the Divine Work

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

0.01 - Letters from the Mother to Her Son, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
that work for the fulfilment of the Divine Work upon earth,
and those that are opposed to this fulfilment. The former have

0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but always inevitable workings. Certainly, this is no short cut or easy sadhana. It requires a colossal faith, an absolute courage and above all an unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid, - the attempt of the ego to enter into contact with the Divine, the wide, full and therefore laborious preparation of the whole lower Nature by the Divine Working to receive and become the higher Nature, and the eventual transformation. In fact, however, the divine
Strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for our weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It "makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills." The intellect becomes aware of a Law that beneficently insists and a succour that upholds; the heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet, in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the most easy and sure of all.

0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
to oppose the Divine Work of Truth.
Health is the outer expression of a deep harmony, one must be

01.01 - The One Thing Needful, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The realisation of the Divine is the one thing needful and the rest is desirable only in so far as it helps or leads towards that or when it is realised, extends and manifests the realisation. Manifestation and organisation of the whole life for the Divine Work, - first, the sadhana personal and collective necessary for the realisation and a common life of God-realised men, secondly, for help to the world to move towards that, and to live in the Light - is the whole meaning and purpose of my Yoga. But the realisation is the first need and it is that round which all the rest moves, for apart from it all the rest would have no meaning.
Yoga is directed towards God, not towards man. If a divine supramental consciousness and power can be brought down and established in the material world, that obviously would mean an immense change for the earth including humanity and its life. But the effect on humanity would only be one result of the change; it cannot be the object of the sadhana. The object of the sadhana can only be to live in the divine consciousness and to manifest it in life.

01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The ultimate truth is that God is the sole doer and the best we can do is to let him do freely without let or hindrance. "He that through Grace may see Jhesu, how that He doth all and himself doth right nought but suffereth Jhesu work in him what him liketh, he is meek." And yet one does not arrive at that condition from the beginning or all at once. "The work is not of the hour nor of a day, but of many days and years." And for a long time one has to take up one's burden and work, co-operate with the Divine Working. In the process there is this double movement necessary for the full achievement. "Neither Grace only without full working of a soul that in it is nor working done without grace bringeth a soul to reforming but that one joined to that other." Mysticism is not all eccentricity and irrationality: on the contrary, sanity seems to be the very character of the higher mysticism. And it is this sanity, and even a happy sense of humour accompanying it, that makes the genuine mystic teacher say: "It is no mastery to me for to say it, but for to do it there is mastery." Amen.
Ascendimus ascensiones in corde et cantamus canticum graduum." Confessions of St. Augustine XIII. 9.

0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the example of a total consecration to the Divine Work and the
Series Ten - To a Young Captain
--
before they can be ready for the Divine Work, and that is why
they leave to undergo the test of ordinary life.

0 1958-12-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Yes, everything has changed since you now understand that your battle is not only a personal battle and that by winning it, it is a real service you are rendering to the Divine Work.
Happy New Year, my dear child! I am sure it will bring us a decisive victory.

0 1961-10-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Nor was it insignificant that fire, Agni, was the core of the Vedic mysteries: Agni, the inner flame, the soul within us (for who can deny that the soul is fire?), the innate aspiration drawing man towards the heights; Agni, the ardent will within us that sees, always and forever, and remembers; Agni, the priest of the sacrifice, the Divine Worker, the envoy between earth and heaven (Rig-veda III, 3.2) he is there in the middle of his house (I.70.2). The Fathers who have divine vision set him within as a child that is to be born (IX.83.3). He is the boy suppressed in the secret cavern (V.2.1). He is as if life and the breath of our existence, he is as if our eternal child (I.66.1). O Son of the body (III.4.2), O Fire, thou art the son of heaven by the body of the earth (III.25.1). Immortal in mortals (IV.2. 1), old and outworn he grows young again and again (II.4.5). When he is born he becomes one who voices the godhead: when as life who grows in the mother he has been fashioned in the mother he becomes a gallop of wind in his movement (III.29.11). O Fire, when thou art well borne by us thou becomest the supreme growth and expansion of our being, all glory and beauty are in thy desirable hue and thy perfect vision. O Vastness, thou art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way; thou art a multitude of riches spread out on every side (II.1.12). O Fire brilliant ocean of light in which is divine vision (III.22.2), the Flame with his hundred treasures O knower of all things born(I.59).
But the divine fire is not our exclusive privilegeAgni exists not only in man: He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there (I.70.2).
--
The secret lies in matter. Because Agni is imprisoned in matter and we ourselves are imprisoned there. It is said that Agni is without head or feet, that it conceals its two extremities: above, it disappears into the great heaven of the supraconscient (which the Rishis also called the great ocean), and below, it sinks into the formless ocean of the inconscient (which they also called the rock). We are truncated. But the Rishis were men of a solid realism, a true realism resting upon the Spirit; and since the summits of mind opened out upon a lacuna of lightecstatic, to be sure, but with no hold over the worldthey set upon the downward way.6 Thus begins the quest for the lost sun, the long pilgrimage of descent into the inconscient and the merciless fight against the dark forces, the thieves of the sun, the panis and vritras, pythons and giants, hidden in the dark lair with the whole cohort of usurpers: the dualizers, the confiners, the tearers, the COVERERS. But the Divine Worker, Agni, is helped by the gods, and in his quest he is led by the intuitive ray, Sarama, the heavenly hound with the subtle sense of smell who sets Agni on the track of the stolen herds (strange, shining herds). Now and again there comes the sudden glimmer of a fugitive dawn then all grows dim. One must advance step by step, digging, digging, fighting every inch of the way against the wolves whose savage fury increases the nearer one draws to their denAgni is a warrior. Agni grows through his difficulties, his flame burns more brilliantly with each blow from the Adversary; for, as the Rishis said, Night and Day both suckled the divine Child; they even said that Night and Day are the two sisters, Immortal, with a common lover [the sun] common they, though different their forms (I.113.2,3). These alternations of night and brightness accelerate until Day breaks at last and the herds of Dawn7 surge upward awakening someone who was dead (I.113.8). The infinite rock of the inconscient is shattered, the seeker uncovers the Sun dwelling in the darkness (III.39.5), the divine consciousness in the heart of Matter. In the very depths of Matter, that is to say, in the body, on earth, the Rishis found themselves cast up into Light that same Light which others sought on the heights, without their bodies and without the earth, in ecstasy. And this is what the Rishis would call the Great Passage. Without abandoning the earth they found the vast dwelling place, that dwelling place of the gods, Swar, the original Sun-world that Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental World: Human beings [the Rishis emphasize that they are indeed men] slaying the Coverer have crossed beyond both earth and heaven [matter and mind] and made the wide world their dwelling place (I.36.8). They have entered the True, the Right, the Vast, Satyam, Ritam, Brihat, the unbroken light, the fearless light, where there is no longer suffering nor falsehood nor death: it is immortality, amritam.
***

0 1962-03-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some of them get converted. Their conversion means a great entity joining the Divine Work but that seldom happens.
Yes, but what about the minor gods? You often speak of a little Kali or a little Durga; are these beings beneficent?

0 1963-10-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But because of my inner work, I become increasingly aware of things, increasingly aware of the Care, the Solicitude and the hierarchical Organization of circumstances so that the most precious and useful thing for the Divine Work is favoredof course not conspicuously so, but inwardly. And yet, in the three domainsgovernment, money and healththings always reach a POINT, a point of such tension and complication that if you didnt have the inner certitude, they would always seem to point simply to the catastrophe, the fall. And its ALWAYS at that point that (gesture of abrupt reversal) everything turns aroundnot before, not one minute before.
Its not to give me faith I have it; its not to give me consciousness I have it; its for an outward reason. I cannot yet grasp why. Because inwardly, even if I were told that everything would be demolished in the most tragic manner, I would say, Very well. And in all sincerity, you know, nothing anywhere in me starts protesting or vibrating, nothing at all. I say, All right. But I see I do see that in that tension, a certain power is released, like a power intense enough to cure a tamas, to change a tamas.1

0 1964-01-29, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The extreme acuteness of your difficulties is due to the yoga having come down against the bed-rock of Inconscience which is the fundamental basis of all resistance in the individual and in the world to the victory of the Spirit and the Divine Work that is leading toward that victory. The difficulties themselves are general in the Ashram as well as in the outside world.
The description follows. You would think it was happening now:

0 1965-09-15b, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For those who are capable of it, the service to the Divine Work is infinitely more important than the service to the country.
I do not think I have said anything this morning that could contradict this undeniable fact.

0 1965-09-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For instance, India is free and her freedom was necessary if the Divine Work was to be done. The difficulties that surround her now and may increase for a time, especially with regard to the Pakistan imbroglio, were also things that had to come and to be cleared out. Here too there is sure to be a full clearance, though unfortunately, a considerable amount of human suffering in the process is inevitable. Afterwards the work for the Divine will become more possible and it may well be that the dream, if it is a dream, of leading the world towards the spiritual light, may even become a reality. So I am not disposed even now, in these dark conditions to consider my will to help the world as condemned to failure.
Sri Aurobindo

0 1966-09-07, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Mother laughs) You know, there are lots of people who put money in their walls (they hide it with curtains or papers). Theres a fortune, several crores3 of rupees: millions hidden away in walls! And then they worry themselves sick, they constantly fear a police raid; while if they gave it away, they would become quite respectable people! They wouldnt be scared anymore, they would have a peaceful life. I have the possibility of saying that they are anonymous gifts, as in temples; so thats a way for them to turn honest, it would be all to their advantage, but they are more attached to their money than to their life! I said several times (I know some people who have money hidden in their walls), I let it be known through intermediaries that they only had to put it in a suitcase and come and leave it at my door. And Ill say its an anonymous gift, thats all. And they will be freenot only free, but (smiling) with a blessing, because its for the Divine Work. No, they are prisoners, prisoners of their money.
And the rather interesting thing is that (without any exception so far) all those who had an opportunity to give me money and didnt want towho didnt want to because of their attachment to their moneylost it. It was taken from them, either by the government or a financial catastrophe or an industrial catastrophe, or simply stolenlost.

0 1966-09-21, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(This conversation came about following a personal question of Satprem's, who asked Mother if he should not refuse an amount of money offered to him by the French government: a war pension. Satprem's intention was to refuse that pension, not wanting to feel tied to any government and any country for any amount of money. Mother advised him to accept that money for the Divine Work.)
I had a revelation, in the sense that it was more on the order of a vision.

0 1967-05-06, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He even told me (I saw him), he even told me the vision that was at the origin of his cure. And it was really interesting. He said he saw it, as it were, almost with open eyes: everything was dark (it was in the night), the room was dark, he felt absolutely depressed, andit was a heart attackhad no more interest in anything, no more interest in life, and felt as if he was letting himself slip into death, just like that. Then, suddenly, he thought of me. Andhe says his eyes were open the whole room was dark, except for a sort of oval of light just in front of him. A quite dazzling oval of light, which remained. So he looked (he wasnt asleep), he looked to see what could be causing that light (he is sufficiently materialistic), but then, nothinghe realized there was nothing. Then he started watching that light, and he saw, rising from the bottom (he didnt know from where, couldnt see from where) like a flametwo small flamesof a very, very pale light, very bright. He found it interesting, and continued to watch. And all of a sudden, he saw in the light the shape of what he calls I think its Mahasaraswati (I forget which, but I think its Mahasaraswati: perfection in work), that he saw there, staying there. And at the same time he felt in himself, oh, a great desire to serve, to work well, to consecrate his life to the Divine Work, all that. And the next morning, when the doctors came they said, Oh, everything is changed!
Interesting.

0 1967-06-14, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ive made discoveries. Diseases, accidents, catastrophes, wars, all that, is because the human material consciousness is so small, so narrow that it has a rabid taste for drama. And of course, behind there is the vital being having fun, influences too anyway all that enjoys an opportunity to delay the Divine Work and make things difficult. And all that takes pleasure in that naturally encourages drama. But the seed of the difficulty is that pettiness, extreme pettiness of the physical consciousness the material physical consciousness which has an absolutely perverse taste for drama. Drama the slightest thing has to make a drama: if you have a toothache, it becomes a drama1; if you bang against something, it becomes a drama; if two nations quarrel, it becomes a dramaeverything becomes a drama. The taste for drama. The slightest upset in the body, the least disorder, which should go completely unnoticed, oh, it makes a big fuss, a drama. The taste for drama. I was thoroughly disgusted.
Everything, everything Like the loud buzz at a fair.

0 1969-04-09, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Open yourselves to this consciousness if you aspire to serve5 the Divine Work.
To come into contact with this new consciousness, the essential condition is no longer to have any desires and to be wholly sincere.

0 1969-08-27, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(This note is about a person physically close to Sri Aurobindo, who tried to destroy Mother and separate her from Sri Aurobindo. In fact, it is clear and understandable that the darkest shadow is right under the light, and that he or she who comes to do the Divine Work must take on himself or herself the whole burden of the Opposer. Thus is it near Sri Aurobindo and Mother that the greatest adversaries will be found. That also explains Mothers departure and the ensuing murky situation in Auroville and in the Ashram. For obvious reasons we will not publish Mothers note or the long conversation that followed in its integrality, but only a few brief extracts, insofar as they illustrate the problem, or perhaps the mystery, of Sri Aurobindos and Mothers departures, for they have one and the same reason.)
Naturally, this mustnt be published, but its to be kept.

0 1970-05-27, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You seem to forget that, by the very fact that you live in the Ashram, you work neither for yourselves nor for an employer, but for the Divine. Your life must be a consecration to the Divine Work and cannot be governed by petty human considerations.
Would you like to publish it, or have it posted up?

08.01 - Choosing To Do Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is not for a personal and egoistic aim that you seek perfection, it is for the sake of manifesting the Divine, it is to put all at the service of the Divine. You do not do Yoga with the intention of perfecting yourself personally, for your own sake, but for the Divine Work that has to be done, for the fulfilment of the Divine Will.
So long as a personal aspiration is there, a personal desire, an egoistic will, it is a mixture, it is not the exact expression of the Divine Will. The only thing that counts is the Divine, His Will, His manifestation, His expression. You are for that, you are that, and nothing else. If there happens to be a feeling of I, of ego, of the individual person, it means that you are not yet what you ought to be. I do not say that the thing can be done forthwith, but that this is the truth of the matter.

08.04 - Doing for Her Sake, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Whatever you dostudy or sportsyou must, think of the Divine in doing it. It is not a very difficult thing after all. At first you may do it as a kind of preparation to make yourself capable of receiving the divine force, and then as service to help in the collective work. You can do it not for personal gain but in order to be ready for the Divine Work.
This seems to me indispensable. If you keep the ordinary point of view, you will always find yourself in conditions that are not wholly satisfactory and incapable of receiving all the forces that you can receive.

09.04 - The Divine Grace, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As soon as you come in contact with it, you find that there is not a second in time, not a point in space which does not show in a signal manner this ceaseless work of the Grace, its constant intervention. And once you have seen that, you feel you are never up to the mark. For you must never forget that you must not have fear or anguish or regret or recoil or even suffering. If you were in union with this Grace, if you saw it everywhere, you would begin to live a life of exultation, all power and infinite happiness. And that would be the best possible collaboration in the Divine Work.
II

1.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
wonderful, but greater yet and more wonderful are the heavens within you. It is these Edens that await the Divine Worker.2
There are many ways to set out to work; each of us has, in fact, his or her own particular approach: for one it may be a well-crafted object or a job well done; for another a beautiful idea, an encompassing philosophical system; for still another a piece of music, the flowing of a river, a burst of sunlight on the sea; all are ways of breathing the Infinite. But these are brief moments, and we seek permanence. These are moments subject to many uncontrollable conditions, and we seek something inalienable, independent of conditions and circumstances

1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
17:The personal will of the Sadhaka has first to seize on the egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right; once turned, he has still to train them to recognise that always, always to accept, always to follow that. Progressing, he learns, still using the personal will, personal effort, personal energies, to employ them as representatives of the higher Power and in conscious obedience to the higher Influence. Progressing yet farther, his will, effort, energy become no longer personal and separate, but activities of that higher Power and Influence at work in the individual. But there is still a sort of gulf of distance which necessitates an obscure process of transit, not always accurate, sometimes even very distorting, between the divine Origin and the emerging human current. At the end of the progress, with the progressive disappearance of egoism and impurity and ignorance, this last separation is removed; all in the individual becomes the Divine Working.

GURU

--
24:The surest way towards this integral fulfilment is to find the Master of the secret who dwells within us, open ourselves constantly to the divine Power which is also the divine Wisdom and Love and trust to it to effect the conversion. But it is difficult for the egoistic consciousness to do this at all at the beginning. And, if done at all, it is still difficult to do it perfectly and in every strand of our nature. It is difficult at first because our egoistic habits of thought, of sensation, of feeling block up the avenues by which we can arrive at the perception that is needed. It is difficult afterwards because the faith, the surrender, the courage requisite in this path are not easy to the ego-clouded soul. the Divine Working is not the working which the egoistic mind desires or approves; for it uses error in order to arrive at truth, suffering in order to arrive at bliss, imperfection in order to arrive at perfection. The ego cannot see where it is being led; it revolts against the leading, loses confidence, loses courage. These failings would not matter; for the divine Guide within is not offended by our revolt, not discouraged by our want of faith or repelled by our weakness; he has the entire love of the mother and the entire patience of the teacher. But by withdrawing our assent from the guidance we lose the consciousness, though not all the actuality-not, in any case, the eventuality -- of its benefit. And we withdraw our assent because we fail to distinguish our higher Self from the lower through which he is preparing his self-revelation. As in the world, so in ourselves, we cannot see God because of his workings and, especially, because he works in us through our nature and not by a succession of arbitrary miracles. Man demands miracles that he may have faith; he wishes to be dazzled in order that he may see. And this impatience, this ignorance may turn into a great danger and disaster if, in our revolt against the divine leading, we call in another distorting Force more satisfying to our impulses and desires and ask it to guide us and give it the Divine Name.
25:But while it is difficult for man to believe in something unseen within himself, it is easy for him to believe in something which he can image as extraneous to himself. The spiritual progress of most human beings demands an extraneous support, an object of faith outside us. It needs an external image of God; or it needs a human representative, -- Incarnation, Prophet or Guru; or it demands both and receives them. For according to the need of the human soul the Divine manifests himself as deity, as human divine or in simple humanity, -- using that thick disguise, which so successfully conceals the Godhead, for a means of transmission of his guidance.
--
38:Time is a field of circumstances and forces meeting and working out a resultant progression whose course it measures. To the ego it is a tyrant or a resistance, to the Divine an instrument. Therefore, while our effort is personal. Time appears as a resistance, for it presents to us all the obstruction of the forces that conflict with our own. When the Divine Working and the personal are combined in our consciousness, it appears as a medium and condition. When the two become one, it appears as a servant and instrument.
39:The ideal attitude of the Sadhaka towards Time is to have an endless patience as if he had all eternity for his fulfilment and yet to develop the energy that shall realise now and with an ever-increasing mastery and pressure of rapidity till it reaches the miraculous instantaneousness of the supreme divine Transformation.

1.02.4.2 - Action and the Divine Will, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
of the Divine Work. It is these symbols which govern the sense
of the two final verses of the Upanishad.

10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And She herself came down upon earth as Ashwapati's daughter to undertake the human labour and accomplish the Divine Work.
II

10.29 - Gods Debt, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, we go beyond the gods, to the very origin, God himself, the Supreme. What is the debt that God, the Supreme, the Divine, owes to us human beings? We owe to God everything, our life, our very existence, our soul and substance given to us by him, then how is he indebted to us? What kind of debt he has incurred which he has to pay to his creature, the human being? Primarily because he is the Divine Father, he has to take charge of his own creation, see to its growth and fruition and fulfilment. Indeed that is the role of the Divine in us (and above us and around us): that is his work, the Divine Work. Since he has put us out of his consciousness (for a special experience of growth and development), it is also his work (and duty) to bring us back to him: after a process of self-separation a process of self-integration. Man, so long as he is a separate consciousness has to dedicate, lift up and unify this separative conscious being to the whole being and consciousness. This is how he discharges his debt to the Divine, and the answering grace of the Divine is the clearing of the debt which He owes to His creatures.
What has been said of man is equally applicable to earth. The destiny of man is the destiny of earth as also the destiny of earth is the destiny of man. For man is an earthly creature, is born out of earth and he grows with the growth of the earth; equally the earth grows with the growth of man.

1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
22:When once the object of concentration has possessed and is possessed by the three master instruments, the thought, the heart and the will, -- a consummation fully possible only when the desire-soul in us has submitted to the Divine Law, -- the perfection of mind and life and body can be effectively fulfilled in our transmuted nature. This will be done, not for the personal satisfaction of the ego, but that the whole may constitute a fit temple for the Divine Presence, a faultless instrument for the Divine Work. For the work can be truly performed only when the instrument, consecrated and perfected, has grown fit for a selfless action, -- and that will be when personal desire and egoism are abolished, but not the liberated individual. Even when the little ego has been abolished, the true Spiritual Person can still remain and God's will and work and delight in him and the spiritual use of his perfection and fulfilment. Our works will then be divine and done divinely; our mind arid life and will, devoted to the Divine, will be used to help fulfil in others and in the world that which has been first realised in ourselves, -all that we can manifest of the embodied Unity, Love, Freedom, Strength, Power, Splendour, immortal Joy which is the goal of the spirit's terrestrial adventure.
23:The Yoga must start with an effort or at least a settled turn towards this total concentration. A constant and unfailing will of consecration of all ourselves to the Supreme is demanded of us, an offering of our whole being and our many-chambered nature to the Eternal who is the All. The effective fullness of our concentration on the one thing needful to the exclusion of all else will be the measure of our self-consecration to the One who is alone desirable. But this exclusiveness will in the end exclude nothing except the falsehood of our way of seeing the world and our will's ignorance. For our concentration on the Eternal will be consummated by the mind when we see constantly the Divine in itself and the Divine in ourselves, but also the Divine in all things and beings and happenings. It will be consummated by the heart when all emotion is summed up in the love of the Divine, -- of the Divine in itself and for itself, but love too of the Divine in all its beings and powers and personalities and forms in the Universe' It will be consummated by the will when we feel and receive always the divine impulsion and accept that alone as our sole motive force; but this will mean that, having slain to the last rebellious straggler the wandering impulses of the egoistic nature, we have universalised ourselves and can accept with a constant happy acceptance the one divine working in all things. This is the first fundamental siddhi of the integral Yoga.
--
26:In the first movement of self-preparation, the period of personal effort, the method we have to use is this concentration of the whole being on the Divine that it seeks and, as its corollary, this constant rejection, throwing out, katharsis, of all that is not the true Truth of the Divine. An entire consecration of all that we are, think, feel and do will be the result of this persistence. This consecration in its turn must culminate in an integral self-giving to the Highest; for its crown and sign of completion is the whole nature's all-comprehending absolute surrender. In the second stage of the Yoga, transitional between the human and the Divine Working, there will supervene an increasing purified and vigilant passivity, a more and more luminous divine response to the Divine Force, -- but not to any other; and there will be as a result the growing inrush of a great and conscious miraculous working from above. In the last period there is no effort at all, no set method, no fixed sadhana; the place of endeavour and Tapasya will be taken by a natural, simple, powerful and happy disclosing of the flower of the Divine out of the bud of a purified and perfected terrestrial nature. These are the natural successions of the action of the Yoga.
27:These movements are indeed not always or absolutely arranged in a strict succession to each other. The second stage begins in part before the first is completed; the first continues in part until the second is perfected; the last divine working can manifest from time to time as a promise before it is finally settled and normal to the nature. Always too there is something higher and greater than the individual which leads him even in his personal labour and endeavour. Often he may become, and remain for a time, wholly conscious, even in parts of his being permanently conscious, of this greater leading behind the veil, and that may happen long before his whole nature has been purified in all its parts from the lower indirect control. Even, he may be thus conscious from the beginning; his mind and heart, if not his other members, may respond to its seizing and penetrating guidance with a certain initial completeness from the very first steps of the Yoga. But it is the constant and complete and uniform action of the great direct control that more and more distinguishes the transitional stage as it proceeds and draws to its close. This predominance of a greater diviner leading, not personal to ourselves, indicates the nature's increasing ripeness for a total spiritual transformation. It is the unmistakable sign that the self-consecration has not only been accepted in principle but is fulfilled in act and power. The Supreme has laid his luminous hand upon a chosen human vessel of his miraculous Light and Power and Ananda.

1.03 - The Armour of Grace, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:To walk through life armoured against all fear, peril and disaster, only two things are needed, two that go always together - the Grace of the Divine Mother and on your side an inner state made up of faith, sincerity and surrender. Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect. An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards to heaven. Regard your life as given you only for the Divine Work and to help in the divine manifestation. Desire nothing but the purity, force, light, wideness, calm, Ananda of the divine consciousness and its insistence to transform and perfect your mind, life and body. Ask for nothing but the divine, spiritual and supramental Truth, its realisation on earth and in you and in all who are called and chosen and the conditions needed for its creation and its victory over all opposing forces.
2:Let your sincerity and surrender be genuine and entire. When you give yourself, give completely, without demand, without condition, without reservation so that all in you shall belong to the Divine Mother and nothing be left to the ego or given to any other power.

1.03 - The Gods, Superior Beings and Adverse Forces, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the terrestrial organisation, the world of insects is, so to say, the direct work of hostile creators in the vital world; they are the result of adverse and often diabolical thoughts and imaginations, directed not towards man but towards the Divine Work. Often an insect that looks quite harmless is the messenger of a bad and malevolent will; in that case one must deal severely with it.
Love can tolerate anything but in action, the Divine chooses and decides. Yet even in his act of destruction, there shines out pure Love, sublime Love.

1.04 - Money, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:If you are free from the money-taint but without any ascetic withdrawal, you will have a greater power to comm and the money-force for the Divine Work. Equality of mind, absence of demand and the full dedication of all you possess and receive and all your power of acquisition to the Divine Shakti and her work are the signs of this freedom. Any perturbation of mind with regard to money and its use, any claim, any grudging is a sure index of some imperfection or bondage.
7:The ideal Sadhaka in this kind is one who if required to live poorly can so live and no sense of want will affect him or interfere with the full inner play of the divine consciousness, and if he is required to live richly, can so live and never for a moment fall into desire or attachment to his wealth or to the things that he uses or servitude to self-indulgence or a weak bondage to the habits that the possession of riches creates. The divine Will is all for him and the divine Ananda.

1.05 - Morality and War, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For all those whom the Divine Grace has kept far from the horrible conflict which is tearing men apart, the only way to express their gratitude is by a complete consecration of their whole being to the Divine Work.
May 1940

1.05 - War And Politics, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo was not only fighting Hitler, he had also the onerous task of conquering the extreme antipathy of his own disciples towards the British. The Ashram ran the danger of being disbanded for our anti-British and pro-Hitler feelings. How many letters had Sri Aurobindo to write to his disciples to show their grave error and the danger of the Nazi victory! I quote only one such letter he wrote to a disciple, in 1942, "...You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance.... There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one wins; there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country do not dream of and cannot yet at all realise. If the other side that has declared itself for the free future of humanity triumphs, this terrible danger will have been averted and conditions will have been created in which there will be a chance for the Ideal to grow, for the Divine Work to be done, for the spiritual Truth for which we stand to establish itself on the earth. Those who fight for this cause are fighting for the Divine and against the threatened reign of the Asura."
In a talk in 1940, Sri Aurobindo said: "There are forces which are trying to destroy the British and their empire forces above and here in this world, I mean inner forces. I myself had wished for its destruction; but at that time I did not know such forces would arise. These forces are working for the evolution of a new world-order which would come following upon the liquidation of the Empire. But, for the advent of this new arrangement, the Empire needn't be destroyed. The new arrangement can be achieved more quietly by a change in the balance of forces, without much destruction. Had it not been for Hitler, I wouldn't have cared what power remained or went down. Now the question is whether the new world-order is to come after much suffering and destruction or with as little of it as possible. Destruction of England would mean victory for Hitler and in that case, perhaps after a great deal of suffering and oppression, and reaction to them, that world-order may come or may not, or it may come only after pralaya! Of course the issue has been decided by the Divine Vision and there can be no change. But nobody knows what the decision is."

1.05 - Work and Teaching, #Words Of The Mother I, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The essential mistake was to have considered Sri Aurobindos teaching as one among the spiritual teachingsand the work done here now as one among the many aspects of the Divine Works.
This has falsified your basic position and has been the cause of all the difficulties and confusions.

1.06 - Man in the Universe, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:On the other hand it is by means of the universe that the individual is impelled to realise himself. Not only is it his foundation, his means, his field, the stuff of the Divine Work; but also, since the concentration of the universal Life which he is takes place within limits and is not like the intensive unity of Brahman free from all conception of bound and term, he must necessarily universalise and impersonalise himself in order to manifest the divine All which is his reality. Yet is he called upon to preserve, even when he most extends himself in universality of consciousness, a mysterious transcendent something of which his sense of personality gives him an obscure and egoistic representation. Otherwise he has missed his goal, the problem set to him has not been solved, the Divine Work for which he accepted birth has not been done.
10:The universe comes to the individual as Life, - a dynamism the entire secret of which he has to master and a mass of colliding results, a whirl of potential energies out of which he has to disengage some supreme order and some yet unrealised harmony. This is after all the real sense of man's progress. It is not merely a restatement in slightly different terms of what physical Nature has already accomplished. Nor can the ideal of human life be simply the animal repeated on a higher scale of mentality. Otherwise, any system or order which assured a tolerable well-being and a moderate mental satisfaction would have stayed our advance. The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.

1.06 - The Four Powers of the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:MAHAKALI is of another nature. Not wideness but height, not wisdom but force and strength are her peculiar power. There is in her an overwhelming intensity, a mighty passion of force to achieve, a divine violence rushing to shatter every limit and obstacle. All her divinity leaps out in a splendour of tempestuous action; she is there for swiftness, for the immediately effective process, the rapid and direct stroke, the frontal assault that carries everything before it. Terrible is her face to the Asura, dangerous and ruthless her mood against the haters of the Divine; for she is the Warrior of the Worlds who never shrinks from the battle. Intolerant of imperfection, she deals roughly with all in man that is unwilling and she is severe to all that is obstinately ignorant and obscure; her wrath is immediate and dire against treachery and falsehood and malignity, ill-will is smitten at once by her scourge. Indifference, negligence and sloth in the Divine Work she cannot bear and she smites awake at once with sharp pain, if need be, the untimely slumberer and the loiterer. The impulses that are swift and straight and frank, the movements that are unreserved and absolute, the aspiration that mounts in flame are the motion of Mahakali. Her spirit is tameless, her vision and will are high and far-reaching like the flight of an eagle, her feet are rapid on the upward way and her hands are outstretched to strike and to succour. For she too is the Mother and her love is as intense as her wrath and she has a deep and passionate kindness. When she is allowed to intervene in her strength, then in one moment are broken like things without consistence the obstacles that immobilise or the enemies that assail the seeker. If her anger is dreadful to the hostile and the vehemence of her pressure painful to the weak and timid, she is loved and worshipped by the great, the strong and the noble; for they feel that her blows beat what is rebellious in their material into strength and perfect truth, hammer straight what is wry and perverse and expel what is impure or defective. But for her what is done in a day might have taken centuries; without her Ananda might be wide and grave or soft and sweet and beautiful but would lose the flaming joy of its most absolute intensities. To knowledge she gives a conquering might, brings to beauty and harmony a high and mounting movement and imparts to the slow and difficult labour after perfection an impetus that multiplies the power and shortens the long way. Nothing can satisfy her that falls short of the supreme ecstasies, the highest heights, the noblest aims, the largest vistas. Therefore with her is the victorious force of the Divine and it is by grace of her fire and passion and speed if the great achievement can be done now rather than hereafter.
10:Wisdom and Force are not the only manifestations of the supreme Mother there is a subtler mystery of her nature and without it Wisdom and Force would be incomplete things and without it perfection would not be perfect. Above them is the miracle of eternal beauty, an unseizable secret of divine harmonies, the compelling magic of an irresistible universal charm and attraction that draws and holds things and forces and beings together and obliges them to meet and unite that a hidden Ananda may play from behind the veil and make of them its rhythms and its figures. This is the power of MAHALAKSHMI and there is no aspect of the Divine Shakti more attractive to the heart of embodied beings. Maheshwari can appear too calm and great and distant for the littleness of earthly nature to approach or contain her, Mahakali too swift and formidable for its weakness to bear; but all turn with joy and longing to Mahalakshmi. For she throws the spell of the intoxicating sweetness of the Divine: to be close to her is a profound happiness and to feel her within the heart is to make existence a rapture and a marvel; grace and charm and tenderness flow out from her like light from the sun and wherever she fixes her wonderful gaze or lets fall the loveliness of her smile, the soul is seized and made captive and plunged into the depths of an unfathomable bliss. Magnetic is the touch of her hands and their occult and delicate influence refines mind and life and body and where she presses her feet course miraculous streams of an entrancing Ananda.

1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This can be done without risk or danger only by one who moves in the gnostic realms and possesses in his mental faculties the light of the spirit and the power of the truth. He, the Divine Worker, is free from all preference and all attachment; he has broken down the limits of his ego and is now only a perfectly pure and impersonal instrument of the supramental action upon earth.
There are also all the words that are uttered to express ideas, opinions, the results of reflection or study. Here we are in an intellectual domain and we might think that in this domain men are more reasonable, more self-controlled, and that the practice of rigorous austerity is less indispensable. It is nothing of the kind, however, for even here, into this abode of ideas and knowledge, man has brought the violence of his convictions, the intolerance of his sectarianism, the passion of his preferences. Thus, here too, one must resort to mental austerity and carefully avoid any exchange of ideas that leads to controversies which are all too often bitter and nearly always unnecessary, or any clash of opinion which ends in heated discussions and even quarrels, which are always the result of some mental narrowness that can easily be cured when one rises high enough in the mental domain.

1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The elimination of this form of ego leads straight towards the true instrumental action which Is the essence of a perfect Karmayoga. For while we cherish the instrumental ego, we may pretend to ourselves that we are conscious instruments of the Divine, but in reality we are trying to make of the Divine shakti an instrument of our own desires or our egoistic purpose. And even if the ego is subjected but not eliminated, we may indeed be engines of the Divine Work, but we shall be imperfect tools and deflect or impair the working by our mental errors, our vital distortions or the obstinate incapacities of our physical nature. If this ego disappears, then we can truly become, not only pure instruments consciously consenting to every turn of the divine Hand that moves us, but aware of our true nature, conscious portions of the one Eternal and Infinite put out in herself for her works by the supreme shakti.
There is another greater step to be taken after the surrender of our instrumental ego to the Divine shakti. It is not enough to know her as the one Cosmic Force that moves us and all creatures on the planes of mind, life and Matter; for this is the lower Nature and, although the Divine Knowledge, Light, Power are there concealed and at work in the Ignorance and can break partly its veil and manifest something of their true character or descend from above and uplift these inferior workings, yet, even if we realise the One ill a spiritualised mind, a spiritualised life-movement, a spiritualised body-consciousness, an imperfection remains in the dynamic parts. There is a stumbling response to the Supreme Power, a veil over the face of the Divine, a constant mixture of the Ignorance. It is only when we open to the Divine shakti in the truth of her force which transcends this lower prakriti that we can be perfect instruments of her power and knowledge.
Not only liberation but perfection must be the aim of the Karmayoga. the Divine Works through our nature and according to our nature; if our nature is imperfect, the work also will be imperfect, mixed, inadequate. Even it may be marred by gross errors, falsehoods, moral weaknesses, diverting influences. The work of the Divine will be done in us even then, but according to our weakness, not according to the strength and purity of its source. If ours were not an integral Yoga, if we sought only the liberation of the self within us or the motionless existence of Purusha separated from prakriti, this dynamic imperfection might not matter. Calm, untroubled, not depressed, not elated, refusing to accept the perfection or imperfection, fault or merit, sin or virtue as ours, perceiving that it is the modes of Nature working in the field of her modes that make this mixture, we could withdraw into the silence of the spirit and, pure, untouched, witness only the workings of prakriti. But in an integral realisation this can only be a step on the way, not our last resting-place. For we aim at the divine realisation not only in the immobility of the Spirit, but also in the movement of Nature. And this cannot be altogether until we can feel the presence and power of the Divine in every step, motion, figure of our activities, in every turn of our will, in every thought, feeling and impulse. No doubt, we can feel that in a sense even in the nature of the Ignorance, but it is the divine Power and Presence in a disguise, a diminution, an inferior figure. Ours is a greater demand, that our nature shall be a power of the Divine in the Truth of the Divine, in the Light, in the force of the eternal self-conscient Will, in the wideness of the sempiternal Knowledge.
After the removal of the veil of ego, the removal of the veil of Nature and her inferior modes that govern our mind, life and body. As soon as the limits of the ego begin to fade, we see how that veil is constituted and detect the action of cosmic Nature in us, and in or behind cosmic Nature we sense the presence of the cosmic Self and the dynamisms of the world-pervading Ishwara. The Master of the instrument stands behind all this working, and even within the working there is his touch and the drive of a great guiding or disposing Influence. It is no longer ego or ego-force that we serve; we obey the World-Master and his evolutionary impulse. At each step we say in the language of the Sanskrit verse, "Even as I am appointed by Thee seated in my heart, so, 0 Lord, I act." But still this action may be of two very different kinds, one only illumined, the other transformed and uplifted into a greater supernature. For we may keep on in the way of action upheld and followed by our nature when by her and her illusion of egoism we were "turned as if mounted on a machine," but now with a perfect understanding of the mechanism and its utilisation for his world purposes by the Master of works whom we feel behind it. This is indeed as far as even many great Yogis have reached on the levels of spiritualised mind; but it need not be so always, for there is a greater supramental possibility. It is possible to rise beyond spiritualised mind and to act spontaneously in the living presence of the original divine Truth-Force of the Supreme Mother Our motion one with her motion and merged in it, our will one with her will, our energy absolved

1.12 - The Divine Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.12 - the Divine Work
class:chapter

1.1.4 - The Physical Mind and Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
One is either conscious of the power or peace or other force (light, ananda, knowledge, movements of the Divine Working) or, if not conscious of that, is aware of the resultsei ther of these things is sufficient to show that one is open. To feel the grace descending and yet doubt whether it is not a vital imagination is a folly of the physical mind; a spiritual experience must be accepted as it is; if one questions at every moment whether an experience is an experience or Grace is grace or peace is peace or light is light, one will spend all the time in these useless and fantastic doubts instead of making a quiet and natural progress.
***

1.15 - Prayers, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let us pray with all our heart that the Divine Work may be accomplished.
*

1.15 - The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Science, a power of will, an intelligence at work; but that power is the power of will and intelligence of the Self, Spirit or Godhead within it, it is not the separate, self-derived will or idea of the mechanical cell or atom. This universal will and intelligence, involved, develops its powers from form to form, and on earth at least it is in man that it draws nearest to the full divine and there first becomes, even in the outward intelligence in the form, obscurely conscious of its divinity. But still there too there is a limitation, there is that imperfection of the manifestation which prevents the lower forms from having the self-knowledge of their identity with the Divine. For in each limited being the limitation of the phenomenal action is accompanied by a limitation also of the phenomenal consciousness which defines the nature of the being and makes the inner difference between creature and creature. the Divine Works behind indeed and governs its special manifestation through this outer and imperfect consciousness and will, but is itself secret in the cavern, guhayam, as the Veda puts it, or as the Gita expresses it, "In the heart of all existences the Lord abides turning all existences as if mounted on a machine by Maya." This secret working of the Lord hidden in the heart from the egoistic nature-consciousness through which he works, is God's universal method with creatures. Why then should we
154

1.16 - The Process of Avatarhood, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This doctrine is a hard saying, a difficult thing for the human reason to accept; and for an obvious reason, because of the evident humanity of the Avatar. The Avatar is always a dual phenomenon of divinity and humanity; the Divine takes upon himself the human nature with all its outward limitations and makes them the circumstances, means, instruments of the divine consciousness and the divine power, a vessel of the divine birth and the Divine Works. But so surely it must be, since otherwise the object of the Avatar's descent is not fulfilled; for that object is precisely to show that the human birth with all its limitations can be made such a means and instrument of the divine birth and divine works, precisely to show that the human type of consciousness can be compatible with the divine essence of consciousness made manifest, can be converted into its vessel, drawn into nearer conformity with it by a change of its mould
The Process of Avatarhood

1.17 - The Divine Birth and Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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
object:1.18 - the Divine Worker
author class:Sri Aurobindo
--
buddhiman manus.yes.u, - not the perplexed thinker who judges life and works by the external, uncertain and impermanent distinctions of the lower reason. Therefore the liberated man is not afraid of action, he is a large and universal doer of all works, kr.tsna-karma-kr.t; not as others do them in subjection to Nature, but poised in the silent calm of the soul, tranquilly in Yoga with the Divine. The Divine is the lord of his works, he is only their channel through the instrumentality of his nature conscious of and subject to her Lord. By the flaming intensity and purity of this knowledge all his works are burned up as in a fire and his mind remains without any stain or disfiguring mark from them, calm, silent, unperturbed, white and clean and pure. To do all in this liberating knowledge, without the personal egoism of the doer, is the first sign of the Divine Worker.
The second sign is freedom from desire; for where there is not the personal egoism of the doer, desire becomes impossible; it is starved out, sinks for want of a support, dies of inanition.
--
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.
--
Equality is the fourth sign of the Divine Worker. He has, says the Gita, passed beyond the dualities; he is dvandvatta. We have seen that he regards with equal eyes, without any disturbance of feeling, failure and success, victory and defeat; but not only these, all dualities are in him surpassed and reconciled.
The outward distinctions by which men determine their psychological attitude towards the happenings of the world, have for him only a subordinate and instrumental meaning. He does not ignore them, but he is above them. Good happening and evil happening, so all-important to the human soul subject to desire, are to the desireless divine soul equally welcome since by their mingled strand are worked out the developing forms of the eternal good. He cannot be defeated, since all for him is moving towards the divine victory in the Kurukshetra of Nature, dharmaks.etre kuruks.etre, the field of doings which is the field
--
Again, the sign of the Divine Worker is that which is central to the divine consciousness itself, a perfect inner joy and peace which depends upon nothing in the world for its source or its continuance; it is innate, it is the very stuff of the soul's consciousness, it is the very nature of divine being. The ordinary man depends upon outward things for his happiness; therefore he has desire; therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure and pain, joy and grief; therefore he measures all things in the balance of good fortune and evil fortune. None of these things can affect the divine soul; it is ever satisfied without any kind of dependence, nitya-tr.pto nirasrayah.; for its delight, its divine ease, its happiness, its glad light are eternal within, ingrained in itself, atma-ratih., antah.-sukho 'ntar-aramas tathantar-jyotir eva yah.. What joy it takes in outward things is not for their sake, not for things which it seeks in them and can miss, but for the self in them, for their expression of the Divine, for that which is eternal in them and which it cannot miss. It is without attachment to their outward touches, but finds everywhere the same joy that it finds in itself, because its self is theirs, has become one self with the self of all beings, because it is united with the one and equal
Brahman in them through all their differences, brahmayogayuktatma, sarvabhutatma-bhutatma. It does not rejoice in the touches of the pleasant or feel anguish in the touches of the unpleasant; neither the wounds of things, nor the wounds of friends, nor the wounds of enemies can disturb the firmness of its outgazing mind or bewilder its receiving heart; this soul is in its nature, as the Upanishad puts it, avran.am, without wound or scar. In all things it has the same imperishable Ananda, sukham aks.ayam asnute.
--
And yet this liberation does not at all prevent him from acting. Only, he knows that it is not he who is active, but the modes, the qualities of Nature, her triple gun.as. "The man who knows the principles of things thinks, his mind in Yoga (with the inactive Impersonal), 'I am doing nothing'; when he sees, hears, touches, smells, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks, takes, ejects, opens his eyes or closes them, he holds that it is only the senses acting upon the objects of the senses." He himself, safe in the immutable, unmodified soul, is beyond the grip of the three gunas, trigun.atta; he is neither sattwic, rajasic nor tamasic; he sees with a clear untroubled spirit the alternations of the natural modes and qualities in his action, their rhythmic play of light and happiness, activity and force, rest and inertia. This superiority of the calm soul observing its action but not involved in it, this traigun.attya, is also a high sign of the Divine Worker. By itself the idea might lead to a doctrine of the mechanical determinism of Nature and the perfect aloofness and irresponsibility of the soul; but the Gita effectively avoids this fault of an insufficient thought by its illumining supertheistic idea of the Purushottama. It makes it clear that it is not in the end Nature which mechanically determines its own action; it is the will of the Supreme which inspires her; he who has already slain the Dhritarashtrians, he of whom Arjuna is only the human instrument, a universal Soul, a transcendent Godhead is the master of her labour. The reposing of works in the Impersonal is a means of getting rid of the personal egoism of the doer, but the end is to give up all our actions to that great Lord of all, sarva-loka-mahesvara. "With a consciousness identified with the
Self, renouncing all thy actions into Me, mayi sarvan.i karman.i

1.2.01 - The Call and the Capacity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is useless to raise the question of fitness. No one is fit - for all human beings are full of faults and incapacities - even the greatest sadhaks are not free. It is a question only of aspiration, of believing in the divine Grace and letting the Divine Work in you, not making a refusal.
It is difficult to say that any particular quality makes one fit or the lack of it unfit. One may have strong sex impulses, doubts, revolts and yet succeed in the end, while another may fail. If one has a fundamental sincerity, a will to go through in spite of all things and a readiness to be guided, that is the best security in the sadhana.

1.2.04 - Sincerity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Grace that reveals the sadhak to himself and transforms what is deficient in him that it can be done. And even then only if he himself consents and lends himself wholly to the Divine Working.
It is quite natural that there should be much mixture in the attitude till all is clear - the ordinary nature clings to the action and the transformation in its completeness cannot be sudden.

1.2.07 - Surrender, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
seeing it done by the Divine Force itself and helping constantly by its own vigilant and conscious assent to and call for the Divine Working.
Usually there cannot but be a mixture of these two ways until the consciousness is ready to be entirely open, entirely submitted to the Divine's origination of all its action. It is then that all responsibility disappears and there is no personal burden on the shoulders of the sadhak.

1.2.10 - Opening, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Open with sincerity. That means to open integrally and without reservation: not to give one part of you to the Divine Working and keep back the rest; not to make a partial offering and keep for yourself the other movements of your nature. All must be opened wide; it is insincerity to hold back any part of you or keep it shut to the Divine.
Open with faithfulness. That means to be open constantly and always; not to open one day and withdraw the next.

1.3.04 - Peace, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is only when one sees the Divine in all things that objects get a value for the Yoga, but even then not for their own sake or as objects of desire, but for the sake of the Divine within and as a means of the Divine Work and manifestation.
Peace Comes Little by Little

1.4.02 - The Divine Force, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the claim of those sadhaks who say that they feel the force of the Guru or the force of the Divine Working in them and leading towards spiritual fulfilment and experience. Whether it is so or not in a particular case is a personal question, but the statement cannot be denounced as per se incredible and manifestly false because such things cannot be. Farther, if it be true that spiritual force is the original one and the others are derivative from it, then there is no irrationality in supposing that spiritual force can produce mental results, vital results, physical results. It may act through mental, vital or physical energies and through the means which these energies use, or it may act directly on mind, life or matter as the field of its own special and immediate action.
Either way is prima facie possible. In a case of cure of illness, someone is lying ill for two days, weak, suffering from pains and fever; he takes no medicine but finally asks for cure from his Guru; the next morning he rises well, strong and energetic.

1929-06-02 - Divine love and its manifestation - Part of the vital being in Divine love, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Divine love of which I speak is a Love that manifests here upon this physical earth, in matter, but it must be pure of its human distortions, if it is to incarnate. The vital is an indispensable agent in this as in all manifestation. But as has happened always, the adverse powers have put their hold on this most precious thing. It is the energy of the vital that enters into dull and insensitive matter and makes it responsive and alive. But the adverse forces have distorted it; they have turned it into a field of violence and selfishness and desire and every kind of ugliness and prevented it from taking part in the Divine Work. The one thing to be done is to change it, not to suppress its movement or destroy it. For without it no intensity is possible anywhere. The vital is in its very nature that in us which can give itself away. Just because it is that which has always the impulse and the strength to take, it is also that which is capable of giving itself to the utmost; because it knows how to possess, it knows also how to abandon itself without reserve. The true vital movement is the most beautiful and magnificent of movements; but it has been twisted and turned into the most ugly, the most distorted, the most repulsive. Wherever into a human story of love, there has entered even an atom of pure love and it has been allowed to manifest without too much distortion, we find a true and beautiful thing. And if the movement does not last, it is because it is not conscious of its own aim and seeking; it has not the knowledge that it is not the union of one being with another that it is seeking after but the union of all beings with the Divine.
Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The material world in its darkness and ignorance had forgotten the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep; it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, There is something that is worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love! And with the awakening to love there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace. Love cannot exist in its pure beauty, love cannot put on its native power and intense joy of fullness until there is this interchange, this fusion between the earth and the Supreme, this movement of Love from the Divine to the creation and from the creation to the Divine. This world was a world of dead matter, till Divine love descended into it and awakened it to life. Ever since it has gone in search of this divine source of life, but it has taken in its search every kind of wrong turn and mistaken way, it has wandered hither and thither in the dark. The mass of this creation has moved on its road like the blind seeking for the unknown, seeking but ignorant of what it sought. The maximum it has reached is what seems to human beings love in its highest form, its purest and most disinterested kind, like the love of the mother for the child. This human movement of love is secretly seeking for something else than what it has yet found; but it does not know where to find it, it does not even know what it is. The moment mans consciousness awakens to the Divine love, pure, independent of all manifestation in human forms, he knows for what his heart has all the time been truly longing. That is the beginning of the Souls aspiration, that brings the awakening of the consciousness and its yearning for union with the Divine. All the forms that are of the ignorance, all the deformations it has imposed must from that moment fade and disappear and give place to one single movement of the creation answering to the Divine love by its love for the Divine. Once the creation is conscious, awakened, opened to love for the Divine, the Divine love pours itself without limit back into the creation. The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.

1951-02-17 - False visions - Offering ones will - Equilibrium - progress - maturity - Ardent self-giving- perfecting the instrument - Difficulties, a help in total realisation - paradoxes - Sincerity - spontaneous meditation, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But one can also formulate to oneself ones will and try to pass it before the screen of ones higher ideal, and see what it looks like in front of this ideal, whether it cuts a fine figure or not. If it vacillates, you may be sure there is something there to check up. If, on the other hand, it passes very quietly and without protest, you may risk doing what you wanted and see the result. But here too we are before a very difficult problem. Those who wish to remain in an inner peace say that everything that happens is the will of Godthis is very convenient for being quiet, it is the best way, there is no better; if there is a better way, it is much more difficult. So, if your will is contradicted, you say it is the will of God; you are quiet, you have done what you could and the result is different from what you expected, and you are in peace. (Note that this is not very easy; it is so far quite good, but this is not all.) But it may also be quite possible that your will was contradicted by circumstances and yet it was right. Then the solution is much more difficult. First, how to know that it was right? If you are quite impartial, quiet, peaceful, and as little egoistic as possible, if you look straight in the face at what has happened and see a sort of contradiction, the impression that a light has gone out and you are in the presence of a falsehood, you remain quite calm, but you see and understand that your will has been contradicted for some unknown reason, though in itself it was not false, that what you had seen was the truth but it did not manifest itself for some reason or other. So you must start on the adventure of discovering the reason why your truth did not manifest itself. This is a problem a little more difficult but if you expand your vision sufficiently, both in height and wideness, you can immediately see the consequences your will would have had if it had been realised, and the consequences of what would have happened; and if you fling your view far enough, you will be able to see that your will, however true it was, was a partial truthit was not a collective, general truth, and still less a universal oneand, consequently, if this truth had been realised at that moment, it would have dislocated a certain ensemble and many things which form a part of the Divine Work (for everything, in fact, is a part of the Divine Work, the entire creation, the entire universe): one part of the whole would have been left behind.
People always ask, But if the Divine is all-powerful, why is it that things have not yet changed? This is the reason why.

1951-02-22 - Surrender, offering, consecration - Experiences and sincerity - Aspiration and desire - Vedic hymns - Concentration and time, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Consecration generally has a more mystical sense but this is not absolute. A total consecration signifies a total giving of ones self; hence it is the equivalent of the word surrender, not of the word soumission which always gives the impression that one accepts passively. You feel a flame in the word consecration, a flame even greater than in the word offering. To consecrate oneself is to give oneself to an action; hence, in the yogic sense, it is to give oneself to some divine work with the idea of accomplishing the Divine Work.
When the resolution has been taken, when you have decided that the whole of your life shall be given to the Divine, you have still at every moment to remember it and carry it out in all the details of your existence. You must feel at every step that you belong to the Divine; you must have the constant experience that, in whatever you think or do, it is always the Divine Consciousness that is acting through you. You have no longer anything that you can call your own; you feel everything as coming from the Divine, and you have to offer it back to its source. When you can realise that, then even the smallest thing to which you do not usually pay much attention or care, ceases to be trivial and insignificant; it becomes full of meaning and it opens up a vast horizon beyond.

1951-02-24 - Psychic being and entity - dimensions - in the atom - Death - exteriorisation - unconsciousness - Past lives - progress upon earth - choice of birth - Consecration to divine Work - psychic memories - Individualisation - progress, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is exactly what happens to a psychic being which has reached the last stage of its development. After that, it will no longer be bound by the necessity of coming upon earth, it will have completed its development and will be able to choose freely either to consecrate itself to the Divine Work or go elsewhere, that is, in the higher worlds. But generally, having come to this stage, it remembers all that has happened to it and understands the great necessity of coming to the help of those who are yet struggling in the midst of difficulties. These psychic beings give their whole existence to the Divine Workthis is not absolute, inevitable, they choose freely, but ninety times out of a hundred this is what they do.
But in ordinary livesand by that I mean the life of a certain lite of sufficiently well-developed people the contact between the external being and the psychic is quite intermittent; it is the result of certain experiences or certain inner needs. At that moment the psychic being is in front, as Sri Aurobindo says, that is, it comes to the surface of the consciousness, it is in direct contact with material circumstances, with forms and words and sounds, etc., for a very short time; so it records all that like a photograph or a cinema, but it is just a minute, a few moments in a lifetime. These moments may repeat themselves several times, but they do not last; and it is this the psychic being remembers; and when you have real psychic memories, sincere, spontaneous, not fabricated by the mind or the vital, that is, purely psychic, exact, your memory is intermittent. And it is often very difficult to locate your past lives, to say: I was this or that. It is only when the psychic experience has taken place at a very important moment of your life and a whole set of circumstances gives you, so to say, the key to the story (dresses, spoken words, customs or an environment giving you the key) that you can say: Oh! That life, I have lived it. But if someone comes and narrates to you all his previous lives from the monkey onwards, with a mass of details, you may be sure that he is a humbug!

1951-03-26 - Losing all to gain all - psychic being - Transforming the vital - physical habits - the subconscient - Overcoming difficulties - weakness, an insincerity - to change the world - Psychic source, flash of experience - preparation for yoga, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Many people tell you, But then this is egoism!it is egoism if you do it in an egoistic way, for your personal profit, if you try to acquire powers, to become powerful enough to influence others, or if you seek means to make a comfortable life for yourself. Naturally, if you do it in this spirit, it will be egoistic. But the beauty of it is that you will not get anywhere! You will begin by deceiving yourself, you will live in increasing illusions and you will fall back into a greater and greater obscurity. Consequently, things are organised much better than one thinks; if you do your work egoistically (we have said that our field of work is always within our reach), it will come to nothing. And hence the required condition is to do it with an absolute sincerity in your aspiration for the realisation of the Divine Work. So if you start like that I can assure you that you will have such an interesting journey that even if it takes very long, you will never get tired. But you must do it like that with an intensity of will, with perseverance and that indispensable good humour which smiles at difficulties and laughs at mistakes. Then everything will go well.
What mirror is that which can reflect the Supreme?

1951-05-03 - Money and its use for the divine work - problems - Mastery over desire- individual and collective change, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1951-05-03 - Money and its use for the Divine Work - problems - Mastery over desire- individual and collective change
author class:The Mother
--
One must first know what the divine will is. But there is a surer wayto surrender money for the Divine Work, if one is not sure oneself. Divinely means at the service of the Divineit means not to use money for ones own satisfaction but to place it at the Divines service.
Sri Aurobindo speaks of a weak bondage to the habits that the possession of riches creates.

1953-05-20, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Even for the smallest thing, something that is not in keeping with what you expected, what you have worked for, instead of an opposite reaction coming inspontaneously, irresistibly, you draw back: No, not thatif you have made a complete surrender, a total surrender, well, it does not happen like that: you are as quiet, as peaceful, as calm in one case as in the other. And perhaps you had the notion that it would be better if it happened in a certain way, but if it happens differently, you find that this also is all right. You might have, for example, worked very hard to do a certain thing, so that something might happen, you might have given much time, much of your energy, much of your will, and all that not for your own sake, but, say, for the Divine Work (that is the offering); now suppose that after having taken all this trouble, done all this work, made all these efforts, it all goes just the other way round, it does not succeed. If you are truly surrendered, you say: It is good, it is all good, it is all right; I did what I could, as well as I could, now it is not my decision, it is the decision of the Divine, I accept entirely what He decides. On the other hand, if you do not have this deep and spontaneous surrender, you tell yourself: How is it? I took so much trouble to do a thing which is not for a selfish purpose, which is for the Divine Work, and this is the result, it is not successful! Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it is like that.
True surrender is a very difficult thing.

1953-07-15, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, it continues. It continues, it is no better. Besides, the conditions to be fulfilled are not fulfilled.1 So you cant expect that it would be better. Even this very morning, I was complaining (but I was complaining is just a way of speaking, it is to make myself understood), I was telling myself: to do what we want to do we need a great deal of moneya great deal, you understand, not just a little and then I said to myself: still, it is not that money is lacking; there is a lot of money in the world. There are even people who have so much that they do not know what to do with it. But it will never come to their mind to give it for the Divine Work. They cant say that they do not know, for one has always the means to know if one wants to know. When the idea comes to you: I want to make the best use of my money (and the best use, not only from the viewpoint that this gentleman or lady conceives as being useful, well, one can always find out. Generally (there are exceptions), generally these people who have a lot of money put one condition: it must bring them at least some satisfaction. There must be some meritthey give, but they must get something. If they are not business people and do not give their money to gain more, if they are, for example, philanthropists who wish to give money to help humanity make progress, they always wish, more or less consciously (but generally very consciously) they always wish, that it should bring them fame, a kind of satisfaction of their amour-propre. They give money for founding a school: the school will bear their name. They build a monument somewhere: it must be mentioned that Mr. So-and-so has donated the money and so on. There was a time when I was building Golconde,2 there were people who approached me or sent others to me to say: I am quite willing to give you so much or so much, but you must place in one of the rooms a marble tablet on which is written: This room has been built by the gift of Mr. So-and- so. Then, I said: I am sorry. I can make marble tablets for you but Ill pave the basement with them! It is like that.
There are exceptions, as there are exceptions to all rules; however I cannot say that money goes spontaneously, freely, without effort there where useful things will be done most. No. The maximum of goodwill is to give money for something which one understands well (which is also easy to understand), to build a hospital, for example, or to open a crche for little children. These are all works of goodwill that men understand. But if they are told that we want to change the human consciousness, we want to create a new world, oh! the first thing they say is: Pardon me! Do not speak of God, for if it is God who is doing the work, well, it is God who will give you the means for it and you have no need of our help. I have heard people saying: If you represent the Divine upon earth you can do whatever you like; there is no need for us to give you anything. And how many among you are free from that idea (an aftertaste of that idea): the Divine is all-powerful, therefore, the Divine can do whatever he likes?

1953-08-05, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But if this fully formed being wants to become an instrument of work for the Divine, if instead of retiring to repose in a psychic bliss, in its own domain, he chooses to be a worker upon earth to help in the fulfilment of the Divine Work, then he has a fresh progress to make, a progress in the capacity for work, for organisation of his work and for expression of the Divine Will. So there is a time when the thing changes. So long as he remains in the world, so long as he chooses to work for the Divine, he will progress. Only if he withdraws into the psychic world and refuses to continue doing the Divine Work or renounces it, can he remain in a static condition outside all progress, because, as I have told you, only upon earth is there progress, only in the physical world; it is not acquired everywhere. In the psychic world there is a kind of blissful repose. One remains what one is, without any movement.
But for those who are not conscious of their psychic?

1954-05-05 - Faith, trust, confidence - Insincerity and unconsciousness, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One has given oneself totally to the Divine Work, one has faith in it, not only in its possibility, but faith that it is the thing which is true and which must be, and one gives oneself entirely to it, without asking what will happen. And so, therein or thereon may be grafted a certitude, a confidence that one is capable of accomplishing it, that is, of participating in it and doing it because one has given oneself to ita confidence that what one is going to do, what one wants to do, one will be able to do; that this realisation one wants to attain, one will attain. The first does not put any questions, does not think of the results: it gives itself entirelyit gives itself and then thats all. It is something that absorbs one completely. The other may be grafted upon it. Confidence says: Yes, I shall participate, realise what I want to realise, I shall surely take part in this work. For the other, one has faith in the Divine, that it is the Divine who is all, and can do all, and does all and who is the only real existence and one gives oneself entirely to this faith, to the Divine, thats all. One has faith in the existence of the Divine and gives oneself; and there can also be grafted upon this a trust that this relation one has with the Divine, this faith one has in the Divine, will work in such a way that all that happen to himwhatever it may be, all that happen to himwill not only be an expression of the divine will (that of course is understood) but also the best that could happen, that nothing better could have happened to him, since it is the Divine who is doing it for him. This attitude is not necessarily a part of faith, for faith does not questions anything, it does not ask what the consequence of its self-giving will beit gives itself, and thats all; while confidence can come and say, Thats what the result will be. And this is an absolute fact, that is, the moment one gives oneself entirely to the Divine, without calculating, in a total faith, without bargaining of any kindone gives oneself, and then, come what may! That does not concern me, I just give myselfautomatically it will always be for you, in all circumstances, at every moment, the best that will happen not the way you conceive of it (naturally, thought knows nothing), but in reality. Well, there is a part of the being which can become aware of this and have this confidence. This is something added on to faith which gives it more strength, a strengthhow shall I put it?of total acceptance and the best utilisation of what happen.
There is a state in which one realises that the effect of things, circumstances, all the movements and actions of life on the consciousness depends almost exclusively upon ones attitude to these things. There is a moment when one becomes sufficiently conscious to realise that things in themselves are truly neither good nor bad: they are this only in relation to us; their effect on us depends absolutely upon the attitude we have towards them. The same thing, identically the same, if we take it as a gift of God, as a divine grace, as the result of the full Harmony, helps us to become more conscious, stronger, more true, while if we take itexactly the very same circumstanceas a blow from fate, as a bad force wanting to affect us, this constricts us, weighs us down and takes away from us all consciousness and strength and harmony. And the circumstance in itself is exactly the sameof this, I should like you all to have the experience, for when you have it, you become master of yourself. Not only master of yourself but, in what concerns you, master of the circumstances of your life. And this depends exclusively upon the attitude you take; it is not an experience that occurs in the head, though it begins there, but an experience which can occur in the body itself. So much so, thatwell, it is a realisation which naturally asks for a lot of work, concentration, self-mastery, consciousness pushed into Matter, but as a result, in accordance with the way the body receives shocks from outside, the effect may be different. And if you attain perfection in that field, you become master of accidents. I hope this will happen. It is possible. It is not only possible; it is certain. Only it is just one step forward. That is, this power you havealready fully and formidably realised in the mindto act upon circumstances to the extent of changing them totally in their action upon you, that power can descend into Matter, into the physical substance itself, the cells of the body, and give the same power to the body in relation to the things around it.

1954-06-02 - Learning how to live - Work, studies and sadhana - Waste of the Energy and Consciousness, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Can one study for the Divine and not for oneself, prepare oneself for the Divine Work?
Yes, if you study with the feeling that you must develop yourselves to become instruments. But truly, it is done in a very different spirit, isnt it?very different. To begin with, there are no longer subjects you like and those you dont, no longer any classes which bore you and those which dont, no longer any difficult things and things not difficult, no longer any teachers who are pleasant or any who are notall that disappears immediately. One enters a state in which one takes whatever happen as an opportunity to learn to prepare oneself for the Divine Work, and everything becomes interesting. Naturally, if one is doing that, it is quite all right.
What you have said in the Bulletin about educating the mindthis means that one educates oneself for that, lives and studies for the Divine. Then isnt this a work done for the Divine?
--
Energy, Consciousness is infinitely, a thousand times more wasted than money. Should there be no wastage my word, I believe the Ashram couldnt be here! There is not a second when there isnt any wastage sometimes it is worse than that. There is this habithardly conscious, I hopeof absorbing as much Energy, as much Consciousness as one can and using it for ones personal satisfactions. That indeed is something which is happening every minute. If all the Energy, all the Consciousness which is constantly poured out upon you all, were used for the true purpose, that is, for the Divine Work and the preparation for the Divine Work, we should be already very far on the road, much farther than we are. But everybody, more or less consciously, and in any case instinctively, absorbs as much Consciousness and Energy as he can and as soon as he feels this Energy in himself, he uses it for his personal ends, his own satisfaction.
Who thinks that all this Force that is here, that is infinitely greater, infinitely more precious than all money-forces, this Force which is here and is given consciously, constantly, with an endless perseverance and patience, only for one sole purpose, that of realising the Divine Workwho thinks of not wasting it? Who realises that it is a sacred duty to make progress, to prepare oneself to understand better and live better? For people live by the divine Energy, they live by the divine Consciousness, and use them for their personal, selfish ends.
You are shocked when a few thousand rupees are wasted but not shocked when there are when streams of Consciousness and Energy are diverted from their true purpose!

1954-06-16 - Influences, Divine and other - Adverse forces - The four great Asuras - Aspiration arranges circumstances - Wanting only the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To be taken back into the Divine. There were four great Asuras. Out of the four, two are converted. They are taking part in the Divine Work. The other two are holding out well. How long will they hold out? We shall see. So, they have the choice between being converted, that is, taking their place, poised, in the whole totality or else being dissolved, that is, being re-absorbed by their origin.
There is one of them who has almost attempted conversion and not succeeded. When it had to be done, it seemed to him quite unpleasant. So he has put it off till another time.

1954-07-28 - Money - Ego and individuality - The shadow, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(After a silence) And this is somethingan experience that one can have daily, or almost when one has those movements of great enthusiasm, great aspiration, when one suddenly becomes conscious of the divine goal, the urge towards the Divine, the desire to take part in the Divine Work, when one comes out of oneself in a great joy and great force and then, a few hours later, one is miserable for a tiny little thing; one indulges in so petty, so narrow, so commonplace a self-interestedness, has such a dull desire and all the rest has evaporated as if it did not exist. One is quite accustomed to contradictions; one doesnt pay attention to this and that is why all these things live comfortably together as neighbours. One must first discover them and prevent them from intermingling in ones consciousness: decide between them, separate the shadow from the light. Later one can get rid of the shadow.
There we are, and now it is time. Anything urgent to ask? No?

1954-08-04 - Servant and worker - Justification of weakness - Play of the Divine - Why are you here in the Ashram?, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is not even very difficult. You can first do it as a preparation so as to become capable of receiving the divine forces, and then, as a service, so that you may help in constructing the whole organisation of the Ashram. You can do it not with any personal gain in view, but with the intention of making yourselves ready to accomplish the Divine Work! This seems to me even quite indispensable if you want to profit fully from the situation. If you keep the ordinary point of view, well, you will always find yourselves in conditions which are not quite satisfactory, and incapable of receiving all the forces you can receive.
Mother, if for instance in the long jump one makes an effort to jump a greater and greater distance, how does one do the Divine Work?
Eh? Excuse me, it is not for the pleasure of doing the long jump, it is to make your body more perfect in its functioning, and, therefore, a more suitable instrument for receiving the divine forces and manifesting them.

1954-09-08 - Hostile forces - Substance - Concentration - Changing the centre of thought - Peace, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What are the adverse forces? There are as many of them as there are elements in the world. Only, unless they express themselves physically, we do not see them. So we are not aware of them. But I told you the other day that the atmosphere is full of countless formations which are usually made up of thoughts, desires, impulses, wills, and which are as mixed as mens thoughts. There are good ones, there are bad ones; and behind that there are all the formations of the vital world, a world essentially hostile to the Divine. Only the vital in man, under the psychic influence, can change and become a collaborator in the Divine Work. Otherwise, the vital world is essentially formed of beings hostile to the Divine Work, and those who open themselves to these forces without any control are naturally under the influence of the adverse forces. So, one cant say what these adverse forces are. It would be easier to say what they are not.
(Speaking to the children in the first row) Do you have a questions? You have a question? And you? You?

1954-11-03 - Body opening to the Divine - Concentration in the heart - The army of the Divine - The knot of the ego -Streng thening ones will, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How to cut it? Take a sword and strike it (laughter), when one becomes conscious of it. For usually one is not; we think it quite normal, what happen to us; and in fact it is very normal but we think it quite good also. So to begin with one must have a great clear-sightedness to become aware that one is enclosed in all these knots which hold one in bondage. And then, when one is aware that theres something altogether tightly closed in thereso tightly that one has tried in vain to move it then one imagines his will to be a very sharp sword-blade, and with all ones force one strikes a blow on this knot (imaginary, of course, one doesnt take up a sword in fact), and this produces a result. Of course you can do this work from the psychological point of view, discovering all the elements constituting this knot, the whole set of resistances, habits, preferences, of all that holds you narrowly closed in. So when you grow aware of this, you can concentrate and call the divine Force and the Grace and strike a good blow on this formation, these things so closely held, like that, that nothing can separate them. And at that moment you must resolve that you will no longer listen to these things, that you will listen only to the divine Consciousness and will do no other work except the Divine Work without worrying about personal results, free from all attachment, free from all preference, free from all wish for success, power, satisfaction, vanity, all this All this must disappear and you must see only the divine Will incarnated in your will and making you act. Then, in this way, you are cured.
Mother, how can one streng then ones will?

1954-12-22 - Possession by hostile forces - Purity and morality - Faith in the final success -Drawing back from the path, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Well, if they want to, why cant they? There is nothing in the universe which doesnt have one single origin that is, a supreme origin the hostile forces like everything else; and if they give up their revolt and separation and aspire to return to their source, they can very well be converted. It may require much more effort from them than is necessary for a human being to change his defects, that of course is obvious. It is a much greater effort and, above all, much deeper, because the origin of their revolt is very deep; it is not superficial. But still, they can manage it. They have the power also; these are very powerful beings who, if they resolve to be converted, can do it; and then they become some of the most wonderful instruments for the Divine Work. The very ones who were some of the greatest adversaries.
I am looking for someone who told me that she would ask me a question. It is Sujat. Where is she perched? At the end of the world! I shall never be able to hear her. What did you want to ask?

1955-06-08 - Working for the Divine - ideal attitude - Divine manifesting - reversal of consciousness, knowing oneself - Integral progress, outer, inner, facing difficulties - People in Ashram - doing Yoga - Children given freedom, choosing yoga, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But he stresses precisely that. It is simply in order to stress the point. It means that all this perfection which we are going to acquire is not for a personal and selfish end, it is in order to be able to manifest the Divine, it is put at the service of the Divine. We do not pursue this development with a selfish intention of personal perfection; we pursue it because the Divine Work has to be accomplished.
But why do we do this divine Work? It is to make ourselves...
No, not at all! It is because that's the divine Will. It is not at all for a personal reason, it must not be that. It is because it's the divine Will and it's the Divine Work.
So long as a personal aspiration or desire, a selfish will, get mingled in it, it always creates a mixture and is not exactly an expression of the divine Will. The only thing which must count is the Divine, His Will, His manifestation, His expression. One is here for that, one is that, and nothing else. And so long as there is a feeling of self, of the ego, the person, which enters, well, this proves that one is not yet what one ought to be, that's all. I don't say that this can be done overnight but still this indeed is the truth.

1955-11-09 - Personal effort, egoistic mind - Man is like a public square - Natures work - Ego needed for formation of individual - Adverse forces needed to make man sincere - Determinisms of different planes, miracles, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A being that is absolutely sincere becomes the master of the adverse forces. But so long as there is egoism in a being or pride or ill-will, it will always be the object of temptation, of attack; and it will always be fully subject to this constant conflict with what, under the appearance of hostile beings, toils in spite of itself at the Divine Work.
The time is not absolutely determined. I have already explained this to you several times. There are many fields of consciousness, zones of consciousness superimposed upon one another; and in each one of these fields of consciousness or action there is a determinism which seems absolute. But the intervention in one field of even the next higher field, like the intervention of the vital in the physical, introduces the determinism of the vital in that of the physical, and necessarily transforms the determinism of the physical. And if through aspiration, the inner will, self-giving and true surrender one can enter into contact with the higher regions or even the supreme region, from up there the supreme determinism will come down and transform all the intermediate determinisms and it will be able to bring about in a so-to-say almost inexistent span of time what would have otherwise taken either years or lives to be accomplished. But this is the only way.

1955-11-23 - One reality, multiple manifestations - Integral Yoga, approach by all paths - The supreme man and the divine man - Miracles and the logic of events, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo says here: the Divine Working is not the working which the egoistic mind desires or approves; for it uses error in order to arrive at truth, suffering in order to arrive at bliss, imperfection in order to arrive at perfection. How?
Like that. As the world is today.

1956-07-25 - A complete act of divine love - How to listen - Sports programme same for boys and girls - How to profit by stay at Ashram - To Women about Their Body, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Why make a distinction between the two? They are both human beings trying to become fit instruments for the Divine Work, above questions of sex, caste, creed and nationality; they are all children of the same infinite Mother and aspirants to the one and eternal Godhead.
What is the ideal of physical beauty for a woman?

1956-08-01 - Value of worship - Spiritual realisation and the integral yoga - Symbols, translation of experience into form - Sincerity, fundamental virtue - Intensity of aspiration, with anguish or joy - The divine Grace, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And that would be the best possible collaboration in the Divine Work.
Later a disciple asked Mother: "Why did you say 'almost'? Isn't then the disappearance complete?" To which Mother answered: "Somewhere, I believe it is in 'The Yoga of Self-Perfection' [The Synthesis of Yoga], regarding those who wish to merge in the Supreme, Sri Aurobindo says or rather hints that this cannot be done, for the Supreme wants it otherwise. But Sri Aurobindo says it without saying it, it is just an allusion in passing. The idea is that beyond Being and Non-Being, the total Summit necessarily includes a formwhat might be called an essential formof the individuality, which no longer contradicts or is even distinct from the One, but is included in the One without any separation. But the words at our disposal mean nothing! And one is reduced to giving a childish explanation. That is why I said 'almost'."

1956-08-08 - How to light the psychic fire, will for progress - Helping from a distance, mental formations - Prayer and the divine - Grace Grace at work everywhere, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And that would be the best possible collaboration in the Divine Work.
Talk of 1 August 1956 (p. 250)

1958-02-12 - Psychic progress from life to life - The earth, the place of progress, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When it has become an almost completely formed and already very conscious being, it presides over the formation of the new body, and usually through an inner influence it chooses the elements and the substance which will form its body in such a way that the body is adapted to the needs of its new experience. But this is at a rather advanced stage. And later, when it is fully formed and returns to earth with the idea of service, of collective help and participation in the Divine Work, then it is able to bring to the body in formation certain elements of the mind and vital from previous lives which, having been organised and impregnated with psychic forces in previous lives, could be preserved and, consequently, can participate in the general progress. But this is at a very, very advanced stage.
When the psychic is fully developed and very conscious, when it becomes a conscious instrument of the divine Will, it organises the vital and the mind in such a way that they too participate in the general harmony and can be preserved.

2.01 - The Mother, #Words Of The Mother I, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Later on, as the interior and exterior development proceeded, the spiritual and psychic relation with one of these beings became more and more clear and frequent; and although I knew little of the Indian philosophies and religions at that time I was led to call him Krishna, and henceforth I was aware that it was with him (whom I knew I should meet on earth one day) that the Divine Work was to be done.
In the year 1910 my husb and came alone to Pondicherry where, under very interesting and peculiar circumstances, he made the acquaintance of Sri Aurobindo. Since then we both strongly wished to return to India the country which I had always cherished as my true mother-country. And in 1914 this joy was granted to us.

2.02 - Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An absolute, eternal and infinite Self-existence, Self-awareness, Self-delight of being that secretly supports and pervades the universe even while it is also beyond it, is, then, the first truth of spiritual experience. But this truth of being has at once an impersonal and a personal aspect; it is not only Existence, it is the one Being absolute, eternal and infinite. As there are three fundamental aspects in which we meet this Reality, Self, Conscious Being or Spirit and God, the Divine Being, or to use the Indian terms, the absolute and omnipresent Reality, Brahman, manifest to us as Atman, Purusha, Ishwara, - so too its power of Consciousness appears to us in three aspects: it is the self-force of that consciousness conceptively creative of all things, Maya; it is Prakriti, Nature or Force made dynamically executive, working out all things under the witnessing eye of the Conscious Being, the Self or Spirit; it is the conscious Power of the Divine Being, Shakti, which is both conceptively creative and dynamically executive of all the Divine Workings. These three aspects and their powers base and comprise the whole of existence and all Nature and, taken together as a single whole, they reconcile the apparent disparateness and incompatibility of the supracosmic Transcendence, the cosmic universality and the separativeness of our individual existence; the Absolute, cosmic Nature and ourselves are linked in oneness by this triune aspect of the one Reality. For taken by itself the existence of the Absolute, the Supreme Brahman, would be a contradiction of the relative universe and our own real existence would be incompatible with its sole incommunicable Reality. But the Brahman is at the same time omnipresent in all relativities; it is the Absolute independent of all relatives, the Absolute basing all relatives, the Absolute governing, pervading, constituting all relatives; there is nothing that is not the omnipresent Reality. In observing the triple aspect and the triple power we come to see how this is possible.
If we look at this picture of the Self-Existence and its works as a unitary unlimited whole of vision, it stands together and imposes itself by its convincing totality: but to the analysis of the logical intellect it offers an abundance of difficulties, such as all attempts to erect a logical system out of a perception of an illimitable Existence must necessarily create; for any such endeavour must either effect consistency by an arbitrary sectioning of the complex truth of things or else by its comprehensiveness become logically untenable. For we see that the Indeterminable determines itself as infinite and finite, the Immutable admits a constant mutability and endless differences, the One becomes an innumerable multitude, the Impersonal creates or supports personality, is itself a Person; the Self has a nature and is yet other than its nature; Being turns into becoming and yet it is always itself and other than its becomings; the Universal individualises itself and the Individual universalises himself; Brahman is at once void of qualities and capable of infinite qualities, the Lord and Doer of works, yet a non-doer and a silent witness of the workings of Nature. If we look carefully at these workings of Nature, once we put aside the veil of familiarity and our unthinking acquiescence in the process of things as natural because so they always happen, we discover that all she does in whole or in parts is a miracle, an act of some incomprehensible magic. The being of the Self-existence and the world that has appeared in it are, each of them and both together, a suprarational mystery. There seems to us to be a reason in things because the processes of the physical finite are consistent to our view and their law determinable, but this reason in things, when closely examined, seems to stumble at every moment against the irrational or infrarational and the suprarational: the consistency, the determinability of process seems to lessen rather than increase as we pass from matter to life and from life to mentality; if the finite consents to some extent to look as if it were rational, the infinitesimal refuses to be bound by the same laws and the infinite is unseizable. As for the action of the universe and its significance, it escapes us altogether; if Self, God or Spirit there be, his dealings with the world and us are incomprehensible, offer no clue that we can follow. God and Nature and even ourselves move in a mysterious way which is only partially and at points intelligible, but as a whole escapes our comprehension. All the works of Maya look like the production of a suprarational magical Power which arranges things according to its wisdom or its phantasy, but a wisdom which is not ours and a phantasy which baffles our imagination.

2.02 - On Letters, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
For ordinary men work is, of course, necessary, but one who wants to do 'divine work' must prepare himself. He must learn to be 'an instrument' first. All these Europeans have to learn that the work they take up is only a preparation for the Divine Work. They must know that it is not any mentally constructed work to which they must obstinately stick, if they want to be the instruments of God.
For instance, all these tall ideas like Madame Y's about regenerating India and taking up big schemes and being regarded as big workers and saviours have got a fascination. One who wants to do the Divine Work must learn to forget the difference between important and unimportant work, small work and great work, till the work that is intended is found by him.
Disciple: She would profit spiritually only if she learnt from her work and her experience. India has got her own Dharma and work for her has to be done in keeping with her Dharma.

2.03 - The Eternal and the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
No man is simply good or simply bad; every man is a mixture of contraries: even we find these contraries often inextricably mixed up in a single feeling, a single action. All kinds of conflicting qualities, powers, values meet together and run into each other to make up our action, life, nature. We can only understand entirely if we get to some sense of the Absolute and yet look at its workings in all the relativities which are being manifested, - look not only at each by itself, but each in relation to all and to that which exceeds and reconciles them all. In fact we can only know by getting to the divine view and purpose in things and not merely looking at our own, though our own limited human view and momentary purpose have their validity in the cadre of the All. For behind all relativities there is this Absolute which gives them their being and their justification. No particular act or arrangement in the world is by itself absolute justice; but there is behind all acts and arrangements something absolute which we call justice, which expresses itself through their relativities and which we would realise if our view and knowledge were comprehensive instead of being as they are partial, superficial, limited to a few ostensible facts and appearances. So too there is an absolute good and an absolute beauty: but we can only get a glimpse of it if we embrace all things impartially and get beyond their appearances to some sense of that which, between them, all and each are by their complex terms trying to state and work out; not an indeterminate, - for the indeterminate, being only the original stuff or perhaps the packed condition of determinations, would explain by itself nothing at all, - but the Absolute. We can indeed follow the opposite method of breaking up all things and refusing to look at them as a whole and in relation to that which justifies them and so create an intellectual conception of absolute evil, absolute injustice, the absolute hideousness, painfulness, triviality, vulgarity or vanity of all things; but that is to pursue to its extreme the method of the Ignorance whose view is based upon division. We cannot rightly so deal with the Divine Workings. Because the Absolute expresses itself through relativities the secret of which we find it difficult to fathom, because to our limited view everything appears to be a purposeless play of oppositions and negatives or a mass of contradictions, we cannot conclude that our first limited view is right or that all is a vain delusion of the mind and has no reality. Nor can we solve all by an original unreconciled contradiction which is to explain all the rest. The human reason is wrong in attaching a separate and definitive value to each contradiction by itself or getting rid of one by altogether denying the other; but it is right in refusing to accept as final and as the last word the coupling of contradictions which have in no way been reconciled together or have not found their source and significance in something beyond their opposition.
We cannot, either, effect a reconciliation or explanation of the original contradictions of existence by taking refuge in our concept of Time. Time, as we know or conceive it, is only our means of realising things in succession, it is a condition and cause of conditions, varies on different planes of existence, varies even for beings on one and the same plane: that is to say, it is not an Absolute and cannot explain the primary relations of the

2.04 - Agni, the Illumined Will, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The solution of the problem depends on right realisation, and right realisation starts from the right illuminative Word, expression of the inspired Thought which is sent to the seer out of the Vast. Therefore the Rishi asks farther, "What word is uttered to Agni?" What word of affirmation, what word of realisation? Two conditions have to be satisfied. The Word must be accepted by other divine Powers, that is, it must bring out some potentiality in the nature or bring into it some light of realisation by which the Divine Workers may be induced to manifest in the superficial consciousness of humanity and embrace openly their respective functions. And it must be illuminative of the double nature of Agni, this Lord of the lustrous flame. Bhama means both a light of knowledge and a flame of action. Agni is a Light as well as a Force.
The Word arrives. Yo martyes.u amr.to r.tava. Agni is, preeminently, the Immortal in mortals. It is this Agni by whom the other bright sons of Infinity are able to work out the manifestation and self-extension of the Divine (devavti, devatati) which is at once aim and process of the cosmic and of the human sacrifice. For he is the divine Will which in all things is always present, is always destroying and constructing, always building and perfecting, supporting always the complex progression of the universe. It is this which persists through all death and change. It is eternally and inalienably possessed of the Truth. In the last obscuration of Nature, in the lowest unintelligence of

2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: As I said, it depends on the Guru. You don't mean to say that the personal side of the Guru decides voluntarily and independently of the Divine what is to be given to a disciple? Even when it appears to take that form it is something else that decides. The more the personal element (in the sense of the vital or mental preference on the part of the Guru) the more is the likelihood of mistake being committed. If he is a mere human Guru, then if he is a Bengali he would like to give his grace to Bengalis or he would choose his relatives. That has nothing to do with the Divine Work. All that idea about patita-pvana and adhama-uddhra means only this that however bad or seemingly wicked the external life may be, the man can yet be saved if he has something in him which can receive the Truth. One may say that even for Grace to descend there are conditions.
Disciple: Are these conditions determined by the Divine?
--
Sri Aurobindo: That is what Isay, that even when one gets the experience of the Divine Consciousness once, one generally remains what he was in his mental and vital being. And so they go about with the usual ideas of the Church or religion in the orthodox sense, making themselves believe that it is the Divine Work.
It is another side of the Adwaitawadins who believe the world to be Maya. Once you get the realisation of the Brahman the rest does not matter they don't mind what happens to the lower nature. If there are movements in the mental or the vital being, they are simply due to the past impulse, and you have nothing to do with them, they are outside you, they do not belong to you.

2.1.02 - Combining Work, Meditation and Bhakti, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
You again try to floor me with Ramakrishna. But one thing puzzles me, as Shankaras stupendous activity of karma puzzles me in the apostle of inactionyou see you are not the only puzzled person in the world. Ramakrishna also gave the image of the jar which ceased gurgling when it was full. Well, but Ramakrishna spent the last years of his life in talking about the Divine and receiving disciples that was not action, not work? Did Ramakrishna become a half-full jar after being a full one or was he never full? Did he get far away from God and so begin a work? Or had he reached a condition in which he was bound neither to rajasic work and mental prattling nor to inactivity and silence, but could do from the divine realisation the Divine Work and speak from the inner consciousness the divine word? If the last, perhaps in spite of his dictum, his example at least is rather in my favour.
I do not know why you drag in humanitarianism, activism, philanthropical sev etc. None of these are part of my Yoga or in harmony with my definition of works, so they dont touch me. I never thought that politics or feeding the poor or writing beautiful poems would lead straight to Vaikuntha or the Absolute. If it were so, Romesh Dutt on one side and Baudelaire on the other would be the first to attain the Highest and welcome us there. It is not the form of the work itself or mere activity but the consciousness and Godward will behind it that are the essence of Karmayoga; the work is only the necessary instrumentation for the union with the Master of works, the transit to the pure Will and power of Light from the will and power of the Ignorance.

2.10 - The Vision of the World-Spirit - Time the Destroyer, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What then is the master man, the Divine Worker, the opened channel of the universal Will to do when he finds the WorldSpirit turned towards some immense catastrophe, figured before his eyes as Time the destroyer arisen and increased for the destruction of the nations, and himself put there in the forefront whether as a fighter with physical weapons or a leader and guide or an inspirer of men, as he cannot fail to be by the very force of his nature and the power within him, svabhavajena svena karman.a? To abstain, to sit silent, to protest by nonintervention? But abstention will not help, will not prevent the fulfilment of the destroying Will, but rather by the lacuna it creates increase confusion. Even without thee, cries the Godhead, my will of destruction would still be accomplished, r.te'pi tvam. If
Arjuna were to abstain or even if the battle of Kurukshetra were not to be fought, that evasion would only prolong and make worse the inevitable confusion, disorder, ruin that are coming.

2.11 - The Modes of the Self, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But if we cannot define the Eternal, we call unify ourselves with it. It has been said that we can become the Impersonal, but not tile personal God, but this is only true in the sense that no one can become individually the Lord of all the universes; we can free ourselves into the existence of the active Brahman as well as that of the Silence; we can live in both, go back to our being in both, but each in its proper way, by becoming one with the Nirguna in our essence and one with the Saguna in the liberty of our active being, in our nature364. The Supreme pours Himself out of an eternal peace, poise and silence into an eternal activity, free and infinite, freely fixing for itself its self-determinations, using infinite quality to shape out of it varied combination of quality. We have to go back to that peace, poise and silence and act out of it with the divine freedom from the bondage of qualities but still using qualities even the most opposite largely and flexibly for the Divine Work in the world. Only, while the Lord acts out of the centre of all things, we have to act by transmission of His will and power and self-knowledge through the individual centre, the soul-form of Him which we are. The Lord is subject to nothing; the Individual soul-form is subject to its own highest Self and the greater and more absolute is that subjection the greater becomes its sense of absolute force and freedom.
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.

2.14 - The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the activities of the cosmic Energy. There is too a suprarational truth formulating itself in spiritual experience which can observe the play of universal possibility, accept all impartially as the true and natural features and consequences of a world of ignorance and inconscience or admit all with calm and compassion as a part of the Divine Working, but, while it awaits the awakening of a higher consciousness and knowledge as the sole escape from what presents itself as evil, is ready with help and intervention where that is truly helpful and possible. But, nonetheless, there is also this other middle truth of consciousness which awakens us to the values of good and evil and the appreciation of their necessity and importance; this awakening, whatever may be the sanction or the validity of its particular judgments, is one of the indispensable steps in the process of evolutionary Nature.
But from what then does this awakening proceed? what is it in the human being that originates and gives its power and place to the sense of good and evil? If we regard only the process, we may agree that it is the vital mind that makes the distinction. Its first valuation is sensational and individual, - all that is pleasant, helpful, beneficial to the life-ego is good, all that is unpleasant, malefic, injurious or destructive is evil. Its next valuation is utilitarian and social: all that is considered helpful to the associated life, all that it demands from the individual in order to remain in association and to regulate association for the best maintenance, satisfaction, development, good order of the associated life and its units, is good; all that has in the view of the society a contrary effect or tendency is evil. But thinking mind then comes in with its own valuation and strives to find out an intellectual basis, an idea of law or principle, rational or cosmic, a law of Karma perhaps or an ethical system founded on reason or on an aesthetic, emotional or hedonistic basis. Religion brings in her sanctions; there is a word or law of God that enjoins righteousness even though Nature permits or stimulates its opposite, - or perhaps Truth and Righteousness are themselves

2.15 - The Cosmic Consciousness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is evident that by dwelling in this cosmic consciousness our whole experience and valuation of everything in the universe will be radically changed. As individual egos we dwell in the Ignorance and judge everything by a broken, partial and personal standard of knowledge; we experience everything according to the capacity of a limited consciousness and force and are therefore unable to give a divine response or set the true value upon any part of cosmic experience. We experience limitation, weakness, incapacity, grief, pain, struggle and its contradictory emotions or the opposite of these things as opposites in an eternal duality and not in the eternity of an absolute good and happiness. We live by fragments of experience and judge by our fragmentary values each thing and the whole. When we try to arrive at absolute values we only promote some partial view of things to do duty for a totality in the Divine Workings; we make-believe that our fractions are integers and thrust our one-sided viewpoints into the catholicity of the all-vision of the Divine.
By entering into the cosmic consciousness we participate in that all-vision and see everything in the values of the Infinite and the One. Limitation itself, ignorance itself change their meaning for us. Ignorance changes into a particular action of divine knowledge, strength and weakness and incapacity into a free putting forth and holding back various measures of divine Force, joy and grief, pleasure and pain into a mastering and a suffering of divine delight, struggle into a balancing of forces and values in the divine harmony. We do not suffer by the limitations of our mind, life and body; for we no longer live in these but in the infinity of the Spirit, and these we view in their right value and place and purpose in the manifestation, as degrees of the supreme being, conscious-force and delight of Sachchidananda veiling and manifesting Himself in the cosmos. We cease to judge men and things by their outward appearances and are delivered from hostile and contradictory ideas and emotions; for it is the soul that we see, the Divine that we seek and find in every thing and creature, and the rest has only a secondary value to us in a scheme of relations which exist now for us only as self-expressions of the Divine and not as having any absolute value in themselves. So too no event can disturb us, since the distinction of happy and unhappy, beneficent and maleficent happenings loses its force, and all is seen in its divine value and its divine purpose. Thus we arrive at a perfect liberation and an infinite equality. It is this consummation of which the Upanishad speaks when it says "He in whom the self has become all existences, how shall he have delusion, whence shall he have grief who knows entirely397 and sees in all things oneness."

2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Ordinarily, one tags everything on to the 'ego'. But in that higher state you understand the Divine Working better than when you are a separate 'ego'. It is when you can become 'nobody' and have experience of the Divine that you can be free. That is Mukti. When I realized the One, my self disappeared. It is difficult to think of myself as so and so, son of so and so. It is a relief and freedom to be 'That' and to remain in 'It'.
Disciple: Can it be called Shankara's Vedantic realization?

2.2.01 - Work and Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Obviously, a more systematic and intensive sadhana is desirable or, in any case, a steady aspiration and a more constant preoccupation with the central aim could bring an established detachment even in the midst of outer things and outer activity and a continuous guidance. The completeness, the Siddhi of this way of Yoga I speak of the separate path of Karma or spiritual actionbegins when one is luminously aware of the Guide and the guidance and when one feels the Power working with oneself as the instrument and the participator in the Divine Work.
***
--
Yes, the use to which you have turned your vital capacities in Bengal and Bombay,to turn them into instruments of service and the Divine Work, is certainly the best possible. Through such action and such use of the vital power, one can certainly progress in Yoga. Vital power is necessary for work and you have an exceptional amount of it. Of course, to make a full Yogic use of it and of its force for action, the ego must gradually fade out and vital attachments and impulses be replaced by the spiritual motive. Bhakti, devotion to the Divine, and the spirit of service to the Divine are among the most powerful means for this change.
***

2.28 - The Divine Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
36: There would be a considerable free diversity between different gnostic communities; each would create its own body of the life of the spirit: there would be, too, a considerable free diversity in the self-expression of the individuals of a single community. But this free diversity would not be a chaos or create any discord; for a diversity of one Truth of knowledge and one Truth of life would be a correlation and not an opposition. In a gnostic consciousness there would be no ego-insistence on personal idea and no push or clamour of personal will and interest: there would be instead the unifying sense of a common Truth in many forms, a common self in many consciousnesses and bodies; there would be a universality and plasticity which saw and expressed the One in many figures of itself and worked out oneness in all diversities as the inherent law of the Truth-consciousness and its truth of nature. A single Consciousness-Force, of which all would be aware and see themselves as its instruments, would act through all and harmonise their action together. The gnostic being would feel a single consonant Force of supernature acting in all: he would accept its formation in himself and obey or use the knowledge and power it gave him for the Divine Work, but he would be under no urge or compulsion to set the power and knowledge in him against the power and knowledge of others or affirm himself as an ego striving against other egos. For the spiritual self has its own inalienable joy and plenitude inviolable in all conditions, its own infinity of truth of being: that it feels always in fullness whatever may be the outward formulation.
37: The truth of the spirit within would not depend on a particular formation; it would have no need, therefore, to struggle for any particular outward formulation and self-affirmation: forms would arise of themselves plastically, in suitable relation to other formulations and each in its own place in the whole formulation.

2.3.01 - Aspiration and Surrender to the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Mother according to the supramental Truth for the divine life and the Divine Work; they must not be determined by his mind and his vital desires. This is the thing you have to remember.
Your psychic being is capable of giving itself to the Mother and living and growing in the Truth; but your lower vital being has been full of attachments and sanskaras and an impure movement of desire and your external physical mind was not able to shake off its ignorant ideas and habits and open to the Truth. That was the reason why you were unable to progress, because you were keeping up an element and movements which could not be allowed to remain; for they were the exact opposite of what has to be established in a divine life. The Mother can only free you from these things, if you really want it, not only in your psychic being, but in your physical mind and all your vital nature. The sign will be that you no longer cherish or insist on your personal notions, attachments or desires, and that whatever the distance or wherever you may be, you will feel yourself open and the power and presence of the Mother with you and working in you and will be contented, quiet, confident, wanting nothing else,

2.3.04 - The Mother's Force, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In this process of the descent from above and the working it is most important not to rely entirely on oneself, but to rely on the guidance of the Guru and to refer all that happens to his judgment and arbitration and decision. For it often happens that the forces of the lower nature are stimulated and excited by the descent and want to mix with it and turn it to their profit. It often happens too that some Power or Powers undivine in their nature present themselves as the Supreme Lord or as the Divine Mother and claim the being's service and surrender. If these things are accepted, there will be an extremely disastrous consequence. If indeed there is the assent of the sadhak to the Divine Working alone and the submission or surrender to that guidance, then all can go smoothly. This assent and a rejection of all egoistic forces or forces that appeal to the ego are the safeguard throughout the sadhana. But the ways of Nature are full of snares, the disguises of the ego are innumerable, the illusions of the Powers of Darkness, Rakshasi Maya, are extraordinarily skilful; the reason is an insufficient guide and often turns traitor; vital desire is always
214

2.3.07 - The Vital Being and Vital Consciousness, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The true vital consciousness is one in which the vital makes full surrender, converts itself into an instrument of the Divine, making no demand, insisting on no desire, answering to the Mother s force and to no other, calm, unegoistic, giving an absolute loyalty and obedience, with no personal vanity or ambition, only willing to be a pure and perfect instrument, desiring nothing for itself but that the Truth may prevail within itself and everywhere and the Divine Victory take place and the Divine Work be done.
It [the true vital] is capable of receiving the movements of the higher consciousness, and afterwards it can be capable of receiving the still greater supramental power and Ananda. If it is not, then the descent of the higher consciousness would be impossible and supramentalisation would be impossible. It is not meant that it possesses these things itself in its own right and that as soon as one is aware of the true vital, one gets all these things as inherent in the true vital.
--
A strong vital is one that is full of life-force, has ambition, courage, great energy, a force for action or for creation, a large expansive movement whether for generosity in giving or for possession and lead and domination, a power to fulfil and materialise - many other forms of vital strength there are also. It is often difficult for such a vital to surrender itself because of this sense of its own powers - but if it can do so, it becomes an admirable instrument for the Divine Work.
No, a weak vital has not the strength to turn spiritually - and being weak more easily falls under a wrong influence and even when it wants, finds it difficult to accept anything beyond its own habitual nature. The strong vital when the will is there can do it much more easily - its one central difficulty is the pride of its ego and the attraction of its powers.

2.3.08 - The Mother's Help in Difficulties, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
only so far as they are necessary for that and for the Divine Work." This latter portion about prayer for outer things is not clear to me. Can you kindly explain?
All depends on whether the outer things are sought for one's own convenience, pleasure, profit etc., or as part of the spiritual life, necessary for the success of the work, the development and fitness of the instruments etc. It is a question mainly of inner attitude. If for instance you pray for money for buying nice food to please the palate, that is not a proper prayer for a sadhak; if you pray for money to give to the Mother and help her work, then it is legitimate.

2.4.02 - Bhakti, Devotion, Worship, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If one lives in the world one can offer such prayers [for help in resolving worldly problems]; but one must not expect that the Divine shall fulfil all those prayers or think that he is bound to do so. When one is a sadhak the prayer should be for the inner things belonging to the sadhana and for outer things only so far as they are necessary for that and for the Divine Work.
***

3.06 - The Delight of the Divine, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
So too this God-lover will be the Divine Worker, not for the sake of works or for a self-regarding pleasure in action, but because in this way God expends the power of his being and in his powers and their signs we find him, because the divine Will in works is the outflowing of the Godhead in the delight of its power, of divine Being in the delight of divine Force. He will feel perfect joy in the works and acts of the Beloved, because in them too he finds the Beloved; he will himself do all works because through those works too the Lord of his being expresses his divine joy in him: when he works, he feels that he is expressing in act and power his oneness with that which he loves and adores; he feels the rapture of the will which he obeys and with which all the force of his being is blissfully identified. So too, again, this God-lover will seek after perfection, because perfection is the nature of the Divine and the more he grows into perfection, the more he feels the Beloved manifest in his natural being. Or he will simply grow in perfection like the blossoming of a flower because the Divine is in him and the joy of the Divine, and as that joy expands in him, soul and mind and life too expand naturally into their godhead. At the same time, because he feels the Divine in all, perfect within every limiting appearance, he will not have the sorrow of his imperfection.
Nor will the seeking of the Divine through life and the meeting of him in all the activities of his being and of the universal being be absent from the scope of his worship. All Nature and all life will be to him at once a revelation and a fine trysting-place. Intellectual and aesthetic and dynamic activities, science and philosophy and life, thought and art and action will assume for him a diviner sanction and a greater meaning. He will seek them because of his clear sight of the Divine through them and because of the delight of the Divine in them. He will not be indeed attached to their appearances, for attachment is an obstacle to the Ananda; but because he possesses that pure, powerful and perfect Ananda which obtains everything but is dependent on nothing, and because he finds in them the ways and acts and signs, the becomings and the symbols and images of the Beloved, he draws from them a rapture which the normal mind that pursues them for themselves cannot attain or even dream. All this and more becomes part of the integral way and its consummation.

3.1.02 - Asceticism and the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This Yoga does not mean a rejection of the powers of Life, but an inner transformation and a change of the spirit in the life and the use of the powers. These powers are now used in an egoistic spirit and for undivine ends; they have to be used in a spirit of surrender to the Divine and for the purposes of the Divine Work. That is what is meant by conquering them back for the Mother. If anyone feels himself too weak to resist the clutch of the egoistic money-force he need not make the endeavour.
***
--
I quite acknowledge the utility of a temporary state of vairagya as an antidote to the too strong pull of the vital. But vairagya always tends to a turning away from life and a tamasic element in vairagya, despair, depression etc., often dilapidates the force of the being and may even lead in some cases to falling between two stools so that one loses earth and misses heaven. I therefore prefer to replace vairagya by a firm and quiet rejection of what has to be rejected, sex, vanity, ego-centrism, attachment, etc. etc.; but that does not include rejection of the activities and powers that can be made instruments of the sadhana and the Divine Work, such as art, music, poetry etc.Yoga can be done without the rejection of life, without killing or impairing the life-joy and the vital force.
***

3.2.01 - On Ideals, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
or a troublesome fanatic; to the idealist the practical man who realises the first steps towards his idea seems a coarse spoiler of the Divine Work and almost its enemy: for by attaching too much importance to what is immediately possible he removes the greater possibilities which he does not see, seems to prevent and often does prevent a larger and nobler realisation. It is the gulf between a Cavour and a Mazzini, between the prophet of an ideal and the statesman of a realisable idea. The latter seems always to be justified by the event, but the former has a deeper justification in the shortcomings of the event. The successes of the executive man hiding away the ideal under the accomplished fact are often the tragedies of the human spirit and are responsible for the great reactions and disappointments it undergoes when it finds how poor and soulless is the accomplished fact compared with the glory of the vision and the ardour of the effort.
It cannot be doubted which of these two opposites and complementaries is the most essential to success. Not only is the upheaval and fertilising of the general consciousness by the thinker and the idealist essential to the practical realisation of great changes, but in the realisation itself the idealist who will not compromise is an indispensable element. Show me a movement without a force of uncompromising idealism working somewhere in its sum of energies and you have shown me a movement which is doomed to failure and abortion or to petty and inconsiderable results. The age or the country which is entirely composed of reasonable, statesmanlike workers ever ready for concession and compromise is a country which will never be great until it has added to itself what is lacking to it and bathed itself in pure and divine fountains and an age which will accomplish nothing of supreme importance for the progress of humanity. There is a difference however between the fanatic of an idea and the true idealist: the former is simply the materialistic, executive man possessed by the idea of another, not himself the possessor of it; he is haunted in his will and driven by the force of the idea, not really illumined by its light.

3.2.02 - Yoga and Skill in Works, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
its limitless purity of self-awareness is truth of itself, satya; the divine knowledge is knowledge of the Truth, the divine Will is power of the Truth, the Divine Workings are words and ideas of the Truth realising themselves in manifold forms and through many stages and in infinite relations. But God is not limited or bound by any particular working or any moment of time or any field of space or any law of relation, because He is universal and infinite. Nor is He limited by the universe; for His infinity is not cosmic, but supracosmic.
But the individualised being is or acts as if he were so bound and limited, because he treats the particular working of existence that he is and the particular moment of time and field of space in which it is actually operating and the particular conditions which reign in the working and in the moment and in the field as if they were self-existent realities and the binding truth of things.

3.2.07 - Tantra, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo1 cannot undertake to guide you as your Guru, for the reason that he takes as disciples only those who follow his special path of Yoga; your experiences follow a different line. In his Yoga there may be an occasional current in the spine as in other nerve channels or different parts of the body, but no awakening of the Kundalini in this particular and powerful fashion. There is only a quiet uprising of the consciousness from the lower centres to join the spiritual consciousness above and a descent of the Divine Force from above which does its own work in the mind and body the manner and stages varying in each sadhak. A perfect confidence in the Divine Mother and a vigilance to repel all wrong suggestions and influences is the main law of this Yoga. Your opening having once been so powerful on the more usual Tantric lines (even without your own will intervening), it is hardly probable that it could now change easily to other linesany such effort might create a serious disturbance. In speaking of a competent Guru Sri Aurobindo meant one who had himself practised this opening of the centres and become siddha in that line of Yoga. It should not be impossible to find onewhen one has the call for the Guru, the Guru sooner or later comes. Meanwhile to put away fear and have confidence in the Divine Working is indispensable but no effort should be made to force the pace by concentrated meditation unless you have a guide whom you can trusta clear guidance from within or a guide from without. The inspiration about the Ida nadi and the subsequent waking of the Shakti show that there was an intervention at a critical moment and that the call to it whenever needed is likely to be effective.
In the experiences proper related in your first letter there is absolutely nothing that should have disturbed youall was quite normal, the usual experiences of the Yogin at such a juncture and very good and powerful, such as do not come except by the grace of the Divine. Probably the opening came after slow invisible preparation as a result of the meditation on the lotus at the top of the head; for that is always an invitation to the Kundalini to awake or for the lower consciousness to rise and meet the higher. The disturbing factor came with the feeling of discomfort in the heart due to some resistance in the physical being which is very often felt and can be overcome by the working of the Force itself and the fear that came afterwards in the seats of the vital Nature, heart, navel etc. But that was no part of the experience, it was an interference by a wrong reaction from the lower or exterior consciousness. If you had not allowed yourself to be disturbed, probably nothing untoward would have disturbed the process. One must not get frightened by unusual states or movements or experiences, the Yogi must be fearless, abh; it is absurd to have a fear because one can control ones states; that is a power very much to be desired and welcomed in Yoga.

3.2.09 - The Teachings of Some Modern Indian Yogis, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As to the dilemma about the cruelty of things, I do not know what answer Ramdas would give. One answer might be that the Divine within is felt through the psychic being and the nature of the psychic being is that of the divine light, harmony, love, but it is covered by the mental and separative vital ego from which strife, hate, cruelty naturally come. It is therefore natural to feel in the kindness the touch of the Divine, while the cruelty is felt as a disguise or perversion in Nature, although that would not prevent the man who has the realisation from feeling and meeting the Divine behind the disguise. I have known even instances in which the perception of the Divine in all accompanied by an intense experience of universal love or a wide experience of an inner harmony had an extraordinary effect in making all around kind and helpful, even the most coarse and hard and cruel. Perhaps it is some such experience which is at the base of Ramdass statement about the kindness. As for the Divine Working, the experience of the Vedantic realisation is that behind the confused mixture of good and evil something is working that he realises as the Divine and in his own life he can look back and see what each step, happy or unhappy, meant for his progress and how it led towards the growth of his spirit. Naturally this comes fully as the realisation progresses; before that he had to walk by faith and may have often felt his faith fail and yielded to grief, doubt and despair for a time.
As for my writings, I dont know if there is any that would clear up the difficulty. You would find mostly the statement of the Vedantic experience, for it is that through which I passed and, though now I have passed to something beyond, it seems to me the most thorough-going and radical preparation for whatever is Beyond, though I do not say that it is indispensable to pass through it. But whatever the solution, it seems to me that the Vedantin is right in insisting that one must, to arrive at it, admit the two facts, the prevalence of evil and suffering here and the experience of that which is free from these thingsand it is only by the progressive experience that one can get a solutionwhe ther through reconciliation, a conquering descent or an escape. If we start from the basis taken as an axiom that the prevalence of suffering and evil in the present and in the hard, outward fact of things, disproves of itself all that has been experienced by sages and mystics of the other side, the realisable Divine, then no solution seems possible.

34.03 - Hymn To Dawn, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
Lo! The luminous Goddess of Delight spreading out like a herd of kine! Like a river She extends herself wide over low lands. She never impairs the Divine Works, she awakes and becomes visible with the rays of the Sun.
(13)

3.4.2 - The Inconscient and the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The extreme acuteness of your difficulties is due to the Yoga having come down against the bedrock of Inconscience which is the fundamental basis of all resistance in the individual and in the world to the victory of the Spirit and the Divine Work that is leading toward that victory. The difficulties themselves are general in the Asram as well as in the outside world. Doubt, discouragement, diminution or loss of faith, waning of the vital enthusiasm for the ideal, perplexity and a baffling of the hope for the future are the common features of the difficulty. In the world outside there are much worse symptoms such as the general increase of cynicism, a refusal to believe in anything at all, a decrease of honesty, an immense corruption, a preoccupation with food, money, comfort, pleasure to the exclusion of higher things and a general expectation of worse and worse things awaiting the world. All that, however acute, is a temporary phenomenon for which those who know anything about the workings of the world-energy and the workings of the Spirit were prepared. I myself foresaw that this worst would come, the darkness of night before the dawn; therefore I am not discouraged. I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come.
This letter was written in April 1944, the one that follows it in June 1944. The final letter in the group was written in April 1947.Ed.

3.7.1.09 - Karma and Freedom, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The mental being in us can be a learner in the school of freedom, not a perfect adept. A real freedom comes when we get away from the mind into the life of the spirit, from personality to the Person, from Nature to the lord of Nature. There again the first liberty is a passive power; it is of the nature of an assent; it is an observing and essential liberty in which the active part of the being is an instrument of the supreme Spirit and its universal action. But the assent is to the will of the Spirit and not to the mechanical force of Nature, and there is thrown on the mind the freedom of the spirits light and purity and a right knowledge of relations and a clear detached assent to the Divine Workings. But if man would have too a freedom of power, of participation, of companionship as the son of God in a greater divine control, he must then not only get back from mind, but must stand, in his thought and will even, above the levels of mentality and find there a station of leverage, a spiritual pou st,2 whence he can sovereignly move the world of his being. Such a station of consciousness there is in our supramental ranges. When the soul is one with the Supreme and with the universal not only in essence of consciousness and spiritual truth of being, but in expressive act too of consciousness and being, when it enjoys an initiating and relating truth of spiritual will and knowledge and the souls overflowing delight in God and existence, when it is admitted to the spirits fullness of assent to self and its creative liberty, its strain of an eternal joy in self-existence and self-manifestation, Karma itself becomes a rhythm of freedom and birth a strain of immortality.3
Taittiriya Upanishad.

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.

3 - Commentaries and Annotated Translations, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
ever sent in as the Divine Worker; therefore by the will they
sent thee in; O Lord of sacrifice, (or they sacrificed), the divine
--
"striver". Agni is the Divine Worker or warrior.
iEt. S. says "the gods send him to war, therefore men send
--
dvmrEt\ the Divine Worker, therefore it was 5(vA by the
him as
--
on (Ashti) - Agni is the Divine Worker & fighter who pushes
Mandala Four

4.01 - The Principle of the Integral Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
At the same time we have seen that each of the three ways at its height, if it is pursued with a certain largeness, can take into itself the powers of the others and lead to their fulfilment. It is therefore sufficient to start by one of them and find the point at which it meets the other at first parallel lines of advance and melts into them by its own widenings. At the same time a more difficult, complex, wholly powerful process would be to start, as it were, on three lines together, on a triple wheel of soul-power. But the consideration of this possibility must be postponed till we have seen what are the conditions and means of the Yoga of self-perfection. For we shall see that this also need not be postponed entirely, but a certain preparation of it is part of and a certain initiation into it proceeds by the growth of the Divine Works, love and knowledge. This outflowering has its two terms; first, comes the growth out of the separative human ego into the unity of the spirit, then the possession of the divine nature in its proper and its higher forms and no longer in the inferior forms of the mental being which are a mutilated translation and not the au thentic text of the original script of divine Nature in the cosmic individual. In other words, a perfection has to be aimed at which amounts to the elevation of the mental into the full spiritual and supramental nature. Therefore this integral Yoga of knowledge, love and works has to be extended into a Yoga of spiritual and gnostic self-perfection. As gnostic knowledge, will and Ananda are a direct instrumentation of spirit and can only be won by growing into the spirit, into divine being, this growth has to be the first aim of our Yoga. The mental being has to enlarge itself into the oneness of the Divine before the Divine will perfect in the soul of the individual its gnostic outflowering. That is the reason why the triple way of knowledge, works and love becomes the keynote of the whole Yoga, for that is the direct means for the soul in mind to rise to its highest intensities where it passes upward into the divine oneness. That too is the reason why the Yoga must be integral. For ifimmergence in the Infinite or some close union with the Divine were all our aim, an integral Yoga would be superfluous, except for such greater satisfaction of the being of man as we may get by a self-lifting of the whole of it towards its Source. But it would not be needed for the essential aim, since by any single power of the soul-nature we can meet with the Divine; each at its height rises up into the infinite and absolute, each therefore offers a sufficient way of arrival, for all the hundred separate paths meet in the Eternal. But the gnostic being is a complete enjoyment and possession of the whole divine and spiritual nature; and it is a complete lifting of the whole nature of man into its power of a divine and spiritual existence. Integrality becomes then an essential condition of this Yoga.
At the same time we have seen that each of the three ways at its height, if it is pursued with a certain largeness, can take into itself the powers of the others and lead to their fulfilment. It is therefore sufficient to start by one of them and find the point at which it meets the other at first parallel lines of advance and melts into them by its own widenings. At the same time a more difficult, complex, wholly powerful process would be to start, as it were, on three lines together, on a triple wheel of soul-power. But the consideration of this possibility must be postponed till we have seen what are the conditions and means of the Yoga of self-perfection. For we shall see that this also need not be postponed entirely, but a certain preparation of it is part of and a certain initiation into it proceeds by the growth of the Divine Works, love and knowledge.
author class:Sri Aurobindo

4.1.1.05 - The Central Process of the Yoga, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Supreme Lord or as the Divine Mother and claim the being's service and surrender. If these things are accepted, there will be an extremely disastrous consequence. If indeed there is the assent of the sadhak to the Divine Working alone and the submission or surrender to that guidance, then all can go smoothly. This assent and a rejection of all egoistic forces or forces that appeal to the ego are the safeguard throughout the sadhana. But the ways of Nature are full of snares, the disguises of the ego are innumerable, the illusions of the Powers of Darkness, Rakshasi
Maya, are extraordinarily skilful; the reason is an insufficient guide and often turns traitor; vital desire is always with us tempting to follow any alluring call. This is the reason why in this Yoga we insist so much on what we call samarpan.a - rather inadequately rendered by the English word surrender. If the heart centre is fully opened and the psychic is always in control, then there is no question; all is safe. But the psychic can at any moment be veiled by a lower upsurge. It is only a few who are exempt from these dangers and it is precisely those to whom surrender is easily possible. The guidance of one who is himself by identity or represents the Divine is in this difficult endeavour imperative and indispensable.

4.2.2.03 - An Experience of Psychic Opening, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What was meant [by "plasticity within"], I suppose, was the psychic plasticity which makes surrender possible along with a free openness to the Divine Working from above - plasticity within as opposed to the rigidity which insists on maintaining one's own ideas, feelings, habitual ways of consciousness as opposed to the higher things from above or from the psychic within.

4.2.2 - Steps towards Overcoming Difficulties, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
While the recognition of the Divine Power and the attunement of ones own nature to it cannot be done without the recognition of the imperfections in that nature, yet it is a wrong attitude to put too much stress either on them or on the difficulties they create, or to distrust the Divine Working because of the difficulties one experiences, or to lay too continual an emphasis on the dark side of things. To do this increases the force of the difficulties, gives a greater right of continuance to the imperfections. I do not insist on a Couistic optimismalthough excessive optimism is more helpful than excessive pessimism; that (Couism) tends to cover up difficulties and there is besides always a measure to be observed in things. But there is no danger of your covering them up and deluding yourself with too bright an outlook, quite the contrary; you always lay stress too much on the shadows and by so doing thicken them and obstruct your outlets of escape into the Light. Faith, more faith! Faith in your possibilities, faith in the Power that is at work behind the veil, faith in the work that is to be done and the offered guidance.
There cannot be any high endeavour, least of all in the spiritual field, which does not raise or encounter grave obstacles of a very persistent character. These are both internal and external, and, although in the large they are fundamentally the same for all, there may be a great difference in the distribution of their stress or the outward form they take. But the one real difficulty is the attunement of the nature with the working of the Divine Light and Power. Get that solved and the others will either disappear or take a subordinate place; and even with those difficulties that are of a more general character, more lasting because they are inherent in the work of transformation, they will not weigh so heavily because the sense of the supporting Force and a greater power to follow its movement will be there.

4.2.5 - Dealing with Depression and Despondency, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In view of what it would mean for yourself and for me and the Divine Work, I ask you to give me your promise never again to yield to this suggestion or contemplate seriously its fulfilment.
I have promised you that, if you keep on, the transformation shall take place and it is not an idle promise that I have made. If once you threw off this Influence, the one that gives you fits like this, the transformation would not only be certain but swift and easy. But in any case, if you keep on aspiring for transformation and not for escape, as you wrote today, the transformation is bound to come.

4.3.1 - The Hostile Forces and the Difficulties of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
No, [the vital ego is] certainly not [a hostile power]it is part of the ordinary human nature, everybody has it. It has to be purified and transformed, the ego being replaced by the true vital being of which it is a distorted shadow. The forces of the lower nature are often rebellious and resist transformation out of attachment to the familiar movements of the Ignorance, desire, vanity, pride, lust, self-will etc., but they are not in their nature hostile. The hostile Forces are those whose very raison dtre is revolt against the Divine, against the Light and Truth and enmity to the Divine Work.
***

5.1.02 - The Gods, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Of course, the gods exist - that is to say, there are Powers that stand above the world and transmit the Divine Workings. It is the physical mind which believes only in what is physical that denies them. There are also beings of other worlds - gods and
Asuras etc.

5.4.02 - Occult Powers or Siddhis, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
there, a faculty or a psychic habit of the nature - I use the word psychic in the popular sense, it has nothing to do with what I call the psychic being. If she practises Yoga and is able to make some considerable progress, then it would be possible for her to bar the door to these visitors. At the same time I might say that this power need not be a mere source of trouble; it can be helpful even: for it can give one who has acquired mastery over his own nature the knowledge of the thoughts and feelings around her and she can then help, guide, change what has to be changed in their minds so that they can become more effective for the Divine Work. I shall await what further you have to tell me about X's experiences before saying anything further about her entry into the field of Yoga.
Occult Powers and Health

7.02 - The Mind, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is only love that can understand and get at the secrets of the Divine Working. The mind, the physical mind especially, is incapable of seeing correctly and yet it always wants to judge. It is only a true, sincere humility in the mind, allowing the psychic to rule the being, that can save human beings from ignorance and obscurity.
Each time that I try to rise a little, there is a setback.

7.06 - The Simple Life, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then, Sire, I would ask that you do not call me again to your palace, for I want to devote my time to the Divine Work.
Let it be so, said Akbar. But I in my turn have a favour to ask you.

7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
prepare oneself for the Divine Work?
One can. But that requires quite a different attitude.
--
say, for the Divine Work, for preparing the Divine Work,
we would have gone by now far on the road, much far-

Conversations with Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Evidently she is coming here with this plan of work imaginary work. India is not what she thinks. India is India. After a short time every foreign element is either absorbed or thrown out. And the life is different from that of Europe. These ideas about a work to be done are common. It is the mental being which invents its own inspirations: one part of the mind ascends and when coming down takes on the nature of a revelation. The mind wants to achieve something and seeks a great and important work. But all work, even the humblest, has the same value if it is that which ought to be done. There is something true behind, it is the idea of a work to be accomplished. And this work is the Divine Work but one must be perfect to be able to undertake it. There are many men whose work has no need of perfection; they vaguely feel an impulsion, the mind mixes up its own desires and they go on thus. But I am speaking of those who have to realise some spiritual work then, for these, the work will be found when the instrument is ready.
Naturally, all work is a preparation. Your friends X seem to me to be in the same position as Z It is the mind which is pushing them though they are altogether unaware of it. And they must learn to put aside this illusion; then all work is good for Yoga.

The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
abridgement, reduced to human proportions and possibilities, of the Divine Work. Since the
Adept must contri bute the best of his qualities if he wants to succeed, it appears just and
--
never understand. This is the Divine Work, supernatural, ineffable, whose mystery no mortal
will ever penetrate, In the nocturnal, silent and deep firmament shines one single star, an
--
Work is a short version and a reduction of Creation, all the circumstances of the Divine Work
must be found on a smaller scale in that of the alchemist. As a consequence, when the
--
admires the Divine Works, without outer manifestations, without rites, without veils.
Contemplative, and ignorant of need, desire and suffering, he holds toward the master of the

Timaeus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The soul of the world is framed on the analogy of the soul of man, and many traces of anthropomorphism blend with Plato's highest flights of idealism. The heavenly bodies are endowed with thought; the principles of the same and other exist in the universe as well as in the human mind. The soul of man is made out of the remains of the elements which had been used in creating the soul of the world; these remains, however, are diluted to the third degree; by this Plato expresses the measure of the difference between the soul human and divine. The human soul, like the cosmical, is framed before the body, as the mind is before the soul of eitherthis is the order of the Divine Workand the finer parts of the body, which are more akin to the soul, such as the spinal marrow, are prior to the bones and flesh. The brain, the containing vessel of the divine part of the soul, is (nearly) in the form of a globe, which is the image of the gods, who are the stars, and of the universe.
There is, however, an inconsistency in Plato's manner of conceiving the soul of man; he cannot get rid of the element of necessity which is allowed to enter. He does not, like Kant, attempt to vindicate for men a freedom out of space and time; but he acknowledges him to be subject to the influence of external causes, and leaves hardly any place for freedom of the will. The lusts of men are caused by their bodily constitution, though they may be increased by bad education and bad laws, which implies that they may be decreased by good education and good laws. He appears to have an inkling of the truth that to the higher nature of man evil is involuntary. This is mixed up with the view which, while apparently agreeing with it, is in reality the opposite of it, that vice is due to physical causes. In the Timaeus, as well as in the Laws, he also regards vices and crimes as simply involuntary; they are diseases analogous to the diseases of the body, and arising out of the same causes. If we draw together the opposite poles of Plato's system, we find that, like Spinoza, he combines idealism with fatalism.

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

GURU

WORDNET

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

GURU

WORDNET

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *