the Divine Play

0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
One day, in January 1884, the Master was going toward the pine-grove when he went into a trance. He was alone. There was no one to support him or guide his footsteps. He fell to the ground and dislocated a bone in his left arm. This accident had a significant influence on his mind, the natural inclination of which was to soar above the consciousness of the body. The acute pain in the arm forced his mind to dwell on the body and on the world outside. But he saw even in this a divine purpose; for, with his mind compelled to dwell on the physical plane, he realized more than ever that he was an instrument in the hand of the Divine Mother, who had a mission to fulfil through his human body and mind. He also distinctly found that in the phenomenal world God manifests Himself, in an inscrutable way, through diverse human beings, both good and evil. Thus he would speak of God in the guise of the wicked, God in the guise of the pious. God in the guise of the hypocrite, God in the guise of the lewd. He began to take a special delight in watching the Divine Play in the relative world. Sometimes the sweet human relationship with God would appear to him more appealing than the all-effacing Knowledge of Brahman. Many a time he would pray: "Mother, don't make me unconscious through the Knowledge of Brahman. Don't give me Brahmajnana, Mother. Am I not Your child, and naturally timid? I must have my Mother. A million salutations to the Knowledge of Brahman! Give it to those who want it." Again he prayed: "O Mother let me remain in contact with men! Don't make me a dried-up ascetic. I want to enjoy Your sport in the world." He was able to taste this very rich divine experience and enjoy the love of God and the company of His devotees because his mind, on account of the injury to his arm, was forced to come down to the consciousness of the body. Again, he would make fun of people who proclaimed him as a Divine Incarnation, by pointing to his broken arm. He would say, "Have you ever heard of God breaking His arm?" It took the arm about five months to heal.
--- BEGINNING OF HIS ILLNESS

0 1961-07-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I quite understand. But when one speaks of the Lila, the Divine Play, it implies that He in some way remains in the background and doesnt really get into the act, as they say that Hes no really part of the game, but simply watches.
Yes, yes He is! He is totally involved in it. He Himself is the Play.

0 1963-12-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Lila: the Divine Play.
The egoistic illusion.

0 1966-05-25, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And everything remains just as concrete and just as realit doesnt become misty. Its just as concrete, just as real, but it becomes divine, because because it IS the Divine. Its the Divine Playing.
There, mon petit.

0 1967-12-06, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As a result, my impression was that unless the whole universe becomes THAT, well whats the use? All, all that isnt Consciousness, the supreme consciousness, I mean, yes, supreme and supremely divine, all the rest Its the first time Ive felt so intensely the uselessness of all outward activities their uselessness IN THEMSELVES, like a blossoming, because when there is the Divine Play, then the same things become lovely, it all becomes interesting, but in themselves, for themselves, they are NOTHING. Its the first time I have felt that so intensely. Because I felt it in the subtle world (in the material world its always mixed with all kinds of trouble and effort and difficulty, so its completely different), there, things are absolutely free of difficulties, completely harmonious, really, and it was NOTHING. You understand, when Sri Aurobindo was there, it was perfect, but when he withdrew tasteless.
And its the PHYSICAL consciousness that has those experiences at night: the body remains in trance, its the physical consciousness; it was the physical consciousness, but in a subtle physical freed from all difficultiesand it was no better. You know, it was like a reply to the ambition of people here on earth who want life to be pleasant, easy, without difficulties, without conflicts and clashes and diseases and they say, Oh, how charming all would be!Its not true: if THAT isnt there, empty.

1.08 - Attendants, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
I may as well narrate how I was made the recipient of a favour. Champaklal and I used to attend on Sri Aurobindo when he washed his face and mouth. Once in the course of doing it, he made a gesture of giving me something as I was holding the bowl for gargling. I immediately stretched out my left hand and he softly deposited something without any look or comment. I felt a sudden thrill and drew back into the light to see if it could be a tooth. Yes, it was indeed a whole side-tooth. I showed it to Champaklal who was busy doing some work. His eyes rolled in astonishment. Then he extracted from me the story of how I received the extraordinary present! Of course I handed it over to him for safe custody. Later several times he commented on my unusual luck! Or perhaps how he had missed it! Truly speaking, these things belonged to his domain, but the Divine sometimes oversteps our human rules and rights. Many such instances come to our notice but since they are more a question of inner perception, no rational proof can be adduced as to their truth. Only the person involved knows that his inner aspiration has found an answer. I will give an illustration. I have stated that when Sri Aurobindo resumed walking, instead of using crutches he leaned on Purani and Champaklal. After a few months Champaklal alone was retained. He stood on the left side while Sri Aurobindo used a stick on the right. Champaklal would of course never miss his chance as well as his duty. He would not be Champaklal if he did! Now, a desire was growing within me to hold, like him, Sri Aurobindo's arm on my shoulder, at least once. But being by nature a bit shy and fearing that my unsubstantial body would be too weak to bear the divine weight and substance, I stifled my desire before it raised its head. It so happened that one day the Mother came for Sri Aurobindo's walk long before the appointed time and Champaklal was not present; only I was there. What to do? To my excited surprise the Mother said, "You can give the support!" Very cautiously and almost palpitatingly I sat by his left side on the couch and put my right hand around his waist; he put his left arm over my shoulder and stood up. We had hardly taken a round or two when Champaklal arrived running. I could guess what must have been his feeling at that momentous sight! Then I withdrew and he took his place and the Master must have felt an immense relief! But a minute's soft velvety touch is unforgettable. If such was my experience, I don't know what Purani and Champaklal, who had supported the Lord for months, must have felt! Somebody rightly appreciated the value of the touch when he said that Champaklal's shoulders should be wrapped in gold! Each one of us had his chance, as we called it; whatever we had inwardly aspired for had its proper response and he who received it could alone testify to the truth of the phenomenon, ye yatha mam prapadyante.[1] This is the Divine Play between the devotee and the Lord!
I shall quote another instance at the risk of being mocked at by the rationalists and being dubbed an apostate, for was I not once a materialist myself? As I have said, Sri Aurobindo used to take a peppermint pastille while he was dictating Savitri and Champaklal's role was to offer it, when wanted. He would wait and wait even if not called at the due hour, he would sometimes hurry his meal so as not to miss the occasion. I thought, "Why should I not get one chance, at least?" But my friend would hear the call even if it was whispered and would run from wherever he might be in the room. Here again, Sri Aurobindo consciously or unconsciously responded to my silent wish by asking one day for the pastille much earlier than the usual time, when Champaklal was not present. He came up and waited for the call. I put on a very innocent face though now and again a mischievous smile tried to betray it. Then at last, very much piqued, Champaklal asked me, "What's the matter? He is not asking for the pastille?" I could not help breaking into laughter. He understood but enquired exactly when he had asked, who had given it, etc., etc. All these incidents were our little pranks played among ourselves and between us and the Master. I shall not protest if anyone calls me too credulous and finds these as nothing but sentimental outpourings of bhaktas. These instances do illustrate why I call Champaklal a real bhakta and have looked upon his service as having the true spirit. No wonder that the Lord, during his last hours, amply recompensed him by repeatedly embracing him, to our great bewildered delight.

1.11 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M: "You once said that one comes down to the plane of the Lila in order to enjoy the Divine Play."
MASTER; "No, not exactly that. The Lila is real too.

1.17 - M. AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"All that I have just said belongs to the realm of reasoning. Brahman alone is real and the world illusory-that is reasoning. And everything but Brahman is like a dream. But this is an extremely difficult path. To one who follows it even the Divine Play in the world becomes like a dream and appears unreal; his 'I' also vanishes. The followers of this path do not accept the Divine Incarnation. It is a very difficult path. The lovers of God should not hear much of such reasoning.
"That is why God incarnates Himself as man and teaches people the path of devotion.

1.3.04 - Peace, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the Vaishnava feeling that the Vedantic peace is not enough, the love and joy of the Divine is more precious. But unless the two things go together, the love and joy felt is perhaps intense, but impermanent, and it is also true that it gets easily mixed, misdirected or turns to something that is not the true thing at all. Peace and purity must be got as the foundation of the consciousness, otherwise there is no firm standing ground for the Divine Play.
Active experience of the joy, peace, love, etc. when the direct contact is there; but even when it is not there, a quiet mind, heart and vital waiting and aspiring for the contact and the

1960 04 06, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Krishna is the immanent Divine, the Divine Presence in everyone and in all things. He is also, sovereignly, the aspect of Delight and Love of the Supreme; he is the smiling tenderness and the playful gaiety; he is at once the player, the play and all his playmates. And as both the game and its results are wholly known, conceived, willed, organised and played consciously in their entirety, there can be room for nothing but the delight of the play. Thus to see Krishna means to find the inner Godhead, to play with Krishna means to be identified with the inner Godhead and to share in his consciousness. When you achieve this state, you enter immediately into the bliss of the Divine Play; and the more complete the identification, the more perfect the state.
But if some corner of the consciousness keeps the ordinary perception, the ordinary understanding, the ordinary sensation, then you see the suffering of others, you find the play that causes so much suffering very cruel and you conclude that the God who takes pleasure in such a play must be a terrible Torturer; but on the other hand, when you have had the experience of identification with the Divine, you cannot forget the immense, the wonderful love which he puts into his play, and you understand that it is the limitation of our vision that makes us judge in this way, and that far from being a voluntary Torturer, he is the great beneficent love that guides the world and men, by the quickest routes, in their progressive march towards perfection, a perfection which, moreover, is always relative and is always being surpassed.

1961 05 22?, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I understand, but they speak of the Lila, the Divine Play; so He is standing back, as it were. He is not really entirely involved, not really absolutely in the play.
Yes, yes, He is! He is totally in it. He himself is the Play.

2.03 - The Eternal and the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In that power lies the justification of individual existence; the individual and the universal unfolding in themselves the divine light, power, joy of transcendent Sachchidananda always manifest above them, always secret behind their surface appearances, this is the hidden intention, the ultimate significance of the Divine Play, the Lila. But it is in themselves, in their transformation but also their persistence and perfect relations, not in their selfannihilation that that must be unfolded. Otherwise there would be no reason for their ever having existed; the possibility of the Divine's unfolding in the individual is the secret of the enigma; his presence there and this intention of self-unfolding are the key to the world of Knowledge-Ignorance.

2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An air from a consciousness greater than mind has already been felt by many of those who have climbed to the human summits and to the glow that has come from above they have given many names, bodhi, intuition, gnosis. But these things are only the faint edge of that greater light thrust into the pallid twilight that we call mind. Only when the lid between mind and supermind has been utterly rent apart and the full power of the sun of a divine Gnosis can pour down - not trickling through mind as in diminished and deflected beams - and transform the whole mind and life and body of the human creature, can man's labour finish. Then only shall begin the Divine Play and the free outpouring of the liberated self-creating Spirit.
To rise into this greater consciousness above our mental level of humanity as man has risen above the level of the life-mind of the beast, to grow from mind into supermind, from twilight into light, from the mind's half-consciousness into what is now to us superconscient, from a narrow imprisoned ego into the transcendent and universalised individual, from a struggling half effective into a throned and master power, from little transient joys and sorrows into an unalloyed divine delight, this is the goal of our journey, the secret of our struggle.

2.19 - Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the same movement, by the very awakening into the spirit, there is a dissolution of the cosmic ignorance; for we have the knowledge of ourselves as our timeless immutable self possessing itself in cosmos and beyond cosmos: this knowledge becomes the basis of the Divine Play in time, reconciles the one and the many, the eternal unity and the eternal multiplicity, reunites the soul with God and discovers the Divine in the universe. It is by this realisation that we can approach the Absolute as the source of all circumstances and relations, possess the world in ourselves in an utmost wideness and in a conscient dependence on its source, and by so taking it up raise it and realise through it the absolute values that converge into the Absolute. If our self-knowledge is thus made complete in all its essentials, our practical ignorance which in its extreme figures itself as wrongdoing, suffering, falsehood, error and is the cause of all life's confusions and discords, will yield its place to the right will of self-knowledge and its false or imperfect values recede before the divine values of the true Consciousness-Force and Ananda.
For right consciousness, right action and right being, not in the imperfect human sense of our petty moralities but in the large and luminous movement of a divine living, the conditions are union with God, unity with all beings, a life governed and formed from within outwards in which the source of all thought, will and action shall be the Spirit working through the truth and the divine law which are not built and constructed by the mind of Ignorance but are self-existent and spontaneous in their selffulfilment, not so much a law as the truth acting in its own consciousness and in a free luminous plastic automatic process of its knowledge.

32.10 - A Letter, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
All Nature is anxious to give birth to the Supermind, and we too, all human beings, have been making the same effort, although unconsciously. Behind your power and mine, behind your effort and mine there resides an enormous power of the whole universe, and that power is aspiring for the divine manifestation in humanity, for the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth .and the Divine Play of the Golden Age. When that universal Power reveals itself to our sight, and when we are able to recognise it and consciously collaborate with it, there can be nothing beyond our reach.
***

3.6.01 - Heraclitus, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Heraclitus might have seen it if he had carried his vision a little farther. Force by itself can only produce a balance of forces, the strife that is justice; in that strife there takes place a constant exchange and, once this need of exchange is seen, there arises the possibility of modifying and replacing war by reason as the determinant principle of the exchange. This is the second effort of man, of which Heraclitus did not clearly see the possibility. From exchange we can rise to the highest possible idea of interchange, a mutual dependency of self-giving as the hidden secret of life; from that can grow the power of Love replacing strife and exceeding the cold balance of reason. There is the gate of the divine ecstasy. Heraclitus could not see it, and yet his one saying about the kingdom of the child touches, almost reaches the heart of the secret. For this kingdom is evidently spiritual, it is the crown, the mastery to which the perfected man arrives; and the perfect man is a divine child! He is the soul which awakens to the Divine Play, accepts it without fear or reserve, gives itself up in a spiritual purity to the Divine, allows the careful and troubled force of man to be freed from care and grief and become the joyous play of the divine Will, his relative and stumbling reason to be replaced by that divine knowledge which to the Greek, the rational man, is foolishness, and the laborious pleasure-seeking of the bound mentality to lose itself in the spontaneity of the divine Ananda; "for of such is the kingdom of heaven." The Paramhansa, the liberated man, is in his soul bālavat, even as if a child.
The first laws of working of the Gods. ↩

3.8.1.02 - Arya - Its Significance, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Aryan perfected is the Arhat. There is a transcendent Consciousness which surpasses the universe and of which all these worlds are only a side-issue and a by-play. To that consciousness he aspires and attains. There is a Consciousness which, being transcendent, is yet the universe and all that the universe contains. Into that consciousness he enlarges his limited ego; he becomes one with all beings and all inanimate objects in a single self-awareness, love, delight, all-embracing energy. There is a consciousness which, being both transcendental and universal, yet accepts the apparent limitations of individuality for work, for various standpoints of knowledge, for the play of the Lord with His creations; for the ego is there that it may finally convert itself into a free centre of the divine work and the Divine Play. That consciousness too he has sufficient love, joy and knowledge to accept; he is puissant enough to effect that conversion. To embrace individuality after transcending it is the last and divine sacrifice. The perfect Arhat is he who is able to live simultaneously in all these three apparent states of existence, elevate the lower into the higher, receive the higher into the lower, so that he may represent perfectly in the symbols of the world that with which he is identified in all parts of his being,the triple and triune Brahman.
the word "rya" printed in Devanagari script on the cover of the review.

9.99 - Glossary, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
lila: the Divine Play; the Relative.The creation is often explained by the Vaishnavas as the lila of God, a conception that introduces elements of spontaneity and freedom into the universe. As a philosophical term, the Lila (the Relative) is the correlative of the Nitya (the Absolute).
lotus: Each of the six centres along the Sushumna is called a lotus, since they have a form like that of a lotus blossom. See Kundalini.

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