Yoga of self-perfection coincides with the Yogas of knowledge, works and devotion; for it is impossible to change the human nature into the divine or to make it an instrument of the divine knowledge, will and joy of existence, unless there is a union with the supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and a unity with its universal Self in all things and beings. A wholly separative possession of the divine nature by the human individual, as distinct from a self-withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible. But this unity will not be an inmost spiritual oneness qualified, so long as the human life lasts, by a separative existence in mind, life and body; the full perfection is a possession, through this spiritual unity, of unity too with the universal Mind, the universal Life, the universal Form which are the other constant terms of cosmic being. Moreover, since human life is still accepted as a self-expression of the realised Divine in man, there must be an action of the entire divine nature in our life; and this brings in the need of the supramental conversion which substitutes the native action of spiritual being for the imperfect action of the superficial nature and spiritualises and transfigures its mental, vital and physical parts by the spiritual ideality. These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being.

4.03 - Prayer of Quiet, #The Interior Castle or The Mansions, #Saint Teresa of Avila, #Christianity
5.: Some one told me of a certain book written on the subject by the saintly Friar Peter of Alcantara (as I think I may justly call him); I should have submitted to his decision, knowing that he was competent to judge, but on reading it I found he agreed with me that the mind must act until called to recollection by love, although he stated it in other words.33'Possibly I may be mistaken, but I rely on these reasons. Firstly, he who reasons less and tries 30 St. Teresa read this in the Tercer Abecedario of Francisco de Osuna (tr. vi, ch, iv): 'This exercise concentrates the senses of man in the interior of the heart where dwells 'the daughter of the king'; that is, the Catholic soul; thus recollected, man may well be compared to the tortoise or sea-urchin which rolls itself up and withdraws within itself, disregarding everything outside.' Eighth Counsel. Let the last and chiefest counsel be that in this holy exercise we should endeavour to unite Meditation with Contemplation making of the one a ladder for attaining to the other. For this we must know that (p. 118) the very office of Meditation is to consider Divine things with studiousness and attention passing from one to another, to move our hearts to some affection and deep feeling for them, which is as though one should strike a flint to draw from it the spark. For Contemplation is to have drawn forth this spark: I mean to have now found this affection and feeling which were sought for, and to be in peace and silence enjoying them; not with many discursive and intellectual speculations but with simple gaze upon the truth. Wherefore, says a holy teacher, Meditation goes its way and brings forth fruit, with labour, but Contemplation bears fruit without labour. The one seeketh, the other findeth; the one consumeth the food, the other enjoys it; the one discourseth, and maketh reflections, the other is contented with a simple gaze upon the things, for it hath in possession their love and joy. Lastly, the one is as the means, the other as the end; the one as the road and journeying along it, the other as the end of the road and of the journeying. From this is to be inferred a very common thing, which all masters of the spiritual life teach, although it is little (p. 119) understood of those who learn it; which is this, that, as the means cease when the end has been attained, as the voyaging is over when the port has been touched, so when, through the working out of our Meditation, we have come to the repose and sweet savour of Contemplation, we ought then to cease from that pious and laborious searching; and being satisfied with the simple gaze upon, and thought of, God-as though we had Him there present before us-we should rest in the enjoyment of that affection then given, whether it be of love, or of admiration, or joy, or other like sentiment. The reason why this counsel is given is this, that as the aim of this devotion is love and the affections of the will rather than the speculations of the understanding, when the will has been caught and taken by this affection, we should put away all those discursive and intellectual speculations, so far as we can, in order that our soul with all its forces may be fastened upon this affection without being diverted by the action of other influences. A learned teacher, therefore, counsels us that as soon as anyone feels himself fired by the love of God, he should first put aside (p. 120.) all these considerations and thoughts-however exalted they may seem-not because they are really not good in themselves, but because they are then hindrances to what is better. and more important. For this is nothing else than that, having come to the end and purpose of our work, we should stay therein, and leave Meditation for the love of Contemplation. This may especially be done at the end of any exercise, that is, after the petition for the Divine Love of which we have spoken, for one reason, because then it is supposed that the labour of the exercise we have just gone through has produced some divine devotion and feeling, since, saith the wise man, 'Better is the end of prayer than the beginning': and for another reason, that, after the work of Prayer and Meditation, it is well that one should give his mind a little rest, and allow it to repose in the arms of Contemplation. At this point, then, we should put away all other thoughts that may present themselves, and, quieting the mind and stilling the memory, fix all upon our Lord; and remembering that we are then in His presence, no longer dwell upon the details of divine things. Ibidem p. 121. And not only at the end of the exercise but in the midst of it, and at whatever part of it, this spiritual swoon should come upon us, when the intellect is laid to sleep, we should make this pause, and enjoy the blessing bestowed; and then, when we have finished the digestion of it, turn to the matter we have in hand, as the gardener does, when he waters his garden-bed; who, after giving it (p. 122) a sufficiency of water, holds back the stream, and lets it soak and spread itself through the depths of the earth; and then when this hath somewhat dried up, he turns down upon it again the flow of water that it may receive still more, and be well irrigated.' to do least, does most in spiritual matters. We should make our petitions like beggars before a powerful and rich Emperor; then, with downcast eyes, humbly wait. When He secretly shows us He hears our prayers, it is well to be silent, as He has drawn us into His presence; there would then be no harm in trying to keep our minds at rest (that is to say, if we can). If, however, the King makes no sign of listening or of seeing us, there is no need to stand inert, like a dolt, which the soul would resemble if it continued inactive. In this case its dryness would greatly increase, and the imagination would be made more restless than before by its very effort to think of nothing. Our Lord wishes us at such a time to offer Him our petitions and to place ourselves in His presence; He knows what is best for us.
6.: I believe that human efforts avail nothing in these matters, which His Majesty appears to reserve to Himself, setting this limit to our powers. In many other things, such as penances, good works, and prayers, with His aid we can help ourselves as far as human weakness will allow. The second reason is, that these interior operations being sweet and peaceful,34' any painful effort does us more harm than good. By 'painful effort' I mean any forcible restraint we place on ourselves, such as holding our breath.35' We should rather abandon our souls into the hands of God, leaving Him to do as He chooses with us, as far as possible forgetting all self-interest and resigning ourselves entirely to His will. The third reason is, that the very effort to think of nothing excites our imagination the more. The fourth is, because we render God the most true and acceptable service by caring only for His honour and glory and forgetting ourselves, our advantages, comfort and happiness. How can we be self-oblivious, while keeping ourselves under such strict control that we are afraid to move, or even to think, or to leave our minds enough liberty to desire God's greater glory and to rejoice in the glory which He possesses? When His Majesty wishes the mind to rest from working He employs it in another manner, giving it a light and knowledge far above any obtainable by its own efforts and absorbing it entirely into Himself. Then, though it knows not how, it is filled with wisdom such as it could never gain for itself by striving to suspend the thoughts. God gave us faculties for our use; each of them will receive its proper reward. Then do not let us try to charm them to sleep, but permit them to do their work until divinely called to something higher.36 'The whole of the time in which our Lord communicates the simple, loving general attention of which I made mention before, or when the soul, assisted by grace, is established in that state, we must contrive to keep the understanding in repose, undisturbed by the intrusion of forms, figures, or particular knowledge, unless it were slightly and for an instant, and that with sweetness of love, to enkindle our souls the more. At other times, however, in all our acts of devotion and good works, we must make use of good recollections and meditations, so that we may feel an increase of profit and devotion; most especially applying ourselves to the life, passion,

4.2.4 - Time and CHange of the Nature, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
You ask how you can repair the wrong you seem to have done. Admitting that it is as you say, it seems to me that the reparation lies precisely in this, in making yourself a vessel for the Divine Truth and the Divine Love. And the first steps towards that are a complete self-consecration and self-purification, a complete opening of oneself to the Divine, rejecting all in oneself that can stand in the way of the fulfilment. In the spiritual life there is no other reparation for any mistake, none that is wholly effective. At the beginning one should not ask for any other fruit or results than this internal growth and change for otherwise one lays oneself open to severe disappointments. Only when one is free, can one free others and in Yoga it is out of the inner victory that there comes the outer conquest.
***

4.3.3 - Dealing with Hostile Attacks, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
That it is the same hostile force would be shown, even if its presence were not for us visible and palpable, by the fact that the suggestions it makes to the minds of its victims are always the same. Its one master sign is always this impulse to get away from the Asram, away from myself and the Mother, out of this atmosphere, and at once. For the force does not want to give time for reflection, for resistance, for the saving Power to be felt and act. Its other signs are doubt; tamasic depression; an exaggerated sense of impurity and unfitness; the idea that the Mother is remote, does not care for one, is not giving what she ought to give, is not divine, with other similar suggestions accompanied by an inability to feel her presence or her help; a feeling that the Yoga is not possible or is not going to be done in this life; the desire to go away and do something in the ordinary world the thing itself suggested varying according to the personal mind. If it were not this one invariable hostile force acting, there would not be this exact similarity in all the cases. In each case it is the same obscurities thrown on the intelligence, the same subconscious movements of the vital brought to the surface, the same irrational impulses pushing to the same action,departure, renunciation of the souls truth, refusal of the Divine Love and the Divine Call.
It is the vital crisis, the test, the ordeal for you as for othersa test and ordeal which we would willingly spare to those who are with us but which they call on themselves by persistence in some wrong line of movement or some falsification of the inner attitude. If you reject entirely the falsehood that this force casts upon the sadhaka, if you remain faithful to the Light that called you here, you conquer and, even if serious difficulties still remain, the final victory is sure and the divine triumph of the soul over the Ignorance and the darkness.

7.01 - The Soul (the Psychic), #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Live in the consciousness of the psychic centre; thus your will will express the Divines Will alone and your transformed being will then be able to receive and manifest the Divine Love.
25 September 1934

BOOK XII. - Of the creation of angels and men, and of the origin of evil, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
Besides, this too has to be inquired into, whether, if the[Pg 493] good angels made their own will good, they did so with or without will? If without, then it was not their doing. If with, was the will good or bad? If bad, how could a bad will give birth to a good one? If good, then already they had a good will. And who made this will, which already they had, but He who created them with a good will, or with that chaste love by which they cleaved to Him, in one and the same act creating their nature, and endowing it with grace? And thus we are driven to believe that the holy angels never existed without a good will or the love of God. But the angels who, though created good, are yet evil now, became so by their own will. And this will was not made evil by their good nature, unless by its voluntary defection from good; for good is not the cause of evil, but a defection from good is. These angels, therefore, either received less of the grace of the Divine Love than those who persevered in the same; or if both were created equally good, then, while the one fell by their evil will, the others were more abundantly assisted, and attained to that pitch of blessedness at which they became certain they should never fall from it,as we have already shown in the preceding book.[528] We must therefore acknowledge, with the praise due to the Creator, that not only of holy men, but also of the holy angels, it can be said that "the love of God is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto them."[529] And that not only of men, but primarily and principally of angels it is true, as it is written, "It is good to draw near to God."[530] And those who have this good in common, have, both with Him to whom they draw near, and with one another, a holy fellowship, and form one city of GodHis living sacrifice, and His living temple. And I see that, as I have now spoken of the rise of this city among the angels, it is time to speak of the origin of that part of it which is hereafter to be united to the immortal angels, and which at present is being gathered from among mortal men, and is either sojourning on earth, or, in the persons of those who have passed through death, is resting in the secret receptacles and abodes of disembodied spirits. For from one man, whom God created as the first, the whole[Pg 494] human race descended, according to the faith of Holy Scripture, which deservedly is of wonderful authority among all nations throughout the world; since, among its other true statements, it predicted, by its divine foresight, that all nations would give credit to it.
10. Of the falseness of the history which allots many thousand years to the world's past.

Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
friend) tooLove unspeakable, the ecstasy of Divine love which is called up by the Divine Lover alone.
You are a hero, Sakhi and everything else in your yearning for the Lord.

The Divine Names Text (Dionysis), #The Divine Names, #unset, #Zen
By all things, then, the Beautiful and Good is desired and beloved and cherished; and, by reason of It, and for the sake of It, the less love the greater suppliantly; and those of the same rank, their fellows brotherly; and the greater, the less considerately; and these severally love the things of themselves continuously; and all things by aspiring to the Beautiful and Good, do and wish all things whatever |45 they do and wish. Further, it may be boldly said with truth, that even the very Author of all things, by reason of overflowing Goodness, loves all, makes all, perfects all, sustains all, attracts all; and even the Divine Love is Good of Good, by reason of the Good. For Love itself, the benefactor of things that be, pre-existing overflowingly in the Good, did not permit itself to remain unproductive in itself, but moved itself to creation 25, as befits the overflow which is generative of all.
SECTION XI.
--
But Divine Love is extatic, not permitting (any) to be lovers of themselves, but of those beloved. They shew this too, the superior by becoming mindful of the inferior; and the equals by their mutual coherence; and the inferior, by a more divine respect towards things superior. Wherefore also, Paul the Great, when possessed by the Divine Love, and participating in its extatic power, says with inspired lips, "I live no longer, but Christ lives in me." As a true lover, and beside himself, as he says, to Almighty God, and not living the life of himself, but the life of the Beloved, as a life excessively esteemed. One might make bold to say even this, on behalf of truth, that the very Author of all things, by the beautiful and good love of everything, through an overflow of His loving goodness, becomes out of Himself, by His providences for all existing things, |49 and is, as it were, cozened by goodness and affection and love, and is led down from the Eminence above all, and surpassing all, to being in all, as befits an extatic superessential power centred in Himself. Wherefore, those skilled in Divine things call Him even Jealous, as (being) that vast good Love towards all beings, and as rousing His loving inclination to jealousy,----and as proclaiming Himself Jealous----to Whom the things desired are objects of jealousy, and as though the objects of His providential care were objects of jealousy for Him. And, in short, the lovable is of the Beautiful and Good, and Love preexisted both in the Beautiful and Good, and on account of the Beautiful and Good, is and takes Being.
SECTION XIV.
But what do the theologians mean when at one time they call Him Love, and Loving-kindness, and at another, Loved and Esteemed? For, of the one, He is Author and, as it were, Producer and Father; but the other, He Himself is; and by one He is moved, but by the other He moves; or (when they say), that He Himself is Procurer and Mover of Himself and by Himself. In this sense, they call Him esteemed and loved, as Beautiful and Good: but again Love and Loving-kindness, as being at once moving and conducting Power to Himself;----the alone----self Beautiful and Good, by reason of Itself, and, being, as it were, a manifestation of Itself through Itself, and a good Progression of the |50 surpassing union, and a loving Movement, simplex, self-moved, self-operating, pre-existing in the Good, and from the Good bubbling forth to things existing, and again returning to the Good, in which also the Divine Love indicates distinctly Its own unending and unbeginning, as it were a sort of everlasting circle whirling round in unerring combination, by reason of the Good, from the Good, and in the Good, and to the Good, and ever advancing and remaining and returning in the same and throughout the same. And these things our illustrious initiator divinely set forth throughout His Hymns of Love, of which we may appropriately make mention, and, as it were, place as a certain sacred chapter to our treatise concerning Love.
SECTION XV. Extract from the "Hymns of Love" by the most holy Hierotheus:----
--
But some one may say, it is not the mark of justice to leave pious men without assistance, when they are ground down by evil men. To which we must reply, that, if those whom you call pious do indeed love things on earth, which are zealously sought after by the earthly, they have altogether fallen from the Divine Love. And I do not know how they could be called pious, when they unjustly treat things truly loveable and divine, which do not at once surpass in influence in their estimation things undesirable and unloveable. But, if they love the realities, they who desire certain things ought to rejoice when they attain the things desired. Are they not then nearer the angelic virtues, when, as far as possible, by aspiration after things Divine, they withdraw from the affection for earthly things, by being exercised very manfully to this, in their perils, on behalf of the beautiful? So that, it is true |100 to say, that this is rather a property of the Divine Justice----not to pamper and destroy the bravery of the best, by the gifts of earthly things, nor, if any one should attempt to do this, to leave them without assistance, but to establish them in the excellent and harsh condition, and to dispense to them, as being such, things meet for them.
SECTION IX.

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