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The Journal in Detail
 

            “For a knowledge from above begins to descend, frequently, constantly, then uninterruptedly, and to manifest in the mind’s quietude or silence;…”¹

Sri Aurobindo

            “That Self and Spirit cannot be expressed by the mind’s abstract generalisations; all the inspired descriptions of the seers and mystics cannot exhaust its contents and its splendours.”² 

Sri Aurobindo

            “Only those Scriptures, religions, philosophies which can be thus  constantly renewed, relived, their stuff of permanent truth constantly reshaped and developed in the inner thought and spiritual experience of a developing humanity, continue to be of living importance to mankind. The rest remain as monuments of the past, but have no actual force or vital impulse for the future.”³

Sri Aurobindo

“…but when we advance in self-knowledge, we find that all our thought and will originate from above though formed in the mind and there first overtly active.”⁴

Sri Aurobindo

            “Truth is not a dogma that one can learn once and for all and impose as a rule. Truth is as infinite as the supreme Lord and It manifests every instant for those who are sincere and attentive.”⁹

The Mother

“For knowledge shall pour down in radiant streams

And even darkened mind quiver with new life

And kindle and burn with the Ideal’s fire

And turn to escape from mortal ignorance.”⁶   

Sri Aurobindo

             

 

 

  Journal in Detail          

            A concentrated writing can be truly offered near the Divine if it remains free absolutely from all motives. It should be written for the sole satisfaction of the Divine, for the sole reception of the transcendent wisdom, for the sole opening towards the Word that can incarnate the highest Truth and a concentration on central thought and central Truth that can become Omnipotent. It can be made fit for the Divine offering if the writing is made perfect, even in its smallest external detail as well as the highest Spirit and Soul quality from which it has descended.

           

            So the first objective of The Descent is to restate the Spiritual experience and bridge the gulf between Sri Aurobindo’s early sadhana at Pondicherry and The Mother’s last cellular transformation experience which is a preliminary effort to accumulate Their vast Spiritual wealth from without and the utter need to live within, which is an atmosphere of Their Supreme Presence; its second objective is to concentrate, contemplate and meditate on the written Truth and constantly revise and heighten the already restated statements through fresh instreaming of overhead Spiritual experiences and Wisdom which is extended to overcome the human limitation of fragmentary knowledge in Ignorance, leading towards an integration of Knowledge; its third objective is to identify The Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s established and the most concentrated Spiritual experiences and find the possible means of purification to repeat those experiences which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal movement of Consciousness our external life is perfected; its fourth objective is to establish a strong Spiritual foundation by Jivatma's union with Paramatma, which will serve as a platform for the development and consummation of Their highest hinted Spiritual experiences and utilise that base as lever action to escape into still unknown heights of Consciousness and call down the corresponding divine Light to penetrate into the untouched nether domain of dark Subconscient and Inconscient planes.

           

            So the writings of The Descent depend firstly on the Word that descends from above and is caught through large, subtle and plastic Idea which does not insist too much on rigid definition; secondly, it organises anew the highest and the best written wisdom already available on the earth through its past and present Spiritual experiences; thirdly, some of its writings are based on the construction of the mind which expresses partial and practical  half light and half truth and waits till its constant element of falsity and twilight are replaced by the higher and wider Knowledge from within and above; fourthly, to mind Spiritual experiences of Individual, Cosmic and Transcendent Beings are intelligible as eternal hierarchies of powers of Consciousness and we cannot hope to describe adequately the visions of heights of Consciousness or experience of the mysteries Absolute in terms of negative or positive abstract mental language but can only hope to indicate, glimpse and hint it to the utmost power of our pure symbolic language which is ‘yet to be discovered and mapped in their completeness;’⁵ fifthly, integral Yoga authorises ‘an absolute liberty’⁷ to enter new subjective Spiritual experience and reaffirm rightly all knowledge in new terms and new combinations; sixthly, Consciousness must be trained to move in between Subliminal, Psychic and Spiritual planes and through this movement corresponding Psychic and Spiritual Sheaths and adjacent subtle mental, subtle vital and subtle physical sheaths are purified, enlarged, transformed and perfected and writing/oration can be used as Prakriti-yajna, one of the important means for this movement of Divine Consciousness and descent of Divine Shakti; and lastly, it aims at elevating all writings towards the status of absolute Brahman through constant restatement extending over a long formative period of Sadhana and in this endless growth of impersonal and universal state there is no trace of negation, discord and division and one enters into exceedingly affirmative and uniting Consciousness with radically different ecstatic awareness of things. There can develop a Supramental envisaging of the universe whose each step and each action are dictated by an innate Spiritual vision, a comprehensive and exact penetration into the Truth of all and the Truth of each thing. Large and plastic ideas and speech can be expressed through the supreme effort of creative Consciousness in carrying those highest experiences to its farthest end and assist mankind towards the possession of the knowledge of God and the supreme Reality.

 

            The Descent can serve its true purpose when it can catch without ego, most of the secret threads of integral Yoga or seize the knowledge of the Unknowable directly, not by intellectual poor abstract understanding but by the discovery of another overhead language which is at once creatively metaphysical, revealingly poetic, substantially malleable and can pour down in a vivid plastic massiveness of flaming stream.        

 

           A Sadhaka’s Spiritual life is secured through the complete union of the Soul with the universal and transcendent Divine and by fulfilment of the task of accountability in sadhana before his Self, World and Divine. His principal motive is to give Them (dual Divine) consecrated service and this slavehood to the Divine gives him the right to enter deep into Their Teachings. Their Teachings contain vast Truths of reconciling wisdom and Oneness whose wrong discrimination and misuse¹¹ can make life asuric and a separative commerce⁸ with the world for some personal gain may become predominant. If he accumulates Their Spiritual opulence rightly without separate personal energy of ego, vidhipurbakam,¹⁰ then life will flower unimaginably with predominance of Silence, Truth, Plasticity, Consciousness and Love in his frontal nature and he will serve at once as passive Instrument of Divine Will and active Participant in the bliss of universal Divine action and the bliss of world transformation.

 

 

OM TAT SAT

           

References:

1: CWSA-22/The life Divine/p-946,

2: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-296,

3: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-5,

4: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-818, 

5: CWSA-22/The life Divine/p-953,

6: Savitri-710,

7: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-56,

8: “The man of knowledge, the liberated soul offers on the contrary all his activities to the one eternal Godhead without any attachment to their fruit or to the satisfaction of his lower personal desires. He works for God, not for himself, for the universal welfare, for the Soul of the world and not for any particular object which is of his own personal creation or for any construction of his mental will or object of his vital longings, as a divine agent, not as a principal and separate profiteer in the world commerce. And this, it must be noted, is a thing that cannot be really done except in proportion as the mind arrives at equality, universality, wide impersonality, and a clear freedom from every disguise of the insistent ego: for without these things the claim to be thus acting is a pretension or an illusion.” CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita-458, "At any rate in man it is the ego idea which chiefly supports the falsehood of a separative existence; to get rid of this idea; to dwell on the opposite idea of unity, of the one self, the one spirit, the one being of nature is therefore an effective remedy; but it is not by itself absolutely effective. For the ego, though it supports itself by this ego idea, aham-buddhi, finds its most powerful means for a certain obstinacy or passion of persistence in the normal action of the sense-mind, the prana and the body. To cast out of us the ego idea is not entirely possible or not entirely effective until these instruments have undergone purification; for their action being persistently egoistic and separative, the buddhi is carried away by them, --as a boat by winds on the sea, (The Gita-2.67) says the Gita, --the knowledge in the intelligence is being constantly obscured or lost temporarily and has to be restored again, a very labour of Sisyphus. But if the lower instruments have been purified of egoistic desire, wish, will, egoistic passion, egoistic emotion and the buddhi itself of egoistic idea and preference, then the knowledge of the spiritual truth of oneness can find a firm foundation. Till then, the ego takes all sorts of subtle forms and we imagine ourselves to be free from it, when we are really acting as its instruments and all we have attained is a certain intellectual poise which is not the true spiritual liberation.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-677,

9: The Mother’s Agenda-22.03.1967,

10: “Even those who sacrifice to other godheads with devotion and faith, they also sacrifice to Me, O son of Kunti, though not according to the true law, avidhipurbakam.” The Gita-9.23, “The sacrifice not performed according to the right rule of the Shastra, vidhi-hina, without giving of food, without the mantra, without gifts, empty of faith, is said to be tamasic.” The Gita-17.13, "By works the Vedantins understood these religious works, the sacrificial system,  the yajna,  full of a careful order,  vidhi,  of exact and complicated rites, kriya-visesa-bahulam. But in Yoga works had a much wider significance. The Gita insists on this wider significance; in our conception of spiritual activity all works have to  be included,  sarva-karmani.  At the same time it does not, like Buddhism, reject the idea of the sacrifice, it prefers to uplift and enlarge it. Yes, it says in effect, not only is sacrifice, yajna, the most important part of life, but all life, all works should be regarded as sacrifice, are yajna, though by the ignorant they are performed without the higher knowledge and by the most ignorant not in the true order, avidhi-purvakam." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-89,

11: "Very long ago (very long, a few years after Sri Aurobindo left), one night (because I was already seeing him), I saw him: I had  gone to his place, and I found him sitting on a sort of bed … with a truss: three or four bandages like that on his body! (Mother laughs) So he called me and said (in English), “Look, Look what they’re doing with me! Look, they’re putting bandages all over me!” So I inquired-and found that they wanted to make cuts in his writings…." The Mother/July-23/1969/Mother’s Agenda/Vol-10/P: 251-256,

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           The supramental word manifests inwardly with a light, a power, a rhythm of thought and a rhythm of inner sound that make it the natural and living body of the supramental thought and vision and it pours into the language, even though the same as that of mental speech, another than the limited intellectual, emotional or sensational significance. It is formed and heard in the intuitive mind or supermind and need not at first except in certain highly gifted souls come out easily into speech and writing, but that too can be freely done when the physical consciousness and its organs have been made ready, and this is a part of the needed fullness and power of the integral perfection.”

Sri Aurobindo

CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-837

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