classes ::: God,
children :::
branches :::

bookmarks: Instances - Definitions - Quotes - Chapters - Wordnet - Webgen


object:the Divine Person
object:the Divine Personalities
object:God (forms)
object:emanations
object:formations
class:God

the Divine Personalities:
But behind all these and in them he has felt a Divinity who is all these things, a Bringer of Light, a Guide and All-Knower, a Master of Force, A Giver of Bliss, Friend, Helper, Father, Mother Playmate in the
world-game, an absolute Master of his being, his souls Beloved and Lover. All relations known to human personality are there in the souls contact with the Divine; but they rise towards superhuman levels and compel him towards a divine nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

see also ::: persons, being, powers, aspects



see also ::: aspects, being, persons, powers

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO

aspects
being
persons
powers

AUTH

BOOKS
The_Synthesis_Of_Yoga

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1956-04-18_-_Ishwara_and_Shakti,_seeing_both_aspects_-_The_Impersonal_and_the_divine_Person_-_Soul,_the_presence_of_the_divine_Person_-_Going_to_other_worlds,_exteriorisation,_dreams_-_Telling_stories_to_oneself
3.05_-_The_Divine_Personality

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
0.01_-_I_-_Sri_Aurobindos_personality,_his_outer_retirement_-_outside_contacts_after_1910_-_spiritual_personalities-_Vibhutis_and_Avatars_-__transformtion_of_human_personality
0_1958-10-01
0_1958-10-04
03.01_-_Humanism_and_Humanism
03.04_-_The_Body_Human
03.06_-_Divine_Humanism
04.01_-_The_Divine_Man
05.12_-_The_Soul_and_its_Journey
1.01_-_Tara_the_Divine
1.02.3.1_-_The_Lord
1.02_-_The_Divine_Teacher
1.02_-_THE_NATURE_OF_THE_GROUND
1.04_-_The_Gods_of_the_Veda
1.06_-_The_Ascent_of_the_Sacrifice_2_The_Works_of_Love_-_The_Works_of_Life
1.17_-_The_Divine_Birth_and_Divine_Works
1.18_-_The_Divine_Worker
12.07_-_The_Double_Trinity
1.20_-_Tabooed_Persons
1.23_-_The_Double_Soul_in_Man
1.3.2.01_-_I._The_Entire_Purpose_of_Yoga
1.3_-_Mundaka_Upanishads
14.02_-_Occult_Experiences
15.06_-_Words,_Words,_Words...
1.60_-_Between_Heaven_and_Earth
1956-04-18_-_Ishwara_and_Shakti,_seeing_both_aspects_-_The_Impersonal_and_the_divine_Person_-_Soul,_the_presence_of_the_divine_Person_-_Going_to_other_worlds,_exteriorisation,_dreams_-_Telling_stories_to_oneself
2.01_-_On_Books
21.03_-_The_Double_Ladder
2.11_-_The_Modes_of_the_Self
27.01_-_The_Golden_Harvest
3.05_-_The_Divine_Personality
3.07_-_The_Ananda_Brahman
3.08_-_The_Mystery_of_Love
3.2.10_-_Christianity_and_Theosophy
3.6.01_-_Heraclitus
r1912_01_16
r1914_04_28
r1914_06_29
Sayings_of_Sri_Ramakrishna_(text)

PRIMARY CLASS

God
SIMILAR TITLES
the Divine Person

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH


TERMS ANYWHERE

. a (ananda purusha; ananda-purusha) ::: the "supreme bliss Soul", the aspect of the divine Personality (purus.a) corresponding to the impersonal anandaṁ brahma; same as anandamaya purus.a.

. a brahma (purusha brahma) ::: brahman seen in its personal aspect as the purus.a, "the divine Person who knows himself in all these things and persons and becomes all things and persons in his consciousness and shapes their thoughts and forms".

. amaya ::: full of infinite qualities (anantagun.a); the "Godhead, the spirit manifested in Nature" who "appears in a sea of infinite quality" expressing his "absolute capacity of boundlessly varied selfrevelation"; Kr.s.n.a seen in the second degree of the third intensity of Kr.s.n.adarsana, a kind of vision of the divine Personality corresponding to anantaṁ brahma in the impersonal brahmadarsana. ananta-j ñana

anandamaya (anandamaya; anandamay) ::: full of or consisting of anandamaya ananda; joyous, delightful, blissful, beatific; characterized by an equal delight (sama ananda) in all experiences; having the nature of pure ananda of saccidananda, or of the principle of ananda involved in or subordinated to the principle of another plane, such as the physical, mental, etc.; ("the Anandamaya") the All-Blissful, short for anandamaya isvara or anandamaya purus.a; the third degree of . 14 the third intensity of Kr.s.n.adarsana, a kind of vision of the divine Personality corresponding to anandaṁ brahma in the impersonal brahmadarsana.

bhava ::: becoming; state of being (sometimes added to an adjective to bhava form an abstract noun and translatable by a suffix such as "-ness", as in br.hadbhava, the state of being br.hat [wide], i.e., wideness); condition of consciousness; subjectivity; state of mind and feeling; physical indication of a psychological state; content, meaning (of rūpa); spiritual experience, realisation; emotion, "moved spiritualised state of the affective nature"; (madhura bhava, etc.) any of several types of relation between the jiva and the isvara, each being a way in which "the transcendent and universal person of the Divine conforms itself to our individualised personality and accepts a personal relation with us, at once identified with us as our supreme Self and yet close and different as our Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher"; attitude; mood; temperament; aspect; internal manifestation of the Goddess (devi), in . her total divine Nature (daivi prakr.ti or devibhava) or in the "more seizable because more defined and limited temperament" of any of her aspects, as in Mahakali bhava; a similar manifestation of any personality or combination of personalities of the deva or fourfold isvara, as in Indrabhava or Aniruddha bhava; in the vision of Reality (brahmadarsana), any of the "many aspects of the Infinite" which "disclose themselves, separate, combine, fuse, are unified together" until "there shines through it all the supreme integral Reality"; especially, the various "states of perception" in which the divine personality (purus.a) is seen in the impersonality of the brahman, ranging from the "general personality" of sagun.a brahman to the "vivid personality" of Kr.s.n.akali. bh bhavasamrddhi

DIVINE AND FORM. ::: The personal realisation of the Divine may be sometimes with Form, sometimes without Form. Without Form, it is the Presence of the living Divine Person, felt in everything. With Form, it comes with the image of the One to whom worship is offered. The Divine can always manifest himself in a form to the Bhakta or seeker. One sees him in the form in which one worships or seeks him or in a form suitable to the Divine Personality who is the object of the adoration. How it manifests depends upon many things and it is too various to be reduced to a single rule. Sometimes it is in the heart that the Presence with the form is seen, sometimes in any of the other centres, sometimes above and guiding from there, sometimes it is seen outside and in front as if an embodied person. Its advantages are an intimate relation and constant guidance or if felt or seen within, a very strong and concrete realisation of the constant Presence. But one must be very sure of the purity of one’s adoration and seekings for the disadvantage of this kind of embodied relation is that other Forces can imitate the Form or counterfeit the voice and the guidance and this gets more force if it is associated with a constructed image which is not the true thing. Several have been misled in this way because pride, vanity or desire was strong in them and robbed them of the fine psychic perception that is not mental.

madhura (madhura; madhur) ::: sweet; blissful; short for madhura rasa, the sweet taste perceived by rasadr.s.t.i; short for madhura bhava or madhura dasya, the relation of ecstatic love and surrender to the Divine that brings the highest experience of "the sweetness and intimate control of the divine Personality". madhura bh bhava

Pantheistic Personalism: The doctrine that reality consists of a Supreme Personality of which the world of persons are parts. The Divine Personality having no separate existence from its creation. See also Critical Personalism, Mono-Personalism. -- R.T.F.

Pantheistic personalism: The doctrine that reality consists of a Supreme Personality, of which the world of persons are parts. The Divine Personality having no separate existence from its creation.

sarvamaya ::: Kr.s.n.a seen "as the All, not only in the unique essence of things, but in the manifold form of things", the first degree of the third intensity of Kr.s.n.adarsana, a kind of vision of the divine Personality corresponding to sarvaṁ brahma in the impersonal brahmadarsana. sarva sarvam

Śiva (Shiva) ::: "the auspicious", a name of the god who is at once "the Siva Master of the force that acts in the worlds and the Yogin who enjoys the supreme liberty and peace"; especially the contemplative aspect of this deity, in contrast to his "terrible" aspect which is called Rudra2 and sometimes regarded as a distinct god; the divine personality representing absolute Existence (sat) with infinite Force (tapas) inherent in it, whose immobility is translated in the lower hemisphere of existence (aparardha) by inertia, figured in the image of Śiva"s body lying under the feet of the dancing Kali; (also called Mahesvara and identified with Mahavira) the aspect of the fourfold isvara whose sakti is Mahesvari; a name of the Lord and supreme Being (isvara, purus.ottama). siva siv a K Kali



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KEYS (10k)

   1 Sri Aurobindo

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   2 Sri Aurobindo

1::::
   As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 179,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Heaven and hell are not geographical. If you go in search of them you will never find them anywhere. They are within you, they are psychological. The mind is heaven, the mind is hell, and the mind has the capacity to become either. But people go on thinking everything is somewhere outside. We always go on looking for everything outside because to be inwards is very difficult. We are outgoing. If somebody says there is a god, we look at the sky. Somewhere, sitting there, will be the divine person. ~ Rajneesh,
2::::
   As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 179,

IN CHAPTERS [37/37]



   21 Integral Yoga
   2 Occultism
   1 Philosophy
   1 Buddhism


   20 Sri Aurobindo
   10 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   3 The Mother
   2 Satprem
   2 James George Frazer
   2 A B Purani


   6 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   3 Record of Yoga
   3 Essays On The Gita
   3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   2 The Golden Bough
   2 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
   2 Agenda Vol 01


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
   In his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo says about the Avatar: "He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of divine life, the Divine Personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth."[5]
   "He comes as the divine power and love which calls men to itself, so that they may take refuge in that and no longer in the insufficiency of their human wills and the strife of their human fear, wrath and passion, and liberated from all this unquiet and suffering may live in the calm and bliss of the Divine."[6]
   "The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what are the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, 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 1958-10-01, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   It was so strong, so strong that it was really inexpressible. The negative experience of no longer being an individual, or in other words, the dissolution of the ego, took place a long time ago and still takes place quite often: the ego completely vanishes. But this was a positive experience of being not just the universe in its totality, but something elseineffable, yet concrete, absolutely concrete! Unutterable1and yet utterly concrete: the Divine Person beyond the Impersonal.
   The experience lasted for only a few minutes. And I knew, then, that all our words all our words are empty. But circumstances were such that I had to speak

0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   (Shortly afterwards, concerning the experience of Wednesday, October 1: the Divine Person beyond the Impersonal)
   Before, I always had the negative experience of the disappearance of the ego, of the oneness of Creation, where everything implying separation disappearedan experience that, personally, I would call negative. Last Wednesday, while I was speaking (and thats why at the end I could no longer find my words), I seemed suddenly to have left this negative phenomenon and entered into the positive experience: the experience of BEING the Supreme Lord, the experience that nothing exists but the Supreme Lordall is the Supreme Lord, there is nothing else. And at that moment, the feeling of this infinite power that has no limit, that nothing can limit, was so overwhelming that all the functions of the body, of this mental machine that summons up words, all this was I could no longer speak French. Perhaps the words could have come to me in Englishprobably, because it was easier for Sri Aurobindo to express himself in English, and thats how it must have happened: it was the part embodied in Sri Aurobindo (the part of the Supreme that was embodied in Sri Aurobindo for its manifestation) that had the experience. This is what joined back with the Origin and caused the experience I was well aware of it. And that is probably why its transcription through English words would have been easier than through French words (for at these moments, such activities are purely mechanical, rather like automatic machines). And naturally the experience left something behind. It left the sense of a power that can no longer be qualified,5 really. And it was there yesterday evening.

03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It is the cult of the Divine Human which enunciates the mystic truth that man is greater than all and surpasses the Vedic Law (which aims usually at the impersonal Absolute). But Man here is to be understood as the Divine Person in his human norm, not at all the human man, as modern humanists of our country would like to have. It does not mean the glorification of man's human attributes and movements, even if they be most sattwic and idealistic; it refers rather to the divinised type, the archetype that is eternal in the super-consciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts upon earth he does so in manner and measure that do not belong to this plane.
   Only the other day I found a critic in The Manchester Guardian referring to The Gita as something frigid (and confused)!

03.04 - The Body Human, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Divine means the All: whatever there is (manifest or beyond) is within Him and is Himself. Man too who is within that Divine is the Divine in a special way; for he is a replica or epitome of the Divine containing or embodying the threefold status and movement of the Divine the Transcendent, the Cosmic and the Individual. He is co-extensive with the Divine. Only, the Divine is conscious, supremely conscious, while Man is unconscious or at best half-conscious. God has made himself the world and its creatures, the transcendental has become the material cosmos, true; but God has made himself Man in a special sense and for a special purpose. Man is not a fabrication of the Lower Maya, a formation thrown up in the evolutionary course by a temporary idea in the Cosmic Mind and developed through the play of forces; on the other hand, it is a typal reality, a Real-Ideaa formation of the original truth-consciousness, the Divine's own transcendental existence. Man is the figure of the Divine Person. The Impersonal become or viewed as the Personal takes up the human aspect, the human, that is to say, as its original prototype in the superconscience.
   The conception of a personal immortality the impersonal is naturally always immortal, there is no problem thereof a physical immortality even attains a significant value looked at from this standpoint. The urge for immortality is not merely a wish to continue indefinitely an earthly life, because of its pleasures or because of an unreasoning attachment; it means regaining and establishing the immortal body that one has or that one is essentially and potentially. The body seeks to be immortal, for it contains and secretly is its immortal Formal Cause (to make use of an Aristotelian term). The materialisation of an immortal being and figure of being that is the consummation demanded of human life on earth.

03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It is the cult of the Divine Human which enunciates the mystic truth that Man is greater than all and surpasses even the Vedic Law (which aims usually at the impersonal Absolute). But Man -here is to be understood as the Divine Person in his human norm, not the human man at all, as modern humanists of our country would like to have it. It does not mean the glorification of man's human attributes and movements, even if they be most sattwic and idealistic; it refers rather to the divinised type, the archetype that is eternally in the super-consciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts on earth, he does so in a manner and measure that do not belong to this plane of humanity familiar to us.
   Only the other day I found a critic in the Manchester Guardian referring to the Gita as something frigid and confused !!

04.01 - The Divine Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Thus then the embodied human person who has the embodied Divine Person before his eyes must know how to instal and incorporate the Divine Person in him, in his body and physical existence. That was perhaps the mystery sought to be conveyed in the Christian sacrament of transubstantiation. The bread and wine that the initiate has to take in representare or become actually and physically, as the Christian mystics assert the flesh and blood of Christ. One has to become the Divine Person in flesh and blood, wholly and integrally. As the fossil is a transmutation in stone, grain by grain, of a living bodyorganic elements eliminated and replaced by the inorganic in the very atomic structure and constitutioneven so, the living human structure, the mental, vital and physical formation will be translated, grain by grain, atom by atom into the divine substance by the infusion and imposition of the Divine figure.
   The Christian mystics themselves, however, do not seem to have aimed at real physical transubstantiationalthough that might have been at the back of the older Hebrew sacrament of the Eucharist; the perfection sought by them was to be enjoyed in Heaven in company of the Father and not on this earth and in this human body: it was more a sublimation than a transformation that was their goal. The flesh for them was always too weak.

05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   For it must be remembered that the human soul after all is not a simple and unilateral being, it is a little cosmos in itself. The soul is not merely a point or a single ray of light come down straight from its divine archetype or from the Divine himself, it is also a developing fire that increases and enriches itself through the multiple experiences of an evolutionary progressionit not only grows in height but extends in wideness also. Even though it may originally emanate from one principle and Personality, it takes in for its development and fulfilment influences and elements from the others also. Indeed, we know that the Four primal personalities of the Divine are not separate and distinct as they may appear to the human mind which cannot understand distinction without disparity. The Vedic gods themselves are so linked together, so interpenetrate one another that finally it is asserted that there is only one existence, only it is given many names. All the Divine Personalities are aspects of the Divine blended and fused together. Even so the human soul, being a replica of the Divine, cannot but be a complex of many personalities and often it may be difficult and even harmful to find and fix upon a dominant personality. The full flowering of the human soul, its perfect divinisation demands the realisation of a many-aspected personality, the very richness of the Divine within it.
   ***

1.01 - Tara the Divine, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
  and danger is found within the Divine Person of Tara.
  - 22 -

1.02 - The Divine Teacher, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Very obviously a great body of the profoundest teaching cannot be built round an ordinary occurrence which has no gulfs of deep suggestion and hazardous difficulty behind its superficial and outward aspects and can be governed well enough by the ordinary everyday standards of thought and action. There are indeed three things in the Gita which are spiritually significant, almost symbolic, typical of the profoundest relations and problems of the spiritual life and of human existence at its roots; they are the Divine Personality of the Teacher, his characteristic relations with his disciple and the occasion of his teaching. The teacher is God himself descended into humanity; the disciple is the first, as we might say in modern language, the representative man of his age, closest friend and chosen instrument of the
  Avatar, his protagonist in an immense work and struggle the secret purpose of which is unknown to the actors in it, known only to the incarnate Godhead who guides it all from behind the veil of his unfathomable mind of knowledge; the occasion is the violent crisis of that work and struggle at the moment when the anguish and moral difficulty and blind violence of its apparent movements forces itself with the shock of a visible revelation on the mind of its representative man and raises the whole question of the meaning of God in the world and the goal and drift and sense of human life and conduct.

1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  (In the Reality unitively known by the mystic), we can speak no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Persons. There were we all one before our creation, for this is our super-essence. There the Godhead is in simple essence without activity.
  Ruysbroeck

1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  These are negative and a priori considerations, but they are supported by more positive indications. The other Aryan religions which are most akin in conception to the Vedic and seem originally to have used the same names for their deities, present themselves to us even at their earliest vaguely historic stage as moralised religions. Their gods had not only distinct moral attri butes, but represented moral & subjective functions. Apollo is not only the god of the sun or of pestilencein Homer indeed Haelios (Saurya) & not Apollo is the Sun God but the divine master of prophecy and poetry; Athene has lost any naturalistic significance she may ever have had and is a pure moral force, the goddess of strong intelligence, force guided by brain; Ares is the lord of battles, not a storm wind; Artemis, if she is the Moon, is also goddess of the free hunting life and of virginity; Aphrodite is only the goddess of Love & Beauty There is therefore a strong moral element in the cult & there are clear subjective notions attached to the Divine Personalities. But this is not all. There was not only a moral element in the Greek religion as known & practised by the layman, there was also a mystic element and an esoteric belief & practice practised by the initiated. The mysteries of Eleusis, the Thracian rites connected with the name of Orpheus, the Phrygian worship of Cybele, even the Bacchic rites rested on a mystic symbolism which gave a deep internal meaning to the exterior circumstances of creed & cult. Nor was this a modern excrescence; for its origins were lost to the Greeks in a legendary antiquity. Indeed, if we took the trouble to understand alien & primitive mentalities instead of judging & interpreting them by our own standards, I think we should find an element of mysticism even in savage rites & beliefs. The question at any rate may fairly be put, Were the Vedic Rishis, thinkers of a race which has shown itself otherwise the greatest & earliest mystics & moralisers in historical times, the most obstinately spiritual, theosophic & metaphysical of nations, so far behind the Orphic & Homeric Greeks as to be wholly Pagan & naturalistic in their creed, or was their religion too moralised & subjective, were their ceremonies too supported by an esoteric symbolism?
  The immediate or at any rate the earliest known successors of the Rishis, the compilers of the Brahmanas, the writers of theUpanishads give a clear & definite answer to this question.The Upanishads everywhere rest their highly spiritual & deeply mystic doctrines on the Veda.We read in the Isha Upanishad of Surya as the Sun God, but it is the Sun of spiritual illumination, of Agni as the Fire, but it is the inner fire that burns up all sin & crookedness. In the Kena Indra, Agni & Vayu seek to know the supreme Brahman and their greatness is estimated by the nearness with which they touched him,nedistham pasparsha. Uma the daughter of Himavan, the Woman, who reveals the truth to them is clearly enough no natural phenomenon. In the Brihadaranyaka, the most profound, subtle & mystical of human scriptures, the gods & Titans are the masters, respectively, of good and of evil. In the Upanishads generally the word devah is used as almost synonymous with the forces & functions of sense, mind & intellect. The element of symbolism is equally clear. To the terms of the Vedic ritual, to their very syllables a profound significance is everywhere attached; several incidents related in the Upanishads show the deep sense then & before entertained that the sacrifices had a spiritual meaning which must be known if they were to be conducted with full profit or even with perfect safety. The Brahmanas everywhere are at pains to bring out a minute symbolism in the least circumstances of the ritual, in the clarified butter, the sacred grass, the dish, the ladle. Moreover, we see even in the earliest Upanishads already developed the firm outlines and minute details of an extraordinary psychology, physics, cosmology which demand an ancient development and centuries of Yogic practice and mystic speculation to account for their perfect form & clearness. This psychology, this physics, this cosmology persist almost unchanged through the whole history of Hinduism. We meet them in the Puranas; they are the foundation of the Tantra; they are still obscurely practised in various systems of Yoga. And throughout, they have rested on a declared Vedic foundation. The Pranava, the Gayatri, the three Vyahritis, the five sheaths, the five (or seven) psychological strata, (bhumi, kshiti of the Vedas), the worlds that await us, the gods who help & the demons who hinder go back to Vedic origins.All this may be a later mystic misconception of the hymns & their ritual, but the other hypothesis of direct & genuine derivation is also possible. If there was no common origin, if Greek & Indian separated during the naturalistic period of the common religion supposed to be recorded in the Vedas it is surprising that even the little we know of Greek rites & mysteries should show us ideas coincident with those of Indian Tantra & Yoga.

1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the
  Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing

1.17 - The Divine Birth and Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Avatar may descend as a great spiritual teacher and saviour, the Christ, the Buddha, but always his work leads, after he has finished his earthly manifestation, to a profound and powerful change not only in the ethical, but in the social and outward life and ideals of the race. He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of the divine life, the Divine Personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth. It is indeed curious to note that the
  The Divine Birth and Divine Works
  --
  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.
  In the teaching of the Gita, which is more catholic and complex than other specialised teachings and disciplines, these things assume a larger meaning. For the unity here is the allembracing Vedantic unity by which the soul sees all in itself and itself in all and makes itself one with all beings. The dharma
  --
  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

1.18 - The Divine Worker, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   doing and its objects bring about in his mind and heart any of those reactions which we call passion and sin. For sin consists not at all in the outward deed, but in an impure reaction of the personal will, mind and heart which accompanies it or causes it; the impersonal, the spiritual is always pure, apapaviddham, and gives to all that it does its own inalienable purity. This spiritual impersonality is a third sign of the divine worker. All human souls, indeed, who have attained to a certain greatness and largeness are conscious of an impersonal Force or Love or Will and Knowledge working through them, but they are not free from egoistic reactions, sometimes violent enough, of their human personality. But this freedom the liberated soul has attained; for he has cast his personality into the impersonal, where it is no longer his, but is taken up by the Divine Person, the
  Purushottama, who uses all finite qualities infinitely and freely and is bound by none. He has become a soul and ceased to be a sum of natural qualities; and such appearance of personality as remains for the operations of Nature, is something unbound, large, flexible, universal; it is a free mould for the Infinite, it is a living mask of the Purushottama.

12.07 - The Double Trinity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   But the saving grace lies in the third person which is the Divine Person, man's true person and real identity. This is composed of true consciousness, true force, and the supreme truth of being, the delight and immortality. This is as we call it man's psychic being or soul.
   This being made of light and power and delight is not a formless entity but a real being, a person and possesses a name and body, a Divine name and a Divine body recognisable in the same way as a physical body is recognised.

1.20 - Tabooed Persons, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  already called. the Divine Person is a source of danger as well as
  of blessing; he must not only be guarded, he must also be guarded

1.23 - The Double Soul in Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  12:For these are achievements of the spiritual mind in man; they are movements of that mind passing beyond itself, but on its own plane, into the splendours of the Spirit. Mind, even at its highest stages far beyond our present mentality, acts yet in its nature by division; it takes the aspects of the Eternal and treats each aspect as if it were the whole truth of the Eternal Being and can find in each its own perfect fulfilment. Even it erects them into opposites and creates a whole range of these opposites, the Silence of the Divine and the divine Dynamis, the immobile Brahman aloof from existence, without qualities, and the active Brahman with qualities, Lord of existence, Being and Becoming, the Divine Person and an impersonal pure Existence; it can then cut itself away from the one and plunge itself into the other as the sole abiding Truth of existence. It can regard the Person as the sole Reality or the Impersonal as alone true; it can regard the Lover as only a means of expression of eternal Love or love as only the self-expression of the Lover; it can see beings as only personal powers of an impersonal Existence or impersonal existence as only a state of the one Being, the Infinite Person. Its spiritual achievement, its road of passage towards the supreme aim will follow these dividing lines. But beyond this movement of spiritual Mind is the higher experience of the supermind Truth-Consciousness; there these opposites disappear and these partialities are relinquished in the rich totality of a supreme and integral realisation of eternal Being. It is this that is the aim we have conceived, the consummation of our existence here by an ascent to the supramental Truth-Consciousness and its descent into our nature. The psychic transformation after rising into the spiritual change has then to be completed, integralised, exceeded and uplifted by a supramental transformation which lifts it to the summit of the ascending endeavour.
  13:Even as between the other divided and opposed terms of manifested Being, so also a supramental consciousness-energy could alone establish a perfect harmony between these two terms - apparently opposite only because of the Ignorance - of spirit status and world dynamism in our embodied existence. In the Ignorance Nature centres the order of her psychological movements, not around the secret spiritual self, but around its substitute, the ego-principle: a certain ego-centrism is the basis on which we bind together our experiences and relations in the midst of the complex contacts, contradictions, dualities, incoherences of the world in which we live; this ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite, our defence. But in our spiritual change we have to forego this defence; ego has to vanish, the person finds itself dissolved into a vast impersonality, and in this impersonality there is at first no key to an ordered dynamism of action. A very usual result is that one is divided into two parts of being, the spiritual within, the natural without; in one there is the divine realisation seated in a perfect inner freedom, but the natural part goes on with the old action of Nature, continues by a mechanical movement of past energies her already transmitted impulse. Even, if there is an entire dissolution of the limited person and the old ego-centric order, the outer nature may become the field of an apparent incoherence, although all within is luminous with the Self. Thus we become outwardly inert and inactive, moved by circumstance or forces but not self-mobile,9 even though the consciousness is enlightened within, or as a child though within is a plenary self-knowledge,10 or as one inconsequent in thought and impulse though within is an utter calm and serenity,11 or as the wild and disordered soul though inwardly there is the purity and poise of the Spirit.12 Or if there is an ordered dynamism in the outward nature, it may be a continuation of superficial ego-action witnessed but not accepted by the inner being, or a mental dynamism that cannot be perfectly expressive of the inner spiritual realisation; for there is no equipollence between action of mind and status of spirit. Even at the best where there is an intuitive guidance of Light from within, the nature of its expression in dynamism of action must be marked with the imperfections of mind, life and body, a King with incapable ministers, a Knowledge expressed in the values of the Ignorance. Only the descent of the Supermind with its perfect unity of Truth-Knowledge and Truth-Will can establish in the outer as in the inner existence the harmony of the Spirit; for it alone can turn the values of the Ignorance entirely into the values of the Knowledge.

1.3.2.01 - I. The Entire Purpose of Yoga, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  He is also Absolute and Supreme Personality playing in the universe and as the universe; in the universe He appears to be its Soul & Lord, as the universe He appears to be the motion or process of the Will of the Lord and to become all the subjective and objective results of the motion. All the states of the Brahman, the transcendent, the continent, the universal, the individual are informed & sustained by the Divine Personality. He is both the Existent & the state of existence. We call the state of existence the Impersonal Brahman, the Existent the
  Personal Brahman. There is no difference between them except to the play of our consciousness; for every impersonal state depends upon a manifest or secret Personality and can reveal the Personality which it holds and veils and every Personality attaches to itself and can plunge itself into an impersonal existence. This they can do because Personality & Impersonality are merely different states of self-consciousness in one Absolute

1.3 - Mundaka Upanishads, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  beyond the Most High, even the Divine Person.
  s yo h v

14.02 - Occult Experiences, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   These outer personalities there is not one, there are many you consider this body of yours as your only form, but you have many. Each level has its own individual form and a recognisable one. Each one has special eyes, nose, ears, so this inner personality also has recognisable features. If you know, you can even name them it is this person, that person. The subtle physical is more concrete. Only the physical form, the material form does not change much. It changes, yes, according to your age, slowly but for sometime you are the same. These inner forms are changeful; they are not restricted to one rigid figure. Still they are recognisable. There is a plasticity which is very natural; according to the situation, according to your mood, according to your feeling, they change. But the most important, the most original form is your psychic being your true being that which we must strive to realise and attain. As the Mother says: It is the Divine Personality in each one of us. Your outer personality is sometimes only a caricature, but still it tries to reflect, though with difficulty, something of the needs and urges of this inmost reality of yours. Someone has asked me: "How to find, how to know this inner being, the true being in me?" For, as the poet here says, he can't touch you and you can't touch him, but what you want is to touch that person. The fact is that it is not so altogether out of contact, not altogether unless a man is a total villain, which is very rare. You can't obliterate that true existence of you, it is there. It expresses itself in all the movements that are good and noble and selfless. Whenever you see something beautiful or do something nice, be sure that it is your psychic being that sees or does it. The psychic being in you is the Mother for it is an emanation of Herself that She has put in you, in order to protect you. When you see the sunset and feel happy, it is the psychic being in you that sees it. It is a small beginning but it is a beginning. Let your psychic being guide your acts. The only thing necessary is to be sincere. You have to be sincere. First day you will find it very difficult, second day you will find it easier, third day it will become still easier and then on the fourth day it will become your nature. It is not easy, but if you try you will be able to do it.
   ***

15.06 - Words, Words, Words..., #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Today a new consciousness is abroad. The earth-atmosphere is filled with the new spirit. But here the Mother has left with us not merely her consciousness but a conscious beinga part of her living personality in us, that is the divine legacy we enjoy. We must not simply be proud of it but try to prove ourselves worthy of it. the Divine Personality will grow everywhere but the path-finders, forerunners are among you.
   Naturally there will be formations of the new life in all climes and countries, but the patterns, the norms will have been set by you for the Mother was here in her physical material body.

1.60 - Between Heaven and Earth, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  attention is that the Divine Personage may not touch the ground with
  his foot. This rule was observed by the supreme pontiff of the
  --
  preserve the life of the Divine Person and with it the life of his
  subjects and worshippers. Nowhere, it is thought, can his precious

1956-04-18 - Ishwara and Shakti, seeing both aspects - The Impersonal and the divine Person - Soul, the presence of the divine Person - Going to other worlds, exteriorisation, dreams - Telling stories to oneself, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  object:1956-04-18 - Ishwara and Shakti, seeing both aspects - The Impersonal and the Divine Person - Soul, the presence of the Divine Person - Going to other worlds, exteriorisation, dreams - Telling stories to oneself
  author class:The Mother
  --
  Sri Aurobindo says that when one succeeds in not separating them in ones consciousness, one can fully understand who the Lord of the Sacrifice is. Otherwise one leans to one side or the other and naturally what one does is in complete. He says very clearly, doesnt he? that if one leans to the side of the Master without laying stress on the Shakti or the Mother, one goes into the Impersonal and out of the creation, one returns into Nirvana. He says that this tendency towards the Impersonal may exist even in the yoga of works, in Karmayoga, and that impersonal force, impersonal action is always considered as the liberating aspect which frees you from the narrowness of the person. And that is why there is nothing surprising in the overwhelming strength of this experience. Till today this is what has always been considered as yoga: to abandon the personal and enter into the consciousness of the impersonal. Sri Aurobindo speaks of it as an overwhelming experience, for it gives you the impression of liberation from all the egos limitations. And later, he describes the union: insistence on the personal side and union with the Divine Person; then the world is no longer an illusion nor something transient which will disappear after a time, but the constant and dynamic expression of the eternal divine Person.
  That is the other side.
  --
  This is the presence of the Divine Person.
  This fine flower of the cosmic Energy carries in it

2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   the Divine Personality and its Transcendence.
   Existence of two Natures par and apar.

21.03 - The Double Ladder, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Now from where did this speck of light or consciousness come? Indeed, from where did come the dead dust-particle itself? The rishis declare that the origin of things, of the whole creation is Sat, Being, pure Being, absolute Existence. It is absolute unity, indivisibility, immobility. It has two other fundamental qualities, Chit or Consciousness and Ananda or Delight, but fused into the Being and one with it. However, in this Being there occurred a movement, a stirring, which meant a division in the indivisibility. This urge to division sent the Being rushing head forward, as it were, right down into its opposite, the dead material being, inconscient matter where it pulverised itself into infinite infinitesimal particles, the two standing as though at opposite poles. But the original division - apart from its first downward rectilinear dash so to say - had another chequered career. It was also a gradual movement of fission, or a process of genealogical multiplication as it were. Division meant subdivision leading to further subdivisions, stretching ad infinitumdownwards, towards regions more and more impure, imperfect, narrow and dense, of lesser and lesser values till we reach the bedrock of them all, the earth. I may give here a picture or illustration of what the process of division and subdivision was like. In the first original gesture the One Supreme Being divided into a double Existence - Ishwara and Ishwari. They further subdivided themselves, that is to say, sent down - In the gradation of consciousness - parts and portions, personalities and emanations of themselves in diminishing values. In the present cycle of terrestrial evolution, Sri Aurobindo says, four are the powers of the supreme Ishwari that have come forward to guide and effectuate the destiny of the hour. They are the supreme effective Powers, they are from - what is called - the Supramental Consciousness. But they have sent down into the still lower regions nearer to the human consciousness, more easily available to it, other forms and figures of the Divine Personality. They are chiefly the gods of the Overmind who are interested in the human destiny and some of them appear as presiding deities or Ishta-devata and establish individual relations with men.
   Now this process of devolution has gone on; from the supreme Consciousness, it has entered into the Supramental, then into the Overmental and then into the mental regions, and peopled all of them with gods and divinities. In the lower regions - lower, that is to say, denser, obscurer, and more ignorant forms of consciousness - they have become smaller gods, dwarf gods. Perhaps to these also the Vedic Rishis offered their namasand stoma,their obeisance as blakhilyagods. The gods have come down farther still and proliferated liberally in the earth's atmosphere. The gods and goddesses of the woodland, of rivers and springs, of mounts and hills, form a whole world of mythology - they are not mere creations of fancy or abstract imagination. The totems of the primitive people continue the same story of proliferation into still darker and denser regions of being and consciousness that may rather be called non-being and unconsciousness. And even, I may say if I am allowed to, the world of rocks and stones is not excluded: they too in their solid material dead body enshrine something of the god in devolution.

2.11 - The Modes of the Self, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The distinction between the Personal and the Impersonal is substantially the same as the Indian distinction, but the associations of the English words carry within them a certain limitation which is foreign to Indian thought. The personal God of the European religions is a Person in the human sense of the word, limited by His qualities though otherwise possessed of omnipotence and omniscience; it answers to the Indian special conceptions of Shiva or Vishnu or Brahma or of the Divine Mother of all, Durga or Kali. Each religion really erects a different personal Deity according to its own heart and thought to adore and serve. The fierce and inexorable God of Calvin is a different being from the sweet and loving God of St. Francis, as the gracious Vishnu is different from the terrible though always loving and beneficent Kali who has pity even in her slaying and saves by her destructions. Shiva, the God of ascetic renunciation who destroys all things seems to be a different being from Vishnu and Brahma, who act by grace, love, preservation of the creature or for life and creation. It is obvious that such conceptions can be only in a very partial and relative sense true descriptions of the infinite and omnipresent Creator and Ruler of the universe. Nor does Indian religious thought affirm them as adequate descriptions. The Personal God is not limited by His qualities. He is Ananta-guna, capable of infinite qualities and beyond them and lord of them to use them as He will, and He manifests Himself in various names and forms of His infinite godhead to satisfy the desire and need of the individual soul according to its own nature and personality. It is for this reason that the normal European mind finds it so difficult to understand Indian religion as distinct from Vedantic or Sankhya philosophy, because it cannot easily conceive of a personal God with infinite qualities, a personal God who is not a Person, but the sole real Person and the source of all personality. Yet that is the only valid and complete truth of the Divine Personality.
  The place of the Divine Personality in our synthesis will best be considered when we come to speak of the Yoga of devotion; it is enough here to indicate that it has its place and keeps it in the integral Yoga even when liberation has been attained. There are practically three grades of the approach to the personal Deity; the first in which He is conceived with a particular form or particular qualities as the name and form of the Godhead which our nature and personality prefers365; a second in which He is the one real Person, the All-Personality, the Ananta-guna; a third in which we get back to the ultimate source of all idea and fact of personality in that which the Upanishad indicates by the single word Lie without fixing any attributes. It is there that our realisations of the personal and the impersonal Divine meet and become one in the utter Godhead. For the impersonal Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a mere state or power and degree of being any more than we ourselves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the annullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible state of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.
  When in That we live and have our being, we can possess it in both its modes, the Impersonal in a supreme state of being and consciousness, in an infinite impersonality of self-possessing power and bliss, the Personal by the divine nature acting through the individual soul-form and by the relation between that and its transcendent and universal Self. We may keep even our relation with the personal Deity in His forms and names; if, for instance, our work is predominantly a work of Love it is as the Lord of Love that we can seek to serve and express Him, but we shall have at the same time an integral realisation of Him in all His names and forms and qualities and not mistake the front of Him which is prominent in our attitude to the world for all the infinite Godhead.

27.01 - The Golden Harvest, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Radha is the personification of the supreme global and integral identification of the Divine with the human, or rather the transfusion of the Divine Person into the substance of the human person. Radha says, every drop of blood, every particle of flesh in her body cries out for every drop of blood, every particle of flesh of Krishna's body. Radha has made, as it were, a fossil transmutation of her body replacing it bit by bit by Krishna's body. She feels she is none other than Krishna, even physically himself. It is an utter unity and identity - not merely in the Vedantic way, up there in Atman, but down here also: it is an infusion or immixture in Nature also. It is a kind of coalescence by fusion as of the sub-atomic particles (- the matrix, by the way, of the supreme incalculable energy). Because of this supreme union and identification, even down to the material body, Radha feels that her body is no longer her own but Krishna's and therefore utterly sacred. She cries out as the Vaishnava poet says: "O sister, when this body dies, do not burn it or throw it into the river, but keep it suspended on a branch of the tamaltree. Tamal has a dark hue, my Krishna is also of dark hue. I love Tamal because I love Krishna."
   The earth, the body that has once received the touch of the earth-made body of the Divine never loses the virtue of that contact. That contact remains imbedded in the substance of the mortal human body: it abides there as a secret aroma, as the fragrance of a flower hidden in its pollens. So long as the flower lasts, the perfume' will last - even after, even when it has withered.

3.05 - The Divine Personality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  object:3.05 - the Divine Personality
  class:chapter
  --
  One question rises immediately in a synthetic Yoga which must not only comprise but unify knowledge and devotion, the difficult and troubling question of the Divine Personality. All the trend of modern thought has been towards the belittling of personality; it has seen behind the complex facts of existence only a great impersonal force, an obscure becoming, and that too works itself out through impersonal forces and impersonal laws, while personality presents itself only as a subsequent, subordinate, partial, transient phenomenon upon the face of this impersonal movement. Granting even to this Force a consciousness, that seems to be impersonal, indeterminate, void in essence of all but abstract qualities or energies; for everything else is only a result, a minor phenomenon. Ancient Indian thought starting from quite the other end of the scale arrived on most of its lines at the same generalisation. It conceived of an impersonal existence as the original and eternal truth; personality is only an illusion or at best a phenomenon of the mind.
  On the other hand, the way of devotion is impossible if the personality of the Divine cannot be taken as a reality, a real reality and not a hypostasis of the illusion. There can be no love without a lover and beloved. If our personality is an illusion and the Personality to whom our adoration rises only a primary aspect of the illusion, and if we believe that, then love and adoration must at once be killed, or can only survive in the illogical passion of the heart denying by its strong beats of life the clear and dry truths of the reason. To love and adore a shadow of our minds or a bright cosmic phenomenon which vanishes from the eye of Truth, may be possible, but the way of salvation cannot be built upon a foundation of wilful self-deception. The bhakta indeed does not allow these doubts of the intellect to come in his way; he has the divinations of his heart, and these are to him sufficient. But the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has to know the eternal and ultimate Truth and not to persist to the end in the delight of a Shadow. If the impersonal is the sole enduring truth, then a firm synthesis is impossible. He can at most take the Divine Personality as a symbol, a powerful and effective fiction, but he will have in the end to overpass it and to abandon devotion for the sole pursuit of the ultimate knowledge. He will have to empty being of all its symbols, values, contents in order to arrive at the featureless Reality.
  We have said, however, that personality and impersonality, as our minds understand them, are only aspects of the Divine and both are contained in his being; they are one thing which we see from two opposite sides and into which we enter by two gates. We have to see this more clearly in order to rid ourselves of any doubts with which the intellect may seek to afflict us as we follow the impulse of devotion and the intuition of love or to pursue us into the joy of the divine union. They fall away indeed from that joy, but if we are too heavily weighted with the philosophical mind, they may follow us almost up to its threshold. It is well therefore to discharge ourselves of them as early as may be by perceiving the limits of the intellect, the rational philosophic mind, in its peculiar way of approaching the truth and the limits even of the spiritual experience which sets out from the approach through the intellect, to see that it need not be the whole integrality of the highest and widest spiritual experience. Spiritual intuition is always a more luminous guide than the discriminating reason, and spiritual intuition addresses itself to us not only through the reason, but through the rest of our being as well, through the heart and the life also. The integral knowledge will then be that which takes account of all and unifies their diverse truths. The intellect itself will be more deeply satisfied if it does not confine itself to its own data, but accepts truth of the heart and the life also and gives to them their absolute spiritual value.
  --
  The intelligence can also follow this trend, but it ceases then to be the pure intellect; it calls in its power of imagination to its aid, it becomes the image-maker, the creator of symbols and values, a spiritual artist and poet. Therefore the severest intellectual philosophy admits the Saguna, the Divine Person, only as the supreme cosmic symbol; go beyond it to reality and you will arrive, it says, at last to the Nirguna, the pure Impersonal. The rival philosophy asserts the superiority of the Saguna; that which is impersonal is, it will perhaps say, only the material, the stuff of his spiritual nature out of which he manifests the powers of his being, consciousness and bliss, all that expresses him; the impersonal is the apparent negative out of which he looses the temporal variations of his eternal positive of personality. There are evidently here two instincts, or, if we hesitate to apply that word to the intellect, two innate powers of our being which are dealing each in its own manner with the same Reality.
  Both the ideas of the intellect, its discriminations, and the aspirations of the heart and life, their approximations, have behind them realities at which they are the means of arriving. Both are justified by spiritual experience; both arrive at the divine absolute of that which they are seeking. But still each tends, if too exclusively indulged, to be hampered by the limitations of its innate quality and its characteristic means. We see that in our earthly living, where the heart and life followed exclusively failed to lead to any luminous issue, while an exclusive intellectuality becomes either remote, abstract and impotent or a sterile critic or dry mechanist. Their sufficient harmony and just reconciliation is one of the great problems of our psychology and our action.
  --
  We have to look at the Divine Personality from this standpoint. When we speak of personality, we mean by it at first something limited, external and separative, and our idea of a personal God assumes the same imperfect character. Our personality is to us at first a separate creature, a limited mind, body, character which we conceive of as the person we are, a fixed quantity; for although in reality it is always changing, yet there is a sufficient element of stability to give a kind of practical justification to this notion of fixedness. We conceive of God as such a person, only without body, a separate person different from all others with a mind and character limited by certain qualities. At first in our primitive conceptions this deity is a thing of much inconstancy, freak and caprice, an enlarged edition of our human character; but afterwards we conceive of the divine nature of personality as a quite fixed quantity and we attribute to it those qualities alone which we regard as divine and ideal, while all the others are eliminated. This limitation compels us to account for all the rest by attri buting them to a Devil, or by lending to man an original creative capacity for all that we consider evil, or else, when we perceive that this will not quite do, by erecting a power which we call Nature and attri buting to that all the lower quality and mass of action for which we do not wish to make the Divine responsible. At a higher pitch the attri bution of mind and character to God becomes less anthropomorphic and we regard him as an infinite Spirit, but still a separate person, a spirit with certain fixed divine qualities as his attri butes. So are conceived the ideas of the Divine Personality, the personal God which vary so much in various religions.
  All this may seem at first sight to be an original anthropomorphism terminating in an intellectual notion of the Deity which is very much at variance with the actualities of the world as we see it. It is not surprising that the philosophical and sceptical mind should have found little difficulty in destroying it all intellectually, whether in the direction of the denial of a personal God and the assertion of an impersonal Force or Becoming or in that of an impersonal Being or an ineffable denial of existence with all the rest as only symbols of Maya or phenomenal truths of the Time-consciousness. But these are only the personifications of monotheism. Polytheistic religions, less exalted perhaps, but wider and more sensitive in their response to cosmic life, have felt that all in the cosmos has a divine origin; therefore they conceived of the existence of many divine personalities with a vague sense of an indefinable Divine behind, whose relations with the personal gods were not very clearly conceived. And in their more exoteric forms these gods were crudely anthropomorphic; but where the inner sense of spiritual things became clearer, the various godheads assumed the appearance of personalities of the one Divine,--that is the declared point of view of the ancient Veda. This Divine might be a supreme Being who manifests himself in various divine personalities or an impersonal existence which meets the human mind in these forms; or both views might be held simultaneously without any intellectual attempt to reconcile them, since both were felt to be true to spiritual experience.
  If we subject these notions of the Divine Personality to the discrimination of the intellect, we shall be inclined to reduce them, according to our bent, to fictions of the imagination or to psychological symbols, in any case, the response of our sensitive personality to something which is not this at all, but is purely impersonal. We may say that That is in reality the very opposite of our humanity and our personality and therefore in order to enter into relations with it we are impelled to set up these human fictions and these personal symbols so as to make it nearer to us. But we have to judge by spiritual experience, and in a total spiritual experience we shall find that these things are not fictions and symbols, but truths of divine being in their essence, however imperfect may have been our representations of them. Even our first idea of our own personality is not an absolute error, but only an incomplete and superficial view beset by many mental errors. Greater self-knowledge shows us that we are not fundamentally the particular formulation of form, powers, properties, qualities with a conscious I identifying itself with them, which we at first appear to be. That is only a temporary fact, though still a fact, of our partial being on the surface of our active consciousness. We find within an infinite being with the potentiality of all qualities, of infinite quality, ananta-guna, which can be combined in any number of possible ways, and each combination is a revelation of our being. For all this personality is the self-manifestation of a Person, that is to say of a being who is conscious of his manifestation.
  But we see too that this being does not seem to be composed even of infinite quality, but has a status of his complex reality in which he seems to stand back from it and to become an indefinable conscious existence, anirdesyam. Even consciousness seems to be drawn back and leave merely a timeless pure existence. And again even this pure self of our being seems at a certain pitch to deny its own reality, or to be a projection from a self-less Footnote:{anatmyam anilayanam. Taittiriya Upanishad.} baseless unknowable, which we may conceive of either as a nameless somewhat, or as a Nihil. It is when we would fix upon this exclusively and forget all that it has withdrawn into itself that we speak of pure impersonality or the void Nihil as the highest truth. But a more integral vision shows us that it is the Person and the personality and all that it had manifested which has thus cast itself upward into its own unexpressed absolute. And if we carry up our heart as well as our reasoning mind to the Highest, we shall find that we can reach it through the absolute Person as well as through an absolute impersonality. But all this self-knowledge is only the type within ourselves of the corresponding truth of the Divine in his universality. There too we meet him in various forms of divine personality; in formulations of quality which variously express him to us in his nature; in infinite quality, the Ananta-guna; in the Divine Person who expresses himself through infinite quality; in absolute impersonality, an absolute existence or an absolute non-existence, which is yet all the time the unexpressed Absolute of this divine Person, this conscious Being who manifests himself through us and through the universe.
  Even on the cosmic plane we are constantly approaching the Divine on either of these sides. We may think, feel and say that God is Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Power, Love, Delight, Beauty; we may see him as a universal force or as a universal consciousness. But this is only the abstract way of experience. As we ourselves are not merely a number of qualities or powers or a psychological quantity, but a being, a person who so expresses his nature, so is the Divine a Person, a conscious Being who thus expresses his nature to us. And we can adore him through different forms of this nature, a God of righteousness, a God of love and mercy, a God of peace and purity; but it is evident that there are other things in the divine nature which we have put outside the form of personality in which we are thus worshipping him. The courage of an unflinching spiritual vision and experience can meet him also in more severe or in terrible forms. None of these are all the Divinity; yet these forms of his personality are real truths of himself in which he meets us and seems to deal with us, as if the rest had been put away behind him. He is each separately and all altogether.
  He is Vishnu, Krishna, Kali; he reveals himself to us in humanity as the Christ personality or the Buddha personality. When we look beyond our first exclusively concentrated vision, we see behind Vishnu all the personality of Shiva and behind Shiva all the personality of Vishnu. He is the Ananta-guna, infinite quality and the infinite divine Personality which manifests itself through it. Again he seems to withdraw into a pure spiritual impersonality or beyond all idea even of impersonal Self and to justify a spiritualised atheism or agnosticism; he becomes to the mind of man an indefinable, anirdesyam. But out of this unknowable the conscious Being, the Divine Person, who has manifested himself here, still speaks, ''This too is I; even here beyond the view of mind, I am He, the Purushottama.''
  For beyond the divisions and contradictions of the intellect there is another light and there the vision of a truth reveals itself which we may thus try to express to ourselves intellectually. There all is one truth of all these truths; for there each is present and justified in all the rest. In that light our spiritual experience becomes united and integralised; no least hair's breadth of real division is left, no shade of superiority and inferiority remains between the seeking of the Impersonal and the adoration of the Divine Personality, between the way of knowledge and the way of devotion.
  

3.07 - The Ananda Brahman, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Lover. Its impersonality is the blissful greatness of the Brahman, but from that can look out upon us the sweetness and intimate control of the Divine Personality. For Ananda is the presence of the Self and Master of our being and the stream of its outflowing can be the pure joy of his Lila.
  

3.08 - The Mystery of Love, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   alone, may discover in it things he had not dreamed of; the being of the Divine has surprises for us which confound the ideas of the limiting intellect. But ordinarily the way of devotion begins from the other end; it starts from and it rises and widens to its issue by adoration of the Divine Personality. The Divine is a Being and not an abstract existence or a status of pure timeless infinity; the original and universal existence is He, but that existence is inseparable from consciousness and bliss of being, and an existence conscious of its own being and its own bliss is what we may well call a divine infinite Person, - Purusha. Moreover all consciousness implies power, Shakti; where there is infinite consciousness of being, there is infinite power of being, and by that power all exists in the universe. All beings exist by this
  Being; all things are the faces of God; all thought and action and feeling and love proceed from him and return to him, all their results have him for source and support and secret goal.

3.2.10 - Christianity and Theosophy, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The personality of this single life in man is a formation in the Ignorance, therefore a fall; it cannot be the summit of the being. We do not admit that it is the summit of the natural creation either, but say there are higher summits to which we have to climb and reveal their powers in earthly nature. The natural creation is an evolution of the hidden Divine Consciousness in Nature which is limited and disguised at first by the Ignorance. It has still to climb out of the Ignorance therefore to get beyond the human person into the Divine Person. It is in this spiritual evolution that the Plan Divine (dessein de Dieu) manifests its central and significant line and calls all creation to the crowning Grace.
  You will see therefore that the resemblance of the transformation here to our ideal is only on the surface, in the words, but not in the content of the words which is much narrower and of another order. So far as there is agreement and coincidence, it is because there is contained in them what is common (a certain conversion of the consciousness) to all spiritual disciplines; for all, in East or in West, have a common core of experienceit is in their developments, range, turn to this or that aspect or else their will towards the totality of the Truth that they differ.

3.6.01 - Heraclitus, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Equally striking is his condemnation of idol-worship, one of the earliest in human history,-"he who prays to an image is chattering to a stone wall." The intolerant violence of this protestant rationalism and positivism makes Heraclitus again a precursor of a whole movement of the human mind. It is not indeed a religious protest such as that of Mahomed against the naturalistic, Pagan and idolatrous polytheism of the Arabs or of the Protestants against the aesthetic and emotional saint-worship of the Catholic Church, its Mariolatry and use of images and elaborate ritual; its motive is philosophic, rational, psychological. Heraclitus was not indeed a pure rationalist He believes in the Gods, but as psychological presences, cosmic powers, and he is too impatient of the grossness of the physical image, its hold on the senses, its obscuration of the psychological significance of the godheads to see that it is not to the stone, but to the Divine Person figured in the stone that the prayer is offered. It is noticeable that in his conception of the gods he is kin to the old Vedic seers, though not at all a religious mystic in his temperament. The Vedic religion seems to have excluded physical images and it was the protestant movements of Jainism and Buddhism which either introduced or at least popularised and made general the worship of images in India. Here too Heraclitus prepares the way for the destruction of the old religion, the reign of pure philosophy and reason and the void which was filled up by Christianity; for man cannot live by reason alone. When it was too late, some attempt was made to re-spiritualise the old religion, and there was the remarkable effort of Julian and Libanius to set up a regenerated Paganism against triumphant Christianity; but the attempt was too unsubstantial, too purely philosophic, empty of the dynamic power of the religious spirit. Europe had killed its old creeds beyond revival and had to turn for its religion to Asia.
  Thus, for the general life of man Heraclitus has nothing to give us beyond his hint of an aristocratic principle in society and politics,-and we may note that this aristocratic bent was very strong in almost all the subsequent Greek philosophers. In religion his influence tended to the destruction of the old creed without effectively putting anything more profound in its place; though not himself a pure rationalist, he prepared the way for philosophic rationalism. But even without religion philosophy by itself can give us at least some light on the spiritual destiny of man, some hope of the infinite, some ideal perfection after which we can strive. Plato who was influenced by Heraclitus, tried to do this for us; his thought sought after God, tried to seize the ideal, had its hope of a perfect human society. We know how the Neo-platonists developed his ideas under the influence of the East and how they affected Christianity. The Stoics, still more directly the intellectual descendants of Heraclitus, arrived at very remarkable and fruitful ideas of human possibility and a powerful psychological discipline,-as we should say in India, a Yoga,-by which they hoped to realise their ideal. But what has Heraclitus himself to give us? Nothing directly; we have to gather for ourselves whatever we can from his first principles and his cryptic sentences.

r1912 01 16, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Lipi. God. Int[erpretation]. the Divine Personality will manifest not only behind the Vani, but in all the circumstances of the life and Yoga.
   Lipi. Tonight .. delight .. safety. The Ananda and the confirmation of the conditions of outward action of the Yoga are to be among todays siddhis.

r1914 04 28, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Krishnadarshana in the separate bhuta is establishing itself persistently in place of the old forms of the Brahmadrishti, but it is still interrupted by the denial of vision of the Divine Personality.
   Lipis

r1914 06 29, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   6) The full joyous sensibility to the knowledge of the Divine Personality. (antard.)
   7) before the light the fulfilment of the tapas independent of the obstacle of time

Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  Sannyasa. Till now he was worshipping the Deity as the Divine Personality endowed with attributes,
  From Totapuri he learnt the method of contemplating on Him in His attri buteless and impersonal aspect,
  --
  remains content with realising the Divine Person alone-my Divine Mother, or any of Her infinite forms of
  glory, such as the Divine Incarnations like Sri Krishna and Chaitanya Deva, the visible revelations of God.

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