"Her beauty and flaming strength were seen afar" Savitri-367 Ashram In Detail “In ancient times the disciple had to undergo severe tests to prove his ability for initiation. Here we do not follow that method. Apparently there is no test and no trial. But if you see the truth, you will find that here it is much more difficult. There the disciple knew that he was undergoing a period of trial and after he had passed through some outward tests, he was taken in. But here you have to face life and you are watched at every moment. It is not only your outer actions that count. Each and every thought and inner movement is seen, every reaction is noticed. It is not what you do in the solitude of the forest, but what you do in the thick of the battle of life that is important. Are you ready to submit yourself for such tests? Are you ready to change yourself completely? You will have to throw off your ideas, ideals, values, interests and opinions. Everything will have to be learnt anew. If you are ready for all this, then take a plunge; otherwise don’t try to step in.” The Mother TMCW-14/The Words of the Mother-II/p-43-44 The Ashram in Detail A liberated Soul²³ becomes the luminous Soul Centre of multiple liberating Souls which forms the basis of harmonious progressive intermediate collective living of faithful and sincere aspirants, the Ashram . His difficult task is to go through severe Spiritual training and preparation in which his subtle and causal body are moulded, expanded, and densified through gradual and intensive non-waking and waking trance. His contact and cognition of all things and persons translate into a deep sense of identity through more intimate, powerful and efficient instrumentation of Consciousness force, where Spirit breaks through Matter’s wall and he begins to be the master of the mysteries of the material world. Thus, he emerges as Divine’s or Spirit’s conscious slave. His more difficult task is to become an Impersonal Centre or Centre of Universality to include the whole of humanity as ultimate collectivity, the Deva Sangha and the power of embracing the whole universe in his formless Consciousness is the sole preoccupation of a liberated universalised individual Soul Centre. He fills the emptiness in human heart with the nameless Divine Influence accompanied by the capacity to transform ‘the greatest difficulties into best opportunities,’²⁴ heals all the bitter cruelties, crudities and aberrations of earth, ‘guards the world with its all seeing gaze,’¹⁷ ‘mastered the tides of Nature with a look;’¹⁸ his ‘gaze controls the turbulent whirl of things,’²⁰ channels the total energy of Universal and Transcendent forces which would flow unobstructed and unrestricted, effective inclusion and penetration of dynamised intimate vision and he serves humanity by becoming its slave or does good of all creatures, sarvabhutahite ratah .¹ His most difficult task is the extreme accumulation of the ‘Spirit’s bare and absolute potencies’³¹ to become mightier than all the forces of the material and vital world and wrestles with Matter to meet and confront victoriously dark forces of naked Hell, compel active dynamic unification of cosmic Nature and ‘last and mightiest transformation’¹⁹ of Inconscient and mundane surface Nature. Then he emerges as Universalised individual Soul Centre with liberated immobile Soul and transformed mobile Nature. The right relation of the individual liberated Soul Centre with the collectivity, as proposed in the Gita is to live in the world with the sense of oneness with all existence, ekatvamasthitah ,²⁵ without separation from the Divine, mayi nivasisyas i,²¹ without finding fault of the Divine, nirdosham hi samam brahma ,²⁷ without controversy, buddhi veda ,¹¹ without enemy, nirbairah ,² without narrow carping, asuya ³ and without anxiety, chinta; ⁴ he is not bound by works and all actions vanish and are dissolved by their very execution and leave the immutable Self unaffected and the Soul unmodified, praviliyante karmani; ¹⁶ as proposed in the Isha Upanishad is to see oneness everywhere, ekatvam anupasyatah, ²⁶ to act, live and enjoy in the world for a hundred years without clinging or leaving any mark on his Soul, na karma lipyate nare, ⁶ and by renouncing all egoistic sense of desire, tyaktena bhunjitha .⁵ In integral Yoga the preservation of the entire range of visible individual activities are no longer inconsistent with the attainment of cosmic and transcendent Consciousness. The Life Divine or Nature’s conscious integral Evolution proposes to call down the unconquerable impulse of God, Light, Freedom, Bliss and Immortality to individual vessel and extension of these highest realisations to earth and men, the large and luminous movement of a Divine living through Divine union, unity and harmony with all Beings and a life governed and formed from within outwards; the conflicting ideals of mind will fall away from him and as proposed in The Synthesis of Yoga is to gather and sum up in himself all that is the best and the profoundest and the completest and pours them freely in the form of Divine Will, Knowledge, Love, Delight and Beauty on his surroundings. The right relation of a universalised liberated individual Soul Centre with the Divine as proposed in Integral Karma Yoga is the play of the Divine Will, Power, Force and Omnipotence and all weakness, incapacity and impotence is a holding back of Will in tranquil concentrated force so that certain forms of realised Divine conscious-force is brought forward into form of Power; as proposed in Integral Jnana Yoga is the play of Divine Knowledge, Wisdom and Omniscience and all Ignorance and all perversity is a holding back of Knowledge and Truth in the repose of conscious self-awareness so that certain form of consciousness is brought forward into activity of Light; as proposed in Integral Bhakti Yoga is the play of Love, Delight and Beauty and all suffering, pain, evil and incapacity of possessive delight is a holding back of joy in the still sea of Divine Bliss so that certain forms of Divine union and enjoyment is brought forward as an active upwelling of waves of Bliss; as proposed in Integral Yoga of Self-Perfection , is the dynamic play of all becoming with the Divine Being and all cessation, death and annihilation is a holding back of various sweetness of unification and joyous creative Maya in the eternal being of the Sachchidananda so that certain form of Divine Immortality and Perfection are brought forward as Nature’s all-powerful remedy; as proposed in Supramental Yoga is the play of all-containing and all-comprehending Maya with Brahman and ever dividing and limiting consciousness of mind, ever divergent action of life and infinitely-divided substance of Matter are holding back of a force intimately conscious of all the uniting relations so that certain forms of infinite is known and the finite is not separated from it as an independent reality and liberated from the knot of divided existence and as proposed in integral Yoga is to enjoy oneness with God, with itself in its own individuality, with its other brother selves in the universality and beyond them in the Transcendence and all discords and disharmonies of existence are holding back of infinite self-fulfillment of all life. The right relation of a Transformed Nature and Soul of a Universalised individual Soul Centre to the Existence as proposed in Integral Karma Yoga is the Purusha’s possession of Prakriti followed by Ishwara-Shakti realisation where the individual knows, transcends, enjoys and controls Spiritually his manifested being and determines, produces and orders all relation largely and freely through cosmic action, cosmic awareness and intensify the infinitely plastic yet harmonious diversity of action. The end of the path of integral Karma Yoga is 'a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.'³⁴ His action as proposed in Integral Jnana Yoga is to get back to the fact of eternal Oneness where an apparent discord is realised as an element of the general ever-present and ever-developing harmony and all relations in the world, even to its greatest and most shocking apparent discords, are relations of something eternal to itself in its own universal existence. 'For, followed more largely and with less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realization of the supreme Self not only in one’s own being but in all beings and, finally, the realization of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realization a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into activities of the divine consciousness utilizable for the projection of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualization and to the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.'³⁴ His action as proposed in Integral Bhakti Yoga is to realise universal divine Love that transforms all beings and things into all-embracing ecstasy and million-bodied beatitude and the play of the Divine Beloved in His infinite house of Delight. 'And this Yoga is catholic in its use of all emotional relations, so that even enmity and opposition to God, considered as an intense, impatient and perverse form of Love, is conceived as a possible means of realisation and salvation.'³ ⁴ His action as proposed in Integral Yoga of Self-Perfection, is to heal all disorder, disease, suffering, pain by the intervention of a Divine Force above instead of struggling from below; as proposed in Supramental Yoga is to embrace all contact with men and universe with a purified flame force and transformed Divine Nature and arrives at perfect relation with supreme and universal Purusha and the supreme and universal Para Shakti and as proposed in integral Yoga revived from ancient Vedanta (1) as seeing all existences in the Self and (2) the Self in all existences; (3) and the Self-being has become all these existences that belong to the worlds of the becoming. The original and integral view of Life, accepts this Existence as self-concentration and self-diffusion of conscious dynamic Force in Infinite extension of Space and Time and unfolds itself through the concentration and expansion of the Individual Soul. It confirms that this World is the progressive revelation of a great, a transcendent and a luminous Play of Reality perpetually creating and re-creating Itself; it is like a gold vessel made up of the stuff of pure gold, the Brahman, an act of mutable rhythm of creative Consciousness, a self-aware force of existence, eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible and there can be no trace of alloy in the Divine’s creation. Brahman is not only the cause, ordering and indwelling power of the universe but also its material and its sole material. The perception of this universe as a field of insistent suffering, enormous toil, presence of incapacity and sorrow which baffle our reason as facts, is the result of limited or relative human consciousness because of the wrong relation of the individual with the Self, Nature and Universe, misrepresentation of a manifold Reality and creates the system of false accountantship, unchangeable rigidity and mistaken appearance of opposition and conflict to the harmonious play of the Divine in its universal manifestation. Or if to us things appear undivine or this bondage to a perpetual stamp of imperfection and disharmony or judge the external phenomenon as inconsistent with the nature of inner being or world existence as an illusion because the world is not Divinely explained to us; Divine has not wholly possessed our limited Consciousness; we are ignorant of the sense and purpose of the evolution of Nature in the world in its entirety and its proper place and Divine meaning in the complete manifestation. This world appears to us as a cosmic madhouse so long as we rest on the madness of error, falsehood and ignorance and subject ourselves to the original limitation of its law. So, our proper aim of life is always to get cured of all our insanity and depart into Truth, Light, Freedom and Immortality. So, all the harshest apparent discord³⁶ of existence can be thrown out by an inalienable concord of the Being inherent in an inalienable unity of the Being and change them into essential elements of truth, a growing universal rhythm and ultimate harmony. The wrong, mutilated human relation created by limiting ego, intellect’s outward gaze and mental self sufficiency as practiced now by man are full of narrowness, smallness, fragmentary and restrictive because he has not opened himself to the perennial Source or he has not secured the ground upon which freedom and perfection would naturally flower and has not expanded into most subtle fullness of the Divine Truth. Attachment to mutable personality is the cause of our incurable littleness, discord, and quarrel with ourselves and with life and with others. The nature of the ego is a self-limitation of consciousness by a willed ignorance and its exclusive absorption in the partial movement of energies are necessary for the certain limited and preparatory experience or it is a practical construction of our consciousness devised to centralise the action of Nature. This egoistic life finds all its values transformed and corrected when it can group round the right central conception of effective knowledge of impersonality and untroubled oneness of Being. When the right consciousness is restored it asks no essential change of the eternal relation with the Spirit but the in-view and out-view of the individual centre is profoundly modified. So, the right relation of an individual with the existence can be recovered by participation in the consciousness of the totality which includes the consciousness of the Transcendent and the Universal. A true Divine living, right and full value of life is possible when the partial and separative movement of human mind and ego recognises the false doctrine, ‘he alone is important to himself, he is infinitely important centre to the All, (the centre of its own universe) but to him the All is negligible’⁸ and learns to submit to the ‘form of Oneness’²² or the total movement of the Infinite and the continuation of the illumined individual in the action of the world is still necessary and indispensable in the universal play because the world is his foundation, his means, his field, the stuff of the divine Work and he must necessarily universalise and impersonalise in order to realise himself ‘as one concentration of the universal,’²² manifest the Divine All and Supreme Reality. The largest vision of integral Yoga recommends an individual to be wise when he shows unwillingness to limit man’s avenues towards God and a refusal to put a limit to the Soul’s ascension of the Infinite and the Divine manifestation through all the godheads, men, creatures and objects; the wiser drives straight into the Divine realisation and then seizes one after the another methods of Nature’s many-sided passage of conscious Evolution and Yoga; gathers together all Spiritual experience and returns either naturally or through concentrated effort to the one Supreme experience of all reconciling Oneness and he learns to overcome all partial and one sided exclusive experience of the Brahman and realises the Integral Static and Dynamic Brahman ; the wisest is able to call down this ultimate Divine Truth to elevate the material things and creatures to their highest and widest Divine manifestation and he can draw humanity towards greatest unity when he is perfectly capable of every kind of Spiritual experience and possesses highest Integral Knowledge. A supreme Knowledge is that which includes Spiritual experiences of all kinds, gives to each its absolute state of Brahman and integralises all Knowledge, neglects nothing, overlooks nothing and leaves no stone unturned. It recognises that the eternal Spirit as the immutable inhabitant of this fit and noble mutable robe, the bodily mansion, out of which the Divine constantly weaves His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His All Life. Or the Spirit born into the material existence is assigned a task to create out of Matter a temple of Divinity. The problems of All Life arise from an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered unity can be resolved when the fully awakened human mind realises an Omnipresent Reality as the truth of all life and when he accepts this existence freely as the Divine, invades mortality with the immortal’s Truth, Light and Beatitude and the redemption comes by the recovery of the universal Consciousness in the individual and of Spiritual term in the physical Consciousness. The Son of Man is supremely capable of incarnating God through the human journey of sacrificial work, sacrificial wisdom and sacrificial emotion, without which he would be only an insect crawling among all other ephemeral creatures or harbours subhuman nature which is ‘lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl.’²⁹ The modern man is most discontented by the pressure of limitation and obstacle of mechanised living and satisfaction comes by surpassing of the limit, growing manifestation and overcoming of the obstacle by full possession of illimitable self-Consciousness, self-Power and self-Delight. This effort can give birth to a perfect man who combines absolute calm and passivity of mind with free and inexhaustible activity and reconciles harmoniously three kinds of life that of the ordinary material existence, a life of mental activity and progress and unchanging Spiritual beatitude and resolves their discords. A perfected human Soul’s Divine work is to hasten the process of evolution of the race and his action can be steadfast and truly Divine if it proceeds on the basis of a Spiritual equality, a calm, impersonal and equal self-identification with all beings. The individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and the perfect utility of his perfection is, having realised in himself the Divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and universalise it in others. The individual Divine incarnation in a human body shall evolve towards universal Divine Incarnation through emergence of infinite Consciousness. The many souls, minds, lives, and bodies of the universal manifestation are only faces of the one Divine, only His masks and disguises. We perceive each being to be the universal Narayana presenting to us in many disguises and lose ourselves in that universality and perceive our own mind, life and body as the only valid shape and substance of manifestation of incorporeal and immaterial, while all whom we formerly conceived of as others, are now to our universal and impersonal Consciousness our Self in other minds, lives and bodies. The Consciousness of collective humanity is a sum of individual ego. It is rather even more tortured, troubled, and obscured, certainly more vague, confused and un-progressive. The liberated individual Soul in this respect is more valuable than the collectivity and cannot be called on to subordinate his more profound, more dynamic, and more luminous possibilities of becoming a perfect channel of Divine Light, Peace, Compassion and Benevolence and he cannot suppress or maim his proper development to a darker and recalcitrant collective entity. A universalised liberated individual lives neither for the individual ego nor for the collective ego; rather he lives in and for the Divine in himself, in and for the Divine in collectivity, in and for the Divine in all beings and his progressive evolution of Soul and Nature would be at each stage harmonious in its every detail and essential principle. Integral Jnana Yoga proposes that a developed Soul can serve God the oppressed, God the poor and God the miserable or ‘service of God in man’⁷ in order to ‘complete the realisation’⁷ of the Divine in all things. Ethical rules of altruism, philanthropy and the service of the Nation are in themselves potent instruments of self-enlargement and self-correction of the narrower province of self-righteous and magnified ego, a partial and insecure superstructure, seem to be actuated and debased by this soul of desire and must be so till the child Soul or developing Soul finds the secret of the Divine Oneness and vast descent of Divine Love, Light and Bliss. If in to the Spiritual aim there enters the impulse to deny the personal self or the limited vision of mind to serve humanity or the world at large, it comes not from the ego nor from the collective sense of the race, but from something more occult and profound, Transcendent of both these things; for it is founded on a sense of the Divine in all and it works not for the sake of some selfish purpose or mental action of altruism but for the sake of the one Self and only what the supreme Truth and Good decided would be executed in the person or group or collective. It is this transcendent Source that a developed Soul or ripened Soul must seek, possess, and serve this vaster Being and Consciousness to which the service to the race and the individual are minor terms of its existence and inferior activities. The greatest service to humanity, the surest foundation for its true progress, happiness and perfection is to prepare or find the way by which the individual and collective man can transcend the ego and live in its true Self and help mankind to possess higher Consciousness and supreme Reality. The individual will no longer be bound to cruel phenomena of incapacity, disharmony, insistent suffering and baffled by evil and ignorance which seem to be the natural circumstance of a difficult evolution in Ignorance; for all grief, revolt,³³ impatience, wrong will, trouble are identified as limitation of ego, outcome of relative consciousness and violence committed against the Will of the Divine Master. When the Truth Force possesses the mind, life and body of a developed Soul, then there cannot stay alive any trouble, grief, disharmony and disturbance of untransformed Nature and there survives the permanent vibration of Harmony, of Order and of Divine unity. Or in the language of the Gita , in that established exceeding Bliss Consciousness, a developed or ripened Soul ‘is not shaken by the most violent or the fieriest assault of mental grief, na duhkhena gurunapi vichalyate .’³⁰ To live in absolute calm, peace, silence and equality during a period of extreme adversity is the sign of true Spiritual living and he can draw the right and full profit from life. The emergence of mind in life brings in evolution an increase of the immense range of its capacity followed by an immense trail of constant error. The mental man thinks and acts for a long period within the range of his limited consciousness and individual ego because a rapid development of Truth-consciousness is not the intention of Mother Nature. He can give real service if the intellect must consent to pass out of the bounds of finite logic and accustom itself to the logic of the Infinite which enforces on the reason an utmost plasticity and opens it to an awareness of the larger state of possibilities. Thus, intellectual understanding is replaced with Spiritual Intuition, which is more vast, subtle and complex in its operation and the change of Nature is assisted by the plastic power of adaptation of things and sure faultless action. So, our imperfect mental intelligence must learn the difficult lesson to approach the Absolute not by exclusive logical oppositions but by a profound catholic Intuition. As we pass from the necessary stage of transition of mental to Spiritual, a subtle wideness of increasing intensity of Light, of Power, of Peace and of Ecstasy marks our passing out of limitation. A Spiritual man accepts all creatures as his own Self in many minds, vitals and bodies. His world vision includes perfect Spiritual knowledge and understanding not only of all our internal activities but all the unrolling of things, events, human, animal, and natural activities around us. His Spiritual realisation, Spiritual mastery and Spiritual influence preoccupy him in acceptance of the world truths, the world energies, the world tendencies and the world purposes as its own and he bears all suffering so that all things must turn into the ecstasy of Ananda . The subliminal inner being widens indefinitely and breaks the boundaries of individuality to enter cosmic Consciousness, which is the merger of ego into the world being. Its natural outcome is a greater feeling of oneness with other beings, entire openness to universal Energy, intimately aware of the play of the cosmic forces, total liberation of Soul, mind, heart and individual action would be bound by nothing other than the Divine Wisdom and Will and casting them all into Cosmic Self and Divine Reality. Beyond this Himalayan height and Oceanic largeness there opens only the Supramental vistas of incommunicable Transcendences. The Supramental man lives and acts in cosmic Consciousness founded upon the knowledge by Identity, which covers all the earth and all that lies behind and beyond in other planes of Consciousness and hence the power and knowledge at his disposal would be much greater than the power and knowledge of mental man. His Influence spreads in the earth’s atmosphere as dynamisation of universal Order, great Harmony and the sense of Oneness of all existence. He becomes Godhead in man and is aware of his true integral Self and Divine universality of his action in Consciousness is similar to the strong and steady Sunlight that securely illumines the whole kingdom of his thought, feeling, action and will and he serves the earth from above. The whole world is held within his Cosmic Consciousness and his intimate inclusion is aided in the movement of world activity. His universal Nature is like Vasishtha’s cow of plenty, Kamadhenu, from whose udder all mankind can draw its need and fulfill its deficiency. The relatively easier task or difficult task of a Supramental man²⁸ is permanent ascent of Consciousness to highest Sachchidananda state; his more difficult task is permanent descent of highest Sachchidananda Consciousness to physical life and earth and liberating the material vessel from the influence of tamasic, rajasic and sattwic mind; his most difficult task is the penetration of this highest Consciousness to triple time extending from beginning of the creation of Subconscient plane to the period of complete Divinisation of earth life in Superconscient plane, known as All Life. Or the Consciousness of dynamic Spirit moves backward to the past of this birth and past births in order to illumine the Subconscient obscurity and Consciousness of dynamic Spirit moves forward to call down Divine energies and manifesting action of a thousand year ahead from the Superconscient plane. The eternal Self within us has thrown itself out as the adventurer in Time and Space, limiting itself to the flow of dynamic movements in the succession of moments of seeking and divisibility of an objective field of substance so that they may win back again from imperfect and developing awareness, the infinite possibilities of lost Self-knowledge and All-knowledge. The right and ideal relation of the individual with the Time is ‘soul’s climbing beyond mortal time’¹⁰ in order to bring down Timeless Eternal into the slipping moments or to link Time’s second to infinity by endless descent of Divine force or the moments stretched into eternity, failing which gives birth to the wrong mental relation resulting in impatience and appearance of a continuous succession of moments of being in an eternal Time. Similarly, the right relation of the individual with Space or the small span of life and surroundings to which we are mentally and sensationally conscious is to call down God’s Spaceless Omnipotence into fragmented atmosphere or ‘lost in the depths of its own solitude’⁹ and recalls the Soul’s adventure into Space, failing which gives birth to wrong relation resulting in incapacity. So a true law of living must be evolved which can help us soonest to get back to the Self-knowledge which experiences Conscious Being subjectively as Time whose fundamental truth is the eternity of the Eternal and objectively as Space whose fundamental truth is the infinity of the Infinite or self-conceptive extension of one Being; where former is the mobile self-extension of passing a succession of moments in which the mind experiences itself at a certain point whence it looks back and ahead and the latter is only a coexistence of things or a static self-extension measured out by mind through divisibility of substance and all things stand or move together in a fixed order. ³⁵ Those who are rightly related with time and rightly related with the surrounding space can alone assist in the Divine work. Time-Space as a whole is eternal in its essential power of manifestation in which there is a movement of Consciousness and Spiritual Existence displaying the field of movement of its Conscious-Force to newly create and manifest things and happenings and must therefore be temporary in their appearance on the surface. Each state of Consciousness has its own Time and Space and they change with the change of Consciousness. Space is a property of Matter which is a creation of Energy in movement. Time is a dimension of Space for the complete action of this Energy. To relate rightly, steadily and wholly to the entire extension of the conceptual Reality of Time and Space is not practicable by limited mental consciousness but is possible in Timeless and Spaceless static self-aware Supramental Consciousness that comprehends all things in dynamic Knowledge and governs their objective manifestation in indivisible Space and triple Time. To truly understand the significance of Space and Time, Consciousness must pass beyond the finite reason and the finite sense to a larger Spiritual sense. In Supermind, the continuously momentary conscious being of Time and divisibility of Space are annulled and the burden of Time³⁷ and Space disappears completely in the coexistent inner tranquil immobility and infinite immobile mobility and things become vast, calm, luminous, self-existent, immense and full of joy. The Divine Centres, consisting of a few collective Souls all over the world, can grow when an individual or a group enters sufficiently strong direct Divine descent from a higher plane and utilise that Influence initially as the transformation of his whole nature and finally becomes a centre of world transformation. Firstly, there will be prolonged, tedious and painful period of preparation, sincere practice and purification of all our Being and Nature till it is ready and fit for opening towards secret inmost Soul, the Psychic being in the heart or opening of Spiritual being above the head, a Divine Influence and Presence; secondly, all the conflicting members and elements of his personality consent to bear the difficult and exacting process of transformation and it would not be easy to arrive at a complete change in one life while still enclosed in the limitation of the lower nature; lastly, the ‘hardest of all’¹⁴ is the invisible occult war and struggle he has to carry through against the universal dark forces attached in their root nature to ignorance, to misuse of force, to perversity of delight and to present unstable creation when he seeks ‘to make the final Supramental conversion and reversal of Consciousness by which the Divine Truth must be established’¹⁴ on the earth’s atmosphere in all its plentitude. He must grow aware of the interventions, suggestions and impulsions of cosmic forces that oppose the increase of harmony, truth and good and have disguised themselves as the original movement of his own mind and life and wage battle against them. He must realise himself as an illumined virgin mould and embodied Soul through which ‘Formless shines’¹⁵ and cosmic Nature seeks to fulfill itself and emerges out of the powers of universal Nature antagonist to the Light of Knowledge. A new Heaven on earth could descend; a world of Supramental Light could be created in the midst of receding darkness of this terrestrial existence by stilling or transcending the temporal activity of our conscious mind. In the Supramental Era, or entry into the silence of conscious Eternity, Satya Yuga, Unity, Universality, Perfection, Harmony, Freedom and Truth of order would be the Consciousness of the race. There, Life would repose on a realisation of great varieties; Love would be all-inclusive, motiveless, a union of Soul with Soul and a joy of identity; Justice would be absolutely secured by opulent management and spontaneous action of being in harmony with the truth of things; Law of Supermind is unity fulfilled in diversity, a complete dynamism of return to his own potentialities; it would be self-existent and spontaneous in their self-fulfillment, an inevitable self-development of the truth of thing and the process of innate Knowledge, a Knowledge inherent in existence so as to allow progression and its motion is directed towards a Divinely foreseen goal; Equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect difference; artificial standards and rigid standardisation would be replaced by infinitely plastic harmonious principle and free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution of truth of idea, action and creation. So an Ashram is a Spiritual Centre, where a developed Soul or a group of developed Souls is preoccupied with reconciling the perfect Spirit with imperfect Matter after one goes through a long formative period of Sadhana in which his Spiritual foundation of Divine union is established. Thus he pours out on his surrounding earth ‘the delight of His being and the glories of His godhead’¹² and he must not live ‘bound in the slow collective evolution’¹³ of the Divine Centre but to pursue, find, know and possess the Eternal through swift individual Spiritual evolution. The relationship between one community and the other would assure harmonious diversity, mutuality and oneness. There would be considerable free diversity in the self-expression of the individuals of a single community and between different Gnostic communities which would create their own body of the life of the Spirit. The greatest richness of diversity and liberty of self-expression based on an underlying oneness and stability in utmost mutability are the law of the Supramental perfected community³² and there the perfected individual’s Self-expression and Self-realisation need not be a long white monotone. He would not be cast according to a single moulded fixed pattern of personality or insist on the sameness of action or fixed law in all circumstances or subordinate himself to mass consciousness, but there would be the union of freedom, order of conscious unity, universality, integral self-awareness, plasticity, infinite variation and harmonious diversity of action and expression of the collective life in its manifestation of Gnostic Consciousness. This Gnostic community will ensure a luminous integral unity with its greatest completeness in the everyday life of Gnostic beings, and it will also ensure and impose similar dominating concord, right relation and order upon the life of surrounding ignorant mundane communities within the boundary of certain limitations. It will surely admit within its border as much of human life as is turned towards Spirituality; a dominant principle of harmony would impose itself on the life of Ignorance, leaving the rest to function freely on the lame movement of mind and mental self-sufficiency of old foundation. OM TAT SAT References: 1: The Gita-5.25, 12.4, 2: The Gita-11.55, 3: The Gita-3.31, 4: The Gita-16.11, 5: The Isha Upanishad-1, 6: The Isha Upanishad-2, 7: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-517, 8: CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-80 9: Savitri-411, 10: Savitri-461, 11: The Gita-3.26, 12: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-668, 13: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-359, 14: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-133, 15: “The virgin forms through which the Formless shines,” Savitri-327, 16: The Gita-4.23, 17: Savitri-317, 18: “He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:” Savitri-219, 19: “A last and mightiest transformation came.” Savitri-318, "The world’s darkness had consented to Heaven-light And God needed no more the Inconscient’s screen. A mighty transformation came on her." Savitri-664 20: Savitri-571, 21: The Gita-12.8, 22: CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-183, 23: “There are two types of liberated Souls. The first type of liberated Soul, ‘may be content with a subtle and limited action within the old human surroundings which will in no way seek to change their outward appearance.’ The second type of liberated Soul who ‘will not only alter the forms and sphere of its own external life but, leaving nothing around it unchanged or unaffected, create a new world or a new order.’ Ashram is a place of stay of the second type of liberated Souls.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-268, “For as the progression of the change proceeded, the energy of the liberated individual would be no longer the limited energy of mind, life and body, with which it started; the being would emerge into and put on — even as there would emerge in him and descend into him, assuming him into it — a greater light of Consciousness and a greater action of Force: his natural existence would be the instrumentation of a superior Power, an overmental and supramental Consciousness- Force, the power of the original Divine Shakti. ” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-961, “The last or highest emergence is the liberated man who has realised the Self and Spirit within him, entered into the cosmic consciousness, passed into union with the Eternal and, so far as he still accepts life and action, acts by the light and energy of the Power within him working through his human instruments of Nature. ” CWSA-22-The Life Divine/p-915, “But it is possible to go farther; for the spiritual being, once inwardly liberated, can develop in mind the higher states of being that are its own natural atmosphere and bring down a supramental energy and action which are proper to the Truth-consciousness; the ordinary mental instrumentation, life- instrumentation, physical instrumentation even, could then be entirely transformed and become parts no longer of an ignorance however much illumined, but of a supramental creation which would be the true action of a spiritual truth-consciousness and knowledge.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-888, "All the action of the perfected soul will be even such a constant divine giving (Dana) of itself and its powers, an outflowing of the knowledge, light, strength, love, joy, helpful shakti which it possesses in the Divine and by his influence and effluence on all around it according to their capacity of reception or on all this world and its creatures. That will be the complete result of the complete self-giving of the soul to the Master of our existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-490-491, 24: “The obstacle which the physical presents to the spiritual is no argument for the rejection of the physical; for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-11, 25: The Gita-6.31, 26: Isha Upanishada-7, 27: The Gita-5.19, 28: “Ordinarily the supramental knowledge will be organised first and with the most ease in the processes of pure thought and knowledge, jnana , because here the human mind has already the upward tendency and is the most free. Next and with less ease it will be organised in the processes of applied thought and knowledge because there the mind of man is at once most active and most bound and wedded to its inferior methods. The last and most difficult conquest, because this is now to his mind a field of conjecture or a blank, will be the knowledge of the three times, trikaladristi. ” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-839, 29: Savitri-215, 30: The Gita-6.22, 31: “Our spirit’s truth lives in the naked self” Savitri-543, “The Spirit’s bare and absolute potencies Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God.” Savitri-57, “He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.” Savitri-219, 32: “A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1087-1088, “To be occupied with the good of all beings, to make the joy and grief of others one’s own has been described as a sign of the liberated and fulfilled spiritual man.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1011, 33: “The buddhi dwelling always in this master idea (consecration) must discourage all its own lesser insistences and preferences and teach the whole being that the ego whether it puts forth its claim through the reason, the personal will, the heart or the desire-soul in the prana, has no just claim of any kind and all grief, revolt, impatience, trouble is a violence against the Master of the being .” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-723, “Revolt and impatience mean always that there is a part of the being or something in the being which does not submit, has not given itself to God, but insists on God going out of his way to obey it. That may be very well in the Bhakti-marga , but it will not do on this Way. The revolt and impatience may come and will come in the heart or the prana when these are still subject to imperfection and impurity; but it is then for the will and the faith in your buddhi to reject them, not to act upon them. If the will consents, approves and supports them, (revolt and impatience) it means that you are siding with the inner enemy. If you want rapid progress, the first condition is that you should not do this; for every time you do it, the enemy is strengthened and the shuddhi postponed.” CWSA-36/Autobiographical Notes/p-229, 34: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-38-40, 35: “This development and progress of the world according to an original truth of its own being implies a succession of Time, a relation in Space and a regulated interaction of related things in Space to which the succession of Time gives the aspect of Causality. Time and Space, according to the metaphysician, have only a conceptual and not a real existence; but since all things and not these only are forms assumed by Conscious-Being in its own consciousness, the distinction is of no great importance. Time and Space are that one Conscious-Being viewing itself in extension, subjectively as Time, objectively as Space. Our mental view of these two categories is determined by the idea of measure which is inherent in the action of the analytical, dividing movement of Mind. Time is for the Mind a mobile extension measured out by the succession of the past, present and future in which Mind places itself at a certain standpoint whence it looks before and after . Space is a stable extension measured out by divisibility of substance ; at a certain point in that divisible extension Mind places itself and regards the disposition of substance around it.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-142-143, “Sri Aurobindo says time is an unbroken succession of ‘moments’” The Mother/30th March/1963/The Mother’s Agenda-4/102, " Man, still a child in Nature’s mighty hands, In the succession of the moments lives; To a changing present is his narrow right; His memory stares back at a phantom past, The future flees before him as he moves; He sees imagined garments, not a face." Savitri-53 36: "I have such an absolute certitude that the Wisdom that acts in the world is infinitely superior to all that we can imagine. We are like ignorant and stupid children in front of "something" that acts with a CERTITUDE, and so luminous, so luminous. With a superharmony that turns into harmony the things that seem to us the most discordant ." The Mother's Agenda/November 14, 1964, “All relations in the world, even to its greatest and most shocking apparent discords, are relations of something eternal to itself in its own universal existence ; they are not anywhere or at any time collisions of disconnected beings who meet fortuitously or by some mechanical necessity of cosmic existence. Therefore to get back to this eternal fact of oneness is our essential act of self-knowledge; to live in it must be the effective principle of our inner possession of our being and of our right and ideal relations with the world. That is why we have had to insist first and foremost on oneness as the aim and in a way the whole aim of our Yoga of knowledge.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-437 37: "The path is difficult. And yet this body is full of good will; it is filled with the psychic in every one of its cells. It’s like a child. The other day, it cried out quite spontaneously, ‘O my Sweet Lord, give me the time to realize You! ’ It did not ask to hasten the process, it did not ask to lighten its work; it only asked for enough TIME to do the work. ‘Give me the time!’" The Mother's Agenda-May 19, 1959, Download this WEB PAGE as a PDF file INTEGRAL KARMA YOGA "It (Supramental Action) will proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from the summits in the totality of an illumined and uplifted being, will and knowledge and not by the selected, calculated and standardised action which is all that the intellectual reason or ethical will can achieve. Its (Supramental Action's) sole aim will be (1) the expression of the divine in us and (2) the keeping together of the world and (3) its progress towards the Manifestation that is to be ...It will be an action not bound by the dualities but full and large in the spirit’s impartial joy of existence. The happy and inspired movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering and ignorant ego." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-206, INTEGRAL JNANA YOGA "The goal of Yoga is always hard to reach, but this one (integral Yoga) is more difficult than any other, and it is only for those who have the call, the capacity, the willingness to face everything and every risk, even the risk of failure, and the will to progress towards an entire selflessness, desirelessness and surrender." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-27 INTEGRAL BHAKTI YOGA "The supramental love means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire flooding of the body consciousness with the physical experience of oneness, the presence of the Beloved in every part, in every cell of the body... With the supramental change, the very thing on which you insist, the possibility of the free physical meeting of the embodied Divine with the sadhak without conflict of forces and without undesirable reactions becomes possible, assured and free." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-482-483 “The Asram has nothing to do with Hindu religion or culture or any religion or nationality. The Truth of the Divine which is the spiritual reality behind all religions and the descent of the supramental which is not known to any religion are the sole things which will be the foundation of the work of the future.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-701 “Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA/21/The Life Divine/p-31 “To be occupied with the good of all beings, to make the joy and grief of others one’s own has been described as a sign of the liberated and fulfilled spiritual man.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA/22/The Life Divine/p-1011,

The Central Truth of The Life Divine "Although Light grows on earth and Night recedes, Yet till the evil is slain in its own home And Light invades the world’s inconscient base And perished has the adversary Force, He still must labour on, his work half done." Savitri-448 The Central Truth of The Divine Life Or The Book of Consciousness “A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence .”¹ Sri Aurobindo “If consciousness is the central secret , life is the outward indication, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which liberates consciousness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its effectuation in material act.”² Sri Aurobindo “But also the central Consciousness in its turn will take up more and more the outer mental activities of knowledge and turn them into a parcel of itself or an annexed province; it will infuse into them its more authentic movement and make a more and more spiritualised and illumined mind its instrument in these surface fields, its new conquests, as well as in its own deeper spiritual empire.”¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo “For the gulf between mind and supermind has to be bridged, the closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now a void and a silence. This can be done only by the triple transformation to which we have already made a passing reference: there must first be the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into a soul-instrumentation; on that or along with that there must be the spiritual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force, Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must supervene the supramental transmutation, — there must take place as the crowning movement the ascent into the supermind and the transforming descent of the supramental Consciousness into our entire being and nature.”⁸ Sri Aurobindo The central thought, the central secret and central truth of Integral Evolution is identified as Consciousness, which is the real creative Power, the universal Witness, the force of awareness, a play of Energy, an infinite, indivisible Existence moves out of its fundamental purity into the varied play of Force; for whom the world is a field and condition of Divine Life; life is the exterior and dynamic sign and index of that revelation and effectuation; all life is the fundamental poise of its own constituting Consciousness in possession both of unity and of diversity where the former contains and governs the latter; the physical, vital, mind, soul and Supermind are instruments of Consciousness; the accessories or subordinate energies of these instruments are identified as elements of Consciousness; following this line the individual Consciousness fulfils itself by that which is beyond his obscured and limited ego, beyond the thought and speech, a centre of the Divine Life and of the universal Consciousness embracing, utilising and transforming all individual determinations into the Divine harmony; universal Consciousness fulfils itself by variations of numberless individuals and not by suppressing the variations; the Transcendent Consciousness fulfils, contains, manifests, constitutes the cosmos and the individual by its own infinite harmonic varieties and it is the true truth and source of both the Individuality and the Cosmic Being. Consciousness or the power of Being is like the nave of a wheel works through the individual centre, with the Divine Life or transformed Becoming is its circumference, the wheel. The spokes, the radiating bars connecting the wheel and the nave are the instruments of Consciousness responsible for rightly relating the existence with the Supreme through change of consciousness and thus the evolutionary growth of life is accelerated. Consciousness: “An integral consciousness will become the basis of an entire harmonisation of life through the total transformation, unification, integration of the being and the nature…An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic experience is essential for the complete transformation of our nature.”⁷ Sri Aurobindo “Consciousness is the breath that makes everything live.”¹⁴ The Mother The Highest Consciousness is an awareness of the Spirit by Identity, subordinated by the awareness of the Spirit by Inclusion of Psychic opening and Indwelling of Spiritual opening, which is the very stuff of the Spirit’s triple self-knowledge. We have two fundamental facts – a fact of pure Existence or Being and a fact of world existence or Becomings; to deny one or the other is to bring either narrow limitation to our Spiritual order or an incompetent and restricting physical life and to recognise the facts of Consciousness is to find out their true and fruitful relation. Consciousness is only a bridge of transition in which initially the Spirit becomes partially aware of itself and finally becomes the normal waking trance of luminous Superconscience. The extension of this consciousness can be satisfied by an inner enlargement from the individual consciousness into the cosmic existence and in the Transcendent Consciousness, both the individual and universal find its own fullness, freedom of reality and perfect harmonisation. Therefore, man’s importance in the world is recognised by the development of a comprehensive Consciousness in which Silence and cosmic Activity are reconciled and a transfiguration by a perfect self-discovery becomes possible. We must note that what we mean ordinarily by the superficial man6 is not the inner self, but only a sum of apparent continuous movement of consciousness-force concentrated on the surface in a certain stream of superficial workings or an unequal concentration of consciousness in which there is the beginning of self-division, which does all his works, thinks all his thoughts, feels all his emotions. Behind this stream of energy there is the whole sea of consciousness, the vast sea of Subliminal, Superconscient and Subconscient Self which is aware of the stream but of which the stream is unaware. Yet it is really the hidden sea and not the superficial stream which is doing all the action and the source of all his movement. Instruments of Consciousness: Consciousness is a self-aware force of existence whose middle term is Mind, below it, it sinks into Vital, Physical and Subconscient movements and above it, it rises to Subliminal, Spiritual and Supramental heights. This Consciousness is quite involved in Inconscient Matter, hesitating on the verge between involution and conscious evolution in the non-animal form of life, consciously evolving but greatly limited and hampered in the mind housed in the living body of man, destined to be fully evolved by awakening the Supermind in the embodied fully developed mental being and Nature. The phenomenon of Consciousness is certainly a Force, a formative movement of energies and all material forms are born out of meeting and mutual adaptation between unshaped forces. Subconscient consciousness is the Inconscient vibrating on the borders of consciousness, sending up its motions to be changed into conscious stuff, swallowing into its depths impressions of past experience as seeds of unconscious habit and returning them constantly but often chaotically to the surface consciousness; for surface consciousness is bound down to ego in all its activities and the first formation of egoistic consciousness is the dualities of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil. The supraphysical plane of consciousness ³ is not governed by the law of Spiritual evolution and from this world, bright and dark forces cast their influence on the physical plane of existence. The enlargement of the superficially active surface consciousness is possible either by some kind of untaught effort and casual ill-ordered effect or by a scientific and well-regulated practice. The surface consciousness is having three appearances; firstly, the material consciousness is a submerged consciousness, self-oblivious, and is lost in the form but really obeys faultlessly the laws of Right and Truth fixed for it by the Divine Will concealed in its own superficial expressive action; this body consciousness is a patient servant and what it craves for is long life, good health, physical strength and comfortable easy life and the right action of the physical consciousness is distorted by the pressure of separative consciousness of physical mind; secondly, the vital consciousness is an emerging consciousness seen as an important part in animal life and intuitively evident in plant, it acts in the cells of the body for purposeful movements, automatic vital function and a process of the growth, activity, attraction, repulsion and decay of form to which our mind is a stranger; it has the same initial reactions of pleasure and pain, sleep and wakefulness as that of mental consciousness but different in constitution of its self-experience; thirdly, the mental consciousness is not the completely illumined consciousness emerged out of the obscuration of Matter but it is the emerged individual limited consciousness, aware of things and forces in their apparent division and opposition to each other but not in their real unity, reflects new ideas as facts of life, modifies comfortably the internal and the external existence of the being; delivers out of its imprisonment but it is not yet master of the act and form and is aware therefore only of a fragmentary movement of its own total progressive activities; it is a many-sided mental effort in order to arrive at an apprehensive knowledge. Apprehensive Consciousness, Prajnana, is a luminous mental activity in the body, sense mind and nerves unconsciously without any notice; it is active, formative of creative knowledge, originative, cognizant as the processor and witness of its own working; it is in its nature truth seeing, truth hearing and truth remembering; apprehensive active consciousness works as an energy throwing up knowledge and activity out of itself; an apprehensive passive consciousness does not act as an energy with absence of force of action; mental waking consciousness is only a small selection of the entire conscious being, it is a perceptive consciousness of waking state where the transcript of physical things and of our contacts with universe are recorded. If we develop our inner being, live more inwardly than most men do, then the balance is changed and a larger dream consciousness opens before us; our dreams can take on a subliminal and no longer a subconscious character and can assume a reality and significance; this is also subliminal consciousness, which is a witness to truth through truth vision, truth hearing, truth discernment, truth touch, truth thought and truth action and its testimony can be confirmed again and again in physical and objective field, it delivers us definitely from circumscription by the material and from the illusion of the obvious; on the border of subliminal consciousness there is Psychic Consciousness ,⁹ which can identify itself with other Souls, can enter into them, can realise its unity with them and this can take place in perfect waking state, observes all distinctions of objective world and exceeds them. Above it there is Spiritual Consciousness ,¹⁰ which is intrinsic, self-existent, more embracing, universal and transcendent, it can take up mind, life and body into its light and give them the immobile and featureless Divine touch; for it has a greater instrumentality of knowledge, a fountain of deeper light, power and will, an unlimited splendour and force of love, joy and beauty; its highest state is Overmind Consciousness , which can hold any number of seemingly fundamental oppositions together in a reconciling global vision. In Sleep Consciousness all the material and sensory experiences cease in the deeper trance when we enter into superconscience, no record from it or transcript of its contents can normally reach us; it is only by a special or an unusual development, in a supernormal condition or through a break or rift in our confined normality, that we can be on the surface conscious of the contacts or messages of the Superconscience. This Consciousness of the upper hemisphere, also known as the Supramental Truth Consciousness¹¹ is at once a total self-awareness and ordering self-knowledge of the Eternal and Infinite and a power of self-determination inherent in that self-awareness by which the One manifests the harmonies of its infinite potential multiplicity; its other name, the Gnostic Consciousness is that in which all contradictions are cancelled and fused into each other in a higher light of unified plasticity, self-knowledge and world-knowledge, instead of ego-insistence on personal ideas there would be a unifying sense of a common truth in many forms, a common self in many consciousness and bodies; it is extended as an original and ultimate Consciousness which is a power of unity in diversity, it is integral, all-accepting, all-embracing, all-discriminating, all-determining and an indivisible whole-vision. In this comprehensive Supramental Consciousness, it is equally possible to regard and rank waking, dream and sleep consciousness together as three different orders of one Reality or as three different grades of embodied contact of self-experience and world-experience. If we can develop a causal body or Supramental Sheath, which is not formed in most human beings, then this faculty will remain active in the conscious waking state. Beyond the Supramental Consciousness is the infinite Consciousness of Sachchidananda which must always find and achieve itself in the Divine Bliss, an Omnipresent Self-delight. This highest state of Consciousness of the Self is also called Turiya of pure existence and our absolute state of Being, with which it is difficult to have direct contact. Elements of Consciousness: There are some more terminologies through which the instruments of Consciousness are linked to the Divine Life and we have to understand all of them in relation to Consciousness. Ignorance is an unconsciousness, achiti , of the Truth and Right; it is the non-perceiving principle of our consciousness as opposed to the truth-perceiving conscious vision and knowledge; it can only come about as a subordinate phenomenon by some concentration of consciousness absorbed in a part knowledge or a part action of the being and excluding the rest from its awareness; this Ignorance is a frontal power of that all-consciousness which limits itself in certain field, within certain boundaries to a particular operation of knowledge, a particular mode of conscious working, and keeps back all the rest of its knowledge in waiting as a force behind it. Falsehood is a personal attachment to limited consciousness absorbed in part truth and a by-product of world movement. Its necessity becomes inevitable in the fragmentary evolution of Ignorance. Suffering , a great stumbling-block to understand the truth of the universe, is a failure of the consciousness in us to meet the shocks of existence, the incapacity to bear the touch of delight. Evil is a wrong consciousness governed by life ego. Death is a loss of consciousness or failure of consciousness to unite the cells of the body. It is a peaceful transition from one state of surface consciousness to another state of subtle consciousness and can destroy unconsciousness. All Death, Decay and Destruction are the outcome of the arrest of growth of consciousness or the distortion of consciousness. When one enters higher ranges of consciousness beyond mind, he experiences Divine action, creation and Ananda and when one enters lower ranges of consciousness below mind, he experiences undivine action, destruction and suffering. Tamas is the Sanskrit word for the principle and power of inertia of consciousness and the first born of inconscient force:²⁰ a less developed downward depressing consciousness, dull, obscure, sluggish, conservative, unwilling to enlarge itself, recalcitrant to new stimulus of Divine force, barks at all unfamiliar wisdom and light and incompetent in its play is said to be tamasic . Rajas is the principle and power of kinetic force of consciousness impelled by desire and instinct, an intermediate, slow-evolving consciousness, dynamic, possessive, ever restless, governed in its idea not by truth and light, passionate and active; it accepts enjoyment of desire as the ruling human motive. Sattwa is the principle of harmonious upward rising consciousness; a consciousness of limited light, relative freedom, inner satisfaction, happiness, balanced knowledge and eager to possess higher Divine faculties of limitless Wisdom, Love, Delight, Beauty and Silence. Ego is a practical construction of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us; this constant outer ego building is only a provisional device of the Consciousness-Force in things so that the secret individual, the spirit within, may establish a representative and instrumental formation of itself in physical nature; the individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a translation of the secret self into the terms of surface consciousness, or a subjective substitute for our true self in our surface experience; the limited ego is only an intermediate phenomenon of consciousness necessary for a certain line of development in Ignorance; the nature of the ego is a self-limitation of consciousness by a willed ignorance of the rest of its play and its exclusive absorption in one form, one combination of tendencies, one field of the movement of energies. Memory is only a process and utility of consciousness; it is also a poverty-stricken substitute for an integral direct abiding consciousness of self and a direct integral or global perception of things. Mind, life and body are different organisations and grades of one conscious force of Existence; they are inferior expressions of partial consciousness which strive to arrive in the mould of a varied evolution at that superior expression of itself already existent to the Beyond-Mind. Time experience varies with the variation of state of consciousness and Space is a category of consciousness which arranges the perception of phenomena. Reason is only a messenger, a representative or a shadow of a greater consciousness beyond itself. Mind is a degradation¹⁵ of Supramental Consciousness. (Mental) Maya is the inverse creative movement of the Divine Consciousness and (Supramental) Maya is the forward creative movement of the Eternal Consciousness. Yoga-Maya is the power of Supramental Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation. Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; it is a special movement of self-existent direct awareness of Knowledge and it brings to man the brilliant messages from the Unknown. Vision is an instrument of the Consciousness of the dream Self to approach and foresee the Divine action. All evolution is, in essence, a heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being so that it may be raised into the greater intensity of what is still unmanifest, from matter into life, from life into mind, from the mind into the Spirit. Nature is the unconscious God whose conscious part is the creative force of consciousness of the Being within us. Being, Purusha, is the conscious God working within Ignorance, is also the static status of the infinite Consciousness. Purusha is a consciousness that observes and can reserve its will power. (Apara) Prakriti is the dynamic state of finite surface consciousness acting within the boundary of three gunas. Prakriti is an energy full of the substance of consciousness that takes the form of knowledge, will and feeling. Para Prakriti, Shakti is the dynamic status of infinite indwelling and over-dwelling Consciousness. Soul is the inner consciousness that aspires to its own complete self-realisation and therefore always exceeds the individual formation of the moment. Brahman is integral and unifies many states of consciousness at a time and knows itself in all that exists. Divine Will is the potency of the power of consciousness applying itself to a work and a result. “If knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its function is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound and secret recesses of the Divine Mystery.”¹⁶ Tapas is the concentration power of consciousness. Samjnana or Supramental Sens e is the contact of Consciousness with its object; its action is the result of extension and vibration of consciousness in a supra-ethereal ether of light, power and bliss. It can be directly aware of all things in all the planes of consciousness without the aid of a sense organ. Knowledge is a potency of Light and Consciousness that possesses the highest Truth in terms of direct perception and self-experience. Knowledge and Will are dual aspects of one Consciousness or the twin power of actions of Consciousness. Ananda is the very substance of Consciousness and is the outcome of the interaction of Knowledge and Will. Equality is that power of consciousness which brings into the whole of our Nature and Being the sense of eternal tranquillity of Self. Life evolves through growth of consciousness or a greater consciousness means greater life. Integral Education , a utilitarian aspect of Integral Yoga, proceeds ahead with effort, askesis and tapasya , which are defined as the concentration energy of Consciousness. Consciousness is the central Truth of Divine Life which is a self-aware force of existence extended from the Inconscient Sheath to the Bliss Sheath. By movement of Consciousness, fullness of Being, fullness of Consciousness and fullness of Life can be attained. Harmony is the inherent Nature of infinite Divine Consciousness and disharmony or limited harmony is the nature of the finite Consciousness of the three gunas . The Law that descends from Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Consciousness is known as Dharma . The Law that enters the human vessel from the tamasic and rajasic mind and from the surrounding world is known as Adharma . Vedantic Sraddha is the pouring down of Divine attributes of infinite Static consciousness into finite dynamic Consciousness of the three gunas through Purusha Yajna, Vedantic self-discipline. Vedic Sraddha is the pouring down of Divine attributes of infinite Dynamic Consciousness into finite dynamic consciousness of the three gunas by Prakriti Yajna . Sincerity is the concentration of finite dynamic Consciousness of the three gunas around the Psychic being. Exclusive concentration is a concentration of separative mental active consciousness absorbed in part knowledge or a part action of the being and excluding the rest from its awareness. Submission of finite dynamic consciousness to infinite static Consciousness is defined as (Vedantic) surrender. Integral Concentration of Consciousness, Tapas , is the inherent power of Consciousness Force. Submission of finite dynamic consciousness to infinite dynamic consciousness is defined as (Vedic) surrender . Equality is gained when the Consciousness goes beyond the finite consciousness of the three gunas. Renunciation is the rejection of finite dynamic consciousness represented by three gunas of apara-prakriti. 'Samyama is a process of pressure on the consciousness by which the secret Truth, the involved intuition is released…’¹³ The Divine Life:¹² “Our greater self of knowledge waits for us, A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast: It sees from summits beyond thinking mind, It moves in a splendid air transcending life. It shall descend and make earth’s life divine.” Savitri-484 “If our souls could see and love and clasp God’s Truth, Its infinite radiance would seize our hearts, Our being in God’s image be remade And earthly life becomes the life divine.” Savitri-663 This world is real precisely because it consists of an observing consciousness and an objective reality and the world action cannot proceed without the witness because the universe exists only in or for the Consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. The individual can be a centre of the whole universal Consciousness and world transcending Consciousness superior to all cosmic existence and the form of the universe is occupied by the entire immanence of the Formless and Ineffable. So, to exist not as self of body only which is subject to death, desire and pain but to consider body as a minor outward arrangement of Self and an out-flowering of life by expansion and elevation of Consciousness is a first condition of the Divine life. The second condition⁴ of Divine Life is to transcend the ignorance, limitation and control of the surface formation of mind which is only a subordinate and instrument of Self. The third condition of the Divine life is to possess and govern the dynamic condition of becoming from an inner eternity of Being and its outcome is the Spiritual self-possession, self-mastery and the manifestation of Divine miracle. As the Consciousness turns more within all obstacles and resistances appear unreal, transient and extremely relative. Out of this living a fourth condition evolves which insists to withdraw from the absorption of material preoccupation, not by rejecting or neglecting life in the body but by a constant living on the inner and higher planes of Consciousness by an ascent and stepping back inward; both these movements are necessary in order to elevate life from the transient life from moment to moment into the eternal life of our immortal Consciousness. The fifth condition of Divine life is the widening of our range of Consciousness, field of action in time and a taking up and transcending of the existing state of our mental, vital and corporeal consciousness and consider them as the instrument and minor outward formation of the Self. Thus, in reality the world lives in us, thinks in us, formulates itself in us; but we imagine and misunderstand that it is we who live, think, formulate separately by ourselves and for ourselves and we claim the universal forces that act in us as our own. In the last condition of Divine living, the Consciousness is at once aware of the Law, Right and Truth of the Individual and All and the two become consciously harmonised in a mutual unity, One knowing itself as the Many and the Many knowing themselves as the One, life obeys the law of Unity and yet fulfils each thing in the diversity according to its proper rule and function; in this Divine Life all the individuals live at once as one conscious Being in many living Souls, one power of Consciousness in many minds, one joy of force in many lives, one reality of Delight fulfilling itself in many hearts and bodies. An integral evolution of Consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form reveals and manifests the indwelling Spirit is then the central significant motive of our terrestrial existence. Savitri and Supramental/Supreme Consciousness: “The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance, The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.” Savitri-66-67 “The All-containing was contained in form, Oneness was carved into units measurable, The limitless built into a cosmic sum: Unending Space was beaten into a curve, Indivisible Time into small minutes cut, The infinitesimal massed to keep secure The mystery of the Formless cast into form.” Savitri-266-67 “A breadth of all-containing Consciousness Supported Being in a still embrace.” Savitri-271 “A great all-ruling Consciousness is there” Savitri-271 “A light was round him wide and absolute, A diamond purity of eternal sight; A consciousness lay still, devoid of forms, Free, wordless, uncoerced by sign or rule, For ever content with only being and bliss; A sheer existence lived in its own peace On the single spirit’s bare and infinite ground.” Savitri-297 “For one was there supreme behind the God. A Mother Might brooded upon the world; A Consciousness revealed its marvellous front Transcending all that is, denying none:" Savitri-313 “The one Consciousness that made the world was seen; All now was luminosity and force." Savitri-319 Consciousness is a yearning,⁵ an exploration, an action and a search through every movement, gesture and cry and it hunts in the Inconscient depths and Superconscient heights to find some lost felicity, missed sweetness and manifests itself as Knowledge and limiting that knowledge to such extent to create phenomena of Ignorance acting upon surface consciousness. We are in search of that single beginningless and endless Consciousness for whom this creation is a small incident, which mind cannot touch, speech cannot utter, thought cannot reveal; it has no home on earth and no centre in man and yet is the fount of creation, source and origin of all truth, all things thought and all action done. Delight is the original nature of Consciousness and its deepest form is manifested as Divine Love. This Love labours in the depths as established Consciousness which maintains a growing but firm light in the darkness of original Nescience and exults on the heights and its feet can walk in the naked hardest world. Savitri teaches us this lesson that if the highest Consciousness of Divine Love can be called down to the lowest plane of Inconscient, then the perishable stuff of our body can be transformed into immortal Divine Life and harmonise all the obscure forces of existence that surround and press upon the body. This inner movement of ascension and descent of Consciousness can be carried out by the support of Vedantic and Vedic action of Sacrifice and Faith and can be further intensified by the support of Divine Love. Through the movement of Consciousness, Divine Love can be activated which needs no hand to feel and clasp but this mighty vibration can destroy the falsity in human love and heighten the intimacy of Soul with Soul, which no human love can imagine. OM TAT SAT References: 1: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-856, 2: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1054, 3: CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita/p-473, 4: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1062, 5: “A consciousness that yearned through every cry Of unexplored attraction and desire, It found and searched again the unsatisfied deeps Hunting as if in some deep secret heart To find some lost or missed felicity.” Savitri-674 “He (King) neared the still consciousness sustaining all.” Savitri-32, “The one Consciousness that made the world was seen;” Savitri-319, 6: “Yes, the ordinary consciousness is like an axis with everything revolving around it. An axis fixed somewhere, and everything revolves around it – that's the ordinary individual consciousness. And if the axis shifts, one feels lost. It's like a big axis (more or less big, it can also be tiny) planted straight up in time, with everything revolving around it. The consciousness may be more or less extended, more or less high, more or less strong, but it always turns on an axis. And now for me there is no more axis. ” The Mother's Agenda/14th July 1962, 7: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-753, CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-114, 8: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-924, "All the works of mind and intellect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, these again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and those transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-149, 9: “The soul, the psychic entity , then manifests itself as the central being which upholds mind and life and body and supports all the other powers and functions of the Spirit; it takes up its greater function as the guide and ruler of the nature. A guidance, a governance begins from within which exposes every movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false, obscure, opposed to the divine realisation: every region of the being, every nook and corner of it, every movement, formation, direction, inclination of thought, will, emotion, sensation, action, reaction, motive, disposition, propensity, desire, habit of the conscious or subconscious physical, even the most concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the unerring psychic light , their confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled, their obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated and removed; all is purified, set right, the whole nature harmonised, modulated in the psychic key, put in spiritual order.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-941, 10: “This, effected little by little or in a succession of great and swift definitive experiences, is the process of the spiritual transformation . It achieves itself and culminates in an upward ascent often repeated by which in the end the consciousness fixes itself on a higher plane and from there sees and governs the mind, life and body; it achieves itself also in an increasing descent of the powers of the higher consciousness and knowledge which become more and more the whole normal consciousness and knowledge. A light and power, a knowledge and force are felt which first take possession of the mind and remould it, afterwards of the life part and remould that, finally of the little physical consciousness and leave it no longer little but wide and plastic and even infinite. For this new consciousness has itself the nature of infinity: it brings to us the abiding spiritual sense and awareness of the infinite and eternal with a great largeness of the nature and a breaking down of its limitations; immortality becomes no longer a belief or an experience but a normal self-awareness; the close presence of the Divine Being, his rule of the world and of our self and natural members, his force working in us and everywhere, the peace of the infinite, the joy of the infinite are now concrete and constant in the being; in all sights and forms one sees the Eternal, the Reality, in all sounds one hears it, in all touches feels it; there is nothing else but its forms and personalities and manifestations; the joy or adoration of the heart, the embrace of all existence, the unity of the spirit are abiding realities.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-947, 11: “If the spirit could from the first dwell securely on the superior heights and deal with a blank and virgin stuff of mind and matter, a complete spiritual transformation might be rapid, even facile: but the actual process of Nature is more difficult, the logic of her movement more manifold, contorted, winding, comprehensive; she recognises all the data of the task she has set to herself and is not satisfied with a summary triumph over her own complexities. Every part of our being has to be taken in its own nature and character, with all the moulds and writings of the past still there in it: each minutest portion and movement must either be destroyed and replaced if it is unfit, or, if it is capable, transmuted into the truth of the higher being. If the psychic change is complete, this can be done by a painless process, though still the programme must be long and scrupulous and the progress deliberate; but otherwise one has to be satisfied with a partial result or, if one’s own scrupulousness of perfection or hunger of the spirit is insatiable, consent to a difficult, often painful and seemingly interminable action. For ordinarily the consciousness does not rise to the summits except in the highest moments; it remains on the mental level and receives descents from above, sometimes a single descent of some spiritual power that stays and moulds the being into something predominatingly spiritual, or a succession of descents bringing into it more and more of the spiritual status and dynamis: but unless one can live on the highest height reached, there cannot be the complete or more integral change .” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-948, 12: "As it is, the physical body is really only a very disfigured shadow of the eternal life of the Self, but this physical body is capable of a progressive development; the physical substance progresses through each individual formation, and one day it will be able to build a bridge between physical life as we know it and the supramental life that is to manifest." The Mother/ The Mother's Agenda/28.11.1958 “The only hope for the future is in a change of man’s consciousness and the change is bound to come....But it is left to men to decide if they will collaborate in this change or if it will have to be enforced upon them by the power of crushing circumstances... So, wake up and collaborate.” The Mother/ The Mother’s Agenda-Vol-5/p-46, “In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds in my purview, the spiritual and the material, and to try to establish the divine Consciousness and the divine Power in men’s hearts and in earthly life, not for personal salvation only but for a life divine here . This seems to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish its spirituality or alter its Indian character. This at least has always been my view and experience of the reality and nature of the world and things and the Divine: it seemed to me as nearly as possible the integral truth about them and I have therefore spoken of the pursuit of it as the integral Yoga. Everyone is, of course, free to reject and disbelieve in this kind of integrality or to believe in the spiritual necessity of an entire other-worldliness excluding any kind of this-worldliness altogether, but that would make the exercise of my Yoga impossible. My Yoga can include indeed a full experience of the other worlds, the plane of the supreme Spirit and the other planes in between and their possible effects upon our life and material world ; but it will be quite possible to insist only on the realisation of the supreme Being or Ishwara even in one aspect, Shiva, Krishna as Lord of the world and Master of ourselves and our works or else the universal Sachchidananda , and attain to the essential results of this Yoga and afterwards to proceed from them to the integral results if one accepted the ideal of the divine life and this material world conquered by the Spirit. It is this view and experience of things and of the truth of existence that enabled me to write The Life Divin e and Savitri . ” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-375, 13: CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-308, 14: The Mother’s Agenda-29.06.1966, 15: “Man and the animal are both mentally conscious beings: but the animal is fixed in vital mind and mind-sense and cannot exceed its limitations, while man has received into his sense-mind the light of another principle, the intellect, which is really at once a reflection and a degradation of the supermind, a ray of gnosis seized by the sense-mentality and transformed by it into something other than its source: for it is agnostic like the sense- mind in which and for which it works, not gnostic; it seeks to lay hold on knowledge, because it does not possess it, it does not like supermind hold knowledge in itself as its natural prerogative. In other words, in each of these forms of existence the universal being has fixed its action of consciousness in a different principle or, as between man and animal, in the modification of a lower by a higher though still not a highest-grade principle.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-739, 16: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-149, 17: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-147, 18: “For, as a matter of fact, while the very keyword of the ideal creation is a plenary self-consciousness and self-possession in the infinite Soul and a perfect oneness, the keyword of the creation of which we have present experience is the very opposite; it is an original inconscience developing in life into a limited and divided self-consciousness, an original inert subjection to the drive of a blind self-existent Force developing in life into a struggle of the self-conscious being to possess himself and all things and to establish in the kingdom of this unseeing mechanic Force the reign of an enlightened Will and Knowledge.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-501-502 19: “It is consciousness and life that must be the keywords to what is being thus worked out in Time; for without them Matter and the world of Matter would be a meaningless phenomenon, a thing that has just happened by Chance or by an unconscious Necessity. But consciousness as it is, life as it is cannot be the whole secret; for both are very clearly something unfinished and still in process. In us consciousness is Mind, and our mind is ignorant and imperfect, an intermediate power that has grown and is still growing towards something beyond itself: there were lower levels of consciousness that came before it and out of which it arose, there must very evidently be higher levels to which it is itself arising. Before our thinking, reasoning, reflecting mind there was a consciousness unthinking but living and sentient, and before that there was the subconscious and the unconscious; after us or in our yet unevolved selves there is likely to be waiting a greater consciousness , self-luminous, not dependent on constructive thought: our imperfect and ignorant thought-mind is certainly not the last word of consciousness, its ultimate possibility. For the essence of consciousness is the power to be aware of itself and its objects, and in its true nature this power must be direct, self-fulfilled and complete : if it is in us indirect, incomplete, unfulfilled in its workings, dependent on constructed instruments, it is because consciousness here is emerging from an original veiling Inconscience and is yet burdened and enveloped with the first Nescience proper to the Inconscient; but it must have the power to emerge completely, its destiny must be to evolve into its own perfection which is its true nature. Its true nature is to be wholly aware of its objects, and of these objects the first is self, the being which is evolving its consciousness here, and the rest is what we see as not-self, — but if existence is indivisible, that too must in reality be self: the destiny of evolving consciousness must be, then, to become perfect in its awareness, entirely aware of self and all-aware. This perfect and natural condition of consciousness is to us a superconscience, a state which is beyond us and in which our mind, if suddenly transferred to it, could not at first function; but it is towards that superconscience that our conscious being must be evolving.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1052-1053, 20: “Buddhi , which is simply the determinative power that determines all inertly out of indeterminate inconscient Force, takes for us the form of intelligence and will. Manas, the inconscient force which seizes Nature’s discriminations by objective action and reaction and grasps at them by attraction, becomes sense-perception and desire, the two crude terms or degradations of intelligence and will, — becomes the sense-mind sensational, emotive, volitional in the lower sense of wish, hope, longing, passion, vital impulsion, all the deformations (vikara ) of will. The senses become the instruments of sense-mind, the perceptive five of our sense-knowledge, the active five of our impulsions and vital habits, mediators between the subjective and objective; the rest are the objects of our consciousness, visayas of the senses.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-97, “Therefore, since consciousness is always there even in an apparently inconscient Force, we must find a corresponding psychological power of these three modes which informs their more outward executive action. On their psychological side the three qualities may be defined, tamas as Nature’s power of nescience, rajas as her power of active seeking ignorance enlightened by desire and impulsion, sattwa as her power of possessing and harmonising knowledge.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-427, “But it is dominated by a huge force and impulsion of mute rajasic kinesis which drives it, even in and even by its dispersion and disintegration, to build and create and again by a sattwic ideative element in its apparently inconscient force which is always imposing a harmony and preservative order on the two opposite tendencies. Rajas, the principle of creative endeavour and motion and impulsion in Prakriti, kinesis, pravritti , so seen in Matter, appears more evidently as a conscious or half-conscious passion of seeking and desire and action in the dominant character of Life, — for that passion is the nature of all vital existence.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/428, “The old semi-Buddhistic , semi-Sankhya theory which saw only the Quiescent and nothing else in the world except a constant combination of the five elements (The Gita-18.14) and the three modes of inconscient Energy lighting up their false activity by the consciousness of the Quiescent in which it is reflected, is not the whole truth of the Brahman. We are not a mere mass of changing mind-stuff, life-stuff, body-stuff taking different forms of mind and life and body from birth to birth, so that at no time is there any real self or conscious reason of existence behind all the flux or none except that Quiescent who cares for none of these things. There is a real and stable power of our being behind the constant mutation of our mental, vital and physical personality, and this we have to know and preserve in order that the Infinite may manifest Himself through it according to His will in whatever range and for whatever purpose of His eternal cosmic activity.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-376 Download this file in PDF format: “There must grow up within us or there must manifest a consciousness more and more open to the deeper and the higher being, more and more laid bare to the cosmic Self and Power and to what comes down from the Transcendence, turned to a higher Peace, permeable to a greater light, force and ecstasy, a consciousness that exceeds the small personality and surpasses the limited light and experience of the surface mind, the limited force and aspiration of the normal life consciousness, the obscure and limited responsiveness of the body.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-938 "That’s another interesting point, because I was an outright atheist: till the age of twenty, the very idea of God made me furious. Therefore I had the most solid base – no imaginings, no mystic atavism ; my mother was very much an unbeliever and so was my father. So from the point of view of atavism it was very good: positivism, materialism. Only one thing: since I was very small, a will for perfection in any field whatever; a will for perfection and the sense of a limitless consciousness – no limits to one’s progress or to one’s power or to one’s scope. And that, since I was very small. But mentally, an absolute refusal to believe in a "God": I believed only in what I could touch and see. And the whole faculty for experiences was already there (they didn’t manifest because the time hadn’t come). Only, the sense of a Light here (gesture above the head), which began when I was very small, I was five, along with a will for perfection. A will for perfection: oh, whatever I did always had to be the best I could do. And then, a limitless consciousness. These two things. And my return to the Divine came about through Theon’s teaching, when I was told for the first time, "The Divine is within, there" (Mother strikes her breast). Then I felt at once, "Yes, this is it." Then I did all the work that’s taught to find Him again; and through here (gesture to the heart center) I went there (gesture of junction above with the Supreme). But outwardly, mentally, no religion – a horror of religions... And I see now that it was the most solid base possible for this experience : there was no danger of imaginings." The Mother The Mother's Agenda/March 26, 1966

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The Mundane Perfection "But only when we break through Matter’s wall In that spiritual vastness can we stand" Savitri-543 “There are three stages of the ascent , — (1) at the bottom the bodily life enslaved to the pressure of necessity and desire, (2) in the middle the mental, higher emotional and psychic rule that feels after greater interests, aspirations, experiences, (3) at the summits first a deeper psychic and spiritual state and then a supramental eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations and seekings discover their own intimate significance. (1) In the bodily life first desire and need and then the practical good of the individual and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant force. (2) In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are half-lights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals formed by the mind as a result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and experience. Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes its brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the urge of mental Nature to mould in the sense of the idea or the ideal the life of the individual, and in the end even the vaguer more complex life of the society is forced to undergo this subtle process. (3) In the spiritual life, or when a higher power than Mind has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or supramental Self, the Divine Being, the supreme and immanent Reality, must be alone the Lord within us and shape freely our final development according to the highest, widest, most integral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the end that nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual has nothing further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has become a portion of the impersonality or the universal personality of the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation and play of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of the world in its march towards the divine goal can move him to action. Mental ideas, opinions, constructions are his no more; for his mind has fallen into silence, it is only a channel for the Light and Truth of the divine knowledge. Ideals are too narrow for the vastness of his spirit; it is the ocean of the Infinite that flows through him and moves him for ever. ” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-208-209 The Agenda of Mundane Perfection “A gaol is this immense material world: Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed Law, At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace.” Savitri-18 “He too is a machine amid machines; A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought, A beating heart cuts out emotion’s modes; An insentient energy fabricates a soul.” Savitri-20 “A long dim preparation is man's life, A circle of toil and hope and war and peace Tracked out by Life on Matter's obscure ground.” Savitri-24 “A struggling ignorance is his wisdom’s mate: He waits to see the consequence of his acts, He waits to weigh the certitude of his thoughts, He knows not what he shall achieve or when; He knows not whether at last he shall survive, Or end like the mastodon and the sloth And perish from the earth where he was king. He is ignorant of the meaning of his life, He is ignorant of his high and splendid fate.” Savitri-53 “Even in his mortal session in body’s house, An aimless traveller between birth and death, Ephemeral dreaming of immortality, To reign she spurs him. He takes up her powers; He has harnessed her to the yoke of her own law.” Savitri-65 "Life in its boundaries lingered satisfied With the small happiness of the body’s acts." Savitri-114 “Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act, Life had for them no aim save Nature’s joy And the stimulus and delight of outer things; Identified with the spirit’s outward shell, They worked for the body’s wants, they craved no more.” Savitri-143 “There was no thinking self, aim there was none: All was unorganised stress and seekings vague.” Savitri-147 “It knew itself a creature of the mud; It asked no larger law, no loftier aim; It had no inward look, no upward gaze.... It took appearance for the face of God,... It knew not the Immortal in its house; It had no greater deeper cause to live. In limits only it was powerful; Acute to capture truth for outward use, Its knowledge was the body’s instrument; Absorbed in the little works of its prison house It turned around the same unchanging points In the same circle of interest and desire, But thought itself the master of its jail.” Savitri-149-150 “His little hour is spent in little things… Time has he none to turn his eyes within And look for his lost self and his dead soul.” Savitri-164-165 “In street and house, in councils and in courts Beings he (King Aswapati) met who looked like living men And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought But harboured all that is subhuman, vile And lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl.” Savitri-215 “Our human knowledge is a candle burnt On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth; Man’s virtue, a coarse-spun ill-fitting dress, Apparels wooden images of Good; Passionate and blinded, bleeding, stained with mire His energy stumbles towards a deathless Force.” Savitri-280-281 “The world lived on made empty of its Cause, Like love when the beloved’s face is gone.” Savitri-305 “Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven, Descended here unhappy and sublime, A link between the demigod and the beast, He knows not his own greatness nor his aim; He has forgotten why he has come and whence.” Savitri-336-37 “Once were my (Satyavan) days like days of other men: To think and act was all, to enjoy and breathe; This was the width and height of mortal hope:” Savitri-406-7 "He is a puppet of the dance of Time; He is driven by the hours, the moment’s call Compels him with the thronging of life’s need And the babel of the voices of the world." Savitri-478 “But when she (Savitri) came back to her self of thought, Once more she was a human thing on earth, A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight, A mind compelled to think out ignorance, A life-force pressed into a camp of works And the material world her limiting field.” Savitri-488 (Savitri said) “Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds, Not live beyond life nor think beyond the mind; Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.” Savitri-520 "The men who walked beneath an unreal sky Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut And pushed by unseen hands across the soil Or moving pictures upon Fancy’s film:" Savitri-546 (Death said) “This is the world in which thou mov’st, astray In the tangled pathways of the human mind, In the issueless circling of thy human life, Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.” Savitri-618 “A reasoning animal willed and planned and sought; He stood erect among his brute compeers, He built life new, measured the universe, Opposed his fate and wrestled with unseen Powers, Conquered and used the laws that rule the world, And hoped to ride the heavens and reach the stars, A master of his huge environment. Now through Mind’s windows stares the demigod Hidden behind the curtains of man’s soul: (Psychic being) He has seen the Unknown, looked on Truth’s veilless face; A ray has touched him from the eternal sun; Motionless, voiceless in foreseeing depths, He stands awake in Supernature’s light And sees a glory of arisen wings And sees the vast descending might of God.” Savitri-622 (Savitri said) “The souls of men have wandered from the Light And the great Mother turns away her face. The eyes of the creatrix Bliss are closed And sorrow’s touch has found her in her dreams.” Savitri-628 (Death said) “Vainly thou seekst in Matter’s world an aim; No aim is there, only a will to be.” Savitri-644 If one’s all action, all thinking process and all emotions are executed comfortably without contact with the Divine, then he is identified as a Mundane. "Those who have given themselves up too entirely to this outward drive of the mentality, fall into the hands of the lower nature, cling to it and make it their foundation."¹¹ In integral Yoga, if one excludes the Divine from his action, thought and association, then that exercise is identified as a waste of time¹ ² and energy. Nature’s first evolutionary basis is material life, and man must first accord due importance to his external fact of material and vital existence; the Nature’s force of conservation is secured by the abundant multiplication of the physical man. His next greater preoccupation in the evolution is to find himself as a mental being in the material life—as much as possible perfected individual and social existence. European civilization moved in this direction through the Hellenic idea and was further reinforced by the Romans through the ideal of organised power, the cult of reason, the interpretation of life by intellectual thought, constructive and utilitarian organisation and the last outcome of this inspiration was the Government of life by Modern Science. The ancient Indian trend was a pursuit of an ideal truth, good and beauty and moulding of mind, life and body into perfection and harmony by this ideal. As soon as the mind is sufficiently developed, there awakens in man the Spiritual preoccupation, the discovery of Self and the inmost truth of Being, perfection of Nature by the Power of the Spirit, the solidarity, unity, mutuality of all beings in the Spirit. This Eastern ideal of love, truth, compassion, altruism, philanthropy and service, carried by Buddhism and other ancient Spiritual disciplines, were carried to the coasts of Asia and Egypt and from there poured by Christianity into Europe. The barbaric flood of tamasic inertia and rajasic vitality created confusion and darkness over Asia and Europe respectively and these religious motives burned for some centuries like dim torch lights and had not succeeded to make this world a little happier, they only gave infinitesimal bits of momentary relief to human suffering till it was abandoned by modern man who has found another light, the light of Science. In Europe , the negation of the materialist that Matter alone is real and the Spirit is a lie moved towards the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world’s powers and possessions. It has experienced an enormous and indispensable utility for a very brief period of rationalistic materialism through which the human race was passing. The modern dominant trend pushes Religion aside as an out-of-date superstition; Spiritual realisations and experiences are discredited as a shadowy mysticism, fundamentally false because incompatible with the self-evident truth of the material world and a sublimated crudity deviating from true human evolution, which should be solely the evolution of physical strength and life-power of practical physical mind, the reason governing thought, conduct and organising intelligence. The prevalent mundane existence depends ultimately on the false perception that (1) to cabin ourselves in the acceptation of formula of material life and its experiences as the only reality; (2) outward life and its narrow domain of objective external solidities are alone valid standard knowledge and hence deserves importance; (3) all our pursuit is directed towards an outwardly acquired or learned knowledge and tied the thought to visible things and rely strictly on the wholesome and nourishing outer source and its constructing principle; (4) material energy is ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things, the sole instrumentation of the World-Force and creator of this universe and to think that the God lives hidden in the clay is a high insanity;⁶ (5) the materialist ideal considers the extrovert¹ attitude as the only safety and to go inward and live inward is a difficult task or opposes the introvert action considering it as age-long superstition, entry into darkness, dull emptiness and become morbid; all other Spiritual experience claiming to be real must be either a hallucination or an imitation or subjective result of superstitious imagination and no evidence could be accepted of such facts unless it is objective truth and physical actuality in its character; (6) the most of the Spiritual experiences of any kind are beyond the perception of ‘tribunal of the common mentality’² and they consider their own incapacity of experience as a proof of their invalidity or their non-existence and demand physically valid proof of a supraphysical fact and (7) lastly, we conclude that the eternal Becoming is the only truth of our existence and the eternal Being is only a hallucination, fiction of our intelligence, undeserving of inquiry, an idea born out of our words and verbal dialectics and non-existent; through this superficial inner look we do not find the Spiritual self but the unhealthy life-ego and the mind-ego;¹ this inward tendency has not solved the problem of life nor any of the problems with which humanity is at grips and hence all the adventure of the Unseen is discouraged and even prohibited. The above present appearance or status is accepted as a veiled and partial figure of the Infinite and to limit ourselves to this first figure of imperfect humanity is to exclude our Divine potentiality and deprive ourselves of bringing a wider meaning into our human existence. The consistent materialist recognises itself as a creature of mud, is ignorant of the larger Spiritual law and loftier inner aim of life that develops an inward look and upward gaze; he is aware only of its needs and its desires, seeks a partial and short-lived power, knowledge and happiness and falls into the illusion of the chain of works. Thus, the aim of the most mundane philosophy is fulfilment, human perfection, satisfaction of the individual but this can be best assured when we deliver ourselves from limiting mental and vital ego and command a wider life, a larger existence, a higher consciousness and a happier Soul state. Most of humanity devotes the major part of their energy to life on earth, to the terrestrial needs, interests, desires, and ideals suitable to the individual and the race. The law, condition of growth, the natural impulse of rule imposed upon the general humanity is the care of the body, sufficient development and enjoyment of the vital and mental being, the pursuit of high and large individual and collective ideals of attainable human perfection. Without these things man could not attain his full manhood. Any view, ideology or partial knowledge that neglects, unduly belittles and intolerantly condemns them is unfit to be the general and complete law of human living. Nature takes good care so that the race shall not neglect these fundamental necessities; for they are the part and portion of the Divine plan in us and the first step of maintenance of their material and mental ground and these are also the foundation and body of her structure. A considerable part of the race had swerved aside to the real call of the Ascetic life;³ they adhered to the normal life but with an underlying belief in its unreality, a greyness and restless dissatisfaction with the life in which they must still continue and the poor inconclusiveness of the greatest results they can achieve. This belief can insist to unnerve the life impulse and an increasing littleness of its motives and an absorption in an ordinary narrow living. Thus, humanity is deprived of a natural response to the Divine Being’s larger joy in cosmic existence and a failure of the great progressive human idealism of collective self-development and a noble embrace of the battle and the labour. If we push far enough the materialist conclusion that Matter alone is real, then we arrive at the insignificance and unreality of the life of the individual and the race. Thus, man is compelled either towards a transient existence of ‘live a life,’ or a dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual, with full awareness that the latter is a transient friction of the nervous mentality and the former is only a little more long-lived collective form of the same nervous spasm of matter. Thus, he works and enjoys under the impulsion of a material energy which deceives him with a brief delusion of life or with a nobler delusion of an ethical aim and a mental consummation. One high and reasonable aim for the individual human being is to study the law of the Becomings and take the best advantage of their secret. His business is to make the most of such actualities as exist and to seize on or to advance towards the highest possibilities that can be developed here or are in making. His highest thought and largest contribution is towards the present intellectual, moral and vital welfare and future progress of the race. Welfare and progress of humanity during its persistence on earth provide the largest field and the natural limits for the terrestrial aim of his being. The superior persistence of the race and the greatness and importance of the collective life should determine the nature and scope of his ideals. But if the progress or welfare of humanity be excluded as not his highest business or as delusion of ego, the individual is there to achieve his greatest possible perfection or make the most of his life in whatever way his nature demands will then be life’s significance. It is a fact that an inward turn and movement in finding the personal self is not imprisonment but an initial step towards discovering our universality and true freedom. Since development is clearly the law of the human Soul, it is most likely to be discovered by giving full and legitimate value to each part of his composite being and many-sided aspiration. This finding must be an integration and evolutionary synthesis.⁴ The synthesis of this kind was attempted in the ancient Indian culture⁹ and did not succeed due to the exaggeration of any of its four intentions. It accepted four legitimate motives for integration and fulfillment of human living, -- (1) man’s basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, (2) satisfaction of his desires and new wants and enjoyment of maximum opportunities of existence, a period of normal living to satisfy human interests and ego; (3) his ethical and religious aspiration, a period of development of moderate Spirituality and (4) his ultimate Spiritual realisation of God, Light, Freedom, Bliss and Immortality and an ultimate release from the ordinary mundane existence. In the ancient culture, greatest emphasis was laid on fitting of the individual into the community and the individual had to pass first through the social status of the physical, vital, and mental being with his satisfaction of interest, desire, pursuit of knowledge and right living before he could reach fitness for a truer self-realisation and free Spiritual existence. It is a fact that it is impossible for all to trace out the whole circle of development in a single short lifetime. So a theory of complete evolution is developed through a long succession of rebirths, or all life, before one could be fit for the ultimate Spiritual realisation. Man’s failure to reconcile the above synthesis gave birth to two schools in opposition to each other and human thought falls apart towards two opposite extremes, (1) first one is the normal mundane and pragmatic life of interests and desires with an ethical and religious colouring and coating which regards the fulfillment and satisfaction of the mental, vital and physical ego-sense as the object of life and looks no farther while the other is (2) an abnormal or supernormal inner life which begins and is founded on Ascetic renunciation, regards the conquest of ego in the interest of Soul, Spirit or whatever the ultimate reality as one thing supremely worth living. In Europe, the affirmation of the Materialist directed life towards the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world’s powers and possessions. In India ,¹⁰ the Ascetic affirmation has resulted in a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit. The gulf between the two is to be reconciled through a synthesis of Evolution . Since life has no Divine significance in the immediate future so the impatience of human intellect searched some shortcut and stumbled on some maimed achievement or recoiled towards a past egoistic life and its satisfaction. Life is split between Spiritual and Mundane and there can only be an abrupt transition and not a harmonious reconciliation of integral human existence. Man has recently advanced considerably in knowledge of the physical world, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature and Science has succeeded in mechanizing the life of the whole of humanity. He continues to manifest the same capacities and incapacities, the same qualities and defects, the same efforts, blunders, achievements, frustrations as that of the early beginnings of the race. If progress there has been, it is at most perhaps in a wider circle. Man today is not wiser than the ancient Seers and Sages and Thinkers, not more Spiritual than the great Seekers of old, the first mighty Mystics, not having the more courageous and war loving attitude than the ancient Kings; not superior in arts and crafts to the ancient Artists and Craftsmen; the old races that have disappeared showed as potent an intrinsic originality, invention, capacity of dealing with life. If the present modern man in this respect has gone a little farther, it is because he has inherited the achievements of his forerunners. Nothing warrants the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge and half-ignorance which is the stamp of his type. Even if he develops a higher knowledge, he may not be able to break out of the utmost boundary of the mental circle. Now a stage has been reached in which the human mind has reached in a certain direction of enormous growth, while in the other stands arrested and bewildered and may no longer find a safe exit. Man has raised a huge and complex structure, a huge mechanical organisation and scientific knowledge of external life for the service of his mental, vital and physical claims, urges and enjoyments, a complex, political, social, religious, administrative, economic and cultural machinery, an organised collectivity for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction and for the multiplication of new wants and an aggressive expansion of the collective ego. He is a dangerous servant of his blundering ego and unlimited appetites. Yet he is searching for a greater seeing mind beyond the sense knowledge, the rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe is only an earnest of the energy and success which we may hope to see repeated in the conquest of what lies beyond, an intuitive Soul of knowledge, discovery of higher truth, good and beauty which could provide the basic fullness of life, the discovery⁷ of a greater and diviner Spirit which would intervene and use life for a higher perfection of the being and a condition of free growth that exceeded it. What is necessary now is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the vision of this high change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way. Humanity is now at the critical juncture of its world destiny, where it will either escape or resolve the problem through Spiritual ascension. The surface consciousness of a mundane⁵ is ignorant of mass relations, separated from each other, rooted in a divided ego and mind’s constructed knowledge and must strive for some kind of right relation between their embodied ignorance. His relations formed in groups are constantly marred by imperfect understanding, gross misunderstanding, strife, discord, unhappiness and the superficiality of his mind’s deceptive constructions is the cause of his frustration. For perfect social living he labours to establish unity, mutuality and harmony and what he builds is a constructed unity, an association of interests and egos enforced by law and social custom and imposes an artificial constructed order in which the interests of some prevail over the interests of others. He is a social being and for its perfection he has to improve ethical and social relation with other men and live for its benefit and utility; society is also there for the service of all, to give them their right relation, education, training, economic opportunity, right frame of life. Modern spirit has sought a civilization of material order and comfort and generalised the utilitarian rationality through Reason, Science and Education which will make the individual a perfected social being in a perfected economic society. The Spiritual ideal is substituted by mentalised and moralised humanitarianism, relieved of all religious colouring and a social ethic. Thus, the race is hurried forward by its own momentum into a chaos of its life in which all received values and firm ground of conduct and culture were overthrown and seemed to disappear from its social organisation. These disorders, defects and disharmonies are normal to a status and energy of Ignorance and can only be dissolved by a greater Light than that of mind nature or life nature. The relation between one mundane community and another mundane community is accommodated with a constant recurrence of strife of collective ego with collective ego and through persistent readjustment of social order one can experience nothing better than an imperfect structure of life, a narrow domain of objective external solidities, a combination of association and regulated conflict, an accommodation of interests grouped or dovetailed into each other to form a society and a consolidation by need and the pressure of struggle with outside forces. An increasing mechanisation, a standardisation, a fixing of all into a common mould in order to ensure harmony is its mental method. The aim which the most mundane philosophy pursues, the fulfillment, perfection, satisfaction of the individual, is best assured not by satisfying the narrow ego but by finding freedom in a higher and larger Self and change by true union of consciousness founded upon a nature of Self-knowledge, entry into inner or subliminal reality, inner realisation of unity, concord of our inner forces of being and inner forces of life; for in that way alone can there come liberation from Ignorance in which our mentality dwells and a release into a complete consciousness, a true and integral self-realisation and self-knowledge. Recapitulation: "...the Divine of yesterday is only an apprentice to the Divine of tomorrow ..." The Mother The Mother's Agenda/October 8, 1956 “These (conversations of the Mother’s Agenda) are the first stammerings of a novice (The Mother felt Herself as a beginner in the path of the eternal unfolding of the Spirit).” The Mother The Mother’s Agenda-6/322 “I am learning to work. I am only an apprentice, simply an apprentice – I am learning the trade!” The Mother The Mother’s Agenda/ May 1, 1958, “We can learn things from a flower, an animal, a child, if we are eager to know always more, because there is only One Teacher in the world — the Supreme Lord, and He manifests through everything.” The Mother TMCW-12/On Education/p-129 The outer apparent natural man, the ephemeral being, the son of death, subject to constraint of his material embodiment and imprisoned in a limited mentality, must become the real inner Man; he has to recognise himself as the child of Immortality, son of God. His first business is to evolve his individual separative personality and its perfect disengagement from the lower subconscient urges in which the individual is overpowered by the mass consciousness of the world and entirely subject to the mechanical workings of three modes of Nature; he has to evolve all his human capacities of power, knowledge and enjoyment ("Our minds are starters in the race to God," Savitri-169) so that he may turn them upon the world with more and more self-mastery and force and then his next business is to successfully turn his faculties to higher, larger and greater work, to enlarge his partial being into a complete realisation and union of Supreme Self,⁸ his partial consciousness into an integral Consciousness, his existing life must be aware of 'a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;'¹³ and 'The life that wins its aim asks greater aims,'¹⁴ his self-mastery, swarat, into mastery over environment, samrat, world union and world harmony, transforms his obscure, erroneous and ignorant mentality into luminous knowledge, will, feeling and action. OM TAT SAT References: - 1: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1064, 2: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-677, 3: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-702, 4: "That equation can only be found if we recognise the purport of our whole complex human nature in its right place in the cos- mic movement; what is needed is to give its full legitimate value to each part of our composite being and many-sided aspiration and find out the key of their unity as well as their difference. The finding must be by a synthesis or an integration and, since development is clearly the law of the human soul, it is most likely to be discovered by an evolutionary synthesis . A synthesis of this kind was attempted in the ancient Indian culture. It accepted four legitimate motives of human living, — (1) man’s vital interests and needs, (2) his desires, (3) his ethical and religious aspiration, (4) his ultimate spiritual aim and destiny, — in other words, the claims of his vital, physical and emotional being, the claims of his ethical and religious being governed by a knowledge of the law of God and Nature and man, and the claims of his spiritual longing for the Beyond for which he seeks satisfaction by an ultimate release from an ignorant mundane existence. It provided for a period of education and preparation based on this idea of life, a period of normal living to satisfy human desires and interests under the moderating rule of the ethical and religious part in us, a period of withdrawal and spiritual preparation, and a last period of renunciation of life and release into the spirit."CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-703, 5: “Our aim becomes quite other; it is to live in the Divine, the Infinite, in God and not in any mere egoism and temporality, but at the same time not apart from Nature, from our fellow-beings, from earth and the mundane existence, any more than the Divine lives aloof from us and the world. He exists also in relation to the world and Nature and all these beings, but with an absolute and inalienable power, freedom and self-knowledge.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-436, 6: “The worst of it is that generally the whole material reality seems to be the only reality, and everything which is not that seems altogether secondary. And the “right” of that material consciousness to rule, guide, organise life, to dominate all the rest, is justified to such an extent that if someone tries to challenge this sacrosanct authority, he is considered half-mad or extremely dangerous. It seems to me one must still go a very long way to consider material life in the way Sri Aurobindo has described it here (CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-171-172). And I am quite convinced that if one feels it like that, sees it like that, as he has described it, one is very, very close to the remedy.” TMCW-8/Questions and Answers-1956/p-289-290, 7: “Everything can be part of “sadhana” ; it depends on the inner attitude. Naturally, if one lets himself be invaded by the Western atmosphere, farewell to the sadhana. But even in the most materialistic milieu, if one retains one’s aspiration and one’s faith in the Divine Life, the sadhana can and should continue.” The Mother/TMCW-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-44, “The average human being even now is in his inward existence as crude and undeveloped as was the bygone primitive man in his outward life. But as soon as we go deep within ourselves, — and Yoga means a plunge into all the multiple profundities of the soul, — we find ourselves subjectively, as man in his growth has found himself objectively, surrounded by a whole complex world which we have to know and to conquer.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-75, “The Transcendence of this lower triple being and this lower triple world, to which ordinarily our consciousness and its powers and results are limited, -- a transcendence described by the Vedic seers as an exceeding or breaking beyond two farmaments of heaven and earth, --opens out a hierarchy of infinitudes to which the normal existence of man even in its highest and widest flights is still a stranger. Into that altitude, even to the lowest step of its hierarchy, it is difficult for him to rise.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-465, 8: “But this exclusive consummation (realisation of Supreme Self) is not the sole or inevitable result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and with less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realisation of the supreme Self not only in one’s own being but in all beings and, finally, the realisation of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realisation a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane , into activities of the divine consciousness utilizable for the projection of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualization and to the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-38-39, 9: "The ancient civilisation of India founded itself very expressly upon four human interests; first, desire and enjoyment, next, material, economic and other aims and needs of the mind and body, thirdly, ethical conduct and the right law of individual and social life, and, lastly spiritual liberation; kama, artha, dharma, moksa. The business of culture and social organisation was to lead, to satisfy, to support these things in man and to build some harmony of their forms and motives. Except in very rare cases the satisfaction of the three mundane objects must run before the other; fullness of life must precede the surpassing of life. The debt to the family, the community and the gods could not be scamped; earth must have her due and the relative its play, even if beyond it there was the glory of heaven or the peace of the Absolute. There was no preaching of a general rush to the cave and the hermitage." CWSA-20/The Renaissance in India/125-126, 10: “The Indian system did not entirely leave this difficult growth to the individual’s unaided inner initiative. It supplied him with a framework; it gave him a scale and gradation for his life which could be made into a kind of ladder rising in that sense. This high convenience was the object of the four Asramas. Life was divided into four natural periods and each of them marked out a stage in the working out of this cultural idea of living. There was the period of the (1) student, (2) the period of the householder, (3) the period of the recluse or forest-dweller, (4) the period of the free supersocial man, parivrajaka. (1) The student life was framed to lay the groundwork of what the man had to know, do and be. It gave a thorough training in the necessary arts, sciences, branches of knowledge, but it was still more insistent on the discipline of the ethical nature and in earlier days contained as an indispensable factor a grounding in the Vedic formula of spiritual knowledge. In these earlier days this training was given in suitable surroundings far away from the life of cities and the teacher was one who had himself passed through the round of this circle of living and, very usually, even, one who had arrived at some remarkable realisation of spiritual knowledge. But subsequently education became more intellectual and mundane; it was imparted in cities and universities and aimed less at an inner preparation of character and knowledge and more at instruction and the training of the intelligence. But in the beginning the Aryan man was really prepared in some degree for the four great objects of his life, artha, kama, dharma, moksa. (2) Entering into the householder stage to live out his knowledge, he was able to serve there the three first human objects; he satisfied his natural being and its interests and desire to take the joy of life, he paid his debt to the society and its demands and by the way he discharged his life functions he prepared himself for the last greatest purpose of his existence. (3) In the third stage he retired to the forest and worked out in a certain seclusion the truth of his spirit. He lived in a broad freedom from the stricter social bonds; but if he so willed, gathering the young around him or receiving the inquirer and seeker, he could leave his knowledge to the new rising generation as an educator or a spiritual teacher. (4) In the last stage of life he was free to throw off every remaining tie and to wander over the world in an extreme spiritual detachment from all the forms of social life, satisfying only the barest necessities, communing with the universal spirit, making his soul ready for eternity. This circle was not obligatory on all. The great majority never went beyond the two first stages; many passed away in the vanaprastha or forest stage. Only the rare few made the last extreme venture and took the life of the wandering recluse. But this profoundly conceived cycle gave a scheme which kept the full course of the human spirit in its view; it could be taken advantage of by all according to their actual growth and in its fullness by those who were sufficiently developed in their present birth to complete the circle. ” CWSA-20/The Renaissance in India/p-174 to 176, 11: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-326, 12: “The importance of Savitri is immense...Its subject is universal. Its revelation is prophetic. The time spent in its atmosphere is not wasted ... Take all the time necessary to see this exhibition. It will be a happy compensation for the feverish haste men put now in all they do.” The Mother/TMCW-13/Words of the Mother-I/p-26, "Whoever is too great must lonely live. Adored he walks in mighty solitude; Vain is his labour to create his kind, His only comrade is the Strength within." Savitri-368, (Death God said) “I lay waste human happiness with my breath And slay the will to live, the joy to be” Savitri-535 13: Savitri-169, 14: Savitri-200, Download this WEB PAGE in PDF format: “In the beginning of the Yoga you are apt to forget the Divine very often. But by constant aspiration you increase your remembrance and you diminish the forgetfulness. But this should not be done as a severe discipline or a duty; it must be a movement of love and joy. Then very soon a stage will come when, if you do not feel the presence of the Divine at every moment and whatever you are doing, you feel at once lonely and sad and miserable…Whenever you find that you can do something without feeling the presence of the Divine and yet be perfectly comfortable, you must understand that you are not consecrated in that part of your being. That is the way of the ordinary humanity which does not feel any need of the Divine. But for a seeker of the Divine Life it is very different. And when you have entirely realised unity with the Divine, then, if the Divine were only for a second to withdraw from you, you would simply drop dead ; for the Divine is now the Life of your life, your whole existence, your single and complete support. If the Divine is not there, nothing is left.” The Mother TMCW-3/Questions and Answers-1929-1931/p-26–27 “A mass of new material is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the great theistic religions of India and of the world and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, but to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of modern knowledge and seeking ; and, beyond that, the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the consciousness of mankind but now breaking out again from behind the veil.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-10, “No material organisation, whatever its degree of preparation, is capable of bringing a solution to the miseries of man…Man must rise to a higher level of consciousness and get rid of his ignorance, limitation and selfishness in order to get rid also of his sufferings.” The Mother The Mother's Centenary Works/Vol-14/p-277

World Hindu Wisdom Meet 2014 "Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all. Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy," Savitri-701 Sanatana Dharma “I regard the spiritual history of mankind and especially of India as a constant development of a divine purpose, not a book that is closed, the lines of which have to be constantly repeated. Even the Upanishads and the Gita were not final though everything may be there in seed… I may say that it is far from my purpose to propagate any religion new or old for humanity in the future. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded, is my conception of the matter.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-411 The third lecture delivered by S.A. Maa Krishna at the World Hindu Wisdom Meet-2014 held at Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia on 17.04.2014: (This pilgrimage to Bali witnessed tremendous opening towards The Mother’s new Divinity, both by the Balinese Aspirants and the noble participants of World Hindu Wisdom Meet-2014 which is a continuation of its earlier World Hindu Summit Meet in 2012 and 2013 . The first-day session, 16.04.2014, began with the inauguration of S.A. Maa Krishna’s Book The Divine Bliss which focuses on the man’s possibility of ascending to the status of Integral Godhead through Divine Call and our Soul’s task in Integral Yoga is to reveal The Mother’s Power which is too great for earth, to live in Her Bliss which is too large for heaven, to open toward Her Light which is too intense for inconscient hell, to extricate Her Beauty which is too vast for physical consciousness and to possess Her Love which is too boundless. The second-day session, 17.04.2014 began with S.A. Maa Krishna’s recitation of the Hymn offered to Mother Durga in which Sri Aurobindo projected India as the noblest race destined to save the world by calling down the Divine Mother power, by whose appearance we can regain the lost Spiritual Teaching, inviolate Character, strength of Intuition, force of Austerity, power of Virginity and true liberating Integral Knowledge. She only can slay the dark enemy of Titan and Asura within and root out all obscurity without. Our earnest prayer is that may our entire life and all life of successive births and bodies become a ceaseless worship of the Mother and that all our actions are a continuous service dedicated to Her. May She descend and manifest physically upon this earth. The second-day session ended with S.A. Maa Krishna’s lecture representing The Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s world vision, world redemption and world transformation. She pointed out that this creation is to be wholly accepted and embraced as the manifestation of the Brahman . If the existing mind of most men is crippled; life is untaught and crude; if there exist brutal and evil activities, then they are to be accepted as incidents of the Divine’s vast and varied plot; His great and dangerous drama’s needed steps. We have to meet our Lord in the nescient sleep of shadow and the Night in the form of Subconscient Sheath and in the wakefulness of the stars and Sun symbolising Supramental Self and wait for the hour in which high meets the low. The emergence of Divine Life on earth is possible by the reconciliation of God’s Night below the feet and His fathomless Light above the head. Bali is long recognised as the land of peace, whose Soul has turned towards greater Spiritual Call and this auspicious World Hindu Wisdom Meet-2014 has opened enormous Spiritual possibilities for the children of Bali and its ardent seekers.) OM Manatha Sree Jagannatha Mad Guru Sree Jagad Guru Mad Atma Sarva Bhutatma Thasmai Sree Guruvae Namahah “Supreme Lord, Eternal Truth, let us obey Thee alone and live according to Truth.” OM Swastiastu Om Namo Bhagavateh Divine Amar Atman! My all Eternal Love and heartiest Pranams to you all, WORLD HINDU WISDOM MEET-2014 PROPOSAL “There are very few people who carry with them an atmosphere which irradiates joy, peace, confidence- it is very rare. But these are truly benefactors of humanity. They don’t need to open their mouth.” The Mother On this auspicious occasion of the noble and great World Hindu Parisad/World Hindu Wisdom Meet-2014, I propose the following abstracts not on behalf of me but on behalf of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo for world Spiritual movement and radical Divine change. All our human effort has a subordinate role and utility before the great mysterious infinitely superior Divine plan and wisdom which has worked out its faultless action since the beginning of this creation. We must hate none, despise none, be repelled by none, but rather to accept this existence as the body of the Brahman, where the Divine is little revealed in one or more revealed in another or veiled and wholly distorted in others for that which He intends to become something best in their form and to execute secret Divine plan in their recalcitrant nature. This spiritual experience extends to embracing Godhead in whatever disguise He approaches us. We must regard, obey and adhere to the law, guidelines, norms of traditional or ancient schools of Yoga in conformity with our highest objective Truth realization and proceed ahead with the other complementary discipline of constantly renovating and restating all truth and practice through fresh instreaming of Spiritual experiences. We propose to give secondary importance to the outward appearance of things and fellow creatures and deliver them from contradictory and hostile ideas and emotions and insists to lean on the primary importance of seeking the Soul and Divine in all. And we always preserve within us the inalienable sense of unity in the midst of infinite variation of potentiality and differences of all possible relations. A seeker of truth would under no circumstance set the power and knowledge in him against the power and knowledge in others or affirm himself as an ego striving against other egos. He is rightly related to the world by giving or contributing what is the best, the profoundest and the completest in him. All our actions of intermediate planes between the highest and the lowest are the intermingling of truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, joy and suffering, from which pure truth, wisdom and delight have to be worked out. It further believes that the Truth of things that emerges out of the phenomenal world’s contradictions is an infinite Bliss and self-conscious Existence, the same everywhere, self-existent in all things, in all times and beyond Time, whose largest totality and most intense vibrations of activity can be entirely manifested through practice of Yoga and Spiritual discipline. The integral liberating Knowledge or “Sā Vidya Yā Vimuktaye ” insists on the unity and reality of all the manifestations of the Absolute and refuses to confine truth to any one aspect. It admits all the valid truths of all the Schools of thought by getting rid of their limitation and negation and reconciles these partial truths in the larger all-truth that fulfills our whole being entirely. This Wisdom proposes to turn all the individual problems, one sided view points, individual perfection, liberation, ananda and limitation imposed on Brahman out of partial Divine experiences into catholicity of the all vision of the Divine and he will be able to wait, learn, grow, integrate, synthesize and universalize all Deities, Teachers, Scriptures, Religions, developmental urges invented by Mother nature and weld them strongly to the One, the Ineffable and the Infinite and unifies many states of Consciousness at a time. Lastly, we aspire for the complete descent of the dynamic Divine Shakti or the Divine Mother through all Her attributes that of the Truth Supreme, Love Supreme, Delight Supreme, Knowledge Supreme, Beauty Supreme, Power Supreme, Life Supreme, Light Supreme, Silence Supreme, Peace Supreme, Word Supreme, Voice Supreme, Void Supreme, and entry into all the intermediate worlds or planes of Consciousness that exists between the Inconscient Matter and Sachchidananda. Though the UNKNOWABLE is not knowable by the finite mind or to our limited mental consciousness, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self-evident to an infinite Consciousness or a knowledge by Identity and the Spiritual Being within us can explore all the ranges of Consciousness from the darkest Inconscient plane to the highest plane of Sachchidananda to unravel the whole of the Unknowable and its complete Divine manifestation. OM TAT SAT Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Post Speech Thesis: Religion is considered great if behind every exoteric side of fixed faith, devotion, hope, symbol, ritual, ceremony and limiting dogmas there exists an esoteric side of inner Spiritual preparation, illumination and discovery of the mystery of the higher planes of existence. Its real motive is to train man’s mind, life and body for the emergence of an inner Spiritual Light and higher Consciousness. Integral Yoga accepts all ‘exoteric Religion’ as unconscious Yoga, the inferior stage and first approach of tardy evolution and insists on its subordination over esoteric Religion, which is a conscious Yoga of swift Spiritual evolution. We have to identify two forms of Spiritual evolution developed by Mother nature; the first is an esoteric movement of Consciousness, the Mystic approach of concentrated evolution and unfolding of endless Spiritual mysteries in secrecy and silence of a secured and isolated Spiritual Fortress; the second is an exoteric diffusive Religious approach of entering commerce with the world in transforming it; here the highest available Spiritual truth is generalised for the largest benefit of humanity. These two complementary movements of the subjective adventure of Self-concentration of Spirituality and subordinate action of the objective adventure of Self-expansion of Religion are effectively combined in integral Yoga. But in integral Yoga, Self-expansion is pursued primarily by movement of universal Consciousness and secondarily by the active mind of three Gunas or by psycho-physical machinery. Integral Yoga is considered safe and secure when the Self-expansion becomes a subordinate and outcome of self-concentration. In Religion, the Knowledge of the Self, World and God are relatively fixed and in Spirituality, they are constantly updated, relived, renewed and restated and their endless Truth is endlessly unfolded. Now it is time for humanity to search for that highest Spiritual Knowledge which gathers together, illumines, integralises and harmonises the essential truth of all available knowledge and finds the basic and justifying reason of the existence of four negations of Ignorance, Falsehood, Suffering and Death and cures them. This effort can begin with the thorough study of the evolution of the Spiritual history of the earth and must culminate with the realisation of that Vedantic Supreme Reality, which, being known, all is known, yasmin vijnate sarvam idam vijnatam . OM TAT SAT Download this WEB PAGE in PDF Format: Photo Gallery “Help men, but do not pauperise them of their energy; lead and instruct men, but see that their initiative and originality remain intact; take others into thyself, but give them in return the full godhead of their nature. He who can do this is the leader and the guru .” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-13/Essays in Philosophy and Yoga-p-208 “That is why it is always said that, no matter what aspect of the Divine you adore or even what guide you choose, if you are perfect in your self-giving and absolutely sincere, you are sure to attain the spiritual goal.” The Mother The Mother’s Centenary Works (second edition)/Vol.8/p-243, The Divine Bliss “For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him....For the seeker of the integral Yoga… will meet him (the Divine) in the faces of the Gods, his cosmic personalities supporting the World-Play, detect him behind the mask of the Vibhutis, embodied World-Forces or human Leaders, reverence and obey him in the Guru , worship him in the Avatar .” Sri Aurobindo CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-67, 130 Hymn to Mother Durga “It has always been said that to take disciples means to take upon yourself the difficulties of the disciples as well as your own. Of course, if the Guru does not identify himself with the disciple, does not take him into his own consciousness, keeps him outside and only gives him upadesa , leaving him to do the rest himself, then the chance of these effects is much diminished, made practically nil.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-197, “The ideal is that of humanity in God, of God in humanity, the ancient ideal of the sanatana dharma but applied as it has never been applied before to the problem of politics and the work of national revival. To realise that ideal, to impart it to the world is the mission of India. She has evolved a religion which embraces all that the heart, the brain, the practical faculty of man can desire but she has not yet applied it to the problems of modern politics. This therefore is the work which she has still to do before she can help humanity; the necessity of this mission is the justification for her resurgence, the great incentive of saving herself to save mankind is the native power which will give her the force, the strength, the vehemence which can alone enable her to realise her destiny... Spirituality is India’s only politics, the fulfilment of the Sanatan Dharma its only Swaraj. ” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-6-7/Vande Mataram/p-1017 CWSA-36/Autobiographical Note/p-170 Each Nation/Continent is having its Soul quality about which she must be aware. For example, Europe represents ‘material sincerity and honesty;’ Roman empire represents ‘efficiency and administrative organisation;’ Arabians represent ‘passionate and impulsive in Nature;’ India represents ‘ Spiritual heart centre of the world ; ’ France represents ‘clarity in intellect;’ Japan represents ‘wonderful and unexpected progress through Beauty;’ Germany represents ‘skill and inventiveness;’ Russia represents ‘brotherhood of man;’ United States of America represents ‘enthusiasm for adventure and practical organisation;’ China represents ‘inventive intellect with creative power and self-expansion;’ Ireland represents ‘fine psychic turn and quick intelligence and delicate imagination;’ Australia represents ‘emergence of new generous energy and enthusiasm;’ Israel represents ‘intellectuals with an exceptional will and sense of organisation;’ Ukraine represents ‘extraordinary Heroism and Nationalism.’

The Bhagavad Gita and Integral Yoga “Sri Aurobindo considers the message of the Gita to be the basis of the great spiritual movement which has led and will lead humanity more and more to its liberation, that is to say, to its escape from falsehood and ignorance, towards the truth.” The Mother 29th June 1960 The Gita informs us that the all-pervading Brahman, Vasudeva is endless in His self-extension in the universe, nastyonto vistarasya me, and the highest power of Supreme manifestation is only a very partial revelation of the Infinite, an infinitesimal portion of His Spirit; even the whole universe is preoccupied by only one degree of His greatness, illumined by one ray of His splendour and it will still remain the perennial Source of ‘birth of all that shall come into the being.’ The Gita lays maximum stress on the development of highest goal of the Supra-cosmic faculties, which will preoccupy man with his real business of becoming God, Brahmabhutah; secondly it stresses on His universal Consciousness in which all moves and acts and through this He extends His faculty of universal Divine action, sarvabhuta-hite ratah; thirdly, it emphasizes on the acceptance of Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body, manusim tanumasritam; and fourthly, it insists on the manifestation of Divine Nature, madbhava, in all things through intervention of four fold Soul force, chaturvarnyam maya sristam, four-fold Divine Shaktis, chatvaro manovastatha, sevenfold Integral Knowledge, maharsaya saptapurbe, and thus the final object of this Yoga is then a self-completing union of Soul with the Purushottama through the formula ‘thou shalt first see all existences without exception in the Self, then in Me,’ atmani atho mayi, and of suffusion of Purushottama Consciousness into the manifested Divine nature, prakritim mamikam, svam prakritim, para prakriti. An earth-bound Soul moves the consciousness (first phase) between three modes of nature that of tamas, principle of inertia, rajas, principle of desire and action and sattwa, principle of limited knowledge, harmony and happiness. A seeker of Spiritual life, jijnasu, has to (second phase) increase his sattwic Nature by practice of self-control. Sattwic Nature is identified as passage to higher Spiritual life beyond the gunas. When the Psychic being in the heart experiences partial opening or Spiritual being above the head experiences partial opening through partial Divine union, the Consciousness (third phase) undulates between three gunas and trigunatita state beyond the modes of Nature. Then in the fourth phase of sadhana of Spiritual man the consciousness moves ceaselessly between waking trance of Psychic being/Kshara Purusha and non-waking Samadhi state of Spiritual being/Akshara Purusha. After long movement in these planes, in the fifth phase of Sadhana, the gulf between them is bridged and the concentration power multiplies; in the last phase, the Consciousness moves between Supramental/Bliss Self and Subconscient/Inconscient Self. The ceaseless movement of Consciousness from highest plane to the lowest plane is the normal state of an integral Yogi and the beginning of his large universal action. OM TAT SAT

The Blessed Lord said,"These three Soul slaying Truths, desire, anger and greed are to be renounced by men." The Gita-16. Publisher's Note This web page is an annexure of the Book 'The Bhagavad Gita and Integral Yoga.' Apart from verifying the Mother’s exclamation related with Essays on the Gita , ‘Oh, what a treasure that is – a gold mine!’²⁶…this book partly fulfills three-tier accountability claimed from an integral Sadhaka ; firstly, in order to satisfy his own Self ‘he has to begin from the law of his present imperfection, to take full account of it and see how it can be converted to the law of a possible perfection;’²² secondly, he is answerable for his Sadhana to the world, which is his greater Self and with whom he is bound with mutual debt; thirdly, he is accountable to the Divine Source from whom he receives Grace and overhead support in abundance. Cette page Web est une annexe du livre «La Bhagavad Gita et le Yoga Intégral» . En plus de vérifier l’exclamation de la Mère dans les Essais sur la Gita : « Oh, quel trésor c’est – une mine d’or ! »²⁶… ce livre remplit en partie la responsabilité à trois niveaux réclamée d’une Sadhaka intégrale ; premièrement, pour satisfaire son propre Soi, « il doit partir de la loi de son imperfection actuelle, en prendre pleinement en compte et voir comment elle peut se convertir à la loi d'une perfection possible »² ² ; deuxièmement, il est responsable pour sa Sadhana envers le monde, qui est son plus grand Soi et avec lequel il est lié par une dette mutuelle ; troisièmement, il est responsable devant la Source Divine dont il reçoit en abondance la Grâce. This book partly fulfills Sri Aurobindo’s directives issued in The Synthesis of Yoga that before beginning integral Yoga (whose objective is to reconcile dynamic Spirit with static Matter) a Sadhaka can retain his ancient Aryan status by long practicing the Vedantic text of the Veda, the Upanishad and the Gita (whose objective is to strengthen Spiritual foundation by union of Jivatma with Paramatma or static Spirit.). In integral Yoga the static Divine union is dynamised. Ce livre répond en partie aux directives de Sri Aurobindo émises dans La Synthèse du Yoga selon lesquelles avant de commencer le Yoga intégral (dont l'objectif est de réconcilier l'Esprit dynamique avec la Matière statique), un Sadhaka peut conserver son statut aryen en pratiquant longtemps le texte védantique du Veda, de l'Upanishad et la Gita (dont l'objectif est de renforcer le fondement spirituel par l'union du Jivatma avec Paramatma ou Esprit statique.). Dans le Yoga intégral, l’union divine statique est dynamisée. Apart from the Gita's Moderate Spiritual Teachings, this book reconciles the Gita's strong Spiritual message with the stronger Spiritual message of Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita and the strongest Spiritual message of Savitri . Or it has partly reconciled 'Easy the heavens were to build for God' (Savitri-653) with "Earth was his difficult matter, earth the glory" (Savitri-653) and recognized the greatest action of the Divine Mother as "Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory." (Savitri-639) Sri Aurobindo projected the aim of the Gita as "something absolute, unmitigated, uncompromising, a turn, an attitude that will change the whole poise of the soul." (Essays on the Gita-102-103) Outre les enseignements spirituels modérés de la Gita, ce livre réconcilie le message spirituel fort de la Gita avec le message spirituel plus fort des Essais sur la Gita de Sri Aurobindo et le message spirituel le plus fort de Savitri. Ou bien il a en partie réconcilié « Les cieux devaient construire facilement pour Dieu » (Savitri-653) avec « La terre était sa matière difficile, la terre la gloire » (Savitri-653) et a reconnu la plus grande action de la Mère Divine comme « La Terre a vu mon combat, le ciel ma victoire." (Savitri-639) Sri Aurobindo a défini le but de la Gîtâ comme « quelque chose d'absolu, de sans réserve, d'intransigeant, une orientation, une attitude qui transformera l'équilibre de l'âme. » (Essais sur la Gîtâ-102-103) Here, we have put our sincere effort into extracting gold from Essays on the Gita. Gold is the symbol of Supramental energy and The Mother confirmed categorically that Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual experience at Alipore jail (The Mother’s Agenda-September 26, 1962) and the descent of overhead Truth in the book Essays on the Gita (The Mother’s Agenda/Vol-3/p-355) are not Overmental, but direct experience from the Supramental plane. This also further confirms that an entry into Sri Aurobindo's writings opens the door towards a brief Supramental touch. All eighteen chapters of the Gita are restated here with the objective of extracting Gold from Sri Aurobindo's writings and to discover a passage to this new Consciousness. This ascent of our Consciousness to superior planes and calling down the immaculate treasure of 'supernature's gold' (Savitri-339) to our material life is identified as a special privilege. Savitri book proposes that all can visit 'the secret Supermind’s huge store' (Savitri-187) for a brief period, receive 'A little gift comes from the Immensitudes' (Savitri-237) and discover 'An immeasurable luminous secrecy.' (Savitri-309) This wealth is 'measureless to life its gain of joy.' (Savitri-237) The Gita also identifies that the possession of Supreme Bliss is the highest treasure of life and a seeker of Truth 'must practice this Yoga resolutely without yielding to any discouragement by difficulty or failure (until the release, until the bliss of Nirvana is secured as an eternal possession).” (The Gita-6.23) Nous avons consacré ici nos efforts sincères à extraire l'or des Essais sur la Gîtâ. L'or est le symbole de l'énergie supramentale et la Mère a confirmé catégoriquement que l'expérience spirituelle de Sri Aurobindo à la prison d'Alipore (L'Agenda de la Mère, 26 septembre 1962) et la descente de la Vérité céleste dans le livre Essais sur la Gîtâ (L'Agenda de la Mère, vol. 3, p. 355) ne sont pas surmentales, mais une expérience directe du plan supramental. Cela confirme également qu’une entrée dans les écrits de Sri Aurobindo ouvre la porte à un bref contact supramental. Les dix-huit chapitres de la Gîtâ sont ici réitérés dans le but d'extraire l'or des écrits de Sri Aurobindo et de découvrir un passage vers cette nouvelle Conscience. Cette ascension de notre Conscience vers les plans supérieurs et l'appel du trésor immaculé de « l'or de la surnature » (Savitri, 339) à notre vie matérielle sont considérés comme un privilège particulier. Le livre de Savitri propose que tous puissent visiter « l'immense réserve secrète du Supramental » (Savitri-187) pendant une brève période, recevoir «Un petit cadeau vient des Immensitudes » (Savitri-237) et découvrir « Un secret lumineux incommensurable ». (Savitri-309) Cette richesse est « sans mesure pour la vie, son gain de joie ». (Savitri-237) La Gita identifie également que la possession de la Félicité Suprême est le plus grand trésor de la vie et qu'un chercheur de Vérité « doit pratiquer ce Yoga résolument sans céder au découragement par la difficulté ou l'échec (jusqu'à la libération, jusqu'à ce que la félicité du Nirvana soit assurée comme une possession éternelle). » (La Gita-6.23), OM TAT SAT References are from the Manuscript "The Bhagavad Gita and Integral Yoga ." The Mother “I met a man (I was perhaps 20 or 21 at the time), an Indian who had come to Europe and who told me of the Gita . There was a French translation of it (a rather poor one, I must say) which he advised me to read, and then he gave me the key (HIS key, it was his key). He said, ‘Read the Gita ...’ (this translation of the Gita which really wasn’t worth much but it was the only one available at the time – in those days I wouldn’t have understood anything in other languages; and besides, the English translations were just as bad and ... well, Sri Aurobindo hadn’t done his yet!). He said, ‘Read the Gita knowing that Krishna is the symbol of the immanent God, the God within.’ That was all. ‘Read it with THAT knowledge – with the knowledge that Krishna represents the immanent God, the God within you.’ Well, within a month, the whole thing was done!” The Mother The Mother's Agenda/August 25, 1954 "J’ai rencontré un homme (j’avais peut-être vingt-et-un ans, je crois, ou vingt ans) un homme qui était un Indien , qui venait d’ici et qui m’a parlé de la Guîtâ. Il y avait une traduction (qui était d’ailleurs assez mauvaise) et il m’a conseillé de la lire, et il m’a donné la clé – sa clé, c’était sa clé. Il m’a dit: «Lisez la Guîtâ» (cette traduction de la Guîtâ, qui ne vaut pas grand-chose, mais enfin c’était la seule en français; de ce temps-là je n’aurais rien pu comprendre en d’autres langues; d’ailleurs les traductions anglaises sont aussi mauvaises et je n’avais pas... Sri Aurobindo n’avait pas encore écrit la sienne!). Il a dit: «Lisez la Guîtâ et prenez Krishna pour le symbole du Dieu immanent, du Dieu intérieur.» C’était tout ce qu’il m’a dit. Il m’a dit: «Lisez-la avec cette connaissance-là, que Krishna représente, dans la Guîtâ, le Dieu immanent, le Dieu qui est au-dedans de vous.» Mais en un mois, tout le travail était fait!" La Mère L'agenda de la mère/25 août 1954 1 / Chapter 1. The Dejection of Arjuna Summary or A Brief Restatement: The first chapter of the Gita gives the message that if one will not accumulate Soul force from within and above, then during the period of extreme adversity, he will experience Spiritual fall of recoil into tamasic and rajasic states of Consciousness. Arjuna was given the task of slaying his own kith and kin (symbol of falsehood), whom the Lord had already slain in the subtle world. Any objective and outward action is considered as Divine action if the same work is already executed in the subtle world through intervention of a Transcendent Force. This world and life are accepted here as a field of inner and outer war waged over considerable countries. The original question raised by Arjuna throughout the Gita is identified as the experience of Divine perfection, vividly to works and life.’ The Lord promises Arjuna to raise humanity from the yoke of the lower Nature and transform this earthbound, ordinary action into Divine action. Here, Kurukshetra is the symbol of the outer war against falsehood, Dharmakshetra is the symbol of inner war against lower nature; Arjuna is the symbol of closest companion and instrument of the Divine, the Lord is revealed here as the Divine Teacher, who is also the friend of all creatures and the Lord of all the multiple subtle worlds. Here, Lower Nature is the symbol of Soul slaying truth and Higher Nature is the symbol of Soul saving Truth. The Yoga of the Dejection : "But what, then, is it that makes the difficulty for the man who has to take the world as it is and act in it and yet would live, within, the spiritual life? What is this aspect of existence which appals his awakened mind and brings about what the title of the first chapter of the Gita calls significantly the Yoga of the dejection of Arjuna , the dejection and discouragement felt by the human being when he is forced to face the spectacle of the universe as it really is with the veil of the ethical illusion, the illusion of self-righteousness torn from his eyes, before a higher reconciliation with himself is effected? It is that aspect which is figured outwardly in the carnage and massacre of Kurukshetra and spiritually by the vision of the Lord of all things as Time arising to devour and destroy the creatures whom it has made. This is the vision of the Lord of all existence as the universal Creator but also the universal Destroyer, of whom the ancient Scripture can say in a ruthless image, “The sages and the heroes are his food and death is the spice of his banquet.” It is one and the same truth seen first indirectly and obscurely in the facts of life and then directly and clearly in the soul’s vision of that which manifests itself in life. The outward aspect is that of world-existence and human existence proceeding by struggle and slaughter; the inward aspect is that of the universal Being fulfilling himself in a vast creation and a vast destruction. Life a battle and a field of death, this is Kurukshetra ; God the Terrible, this is the vision that Arjuna sees on that field of massacre." 39-40, "We must acknowledge Kurukshetra ; we must submit to the law of Life by Death before we can find our way to the life immortal ; we must open our eyes, with a less appalled gaze than Arjuna’s , to the vision of our Lord of Time and Death and cease to deny, hate or recoil from the universal Destroyer." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-46 Arjuna , a pure sattwic man and his tamasic and rajasic recoil from the war field: Arjuna's recoil from the war field or Spiritual fall is observed in this first chapter. Whatever emotional feeling and attachment towards kith and kin he expressed to the Lord within the jurisdiction of three gunas is identified here as Soul-slaying truth, nasana atmanah . (The Gita-16.21) Whatever Knowledge the Lord has given Arjuna is identified here as soul-saving creative truth, atmanam srijami . (The Gita-4.7) Literally, Arjuna means "bright," "shining," or "white." It is derived from the Sanskrit word "अर्जुन" (arjuna) , which can also imply being clear, pure, or straightforward. "Arjuna is, in the language of the Gita , a man subject to the action of the three gunas or modes of the Nature-Force and habituated to move unquestioningly in that field, like the generality of men. He justifies his name only in being so far pure and sattwic as to be governed by high and clear principles and impulses and habitually control his lower nature by the noblest Law which he knows. He is not of a violent Asuric disposition, not the slave of his passions, but has been trained to a high calm and self-control , to an unswerving performance of his duties and firm obedience to the best principles of the time and society in which he has lived and the religion and ethics to which he has been brought up. He is egoistic like other men, but with the purer or sattwic egoism which regards the moral law and society and the claims of others and not only or predominantly his own interests, desires and passions. He has lived and guided himself by the Shastra , the moral and social code. The thought which preoccupies him, the standard which he obeys is the dharma , that collective Indian conception of the religious, social and moral rule of conduct, and especially the rule of the station and function to which he belongs, he the Kshatriya, the high- minded, self-governed, chivalrous prince and warrior and leader of Aryan men. Following always this rule, conscious of virtue and right dealing he has travelled so far and finds suddenly that it has led him to become the protagonist of a terrific and unparalleled slaughter, a monstrous civil war involving all the cultured Aryan nations which must lead to the complete destruction of the flower of their manhood and threatens their ordered civilisation with chaos and collapse." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-22-23, "Whoever prematurely attempts to get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainly against the greater will of the World-Spirit. Whoever turns from it in the weakness of his lower members, as did Arjuna in the beginning, — therefore was his shrinking condemned as a small and false pity, an inglorious, an un-Aryan and unheavenly feebleness of heart and impotence of spirit, klaibyam, ksudram hridaya-daurbalyam, (The Gita-2.3)— is showing not true virtue, but a want of spiritual courage to face the sterner truths of Nature and of action and existence. Man can only exceed the law of battle by discovering the greater law of his immortality. There are those who seek this where it always exists and must primarily be found, in the higher reaches of the pure spirit, and to find it turn away from a world governed by the law of Death." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-385, “We see in the teaching of the Gita how subtle a thing is the freedom from egoism which is demanded. Arjuna is driven to fight by the egoism of strength, the egoism of the Kshatriya; he is turned from the battle by the contrary egoism of weakness, the shrinking, the spirit of disgust, the false pity that overcomes the mind, the nervous being and the senses, — not that divine compassion which strengthens the arm and clarifies the knowledge. But this weakness comes garbed as renunciation, as virtue: “Better the life of the beggar than to taste these blood-stained enjoyments; I desire not the rule of all the earth, no, nor the kingdom of the gods.” How foolish of the Teacher, we might say, not to confirm this mood, to lose this sublime chance of adding one more great soul to the army of Sannyasins, one more shining example before the world of a holy renunciation. But the Guide sees otherwise, the Guide who is not to be deceived by words; “This is weakness and delusion and egoism that speak in thee. Behold the Self, open thy eyes to the knowledge, purify thy soul of egoism.” And afterwards? “Fight, conquer, enjoy a wealthy kingdom.” (The Gita-11.33)” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-331-332, “As a result he turns towards renunciation. Better the life of the mendicant living upon alms than this dharma of the Kshatriya , this battle and action culminating in undiscriminating massacre, this principle of mastery and glory and power which can only be won by destruction and bloodshed, this conquest of blood-stained enjoyments, this vindication of justice and right by a means which contradicts all righteousness and this affirmation of the social law by a war which destroys in its process and result all that constitutes society.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-55, “Arjuna said: Better to live in this world even on alms than to slay these high-souled Gurus. Slaying these Gurus, I should taste of blood-stained enjoyments even in this world.” The Gita-2.5, Arjuna, the Instrument and Emanation of the Lord: "Arjuna himself is a Vibhuti ; he is a man high in the spiritual evolution, a figure marked out in the crowd of his contemporaries, a chosen instrument of the divine Narayana , the Godhead in humanity. In one place the Teacher speaking as the supreme and equal Self of all declares that there is none dear to him, none hated, but in others he says that Arjuna is dear to him and his bhakta and therefore guided and safe in his hands , chosen for the vision and the knowledge. There is here only an apparent inconsistency. The Power as the self of the cosmos is equal to all, therefore to each being he gives according to the workings of his nature; but there is also a personal relation of the Purushottama to the human being in which he is especially near to the man who has come near to him. All these heroes and men of might who have joined in battle on the plain of Kurukshetra are vessels of the divine Will and through each he works according to his nature but behind the veil of his ego. Arjuna has reached that point when the veil can be rent and the embodied Godhead can reveal the mystery of his workings to his Vibhuti. It is even essential that there should be the revelation. He is the instrument of a great work, a work terrible in appearance but necessary for a long step forward in the march of the race, a decisive movement in its struggle towards the kingdom of the Right and the Truth, dharmarajya . The history of the cycles of man is a progress towards the unveiling of the Godhead in the soul and life of humanity ; each high event and stage of it is a divine manifestation. Arjuna , the chief instrument of the hidden Will, the great protagonist, must become the divine man capable of doing the work consciously as the action of the Divine. So only can that action become psychically alive and receive its spiritual import and its light and power of secret significance. He is called to self-knowledge; he must see God as the Master of the universe and the origin of the world’s creatures and happenings, all as the Godhead’s self-expression in Nature, God in all, God in himself as man and as Vibhuti, God in the lownesses of being and on its heights, God on the topmost summits, man too upon heights as the Vibhuti and climbing to the last summits in the supreme liberation and union. Time in its creation and destruction must be seen by him as the figure of the Godhead in its steps, — steps that accomplish the cycles of the cosmos on whose spires of movement the divine spirit in the human body rises doing God’s work in the world as his Vibhuti to the supreme transcendences. This knowledge has been given; the Time-figure of the Godhead is now to be revealed and from the million mouths of that figure will issue the command for the appointed action to the liberated Vibhuti. " CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-375-376, " The Gita’s injunction is to worship the Divine by our own work, sva-karmana ; (The Gita-18.46) our offering must be the works determined by our own law of being and nature. For from the Divine all movement of creation and impulse to act originates and by him all this universe is extended and for the holding together of the worlds he presides over and shapes all action through the Swabhava. To worship him with our inner and outer activities, to make our whole life a sacrifice of works to the Highest is to prepare ourselves to become one with him in all our will and substance and nature. Our work should be according to the truth within us, it should not be an accommodation with outward and artificial standards: it must be a living and sincere expression of the soul and its inborn powers. For to follow out the living inmost truth of this soul in our present nature will help us eventually to arrive at the immortal truth of the same soul in the now superconscious supreme nature. There we can live in oneness with God and our true self and all beings and, perfected, become a faultless instrument of divine action in the freedom of the immortal Dharma. " CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-524-525, The Lord asks Arjuna , soul of the disciple to prepare all the time, the rest of his life, “Become my-minded, my lover and adorer, a sacrificer to me, bow thyself to me, to me thou shalt come, this is my pledge and promise to thee, for dear art thou to me. Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in me alone. I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve." (The Gita-18.65-66) " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita -556, Sri Krishna, the Avatar: “But still the Vibhuti is not the Avatar ; otherwise Arjuna, Vyasa, Ushanas would be Avatars as well as Krishna, even if in a less degree of the power of Avatarhood . The divine quality is not enough; there must be the inner consciousness of the Lord and Self governing the human nature by his divine presence. The heightening of the power of the qualities is part of the becoming, bhutagrama, (The Gita-8.19, 9.8) an ascent in the ordinary manifestation; in the Avatar there is the special manifestation, the divine birth from above, the eternal and universal Godhead descended into a form of individual humanity, atmanam srijami, (The Gita-4.7) and conscious not only behind the veil but in the outward nature. ” CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita/p-161, “The crisis in which the Avatar appears, though apparent to the outward eye only as a crisis of events and great material changes, is always in its source and real meaning a crisis in the consciousness of humanity when it has to undergo some grand modification and effect some new development. For this action of change a divine force is needed; but the force varies always according to the power of consciousness which it embodies; hence the necessity of a divine consciousness manifesting in the mind and soul of humanity. Where, indeed, the change is mainly intellectual and practical, the intervention of the Avatar is not needed; there is a great uplifting of consciousness, a great manifestation of power in which men are for the time being exalted above their normal selves, and this surge of consciousness and power finds its wave-crests in certain exceptional individuals, vibhutis , whose action leading the general action is sufficient for the change intended.” CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita-168, “The Avatar is not bound to do extraordinary actions, but he is bound to give his acts or his work or what he is — any of these or all — a significance and an effective power that are part of something essential to be done in the history of the earth and its races.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I-490, (This means Avatar has not descended to show any extraordinary miracle and satisfy our endless desire, but to elevate our ordinary action to Divine Action and transform our lower Nature into Divine Nature.) “The natural attitude of the psychic being is to feel itself as the child, the son of God, the Bhakta ; it is a portion of the Divine, one in essence, but in the dynamics of the manifestation there is always even in identity a difference. The Jivatman , on the contrary, lives in the essence and can merge itself in identity with the Divine; but it too, the moment it presides over the dynamics of the manifestation, knows itself as one centre of the multiple Divine, not as the Parameshwara . It is important to remember this distinction; for, otherwise, if there is the least vital egoism, one may begin to think of oneself as an Avatara … ” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-61, (This indicates that Avatars are special manifestations of Supreme Self whereas other liberated Souls are one Psychic centre of the multiple universal Self. This they must remember all the time.) "An Avatar, roughly speaking, is one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action; he feels identified inwardly with this divine power and presence. A Vibhuti is supposed to embody some power of the Divine and is enabled by it to act with great force in the world but that is all that is necessary to make him a Vibhuti: the power may be very great but the consciousness is not that of an inborn or indwelling Divinity. (That means an Avatar is born free wheras all others are not free from the influence of three Gunas. (The Gita18.40)) This is the distinction we can gather from the Gita which is the main authority on this subject. If we follow this distinction, we can confidently say from what is related of them that Rama and Krishna can be accepted as Avatars; Buddha figures as such although with a more impersonal consciousness of the Power within him; Ramakrishna voiced the same consciousness when he spoke of him who was Rama and who was Krishna being within him. But Chaitanya’s case is peculiar; for according to the accounts he ordinarily felt and declared himself a bhakta of Krishna and nothing more, but in great moments he manifested Krishna, grew luminous in mind and body and was Krishna himself and spoke and acted as the Lord. His contemporaries saw in him an Avatar of Krishna, a manifestation of the divine love. Shankara and Vivekananda were certainly Vibhutis ; they cannot be reckoned as more, though as Vibhutis they were very great."CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-485-486, “But you see, you see all the way I have come...And I was born with a consciously prepared body—Sri Aurobindo was aware of that, he said it immediately the first time he saw me: I was born free. That is, from the spiritual standpoint: without any desire. Without any desire and attachment. And mon petit, if there is the slightest desire and the slightest attachment, it is IMPOSSIBLE to do this work." The Mother, 28th March-1964, The Mother’s Agenda-5/100, Our real, proper and main business of acceptance of this life and action: "The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man’s real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe."CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-48, "The growth of the god in man is man’s proper business ; the steadfast turning of this lower Asuric and Rakshasic into the divine nature is the carefully hidden meaning of human life. As this growth increases, the veil falls and the soul comes to see the greater significance of action and the real truth of existence. The eye opens to the Godhead in man, to the Godhead in the world; it sees inwardly and comes to know outwardly the infinite Spirit, the Imperishable from whom all existences originate and who exists in all and by him and in him all exist always. Therefore when this vision, this knowledge seizes on the soul, its whole life-aspiration becomes a surpassing love and fathomless adoration of the Divine and Infinite.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-327, "To discover the spiritual being in himself is the main business of the spiritual man and to help others towards the same evolution is his real service to the race; till that is done, an outward help can succour and alleviate, but nothing or very little more is possible." CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-917-918, “This is what a true subjectivism teaches us, — first, that we are a higher self than our ego or our members, secondly, that we are in our life and being not only ourselves but all others; for there is a secret solidarity which our egoism may kick at and strive against, but from which we cannot escape. It is the old Indian discovery that our real “I” is a Supreme Being which is our true self and which it is our business to discover and consciously become and, secondly, that that Being is one in all, expressed in the individual and in the collectivity, and only by admitting and realising our unity with others can we entirely fulfil our true self-being.” CWSA-25/The Human Cycle/p-47-48 Our understanding of the Creator of the World: "We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. " CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-382 In the Gita the Lord reveals His Cosmic Form in chapter 11, verses 25 to 32, as the Time Spirit, the ultimate Destroyer and Devourer. In King Aswapati's Yoga, we find that after establishing himself in the dynamic aspect of the Supreme Self, King met the destructive aspect of the Divine. “The soul’s ignorance is slain but not the soul:” Savitri-311, (Ignorance is here desire Soul) “Now other claims had hushed in him their cry:" Savitri-316, (Now other claims are of desire Soul) “The covering Nescience was unmasked and slain;” Savitri-313, “To err no more was natural to mind; Wrong could not come where all was light and love.” Savitri-313-14 “All that denies must be torn out and slain (All that denies of Supreme Love) And crushed the many longings for whose sake (many longings of desire) We lose the One (Divine) for whom our lives were made.” Savitri-316, “All seemed to have perished that was undivine:” Savitri-318, “The covering mind was seized and torn apart;” Savitri-319, Our understanding of the Creation: If we recognise the Subconscient transformation, we have to accept the discord of existence in the line as indicated in Essays on the Gita and Savitri . "The discords of the worlds are God’s discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and thrilled vastnesses of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-382, “All contraries heal their long dissidence.” Savitri-450-51 All contraries were true in one huge spirit” Savitri-555 “All here shall be one day her sweetness’ home, All contraries prepare her harmony; Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes; In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell, Her clasp will turn to ecstasy our pain.” Savitri-314 “All contraries are aspects of God’s face.” Savitri-656 “The obstacle which the physical presents to the spiritual is no argument for the rejection of the physical; for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. ” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-11"All existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of name and form." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-13-14, "All existence is a manifestation of the divine Existence and that which is within us is spirit of the eternal Spirit. We have come indeed into the lower material nature and are under its influence, but we have come there from the supreme spiritual nature: this inferior imperfect status is our apparent, but that our real being." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-424, "Surely you could not believe that sadhana could be done without facing some difficulties. As your aspiration is sincere, whatever was in the subconscient standing in the way of the Divine Realisation, has come to the surface in order to be transformed. There is nothing there to make you sad or depressed — on the contrary you ought to rejoice at these occasions to make progress and never forget to lean for support and help on my love, force and blessings." The Mother/TMCW-vol-14/p-227 The Three Gunas: "The gunas affect every part of our natural being. They have indeed their strongest relative hold in the three different members of it, mind, life and body. Tamas, the principle of inertia, is strongest in material nature and in our physical being. The action of this principle is of two kinds, inertia of force and inertia of knowledge. Whatever is predominantly governed by Tamas , tends in its force to a sluggish inaction and immobility or else to a mechanical action which it does not possess, but is possessed by obscure forces which drive it in a mechanical round of energy; equally in its consciousness it turns to an inconscience or enveloped subconscience or to a reluctant, sluggish or in some way mechanical conscious action which does not possess the idea of its own energy, but is guided by an idea which seems external to it or at least concealed from its active awareness. Thus the principle of our body is in its nature inert, subconscient, incapable of anything but a mechanical and habitual self-guidance and action: though it has like everything else a principle of kinesis and a principle of equilibrium of its state and action, an inherent principle of response and a secret consciousness, the greatest portion of its rajasic motions are contributed by the life-power and all the overt consciousness by the mental being. The principle of rajas has its strongest hold on the vital nature. It is the Life within us that is the strongest kinetic motor power, but the life-power in earthly beings is possessed by the force of desire, therefore rajas turns always to action and desire; desire is the strongest human and animal initiator of most kinesis and action, predominant to such an extent that many consider it the father of all action and even the originator of our being. Moreover, rajas finding itself in a world of matter which starts from the principle of inconscience and a mechanical driven inertia, has to work against an immense contrary force; therefore its whole action takes on the nature of an effort, a struggle, a besieged and an impeded conflict for possession which is distressed in its every step by a limiting incapacity, disappointment and suffering: even its gains are precarious and limited and marred by the reaction of the effort and an aftertaste of insufficiency and transience. The principle of sattwa has its strongest hold in the mind; not so much in the lower parts of the mind which are dominated by the rajasic life-power, but mostly in the intelligence and the will of the reason. Intelligence, reason, rational will are moved by the nature of their predominant principle towards a constant effort of assimilation, assimilation by knowledge, assimilation by a power of understanding will, a constant effort towards equilibrium, some stability, rule, harmony of the conflicting elements of natural happening and experience. This satisfaction it gets in various ways and in various degrees of acquisition. The attainment of assimilation, equilibrium and harmony brings with it always a relative but more or less intense and satisfying sense of ease, happiness, mastery, security, which is other than the troubled and vehement pleasures insecurely bestowed by the satisfaction of rajasic desire and passion. Light and happiness are the characteristics of the sattwic guna . The whole nature of the embodied living mental being is determined by these three gunas ." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-684-685, "The passage through sattwa is the ordinary idea of Yoga, it is the preparation and purification by the yama-niyama of Patanjali or by other means in other Yogas, e.g., saintliness in the bhakti schools, the eightfold path in Buddhism etc., etc. In our Yoga (Integral Yoga) the evolution through sattwa i s replaced by the cultivation of equanimity, samata , and by the psychic transformation." CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-424, “…for mind is a twilight preparing for light, an ignorance seeking after knowledge, a bondage to Nature groping after freedom and mastery over Nature. It is not on mind, on its self-modifying ignorance and bondage or even on its half-light, half-mastery, half-knowledge that the next step can base itself. It must base itself on soul consciousness, consciousness of the spirit and self for so only can there be the full light, the spontaneous mastery, the intimate and real knowledge.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-427, Freedom from Lower Nature: " In the lower nature each being appears as the ego, in the higher he is the individual Purusha . In other words multiplicity is part of the spiritual nature of the One. This individual soul is myself, in the creation it is a partial manifestation of me, mamaivaamsah , (The Gita-15.7) and it possesses all my powers; it is witness, giver of the sanction, upholder, knower, lord. It descends into the lower nature and thinks itself bound by action, so to enjoy the lower being: it can draw back and know itself as the passive Purusha free from all action. It can rise above the three gunas and, liberated from the bondage of action, yet possess action, even as I do myself, and by adoration of the Purushottama and union with him it can enjoy wholly its divine Nature." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p- 80, "Transcending the lower nature of the three gunas and seating the soul in the immobile Purusha beyond the three gunas , we can ascend finally into the higher nature of the infinite Godhead which is not bound by the three gunas even when it acts through Nature. Reaching the inner actionlessness of the silent Purusha, naiskarmya , and leaving Prakriti to do her works, we can attain supremely beyond to the status of the divine Mastery which is able to do all works and yet be bound by none. The idea of the Purushottama, seen here as the incarnate Narayana, Krishna , is therefore the key . Without it the withdrawal from the lower nature to the Brahmic condition leads necessarily to inaction of the liberated man, his indifference to the works of the world; with it the same withdrawal becomes a step by which the works of the world are taken up in the spirit, with the nature and in the freedom of the Divine. See the silent Brahman as the goal and the world with all its activities has to be forsaken; see God, the Divine, the Purushottama as the goal, superior to action yet its inner spiritual cause and object and original will, and the world with all its activities is conquered and possessed in a divine transcendence of the world . It can become instead of a prison-house an opulent kingdom, rajyam samruddham, which we have conquered for the spiritual life by slaying the limitation of the tyrant ego and overcoming the bondage of our gaoler desires and breaking the prison of our individualistic possession and enjoyment. The liberated universalised soul becomes svarat samrat , self-ruler and emperor." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p- 134-135, "First, therefore, the Teacher points out that all these ideas and feelings which trouble, perplex and baffle Arjuna, joy and sorrow, desire and sin, the mind’s turn towards governing action by the outward results of action, the human shrinking from what seems terrible and formidable in the dealings of the universal Spirit with the world, are things born of the subjection of our consciousness to a natural ignorance, the way of working of a lower nature in which the soul is involved and sees itself as a separate ego returning to the action of things upon it dual reactions of pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, right and wrong, good happening and evil fortune. These reactions create a tangled web of perplexity in which the soul is lost and bewildered by its own ignorance; it has to guide itself by partial and imperfect solutions that serve ordinarily with a stumbling sufficiency in the normal life, but fail when brought to the test of a wider seeing and a profounder experience. To understand the real sense of action and existence one must retreat behind all these appearances into the truth of the spirit; one must found self-knowledge before one can have the basis of a right world-knowledge." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-452-453, Our understanding of the First Law of the Creator: “Thou shalt not conquer except by battle with thy fellows and thy surroundings; thou shalt not even live except by battle and struggle and by absorbing into thyself other life. The first law of this world that I have made is creation and preservation by destruction. ” CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-40, "He appears to us too in the universe as the universal spirit of Destruction, who seems to create only to undo his creations in the end, — “I am all-snatching Death,” aham mrityuh sarva-harah . (the Gita-10.34) And yet his Power of becoming does not cease from its workings, for the force of rebirth and new creation ever keeps pace with the force of death and destruction, — “and I am too the birth of all that shall come into being .” (The Gita-10.34) The divine Self in things is the sustaining Spirit of the present, the withdrawing Spirit of the past, the creative Spirit of the future." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-363, “Outwardly also, the nation or community or race which shrinks too long from destroying and replacing its past forms of life, is itself destroyed, rots and perishes and out of its debris other nations, communities and races are formed. By destruction of the old giant occupants man made himself a place upon earth. By destruction of the Titans the gods maintain the continuity of the divine Law in the cosmos. Whoever prematurely attempts to get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainly against the greater will of the World-Spirit. Whoever turns from it in the weakness of his lower members, as did Arjuna in the beginning, — therefore was his shrinking condemned as a small and false pity, an inglorious, an un-Aryan and unheavenly feebleness of heart and impotence of spirit, klaibyam, ksudram hridaya-daurbalyam, (The Gita-2.3)— is showing not true virtue, but a want of spiritual courage to face the sterner truths of Nature and of action and existence. Man can only exceed the law of battle by discovering the greater law of his immortality. ” CSWA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-384-85, "It means exactly this (I am going back to the preceding sentence): Who can protect the one whom God has already slain? He has already been slain by God. When God has decided that someone is to be slain, nothing can protect him or keep him from being slain. And Sri Aurobindo adds: the man who slays (because it is not God who slays directly, he uses a man), the man who slays is only a circumstance, the instrument through which the thing decided by God behind the veil is accomplished materially here... These are political texts from the revolutionary period, concerning bomb attacks against the English. And then he says that the man God has protected can never be touched. However hard you try, you will never be able to slay him. But who can protect the man God has already slain? He has already been slain by God. And man is simply the instrument used by God to do here what has been done there (it has ALREADY been done there). it’s very simple." The Mother/The Mother's Agenda/18.04.1961 1 / Chapter 1. The Dejection of Arjuna The Message of this First Chapter for a Sadhak of Integral Yoga: "He (the Lord) discourages the tamasic recoil and the tendency to renunciation and enjoins the continuance of action and even of the same fierce and terrible action, but he points the disciple towards another and inner renunciation which is the real issue from his crisis and the way towards the soul’s superiority to the world-Nature and yet its calm and self-possessed action in the world. Not a physical asceticism, but an inner askesis is the teaching of the Gita. " CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-55-56 “But for the sadhaka of the integral Yoga this inner or this outer solitude can only be incidents or periods in his spiritual progress. Accepting life, he has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world’s burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Their representative character gives them a much more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to recurrence. Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-77-78 First six chapters and succeeding chapters: "Thus in the first six chapters the knowledge necessary for the distinction between (1) the immutable self (Spiritul being) (2) and the soul veiled in nature (Psychic being) was accorded an entire prominence." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-409 "The whole object of the first six chapters of the Gita is to synthetise in a large frame of Vedantic truth the two methods, ordinarily supposed to be diverse and even opposite, of the Sankhyas and the Yogins . The Sankhya is taken as the starting-point and the basis ; but it is from the beginning and with a progressively increasing emphasis permeated with the ideas and methods of Yoga and remoulded in its spirit. The practical difference, as it seems to have presented itself to the religious minds of that day, lay first in this that Sankhya proceeded by knowledge and through the Yoga of the intelligence, while Yoga proceeded by works and the transformation of the active consciousness and, secondly, — a corollary of this first distinction, — that Sankhya led to entire passivity and the renunciation of works, sannyasa , while Yoga held to be quite sufficient the inner renunciation of desire, the purification of the subjective principle which leads to action and the turning of works Godwards, towards the divine existence and towards liberation. Yet both had the same aim, (1) the transcendence of birth and of this terrestrial existence and (2) the union of the human soul with the Highest. " CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-81 "The First six chapters of the Gita have been treated as a single block of teachings, its primary basis of practice and knowledge; the remaining twelve may be similarly treated as two closely connected blocks which develop the rest of the doctrine from this primary basis. The seventh to the twelfth chapters lay down a large metaphysical statement of the (1) nature of the Divine Being and (2) on that foundation closely relate and synthetise knowledge and devotion, just as the first part of the Gita related and synthetised works and knowledge. The vision of the World-Purusha intervenes in the eleventh chapter, gives a dynamic turn to this stage of the synthesis and relates it vividly to works and life (This is original Question) . Thus again all is brought powerfully back to the original question of Arjuna round which the whole exposition revolves and completes its cycle. Afterwards (From chapter-13 to 18) the Gita proceeds (1) by the differentiation of the Purusha and Prakriti to work out its ideas of the action of the gunas , (Chapter-13) (2) of the ascension beyond the gunas (Chapter-14) and (3) of the culmination of desireless works with knowledge where that coalesces with Bhakti, — knowledge, works and love made one, (Chapter-15) — and (4) it rises thence to its great finale, the supreme secret of self-surrender to the Master of Existence. (Chapter-18)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-263 2 / Chapter 2. Sankhya Yoga Summary or A Brief Restatement: A Sadhaka of the Gita and Integral Yoga must always remember this Mantra , jatasyahi dhrubo mrityu dhrubam janma mritasya cha, 'For certain is death for the born, and certain is birth for the dead.' (The Gita-2.27) Its complementary line in Savitri is 'This was the day when Satyavan must die.' (Savitri-10) This memory gives the next task to a Sadhak to utilise time as a bank of accumulating Spiritual energy. Those who accumulate Soul force are considered fit for immortality. (The Gita-2.15, 4.31, 10.18, 13.13, 13.26, 14.20, 14.27). Both the Gita and integral Yoga propose to begin Yoga with purified intellect, and practice of buddhi Yoga, Yoga of intellect and arrive at the state of waking Samadhi, Sthita-pranjya , which has three characteristics in the frontal Nature. They are equality, a silent mind and a desireless state. The practice of Self-control through buddhi Yoga increases the power of concentration and increased concentration helps to increase the power of consecration. Through consecration, one unites with the Divine and the Soul force increases. " Sankhya has been admitted for the separation of the soul from the lower nature, — a separation that must be effected by self-knowledge through (1) the discriminating reason and (2) by transcendence of our subjection to the three gunas constituent of that nature. It has been completed and its limitations exceeded by a large revelation of the unity of the supreme Soul and supreme Nature, para purusha , para-prakriti ." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-355 "But Sankhya explains what modern Science leaves in obscurity, the process by which the mechanical and inconscient takes on the appearance of consciousness. It is because of the reflection of Prakriti in Purusha ; the light of consciousness of the Soul is attributed to the workings of the mechanical energy and it is thus that the Purusha , observing Nature as the witness and forgetting himself, is deluded with the idea generated in her that it is he who thinks, feels, wills, acts, while all the time the operation of thinking, feeling, willing, acting is conducted really by her and her three modes and not by himself at all. To get rid of this delusion is the first step towards the liberation of the soul from Nature and her works." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-74 The First Necessity of the Gita's Yoga: "To see all existence steadily and see it whole and not be misled by its conflicting truths, is the first necessity for the calm and complete wisdom to which the Yogin is called upon to rise. A certain absolute freedom is one aspect of the soul’s relations with Nature at one pole of our complex being; a certain absolute determinism by Nature is the opposite aspect at its opposite pole;..." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-213, "But the direct way to union lies through the firm realisation of the immutable Self, and it is the Gita’s insistence on this as a first necessity, after which alone works and devotion can acquire their whole divine meaning, that makes it possible for us to mistake its drift." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-235, "We have already seen that for this end (doing good of all creatures by Karmayoga ) self-knowledge, equality, impersonality are the first necessities , and that that is the way of reconciliation between knowledge and works, between spirituality and activity in the world, between the ever immobile quietism of the timeless self and the eternal play of the pragmatic energy of Nature." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-281, "We have now set before us three interdependent movements of our release out of the normal nature and our growth into the divine and spiritual being. “By the delusion of the dualities which arises from wish and disliking, all existences in the creation are led into bewilderment,” (The Gita-7.27) says the Gita. That is the ignorance, the egoism which fails to see and lay hold on the Divine everywhere, because it sees only the dualities of Nature and is constantly occupied with its own separate personality and its seekings and shrinkings. For escape from this circle the first necessity in our works is to get clear of the sin of the vital ego, the fire of passion, the tumult of desire of the rajasic nature, and this has to be done by the steadying sattwic impulse of the ethical being. When that is done, yesam tvantagatam papam jananam punyakarmanam , (The Gita-7.28) or rather as it is being done, for after a certain point all growth in the sattwic nature brings an increasing capacity for a high quietude, equality and transcendence, — it is necessary to rise above the dualities and to become impersonal, equal, one self with the Immutable, one self with all existences." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-282, "Our first experience of what is beyond our normal status, concealed behind the egoistic being in which we live, is still for the Gita the calm of a vast impersonal immutable self in whose equality and oneness we lose our petty egoistic personality and cast off in its tranquil purity all our narrow motives of desire and passion." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-290, "To rise out of our lower personal egoism, to enter into the impersonal and equal calm of the immutable eternal all-pervading Akshara Purusha , to aspire from that calm by a perfect self-surrender of all one’s nature and existence (Purusha Yajna) to that which is other and higher than the Akshara , is the first necessity of this Yoga . In the strength of that aspiration one can rise to the immortal Dharma . There, made one in being, consciousness and divine bliss with the greatest Uttama Purusha , made one with his supreme dynamic nature-force, sva Prakritih , the liberated spirit can know infinitely, love illimitably, act unfalteringly in the authentic power of a highest immortality and a perfect freedom. The rest of the Gita (from chapters 13 to 18) is written to throw a fuller light on this immortal Dharma ." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-406, "The first requisite is to shake the wings of the soul free from desire and passion and troubling emotion and all this perturbed and distorting atmosphere of human mind and arrive into an ether of dispassionate equality, a heaven of impersonal calm, an egoless feeling and vision of things. For only in that lucid upper air, reaches free from all storm and cloud, can self-knowledge come and the law of the world and the truth of Nature be seen steadily and with an embracing eye and in an undisturbed and all-comprehending and all-penetrating light. Behind this little personality which is a helpless instrument, a passive or vainly resistant puppet of Nature and a form figured in her creations, there is an impersonal self one in all which sees and knows all things; there is an equal, impartial, universal presence and support of creation, a witnessing consciousness that suffers Nature to work out the becoming of things in their own type, svabhava, but does not involve and lose itself in the action she initiates. To draw back from the ego and the troubled personality into this calm, equal, eternal, universal, impersonal Self is the first step towards a seeing action in Yoga done in conscious union with the divine Being and the infallible Will that, however obscure now to us, manifests itself in the universe." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-453, “This is the solution, this the salvation, this the perfection that I offer to all those who can listen to a divine voice within them and are capable of this faith and knowledge. But to climb to this pre-eminent condition the first necessity , the original radical step is to turn away from all that belongs to your lower Nature and fix yourself by concentration of the will and intelligence on that which is higher than either will or intelligence, higher than mind and heart and sense and body. And first of all you must turn to your own eternal and immutable self, impersonal and the same in all creatures. So long as you live in ego and mental personality, you will always spin endlessly in the same rounds and there can be no real issue. Turn your will inward beyond the heart and its desires and the sense and its attractions; lift it upward beyond the mind and its associations and attachments and its bounded wish and thought and impulse. Arrive at something within you that is eternal, ever unchanged, calm, unperturbed, equal, impartial to all things and persons and happenings , not affected by any action, not altered by the figures of Nature. Be that, be the eternal self, be the Brahman. If you can become that by a permanent spiritual experience , you will have an assured basis on which you can stand delivered from the limitations of your mind-created personality, secure against any fall from peace and knowledge, free from ego." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-581-582, (This passage speaks about the security against Spiritual fall .) “ The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samata . The self, spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience on at least one side of equality, the equal Brahman , samam brahma; (The Gita-5.19) the Gita even goes so far in one passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvam yoga ucyate. (The Gita-2.48) That is to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman , of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas , of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. Moreover, it is the condition of a securely and perfectly divine action; the security and largeness of the cosmic action of the Infinite is based upon and never breaks down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character of the perfect spiritual action; to be equal and one to all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness, — even in the most physical consciousness, — and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be done, always and imminuably full of the divine equality and calm must be its inmost principle. That may be said to be the passive or basic, the fundamental and receptive side of equality, but there is also an active and possessive side , an equal bliss which can only come when the peace of equality is founded and which is the beatific flower of its fullness.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-692-693, Enlightened Man's Approach towards Fear: " On this path, no effort is lost, no obstacle prevails; even a little of this dharma delivers from the great fear, swalpamapyasya dharmasya trayate mahatobhayat. " (The Gita-2.40) “But even before we can attain or are firmly seated in that universal vision, we have by all the means in our power to insist on this receptive and active equality and calm . Even something of it, alpam api asya dharmasya, (The Gita-2.40) is a great step towards perfection; a first firmness in it is the beginning of liberated perfection; its completeness is the perfect assurance of a rapid progress in all the other members of perfection. For without it (equality) we can have no solid basis; and by the pronounced lack of it we shall be constantly falling back to the lower status of desire, ego, duality, ignorance.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-724, " I have declared to you the poise of a self-liberating intelligence in Sankhya , says the divine Teacher to Arjuna. I will now declare to you another poise in Yoga. You are shrinking from the results of your works, you desire other results and turn from your right path in life because it does not lead you to them. But this idea of works and their result, desire of result as the motive, the work as a means for the satisfaction of desire, is the bondage of the ignorant who know not what works are, nor their true source, nor their real operation, nor their high utility. My Yoga will free you from all bondage of the soul to its works, karma-bandham prahasyasi . (The Gita-2.39) You are afraid of many things, afraid of sin, afraid of suffering, afraid of hell and punishment, afraid of God, afraid of this world, afraid of the hereafter, afraid of yourself. What is it that you are not afraid of at this moment, you the Aryan fighter, the world’s chief hero? But this is the great fear which besieges humanity, its fear of sin and suffering now and hereafter, its fear in a world of whose true nature it is ignorant, of a God whose true being also it has not seen and whose cosmic purpose it does not understand. My Yoga will deliver you from the great fear and even a little of it will bring deliverance. (The Gita-2.40) When you have once set out on this path, you will find that no step is lost; every least movement will be a gain; you will find there no obstacle that can baulk (unwilling and reluctant) you of your advance. A bold and absolute promise and one to which the fearful and hesitating mind beset and stumbling in all its paths cannot easily lend an assured trust; nor is the large and full truth of it apparent unless with these first words of the message of the Gita we read also the last , “Abandon all laws of conduct and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver you from all sin and evil; do not grieve.” (The Gita-18.66)" CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p- 94-95, "From the first words there comes the suggestion that the hidden truth behind these terrifying forms is a reassuring, a heartening and delightful truth. There is something that makes the heart of the world to rejoice and take pleasure in the name and nearness of the Divine. It is the profound sense of that which makes us see in the dark face of Kali the face of the Mother and to perceive even in the midst of destruction the protecting arms of the Friend of creatures , in the midst of evil the presence of a pure unalterable Benignity and in the midst of death the Master of Immortality. From the terror of the King of the divine action the Rakshasas, the fierce giant powers of darkness, flee destroyed, defeated and overpowered. But the Siddhas, but the complete and perfect who know and sing the names of the Immortal and live in the truth of his being, bow down before every form of Him and know what every form enshrines and signifies. Nothing has real need to fear except that which is to be destroyed, the evil, the ignorance, the veilers in Night, the Rakshasa powers. All the movement and action of Rudra the Terrible is towards perfection and divine light and completeness." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p- 389-390, Enlightened man's approach towards death: "The enlightened man does not mourn either for the living or the dead, for he knows that suffering and death are merely incidents in the history of the soul. The soul, not the body, is the reality....The man who rises above the conception of himself as a life and a body, who does not accept the material and sensational touches of the world at their own value or at the value which the physical man attaches to them, who knows himself and all as souls, learns himself to live in his soul and not in his body and deals with others too as souls and not as mere physical beings. For by immortality is meant not the survival of death, — that is already given to every creature born with a mind, — but the transcendence of life and death . It means that ascension by which man ceases to live as a mind-informed body and lives at last as a spirit and in the Spirit. Whoever is subject to grief and sorrow, a slave to the sensations and emotions, occupied by the touches of things transient cannot become fit for immortality." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-61, "Our physical death is also a pralaya, — the Gita will presently use the word in the sense of this death, pralayam yati deha-bhrut , “the soul bearing the body comes to a pralaya ,” (The Gita-14.14) to a disintegration of that form of matter with which its ignorance identified its being and which now dissolves into the natural elements. But the soul itself persists and after an interval resumes in a new body formed from those elements its round of births in the cycle, just as after the interval of pause and cessation the universal Being resumes his endless round of the cyclic aeons. This immortality in the rounds of Time is common to all embodied spirits." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p- 421-422, "Samadhi or Yogic trance retires to increasing depths according as it draws farther and farther away from the normal or waking state and enters into degrees of consciousness less and less communicable to the waking mind, less and less ready to receive a summons from the waking world. Beyond a certain point the trance becomes complete and it is then almost or quite impossible to awaken or call back the soul that has receded into them; it can only come back by its own will or at most by a violent shock of physical appeal dangerous to the system owing to the abrupt upheaval of return. There are said to be supreme states of trance in which the soul persisting for too long a time cannot return; for it loses its hold on the cord which binds it to the consciousness of life, and the body is left, maintained indeed in its set position, not dead by dissolution, but incapable of recovering the ensouled life which had inhabited it. Finally, the Yogin acquires at a certain stage of development the power of abandoning his body definitively without the ordinary phenomena of death, by an act of will, (Iccha Mrityu) or by a process of withdrawing the pranic life-force through the gate of the upward life-current (udana), opening for it a way through the mystic brahmarandhra in the head. By departure from life in the state of Samadhi he attains directly to that higher status of being to which he aspires." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-520-521, The creed of Aryan Fighter: "It is the creed of the Aryan fighter. “Know God,” it says, “know thyself, help man; protect the Right, do without fear or weakness or faltering thy work of battle in the world. Thou art the eternal and imperishable Spirit, thy soul is here on its upward path to immortality; life and death are nothing, sorrow and wounds and suffering are nothing, for these things have to be conquered and overcome. Look not at thy own pleasure and gain and profit, but above and around, above at the shining summits to which thou climbest, around at this world of battle and trial in which good and evil, progress and retrogression are locked in stern conflict. Men call to thee, their strong man, their hero for help; help then, fight. Destroy when by destruction the world must advance, but hate not that which thou destroyest, neither grieve for all those who perish. Know everywhere the one self, know all to be immortal souls and the body to be but dust. Do thy work with a calm, strong and equal spirit; fight and fall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the work that God and thy nature have given to thee to accomplish.” CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p- 66-67 Those who are not satisfied with life as it is: "But if you are not satisfied with your social duty and the virtue of your order, if you think that leads you to sorrow and sin, then I bid you rise to a higher and not sink to a lower ideal. Put away all egoism from you, disregard joy and sorrow, disregard gain and loss and all worldly results; look only at the cause you must serve and the work that you must achieve by divine command ; “so thou shalt not incur sin.” (The Gita-2.38).....Destroy when by destruction the world must advance, but hate not that which thou destroyest, neither grieve for all those who perish. Know everywhere the one self, know all to be immortal souls and the body to be but dust. Do thy work with a calm, strong and equal spirit; fight and fall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the work that God and thy nature have given to thee to accomplish.” CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-66-67, “That is all right in the ordinary karmayoga which aims at union with the cosmic Spirit and stops short at the Overmind — but here (in Integral Yoga) a special work has to be done and a new realisation achieved for the earth and not for ourselves alone. It is necessary to stand apart from the rest of the world so as to separate ourselves from the ordinary consciousness in order to bring down a new one… It is not that love for all is not part of the sadhana, but it has not to translate itself at once into a mixing with all — it can only express itself in a general and when need be dynamic universal goodwill, but for the rest it must find vent in this labour of bringing down the higher consciousness with all its effect for the earth. As for accepting the working of the Divine in all things that is necessary here too in the sense of seeing it even behind our struggles and difficulties, but not accepting the nature of man and the world as it is — our aim is to move towards a more divine working which will replace what now is by a greater and happier manifestation. That too is a labour of divine Love .” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-812-813, "Moreover not only a faith in the fundamental principle, ideas, way of the Yoga is needed, but a day to day working faith in the power in us to achieve, in the steps we have taken on the way, in the spiritual experiences that come to us, in the intuitions, the guiding movements of will and impulsion, the moved intensities of the heart and aspirations and fulfilments of the life that are the aids, the circumstances and the stages of the enlarging of the nature and the stimuli or the steps of the soul’s evolution. At the same time it has always to be remembered that we are moving from imperfection and ignorance towards light and perfection, and the faith in us must be free from attachment to the forms of our endeavour and the successive stages of our realisation. There is not only much that will be strongly raised in us in order to be cast out and rejected, a battle between the powers of ignorance and the lower nature and the higher powers that have to replace them, but experiences, states of thought and feeling, forms of realisation that are helpful and have to be accepted on the way and may seem to us for the time to be spiritual finalities, are found afterwards to be steps of transition, have to be exceeded and the working faith that supported them withdrawn in favour of other and greater things or of more full and comprehensive realisations and experiences, which replace them or into which they are taken up in a completing transformation. There can be for the seeker of the integral Yoga no clinging to resting-places on the road or to half-way houses; he cannot be satisfied till he has laid down all the great enduring bases of his perfection and broken out into its large and free infinities, and even there he has to be constantly filling himself with more experiences of the Infinite. His progress is an ascent from level to level and each new height brings in other vistas and revelations of the much that has still to be done, bhuri kartvam , till the divine Shakti has at last taken up all his endeavour and he has only to assent and participate gladly by a consenting oneness in her luminous workings. That which will support him through these changes, struggles, transformations which might otherwise dishearten and baffle, — for the intellect and life and emotion always grasp too much at things, fasten on premature certitudes and are apt to be afflicted and unwilling when forced to abandon that on which they rested, — is a firm faith in the Shakti that is at work and reliance on the guidance of the Master of the Yoga whose wisdom is not in haste and whose steps through all the perplexities of the mind are assured and just and sound, because they are founded on a perfectly comprehending transaction with the necessities of our nature. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-775-776, "The Yoga of perfection necessary to this change has, so far as we have been considering it, consisted in a preparatory purification of the mental, vital and physical nature, a liberation from the knots of the lower Prakriti, a consequent replacement of the egoistic state always subject to the ignorant and troubled action of the desire soul by a large and luminous static equality which quiets the reason, the emotional mind, the life mind and the physical nature and brings into us the peace and freedom of the spirit, and a dynamical substitution of the action of the supreme and universal divine Shakti under the control of the Ishwara for that of the lower Prakriti, — an action whose complete operation must be preceded by the perfection of the natural instruments. And all these things together, though not as yet the whole Yoga, constitute already a much greater than the present normal consciousness, spiritual in its basis and moved by a greater light, power and bliss, and it might be easy to rest satisfied with so much accomplished and think that all has been done that was needed for the divine conversion. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-784, “There must come upon us in the change at once a reversal and rejection of our present way of existence and a fulfilment of its inner trend and tendency.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1012, "At first the mind takes all that comes from beyond it without distinction as the sufficient spiritual illumination and accepts even initial states and first enlightenments as a finality, but afterwards it finds that to rest here would be to rest in a partial realisation and that one has to go on heightening and enlarging till at least there is reached a certain completeness of divine breadth and stature." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-813, “Moreover, the descent may be enough to liberate, but not to perfect, or it may be enough to make a great change in the inner being, while the outer remains an imperfect instrument, clumsy, sick or unexpressive. Finally, the transformation effected by the sadhana cannot be complete unless it is a supramentalisation of the being. Psychisation is not enough, it is only a beginning ; spiritualisation and the descent of the higher consciousness is not enough, it is only a middle term ; the ultimate achievement needs the action of the supramental Consciousness and Force. Something less than that may very well be considered enough by the individual, but it is not enough for the earth-consciousness to take the definitive stride forward it must take at one time or another.” CWSA-29//Letters on Yoga-II/p-399, “The vairagya of one who has tasted the world’s gifts or prizes but found them insufficient or, finally, tasteless and turns away towards a higher and more beautiful ideal or the vairagya of one who has done his part in life’s battles but seen that something greater is demanded of the soul, is perfectly helpful and a good gate to the Yoga. Also the sattwic vairagya which has learned what life is and turns to what is above and behind life. By the ascetic vairagya I mean that which denies life and world altogether and wants to disappear into the Indefinite and I object to it for those who come to this Yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life. But if one is satisfied with life as it is, then there is no reason to seek to bring the Divine into life, — so vairagya in the sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is is perfectly admissible and even in a certain sense indispensable for my Yoga. ” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II-389, "I am continuing my reading of the Veda. I had to stop for some days because of a sore throat. But anyway, I’m starting again...The Vedas, after all, were written by people who remembered a radical experience , which must have taken place on earth at a given moment, as an example of what was to come. (This always happens in the yoga: a first radical experience comes like a herald of the future realization.) So in the terrestrial yoga – in the yoga of the earth, of the planet earth – there was a moment when it came; they who are called the forefathers must have created, through their effort and their yoga, at least an image of the supramental realization. And those who wrote the Vedas, who composed all these hymns, remembered or kept the tradition of that experience . And oh, mon petit, it had the same effect on me as when I read the ‘Yoga of Self-Perfection’ in The Synthesis of Yoga (Mother catches her breath): there is such a gulf between what we are, what life on earth and human consciousness now are, even among the most enlightened, the most advanced, and THAT! ..." The Mother's Agenda/April 7, 1961 (Here the Mother confirms that The Synthesis of Yoga is a book descended from the Supramental world, and by concentrating on this book one will be automatically dragged towards THAT plane.) Sign of waking trance of an integral Sadhak: "It is this calm, desireless, griefless fixity of the buddhi in self-poise and self-knowledge to which the Gita gives the name of Samadhi . The sign of the man in Samadhi is not that he loses consciousness of objects and surroundings and of his mental and physical self and cannot be recalled to it even by burning or torture of the body, — the ordinary idea of the matter; trance is a particular intensity, not the essential sign. The test is the expulsion of all desires , their inability to get at the mind, and it is the inner state from which this freedom arises, the delight of the soul gathered within itself with the mind equal and still and high-poised above the attractions and repulsions, the alternations of sunshine and storm and stress of the external life. It is drawn inward even when acting outwardly ; it is concentrated in self even when gazing out upon things; it is directed wholly to the Divine even when to the outward vision of others busy and preoccupied with the affairs of the world." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-101-102, "For the mind is really a reflector and a medium and none of its activities originate in themselves, none exist per se. Ordinarily, the mind reflects the status of mortal nature and the activities of the Force which works under the conditions of the material universe. But if it becomes clear, passive, pure by the renunciation of these activities and of the characteristic ideas and outlook of mental nature, then as in a clear mirror or like the sky in clear water which is without ripple and unruffled by winds, the divine is reflected. The mind still does not entirely possess the divine or become divine, but is possessed by it or by a luminous reflection of it so long as it remains in this pure passivity. If it becomes active, it falls back into the disturbance of the mortal nature and reflects that and no longer the divine. For this reason an absolute quietism and a cessation first of all outer action and then of all inner movement is the ideal ordinarily proposed; here too, for the follower of the path of knowledge, there must be a sort of waking Samadhi . Whatever action is unavoidable, must be a purely superficial working of the organs of perception and motor action in which the quiescent mind takes eventually no part and from which it seeks no result or profit....But this is insufficient for the integral Yoga . There must be a positive transformation and not merely a negative quiescence of the waking mentality. The transformation is possible because, although the divine planes are above the mental consciousness and to enter actually into them we have ordinarily to lose the mental in Samadhi , yet there are in the mental being divine planes superior to our normal mentality which reproduce the conditions of the divine plane proper , although modified by the conditions, dominant here, of mentality. All that belongs to the experience of the divine plane can there be seized, but in the mental way and in a mental form. To these planes of divine mentality it is possible for the developed human being to arise in the waking state; or it is possible for him to derive from them a stream of influences and experiences which shall eventually open to them and transform into their nature his whole waking existence. These higher mental states are the immediate sources, the large actual instruments, the inner stations of his perfection." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-397-398, Winds carry away a ship: "For evidently there are two possibilities of the action of the intelligent will. It may take its downward and outward orientation towards a discursive action of the perceptions and the will in the triple play of Prakriti, or it may take its upward and inward orientation towards a settled peace and equality in the calm and immutable purity of the conscious silent soul no longer subject to the distractions of Nature. In the former alternative the subjective being is at the mercy of the objects of sense, it lives in the outward contact of things. That life is the life of desire. For the senses excited by their objects create a restless or often violent disturbance, a strong or even headlong outward movement towards the seizure of these objects and their enjoyment, and they carry away the sense-mind, “as the winds carry away a ship upon the sea”; (The Gita-2.67) the mind subjected to the emotions, passions, longings, impulsions awakened by this outward movement of the senses carries away similarly the intelligent will, which loses therefore its power of calm discrim- ination and mastery. Subjection of the soul to the confused play of the three gunas of Prakriti in their eternal entangled twining and wrestling, ignorance, a false, sensuous, objective life of the soul, enslavement to grief and wrath and attachment and pas- sion, are the results of the downward trend of the buddhi, — the troubled life of the ordinary, unenlightened, undisciplined man. Those who like the Vedavadins make sense-enjoyment the object of action and its fulfilment the highest aim of the soul, are misleading guides. The inner subjective self-delight independent of objects is our true aim and the high and wide poise of our peace and liberation." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-98-99, "The ego turn, the separative turn of the being, is the fulcrum of the whole embarrassed labour of the ignorance and the bondage. So long as one is not free from the ego sense, there can be no real freedom. The seat of the ego is said to be in the buddhi; it is an ignorance of the discriminating mind and reason which discriminate wrongly and take the individuation of mind, life and body for a truth of separative existence and are turned away from the greater reconciling truth of the oneness of all existence. 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, says the Gita , (The Gita-2.67)— 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. Moreover, to throw away the active sense of ego is not enough; that may merely bring an inactive state of the mentality, a certain passive inert quietude of separate being may take the place of the kinetic egoism, which is also not the true liberation. The ego sense must be replaced by a oneness with the transcendental Divine and with universal being. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-676-677 Equality, samata : "Fixed in Yoga do thy actions, having abandoned attachment, having become equal in failure and success; for it is equality that is meant by Yoga, samatwam yoga uchyate. " The Gita-2.48, "The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a perfect equality. Perfection in the sense in which we use it in Yoga, means a growth out of a lower undivine into a higher divine nature. In terms of knowledge it is a putting on the being of the higher self and a casting away of the darker broken lower self or a transforming of our imperfect state into the rounded luminous fullness of our real and spiritual personality. In terms of devotion and adoration it is a growing into a likeness of the nature or the law of the being of the Divine, to be united with whom we aspire, — for if there is not this likeness, this oneness of the law of the being, unity between that transcending and universal and this individual spirit is not possible. The supreme divine nature is founded on equality. This affirmation is true of it whether we look on the Supreme Being as a pure silent Self and Spirit or as the divine Master of cosmic existence. The pure Self is equal, unmoved, the witness in an impartial peace of all the happenings and relations of cosmic existence. While it is not averse to them, — aversion is not equality, nor, if that were the attitude of the Self to cosmic existence, could the universe come at all into being or proceed upon its cycles, — a detachment, the calm of an equal regard, a superiority to the reactions which trouble and are the disabling weakness of the soul involved in outward nature, are the very substance of the silent Infinite’s purity and the condition of its impartial assent and support to the many-sided movement of the universe. But in that power too of the Supreme which governs and develops these motions, the same equality is a basic condition." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-698, "But even a human perfection cannot dispense with equality as one of its chief elements and even its essential atmosphere. The aim of a human perfection must include, if it is to deserve the name, two things, self-mastery and a mastery of the surroundings; it must seek for them in the greatest degree of these powers which is at all attainable by our human nature. Man’s urge of self-perfection is to be, in the ancient language, svarat and samrat , self-ruler and king. But to be self-ruler is not possible for him if he is subject to the attack of the lower nature, to the turbulence of grief and joy, to the violent touches of pleasure and pain, to the tumult of his emotions and passions, to the bondage of his personal likings and dislikings, to the strong chains of desire and attachment, to the narrowness of a personal and emotionally preferential judgment and opinion, to all the hundred touches of his egoism and its pursuing stamp on his thought, feeling and action. All these things are the slavery to the lower self which the greater “I” in man must put under his feet if he is to be king of his own nature. To surmount them is the condition of self-rule; but of that surmounting again equality is the condition and the essence of the movement. To be quite free from all these things, — if possible, or at least to be master of and superior to them, — is equality. Farther, one who is not self-ruler, cannot be master of his surroundings. The knowledge, the will, the harmony which is necessary for this outward mastery, can come only as a crown of the inward conquest. It belongs to the self-possessing soul and mind which follows with a disinterested equality the Truth, the Right, the universal Largeness to which alone this mastery is possible, — following always the great ideal they present to our imperfection while it understands and makes a full allowance too for all that seems to conflict with them and stand in the way of their manifestation. This rule is true even on the levels of our actual human mentality, where we can only get a limited perfection. But the ideal of Yoga takes up this aim of Swarajya and Samrajya and puts it on the larger spiritual basis. There it gets its full power, opens to the diviner degrees of the spirit; for it is by oneness with the Infinite, by a spiritual power acting upon finite things, that some highest integral perfection of our being and nature finds its own native foundation." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-701-702 "A perfect equality not only of the self, but in the nature is a condition of the Yoga of self-perfection. The first obvious step to it will be the conquest of our emotional and vital being, for here are the sources of greatest trouble, the most rampant forces of inequality and subjection, the most insistent claim of our imperfection. The equality of these parts of our nature comes by purification and freedom. We might say that equality is the very sign of liberation. To be free from the domination of the urge of vital desire and the stormy mastery of the soul by the passions is to have a calm and equal heart and a life-principle governed by the large and even view of a universal spirit. Desire is the impurity of the Prana, the life-principle, and its chain of bondage. A free Prana means a content and satisfied life-soul which fronts the contact of outward things without desire and receives them with an equal response; delivered, uplifted above the servile duality of liking and disliking, indifferent to the urgings of pleasure and pain, not excited by the pleasant, not troubled and overpowered by the unpleasant, not clinging with attachment to the touches it prefers or violently repelling those for which it has an aversion, it will be opened to a greater system of values of experience. All that comes to it from the world with menace or with solicitation, it will refer to the higher principles, to a reason and heart in touch with or changed by the light and calm joy of the spirit. Thus quieted, mastered by the spirit and no longer trying to impose its own mastery on the deeper and finer soul in us, this life-soul will be itself spiritualised and work as a clear and noble instrument of the diviner dealings of the spirit with things. There is no question here of an ascetic killing of the life-impulse and its native utilities and functions; not its killing is demanded, but its transformation. The function of the Prana is enjoyment, but the real enjoyment of existence is an inward spiritual Ananda, not partial and troubled like that of our vital, emotional or mental pleasure, degraded as they are now by the predominance of the physical mind, but universal, profound, a massed concentration of spiritual bliss possessed in a calm ecstasy of self and all existence. Possession is its function, by possession comes the soul’s enjoyment of things, but this is the real possession, a thing large and inward, not dependent on the outward seizing which makes us subject to what we seize. All outward possession and enjoyment will be only an occasion of a satisfied and equal play of the spiritual Ananda with the forms and phenomena of its own world-being. The egoistic possession, the making things our own in the sense of the ego’s claim on God and beings and the world, parigraha, (The Gita-6.10) must be renounced in order that this greater thing, this large, universal and perfect life, may come. Tyaktena bhunjıthah, (Isha Upanishad-1) by renouncing the egoistic sense of desire and possession, the soul enjoys divinely its self and the universe." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-702-703, "The first business of the sadhaka is to see whether he has the perfect equality, how far he has gone in this direction or else where is the flaw, and to exercise steadily his will on his nature or invite the will of the Purusha to get rid of the defect and its causes. There are four things that he must have; first, equality in the most concrete practical sense of the word, samata , freedom from mental, vital, physical preferences, an even acceptance of all God’s workings within and around him; secondly, a firm peace and absence of all disturbance and trouble, santi ; thirdly, a positive inner spiritual happiness and spiritual ease of the nat- ural being which nothing can lessen, sukham ; fourthly, a clear joy and laughter of the soul embracing life and existence. To be equal is to be infinite and universal, not to limit oneself, not to bind oneself down to this or that form of the mind and life and its partial preferences and desires. But since man in his present normal nature lives by his mental and vital formations, not in the freedom of his spirit, attachment to them and the desires and preferences they involve is also his normal condition. To accept them is at first inevitable, to get beyond them exceedingly difficult and not, perhaps, altogether possible so long as we are compelled to use the mind as the chief instrument of our action. The first necessity therefore is to take at least the sting out of them, to deprive them, even when they persist, of their greater insistence, their present egoism, their more violent claim on our nature." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-721-722 The Highest Objective of a Sankhya Sadhak: "The status he reaches is the Brahmic condition; he gets to firm standing in the Brahman, brahmı sthiti. It is a reversal of the whole view, experience, knowledge, values, seeings of earth-bound creatures...he is an ocean of wide being and consciousness which is ever being filled, yet ever motionless in its large poise of his soul; all the desires of the world enter into him as waters into the sea, yet he has no desire nor is troubled . For while they are filled with the troubling sense of ego and mine and thine, he is one with the one Self in all and has no “I” or “mine”. He acts as others, but he has abandoned all desires and their longings. He attains to the great peace and is not bewildered by the shows of things; he has extinguished his individual ego in the One, lives in that unity and, fixed in that status at his end,...." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-103-104, "A new consciousness is at work upon earth to prepare the coming of the superhuman being...Open yourselves to this consciousness if you aspire to serve 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.” The Mother/The Mother’s Agenda-9th April 1969, "All animal perceptions, sensibilities, activities are ruled by nervous and vital instincts, cravings, needs, satisfactions, of which the nexus is the life-impulse and vital desire. Man too is bound, but less bound, to this automatism of the vital nature. Man can bring an enlightened will, an enlightened thought and enlightened emotions to the difficult work of his self-development; he can more and more subject to these more conscious and reflecting guides the inferior function of desire . In proportion as he can thus master and enlighten his lower self, he is man and no longer an animal. When he can begin to replace desire altogether by a still greater enlightened thought and sight and will in touch with the Infinite, consciously subject to a diviner will than his own, linked to a more universal and transcendent knowledge, he has commenced the ascent towards the superman ; he is on his upward march towards the Divine." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-80 2 / Chapter 2. Sankhya Yoga The First Necessity of an integral Sadhaka: "Our first step in this path of knowledge , having once determined in our intellect that what seems is not the Truth, that the self is not the body or life or mind, since these are only its forms, must be to set right our mind in its practical relation with the life and the body so that it may arrive at its own right relation with the Self. This it is easiest to do by a device with which we are already familiar, since it played a great part in our view of the Yoga of Works; it is to create a separation between the Prakriti and the Purusha. The Purusha , the soul that knows and commands has got himself involved in the workings of his executive conscious force, so that he mistakes this physical working of it which we call the body for himself; he forgets his own nature as the soul that knows and commands; he believes his mind and soul to be subject to the law and working of the body; he forgets that he is so much else besides that is greater than the physical form; he forgets that the mind is really greater than Matter and ought not to submit to its obscurations, reactions, habit of inertia, habit of incapacity; he forgets that he is more even than the mind, a Power which can raise the mental being above itself; that he is the Master, the Transcendent and it is not fit the Master should be enslaved to his own workings, the Transcendent imprisoned in a form which exists only as a trifle in its own being. All this forgetfulness has to be cured by the Purusha remembering his own true nature and first by his remembering that the body is only a working and only one working of Prakriti. " CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-343, " The first necessity of preparation is the purifying of all the members of our being; especially, for the path of knowledge, the purification of the understanding, the key that shall open the door of Truth ; and a purified understanding is hardly possible without the purification of the other members. An unpurified heart, an unpurified sense, an unpurified life confuse the understanding, disturb its data, distort its conclusions, darken its seeing, misapply its knowledge; an unpurified physical system clogs or chokes up its action. There must be an integral purity. Here also there is an interdependence; for the purification of each member of our being profits by the clarifying of every other, the progressive tranquillisation of the emotional heart helping for instance the purification of the understanding while equally a purified understanding imposes calm and light on the turbid and darkened workings of the yet impure emotions. It may even be said that while each member of our being has its own proper principles of purification, yet it is the purified understanding that in man is the most potent cleanser of his turbid and disordered being and most sovereignly imposes their right working on his other members. Knowledge, says the Gita, is the sovereign purity; light is the source of all clearness and harmony even as the darkness of ignorance is the cause of all our stumblings. Love, for example, is the purifier of the heart and by reducing all our emotions into terms of divine love the heart is perfected and fulfilled; yet love itself needs to be clarified by divine knowledge. The heart’s love of God may be blind, narrow and ignorant and lead to fanaticism and obscurantism; it may, even when otherwise pure, limit our perfection by refusing to see Him except in a limited personality and by recoiling from the true and infinite vision. The heart’s love of man may equally lead to distortions and exaggerations in feeling, action and knowledge which have to be corrected and prevented by the purification of the understanding.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-309 "What Science does for our knowledge of the material world, replacing first appearances and uses by the hidden truths and as yet occult powers of its great natural forces and in our own minds beliefs and opinions by verified experience and a profounder understanding, Yoga does for the higher planes and worlds and possibilities of our being which are aimed at by the religions. Therefore all this mass of graded experience existing behind closed doors to which the consciousness of man may find, if it wills, the key, falls within the province of a comprehensive Yoga of knowledge, which need not be confined to the seeking after the Absolute alone or the knowledge of the Divine in itself or of the Divine only in its isolated relations with the individual human soul. It is true that the consciousness of the Absolute is the highest reach of the Yoga of knowledge and that the possession of the Divine is its first, greatest and most ardent object and that to neglect it for an inferior knowledge is to afflict our Yoga with inferiority or even frivolity and to miss or fall away from its characteristic object; but, the Divine in itself being known, the Yoga of knowledge may well embrace also the knowledge of the Divine in its relations with ourselves and the world on the different planes of our existence. To rise to the pure Self being steadfastly held to as the summit of our subjective self-uplifting, we may from that height possess our lower selves even to the physical and the workings of Nature which belong to them." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-4 60-461, Spiritualised Intelligence and Buddhi Yoga are passages for direct contact with Supermind: “But still this line of development too is necessary, because there must be a bridge between the spirit and the intellectual reason: the light of a spiritual or at least a spiritualised intelligence is necessary for the fullness of our total inner evolution, and without it, if another deeper guidance is lacking, the inner movement may be erratic and undisciplined, turbid and mixed with unspiritual elements or one-sided or incomplete in its catholicity. For the transformation of the Ignorance into the integral Knowledge the growth in us of a spiritual intelligence ready to receive a higher light and canalise it for all the parts of our nature is an intermediate necessity of great importance .” CWSA-22/The Life Divine-913, "The test that we have done this is the presence of an undisturbed calm in the mind and spirit. The sadhaka must be on the watch as the witnessing and willing Purusha behind or, better, as soon as he can manage it, above the mind, and repel even the least indices or incidence of trouble, anxiety, grief, revolt, disturbance in his mind. If these things come, he must at once detect their source, the defect which they indicate, the fault of egoistic claim, vital desire, emotion or idea from which they start and this he must discourage by his will, his spiritualised intelligence , his soul unity with the Master of his being. On no account must he admit any excuse for them, however natural, righteous in seeming or plausible, or any inner or outer justification. If it is the prana which is troubled and clamorous, he must separate himself from the troubled prana, keep seated his higher nature in the buddhi and by the buddhi school and reject the claim of the desire-soul in him; and so too if it is the heart of emotion that makes the clamour and the disturbance. If on the other hand it is the will and intelligence itself that is at fault, then the trouble is more difficult to command, because then his chief aid and instrument becomes an accomplice of the revolt against the divine Will and the old sins of the lower members take advantage of this sanction to raise their diminished heads. Therefore there must be a constant insistence on one main idea, the self-surrender to the Master of our being, God within us and in the world, the supreme Self, the universal Spirit. The buddhi dwelling always in this master idea (self-surrender) must discourage all its own lesser insistences and preferences and teach the whole being that the ego whether it puts forth its claim through the reason, the personal will, the heart or the desire-soul in the prana , has no just claim of any kind and all grief, revolt, impatience, trouble is a violence against the Master of the being .... This complete self-surrender must be the chief mainstay of the sadhaka because it is the only way, apart from complete quiescence and indifference to all action, — and that has to be avoided , — by which the absolute calm and peace can come . The persistence of trouble, asanti , the length of time taken for this purification and perfection, itself must not be allowed to become a reason for discouragement and impatience. It comes because there is still something in the nature which responds to it, and the recurrence of trouble serves to bring out the presence of the defect , put the sadhaka upon his guard and bring about a more enlightened and consistent action of the will to get rid of it. When the trouble is too strong to be kept out, it must be allowed to pass and its return discouraged by a greater vigilance and insistence of the spiritualised buddhi . Thus persisting, it will be found that these things lose their force more and more, become more and more external and brief in their recurrence, until finally calm becomes the law of the being . This rule persists so long as the mental buddhi is the chief instrument ; but when the supramental light takes possession of mind and heart, then there can be no trouble, grief or disturbance; for that brings with it a spiritual nature of illumined strength in which these things can have no place. There the only vibrations and emotions are those which belong to the anandamaya nature of divine unity.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-722-724, “Buddhiyoga is fulfilled by karmayoga ; the Yoga of the self-liberating intelligent will finds its full meaning by the Yoga of desireless works . Thus the Gita founds its teaching of the necessity of desireless works, niskama karma , and unites the subjective practice of the Sankhyas — rejecting their merely physical rule — with the practice of Yoga.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-109, "Works are far inferior to Yoga of the intelligence , Buddhiyoga, O Dhananjaya ; desire rather refuge in the intelligence; poor and wretched souls are they who make the fruit of their works the object of their thoughts and activities. One whose intelligence has attained to unity, casts away –even here in this world of dualities –both good doing and evil doing. Therefore strive to be in Yoga; Yoga is skill in works. The sages who have united their reason and will with the Divine renounce the fruit which action yields and, liberated from the bondage of birth, they reach the status beyond misery. When thy intelligence shall cross beyond the whirl of delusion, then shalt thou become indifferent to Scripture heard or that which thou hast yet to hear. When thy intelligence which is bewildered by the Sruti, shall stand unmoving and stable in Samadhi, then shalt thou attain to Yoga." The Gita-2.49-53, "I am the birth of everything and from Me all proceeds into development of action and movement; understanding thus, the wise adore Me in rapt emotion. Their consciousness full of Me, their life wholly given up to Me, illumining each other, mutually talking about Me, they are ever contented and joyful. To these who are thus in a constant union with Me, and adore Me with an intense delight of love, I give the Yoga of understanding, Buddhiyoga , by which they come to Me. Out of compassion for them, I, lodged in their self, lift the blazing lamp of knowledge and destroy the darkness which is born of the ignorance. (This destruction of darkness hinted in the Gita is identified as Supramental action through buddhi Yoga. )" The Gita-10.8-11, It appears from Sri Aurobindo’s following writings that those whose intellect is Spiritualised or those who have practiced Buddhi Yoga of the Gita can draw direct benefit from Supramental energy, that is now active in earth’s atmosphere, “All that [ideas such as “everything will soon be spiritualised”] is absurd. The descent of the supramental means only that the Power will be there in the earth consciousness as a living force just as the thinking mental and the higher mental are already there. But an animal cannot take advantage of the presence of the thinking mental Power or an undeveloped man of the presence of the higher mental Power — so too everybody will not be able to take advantage of the presence of the supramental Power. I have also often enough said that it will be at first for the few, not for the whole earth, — only there will be a growing influence of it on the earth life.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga/p-290, "As for the conquest of death, it is only one of the sequelae of supramentalisation — and I am not aware that I have forsworn my views about the supramental descent. But I never said or thought that the supramental descent would automatically make everybody immortal. The supramental descent can only make the best conditions for anybody who can open to it then or thereafter attaining to the supramental consciousness and its consequences. But it would not dispense with the necessity of sadhana . If it did, the logical consequence would be that the whole earth, men, dogs and worms, would suddenly wake up to find themselves supramental. There would be no need of an Asram or of Yoga. " CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-312-313, “The supramental man on the contrary will think more with the universal mind or even may rise above it, and his individuality will rather be a vessel of radiation and communication to which the universal thought and knowledge of the Spirit will converge than a centre. The mental man thinks and acts in a radius determined by the smallness or largeness of his mentality and of its experience. The range of the supramental man will be all the earth and all that lies behind it on other planes of existence...Ordinarily the supramental knowledge will be organised (1) first and with the most ease in the processes of pure thought and knowledge, jnana , (Purified intellect) because here the human mind has already the upward tendency and is the most free. (2) Next and with less ease it (Supramental Knowledge) will be organised in the processes of applied thought and knowledge (tamasic, rajasic and sattwic mind ) because there the mind of man is at once most active and most bound and wedded to its inferior methods. (3) The last and most difficult conquest, because this is now to his mind a field of conjecture or a blank, will be the knowledge of the three times, trikaladristi .” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-837, 839, "And first it will be enough to take certain clues from the thinking mind; for it is there that some of the nearest keys to the supramental action are discoverable. The thought of the intuitive mind proceeds wholly by four powers that shape the form of the truth, (1) an intuition that suggests its idea, (2) an intuition that discriminates, (3) an inspiration that brings in its word and something of its greater substance and (4) a revelation that shapes to the sight its very face and body of reality." CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-813, "Intuition has a fourfold power. (1) A power of revelatory truth-seeing, (2) a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, (3) a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of its intervention in our mental intelligence, (4) a power of true and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth, — these are the fourfold potencies of Intuition.... A certain integration can thus take place, but whether it is a total integration must depend on the extent to which the new light is able to take up the subconscient and penetrate the fundamental Inconscience. Here the intuitive light and power may be hampered in its task because it is the edge of a delegated and modified supermind, but does not bring in the whole mass or body of the identity knowledge. The basis of Inconscience in our nature is too vast, deep and solid to be altogether penetrated, turned into light, transformed by an inferior power of the Truth-nature." CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-983-984, "A fourth method is one which suggests itself naturally to the developed intelligence and suits the thinking man. This is to develop our intellect instead of eliminating it, but with the will not to cherish its limitations, but to heighten its capacity, light, intensity, degree and force of activity until it borders on the thing that transcends it and can easily be taken up and transformed into that higher conscious action. This movement also is founded on the truth of our nature and enters into the course and movement of the complete Yoga of self-perfection. That course, as I have described it, included a heightening and greatening of the action of our natural instruments and powers till they constitute in their purity and essential completeness a preparatory perfection of the present normal movement of the Shakti that acts in us. The reason and intelligent will, the buddhi , is the greatest of these powers and instruments, the natural leader of the rest in the developed human being, the most capable of aiding the development of the others. The ordinary activities of our nature are all of them of use for the greater perfection we seek, are meant to be turned into material for them, and the greater their (mind, life and body) development, the richer the preparation for the supramental action. " CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-806, "Even the purest reason, the most luminous rational intellectuality is not the gnosis. Reason or intellect is only the lower buddhi ; it is dependent for its action on the percepts of the sense-mind and on the concepts of the mental intelligence. It is not like the gnosis, self-luminous, authentic, making the subject one with the object. There is, indeed, a higher form of the buddhi that can be called the intuitive mind or intuitive reason, and this by its intuitions, its inspirations, its swift revelatory vision, its luminous insight and discrimination can do the work of the reason with a higher power, a swifter action, a greater and spontaneous certitude. It acts in a self-light of the truth which does not depend upon the torch-flares of the sense-mind and its limited uncertain percepts; it proceeds not by intelligent but by visional concepts : it is a kind of truth-vision, truth-hearing, truth-memory, direct truth-discernment. This true and authentic intuition must be distinguished from a power of the ordinary mental reason which is too easily confused with it, the power of involved reasoning that reaches its conclusion by a bound and does not need the ordinary steps of the logical mind. The logical reason proceeds pace after pace and tries the sureness of each step like a man who is walking over unsafe ground and has to test by the hesitating touch of his foot each span of soil that he perceives with his eye. But this other supralogical process of the reason is a motion of rapid insight or swift discernment; it proceeds by a stride or leap, like a man who springs from one sure spot to another point of sure footing, — or at least held by him to be sure. He sees the space he covers in one compact and flashing view, but he does not distinguish or measure either by eye or touch its successions, features and circumstances . This movement has something of the sense of power of the intuition, something of its velocity, some appearance of its light and certainty, and we always are apt to take it for the intuition. But our assumption is an error and, if we trust to it, may lead us into grievous blunders." CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-477-478 The Message of this Second Chapter for a Sadhak of Integral Yoga: “There is a divine compassion which descends to us from on high and for the man whose nature does not possess it, is not cast in its mould, to pretend to be the superior man, the master-man or the superman is a folly and an insolence, for he alone is the superman who most manifests the highest nature of the Godhead in humanity. This compassion observes with an eye of love and wisdom and calm strength the battle and the struggle, the strength and weakness of man, his virtues and sins, his joy and suffering, his knowledge and his ignorance, his wisdom and his folly, his aspiration and his failure and it enters into it all to help and to heal...But it is also the divine compassion that smites down the strong tyrant and the confident oppressor, not in wrath and with hatred,...” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-58-59 "Which instrument then by its purification and perfection will bring about most easily and effectively or can aid with a most powerful rapidity the perfection of the rest?. .. Since we are the spirit enveloped in mind, a soul evolved here as a mental being in a living physical body, it must naturally be in the mind, the antahkarana , that we must look for this desideratum. And in the mind it is evidently by the buddhi , the intelligence and the will of the intelligence that the human being is intended to do whatever work is not done for him by the physical or nervous nature as in the plant and the animal. Pending the evolution of any higher supramental power the intelligent will must be our main force for effectuation and to purify it becomes a very primary necessity. Once our intelligence and will are well purified of all that limits them and gives them a wrong action or wrong direction, they can easily be perfected, can be made to respond to the suggestions of Truth, understand themselves and the rest of the being, see clearly and with a fine and scrupulous accuracy what they are doing and follow out the right way to do it without any hesitating or eager error or stumbling deviation. Eventually their (Intelligence and Will) response can be opened up to the perfect discernings, intuitions, inspirations, revelations of the supermind and proceed by a more and more luminous and even infallible action. But this purification cannot be effected without a preliminary clearing of its natural obstacles in the other lower parts of the antahkarana , and the chief natural obstacle running through the whole action of the antahkarana, through the sense, the mental sensation, emotion, dynamic impulse, intelligence, will, is the intermiscence and the compelling claim of the psychic prana . (The deformation which enters in and prevents the purity, is a form of vital craving; the grand deformation which the psychic prana contributes to our being, is desire....The psychic prana invades the sensational mind and brings into it the unquiet thirst of sensations, invades the dynamic mind with the lust of control, having, domination, success, fulfilment of every impulse, fills the emotional mind with the desire for the satisfaction of liking and disliking, for the wreaking of love and hate, brings the shrinkings and panics of fear and the strainings and disappointments of hope, imposes the tortures of grief and the brief fevers and excitements of joy, makes the intelligence and intelligent will the accomplices of all these things and turns them in their own kind into deformed and lame instruments, the will into a will of craving and the intelligence into a partial, a stumbling and an eager pursuer of limited, impatient, militant prejudgment and opinion... The proper action of the psychic prana is pure possession and enjoyment, bhoga .)This then must be dealt with, its dominating intermiscence ruled out, its claim denied, itself quieted and prepared for purification." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-654-655, "It is therefore an immense gain if we can acquire the capacity of always being able at will to command an absolute tranquillity and silence of the mind free from any necessity of mental thought or movement and disturbance and, based in that silence, allow thought and will and feeling to happen in us only when the Shakti wills it and when it is needful for the divine purpose. It becomes easier then to change the manner and character of the thought and will and feeling. Nevertheless it is not the fact that by this method the supramental light will immediately replace the lower mind and reflective reason. When the inner action proceeds after the silence, (Psychic action) even if it be then a more predominatingly intuitive thought and movement, (Spiritual action) the old powers will yet interfere, if not from within, then by a hundred suggestions from without, and an inferior mentality will mix in, will question or obstruct or will try to lay hold on the greater movement and to lower or darken or distort or minimise it in the process. Therefore the necessity of a process of elimination or transformation of the inferior mentality remains always imperative , — or perhaps both at once, (1) an elimination of all that is native to the lower being, its disfiguring accidents, its depreciations of value, its distortions of substance and all else that the greater truth cannot harbour, and (2) a transformation of the essential things our mind derives from the supermind and spirit but represents in the manner of the mental ignorance." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-803 3 / Chapter 3. Karma Yoga Summary or A Brief Restatement: This chapter gives the message that desire is our greatest enemy, jahi kamam durasadam, ' this enemy in the form of desire, who is so hard to assail.' (The Gita-3.43) Desire has its root in the Inconscient sheath. Savitri book has identified that the key to the problem of existence is there in the Inconscient Sheath. "For the key is hid and by the Inconscient kept; The secret God beneath the threshold dwells." (Savitri-68) This problem of desire is resolved by discovery of the Inconscient Self, the secret God beneath the threshold. King Aswapati experienced the tearing of desire from its Inconscient root. 'He tore desire up from its bleeding roots And offered to the gods the vacant place.' (Savitri-318) This chapter also hints about the key of Karma Yoga which is identified as maye sarvani karmani sannyasya, (The Gita-3.30) surrendering the whole action into the Divine's hand by renouncing desire, ego, attachment and the three Gunas . The Knowledge of Wheel of Works as hinted in the Gita is identified as crucial in Integral Yoga in reconciling Matter and Spirit. “From Matter, anna , creatures come into being, from rain is the birth of Matter (food), from sacrifice comes into being the rain (Divine Grace), sacrifice is born of work; work know to be born of Brahman (Divine Will), Brahman (Divine Will) is born of Immutable (Chit Shakti ), therefore is the all-pervading Brahman Consciousness (Chit Shakti) is established in Matter by continuous sacrifice, nitya Yajna. He who follows not here this wheel of works, evam pravartitam chakram , thus set in movement, evil is his being, sensual is his delight, in vain, O Partha that man lives.” (The Gita-3.14, 15, 16,) In Integral Yoga, the wheel of Works is given much importance and its value has been much widened and developed. “This earth is not alone our teacher and nurse; The powers of all the worlds have entrance here. In their own fields they follow the wheel of law. (This wheel of Law is the same as the wheel of works.) And cherish the safety of a settled type; On earth out of their changeless orbit thrown Their law is kept, lost their fixed form of things.” Savitri-153 “This seeming driver of her wheel of works Missioned to motive and record her drift And fix its law on her inconstant powers, This master-spring of a delicate enginery, Aspired to enlighten its user and refine Lifting to a vision of the indwelling Power The absorbed mechanic’s crude initiative:” Savitri-158 “No silent peak is found where Time can rest. This was a magic stream that reached no sea. However far he went, wherever turned, The wheel of works ran with him and outstripped; Always a farther task was left to do.” Savitri-197 “He (Divine) dwells in me, (Savitri) the mover of my acts, Turning the great wheel of his cosmic work . I am the living body of his light, I am the thinking instrument of his power, I incarnate Wisdom in an earthly breast, I am his conquering and unslayable will. The formless Spirit drew in me its shape; In me are the Nameless and the secret Name.” Savitri-634 (Nameless is the Spiritual being and secret Name is the Psychic being.) “A vision shall compel thy coursing breath, Thy heart shall drive thee on the wheel of works, Thy mind shall urge thee through the flames of thought, To meet me in the abyss and on the heights, To feel me in the tempest and the calm, And love me in the noble and the vile, In beautiful things and terrible desire.” Savitri-700 "It is the old methods of yoga which demand silence and solitude...The yoga of tomorrow is to find the Divine in work and in relation with the world." The Mother/TMCW/Vol-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-49, "Equality, renunciation of all desire for the fruit of our works, action done as a sacrifice to the supreme Lord of our nature and of all nature, — these are the three first Godward approaches in the Gita’s way of Karmayoga." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-105, "... what is meant by action done as Yoga, Karmayoga ? It is non-attachment, it is to do works without clinging with the mind to the objects of sense and the fruit of the works. Not complete inaction, which is an error, a confusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless and unattached works, are the first secret of perfection." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-108-109, "The first step on this long path is to consecrate all our works as a sacrifice to the Divine in us and in the world; this is an attitude of the mind and heart, not too difficult to initiate, but very difficult to make absolutely sincere and all-pervasive. The second step is to renounce attachment to the fruit of our works; for the only true, inevitable and utterly desirable fruit of sacrifice — the one thing needful — is the Divine Presence and the Divine Consciousness and Power in us, and if that is gained, all else will be added. This is a transformation of the egoistic will in our vital being, our desire-soul and desire-nature, and it is far more difficult than the other. The third step is to get rid of the central egoism and even the ego-sense of the worker. That is the most difficult transformation of all and it cannot be perfectly done if the first two steps have not been taken; but these first steps too cannot be completed unless the third comes in to crown the movement and, by the extinction of egoism, eradicates the very origin of desire. Only when the small ego-sense is rooted out from the nature can the seeker know his true person that stands above as a portion and power of the Divine and renounce all motive-force other than the will of the Divine Shakti. " CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p- 247-248, The Lord of Sacrifice: "“For with sacrifice as their companion,” says the Gita, “the All-Father created these peoples. ” (The Gita-3.10) The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and completer, a diviner All which demands from it subordination and service. Indeed, sacrifice is imposed and, where need be, compelled by the universal World-Force; it takes it even from those who do not consciously recognise the law, — inevitably, because this is the intrinsic nature of things. Our ignorance or our false egoistic view of life can make no difference to this eternal bedrock truth of Nature. For this is the truth in Nature, that this ego which thinks itself a separate independent being and claims to live for itself, is not and cannot be independent nor separate, nor can it live to itself even if it would, but rather all are linked together by a secret Oneness." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-106, "Life is an altar to which she brings her workings and the fruits of her workings and lays them before whatever aspect of the Divinity the consciousness in her has reached for whatever result of the sacrifice the desire of the living soul can seize on as its immediate or its highest good.... A mutual giving and receiving is the law of Life without which it cannot for one moment endure, and this fact is the stamp of the divine creative Will on the world it has manifested in its being, the proof that with sacrifice as their eternal companion the Lord of creatures has created all these existences. (The Gita-3.10) The universal law of sacrifice is the sign that the world is of God and belongs to God and that life is his dominion and house of worship and not a field for the self-satisfaction of the independent ego ; not the fulfilment of the ego, — that is only our crude and obscure beginning, — but the discovery of God, the worship and seeking of the Divine and the Infinite through a constantly enlarging sacrifice culminating in a perfect self-giving founded on a perfect self-knowledge, is that to which the experience of life is at last intended to lead .” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-125-126, “Sacrifice is the very condition of life; with sacrifice as their eternal companion the Father of creatures created the peoples. But the sacrifices of the Vedavadins are offerings of desire directed towards material rewards, desire eager for the result of works, desire looking to a larger enjoyment in Paradise as immortality and highest salvation. This the system of the Gita cannot admit; for that in its very inception starts with the renunciation of desire, with its rejection and destruction as the enemy of the soul. ” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-89-90, “With sacrifice the Lord of creatures of old created creatures and said: By this shall you bring forth (fruits or offspring), let this be your milker of desires. Foster by this the gods and let the gods foster you; fostering each other, you shall attain to the supreme good. Fostered by sacrifice the gods shall give you desired enjoyments: who enjoys their given enjoyments and has not given to them, he is a thief. ” The Gita-3.10, 11, 12 "Only when the heart, the will and the mind of knowledge associate themselves with the law and gladly follow it, can there come the deep joy and the happy fruitfulness of divine sacrifice. The mind’s knowledge of the law and the heart’s gladness in it culminate in the perception that it is to our own Self and Spirit and the one Self and Spirit of all that we give. And this is true even when our self-offering is still to our fellow-creatures or to lesser Powers and Principles and not yet to the Supreme. “Not for the sake of the wife,” says Yajnavalkya in the (Brihadaranyaka) Upanishad, “but for the sake of the Self is the wife dear to us.” This in the lower sense of the individual self is the hard fact behind the coloured and passionate professions of egoistic love; but in a higher sense it is the inner significance of that love too which is not egoistic but divine. All true love and all sacrifice are in their essence Nature’s contradiction of the primary egoism and its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from which we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-107 Lokasangraha, Gathering together of people encouraged in Integral Yoga: "The works of sacrifice are thus vindicated as a means of liberation and absolute spiritual perfection, samsiddhi (The Gita-3.20). So Janaka and other great Karmayogins of the mighty ancient Yoga attained to perfection, by equal and desireless works done as a sacrifice, without the least egoistic aim or attachment — karmanaiva hi samsiddhim asthita janakadayah . (The Gita-3.20) So too and with the same desirelessness, after liberation and perfection, works can and have to be continued by us in a large divine spirit, with the calm high nature of a spiritual royalty. “Thou shouldst do works regarding also the holding together of the peoples, lokasangraham evapi sampasyan kartum arhasi . (The Gita-3.20) Whatsoever the Best doeth, that the lower kind of man puts into practice; the standard he creates, the people follows. O son of Pritha , I have no work that I need to do in all the three worlds, I have nothing that I have not gained and have yet to gain, and I abide verily in the paths of action ,” varta eva cha karmani , (The Gita-3.22) — eva implying, I abide in it and do not leave it as the Sannyasin thinks himself bound to abandon works. “For if I did not abide sleeplessly in the paths of action, men follow in every way my path, these peoples would sink to destruction if I did not works and I should be the creator of confusion and slay these creatures. As those who know not act with attachment to the action, he who knows should act without attachment , having for his motive to hold together the peoples . He should not create a division of their understanding in the ignorant who are attached to their works; he should set them to all actions, doing them himself with knowledge and in Yoga. ” (The Gita-3.23 to 26)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-135-136, "The motive cannot be personal desire on the intellectual, moral, emotional level, for that has been abandoned, — even the moral motive has been abandoned, since the liberated man has passed beyond the lower distinction of sin and virtue, lives in a glorified purity beyond good and evil. It cannot be the spiritual call to his perfect self-development by means of disinterested works, for the call has been answered, the development is perfect and fulfilled. His motive of action can only be the holding together of the peoples, chikırsur lokasangraham . (The Gita-3.25)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-138, "The whole world is moving towards this dharma , each man according to his capacity, — “it is my path that men follow in every way ,” (The Gita-3.23)— and the God-seeker, making himself one with all, making their joy and sorrow and all their life his own, the liberated made already one self with all beings, lives in the life of humanity, lives for the one Self in humanity, for God in all beings, acts for lokasangraha , for the maintaining of all in their dharma and the Dharma , for the maintenance of their growth in all its stages and in all its paths towards the Divine. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-174, "Therefore Arjuna is bidden to resist, to fight, to conquer; but, to fight without hatred or personal desire or personal enmity or antagonism, since to the liberated soul these feelings are impossible. To act for the lokasangraha , impersonally, for the keeping and leading of the peoples on the path to the divine goal, is a rule which rises necessarily from the oneness of the soul with the Divine, the universal Being, since that is the whole sense and drift of the universal action. Nor does it conflict with our oneness with all beings, even those who present themselves here as opponents and enemies." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-210, "The highest way appointed for him is to carry out the will of God without egoism, as the human occasion and instrument of that which he sees to be decreed, with the constant supporting memory of the Godhead in himself and man, mam anusmaran , (The Gita-8.13) and in whatever ways are appointed for him by the Lord of his Nature. Nimittamatram bhava savyasachin . (The Gita-11.33) He will not cherish personal enmity, anger, hatred, egoistic desire and passion, will not hasten towards strife or lust after violence and destruction like the fierce Asura , but he will do his work, lokasangrahaya . " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-386, "But it would seem that this can be attained very well, best even, pre-eminently, directly, by the quiescence of Sannyasa . Its appointed path would seem to be the way of the Akshara , a complete renunciation of works and life, an ascetic seclusion, an ascetic inaction. Where is the room here, or at least where is the call, the necessity, for the command to action, and what has all this to do with the maintenance of the cosmic existence, lokasangraha , the slaughter of Kurukshetra , the ways of the Spirit in Time, the vision of the million-bodied Lord and his high-voiced bidding, “Arise, slay the foe, enjoy a wealthy kingdom”? And what then is this soul in Nature? This spirit too, this Kshara , this enjoyer of our mutable existence, is the Purushottama ; it is he in his eternal multiplicity, that is the Gita’s answer. “It is an eternal portion of me that becomes the Jiva in a world of Jivas. ” (The Gita-15.7)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-444-445, "Mankind upon earth is one foremost self-expression of the universal Being in His cosmic self-unfolding; he expresses, under the conditions of the terrestrial world he inhabits, the mental power of the universal existence. All mankind is one in its nature, physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been in spite of all differences of intellectual development ranging from the poverty of the Bushman and negroid to the rich cultures of Asia and Europe , and the whole race has, as the human totality, one destiny which it seeks and increasingly approaches in the cycles of progression and retrogression it describes through the countless millenniums of its history. Nothing which any individual race or nation can triumphantly realise, no victory of their self-aggrandisement, illumination, intellectual achievement or mastery over the environment, has any permanent meaning or value except in so far as it adds something or recovers something or preserves something for this human march. The purpose which the ancient Indian scripture offers to us as the true object of all human action , lokasangraha, the holding together of the race in its cyclic evolution, is the constant sense, whether we know it or know it not, of the sum of our activities." CWSA-25/The Human Cycle/p-66-67, In The Life Divine , Sri Aurobindo has hinted that to generalise the highest Spiritual truth in humanity is a task of Religion and given to the Religious Leaders to accomplish. He pointed out that, “Another untoward result or peril of the diffusive movement (of self-expansion) and the consequent invasion has been the intellectual formalisation of spiritual knowledge into dogma and the materialisation of living practice into a dead mass of cult and ceremony and ritual, a mechanisation by which the spirit was bound to depart in course of time from the body of the religion. But this risk (of generalisation of Spirituality) had to be taken , for the expansive movement was an inherent necessity of the spiritual urge in evolutionary Nature.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-903, "The Gita declares that the action of the liberated man must be directed not by desire, but towards the keeping together of the world, its government, guidance, impulsion, maintenance in the path appointed to it. This injunction has been interpreted in the sense that the world being an illusion in which most men must be kept, since they are unfit for liberation, he must so act outwardly as to cherish in them an attachment to their customary works laid down for them by the social law. If so, it would be a poor and petty rule and every noble heart would reject it to follow rather the divine vow of Amitabha Buddha, the sublime prayer of the Bhagavata, the passionate aspiration of Vivekananda . But if we accept rather the view that the world is a divinely guided movement of Nature emerging in man towards God and that this is the work in which the Lord of the Gita declares that he is ever occupied although he himself has nothing ungained that he has yet to win, then a deep and true sense will appear for this great injunction. To participate in that divine work, to live for God in the world will be the rule of the Karmayogin ; to live for God in the world and therefore so to act that the Divine may more and more manifest himself and the world go forward by whatever way of its obscure pilgrimage and move nearer to the divine ideal. " CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-272, "In other words, no matter how great he may be, no matter how conscious, how powerful, ONE avatar all alone cannot realize the supramental life on earth. Either a group in time, a number of individuals staggered over a certain period of time, or a group spread over a certain space- or may be both is indispensable for this Realisation. I am convinced of it." The Mother’s Agenda/Vol-3/p-158, "But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who have reached the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape; a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance." SABCL-20/196, "All mankind is one in its nature, physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been in spite of all differences of intellectual development ranging from the poverty of the Bushman and negroid to the rich cultures of Asia and Europe, and the whole race has, as the human totality, one destiny which it seeks and increasingly approaches in the cycles of progression and retrogression it describes through the countless millenniums of its history. Nothing which any individual race or nation can triumphantly realise, no victory of their self-aggrandisement, illumination, intellectual achievement or mastery over the environment, has any permanent meaning or value except in so far as it adds something or recovers something or preserves something for this human march. The purpose which the ancient Indian scripture offers to us as the true object of all human action, lokasangraha , the holding together of the race in its cyclic evolution, is the constant sense, whether we know it or know it not, of the sum of our activities." CWSA-25/The Human Cycle/p-67, “For it is in God alone, by the possession of the Divine only that all the discords of life can be resolved, and therefore the raising of men towards the Divine is in the end the one effective way of helping mankind . All other activities and realizations of our self-experience have their use and power, but in the end these crowded side-tracks or these lonely paths must circle round to converge into the wideness of the integral way by which the liberated soul transcends all, embraces all and becomes the promise and the power of the fulfillment of all in their manifested being of the Divine.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-445 Lokasangraha , or the gathering together of people is discouraged through Integral Yoga: “It may be said generally that to be overanxious to pull people, especially very young people, into the sadhana is not wise. The sadhak who comes to this Yoga must have a real call, and even with the real call the way is often difficult enough. But when one pulls people in in a spirit of enthusiastic propagandism, the danger is of lighting an imitative and unreal fire, not the true Agni, or else a short-lived fire which cannot last and is submerged by the uprush of the vital waves. This is especially so with young people who are plastic and easily caught hold of by ideas and communicated feelings not their own — afterwards the vital rises with its unsatisfied demands and they are swung between two contrary forces or rapidly yield to the strong pull of the ordinary life and action and satisfaction of desire which is the natural bent of adolescence. Or else the unfit adhara tends to suffer under the stress of a call for which it was not ready, or at least not yet ready. When one has the real thing in oneself, one goes through and finally takes the full way of sadhana , but it is only a minority that does so. It is better to receive only people who come of themselves and of these only those in whom the call is genuinely their own and persistent.” CWSA-35/The Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-691-692, "It is not intended to supramentalise humanity at large, but to establish the principle of the supramental consciousness in the earth-evolution. If that is done, all that is needed will be evolved by the supramental Power itself. It is not therefore important that the mission should be widespread. What is important is that the thing should be done at all in however small a number; that is the only difficulty…It would therefore be a waste of time and energy which should be devoted to the preliminary work psychicisation and spiritualisation of the being and nature without which no supramentalisation is possible.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-288-290, “All that [ideas such as “everything will soon be spiritualised”] is absurd. The descent of the supramental means only that the Power will be there in the earth consciousness as a living force just as the thinking mental and the higher mental are already there. But an animal cannot take advantage of the presence of the thinking mental Power or an undeveloped man of the presence of the higher mental Power — so too everybody will not be able to take advantage of the presence of the supramental Power. I have also often enough said that it will be at first for the few, not for the whole earth, — only there will be a growing influence of it on the earth life.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-290, “To concentrate most on one’s own spiritual growth and experience is the first necessity of the sadhak — to be too eager to help others draws away from the inner work. There is also likely to be an overzeal and haste which clouds the discrimination and makes what help is given less effective than it should be. To grow in the spirit is the greatest help one can give to others, for then something flows out naturally to those around that helps them.” CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-317, “The idea of helping others is a subtle form of the ego. It is only the Divine Force that can help. One can be its instrument, but you should first learn to be a fit and egoless instrument.” CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-318, “The best way to help the world is to transform oneself by an integral and intensive yoga .” The Mother/TMCW-14/Words of The Mother-II/p-277, "Certainly, a great step will be taken when it becomes natural for man to seek to perfect himself instead of expecting perfection in others …. That reversal is at the basis of all true progress. The first human instinct is, “It’s the fault of circumstances, it’s people’s fault, it’s … See how this fellow is, how that fellow is, how …” And it goes on indefinitely. The FIRST STEP, the very first step is to say, “If I were as I should be, or if the body were as it should be, all would be perfectly all right for it.” If, to make progress, you wait for others to do so, you can wait indefinitely...That’s the first thing that should be spread everywhere... Never lay the blame on others or on circumstances because whatever the circumstances may be, even apparently the worst, if you are in the true attitude and have the true consciousness, it doesn’t matter in the least for your inner progress, not in the least –and I’ll say, including death... That really seems to be the first lesson to be learned." The Mother's Agenda/December 10/1969, "The best way of helping others is to transform oneself. Be perfect and you will be in a position to bring perfection to the world." The Mother/TMCW-14/Words of The Mother-II/p-276, “That is all right in the ordinary karmayoga which aims at union with the cosmic Spirit and stops short at the Overmind — but here a special work has to be done and a new realisation achieved for the earth and not for ourselves alone. It is necessary to stand apart from the rest of the world so as to separate ourselves from the ordinary consciousness in order to bring down a new one… It is not that love for all is not part of the sadhana , but it has not to translate itself at once into a mixing with all — it can only express itself in a general and when need be dynamic universal goodwill, but for the rest it must find vent (outlet or finding a passage) in this labour of bringing down the higher consciousness with all its effect for the earth. As for accepting the working of the Divine in all things that is necessary here too in the sense of seeing it even behind our struggles and difficulties, but not accepting the nature of man and the world as it is — our aim is to move towards a more divine working which will replace what now is by a greater and happier manifestation. That too is a labour of divine Love.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram- 812-813, “There must come upon us in the change at once a reversal and rejection of our present way of existence and a fulfilment of its inner trend and tendency.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1012, If a liberated Soul’s consciousness is universalised, then through the movement of his Consciousness, many unknown Souls in distant lands will be liberated. Thus, the task of the liberated Soul of liberating others is accomplished or earth “Knows that one high step might enfranchise all.” Savitri-371, “I suppose I myself am accused of rude and arrogant behaviour because I refuse to see people, do not answer letters, and a host of other misdemeanours. I have heard of a famous recluse who threw stones at anybody coming to his retreat because he did not want disciples and found no other way of warding off the flood of candidates. I at least would hesitate to pronounce that such people had no spiritual life or experience. Certainly, I prefer that sadhaks should be reasonably considerate towards each other, but that is for the sake of collective life and harmony, not as a siddhi of the Yoga or an indispensable sign of inner experience.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV-656, “You must not hunger after any relations with anyone. The relations of the sadhaka with others must be created for him from within, when he has the true consciousness and lives in the Light. They will be determined within him by the power and will of the Divine 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.” CWSA-32/The Mother and Letters on the Mother-142, "But even when you have the vision of the true thing, it’s RARELY wise to intervene. It becomes indispensable only if someone wants to do something that will necessarily end in a catastrophe. And even then (smiling), the intervention isn’t always very effective... Ultimately, it’s only when you are absolutely sure you have the vision of the truth that it’s legitimate to intervene. Not only that, but also the clear vision of consequences. In order to intervene in another’s actions, you must be a prophet—a prophet. A prophet with total benevolence and compassion. You must even have the vision of the consequence the intervention will have in other’s destiny. People are constantly giving each other advice: “Do this, don’t do that.” I see that, they don’t realize the extent to which they create confusion, they add to the confusion and disorder. And sometimes they harm the individual’s normal development... I consider opinions to be always dangerous things, and most of the time without any value whatever... You should interfere in another’s affairs only if, first, you are infinitely wiser than the other (of course, you always think you are wiser!), but I mean, objectively and not according to your own opinion: if you see more, better, and if you are yourself beyond passions, desires, blind reactions. You must yourself be above all those things in order to have the right to intervene in another’s life—even when they ask you to. And when they don’t ask you to, it’s simply interfering in other people’s business." The Mother’s Agenda/Vol.-7/p-198-199, “As for the people who want to draw others to the Yoga, I should say that if they draw themselves nearer to the inner goal that would be a much more fruitful activity. And in the end it would “draw” much more people and in a better way than the writing of many letters.” CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-325, "This “helping others” is a perilous business — it brings the “guru ” ego or else you very uncertainly rid others of their difficulties and very certainly get them yourself. “Why do you have all these disciples?” said a sage to some Maratha saint (I have forgotten the names); “to have disciples means to add all their difficulties to your own.” “Helping others” has the same disadvantage." CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-318, "In “helping” one often gets part of the other’s inconvenience and many Yogis refuse to take disciples because they will have to assume others’ burdens as well as their own. There are also other dangers — growth of ego etc." CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-319, “One thing only I can tell you that whatever the sincerity, simplicity and purity of the relation between two human beings, it shuts them off more or less from the direct divine force and help and limits their strength, light and power only to the sum of their potentialities.” The Mother/TMCW/Vol-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-120 Lokasangraha is thoroughly discouraged in Savitri : “For those who are eager to get rid of falsehood, here is a way: Do not try to please yourself, do not try either to please others. Try only to please the Lord…Because He alone is the Truth. Each and every one of us, human beings in our physical body, is a coat of falsehood put on the Lord and hiding Him…As He alone is true to Himself, it is on Him that we must concentrate and not on the coats of falsehood.” The Mother/TMCW/15/Words of the Mother-III/80, TMCW/14/Words of the Mother-II/196, "Whoever is too great must lonely live. Adored he walks in mighty solitude; Vain is his labour to create his kind, His only comrade is the Strength within." Savitri-368 "And Savitri mingling in that glorious crowd, Yearning to the spiritual light they bore, Longed once to hasten like them to save God’s world; But she reined back the high passion in her heart; She knew that first she must discover her soul. Only who save themselves can others save. " Savitri-501 Death said to Para-prakriti Savitri: “If Satyavan had lived, love would have died; But Satyavan is dead and love shall live A little while in thy sad breast, until His face and body fade on memory’s wall Where other bodies, other faces come.” Savitri-610, (Human admirers will replace Paramatma. ) (Death said) “What knowst thou of earth’s rich and changing life Who thinkst that one man dead all joy must cease? Hope not to be unhappy till the end: For grief dies soon in the tired human heart; Soon other guests the empty chambers fill. ” Savitri-637, (Human admirers will replace Paramatma. ) Death said to Para-prakriti Savitri: “Return and try thy soul! Soon shalt thou find appeased that other men (human admirers will replace Paramatma .) On lavish earth have beauty, strength and truth, And when thou hast half forgotten, one of these Shall wind himself around thy heart that needs Some human answering heart against thy breast; For who, being mortal, can dwell glad alone? Then Satyavan shall glide into the past, (Satyavan is the symbol of Paramatma ) A gentle memory pushed away from thee By new love and thy children’s tender hands, Till thou shalt wonder if thou lov’dst at all. Such is the life earth’s travail has conceived, A constant stream that never is the same.” Savitri-637-638 “In moments when the inner lamps are lit And the life’s cherished guests are left outside, Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.” Savitri-47 (Spirit alone can bridge the gulf between different planes or ten subtle bodies.) The Two Levels of Consciousness: "But the consciousness of man is of a double kind and corresponds to a double truth of existence; for there is a truth of the inner reality and a truth of the outer appearance. According as he lives in one or the other, he will be a mind dwelling in human ignorance or a soul founded in divine knowledge." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-573, “There is a state of being experienced in Yoga in which we become a double consciousness, (1) one on the surface, small, active, ignorant, swayed by thoughts and feelings, grief and joy and all kinds of reactions, (2) the other within calm, vast, equal, observing the surface being with an immovable detachment or indulgence or, it may be, acting upon its agitation to quiet, enlarge, transform it.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-360, "The perception of the ignorance of our assumption of freedom while one is all the time in the meshes of this lower nature, is the view-point at which the Gita arrives and it is in contradiction to this ignorant claim that it affirms the complete subjection of the ego-soul on this plane to the gunas. “While the actions are being entirely done by the modes of Nature,” it says, “he whose self is bewildered by egoism thinks that it is his ‘I’ which is doing them. But one who knows the true principles of the divisions of the modes and of works, realises that it is the modes which are acting and reacting on each other and is not caught in them by attachment. Those who are bewildered by the modes, get attached to the modes and their works; dull minds, not knowers of the whole, let not the knower of the whole disturb them in their mental standpoint. Giving up thy works to Me, free from desire and egoism, fight delivered from the fever of thy soul.” Here there is the clear distinction between two levels of consciousness , two standpoints of action, that of the soul caught in the web of its egoistic nature and doing works with the idea, but not the reality of free will, under the impulsion of Nature, and that of the soul delivered from its identification with the ego, observing, sanctioning and governing the works of Nature from above her." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-214-215, “This, no doubt, is the root of the injunction imposed in the Gita (The Gita-3.29) on the man who has the knowledge not to disturb the life basis and thought basis of the ignorant; for impelled by his example but unable to comprehend the principle of his action, they would lose their own system of values without arriving at a higher foundation.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-58, “Then there were the few—the rare individuals —who are ready to make the necessary effort to prepare themselves for the transformation and to attract the new forces, try to adapt matter, seek the means of expression and so forth. Those are ready for Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga . They are very few . There are even those who have the sense of sacrifice and are ready have a hard and difficult life, as long as it leads them or helps them towards this future transformation. But they should not, they should in no way try to influence others and make them share their own effort: that would be quite unjust – not only unjust, but extremely clumsy because it would alter the universal – or at least terrestrial – rhythm and movement, and instead of helping, it would cause conflicts and result in chaos.” The Mother Agenda/27th November, 1965, “In fact, the creative Consciousness-Force in our earth existence has to lead forward, in an almost simultaneous process but with a considerable priority and greater stress of the inferior element, a double evolution . (1) There is an evolution of our outward nature, the nature of the mental being in the life and body, and (2) there is within it, pressing forward for self-revelation because with the emergence of mind that revelation is becoming possible, a preparation at least, even the beginning of an evolution of our inner being, our occult subliminal and spiritual nature... But if her intention is a comprehensive change of the being, this double evolution is intelligible and justifies itself; for it is for that purpose indispensable. ” CWSA-22/The Life Divine-890, “Or, again, we can posit a double consciousness of Brahman the Reality, (1) one static and (2) one dynamic, (1) one essential and spiritual in which it is Self perfect and absolute, (2) another formative, pragmatic, in which it becomes not-self and with which its absoluteness and perfection have no concern of participation; for it is only a temporal formation in the timeless Reality.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-415 The First Rule of Karma Yoga : "What then are the lines of Karmayoga laid down by the Gita? Its key principle, its spiritual method, can be summed up as the union of two largest and highest states or powers of consciousness, equality and oneness. The kernel of its method is an unreserved acceptance of the Divine in our life as in our inner self (Psychic being) and spirit (Spiritual being). An inner renunciation of personal desire leads to equality, accomplishes our total surrender to the Divine, supports a delivery from dividing ego which brings us oneness. But this must be a oneness in dynamic force and not only in static peace or inactive beatitude. The Gita promises us freedom for the spirit even in the midst of works and the full energies of Nature, if we accept subjection of our whole being to that which is higher than the separating and limiting ego. It proposes an integral dynamic activity founded on a still passivity; a largest possible action irrevocably based on an immobile calm is its secret, — free expression out of a supreme inward silence." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p- 95, " In the field of action desire takes many forms, but the most powerful of all is the vital self’s craving or seeking after the fruit of our works. The fruit we covet may be a reward of internal pleasure; it may be the accomplishment of some preferred idea or some cherished will or the satisfaction of the egoistic emotions, or else the pride of success of our highest hopes and ambitions. Or it may be an external reward, a recompense entirely material, wealth, position, honour, victory, good fortune or any other fulfilment of vital or physical desire. But all alike are lures by which egoism holds us. Always these satisfactions delude us with the sense of mastery and the idea of freedom, while really we are harnessed and guided or ridden and whipped by some gross or subtle, some noble or ignoble, figure of the blind Desire that drives the world. Therefore the first rule of action laid down by the Gita is to do the work that should be done without any desire for the fruit, niskama karma ... And to our partial self-discipline we give various names and forms; we habituate ourselves by practice to the sense of duty, to a firm fidelity to principle, a stoical fortitude or a religious resignation, a quiet or an ecstatic submission to God’s will. But it is not these things that the Gita intends, useful though they are in their place; it aims at something absolute, unmitigated, uncompromising, a turn, an attitude that will change the whole poise of the soul. Not the mind’s control of vital impulse is its rule, but the strong immobility of an immortal spirit." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p- 102-103, " Whoever sincerely enters the path of works, must leave behind him the stage in which need and desire are the first law of our acts . For whatever desires still trouble his being, he must, if he accepts the high aim of Yoga, put them away from him into the hands of the Lord within us. The supreme Power will deal with them for the good of the sadhaka and for the good of all. In effect, we find that once this surrender is done, — always provided the rejection is sincere, — egoistic indulgence of desire may for some time recur under the continued impulse of past nature but only in order to exhaust its acquired momentum and to teach the embodied being in his most unteachable part, his nervous, vital, emotional nature, by the reactions of desire, by its grief and unrest bitterly contrasted with calm periods of the higher peace or marvellous movements of divine Ananda, that egoistic desire is not a law for the soul that seeks liberation or aspires to its own original god-nature. Afterwards the element of desire in those impulsions will be thrown away or persistently eliminated by a constant denying and transforming pressure. Only the pure force of action in them (pravritti) justified by an equal delight in all work and result that is inspired or imposed from above will be preserved in the happy harmony of a final perfection. To act, to enjoy is the normal law and right of the nervous being; but to choose by personal desire its action and enjoyment is only its ignorant will, not its right. Alone the supreme and universal Will must choose; action must change into a dynamic movement of that Will; enjoyment must be replaced by the play of a pure spiritual Ananda . All personal will is either a temporary delegation from on high or a usurpation by the ignorant Asura ." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p- 209-210, “The first step on this free, this equal, this divine way of action is to put from you attachment to fruit and recompense and to labour only for the sake of the work itself that has to be done. For you must deeply feel that the fruits belong not to you but to the Master of the world. Consecrate your labour and leave its returns to the Spirit who manifests and fulfils himself in the universal movement. The outcome of your action is determined by his will alone and whatever it be, good or evil fortune, success or failure, it is turned by him to the accomplishment of his world purpose. An entirely desireless and disinterested working of the personal will and the whole instrumental nature is the first rule of Karmayoga . Demand no fruit, accept whatever result is given to you; accept it with equality and a calm gladness: successful or foiled, prosperous or afflicted, continue unafraid, untroubled and unwavering on the steep path of the divine action... This is no more than the first step on the path. For you must be not only unattached to results, but unattached also to your labour. Cease to regard your works as your own; as you have abandoned the fruits of your work, so you must surrender the work also to the Lord of action and sacrifice. Recognise that your nature determines your action; your nature rules the immediate motion of your Swabhava and decides the expressive turn and development of your spirit in the paths of the executive force of Prakriti . Bring in no longer any self-will to confuse the steps of your mind in following the Godward way. Accept the action proper to your nature. Make of all you do from the greatest and most unusual effort to the smallest daily act , make of each act of your mind, each act of your heart, each act of your body, of every inner and outer turn, of every thought and will and feeling, of every step and pause and movement, a sacrifice to the Master of all sacrifice and Tapasya ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-586-587, “Above all, the psychic being imposes on life the law of the sacrifice of all its works as an offering to the Divine and the Eternal. Life becomes a call to that which is beyond Life; its every smallest act enlarges with the sense of the Infinite.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-179, “In work too there is an austerity. It consists in not having any preferences and in doing everything one does with interest. For one who wants to grow in self-perfection, there are no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for progress and self-mastery. It is said that one only does well what one is interested in doing. This is true, but it is truer still that one can learn to find interest in everything one does, even in what appear to be the most insignificant chores. The secret of this attainment lies in the urge towards self-perfection. Whatever occupation or task falls to your lot, you must do it with a will to progress; whatever one does, one must not only do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better in a constant effort for perfection. In this way everything without exception becomes interesting, from the most material chore to the most artistic and intellectual work. The scope for progress is infinite and can be applied to the smallest thing .” TMCW/Vol-12/On Education/p-53 "Even the smallest meanest work became A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament, An offering to the self of the great world Or a service to the One in each and all." Savitri-532 " Its (Supreme Self) absence left the greatest actions dull, Its presence made the smallest seem divine. " Savitri-305 (Savitri promises us that through smallest action offered as a rightly regulated sacrifice can call down the highest Spiritual force from the Supreme Self.) The Highest realisation of exclusive Karma Yoga : “That is all right in the ordinary karmayoga which aims at union with the cosmic Spirit and stops short at the Overmind — but here a special work has to be done and a new realisation achieved for the earth and not for ourselves alone. It is necessary to stand apart from the rest of the world so as to separate ourselves from the ordinary consciousness in order to bring down a new one.” CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram- 812-813, "The Gita at its cryptic close may seem by its silence to stop short of that solution for which we are seeking; it pauses at the borders of the highest spiritual mind and does not cross them into the splendours of the supramental Light . And yet its secret of dynamic, and not only static, identity with the inner Presence, its highest mystery of absolute surrender to the Divine Guide, Lord and Inhabitant of our nature, is the central secret. This surrender (sarva dharman paritejya) is the indispensable means of the supramental change and, again, it is through the supramental change that the dynamic identity becomes possible." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-95-96, "Its initial object was not precisely to propose a way of liberation, moksa , but rather to show the compatibility of works with the soul’s effort towards liberation and of spiritual freedom itself when once attained with continued action in the world, muktasya karma . Incidentally, a synthetic Yoga or psychological method of arriving at spiritual liberation and perfection has been developed and certain metaphysical affirmations have been put forward, certain truths of our being and nature on which the validity of this Yoga reposes. But the original preoccupation remains throughout, the original difficulty and problem , how Arjuna, dislodged by a strong revulsion of thought and feeling from the established natural and rational foundations and standards of action, is to find a new and satisfying spiritual norm of works, or how he is to live in the truth of the Spirit — since he can no longer act according to the partial truths of the customary reason and nature of man — and yet to do his appointed work on the battle-field of Kurukshetra. To live inwardly calm, detached, silent in the silence of the impersonal and universal Self and yet do dynamically the works of dynamic Nature, and more largely, to be one with the Eternal within us and to do all the will of the Eternal in the world expressed through a sublimated force, a divine height of the personal nature uplifted, liberated, universalised, made one with God-nature , — this is the Gita’s solution (of problem of life) . " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-450-451 Action is demanded from Impersonal and universal Consciousness: "For to withdraw from his work, to take refuge in a saintly inactivity and leave the imperfect world with its unsatisfying methods and motives to take care of itself is one possible solution easy to envisage, easy to execute, but this is the very cutting of the knot that has been insistently forbidden by the Teacher . Action is demanded of man by the Master of the world who is the master of all his works and whose world is a field of action, whether done through the ego and in the ignorance or partial light of the limited human reason or initiated from a higher and more largely seeing plane of vision and motive. Again, to abandon this particular action as evil would be another kind of solution, the ready resort of the shortsighted moralising mind, but to this evasion too the Teacher refuses his assent. Arjuna’s abstention would work a much greater sin and evil: it would mean, if it had any effect at all, the triumph of wrong and injustice and the rejection of his own mission as an instrument of the divine workings. A violent crisis in the destinies of the race has been brought about not by any blind motion of forces or solely by the confused clash of human ideas, interests, passions, egoisms, but by a Will which is behind these outward appearances. This truth Arjuna must be brought to see; he must learn to act impersonally, imperturbably as the instrument not of his little personal desires and weak human shrinkings, but of a vaster and more luminous Power, a greater all-wise divine and universal Will. He must act impersonally and universally in a high union of his soul with the inner and outer Godhead, yukta, in a calm Yoga with his own supreme Self and the informing Self of the universe." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-451-452, "For I am the eternal Worker within you and I ask of you works. I demand of you not a passive consent to a mechanical movement of Nature from which in your self you are wholly separated, indifferent and aloof, but action complete and divine, done as the willing and understanding instrument of the Divine , done for God in you and others and for the good of the world. This action I propose to you, first no doubt as a means of perfection in the supreme spiritual Nature, but as a part too of that perfection . Action is a part of the integral knowledge of God, of his greater mysterious truth and of an entire living in the Divine; action can and should be continued even after perfection and freedom are won. I ask of you the action of the Jivanmukta , the works of the Siddha . Something has to be added to the Yoga already described, — for that was only a first Yoga of knowledge. There is also a Yoga of action in the illumination of God-experience; works can be made one spirit with knowledge. For works done in a total self-vision and God-vision, a vision of God in the world and of the world in God are themselves a movement of knowledge, a movement of light, an indispensable means and an intimate part of spiritual perfection. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-585, “The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and completer, a diviner All which demands from it subordination and service. ” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-106, “The Master of the worlds who in the Gita demands of his servant, the bhakta , to be nothing more in life than his instrument , makes this claim as the friend, the guide, the higher Self, and describes himself as the Lord of all the worlds who is the friend of all creatures, sarvalokamahesvaram suhrudam sarvabhutanam; (The Gita-5.29) the two relations in fact must go together and neither can be perfect without the other.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-565, "Never forget that you are not alone. The Divine is with you helping and guiding you. He is the companion who never fails, the friend whose love comforts and strengthens. The more you feel lonely, the more you are ready to perceive His luminous Presence. Have faith and He will do everything for you.” The Mother/TMCW-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-9, 3 / Chapter 3. Karma Yoga The Keyword of Integral Yoga: "But the Gita accepts this Stoic discipline, this heroic philosophy, on the same condition that it accepts the tamasic recoil, it must have above it the sattwic vision of knowledge, at its root the aim at self-realisation and in its steps the ascent to the divine Nature. A Stoic discipline which merely crushed down the common affections of our human nature, — although less dangerous than a tamasic weariness of life, unfruitful pessimism and sterile inertia, because it would at least increase the power and self-mastery of the soul, — would still be no unmixed good, since it might lead to insensibility and an inhuman isolation without giving the true spiritual release. The Stoic equality is justified as an element in the discipline of the Gita because it can be associated with and can help to the realisation of the free immutable Self in the mobile human being, param dristva , (The Gita-2.59) and to status in that new self-consciousness, esa brahmı sthitih . (The Gita-2.72) “Awakening by the understanding to the Highest which is beyond even the discerning mind, put force on the self by the self to make it firm and still, and slay this enemy who is so hard to assail, Desire.” (The Gita-3.43) Both the tamasic recoil of escape and the rajasic movement of struggle and victory are only justified when they look beyond themselves through the sattwic principle to the self-knowledge which legitimises both the recoil and the struggle." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-197 “This is a difficult lesson to learn (rejection of revolt and impatience), but you must learn it. I do not find fault with you for taking long over it, I myself took full twelve years to learn it thoroughly, (written in the year 1919) and even after I knew the principle well enough, it took me quite four years and more to master my lower nature in this respect. But you have the advantage of my experience and my help; you will be able to do it more rapidly, if you consciously and fully assist me, by not associating yourself with the enemy Desire; jahi kamam durasadam , (this enemy in the form of desire, who is so hard to assail. The Gita-3.43) remember that utterance of the Gita, it is a keyword of our Yoga .” CWSA-36/Autobiographical Notes/p-229, "Into all our endeavour upward the lower element of desire will at first naturally enter. For what the enlightened will sees as the thing to be done and pursues as the crown to be conquered, what the heart embraces as the one thing delightful, that in us which feels itself limited and opposed and, because it is limited, craves and struggles, will seek with the troubled passion of an egoistic desire. This craving life-force or desire-soul in us has to be accepted at first, but only in order that it may be transformed. Even from the very beginning it has to be taught to renounce all other desires and concentrate itself on the passion for the Divine. This capital point gained, it has to be taught to desire, not for its own separate sake, but for God in the world and for the Divine in ourselves; it has to fix itself upon no personal spiritual gain, though of all possible spiritual gains we are sure, but on the great work to be done in us and others, on the high coming manifestation which is to be the glorious fulfilment of the Divine in the world, on the Truth that has to be sought and lived and enthroned for ever. But last, most difficult for it, more difficult than to seek with the right object, it has to be taught to seek in the right manner; for it must learn to desire, not in its own egoistic way, but in the way of the Divine. It must insist no longer, as the strong separative will always insists, on its own manner of fulfilment, its own dream of possession, its own idea of the right and the desirable; it must yearn to fulfil a larger and greater Will and consent to wait upon a less interested and ignorant guidance. Thus trained, Desire, that great unquiet harasser and troubler of man and cause of every kind of stumbling, will become fit to be transformed into its divine counterpart. For desire and passion too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul’s seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-83-84 "All the difficulty in dealing spiritually with the works of Life arises because the Will-in-Life for its purposes in the Ignorance has created a false soul of desire and substituted it for that spark of the Divine which is the true psyche. All or most of the works of life are at present or seem to be actuated and vitiated by this soul of desire; even those that are ethical or religious, even those that wear the guise of altruism, philanthropy, self-sacrifice, self- denial, are shot through and through with the threads of its making. This soul of desire is a separative soul of ego and all its instincts are for a separative self-affirmation; it pushes always, openly or under more or less shining masks, for its own growth, for possession, for enjoyment, for conquest and empire. If the curse of disquiet and disharmony and perversion is to be lifted from Life, the true soul, the psychic being, must be given its leading place and there must be a dissolution of the false soul of desire and ego. But this does not mean that life itself must be coerced and denied its native line of fulfilment; for behind this outer life soul of desire there is in us an inner and true vital being which has not to be dissolved but brought out into prominence and released to its true working as a power of the Divine Nature. The prominence of this true vital being under the lead of the true inmost soul within us is the condition for the divine fulfilment of the objects of the Life-Force. Those objects will even remain the same in essence, but transformed in their inner motive and outer character. The Divine Life-Power too will be a will for growth, a force of self-affirmation, but affirmation of the Divine within us, not of the little temporary personality on the surface, — growth into the true divine Individual, the central being, the secret imperishable Person who can emerge only by the subordination and disappearance of the ego. This is life’s true object: growth, but a growth of the spirit in Nature, affirming and developing itself in mind, life and body; possession, but a possession by the Divine of the Divine in all things, and not of things for their own sake by the desire of the ego; enjoyment, but an enjoyment of the divine Ananda in the universe; battle and conquest and empire in the shape of a victorious conflict with the Powers of Darkness, an entire spiritual self-rule and mastery over inward and outward Nature, a conquest by Knowledge, Love and Divine Will over the domains of the Ignorance." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-175-176, "At this stage of the Yoga and even throughout the Yoga this form of desire, this figure of the ego is the enemy against whom we have to be always on our guard with an unsleeping vigilance. We need not be discouraged when we find him lurking within us and assuming all sorts of disguises, but we should be vigilant to detect him in all his masks and inexorable in expelling his influence. The illumining Word of this movement is the decisive line of the Gita, “To action thou hast a right but never under any circumstances to its fruit.” (The Gita-2.47) The fruit belongs solely to the Lord of all works; our only business with it is to prepare success by a true and careful action and to offer it, if it comes, to the divine Master. Afterwards even as we have renounced attachment to the fruit, we must renounce attachment to the work also; at any moment we must be prepared to change one work, one course or one field of action for another or abandon all works if that is the clear command of the Master. Otherwise we do the act not for his sake but for our satisfaction and pleasure in the work, from the kinetic nature’s need of action or for the fulfilment of our propensities; but these are all stations and refuges of the ego. However necessary for our ordinary motion of life, they have to be abandoned in the growth of the spiritual consciousness and replaced by divine counterparts: an Ananda , an impersonal and God-directed delight will cast out or supplant the unillumined vital satisfaction and pleasure, a joyful driving of the Divine Energy the kinetic need; the fulfilment of the propensities will no longer be an object or a necessity, there will be instead the fulfilment of the Divine Will through the natural dynamic truth in action of a free soul and a luminous nature. In the end, as the attachment to the fruit of the work and to the work itself has been excised from the heart, so also the last clinging attachment to the idea and sense of ourselves as the doer has to be relinquished; the Divine Shakti must be known and felt above and within us as the true and sole worker." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-222-223, "The elimination of all egoistic activity and of its foundation, the egoistic consciousness, is clearly the key to the consummation we desire. And since in the path of works action is the knot we have first to loosen, we must endeavour to loosen it where it is centrally tied, in desire and in ego ; for otherwise we shall cut only stray strands and not the heart of our bondage. These are the two knots of our subjection to this ignorant and divided Nature, desire and ego-sense. And of these two desire has its native home in the emotions and sensations and instincts and from there affects thought and volition; ego-sense lives indeed in these movements, but it casts its deep roots also in the thinking mind and its will and it is there that it becomes fully self-conscious. These are the twin obscure powers of the obsessing world-wide Ignorance that we have to enlighten and eliminate. " CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-101-102, "Desire, it is thought, is the real motive power of human living and to cast it out would be to stop the springs of life; satisfaction of desire is man’s only enjoyment and to eliminate it would be to extinguish the impulse of life by a quietistic asceticism. But the real motive power of the life of the soul is Will ; desire is only a deformation of will in the dominant bodily life and physical mind. The essential turn of the soul to possession and enjoyment of the world consists in a will to delight, and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical degradation of the will to delight. It is essential that we should distinguish between pure will and desire, between the inner will to delight and the outer lust and craving of the mind and body. If we are unable to make this distinction practically in the experience of our being, we can only make a choice between a life-killing asceticism and the gross will to live or else try to effect an awkward, uncertain and precarious compromise between them. This is in fact what the mass of men do; a small minority trample down the life instinct and strain after an ascetic perfection; most obey the gross will to live with such modifications and restraints as society imposes or the normal social man has been trained to impose on his own mind and actions; others set up a balance between ethical austerity and temperate indulgence of the desiring mental and vital self and see in this balance the golden mean of a sane mind and healthy human living. But none of these ways gives the perfection which we are seeking, the divine government of the will in life. To tread down altogether the prana, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being must be supported; to indulge the gross will to live is to remain satisfied with imperfection; to compromise between them is to stop half way and possess neither earth nor heaven. But if we can get at the pure will undeformed by desire, — which we shall find to be a much more free, tranquil, steady and effective force than the leaping, smoke-stifled, soon fatigued and baffled flame of desire, — and at the calm inner will of delight not afflicted or limited by any trouble of craving, we can then transform the prana from a tyrant, enemy, assailant of the mind into an obedient instrument. We may call these greater things, too, by the name of desire, if we choose, but then we must suppose that there is a divine desire other than the vital craving, a God-desire of which this other and lower phenomenon is an obscure shadow and into which it has to be transfigured. It is better to keep distinct names for things which are entirely different in their character and inner action." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-658-659 The Reconciliation of Matter and Spirit through the practice of integral Karma Yoga : "The Path of Works aims at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Will. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or, more positively, a conscious centre of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. To That our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path (of integral Yoga) may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-39-40, “His spirit's stillness helped the toiling world. Inspired by silence and the closed eyes' sight (Supramental action of King Aswapati) His force could work with a new luminous art On the crude material from which all is made And the refusal of Inertia's mass And the grey front of the world's Ignorance And nescient Matter and the huge error of life.” Savitri-36, "A Power that lives upon the heights must act, Bring into life’s closed room the Immortal’s air And fill the finite with the Infinite.” Savitri-315-16 “His (Divine’s) will must be worked out in human breasts Against the Evil that rises from the gulfs, Against the world’s Ignorance and its obstinate strength, Against the stumblings of man’s pervert will, Against the deep folly of his human mind, Against the blind reluctance of his heart.” Savitri-444 “All was the violent ocean of a will Where lived captive to an immense caress, Possessed in a supreme identity, Her aim, joy, origin, Satyavan alone.” Savitri-579 Supramental Action: "The perfect supramental action will not follow any single principle or limited rule. It is not likely to satisfy the standard either of the individual egoist or of any organised group-mind. It will conform to the demand neither of the positive practical man of the world nor of the formal moralist nor of the patriot nor of the sentimental philanthropist nor of the idealising philosopher. It will proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from the summits in the totality of an illumined and uplifted being, will and knowledge and not by the selected, calculated and standardised action which is all that the intellectual reason or ethical will can achieve. Its sole aim will be the expression of the divine in us and the keeping together of the world and its progress towards the Manifestation that is to be. This even will not be so much an aim and purpose as a spontaneous law of the being and an intuitive determination of the action by the Light of the divine Truth and its automatic influence. It will proceed like the action of Nature from a total will and knowledge behind her, but a will and knowledge enlightened in a conscious supreme Nature and no longer obscure in this ignorant Prakriti . It will be an action not bound by the dualities but full and large in the spirit’s impartial joy of existence. The happy and inspired movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering and ignorant ego." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-206, " The will in us, because it is the most generally forceful power of our being, — there is a will of knowledge, a will of life, a will of emotion, a will acting in every part of our nature, takes many forms and returns various reactions to things, such as incapacity, limitation of power, mastery, or right will, wrong or perverted will, neutral volition, — in the ethical mind virtue, sin and non-ethical volition, — and others of the kind. These too the positive equality accepts as a tangle of provisional values from which it must start, but which it must transform into universal mastery, into the will of the Truth and universal Right, into the freedom of the divine Will in action. The equal will need not feel remorse, sorrow or discouragement over its stumblings; if these reactions occur in the habitual mentality, it will only see how far they indicate an imperfection and the thing to be corrected, — for they are not always just indicators, and so get beyond them to a calm and equal guidance. It will see that these stumblings themselves are necessary to experience and in the end steps towards the goal. Behind and within all that occurs in ourselves and in the world, it will look for the divine meaning and the divine guidance; it will look beyond imposed limitations to the voluntary self-limitation of the universal Power by which it regulates its steps and gradations, — imposed on our ignorance, self-imposed in the divine knowledge, — and go beyond to unity with the illimitable power of the Divine. All energies and actions it will see as forces proceeding from the one Existence and their perversions as imperfections, inevitable in the developing movement, of powers that were needed for that movement; it will therefore have charity for all imperfections, even while pressing steadily towards a universal perfection. This equality will open the nature to the guidance of the divine and universal Will and make it ready for that supramental action in which the power of the soul in us is luminously full of and one with the power of the supreme Spirit." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-719, "There are four members of this second part of the sadhana or discipline of self-perfection and the first of them is right shakti, the right condition of the powers of the intelligence, heart, vital mind and body. It will only be possible at present to suggest a preliminary perfection of the last of these four, for the full siddhi will have to be dealt with after I have spoken of the supermind and its influence on the rest of the being. The body is not only the necessary outer instrument of the physical part of action, but for the purposes of this life a base or pedestal also for all inner action. All working of mind or spirit has its vibration in the physical consciousness, records itself there in a kind of subordinate corporeal notation and communicates itself to the material world partly at least through the physical machine. But the body of man has natural limitations in this capacity which it imposes on the play of the higher parts of his being. And, secondly, it has a subconscient consciousness of its own in which it keeps with an obstinate fidelity the past habits and past nature of the mental and vital being and which automatically opposes and obstructs any very great upward change or at least prevents it from becoming a radical transformation of the whole nature. It is evident that if we are to have a free divine or spiritual and supramental action conducted by the force and fulfilling the character of a diviner energy, some fairly complete transformation must be effected in this outward character of the bodily nature. The physical being of man has always been felt by the seekers of perfection to be a great impediment and it has been the habit to turn from it with contempt, denial or aversion and a desire to suppress altogether or as far as may be the body and the physical life. But this cannot be the right method for the integral Yoga. The body is given us as one instrument necessary to the totality of our works and it is to be used, not neglected, hurt, suppressed or abolished. If it is imperfect, recalcitrant, obstinate, so are also the other members, the vital being, heart and mind and reason. It has like them to be changed and perfected and to undergo a transforma- tion. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind, so we have in a certain sense to build for ourselves a new body." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-729-730, "If the spirit is everywhere, even in matter — in fact matter itself is only an obscure form of the spirit — and if the supermind is the universal power of the spirit’s omnipresent self-knowledge organising all the manifestation of the being, then in matter and everywhere there must be present a supramental action and, however concealed it may be by another, lower and obscurer kind of operation, yet when we look close we shall find that it is really the supermind which organises matter, life, mind and reason. And this actually is the knowledge towards which we are now moving. There is even a quite visible intimate action of the consciousness, persistent in life, matter and mind, which is clearly a supramental action subdued to the character and need of the lower medium and to which we now give the name of intuition from its most evident characteristics of direct vision and self-acting knowledge, really a vision born of some secret identity with the object of the knowledge. What we call the intuition is however only a partial indication of the presence of the supermind, and if we take this presence and power in its widest character, we shall see that it is a concealed supramental force with a self-conscient knowledge in it which informs the whole action of material energy. It is that which determines what we call law of nature, maintains the action of each thing according to its own nature and harmonises and evolves the whole, which would otherwise be a fortuitous creation apt at any moment to collapse into chaos. All the law of nature is a thing precise in its necessities of process, but is yet in the cause of that necessity and of its constancy of rule, measure, combination, adaptation, re- sult a thing inexplicable, meeting us at every step with a mystery and a miracle, and this must be either because it is irrational and accidental even in its regularities or because it is suprarational, because the truth of it belongs to a principle greater than that of our intelligence. That principle is the supramental; that is to say, the hidden secret of Nature is the organisation of something out of the infinite potentialities of the self-existent truth of the spirit the nature of which is wholly evident only to an original knowledge born of and proceeding by a fundamental identity, the spirit’s constant self-perception. All the action of life too is of this character and all the action of mind and reason, — reason which is the first to perceive everywhere the action of a greater reason and law of being and try to render it by its own conceptional structures, though it does not always perceive that it is something other than a mental Intelligence which is at work, other than an intellectual Logos. All these processes are actually spiritual and supramental in their secret government, but mental, vital and physical in their overt process." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-793-794, "A second movement is one which comes naturally to those who commence the Yoga with the initiative that is proper to the way of Bhakti. It is natural to them to reject the intellect and its action and to listen for the voice, wait for the impulsion or the command, the adesa , obey only the idea and will and power of the Lord within them, the divine Self and Purusha in the heart of the creature, ısvarah sarvabhutanam hriddese . This is a movement which must tend more and more to intuitivise the whole nature, for the ideas, the will, the impulsions, the feelings which come from the secret Purusha in the heart are of the direct intuitive character. This method is consonant with a certain truth of our nature. The secret Self within us is an intuitive self and this intuitive self is seated in every centre of our being, the physical, the nervous, the emotional, the volitional, the conceptual or cognitive and the higher more directly spiritual centres. And in each part of our being it exercises a secret intuitive initiation of our activities which is received and represented imperfectly by our outer mind and converted into the movements of the ignorance in the external action of these parts of our nature. The heart or emotional centre of the thinking desire mind is the strongest in the ordinary man, gathers up or at least affects the presentation of things to the consciousness and is the capital of the system. It is from there that the Lord seated in the heart of all creatures turns them mounted on the machine of Nature by the Maya of the mental ignorance. It is possible then by referring back all the initiation of our action to this secret intuitive Self and Spirit, the ever-present Godhead within us, and replacing by its influences the initiations of our personal and mental nature to get back from the inferior external thought and action to another, internal and intuitive, of a highly spiritualised character. Nevertheless the result of this movement cannot be complete, because the heart is not the highest centre of our being, is not supramental nor directly moved from the supramental sources. An intuitive thought and action directed from it may be very luminous and intense but is likely to be limited, even narrow in its intensity, mixed with a lower emotional action and at the best excited and troubled, rendered unbalanced or exaggerated by a miraculous or abnormal character in its action or at least in many of its accompaniments which is injurious to the harmonised perfection of the being. The aim of our effort at perfection must be to make the spiritual and supramental action no longer a miracle, even if a frequent or constant miracle, or only a luminous intervention of a greater than our natural power, but normal to the being and the very nature and law of all its process." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-803-805, "The highest organised centre of our embodied being and of its action in the body is the supreme mental centre figured by the yogic symbol of the thousand-petalled lotus, sahasradala, and it is at its top and summit that there is the direct communication with the supramental levels. It is then possible to adopt a different and a more direct method, not to refer all our thought and action to the Lord secret in the heart-lotus but to the veiled truth of the Divinity above the mind and to receive all by a sort of descent from above, a descent of which we become not only spiritually but physically conscious. The siddhi or full accomplishment of this movement can only come when we are able to lift the centre of thought and conscious action above the physical brain and feel it going on in the subtle body. If we can feel ourselves thinking no longer with the brain but from above and outside the head in the subtle body, that is a sure physical sign of a release from the limitations of the physical mind, and though this will not be complete at once nor of itself bring the supramental action, for the subtle body is mental and not supramental, still it is a subtle and pure mentality and makes an easier communication with the supramental centres. The lower movements must still come , but it is then found easier to arrive at a swift and subtle discrimination telling us at once the difference, distinguishing the intuitional thought from the lower intellectual mixture, separating it from its mental coatings, rejecting the mere rapidities of the mind which imitate the form of the intuition without being of its true substance. It will be easier to discern rapidly the higher planes of the true supramental being and call down their power to effect the desired transformation and to refer all the lower action to the superior power and light that it may reject and eliminate, purify and transform and select among them its right material for the Truth that has to be organised within us. This opening up of a higher level and of higher and higher planes of it and the consequent re-formation of our whole consciousness and its action into their mould and into the substance of their power and luminous capacity is found in practice to be the greater part of the natural method used by the divine Shakti.... A fourth method is one which suggests itself naturally to the developed intelligence and suits the thinking man. This is to develop our intellect instead of eliminating it, but with the will not to cherish its limitations, but to heighten its capacity, light, intensity, degree and force of activity until it borders on the thing that transcends it and can easily be taken up and transformed into that higher conscious action. This movement also is founded on the truth of our nature and enters into the course and movement of the complete Yoga of self-perfection. That course, as I have described it, included a heightening and greatening of the action of our natural instruments and powers till they constitute in their purity and essential completeness a preparatory perfection of the present normal movement of the Shakti that acts in us. The reason and intelligent will, the buddhi , is the greatest of these powers and instruments, (the four instruments are chitta, or basic mental consciousness, manas, or sense mind, buddhi, or the intelligence and ahankara, or ego idea) the natural leader of the rest in the developed human being, the most capable of aiding the development of the others. The ordinary activities of our nature are all of them of use for the greater perfection we seek, are meant to be turned into material for them, and the greater their development, the richer the preparation for the supramental action . " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-805-806, "It is difficult for the intellect to grasp at all what is meant by these supramental distinctions: the mental terms in which they can be rendered are lacking or inadequate and they can only be understood after a certain sight or certain approximations in experience. A number of indications are all that at present it can be useful to give. And first it will be enough to take certain clues from the thinking mind; for it is there that some of the nearest keys to the supramental action are discoverable. The thought of the intuitive mind proceeds wholly by four powers that shape the form of the truth, (1) an intuition that suggests its idea, (2) an intuition that discriminates, (3) an inspiration that brings in its word and something of its greater substance and (4) a revelation that shapes to the sight its very face and body of reality. These things are not the same as certain movements of the ordinary mental intelligence that look analogous and are easily mistaken for the true intuition in our first inexperience. (1) The suggestive intuition is not the same thing as the intellectual insight of a quick intelligence or (2) the intuitive discrimination as the rapid judgment of the reasoning intellect; (3) the intuitive inspiration is not the same as the inspired action of the imaginative intelligence, (4) nor the intuitive revelation as the strong light of a purely mental close seizing and experience." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-813-814, "The intuitive knowledge on the contrary, however limited it may be in its field or application, is within that scope sure with an immediate, a durable and especially a self-existent certitude. It may take for starting-point or rather for a thing to light up and disclose in its true sense the data of mind and sense or else fire a train of past thought and knowledge to new meanings and issues, but it is dependent on nothing but itself and may leap out of its own field of lustres, independent of previous suggestion or data, and this kind of action becomes progressively more common and adds itself to the other to initiate new depths and ranges of knowledge. In either case there is always an element of self-existent truth and a sense of absoluteness of origination suggestive of its proceeding from the spirit’s knowledge by iden- tity. It is the disclosing of a knowledge that is secret but already existent in the being: it is not an acquisition, but something that was always there and revealable. It sees the truth from within and illumines with that inner vision the outsides and it harmonises, too, readily — provided we keep intuitively awake with whatever fresh truth has yet to arrive. These character- istics become more pronounced and intense in the higher, the proper supramental ranges: in the intuitive mind they may not be always recognisable in their purity and completeness, because of the mixture of mental stuff and its accretion, but in the divine reason and greater supramental action they become free and absolute. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-814-815, "The Transition from mind to supermind is not only the substitution of a greater instrument of thought and knowledge, but a change and conversion of the whole consciousness. There is evolved not only a supramental thought, but a supramental will, sense, feeling, a supramental substitute for all the activities that are now accomplished by the mind. All these higher activities are first manifested in the mind itself as descents, irruptions, messages or revelations of a superior power. Mostly they are mixed up with the more ordinary action of the mind and not easily distinguishable from them in our first inexperience except by their superior light and force and joy, the more so as the mind greatened or excited by their frequent coming quickens its own action and imitates the external characteristics of the supramental activity : its own operation is made more swift, luminous, strong and positive and it arrives even at a kind of imitative and often false intuition that strives to be but is not really the luminous, direct and self-existent truth. The next step is the formation of a luminous mind of intuitive experience, thought, will, feeling, sense from which the intermixture of the lesser mind and the imitative intuition are progressively eliminated: this is a process of purification, suddhi, necessary to the new formation and perfection, siddhi. At the same time there is the disclosure above the mind of the source of the intuitive action and a more and more organised functioning of a true supramental consciousness acting not in the mind but on its own higher plane. This draws up into itself in the end the intuitive mentality it has created as its representative and assumes the charge of the whole activity of the consciousness. The process is progressive and for a long time chequered by admixture and the necessity of a return upon the lower movements in order to correct and transform them. The higher and the lower power act sometimes alternately, — the consciousness descending back from the heights it had attained to its former level but always with some change, — but sometimes together and with a sort of mutual reference. The mind eventually becomes wholly intuitivised and exists only as a passive channel for the supramental action; but this condition too is not ideal and presents, besides, still a certain obstacle, because the higher action has still to pass through a retarding and diminishing conscious substance, — that of the physical consciousness. The final stage of the change will come when the supermind occupies and supramentalises the whole being and turns even the vital and physical sheaths into moulds of itself, responsive, subtle and instinct with its powers. Man then becomes wholly the superman. This is at least the natural and integral process." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-825-826, "The ordinary language of the intellect is not sufficient to describe this action, for the same words have to be used, indicating a certain correspondence, but actually to connote inadequately a different thing. Thus the supermind uses a certain sense action, employing but not limited by the physical organs, a thing which is in its nature a form consciousness and a contact consciousness, but the mental idea and experience of sense can give no conception of the essential and characteristic action of this supramentalised sense consciousness. Thought too in the supramental action is a different thing from the thought of the mental intelligence. The supramental thinking is felt at its basis as a conscious contact or union or identity of the substance of being of the knower with the substance of being of the thing known and its figure of thought as the power of awareness of the self revealing through the meeting or the oneness, because carrying in itself, a certain knowledge form of the object’s content, action, significance. Therefore observation, memory, judgment too mean each a different thing in the supermind from what it is in the process of the mental intelligence." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-856, "The issue out of this dilemma is to a greater perfection towards which the formation of the intuitive, inspired and revelatory mind is only a preparatory stage, and that comes by a constant instreaming and descent of more and more of the " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-903-904 The task for a Sadhaka of Integral Karma Yoga: "The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His. Thus in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sadhaka of the sadhana as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces its own realisation. The divine and all-knowing and all-effecting descends upon the limited and obscure, progressively illumines and energises the whole lower nature and substitutes its own action for all the terms of the inferior human light and mortal activity." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-45-46, "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 or 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 process, with the progressive disappearance of egoism and impurity and ignorance, this last separation is removed; all in the individual becomes the divine working." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-60-61, "But this is not always the manner of the commencement. The sadhaka is often led gradually and there is a long space between the first turning of the mind and the full assent of the nature to the thing towards which it turns. There may at first be only a vivid intellectual interest, a forcible attraction towards the idea and some imperfect form of practice. Or perhaps there is an effort not favoured by the whole nature, a decision or a turn imposed by an intellectual influence or dictated by personal affection and admiration for someone who is himself consecrated and devoted to the Highest. In such cases, a long period of preparation may be necessary before there comes the irrevocable consecration; and in some instances it may not come. There may be some advance, there may be a strong effort, even much purification and many experiences other than those that are central or supreme; but the life will either be spent in preparation or, a certain stage having been reached, the mind pushed by an insufficient driving-force may rest content at the limit of the effort possible to it. Or there may even be a recoil to the lower life, — what is called in the ordinary parlance of Yoga a fall from the path . This lapse happens because there is a defect at the very centre. The intellect has been interested, the heart attracted, the will has strung itself to the effort, but the whole nature has not been taken captive by the Divine. It has only acquiesced in the interest, the attraction or the endeavour. There has been an experiment, perhaps even an eager experiment, but not a total self-giving to an imperative need of the soul or to an unforsakable ideal. Even such imperfect Yoga has not been wasted; for no upward effort is made in vain. Even if it fails in the present or arrives only at some preparatory stage or preliminary realisation, it has yet determined the soul’s future." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-70-71, "But for the sadhaka of the integral Yoga this inner or this outer solitude can only be incidents or periods in his spiritual progress. Accepting life, he has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world’s burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Their representative character gives them a much more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to recurrence. Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-77-78, "Every kind of solution has been offered from the entire abandonment of works and life, so far as that is physically possible, to the acceptance of life as it is but with a new spirit animating and uplifting its movements, in appearance the same as they were but changed in the spirit behind them and therefore in their inner significance. The extreme solution insisted on by the world-shunning ascetic or the inward-turned ecstatical and self-oblivious mystic is evidently foreign to the purpose of an integral Yoga, — for if we are to realise the Divine in the world, it cannot be done by leaving aside the world-action and action itself altogether. At a less high pitch it was laid down by the religious mind in ancient times that one should keep only such actions as are in their nature part of the seeking, service or cult of the Divine and such others as are attached to these or, in addition, those that are indispensable to the ordinary setting of life but done in a religious spirit and according to the injunctions of traditional religion and Scripture. But this is too formalist a rule for the fulfilment of the free spirit in works, and it is besides professedly no more than a provisional solution for tiding over the transition from life in the world to a life in the Beyond which still remains the sole ultimate purpose. An integral Yoga must lean rather to the catholic injunction of the Gita that even the liberated soul, living in the Truth, should still do all the works of life so that the plan of the universal evolution under a secret divine leading may not languish or suffer. But if all works are to be done with the same forms and on the same lines as they are now done in the Ignorance, our gain is only inward and our life is in danger of becoming the dubious and ambiguous formula of an inner Light doing the works of an outer Twilight, the perfect Spirit expressing itself in a mould of imperfection foreign to its own divine nature. If no better can be done for a time, — and during a long period of transition something like this does inevitably happen, — then so it must remain till things are ready and the spirit within is powerful enough to impose its own forms on the life of the body and the world outside; but this can be accepted only as a transitional stage and not as our soul’s ideal or the ultimate goal of the passage." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-135-136, "Whoever sincerely enters the path of works, must leave behind him the stage in which need and desire are the first law of our acts. For whatever desires still trouble his being, he must, if he accepts the high aim of Yoga, put them away from him into the hands of the Lord within us. The supreme Power will deal with them for the good of the sadhaka and for the good of all. In effect, we find that once this surrender is done, — always provided the rejection is sincere, — egoistic indulgence of desire may for some time recur under the continued impulse of past nature but only in order to exhaust its acquired momentum and to teach the embodied being in his most unteachable part, his nervous, vital, emotional nature, by the reactions of desire, by its grief and unrest bitterly contrasted with calm periods of the higher peace or marvellous movements of divine Ananda, that egoistic desire is not a law for the soul that seeks liberation or aspires to its own original god-nature. Afterwards the element of desire in those impulsions will be thrown away or persistently eliminated by a constant denying and transforming pressure. Only the pure force of action in them (pravritti) justified by an equal delight in all work and result that is inspired or imposed from above will be preserved in the happy harmony of a final perfection. To act, to enjoy is the normal law and right of the nervous being; but to choose by personal desire its action and enjoyment is only its ignorant will, not its right. Alone the supreme and universal Will must choose; action must change into a dynamic movement of that Will; enjoyment must be replaced by the play of a pure spiritual Ananda. All personal will is either a temporary delegation from on high or a usurpation by the ignorant Asura. The social law, that second term of our progress, is a means to which the ego is subjected in order that it may learn discipline by subordination to a wider collective ego. This law may be quite empty of any moral content and may express only the needs or the practical good of the society as each society conceives it. Or it may express those needs and that good, but modified and coloured and supplemented by a higher moral or ideal law. It is binding on the developing but not yet perfectly developed individual in the shape of social duty, family obligation, communal or national demand, so long as it is not in conflict with his growing sense of the higher Right. But the sadhaka of the Karmayoga will abandon this also to the Lord of works. After he has made this surrender, his social impulses and judgments will, like his desires, only be used for their exhaustion or, it may be, so far as they are still necessary for a time to enable him to identify his lower mental nature with mankind in general or with any grouping of mankind in its works and hopes and aspirations. But after that brief time is over, they will be withdrawn and a divine government will alone abide. He will be identified with the Divine and with others only through the divine consciousness and not through the mental nature." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-209-211, "For, even after he is free, the sadhaka will be in the world and to be in the world is to remain in works. But to remain in works without desire is to act for the good of the world in general or for the kind or the race or for some new creation to be evolved on the earth or some work imposed by the Divine Will within him. And this must be done either in the framework provided by the environment or the grouping in which he is born or placed or else in one which is chosen or created for him by a divine direction. Therefore in our perfection there must be nothing left in the mental being which conflicts with or prevents our sympathy and free self-identification with the kind, the group or whatever collective expression of the Divine he is meant to lead, help or serve. But in the end it must become a free self-identification through identity with the Divine and not a mental bond or moral tie of union or a vital association dominated by any kind of personal, social, national, communal or credal egoism. If any social law is obeyed, it will not be from physical necessity or from the sense of personal or general interest or for expediency or because of the pressure of the environment or from any sense of duty, but solely for the sake of the Lord of works and because it is felt or known to be the Divine Will that the social law or rule or relation as it stands can still be kept as a figure of the inner life and the minds of men must not be disturbed by its infringement. If, on the other hand, the social law, rule or relation is disregarded, that too will not be for the indulgence of desire, personal will or personal opinion, but because a greater rule is felt that expresses the law of the Spirit or because it is known that there must be in the march of the divine All-Will a movement towards the changing, exceeding or abolition of existing laws and forms for the sake of a freer larger life necessary to the world’s progress. " CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-211-212, " There is still left the moral law or the ideal and these, even to many who think themselves free, appear for ever sacred and intangible. But the sadhaka, his gaze turned always to the heights, will abandon them to Him whom all ideals seek imperfectly and fragmentarily to express; all moral qualities are only a poor and rigid travesty of his spontaneous and illimitable perfection. The bondage to sin and evil passes away with the passing of nervous desire; for it belongs to the quality of vital passion, impulsion or drive of propensity in us (rajoguna ) and is extinguished with the transformation of that mode of Nature. But neither must the aspirant remain subject to the gilded or golden chain of a conventional or a habitual or a mentally ordered or even a high or clear sattwic virtue. That will be replaced by something profounder and more essential than the minor inadequate thing that men call virtue. The original sense of the word was manhood and this is a much larger and deeper thing than the moral mind and its structures. The culmination of Karmayoga is a yet higher and deeper state that may perhaps be called “soulhood”, — for the soul is greater than the man; a free soulhood spontaneously welling out in works of a supreme Truth and Love will replace human virtue. But this supreme Truth cannot be forced to inhabit the petty edifices of the practical reason or even confined in the more dignified constructions of the larger ideative reason that imposes its representations as if they were pure truth on the limited human intelligence. This supreme Love will not necessarily be consistent, much less will it be synonymous, with the partial and feeble, ignorant and emotion-ridden movements of human attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the vaster movement; the mind’s partial attainment cannot dictate its terms to the soul’s supreme fulfilment... At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil its movement in the sadhaka according to the essential law or way of his own nature. For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the particular power of the supreme Shakti, out of which his soul has emerged into the Play, not limited indeed by the forms of this law or way, for the soul is infinite. But still its stuff of nature bears that stamp, evolves fluently along those lines or turns around the spiral curves of that dominating influence. He will manifest the divine Truth-movement according to the temperament of the sage or the lion-like fighter or the lover and enjoyer or the worker and servant or in any combination of essential attributes (gunas) that may constitute the form given to his being by its own inner urge. It is this self-nature playing freely in his acts which men will see in him and not a conduct cut, chalked out, artificially regulated, by any lesser rule or by any law from outside." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-212-213 4 / Chapter 4. Towards the Yoga of Knowledge , Jnana Yoga Summary or A Brief Restatement: This chapter gives a hint about the highest secret knowledge, rahasyam uttamam, the purpose of birth of Avatara , the twice-born Soul, the necessity of the Guru, the knowledge of all life, the fourfold Soul forces, universal Divine action, the difference between action and inaction, attainment of Knowledge through faith. The Gita hints about the highest secret knowledge but ' leaves that for the seeker to discover by his own spiritual experience.' An Avatar accepts life and action and by His divine Influence, the problem of Lower Nature is transformed into a higher Divine Nature and ordinary earth-bound action is transformed into Divine action of the liberated Soul. The necessity of Guru as Spiritual fosterer is indispensable in traditional Yoga and by his Influence Psychic and Spiritual being open of a twice-born Soul, and he first realises Psychic being and Spiritual being and then afterwards Supramental being, atmani atho mayi . (The Gita-4.35) "The first step is Karmayoga , the selfless sacrifice of works, and here the Gita’s insistence is on action. The second is Jnanayoga , the self-realisation and knowledge of the true nature of the self and the world; and here the insistence is on knowledge; but the sacrifice of works continues and the path of Works becomes one with but does not disappear into the path of Knowledge. The last step is Bhaktiyoga, adoration and seeking of the supreme Self as the Divine Being, and here the insistence is on devotion; but the knowledge is not subordinated, only raised, vitalised and fulfilled, and still the sacrifice of works continues; the double path becomes the triune way of knowledge, works and devotion. And the fruit of the sacrifice, the one fruit still placed before the seeker , is attained, union with the divine Being and oneness with the supreme divine nature ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-38 Rahasyam Uttamam , The Supreme Secret of the Gita: " He becomes capable of that dwelling in God and giving up of his whole consciousness into the Divine which the Gita upholds as the best or highest secret of things, uttamam rahasyam ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-14, " Such is the analysis, not confining itself to the apparent cosmic process but penetrating into the occult secrets of super-conscious Nature, uttamam rahasyam , by which the Gita founds its synthesis of Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga , its synthesis of knowledge, works and devotion. By the pure Sankhya alone the combining of works and liberation is contradictory and impossible. By pure Monism alone the permanent continuation of works as a part of Yoga and the indulgence of devotion after perfect knowledge and liberation and union are attained, become impossible or at least irrational and otiose. The Sankhya knowledge of the Gita dissipates and the Yoga system of the Gita triumphs over all these obstacles." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p- 80, "But the highest secret of all, uttamam rahasyam , is the Purushottama . This is the supreme Divine, God, who possesses both the infinite and the finite and in whom the personal and the impersonal, the one Self and the many existences, being and becoming, the world-action and the supracosmic peace, pravritti and nivritti , meet, are united, are possessed together and in each other. In God all things find their secret truth and their absolute reconciliation." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-125, " It is the nature of the Purushottama who holds both these together and by his supreme divinity reconciles them in a divine reconciliation which is the highest secret of his being, rahasyam hyetad uttamam ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p- 140, "This double aspect in the Gita’s doctrine of Avatarhood is apt to be missed by the cursory reader satisfied, as most are, with catching a superficial view of its profound teachings, and it is missed too by the formal commentator petrified in the rigidity of the schools. Yet it is necessary, surely, to the whole meaning of the doctrine. Otherwise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma, a popular superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deification of historical or legendary supermen, not what the Gita makes all its teaching, a deep philosophical and religious truth and an essential part of or step to the supreme mystery of all, rahasyam uttamam .“ CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-148, "For he has unified his whole being in the Purushottama, has assumed the divine being and the higher divine nature of becoming, madbhava , has unified even his mind and natural consciousness with the Divine, manmana maccittah . (The Gita-9.34, 18.58) This change is the final evolution of the nature and the consummation of the divine birth, rahasyam uttamam. When it is accomplished, the soul is aware of itself as the master of its nature and, grown a light of the divine Light and will of the divine Will, is able to change its natural workings into a divine action." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-232-233, "“Of all Yogins he who with all his inner self given up to Me, for Me has love and faith, sraddhavan bhajate, him I hold to be the most united with Me in Yoga.” It is this that is the closing word of these first six chapters and contains in itself the seed of the rest, (This is the seed of Chapter-7 to 18) of that which still remains unspoken and is nowhere entirely spoken ; for it is always and remains something of a mystery and a secret, rahasyam, the highest spiritual mystery and the divine secret." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-246, " The passion of love in our self-giving carries us up to him and opens the mystery of his deepest heart of being. Love completes the triple cord of the sacrifice, perfects the triune key of the highest secret, uttamam rahasyam ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-290, " That will and power is now not separately, egoistically his own, but a force of the suprapersonal Divine who acts in this becoming of his own self, this one of his myriad personalities by means of the characteristic form of the natural being, the swabhava. This is the high secret and mystery, uttamam rahasyam , of the action of the liberated man. It is the result of a growing of the human soul into a divine Light and of the union of its nature with a highest universal nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-459, "The account given here of the supreme spiritual and supramental forms of highest Nature action corresponding to the gunas is not derived from the Gita, but introduced from spiritual experience. The Gita does not describe in any detail the action of the highest Nature, rahasyam uttamam ; it leaves that for the seeker to discover by his own spiritual experience. It only points out the nature of the high sattwic temperament and action through which this supreme mystery has to be reached and insists at the same time on the overpassing of Sattwa and transcendence of the three gunas .” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-467, "This mystery of our being implies necessarily a similar supreme mystery of the being of the Purushottama, rahasyam uttamam . It is not an exclusive impersonality of the Absolute that is the highest secret. This highest secret is the miracle of a supreme Person and apparent vast Impersonal that are one, an immutable transcendent Self of all things and a Spirit that manifests itself here at the very foundation of cosmos as an infinite and multiple personality acting everywhere, — a Self and Spirit revealed to our last, closest, profoundest experience as an illimitable Being who accepts us and takes us to him, not into a blank of featureless existence, but most positively, deeply, wonderfully into all Himself and in all the ways of his and our conscious existence." 550, “A featureless extinction may be a rigorous demand of the mind’s logic of self-annulment; it is not the last word of the supreme mystery, rahasyam uttamam .” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-551, The Purpose of Divine Birth and Divine Action of Avatar (Janma Karma cha Me Divyam ): “For there are two aspects of the divine birth ; (1) one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar (Janma karma cha me divyam, My birth and action are both Divine) ; (2) the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhavam agatah ; (The Gita-4.10/10.6/13.18/14.19) it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. (sa yogi maye vartate, that Yogi lives and acts in Me) It is that (1) new birth which Avatarhood and (2) the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-148, "We have to remember and take together its doctrine of the one Self in all, of the Godhead seated in the heart of every creature, its teaching about the relations between the Creator and his creation, its strongly emphasised idea of the vibhuti, — noting too the language in which the Teacher gives his own divine example of selfless works which applies equally to the human Krishna and the divine Lord of the worlds, and giving their due weight to such passages as that in the ninth chapter, “Deluded minds despise Me lodged in the human body because they know not my supreme nature of being, Lord of all existences”; (The Gita-9.11) and we have to read in the light of these ideas this passage we find before us and its declaration that by the knowledge of his divine birth and divine works men come to the Divine and by becoming full of him and even as he and taking refuge in him they arrive at his nature and status of being, madbhavam ." (The Gita-4.10/10.6/13.18/14.19) CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-149, "This is the double condition of the divine birth of the soul , of its release from the mortality of the ego and the body into the spiritual and eternal, — (1) knowledge first of one’s timeless immutable self and union through it with the timeless Godhead, (2) but knowledge too of that which lives behind the riddle of cosmos, the Godhead in all existences and their workings." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-307, "The divinised man entering into his divine nature will act even as he acts; he will not give himself up to inaction. The Divine is at work in man in the ignorance and at work in man in the knowledge. To know Him is our soul’s highest welfare and the condition of its perfection, but to know and realise Him as a transcendent peace and silence is not all; the secret that has to be learned is at once (1) the secret of the eternal and unborn Divine and (2) the secret of the divine birth and works, janma karma cha me divyam . (The Gita-4.9) The action which proceeds from that knowledge, will be free from all bondage; “he who so knoweth me,” says the Teacher, “is not bound by works .” (The Gita-4.14)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-144, "For the reason why the practice of this Yoga becomes possible and easy is that in doing it we give up the whole working of all that we naturally are into the hands of that inner divine Purusha . The Godhead works out the divine birth in us progressively, simply, infallibly, by (1) taking up our being into his and (2) by filling it with his own knowledge and power, jnanadıpena bhasvata ; (The Gita-10.11) he lays hands on our obscure ignorant nature and transforms it into his own light and wideness. What with entire faith and without egoism we believe in and impelled by him will to be, the God within will surely accomplish. But the egoistic mind and life we now and apparently are, must first surrender itself for transmutation into the hands of that inmost secret Divinity within us." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-310 "In a high state where ignorance is no more, Each movement is a wave of peace and bliss, Repose God’s motionless creative force, Action a ripple in the Infinite And birth a gesture of Eternity. " Savitri-200 "The mystery of God’s birth and acts remains Leaving unbroken the last chapter’s seal, Unsolved the riddle of the unfinished Play; The cosmic Player laughs within his mask, And still the last inviolate secret hides Behind the human glory of a Form, Behind the gold eidolon of a Name." Savitri-311, The Divine Birth of Human Being, Dvija: “The ordinary man who wishes to reach God through knowledge, must undergo an elaborate training. He must begin by becoming absolutely pure, he must cleanse thoroughly his body, his heart and his intellect, he must get himself a new heart and be born again; for only the twice born can understand or teach the Vedas . When he has done this he needs yet four things before he can succeed, (1) the Sruti or recorded revelation, (2) the Sacred Teacher, (3) the practice of Yoga and (4) the Grace of God. ” CWSA-18/Kena and other Upanishads/p-169, "The language of the Gita shows therefore that the divine birth is that of the conscious Godhead in our humanity and essentially the opposite of the ordinary birth even though the same means are used, because it is not the birth into the Ignorance, but the birth of the knowledge, not a physical phenomenon, but a soul-birth. It is the Soul’s coming into birth as the self-existent Being controlling consciously its becoming and not lost to self-knowledge in the cloud of the ignorance. It is the Soul born into the body as Lord of Nature, standing above and operating in her freely by its will , not entangled and helplessly driven round and round in the mechanism; for it works in the knowledge and not, as most do, in the ignorance. It is the secret Soul in all coming forward from its governing secrecy behind the veil to possess wholly in a human type, but as the Divine, the birth which ordinarily it possesses only from behind the veil as the Ishwara while the outward consciousness in front of the veil is rather possessed than in possession because there it is a partially conscious being, the Jiva lost to self-knowledge and bound in its works through a phenomenal subjection to Nature. The Avatar therefore is a direct manifestation in humanity by Krishna the divine Soul of that divine condition of being to which Arjuna , the human soul, the type of a highest human being, a Vibhuti , is called upon by the Teacher to arise, and to which he can only arise by climbing out of the ignorance and limitation of his ordinary humanity. It is the manifestation from above of that which we have to develop from below ; it is the descent of God into that divine birth of the human being into which we mortal creatures must climb; it is the attracting divine example given by God to man in the very type and form and perfected model of our human existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-156-157, "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 Gita-4.10/10.6/13.18/14.19) 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."CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-175, "Change your being, be reborn into the spirit and by that new birth proceed with the action to which the Spirit within has appointed you, may be said to be the heart of its message. Or again, put otherwise, with a deeper and more spiritual import, make the work you have to do here your means of inner spiritual rebirth , the divine birth, and, having become divine, do still divine works as an instrument of the Divine for the leading of the peoples. Therefore there are here two things which have to be clearly laid down and clearly grasped, the way to the change, to this upward transference, this new divine birth, and the nature of the work or rather the spirit in which it has to be done, since the outward form of it need not at all change, although really its scope and aim become quite different. But these two things are practically the same, for the elucidation of one elucidates the other. The spirit of our action arises from the nature of our being and the inner foundation it has taken, but also this nature is itself affected by the trend and spiritual effect of our action; a very great change in the spirit of our works changes the nature of our being and alters the foundation it has taken; it shifts the centre of conscious force from which we act. If life and action were entirely illusory, as some would have it, if the Spirit had nothing to do with works or life, this would not be so; but the soul in us develops itself by life and works and, not indeed so much the action itself, but the way of our soul’s inner force of working determines its relations to the Spirit. This is, indeed, the justification of Karmayoga as a practical means of the higher self-realisation ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-251 “Some near approached, were touched, caught fire, then failed, Too great was her demand, too pure her force. Thus lighting earth around her like a sun, Yet in her inmost sky an orb aloof, A distance severed her from those most close.” Savitri-366 The four orders of old Indian social culture, chaturvarnya : "This swadharma is of four general kinds formulated outwardly in the action of the four orders of the old Indian social culture, chaturvarnya . (The Gita-4.13) That system corresponds, says the Gita, to a divine law, it “was created by me according to the divisions of the gunas and works,” — created from the beginning by the Master of existence. In other words, there are four distinct orders of the active nature, or four fundamental types of the soul in nature, svabhava , and the work and proper function of each human being corresponds to his type of nature. This is now finally explained in preciser detail. The works of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras , says the Gita, are divided according to the qualities (gunas) born of their own inner nature, spiritual temperament, essential character (svabhava ). Calm, self-control, askesis, purity, long-suffering, candour, knowledge, acceptance of spiritual truth are the work of the Brahmin , born of his swabhava . Heroism, high spirit, resolution, ability, not fleeing in the battle, giving, lordship ( ısvara-bhava , the temperament of the ruler and leader) are the natural work of the Kshatriya. Agriculture, cattle-keeping, trade inclusive of the labour of the craftsman and the artisan are the natural work of the Vaishya. All work of the character of service falls within the natural function of the Shudra . A man, it goes on to say, who devotes himself to his own natural work in life acquires spiritual perfection, not indeed by the mere act itself, but if he does it with right knowledge and the right motive, if he can make it a worship of the Spirit of this creation and dedicate it sincerely to the Master of the universe from whom is all impulse to action. All labour, all action and function, whatever it be, can be consecrated by this dedication of works, can convert the life into a self-offering to the Godhead within and without us and is itself converted into a means of spiritual perfection. But a work not naturally one’s own, even though it may be well performed, even though it may look better from the outside when judged by an external and mechanical standard or may lead to more success in life, is still inferior as a means of subjective growth precisely because it has an external motive and a mechanical impulsion. One’s own natural work is better, even if it looks from some other point of view defective. One does not incur sin or stain when one acts in the true spirit of the work and in agreement with the law of one’s own nature. All action in the three gunas is imperfect, all human work is subject to fault, defect or limitation; but that should not make us abandon our own proper work and natural function. Action should be rightly regulated action, niyatam karma , (The Gita-3.8, 18.47) but intrinsically one’s own, evolved from within, in harmony with the truth of one’s being, regulated by the Swabhava , svabhava-niyatam karma ." (The Gita-18.47) CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-509-510, "The ancient Chaturvarnya must not be judged by its later disintegrated degeneration and gross meaningless parody, the caste system. But neither was it precisely the system of the classes which we find in other civilisations, priesthood, nobility, merchant class and serfs or labourers. It may have had outwardly the same starting-point, but it was given a very different revealing significance. The ancient Indian idea was that man falls by his nature into four types. There are, first and highest, the man of learning and thought and knowledge; next, the man of power and action, ruler, warrior, leader, administrator; third in the scale, the economic man, producer and wealth-getter, the merchant, artisan, cultivator: these were the twice-born, who received the initiation, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya . Last came the more undeveloped human type, not yet fit for these steps of the scale, unintellectual, without force, incapable of creation or intelligent production, the man fit only for unskilled labour and menial service, the Shudra . The economic order of society was cast in the form and gradation of these four types. The Brahmin class was called upon to give the community its priests, thinkers, men of letters, legists, scholars, religious leaders and guides. The Kshatriya class gave it its kings, warriors, governors and administrators. The Vaishya order supplied it with its producers, agriculturists, craftsmen, artisans, merchants and traders. The Shudra class ministered to its need of menials and servants. As far as this went, there was nothing peculiar in the system except its extraordinary durability and, perhaps, the supreme position given to religion, thought and learning, not only at the top of the scale, — for that can be paralleled from one or two other civilisations, — but as the dominant power. The Indian idea in its purity fixed the status of a man in this order not by his birth, but by his capacities and his inner nature, and, if this rule had been strictly observed, that would have been a very clear mark of distinctness, a superiority of a unique kind. But even the best society is always something of a machine and gravitates towards the material sign and standard, and to found truly the social order upon this finer psychological basis would have been in those times a difficult and vain endeavour. In practice we find that birth became the basis of the Varna . It is elsewhere that we must look for the strong distinguishing mark which has made of this social structure a thing apart and sole in its type." CWSA-20/The Renaissance in India/p-170-171 Nitya Yajna , ceaseless sacrifice is the Central truth of the Gita and Integral Yoga: " Sacrifice is the law of the world and nothing can be gained without it, neither mastery here, nor the possession of heavens beyond, nor the supreme possession of all; “this world is not for him who doeth not sacrifice, how then any other world?” (The Gita-4.31) Therefore all these and many other forms of sacrifice have been “extended in the mouth of the Brahman ,” (The Gita-4.32) the mouth of that Fire which receives all offerings; they are all means and forms of the one great Existence in activity, means by which the action of the human being can be offered up to That of which his outward existence is a part and with which his inmost self is one. They are “all born of work” (The Gita-3.14-15); all proceed from and are ordained by the one vast energy of the Divine which manifests itself in the universal karma and makes all the cosmic activity a progressive offering to the one Self and Lord and of which the last stage for the human being is self-knowledge and the possession of the divine or Brahmic consciousness. “So knowing thou shalt become free.” (The Gita-9.28)" CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-122, "But the integral Yoga pushed towards a complete union of the Divine with the earth-life cannot stop short in this narrow province or limit this union within the lesser dimensions of an ethical rule of philanthropy and beneficence. All action must be made in it part of the God-life, (1) our acts of knowledge, (2) our acts of power and production and creation, (3) our acts of joy and beauty and the soul’s pleasure, (4) our acts of will and endeavour and struggle and not our acts only of love and beneficent service. Its way to do these things will be not outward and mental, but inward and spiritual, and to that end it will bring into all activities, whatever they are, the spirit of divine love, the spirit of adoration and worship, the spirit of happiness in the Divine and in the beauty of the Divine so as to make all life a sacrifice of the works of the soul’s love to the Divine, its cult of the Master of its existence." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-162 Significance of Sacrifice: "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 . (The Gita-3.26, 5.13) 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 . (The Gita-9.23) Sacrifice is the very condition of life; with sacrifice as their eternal companion the Father of creatures created the peoples. (The Gita-3.10)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-89 "Even the material interchange between gods and men proceeds upon this principle, as typified in the dependence of rain and its product food on this working and on them the physical birth of creatures. (The Gita-3.14, 15) For all the working of Prakriti is in its true nature a sacrifice, yajna , with the Divine Being as the enjoyer of all energisms and works and sacrifice and the great Lord of all existences, bhoktaram yajnatapasam sarvaloka-mahesvaram , (The Gita-5.29) and to know this Divine all-pervading and established in sacrifice, sarvagatam yajne pratisthitam, (The Gita-3.15) is the true, the Vedic knowledge." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-117 The Sacrifice of Knowledge is the Highest Sacrifice: "In answer Krishna affirms that the Sankhya goes by knowledge and renunciation, the Yoga by works; but the real renunciation is impossible without Yoga, without works done as a sacrifice, done with equality and without desire of the fruit, with the perception that it is Nature which does the actions and not the soul; but immediately afterwards he declares that the sacrifice of knowledge is the highest, all work finds its consummation in knowledge, (The Gita-4.33) by the fire of knowledge all works are burnt up; therefore by Yoga works are renounced and their bondage overcome for the man who is in possession of his Self." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-82, "But there are gradations in the range of these various forms of sacrifice, the physical offering the lowest , the sacrifice of knowledge the highest . Knowledge is that in which all this action culminates, (The Gita-4.33) not any lower knowledge, but the highest, self- knowledge and God-knowledge, that which we can learn from those who know the true principles of existence, (The Gita-4.34) that by possessing which we shall not fall again into the bewilderment of the mind’s ignorance and into its bondage to mere sense-knowledge and to the inferior activity of the desires and passions. The knowledge in which all culminates is that by which “thou shalt see all existences (becomings, bhutani ) without exception in the Self, then in Me.” (The Gita-4.35) For the Self is that one, immutable, all-pervading, all-containing, self-existent reality or Brahman hidden behind our mental being into which our consciousness widens out when it is liberated from the ego; we come to see all beings as becomings, bhutani, within that one self-existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-122, "The sacrifice of knowledge, says the Gita therefore, is greater than any material sacrifice . “Even if thou art the greatest doer of sin beyond all sinners, thou shalt cross over all the crookedness of evil in the ship of knowledge . . . . (The Gita-4.36) There is nothing in the world equal in purity to knowledge.” (The Gita-4.38) By knowledge desire and its first-born child, sin, are destroyed. The liberated man is able to do works as a sacrifice because he is freed from attachment through his mind, heart and spirit being firmly founded in self- knowledge, gata-sangasya jnana vasthita-cetasah . (The Gita-4.23) All his work disappears completely as soon as done, suffers laya, as one might say, in the being of the Brahman , pravilıyate ; (The Gita-4.23) it has no reactionary consequence on the soul of the apparent doer. The work is done by the Lord through his Nature, it is no longer personal to the human instrument. The work itself becomes but power of the nature and substance of the being of the Brahman ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-200, "Those who lay a predominant stress on knowledge, arrive to the same point by an always increasing, engrossing, enforcing power of the vision of the Divine on the soul and the nature. Theirs is the sacrifice of knowledge and by an ineffable ecstasy of knowledge they come to the adoration of the Purushottama , jnana-yajnena yajanto mam upasate . (The Gita-9.15) This is a comprehension filled with Bhakti, because it is integral in its instruments, integral in its objective. It is not a pursuit of the Supreme merely as an abstract unity or an indeterminable Absolute. It is a heart-felt seeking and seizing of the Supreme and the Universal, a pursuit of the Infinite in his infinity and of the Infinite in all that is finite, a vision and embracing of the One in his oneness and of the One in all his several principles, his innumerable visages, forces, forms, here, there, everywhere, timelessly and in time, multiply, multitudinously, in endless aspects of his Godhead, in beings without number, all his million universal faces fronting us in the world and its creatures, ekatvena prithaktvena bahudha visvatomukham. (The Gita-9.15) This knowledge becomes easily an adoration, a large devotion, a vast self-giving, an integral self-offering because it is the knowledge of a Spirit, the contact of a Being, the embrace of a supreme and universal Soul which claims all that we are even as it lavishes on us when we approach it all the treasures of its endless delight of existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-327-328, "All true Truth of love and of the works of love the psychic being accepts in their place: but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns it into a stake of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-157, “It is therefore through the sacrifice of love, works and knowledge with the psychic being as the leader and priest of the sacrifice that life itself can be transformed into its own true spiritual figure. If the sacrifice of knowledge rightly done is easily the largest and purest offering we can bring to the Highest, the sacrifice of love is not less demanded of us for our spiritual perfection; it is even more intense and rich in its singleness and can be made not less vast and pure. This pure wideness is brought into the intensity of the sacrifice of love when into all our activities there is poured the spirit and power of a divine infinite joy and the whole atmosphere of our life is suffused with an engrossing adoration of the One who is the All and the Highest. For then does the sacrifice of love attain its utter perfection when, offered to the divine All, it becomes integral, catholic and boundless, and when, uplifted to the Supreme, it ceases to be the weak, superficial and transient movement men call love and becomes a pure and grand and deep uniting Ananda .” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-158 4 / Chapter 4. Towards the Yoga of Knowledge , Jnana Yoga The Reconciliation of Matter and Spirit through the practice of integral Jnana Yoga : “But this exclusive consummation (realisation of Supreme Self) is not the sole or inevitable result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and with less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realization of the supreme Self not only in one’s own being but in all beings and, finally, the realization of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realization a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into activities of the divine consciousness utilizable for the projection of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualization and to the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-38-39 "Or a revealing Force sweeps blazing in; Out of some vast superior continent Knowledge breaks through trailing its radiant seas, And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.” Savitri-47 “Of wisdom looked from light on transient things. A scout of victory in a vigil tower, Her aspiration called high destiny down; A silent warrior paced in her city of strength Inviolate, guarding Truth’s diamond throne.” Savitri-358 “Our greater self of knowledge waits for us, A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast: It sees from summits beyond thinking mind, It moves in a splendid air transcending life. It shall descend and make earth’s life divine.” Savitri-484 “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.” Savitri-710 The Gita's Message of Material Sacrifice for Cellular Transformation: “In the light of a larger knowledge Matter also can be seen to be the Brahman , a self-energy put forth by the Brahman, a form and substance of Brahman ; aware of the secret consciousness within material substance, secure in this larger knowledge, the gnostic light and power can unite itself with Matter, so seen, and accept it as an instrument of a spiritual manifestation. A certain reverence, even, for Matter and a sacramental attitude in all dealings with it is possible. As in the Gita the act of the taking of food is spoken of as a material sacrament, a sacrifice, an offering of Brahman to Brahman by Brahman, so also the gnostic consciousness and sense can view all the operations of Spirit with Matter.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine-1022-1023, " Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman fire, Brahman is that which is to be attained by samadhi in Brahman- action." The Gita-4.24 5/ Chapter 5. The Yoga of Renunciation (Karma Sannyasa Yoga) Summary or A Brief Restatement: This chapter identifies that true sannyasa i s within and not without; Karma Yoga i s greater than Jnana Yoga, though the objective of both is the same. " That equality, impersonality, peace, joy, freedom do not depend on so outward a thing as doing or not doing works. The Gita insists repeatedly on the difference between the inward and the outward renunciation, tyaga and sannyasa . The latter, it says, is valueless without the former, hardly possible even to attain without it, and unnecessary when there is the inward freedom. In fact tyaga itself is the real and sufficient Sannyasa . “He should be known as the eternal Sannyasin who neither hates nor desires; free from the dualities he is happily and easily released from all bondage.” (The Gita-5.3) The painful process of outward Sannyasa, duhkham aptum, (The Gita-5.6) is an unnecessary process. It is perfectly true that all actions, as well as the fruit of action, have to be given up, to be renounced, but inwardly, not outwardly, not into the inertia of Nature, but to the Lord in sacrifice, into the calm and joy of the Impersonal from whom all action proceeds without disturbing his peace ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-184-185 Karma Yoga is superior to Jnana Yoga : " Arjuna is perplexed; here are desireless works, the principle of Yoga, and renunciation of works , the principle of Sankhya, put together side by side as if part of one method, yet there is no evident reconciliation between them. For the kind of reconciliation which the Teacher has already given, — in outward inaction to see action still persisting and in apparent action to see a real inaction since the soul has renounced its illusion of the worker and given up works into the hands of the Master of sacrifice, — is for the practical mind of Arjuna too slight, too subtle and expressed almost in riddling words; he has not caught their sense or at least not penetrated into their spirit and reality. Therefore he asks again, “Thou declarest to me the renunciation of works, O Krishna, and again thou declarest to me Yoga; which one of these is the better way, that tell me with a clear decisiveness.” (The Gita-5.1) ....The answer is important, for it puts the whole distinction very clearly and indicates though it does not develop entirely the line of reconciliation . “Renunciation and Yoga of works both bring about the soul’s salvation, but of the two the Yoga of works is distinguished above the renunciation of works. He should be known as always a Sannyasin (even when he is doing action) who neither dislikes nor desires; for free from the dualities he is released easily and happily from the bondage. Children speak of Sankhya and Yoga apart from each other, not the wise; if a man applies himself integrally to one, he gets the fruit of both,” because in their integrality each contains the other. “The status which is attained by the Sankhya , to that the men of the Yoga also arrive; who sees Sankhya and Yoga as one, he sees. But renunciation is difficult to attain without Yoga ; the sage who has Yoga attains soon to the Brahman ; his self becomes the self of all existences (of all things that have become), and even though he does works, he is not involved in them.” He knows that the actions are not his, but Nature’s and by that very knowledge he is free; he has renounced works, does no actions, though actions are done through him; he becomes the Self, the Brahman, brahmabhuta, (The Gita-5.24) he sees all existences as becomings ( bhutani) of that self-existent Being, his own only one of them, all their actions as only the development of cosmic Nature working through their individual nature and his own actions also as a part of the same cosmic activity. This is not the whole teaching of the Gita ; for as yet there is only the idea of the immutable self or Purusha, the Akshara Brahman , and of Nature, Prakriti , as that which is responsible for the cosmos and not yet the idea, clearly expressed, of the Ishwara, the Purushottama ; as yet only the synthesis of works and knowledge and not yet , in spite of certain hints, the introduction of the supreme element of devotion which becomes so important afterwards; as yet only the one inactive Purusha and the lower Prakriti and not yet the distinction of the triple Purusha and the double Prakriti. It is true the Ishwara is spoken of, but his relation to the self and nature is not yet made definite . The first six chapters only carry the synthesis so far as it can be carried without the clear expression and decisive entrance of these (Ishwara's relation with Self and Nature) all-important truths which, when they come in, must necessarily enlarge and modify, though without abolishing, these first reconciliations. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-82-84 True Renunciation: "The true Sannyasa of action is the reposing of all works on the Brahman . “He who, having abandoned attachment, acts reposing (or founding) his works on the Brahman, brahmanya dhaya karmani , (The Gita-5.10) is not stained by sin even as water clings not to the lotus-leaf.” (The Gita-5.10) Therefore the Yogins first “do works with the body, mind, understanding, or even merely with the organs of action, abandoning attachment, for self-purification, sangam tyaktvatmasuddhaye . (The Gita-5.11) By abandoning attachment to the fruits of works the soul in union with Brahman attains to peace of rapt foundation in Brahman, but the soul not in union is attached to the fruit and bound by the action of desire.” (The Gita-5.12) The foundation, the purity, the peace once attained, the embodied soul perfectly controlling its nature, having renounced all its actions by the mind, inwardly, not outwardly, “sits in its nine- gated city neither doing nor causing to be done.” (The Gita-5.13) For this soul is the one impersonal Soul in all, the all-pervading Lord, prabhu, vibhu, who, as the impersonal, neither creates the works of the world, nor the mind’s idea of being the doer, na kartrutvam na karmani , (The Gita-5.14) nor the coupling of works to their fruits, the chain of cause and effect." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-185, "There is nothing that is not ancient and familiar in the first of these three transforming inner movements; for it has always been one of the principal objects of spiritual discipline. It has been best formulated in the already expressed doctrine of the Gita by which a complete renouncement of desire for the fruits as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the complete achievement of a perfect equality are put forward as the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual equality is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire , — to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success or failure, to look with an equal eye on high and low, friend and enemy, the virtuous and the sinner, to see in all beings the manifold manifestation of the One and in all things the multitudinous play or the slow masked evolution of the embodied Spirit. It is not a mental quiet, aloofness, indifference, not an inert vital quiescence, not a passivity of the physical consciousness consenting to no movement or to any movement that is the condition aimed at, though these things are sometimes mistaken for this spiritual condition, but a wide comprehensive unmoved universality such as that of the Witness Spirit behind Nature. For all here seems to be a mobile half-ordered half-confused organisation of forces, but behind them one can feel a supporting peace, silence, wideness, not inert but calm, not impotent but potentially omnipotent with a concentrated, stable, immobile energy in it capable of bearing all the motions of the universe. This Presence behind is equal-souled to all things: the energy it holds in it can be unloosed for any action, but no action will be chosen by any desire in the Witness Spirit; a Truth acts which is beyond and greater than the action itself or its apparent forms and impulses, beyond and greater than mind or life-force or body, although it may take for the immediate purpose a mental, a vital or a physical appearance. It is when there is this death of desire and this calm equal wideness in the consciousness everywhere, that the true vital being within us comes out from the veil and reveals its own calm, intense and potent presence. For such is the true nature of the vital being, pranamaya purusa ; it is a projection of the Divine Purusha into life, — tranquil, strong, luminous, many-energied, obedient to the Divine Will, egoless, yet or rather therefore capable of all action, achievement, highest or largest enterprise. The true Life-Force too reveals itself as no longer this troubled harassed divided striving surface energy, but a great and radiant Divine Power, full of peace and strength and bliss, a wide-wayed Angel of Life with its wings of Might enfolding the universe." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-177-178 Self-Purification: "Therefore the Yogins do works with the body, mind, understanding, or even merely with the organs of action, abandoning attachment, for self-purification, atmasuddhaye. " The Gita-5.11, "Acts of sacrifice, giving and askesis ought not to be renounced at all, but should be performed, for they purify the wise." The Gita-18.5, "If there is to be an active perfection of our being, the first necessity is a purification of the working of the instruments which it now uses for a music of discords . The being itself, the spirit, the divine Reality in man stands in no need of purification; it is for ever pure, not affected by the faults of its instrumentation or the stumblings of mind and heart and body in their work, as the sun, says the Upanishad, is not touched or stained by the faults of the eye of vision. Mind, heart, the soul of vital desire, the life in the body are the seats of impurity; it is they that must be set right if the working of the spirit is to be a perfect working and not marked by its present greater or less concession to the devious pleasure of the lower nature. What is ordinarily called purity of the being, is either a negative whiteness , a freedom from sin gained by a constant inhibition of whatever action, feeling, idea or will we think to be wrong, or else, the highest negative or passive purity, the entire God-content, inaction, the complete stilling of the vibrant mind and the soul of desire, which in quietistic disciplines leads to a supreme peace; for then the spirit appears in all the eternal purity of its immaculate essence. That gained, there would be nothing farther to be enjoyed or done. But here we have the more difficult problem of a total, unabated, even an increased and more powerful action founded on perfect bliss of the being, the purity of the soul’s instrumental as well as the spirit’s essential nature. Mind, heart, life, body are to do the works of the Divine, all the works which they do now and yet more, but to do them divinely, as now they do not do them. This is the first appearance of the problem before him on which the seeker of perfection has to lay hold, that it is not a negative, prohibitory, passive or quietistic, but a positive, affirmative, active purity which is his object. A divine quietism discovers the immaculate eternity of the Spirit, a divine kinetism adds to it the right pure undeviating action of the soul, mind and body." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-643-644, "Moreover, it is a total purification of all the complex instrumentality in all the parts of each instrument that is demanded of us by the integral perfection. It is not, ultimately, the narrower moral purification of the ethical nature. Ethics deals only with the desire-soul and the active outward dynamical part of our being; its field is confined to character and action. It prohibits and inhibits certain actions, certain desires, impulses, propensities, it inculcates certain qualities in the act, such as truthfulness, love, charity, compassion, chastity. When it has got this done and assured a base of virtue, the possession of a purified will and blameless habit of action, its work is finished. But the Siddha of the integral perfection has to dwell in a larger plane of the Spirit’s eternal purity beyond good and evil. By this phrase it is not meant, as the rash hastily concluding intellect would be prone to imagine, that he will do good and evil indifferently and declare that to the spirit there is no difference between them, which would be in the plane of individual action an obvious untruth and might serve to cover a reckless self-indulgence of the imperfect human nature. Neither is it meant that since good and evil are in this world inextricably entangled together, like pain and pleasure, — a proposition which, however true at the moment and plausible as a generalisation, need not be true of the human being’s greater spiritual evolution, — the liberated man will live in the spirit and stand back from the mechanical continued workings of a necessarily imperfect nature. This, however possible as a stage towards a final cessation of all activity, is evidently not a counsel of active perfection. But it is meant that the Siddha of the active integral perfection will live dynamically in the working of the transcendent power of the divine Spirit as a universal will through the supermind individualised in him for action. His works will therefore be the works of an eternal Knowledge, an eternal Truth, an eternal Might, an eternal Love, an eternal Ananda; but the truth, knowledge, force, love, delight will be the whole essential spirit of whatever work he will do and will not depend on its form; they will determine his action from the spirit within and the action will not determine the spirit or subject it to a fixed standard or rigid mould of working. He will have no dominant mere habit of character, but only a spiritual being and will with at the most a free and flexible temperamental mould for the action. His life will be a direct stream from the eternal fountains, not a form cut to some temporary human pattern. His perfection will not be a sattwic purity, but a thing uplifted beyond the gunas of Nature, a perfection of spiritual knowledge, spiritual power, spiritual delight, unity and harmony of unity; the outward perfection of his works will be freely shaped as the self-expression of this inner spiritual transcendence and universality. For this change he must make conscient in him that power of spirit and supermind which is now superconscient to our mentality. But that (Supramental) cannot work in him so long as his present mental, vital, physical being is not liberated from its actual inferior working (of the three Gunas). This purification is the first necessity." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-644-645, "The Purification of the mental being and the psychic prana — we will leave aside for the time the question of the physical purification, that of the body and physical prana, though that too is necessary to an integral perfection, prepares the ground for a spiritual liberation. Suddhi is the condition for mukti. All purification is a release, a delivery; for it is a throwing away of limiting, binding, obscuring imperfections and confusions: (1) purification from desire brings the freedom of the psychic prana , (2) purification from wrong emotions and troubling reactions the freedom of the heart , (3) purification from the obscuring limited thought of the sense mind the freedom of the intelligence, (4) purification from mere intellectuality the freedom of the gnosis . But all this is an instrumental liberation. The freedom of the soul, mukti, is of a larger and more essential character; it is an opening out of mortal limitation into the illimitable immortality of the Spirit." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-674, "But we have on the other hand this advantage that one important instrument sufficiently purified can be used as a means for the purification of the others, one step firmly taken makes easier all the others and gets rid of a host of difficulties. Which instrument then by its purification and perfection will bring about most easily and effectively or can aid with a most powerful rapidity the perfection of the rest?... Since we are the spirit enveloped in mind, a soul evolved here as a mental being in a living physical body, it must naturally be in the mind , the antahkarana , that we must look for this desideratum. And in the mind it is evidently by the buddhi, the intelligence and the will of the intelligence that the human being is intended to do whatever work is not done for him by the physical or nervous nature as in the plant and the animal. Pending the evolution of any higher supramental power the intelligent will must be our main force for effectuation and to purify it becomes a very primary necessity. Once our intelligence and will are well purified of all that limits them and gives them a wrong action or wrong direction, they can easily be perfected, can be made to respond to the suggestions of Truth, understand themselves and the rest of the being, see clearly and with a fine and scrupulous accuracy what they are doing and follow out the right way to do it without any hesitating or eager error or stumbling deviation. Eventually their (purified intelligence and will, buddhya visuddhaya, The Gita-18.51) response can be opened up to the perfect discernings, intuitions, inspirations, revelations of the supermind and proceed by a more and more luminous and even infallible action. But this purification cannot be effected without a preliminary clearing of its natural obstacles in the other lower parts of the antah karana , and the chief natural obstacle running through the whole action of the antah karana , through the sense, the mental sensation, emotion, dynamic impulse, intelligence, will, is the intermiscence and the compelling claim of the psychic prana . This then must be dealt with, its dominating intermiscence ruled out, its claim denied, itself quieted and prepared for purification." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-654-655 Knowledge followed by Equality: "But knowledge comes to its persistent seeker and removes the natural self-ignorance; it shines out like a long-hidden sun and lights up to our vision that self-being supreme beyond the dualities of this lower existence, adityavat (jnanam) prakasayati tat param . (The Gita-5.16) By a long whole-hearted endeavour, by directing our whole conscious being to that, by making that our whole aim, by turning it into the whole object of our discerning mind and so seeing it not only in ourselves but everywhere, we become one thought and self with that, tad-buddhayas tad-atmanah , (The Gita-5.17) we are washed clean of all the darkness and suffering of the lower man by the waters of knowledge, jnana-nirdhuta-kalmasah (The Gita-5.17)... The result (of this awakening of Knowledge) is, says the Git a, a perfect equality to all things and all persons; and then only can we repose our works completely in the Brahman . For the Brahman is equal, samam brahma , (The Gita-5.19) and it is only when we have this perfect equality, samye sthitam manah , (The Gita-5.19) “seeing with an equal eye the learned and cultured Brahmin , the cow, the elephant, the dog, the outcaste” (The Gita-5.18) and knowing all as one Brahman , that we can, living in that oneness , see like the Brahman our works proceeding from the nature freely without any fear of attachment, sin or bondage. Sin and stain then cannot be; for we have overcome that creation full of desire and its works and reactions which belongs to the ignorance, tair jitah. sargah , (The Gita-5.19) and living in the supreme and divine Nature there is no longer fault or defect in our works; for these are created by the inequalities of the ignorance. The equal Brahman i s faultless, nirdosam hi samam brahma , (The Gita-5.19) beyond the confusion of good and evil, and living in the Brahman we too rise beyond good and evil; we act in that purity, stainlessly, with an equal and single purpose of fulfilling the welfare of all existences, ksına-kalmasah sarvabhuta-hite ratah . (The Gita-5.25)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-202-203, “The test it (The Gita) lays down is an absolute equality of the mind and the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view, not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any spot of the nature, then we have the absolute liberation to which the Gita points us, but not otherwise. The tiniest reaction is a proof that the discipline is imperfect and that some part of us accepts ignorance and bondage as its law and clings still to the old nature. Our self-conquest is only partially accomplished; it is still imperfect or unreal in some stretch or part or smallest spot of the ground of our nature. And that little pebble of imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the Yoga!... There are certain semblances of an equal spirit which must not be mistaken for the profound and vast spiritual equality which the Gita teaches. There is an equality of disappointed resignation, an equality of pride, an equality of hardness and indifference: all these are egoistic in their nature. Inevitably they come in the course of the sadhana, but they must be rejected or transformed into the true quietude. There is too, on a higher level, the equality of the stoic, the equality of a devout resignation or a sage detachment, the equality of a soul aloof from the world and indifferent to its doings. These too are insufficient; first approaches they can be, but they are at most early soul-phases only or imperfect mental preparations for our entry into the true and absolute self-existent wide evenness of the spirit.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-103 Nirvana is perfectly compatible with Action in the World: "But the direct way to union lies through the firm realisation of the immutable Self, and it is the Gita’s insistence on this as a first necessity, after which alone works and devotion can acquire their whole divine meaning, that makes it possible for us to mistake its drift. For if we take the passages in which it insists most rigorously upon this necessity and neglect to observe the whole sequence of thought in which they stand, we may easily come to the conclusion (deceptive conclusion) that it does really teach actionless absorption as the final state of the soul and action only as a preliminary means towards stillness in the motionless Immutable. It is in the close of the fifth and throughout the sixth chapter that this insistence is strongest and most comprehensive. There we get the description of a Yoga which would seem at first sight to be incompatible with works and we get the repeated use of the word Nirvana to describe the status to which the Yogin arrives." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-235, "Thus Nirvana is clearly compatible with world-consciousness and with action in the world. For the sages who possess it are conscious of and in intimate relation by works with the Divine in the mutable universe; they are occupied with the good of all creatures, sarvabhuta-hite . (The Gita-5.25) They have not renounced the experiences of the Kshara Purusha, they have divinised them; for the Kshara , the Gita tells us, is all existences, sarvabhutani , (The Gita-6.29) and the doing universal good to all is a divine action in the mutability of Nature. This action in the world is not inconsistent with living in Brahman , it is rather its inevitable condition and outward result because the Brahman in whom we find Nirvana, the spiritual consciousness in which we lose the separative ego-consciousness, is not only within us but within all these existences, exists not only above and apart from all these universal happenings, but pervades them, contains them and is extended in them. Therefore by Nirvana in the Brahman must be meant a destruction or extinction of the limited separative consciousness, falsifying and dividing, which is brought into being on the surface of existence by the lower Maya of the three gunas, and entry into Nirvana is a passage into this other true unifying consciousness which is the heart of existence and its continent and its whole containing and supporting, its whole original and eternal and final truth. Nirvana when we gain it, enter into it, is not only within us, but all around, abhito vartate , (The Gita-5.26) because this is not only the Brahman- consciousness which lives secret within us, but the Brahman- consciousness in which we live. It is the Self which we are within, the supreme Self of our individual being but also the Self which we are without, the supreme Self of the universe, the self of all existences. By living in that self we live in all, and no longer in our egoistic being alone; by oneness with that self a steadfast oneness with all in the universe becomes the very nature of our being and the root status of our active consciousness and root motive of all our action ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-237-238 Sarvabhuta hite ratah : "And the philosopher’s equality is like the Stoic’s, like the world-fleeing ascetic’s, inwardly a lonely freedom, remote and aloof from men; but the man born to the divine birth has found the Divine not only in himself, but in all beings. He has realised his unity with all and his equality is therefore full of sympathy and oneness. He sees all as himself and is not intent on his lonely salvation; he even takes upon himself the burden of their happiness and sorrow by which he is not himself affected or subjected. The perfect sage, the Gita more than once repeats, is ever engaged with a large equality in doing good to all creatures and makes that his occupation and delight , sarvabhutahite ratah. (The Gita-5.25, 12.4) The perfect Yogin is no solitary musing on the Self in his ivory tower of spiritual isolation, but yuktah kritsna-karma-krit , (The Gita-4.18) a many-sided universal worker for the good of the world, for God in the world. For he is a bhakta , a lover and devotee of the Divine, as well as a sage and a Yogin, a lover who loves God wherever he finds Him and who finds Him everywhere; and what he loves, he does not disdain to serve, nor does action carry him away from the bliss of union, since all his acts proceed from the One in him and to the One in all they are directed. The equality of the Gita is a large synthetic equality in which all is lifted up into the integrality of the divine being and the divine nature. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-199, "The result is, says the Gita, a perfect equality to all things and all persons; and then only can we repose our works completely in the Brahman. For the Brahman is equal, samam brahma , and it is only when we have this perfect equality, samye sthitam manah, “seeing with an equal eye the learned and cultured Brahmin , the cow, the elephant, the dog, the outcaste” (The Gita-5.18) and knowing all as one Brahman , that we can, living in that oneness, see like the Brahman our works proceeding from the nature freely without any fear of attachment, sin or bondage. Sin and stain then cannot be; for we have overcome that creation full of desire and its works and reactions which belongs to the ignorance, tair jitah sargah , (The Gita-5.19) and living in the supreme and divine Nature there is no longer fault or defect in our works; for these are created by the inequalities of the ignorance. The equal Brahman is faultless, nirdosam hi samam brahma , (The Gita-5.19) beyond the confusion of good and evil, and living in the Brahman we too rise beyond good and evil; we act in that purity, stainlessly, with an equal and single purpose of fulfilling the welfare of all existences, ksına-kalmasah sarvabhuta-hite ratah . (The Gita-5.25) The Lord in our hearts is in the ignorance also the cause of our actions, but through his Maya, through the egoism of our lower nature which creates the tangled web of our actions and brings back upon our egoism the recoil of their tangled reactions affecting us inwardly as sin and virtue, affecting us outwardly as suffering and pleasure, evil fortune and good fortune, the great chain of Karma . When we are freed by knowledge, the Lord, no longer hidden in our hearts, but manifest as our supreme self, (supreme Self descends to our Psychic heart centre) takes up our works and uses us as faultless instruments, nimitta-matram , (The Gita-11.33) for the helping of the world. ("Wrong could not come where all was light and love." Savitri-314) Such is the intimate union between knowledge and equality; knowledge here in the buddhi reflected as equality in the temperament; above, on a higher plane of consciousness, knowledge as the light of the Being, equality as the stuff of the Nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-102-103, "“Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman, they in whom the stains of sin are effaced and the knot of doubt is cut asunder, masters of their selves, who are occupied in doing good to all creatures, sarvabhuta-hite ratah .” (The Gita-5.25) That would almost seem to mean that to be thus is to be in Nirvana . But the next verse is quite clear and decisive, “Yatis (those who practise self-mastery by Yoga and austerity) who are delivered from desire and wrath and have gained self-mastery, for them Nirvana in the Brahman exists all about them, encompasses them, they already live in it because they have knowledge of the Self.” (The Gita-5.26) That is to say, to have knowledge and possession of the self is to exist in Nirvana . This is clearly a large extension of the idea of Nirvana . Freedom from all stain of the passions, the self-mastery of the equal mind on which that freedom is founded, equality to all beings, sarvabhutesu , (The Gita-3.18) and beneficial love for all, final destruction of that doubt and obscurity of the ignorance which keeps us divided from the all-unifying Divine and the knowledge of the One Self within us and in all are evidently the conditions of Nirvana which are laid down in these verses of the Gita, go to constitute it and are its spiritual substance." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-236-237 5/ Chapter 5. The Yoga of Renunciation (Karma Sannyasa Yoga) Na Kinchit api chintayet: "But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-316 Bridging the gulf between active and passive Brahman : "This status of an inner passivity and an outer action independent of each other is a state of entire spiritual freedom. The Yogin, as the Gita says, even in acting does no actions, for it is not he, but universal Nature directed by the Lord of Nature which is at work. He is not bound by his works, nor do they leave any after effects or consequences in his mind, nor cling to or leave any mark on his soul; (na karme lipyate nare ) (The Gita-5.10) they vanish and are dissolved (Praviliyante karmani) (The Gita-4.3) by their very execution and leave the immutable self unaffected and the soul unmodified. Therefore this would seem to be the poise the uplifted soul ought to take, if it has still to preserve any relations with human action in the world-existence, an unalterable silence, tranquillity, passivity within, an action without regulated by the universal Will and Wisdom which works, as the Gita says, without being involved in, bound by or ignorantly attached to its works. And certainly this poise of a perfect activity founded upon a perfect inner passivity is that which the Yogin has to possess, as we have seen in the Yoga of Works. But here in this status of self-knowledge at which we have arrived, there is an evident absence of integrality; for there is still a gulf, an unrealised unity or a cleft of consciousness between the passive and the active Brahman. We have still to possess consciously the active Brahman without losing the possession of the silent Self. We have to preserve the inner silence, tranquillity, passivity as a foundation; but in place of an aloof indifference to the works of the active Brahman we have to arrive at an equal and impartial delight in them; in place of a refusal to participate lest our freedom and peace be lost we have to arrive at a conscious possession of the active Brahman whose joy of existence does not abrogate His peace, nor His lordship of all workings impair His calm freedom in the midst of His works." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-405-406, 6/ Chapter 6. The Yoga of the Supreme Spirit Summary or A Brief Restatement: “This Yoga of self-control by intelligent will must be rigorously, resolutely and continually practised without yielding to any discouragement by difficulty or failure until the bliss of Nirvana is securely possessed.” The Gita-6.23, " The most important is a steady, quiet endurance that does not allow any upsetting or depression to interfere with your progress. The sincerity of the aspiration is the assurance of the victory."- The Mother/(CWM-14, p. 164, "This peace of Nirvana is reached when all the mental consciousness is perfectly controlled and liberated from desire and remains still in the Self, when, motionless like the light of a lamp in a windless place, it ceases from its restless action, shut in from its outward motion, and by the silence and stillness of the mind the Self is seen within , not disfigured as in the mind, but in the Self, seen, not as it is mistranslated falsely or partially by the mind and represented to us through the ego, but self-perceived by the Self, svaprakasa . Then the soul is satisfied and knows its own true and exceeding bliss, not that untranquil happiness which is the portion of the mind and the senses, but an inner and serene felicity in which it is safe from the mind’s perturbations and can no longer fall away from the spiritual truth of its being. Not even the fieriest assault of mental grief can disturb it ; for mental grief comes to us from outside, is a reaction to external touches, and this is the inner, the self-existent happiness of those who no longer accept the slavery of the unstable mental reactions to external touches. It is the putting away of the contact with pain, the divorce of the mind’s marriage with grief, duhkha-samyoga-viyogam . (The Gita-6.23) The firm winning of this inalienable spiritual bliss is Yoga, it is the divine union; it is the greatest of all gains and the treasure beside which all others lose their value. Therefore is this Yoga to be resolutely practised without yielding to any discouragement by difficulty or failure until the release, until the bliss of Nirvana is secured as an eternal possession." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-242, Sri Aurobindo quoted this line of the Gita (The Gita-6.23) at five places of The Synthesis of Yoga , (pages 61, 220, 245, 723-724, 773, ) confirming it as a very important message for the beginners of Yoga. “For in his Yoga there is nothing too small to be used and nothing too great to be attempted. As the servant and disciple of the Master has no business with pride or egoism because all is done for him from above, so also he has no right to despond because of his personal deficiencies or the stumblings of his nature. For the Force that works in him is impersonal — or superpersonal — and infinite.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-61-61,““Practise unfalteringly,” says the Gita, “with a heart free from despondency,” the Yoga; for even though in the earlier stage of the path we drink deep of the bitter poison of internal discord and suffering, the last taste of this cup is the sweetness of the nectar of immortality and the honey-wine of an eternal Ananda.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-220, “If one has walked long and steadily in the path, the faith of the heart will remain under the fiercest adverse pressure; even if it is concealed or apparently overborne, it will take the first opportunity to re-emerge. For something higher than either heart or intellect upholds it in spite of the worst stumblings and through the most prolonged failure. But even to the experienced sadhaka such falterings or overcloudings bring a retardation of his progress and they are exceedingly dangerous to the novice. It is therefore necessary from the beginning to understand and accept the arduous difficulty of the path and to feel the need of a faith which to the intellect may seem blind, but yet is wiser than our reasoning intelligence. For this faith is a support from above; it is the brilliant shadow thrown by a secret light that exceeds the intellect and its data; it is the heart of a hidden knowledge that is not at the mercy of immediate appearances. Our faith, persevering, will be justified in its works and will be lifted and transfigured at last into the self-revelation of a divine knowledge. Always we must adhere to the injunction of the Gita, “Yoga must be continually applied with a heart free from despondent sinking.” (Th Gita-6.23) Always we must repeat to the doubting intellect the promise of the Master, “I will surely deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve.” (The Gita-18.66) At the end, the flickerings of faith will cease; for we shall see his face and feel always the Divine Presence. ” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-245, "The persistence of trouble, asanti , the length of time taken for this purification and perfection, itself must not be allowed to become a reason for discouragement and impatience. It comes because there is still something in the nature which responds to it, and the recurrence of trouble serves to bring out the presence of the defect , put the sadhaka upon his guard and bring about a more enlightened and consistent action of the will to get rid of it. When the trouble is too strong to be kept out, it must be allowed to pass and its return discouraged by a greater vigilance and insistence of the spiritualised buddhi . Thus persisting, it will be found that these things lose their force more and more, become more and more external and brief in their recurrence, until finally calm becomes the law of the being. This rule persists so long as the mental buddhi is the chief instrument ; but when the supramental light takes possession of mind and heart, then there can be no trouble, grief or disturbance; for that brings with it a spiritual nature of illumined strength in which these things can have no place. There the only vibrations and emotions are those which belong to the anandamaya nature of divine unity .” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-723-724, “And yet faith is necessary throughout and at every step because it is a needed assent of the soul and without this assent there can be no progress. Our faith must first be abiding in the essential truth and principles of the Yoga, and even if this is clouded in the intellect, despondent in the heart, outwearied and exhausted by constant denial and failure in the desire of the vital mind, there must be something in the innermost soul which clings and returns to it, otherwise we may fall on the path or abandon it from weakness and inability to bear temporary defeat, disappointment, difficulty and peril. In the Yoga as in life it is the man who persists unwearied to the last in the face of every defeat and disillusionment and of all confronting, hostile and contradicting events and powers who conquers in the end and finds his faith justified because to the soul and Shakti in man nothing is impossible.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-773, “The description of Yoga as “bitter like poison in the beginning” because of the difficulty and struggle “but in the end sweet as nectar” because of the joy of realisation, the peace of liberation or the divine Ananda and the frequent description by sadhaks and bhaktas of the periods of dryness shows sufficiently that it is no unique peculiarity of this Yoga. All the old disciplines recognised this and it is why the Gita says that Yoga should be practised patiently and steadily with a heart that refuses to be overcome by despondency. It is a recommendation applicable to this path but also to the way of the Gita and to the hard “razor” path of the Vedanta , and to every other. It is quite natural that the higher the Ananda to come down, the more difficult may be the beginning, the drier the deserts that have to be crossed on the way.” CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-628, “If mankind only caught a glimpse of what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust and scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature, to forbid the turning away of our feet from her ordinary pastures.” Sri Aurobindo/TMCW-10/On Thoughts and Aphorisms/p-10-11, "The soul that aspires to perfection, draws back and upward, says the Upanishad, from the physical into the vital and from the vital into the mental Purusha , from the mental into the knowledge-soul and from that self of knowledge into the bliss Purusha . This self of bliss is the conscious foundation of perfect Sachchidananda and to pass into it completes the soul’s ascension. The mind therefore must try to give to itself some account of this decisive transformation of the embodied consciousness, this radiant transfiguration and self-exceeding of our ever aspiring nature. The description mind can arrive at, can never be adequate to the thing itself, but it may point at least to some indicative shadow of it or perhaps some half-luminous image." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-474, “Meanwhile, we should acknowledge that we don’t have the key, it is not yet in our hands. Or rather, we know quite well where it is, and there is only one thing to do: the perfect ‘surrender’ Sri Aurobindo speaks of, the total surrender to the divine Will whatever happens, even in the dark of night…There is night and sun, night and sun, and night again, many nights, but one must cling to this will for ‘surrender,’ cling as through a storm, and put everything into the hands of the Supreme Lord. Until the day when the Sun shall shine forever, the day of total Victory.” The Mother's Agenda/15.11.1958 When one has got to the top of Yoga?: But when one has got to the top? Then works are no longer the cause; the calm of self-mastery and self-possession gained by works becomes the cause. Again, the cause of what? Of fixity in the Self, in the Brahman -consciousness and of the perfect equality in which the divine works of the liberated man are done. “For when one does not get attached to the objects of sense or to works and has renounced all will of desire in the mind , then is he said to have ascended to the top of Yoga.” (The Gita-6.4) That, as we know already, is the spirit in which the liberated man does works; he does them without desire and attachment, without the egoistic personal will and the mental seeking which is the parent of desire. He has conquered his lower self, reached the perfect calm in which his highest self is manifest to him, that highest self always concentrated in its own being, samahita , (The Gita-6.7) in Samadhi , not only in the trance of the inward-drawn consciousness, but always, in the waking state of the mind as well, in exposure to the causes of desire and of the disturbance of calm, to grief and pleasure, heat and cold, honour and disgrace, all the dualities, sıtosna-sukhaduhkhesu tathamanapamanayoh . (The Gita-6.7) This higher self is the Akshara, kutastha , which stands above the changes and the perturbations of the natural being; and the Yogin is said to be in Yoga with it when he also is like it, kutastha , (The Gita-6.8) when he is superior to all appearances and mutations, when he is satisfied with self-knowledge, when he is equal-minded to all things and happenings and persons." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-240-241 What is Self-control, samyama?: " There is a distinction implied too between coercion and suppression, nigraha , and control with right use and right guidance, samyama . The former is a violence done to the nature by the will, which in the end depresses the natural powers of the being, atmanam avasadayet ; (The Gita-6.5) the latter is the control of the lower by the higher self, which successfully gives to those powers their right action and their maximum efficiency, — yogah karmasu kausalam . (The Gita-2.50) This nature of samyama is made very clear by the Gita in the opening of its sixth chapter, “By the self thou shouldst deliver the self, thou shouldst not depress and cast down the self (whether by self-indulgence or suppression); for the self is the friend of the self and the self is the enemy. To the man is his self a friend in whom the (lower) self has been conquered by the (higher) self, but to him who is not in possession of his (higher) self, the (lower) self is as if an enemy and it acts as an enemy.” (The Gita-6.5-6) When one has conquered one’s self and attained to the calm of a perfect self-mastery and self-possession, then is the supreme self in a man founded and poised even in his outwardly conscious human being, samahita . (The Gita-6.7) In other words, to master the lower self by the higher, the natural self by the spiritual is the way of man’s perfection and liberation." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-218-219 Why Rajayogic Meditation is indispensable?: "But this Yoga is after all no easy thing to acquire, as Arjuna indeed shortly afterwards suggests, for the restless mind is always liable to be pulled down from these heights by the attacks of outward things and to fall back into the strong control of grief and passion and inequality. Therefore, it would seem, the Gita proceeds to give us in addition to its general method of knowledge and works a special process of Rajayogic meditation also, a powerful method of practice, abhyasa , a strong way to the complete control of the mind and all its workings. In this process the Yogin is directed to practise continually union with the Self so that that may become his normal consciousness. He is to sit apart and alone, with all desire and idea of possession banished from his mind, self-controlled in his whole being and consciousness. “He should set in a pure spot his firm seat, neither too high, nor yet too low, covered with a cloth, with a deer-skin, with sacred grass, and there seated with a concentrated mind and with the workings of the mental consciousness and the senses under control he should practise Yoga for self-purification, atma-visuddhaye. ” (The Gita-6.11-12) The posture he takes must be the motionless erect posture proper to the practice of Rajayoga ; the vision should be drawn in and fixed between the eye-brows, “not regarding the regions.” (The Gita-6.13) The mind is to be kept calm and free from fear and the vow of Brahmacharya observed; the whole controlled mentality must be devoted and turned to the Divine so that the lower action of the consciousness shall be merged in the higher peace. For the object to be attained is the still peace of Nirvana . “Thus always putting himself in Yoga by control of his mind the Yogin attains to the supreme peace of Nirvana which has its foundation in Me, santim nirvana-paramam matsamstham. ” (The Gita-6.15)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-241, "This is the Karmayoga as it is laid down in the Gita as I have developed it for the integral spiritual life. It is founded not on speculation and reasoning but on experience. It does not exclude meditation and it certainly does not exclude bhakti, for the self-offering to the Divine, the consecration of all oneself to the Divine which is the essence of this Karmayoga are essentially a movement of bhakti. Only it does exclude a life-fleeing exclusive meditation or an emotional bhakti shut up in its own inner dream taken as the whole movement of the Yoga. One may have hours of pure absorbed meditation or of the inner motionless adoration and ecstasy, but they are not the whole of the integral Yoga." CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-218, "I don’t think you understood very well what Mother was trying to tell you. First of all she did not say that prayers or meditation either were no good — how could she when both count for so much in Yoga? What she said was that the prayer must well up from the heart on a crest of emotion or aspiration, the Japa or meditation come in a live push carrying the joy or the light of the thing in it. If done mechanically and merely as a thing that ought to be done (stern grim duty!), it must tend towards want of interest and dryness and so be ineffective. It was what I meant when I said I thought you were doing Japa too much as a means for bringing about a result — I meant too much as a device, a process laid down for getting the thing done. That again was why I wanted the psychological conditions in you to develop, the psychic, the mental — for when the psychic is forward, there is no lack of life and joy in the prayer, the aspiration, the seeking, no difficulty in having the constant stream of bhakti and when the mind is quiet and inturned and upturned there is no difficulty or want of interest in meditation. Meditation by the way is a process leading towards knowledge and through knowledge, it is a thing of the head and not of the heart; so if you want dhyana , you can’t have an aversion to knowledge. Concentration in the heart is not meditation, it is a call on the Divine, on the Beloved. This Yoga too is not a Yoga of knowledge alone — knowledge is one of its means, but its base being self-offering, surrender, bhakti , it is based on the heart and nothing can be eventually done without this base. There are plenty of people here who do or have done Japa and base themselves on bhakti , very few comparatively who have done the “head” meditation; love and bhakti and works are usually the base — how many can proceed by knowledge? Only the few." CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-226-227 What is moderate approach towards Spiritual life?: "And yet the result is not, while one yet lives, a Nirvana which puts away every possibility of action in the world, every relation with beings in the world. It would seem at first that it ought to be so. When all the desires and passions have ceased, when the mind is no longer permitted to throw itself out in thought, when the practice of this silent and solitary Yoga has become the rule, what farther action or relation with the world of outward touches and mutable appearances is any longer possible? No doubt, the Yogin for a time still remains in the body, but the cave, the forest, the mountain-top seem now the fittest, the only possible scene of his continued living and constant trance of Samadhi his sole joy and occupation. But, first, while this solitary Yoga is being pursued, the renunciation of all other action is not recommended by the Gita . This Yoga , it says, is not for the man who gives up sleep and food and play and action, even as it is not for those who indulge too much in these things of the life and the body; but the sleep and waking, the food, the play, the putting forth of effort in works should all be yukta. (The Gita-6.16, 17) This is generally interpreted as meaning that all should be moderate, regulated, done in fit measure, and that may indeed be the significance. But at any rate when the Yoga is attained, all this has to be yukta in another sense, the ordinary sense of the word everywhere else in the Gita . In all states, in waking and in sleeping, in food and play and action, the Yogin will then be in Yoga with the Divine , and all will be done by him in the consciousness of the Divine as the self and as the All and as that which supports and contains his own life and his action." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-243, "At the same time it must be added that the power is enough; the abstention from all physical action is not indispensable, the aversion to action mental or corporeal is not desirable. The seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on the nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; they come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when it is not yet master of the physical. When we attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us ; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for that recession of the soul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge. " CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-347-348, What is the Cosmic Consciousness of the Gita ?: "For when the Gita describes the nature of this self-realisation and the result of the Yoga which comes by Nirvana of the separative ego-mind and its motives of thought and feeling and action into the Brahman -consciousness, it includes the cosmic sense, though lifted into a new kind of vision . “The man whose self is in Yoga , sees the self in all beings and all beings in the self, he sees all with an equal vision.” (The Gita-6.29) All that he sees is to him the Self, all is his self, all is the Divine. But is there no danger, if he dwells at all in the mutability of the Kshara , of his losing all the results of this difficult Yoga, losing the Self and falling back into the mind, of the Divine losing him and the world getting him, of his losing the Divine and getting back in its place the ego and the lower nature? No, says the Gita ; “he who sees Me everywhere and sees all in Me, to him I do not get lost, nor does he get lost to Me.” (The Gita-6.30) For this peace of Nirvana , though it is gained through the Akshara , is founded upon the being of the Purushottama , matsamstham , (The Gita-6.15) and that is extended, the Divine, the Brahman is extended too in the world of beings and, though transcendent of it, not imprisoned in its own transcendence. One has to see all things as He and live and act wholly in that vision; that is the perfect fruit of the Yoga. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-244 Why Action is indispensable in the Gita's Yoga?: "But why act? Is it not safer to sit in one’s solitude looking out upon the world, if you will, seeing it in Brahman , in the Divine, but not taking part in it, not moving in it, not living in it, not acting in it, living rather ordinarily in the inner Samadhi ? Should not that be the law, the rule, the dharma of this highest spiritual condition? No, again; for the liberated Yogin there is no other law, rule, dharma than simply this, to live in the Divine and love the Divine and be one with all beings; his freedom is an absolute and not a contingent freedom, self-existent and not dependent any longer on any rule of conduct, law of life or limitation of any kind. He has no longer any need of a process of Yoga , because he is now perpetually in Yoga . “The Yogin who has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings, however and in all ways he lives and acts, lives and acts in Me. ” (The Gita-6.31) The love of the world spiritualised, changed from a sense-experience to a soul-experience, is founded on the love of God and in that love there is no peril and no shortcoming. ('Wrong could not come where all was light and love.' Savitri-314) Fear and disgust of the world may often be necessary for the recoil from the lower nature, for it is really the fear and disgust of our own ego which reflects itself in the world. But to see God in the world is to fear nothing, it is to embrace all in the being of God; to see all as the Divine is to hate and loathe nothing, but love God in the world and the world in God." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-244-245 Reconciliation of Karma and Jnana Yoga : "Man, therefore, has first of all to become ethical, sukrutı , (The Gita-7.16) and then to rise to heights beyond any mere ethical rule of living, to the light, largeness and power of the spiritual nature, where he gets beyond the grasp of the dualities and its delusion, dvandva-moha . (The Gita-7.27, 28) There he no longer seeks his personal good or pleasure or shuns his personal suffering or pain, for by these things he is no longer affected, nor says any longer, “I am virtuous,” “I am sinful,” but acts in his own high spiritual nature by the will of the Divine for the universal good . We have already seen that for this end self-knowledge, equality, impersonality are the first necessities , and that that is the way of reconciliation between knowledge and works, between spirituality and activity in the world, between the ever immobile quietism of the timeless self and the eternal play of the pragmatic energy of Nature. But the Gita now lays down another and greater necessity for the Karmayogin who has unified his Yoga of works with the Yoga of knowledge. Not knowledge and works alone are demanded of him now, but bhakti also, devotion to the Divine, love and adoration and the soul’s desire of the Highest. This demand, not expressly made until now, had yet been prepared when the Teacher laid down as the necessary turn of his Yoga the conversion of all works into a sacrifice to the Lord of our being and fixed as its culmination the giving up of all works, not only into our impersonal Self, but through impersonality into the Being from whom all our will and power originate. What was there implied is now brought out and we begin to see more fully the Gita’s purpose." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-281-282, “Ultimately, nothing but omnipotence could convert the world, convince the world. The world isn't ready to experience supreme Love. Supreme Love eliminates all problems, even the problem of creation: there are no more problems, I know it since that experience [of April 13, 1962]. But the world isn't ready yet, it may take a few thousand years. Although it is beginning to be ready for the manifestation of supreme Power (which seems to indicate that this will manifest first). And this supreme Power would result from a CONSTANT identification…But this "constancy" isn't yet established: one is identified and then one isn't, is and then isn't, so things get delayed indefinitely. You wind up doing exactly what you tell others not to do – one foot here and one foot there! It just won't do.” The Mother/The Mother’s Agenda-04.07.1962 A Yogi lives and acts in Me, maye vartate : " The wisdom of the liberated man is not then, in the view of the Gita, a consciousness of abstracted and unrelated impersonality, a do-nothing quietude. For the mind and soul of the liberated man are firmly settled in a constant sense, an integral feeling of the pervasion of the world by the actuating and directing presence of the divine Master of the universe, etam vibhutim mama yo vetti. He is aware of his spirit’s transcendence of the cosmic order, but he is aware also of his oneness with it by the divine Yoga, yogam ca mama . And he sees each aspect of the transcendent, the cosmic and the individual existence in its right relation to the supreme Truth and puts all in their right place in the unity of the divine Yoga. He no longer sees each thing in its separateness, — the separate seeing that leaves all either unexplained or one-sided to the experiencing consciousness. Nor does he see all confusedly together, — the confused seeing that gives a wrong light and a chaotic action. Secure in the transcendence, he is not affected by the cosmic stress and the turmoil of Time and circumstance. Untroubled in the midst of all this creation and destruction of things, his spirit adheres to an unshaken and untrembling, an unvacillating Yoga of union with the eternal and spiritual in the universe. He watches through it all the divine persistence of the Master of the Yoga and acts out of a tranquil universality and oneness with all things and creatures. And this close contact with all things implies no involution of soul and mind in the separative lower nature, because his basis of spiritual experience is not the inferior phenomenal form and movement but the inner All and the supreme Transcendence. He becomes of like nature and law of being with the Divine, sa dharmyam agatah , (The Gita-14.2) transcendent even in universality of spirit, universal even in the individuality of mind, life and body. By this Yoga once perfected, undeviating and fixed, avikampena yogena yujyate, (The Gita-10.7) he is able to take up whatever poise of nature, assume whatever human condition, do whatever world-action without any fall from his oneness with the divine Self, without any loss of his constant communion with the Master of existence ('sarvatha vartamanopi sa yogı mayi vartate. ' The Gita-6.31) ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-352-353, "Spirit sees spirit, the divinised consciousness sees God as directly and more directly, as intimately and more intimately than bodily consciousness sees matter. It sees, feels, thinks, senses the Divine. For to the spiritual consciousness all manifest existence appears as a world of spirit and not a world of matter, not a world of life, not a world even of mind; these other things are to its view only God-thought, God-force, God-form. That is what the Gita means by living and acting in Vasudeva, mayi vartate . The spiritual consciousness is aware of the Godhead with that close knowledge by identity which is so much more tremendously real than any mental perception of the thinkable or any sensuous experience of the sensible. It is so aware even of the Absolute who is behind and beyond all world-existence and who originates and surpasses it and is for ever outside its vicissitudes. And of the immutable self of this Godhead that pervades and supports the world’s mutations with his unchanging eternity, this consciousness is similarly aware, by identity, by the oneness of this self with our own timeless unchanging immortal spirit. It is aware again in the same manner of the divine Person who knows himself in all these things and persons and becomes all things and persons in his consciousness and shapes their thoughts and forms and governs their actions by his immanent will. It is intimately conscious of God absolute, God as self, God as spirit, soul and nature. Even this external Nature it knows by identity and self-experience, but an identity freely admitting variation, admitting relations, admitting greater and lesser degrees of the action of the one power of existence. For Nature is God’s power of various self-becoming, atma-vibhuti ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-369, "The practical difficulty of the change from the ignorant and shackled normal nature of man to the dynamic freedom of a divine and spiritual being will be apparent if we ask ourselves, more narrowly, how the transition can be effected from the fettered embarrassed functioning of the three qualities to the infinite action of the liberated man who is no longer subject to the gunas. The transition is indispensable; for it is clearly laid down that he must be above or else without the three gunas , trigunatıta, nistraigunya . On the other hand it is no less clearly, no less emphatically laid down that in every natural existence here on earth the three gunas are there in their inextricable working and it is even said that all action of man or creature or force is merely the action of these three modes upon each other, a functioning in which one or other predominates and the rest modify its operation and results, gunagunesu vartante . (The Gita-3.28) How then can there be another dynamic and kinetic nature or any other kind of works? To act is to be subject to the three qualities of Nature; to be beyond these conditions of her working is to be silent in the Spirit. The Ishwara, the Supreme who is master of all her works and functions and guides and determines them by his divine will, is indeed above this mechanism of quality, not touched or limited by her modes, but still it would seem that he acts always through them , always shapes by the power of the swabhava and through the psychological machinery of the gunas . These three are fundamental properties of Prakriti , necessary operations of the executive Nature-force which takes shape here in us, and the Jiva himself is only a portion of the Divine in this Prakriti . If then the liberated man still does works, still moves in the kinetic movement, it must be so that he moves and acts, in Nature and by the limitation of her qualities, subject to their reactions, not, in so far as the natural part of him persists, in the freedom of the Divine. But the Gita has said exactly the opposite, that the liberated Yogin is delivered from the guna reactions and whatever he does, however he lives, moves and acts in God, i n the power of his freedom and immortality, in the law of the supreme eternal Infinite, sarvatha vartamanopi sa yogı mayi vartate . (The Gita-6.31) There seems here to be a contradiction, an impasse." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-463-464, “That work cannot be fixed by any mind-made rule or human standard; for his consciousness has moved away from human law and limits and passed into the divine liberty, away from government by the external and transient into the self-rule of the inner and eternal, away from the binding forms of the finite into the free self-determination of the Infinite. “Howsoever he lives and acts,” says the Gita, “he lives and acts in Me.” The rules which the intellect of men lays down cannot apply to the liberated soul, — by the external criteria and tests which their mental associations and prejudgments prescribe, such a one cannot be judged; he is outside the narrow jurisdiction of these fallible tribunals. It is immaterial whether he wears the garb of the ascetic or lives the full life of the householder; whether he spends his days in what men call holy works or in the many-sided activities of the world; whether he devotes himself to the direct leading of men to the Light like Buddha, Christ or Shankara or governs kingdoms like Janaka or stands before men like Sri Krishna as a politician or a leader of armies; what he eats or drinks; what are his habits or his pursuits; whether he fails or succeeds; whether his work be one of construction or of destruction; whether he supports or restores an old order or labours to replace it by a new; whether his associates are those whom men delight to honour or those whom their sense of superior righteousness out- castes and reprobates; whether his life and deeds are approved by his contemporaries or he is condemned as a misleader of men and a fomenter of religious, moral or social heresies. He is not governed by the judgments of men or the laws laid down by the ignorant; he obeys an inner voice and is moved by an unseen Power. His real life is within and this is its description that he lives, moves and acts in God, in the Divine, in the Infinite.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-271 Why Bhakti is the greatest Yajna? : "The Gita brings in here as always bhakti as the climax of the Yoga, sarvabhutasthitam yo mam bhajati ekatvam asthitah ; (The Gita-6.31) that may almost be said to sum up the whole final result of the Gita’s teaching — whoever loves God in all and his soul is founded upon the divine oneness, however he lives and acts, lives and acts in God. And to emphasise it still more, after an intervention of Arjuna and a reply to his doubt as to how so difficult a Yoga can be at all possible for the restless mind of man, the divine Teacher returns to this idea and makes it his culminating utterance. “The Yogin is greater than the doers of askesis, greater than the men of knowledge, greater than the men of works; become then the Yogin, O Arjuna ,” (The Gita-6.46) the Yogin, one who seeks for and attains, by works and knowledge and askesis or by whatever other means, not even spiritual knowledge or power or anything else for their own sake, but the union with God alone; for in that all else is contained and in that lifted beyond itself to a divinest significance. But even among Yogins the greatest is the Bhakta . “Of all Yogins he who with all his inner self given up to Me, for Me has love and faith, sraddhavan bhajate , him I hold to be the most united with Me in Yoga .” (The Gita-6.47) It is this that is the closing word of these first six chapters and contains in itself the seed of the rest, of that which still remains unspoken and is nowhere entirely spoken ; for it is always and remains something of a mystery and a secret, rahasyam , the highest spiritual mystery and the divine secret." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-246, 6/ Chapter 6. The Yoga of the Supreme Spirit Method of Self-discipline for a Sadhak of Integral Yoga: "The integral Yoga will make use of both the passive and the active methods according to the need of the nature and the guidance of the inner spirit, the Antaryamin. It will not limit itself by the passive way, for that would lead only to some individual quietistic salvation or negation of an active and universal spiritual being which would be inconsistent with the totality of its aim. It will use the method of endurance, but not stop short with a detached strength and serenity, but move rather to a positive strength and mastery, in which endurance will no longer be needed, since the self will then be in a calm and powerful spontaneous possession of the universal energy and capable of determining easily and happily all its reactions in the oneness and the Ananda . It will use the method of impartial indifference, but not end in an aloof indifference to all things, but rather move towards a high-seated impartial acceptance of life strong to transform all experience into the greater values of the equal spirit. It will use too temporarily resignation and submission, but by the full surrender of its personal being to the Divine it will attain to the all-possessing Ananda in which there is no need of resignation, to the perfect harmony with the universal which is not merely an acquiescence, but an embracing oneness, to the perfect instrumentality and subjection of the natural self to the Divine by which the Divine also is possessed by the individual spirit. It will use fully the positive method, but will go beyond any individual acceptance of things which would have the effect of turning existence into a field only of the perfected individual knowledge, power and Ananda. That it will have, but also it will have the oneness by which it can live in the existence of others for their sake and not only for its own and for their assistance and as one of their means, an associated and helping force in the movement towards the same perfection. It will live for the Divine, not shunning world-existence, not attached to the earth or the heavens, not attached either to a supracosmic liberation, but equally one with the Divine in all his planes and able to live in him equally in the Self and in the manifestation." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-719-720 7/ Chapter 7. The Yoga of Knowledge Summary or A Brief Restatement: This seventh chapter deals with Para and Apara-Prakriti (The Gita-7.1 to 14) and The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge. (The Gita-7.15 to 28) This chapter also hints at knowing the Divine in totality, samagram mam, through intermediate Spiritual experience of cosmic Consciousness, Vasudevah sarvam iti . The action of three Gunas and the Divine Will: "There is first the distinction between the Self and the individual being in Nature. The distinction has been used to point out that this individual being in Nature is necessarily subject, so long as he lives shut up within the action of the ego, to the workings of the three gunas which make up by their unstable movements the whole scope and method of the reason, the mind and the life and senses in the body. And within this circle there is no solution. Therefore the solution has to be found by an ascent out of the circle, above this nature of the gunas , to the one immutable Self and silent Spirit, because then one gets beyond that action of the ego and desire which is the whole root of the difficulty. But since this by itself seems to lead straight towards inaction, as beyond Nature there is no instrumentality of action and no cause or determinant of action, — for the immutable self is inactive, impartial and equal to all things, all workings and all happenings, — the Yoga idea is brought in of the Ishwara, the Divine as master of works and sacrifice, and it is hinted (The Gita-5.2) but not yet expressly stated that this Divine exceeds even the immutable self and that in him lies the key to cosmic existence. Therefore by rising to him through the Self it is possible to have spiritual freedom from our works and yet to continue in the works of Nature. But it has not yet been stated who is this Supreme, incarnate here in the divine teacher and charioteer of works, or what are his relations to the Self and to the individual being in Nature. Nor is it clear how the Will to works coming from him can be other than the will in the nature of the three gunas . And if it is only that, then the soul obeying it can hardly fail to be in subjection to the gunas in its action, if not in its spirit, and if so, at once the freedom promised becomes either illusory or incomplete. Will seems to be an aspect of the executive part of being, to be power and active force of nature, Shakti, Prakriti . Is there then a higher Nature than that of the three gunas ? Is there a power of pragmatic creation, will, action other than that of ego, desire, mind, sense, reason and the vital impulse?" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-264-265, "This lower nature of the three gunas which creates so false a view of things and imparts to them an inferior character is a Maya, a power of illusion, by which it is not meant that it is all non-existent or deals with unrealities, but that it bewilders our knowledge, creates false values, envelops us in ego, mentality, sense, physicality, limited intelligence and there conceals from us the supreme truth of our existence. This illusive Maya hides from us the Divine that we are, the infinite and imperishable spirit. “By these three kinds of becoming which are of the nature of the gunas , this whole world is bewildered and does not recognise Me supreme beyond them and imperishable.” (The Gita-7.13) If we could see that that Divine is the real truth of our existence, all else also would change to our vision, assume its true character and our life and action acquire the divine values and move in the law of the divine nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-276, "The first door of escape we see out of this limitation of our possibilities, out of this confused mixture of dharmas is in a certain high trend towards impersonality, a movement inwards towards something large and universal and calm and free and right and pure hidden now by the limiting mind of ego. The difficulty is that while we can feel a positive release into this impersonality in moments of the quiet and silence of our being, an impersonal activity is by no means so easy to realise. The pursuit of an impersonal truth or an impersonal will in our conduct is vitiated so long as we live at all in our normal mind by that which is natural and inevitable to that mind, the law of our personality, the subtle urge of our vital nature, the colour of ego. The pursuit of impersonal truth is turned by these influences into an unsuspected cloak for a system of intellectual preferences supported by our mind’s limiting insistence; the pursuit of a disinterested impersonal action is converted into a greater authority and apparent high sanction for our personal will’s interested selections and blind arbitrary persistences. On the other hand an absolute impersonality would seem to impose an equally absolute quietism, and this would mean that all action is bound to the machinery of the ego and the three gunas and to recede from life and its works the only way out of the circle. This impersonal silence however is not the last word of wisdom in the matter , because it is not the only way and crown or not all the way and the last crown of self-realisation (The last perfection of integral Yoga is identified as Truth supreme.) open to our endeavour. There is a mightier fuller more positive spiritual experience in which the circle of our egoistic personality and the round of the mind’s limitations vanish in the unwalled infinity of a greatest self and spirit and yet life and its works not only remain still acceptable and possible but reach up and out to their widest spiritual completeness and assume a grand ascending significance." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-545-546 "And there is this coincidence because that is always man’s highest and freest possible experience of a quietistic inner largeness and silence reconciled with an outer dynamic active living, the two coexistent or fused together in the impersonal infinite reality and illimitable action of the one immortal Power and sole eternal Existence. But the Gita adds a phrase of immense import that alters everything, atmani atho mayi. (The Gita-4.35) The demand is to see all things in the self and then in “Me” the Ishwara , to renounce all action into the Self, Spirit, Brahman and thence into the supreme Person, the Purushottama . There is here a still greater and profounder complex of spiritual experience, a larger transmutation of the significance of human life, a more mystic and heart-felt sweep of the return of the stream to the ocean , the restoration of personal works and the cosmic action to the Eternal Worker. The stress on pure impersonality has this difficulty and incompleteness for us that it reduces the inner person, the spiritual individual, that persistent miracle of our inmost being, to a temporary, illusive and mutable formation in the Infinite. The Infinite alone exists and except in a passing play has no true regard on the soul of the living creature. There can be no real and permanent relation between the soul in man and the Eternal , if that soul is even as the always renewable body no more than a transient phenomenon in the Infinite. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-548, "There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature. (The Gita-18.61) This divine Will is not an alien Power or Presence; it is intimate to us and we ourselves are part of it: for it is our own highest Self that possesses and supports it. Only, it is not our conscious mental will; it rejects often enough what our con- scious will accepts and accepts what our conscious will rejects. For while this secret One knows all and every whole and each detail, our surface mind knows only a little part of things. Our will is conscious in the mind, and what it knows, it knows by the thought only; the divine Will is superconscious to us because it is in its essence supra-mental, and it knows all because it is all. Our highest Self which possesses and supports this universal Power is not our ego-self, not our personal nature; it is something transcendent and universal of which these smaller things are only foam and flowing surface. If we surrender our conscious will and allow it to be made one with the will of the Eternal, then, and then only, shall we attain to a true freedom; living in the divine liberty, we shall no longer cling to this shackled so-called free- will, a puppet freedom ignorant, illusory, relative, bound to the error of its own inadequate vital motives and mental figures." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-97-98, "But how then shall we continue to act at all? For ordinarily the human being acts because he has a desire or feels a mental, vital or physical want or need; he is driven by the necessities of the body, by the lust of riches, honours or fame, or by a craving for the personal satisfactions of the mind or the heart or a craving for power or pleasure. Or he is seized and pushed about by a moral need or, at least, the need or the desire of making his ideas or his ideals or his will or his party or his country or his gods prevail in the world. If none of these desires nor any other must be the spring of our action, it would seem as if all incentive or motive power had been removed and action itself must necessarily cease. The Gita replies with its third great secret of the divine life. All action must be done in a more and more Godward and finally a God-possessed consciousness; our works must be a sacrifice to the Divine and in the end a surrender of all our being, mind, will, heart, sense, life and body to the One must make God-love and God-service our only motive. This transformation of the motive force and very character of works is indeed its master idea; it is the foundation of its unique synthesis of works, love and knowledge. In the end not desire, but the consciously felt will of the Eternal remains as the sole driver of our action and the sole originator of its initiative." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-104, Comprehensive Knowledge of the Supreme Lord: "This (The first six chapters of the Gita closes with this knowledge that the Divine is the source of all works and with this knowledge the Divine worker becomes free.) is what the Teacher proposes to give in the opening verses of the seventh chapter which initiate the development that occupies all the rest of the book. “Hear,” he says, “how by practising Yoga with a mind attached to me and with me as asraya (the whole basis, lodgment, point of resort of the conscious being and action) thou shalt know me without any remainder of doubt, integrally, samagram mam . I will speak to thee without omission or remainder, asesatah ,” (for otherwise a ground of doubt may remain), “the essential knowledge, attended with all the comprehensive knowledge, by knowing which there shall be no other thing here left to be known.” (The Gita-7.1-2) The implication of the phrase is that the Divine Being is all, vasudevah sarvam , and therefore if he is known integrally in all his powers and principles, then all is known, not only the pure Self, but the world and action and Nature. There is then nothing else here left to be known, because all is that Divine Existence. It is only because our view here is not thus integral, because it rests on the dividing mind and reason and the separative idea of the ego, that our mental perception of things is an ignorance. We have to get away from this mental and egoistic view to the true unifying knowledge, and that has two aspects, the essential, jnana , and the comprehensive, vijnana, (The Gita-7.2) the direct spiritual awareness of the supreme Being and the right intimate knowledge of the principles of his existence, Prakriti, Purusha and the rest, by which all that is can be known in its divine origin and in the supreme truth of its nature. That integral knowledge, says the Gita , is a rare and difficult thing ; “among thousands of men one here and there strives after perfection, and of those who strive and attain to perfection one here and there knows me in all the principles of my existence, tattvatah . (The Gita-7.3)” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-265-266, "The Inconscient is a sleep or a prison, the conscient a round of strivings without ultimate issue or the wanderings of a dream: we must wake into the superconscious where all darkness of night and half-lights cease in the self-luminous bliss of the Eternal. The Eternal is our refuge; all the rest are false values, the Ignorance and its mazes, a self-bewilderment of the soul in phenomenal Nature." CWSA-21-22/The Life Divine/p-666, "It may be asked how is that devotion high and noble, udara , which seeks God only for the worldly boons he can give or as a refuge in sorrow and suffering, and not the Divine for its own sake? Do not egoism, weakness, desire reign in such an adoration and does it not belong to the lower nature ? Moreover, where there is not knowledge, the devotee does not approach the Divine in his integral all-embracing truth, vasudevah sarvam iti , (The Gita-7.19) but constructs imperfect names and images of the Godhead which are only reflections of his own need, temperament and nature, and he worships them to help or appease his natural longings. He constructs for the Godhead the name and form of Indra or Agni, of Vishnu or Shiva, of a divinised Christ or Buddha , or else some composite of natural qualities, an indulgent God of love and mercy, or a severe God of righteousness and justice, or an awe-inspiring God of wrath and terror and flaming punishments, or some amalgam of any of these, and to that he raises his altars without and in his heart and mind and falls down before it to demand from it worldly good and joy or healing of his wounds or a sectarian sanction for an erring, dogmatic, intellectual, intolerent knowledge. All this up to a certain point is true enough. Very rare is the great soul who knows that Vasudeva the omnipresent Being is all that is, vasudevah sarvam iti sa mahatma sudurlabhah . (The Gita-7.19) Men are led away by various outer desires which take from them the working of the inner knowledge, kamais tais tair hritajnanah . (The Gita-7.20) Ignorant, they resort to other godheads, imperfect forms of the deity which correspond to their desire, prapadyante ’nyadevatah (The Gita-7.20). Limited, they set up this or that rule and cult, tam tam niyamam asthaya , (The Gita-7.20) which satisfies the need of their nature. And in all this it is a compelling personal determination, it is this narrow need of their own nature that they follow and take for the highest truth, incapable yet of the infinite and its largeness. The Godhead in these forms gives them their desires if their faith is whole; but these fruits and gratifications are temporary and it is a petty intelligence and unformed reason which makes the pursuit of them its principle of religion and life. And so far as there is a spiritual attainment by this way, it is only to the gods; it is only the Divine in formations of mutable nature and as the giver of her results that they realise. But those who adore the transcendent and integral Godhead embrace all this and transform it all, exalt the gods to their highest, Nature to her summits, and go beyond them to the very Godhead, realise and attain to the Transcendent. Devan deva-yajo yanti mad-bhakta api . (The Gita-7.23)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-285-286, "In other words, the supreme Purusha is not an entirely relationless Absolute aloof from our illusions, but he is the Seer, Creator and Ruler of the worlds, kavim anusasitaram, dhataram , (The Gita-8.9) and it is by knowing and by loving Him as the One and the All, vasudevah sarvam iti, that we ought by a union with him of our whole conscious being in all things, all energies, all actions to seek the supreme consummation, the perfect perfection, the absolute release." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-299, "This is what is intended by the phrase, vasudevah sarvam iti ; the Godhead is all that is universe and all that is in the universe and all that is more than the universe. (1)The Gita lays stress first on his supracosmic existence. For otherwise the mind would miss its highest goal and remain turned towards the cosmic only or else attached to some partial experience of the Divine in the cosmos. (2) It lays stress next on his universal existence in which all moves and acts. For that is the justification of the cosmic effort and that is the vast spiritual self-awareness in which the Godhead self-seen as the Time-Spirit does his universal works. (3) Next it insists with a certain austere emphasis on the acceptance of the Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body . For he is the Immanent in all existences, and if the indwelling divinity is not recognised, not only will the divine meaning of individual existence be missed, the urge to our supreme spiritual possibilities deprived of its greatest force, but the relations of soul with soul in humanity will be left petty, limited and egoistic. (4) Finally , it insists at great length on the divine manifestation in all things in the universe and affirms the derivation of all that is from the nature, power and light of the one Godhead. For that seeing too is essential to the God-knowledge; on it is founded the integral turn of the whole being and the whole nature God-wards, the acceptance by man of the works of the divine Power in the world and the possibility of remoulding his mentality and will into the type of the God-action, transcendent in initiation, cosmic in motive, transmitted through the individual, the Jiva ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-316 "This Godhead is the origin of all that is here or elsewhere and by his Nature he has become all these innumerable existences, abhut sarvani bhutani ; (Isha Upanishad-7) therefore man has to see and adore the One in all things animate and inanimate, to worship the manifestation in sun and star and flower, in man and every living creature, in the forms and forces, qualities and powers of Nature, vasudevah sarvam iti ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-344, "He is the Being, all are his becomings. He does not create out of a void, out of a Nihil or out of an unsubstantial matrix of dream. Out of himself he creates, in himself he becomes; all are in his being and all is of his being. This truth admits and exceeds the pantheistic seeing of things. Vasudeva is all, vasudevah sarvam ; but Vasudeva is all that appears in the cosmos because he is too all that does not appear in it, all that is never manifested. His being is in no way limited by his becoming; he is in no degree bound by this world of relations. Even in becoming all he is still a Transcendence; even in assuming finite forms he is always the Infinite." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-348, "We have to arrive at the hidden truth behind its manifest appearances; we have to discover the Spirit behind these veils and to see all as the One, vasudevah sarvam iti , individual, universal, transcendent. But this is a thing impossible to achieve with any completeness of inner reality, so long as we live concentrated in the inferior Nature. For in this lesser movement Nature is an ignorance, a Maya ; she shelters the Divine within its folds and conceals him from herself and her creatures. The Godhead is hidden by the Maya of his own all-creating Yoga, the Eternal figured in transience, Being absorbed and covered up by its own manifesting phenomena. In the Kshara taken alone as a thing in itself, the mutable universal apart from the undivided Immutable and the Transcendent, there is no completeness of knowledge, no completeness of our being and therefore no liberation." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-436, Para and Apara Prakriti : “Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, reason and ego is My eightfold divided Nature, apara-prakriti. Know too My other Divine Nature, Para-prakriti, different from this Apara Prakriti ; this Supreme Nature or the Supreme Mother which becomes the Jiva in the heart and by which this world is upheld. This ‘upholding of the world,’ jagat dharayate, means Para-Prakriti also penetrates into Apara Prakriti by which this world can be purified, transformed and perfected.” The Gita-7.4, 5, "The infinite divine Shakti is present everywhere and secretly supports the lower formulation, para prakritir meyaya dharyate jagat , (The Gita-7.5) but it holds itself back, hidden in the heart of each natural existence, sarvabhutanam hriddese , (The Gita-18.61) until the veil of Yogamaya is rent by the light of knowledge. The spiritual being of man, the Jiva , possesses the divine Nature. He is a manifestation of God in that Nature, para prakritir jıva-bhuta , (The Gita-7.5) and he has latent in him all the divine energies and qualities, the light, the force, the power of being of the Godhead. But in this inferior Prakriti in which we live, the Jiva follows the principle of selection and finite determination, and there whatever nexus of energy, whatever quality or spiritual principle he brings into birth with him or brings forward as the seed of his self-expression, becomes an operative portion of his swabhava , his law of self-becoming, and determines his swadharma, his law of action." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-371-372, "The perfecting of the normal mind, heart, prana and body gives us only the perfection of the psycho-physical machine we have to use and creates certain right instrumental conditions for a divine life and works lived and done with a purer, greater, clearer power and knowledge. The next question is that of the Force which is poured into the instruments, karana , and the One who works it for his universal ends. The force at work in us must be the manifest divine Shakti, the supreme or the universal Force unveiled in the liberated individual being, para prakritir jıvabhuta , (The Gita-7.5) who will be the doer of all the action and the power of this divine life, karta . The One behind this force will be the Ishwara, the Master of all being, with whom all our existence will be in our perfection a Yoga at once of oneness in being and of union in various relations of the soul and its nature with the Godhead who is seated within us and in whom too we live, move and have our being. It is this Shakti with the Ishwara in her or behind her whose divine presence and way we have to call into all our being and life. For without this divine presence and this greater working there can be no siddhi of the power of the nature." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-740, "But the perfection sought in the integral Yoga i s not only to be one with her in her highest spiritual power and one with her in her universal action, but to realise and possess the fullness of this Shakti in our individual being and nature. (1) For the supreme Spirit is one as Purusha or as Prakriti, conscious being or power of conscious being, and as the Jiva in essence of self and spirit is one with the supreme Purusha , (mamaivansa jivabhuta, The Gita-15.7 ) (2) so on the side of Nature, in power of self and spirit it is one with Shakti, para prakritir jıvabhuta. (The Gita-7.5 ) To realise this double oneness is the condition of the integral self-perfection. The Jiva is then the meeting-place of the play of oneness of the supreme Soul and Nature... To reach this perfection we have to become aware of the divine Shakti, draw her to us and call her in to fill the whole system and take up the charge of all our activities. There will then be no separate personal will or individual energy trying to conduct our actions, no sense of a little personal self as the doer, nor will it be the lower energy of the three gunas , the mental, vital and physical nature. The divine Shakti will fill us and preside over and take up all our inner activities, our outer life, our Yoga. She will take up the mental energy, her own lower formation, and raise it to its highest and purest and fullest powers of intelligence and will and psychic action. She will change the mechanical energies of the mind, life and body which now govern us into delight-filled manifestations of her own living and conscious power and presence. She will manifest in us and relate to each other all the various spiritual experiences of which the mind is capable. And as the crown of this process she will bring down the supramental light into the mental levels, change the stuff of mind into the stuff of supermind, transform all the lower energies into energies of her supramental nature and raise us into our being of gnosis. The Shakti will reveal herself as the power of the Purushottama , and it is the Ishwara who will manifest himself in his force of supermind and spirit and be the master of our being, action, life and Yoga. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-760-761, "In the second stage the individual doer disappears , but there is not necessarily any quietistic passivity; there may be a full kinetic action, only all is done by the Shakti. It is her power of knowledge which takes shape as thought in the mind; the sadhaka has no sense of himself thinking, but of the Shakti thinking in him. The will and the feelings and action are also in the same way nothing but a formation, operation, activity of the Shakti in her immediate presence and full possession of all the system. The sadhaka does not think, will, act, feel, but thought, will, feeling, action happen in his system. The individual on the side of action has disappeared into oneness with universal Prakriti, has become an individualised form and action of the divine Shakti. He is still aware of his personal existence, but it is as the Purusha supporting and observing the whole action, conscious of it in his self-knowledge and enabling by his participation the divine Shakti to do in him the works and the will of the Ishwara . The Master of the power is then sometimes hidden by the action of the power, sometimes appears governing it and compelling its workings. Here too there are three things present to the consciousness , (1) the Shakti carrying on all the knowledge, thought, will, feeling, action for the Ishwara in an instrumental human form, (2) the Ishwara , the Master of existence governing and compelling all her action, and (3) ourself as the soul, the Purusha of her individual action enjoying all the relations with him which are created by her workings. There is another form of this realisation in which the Jiva disappears into and becomes one with the Shakti and there is then only the play of the Shakti with the Ishwara, Mahadeva and Kali, Krishna and Radha, the Deva and the Devi . This is the intensest possible form of the Jiva’s realisation of himself as a manifestation of Nature, a power of the being of the Divine, para prakritir jıva-bhuta ." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-769 Link between Para and Apara Prakriti : "The supreme nature of spiritual being gives us then both an original truth and power of existence beyond cosmos and a first basis of spiritual truth for the manifestation in the cosmos. But where is the link between this supreme nature and the lower phenomenal nature? On me, says Krishna, all this, all that is here — sarvam idam , (The Gita-7.7) the common phrase in the Upanishads for the totality of phenomena in the mobility of the universe — is strung like pearls upon a thread. But this is only an image which we cannot press very far; for the pearls are only kept in relation to each other by the thread and have no other oneness or relation with the pearl-string except their dependence on it for this mutual connection....The workings of the gunas are only the superficial unstable becomings of reason, mind, sense, ego, life and matter, sattvika bhava rajasas tamasas ca ; (The Gita-7.12) but this (Para-prakriti) is rather the essential stable original intimate power of the becoming, svabhava. It is that which determines the primary law of all becoming and of each Jiva ; it constitutes the essence and develops the movement of the nature. It is a principle in each creature that derives from and is immediately related to a transcendent divine Becoming , that of the Ishwara, madbhavah . (The Gita-8.5, 10.6, 13.19) In this relation of the divine bhava to the svabhava and of the svabhava to the superficial bhavah , of the divine Nature to the individual self-nature and of the self-nature in its pure and original quality to the phenomenal nature in all its mixed and confused play of qualities, we find the link between that supreme and this lower existence . The degraded powers and values of the inferior Prakriti derive from the absolute powers and values of the supreme Shakti and must go back to them to find their own source and truth and the essential law of their operation and movement. So too the soul or Jiva involved here in the shackled, poor and inferior play of the phenomenal qualities, if he would escape from it and be divine and perfect, must by resort to the pure action of his essential quality of Swabhava go back to that higher law of his own being in which he can discover the will, the power, the dynamic principle, the highest working of his divine nature. " CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-270-272 How do we go beyond the three modes of Nature, Gunas ?: "The Gita has laid it down from the beginning that the very first precondition of the divine birth , the higher existence is the slaying of rajasic desire and its children, and that means the exclusion of sin. Sin is the working of the lower nature for the crude satisfaction of its own ignorant, dull or violent rajasic and tamasic propensities in revolt against any high self-control and self-mastery of the nature by the spirit. And in order to get rid of this crude compulsion of the being by the lower Prakriti in its inferior modes we must have recourse to the highest mode of that Prakriti, the sattwic , which is seeking always for a harmonious light of knowledge and for a right rule of action. The Purusha , the soul within us which assents in Nature to the varying impulse of the gunas, has to give its sanction to that sattwic impulse and that sattwic will and temperament in our being which seeks after such a rule. The sattwic will in our nature has to govern us and not the rajasic and tamasic will. This is the meaning of all high reason in action as of all true ethical culture; it is the law of Nature in us striving to evolve from her lower and disorderly to her higher and orderly action, to act not in passion and ignorance with the result of grief and unquiet, but in knowledge and enlightened will with the result of inner happiness, poise and peace. We cannot get beyond the three gunas , if we do not first develop within ourselves the rule of the highest guna, sattwa . “The evil-doers attain not to me,” says the Purushottama , “souls bewildered, low in the human scale; for their knowledge is reft away from them by Maya and they resort to the nature of being of the Asura . ” (The Gita-7.15) This bewilderment is a befooling of the soul in Nature by the deceptive ego. The evil-doer cannot attain to the Supreme because he is for ever trying to satisfy the idol ego on the lowest scale of human nature ; his real God is this ego. His mind and will, hurried away in the activities of the Maya of the three gunas , are not instruments of the spirit, but willing slaves or self-deceived tools of his desires. He sees this lower nature only and not his supreme self and highest being or the Godhead within himself and in the world: he explains all existence to his will in the terms of ego and desire and serves only ego and desire. ("A swimmer lost between two leaping seas" Savitri-700 (sea of Light of Supreme Self and Inconscient Self)) To serve ego and desire without aspiration to a higher nature and a higher law is to have the mind and the temperament of the Asura . A first necessary step upward is to aspire to a higher nature and a higher law, to obey a better rule than the rule of desire, to perceive and worship a nobler godhead than the ego or than any magnified image of the ego, to become a right thinker and a right doer. This too is not in itself enough; for even the sattwic man is subject to the bewilderment of the gunas , because he is still governed by wish and disliking, iccha-dvesa. (The Gita-7.27) He moves within the circle of the forms of Nature and has not the highest, not the transcendental and integral knowledge. Still by the constant upward aspiration in his ethical aim he in the end gets rid of the obscuration of sin which is the obscuration of rajasic desire and passion and acquires a purified nature capable of deliverance from the rule of the triple Maya . By virtue alone man cannot attain to the highest, but by virtue (Obviously, by the true inner punya , a sattwic clarity in thought, feeling, temperament, motive and conduct, not a merely conventional or social virtue.) he can develop a first capacity for attaining to it, adhikara . (The Gita-2.47) For the crude rajasic or the dull tamasic ego is difficult to shake off and put below us; the sattwic ego is less difficult and at last, when it sufficiently subtilises and enlightens itself, becomes even easy to transcend, transmute or annihilate." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-280-281 Reconciliation of Jnana and Bhakti Yoga : "We have now set before us three interdependent movements of our release out of the normal nature and our growth into the divine and spiritual being. “By the delusion of the dualities which arises from wish and disliking, all existences in the creation are led into bewilderment,” says the Gita . That is the ignorance, the egoism which fails to see and lay hold on the Divine everywhere, because it sees only the dualities of Nature and is constantly occupied with its own separate personality and its seekings and shrinkings. For escape from this circle the first necessity in our works is to get clear of the sin of the vital ego, the fire of passion, the tumult of desire of the rajasic nature, and this has to be done by the steadying sattwic impulse of the ethical being. When that is done, yesam tvantagatam papam jananam punyakarmanam , (The Gita-7.28) or rather as it is being done, for after a certain point all growth in the sattwic nature brings an increasing capacity for a high quietude, equality and transcendence, — it is necessary to rise above the dualities and to become impersonal, equal, one self with the Immutable, one self with all existences. This process of growing into the spirit completes our purification. But while this is being done, while the soul is enlarging into self-knowledge, it has also to increase in devotion. For it has not only to act in a large spirit of equality, but to do also sacrifice to the Lord, to that Godhead in all beings which it does not yet know perfectly, but which it will be able so to know, integrally, samagram mam , (The Gita-7.1) when it has firmly the vision of the one self everywhere and in all existences. Equality and vision of unity once perfectly gained, te dvandva-moha-nirmuktah , (The Gita-7.28) a supreme bhakti, an all-embracing devotion to the Divine, becomes the whole and the sole law of the being. All other law of conduct merges into that surrender, sarva-dharman parityajya . (The Gita-18.66) The soul then becomes firm in this bhakti and in the vow of self-consecration of all its being, knowledge, works; for it has now for its sure base, its absolute foundation of existence and action the perfect, the integral, the unifying knowledge of the all-originating Godhead, te bhajante mam drudha-vratah . (The Gita-7.28)" CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-82-83 Integral Knowledge is the condition of realising Transcendent Divine Love: "For note that it is bhakti with knowledge which the Gita demands from the disciple and it regards all other forms of devotion as good in themselves but still inferior; they may do well by the way, but they are not the thing at which it aims in the soul’s culmination. Among those who have put away the sin of the rajasic egoism and are moving towards the Divine, the Gita distinguishes between four kinds of bhaktas . There are those who turn to him as a refuge from sorrow and suffering in the world, arta . There are those who seek him as the giver of good in the world, artharthı. There are those who come to him in the desire for knowledge, jijnasu . And lastly there are those who adore him with knowledge, jnanı . All are approved by the Gita , but only on the last does it lay the seal of its complete sanction. All these movements without exception are high and good, udarah sarva evaite , (The Gita-7.18) but the bhakti with knowledge excels them all, visisyate . (The Gita-7.17) We may say that these forms are successively the bhakti o f the vital-emotional and affective nature, that of the practical and dynamic nature, that of the reasoning intellectual nature, and that of the highest intuitive being which takes up all the rest of the nature into unity with the Divine. Practically, however, the others may be regarded as preparatory movements. For the Gita itself here says that it is only at the end of many existences that one can, after possession of the integral knowledge and after working that out in oneself through many lives, attain at the long last to the Transcendent. For the knowledge of the Divine as all things that are is difficult to attain and rare on earth is the great soul, mahatma , (The Gita-7.19) who is capable of fully so seeing him and of entering into him with his whole being, in every way of his nature, by the wide power of this all-embracing knowledge, sarvavit sarvabhavena . (The Gita-15.19)" CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-284-285, ““There is the immutable and impersonal spiritual being (Purusha),” says Krishna later on, “and there is the mutable and personal spiritual being. But there is too another Highest (uttama purusa ) called the supreme self, Paramatman , he who has entered into this whole world and upbears it, the Lord, the imperishable. I am this Purushottama who am beyond the mutable and am greater and higher even than the immutable. He who has knowledge of me as the Purushottama , adores me (has bhakti for me, bhajati) , with all-knowledge and in every way of his natural being.” (The Gita-15.19) And it is this bhakti of an integral knowledge and integral self-giving which the Gita now begins to develop.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-284, “This Yoga of love will give you a highest potential force for spiritual largeness and unity and freedom. But it must be a love which is one with God-knowledge. There is a devotion which seeks God in suffering for consolation and succour and deliverance; there is a devotion which seeks him for his gifts, for divine aid and protection and as a fountain of the satisfaction of desire; there is a devotion that, still ignorant, turns to him for light and knowledge. And so long as one is limited to these forms, there may persist even in their highest and noblest Godward turn a working of the three gunas. But when the God- lover is also the God-knower, the lover becomes one self with the Beloved; for he is the chosen of the Most High and the elect of the Spirit. Develop in yourself this God-engrossed love; the heart spiritualised and lifted beyond the limitations of its lower nature will reveal to you most intimately the secrets of God’s immeasurable being, bring into you the whole touch and influx and glory of his divine Power and open to you the mysteries of an eternal rapture. It is perfect love that is the key to a perfect knowledge ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-589, " The devotee on the other hand tends to look down on the sawdust dryness of mere knowledge. And it is true that philosophy by itself without the rapture of spiritual experience is something as dry as it is clear and cannot give all the satisfaction we seek, that its spiritual experience even, when it has not left its supports of thought and shot up beyond the mind, lives too much in an abstract delight and that what it reaches, is not indeed the void it seems to the passion of the heart, but still has the limitations of the peaks. On the other hand, love itself is not complete without knowledge. The Gita distinguishes between three initial kinds of Bhakti, that which seeks refuge in the Divine from the sorrows of the world, arta , that which, desiring, approaches the Divine as the giver of its good, artharthı , and that which attracted by what it already loves, but does not yet know, yearns to know this divine Unknown, jijnasu ; but it gives the palm to the Bhakti that knows. Evidently the intensity of passion which says, “I do not understand, I love,” and, loving, cares not to understand, is not love’s last self-expression, but its first, nor is it its highest intensity. Rather as knowledge of the Divine grows, delight in the Divine and love of it must increase. Nor can mere rapture be secure without the foundation of knowledge; to live in what we love, gives that security, and to live in it means to be one with it in consciousness, and oneness of consciousness is the perfect condition of knowledge. Knowledge of the Divine gives to love of the Divine its firmest security, opens to it its own widest joy of experience, raises it to its highest pinnacles of outlook." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-550-551 7/ Chapter 7. The Yoga of Knowledge How Traditional and Integral Yoga are reconciled?: The Gita confirms that a seeker of truth, jijnasu , after many births of preparation, purification of impurity and sin, endeavouring with sincerity becomes a traditional Yogi and attains the highest goal of liberation of Soul or a Soul who fell from Yoga, yogabhrasta , from the past birth, in this birth strives with sincerity to overcome the samskara of many births in a brief period of this life and attains the highest goal...' (The Gita-6.45) ' "After many births of preparation, a traditional Yogi, Jnani, attains My Purushottama or Supramental state of Consciousness. Before realisation of this highest Consciousness, he also realises the intermediate stair that all this existence is Divine, the Cosmic Consciousness, Vasudevah sarvamiti. Such great Soul with realisation of Vasudevah sarvamiti or integral Yogi is very rare, samahatma sudurlava ." (The Gita-7.19) An integral Yogi, after many births of preparation, attains integral Transformation, integral Perfection and integral Knowledge. "Among thousands of seekers of truth, jijnasu, one here and there strives after perfection and becomes a Yogi. And of those few siddha Yogi who strive and attain the perfection of Yoga one here and there attains integral perfection and knows the Divine with all the principles of His existence, betti tattvatah ." (The Gita-7.3) "It must also be kept in mind that the supramental change is difficult, distant and ultimate stage; it must be regarded as the end of a far-off vista; it cannot be and must not be turned into a first aim, a constantly envisaged goal or an immediate objective. For it can only come into the view of possibility after much arduous self-conquest and self-exceeding, at the end of many long and trying stages of difficult self-evolution of the nature. (1) One must first acquire an inner Yogic consciousness and replace by it our ordinary view of things, natural movements, motives of life; one must revolutionise the whole present build of our being. (2) Next, we have to go still deeper, discover our veiled psychic entity and in its light and under its government psychicise our inner and outer parts, turn mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature and all our mental, vital, physical action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul. (3) Afterwards or concurrently we have to spiritualise the being in its entirety by a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, freedom and wideness. (4) It is necessary to break down the limits of the personal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into the cosmic consciousness, realise the self, and acquire a spiritualised and universalised mind and heart, life-force, physical consciousness. (5) Then only the passage into supramental consciousness begins to become possible, and even then there is a difficult ascent to make each stage of which is a separate arduous achievement. ” (CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/281-282) Dynamic Divine Union for a Sadhaka of Integral Yoga: “There is however a possibility of arriving at this result without the passage through the passivity of the mental Purusha , by a more persistently and predominantly kinetic Yoga. Or there may be a combination of both the methods, alternations between them and an ultimate fusion. And here the problem of spiritual action assumes a more simple form. In this kinetic movement there are three stages. (1) In the first the Jiva is aware of the supreme Shakti, receives the power into himself and uses it under her direction, with a certain sense of being the subordinate doer, a sense of minor responsibility in the action, — even at first, it may be, a responsibility for the result; but that disappears, for the result is seen to be determined by the higher Power, and only the action is felt to be partly his own. (2) The sadhaka then feels that it is he who is thinking, willing, doing, but feels too the divine Shakti or Prakriti behind driving and shaping all his thought, will, feeling and action: the individual energy belongs in a way to him, but is still only a form and an instrument of the universal divine Energy. (3) The Master of the Power may be hidden from him for a time by the action of the Shakti, or he may be aware of the Ishwara sometimes or continually manifest to him. In the latter case there are three things present to his consciousness, (1) himself as the servant of the Ishwara, the Shakti behind as a great Power supplying the energy, shaping the action, formulating the results, the Ishwara above determining by his will the whole action. (2) In the second stage the individual doer disappears, but there is not necessarily any quietistic passivity; there may be a full kinetic action, only all is done by the Shakti . It is her power of knowledge which takes shape as thought in the mind; the sadhaka has no sense of himself thinking, but of the Shakti thinking in him. The will and the feelings and action are also in the same way nothing but a formation, operation, activity of the Shakti in her immediate presence and full possession of all the system. (3) The sadhaka does not think, will, act, feel, but thought, will, feeling, action happen in his system. The individual on the side of action has disappeared into oneness with universal Prakriti, has become an individualised form and action of the divine Shakti. He is still aware of his personal existence, but it is as the Purusha supporting and observing the whole action, conscious of it in his self-knowledge and enabling by his participation the divine Shakti to do in him the works and the will of the Ishwara. The Master of the power is then sometimes hidden by the action of the power, sometimes appears governing it and compelling its workings. Here too there are three things present to the consciousness, (1) the Shakti carrying on all the knowledge, thought, will, feeling, action for the Ishwara in an instrumental human form, the Ishwara, the Master of existence governing and compelling all her action, and ourself as the soul, the Purusha of her individual action enjoying all the relations with him which are created by her workings. (2) There is another form of this realisation in which the Jiva disappears into and becomes one with the Shakti and there is then only the play of the Shakti with the Ishwara, Mahadeva and Kali, Krishna and Radha, the Deva and the Devi. (3) This is the intensest possible form of the Jiva’s realisation of himself as a manifestation of Nature, a power of the being of the Divine, para prakritir jıva-bhuta. ” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-768-769 8/ Chapter 8 - The Immutable Brahman Summary or A Brief Restatement: Integral Yoga's Maha mantra 'All life is Yoga' is derived from this chapter, where Arjuna was asked by the Lord, "tasmat sarvesu kalesu Yoga Yukto Bhavarjuna , therefore all Time of All Life be in Yoga, O Arjuna." (The Gita-8.27) The other complementary Mantra is "tasmat sarvesu kalesu mam anusmara yudhya cha, therefore, at all Times of All Life remember Me and fight." (The Gita-8.7) In Integral Education and Integral Yoga, birth to death and death to rebirth are recognised as a long training ground of the Soul, in ascending and descending multiple planes of Consciousness. Life and Death are both opportunities for the evolution of Consciousness and not a cessation of growth. “I have also come to realize that for this sadhana of the body, the mantra is essential. Sri Aurobindo gave none; he said that one should be able to do all the work without having to resort to external means. Had he reached the point where we are now, he would have seen that the purely psychological method is inadequate and that a japa is necessary, because only japa has a direct action on the body. So I had to find the method all alone, to find my mantra by myself. But now that things are ready, I have done ten years of work in a few months. That is the difficulty, it requires time ... And I repeat my mantra constantly – when I am awake and even when I sleep. I say it even when I am getting dressed, when I eat, when I work, when I speak with others; it is there, just behind in the background, all the time, all the time…In fact, you can immediately see the difference between those who have a mantra and those who don’t. With those who have no mantra, even if they have a strong habit of meditation or concentration, something around them remains hazy and vague . Whereas the japa imparts to those who practice it a kind of precision, a kind of solidity: an armature. They become galvanized, as it were.” The Mother’s Agenda/ May 19, 1959, Seven Questions raised by Arjuna : (1) What is tad brahma , (2) what is adhyatma and (3) what is karma , O Purushottama ? (4) What is declared to be adhibhuta, (5) what is called adhidaiva ? (6) What is adhiyajna in this body? O Madhusudana ? (7) And how in the critical moment of departure from physical existence, art Thou to be known by the self-controlled?” The Gita-8.1, 2 Answer attempted: "The Blessed Lord said: (1) The Akshara or the Immutable is the supreme Brahman; (2) svabhava is called adhyatma , (3) Karma is the name given to the creative movement, visargah which brings into existence all beings and their subjective and objective states. (4) Adhibhuta is ksharo bhavah or mutable state, (5) adhidaiva is Purusha or Soul within Nature; (6) I myself am the lord of sacrifice, adhiyajna here in the body. (7) Whoever leaves his body and departs remembering Me at the time of his death, comes to My status of being, madbhava ; there is no doubt about that." The Gita-8.3, 4, 5 The last transformation of its phenomenal nature and existence: "Man, born into the world, revolves between world and world in the action of Prakriti and Karma . Purusha in Prakriti is his formula: what the soul in him thinks, contemplates and acts, that always he becomes. All that he had been, determined his present birth; and all that he is, thinks, does in this life up to the moment of his death, determines what he will become in the worlds beyond and in lives yet to be. If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation. The body is abandoned, but the soul goes on its way, tyaktva kalevaram (The Gita-8.5). Much then depends on what he is at the critical moment of his departure. For whatever form of becoming his consciousness is fixed on at the time of death and has been full of that always in his mind and thought before death, to that form he must attain, since the Prakriti by Karma works out the soul’s thoughts and energies and that is in real fact her whole business. Therefore, if the soul in the human being desires to attain to the status of the Purushottama , there are two necessities , two conditions which must be satisfied before that can be possible. (1) He must have moulded towards that ideal his whole inner life in his earthly living; and (2) he must be faithful to his aspiration and will in his departing. “Whoever leaves his body and departs” says Krishna “remembering Me at his time of end, comes to my bhava ,” (The Gita-8.5) that of the Purushottama , my status of being. He is united with the original being of the Divine and that is the ultimate becoming of the soul, paro bhavah , (The Gita-9.11) the last result of Karma in its return upon itself and towards its source. The soul which has followed the play of cosmic evolution that veils here its essential spiritual nature, its original form of becoming, svabhava, and has passed through all these other ways of becoming of its consciousness which are only its phenomena, tamtambhavam , (The Gita-8.6) returns to that essential nature and, finding through this return its true self and spirit, comes to the original status of being which is from the point of view of the return a highest becoming, mad-bhavam (The Gita-8.5). In a certain sense we may say that it becomes God , since it unites itself with nature of the Divine in a last transformation of its own phenomenal nature and existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-294-295 The Popular Religion: "The Gita here lays a great stress on the thought and state of mind at the time of death, a stress which will with difficulty be understood if we do not recognise what may be called the self-creative power of the consciousness. What the thought, the inner regard, the faith, sraddha , settles itself upon with a complete and definite insistence, into that our inner being tends to change. This tendency becomes a decisive force when we go to those higher spiritual and self-evolved experiences which are less dependent on external things than is our ordinary psychology, enslaved as that is to outward Nature . There we can see ourselves steadily becoming that on which we keep our minds fixed and to which we constantly aspire. Therefore there any lapse of the thought, any infidelity of the memory means always a retardation of the change or some fall in its process and a going back towards what we were before , — at least so long as we have not substantially and irrevocably fixed our new becoming. When we have done that, when we have made it normal to our experience, the memory of it remains self-existently because that now is the natural form of our consciousness. In the critical moment of passing from the mortal plane of living, the importance of our then state of consciousness becomes evident. But it is not a death-bed remembrance at variance with or insufficiently prepared by the whole tenor of our life and our past subjectivity that can have this saving power. The thought of the Gita here is not on a par with the indulgences and facilities of popular religion ; it has nothing in common with the crude fancies that make the absolution and last unction of the priest, an edifying “Christian” death after an unedifying profane life or the precaution or accident of a death in sacred Benares or holy Ganges a sufficient machinery of salvation. The divine subjective becoming on which the mind has to be fixed firmly in the moment of the physical death, yam smaran bhavam tyajati ante kalevaram , (The Gita-8.6) must have been one into which the soul was at each moment growing inwardly during the physical life, sada tad-bhava-bhavitah . (The Gita-8.6) “Therefore,” says the divine Teacher, “at all times remember me and fight; for if thy mind and thy understanding are always fixed on and given up to Me, mayi arpita-mano-buddhih , to Me thou shalt surely come. (The Gita-8.7) For it is by thinking always of him with a consciousness united with him in an undeviating Yoga of constant practice that one comes to the divine and supreme Purusha .” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-295-296 “Yoga is not a matter of theory or dogma, like philosophy or popular religion, but a matter of experience. Its experience is that of a conscient universal and supracosmic Being with whom it brings us into union, and this conscious experience of union with the Invisible, always renewable and verifiable, is as valid as our conscious experience of a physical world and of visible bodies with whose invisible minds we daily communicate.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-555, “In the transformation of ordinary religious worship into the Yoga of pure Bhakti we see this development from the motived and interested worship of popular religion into a principle of motiveless and self-existent love. This last is in fact the touch-stone of the real Bhakti and shows whether we are really in the central way or are only upon one of the bypaths leading to it. We have to throw away the props of our weakness, the motives of the ego, the lures of our lower nature before we can deserve the divine union.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-553, "Buddhism only became a popular religion when Buddha had taken the place of the supreme Deity as an object of worship." CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-556, "Even popular religion is a sort of ignorant Yoga of devotion." CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-559, "The origin of this divine fear was crude enough in some of the primitive popular religions." CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-562, “All that is popular Yoga . (The correspondent wrote, “It is said that if a disciple receives his Guru’s touch or grace, his main difficulties very often disappear.”) The Guru’s touch or grace may open something, but the difficulties have always to be worked out still. What is true is that if there is complete surrender which implies the prominence of the psychic, these difficulties are no longer felt as a burden or obstacle but only as superficial imperfections which the working of the grace will remove.” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-197, “You see, the faith of people is a superstition – it’s not faith, it’s superstition. Now there are more and more people who think they have faith, and they ask me ridiculous things! They have superstitions like. Someone brings me a child born with a deformed arm, and the superstition is that if I put my hand on the arm of the child, he’ll be healed.... Things like that. It’s completely stupid. That’s not Power! They need a little miracle, you know, at their level.” The Mother’s Agenda-8.05.1971, "Sri Ramakrishna’s saying, “With the Guru’s grace all difficulties can disappear in a flash, even as agelong darkness does the moment you strike a match.” This is possible after long tapasya , “This “state of grace” is often prepared by a long tapasya or purification in which nothing decisive seems to happen, only touches or glimpses or passing experiences at the most, and it (decisive change) comes suddenly without warning.” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-195, "But it has given me a very precise picture of what would happen if for some reason or other I were no longer here.... Everyone would use my name to ... (Mother laughs) It would be frightening!" The Mother's Agenda-April 23, 1968, "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." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-63-64 The Last state of a Yogi before Death and How will one easily get the Divine in life? : "The Gita describes the last state of the mind of the Yogin in which he passes from life through death to this supreme divine existence. A motionless mind, a soul armed with the strength of Yoga, a union with God in bhakti , — the union by love is not here superseded by the featureless unification through knowledge, it remains to the end a part of the supreme force of the Yoga, — and the life-force entirely drawn up and set between the brows in the seat of mystic vision . All the doors of the sense are closed, the mind is shut in into the heart, the life-force taken up out of its diffused movement into the head, the intelligence concentrated in the utterance of the sacred syllable OM and its conceptive thought in the remembrance of the supreme Godhead, mam anusmaran ( The Gita-8.13). That is the established Yogic way of going , a last offering up of the whole being to the Eternal, the Transcendent. But still that is only a process; the essential condition is the constant undeviating memory of the Divine in life , even in action and battle — mam anusmara yudhya cha (The Gita-8.7)— and the turning of the whole act of living into an uninterrupted Yoga, nitya-yoga (The Gita-8.14). Whoever does that, finds Me easy to attain , says the Godhead; he is the great soul who reaches the supreme perfection." (CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-297) All our life is a Yoga: "For that is after all the essential, to make the whole being one with the Divine, so entirely and in all ways one as to be naturally and constantly fixed in union, and thus to make all living, not only thought and meditation, but action, labour, battle, a remembering of God. “Remember me and fight,” (The Gita-8.7) means not to lose the ever-present thought of the Eternal for one single moment in the clash of the temporal which normally absorbs our minds, and that seems sufficiently difficult, almost impossible. It is entirely possible indeed only if the other conditions are satisfied. If we have become in our consciousness one self with all, one self which is always to our thought the Divine, and even our eyes and our other senses see and sense the Divine Being everywhere so that it is impossible for us at any time at all to feel or think of anything as that merely which the unenlightened sense perceives, but only as the Godhead at once concealed and manifested in that form, and if our will is one in consciousness with a supreme will and every act of will, of mind, of body is felt to come from it, to be its movement, instinct with it or identical, then what the Gita demands can be integrally done. The remembrance of the Divine Being becomes no longer an intermittent act of the mind, but the natural condition of our activities and in a way the very substance of the consciousness. The Jiva has become possessed of its right and natural, its spiritual relation to the Purushottama and all our life is a Yoga , (The Gita-8.27) an accomplished and yet an eternally self-accomplishing oneness." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-300, “In the beginning of the Yoga you are apt to forget the Divine very often. But by constant aspiration you increase your remembrance and you diminish the forgetfulness. But this should not be done as a severe discipline or a duty; it must be a movement of love and joy. Then very soon a stage will come when, if you do not feel the presence of the Divine at every moment and whatever you are doing, you feel at once lonely and sad and miserable…Whenever you find that you can do something without feeling the presence of the Divine and yet be perfectly comfortable, you must understand that you are not consecrated in that part of your being. That is the way of the ordinary humanity which does not feel any need of the Divine. But for a seeker of the Divine Life it is very different. And when you have entirely realised unity with the Divine, then, if the Divine were only for a second to withdraw from you, you would simply drop dead; for the Divine is now the Life of your life, your whole existence, your single and complete support. If the Divine is not there, nothing is left.” The Mother/TMCW-3/Questions and Answers-1929-1931/p-26–27, 8/ Chapter 8 - The Immutable Brahman The Attitude towards Death for a Sadhaka of Integral Yoga: “The last two sentences (In whom there is neither going and coming) contain indeed the whole gist of the matter. The true salvation or the true freedom from the chain of rebirth is not the rejection of terrestrial life or the individual’s escape by a spiritual self-annihilation, even as the true renunciation is not the mere physical abandonment of family and society; it is the inner identification with the Divine in whom there is no limitation of past life and future birth but instead the eternal existence of the unborn Soul. He who is free inwardly, even doing actions, does nothing at all, says the Gita ; for it is Nature that works in him under the control of the Lord of Nature. Equally, even if he assumes a hundred times the body, he is free from any chain of birth or mechanical wheel of existence since he lives in the unborn and undying spirit and not in the life of the body. Therefore attachment to the escape from rebirth is one of the idols which, whoever keeps, the sadhaka of the integral Yoga must break and cast away from him. For his Yoga is not limited to the realisation of the Transcendent beyond all world by the individual soul; it embraces also the realisation of the Universal, “the sum-total of all souls”, and cannot therefore be confined to the movement of personal salvation and escape. Even in his transcendence of cosmic limitations he is still one with all in God; a divine work remains for him in the universe. ” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-270-271, “Two things are needed. First, nothing in your being, no part of your being, should wish to die. That doesn’t often happen. You always have, somewhere in you, a defeatist: something tired or disgusted, which has had enough, something lazy or which doesn’t want to fight and says, ‘Ah, well, let it be over, so much the better.’ That’s enough – you’re dead. But it’s a fact: if nothing, absolutely nothing in you consents to die, you will not die. For someone to die, there is always a second, if a hundredth part of a second, when he consents. If there isn’t that second of consent, he will not die. But who is certain he doesn’t have within himself, somewhere, a tiny bit of a defeatist which just yields and says, ‘Oh well’? ... Hence the need to unify oneself. Whatever the path we may follow, the subject we may study, we always reach the same result. The most important thing for an individual is to unify himself around his divine center; that way he becomes a real individual, master of himself and of his destiny. Otherwise, he is a plaything of the forces, which toss him about like a cork in a stream. He goes where he doesn’t want to, is made to do what he doesn’t want to, and finally he gets lost in a hole without any way to stop himself doing so. But if you are consciously organised, unified around the divine center, governed and led by it, you are the master of your destiny. It’s worth trying.... At any rate, I find it’s better to be the master rather than the slave.” The Mother/ The Mother’s Agenda/September 7, 1968, “God knows, never, not one minute in my life, even when things were the darkest, the blackest, the most negative, the most painful, not once did the thought come, ‘I would like to die.’” The Mother/ The Mother’s Agenda-5/288, The Mother confirms that the death of a Spiritual man must be willed death, iccha mrityu , and it must be in complete harmony, "It is difficult to say for sure, but Ramakrishna died of cancer, and now that I have had the experience, I know in an ABSOLUTE way that this is impossible. If he had decided to go because the Divine wanted him to go, it would have been an orderly departure, in total harmony and with a total will, whereas this illness is a means of disorder." The Mother's Agenda/June 6, 1958, 9/ Chapter 9. The King-Knowledge, The King-Secret Summary or A Brief Restatement: "This truth is the secret of being which the Gita is now going to apply in its amplitude of result for our inner life and our outer works. What it is going to say is the most secret thing of all. (The Gita-9.1-3) It is the knowledge of the whole Godhead, samagram mam , (The Gita-7.1) which the Master of his being has promised to Arjuna, that essential knowledge attended with the complete knowledge of it in all its principles which will leave nothing yet to be known. The whole knot of the ignorance which has bewildered his human mind and has made his will recoil from his divinely appointed work, will have been cut entirely asunder. This is the wisdom of all wisdoms, the secret of all secrets, the king-knowledge, the king-secret. It is a pure and supreme light which one can verify by direct spiritual experience and see in oneself as the truth : it is the right and just knowledge, the very law of being. It is easy to practise when one gets hold of it, sees it, tries faithfully to live in it." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-309 The Mystery of Transcendent Godhead: "The Gita then proceeds to unveil the supreme and integral secret, the one thought and truth in which the seeker of perfection and liberation must learn to live and the one law of perfection of his spiritual members and of all their movements. This supreme secret is the mystery of the transcendent Godhead who is all and everywhere, yet so much greater and other than the universe and all its forms that nothing here contains him, nothing expresses him really, and no language which is borrowed from the appearances of things in space and time and their relations can suggest the truth of his unimaginable being. The consequent law of our perfection is an adoration by our whole nature and its self-surrender to its divine source and possessor. Our one ultimate way is the turning of our entire existence in the world, and not merely of this or that in it, into a single movement towards the Eternal. By the power and mystery of a divine Yoga we have come out of his inexpressible secrecies into this bounded nature of phenomenal things. By a reverse movement of the same Yoga we must transcend the limits of phenomenal nature and recover the greater consciousness by which we can live in the Divine and the Eternal." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-311 Manusim Tanum Asritam: "Mortal mind is bewildered by its ignorant reliance upon veils and appearances; it sees only the outward human body, human mind, human way of living and catches no liberating glimpse of the Divinity who is lodged in the creature. It ignores the divinity within itself and cannot see it in other men, and even though the Divine manifest himself in humanity as Avatar and Vibhuti , it is still blind and ignores or despises the veiled Godhead, avajananti mam mudha manusım tanum asritam. (The Gita-9.11) And if it ignores him in the living creature, still less can it see him in the objective world on which it looks out from its prison of separative ego through the barred windows of the finite mind. It does not see God in the universe; it knows nothing of the supreme Divinity who is master of these planes full of various existences and dwells within them; it is blind to the vision by which all in the world grows divine and the soul itself awakens to its own inherent divinity and becomes of the Godhead, godlike. What it does see readily, and to that it attaches itself with passion, is only the life of the ego hunting after finite things for their own sake and for the satisfaction of the earthly hunger of the intellect, body, senses. Those who have given themselves up too entirely to this outward drive of the mentality, fall into the hands of the lower nature, cling to it and make it their foundation. They become a prey to the nature of the Rakshasa in man who sacrifices everything to a violent and inordinate satisfaction of his separate vital ego and makes that the dark godhead of his will and thought and action and enjoyment. Or they are hurried onward in a fruitless cycle by the arrogant self-will, self-sufficient thought, self-regarding act, self-satisfied and yet ever unsatisfied intellectualised appetite of enjoyment of the Asuric nature. But to live persistently in this separative ego-consciousness and make that the centre of all our activities is to miss altogether the true self-awareness. The charm it throws upon the misled instruments of the spirit is an enchantment that chains life to a profitless circling. All its hope, action, knowledge are vain things when judged by the divine and eternal standard, for it shuts out the great hope, excludes the liberating action, banishes the illuminating knowledge. It is a false knowledge that sees the phenomenon but misses the truth of the phenomenon, a blind hope that chases after the transient but misses the eternal, a sterile action whose every profit is annulled by loss and amounts to a perennial labour of Sisyphus." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-325-327, "But the identity of the Lord and the soul in mutable Nature is hidden from us by outward appearance and lost in the crowding mobile deceptions of that Nature. And those who allow themselves to be governed by the figures of Nature, the figure of humanity or any other form, will never see it, but will ignore and despise the Divine lodged in the human body . Their ignorance cannot perceive him in his coming in and his going forth or in his staying and enjoying and assumption of quality, but sees only what is there visible to the mind and senses, not the greater truth which can only be glimpsed by the eye of knowledge. Never can they have sight of him, even if they strive to do so, until they learn to put away the limitations of the outward consciousness and build in themselves their spiritual being, create for it, as it were, a form in their nature. Man, to know himself, must be kritatma , (He who is perfected in Self) formed and complete in the spiritual mould, enlightened in the spiritual vision. The Yogins who have this eye of knowledge, see the Divine Being we are in their own endless reality, their own eternity of spirit. Illumined, they see the Lord in themselves and are delivered from the crude material limitation, from the form of mental personality, from the transient life formulation: they dwell immortal in the truth of the self and spirit. But they see him too not only in themselves, but in all the cosmos. In the light of the sun that illumines all this world they witness the light of the Godhead which is in us; the light in the moon and in fire is the light of the Divine. It is the Divine who has entered into this form of earth and is the spirit of its material force and sustains by his might these multitudes. The Divine is the godhead of Soma who by the rasa, the sap in the Earth-mother, nourishes the plants and trees that clothe her surface. The Divine and no other is the flame of life that sustains the physical body of living creatures and turns its food into sustenance of their vital force. He is lodged in the heart of every breathing thing; from him are memory and knowledge and the debates of the reason. He is that which is known by all the Vedas and by all forms of knowing; he is the knower of Veda and the maker of Vedanta . In other words, the Divine is at once the Soul of matter and the Soul of life and the Soul of mind as well as the Soul of the supramental light that is beyond mind and its limited reasoning intelligence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-446-447, " That is why each Incarnation holds before men his own example and declares of himself that he is the way and the gate; he declares too the oneness of his humanity with the divine being, declares that the Son of Man and the Father above from whom he has descended are one, that Krishna in the human body, manusım tanum asritam , (The Gita-9.11) and the supreme Lord and Friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the same divine Purushottama , revealed there in his own being, revealed here in the type of humanity." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-149 Lord is the Giver of outer an inner oppulence : "The God-lover advances constantly towards this ultimate necessity of our birth in cosmos through a concentrated love and adoration by which he makes the supreme and universal Divine the whole object of his living — not either egoistic terrestrial satisfaction or the celestial worlds — and the whole object of his thought and his seeing. To see nothing but the Divine, to be at every moment in union with him, to love him in all creatures and have the delight of him in all things is the whole condition of his spiritual existence. His God- vision does not divorce him from life, nor does he miss anything of the fullness of life; for God himself becomes the spontaneous bringer to him of every good and of all his inner and outer getting and having, yoga-ksemam vahamyaham . (The Gita-9.22) The joy of heaven and the joy of earth are only a small shadow of his possessions; for as he grows into the Divine, the Divine too flows out upon him with all the light, power and joy of an infinite existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-331-332, "This relation of the divine fatherhood and the closer rela- tion with the Divine as the Mother-Soul of the universe have their springs in another early religious motive. One type of the Bhakta, says the Gita , is the devotee who comes to the Divine as the giver of his wants, the giver of his good, the satisfier of the needs of his inner and his outer being. “I bring to my bhakta” says the Lord “his getting and his having of good, yogaksemam vahamyaham . ” (The Gita-9.22) The life of man is a life of wants and needs and therefore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in his mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through prayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough journey, for protection and aid in his struggle. Whatever cru- dities there may be in the ordinary religious approach to God by prayer, and there are many, especially that attitude which imagines the Divine as if capable of being propitiated, bribed, flattered into acquiescence or indulgence by praise, entreaty and gifts and has often little regard to the spirit in which he is approached, still this way of turning to the Divine is an essential movement of our religious being and reposes on a universal truth." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-566 Integral Devotion: "The great-souled who open themselves to the light and largeness of the diviner nature of which man is capable, are alone on the path narrow in the beginning, inexpressibly wide in the end that leads to liberation and perfection. The growth of the god in man is man’s proper business ; the steadfast turning of this lower Asuric a nd Rakshasic into the divine nature is the carefully hidden meaning of human life. As this growth increases, the veil falls and the soul comes to see the greater significance of action and the real truth of existence. The eye opens to the Godhead in man, to the Godhead in the world; it sees inwardly and comes to know outwardly the infinite Spirit, the Imperishable from whom all existences originate and who exists in all and by him and in him all exist always. Therefore when this vision, this knowledge seizes on the soul, its whole life-aspiration becomes a surpassing love and fathomless adoration of the Divine and Infinite. The mind attaches itself singly to the eternal, the spiritual, the living, the universal, the Real; it values nothing but for its sake, it delights only in the all-blissful Purusha. All the word and all the thought become one hymning of the universal greatness, Light, Beauty, Power and Truth that has revealed itself in its glory to the human spirit and a worship of the one supreme Soul and infinite Person. All the long stress of the inner self to break outward becomes a form now of spiritual endeavour and aspiration to possess the Divine in the soul and realise the Divine in the nature. All life becomes a constant Yoga and unification of that Divine and this human spirit. This is the manner of the integral devotion; it creates a single uplifting of our whole being and nature through sacrifice by the dedicated heart to the eternal Purushottama . (The Gita-9.13-14)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-327, "It is possible so to turn life into an act of adoration to the Supreme by the spirit in one’s works; for, says the Gita , “He who gives to me with a heart of adoration a leaf, a flower, a fruit or a cup of water, I take and enjoy that offering of his devotion”; (The Gita-9.26) and it is not only any dedicated external gift that can be so offered with love and devotion, but all our thoughts, all our feelings and sensations, all our outward activities and their forms and objects can be such gifts to the Eternal. It is true that the special act or form of action has its importance, even a great importance, but it is the spirit in the act that is the essential factor; the spirit of which it is the symbol or materialised expression gives it its whole value and justifying significance. Or it may be said that a complete act of divine love and worship has in it three parts that are the expressions of a single whole, (1) — a practical worship of the Divine in the act, (2) a symbol of worship in the form of the act expressing some vision and seeking or some relation with the Divine, (3) an inner adoration and longing for oneness or feeling of oneness in the heart and soul and spirit. It is so that life can be changed into worship, — by putting behind it the spirit of a transcendent and universal love, the seeking of oneness, the sense of oneness; by making each act a symbol, an expression of Godward emotion or a relation with the Divine; by turning all we do into an act of worship, an act of the soul’s communion, the mind’s understanding, the life’s obedience, the heart’s surrender." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-162-163 All are equally entitled to the Supreme Liberation: "The equal Divine Presence in all of us makes no other preliminary condition, if once this integral self-giving has been made in faith and in sincerity and with a fundamental completeness. All have access to this gate, all can enter into this temple: our mundane distinctions disappear in the mansion of the All-lover. There the virtuous man is not preferred, nor the sinner shut out from the Presence; together by this road the Brahmin pure of life and exact in observance of the law and the outcaste born from a womb of sin and sorrow and rejected of men can travel and find an equal and open access to the supreme liberation and the highest dwelling in the Eternal. Man and woman find their equal right before God; for the divine Spirit is no respecter of persons or of social distinctions and restrictions: all can go straight to him without intermediary or shackling condition. “If” says the divine Teacher “even a man of very evil conduct turns to me with a sole and entire love, he must be regarded as a saint, for the settled will of endeavour in him is a right and complete will. Swiftly he becomes a soul of righteousness and obtains eternal peace.” (The Gita-9.30-31) In other words a will of entire self-giving opens wide all the gates of the spirit and brings in response an entire descent and self-giving of the Godhead to the human being, and that at once reshapes and assimilates everything in us to the law of the divine existence by a rapid transformation of the lower into the spiritual nature . The will of self-giving forces away by its power the veil between God and man; it annuls every error and annihilates every obstacle. Those who aspire in their human strength by effort of knowledge or effort of virtue or effort of laborious self-discipline, grow with much anxious difficulty towards the Eternal; but when the soul gives up its ego and its works to the Divine, God himself comes to us and takes up our burden . To the ignorant he brings the light of the divine knowledge, to the feeble the power of the divine will, to the sinner the liberation of the divine purity, to the suffering the infinite spiritual joy and Ananda . Their weakness and the stumblings of their human strength make no difference. “This is my word of promise,” cries the voice of the Godhead to Arjuna , “that he who loves me shall not perish. ” (The Gita-9.31) Previous effort and preparation, the purity and the holiness of the Brahmin , the enlightened strength of the king-sage great in works and knowledge have their value, because they make it easier for the imperfect human creature to arrive at this wide vision and self-surrender; but even without this preparation all who take refuge in the divine Lover of man, the Vaishya once preoccupied with the narrowness of wealth-getting and the labour of production, the Shudra hampered by a thousand hard restrictions, woman shut in and stunted in her growth by the narrow circle society has drawn around her self-expansion, those too, papa-yonayah , on whom their past Karma has imposed even the very worst of births, the outcaste, the Pariah, the Chandala , find at once the gates of God opening before them . In the spiritual life all the external distinctions of which men make so much because they appeal with an oppressive force to the outward mind, cease before the equality of the divine Light and the wide omnipotence of an impartial Power." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-334-335, "For from all, from the thief and the harlot and the outcaste as from the saint and the sage, the Beloved looks forth and cries to us, “This is I.” “He who loves Me in all beings,” — what greater word of power for the utmost intensities and profundities of divine and universal love, has been uttered by any philosophy or any religion?" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-208, "If Narayana is without difficulty visible in the sage and the saint, how shall he be easily visible to us in the sinner, the criminal, the harlot and the outcaste?" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-359 Love of the world, the mask, must change into the love of God, the Truth: " The earthly world preoccupied with the dualities and bound to the immediate transient relations of the hour and the moment is for man, so long as he dwells here attached to these things and while he accepts the law they impose on him for the law of his life, a world of struggle, suffering and sorrow. The way to liberation is to turn from the outward to the inward, from the appearance created by the material life which lays its burden on the mind and imprisons it in the grooves of the life and the body to the divine Reality which waits to manifest itself through the freedom of the spirit. Love of the world, the mask, must change into the love of God, the Truth . Once this secret and inner Godhead is known and is embraced, the whole being and the whole life will undergo a sovereign uplifting and a marvellous transmutation. In place of the ignorance of the lower Nature absorbed in its outward works and appearances the eye will open to the vision of God everywhere, to the unity and universality of the spirit. The world’s sorrow and pain will disappear in the bliss of the All-blissful; our weakness and error and sin will be changed into the all-embracing and all-transforming strength, truth and purity of the Eternal. To make the mind one with the divine consciousness, to make the whole of our emotional nature one love of God everywhere, to make all our works one sacrifice to the Lord of the worlds and all our worship and aspiration one adoration of him and self-surrender, to direct the whole self Godwards in an entire union is the way to rise out of a mundane into a divine existence. This is the Gita’s teaching of divine love and devotion, in which knowledge, works and the heart’s longing become one in a supreme unification, a merging of all their divergences, an intertwining of all their threads, a high fusion, a wide identifying movement." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-335-336, "There is a love in which the emotion is turned towards the Divine in an increasing receptivity and growing union. What it receives from the Divine it pours out on others, but truly without demanding a return. If you are capable of that, then that is the highest and most satisfying way to love." TMCW/Vol-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-122 Reconciliation of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga: “Devotion is all-important, but works with devotion are also important; by the union of knowledge, devotion and works the soul is taken up into the highest status of the Ishwara to dwell there in the Purushottama who is master at once of the eternal spiritual calm and the eternal cosmic activity. This is the synthesis of the Gita .” CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita-86, "There will be needed a will that shall make this new knowledge, vision, consciousness a motive of action and the sole motive. And it must be the motive not of an action grudging, limited, confined to a few necessary operations of Nature or to the few things that seem helpful to a formal perfection, apposite to a religious turn or to an individual salvation, but rather all action of human life taken up by the equal spirit and done for the sake of God and the good of all creatures. There will be needed an uplifting of the heart in a single aspiration to the Highest, a single love of the Divine Being, a single God-adoration. And there must be a widening too of the calmed and enlightened heart to embrace God in all beings. There will be needed a change of the habitual and normal nature of man as he is now to a supreme and divine spiritual nature. There will be needed in a word a Yoga which shall be at once a Yoga of integral knowledge, a Yoga of the integral will and its works, a Yoga of integral love, adoration and devotion and a Yoga of an integral spiritual perfection of the whole being and of all its parts and states and powers and motions." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-575-576, " This integral God-love demands too an integral work for the sake of the Divine in yourself and in all creatures. The ordinary man does works in obedience to some desire sinful or virtuous, some vital impulse low or high, some mental choice common or exalted or from some mixed mind and life motive. But the work done by you must be free and desireless; work done without desire creates no reaction and imposes no bondage. Done in a perfect equality and an unmoved calm and peace, but without any divine passion, it is at first the fine yoke of a spiritual obligation, kartavyam karma , (The Gita-3.22) then the uplifting of a divine sacrifice; at its highest it can be the expression of a calm and glad acquiescence in active oneness. The oneness in love will do much more: it will replace the first impassive calm by a strong and deep rapture, not the petty ardour of egoistic desire but the ocean of an infinite Ananda. It will bring the moving sense and the pure and divine passion of the presence of the Beloved into your works; there will be an insistent joy of labour for God in yourself and for God in all beings. Love is the crown of works and the crown of knowledge." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-590-591 9/ Chapter 9. The King-Knowledge, The King-Secret Reconciliation of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti in Integral Yoga: "In the ordinary human existence an outgoing action is obviously three-fourths or even more of our life. It is only the exceptions, the saint and the seer, the rare thinker, poet and artist who can live more within themselves; these indeed, at least in the most intimate parts of their nature, shape themselves more in inner thought and feeling than in the surface act. But it is not either of these sides separated from the other, but rather a harmony of the inner and the outer life made one in fullness and transfigured into a play of something that is beyond them which will create the form of a perfect living. A Yoga of works, a union with the Divine in our will and acts — and not only in knowledge and feeling — is then an indispensable, an inexpressibly important element of an integral Yoga. The conversion of our thought and feeling without a corresponding conversion of the spirit and body of our works would be a maimed achievement.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-91-92, “It (Divine Will) has all the power of a way of works integral and absolute, but because of its law of sacrifice and self-giving to the Divine Self and Master, it is accompanied on its one side by the whole power of the path of Love and on the other by the whole power of the path of Knowledge. At its end all these three divine Powers work together, fused, united, completed, perfected by each other.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-114, “In the integral Yoga these three lines of approach ( Karma, Bhakti and Jnana ) give up their exclusions, meet and coalesce or spring out of each other; (1) liberated from the mind’s veil over the self, we live in the Transcendence, (2) enter by the adoration of the heart into the oneness of a supreme love and bliss, and (3) all our forces of being uplifted into the one Force, our will and works surrendered into the one Will and Power, assume the dynamic perfection of the divine Nature.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p- 276, "Action is the first power of life. Nature begins with force and its works which, once conscious in man, become will and its achievements; therefore it is that by turning his action God- wards the life of man best and most surely begins to become divine. It is the door of first access , the starting-point of the initiation. When the will in him is made one with the divine will and the whole action of the being proceeds from the Divine and is directed towards the Divine, the union in works is perfectly accomplished. But works fulfil themselves in knowledge; all the totality of works, says the Gita , finds its rounded culmination in knowledge, sarvam karma khilam jnane parisamapyate. (The Gita-4.33) By union in will and works we become one in the omnipresent conscious being from whom all our will and works have their rise and draw their power and in whom they fulfil the round of their energies. And the crown of this union is love; for love is the delight of conscious union with the Being in whom we live, act and move, by whom we exist, for whom alone we learn in the end to act and to be. That is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from works as our way of access and our line of contact." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-545, “Since then the union of these three powers lies our base of perfection, the seeker of an integral self-fulfilment in the Divine must avoid or throw away, if he has them at all, the misunderstanding and mutual depreciation which we often find existent between the followers of the three paths .” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-548, " There is an intensity of love, as there is an intensity of knowledge, to which works seem something outward and distracting. But works are only thus outward and distracting when we have not found oneness of will and consciousness with the Supreme. When once that is found, works become the very power of knowledge and the very outpouring of love. If knowledge is the very state of oneness and love its bliss, divine works are the living power of its light and sweetness. There is a movement of love, as in the aspiration of human love, to separate the lover and the loved in the enjoyment of their exclusive oneness away from the world and from all others, shut up in the nuptial chambers of the heart. That is perhaps an inevitable movement of this path. But still the widest love fulfilled in knowledge sees the world not as something other and hostile to this joy, but as the being of the Beloved and all creatures as his being, and in that vision divine works find their joy and their justification... This is the knowledge in which an integral Yoga must live. We have to start Godward from the powers of the mind, the intellect , the will, the heart, and in the mind all is limited. Limitations, exclusiveness there can hardly fail to be at the beginning and for a long time on the way. But an integral Yoga will wear these more loosely than more exclusive ways of seeking, and it will sooner emerge from the mental necessity. It may commence with the way of love, as with the way of knowledge or of works; but where they meet, is the beginning of its joy of fulfilment. Love it cannot miss, even if it does not start from it; for love is the crown of works and the flowering of knowledge ." CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-551 “As in the other Yogas, so in this (Integral Yoga), one comes to see divine everywhere and in all and to pour out the realisation of the Divine in all one’s inner activities and outward actions. But all is supported by the primary force of emotional union: for it is by love that the entire self-consecration and the entire possession is accomplished, and thought and action become shapes and figures of the divine love which possesses the spirit and its members.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-575, “Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine-31, "By constant reference of all one’s will and works to the Divine, love and adoration grow, the psychic being comes forward. By the reference to the Power above we can come to feel it above and its descent and the opening to an increasing consciousness and knowledge. Finally works, bhakti and knowledge join together and self-perfection becomes possible — what we call the transformation of the nature ." CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-217 10/ Chapter 10. God in Power of Becoming Summary or A Brief Restatement: In this tenth Chapter, The Mother book's four mediatrix Spiritual Mother Powers are hinted as chatwaro manabastatha, (The Gita-10.6) and seven-fold Ignorance and seven-fold Integral Knowledge of The Life Divine book are hinted as Mahasaya Sapta-purbe. (The Gita-10.6) This chapter hints that Lord Himself is Consciousness, whose movement is identified as crucial in Integral Yoga. Those who learn the lesson of the movement of Consciousness, after the Psychic and Spiritual opening, are able to bridge the gulf between multiple (ten) planes of Consciousness and by bridging this gap; thus a passage is made between the highest Supreme Ananda and the lowest Inconscient sheath. E manations or the Vibhutis are having cosmic Consciousness and whoever will pursue Integral Yoga must travel for a long period in Universal Consciousness before arriving at the gate of Supramental Consciousness. Questions raised by Arjuna: " Arjuna , though he accepts the revelation of Vasudeva as all and though his heart is full of the delight of it, — for already he finds that it is delivering him from the perplexity and stumbling differentiations of his mind which was crying for a clue, a guiding truth amid the bewildering problems of a world of oppositions, and it is to his hearing the nectar of immortality, amritam , yet feels the need of such supports and indices. He feels that they are indispensable to overcome the difficulty of a complete and firm realisation; for how else can this knowledge be made a thing of the heart and life? He requires guiding indications, asks Krishna even for a complete and detailed enumeration of the sovereign powers of his becoming and desires that nothing shall be left out of the vision, nothing remain to baffle him. “Thou shouldst tell me” he says “of thy divine self-manifestations in thy sovereign power of becoming, divya atma-vibhu tayah , (The Gita-10.19) all without exception, — asesena, (without exception, The Gita-4.35) nothing omitted, — thy Vibhutis by which thou pervadest these worlds and peoples. How shall I know thee, O Yogin , by thinking of thee everywhere at all moments and in what pre-eminent becomings should I think of thee ?” This Yoga by which thou art one with all and one in all and all are becomings of thy being, all are pervading or pre-eminent or disguised powers of thy nature, tell me of it, he cries, in its detail and extent, and tell me ever more of it; it is nectar of immortality to me, and however much of it I hear, I am not satiated." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p- 359-360 Special Power of Becoming of the Godhead: "Then among all these living beings, cosmic godheads, superhuman and human and subhuman creatures, and amid all these qualities, powers and objects, the chief, the head, the greatest in quality of each class is a special power of the becoming of the Godhead. I am, says the Godhead, Vishnu among the Adityas, Shiva among the Rudras, Indra among the gods, Prahlada among the Titans, Brihaspati the chief of the high priests of the world, Skanda the war-god, leader of the leaders of battle, Marichi among the Maruts , the lord of wealth among the Yakshas and Rakshasas, the serpent Ananta among the Nagas, Agni among the Vasus, Chitraratha among the Gandharvas, Kandarpa the love-God among the progenitors, Varuna among the peoples of the sea, Aryaman among the Fathers, Narada among the divine sages, Yama lord of the Law among those who maintain rule and law, among the powers of storm the Wind-God. At the other end of the scale I am the radiant sun among lights and splendours, the moon among the stars of night, the ocean among the flowing waters, Meru among the peaks of the world, Himalaya among the mountain-ranges, Ganges among the rivers, the divine thunderbolt among weapons. Among all plants and trees I am the Aswattha , among horses Indra’s horse Uchchaihsravas , Airavata among the elephants, among the birds Garuda, Vasuki the snake-god among the serpents, Kamadhuk the cow of plenty among cattle, the alligator among fishes, the lion among the beasts of the forest. I am Margasirsha , first of the months; I am spring, the fairest of the seasons.... In living beings, the Godhead tells Arjuna , I am consciousness by which they are aware of themselves and their surroundings. I am mind among the senses, mind by which they receive the impressions of objects and react upon them. I am man’s qualities of mind and character and body and action; I am glory and speech and memory and intelligence and steadfastness and forgiveness, the energy of the energetic and the strength of the mighty. I am resolution and perseverance and victory, I am the sattwic quality of the good, I am the gambling of the cunning; I am the mastery and power of all who rule and tame and vanquish and the policy of all who succeed and conquer; I am the silence of things secret, the knowledge of the knower, the logic of those who debate. I am the letter A among letters, the dual among compounds, the sacred syllable OM among words, the Gayatri among metres, the Sama-veda among the Vedas and the great Sama among the mantras . I am Time the head of all reckoning to those who reckon and measure. I am spiritual knowledge among the many philosophies, arts and sciences. I am all the powers of the human being and all the energies of the universe and its creatures....Those in whom my powers rise to the utmost heights of human attainment are myself always, my special Vibhutis . I am among men the king of men, the leader, the mighty man, the hero. I am Rama among warriors, Krishna among the Vrishnis, Arjuna among the Pandavas. The illumined Rishi is my Vibhuti; I am Bhrigu among the great Rishis . The great seer, the inspired poet who sees and reveals the truth by the light of the idea and sound of the word, is myself luminous in the mortal; I am Ushanas among the seer-poets. The great sage, thinker, philosopher is my power among men, my own vast intelligence; I am Vyasa among the sages. But, with whatever variety of degree in manifestation, all beings are in their own way and nature... powers of the Godhead; nothing moving or unmoving, animate or inanimate in the world can be without me. I am the divine seed of all existences and of that seed they are the branches and flowers; what is in the seed of self, that only they can develop in Nature. There is no numbering or limit to my divine Vibhutis; what I have spoken is nothing more than a summary development and I have given only the light of a few leading indications and a strong opening to endless verities. Whatever beautiful and glorious creature thou seest in the world, whatever being is mighty and forceful among men and above man and below him, know to be a very splendour, light and energy of Me and born of a potent portion and intense power of my existence. But what need is there of a multitude of details for this knowledge? Take it thus, that I am here in this world and everywhere, I am in all and I constitute all: there is nothing else than I, nothing without Me. I support this entire universe with a single degree of my illimitable power and an infinitesimal portion of my fathomless spirit ; all these worlds are only sparks, hints, glintings of the I Am eternal and immeasurable." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-363-365 Liberated man's view of the world around him: "But when this new self-vision and consciousness have been acquired in place of the original ignorance, what will be the liberated man’s view of the world around him, his attitude towards the cosmic manifestation of which he has now the central secret ? (1) He will have first the knowledge of the unity of existence and the regarding eye of that knowledge. He will see all around him as souls and forms and powers of the one divine Being. Henceforward that vision will be the starting-point of all the inward and outward operations of his consciousness; it will be the fundamental seeing, the spiritual basis of all his actions. He will see all things and every creature living, moving and acting in the One, contained in the divine and eternal Existence. (2) But he will also see that One as the Inhabitant in all, their Self, the essential Spirit within them without whose secret presence in their conscious nature they could not at all live, move or act and without whose will, power, sanction or sufferance not one of their movements at any moment would be in the least degree possible. Themselves too, their soul, mind, life and physical mould he will see only as a result of the power, will and force of this one Self and Spirit. (3) All will be to him a becoming of this one universal Being. Their consciousness he will see to be derived entirely from its consciousness, their power and will to be drawn from and dependent on its power and will, their partial phenomenon of nature to be a resultant from its greater divine Nature, whether in the immediate actuality of things it strikes the mind as a manifestation or a disguise, a figure or a disfigurement of the Godhead. No untoward or bewildering appearance of things will in any smallest degree diminish or conflict with the completeness of this vision. It is the essential foundation of the greater consciousness into which he has arisen, it is the indispensable light that has opened around him and the one perfect way of seeing, the one Truth that makes all others possible." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-367-368, "The liberated eye of knowledge in the spiritual consciousness does not in its outlook on the world see this struggling lower Nature alone . If we perceive only the apparent outward fact of our nature and others’ nature, we are looking with the eye of the ignorance and cannot know God equally in all, in the sattwic, the rajasic, the tamasic creature, in God and Titan, in saint and sinner, in the wise man and the ignorant, in the great and in the little, in man, animal, plant and inanimate existence. The liberated vision sees three things at once as the whole occult truth of the natural being. (1) First and foremost it sees the divine Prakriti in all, secret, present, waiting for evolution; it sees her as the real power in all things, that which gives its value to all this apparent action of diverse quality and force, and it reads the significance of these latter phenomena not in their own language of ego and ignorance, but in the light of the divine Nature. (2) Therefore it sees too, secondly, the differences of the apparent action in Deva and Rakshasa , man and beast and bird and reptile, good and wicked, ignorant and learned, but as action of divine quality and energy under these conditions, under these masks. It is not deluded by the mask, but detects behind every mask the Godhead. It observes the perversion or the imperfection, but it pierces to the truth of the spirit behind, it discovers it even in the perversion and imperfection self-blinded, struggling to find itself, groping through various forms of self-expression and experience towards complete self-knowledge, towards its own infinite and absolute. The liberated eye does not lay undue stress on the perversion and imperfection, but is able to see all with a complete love and charity in the heart, a complete understanding in the intelligence, a complete equality in the spirit. (3) Finally, it sees the upward urge of the striving powers of the Will to be towards Godhead; it respects, welcomes, encourages all high manifestations of energy and quality, the flaming tongues of the Divinity, the mounting greatnesses of soul and mind and life in their intensities uplifted from the levels of the lower nature towards heights of luminous wisdom and knowledge, mighty power, strength, capacity, courage, heroism, benignant sweetness and ardour and grandeur of love and self-giving, pre-eminent virtue, noble action, captivating beauty and harmony, fine and godlike creation. The eye of the spirit sees and marks out the rising godhead of man in the great Vibhuti ." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-373-374 The Manifestation of Godhead: "This is a recognition of the Godhead as Power, but power in its widest sense, power not only of might, but of knowledge, will, love, work, purity, sweetness, beauty. The Divine is being, consciousness and delight, and in the world all throws itself out and finds itself again by energy of being, energy of consciousness and energy of delight; this is a world of the works of the divine Shakti. That Shakti shapes herself here in innumerable kinds of beings and each of them has its own characteristic powers of her force. Each power is the Divine himself in that form, in the lion as in the hind, in the Titan as in the God, in the inconscient sun that flames through ether as in man who thinks upon earth. The deformation given by the gunas is the minor, not really the major aspect; the essential thing is the divine power that is finding self-expression. It is the Godhead who manifests himself in the great thinker, the hero, the leader of men, the great teacher, sage, prophet, religious founder, saint, lover of man, the great poet, the great artist, the great scientist, the ascetic self-tamer, the tamer of things and events and forces. The work itself, the high poem, the perfect form of beauty, the deep love, the noble act, the divine achievement is a movement of godhead; it is the Divine in manifestation....The Gita puts it in that right place and perspective. It must be based on the recognition of the divine self in all men and all creatures; it must be consistent with an equal heart to the great and the small, the eminent and the obscure manifestation. God must be seen and loved in the ignorant, the humble, the weak, the vile, the outcaste. In the Vibhuti himself it is not, except as a symbol, the outward individual that is to be thus recognised and set high, but the one Godhead who displays himself in the power. But this does not abrogate the fact that there is an ascending scale in manifestation and that Nature mounts upward in her degrees of self-expression from her groping, dark or suppressed symbols to the first visible expressions of the Godhead. Each great being, each great achievement is a sign of her power of self-exceeding and a promise of the final, the supreme exceeding. Man himself is a superior degree of natural manifestation to the beast and reptile, though in both there is the one equal Brahman. But man has not reached his own highest heights of self-exceeding and meanwhile every hint of a greater power of the Will to be in him must be recognised as a promise and an indication. Respect for the divinity in man, in all men, is not diminished, but heightened and given a richer significance by lifting our eyes to the trail of the great Pioneers who lead or point him by whatever step of attainment towards supermanhood. " CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-374-375 10/ Chapter 10. God in Power of Becoming Vibhuti Yoga is considered Indispensable to pursue Integral Yoga: " The divine Teacher accedes to the request of the disciple, but with an initial reminder that a full reply is not possible. For God is infinite and his manifestation is infinite. The forms of his manifestation too are innumerable. Each form is a symbol of some divine power, vibhuti, concealed in it and to the seeing eye each finite carries in it its own revelation of the infinite. Yes, he says, I will tell thee of my divine Vibhutis, but only in some of my principal pre-eminences and as an indication and by the example of things in which thou canst most readily see the power of the Godhead, pradhanyatah, uddesatah . (The Gita-10.19, 40) For there is no end to the innumerable detail of the Godhead’s self-extension in the universe, nasti anto vistarasya me . (The Gita-10.19) This reminder begins the passage and is repeated at the end in order to give it a greater and unmistakable emphasis. And then throughout the rest of the chapter (The Gita-10.19 to 42) we get a summary description of these principal indications, these pre-eminent signs of the divine force present in the things and persons of the universe. It seems at first as if they were given pell-mell, without any order, but still there is a certain principle in the enumeration, which, if it is once disengaged, can lead by a helpful guidance to the inner sense of the idea and its consequences. The chapter has been called the Vibhuti-Yoga, — an indispensable yoga. For while we must identify ourselves impartially with the universal divine Becoming in all its extension , its good and evil, perfection and imperfection, light and darkness, we must at the same time realise that there is an ascending evolutionary power in it, an increasing intensity of its revelation in things, a hierarchic secret something that carries us upward from the first concealing appearances through higher and higher forms towards the large ideal nature of the universal Godhead." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-360-361 Triple state of Cosmic Consciousness: "It may even seem as if it were the greatest oneness, since it accepts all that we can be sensible of in the mind-created world as our own. Sometimes one sees it spoken of as the highest achievement. Certainly, it is a great realisation and the path to a greater. It is that which the Gita speaks of as the accepting of all existences as if oneself whether in grief or in joy; it is the way of sympathetic oneness and infinite compassion which helps the Buddhist to arrive at his Nirvana . Still there are gradations and degrees. In the first stage the soul is still subject to the reactions of the duality, still subject therefore to the lower Prakriti; it is depressed or hurt by the cosmic suffering, elated by the cosmic joy. We suffer the joys of others, suffer their griefs; and this oneness can be carried even into the body, as in the story of the Indian saint who, seeing a bullock tortured in the field by its cruel owner, cried out with the creature’s pain and the weal of the lash was found reproduced on his own flesh. (The second stage of Soul) But there must be a oneness with Sachchidananda in his freedom as well as with the subjection of the lower being to the reactions of Prakriti. This is achieved when the soul is free and superior to the cosmic reactions which are then felt only in the life, mind and body and as an inferior movement; the soul understands, accepts the experience, sympathises, but is not overpowered or affected, so that at last even the mind and body learn also to accept without being overpowered or even affected except on their surface. (The third state of the Soul) And the consummation of this movement is when the two spheres of existence are no longer divided and the mind, life and body obeying utterly the higher law grow into the spirit’s freedom; free from the lower or ignorant response to the cosmic touches, their struggle and their subjection to the duality ceases. This does not mean insensibility to the subjection and struggles and sufferings of others, but it does mean a spiritual supremacy and freedom which enables one to understand perfectly, put the right values on things and heal from above instead of struggling from below. It does not inhibit the divine compassion and helpfulness, but it does inhibit the human and animal sorrow and suffering." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-416-417 11/ Chapter 11. The Vision of The World-Spirit Summary or A Brief Restatement: The Third Eye given to Arjuna : "What thou hast to see, replies the Avatar , the human eye cannot grasp, — for the human eye can see only the outward appearances of things or make out of them separate symbol forms, each of them significant of only a few aspects of the eternal Mystery. But there is a divine eye , an inmost seeing, by which the supreme Godhead in his Yoga can be beheld and that eye I now give to thee. Thou shalt see, he says, my hundreds and thousands of divine forms, various in kind, various in shape and hue; thou shalt see the Adityas and the Rudras and the Maruts and the Aswins; thou shalt see many wonders that none has beheld; thou shalt see today the whole world related and unified in my body and whatever else thou willest to behold. This then is the keynote, the central significance. It is the vision of the One in the many, the Many in the One, — and all are the One. It is this vision that to the eye of the divine Yoga liberates, justifies, explains all that is and was and shall be. Once seen and held, it lays the shining axe of God at the root of all doubts and perplexities and annihilates all denials and oppositions. It is the vision that reconciles and unifies. If the soul can arrive at unity with the Godhead in this vision, — Arjuna has not yet done that, therefore we find that he has fear when he sees , — all even that is terrible in the world loses its terror. We see that it too is an aspect of the Godhead and once we have found his meaning in it, not looking at it by itself alone, we can accept the whole of existence with an all-embracing joy and a mighty courage, go forward with sure steps to the appointed work and envisage beyond it the supreme consummation. The soul admitted to the divine knowledge which beholds all things in one view, not with a divided, partial and therefore bewildered seeing, can make a new discovery of the world and all else that it wills to see, yacca nyad drastum icchasi ; (The Gita-11.7) it can move on the basis of this all- relating and all-unifying vision from revelation to completing revelation.... The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly all the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands the tremendous vision. “I see” he cries “all the gods in thy body, O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creating lord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divine Serpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces, I see thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not thy end nor thy middle nor thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form universal. I see thee crowned and with thy mace and thy discus, hard to discern because thou art a luminous mass of energy on all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-bright Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou art the sempiternal soul of existence.” 378-379 Before Becoming a Brahmin Soul Force, one must be a Kshatriya Soul Force: "No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu cannot prevail till the debt to Rudra is paid. To turn aside then and preach to a still unevolved mankind the law of love and oneness? Teachers of the law of love and oneness there must be, for by that way must come the ultimate salvation. But not till the Time-Spirit in man is ready, can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone, but it is Rudra who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand. And meanwhile the fierce forward labour of mankind tormented and oppressed by the Powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle and the word of its prophet." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-386, “Satyakama must have known perfectly well that he was the illegitimate son of a serving woman, but he wished to know his father’s name and gotra because he would have to tell it to his guru . Even after knowing the worst, he persisted in his intention of taking up spiritual studies, so that he can have had no fear of being rejected on account of his base origin. His guru , impressed by his truthfulness, says, “None but a Brahmin would have the moral strength to make such an avowal.” It can hardly be meant by this that Satyakama’s father must have been a Brahmin , but that since he had the Brahmin qualities, he must be accepted as a Brahmin. Even the Kshatriya would have hesitated to speak so truthfully, because the Kshatriya is by nature a lover of honour and shuns dishonour, he has the sense of mana and apamana; but the true Brahmin is samo manapamanayoh , he accepts indifferently worldly honour and dishonour and cares only for the truth and the right . In short the Gautama concludes that, whatever may be Satyakama’s physical birth, spiritually he is of the highest order and especially fitted for a sadhaka; na satyad agat , he did not depart from the truth.” CWSA-18/Kena and other Upanishads/p-267, Every breath of life is a breath too of death: "This last cry of Arjuna (The Gita-11.36 to 11.46) indicates the double intention in the vision. This is the figure of the supreme and universal Being, the Ancient of Days who is for ever, sanatanam purusam puranam , (The Gita-18.38) this is (1) he who for ever creates, for Brahma the Creator is one of the Godheads seen in his body, he who keeps the world always in existence, for he is the guardian of the eternal laws, but (2) who is always too destroying in order that he may new-create, who is Time, who is Death, who is Rudra the Dancer of the calm and awful dance, who is Kali with her garland of skulls trampling naked in battle and flecked with the blood of the slaughtered Titans, who is the cyclone and the fire and the earthquake and pain and famine and revolution and ruin and the swallowing ocean. And it is this last aspect of him which he puts forward at the moment. It is an aspect from which the mind in men willingly turns away and ostrich-like hides its head so that perchance, not seeing, it may not be seen by the Terrible. The weakness of the human heart wants only fair and comforting truths or in their absence pleasant fables; it will not have the truth in its entirety because there there is much that is not clear and pleasant and comfortable, but hard to understand and harder to bear . The raw religionist, the superficial optimistic thinker, the sentimental idealist, the man at the mercy of his sensations and emotions agree in twisting away from the sterner conclusions, the harsher and fiercer aspects of universal existence. Indian religion has been ignorantly reproached for not sharing in this general game of hiding, because on the contrary it has built and placed before it the terrible as well as the sweet and beautiful symbols of the Godhead. But it is the depth and largeness of its long thought and spiritual experience that prevent it from feeling or from giving countenance to these feeble shrinkings....Indian spirituality knows that God is Love and Peace and calm Eternity, — the Gita which presents us with these terrible images, speaks of the Godhead who embodies himself in them as the lover and friend of all creatures. But there is too the sterner aspect of his divine government of the world which meets us from the beginning, the aspect of destruction, and to ignore it is to miss the full reality of the divine Love and Peace and Calm and Eternity and even to throw on it an aspect of partiality and illusion, because the comforting exclusive form in which it is put is not borne out by the nature of the world in which we live. This world of our battle and labour is a fierce dangerous destructive devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward, whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken , in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought of India has never taken refuge. We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being and that so he has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the complete union and feel this truth in the depths of our being that we can entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The discords of the worlds are God’s discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and thrilled vastnesses of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-380-382 The utility of Destruction by Time Spirit: "The highest way appointed for him is to carry out the will of God without egoism, as the human occasion and instrument of that which he sees to be decreed, with the constant supporting memory of the Godhead in himself and man, mam anusmaran , (The Gita-8.07) and in whatever ways are appointed for him by the Lord of his Nature. Nimittamatram bhava savyasacin . (The Gita-11.33) He will not cherish personal enmity, anger, hatred, egoistic desire and passion, will not hasten towards strife or lust after violence and destruction like the fierce Asura , but he will do his work, lokasangrahaya . (The Gita-3.20) Beyond the action he will look towards that to which it leads, that for which he is warring. For God the Time-Spirit does not destroy for the sake of destruction , but to make the ways clear in the cyclic process for a greater rule and a progressing manifestation, rajyam samruddham . (The Gita-11.33) He will accept in its deeper sense, which the superficial mind does not see, the greatness of the struggle , the glory of the victory, — if need be, the glory of the victory which comes masked as defeat, — and lead man too in the enjoyment of his opulent kingdom . Not appalled by the face of the Destroyer, he will see within it the eternal Spirit imperishable in all these perishing bodies and behind it the face of the Charioteer, the Leader of man, the Friend of all creatures, suhrudam sarvabhutanam . (The Gita-5.29) This formidable World-Form once seen and acknowledged, it is to that reassuring truth that the rest of the chapter is directed; it discloses in the end a more intimate face and body of the Eternal ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-386-387, The Way to that unimaginable Transformation: "But what then is the uniqueness of this Form by which it is lifted so far beyond cognizance that all the ordinary endeavour of human knowledge and even the inmost austerity of its spiritual effort are insufficient, unaided, to reach the vision? It is this that man can know by other means this or that exclusive aspect of the one existence, its individual, cosmic or world- excluding figures, but not this greatest reconciling Oneness of all the aspects of the Divinity in which at one and the same time and in one and the same vision all is manifested, all is exceeded and all is consummated. For here transcendent, universal and individual Godhead, Spirit and Nature, Infinite and finite, space and time and timelessness, Being and Becoming, all that we can strive to think and know of the Godhead, whether of the absolute or the manifested existence, are wonderfully revealed in an ineffable oneness. This vision can be reached only by the absolute adoration, the love, the intimate unity that crowns at their summit the fullness of works and knowledge . To know, to see, to enter into it, to be one with this supreme form of the Supreme becomes then possible, and it is that end which the Gita proposes for its Yoga. There is a supreme consciousness through which it is possible to enter into the glory of the Transcendent and contain in him the immutable Self and all mutable Becoming, —it is possible to be one with all, yet above all, to exceed world and yet embrace the whole nature at once of the cosmic and the supracosmic Godhead. This is difficult indeed for limited man imprisoned in his mind and body: but, says the Godhead, “be a doer of my works, accept me as the supreme being and object, become my bhakta , be free from attachment and without enmity to all existences; for such a man comes to me.” In other words superiority to the lower nature, unity with all creatures, oneness with the cosmic Godhead and the Transcendence, oneness of will with the Divine in works, absolute love for the One and for God in all, — this is the way to that absolute spiritual self-exceeding and that unimaginable transformation ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-394-395 11/ Chapter 11. The Vision of The World-Spirit Svarat and Samrat status of an integral Sadhak: " The idea of the Purushottama , seen here as the incarnate Narayana, Krishna, is therefore the key . Without it the withdrawal from the lower nature to the Brahmic condition leads necessarily to inaction of the liberated man, his indifference to the works of the world; with it the same withdrawal becomes a step by which the works of the world are taken up in the spirit, with the nature and in the freedom of the Divine. See the silent Brahman as the goal and the world with all its activities has to be forsaken; see God, the Divine, the Purushottama as the goal, superior to action yet its inner spiritual cause and object and original will, and the world with all its activities is conquered and possessed in a divine transcendence of the world. It can become instead of a prison-house an opulent kingdom, rajyam samriddham, (The Gita-11.33) which we have conquered for the spiritual life by slaying the limitation of the tyrant ego and overcoming the bondage of our gaoler desires and breaking the prison of our individualistic possession and enjoyment. The liberated universalised soul becomes svarat samrat, self-ruler and emperor. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-135, "The Gita , making its call on the warrior nature of Arjuna, starts with this heroic movement. It calls on him to turn on the great enemy desire and slay it. Its first description of equality is that of the Stoic philosopher. “He whose mind is undisturbed in the midst of sorrows and amid pleasures is free from desire, from whom liking and fear and wrath have passed away, is the sage of settled understanding . Who in all things is without affection though visited by this good or that evil and neither hates nor rejoices, his intelligence sits firmly founded in wisdom.” (The Gita-2.56-57) If one abstains from food, it says, giving a physical example, the object of sense ceases to affect, but the affection itself of the sense, the rasa, remains; it is only when, even in the exercise of the sense, it can keep back from seeking its sensuous aim in the object, artha , and abandon the affection, the desire for the pleasure of taste, that the highest level of the soul is reached. It is by using the mental organs on the objects, “ranging over them with the senses,” visayan indriyais caran , but with senses subject to the self, freed from liking and disliking, that one gets into a large and sweet clearness of soul and temperament in which passion and grief find no place. All desires have to enter into the soul, as waters into the sea, and yet it has to remain immovable, filled but not disturbed: so in the end all desires can be abandoned. To be freed from wrath and passion and fear and attraction is repeatedly stressed as a necessary condition of the liberated status, and for this we must learn to bear their shocks, which cannot be done without exposing ourselves to their causes. “He who can bear here in the body the velocity of wrath and desire, is the Yogin, the happy man.” (The Gita-5.23) Titiksa , the will and power to endure, is the means. “The material touches which cause heat and cold, happiness and pain, things transient which come and go, these learn to endure. For the man whom these do not trouble nor pain, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasure and suffering, makes himself apt for immortality.” (The Gita-2.15) The equal-souled has to bear suffering and not hate, to receive pleasure and not rejoice. Even the physical affections are to be mastered by endurance and this too is part of the Stoic discipline. Age, death, suffering, pain are not fled from, but accepted and vanquished by a high indifference. Not to flee appalled from Nature in her lower masks, but to meet and conquer her is the true instinct of the strong nature, purusarsabha , (The Gita-2.15) the leonine soul among men. Thus compelled, she throws aside her mask and reveals to him his true nature as the free soul, not her subject but her king and lord, svarat, samrat ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-195-197, " The Gita accepts the endurance and fortitude of our struggle with the lower nature as a preliminary movement ; but if a certain mastery comes by our individual strength, the freedom of mastery only comes by our union with God, by a merging or dwelling of the personality in the one divine Person and the loss of the personal will in the divine Will. There is a divine Master of Nature and her works, above her though inhabiting her, who is our highest being and our universal self; to be one with him is to make ourselves divine. By union with God we enter into a supreme freedom and a supreme mastery. The ideal of the Stoic, the sage who is king because by self-rule he becomes master also of outward conditions, resembles superficially the Vedantic idea of the self-ruler and all-ruler, svarat samrat ; but it is on a lower plane. The Stoic kingship is maintained by a force put upon self and environment; the entirely liberated kingship of the Yogin exists naturally by the eternal royalty of the divine nature, a union with its unfettered universality, a finally unforced dwelling in its superiority to the instrumental nature through which it acts. His mastery over things is because he has become one soul with all things. To take an image from Roman institutions, the Stoic freedom is that of the libertus, the freedman, who is still really a dependent on the power that once held him enslaved; his is a freedom allowed by Nature because he has merited it. The freedom of the Gita is that of the freeman, the true freedom of the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity. Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in the Divine; he is the privileged child of the mansion, balavat , who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of the Perfect, the All-blissful, the All-loving, the All-beautiful. The kingdom which he enjoys, rajyam samriddham , (The Gita-11.33) is a sweet and happy dominion of which it may be said, in the pregnant phrase of the Greek thinker, “The kingdom is of the child.”" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-207, " The witness Purusha in the mind observes that the inadequacy of his effort, all the inadequacy in fact of man’s life and nature arises from the separation and the consequent struggle, want of knowledge, want of harmony, want of oneness. It is essential for him to grow out of separative individuality , to universalise himself, to make himself one with the universe. This unification can be done only through the soul by making our soul of mind one with the universal Mind, our soul of life one with the universal Life-soul, our soul of body one with the universal soul of physical Nature. When this can be done, in proportion to the power, intensity, depth, completeness, permanence with which it can be done, great effects are produced upon the natural action. Especially there grows an immediate and profound sympathy and immixture of mind with mind, life with life, a lessening of the body’s insistence on separateness, a power of direct mental and other intercommunication and effective mutual action which helps out now the inadequate indirect communication and action that was till now the greater part of the conscious means used by embodied mind. But still the Purusha sees that in mental, vital, physical nature, taken by itself, there is always a defect, inadequacy, confused action, due to the mechanically unequal interplay of the three modes or gunas of Nature. To transcend it he has in the universality too to rise to the supramental and spiritual, to be one with the supramental soul of cosmos, the universal spirit. He arrives at the larger light and order of a higher principle in himself and the universe which is the characteristic action of the divine Sachchidananda . Even, he is able to impose the influence of that light and order, not only on his own natural being, but, within the radius and to the extent of the Spirit’s action in him, on the world he lives in, on that which is around him. He is svarat, self-knower, self-ruler, but he begins to be also through this spiritual oneness and transcendence samrat, a knower and master of his environing world of being. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-641, " But even a human perfection cannot dispense with equality as one of its chief elements and even its essential atmosphere. The aim of a human perfection must include, if it is to deserve the name, two things, self-mastery and a mastery of the surroundings; it must seek for them in the greatest degree of these powers which is at all attainable by our human nature. Man’s urge of self-perfection is to be, in the ancient language, svarat and samrat , self-ruler and king. But to be self-ruler is not possible for him if he is subject to the attack of the lower nature, to the turbulence of grief and joy, to the violent touches of pleasure and pain, to the tumult of his emotions and passions, to the bondage of his personal likings and dislikings, to the strong chains of desire and attachment, to the narrowness of a personal and emotionally preferential judgment and opinion, to all the hundred touches of his egoism and its pursuing stamp on his thought, feeling and action. All these things are the slavery to the lower self which the greater “I” in man must put under his feet if he is to be king of his own nature. To surmount them is the condition of self-rule; but of that surmounting again equality is the condition and the essence of the movement. To be quite free from all these things, — if possible, or at least to be master of and superior to them, — is equality. Farther, one who is not self-ruler, cannot be master of his surroundings. The knowledge, the will, the harmony which is necessary for this outward mastery, can come only as a crown of the inward conquest. It belongs to the self-possessing soul and mind which follows with a disinterested equality the Truth, the Right, the universal Largeness to which alone this mastery is possible, — following always the great ideal they present to our imperfection while it understands and makes a full allowance too for all that seems to conflict with them and stand in the way of their manifestation. This rule is true even on the levels of our actual human mentality, where we can only get a limited perfection. But the ideal of Yoga takes up this aim of Swarajya and Samrajya and puts it on the larger spiritual basis. There it gets its full power, opens to the diviner degrees of the spirit; for it is by oneness with the Infinite, by a spiritual power acting upon finite things, that some highest integral perfection of our being and nature finds its own native foundation. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-701-702 "Let me tell you about a recent occurrence. E. had sent a telegram saying that she had a perforated intestine (but it must have been something else because they operated on her only after several days, and when you are not operated on immediately in such cases, you die). Anyway, it was very serious and she was on the threshold of death – that much is certain. She wrote me a letter the day before the operation (what is interesting is that now she doesn’t even remember what she wrote). It was a magnificent letter saying that she was conscious of the Divine Presence and of the Divine Plan. ‘Tomorrow they will operate on me,’ she said. ‘And I am entirely aware that this operation has ALREADY been done, that it is a fact accomplished by the Divine Will; otherwise it could be a fatal ordeal.’ And she said she was conscious of the supreme Will’s action, in a perfect peace. It was a magnificent letter. And the whole thing went off almost miraculously; she recovered in such a miraculous way that the surgeon himself said, I must congratulate you, to which she replied, ‘How surprising! You did the operation!’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we did the operation, but it is your body that willed to be healed, and I congratulate you for your body’s willpower.’ Of course she wrote to me that she knew who had been there to see that all went well. And this feeling of the thing being already accomplished is a beginning of the consciousness Sri Aurobindo speaks of in the ‘Yoga of Self-Perfection,’ where one is simultaneously both here and there. Because, as Sri Aurobindo says, some people have managed to be entirely ‘there,’ but what he has called the ‘realization’ is to be both there and here simultaneously." The Mother's Agenda-April 18, 1961, The Mother's Experience: "But this was merely the beginning of my vision. Only after a series of experiences – a ten months’ sojourn in Pondicherry , five years of separation, then the return to Pondicherry and the meeting in the same house and in the same way – did the END of the vision occur.... I was standing just beside him. My head wasn’t exactly on his shoulder, but where his shoulder was (I don’t know how to explain it – physically there was hardly any contact). We were standing side by side like that, gazing out through the open window, and then TOGETHER, at exactly the same moment, we felt, ‘Now the Realization will be accomplished.’ That the seal was set and the Realization would be accomplished. I felt the Thing descending massively within me, with the same certainty I had felt in my vision. From that moment on there was nothing to say – no words, nothing. We knew it was THAT... But between these two meetings he participated in a whole series of experiences, experiences of gradually growing awareness. This is partly noted in Prayers and Meditations (I have cut out all the personal segments). But there was one experience I didn’t speak of there (that is, I didn’t describe it, I put only the conclusion) – the experience where I say ‘Since the man refused I was offering participation in the universal work and the new creation and the man didn’t want it, he refused, and so I now offer it to God ....I don’t know, I’m putting it poorly, but this experience was concrete to the point of being physical. It happened in a Japanese country-house where we were living, near a lake. There was a whole series of circumstances, events, all kinds of things – a long, long story, like a novel. But one day I was alone in meditation (I have never had very profound meditations, only concentrations of consciousness – Mother makes an abrupt gesture showing a sudden ingathering of the entire being); and I was seeing.... You know that I had taken on the conversion of the Lord of Falsehood: I tried to do it through an emanation incarnated in a physical being, and the greatest effort was made during those four years in Japan. The four years were coming to an end with an absolute inner certainty that there was nothing to be done – that it was impossible, impossible to do it this way. There was nothing to be done. And I was intensely concentrated, asking the Lord, ‘Well, I made You a vow to do this, I had said, “Even if it’s necessary to descend into hell, I will descend into hell to do it....” Now tell me, what must I do?...’The Power was plainly there: suddenly everything in me became still; the whole external being was completely immobilized and I had a vision of the Supreme ... more beautiful than that of the Gita. A vision of the Supreme. And this vision literally gathered me into its arms; it turned towards the West, towards India, and offered me – and there at the other end I saw Sri Aurobindo. It was ... I felt it physically. I saw, saw – my eyes were closed but I saw (twice I have had this vision of the Supreme – once here, much later – but this was the first time) ... ineffable. It was as if this Immensity had reduced itself to a rather gigantic Being who lifted me up like a wisp of straw and offered me. Not a word, nothing else, only that... Then everything vanished... The next day we began preparing to return to India... It was after this vision, when I returned from Japan, that this meeting with Sri Aurobindo took place, along with the certainty that the Mission would be accomplished." The Mother's Agenda/December 20, 1961, Viswarupa of Divine Mother Revealed to Death God: (Death God said to Savitri) " Or if she (Divine Mother) dwells within thy (Savitri's) mortal heart, Show me the body of the living Truth Or draw for me the outline of her face That I too may obey and worship her. Then will I give thee back thy Satyavan." Savitri-655 "Or if the Mighty Mother is with thee, Show me her face that I may worship her; Let deathless eyes look into the eyes of Death, An imperishable Force touching brute things Transform earth’s death into immortal life." Savitri-664 Savitri's revelation of Viswa Rupa, Universal Vision to Death God: "A pressure of intolerable force Weighed on his (Death's) unbowed head and stubborn breast; Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts, Light was a luminous torture in his heart, Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves; His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze. Her mastering Word commanded every limb And left no room for his enormous will That seemed pushed out into some helpless space And could no more re-enter but left him void. He called to Night but she fell shuddering back, He called to Hell but sullenly it retired: He turned to the Inconscient for support, From which he was born, his vast sustaining self; It drew him back towards boundless vacancy As if by himself to swallow up himself: He called to his strength, but it refused his call. His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured." Savitri-667 12/ Chapter 12. Bhakti Yoga Summary or A Brief Restatement: The Gita categorically speaks of two kinds of Bhakti one that (1) of the devotion born out of many branching desires100 and (2) other that of the concentrated single pointed devotion, ekabhakti, (The Gita-7.17) after one is thoroughly established in mutable and personal Saguna Brahman consciousness and in the impersonal and immutable Nirguna Brahman consciousness. It is through the latter passage one will discover the Cosmic Consciousness, Vasudevah Sarvamiti , the vision of universal Godhead, Viswa Rupa Darshana , and the Supramental Consciousness, Purushottama. The Divine Love of this latter type of Bhakti is extensively developed in Sri Aurobindo’s epic Savitri. The traditional Sadhak Soul who is established in Bhakti, through practice of Bhakti Yoga is dear to the Divine. (1) He is having ill will to none, and having compassion and friendship to all beings, free from ego, even minded in pain and pleasure, forgives all, he is ever content, self-controlled and firm willed; his emotional mind and intellect are given up to the Divine; (2) he neither agitates the world, udbega, nor feels agitated by the world; he is free from the agitation of joy, resentment and fear; (3) he does not expect favour from anybody, is pure, skilful, indifferent, given up all initiation of work; (4) he who neither rejoices nor hates, neither grieves nor desires, has abolished the distinction between fortunate and unfortunate happenings and is full of devotion to the Divine; (5) he is equal to friend and enemy, honour and dishonour, cold and heat, pleasure and pain, praise and blame is free from attachment, silent, content with whatever comes, without attachment to home, family, clan, religion and nation, firm in emotional mind fully turned towards the Divine through devotion. "This Yoga (Integral Yoga) too is not a Yoga of knowledge alone — knowledge is one of its means, but its base being self-offering, surrender, bhakti , it is based on the heart and nothing can be eventually done without this base. There are plenty of people here who do or have done Japa and base themselves on bhakti, very few comparatively who have done the “head” meditation; love and bhakti and works are usually the base — how many can proceed by knowledge? Only the few." CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-226-227 A Sadhaka is considered fit to pursue Yoga of self-perfection of integral Yoga and will succeed if he satisfies the condition as indicated in the Gita , “the exceedingly dear, atiba priya devotee is he who makes Purushottama his one and only supreme aim of life and with full of faith, follows the written truth of reconciling karma, jnana and bhakti Yoga in every detail or obeys the immortalising Dharma uttered by the Lord entirely;” (The Gita-12.20) or as indicated in Savitri : "Her (Savitri's) consciousness grew aware of him (Paramatma Satyavan ) alone. And all her separate self was lost in his." Savitri-410 Dwells in Me, mayi nivasisyasi : "The real goal of the Yoga is then a living and self-completing union with the divine Purushottama and is not merely a self- extinguishing immergence in the impersonal Being. To raise our whole existence to the Divine Being, to dwell in him (mayyeva nivasisyasi ), to be at one with him, unify our consciousness with his, to make our fragmentary nature a reflection of his perfect nature, to be inspired in our thought and sense wholly by the divine knowledge, to be moved in will and action utterly and faultlessly by the divine will, to lose desire in his love and delight, i s man’s perfection; it is that which the Gita describes as the highest secret. It is the true goal and the last sense of human living and the highest step in our progressive sacrifice of works. For he remains to the end the master of works and the soul of sacrifice." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-132-133, "The liberation of the Gita is not a self-oblivious abolition of the soul’s personal being in the absorption of the One, sayujya mukti; it is all kinds of union at once. There is an entire unification with the supreme Godhead in essence of being and intimacy of consciousness and identity of bliss, sayujya , — for one object of this Yoga is to become Brahman, brahmabhuta. There is an eternal ecstatic dwelling in the highest existence of the Supreme, salokya , — for it is said, “Thou shalt dwell in me,” nivasisyasi mayyeva . (The Gita-12.8) There is an eternal love and adoration in a uniting nearness, there is an embrace of the liberated spirit by its divine Lover and the enveloping Self of its infinitudes, samıpya . There is an identity of the soul’s liberated nature with the divine nature, sadrisya mukti, — for the perfection of the free spirit is to become even as the Divine, madbhavam agatah , (The Gita-4.10) and to be one with him in the law of its being and the law of its works and nature, sadharmyam agatah . (The gita-14.2) The orthodox Yoga of knowledge aims at a fathomless immergence in the one infinite existence, sayujya ; it looks upon that alone as the entire liberation. The Yoga of adoration envisages an eternal habitation or nearness as the greater release, salokya, samıpya . The Yoga of works leads to oneness in power of being and nature, sadrisya . But the Gita envelops them all in its catholic integrality and fuses them all into one greatest and richest divine freedom and perfection." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-398, "Mark that nowhere in the Gita is there any indication that dissolution of the individual spiritual being into the unmanifest, indefinable or absolute Brahman , avyaktam anirdesyam , is the true meaning or condition of immortality or the true aim of Yoga . On the contrary it describes immortality later on as an indwelling in the Ishwara in his supreme status, mayi nivasisyasi, param dhama , (The Gita-12.8, 10.12) and here as sadharmya, param siddhim, (The Gita-14.2, 1) a supreme perfection, a becoming of one law of being and nature with the Supreme, persistent still in existence and conscious of the universal movement but above it, as all the sages still exist, munayah sarve , (The Gita-14.1) not bound to birth in the creation, not troubled by the dissolution of the cycles. (The Gita-14.2) " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-422, “The individual spirit exists and ever existed beyond in the Eternal, for it is itself everlasting, sanatana . It is evidently this idea of the eternal individual which leads the Gita to avoid any expression at all suggestive of a complete dissolution, laya , and to speak rather of the highest state of the soul as a dwelling in the Purushottama, nivasisyasi mayyeva. If when speaking of the one Self of all it seems to use the language of Adwaita, yet this enduring truth of the eternal individual, mamam sah sanatanah , (The Gita-15.7) adds something which brings in a qualification and appears almost to accept the seeing of the Visishtadwaita , — though we must not therefore leap at once to the conclusion that that alone is the Gita’s philosophy or that its doctrine is identical with the later doctrine of Ramanuja. Still this much is clear that there is an eternal, a real and not only an illusive principle of multiplicity in the spiritual being of the one divine Existence. ” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-445-446, "And yet or rather therefore, because it is the truth of our self and spirit, the truth of its oneness with that Spirit from which all comes and by it and as its derivations and suggestions all exists and travails, it is not a negation but a fulfilment of all that mind and life point to and bear in them as their secret and unaccomplished significance. Thus it is not by a nirvana, an exclusion and negating extinction of all that we are here, but by a nirvana, an exclusion and negating extinction of ignorance and ego and a consequent ineffable fulfilment of our knowledge and will and heart’s aspiration, an uplifted and limitless living of them in the Divine, in the Eternal, nivasisyasi mayyeva , a transfigurement and transference of all our consciousness to a greater inner status that there comes this supreme perfection and release in the spirit." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-543, "This mystery of our existence signifies that what we are is not only a temporary name and form of the One, but as we may say, a soul and spirit of the Divine Oneness. Our spiritual individuality of which the ego is only a misleading shadow and projection in the ignorance has or is a truth that persists beyond the ignorance; there is something of us that dwells for ever in the supreme nature of the Purushottama, nivasisyasi mayi . This is the profound comprehensiveness of the teaching of the Gita that while it recognises the truth of the universalised impersonality into which we enter by the extinction of ego, brahma-nirvana , (The Gita-5.24, 25, 26) -- for indeed without it there can be no liberation or at least no absolute release, — it recognises too the persistent spiritual truth of our personality (Psychic being) as a factor of the highest experience. Not this natural but that divine and central being in us is the eternal Jiva. It is the Ishwara, Vasudeva who is all things, that takes up our mind and life and body for the enjoyment of the lower Prakriti; it is the supreme Prakriti , the original spiritual nature of the supreme Purusha that holds together the universe and appears in it as the Jiva . This Jiva then is a portion of the Purushottama’s original divine spiritual being, a living power of the living Eternal. He is not merely a temporary form of lower Nature , but an eternal portion of the Highest in his supreme Prakriti, an eternal conscious ray of the divine existence and as everlasting as that supernal Prakriti. One side of the highest perfection and status of our liberated consciousness must then be to assume the true place of the Jiva in a supreme spiritual Nature, there to dwell in the glory of the supreme Purusha and there to have the joy of the eternal spiritual oneness." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-549-550, Fitness to become an instrument of the descent of overhead Divine Love: “To bring the Divine Love and Beauty and Ananda into the world is, indeed, the whole crown and essence of our Yoga. But it has always seemed to me impossible unless there comes as its support and foundation and guard the Divine Truth — what I call the Supramental — and its Divine Power. Otherwise Love itself blinded by the confusions of this present consciousness may stumble in its human receptacles and, even otherwise, may find itself unrecognised, rejected or rapidly degenerating and lost in the frailty of man’s inferior nature. But when it comes in the Divine Truth and Power, Divine Love descends first as something transcendent and universal and out of that transcendence and universality it applies itself to persons according to the Divine Truth and Will, creating a vaster, greater, purer personal love than any the human mind or heart can now imagine. It is when one has felt this descent that one can be really an instrument for the birth and action of the Divine Love in the world.” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-333" “All true Truth of love and of the works of love the psychic being accepts in their place: but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns it into a stake of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-157, “It is therefore through the sacrifice of love, works and knowledge with the psychic being as the leader and priest of the sacrifice that life itself can be transformed into its own true spiritual figure. If the sacrifice of knowledge rightly done is easily the largest and purest offering we can bring to the Highest, the sacrifice of love is not less demanded of us for our spiritual perfection; it is even more intense and rich in its singleness and can be made not less vast and pure. This pure wideness is brought into the intensity of the sacrifice of love when into all our activities there is poured the spirit and power of a divine infinite joy and the whole atmosphere of our life is suffused with an engrossing adoration of the One who is the All and the Highest. For then does the sacrifice of love attain its utter perfection when, offered to the divine All, it becomes integral, catholic and boundless, and when, uplifted to the Supreme, it ceases to be the weak, superficial and transient movement men call love and becomes a pure and grand and deep uniting Ananda .” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-158, “Ultimately, nothing but omnipotence could convert the world, convince the world. The world isn't ready to experience supreme Love. Supreme Love eliminates all problems, even the problem of creation: there are no more problems, I know it since that experience [of April 13, 1962]. But the world isn't ready yet, it may take a few thousand years. Although it is beginning to be ready for the manifestation of supreme Power (which seems to indicate that this will manifest first). And this supreme Power would result from a CONSTANT identification…(The Gita proposes that the constant union, nitya yoga, with the Divine is made possible by the reconciliation of Karma and Jnana Yoga .) But this "constancy" isn't yet established: one is identified and then one isn't, is and then isn't, so things get delayed indefinitely. You wind up doing exactly what you tell others not to do – one foot here and one foot there! It just won't do.” The Mother’s Agenda-04.07.1962, "Annulled were the tables of the law of Pain, And in their place grew luminous characters." Savitri-232 "There meet and clasp the eternal opposites, T here pain becomes a violent fiery joy; Evil turns back to its original good, And sorrow lies upon the breasts of Bliss: She has learned to weep glad tears of happiness; Her gaze is charged with a wistful ecstasy. Then shall be ended here the Law of Pain." Savitri-451 The Divine Love, the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces: "Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Nature- forces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind’s and the life’s falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind’s ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-166-167 Supramental Love: "There in the supramental Gnosis is the fulfilment, the culminating height, the all-embracing extent of the inner adoration, the profound and integral union, the flaming wings of Love upbearing the power and joy of a supreme Knowledge. For supramental Love brings an active ecstasy that surpasses the void passive peace and stillness which is the heaven of the liberated Mind and does not betray the deeper greater calm which is the beginning of the supramental silence. The unity of a love which is able to include in itself all differences without being dimin- ished or abrogated by their present limitations and apparent dissonances is raised to its full potentiality on the supramental level. For there an intense oneness with all creatures founded on a profound oneness of the soul with the Divine can harmonise with a play of relations that only makes the oneness more perfect and absolute. The power of Love supramentalised can take hold of all living relations without hesitation or danger and turn them Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life. For it is the very nature of the supramental experience that it can perpetuate the play of difference without forfeiting or in the least diminishing either the divine union or the infinite oneness. For a supramentalised consciousness it would be utterly possible to embrace all contacts with men and the world in a purified flame-force and with a transfigured significance, because the soul would then perceive always as the object of all emotion and all seeking for love or beauty the One Eternal and could spiritually use a wide and liberated life-urge to meet and join with that One Divine in all things and all creatures." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-168-169, “All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object. The supramental is simply the Truth-Consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter. One has indeed to rise to high summits to reach it, but the more one rises, the more one can bring down below. No doubt, life and body have not to remain the ignorant, imperfect, impotent things they are now; but why should a change to fuller life- power, fuller body-power be considered something aloof, cold and undesirable? The utmost Ananda the body and life are now capable of is a brief excitement of the vital mind or the nerves or the cells which is limited, imperfect and soon passes; with the supramental change all the cells, nerves, vital forces, embodied mental forces can become filled with a thousandfold Ananda, capable of an intensity of bliss which passes description and which need not fade away. How aloof, repellent and undesirable! The supramental love means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire flooding of the body consciousness with the physical experience of oneness, the presence of the Beloved in every part, in every cell of the body. Is that too something aloof and grand but undesirable? With the supramental change, the very thing on which you insist, the possibility of the free physical meeting of the embodied Divine with the sadhak without conflict of forces and without undesirable reactions becomes possible, assured and free. That too is, I suppose, something aloof and undesirable? I could go on — for pages, but this is enough for the moment.” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-482-483 12/ Chapter 12. Bhakti Yoga The Objective of Divine Love in Integral Yoga: "The way of Bhakti is supposed often to be necessarily infe- rior because it proceeds by worship which belongs to that stage of spiritual experience where there is a difference, an insufficient unity between the human soul and the Divine, because its very principle is love and love means always two, the lover and the beloved, a dualism therefore, while oneness is the highest spir- itual experience, and because it seeks after the personal God while the Impersonal is the highest and the eternal truth, if not even the sole Reality. But worship is only the first step on the path of devotion. Where external worship changes into the inner adoration, real Bhakti begins; that deepens into the intensity of divine love; that love leads to the joy of closeness in our relations with the Divine; the joy of closeness passes into the bliss of union. Love too as well as knowledge brings us to a highest oneness and it gives to that oneness its greatest possible depth and intensity. It is true that love returns gladly upon a difference in oneness, by which the oneness itself becomes richer and sweeter. But here we may say that the heart is wiser than the thought, at least than that thought which fixes upon opposite ideas of the Divine and concentrates on one to the exclusion of the other which seems its contrary, but is really its complement and a means of its greatest fulfilment. This is the weakness of the mind that it limits itself by its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against the other." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-548-549, The Reconciliation of Matter and Spirit through the practice of integral Bhakti Yoga : "The Path of Devotion (traditional Bhakti Yoga) aims at the enjoyment of the supreme Love and Bliss and utilises normally the conception of the supreme Lord in His personality as the divine Lover and enjoyer of the universe. The world is then realised as a play of the Lord, with our human life as its final stage, pursued through the different phases of self-concealment and self-revelation. The principle of Bhakti Yoga is to utilise all the normal relations of human life into which emotion enters and apply them no longer to transient worldly relations, but to the joy of the All-Loving, the All-Beautiful and the All-Blissful. Worship and meditation are used only for the preparation and increase of intensity of the divine relationship. And this Yoga is catholic in its use of all emotional relations, so that even enmity and opposition to God, considered as an intense, impatient and perverse form of Love, is conceived as a possible means of realisation and salvation. This path, too, as ordinarily practised, (in traditional Bhakti Yoga ) leads away from world-existence to an absorption, of another kind than the Monist’s, in the Transcendent and Supra-cosmic...But, here (in Integral Yoga ) too, the exclusive result is not inevitable. The Yoga itself provides a first corrective by not confining the play of divine love to the relation between the supreme Soul and the individual, but extending it to a common feeling and mutual worship between the devotees themselves united in the same realisation of the supreme Love and Bliss. It provides a yet more general corrective in the realisation of the divine object of Love in all beings not only human but animal, easily extended to all forms whatsoever. We can see how this larger application of the Yoga of Devotion may be so used as to lead to the elevation of the whole range of human emotion, sensation and aesthetic perception to the divine level , its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards love and joy in our humanity.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-39 "To live, to love are signs of infinite things, Love is a glory from eternity’s spheres. Abased, disfigured, mocked by baser mights That steal his name and shape and ecstasy, He is still the godhead by which all can change." Savitri-397 “Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void: The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night, The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds. He (Divine Love) labours in the depths, exults on the heights; He shall remake thy universe, O Death.” Savitri-592, By Devotion one knows Me: "Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. “By Bhakti” says the Lord in the Gita “shall a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the principles of my being, then he enters into Me.” (The Gita-18.55) Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one’s love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover’s being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-547, "If to thought the Impersonal seems the wider and higher truth, the Personal a narrower experience, the spirit finds both of them to be aspects of a Reality which figures itself in both, and if there is a knowledge of that Reality to which thought arrives by insistence on the infinite Impersonality, there is also a knowledge of it to which love arrives by insistence on the infinite Personality. The spiritual experience of each leads, if followed to the end, to the same ultimate Truth. By Bhakti as by knowledge, as the Gita tells us, we arrive at unity with the Purushottama, the Supreme who contains in himself the impersonal and numberless personalities, the qualitiless and infinite qualities, pure being, consciousness and delight and the endless play of their relations." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-550 13/ Chapter 13. The Field and Its Knower Summary or A Brief Restatement: “The Gita in its last six chapters, in order to found on a clear and complete knowledge the way of the soul’s rising out of the lower into the divine nature , restates in another form the enlightenment the Teacher has already imparted to Arjuna. Essentially it is the same knowledge, but details and relations are now made prominent and assigned their entire significance, thoughts and truths brought out in their full value that were alluded to only in passing or generally stated in the light of another purpose.” CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-409 In this thirteenth chapter, the relationship between Matter and Spirit is worked out and for maintaining the Spiritual pursuit Arjuna raised the Question which can be divided into six parts. He wanted to know these six elements in order to strengthen his Spiritual pursuit. “Six Questions raised by Arjuna : (1) The Field, Kshetra , and (2) the Knower of the Field, Kshetrajna , (3) Knowledge, Jnana , and (4) the object of Knowledge, Jneya , (5) Nature, Prakriti and (6) Self, Purusha, these I would like to learn, O Keshava .” The Gita-13.1 The Field, Kshetra : The Upanishad speaks of a fivefold body or sheath of Nature, a physical (Annamaya Kosha ), vital (Pranamaya Kosha ), mental (Manomaya Kosha ), ideal (Vijnanamaya Kosha ) and divine body (Anandamaya Kosha ); this may be regarded as the totality of the field, kshetram . Twenty-four Principles of Field: "The Gita contents itself to restate the whole working of lower Prakriti , f ield, kshetra , in line with Sankhya thinkers. This kshetra is the product of twenty-four cosmic principles where except abyakta Prakriti, all the other twenty-three elements are of lower Nature . They are five bhutas , that of ether, fire, air, water and earth, or ‘the ethereal, the radiant, electric and gaseous, the liquid, and the other elemental conditions of matter are the physical medium.’ (CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-272), five tanmatras, that of sound, touch, sight, taste and smell, five karmendriyas of speech, locomotion, the seizing of things, ejection and generation, (or hands, feet, mouth, excretion, and reproduction) five jnanendriya , ear, srotram , eye, chakhuh, tongue, rasanam , sense of touch, sparsanam and nose, ghranam , unmanifest Nature, abyakta Prakriti , mind, manas , intelligent will, buddhi and ego, ahamkara . This lower nature, also known as apara prakriti , is constituted of three inconscient energy or three gunas or essential modes; sattwa, the seed of intelligence, conserves the working of energy; rajas , the seed of force and action, creates the working of energy; tamas , the seed of inertia and non-intelligence, dissolves what sattwa conserves and rajas creates. When the three gunas are in equilibrium, the Soul, Kshara Purusha is liberated and contact with Akshara Purusha is established but when the equilibrium is disturbed then there is the ceaseless creation, conservation and dissolution begins, unrolling the phenomena of cosmos." (Ref: CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-71) "Pleasure and pain, liking and disliking are the principal deformations of the kshetra . From the Vedantic point of view we may say that pleasure and pain are the vital or sensational deformations given by the lower energy to the spontaneous Ananda or delight of the spirit when brought into contact with her workings. And we may say from the same view-point that liking and disliking are the corresponding mental deformations given by her to the reactive Will of the spirit that determines its response to her contacts. These dualities are the positive and negative terms in which the ego soul of the lower nature enjoys the universe. The negative terms, pain, dislike, sorrow, repulsion and the rest, are perverse or at the best ignorantly reverse responses: the positive terms, liking, pleasure, joy, attraction, are ill-guided responses or at the best insufficient and in character inferior to those of the true spiritual experience." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-413-414, "“(1) Hatred and (2) disliking and (3) scorn and (4) repulsion, (5) clinging and (6) attachment and (7) preference (The above seven deformations foreseen in integral Yoga can be compared with seven vicaras of the Gita , that of liking and disliking, iccha, dwesa , pleasure and pain, sukham, dukham , consciousness, chetana, collocation, samghata, persistence, dhriti) are natural, necessary, inevitable at a certain stage: they attend upon or they help to make and maintain Nature’s choice in us. But to the Karmayogin they are a survival, a stumbling block, a process of the Ignorance and, as he progresses, they fall away from his nature. The child-soul needs them for its growth; but they drop from an adult (-soul) in the divine culture. (1) In the God-nature to which we have to rise there can be an adamantine, even a destructive severity but not hatred, (3) a divine irony but not scorn, (4, 2) a calm, clear-seeing and forceful rejection but not repulsion and dislike. (1) Even what we have to destroy, we must not abhor or fail to recognise as a disguised or temporary movement of the Eternal.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-223, (5) “There can be for the seeker of the integral Yoga no clinging to resting-places on the road or to half-way houses; he cannot be satisfied till he has laid down all the great enduring bases of his perfection and broken out into its large and free infinities, and even there he has to be constantly filling himself with more experiences of the Infinite.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-776, (6) “Therefore attachment and desire must be utterly cast out; there is nothing in the world to which we must be attached, not wealth nor poverty, nor joy nor suffering, nor life nor death, nor greatness nor littleness, nor vice nor virtue, nor friend, nor wife, nor children, nor country, nor our work and mission, nor heaven nor earth, nor all that is within them or beyond them. And this does not mean that there is nothing at all that we shall love, nothing in which we shall take delight; for attachment is egoism in love and not love itself, desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in things.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-329, (7) “For the perfect action and experience is not to be determined by any kind of mental or vital preference, but by the revealing and inspiring spiritual will which is the Shakti in her direct and real initiation. When I say that as I am appointed, I work, I still bring in a limiting personal element and mental reaction. But it is the Master who will do his own work through myself as his instrument, and there must be no mental or other preference in me to limit, to interfere, to be a source of imperfect working.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-725, The Knower of the Field, Kshetrajna : "He is knowledge and the object of knowledge. The spiritual supramental knowledge that floods the illumined mind and transfigures it is this spirit manifesting himself in light to the force-obscured soul which he has put forth into the action of Nature. This eternal Light is in the heart of every being; it is he who is the secret knower of the field, ksetrajna, and presides as the Lord in the heart of things over this province and over all these kingdoms of his manifested becoming and action. When man sees this eternal and universal Godhead within himself, when he becomes aware of the soul in all things and discovers the spirit in Nature, when he feels all the universe as a wave mounting in this Eternity and all that is as the one existence, he puts on the light of Godhead and stands free in the midst of the worlds of Nature. A divine knowledge and a perfect turning with adoration to this Divine is the secret of the great spiritual liberation. Freedom, love and spiritual knowledge raise us from mortal nature to immortal being." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-417 Knowledge, Jnana : "The Gita then tells us what is the spiritual knowledge or rather it tells us what are the conditions of knowledge, the marks, the signs of the man whose soul is turned towards the inner wisdom. These signs are the recognised and traditional characteristics of the sage, — his strong turning away of the heart from attachment to outward and worldly things, his inward and brooding spirit, his steady mind and calm equality, the settled fixity of his thought and will upon the greatest inmost truths, upon the things that are real and eternal. First, there comes a certain moral condition, a sattwic government of the natural being. There is fixed in him a total absence of worldly pride and arrogance, a candid soul, a tolerant, long-suffering and benignant heart, purity of mind and body, tranquil firmness and steadfastness, self-control and a masterful government of the lower nature and the heart’s worship given to the Teacher, whether to the divine Teacher within or to the human Master in whom the divine Wisdom is embodied, — for that is the sense of the reverence given to the Guru. Then there is a nobler and freer attitude towards the outward world, an attitude of perfect detachment and equality, a firm removal of the natural being’s attraction to the objects of the senses and a radical freedom from the claims of that constant clamorous ego-sense, ego-idea, ego-motive which tyrannises over the normal man. There is no longer any clinging to the attachment and absorption of family and home. There is instead of these vital and animal movements an unattached will and sense and intelligence, a keen perception of the defective nature of the ordinary life of physical man with its aimless and painful subjection to birth and death and disease and age, a constant equalness to all pleasant or unpleasant happenings, — for the soul is seated within and impervious to the shocks of external events, — and a meditative mind turned towards solitude and away from the vain noise of crowds and the assemblies of men. Finally, there is a strong turn within towards the things that really matter, a philosophic perception of the true sense and large principles of existence, a tranquil continuity of inner spiritual knowledge and light, the Yoga of an unswerving devotion, love of God, the heart’s deep and constant adoration of the universal and eternal Presence." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-414-415 The object of Knowledge, Jneya : "All these things taken together constitute the fundamental character of our first transactions with the world of Nature, but it is evidently not the whole description of our being; it is our actuality but not the limit of our possibilities. There is something beyond to be known, jneyam, and it is when the knower of the field turns from the field itself to learn of himself within it and of all that is behind its appearances that real knowledge begins, jnanam , — the true knowledge of the field no less than of the knower. That turning inward alone delivers from ignorance. For the farther we go inward, the more we seize on greater and fuller realities of things and grasp the complete truth both of God and the soul and of the world and its movements. Therefore, says the divine Teacher, it is the knowledge at once of the field and its knower, ksetra-ksetrajnayor jnanam, (The Gita-13.3) a united and even unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge, which is the real illumination and the only wisdom. For both soul and nature are the Brahman, but the true truth of the world of Nature can only be discovered by the liberated sage who possesses also the truth of the spirit. One Brahman , one reality in Self and Nature is the object of all knowledge. " CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-414 Nature, Prakriti and Self, Purusha : "The Soul and Nature are only two aspects of the eternal Brahman , an apparent duality which founds the operations of his universal existence. The Soul is without origin and eternal, Nature too is without origin and eternal; but the modes of Nature and the lower forms she assumes to our conscious experience have an origin in the transactions of these two entities. They (modes of Nature) come from her, wear by her the outward chain of cause and effect, doing and the results of doing, force and its workings, all that is here transient and mutable. Constantly they change and the soul and Nature seem to change with them, but in themselves these two powers are eternal and always the same. Nature creates and acts, the Soul enjoys her creation and action; but in this inferior form of her action she turns this enjoyment into the obscure and petty figures of pain and pleasure. Forcibly the soul, the individual Purusha, is attracted by her qualitative workings and this attraction of her qualities draws him constantly to births of all kinds in which he enjoys the variations and vicissitudes, the good and evil of birth in Nature. But this is only the outward experience of the soul mutable in conception by identification with mutable Nature. Seated in this body is her and our Divinity, the supreme Self, Paramatman, the supreme Soul, the mighty Lord of Nature, who watches her action, sanctions her operations, upholds all she does, commands her manifold creation, enjoys with his universal delight this play of her figures of his own being. That is the self-knowledge to which we have to accustom our mentality before we can truly know ourselves as an eternal portion of the Eternal. Once that is fixed, no matter how the soul in us may comport itself outwardly in its transactions with Nature, whatever it may seem to do or however it may seem to assume this or that figure of personality and active force and embodied ego, it is in itself free, no longer bound to birth because one through impersonality of self with the inner unborn spirit of existence. That impersonality is our union with the supreme egoless I of all that is in cosmos." CWSA-19/Essays of the Gita/p-417-418 13/ Chapter 13. The Field and Its Knower The Most important verse of this chapter which acts as Source of Supramental action in Integral Yoga: “The Blessed Lord said: The triple realisation of Brahman, atmani atmanam atmana or “of the self by the self in the self” reconciles the relation between Purusha (Spirit) and Prakriti (Matter); it comes by an inner meditation through which the eternal Self becomes visible, pasyanti, to us in our self-existence. 'Or it comes by the Yoga of the Sankhyas , the separation of the soul from nature. Or it comes by the Yoga of works in which the personal will is dissolved through the opening up of our mind and heart and all our active forces to the Lord who assumes to himself the whole of our works in nature.’ (CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-418) "Others, who are unfit for these Dhyana, Jnana and Karma Yoga , may hear of the written Truth of Shastra from men of Spiritual attainment and mould the mind into the sense of THAT to which it listens with utter faith and concentration. But, however arrived at, it carries us beyond the limitation of death to a vast immortality of Spirit.” (The Gita-13.25, 26), " The supermind knows most completely and securely not by thought but by identity, by a pure awareness of the self-truth of things in the self and by the self , atmani atmanam atmana . I get the supramental knowledge best by becoming one with the truth, one with the object of knowledge; the supramental satisfaction and integral light is most there when there is no further division between the knower, knowledge and the known, jnata, jnanam, jneyam. I see the thing known not as an object outside myself, but as myself or a part of my universal self contained in my most direct consciousness. This leads to the highest and completest knowledge; thought and speech being representations and not this direct possession in the consciousness are to the supermind a lesser form and, if not filled with the spiritual awareness, thought becomes in fact a diminution of knowledge. For it would be, supposing it to be a supramental thought, only a partial manifestation of a greater knowledge existing in the self but not at the time present to the immediately active consciousness. In the highest ranges of the infinite there need be no thought at all because all would be experienced spiritually, in continuity, in eternal possession and with an absolute directness and completeness. Thought is only one means of partially manifesting and presenting what is hidden in this greater self-existent knowledge. This supreme kind of knowing will not indeed be possible to us in its full extent and degree until we can rise through many grades of the supermind to that infinite. But still as the supramental power emerges and enlarges its action, something of this highest way of knowledge appears and grows and even the members of the mental being, as they are intuitivised and supramentalised, develop more and more a corresponding action upon their own level. There is an increasing power of a luminous vital, psychic, emotional, dynamic and other identification with all the things and beings that are the objects of our consciousness and these transcendings of the separative consciousness bring with them many forms and means of a direct knowledge. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-831-832, " The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be, not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding. For in the Ignorance all paths are the paths of the spirit seeking for itself blindly or with a growing light; the gnostic being and life would be the spirit’s self-discovery and its seeing and reaching of the aims of all these paths but in the greater way of its own revealed and conscious truth of being. Mind seeks for light, for knowledge, — for knowledge of the one truth basing all, an essential truth of self and things, but also of all truth of diversity of that oneness, all its detail, circumstance, manifold way of action, form, law of movement and happening, various manifestation and creation; for thinking mind the joy of existence is discovery and the penetration of the mystery of creation that comes with knowledge. This the gnostic change will fulfil in an ample measure; but it will give it a new character. It will act not by the discovery of the unknown, but by the bringing out of the known; all will be the finding “of the self by the self in the self” . For the self of the gnostic being will not be the mental ego but the Spirit that is one in all; he will see the world as a universe of the Spirit. The finding of the one truth underlying all things will be the Identical discovering identity and identical truth everywhere and discovering too the power and workings and relations of that identity. The revelation of the detail, the circumstance, the abundant ways and forms of the manifestation will be the unveiling of the endless opulence of the truths of that identity, its forms and powers of self, its curious manifoldness and multiplicity of form bringing out infinitely its oneness. This knowledge will proceed by identification with all, by entering into all, by a contact bringing with it a leap of self-discovery and a flame of recognition, a greater and surer intuition of truth than the mind can reach; there will be an intuition too of the means of embodying and utilising the truth seen, an operative intuition of its dynamic processes, a direct intimate awareness guiding the life and the physical senses in every step of their action and service to the Spirit when they have to be called in as instruments for the effectuation of process in life and matter. " CWSA-22/The Life Divine-22/p-1017-1018 Relation between Purusha and Prakriti: "The distinction made in the Gita between the Purusha and the Prakriti gives us the clue to the various attitudes which the soul can adopt towards Nature in its movement towards perfect freedom and rule. The Purusha is, says the Gita , witness, upholder, source of the sanction, knower, lord, enjoyer; Prakriti executes, it is the active principle and must have an operation corresponding to the attitude of the Purusha . The soul may assume, if it wishes, the poise of the pure witness, saksı ; it may look on at the action of Nature as a thing from which it stands apart; it watches, but does not itself participate. We have seen the importance of this quietistic capacity; it is the basis of the movement of withdrawal by which we can say of everything, — body, life, mental action, thought, sensation, emotion, — “This is Prakriti working in the life, mind and body, it is not myself, it is not even mine,” and thus come to the soul’s separation from these things and to their quiescence. This may, therefore, be an attitude of renunciation or at least of non-participation, tamasic, with a resigned and inert endurance of the natural action so long as it lasts, rajasic , with a disgust, aversion and recoil from it, sattwic, with a luminous intelligence of the soul’s separateness and the peace and joy of aloofness and repose; but also it may be attended by an equal and impersonal delight as of a spectator at a show, joyous but unattached and ready to rise up at any moment and as joyfully depart. The attitude of the Witness at its highest is the absolute of unattachment and freedom from affection by the phenomena of the cosmic existence." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-431-432, "There is no loss of freedom, no descent into an ignorant attachment. The man free in his soul is aware that the Divine is the lord of the action of Nature, that Maya is His Knowledge-Will determining and effecting all, that Force is the Will side of this double divine Power in which knowledge is always present and effectual. He is aware of himself also, even individually, as a centre of the divine existence, — a portion of the Lord, the Gita expresses it, — controlling so far the action of Nature which he views, upholds, sanctions, enjoys, knows and by the determinative power of knowledge controls. And when he universalises himself, his knowledge still reflects only the divine knowledge, his will effectuates only the divine will, he enjoys only the divine delight and not an ignorant personal satisfaction. Thus the Purusha preserves its freedom in its possession, renunciation of limited personality even in its representative enjoyment and delight of cosmic being. It has taken up fully in the higher poise the true relations of the soul and Nature." CWSA-23/The Synhesis of Yoga/p-434-435 The Transformation of Nature: "The psychic and the spiritual opening with their experiences and consequences can lead away from life or to a Nirvana ; but they are here (in Integral Yoga) being considered solely as steps in a transformation of the nature." CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-943,"But all this change means a total passing from the lower human to the higher divine nature. It is a lifting of our whole being or at least of the whole mental being that wills, knows and feels beyond what we are into some highest spiritual consciousness, some satisfying fullest power of existence, some deepest widest delight of the spirit. And this may well be possible by a transcendence of our present natural life, it may well be possible in some celestial state beyond the earthly existence or still beyond in a supracosmic superconscience; it may happen by transition to an absolute and infinite power and status of the Spirit. But while we are here in the body, here in life, here in action, what in this change becomes of the lower nature ? For at present all our activities are determined in their trend and shape by the nature, and this Nature here is the nature of the three gunas, and in all natural being and in all natural activities there is the triple guna, tamas with its ignorance and inertia, rajas with its kinesis and action, its passion and grief and perversion, sattwa with its light and happiness, and the bondage of these things. And granted that the soul becomes superior in the self to the three gunas , how does it escape in its instrumental nature from their working and result and bondage? For even the man of knowledge, says the Gita, must act according to his nature . (The Gita-18.40) To feel and bear the reactions of the gunas in the outer manifestation, but to be free from them and superior in the observing conscious self behind is not sufficient ; for it leaves still a dualism of freedom and subjection, a contradiction between what we are within and what we are without, between our self and our power, what we know ourselves to be and what we will and do. Where is the release here, where the full elevation and transformation to the higher spiritual nature, the immortal Dharma , the law proper to the infinite purity and power of a divine being? If this change cannot be effected while in the body, then so it must be said, that the whole nature cannot be transformed and there must remain an unreconciled duality until the mortal type of existence drops off like a discarded shell from the spirit." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-461-462, "This is the difficulty which the Gita has still to meet in order to justify works to the seeker after the Spirit. Otherwise it must say to Arjuna , “Act temporarily in this fashion, but afterwards seek the higher way of renunciation of works.” But on the contrary it has said that not the cessation of works, but renunciation of desire is the better way; it has spoken of the action of the liberated man, muktasya karma . (The Gita-4.23) It has even insisted on doing all actions, sarvani karmani, (The Gita-3.30, 12.6) kritsna-karma- krit ; (The Gita-4.18) it has said that in whatever way the perfected Yogin lives and acts, he lives and acts in God. (The Gita-6.31, 13.24) This can only be, if the nature also in its dynamics and workings becomes divine, a power imperturbable, intangible, inviolate, pure and untroubled by the reactions of the inferior Prakriti . How and by what steps is this most difficult transformation to be effected ? What is this last secret of the soul’s perfection? what the principle or the process of this transmutation of our human and earthly nature?" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-462, "Every vital fibre has to be persuaded to accept an entire renunciation of all that hitherto represented to it its own existence. Mind has to cease to be mind and become brilliant with something beyond it. Life has to change into a thing vast and calm and intense and powerful that can no longer recognise its old blind eager narrow self of petty impulse and desire. Even the body has to submit to a mutation and be no longer the clamorous animal or the impeding clod it now is, but become instead a conscious servant and radiant instrument and living form of the spirit." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-72-73, "The static freedom of the soul, no longer witness only and knower, is crowned by a dynamic transformation of the nature. The constant mixture, the uneven operation of the three modes acting upon each other in our three instruments ceases from its normal confused, troubled and improper action and movement. Another action becomes possible, commences, grows, culminates, a working more truly right, more luminous, natural and normal to the deepest divine interplay of Purusha and Prakriti although supernatural and supernormal to our present imperfect nature. The body conditioning the physical mind insists no longer on its tamasic inertia that repeats always the same ignorant movement: it becomes a passive field and instrument of a greater force and light, it responds to every demand of the spirit’s force, holds and supports every variety and intensity of new divine experience. Our kinetic and dynamic vital parts , our nervous and emotional and sensational and volitional being, expand in power and admit a tireless action and a blissful enjoyment of experience, but learn at the same time to stand on a foundation of wide self-possessed and self-poised calm, sublime in force, divine in rest, neither exulting and excited nor tortured by sorrow and pain, neither harried by desire and importunate impulses nor dulled by incapacity and indolence. The intelligence, the thinking, understanding and reflective mind, renounces its sattwic limitations and opens to an essential light and peace. An infinite knowledge offers to us its splendid ranges, a knowledge not made up of mental constructions, not bound by opinion and idea or dependent on a stumbling uncertain logic and the petty support of the senses, but self-sure, authentic, all-penetrating, all-comprehending; a boundless bliss and peace, not dependent on deliverance from the hampered strenuousness of creative energy and dynamic action, not constituted by a few limited felicities but self-existent and all-including, pour into ever-enlarging fields and through ever-widening and always more numerous channels to possess the nature. A higher force, bliss and knowledge from a source beyond mind and life and body seize on them to remould in a diviner image." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-240-241, "All must be taken to a spiritual height and placed upon a spiritual basis; t he presence of an inner spiritual change and an outer transformation must be enforced upon the whole of life and not merely on a part of life; all must be accepted that is helpful towards this change or admits it, all must be rejected that is incapable or inapt or refuses to submit itself to the transforming movement. There must be no attachment to any form of things or of life, any object, any activity; all must be renounced if need be, all must be admitted that the Divine chooses as its material for the divine life. But what accepts or rejects must be neither mind nor open or camouflaged vital will of desire nor ethical sense, but the insistence of the psychic being, the command of the Divine Guide of the Yoga, the vision of the higher Self or Spirit, the illumined guidance of the Master. The way of the spirit is not a mental way; a mental rule or mental consciousness cannot be its determinant or its leader." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-186, “This however is a stage and not the whole perfection. The existence, however comparatively large and free, is still subject to the inferior nature. The sattwic, rajasic and tamasic ego is diminished but not eliminated; or if it seems to disappear, it has only sunk in our parts of action into the universal operation of the gunas, remains involved in them and is still working in a covert, subconscient fashion and may force itself to the front at any time. The sadhaka has therefore first to keep the idea and get the realisation of a one self or spirit in all behind all these workings (universalization of Consciousness). He must be aware behind Prakriti of the one supreme and universal Purusha . He must see and feel not only that all is the self-shaping of the one Force, Prakriti or Nature, but that all her actions are those of the Divine in all, the one Godhead in all, however veiled, altered and as it were perverted — for perversion comes by a conversion into lower forms — by transmission through the ego and the gunas . This will farther diminish the open or covert insistence of the ego and, if thoroughly realised, it will make it difficult or impossible for it to assert itself in such a way as to disturb or hamper the farther progress. The ego-sense will become, so far as it interferes at all, a foreign intrusive element and only a fringe of the mist of the old ignorance hanging on to the outskirts of the consciousness and its action. And, secondly, the universal Shakti must be realised, must be seen and felt and borne in the potent purity of its higher action, its supramental and spiritual workings. This greater vision of the Shakti will enable us to escape from the control of the gunas, to convert them into their divine equivalents and dwell in a consciousness in which the Purusha and Prakriti are one and not separated or hidden in or behind each other. There the Shakti will be in its every movement evident to us and naturally, spontaneously, irresistibly felt as nothing else but the active presence of the Divine, the shape of power of the supreme Self and Spirit.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-763, "But at first while we still live in the mind, there is a gulf of division or else a double action. The mental, vital and physical energy in us and the universe is felt to be a derivation from the supreme Shakt i, but at the same time an inferior, separated and in some sense another working. The real spiritual force may send down its messages or the light and power of its presence above us to the lower levels or may descend occasionally and even for a time possess, but it is then mixed with the inferior workings and partially transforms and spiritualises them, but is itself diminished and altered in the process. There is an intermittent higher action or a dual working of the nature . Or we find that the Shakti for a time raises the being to a higher spiritual plane and then lowers it back into the inferior levels. These alternations must be regarded as the natural vicissitudes of a process of transformation from the normal to the spiritual being. The transformation, the perfection cannot for the integral Yoga be complete until the link between the mental and the spiritual action is formed and a higher knowledge applied to all the activities of our existence. That link is the supramental or gnostic energy in which the incalculable infinite power of the supreme being, consciousness, delight formulates itself as an ordering divine will and wisdom, a light and power in the being which shapes all the thought, will, feeling, action and replaces the corresponding individual movements. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-764, “Therefore, when the Mother has put her force upon you or when you yourself have pulled the force upon you, this in you has always prevented it from doing its work in its own way. It has begun itself building according to the ideas of the mind or some demand of the ego, trying to make its own creation in its “own way”, by its own strength, its own sadhana, its own tapasya. There has never been here any real surrender, any giving up of yourself freely and simply into the hands of the Divine Mother. And yet that is the only way to succeed in the supramental Yoga. To be a Yogi, a Sannyasi, a Tapaswi is not the object here. The object is transformation, and the transformation can only be done by a force infinitely greater than your own; it can only be done by being truly like a child in the hands of the Divine Mother. ” CWSA-32/The Mother with Letters on the Mother/p-143, "There are two signs of the transformation of the seeker’s mind of knowledge and works of knowledge from the process of the Ignorance to the process of a liberated consciousness working partly, then wholly in the light of the Spirit. (1) There is first a central change of the consciousness and a growing direct experience, vision, feeling of the Supreme and the cosmic existence, the Divine in itself and the Divine in all things; the mind will be taken up into a growing preoccupation with this first and foremost and will feel itself heightening, widening into a more and more illumined means of expression of the one fundamental knowledge. (2) But also the central Consciousness in its turn will take up more and more the outer mental activities of knowledge and turn them into a parcel of itself or an annexed province; it will infuse into them its more authentic movement and make a more and more spiritualised and illumined mind its instrument in these surface fields, its new conquests, as well as in its own deeper spiritual empire. And this will be the second sign, the sign of a certain completion and perfection, that the Divine himself has become the Knower and all the inner movements, including the activities of what was once a purely human mental action, have become his field of knowledge. There will be less and less individual choice, opinion, preference, less and less of intellectualisation, mental weaving, cerebral galley-slave labour; a Light within will see all that has to be seen, know all that has to be known, develop, create, organise. It will be the Inner Knower who will do in the liberated and universalised mind of the individual the works of an all-comprehending knowledge... These two changes are the signs of a first effectuation in which the activities of the mental nature are lifted up, spiritualised, widened, universalised, liberated, led to a consciousness of their true purpose as an instrumentation of the Divine creating and developing its manifestation in the temporal universe. But this cannot be the whole scope of the transformation ; for it is not in these limits that the integral seeker can cease from his ascension or confine the widening of his nature. For, if it were so, knowledge would still remain a working of the mind, liberated, universalised, spiritualised, but still, as all mind must be, comparatively restricted, relative, imperfect in the very essence of its dynamism; it would reflect luminously great constructions of Truth, but not move in the domain where Truth is authentic, direct, sovereign and native. There is an ascension still to be made from this height, by which the spiritualised mind will exceed itself and transmute into a supramental power of knowledge. Already in the process of spiritualisation it will have begun to pass out of the brilliant poverty of the human intellect; it will mount successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind, and next into the gleaming belts of a still greater free Intelligence illumined with a Light from above. At this point it will begin to feel more freely, admit with a less mixed response the radiant beginnings of an Intuition, not illumined, but luminous in itself, true in itself, no longer entirely mental and therefore subjected to the abundant intrusion of error. Here too is not an end, for it must rise beyond into the very domain of that untruncated Intuition, the first direct light from the self-awareness of essential Being and, beyond it, attain that from which this light comes. For there is an Overmind behind Mind, a Power more original and dynamic which supports Mind, sees it as a diminished radiation from itself, uses it as a transmitting belt of passage downward or an instrument for the creations of the Ignorance. The last step of the ascension would be the surpassing of Overmind itself or its return into its own still greater origin, its conversion into the supramental light of the Divine Gnosis. For there in the supramental Light is the seat of a divine Truth-consciousness that has native in it, as no other consciousness below it can have, the power to organise the works of a Truth which is no longer tarnished by the shadow of the cosmic Inconscience and Ignorance. There to reach and thence to bring down a supramental dynamism that can transform the Ignorance is the distant but imperative supreme goal of the integral Yoga." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-147-148 14/ Chapter 14. The Three Gunas Summary or A Brief Restatement: In this 14th chapter and succeeding chapters, the Lord gave an elaborate description of three gunas . In Savitri, book-2, Canto-10, we find an elaborate description of the three gunas. Here also, the Lord hinted about the higher Nature beyond the three gunas . What are the hierarchies beyond the three gunas that are vividly described in integral Yoga. In The Synthesis Yoga book, we notice four hierarchies the of mind of Ignorance, the self-forgetful mind, mind of knowledge and the Supermind. In The Life Divine, they are hinted as purified Intellect, higher mind, illumined mind, Intuitive mind, overmind and Supermind. "The distinctions between the Soul and Nature rapidly drawn in the verses of the thirteenth chapter by a few decisive epithets, a few brief but packed characterisations of their separate power and functioning, and especially the distinction between the embodied soul subjected to the action of Nature by its enjoyment of her gunas, qualities or modes and the Supreme Soul which dwells enjoying the gunas , but not subject because it is itself beyond them, are the basis on which the Gita rests its whole idea of the liberated being made one in the conscious law of its existence with the Divine. That liberation, that oneness, that putting on of the divine nature, sadharmya , it declares to be the very essence of spiritual freedom and the whole significance of immortality. This supreme importance assigned to sadharmya is a capital point in the teaching of the Gita. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p- 421 Perfection of Karma Yoga, Sadharmya: " And this great thing, (grow into the likeness of the Divine) to rise from the human into the divine nature, we can only do by an effort of Godward knowledge, will and adoration. For the soul sent forth by the Supreme as his eternal portion, his immortal representative into the workings of universal Nature is yet obliged by the character of those workings, avasam prakriter vasat , (The Gita-9.8) to identify itself in its external consciousness with her limiting conditions, to identify itself with a life, mind and body that are oblivious of their inner spiritual reality and of the innate Godhead. To get back to self-knowledge and to the knowledge of the real as distinct from the apparent relations of the soul with Nature, to know God and ourselves and the world with a spiritual and no longer with a physical or externalised experience, through the deepest truth of the inner soul-consciousness and not through the misleading phenomenal significances of the sense-mind and the outward understanding, is an indispensable means of this perfection. Perfection cannot come without self-knowledge and God-knowledge and a spiritual attitude towards our natural existence, and that is why the ancient wisdom laid so much stress on salvation by knowledge , not an intellectual cognizance of things, but a growing of man the mental being into a greater spiritual consciousness. The soul’s salvation cannot come without the soul’s perfection , without its growing into the divine nature; the impartial Godhead will not effect it for us by an act of caprice or an arbitrary sanad of his favour. Divine works are effective for salvation because they lead us towards this perfection and to a knowledge of self and nature and God by a growing unity with the inner Master of our existence. Divine love is effective because by it we grow into the likeness of the sole and supreme object of our adoration and call down the answering love of the Highest to flood us with the light of his knowledge and the uplifting power and purity of his eternal spirit. Therefore, says the Gita , this is the supreme knowledge and the highest of all knowings because it leads to the highest perfection and spiritual status, param siddhim , (The Gita-14.1) and brings the soul to likeness with the Divine, sadharmya . It is the eternal wisdom, the great spiritual experience by which all the sages attained to that highest perfection, grew into one law of being with the Supreme and live for ever in his eternity, not born in the creation, not troubled by the anguish of the universal dissolution. This perfection, then, this sadharmya is the way of immortality and the indispensable condition without which the soul cannot consciously live in the Eternal." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-423-424, "Essentially then, this divine self-perfection is a conversion of the human into a likeness of and a fundamental oneness with the divine nature , a rapid shaping of the image of God in man and filling in of its ideal outlines. It is what is ordinarily termed sadrisya-mukti , a liberation into the divine resemblance out of the bondage of the human seeming, or, to use the expression of the Gita , sadharmya-gati, (The Gita-14.2) a coming to be one in law of being with the supreme, universal and indwelling Divine. To perceive and have a right view of our way to such a transformation we must form some sufficient working idea of the complex thing that this human nature at present is in the confused interminglings of its various principles, so that we may see the precise nature of the conversion each part of it must undergo and the most effective means for the conversion. How to disengage from this knot of thinking mortal matter the Immortal it contains, from this mentalised vital animal man the happy fullness of his submerged hints of Godhead, is the real problem of a human being and living. Life develops many first hints of the divinity without completely disengaging them; Yoga is the unravelling of the knot of Life’s difficulty." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-623 Mahad Brahman: "The soul of man could not grow into the likeness of the Divine, if it were not in its secret essence imperishably one with the Divine and part and parcel of his divinity: it could not be or become immortal if it were merely a creature of mental, vital and physical Nature. All existence is a manifestation of the divine Existence and that which is within us is spirit of the eternal Spirit. We have come indeed into the lower material nature and are under its influence, but we have come there from the supreme spiritual nature: this inferior imperfect status is our apparent, but that our real being. The Eternal puts all this movement forth as his self-creation. He is at once the Father and Mother of the universe; the substance of the infinite Idea, vijnana, the Mahad Brahman , (The Gita-14.3) is the womb into which he casts the seed of his self-conception. As the Over-Soul he casts the seed; as the Mother, the Nature-Soul, the Energy filled with his conscious power, he receives it into this infinite substance of being made pregnant with his illimitable, yet self-limiting Idea. He receives into this Vast of self-conception and develops there the divine embryo into mental and physical form of existence born from the original act of conceptive creation. All we see springs from that act of creation; but that which is born here is only finite idea and form of the unborn and infinite. The Spirit is eternal and superior to all its manifestation : Nature, eternal without beginning in the Spirit, proceeds for ever with the rhythm of the cycles by unending act of creation and unconcluding act of cessation; the Soul too which takes on this or that form in Nature, is no less eternal than she, anadı ubhav api . (The Gita-13.20) Even while in Nature it follows the unceasing round of the cycles, it is, in the Eternal from which it proceeds into them, for ever raised above the terms of birth and death, and even in its apparent consciousness here it can become aware of that innate and constant transcendence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-424-425 The Three Gunas : "But, again, the whole qualitative action of Nature, so infinitely intricate in its detail and variety, is figured as cast into the mould of three general modes of quality everywhere present, intertwined, almost inextricable, sattva, rajas, tamas . These modes are described in the Gita only by their psychological action in man, or incidentally in things such as food according as they produce a psychological or vital effect on human beings. If we look for a more general definition, we shall perhaps catch a glimpse of it in the symbolic idea of Indian religion which attributes each of these qualities respectively to one member of the cosmic Trinity, sattwa to the preserver Vishnu , rajas to the creator Brahma, tamas to the destroyer Rudra . Looking behind this idea for the rationale of the triple ascription, we might define the three modes or qualities in terms of the motion of the universal Energy as Nature’s three concomitant and inseparable powers of equilibrium, kinesis and inertia. But that is only their appearance in terms of the external action of Force. It is otherwise if we regard consciousness and force as twin terms of the one Existence, always coexistent in the reality of being, however in the primal outward phenomenon of material Nature light of consciousness may seem to disappear in a vast action of nescient unillumined energy, while at an opposite pole of spiritual quiescence action of force may seem to disappear in the stillness of the observing or witness consciousness. These two conditions are the two extremes of an apparently separated Purusha and Prakriti, but each at its extreme point does not abolish but at the most only conceals its eternal mate in the depths of its own characteristic way of being. Therefore, since consciousness is always there even in an apparently inconscient Force, we must find a corresponding psychological power of these three modes which informs their more outward executive action. On their psychological side the three qualities may be defined, tamas as Nature’s power of nescience, rajas as her power of active seeking ignorance enlightened by desire and impulsion, sattwa as her power of possessing and harmonising knowledge... The three qualitative modes of Nature are inextricably intertwined in all cosmic existence. Tamas, the principle of inertia, is a passive and inert nescience which suffers all shocks and contacts without any effort of mastering response and by itself would lead to a disintegration of the whole action of the energy and a radical dispersion of substance. But it is driven by the kinetic power of rajas and even in the nescience of Matter is met and embraced by an innate though unpossessed preserving principle of harmony and balance and knowledge. Material energy appears to be tamasic in its basic action, jada, nescient, mechanic and in movement disintegrative. But it is dominated by a huge force and impulsion of mute rajasic kinesis which drives it, even in and even by its dispersion and disintegration, to build and create and again by a sattwic ideative element in its apparently inconscient force which is always imposing a harmony and preservative order on the two opposite tendencies. Rajas , the principle of creative endeavour and motion and impulsion in Prakriti, kinesis, pravritti, so seen in Matter, appears more evidently as a conscious or half-conscious passion of seeking and desire and action in the dominant character of Life, — for that passion is the nature of all vital existence. And it would lead by itself in its own nature to a persistent but always mutable and unstable life and activity and creation without any settled result. But met on one side by the disintegrating power of tamas with death and decay and inertia, its ignorant action is on the other side of its functioning settled and harmonised and sustained by the power of sattwa , subconscient in the lower forms of life, more and more conscient in the emergence of mentality, most conscious in the effort of the evolved intelligence figuring as will and reason in the fully developed mental being. Sattwa , the principle of understanding knowledge and of according assimilation, measure and equilibrium, which by itself would lead only to some lasting concord of fixed and luminous harmonies, is in the motions of this world impelled to follow the mutable strife and action of the eternal kinesis and constantly overpowered or hedged in by the forces of inertia and nescience. This is the appearance of a world governed by the interlocked and mutually limited play of the three qualitative modes of Nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-426-428, "For Purusha veils himself in this round, veils his divine and immortal being in ignorance and is subject to the law of an insistent limiting Prakriti. That law is the compelling rule of the three gunas . It is a triple stair that stumbles upward towards the divine light but cannot reach it. At its base is the law or dharma of inertia : the tamasic man inertly obeys in a customary mechanical action the suggestions and impulses, the round of will of his material and his half-intellectualised vital and sensational nature. In the middle intervenes the kinetic law or dharma; the rajasic man, vital, dynamic, active, attempts to impose himself on his world and environment, but only increases the wounding weight and tyrant yoke of his turbulent passions, desires and egoisms, the burden of his restless self-will, the yoke of his rajasic nature. At the top presses down upon life the harmonic regulative law or dharma; the sattwic man attempts to erect and follow his limited personal standards of reasoning knowledge, enlightened utility or mechanised virtue, his religions and philosophies and ethical formulas, mental systems and constructions, fixed channels of idea and conduct which do not agree with the totality of the meaning of life and are constantly being broken in the movement of the wider universal purpose. The dharma of the sattwic man is the highest in the circle of the gunas; but that too is a limited view and a dwarfed standard. Its imperfect indications lead to a petty and relative perfection; temporarily satisfying to the enlightened personal ego, it is not founded either on the whole truth of the self or on the whole truth of Nature. (Soul slaying truth)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-544 Freedom from Lower Nature: "The spirit within, when we turn to it, illumines the entire field of Nature with its own truth in all the splendour of its rays. In the light of that sun of knowledge the eye of knowledge opens in us and we live in that truth and no longer in this ignorance. Then we perceive that our limitation to our present mental and physical nature was an error of the darkness, then we are liberated from the law of the lower Prakriti, the law of the mind and body, then we attain to the supreme nature of the spirit. That splendid and lofty change is the last, the divine and infinite becoming, the putting off of mortal nature, the putting on of an immortal existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-420, "But to arrive here at this greater spiritual immortality the embodied soul must cease to live according to the law of the lower nature ; it must put on the law of the Divine’s supreme way of existence which is in fact the real law of its own eternal essence. In the spiritual evolution of its becoming, no less than in its secret original being, it must grow into the likeness of the Divine." 422-423 "To see that the modes of Nature are the whole agency and cause of our works and to know and turn to that which is supreme above the gunas , is the way to rise above the lower nature . Only so can we attain to the movement and status of the Divine, madbhava , by which free from subjection to birth and death and their concomitants, decay, old age and suffering, the liberated soul shall enjoy in the end immortality and all that is eternal." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-432, "The world for the Gita is real, a creation of the Lord, a power of the Eternal, a manifestation from the Parabrahman, and even this lower nature of the triple Maya is a derivation from the supreme divine Nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-440, " It is by knowing him at once in the Akshara and the Kshara , it is by knowing him as the Unborn who partially manifests himself in all birth and even himself descends as the constant Avatar, it is by knowing him in his entirety, samagram mam , that the soul is easily released from the appearances of the lower Nature and returns by a vast sudden growth and broad immeasurable ascension into the divine being and supreme Nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-441, "To ascend into the divine nature, we have been told, one must first fix oneself in a perfect spiritual equality and rise above the lower nature of the three gunas . Thus transcending the lower Prakriti we fix ourselves in the impersonality, the imperturbable superiority to all action, the purity from all definition and limitation by quality which is one side of the manifested nature of the Purushottama , his manifestation as the eternity and unity of the self, the Akshara ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-442 Sattwa: "The Gita applies this generalised analysis of the universal Energy to the psychological nature of man in relation to his bondage to Prakriti and the realisation of spiritual freedom. Sattwa , it tells us, is by the purity of its quality a cause of light and illumination and by virtue of that purity it produces no disease or morbidity or suffering in the nature. When into all the doors in the body there comes a flooding of light, as if the doors and windows of a closed house were opened to sunshine, a light of understanding, perception and knowledge, when the intelligence is alert and illumined, the senses quickened, the whole mentality satisfied and full of brightness and the nervous being calmed and filled with an illumined ease and clarity, prasada , one should understand that there has been a great increase and uprising of the sattwic guna in the nature. For knowledge and a harmonious ease and pleasure and happiness are the characteristic results of sattwa . The pleasure that is sattwic is not only that contentment which an inner clarity of satisfied will and intelligence brings with it, but all delight and content produced by the soul’s possession of itself in light or by an accord or an adequate and truthful adjustment between the regarding soul and the surrounding Nature and her offered objects of desire and perception." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-428-429 Rajas: " Rajas , again, the Gita tells us, has for its essence attraction of liking and longing. Rajas is a child of the attachment of the soul to the desire of objects ; it is born from the nature’s thirst for an unpossessed satisfaction. It is therefore full of unrest and fever and lust and greed and excitement, a thing of seeking impulsions, and all this mounts in us when the middle guna increases. It is the force of desire which motives all ordinary personal initiative of action and all that movement of stir and seeking and propulsion in our nature which is the impetus towards action and works, pravritti. Rajas , then, is evidently the kinetic force in the modes of Nature. Its fruit is the lust of action, but also grief, pain, all kinds of suffering; for it has no right possession of its object — desire in fact implies non-possession — and even its pleasure of acquired possession is troubled and unstable because it has not clear knowledge and does not know how to possess nor can it find the secret of accord and right enjoyment. All the ignorant and passionate seeking of life belongs to the rajasic mode of Nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-429 Tamas: "Tamas , finally, is born of inertia and ignorance and its fruit too is inertia and ignorance. It is the darkness of tamas which obscures knowledge and causes all confusion and delusion. Therefore it is the opposite of sattwa , for the essence of sattwa is enlightenment, prakasa, and the essence of tamas is absence of light, nescience, aprakasa . But tamas brings incapacity and negligence of action as well as the incapacity and negligence of error, inattention and misunderstanding or non-understanding; indolence, languor and sleep belong to this guna . Therefore it is the opposite too of rajas ; for the essence of rajas is movement and impulsion and kinesis, pravritti , but the essence of tamas is inertia, apravrtti. Tamas is inertia of nescience and inertia of inaction, a double negative." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-429-430 Above the three Gunas : "But what, asks Arjuna , are the signs of such a man, what his action and how is he said even in action to be above the three gunas? The sign, says Krishna , is that equality of which I have so constantly spoken; the sign is that inwardly he regards happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of equal value and that to him the pleasant and the unpleasant, praise and blame, honour and insult, the faction of his friends and the faction of his enemies are equal things. He is steadfast in a wise imperturbable and immutable inner calm and quietude. He initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done by the gunas of Nature. Sattwa, rajas or tamas may rise or cease in his outer mentality and his physical movements with their results of enlightenment, of impulsion to works or of inaction and the clouding over of the mental and nervous being, but he does not rejoice when this comes or that ceases, nor on the other hand does he abhor or shrink from the operation or the cessation of these things. He has seated himself in the conscious light of another principle than the nature of the gunas and that greater consciousness remains steadfast in him, above these powers and unshaken by their motions like the sun above clouds to one who has risen into a higher atmosphere. He from that height sees that it is the gunas that are in process of action and that their storm and calm are not himself but only a movement of Prakriti; his self is immovable above and his spirit does not participate in that shifting mutability of things unstable. This is the impersonality of the Brahmic status; for that higher principle, that greater wide high-seated consciousness, kutastha , is the immutable Brahman ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-432-433, "A radically different movement has to draw us back from the gunas and lift us above them. The error that accepts the action of the modes of Nature must cease; for as long as it is accepted, the soul is involved in their operations and subjected to their law. Sattwa must be transcended as well as rajas and tamas; the golden chain must be broken no less than the leaden fetters and the bond-ornaments of a mixed alloy . The Gita prescribes to this end a new method of self-discipline. It is to stand back in oneself from the action of the modes and observe this unsteady flux as the Witness seated above the surge of the forces of Nature. He is one who watches but is impartial and indifferent, aloof from them on their own level and in his native posture high above them. As they rise and fall in their waves, the Witness looks, observes, but neither accepts nor for the moment interferes with their course. First there must be the freedom of the impersonal Witness; afterwards there can be the control of the Master, the Ishwara ." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-238, The Synthesis of Yoga book proposes another method in addition to the Gita’s method by which one can go beyond three gunas . “There is nothing to be done with this fickle, restless, violent and disturbing factor but to get rid of it (physical mind) whether (1) by detaching it and then reducing it to stillness or (2) by giving a concentration and singleness to the thought by which it will of itself reject this alien and confusing element.’ CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-314, “Tamas in the spiritual being becomes a divine calm, which is not an inertia and incapacity of action, but a perfect power, sakti, holding in itself all its capacity and capable of controlling and subjecting to the law of calm even the most stupendous and enormous activity: rajas becomes a self-effecting initiating sheer Will of the spirit, which is not desire, endeavour, striving passion, but the same perfect power of being, sakti , capable of an infinite, imperturbable and blissful action. Sattwa becomes not the modified mental light, prakasa , but the self-existent light of the divine being, jyotih , which is the soul of the perfect power of being and illumines in their unity the divine quietude and the divine will of action.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-689, “This process (of Spiritual transformation) may be rapid or tardy according to the amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities and turbulences and impurities of the rajasic passion and restless unharmonised kinetism, the enlightened rigidities and sattwic limitations or poised balancements of constructed equilibrium which are the character of the Ignorance.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-941, Sattwa , the Mediator: "We see then that action is possible without the subjection of the soul to the normal degraded functioning of the modes of Nature. That functioning depends on the mental, vital and physical limitation into which we are cast; it is a deformation, an incapacity, a wrong or depressed value imposed on us by the mind and life in matter. When we grow into the spirit, this dharma or inferior law of Nature is replaced by the immortal dharma of the spirit; there is the experience of a free immortal action, a divine illimitable knowledge, a transcendent power, an unfathomable repose. But still there remains the question of the transition; for there must be a transition, a proceeding by steps, since nothing in God’s workings in this world is done by an abrupt action without procedure or basis. We have the thing we seek in us, but we have in practice to evolve it out of the inferior forms of our nature.4 Therefore in the action of the modes itself there must be some means, some leverage, some point d’appui, by which we can effect this transformation. The Gita finds it in the full development of the sattwic guna till that in its potent expansion reaches a point at which it can go beyond itself and disappear into its source. The reason is evident, because sattwa is a power of light and happiness, a force that makes for calm and knowledge, and at its highest point it can arrive at a certain reflection, almost a mental identity with the spiritual light and bliss from which it derives. The other two gunas cannot get this transformation, rajas into the divine kinetic will or tamas into the divine repose and calm, without the intervention of the sattwic power in Nature. The principle of inertia will always remain an inert inaction of power or an incapacity of knowledge until its ignorance disappears in illumination and its torpid incapacity is lost in the light and force of the omnipotent divine will of repose. Then only can we have the supreme calm. Therefore tamas must be dominated by sattwa . The principle of rajas for the same reason must remain always a restless, troubled, feverish or unhappy working because it has not right knowledge; its native movement is a wrong and perverse action, perverse through ignorance. Our will must purify itself by knowledge; it must get more and more to a right and luminously informed action before it can be converted into the divine kinetic will. That again means the necessity of the intervention of sattwa . The sattwic quality is a first mediator between the higher and the lower nature. It must indeed at a certain point transform or escape from itself and break up and dissolve into its source; its conditioned derivative seeking light and carefully constructed action must change into the free direct dynamics and spontaneous light of the spirit. But meanwhile a high increase of sattwic power delivers us largely from the tamasic and the rajasic disqualification; and its own disqualification, once we are not pulled too much downward by rajas and tamas , can be surmounted with a greater ease. To develop sattwa till it becomes full of spiritual light and calm and happiness is the first condition of this preparatory discipline of the nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-467-469, " Buddhi is really an intermediary between a much higher Truth-mind not now in our active possession, which is the direct instrument of Spirit, and the physical life of the human mind evolved in body. Its powers of intelligence and will are drawn from this greater direct Truth-mind or supermind. Buddhi centres its mental action round the ego-idea, the idea that I am this mind, life and body or am a mental being determined by their action. It serves this ego-idea whether limited by what we call egoism or extended by sympathy with the life around us. An ego-sense is created which reposes on the separative action of the body, of the individualised life, of the mind-responses, and the ego-idea in the buddhi centralises the whole action of this ego’s thought, character, personality. The lower understanding and the intermediary reason are instruments of its desire of experience and self-enlargement. But when the highest reason and will develop, we can turn towards that which these outward things mean to the higher spiritual consciousness. The “I” can then be seen as a mental reflection of the Self, the Spirit, the Divine, the one existence transcendent, universal, individual in its multiplicity; the consciousness in which these things meet, become aspects of one being and assume their right relations, can then be unveiled out of all these physical and mental coverings. When the transition to supermind takes place, the powers of the Buddhi do not perish, but have all to be converted to their supramental values. But the consideration of the supermind and the conversion of the buddhi belongs to the question of the higher siddhi or divine perfection. At present we have to consider the purification of the normal being of man, preparatory to any such conversion, which leads to the liberation from the bonds of our lower nature." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-652-653, Bhakti , a passage to Purushottama Consciousness: " But still there is evidently here a double status , there is a scission of the being between two opposites; (1) a liberated spirit in the immutable Self or (2) Brahman watches the action of an unliberated mutable Nature, — (1) Akshara and (2) Kshara. Is there no greater status, no principle of more absolute perfection, or is this division the highest consciousness possible in the body, and is the end of Yoga to drop the mutable nature and the gunas born of the embodiment in Nature and disappear into the impersonality and everlasting peace of the Brahman ? Is that laya or dissolution of the individual Purusha the greatest liberation? There is, it would seem, something else; for the Gita says at the close, always returning to this one final note, “He also who loves and strives after Me with an undeviating love and adoration, passes beyond the three gunas and he too is prepared for becoming the Brahman .” (The Gita-14.26) This “I” is the Purushottama who is the foundation of the silent Brahman and of immortality and imperishable spiritual existence and of the eternal dharma and of an utter bliss of happiness. There is a status then which is greater than the peace of the Akshara as it watches unmoved the strife of the gunas . There is a highest spiritual experience and foundation above the immutability of the Brahman , there is an eternal dharma greater than the rajasic impulsion to works, pravritti , there is an absolute delight which is untouched by rajasic suffering and beyond the sattwic happiness, and these things are found and possessed by dwelling in the being and power of the Purushottama . But since it is acquired by bhakti, its status must be that divine delight, Ananda , in which is experienced (1) the union of utter love (niratisayapremaspadatvam anandatattvam ) and (2) possessing oneness, the crown of bhakti . And (3) to rise into that Ananda , into that imperishable oneness must be the completion of spiritual perfection and the fulfilment of the eternal immortalising dharma ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-433-434 Supramental Action on Three Gunas : "And so too beyond the inferior light and happiness of that purest quality of Nature, Sattwa, the power that makes for assimilation and equivalence, right knowledge and right dealing, fine harmony, firm balance, right law of action, right possession and brings so full a satisfaction to the mind, beyond this highest thing in the normal nature, admirable in itself so far as it goes and while it can be maintained, but precarious, secured by limitation, dependent on rule and condition, there is at its high and distant source a greater light and bliss free in the free spirit. That is not limited nor dependent on limitation or rule or condition but self-existent and unalterable, not the result of this or that harmony amid the discords of our nature but the fount of harmony and able to create whatever harmony it will. That is a luminous spiritual and in its native action a direct supramental force of knowledge , jyotih , not our modified and derivative mental light, prakasa . That is the light and bliss of widest self-existence, spontaneous self-knowledge, intimate universal identity, deepest self-interchange, not of acquisition, assimilation, adjustment and laboured equivalence. That light is full of a luminous spiritual will and there is no gulf or disparateness between its knowledge and its action. That delight is not our paler mental happiness, sukham , but a profound concentrated intense self-existent bliss extended to all that our being does, envisages, creates, a fixed divine rapture, Ananda . The liberated soul participates more and more profoundly in this light and bliss and grows the more perfectly into it, the more integrally it unites itself with the Divine. And while among the gunas of the lower Nature there is a necessary disequilibrium, a shifting inconstancy of measures and a perpetual struggle for domination, the greater light and bliss, calm, will of kinesis of the Spirit do not exclude each other , are not at war, are not even merely in equilibrium, but each an aspect of the two others and in their fullness all are inseparable and one . Our mind when it approaches the Divine may seem to enter into one to the exclusion of another, may appear for instance to achieve calm to the exclusion of kinesis of action, but that is because we approach him first through the selecting spirit in the mind. Afterwards when we are able to rise above even the spiritual mind, we can see that each divine power contains all the rest and can get rid of this initial error ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p- 466-467 14/ Chapter 14. The Three Gunas Intermediate Self-forgetful Knowledge beyond the three Gunas : "The movement of the Ignorance is egoistic at its core and nothing is more difficult for us than to get rid of egoism while yet we admit personality and adhere to action in the half-light and half-force of our unfinished nature. It is easier to starve the ego by renouncing the impulse to act or to kill it by cutting away from us all movement of personality. It is easier to exalt it into self-forgetfulness immersed in a trance of peace or an ecstasy of divine Love. But our more difficult problem is to liberate the true Person and attain to a divine manhood which shall be the pure vessel of a divine force and the perfect instrument of a divine action. Step after step has to be firmly taken; difficulty after difficulty has to be entirely experienced and entirely mastered. Only the Divine Wisdom and Power can do this for us and it will do all if we yield to it in an entire faith and follow and assent to its workings with a constant courage and patience." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-247, "Matter or body itself is a limiting form of substance of spirit in which life and mind and spirit are involved, self-hidden, self-forgetful by absorption in their own externalising action, but bound to emerge from it by a self-compelling evolution. But matter too is capable of refining to subtler forms of substance in which it becomes more apparently a formal density of life, of mind, of spirit. Man himself has, besides this gross material body, an encasing vital sheath, a mental body, a body of bliss and gnosis. But all matter, all body contains within it the secret powers of these higher principles; matter is a formation of life that has no real existence apart from the informing universal spirit which gives it its energy and substance." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-626-627, "But in the ascent of the human consciousness through the uplifting and transmuting evolutionary — that is to say, (1) self-unveiling, (2) self-developing, (3) progressively self-perfecting — process of Yoga, we have to take account of three successive conditions all of which have to be overpassed before we are able to move on (4 ) the highest levels. The first condition of our consciousness, that in which we now move, is this mind of ignorance that has arisen out of the inconscience and nescience of material Nature, — ignorant but capable of seeking for knowledge and finding it at least in a series of mental representations which may be made clues to the true truth and, more and more refined and illuminated and rendered transparent by the influence, the infiltration and the descent of the light from above, prepare the intelligence for opening to the capacity of true knowledge. All truth is to this mind a thing it originally had not and has had to acquire or has still to acquire, a thing external to it and to be gathered by experience or by following certain ascertained methods and rules of enquiry, calculation, application of discovered law, interpretation of signs and indices. Its very knowledge implies an antecedent nescience; it is the instrument of Avidya." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-887, " The second condition of consciousness is potential only to the human being and gained by an inner enlightening and transformation of the mind of ignorance; it is that in which the mind seeks for its source of knowledge rather within than without and becomes to its own feeling and self-experience, by whatever means, a mind, not of original ignorance, but of self-forgetful knowledge. This mind is conscious that the knowledge of all things is hidden within it or at least somewhere in the being, but as if veiled and forgotten, and the knowledge comes to it not as a thing acquired from outside, but always secretly there and now remembered and known at once to be true, — each thing in its own place, degree, manner and measure. This is its attitude to knowledge even when the occasion of knowing is some external experience, sign or indication, because that is to it only the occasion and its reliance for the truth of the knowledge is not on the external indication or evidence but on the inner confirming witness. The true mind is the universal within us and the individual is only a projection on the surface, and therefore this second state of consciousness we have either when the individual mind goes more and more inward and is always consciously or subconsciously near and sensitive to the touches of the universal mentality in which all is contained, received, capable of being made manifest, or, still more powerfully, when we live in the consciousness of universal mind with the personal mentality only as a projection, a marking board or a communicating switch on the surface." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-887-888, " The third state of consciousness is that of the mind of knowledge in which all things and all truths are perceived and experienced as already present and known and immediately available by merely turning the inner light upon it, as when one turns the eye upon things in a room already known and familiar, — though not always present to the vision because that is not attentive, — and notes them as objects of a pre-existent knowledge. The difference from the second self-forgetful state of consciousness is that there is here no effort or seeking needed but simply a turning or opening of the inner light on whatever field of knowledge, and therefore it is not a recalling of things forgotten and self-hidden from the mind, but a luminous presentation of things already present, ready and available. This last condition (the fourth state of Consciousness) is only possible by a partial supramentalising of the intuitive mentality and its full openness to any and every communication from the supramental ranges. This mind of knowledge is in its essentiality a power of potential omnipotence, but in its actual working on the level of mind it is limited in its range and province. The character of limitation applies to the supermind itself when it descends into the mental level and works in the lesser substance of mentality, though in its own manner and body of power and light, and it persists even in the action of the supramental reason. It is only the higher supramental Shakti acting on its own ranges whose will and knowledge work always in a boundless light or with a free capacity of illimitable extension of knowledge subject only to such limitations as are self-imposed for its own purposes and at its own will by the spirit." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p- 888-889, "The coming of the intimations of the subliminal self to the surface and the activity of the psychical consciousness tend to turn the mind of ignorance, with which we begin, increasingly though not perfectly into a mind of self-forgetful knowledge constantly illuminated with intimations and upsurgings from the inner being, antaratman , rays from the still concealed awareness of its whole self and infinite contents and from the awareness — representing itself here as a sort of memory, a recalling or a bringing out — of an inherent and permanent but hidden knowledge of past, present and future that is always carried within itself by the eternal spirit. But embodied as we are and founded on the physical consciousness, the mind of ignorance still persists as a conditioning environment, an intervening power and limiting habitual force obstructing and mixing with the new formation or, even in moments of large illumination, at once a boundary wall and a strong substratum, and it imposes its incapacities and errors. And to remedy this persistence the first necessity would seem to be the development of the power of a luminous intuitive intelligence seeing the truth of time and its happenings as well as all other truth by intuitive thought and sense and vision and detecting and extruding by its native light of discernment the intrusions of misprision and error... All intuitive knowledge comes more or less directly from the light of the self-aware spirit entering into the mind, the spirit concealed behind mind and conscious of all in itself and in all its selves, omniscient and capable of illumining the ignorant or the self-forgetful mind whether by rare or constant flashes or by a steady instreaming light, out of its omniscience. This all includes all that was, is or will be in time and this omniscience is not limited, impeded or baffled by our mental division of the three times (present, past and future) and the idea and experience of a dead and no longer existent and ill-remembered or forgotten past and a not yet existent and therefore unknowable future which is so imperative for the mind in the ignorance. Accordingly the growth of the intuitive mind can bring with it the capacity of a time knowledge which comes to it not from outside indices, but from within the universal soul of things, its eternal memory of the past, its unlimited holding of things present and its prevision or, as it has been paradoxically but suggestively called, its memory of the future. But this capacity works at first sporadically and uncertainly and not in an organised manner. As the force of intuitive knowledge grows, it becomes more possible to command the use of the capacity and to regularise to a certain degree its functioning and various movements. An acquired power can be established of commanding the materials and the main or the detailed knowledge of things in the triple time, but this usually forms itself as a special or abnormal power and the normal action of the mentality or a large part of it remains still that of the mind of ignorance. This is obviously an imperfection and limitation and it is only when the power takes its place as a normal and natural action of the wholly intuitivised mind that there can be said to be a perfection of the capacity of the triple time knowledge so far as that is possible in the mental being." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-896-897, "At the same time it will be found that it (Intuitive mind) is still a limited instrument. In the first place it (Intuitive mind) will represent a superior knowledge working in the stuff of mind, cast into mental forms and still subject to mental conditions and limitations. It will always lean chiefly on the succession of present moments as a foundation for its steps and successions of knowledge, however far it may range backward or forward, — it will move in the stream of Time even in its higher revelatory action and not see the movement from above or in the stabilities of eternal time with their large ranges of vision, and therefore it will always be bound to a secondary and limited action and to a certain dilution, qualification and relativity in its activities. Moreover, its knowing will be not a possession in itself but a reception of knowledge. It will at most create in place of the mind of ignorance a mind of self-forgetful knowledge constantly reminded and illumined from a latent self- awareness and all-awareness. The range, the extent, the normal lines of action of the knowledge will vary according to the development, but it can never be free from very strong limitations. And this limitation will give a tendency to the still environing or subconsciously subsisting mind of ignorance to reassert itself, to rush in or up, acting where the intuitive knowledge refuses or is unable to act and bringing in with it again its confusion and mixture and error. The only security will be a refusal to attempt to know or at least a suspension of the effort of knowledge until or unless the higher light descends and extends its action. This self-restraint is difficult to mind and, too contentedly exercised, may limit the growth of the seeker. If on the other hand the mind of ignorance is allowed again to emerge and seek in its own stumbling imperfect force, there may be a constant oscillation between the two states or a mixed action of the two powers in place of a definite though relative perfection...The issue out of this dilemma is to a greater perfection towards which the formation of the intuitive, inspired and revelatory mind is only a preparatory stage, and that (greater perfection of intuitive mind) comes by a constant instreaming and descent of more and more of the supramental light and energy into the whole mental being and a constant raising of the intuition and its powers towards their source in the open glories of the supramental nature. There is then a double action of the intuitive mind aware of, (1) open to and referring its knowledge constantly to the light above it for support and confirmation and (2) of that light itself creating a highest mind of knowledge, — really the supramental action itself in a more and more transformed stuff of mind and a less and less insistent subjection to mental conditions. There is thus formed a lesser supramental action, a mind of knowledge tending always to change into the true supermind of knowledge. (1) The mind of ignorance is more and more definitely excluded, its place taken by the (2) mind of self-forgetful knowledge illumined by the intuition, and the intuition itself more perfectly organised becomes capable of answering to a larger and larger call upon it. The increasing (3) mind of knowledge acts as an intermediary power and, as it forms itself, it works upon the other, transforms or replaces it and compels the farther change which effects the transition from (4) mind to supermind. It is here that a change begins to take place in the time consciousness and time knowledge which finds its base and complete reality and significance only on the supramental levels. It is therefore in relation to the truth of supermind that its workings can be more effectively elucidated: for (3) the mind of knowledge is only a projection and a last step in the ascent towards (4) the supramental nature." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-903-904, 15/ Chapter 15. The Supreme Divine Summary or A Brief Restatement: First, by the practice of Self-control, a Sadhak's Psychic Being and Spiritual Being open. A traditional Sadhak utilises the opening of these Selves for the discovery of Purushottama Consciousness and "with their experiences and consequences can lead away from life or to a Nirvana." ( CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-943) An integral Sadhak utilises the opening of these two Selves, "solely as steps in a transformation of the nature" (CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-943) and after long movement of Consciousness, he discovers the Supramental being, and utilises the same for the transformation of the Subconscient and Inconscient Sheaths. "First there comes a description of cosmic existence in the Vedantic image of the aswattha tree. This tree of cosmic existence has no beginning and no end, nanto na cadih ( The Gita-15.3), in space or in time; for it is eternal and imperishable, avyaya . The real form of it cannot be perceived by us in this material world of man’s embodiment, nor has it any apparent lasting foundation here; it is an infinite movement and its foundation is above in the supreme of the Infinite. Its principle is the ancient sempiternal urge to action, pravritti, which for ever proceeds without beginning or end from the original Soul of all existence, adyam purusam yatah pravrittih prasruta puranı. Therefore its original source is above, beyond Time in the Eternal, but its branches stretch down below and it extends and plunges its other roots, well-fixed and clinging roots of attachment and desire with their consequences of more and more desire and an endlessly developing action, plunges them downward here into the world of men. The hymns of the Veda are compared to its leaves and the man who knows this tree of the cosmos is the Veda -knower. And here we see the sense of that rather disparaging view of the Veda or at least of the Vedavada, which we had to notice at the beginning. For the knowledge the Veda gives us is a knowledge of the gods, of the principles and powers of the cosmos, and its fruits are the fruits of a sacrifice which is offered with desire, fruits of enjoyment and lordship in the nature of the three worlds, in earth and heaven and the world between earth and heaven. The branches of this cosmic tree extend both below and above, below in the material, above in the supraphysical planes; they grow by the gunas of Nature, for the triple guna is all the subject of the Vedas, traigunya-visaya vedah. The Vedic rhythms, chandamsi, are the leaves and the sensible objects of desire supremely gained by a right doing of sacrifice are the constant budding of the foliage. Man, therefore, so long as he enjoys the play of the gunas and is attached to desire, is held in the coils of Pravritti, in the movement of birth and action, turns about constantly between the earth and the middle planes and the heavens and is unable to get back to his supreme spiritual infinitudes. This was perceived by the sages. To achieve liberation they followed the path of Nivritti or cessation from the original urge to action , and the consummation of this way is the cessation of birth itself and a transcendent status in the highest supracosmic reach of the Eternal. But for this purpose it is necessary to cut these long-fixed roots of desire by the strong sword of detachment and then to seek for that highest goal whence, once having reached it, there is no compulsion of return to mortal life. To be free from the bewilderment of this lower Maya , without egoism, the great fault of attachment conquered, all desires stilled, the duality of joy and grief cast away, always to be fixed in wide equality, always to be firm in a pure spiritual consciousness, these are the steps of the way to that supreme Infinite. There we find the timeless being which is not illumined by sun or moon or fire, but is itself the light of the presence of the eternal Purusha. I turn away, says the Vedantic verse, to seek that original Soul alone and to reach him in the great passage. That is the highest status of the Purushottama , his supracosmic existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-443-444 The Vision of the Million-bodied Lord: "But it would seem that this can be attained very well, best even, pre-eminently, directly, by the quiescence of Sannyasa . Its appointed path would seem to be the way of the Akshara , a complete renunciation of works and life, an ascetic seclusion, an ascetic inaction. Where is the room here, or at least where is the call, the necessity, for the command to action, and what has all this to do with the maintenance of the cosmic existence, lokasangraha, the slaughter of Kurukshetra, the ways of the Spirit in Time, the vision of the million-bodied Lord and his high- voiced bidding, “Arise, slay the foe, enjoy a wealthy kingdom”? (The Gita-11.33) And what then is this soul in Nature? This spirit too, this Kshara, this enjoyer of our mutable existence, is the Purushottama ; (Supramentalised Psychic being) it is he in his eternal multiplicity, that is the Gita’s answer. “It is an eternal portion of me that becomes the Jiva in a world of Jivas .” (The Gita-15.7) This is an epithet, a statement of immense bearing and consequence. For it means that each soul, each being in its spiritual reality is the very Divine, however partial its actual manifestation of him in Nature. And it means too, if words have any sense, that each manifesting spirit, each of the many, is an eternal individual, an eternal unborn and undying power of the one Existence. We call this manifesting spirit the Jiva , because it appears here as if a living creature in a world of living creatures, and we speak of this spirit in man as the human soul and think of it in the terms of humanity only. But in truth it is something greater than its present appearance and not bound to its humanity: it was a lesser manifestation than the human in its past, it can become something much greater than mental man in its future. And when this soul rises above all ignorant limitation, then it puts on its divine nature of which its humanity is only a temporary veil, a thing of partial and incomplete significance. The individual spirit exists and ever existed beyond in the Eternal, for it is itself everlasting, sanatana . It is evidently this idea of the eternal individual which leads the Gita to avoid any expression at all suggestive of a complete dissolution, laya , and to speak rather of the highest state of the soul as a dwelling in the Purushottama, nivasisyasi mayyeva . (The Gita-12.08) If when speaking of the one Self of all it seems to use the language of Adwaita , yet this enduring truth of the eternal individual, mamamsah sanatanah , (The Gita-15.7) adds something which brings in a qualification and appears almost to accept the seeing of the Visishtadwaita , — though we must not therefore leap at once to the conclusion that that alone is the Gita’s philosophy or that its doctrine is identical with the later doctrine of Ramanuja . Still this much is clear that there is an eternal, a real and not only an illusive principle of multiplicity in the spiritual being of the one divine Existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-444-446, "The mind of knowledge and the will of action are not all; there is within you a heart whose demand is for delight. Here too in the heart’s power and illumination, in its demand for delight, for the soul’s satisfaction your nature must be turned, transformed and lifted to one conscious ecstasy with the Divine. The knowledge of the impersonal self brings its own Ananda ; there is a joy of impersonality, a singleness of joy of the pure spirit. But an integral knowledge brings a greater triple delight. (1) It opens the gates of the Transcendent’s bliss; (2) it releases into the limitless delight of a universal impersonality; (3) it discovers the rapture of all this multitudinous manifestation: for there is a joy of the Eternal in Nature (Eternal in Nature is the Psychic Being) . This Ananda in the Jiva, a portion here of the Divine, takes the form of an ecstasy founded in the Godhead who is his source, in his supreme self, in the Master of his existence. An entire God-love and adoration extends to a love of the world and all its forms and powers and creatures; in all the Divine is seen, is found, is adored, is served or is felt in oneness. Add to knowledge and works this crown of the eternal triune delight; admit this love, learn this worship; make it one spirit with works and knowledge. That is the apex of the perfect perfection. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-588-589, "As with individual, so with universal Love; all that widening of the self through sympathy, goodwill, universal benevolence and beneficence, love of mankind, love of creatures, the attraction of all the myriad forms and presences that surround us, by which mentally and emotionally man escapes from the first limits of his ego, has to be taken up into a unifying divine love for the universal Divine. Adoration fulfilled in love, love in Ananda, the surpassing love, the self-wrapped ecstasy of transcendent delight in the Transcendent which awaits us at the end of the path of Devotion, — has for its wider result a universal love for all beings, the Ananda of all that is; we perceive behind every veil the Divine, spiritually embrace in all forms the All-Beautiful. A universal delight in his endless manifestation flows through us, taking in its surge every form and movement, but not bound or stationary in any and always reaching out to a greater and more perfect expression. This universal love is liberative and dynamic for transformation; for the discord of forms and appearances ceases to affect the heart that has felt the one Truth behind them all and understood their perfect significance. The impartial equality of soul of the selfless worker and knower is transformed by the magic touch of divine Love into an all-embracing ecstasy and million-bodied beatitude. All things become bodies and all movements the playings of the divine Beloved in his infinite house of pleasure. Even pain is changed and in their reaction and even in their essence things painful alter ; the forms of pain fall away, there are created in their place the forms of Ananda ." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-160-161, Kshara Purusha: "There is a spirit here at work in the world that is one in innumerable appearances. It is the developer of birth and action, the moving power of life, the inhabiting and associating consciousness in the myriad mutabilities of Nature; it is the constituting reality of all this stir in Time and Space; it is itself Time and Space and Circumstance. It is this multitude of souls in the worlds; it is the gods and men and creatures and things and forces and qualities and quantities and powers and presences. It is Nature, which is power of the Spirit, and objects, which are its phenomena of name and idea and form, and existences, who are portions and births and becomings of this single self-existent spiritual entity, the One, the Eternal. But what we see obviously at work before us is not this Eternal and his conscious Shakti, but a Nature which in the blind stress of her operations is ignorant of the spirit within her action. Her work is a confused, ignorant and limiting play of certain fundamental modes, qualities, principles of force in mechanical operation and the fixity or the flux of their consequences. And whatever soul comes to the surface in her action, is itself in appearance ignorant, suffering, bound to the incomplete and unsatisfying play of this inferior Nature. The inherent Power in her is yet other than what it thus seems to be; for, hidden in its truth, manifest in its appearances, it is the Kshara , the universal Soul, the spirit in the mutability of cosmic phenomenon and becoming, one with the Immutable and the Supreme . We have to arrive at the hidden truth behind its manifest appearances; we have to discover the Spirit behind these veils and to see all as the One, vasudevah sarvam iti , individual, universal, transcendent. But this is a thing impossible to achieve with any completeness of inner reality, so long as we live concentrated in the inferior Nature. For in this lesser movement Nature is an ignorance, a Maya; she shelters the Divine within its folds and conceals him from herself and her creatures. The Godhead is hidden by the Maya of his own all-creating Yoga, the Eternal figured in transience, Being absorbed and covered up by its own manifesting phenomena. In the Kshara taken alone as a thing in itself, the mutable universal apart from the undivided Immutable and the Transcendent, there is no completeness of knowledge, no completeness of our being and therefore no liberation ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-435-436, "There is however no invariable rule as to the order of the opening. By concentration on the heart centre that can open first liberating the psychic action, which is veiled by the emotional, into free play. In many there is first some opening of the vital centre and for a long time there is an abundant but unpurified play of experiences on the vital plane. In the Tantric discipline there is a process of opening all the centres from the Muladhara upward. In our Yoga (Integral Yoga) very often the Power descends from above and opens the Ajnachakra first, then the others in order. But it is perhaps the safest to open by concentration the heart-lotus first so as to have the psychic influence from the beginning. .. The psychic cannot lose its consciousness in the enjoyment of experiences; when it is in free action, it has the unfailing discrimination of which you speak. It has besides no push to outward enjoyment, though it has Ananda . It is the vital that is carried away by enjoyment and carries away with it the mind and other lower parts — and it can also cover up the psychic; but then what happens is not that the psychic loses its own” CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/350-351, “If desire is rejected and no longer governs the thought, feeling or action and there is the steady aspiration of an entirely sincere self-giving, the psychic usually after a time opens of itself. ” CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-349, “Then only can the psychic being fully open when the sadhaka has got rid of the mixture of vital motives with his sadhana and is capable of a simple and sincere self-offering to the Mother . If there is any kind of egoistic turn or insincerity of motive, if the Yoga is done under a pressure of vital demands, or partly or wholly to satisfy some spiritual or other ambition, pride, vanity or seeking after power, position or influence over others or with any push towards satisfying any vital desire with the help of the Yogic force, then the psychic cannot open, or opens only partially or only at times and shuts again because it is veiled by the vital activities; the psychic fire fails in the strangling vital smoke. Also, if the mind takes the leading part in the Yoga and puts the inner soul into the background, or, if the bhakti or other movements of the sadhana take more of a vital than of a psychic form, there is the same inability. Purity, simple sincerity and the capacity of an unegoistic unmixed self-offering without pretension or demand are the conditions of an entire opening of the psychic being. ” CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-349 Akshara Purusha: "But then there is another spirit of whom we become aware and who is none of these things, but self and self only. This Spirit is eternal, always the same, never changed or affected by manifestation, the one, the stable, a self-existence undivided and not even seemingly divided by the division of things and powers in Nature, inactive in her action, immobile in her motion. It is the Self of all and yet unmoved, indifferent, intangible, as if all these things which depend upon it were not-self, not its own results and powers and consequences, but a drama of action developed before the eye of an unmoved unparticipating spectator. For the mind that stages and shares in the drama is other than the Self which indifferently contains the action. This spirit is timeless, though we see it in Time; it is unextended in space, though we see it as if pervading space. We become aware of it in proportion as we draw back from out inward, or look behind the action and motion for something that is eternal and stable, or get away from time and its creation to the uncreated, away from phenomenon to being, from the personal to impersonality, from becoming to unalterable self-existence. This is the Akshara , the immutable in the mutable, the immobile in the mobile, the imperishable in things perishable. Or rather, since there is only an appearance of pervasion, it is the immutable, immobile and imperishable in which proceeds all the mobility of mutable and perishable things." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-436-437 Reconciliation of Kshara and Akshara Purusha : "There are two Purushas (Spiritual and Psychic beings) in this world, the immutable (and impersonal) and the mutable (and personal); the mutable is all these existences, the Kutastha (the high-seated consciousness of the Brahmic status) is called the immutable. But other than these two is that highest spirit called the supreme Self, who enters the three worlds and upbears them, the imperishable Lord. Since I am beyond the mutable and am greater and higher even than the immutable, in the world and the Veda I am proclaimed as the Purushottama (the supreme Self). He who undeluded thus has knowledge of Me as the Purushottama , adores Me (has bhakti for Me) with all-knowledge and in every way of his natural being." The Gita-15.16 to 19, "The Kshara spirit visible to us as all natural existence and the totality of all existences moves and acts pervadingly in the immobile and eternal Akshara . This mobile Power of Self acts in that fundamental stability of Self, as the second principle of material Nature, Vayu, with its contactual force of aggregation and separation, attraction and repulsion, supporting the formative force of the fiery (radiant, gaseous and electric) and other elemental movements, ranges pervadingly in the subtly massive stability of ether. This Akshara is the self higher than the buddhi it exceeds even that highest subjective principle of Nature in our being, the liberating intelligence, through which man returning beyond his restless mobile mental to his calm eternal spiritual self is at last free from the persistence of birth and the long chain of action, of Karma . This self in its highest status, param dhama , is an unmanifest beyond even the unmanifest principle of the original cosmic Prakriti, Avyakta , and, if the soul turns to this Immutable, the hold of cosmos and Nature falls away from it and it passes beyond birth to an unchanging eternal existence. These two then are the two spirits we see in the world; (1) one emerges in front in its action, (2) the other remains behind it steadfast in that perpetual silence from which the action comes and in which all actions cease and disappear into timeless being, Nirvana . Dvavimau purusau loke ksaras caksara eva ca . (The Gita-15.16)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-437, Brhama Satya Jagat Mithya: "But this greater knowledge and experience, however true and however powerful in its appeal to our highest seeing, has still to get rid of a very real and pressing difficulty, a practical as well as a logical contradiction which seems at first sight to persist up to the highest heights of spiritual experience. The Eternal is other than this mobile subjective and objective experience, there is a greater consciousness, na idam yad upasate : (Kena Upanishad-1.4-8) and yet at the same time all this is the Eternal, all this is the perennial self-seeing of the Self, sarvam˙khalu idam brahma, (Chandogya Upanishad-3.14.1) ayam atma brahma. (Manduka Upanishad-2) The Eternal has become all existences, atma abhut sarvani bhutan i; (Isha Upanishad-7) as the Swetaswatara puts it, “Thou art this boy and yonder girl and that old man walking supported on his staff,” — even as in the Gita the Divine says that he is Krishna and Arjuna and Vyasa and Ushanas , and the lion and the aswattha tree, and consciousness and intelligence and all qualities and the self of all creatures. But how are these two the same, when they seem not only so opposite in nature, but so difficult to unify in experience? For when we live in the mobility of the becoming, we may be aware of but hardly live in the immortality of timeless self-existence. And when we fix ourselves in timeless being, Time and Space and circumstance fall away from us and begin to appear as a troubled dream in the Infinite. The most persuasive conclusion would be, at first sight, that the mobility of the spirit in Nature (Kshara Purusha) is an illusion, a thing real only when we live in it, but not real in essence, and that is why, when we go back into self, it falls away from our incorruptible essence. That is the familiar cutting of the knot of the riddle, brahma satyam jagan mithya. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-438-439 "Mais si vraies qu'elles soient, et si puissamment qu'elles attirent notre vision la plus haute, cette connaissance et cette expérience plus grandes doivent encore se débarrasser d'une très réelle et pressante difficulté, d'une contradiction tout à la fois pratique et logique qui semble au premier abord persister jusqu'aux suprêmes hauteurs de l'expérience spirituelle, Éternel est autre que cette expérience mobile subjective et objective, il existe une conscience plus grande, na idam yad oupâsaté¹; et pourtant, tout ceci est en même temps Éternel, tout ceci est en même temps l'éternelle vision de soi de l'Être, sarvam khalou idam brahma², ayam âtmâ brahma³. Éternel est devenu toutes les existences, âtmâ abhoût sarva-bhoûtâni4; comme le dit la Shwétâshwatara Oupanishad : "Tu es ce garçon et, là-bas, cette jeune fille et ce vieillard qui, pour marcher, s'appuie sur son bâton." De même, dans la Guîtâ, le Divin dit-Il qu'il est Krishna et Ardjouna et Vyâsa et Oushanas, et le lion et l'arbre ashwattha, et la conscience et l'intelligence et toutes les qualités et le moi de toutes les créatures. Mais comment les deux sont-ils le même, lorsqu'ils semblent non seulement si opposés en nature, mais encore si difficiles à unifier en expérience? En effet, lorsque nous vivons en la mobilité du devenir, si nous pouvons prendre conscience de l'immortalité de l'intemporelle existence en soi, il ne nous est guère possible d'y vivre. Et lorsque nous nous établissons en l'être intemporel, le Temps, l'Espace et la circonstance se détachent de nous et commencent d'apparaître comme un rêve agité dans l'Infini. À première vue, la conclusion la plus convaincante serait que la mobilité de l'esprit dans la Nature est une illusion, une chose qui n'a de réalité que quand nous y vivons, mais qui n'est pas réelle en essence : c'est pourquoi, lorsque nous retournons dans le moi, elle se détache de notre essence incorruptible. C'est ainsi que, d'habitude, on tranche le nœud de l'énigme, brahma satyam djagan mithyâ ." Essais sur la Guîtâ-482-483 Uttama Purusha and the Key Word of the Gita in reconciling Kshara and Akshara Purusha : "The Gita finds it in its supreme vision of the Purushottama ; for that is the type, according to its doctrine, of the complete and the highest experience, it is the knowledge of the whole-knowers, kritsnavidah . The Akshara is para , supreme in relation to the elements and action of cosmic Nature. It is the immutable Self of all, and the immutable Self of all is the Purushottama . The Akshara is he in the freedom of his self-existence unaffected by the action of his own power in Nature, not impinged on by the urge of his own becoming, undisturbed by the play of his own qualities. But this is only one aspect though a great aspect of the integral knowledge. The Purushottama is at the same time greater than the Akshara , because he is more than this immutability and he is not limited even by the highest eternal status of his being, param dhama. Still, it is through whatever is immutable and eternal in us that we arrive at that highest status from which there is no returning to birth, and that was the liberation which was sought by the wise of old, the ancient sages. But when pursued through the Akshara alone, this attempt at liberation becomes the seeking of the Indefinable, a thing hard for our nature embodied as we are here in Matter. The Indefinable, to which the Akshara , the pure intangible self here in us rises in its separative urge, is some supreme Unmanifest, paro avyaktah , and that highest unmanifest Akshara is still the Purushottama . Therefore, the Gita has said, those also who follow after the Indefinable, come to me, the eternal Godhead. But yet is he more even than a highest unmanifest Akshara, more than any negative Absolute, neti neti , because he is to be known also as the supreme Purusha who extends this whole universe in his own existence. He is a supreme mysterious All, an ineffable positive Absolute of all things here. He is the Lord in the Kshara, Purushottama not only there, but here in the heart of every creature, Ishwara . And there too even in his highest eternal status, paro avyaktah , (The Gita-8.21) he is the supreme Lord, Parameshwara , no aloof and unrelated Indefinable, but the origin and father and mother and first foundation and eternal abode of self and cosmos and Master of all existences and enjoyer of askesis and sacrifice. It is by knowing him at once in the Akshara and the Kshara , it is by knowing him as the Unborn who partially manifests himself in all birth and even himself descends as the constant Avatar, it is by knowing him in his entirety, samagram mam , (The Gita-7.1) that the soul is easily released from the appearances of the lower Nature and returns by a vast sudden growth and broad immeasurable ascension into the divine being and supreme Nature. For the truth of the Kshara too is a truth of the Purushottama . The Purushottama is in the heart of every creature and is manifested in his countless Vibhutis; the Purushottama is the cosmic spirit in Time and it is he that gives the command to the divine action of the liberated human spirit. He is both Akshara and Kshara , and yet he is other because he is more and greater than either of these opposites. Uttamah purusastvanyah paramatmetyudahritah, yo lokatrayamavisya bibhartyavyaya ısvarah, (The Gita-15.17) “But other than these two is that highest spirit called the supreme Self, who enters the three worlds and upbears them, the imperishable Lord.” (The Gita-15.17) This verse is the keyword of the Gita’s reconciliation of these two apparently opposite aspects of our existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-440-442 The Vision of the Lord: "This eternal individual is not other than or in any way really separate from the Divine Purusha. It is the Lord himself, the Ishwara who by virtue of the eternal multiplicity of his oneness is not all existence a rendering of that truth of the Infinite? — exists for ever as the immortal soul within us and has taken up this body and goes forth from the transient framework when it is cast away to disappear into the elements of Nature. He brings in with him and cultivates for the enjoyment of the objects of mind and sense the subjective powers of Prakriti, mind and the five senses, and in his going forth too he goes taking them as the wind takes the perfumes from a vase. But the identity of the Lord and the soul in mutable Nature is hidden from us by outward appearance and lost in the crowding mobile deceptions of that Nature. And those who allow themselves to be governed by the figures of Nature, the figure of humanity or any other form, will never see it, but will ignore and despise the Divine lodged in the human body. Their ignorance cannot perceive him in his coming in and his going forth or in his staying and enjoying and assumption of quality, but sees only what is there visible to the mind and senses, not the greater truth which can only be glimpsed by the eye of knowledge. Never can they have sight of him, even if they strive to do so, until they learn to put away the limitations of the outward consciousness and build in themselves their spiritual being, create for it, as it were, a form in their nature. Man, to know himself, must be kritatma , formed and complete in the spiritual mould, enlightened in the spiritual vision. The Yogins who have this eye of knowledge, see the Divine Being we are in their own endless reality, their own eternity of spirit. Illumined, they see the Lord in themselves and are delivered from the crude material limitation, from the form of mental personality, from the transient life formulation: they dwell immortal in the truth of the self and spirit. But they see him too not only in themselves, but in all the cosmos. In the light of the sun that illumines all this world they witness the light of the Godhead which is in us; the light in the moon and in fire is the light of the Divine. It is the Divine who has entered into this form of earth and is the spirit of its material force and sustains by his might these multitudes. The Divine is the godhead of Soma who by the rasa , the sap in the Earth-mother, nourishes the plants and trees that clothe her surface. The Divine and no other is the flame of life that sustains the physical body of living creatures and turns its food into sustenance of their vital force. He is lodged in the heart of every breathing thing; from him are memory and knowledge and the debates of the reason. He is that which is known by all the Vedas and by all forms of knowing; he is the knower of Veda and the maker of Vedanta. In other words, the Divine is at once the Soul of matter and the Soul of life and the Soul of mind as well as the Soul of the supramental light that is beyond mind and its limited reasoning intelligence." 446-447 15/ Chapter 15. The Supreme Divine Reconciliation of three Purushas: "The Self, even the individual self, is different from our personality as it is different from our mental ego-sense. Our personality is never the same; it is a constant mutation and various combination. It is not a basic consciousness, but a development of forms of consciousness, — not a power of being, but a various play of partial powers of being, — not the enjoyer of the self- delight of our existence, but a seeking after various notes and tones of experience which shall more or less render that delight in the mutability of relations. This also is Purusha and Brahman , but it is the mutable Purusha, the phenomenon of the Eternal, not its stable reality. The Gita makes a distinction between three Purushas who constitute the whole state and action of the divine Being, the Mutable, the Immutable and the Highest which is beyond and embraces the other two. That Highest is the Lord in whom we have to live, the supreme Self in us and in all. The Immutable is the silent, actionless, equal, unchanging self which we reach when we draw back from activity to passivity, from the play of consciousness and force and the seeking of delight to the pure and constant basis of consciousness and force and delight through which the Highest, free, secure and unattached, possesses and enjoys the play. The Mutable is the substance and immediate motive of that changing flux of personality through which the relations of our cosmic life are made possible. The mental being fixed in the Mutable moves in its flux and has not possession of an eternal peace and power and self-delight; the soul fixed in the Immutable holds all these in itself but cannot act in the world; but the soul that can live in the Highest enjoys the eternal peace and power and delight and wideness of being, is not bound in its self-knowledge and self-power by character and personality or by forms of its force and habits of its consciousness and yet uses them all with a large freedom and power for the self-expression of the Divine in the world. Here again the change is not any alteration of the essential modes of the Self, but consists in our emergence into the freedom of the Highest and the right use of the divine law of our being." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-378-379, "Without knowledge we live blindly in him with the blindness of the power of Nature intent on its works, but forgetful of its source and possessor, undivinely therefore, deprived of the real, the full delight of our being. By knowledge arriving at conscious oneness with that which we know, — for by identity alone can complete and real knowledge exist, — the division is healed and the cause of all our limitation and discord and weakness and discontent is abolished. But knowledge is not complete without works; for the Will in being also is God and not the being or its self-aware silent existence alone, and if works find their culmination in knowledge, knowledge also finds its fulfilment in works. And, here too, love is the crown of knowledge; for love is the delight of union, and unity must be conscious of joy of union to find all the riches of its own delight. Perfect knowledge indeed leads to perfect love, integral knowledge to a rounded and multitudinous richness of love. “He who knows me” says the Gita “as the supreme Purusha,” — not only as the immutable oneness, but in the many-souled movement of the divine and as that, superior to both, in which both are divinely held, — “he, because he has the integral knowledge, seeks me by love in every way of his being.” (The Gita-15.19) This is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from knowledge. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-546 Supramental transformation: "The action of the supramental jnana so constituted evidently surpasses the action of the mental reason and we have to see what replaces the reason in the supramental transformation. The thinking mind of man finds its most clear and characteristic satisfaction and its most precise and effective principle of organ- isation in the reasoning and logical intelligence. It is true that man is not and cannot be wholly governed either in his thought or his action by the reason alone. His mentality is inextricably subjected to a joint, mixed and intricate action of the reasoning intelligence with two other powers, an intuition, actually only half luminous in the human mentality, operating behind the more visible action of the reason or veiled and altered in the action of the normal intelligence, and the life-mind of sensation, instinct, impulse, which is in its own nature a sort of obscure in- volved intuition and which supplies the intelligence from below with its first materials and data. And each of these other powers is in its own kind an intimate action of the spirit operating in mind and life and has a more direct and spontaneous character and immediate power for perception and action than the rea- soning intelligence. But yet neither of these powers is capable of organising for man his mental existence." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-849, "As the physical and vital, the psychical consciousness and sense also are capable of a supramental transformation and receive by it their own integral fullness and significance. The supermind lays hold on the psychical being, descends into it, changes it into the mould of its own nature and uplifts it to be a part of the supramental action and state, the supra-psychic being of the Vijnana Purusha. The first result of this change is to base the phenomena of the psychical consciousness on their true foundation by bringing into it the permanent sense, the complete realisation, the secure possession of the oneness of our mind and soul with the minds and souls of others and the mind and soul of universal Nature. For always the effect of the supramental growth is to universalise the individual consciousness. As it makes us live, even in our individual vital movement and its relations with all around us, with the universal life, so it makes us think and feel and sense, although through an individual centre or instrument, with the universal mind and psychical being. This has two results of great importance." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-880, "The complete transformation comes on us by a certain change, not merely of the poise or level of our regarding conscious self or even of its law and character, but also of the whole substance of our conscious being. Till that is done, the supramental consciousness manifests above the mental and psy- chical atmosphere of being — in which the physical has already become a subordinate and to a large extent a dependent method of our self’s expression, — and it sends down its power, light, and influence into it to illumine it and transfigure. But only when the substance of the lower consciousness has been changed, filled potently, wonderfully transformed, swallowed up as it were into the greater energy and sense of being, mahan, brihat, of which it is a derivation and projection, do we have the perfected, entire and constant supramental consciousness. The substance, the conscious ether of being in which the mental or psychic consciousness and sense live and see and feel and experience is something subtler, freer, more plastic than that of the physical mind and sense. As long as we are dominated by the latter, psychical phenomena may seem to us less real, hallucinatory even, but the more we acclimatise ourselves to the psychical and to the ether of being which it inhabits, the more we begin to see the greater truth and to sense the more spiritually concrete substance of all to which its larger and freer mode of experience bears witness. Even, the physical may come to seem to itself unreal and hallucinatory — but this is an exaggeration and new misleading exclusiveness due to a shifting of the centre and a change of action of the mind and sense — or else may seem at any rate less powerfully real. When, however, the psychical and physical experiences are well combined in their true balance, we live at once in two complementary worlds of our being each with its own reality, but the psychical revealing all that is behind the physical, the soul view and experience taking precedence and enlightening and explaining the physical view and experience. The supramental transformation again changes the whole substance of our consciousness; it brings in an ether of greater being, consciousness, sense, life, which convicts the psychical also of insufficiency and makes it appear by itself an incomplete reality and only a partial truth of all that we are and become and witness." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-881-882, “For the gulf between mind and supermind has to be bridged, the closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now a void and a silence. This can be done only by the triple transformation to which we have already made a passing reference: there must first be the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into a soul-instrumentation; on that or along with that there must be the spiritual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force, Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must supervene the supramental transmutation, — there must take place as the crowning movement the ascent into the supermind and the transforming descent of the supramental Consciousness into our entire being and nature.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-924, "The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be, not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding. For in the Ignorance all paths are the paths of the spirit seeking for itself blindly or with a growing light; the gnostic being and life would be the spirit’s self-discovery and its seeing and reaching of the aims of all these paths but in the greater way of its own revealed and conscious truth of being. Mind seeks for light, for knowledge, — for knowledge of the one truth basing all, an essential truth of self and things, but also of all truth of diversity of that oneness, all its detail, circumstance, manifold way of action, form, law of movement and happening, various manifestation and creation; for thinking mind the joy of existence is discovery and the pen- etration of the mystery of creation that comes with knowledge. This the gnostic change will fulfil in an ample measure; but it will give it a new character. It will act not by the discovery of the unknown, but by the bringing out of the known; all will be the finding “of the self by the self in the self”. For the self of the gnostic being will not be the mental ego but the Spirit that is one in all; he will see the world as a universe of the Spirit. The finding of the one truth underlying all things will be the Identical discovering identity and identical truth everywhere and discovering too the power and workings and relations of that identity. The revelation of the detail, the circumstance, the abundant ways and forms of the manifestation will be the unveiling of the endless opulence of the truths of that identity, its forms and powers of self, its curious manifoldness and multiplicity of form bringing out infinitely its oneness. This knowledge will proceed by identification with all, by entering into all, by a contact bringing with it a leap of self-discovery and a flame of recognition, a greater and surer intuition of truth than the mind can reach; there will be an intuition too of the means of embodying and utilising the truth seen, an operative intuition of its dynamic processes, a direct intimate awareness guiding the life and the physical senses in every step of their action and service to the Spirit when they have to be called in as instruments for the effectuation of process in life and matter." CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1017-1018 16/ Chapter 16. Deva and Asura Summary or A Brief Restatement: “There are two worlds adjacent to this material world, Superconscient and Subconscient; Superconscient world has already been described at length: hear from Me, O Partha, the Subconscient, asuric world.” The Gita-16.6 The whole of humanity is now going through this Subconscient transformation unconsciously and few prepared vessels are going through this transformation consciously. Those who are open towards Subconscient transformation, they will feel all the time a Divine Force is entering the mind, vital, body, and Subconscient sheaths in a very minuscule manner. When this descent of Divine force is strong enough to be felt as a higher body temperature of fever, then its outcome is a miracle in the Subconscient sheath resulting in some Divine manifestation. (1) We get the information from Savitri that if our Psychic and Spiritual beings are open, then beings of those higher planes will accompany us and assist us in our sadhana, involve in many creative actions, and call down divine energies. Integral Yoga identifies ten Selves and their opening activates affirmative Beings belonging to higher planes. (2) Similarly, through our untransformed nature, asuric beings or dark energies enter our system and do their destructive and pessimistic action both in waking and dream states. (3) We also get this information from Savitri that like our parents, some invisible beings pursue us in this birth and take care of us. Similarly, some beings accompany us from our previous births. So, we have to remember that neither this world, nor any creative action, nor any destructive action, nor any powers and personalities that are acting through us are our own. The Mother’s experience of 24-25 July, 1959, gave clearer details about Supramental action in the Subconscient and Inconscient Sheath, “for the first time the Supramental light entered directly into my body, without passing through the inner beings. It entered through the feet and it climbed up and up. And as it climbed, the fever also climbed because the body was not accustomed to this intensity. As all this light neared the head, I thought I would burst and that the experience would have to be stopped…” (The Mother's Agenda-, October 6, 1959) The descending Supramental force through complete surrender, maye sarvani karmani sannyasya , ("Giving up thy works to Me, with thy consciousness founded in the Self, free from desire and egoism" The Gita-3.30) as hinted in the Gita (Which is also identified as a key word of Karma Yoga ) also generates fever , bigatajwarah , (The Gita-3.30) that delivers the Soul. Divine Nature: "The Deva nature is distinguished by an acme of the sattwic habits and qualities; self-control, sacrifice, the religious habit, cleanness and purity, candour and straightforwardness, truth, calm and self-denial, compassion to all beings, modesty, gentleness, forgivingness, patience, steadfastness, a deep sweet and serious freedom from all restlessness, levity and inconstancy are its native attributes. The Asuric qualities, wrath, greed, cunning, treachery, wilful doing of injury to others, pride and arrogance and excessive self-esteem have no place in its composition. But its gentleness and self-denial and self-control are free too from all weakness: it has energy and soul force, strong resolution, the fearlessness of the soul that lives in the right and according to the truth as well as its harmlessness, tejah , abhayam, dhritih, ahimsa, satyam . The whole being, the whole temperament is integrally pure; there is a seeking for knowledge and a calm and fixed abiding in knowledge. This is the wealth, the plenitude of the man born into the Deva nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-471-472 Asuric Nature: "Harshness and hardness and fierceness and a satisfaction in slaying enemies and amassing wealth and unjust enjoyments are Asuric qualities; they come from the violent Titanic nature which denies the Divine in the world and the Divine in man and worships Desire only as its deity ." 58 "The Asuric nature has too its wealth, its plenitude of force, but it is of a very different, a powerful and evil kind. Asuric men have no true knowledge of the way of action or the way of abstention, the fulfilling or the holding in of the nature. Truth is not in them, nor clean doing, nor faithful observance. They see naturally in the world nothing but a huge play of the satisfaction of self; theirs is a world with Desire for its cause and seed and governing force and law, a world of Chance, a world devoid of just relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true, not founded in Truth. Whatever better intellectual or higher religious dogma they may possess, this alone is the true creed of their mind and will in action; they follow always the cult of Desire and Ego. On that way of seeing life they lean in reality and by its falsehood they ruin their souls and their reason. The Asuric man becomes the centre or instrument of a fierce, Titanic, violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount of injury and evil. Arrogant, full of self-esteem and the drunkenness of their pride, these misguided souls delude themselves, persist in false and obstinate aims and pursue the fixed impure resolution of their longings. They imagine that desire and enjoyment are all the aim of life and in their inordinate and insatiable pursuit of it they are the prey of a devouring, a measurelessly unceasing care and thought and endeavour and anxiety till the moment of their death. Bound by a hundred bonds, devoured by wrath and lust, unweariedly occupied in amassing unjust gains which may serve their enjoyment and the satisfaction of their craving, always they think, “Today I have gained this object of desire, tomorrow I shall have that other; today I have so much wealth, more I will get tomorrow. I have killed this my enemy, the rest too I will kill. I am a lord and king of men, I am perfect, accomplished, strong, happy, fortunate, a privileged enjoyer of the world; I am wealthy, I am of high birth; who is there like unto me? I will sacrifice, I will give, I will enjoy.” Thus occupied by many egoistic ideas, deluded, doing works, but doing them wrongly, acting mightily, but for themselves, for desire, for enjoyment, not for God in themselves and God in man, they fall into the unclean hell of their own evil. They sacrifice and give, but from a self-regarding ostentation, from vanity and with a stiff and foolish pride. In the egoism of their strength and power, in the violence of their wrath and arrogance they hate, despise and belittle the God hidden in themselves and the God in man. And because they have this proud hatred and contempt of good and of God, because they are cruel and evil, the Divine casts them down continually into more and more Asuric births. Not seeking him, they find him not, and at last, losing the way to him altogether, sink down into the lowest status of soul-nature, adhamam gatim . (The Gita-16.20)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-472-473 The passage from Asura to Deva : "This graphic description, even giving its entire value to the distinction it implies, must not be pressed to carry more in it than it means. When it is said that there are two creations of beings in this material world, Deva and Asura, it is not meant that human souls are so created by God from the beginning each with its own inevitable career in Nature, nor is it meant that there is a rigid spiritual predestination and those rejected from the beginning by the Divine are blinded by him so that they may be thrust down to eternal perdition and the impurity of Hell. All souls are eternal portions of the Divine, the Asura as well as the Deva , all can come to salvation: even the greatest sinner can turn to the Divine. But the evolution of the soul in Nature is an adventure of which Swabhava and the Karma governed by the swabhava are ever the chief powers; and if an excess in the manifestation of the swabhava , the self-becoming of the soul, a disorder in its play turns the law of being to the perverse side, if the rajasic qualities are given the upper hand, cultured to the diminution of sattwa, then the trend of Karma and its results necessarily culminate not in the sattwic height which is capable of the movement of liberation, but in the highest exaggeration of the perversities of the lower nature. The man, if he does not stop short and abandon his way of error, has eventually the Asura full-born in him, and once he has taken that enormous turn away from the Light and Truth, he can no more reverse the fatal speed of his course because of the very immensity of the misused divine power in him until he has plumbed the depths to which it falls, found bottom and seen where the way has led him, the power exhausted and misspent, himself down in the lowest state of the soul nature, which is Hell. Only when he understands and turns to the Light, does that other truth of the Gita come in, that even the greatest sinner, the most impure and violent evil-doer is saved the moment he turns to adore and follow after the Godhead within him. Then, simply by that turn, he gets very soon into the sattwic way which leads to perfection and freedom." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-473-474 Threefold Doors of Hell: "The Asuric Prakriti is the rajasic at its height; it leads to the slavery of the soul in Nature, to desire, wrath and greed, the three powers of the rajasic ego, and these are the three- fold doors of Hell, the Hell into which the natural being falls when it indulges the impurity and evil and error of its lower or perverted instincts. These three are again the doors of a great darkness, they fold back into tamas, the characteristic power of the original Ignorance; for the unbridled force of the rajasic nature, when exhausted, falls back into the weakness, collapse, darkness, incapacity of the worst tamasic soul-status. To escape from this downfall one must get rid of these three evil forces and turn to the light of the sattwic quality, live by the right, in the true relations, according to the Truth and the Law; then one follows one’s own higher good and arrives at the highest soul status. To follow the law of desire is not the true rule of our nature; there is a higher and juster standard of its works. But where is it embodied or how is it to be found? In the first place, the human race has always been seeking for this just and high Law and whatever it has discovered is embodied in its Shastra, its rule of science and knowledge, rule of ethics, rule of religion, rule of best social living, rule of one’s right relations with man and God and Nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-474-475, “The difference between knowledge and ignorance is a grace of the Spirit; the breath of divine Power blows where it lists and fills today one and tomorrow another with the word or the puissance. If the potter shapes one pot more perfectly than another, the merit lies not in the vessel but the maker. The attitude of our mind must not be “This is my strength” or “Behold god’s power in me”, but rather “A Divine Power works in this mind and body and it is the same that works in all men and in the animal, in the plant and in the metal, in conscious and living things and in things apparently inconscient and inanimate.” This large view of One working in all and of the whole world as the equal instrument of a divine action and gradual self-expression, if it becomes our entire experience, will help to eliminate all rajasic egoism out of us and even the sattwic ego-sense will begin to pass away from our nature.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-250 Shastra , the Law of Right Living for Developing Souls: "Shastra does not mean a mass of customs, some good, some bad, unintelligently followed by the customary routine mind of the tamasic man. Shastra is the knowledge and teaching laid down by intuition, experience and wisdom, the science and art and ethic of life, the best standards available to the race . The half-awakened man who leaves the observance of its rule to follow the guidance of his instincts and desires, can get pleasure but not happiness; for the inner happiness can only come by right living. He cannot move to perfection, cannot acquire the highest spiritual status. The law of instinct and desire seems to come first in the animal world, but the manhood of man grows by the pursuit of truth and religion and knowledge and a right life. The Shastra , the recognised Right that he has set up to govern his lower members by his reason and intelligent will, must therefore first be observed and made the authority for conduct and works and for what should or should not be done, till the instinctive desire nature is schooled and abated and put down by the habit of self-control and man is ready first for a freer intelligent self-guidance and then for the highest supreme law and supreme liberty of the spiritual nature... For the Shastra in its ordinary aspect is not that spiritual law, although at its loftiest point, when it becomes a science and art of spiritual living, Adhyatma-shastra , — the Gita itself describes its own teaching as the highest and most secret Shastra, — it formulates a rule of the self-transcendence of the sattwic nature and develops the discipline which leads to spiritual transmutation. Yet all Shastra is built on a number of preparatory conditions, dharmas ; it is a means, not an end. The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit when abandoning all dharmas the soul turns to God for its sole law of action, acts straight from the divine will and lives in the freedom of the divine nature, not in the Law, but in the Spirit. This is the development of the teaching which is prepared by the next question of Arjuna." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-475-476, "The Gita has made a distinction between action according to the licence of personal desire and action done according to the Shastra . We must understand by the latter the recognised science and art of life which is the outcome of mankind’s collective living, its culture, religion, science, its progressive discovery of the best rule of life, — but mankind still walking in the ignorance and proceeding in a half light towards knowledge. The action of personal desire belongs to the unregenerated state of our nature and is dictated by ignorance or false knowledge and an unregulated or ill-regulated kinetic or rajasic egoism. The action controlled by Shastra is an outcome of intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, social and religious culture; it embodies an attempt at a certain right living, harmony and right order and is evidently an effort, more or less advanced according to circumstances, of the sattwic element in man to overtop, regulate and control or guide, where it must be admitted, his rajasic and tamasic egoism. It is the means to a step in advance, and therefore mankind must first proceed through it and make this Shastra its law of action rather than obey the impulsion of its personal desires. This is a general rule which humanity has always recognised wherever it has arrived at any kind of established and developed society; it has an idea of an order, a law, a standard of its perfection, something other than the guidance of its desires or the crude direction of its raw impulses. This greater rule the individual finds usually outside himself in some more or less fixed outcome of the experience and wisdom of the race, which he accepts, to which his mind and the leading parts of his being give their assent or sanction and which he tries to make his own by living it in his mind, will and action." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-477, "The Shastra is something impersonal to the individual, and that gives it its authority over the narrow personal law of his members; but at the same time it is personal to the collectivity and is the outcome of its experience, its culture or its nature. It is not in all its form and spirit the ideal rule of fulfilment of the Self or the eternal law of the Master of our nature, although it may contain in itself in small or larger measure indications, preparations, illuminating glimpses of that far greater thing. And the individual may have gone beyond the collectivity and be ready for a greater truth, a wider walk, a deeper intention of the Life-Spirit. The leading in him that departs from the Shastra may not indeed be always a higher movement; it may take the form of a revolt of the egoistic or rajasic nature seeking freedom from the yoke of something which it feels to be cramping to its liberty of self-fulfilment and self-finding. But even then it is often justified by some narrowness or imperfection of the Shastra or by the degradation of the current rule of living into a merely restricting or lifeless convention. And so far it is legitimate, it appeals to a truth, it has a good and just reason for existence: for though it misses the right path, yet the free action of the rajasic ego, because it has more in it of liberty and life, is better than the dead and hidebound tamasic following of a convention. The rajasic is always stronger, always more forcefully inspired and has more possibilities in it than the tamasic nature. But also this leading may be sattwic at its heart; it may be a turn to a larger and greater ideal which will carry us nearer to a more complete and ample truth of our self and universal existence than has yet been seen and nearer therefore to that highest law which is one with the divine freedom. And in effect this movement is usually an attempt to lay hold on some forgotten truth or to move on to a yet undiscovered or unlived truth of our being. It is not a mere licentious movement of the unregulated nature; it has its spiritual justification and is a necessity of our spiritual progress. And even if the Shastra is still a living thing and the best rule for the human average, the exceptional man, spiritual, inwardly developed, is not bound by that standard. He is called upon to go beyond the fixed line of the Shastra . For this is a rule for the guidance, control and relative perfection of the normal imperfect man and he has to go on to a more absolute perfection: this is a system of fixed dharmas and he has to learn to live in the liberty of the Spirit." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-479-480 "“Man in his natural being is a sattwic, rajasic and tamasic creature of Nature. According as one or other of her qualities predominates in him, he makes and follows this or that law of his life and action. His tamasic, material, sensational mind subject to inertia and fear and ignorance either obeys partly the compulsion of its environment and partly the spasmodic impulses of its desires or finds a protection in the routine following of a dull customary intelligence. The rajasic mind of desire struggles with the world in which it lives and tries to possess always new things, to command, battle, conquer, create, destroy, accumulate. Always it goes forward tossed between success and failure, joy and sorrow, exultation or despair. But in all, whatever law it may seem to admit, it follows really only the law of the lower self and ego, the restless, untired, self-devouring and all-devouring mind of the Asuric and Rakshasic nature. The sattwic intelligence surmounts partly this state, sees that a better law than that of desire and ego must be followed and erects and imposes on itself a social, an ethical, a religious rule, a Dharma, a Shastra . This is as high as the ordinary mind of man can go, to erect an ideal or practical rule for the guidance of the mind and will and as faithfully as possible observe it in life and conduct. This sattwic mind must be developed to its highest point where it succeeds in putting away the mixture of ego motive altogether and observes the Dharma for its own sake as an impersonal social, ethical or religious ideal, the thing disinterestedly to be done solely because it is right, kartavyam karma . (The Gita-3.22)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-591-592, Shastra , the Law of Right Living for Developed Souls: “To know the highest Truth and to be in harmony with it is the condition of right being, to express it in all that we are, experience and do it is the condition of right living.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-374-75, "But what then shall be the secure base of an action which departs both from the guidance of desire and from the normal law? For the rule of desire has an authority of its own, no longer safe or satisfactory to us as it is to the animal or as it might have been to a primitive humanity, but still, so far as it goes, founded on a very living part of our nature and fortified by its strong indications; and the law, the Shastra has behind it all the authority of long established rule, old successful sanctions and a secure past experience. But this new movement is of the nature of a powerful adventure into the unknown or partly known, a daring development and a new conquest, and what then is the clue to be followed, the guiding light on which it can depend or its strong basis in our being? The answer is that the clue and support is to be found in man’s sraddha , his faith, his will to believe, to live what he sees or thinks to be the truth of himself and of existence. In other words this movement is man’s appeal to himself or to something potent and compelling in himself or in universal existence for the discovery of his truth, his law of living, his way to fullness and perfection. And everything depends on the nature of his faith, the thing in himself or in the universal soul — of which he is a portion or manifestation — to which he directs it and on how near he gets by it to his real self and the Self or true being of the universe. If he is tamasic, obscure, clouded, if he has an ignorant faith, an inept will, he will reach nothing true and will fall away to his lower nature. If he is lured by false rajasic lights, he can be carried away by self-will into bypaths that may lead to morass or precipice. In either case his only chance of salvation lies in a return of sattwa upon him to impose a new enlightened order and rule upon his members which will liberate him from the violent error of his self-will or the dull error of his clouded ignorance. If on the other hand he has the sattwic nature and a sattwic faith and direction for his steps, he will arrive in sight of a higher yet unachieved ideal rule which may lead him even in rare instances beyond the sattwic light some way at least towards a highest divine illumination and divine way of being and living. For if the sattwic light is so strong in him as to bring him to its own culminating point, then he will be able advancing from that point to make out his gate of entrance into some first ray of that which is divine, transcendent and absolute . In all effort at self-finding these possibilities are there; they are the conditions of this spiritual adventure. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-480-481 16/ Chapter 16. Deva and Asura Knowledge of Subconscient and Inconscient world: “A complete and radical change can only be brought about by bringing in persistently the spiritual light and intimate experience of the spiritual truth, power, bliss into the recalcitrant elements until they too recognise that their own way of fulfilment lies there, that they are themselves a diminished power of the spirit and can recover by this new way of being their own truth and integral nature. This illumination is constantly opposed by the Forces of the lower nature and still more by the adverse Forces that live and reign by the world’s imperfections and have laid down their formidable foundation on the black rock of the Inconscience.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-970, "This profounder idea of the world-wide law is at the heart of the teaching about works given in the Gita; a spiritual union with the Highest by sacrifice, an unreserved self-giving to the Eternal is the core of its doctrine. The vulgar conception of sacrifice is an act of painful self-immolation, austere self-mortification, difficult self-effacement; this kind of sacrifice may go even as far as self-mutilation and self-torture. These things may be temporarily necessary in man’s hard endeavour to exceed his natural self; if the egoism in his nature is violent and obstinate, it has to be met sometimes by an answering strong internal repression and counterbalancing violence. But the Gita discourages any excess of violence done to oneself; for the self within is really the Godhead evolving, it is Krishna , it is the Divine; it has not to be troubled and tortured as the Titans of the world trouble and torture it, but to be increased, fostered, cherished, luminously opened to a divine light and strength and joy and wideness. It is not one’s self, but the band of the spirit’s inner enemies that we have to discourage, expel, slay upon the altar of the growth of the spirit; these can be ruthlessly excised, whose names are desire, wrath, inequality, greed, attachment to outward pleasures and pains, the cohort of usurping demons that are the cause of the soul’s errors and sufferings. These should be regarded not as part of oneself but as intruders and perverters of our self’s real and diviner nature; these have to be sacrificed in the harsher sense of the word, whatever pain in going they may throw by reflection on the consciousness of the seeker." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-108-109 17/ Chapter 17. Faith and The Three Gunas Summary or A Brief Restatement: The true nature of static faith as defined in the Gita is of four kind; first is the ‘faith of each man takes the shape, hue, quality given to it by his stuff of being, his constituting temperament, his innate power of existence, sattvanurupa sarvasya sraddha ;’ (The Gita-17.3) secondly , Sraddha is that it is an aspect of the Self, sraddhamayayo Purusha ; (The Gita-17.3) thirdly , whatever is man’s faith that he becomes ultimately, yo yachhadra sa evasah . (The Gita-17.3) This faith is Divinely fulfilled and culminated lastly in an eternal flame of knowledge, sraddhavan labhate jnanam. (The Gita-4.39) " There is one kind of faith demanded as indispensable by the integral Yoga and that may be described as (1) faith in God and the Shakti, (2) faith in the presence and power of the Divine in us and the world, (3) a faith that all in the world is the working of one divine Shakti , that all the steps of the Yoga, its strivings and sufferings and failures as well as its successes and satisfactions and victories are utilities and necessities of her workings and (4) that by a firm and strong dependence on and a total self-surrender to the Divine and to his Shakti in us we can attain to oneness and freedom and victory and perfection." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-771, "Now we have to see how the Gita deals with this question on its own line of spiritual teaching and self-discipline. For Arjuna puts immediately a suggestive query from which the problem or one aspect of it arises. When men, he says, sacrifice to God or the gods with faith, sraddha , but abandon the rule of the Shastra, what is that concentrated will of devotion in them, nistha, which gives them this faith and moves them to this kind of action? Is it sattwa, rajas or tamas? to which strand of our nature does it belong? The answer of the Gita first states the principle that the faith in us is of a triple kind like all things in Nature and varies according to the dominating quality of our nature. The faith of each man takes the shape, hue, quality given to it by his stuff of being, his constituting temperament, his innate power of existence, sattvanurupa sarvasya sraddha . (The Gita-17.3) And then there comes a remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that this Purusha, this soul in man, is, as it were, made of sraddha, a faith, a will to be, a belief in itself and existence, and whatever is that will, faith or constituting belief in him, he is that and that is he. Sraddha mayoyam puruso yo yac-chraddhah sa eva sah . (The Gita-17.3) If we look into this pregnant saying a little closely, we shall find that this single line contains implied in its few forceful words almost the whole theory of the modern gospel of pragmatism. For if a man or the soul in a man consists of the faith which is in him, taken in this deeper sense, then it follows that the truth which he sees and wills to live is for him the truth of his being, the truth of himself that he has created or is creating and there can be for him no other real truth. This truth is a thing of his inner and outer action, a thing of his becoming, of the soul’s dynamics, not of that in him which never changes. He is what he is today by some past will of his nature sustained and continued by a present will to know, to believe and to be in his intelligence and vital force, and whatever new turn is taken by this will and faith active in his very substance, that he will tend to become in the future . We create our own truth of existence in our own action of mind and life, which is another way of saying that we create our own selves, are our own makers." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-481-482, "We have in this central Tantric conception one side of the truth, the worship of the Energy, the Shakti, as the sole effective force for all attainment. We get the other extreme in the Vedantic conception of the Shakti as a power of Illusion and in the search after the silent inactive Purusha as the means of liberation from the deceptions created by the active Energy. But in the integral conception the Conscious Soul is the Lord, the Nature-Soul is his executive Energy. Purusha is of the nature of Sat, the being of conscious self-existence pure and infinite; Shakti or Prakriti is of the nature of Chit, — it is power of the Purusha’s self-conscious existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed in the bliss of conscious self-existence, there is rest; when the Purusha pours itself out in the action of its Energy, there is action, creation and the enjoyment or Ananda of becoming. But if Ananda is the creator and begetter of all becoming, its method is Tapas or force of the Purusha’s consciousness dwelling upon its own infinite potentiality in existence and producing from it truths of conception or real Ideas, vijnana , which, proceeding from an omniscient and omnipotent Self-existence, have the surety of their own fulfilment and contain in themselves the nature and law of their own becoming in the terms of mind, life and matter. The eventual omnipotence of Tapas and the infallible fulfilment of the Idea are the very foundation of all Yoga. In man we render these terms by Will and Faith, — a will that is eventually self-effective because it is of the substance of Knowledge and a faith that is the reflex in the lower consciousness of a Truth or real Idea yet unrealised in the manifestation. It is this self-certainty of the Idea which is meant by the Gita when it says, yo yac-chraddhah sa eva sah. , “whatever is a man’s faith or the sure Idea in him, that he becomes.”" CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-43-44, "The three parts of the perfection of our instrumental nature of which we have till now been reviewing the general features, (1) the perfection of the intelligence, heart, vital consciousness and body, (2) the perfection of the fundamental soul powers, (3) the perfection of the surrender of our instruments and action to the divine Shakti , depend at every moment of their progression on a fourth power that is covertly and overtly the pivot of all endeavour and action, faith, sraddha . The perfect faith is an assent of the whole being to the truth seen by it or offered to its acceptance, and its central working is a faith of the soul in its own will to be and attain and become and its idea of self and things and its knowledge, of which the belief of the intellect, the heart’s consent and the desire of the life mind to possess and realise are the outward figures. This soul faith, in some form of itself, is indispensable to the action of the being and without it man cannot move a single pace in life, much less take any step forward to a yet unrealised perfection. It is so central and essential a thing that the Gita can justly say of it that whatever is a man’s sraddha , that he is, yo yacchraddhah sa eva sah, and, it may be added, whatever he has the faith to see as possible in himself and strive for, that he can create and become." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-771 Sraddha of traditional Yoga : "But faith is necessary ; if faith is absent, if one trusts to the critical intelligence which goes by outward facts and jealously questions the revelatory knowledge because that does not square with the divisions and imperfections of the apparent nature and seems to exceed it and state something which carries us beyond the first practical facts of our present existence, its grief, its pain, evil, defect, undivine error and stumbling, asubham , then there is no possibility of living out that greater knowledge. The soul that fails to get faith in the higher truth and law, must return into the path of ordinary mortal living subject to death and error and evil: it cannot grow into the Godhead which it denies. For this is a truth which has to be lived, — and lived in the soul’s growing light, not argued out in the mind’s darkness. One has to grow into it, one has to become it, — that is the only way to verify it. It is only by an exceeding of the lower self that one can become the real divine self and live the truth of our spiritual existence. All the apparent truths one can oppose to it are appearances of the lower Nature . The release from the evil and the defect of the lower Nature , asubham , can only come by accepting a higher knowledge in which all this apparent evil becomes convinced of ultimate unreality, is shown to be a creation of our darkness. But to grow thus into the freedom of the divine Nature one must accept and believe in the Godhead secret within our present limited nature. For the reason why the practice of this Yoga becomes possible and easy is that in doing it we give up the whole working of all that we naturally are into the hands of that inner divine Purusha . The Godhead works out the divine birth in us progressively, simply, infallibly, by taking up our being into his and by filling it with his own knowledge and power, jnanadıpena bhasvata ; (The Gita-10.11) he lays hands on our obscure ignorant nature and transforms it into his own light and wideness. What with entire faith and without egoism we believe in and impelled by him will to be, the God within will surely accomplish. But the egoistic mind and life we now and apparently are, must first surrender itself for transmutation into the hands of that inmost secret Divinity within us." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-309-310, "And this assent of the being, its conscious acceptance and will to believe and realise (the law of Shastra), may be called by the name which the Gita gives to it, his faith, sraddha . The religion, the philosophy, the ethical law, the social idea, the cultural idea in which I put my faith, gives me a law for my nature and its works, an idea of relative right or an idea of relative or absolute perfection and in proportion as I have a sincerity and completeness of faith in it and an intensity of will to live according to that faith, I can become what it proposes to me , I can shape myself into an image of that right or an exemplar of that perfection." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-478 Tamasic Sacrifice : "The tamasic sacrifice is work which is done without faith, without, that is to say, any full conscious idea and acceptance and will towards the thing Nature yet compels us to execute. It is done mechanically, because the act of living demands it, because it comes in our way, because others do it, to avoid some other greater difficulty which may arise from not doing it, or from any other tamasic motive. And it is apt to be done, if we have in the full this kind of temperament, carelessly, perfunctorily, in the wrong way. It will not be performed by the vidhi or right rule of the Shastra , will not be led in its steps according to the right method laid down by the art and science of life and the true science of the thing to be done. There will be no giving of food in the sacrifice, — and that act in the Indian ritual is symbolic of the element of helpful giving inherent in every action that is real sacrifice, the indispensable giving to others, the fruitful help to others, to the world, without which our action becomes a wholly self-regarding thing and a violation of the true universal law of solidarity and interchange. The work will be done without the dakshina , the much-needed giving or self-giving to the leaders of the sacrificial action, whether to the outward guide and helper of our work or to the veiled or manifest godhead within us. It will be done without the mantra , without the dedicating thought which is the sacred body of our will and knowledge lifted upwards to the godheads we serve by our sacrifice. The tamasic man does not offer his sacrifice to the gods, but to inferior elemental powers or to those grosser spirits behind the veil who feed upon his works and dominate his life with their darkness." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-485-486, The Mother here recounts the general state of consciousness of devotees and ashramites: “To give a rather curious example, there was a kind of spell of illness over the Ashram, stemming mainly from people’s thoughts, from their way of thinking. It was quite widespread and it was horrible, gloomy, full of fear, pettiness, blind submission, (tamasic sacrifice) oh! Everyone was in a state of expectation. .. In short, the atmosphere was such that there was an attempt to prevent me from leaving my room – I had to sneak out! It was disgusting! Well, on the very night I saw the spell over the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo was lying sick in his bed, just as I had seen him in 1950.” The Mother/The Mother’s Agenda/ February 18, 1961, “Note that a tamasic surrender refusing to fulfil the conditions and calling on God to do everything and save one all the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection.” CWSA-32/The Mother with letters on the Mother/p-7, "The effort demanded of the sadhak is that of aspiration, rejection and surrender. If these three are done the rest is to come of itself by the Grace of the Mother and the working of her force in you. But of the three the most important is surrender of which the first necessary form is trust and confidence and patience in difficulty. There is no rule that trust and confidence can only remain if aspiration is there. On the contrary, when even aspiration is not there because of the pressure of inertia, trust and confidence and patience can remain. If trust and patience fail when aspiration is quiescent, that would mean that the sadhak is relying solely on his own effort — it would mean, “Oh, my aspiration has failed, so there is no hope for me. My aspiration fails, so what can Mother do?” On the contrary, the sadhak should feel, “Never mind, my aspiration will come back again. Meanwhile I know that the Mother is with me even when I do not feel her; she will carry me even through the darkest period.” That is the fully right attitude you must have. To those who have it depression can do nothing; even if it comes it has to return baffled. That is not tamasic surrender. Tamasic surrender is when one says, “I won’t do anything; let Mother do everything. Aspiration, rejection, surrender even are not necessary. Let her do all that in me.” There is a great difference between the two attitudes. One is that of the shirker who won’t do anything, the other is that of the sadhak who does his best, but when he is reduced to quiescence for a time and things are adverse, keeps always his trust in the Mother’s force and presence behind all and by that trust baffles the opposition force and calls back the activity of the sadhana. " CWSA-32/The Mother with letters on the Mother/p-139-140, “He has sent me naked into his bitter world And beaten me with his rods of grief and pain That I might cry and grovel at his feet And offer him worship with my blood and tears.” Savitri-505-506 (Death said) “Immutable, bodiless, beautiful, grand and dumb, Immobile on its shining throne it sits; Dumb it receives his offering and his prayer. It has no voice to answer to his call, No feet that move, no hands to take his gifts:” Savitri-609 Rajasic Sacrifice: "The rajasic man offers his sacrifice to lower godheads or to perverse powers, the Yakshas , the keepers of wealth, or to the Asuric and the Rakshasic forces. His sacrifice may be performed outwardly according to the Shastra , but its motive is ostentation, pride or a strong lust after the fruit of his action, a vehement demand for the reward of his works. All work therefore that proceeds from violent or egoistic personal desire or from an arrogant will intent to impose itself on the world for personal objects is of the rajasic nature, even if it mask itself with the insignia of the light, even if it be done outwardly as a sacrifice. Although it is ostensibly given to God or to the gods, it remains essentially an Asuric action. It is the inner state, motive and direction which give their value to our works, and not merely the apparent outer direction, the divine names we may call to sanction them or even the sincere intellectual belief which seems to justify us in the performance. Wherever there is a dominating egoism in our acts, there our work becomes a rajasic sacrifice. The true sattwic sacrifice on the other hand is distinguished by three signs that are the quiet seal of its character. First , it is dictated by the effective truth, executed according to the vidhi, the right principle, the exact method and rule, the just rhythm and law of our works, their true functioning, their dharma ; that means that the reason and enlightened will are the guides and determinants of their steps and their purpose. Secondly , it is executed with a mind concentrated and fixed on the idea of the thing to be done as a true sacrifice imposed on us by the divine law that governs our life and therefore performed out of a high inner obligation or imperative truth and without desire for the personal fruit , — the more impersonal the motive of the action and the temperament of the force put out in it, the more sattwic is its nature. And finally i t is offered to the gods without any reservation; it is acceptable to the divine powers by whom — for they are his masks and personalities — the Master of existence governs the universe." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-486-487, “To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.” Savitri-134, “Repulsion stimulated inert desire; Agony was made a red-spiced food for bliss, Hatred was trusted with the work of lust And torture took the form of an embrace; A ritual anguish consecrated death; Worship was offered to the Undivine. ” Savitri-213 Sattwic Sacrifice: "This sattwic sacrifice comes then very near to the ideal and leads directly towards the kind of action demanded by the Gita ; but it is not the last and highest ideal, it is not yet the action of the perfected man who lives in the divine nature. For it is carried out as a fixed dharma , and it is offered as a sacrifice or service to the gods, to some partial power or aspect of the Divine manifested in ourselves or in the universe. Work done with a disinterested religious faith or selflessly for humanity or impersonally from devotion to the Right or the Truth is of this nature, and action of that kind is necessary for our perfection; for it purifies our thought and will and our natural substance. The culmination of the sattwic action at which we have to arrive is of a still larger and freer kind; it is the high last sacrifice offered by us to the supreme Divine in his integral being and with a seeking for the Purushottama or with the vision of Vasudeva in all that is, the action done impersonally, universally, for the good of the world, for the fulfilment of the divine will in the universe. That culmination leads to its own transcending, to the immortal Dharma . For then comes a freedom in which there is no personal action at all, no sattwic rule of dharma , no limitation of Shastra; the inferior reason and will are themselves overpassed and it is not they but a higher wisdom that dictates and guides the work and commands its objective. There is no question of personal fruit; for the will that works is not our own but a supreme Will of which the soul is the instrument. There is no self-regarding and no selflessness; for the Jiva, the eternal portion of the Divine, is united with the highest Self of his existence and he and all are one in that Self and Spirit. There is no personal action, for all actions are given up to the Master of our works and it is he that does the action through the divinised Prakriti. There is no sacrifice, — unless we can say that the Master of sacrifice is offering the works of his energy in the Jiva to himself in his own cosmic form. This is the supreme self-surpassing state arrived at by the action that is sacrifice, this the perfection of the soul that has come to its full consciousness in the divine nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-487-488 “A rational religion dried the heart. It planned a smooth life’s acts with ethics’ rule Or offered a cold and flameless sacrifice.” Savitri-437-438 “Left far behind were now the faces known, The happy silken babble on laughter’s lips And the close-clinging clasp of intimate hands And adoration’s light in cherished eyes Offered to the one sovereign of their life.” Savitri-466 “The ancient mother offered to her child Her simple world of kind familiar things.” Savitri-578 Tamasic and Rajasic Tapasya : "Tamasic tapasya is that which is pursued under a clouded and deluded idea hard and obstinate in its delusion, maintained by an ignorant faith in some cherished falsehood, performed with effort and suffering imposed on oneself in pursuit of some narrow and vulgar egoistic object empty of relation to any true or great aim or else with a concentration of the energy in a will to do hurt to others. That which makes this kind of energism tamasic is not any principle of inertia, for inertia is foreign to tapasya , but a darkness in the mind and nature, a vulgar narrowness and ugliness in the doing or a brutish instinct or desire in the aim or in the motive feeling. Rajasic energisms of askesis are those which are undertaken to get honour and worship from men, for the sake of personal distinction and outward glory and greatness or from some other of the many motives of egoistic will and pride. This kind of askesis is devoted to fleeting particular objects which add nothing to the heavenward growth and perfection of the soul; it is a thing without fixed and helpful principle, an energy bound up with changeful and passing occasion and itself of that nature. Or even if there is ostensibly a more inward and noble object and the faith and will are of a higher kind, yet if any kind of arrogance or pride or any great strength of violent self-will or desire enters into the askesis or if it drives some violent, lawless or terrible action contrary to the Shastra , opposed to the right rule of life and works and afflicting to oneself and to others, or if it is of the nature of self-torture and hurts the mental, vital and physical elements or violates the God within us who is seated in the inner subtle body, then too it is an unwise, an Asuric , a rajasic or rajaso-tamasic tapasya. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-488-489 Sattwic Tapasya: "Sattwic tapasya is that which is done with a highest enlightened faith, as a duty deeply accepted or for some ethical or spiritual or other higher reason and with no desire for any external or narrowly personal fruit in the action. It is of the character of self-discipline and asks for self-control and a harmonising of one’s nature. The Gita describes three kinds of sattwic askesis. First comes the physical, the askesis of the outward act; under this head are especially mentioned worship and reverence of those deserving reverence, cleanness of the person, the action and the life, candid dealing, sexual purity and avoidance of killing and injury to others. Next is askesis of speech, and that consists in the study of Scripture, kind, true and beneficent speech and a careful avoidance of words that may cause fear, sorrow and trouble to others. Finally t here is the askesis of mental and moral perfection, and that means the purifying of the whole temperament, gentleness and a clear and calm gladness of mind, self-control and silence. Here comes in all that quiets or disciplines the rajasic and egoistic nature and all that replaces it by the happy and tranquil principle of good and virtue. This is the askesis of the sattwic dharma so highly prized in the system of the ancient Indian culture. Its greater culmination will be a high purity of the reason and will, an equal soul, a deep peace and calm, a wide sympathy and preparation of oneness, a reflection of the inner soul’s divine gladness in the mind, life and body. There at that lofty point the ethical is already passing away into the spiritual type and character. And this culmination too can be made to transcend itself, can be raised into a higher and freer light, can pass away into the settled godlike energy of the supreme nature. And what will remain then will be the spirit’s immaculate Tapas , a highest will and luminous force in all the members acting in a wide and solid calm and a deep and pure spiritual delight, Ananda . There will then be no farther need of askesis, no tapasya, because all is naturally and easily divine, all is that Tapas . There will be no separate labour of the lower energism, because the energy of Prakriti will have found its true source and base in the transcendent will of the Purushottama. Then, because of this high initiation, the acts of this energy on the lower planes also will proceed naturally and spontaneously from an innate perfect will and by an inherent perfect guidance. There will be no limitation by any of the present dharmas; for there will be a free action far above the rajasic and tamasic nature, but also far beyond the too careful and narrow limits of the sattwic rule of action." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-489-490 Tamasic, Rajasic and Sattwic Dana: "As with tapasya , all giving also is of an ignorant tamasic , an ostentatious rajasic or a disinterested and enlightened sattwic character. The tamasic gift is offered ignorantly with no consideration of the right conditions of time, place and object; it is a foolish, inconsiderate and in reality a self-regarding movement, an ungenerous and ignoble generosity, the gift offered without sympathy or true liberality, without regard for the feelings of the recipient and despised by him even in the acceptance. The rajasic kind of giving is that which is done with regret, unwillingness or violence to oneself or with a personal and egoistic object or in the hope of a return of some kind from whatever quarter or a corresponding or greater benefit to oneself from the receiver. The sattwic way of giving is to bestow with right reason and goodwill and sympathy in the right conditions of time and place and on the right recipient who is worthy or to whom the gift can be really helpful. Its act is performed for the sake of the giving and the beneficence, without any view to a benefit already done or yet to be done to oneself by the receiver of the benefit and without any personal object in the action. The culmination of the sattwic way of dana will bring into the action an increasing element of that wide self-giving to others and to the world and to God, atma-dana, atma-samarpana , which is the high consecration of the sacrifice of works enjoined by the Gita . And the transcendence in the divine nature will be a greatest completeness of self-offering founded on the largest meaning of existence. All this manifold universe comes into birth and is constantly maintained by God’s giving of himself and his powers and the lavish outflow of his self and spirit into all these existences; universal being, says the Veda , is the sacrifice of the Purusha. All the action of the perfected soul will be even such a constant divine giving of itself and its powers, an outflowing of the knowledge, light, strength, love, joy, helpful shakti which it possesses in the Divine and by his influence and effluence on all around it according to their capacity of reception or on all this world and its creatures. That will be the complete result of the complete self-giving of the soul to the Master of our existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-490-491, “There is a love in which the emotion is turned towards the Divine in an increasing receptivity and growing union. What it receives from the Divine it pours out on others, but truly without demanding a return. If you are capable of that, then that is the highest and most satisfying way to love.” The Mother/(CWM-14, p. 122), “Surrender is giving oneself to the Divine — to give everything one is or has to the Divine and regard nothing as one’s own, to obey only the Divine will and no other, to live for the Divine and not for the ego.” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II-67, SABCL-23/Letters on Yoga-585, “Some give their soul to the Divine, some their life, some offer their work, some their money, a few consecrate all of themselves and all they have—soul, life, work, wealth; these are the true children of God. Others give nothing. These, whatever their position, power and riches are for the Divine purpose valueless ciphers.” The Mother/ TMCW-1/Prayers and Meditations-1, : “Three Steps towards the Supreme Identification. Give all you have, this is the beginning. Give all you do, this is the way. Give all you are, this is the fulfilment.” TMCW-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-103, OM TAT SAT: "The Gita closes this chapter with what seems at first sight a recondite utterance. The formula OM, Tat, Sat , is, it says, the triple definition of the Brahman, by whom the Brahmanas, the Vedas and sacrifices were created of old and in it resides all their significance. Tat, That, indicates the Absolute. Sat indicates the supreme and universal existence in its principle. OM is the symbol of the triple Brahman, the outward-looking, the inward or subtle and the superconscient causal Purusha. Each letter A, U, M indicates one of these three in ascending order and the syllable as a whole brings out the fourth state, Turiya , which rises to the Absolute. OM is the initiating syllable pronounced at the outset as a benedictory prelude and sanction to all act of sacrifice, all act of giving and all act of askesis; it is a reminder that our work should be made an expression of the triple Divine in our inner being and turned towards him in the idea and motive. The seekers of liberation indeed do these actions without desire of fruit and only with the idea, feeling, Ananda of the absolute Divine behind their nature. It is that which they seek by this purity and impersonality in their works, this high desirelessness, this vast emptiness of ego and plenitude of Spirit. Sat means good and it means existence. Both these things, the principle of good and the principle of reality, must be there behind all the three kinds of action. All good works are Sat , for they prepare the soul for the higher reality of our being; all firm abiding in sacrifice, giving and askesis and all works done with that central view, as sacrifice, as giving, as askesis, are Sat, for they build the basis for the highest truth of our spirit. And because sraddha is the central principle of our existence , any of these things done without sraddha is a falsity and has no true meaning or true substance on earth or beyond, no reality, no power to endure or create in life here or after the mortal life in greater regions of our conscious spirit. The soul’s faith, not a mere intellectual belief, but its concordant will to know, to see, to believe and to do and be according to its vision and knowledge, is that which determines by its power the measure of our possibilities of becoming, and it is this faith and will turned in all our inner and outer self, nature and action towards all that is highest, most divine, most real and eternal that will enable us to reach the supreme perfection." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-491-492 17/ Chapter 17. Faith and The Three Gunas Sraddha , the faith of Integral Yoga: "The faith demanded of us both in its general principle and its constant particular application amounts to a large and ever increasing and a constantly purer, fuller and stronger assent of the whole being and all its parts to the presence and guidance of God and the Shakti. The faith in the Shakti, as long as we are not aware of and filled with her presence, must necessarily be preceded or at least accompanied by a firm and virile faith in our own spiritual will and energy and our power to move successfully towards unity and freedom and perfection. Man is given faith in himself, his ideas and his powers that he may work and create and rise to greater things and in the end bring his strength as a worthy offering to the altar of the Spirit. This spirit, says the Scripture, is not to be won by the weak, nayam atma balahınena labhyah . All paralysing self-distrust has to be discouraged, all doubt of our strength to accomplish, for that is a false assent to impotence, an imagination of weakness and a denial of the omnipotence of the spirit. A present incapacity, however heavy may seem its pressure, is only a trial of faith and a temporary difficulty and to yield to the sense of inability is for the seeker of the integral Yoga a non-sense, for his object is a development of a perfection that is there already, latent in the being, because man carries the seed of the divine life in himself, in his own spirit, the possibility of success is involved and implied in the effort and victory is assured because behind is the call and guidance of an omnipotent power. At the same time this faith in oneself must be purified from all touch of rajasic egoism and spiritual pride. The sadhaka should keep as much as possible in his mind the idea that his strength is not his own in the egoistic sense but that of the divine universal Shakti and whatever is egoistic in his use of it must be a cause of limitation and in the end an obstacle. The power of the divine universal Shakti which is behind our aspiration is illimitable, and when it is rightly called upon it cannot fail to pour itself into us and to remove whatever incapacity and obstacle, now or later; for the times and durations of our struggle while they depend at first, instrumentally and in part, on the strength of our faith and our endeavour, are yet eventually in the hands of the wisely determining secret Spirit, alone the Master of the Yoga, the Ishwara. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-779-780, "And behind her is the Ishwara and faith in him is the most central thing in the sraddha of the integral Yoga . This faith we must have and develop to perfection that all things are the workings under the universal conditions of a supreme self-knowledge and wisdom, that nothing done in us or around us is in vain or without its appointed place and just significance, that all things are possible when the Ishwara as our supreme Self and Spirit takes up the action and that all that has been done before and all that he will do hereafter was and will be part of his infallible and foreseeing guidance and intended towards the fruition of our Yoga and our perfection and our life work. This faith will be more and more justified as the higher knowledge opens, we shall begin to see the great and small significances that escaped our limited mentality and faith will pass into knowledge. Then we shall see beyond the possibility of doubt that all happens within the working of the one Will and that that will was also wisdom because it develops always the true workings in life of the self and nature. The highest state of the assent, the sraddha of the being will be when we feel the presence of the Ishwara and feel all our existence and consciousness and thought and will and action in his hand and consent in all things and with every part of our self and nature to the direct and immanent and occupying will of the Spirit. And that highest perfection of the sraddha will also be the opportunity and perfect foundation of a divine strength: it will base, when complete, the development and manifestation and the works of the luminous supramental Shakti. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-781-782 18/ Chapter 18. Renunciation and Moksha Summary or A Brief Restatement: "This part of the subject is introduced by a last question of Arjuna regarding the principle of Sannyasa and the principle of Tyaga and their difference. The frequent harping, the reiterated emphasis of the Gita on this crucial distinction has been amply justified by the subsequent history of the later Indian mind, its constant confusion of these two very different things and its strong bent towards belittling any activity of the kind taught by the Gita as at best only a preliminary to the supreme inaction of Sannyasa . As a matter of fact, when people talk of Tyaga , of renunciation, it is always the physical renunciation of the world which they understand by the word or at least on which they lay emphasis, while the Gita takes absolutely the opposite view that the real Tyaga has action and living in the world as its basis and not a flight to the monastery, the cave or the hill-top. The real Tyaga is action with a renunciation of desire and that too is the real Sannyasa . ” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-493-494 Tyaga: "The liberating activity of the sattwic self-discipline must no doubt be pervaded by a spirit of renunciation, — that is an essential element: but what renunciation and in what manner of the spirit? Not the renunciation of work in the world, not any outward asceticism or any ostentation of a visible giving up of enjoyment, but a renunciation, a leaving, tyaga, of vital desire and ego, a total laying aside, sannyasa, of the separate personal life of the desire soul and ego-governed mind and rajasic vital nature. That is the true condition for entering into the heights of Yoga whether through the impersonal self and Brahmic oneness or through universal Vasudeva or inwardly into the supreme Purushottama . More conventionally taken, Sannyasa in the standing terminology of the sages means the physical depositing or laying aside of desirable actions: Tyaga this is the Gita’s distinction — is the name given by the wise to a mental and spiritual renunciation, an entire abandonment of all attached clinging to the fruit of our works, to the action itself or to its personal initiation or rajasic impulse. In that sense Tyaga, not Sannyasa , is the better way. It is not the desirable actions that must be laid aside, but the desire which gives them that character has to be put away from us. The fruit of the action may come in the dispensation of the Master of works, but there is to be no egoistic demand for that as a reward and condition of doing works. Or the fruit may not at all come and still the work has to be performed as the thing to be done, kartavyam karma , the thing which the Master within demands of us. The success, the failure are in his hands and he will regulate them according to his omniscient will and inscrutable purpose. Action, all action has indeed to be given up in the end, not physically by abstention, by immobility, by inertia, but spiritually to the Master of our being by whose power alone can any action be accomplished. There has to be a renunciation of the false idea of ourselves as the doer; for in reality it is the universal Shakti that works through our personality and our ego. The spiritual transference of all our works to the Master and his Shakti is the real Sannyasa in the teaching of the Gita." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-494-495 What works are to be done?: "The question still arises, what works are to be done? Those even who stand for a final physical renunciation are not at one in this difficult matter. Some would have it that all works must be excised from our life, as if that were possible. But it is not possible so long as we are in the body and alive; nor can salvation consist in reducing our active selves by trance to the lifeless immobility of the clod and the pebble. The silence of Samadhi does not abrogate the difficulty, for as soon as the breath comes again into the body, we are once more in action and have toppled down from the heights of this salvation by spiritual slumber. But the true salvation, the release by an inner renunciation of the ego and union with the Purushottama remains steady in whatever state, persists in this world or out of it or in whatever world or out of all world, is self-existent, sarvatha vartamanopi, (The Gita-6.31) and does not depend upon inaction or action. What then are the actions to be done? The thoroughgoing ascetic answer, not noted by the Gita — it was perhaps not altogether current at the time — might be that solely begging, eating and meditation are to be permitted among voluntary activities and otherwise only the necessary actions of the body. But the more liberal and comprehensive solution was evidently to continue the three most sattwic activities, sacrifice, giving and askesis. And these certainly are to be done, says the Gita, for they purify the wise. But more generally, and understanding these three things in their widest sense, it is the rightly regulated action, niyatam karma, that has to be done, (1) action regulated by the Shastra , the science and art of right knowledge, right works, right living, or (2) regulated by the essential nature, svabhava-niyatam karma, or, (3) finally and best of all, regulated by the will of the Divine within and above us. The last is the true and only action of the liberated man, muktasya karma ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-495-496 Tamasic, rajasic and Sattwic principle of Renunciation: "To renounce these works is not a right movement — the Gita lays that down plainly and trenchantly in the end, niyatasya tu sannyasah karmano nopapadyate. (The Gita-18.7) To renounce them from an ignorant confidence in the sufficiency of that withdrawal for the true liberation is a tamasic renunciation . The gunas follow us, we see, into the renunciation of works as well as into works. A renunciation with attachment to inaction, sango akarmani, would be equally a tamasic withdrawal. And to give them up because they bring sorrow or are a trouble to the flesh and a weariness to the mind or in the feeling that all is vanity and vexation of spirit, is a rajasic renunciation and does not bring the high spiritual fruit; that too is not the true Tyaga . It is a result of intellectual pessimism or vital weariness, it has its roots in ego. No freedom can come from a renunciation governed by this self-regarding principle...The sattwic principle of renunciation is to withdraw not from action, but from the personal demand, the ego factor behind it. It is to do works not dictated by desire but by the law of right living or by the essential nature, its knowledge, its ideal, its faith in itself and the Truth it sees, its sraddha. Or else, on a higher spiritual plane, they are dictated by the will of the Master and done with the mind in Yoga, without any personal attachment either to the action or to the fruit of the action. There must be a complete renunciation of all desire and of all self-regarding egoistic choice and impulse and finally of that much subtler egoism of the will which either says, “The work is mine, I am the doer”, or even “The work is God’s, but I am the doer.” There must be no attachment to pleasant, desirable, lucrative or successful work and no doing of it because it has that nature; but that kind of work too has to be done, — done totally, selflessly, with the assent of the spirit, — when it is the action demanded from above and from within us, kartavyam karma . There must be no aversion to unpleasant, undesirable or ungratifying action or work that brings or is likely to bring with it suffering, danger, harsh conditions, inauspicious consequences; for that too has to be accepted, totally, selflessly, with a deep understanding of its need and meaning, when it is the work that should be done, kartavyam karma . The wise man puts away the shrinkings and hesitations of the desire-soul and the doubts of the ordinary human intelligence, that measure by little personal, conventional or otherwise limited standards. He follows in the light of the full sattwic mind and with the power of an inner renunciation lifting the soul to impersonality, towards God, towards the universal and eternal the highest ideal law of his nature or the will of the Master of works in his secret spirit. He will not do action for the sake of any personal result or for any reward in this life or with any attachment to success, profit or consequence: neither will his works be undertaken for the sake of a fruit in the invisible hereafter or ask for a reward in other births or in worlds beyond us, the prizes for which the half-baked religious mind hungers. The three kinds of result, pleasant, unpleasant and mixed, in this or other worlds, in this or another life are for the slaves of desire and ego; these things do not cling to the free spirit. The liberated worker who has given up his works by the inner sannyasa to a greater Power is free from Karma . Action he will do, for some kind of action, less or more, small or great, is inevitable, natural, right for the embodied soul, — action is part of the divine law of living, it is the high dynamics of the spirit. The essence of renunciation, the true Tyaga, the true Sannyasa is not any rule of thumb of inaction but a disinterested soul, a selfless mind, the transition from ego to the free impersonal and spiritual nature. The spirit of this inner renunciation is the first mental condition of the highest culminating sattwic discipline. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-496-497 Five indispensable requisites for the accomplishment of all work: "The Gita then speaks of the five causes or indispensable requisites for the accomplishment of works as laid down by the Sankhya . These five are, first, the frame of body, life and mind which are the basis or standing-ground of the soul in Nature, adhisthana , next, the doer, karta , third, the various instrumentation of Nature, karana , fourth, the many kinds of effort which make up the force of action, chestah , and last, Fate, daivam , that is to say, the influence of the Power or powers other than the human factors, other than the visible mechanism of Nature, that stand behind these and modify the work and dispose its fruits in the steps of act and consequence. These five elements make up among them all the efficient causes, karana, that determine the shaping and outcome of whatever work man undertakes with mind and speech and body." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-497-498 Universal Spirit universal Nature as the doer of the work: "The doer is ordinarily supposed to be our surface personal ego, but that is the false idea of the understanding that has not arrived at knowledge. The ego is the ostensible doer, but the ego and its will are creations and instruments of Nature with which the ignorant understanding wrongly identifies our self and they are not the only determinants even of human action, much less of its turn and consequence. When we are liberated from ego, our real self behind comes forward, impersonal and universal, and it sees in its self-vision of unity with the universal Spirit universal Nature as the doer of the work and the Divine Will behind as the master of universal Nature. Only so long as we have not this knowledge, are we bound by the character of the ego and its will as the doer and do good and evil and have the satisfaction of our tamasic, rajasic or sattwic nature. But once we live in this greater knowledge, the character and consequences of the work can make no difference to the freedom of the spirit. The work may be outwardly a terrible action like this great battle and slaughter of Kurukshetra ; but although the liberated man takes his part in the struggle and though he slay all these peoples, he slays no man and he is not bound by his work, because the work is that of the Master of the Worlds and it is he who has already slain in his hidden omnipotent will all these armies. This work of destruction was needed that humanity might move forward to another creation and a new purpose, might get rid as in a fire of its past karma of unrighteousness and oppression and injustice and move towards a kingdom of the Dharma. The liberated man does all his appointed work as the living instrument one in spirit with the universal Spirit. And knowing that all this must be and looking beyond the outward appearance he acts not for self but for God and man and the human and cosmic order, (The cosmic order comes into question, because the triumph of the Asura in humanity means to that extent the triumph of the Asura in the balance of the world-forces.) not in fact himself acting, but conscious of the presence and power of the divine Force in his deeds and their issue. He knows that the supreme Shakti i s doing in his mental, vital and physical body, adhisthana , as the sole doer the thing appointed by a Fate which is in truth not Fate, not a mechanical dispensation, but the wise and all-seeing Will that is at work behind human Karma. This “terrible work” on which the whole teaching of the Gita turns, is an extreme example of action inauspicious in appearance, akusalam, though a great good lies beyond the appearance. Impersonally has it to be done by the divinely appointed man for the holding together of the world purpose, loka-sangrahartham , without personal aim or desire, because it is the appointed service." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-498-499 Tamasic, Rajasic and Sattwic Knowledge: "It is clear then that the work is not the sole thing that mat- ters; the knowledge in which we do works makes an immense spiritual difference. There are three things, says the Gita, which go to constitute the mental impulsion to works, and they are the knowledge in our will, the object of knowledge and the knower; and into the knowledge there comes always the working of the three gunas. It is this element of the gunas that makes all the dif- ference to our view of the thing known and to the spirit in which the knower does his work. The tamasic ignorant knowledge is a small and narrow, a lazy or dully obstinate way of looking at things which has no eye for the real nature of the world or of the thing done or its field or the act or its conditions. The tamasic mind does not look for real cause and effect, but absorbs itself in one movement or one routine with an obstinate attachment to it, can see nothing but the little section of personal activity before its eyes and does not know in fact what it is doing but blindly lets natural impulsion work out through its deed results of which it has no conception, foresight or comprehending intelligence. The rajasic knowledge is that which sees the multiplicity of things only in their separateness and variety of operation in all these existences and is unable to discover a true principle of unity or rightly coordinate its will and action, but follows the bent of ego and desire, the activity of its many-branching egoistic will and various and mixed motive in response to the solicitation of internal and environing impulsions and forces. This knowing is a jumble of sections of knowledge, often inconsistent knowledge, put forcefully together by the mind in order to make some kind of pathway through the confusion of our half-knowledge and half-ignorance. Or else it is a restless kinetic multiple action with no firm governing higher ideal and self-possessed law of true light and power within it. The sattwic knowledge on the contrary sees existence as one indivisible whole in all these divisions, one imperishable being in all becomings; it masters the principle of its action and the relation of the particular action to the total purpose of existence; it puts in the right place each step of the complete process. At the highest top of knowledge this seeing becomes the knowledge of the one spirit in the world, one in all these many existences, of the one Master of all works, of the forces of cosmos as expressions of the Godhead and of the work itself as the operation of his supreme will and wisdom in man and his life and essential nature. The personal will has come to be entirely conscious, illumined, spiritually awake, and it lives and works in the One, obeys more and more perfectly his supreme mandate and grows more and more a faultless instru- ment of his light and power in the human person. The supreme liberated action arrives through this culmination of the sattwic knowledge ." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-499-500 The Doer, Instrument and work done: "There are again three things, the doer, the instrument and the work done, that hold the action together and make it possible. And here again it is the difference of the gunas that determines the character of each of these elements. The sattwic mind that seeks always for a right harmony and right knowledge is the governing instrument of the sattwic man and moves all the rest of the machine. An egoistic will of desire supported by the desire-soul is the dominant instrument of the rajasic worker. An ignorant instinct or the unenlightened impulsion of the physical mind and the crude vital nature is the chief instrumental force of the tamasic doer of action. The instrument of the liberated man is a greater spiritual light and power, far higher than the highest sattwic intelligence, and it works in him by an enveloping descent from a supraphysical centre and uses as a clear channel of its force a purified and receptive mind, life and body." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-500-501 Tamasic, Rajasic and Sattwic Action: "Tamasic action is that done with a confused, deluded and ignorant mind, in mechanical obedience to the instincts, im- pulsions and unseeing ideas, without regarding the strength or capacity or the waste and loss of blind misapplied effort or the antecedent and consequence and right conditions of the impulse, effort or labour. Rajasic action is that which a man undertakes under the dominion of desire, with his eyes fixed on the work and its hoped-for fruit and nothing else, or with an egoistic sense of his own personality in the action, and it is done with inordinate effort, with a passionate labour, with a great heaving and straining of the personal will to get at the object of its desire. Sattwic action is that which a man does calmly in the clear light of reason and knowledge and with an impersonal sense of right or duty or the demand of an ideal, as the thing that ought to be done whatever may be the result to himself in this world or another, a work performed without attachment, without liking or disliking for its spur or its drag, for the sole satisfaction of his reason and sense of right, of the lucid intelligence and the enlightened will and the pure disinterested mind and the high contented spirit. At the line of culmination of sattwa it will be transformed and become a highest impersonal action dictated by the spirit within us and no longer by the intelligence, an action moved by the highest law of the nature, free from the lower ego and its light or heavy baggage and from limitation even by best opinion, noblest desire, purest personal will or loftiest mental ideal. There will be none of these impedimenta; in their place there will stand a clear spiritual self-knowledge and illumination and an imperative intimate sense of an infallible power that acts and of the work to be done for the world and for the world’s Master." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-501 Tamasic, Rajasic and Sattwic Doer of Action: "The tamasic doer of action is one who does not put himself really into the work, but acts with a mechanical mind, or obeys the most vulgar thought of the herd, follows the common routine or is wedded to a blind error and prejudice. He is obstinate in stupidity, stubborn in error and takes a foolish pride in his ignorant doing; a narrow and evasive cunning replaces true intelligence; he has a stupid and insolent contempt for those with whom he has to deal, especially for wiser men and his betters. A dull laziness, slowness, procrastination, looseness, want of vigour or of sincerity mark his action. The tamasic man is ordinarily slow to act, dilatory in his steps, easily depressed, ready soon to give up his task if it taxes his strength, his diligence or his patience. The rajasic doer of action on the contrary is one eagerly attached to the work, bent on its rapid completion, passionately desirous of fruit and reward and consequence, greedy of heart, impure of mind, often violent and cruel and brutal in the means he uses; he cares little whom he injures or how much he injures others so long as he gets what he wants, satisfies his passions and will, vindicates the claims of his ego. He is full of an incontinent joy in success and bitterly grieved and stricken by failure. The sattwic doer is free from all this attachment, this egoism, this violent strength or passionate weakness; his is a mind and will unelated by success, undepressed by failure, full of a fixed impersonal resolution, a calm rectitude of zeal or a high and pure and selfless enthusiasm in the work that has to be done. At and beyond the culmination of sattwa this resolution, zeal, enthusiasm become the spontaneous working of the spiritual Tapas and at last a highest soul-force, the direct God-Power, the mighty and steadfast movement of a divine energy in the human instrument, the self-assured steps of the Seer-will, the gnostic intelligence and with it the wide delight of the free spirit in the works of the liberated nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-502 Tamasic, Rajasic and Sattwic Understanding: "The reason armed with the intelligent will works in man in whatever manner or measure he may possess these human gifts and it is accordingly right or perverted, clouded or luminous, narrow and small or large and wide like the mind of its possessor. It is the understanding power of his nature, buddhi, that chooses the work for him or, more often, approves and sets its sanction on one or other among the many suggestions of his complex instincts, impulsions, ideas and desires. It is that which determines for him what is right or wrong, to be done or not to be done, Dharma or Adharma . And the persistence of the will is that continuous force of mental Nature which sustains the work and gives it consistence and persistence. Here again there is the incidence of the gunas. The tamasic reason is a false, ignorant and darkened instrument which chains us to see all things in a dull and wrong light, a cloud of misconceptions, a stupid ignoring of the values of things and people. This reason calls light darkness and darkness light, takes what is not the true law and upholds it as the law, persists in the thing which ought not to be done and holds it up to us as the one right thing to be done. Its ignorance is invincible and its persistence of will is a persistence in the satisfaction and dull pride of its ignorance. That is on its side of blind action; but it is pursued also by a heavy stress of inertia and impotence, a persistence in dullness and sleep, an aversion to mental change and progress, a dwelling on the fears and pains and depressions of mind which deter us in our path or keep us to base, weak and cowardly ways. Timidity, shirking, evasion, indolence, the justification by the mind of its fears and false doubts and cautions and refusals of duty and its lapses and turnings from the call of our higher nature, a safe following of the line of least resistance so that there may be the least trouble and effort and peril in the winning of the fruit of our labour, — rather no fruit or poor result, it says, than a great and noble toil or a perilous and exacting endeavour and adventure, — these are characteristics of the tamasic will and intelligence.... The rajasic understanding, when it does not knowingly choose error and evil for the sake of the error and evil, can make distinctions between right and wrong, between what should or should not be done, but not rightly, rather with a pulling awry of their true measures and a constant distortion of values. And this is because its reason and will are a reason of the ego and a will of desire, and these powers misrepresent and distort the truth and the right to serve their own egoistic purpose. It is only when we are free from ego and desire and look steadily with a calm, pure, disinterested mind concerned only with the truth and its sequences that we can hope to see things rightly and in their just values. But the rajasic will fixes its persistent attention on the satisfaction of its own attached clingings and desires in its pursuit of interest and pleasure and of what it thinks or chooses to think right and justice, Dharma. Always it is apt to put on these things the construction which will most flatter and justify its desires and to uphold as right or legitimate the means which will best help it to get the coveted fruits of its work and endeavour. That is the cause of three fourths of the falsehood and misconduct of the human reason and will. Rajas with its vehement hold on the vital ego is the great sinner and positive misleader... The sattwic understanding sees in its right place, right form, right measure the movement of the world, the law of action and the law of abstention from action, the thing that is to be done and the thing that is not to be done, what is safe for the soul and what is dangerous, what is to be feared and shunned and what is to be embraced by the will, what binds the spirit of man and what sets it free. These are the things that it follows or avoids by the persistence of its conscious will according to the degree of its light and the stage of evolution it has reached in its upward ascent to the highest self and Spirit. The culmination of this sattwic i ntelligence is found by a high persistence of the aspiring buddhi when it is settled on what is beyond the ordinary reason and mental will, pointed to the summits, turned to a steady control of the senses and the life and a union by Yoga with man’s highest Self, the universal Divine, the transcendent Spirit. It is there that arriving through the sattwic guna one can pass beyond the gunas , can climb beyond the limitations of the mind and its will and intelligence and sattwa itself disappear into that which is above the gunas and beyond this instrumental nature. There the soul is enshrined in light and enthroned in firm union with the Self and Spirit and Godhead. Arrived upon that summit we can leave the Highest to guide Nature in our members in the free spontaneity of a divine action: for there there is no wrong or confused working, no element of error or impotence to obscure or distort the luminous perfection and power of the Spirit. All these lower conditions, laws, dharmas cease to have any hold on us; the Infinite acts in the liberated man and there is no law but the immortal truth and right of the free spirit, no Karma , no kind of bondage." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-502-505 Tamasic, Rajasic and Sattwic Happiness: "Harmony and order are the characteristic qualities of the sattwic mind and temperament, quiet happiness, a clear and calm content and an inner ease and peace. Happiness is indeed the one thing which is openly or indirectly the universal pursuit of our human nature, — happiness or its suggestion or some counterfeit of it, some pleasure, some enjoyment, some satisfaction of the mind, the will, the passions or the body. Pain is an experience our nature has to accept when it must, involuntarily as a necessity, an unavoidable incident of universal Nature, or voluntarily as a means to what we seek after, but not a thing de- sired for its own sake, — except when it is so sought in perversity or with an ardour of enthusiasm in suffering for some touch of fierce pleasure it brings or the intense strength it engenders. But there are various kinds of happiness or pleasure according to the guna which dominates in our nature. Thus the tamasic mind can remain well-pleased in its indolence and inertia, its stupor and sleep, its blindness and its error. Nature has armed it with the privilege of a smug satisfaction in its stupidity and ignorance, its dim lights of the cave, its inert contentment, its petty or base joys and its vulgar pleasures. Delusion is the beginning of this satisfaction and delusion is its consequence; but still there is given a dull, a by no means admirable but a sufficient pleasure in his delusions to the dweller in the cave. There is a tamasic happiness founded in inertia and ignorance... The mind of the rajasic man drinks of a more fiery and intoxicating cup; the keen, mobile, active pleasure of the senses and the body and the sense-entangled or fierily kinetic will and intelligence are to him all the joy of life and the very significance of living. This joy is nectar to the lips at the first touch, but there is a secret poison in the bottom of the cup and after it the bitterness of disappointment, satiety, fatigue, revolt, disgust, sin, suffering, loss, transience. And it must be so because these pleasures in their external figure are not the things which the spirit in us truly demands from life; there is something behind and beyond the transience of the form, something that is lasting, satisfying, self-sufficient. What the sattwic nature seeks, therefore, is the satisfaction of the higher mind and the spirit and when it once gets this large object of its quest, there comes in a clear, pure happiness of the soul, a state of fullness, an abiding ease and peace. This happiness does not depend on outward things, but on ourselves alone and on the flowering of what is best and most inward within us. But it is not at first our normal possession; it has to be conquered by self-discipline, a labour of the soul, a high and arduous endeavour. At first this means much loss of habitual pleasure, much suffering and struggle, a poison born of the churning of our nature, a painful conflict of forces, much revolt and opposition to the change due to the ill-will of the members or the insistence of vital movements, but in the end the nectar of immortality rises in the place of this bitterness and as we climb to the higher spiritual nature we come to the end of sorrow, the euthanasia of grief and pain. That is the surpassing happiness which descends upon us at the point or line of culmination of the sattwic discipline." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-505-506, The Central Truth of the Gita: "The Teacher has completed all else that he needed to say, he has worked out all the central principles and the supporting suggestions and implications of his message and elucidated the principal doubts and questions that might rise around it, and now all that rests for him to do is to put into decisive phrase and penetrating formula the one last word, the heart itself of the message, the very core of his gospel. And we find that this decisive, last and crowning word is not merely the essence of what has been already said on the matter, not merely a concentrated description of the needed self-discipline, the Sadhana , and of that greater spiritual consciousness which is to be the result of all its effort and askesis; it sweeps out, as it were, yet farther, breaks down every limit and rule, canon and formula and opens into a wide and illimitable spiritual truth with an infinite potentiality of significance. And that is a sign of the profundity, the wide reach, the greatness of spirit of the Gita’s teaching. An ordinary religious teaching or philosophical doctrine is well enough satisfied to seize on certain great and vital aspects of truth and turn them into utilisable dogma and instruction, method and practice for the guidance of man in his inner life and the law and form of his action; it does not go farther, it does not open doors out of the circle of its own system , does not lead us out into some widest freedom and unimprisoned largeness. This limitation is useful and indeed for a time indispensable. Man bounded by his mind and will has need of a law and rule, a fixed system, a definite practice selective of his thought and action; he asks for the single unmistakable hewn path hedged, fixed and secure to the tread, for the limited horizons, for the enclosed resting-places. It is only the strong and few who can move through freedom to freedom. And yet in the end the free soul ought to have an issue out of the forms and systems in which the mind finds its account and takes its limited pleasure. To exceed our ladder of ascent, not to stop short even on the topmost stair but move untrammelled and at large in the wideness of the spirit is a release important for our perfection; the spirit’s absolute liberty is our perfect status. And this is how the Gita leads us: it lays down a firm and sure but very large way of ascent, a great Dharma , and then it takes us out beyond all that is laid down, beyond all dharmas, into infinitely open spaces, divulges to us the hope, lets us into the secret of an absolute perfection founded in an absolute spiritual liberty, and that secret, guhyatamam , (The Gita-18.64) is the substance of what it calls its supreme word, that the hidden thing, the inmost knowledge." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-526-527, “In other words a will of entire self-giving opens wide all the gates of the spirit and brings in response an entire descent and self-giving of the Godhead to the human being, and that at once reshapes and assimilates everything in us to the law of the divine existence by a rapid transformation of the lower into the spiritual nature . The will of self-giving forces away by its power the veil between God and man; it annuls every error and annihilates every obstacle. ” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-335, "It is nothing less that is meant in the end when we speak of the absolute consecration of the individual to the Divine. But this total fullness of consecration can only come by a constant progression when the long and difficult process of transforming desire out of existence is completed in an ungrudging measure. Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-86, “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.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-87, “Surrender is giving oneself to the Divine — to give everything one is or has to the Divine and regard nothing as one’s own, to obey only the Divine will and no other, to live for the Divine and not for the ego.” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II-67, SABCL-23/Letters on Yoga-585, Mahavakya or the Supreme Word of the Gita : "The last, the closing supreme word of the Gita expressing the highest mystery is spoken in two brief, direct and simple slokas and these are left without farther comment or enlargement to sink into the mind and reveal their own fullness of meaning in the soul’s experience. For it is alone this inner incessantly extending experience that can make evident the infinite deal of meaning with which are for ever pregnant these words in themselves apparently so slight and simple. And we feel, as they are being uttered, that it was this for which the soul of the disciple was being prepared all the time and the rest was only an enlightening and enabling discipline and doctrine. Thus runs this secret of secrets, the highest most direct message of the Ishwara. “Become my-minded, my lover and adorer, a sacrificer to me, bow thyself to me, to me thou shalt come, this is my pledge and promise to thee, for dear art thou to me. Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in me alone. I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve." (The Gita-18.65-66)" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-555-556, "The Gita throughout has been insisting on a great and well-built discipline of Yoga, a large and clearly traced philosophical system, on the Swabhava and the Swadharma , on the sattwic law of life as leading out of itself by a self-exceeding exaltation to a free spiritual dharma of immortal existence utterly wide in its spaces and high-lifted beyond the limitation of even this highest guna, on many rules and means and injunctions and conditions of perfection, and now suddenly it seems to break out of its own structure and says to the human soul, “Abandon all dharmas, give thyself to the Divine alone, to the supreme Godhead above and around and within thee: that is all that thou needest, that is the truest and greatest way, that is the real deliverance.” (The Gita-18.66) The Master of the worlds in the form of the divine Charioteer and Teacher of Kurukshetra has revealed to man the magnificent realities of God and Self and Spirit and the nature of the complex world and the relation of man’s mind and life and heart and senses to the Spirit and the victorious means by which through his own spiritual self-discipline and effort he can rise out of mortality into immortality and out of his limited mental into his infinite spiritual existence. And now speaking as the Spirit and Godhead in man and in all things he says to him, “All this personal effort and self-discipline will not in the end be needed, all following and limitation of rule and dharma can at last be thrown away as hampering encumbrances if thou canst make a complete surrender to Me, depend alone on the Spirit and Godhead within thee and all things and trust to his sole guidance. Turn all thy mind to me and fill it with the thought of me and my presence. Turn all thy heart to me, make thy every action, whatever it be, a sacrifice and offering to me. That done, leave me to do my will with thy life and soul and action; do not be grieved or perplexed by my dealings with thy mind and heart and life and works or troubled because they do not seem to follow the laws and dharmas man imposes on himself to guide his limited will and intelligence. My ways are the ways of a perfect wisdom and power and love that knows all things and combines all its movements in view of a perfect eventual result; for it is refining and weaving together the many threads of an integral perfection. I am here with thee in thy chariot of battle revealed as the Master of Existence within and without thee and I repeat the absolute assurance, the infallible promise that I will lead thee to myself through and beyond all sorrow and evil. Whatever difficulties and perplexities arise, be sure of this that I am leading thee to a complete divine life in the universal and an immortal existence in the transcendent Spirit. ”" CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-556-557, “Strength, if it is spiritual, is a power for spiritual realisation; a greater power is sincerity; the greatest power of all is Grace. I have said times without number that if a man is sincere, he will go through in spite of long delay and overwhelming difficulties. I have repeatedly spoken of the Divine Grace. I have referred any number of times to the line of the Gita: Aham tvam sarvapapebhyo moksayisyami ma sucah.. .. “I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve.”" CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-172, "In the light of this progressive manifestation of the Spirit, first apparently bound in the Ignorance, then free in the power and wisdom of the Infinite, we can better understand the great and crowning injunction of the Gita to the Karma-yogin, “Abandoning all dharmas, all principles and laws and rules of conduct, take refuge in me alone.” All standards and rules are temporary constructions founded upon the needs of the ego in its transition from Matter to Spirit. These makeshifts have a relative imperativeness so long as we rest satisfied in the stages of transition, content with the physical and vital life, attached to the mental movement, or even fixed in the ranges of the mental plane that are touched by the spiritual lustres. But beyond is the unwalled wideness of a supramental infinite consciousness and there all temporary structures cease. It is not possible to enter utterly into the spiritual truth of the Eternal and Infinite if we have not the faith and courage to trust ourselves into the hands of the Lord of all things and the Friend of all creatures and leave utterly behind us our mental limits and measures. At one moment we must plunge without hesitation, reserve, fear or scruple into the ocean of the free, the infinite, the Absolute. After the Law, Liberty; after the personal, after the general, after the universal standards there is something greater, the impersonal plasticity, the divine freedom, the transcendent force and the supernal impulse. After the strait path of the ascent the wide plateaus on the summit." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-208, "A perfect equality of the will is the power which dissolves these knots of the lower impulsion to works. This equality will not respond to the lower impulses, but watch for a greater seeing impulsion from the Light above the mind, and will not judge and govern with the intellectual judgment, but wait for enlightenment and direction from a superior plane of vision. As it mounts upward to the supramental being and widens inward to the spiritual largeness, the dynamic nature will be transformed, spiritualised like the emotional and pranic, and grow into a power of the divine nature. There will be plenty of stumblings and errors and imperfections of adjustment of the instruments to their new working, but the increasingly equal soul will not be troubled overmuch or grieve at these things, since, delivered to the guidance of the Light and Power within self and above mind, it will proceed on its way with a firm assurance and await with growing calm the vicissitudes and completion of the process of transformation. The promise of the Divine Being in the Gita will be the anchor of its resolution, “Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve.”" CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-706 The Most Difficult Part of the Spiritual Problem: "The crux of the spiritual problem, the character of this transition of which it is so difficult for the normal mind of man to get a true apprehension, turns altogether upon the capital distinction between the ignorant life of the ego in the lower nature and the large and luminous existence of the liberated Jiva in his own true spiritual nature. The renunciation of the first must be complete, the transition to the second absolute. This is the distinction on which the Gita dwells here with all possible emphasis. On the one side is this poor, trepidant, braggart egoistic condition of consciousness, ahankrta bhava , the crippling narrowness of this little helpless separative personality according to whose view-point we ordinarily think and act, feel and respond to the touches of existence. On the other are the vast spiritual reaches of immortal fullness, bliss and knowledge into which we are admitted through union with the divine Being, of whom we are then a manifestation and expression in the eternal light and no longer a disguise in the darkness of the ego-nature. It is the completeness of this union which is indicated by the Gita’s satatam maccittah (Always one in heart and consciousness with Me. The Gita-18.57). The life of the ego is founded on a construction of the apparent mental, vital and physical truth of existence, on a nexus of pragmatic relations between the individual soul and Nature, on an intellectual, emotional and sensational interpretation of things used by the little limited I in us to maintain and satisfy the ideas and desires of its bounded separate personality amid the vast action of the universe. All our dharmas , all the ordinary standards by which we determine our view of things and our knowledge and our action, proceed upon this narrow and limiting basis, and to follow them even in the widest wheelings round our ego centre does not carry us out of this petty circle. It is a circle in which the soul is a contented or struggling prisoner, for ever subject to the mixed compulsions of Nature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-543-544, 18/ Chapter 18. Renunciation and Moksha Moksha of the Gita and Liberation (Moksha) of Integral Yoga: " For certain ways of thinking liberation is a throwing off of all nature, a silent state of pure being, a nirvana or extinction, a dissolution of the natural existence into some indefinable Absolute, moksa. But an absorbed and immersed bliss, a wideness of actionless peace, a release of self-extinction or a self-drowning in the Absolute is not our aim. We shall give to the idea of liberation, mukti, only the connotation of that inner change which is common to all experience of this kind, essential to perfection and indispensable to spiritual freedom. We shall find that it then implies always two things, a rejection and an assumption, a negative and a positive side; the negative movement of freedom is a liberation from the principal bonds, the master-knots of the lower soul-nature, the positive side an opening or growth into the higher spiritual existence. But what are these master-knots other and deeper twistings than the instrumental knots of the mind, heart, psychic life-force? We find them pointed out for us and insisted on with great force and a constant emphatic repetition in the Gita ; they are four, desire, ego, the dualities and the three gunas of Nature; for to be desireless, ego-less, equal of mind and soul and spirit and nistraigunya, is in the idea of the Gita to be free, mukta . We may accept this description; for everything essential is covered by its amplitude. On the other hand, the positive sense of freedom is to be universal in soul, transcendently one in spirit with God, possessed of the highest divine nature, — as we may say, like to God, or one with him in the law of our being. This is the whole and full sense of liberation and this is the integral freedom of the spirit." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-674-675, "The ordinary idea is that it is not possible because all action is of the lower gunas, necessarily defective, sadosam , (The Gita-18.48) caused by the motion, inequality, want of balance, unstable strife of the gunas ; but when these unequal gunas fall into perfect equilibrium, all action of Nature ceases and the soul rests in its quietude. The divine Being, we may say, may either exist in his silence or act in Nature through her instrumentation, but in that case must put on the appearance of her strife and imperfection. That may be true of the ordinary deputed action of the Divine in the human spirit with its present relations of soul to nature in an embodied imperfect mental being, but it is not true of the divine nature of perfection. The strife of the gunas is only a representation in the imperfection of the lower nature; what the three gunas stand for are three essential powers of the Divine which are not merely existent in a perfect equilibrium of quietude, but unified in a perfect consensus of divine action. Tamas in the spiritual being becomes a divine calm, which is not an inertia and incapacity of action, but a perfect power, sakti, holding in itself all its capacity and capable of controlling and subjecting to the law of calm even the most stupendous and enormous activity: rajas becomes a self-effecting initiating sheer Will of the spirit, which is not desire, endeavour, striving passion, but the same perfect power of being, sakti, capable of an infinite, imperturbable and blissful action. Sattwa becomes not the modified mental light, prakasa , but the self-existent light of the divine being, jyotih , which is the soul of the perfect power of being and illumines in their unity the divine quietude and the divine will of action. The ordinary liberation gets the still divine light in the divine quietude, but the integral perfection will aim at this greater triune unity .... When this liberation of the nature comes, there is a liberation also of all the spiritual sense of the dualities of Nature. In the lower nature the dualities are the inevitable effect of the play of the gunas on the soul affected by the formations of the sattwic, rajasic and tamasic ego. The knot of this duality is an ignorance which is unable to seize on the spiritual truth of things and concentrates on the imperfect appearances, but meets them not with a mastery of their inner truth, but with a strife and a shifting balance of attraction and repulsion, capacity and incapacity, liking and disliking, pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, acceptance and repugnance; all life is represented to us as a tangle of these things, of the pleasant and the unpleasant, the beautiful and the unbeautiful, truth and falsehood, fortune and misfortune, success and failure, good and evil, the inextricable double web of Nature. Attachment to its likings and repugnances keeps the soul bound in this web of good and evil, joys and sorrows. The seeker of liberation gets rid of attachment, throws away from his soul the dualities, but as the dualities appear to be the whole act, stuff and frame of life, this release would seem to be most easily compassed by a withdrawal from life, whether a physical withdrawal, so far as that is possible while in the body, or an inner retirement, a refusal of sanction, a liberating distaste, vairagya, for the whole action of Nature. There is a separation of the soul from Nature. Then the soul watches seated above and unmoved, udasına, the strife of the gunas in the natural being and regards as an impassive witness the pleasure and pain of the mind and body. Or it is able to impose its indifference even on the outer mind and watches with the impartial calm or the impartial joy of the detached spectator the universal action in which it has no longer an active inner participation. The end of this movement is the rejection of birth and a departure into the silent self, moksa. .. But this rejection (This rejection of birth and departure into the silent self is the liberation of the Gita) is not the last possible word of liberation. The integral liberation comes when this passion for release, mumuksutva , founded on distaste or vairagya , is itself transcended; the soul is then liberated both from attachment to the lower action of nature and from all repugnance to the cosmic action of the Divine. (In integral Yoga, the double escape, (1) escape from the problems of life and (2) escape from universal Divine action are renounced and in the Gita one Soul takes refuge in the supreme abode of param dham through this double escape, which is known as Moksha .) This liberation gets its completeness when the spiritual gnosis can act with a supramental knowledge and reception of the action of Nature and a supramental luminous will in initiation. The gnosis discovers the spiritual sense in Nature, God in things, the soul of good in all things that have the contrary appearance; that soul is delivered in them and out of them, the perversions of the imperfect or contrary forms fall away or are transformed into their higher divine truth, — even as the gunas go back to their divine principles, — and the spirit lives in a universal, infinite and absolute Truth, Good, Beauty, Bliss which is the supramental or ideal divine Nature. The liberation of the Nature becomes one with the liberation of the spirit, and there is founded in the integral freedom the integral perfection." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-688-690, The Integral Liberation: "Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom born of unbroken contact and identification of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sa¯ yujya-mukti, by which it can become free even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the sa¯ lokya-mukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of Sachchidananda; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by the transformation of this lower being into the human image of the Divine, sa¯ dharmya-mukti, and the complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, univer- sal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-48, "When we live in the spirit, then we not only know, but are this truth of our being. The individual then enjoys in the spirit, in the bliss of the spirit, his oneness with the universal existence, his oneness with the timeless Divine and his oneness with all other beings and that is the essential sense of a spiritual liberation from the ego. But the moment the soul leans towards the mental limitation, there is a certain sense of spiritual separativeness which has its joys, but may at any moment lapse into the entire ego-sense, ignorance, oblivion of oneness. To get rid of this separativeness an attempt is made to absorb oneself in the idea and realisation of the Divine, and this takes in certain forms of spiritual askesis the turn of a strain towards the abolition of all individual being and a casting away, in the trance of immersion, of all individual or universal relations with the Divine, in others it becomes an absorbed dwelling in him and not in this world or a continual absorbed or intent living in his presence, sa¯ yujya, sa¯ lokya, sa¯ mı¯pya mukti. The way proposed for the integral Yoga is a lifting up and surrender of the whole being to him, by which not only do we become one with him in our spiritual existence, but dwell too in him and he in us, so that the whole nature is full of his presence and changed into the divine nature; we become one spirit and consciousness and life and substance with the Divine and at the same time we live and move in and have a various joy of that oneness. This integral liberation from the ego into the divine spirit and nature can only be relatively complete on our present level, but it begins to become absolute as we open to and mount into the gnosis. This is the liberated perfection." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-678-679, "Nature’s essential contributions are two, the gunas and the dualities. This inferior action of Nature in which we live has certain essential qualitative modes which constitute the whole basis of its inferiority. The constant effect of these modes on the soul in its natural powers of mind, life and body is a discordant and divided experience, a strife of opposites, dvandva, a motion in all its experience and an oscillation between or a mixture of constant pairs of contraries, of combining positives and negatives, dualities. A complete liberation from the ego and the will of desire must bring with it a superiority to the qualitative modes of the inferior Nature, traigunyatıtya , a release from this mixed and discordant experience, a cessation or solution of the dual action of Nature. But on this side too there are two kinds of freedom . (1) A liberation from Nature in a quiescent bliss of the spirit is the first form of release. (2) A farther liberation of the Nature into a divine quality and spiritual power of world- experience fills the supreme calm with the supreme kinetic bliss of knowledge, power, joy and mastery. A divine unity of supreme spirit and its supreme nature is the integral liberation. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-682-683 Fourfold Soul Force: "Through four soul-stages a man must pass before he can be perfect; first, as a Sudra, by service and obedience to tame the brute in his being; then, as a Vaishya to satisfy within the law of morality the lower man in him and evolve the higher man by getting the first taste of delight in well-doing to others than himself and his; then, as the Kshatriya, to be trained in those first qualities without which the pursuit of the Eternal is impossible, courage, strength, unconquerable tenacity and self-devotion to a great task; last, as the Brahmin , so to purify body & mind and nature that he may see the Eternal reflected in himself as in an unsoiled mirror. Having once seen God, man can have no further object in life than to reach and possess Him." CWSA-17/Isha Upanishad/p-195, "The fundamental truth is not this outward thing, but a force of our inner being in movement, the truth of the fourfold active power of the spiritual nature . Each Jiva possesses in his spiritual nature these four sides, is a soul of knowledge, a soul of strength and of power, a soul of mutuality and interchange, a soul of works and service, but one side or other predominates in the action and expressive spirit and tinges the dealings of the soul with its embodied nature; it leads and gives its stamp to the other powers and uses them for the principal strain of action, tendency, experience. The Swabhava then follows, not crudely and rigidly as put in the social demarcation, but subtly and flexibly the law of this strain and develops in developing it the other three powers. Thus the pursuit of the impulse of works and service rightly done develops knowledge, increases power, trains closeness or balance of mutuality and skill and order of relation. Each front of the fourfold godhead moves through the enlargement of its own dominant principle of nature and enrichment by the other three towards a total perfection. This development undergoes the law of the three gunas. There is possible a tamasic and rajasic way of following even the dharma of the soul of knowledge, a brute tamasic and a high sattwic way of following the dharma of power, a forceful rajasic or a beautiful and noble sattwic way of following the dharma of works and service. To arrive at the sattwic way of the inner individual Swadharma and of the works to which it moves us on the ways of life is a preliminary condition of perfection. And it may be noted that the inner Swadharma is not bound to any outward social or other form of action, occupation or function. The soul of works or that element in us that is satisfied to serve, can, for example, make the life of the pursuit of knowledge, the life of struggle and power or the life of mutuality, production and interchange a means of satisfying its divine impulse to labour and to service... And in the end to arrive at the divinest figure and most dynamic soul-power of this fourfold activity is a wide doorway to a swiftest and largest reality of the most high spiritual perfection. This we can do if we turn the action of the Swadharma into a worship of the inner Godhead, the universal Spirit, the transcendent Purushottama and, eventually, surrender the whole action into his hands, mayi sannyasya karmani. (The Gita-3.30) (This verse is often interpreted as a key teaching (of Karma Yoga) on how to perform actions without being bound by attachment to the fruit of work, leading to liberation.) Then as (1) we get beyond the limitation of the three gunas , so also do (2) we get beyond the division of the fourfold law and (3) beyond the limitation of all distinctive dharmas , sarvadharman parityajya . (The Gita-18.66) (1) The Spirit takes up the individual into the universal Swabhava , (2) perfects and unifies the fourfold soul of nature in us and (3) does its self-determined works according to the divine will and the accomplished power of the godhead in the creature." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-523-524, "The Godhead, the spirit manifested in Nature appears in a sea of infinite quality, Ananta-guna . But the executive or mechanical Prakriti is of the threefold guna, sattwa, rajas, tamas, and the Ananta-guna , the spiritual play of infinite quality, modifies itself in this mechanical nature into the type of these three gunas . And in the soul-force in man this Godhead in Nature represents itself as a fourfold effective Power, catur-vyuha, a Power for knowledge, a Power for strength, a Power for mutuality and active and productive relation and interchange, a Power for works and labour and service, and its presence casts all human life into a nexus and inner and outer operation of these four things. The ancient thought of India conscious of this fourfold type of active human personality and nature built out of it the four types of the Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, each with its spiritual turn, ethical ideal, suitable upbringing, fixed function in society and place in the evolutionary scale of the spirit. As always tends to be the case when we too much externalise and mechanise the more subtle truths of our nature, this became a hard and fast system inconsistent with the freedom and variability and complexity of the finer developing spirit in man. Nevertheless the truth behind it exists and is one of some considerable importance in the perfection of our power of nature; but we have to take it in its inner aspects, first, personality, character, temperament, soul-type, then the soul-force which lies behind them and wears these forms, and lastly the play of the free spiritual Shakti in which they find their culmination and unity beyond all modes . For the crude external idea that a man is born as a Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya or Shudra and that alone, is not a psychological truth of our being. The psychological fact is that there are these four active powers and tendencies of the Spirit and its executive Shakti within us and the predominance of one or the other in the more well-formed part of our personality gives us our main tendencies, dominant qualities and capacities, effective turn in action and life. But they are more or less present in all men, here manifest, there latent, here developed, there subdued and depressed or subordinate, and in the perfect man will be raised up to a fullness and harmony which in the spiritual freedom will burst out into the free play of the infinite quality of the spirit in the inner and outer life and in the self-enjoying creative play of the Purusha with his and the world’s Nature-Power." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-742-743, "None of these four types of personality can be complete even in its own field if it does not bring into it something of the other qualities. The man of knowledge cannot serve Truth with freedom and perfection, if he has not intellectual and moral courage, will, audacity, the strength to open and conquer new kingdoms, otherwise he becomes a slave of the limited intellect or a servant or at most a ritual priest of only an established knowledge, (That perhaps is why it was the Kshatriya bringing his courage, audacity, spirit of conquest into the fields of intuitive knowledge and spiritual experience who first discovered the great truths of Vedanta .) — cannot use his knowledge to the best advantage unless he has the adaptive skill to work out its truths for the practice of life, otherwise he lives only in the idea, — cannot make the entire consecration of his knowledge unless he has the spirit of service to humanity, to the Godhead in man and the Master of his being. The man of power must illumine and uplift and govern his force and strength by knowledge, light of reason or religion or the spirit, otherwise he becomes the mere forceful Asura, — must have the skill which will help him best to use and administer and regulate his strength and make it creative and fruitful and adapted to his relations with others, otherwise it becomes a mere drive of force across the field of life, a storm that passes and devastates more than it constructs, — must be capable too of obedience and make the use of his strength a service to God and the world, otherwise he becomes a selfish dominator, tyrant, brutal compeller of men’s souls and bodies. The man of productive mind and work must have an open inquiring mind and ideas and knowledge, otherwise he moves in the routine of his functions without expansive growth, must have courage and enterprise, must bring a spirit of service into his getting and production, in order that he may not only get but give, not only amass and enjoy his own life, but consciously help the fruitfulness and fullness of the surrounding life by which he profits. The man of labour and service becomes a helpless drudge and slave of society if he does not bring knowledge and honour and aspiration and skill into his work, since only so can he rise by an opening mind and will and understanding usefulness to the higher dharmas. But the greater perfection of man comes when he enlarges himself to include all these powers, even though one of them may lead the others, and opens his nature more and more into the rounded fullness and universal capacity of the fourfold spirit. Man is not cut out into an exclusive type of one of these dharmas , but all these powers are in him at work at first in an ill- formed confusion, but he gives shape to one or another in birth after birth, progresses from one to the other even in the same life and goes on towards the total development of his inner existence. Our life itself is at once an inquiry after truth and knowledge, a struggle and battle of our will with ourselves and surrounding forces, a constant production, adaptation, application of skill to the material of life and a sacrifice and service. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-748-749, " The Yoga of self-perfection brings out this soul-force and gives it its largest scope, takes up all the fourfold powers and throws them into the free circle of an integral and harmonious spiritual dynamis. The godhead, the soul-power of knowledge rises to the highest degree of which the individual nature can be the supporting basis. A free mind of light develops which is open to every kind of revelation, inspiration, intuition, idea, discrimination, thinking synthesis; an enlightened life of the mind grasps at all knowledge with a delight of finding and reception and holding, a spiritual enthusiasm, passion, or ecstasy; a power of light full of spiritual force, illumination and purity of working manifests its empire, brahma-tejas, brahma-varcas; a bottomless steadiness and illimitable calm upholds all the illumination, movement, action as on some rock of ages, equal, unperturbed, unmoved, acyuta ... The godhead, the soul-power of will and strength rises to a like largeness and altitude. An absolute calm fearlessness of the free spirit, an infinite dynamic courage which no peril, limitation of possibility, wall of opposing force can deter from pursuing the work or aspiration imposed by the spirit, a high nobility of soul and will untouched by any littleness or baseness and moving with a certain greatness of step to spiritual victory or the success of the God-given work through whatever temporary defeat or obstacle, a spirit never depressed or cast down from faith and confidence in the power that works in the being, are the signs of this perfection. There comes too to fulfilment a large godhead, a soul-power of mutuality , a free self-spending and spending of gift and possession in the work to be done, lavished for the production, the creation, the achievement, the possession, gain, utilisable return, a skill that observes the law and adapts the relation and keeps the measure, a great taking into oneself from all beings and a free giving out of oneself to all, a divine commerce, a large enjoyment of the mutual delight of life. And finally there comes to perfection the godhead, the soul-power of service, the universal love that lavishes itself without demand of return, the embrace that takes to itself the body of God in man and works for help and service, the abnegation that is ready to bear the yoke of the Master and make the life a free servitude to Him and under his direction to the claim and need of his creatures, the self-surrender of the whole being to the Master of our being and his work in the world. These things unite, assist and enter into each other, become one. The full consummation comes in the greatest souls most capable of perfection, but some large manifestation of this fourfold soul-power must be sought and can be attained by all who practise the integral Yoga. " CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-750-751 An integral Sadhak will learn four lessons from the Gita . (1) He learns to know extensively the nature and imperfection of the three Gunas and how to go beyond them by increasing Sattwic Nature. In integral Yoga, the sattwic nature is replaced with Equality and Psychic Consciousness. (2) Perfection of fourfold Soul-forces, chaturvarna , and fourfold Spiritual forces, chatwaro manabostatha and their integration and reconciliation. (3) The power of consecration has to be intensified through self-control. Self-control has to be practiced through a purified intellect. With the opening of the Psychic and Spiritual being, this self-control becomes rigorous and with the opening of the Supramental Self, self-control becomes absolute. Thus, one goes beyond the limitation of all distinctive dharmas, sarvadharman parityajya (The Gita-18.66) and surrender becomes comprehensive and he experiences comprehensive Divine union, samagram mam. ( The Gita-7.1) (4) In integral Yoga, the double escape, (1) escape from the problem of life and (2) escape from universal Divine action, are renounced and in the Gita, one Soul takes refuge in the supreme abode of param dham through these double escapes, which is known as Moksha . The Gita's negative sense of liberation, Mukti , is to become desireless, egoless, beyond the dualities, dwandatita , and beyond the three Gunas , nistreigunya. This is complemented in integral Yoga with a positive sense of freedom which is to be '(1) universal in Soul, (2) transcendentally one in spirit with God and (3) possession of the highest Divine Nature.' (CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-674-675) This is Integral Yoga's Mokshya or Integral Liberation. Download this WEB PAGE as a PDF file: The Bhagavad Gita - Yoga Sadhana Camp Discussion 28 July - 31 July 2025 Audio Recording 28 July 2025 Audio Recording 29 July 2025 Audio Recording 30 July 2025 Audio Recording 31 July 2025 “My yoga begun in 1904 had always been personal and apart; those around me knew I was a sadhak but they knew little more as I kept all that went on in me to myself. It was only after my release that for the first time I spoke at Uttarpara publicly about my spiritual experiences. Until I went to Pondicherry I took no disciples; with those who accompanied me or joined me in Pondicherry I had at first the relation of friends and companions rather than of a guru and disciples; it was on the ground of politics that I had come to know them and not on the spiritual ground. Afterwards only there was a gradual development of spiritual relations until the Mother came back from Japan and the Ashram was founded or rather founded itself in 1926. I began my yoga in 1904 without a guru ; in 1908 I received important help from a Mahratta yogi and discovered the foundations of my sadhana; but from that time till the Mother came to India I received no spiritual help from anyone else. My sadhana before and afterwards was not founded upon books but upon personal experiences that crowded on me from within. But in the jail I had the Gita and the Upanishads with me, practised the yoga of the Gita and meditated with the help of the Upanishads ; these were the only books from which I found guidance; the Veda which I first began to read long afterwards in Pondicherry rather confirmed what experiences I already had than was any guide to my sadhana. I sometimes turned to the Gita for light when there was a question or a difficulty and usually received help or an answer from it, but there were no such happenings in connection with the Gita as are narrated in the book. It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence, but this had nothing to do with the alleged circumstances narrated in the book, circumstances that never took place, nor had it anything to do with the Gita . The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-36/Autobiographical Notes-98-99

" “The Mother of all godheads and all strengths Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme. ” Savitri-313 The Mother Handbook "The boon that we have asked from the Supreme is the greatest that the Earth can ask from the Highest, the change that is most difficult to realise, the most exacting in its conditions. It is nothing less than the descent of the supreme Truth and Power into Matter , the supramental established in the material plane and consciousness and the material world and an integral transformation down to the very principle of Matter. Only a supreme Grace can effect this miracle. The supreme Power has descended into the most material consciousness but it has stood there behind the density of the physical veil, demanding before manifestation, before its great open workings can begin, that the conditions of the supreme Grace shall be there, real and effective. (1) A total surrender, (2) an exclusive self-opening to the divine influence, (3) a constant and integral choice of the Truth and (4) rejection of the falsehood, these are the only conditions made (for activation of Supreme Grace). But these must be fulfilled entirely, without reserve, without any evasion or presence, simply and sincerely down to the most physical consciousness and its workings." The Mother The Mother's Agenda/February 21, 1963, "There has never been here any real surrender, any giving up of yourself freely and simply into the hands of the Divine Mother. And yet that is the only way to succeed in the supramental Yoga. To be a Yogi, a Sannyasi, a Tapaswi is not the object here. The object is transformation, and the transformation can only be done by a force infinitely greater than your own ; it can only be done by being truly like a child in the hands of the Divine Mother.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-32/The Mother with Letters on The Mother/p-143 The Mother book gives the message of the second Divine Call of Jivatma's union with Paraprakriti and attainment of Cosmic Consciousness. It aims at the possession of the tantric objective of dynamic Divine Shakti with the help of the Vedantic method. The Vedantic self-disciplines of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga have been restated here in new terms and combinations of fivefold methods: aspiration, rejection, surrender, faith and sincerity. The first three are utilised to enter union with the static Divine and the last three are meant to experience dynamic Divine union. And consecration is divided into two types, that of Purusha Yajna and Prakriti Yajna . Faith is also divided into two parts that of ascending faith and descending faith or the faith that helps in the ascent of the Soul and the faith that prolongs the descent of Shakti . The first chapter of The Mother book gives importance to discernment of truth from falsehood and acceptance of the former by the rejection of the latter is the starting point of all Yoga. The second chapter gives importance to the psycho-spiritual Vedantic method to enter partial static and dynamic union with the Divine. The third chapter insists on the integration of this Divine union through faith, sincerity and surrender. The fourth chapter stresses the acceptance and utilisation of the Money power for the Divine Work by individuals having control over the lower Nature. The fifth chapter hints at the essence of Karma Yoga and the attainment of dynamic oneness with the Divine Mother. The sixth chapter develops direct contact with the four mediatrix Spiritual Mother Powers after opening of the Spiritual Being above the head, which are given utmost importance and identified as an extension of the Yoga of Self-perfection hinted in The Synthesis of Yoga . This mediatrix Impersonal Nameless Spiritual Mother is hinted in Savitri as: (Supreme Lord said to Savitri) "Abandoning the dubious middle Way, A few shall glimpse the miraculous Origin And some shall feel in you the secret Force And they shall turn to meet a nameless tread , Adventurers into a mightier Day." Savitri-704 There are four aspects or "sides" of the universal Mother: Maheshwari (the supreme Mother), Mahakali (the warrior aspect and the aspect of love), Mahalakshmi (the aspect of harmony and beauty), and Mahasaraswati (perfection in the arts and in work). This is also the supreme mystery; the Gita has hinted as four powers of Manu , ‘chatvaro manabastatha’ (The Gita-10.6) but never developed. These four Mediatrix Spiritual Mother Powers also complement the four Psychic Mother Powers, hinted in the Gita as chaturvarna . (The Gita-4.13) In each birth, we accumulate the Soul forces of Brahma Shakti, Kshetra Shakti, Vaisya Shakti and Shudra Shakti and in this birth, we can reconcile them for Supreme consummation. The reconciliation of the four Spiritual Mother Powers of Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, and Mahasaraswati paves the way for the Yoga of Self-perfection and the extension of Supramental/Bliss action. The method of self-discipline proposed by The Mother book is simple, where purified intellect is utilised for ceaseless aspiration, ceaseless renunciation of lower Nature and ceaseless practice of consecration to experience Divine union in waking trance. Its objective of complete possession of Divine Shakti in individual life is difficult to realise. There are still many missing links and gulfs that will connect the static and dynamic Brahman and the movement of Consciousness between the Psychic being and the Spiritual Being. It proposes to initiate the transformation of Nature with the aid of Purusha Yajna and intensify this action by a more powerful Prakriti Yajna . Faith, sraddha , is identified as the central Truth of The Mother book, which reinforces the contact between static and dynamic Divine. OM TAT SAT “I am not eager to be the Guru of anyone. It is more spontaneously natural for me to feel the Mother of all and to carry them forward silently through the power of love.” The Mother The Mother’s Centenary Works/Vol-13/p-82, The personality of Mediatrix Spiritual Mother, or universal Mother, developed in The Mother book is also hinted and developed in Savitri. " The great World-Mother now in her arose: A living choice reversed fate’s cold dead turn, Affirmed the spirit’s tread on Circumstance, Pressed back the senseless dire revolving Wheel And stopped the mute march of Necessity." Savitri-21 " The great World-Mother by her sacrifice Has made her soul the body of our state; Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness Divinity’s lapse from its own splendours wove The many-patterned ground of all we are. An idol of self is our mortality." Savitri-99 " I felt a covert touch, I heard a call, But could not clasp the body of my God Or hold between my hands the World-Mother’s feet ... But thou hast come and all will surely change: I shall feel the World-Mother in thy golden limbs And hear her wisdom in thy sacred voice." Savitri-405-406 " Casting aside its veil of Ignorance, Allied to gods and cosmic beings and powers It built the harmony of its human state; Surrendered into the great World-Mother’s hands Only she obeyed her sole supreme behest In the enigma of the Inconscient’s world." Savitri-530 In The Mother book, out of four Mother Powers, that of Yogic Power, Consciousness Power, Truth Power and Virgin Power, the Truth Power is manifested. We get the hint of this Truth Power in Savitri : (Supreme Lord said to Savitri:) "O Savitri, thou art my spirit’s Power, The revealing voice of my immortal Word, The face of Truth upon the roads of Time Pointing to the souls of men the routes to God." Savitri-703 (Death God said to Savitri) "Who then art thou hiding in human guise? Thy voice carries the sound of infinity, Knowledge is with thee, Truth speaks through thy words; The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes." Savitri-663 (Savitri spoke about herself) "Once my heart chose and chooses not again. The word I have spoken can never be erased, It is written in the record book of God. The truth once uttered, from the earth’s air effaced, By mind forgotten, sounds immortally For ever in the memory of Time. Once the dice fall thrown by the hand of Fate In an eternal moment of the gods. My heart has sealed its troth to Satyavan: Its signature adverse Fate cannot efface, Its seal not Fate nor Death nor Time dissolve." Savitri-432 (Narad said to Savitri) "He cried to her, “Who is this that comes, the bride, The flame-born, and round her illumined head Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps... Moon-bright thou livest in thy inner bliss. Thou comest like a silver deer through groves Of coral flowers and buds of glowing dreams, Or fleest like a wind-goddess through leaves, Or roamst, O ruby-eyed and snow-winged dove, Flitting through thickets of thy pure desires In the unwounded beauty of thy soul. These things are only images to thy earth, But truest truth of that which in thee sleeps. For such is thy spirit, a sister of the gods, Thy earthly body lovely to the eyes And thou art kin in joy to heaven’s sons." Savitri-418-420 (Satyavan said to Savitri) "I looked upon the world and missed the Self, And when I found the Self, I lost the world, My other selves I lost and the body of God, The link of the finite with the Infinite, The bridge between the appearance and the Truth, The mystic aim for which the world was made, The human sense of Immortality. But now the gold link comes to me with thy feet And His gold sun has shone on me from thy face." Savitri-407-408 (King Aswapati said to Savitri) "For somewhere on the longing breast of earth, Thy unknown lover waits for thee the unknown. Thy soul has strength and needs no other guide Than One who burns within thy bosom’s powers. There shall draw near to meet thy approaching steps The second self for whom thy nature asks, He who shall walk until thy body’s end A close-bound traveller pacing with thy pace, The lyrist of thy soul’s most intimate chords Who shall give voice to what in thee is mute.... One force shall be your mover and your guide, One light shall be around you and within; Hand in strong hand confront Heaven’s question, life:" Savitri-374-375 (Narad said about the nature of Satyavan) "Delightful is the soul of Satyavan,.... His eyes keep a memory from a world of bliss.... His speech carries a light of inner truth, And a large-eyed communion with the Power In common things has made veilless his mind, A seer in earth-shapes of garbless deity." Savitri-430 (Nature of Young Savitri) "A scout of victory in a vigil tower, Her aspiration called high destiny down; A silent warrior paced in her city of strength Inviolate, guarding Truth’s diamond throne." Savitri-358 (Supreme Mother said to King Aswapati) "Awake not the immeasurable descent, Speak not my secret name to hostile Time; Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight. Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth." Savitri-335 The Supreme Word of The Mother : The Power of Consecration has to replace the power of Tapasya and The Mother’s power alone can rend the lid between the higher and lower Hemisphere and bring down into the world of Ignorance, Falsehood, Suffering and Death the unending Light, Truth, Immortal’s Ananda and the Life Divine. The Supreme Method of The Mother : For the transformation of Nature, Prakriti Yajna or Vedic sacrifice (holocaust of Prakriti , sacrifice of the Divine Mother) is considered more powerful than Purusha Yajna or Vedantic sacrifice. Both methods are to be combined for effective transformation though for beginners of sadhana , Vedantic sacrifice is considered indispensable. So The Mother book proposes a safe and secured Vedantic method of self-discipline in order to arrive at the Tantric/Vedic aim. The Supreme Siddhi or Perfection of The Mother : The highest Supramental Force permeates from above the head from Spiritual, Supramental and Bliss Self, within from Psychic, true Mental, true Vital and true Psysical Being, below the feet by the opening of Subconscient and Inconscient Selves, and all around by opening of universal Self and awake in the body the Supreme Love, Beauty and Ananda . Or "It (dynamic Spirit) is within, below, without, above." (Savitri-98) The Supreme Grace of The Mother : The Divine Grace will act when either of the four conditions below is satisfied. The Supreme Divine Grace will intensify only when the four conditions are simultaneously satisfied in Integral Concentration of (1) total and sincere surrender, (2) exclusive self-opening to the Divine Power, (3) constant and integral choice of descending overhea Truth and (4) constant and integral rejection of falsehood of mind, vital, body, surrounding world and Subconscient plane. Download this WEB PAGE as a PDF file: The Practice of Integral Yoga through The Mother Handbook I The Handbook II of The Mother The Central Truth of The Mother “I have quite the feeling that I myself ‘do’ nothing at all, absolutely nothing. The only thing I do is this (gesture of offering upwards), constantly this, in everything – in thoughts, feelings, sensations, in the body’s cells, all the time: ‘You, You, You. It’s You, it’s You, it’s You ...’ That’s all. And nothing else. (Her life the altar, herself the sacrifice. Savitri-473) … In other words, a more and more complete, a more and more integral assent, more and more like this (gesture of letting herself be carried). That’s when you have the feeling that you must be ABSOLUTELY like a child… If you start thinking, ‘Oh, I want to be like this! Oh, I ought to be like that!’ you waste your time.” The Mother The Mother’s Agenda/ November 12, 1960 “During the whole time Sri Aurobindo was here, the four entities he speaks of, the four aspects of The Mother , were always present. And I was constantly obliged to tell one or other of them, “Now keep calm, now, now, calm down”—they were always inclined to intervene!” The Mother The Mother's Agenda/27th June 1962 “Answer that there are many paths of Yoga, — Sri Aurobindo’s is one which is very difficult and exacting and he does not care to accept anyone into it unless he is satisfied that he has a special call and is capable of following the path. No one is admitted to the Asram as a member in the indefinite and conditional way he suggests. It is no use taking up Yoga without knowing what it is. If he wants to read books on the subject, he can read the Essays on the Gita and The Mother . They will not give him a complete idea of this path and its conditions and objects, but they should at least give him some notion of what Yoga is and of the spirit of this Yoga” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and His Ashram/p-569 “Once in the early part of my life (Priti Dasgupta) in the Ashram , the Mother told me while giving flower: “Every morning, read a little bit of Sri Aurobindo’s book, The Mother . Just as in India people read the Gita in the morning. You make the same kind of inner progress by re ading The Mother as you do by reading the Gita . Read it regularly every morning.” The Mother Moments Eternal/ Priti Dasgupta

"One force shall be your mover and your guide, One light shall be around you and within; Hand in strong hand confront Heaven’s question, life:" Savitri-374-375 The Main Frame of Integral Yoga “All Yoga proceeds in its method by three principles of practice ; first, purification , that is to say, the removal of all aberrations, disorders, obstructions brought about by the mixed and irregular action of the energy of being in our physical, moral and mental system; secondly, concentration, that is to say, the bringing to its full intensity and the mastered and self-directed employment of that energy of being in us for a definite end; thirdly, liberation , that is to say, the release of our being from the narrow and painful knots of the individualised energy in a false and limited play, which at present are the law of our nature. The enjoyment of our liberated being which brings us into unity or union with the Supreme, is the consummation ; it is that for which Yoga is done. Three indispensable steps and the high, open and infinite levels to which they mount …”¹³ Sri Aurobindo “(1) The human soul’s individual liberation and enjoyment of union with the Divine in spiritual being, consciousness and delight must always be the first object of the Yoga; (2) its free enjoyment of the cosmic unity of the Divine becomes a second object; (3) but out of that a third appears, the effectuation of the meaning of the divine unity with all beings by a sympathy and participation in the spiritual purpose of the Divine in humanity. The individual Yoga then turns from its separateness and becomes a part of the collective Yoga of the divine Nature in the human race. The liberated individual being, united with the Divine in self (Psychic being) and spirit (Spiritual being), becomes in his natural being a self-perfecting instrument for the perfect outflowering of the Divine in humanity.”⁵ Sri Aurobindo The Main Frame of Integral Yoga Integral Yoga consistently follows the Vedic and the Vedantic arrangements of Divinisation of Becoming and Being, consisting of certain broad facts and principles which define its main framework. These are identified as simplest and most philosophical for the beginners from the point of view of the utility of its various planes of Consciousness. It consists of the triune ordinary principles of mind, life and matter and triune Spiritual principles of Sachchidananda (Sat - Existence, Chit-Tapas -Consciousness, Ananda -Bliss) and the link principle of Vijnana , the Supermind, through these septuple stairs the developing Being can enter the Vedantic sacrifice and developing Nature can enter the Vedic sacrifice and rise to the perfection of Soul and Nature. The Main Frame provides the architecture and structure of Integral Yoga. So, one can be aware of 11x3=33 faculties which require our prior attention. 1) The Three Basic Requisites¹¹ of integral Yoga: In the long and difficult path there must be unshakable patience, whose importance is felt in the three successive stages of integral development; firstly the ardours of the heart and the violence of the eager will that seeks to take the kingdom of heaven by storm can have miserable consequences; the sadhaka should not be in haste to acquire peace, purity, liberation, perfection and Supramental consciousness, need not feel discouraged over the failure in arriving at the immediate aim; need not feel discontent and impatience which will attract all kinds of misfortune and depression. Any search for shortcut or escape from our impediments may draw away the seeker towards the lure of practice of strenuous methods on large scale that are declared glittering substitutes in integral Yoga; secondly, the sadhaka has to go through a prolonged, often tedious and painful period of preparation and purification and wait with full faith till it is ready for the birth and growth of Spiritual faculties, enlarge its understanding of Spiritual experience in order to admit instrumental change. Humanity has first to understand this apparent phenomena of existence through the intellect; for until its mentality is sufficiently developed, purified, silenced and illumined, Spiritual knowledge is not really possible, and in proportion as these attributes are developed, the possibilities of Spiritual knowledge become richer and fuller and the hope of generalisation of Spiritual and Supramental force as the sole transformative force of humanity gets nearer; thirdly even after the Spiritual faculties are gained, it will still be long before all the movements of our conflicting members and elements of our personality consent to bear the difficult and exacting process of transformation; the transformation of the egoistic will in our vital being, desire soul and desire nature are far more difficult than other. Physical mind lives in moments, so is the creator of impatience because it cannot wait for the God’s eternity who works out the distorting Maya through wisdom which went forth since the beginning of creation. The hardest work is to force conversion of the inferior dark universal forces attached to present unstable creation and the most difficult transformation of all is to get rid of the central egoism and even the ego sense of the worker, which can eradicate the very origin of desire. So in this path of sadhana, those who aspire intensely and know how to wait patiently put time at their side. So if one were blissfully content within then things follow their harmonious course. To call down Timeless eternity into succession of moments is the right use of Time and development of endless patience. Secondly, absolute courage as opposed to fear, is indispensable in the three successive stages of sadhana ; firstly the Sadhaka will have to discover the Divine in varying intensities either by courageous adventure of his own consciousness by tearing the constant movement in a circle of routine or like a pilgrim Soul he will follow and reach the highway of his known destination; secondly, having found the Transcendent, he can return upon the universe like a pathfinder hewing his way through a virgin forest; in this search he must even accompany many miles of mind, life and body’s unregenerate activities and expose them towards the transforming light; it is a dreadful and gigantic fight against all the laws of nature, collective suggestions and earthly habits; thirdly it is further a journey into the Inconscient pit which is the home of dark forces, without glorious results, without experiences filling with ecstasy or joy; it is like a desert strewn with every conceivable trap and obstacle. Absolute fearlessness is required, because at every step, at every second one has to wage a war against everything that is established in the physical and vital mind. This exercise is essential for the root solution of the problems of existence. Thirdly, integral Yoga demands a fivefold faith which has to be developed from the very beginning of this Yoga; they are:-- (i) ‘Faith in the God and his Shakti , (ii) faith in the presence and power of the Divine in us and the world, (iii) a faith that all in the world is the working of one divine Shakti, (iv) that all the steps of the Yoga, its strivings and sufferings and failures as well as its successes and satisfactions and victories are utilities and necessities of her workings and (v) that by firm and strong dependence on and a total self-surrender to the Divine and to his Shakti in us we can attain to oneness and freedom and victory and perfection.’¹ If the inward Soul has received the Divine’s call and one has walked long and steadily in the path then the sraddha will remain firm under fiercest adverse pressure and carry one ahead in spite of worst stumbling and through the most prolonged failure. 2) The Three Basic Inward Concentrations¹² of integral Yoga: Firstly, in this concentration the discursive mind must be accustomed to a settled unwavering pursuit of a single connected thought of one thing in itself, grasp Spiritually that one object worthy of seeking and one subject worthy of knowledge and that is identified as to become the pure and absolute Being. This concentration must be practised undistracted of all lures and alien calls and become That which is above all things and all Divine attributes. Secondly, in this process thought ceases and one climbs into an absorbed contemplation , ecstatic meditation, inner Samadhi and in meditation’s deep room the Spirit’s firm truth can be called down into the lower untransformed nature to cast the light, power and bliss of the higher planes on the ordinary consciousness. ‘On meditation’s mounting edge of trance,’²⁶ great stairs of thought leaped up to unattainable heights and there Time stretches to Eternity and Nature unites with Spirit’s Absolute. Thirdly, in this process the mind is stilled either by standing back from all mental action, witness, sakhi, or by rejecting the thought suggestions and holding firmly to the peace of the being. When the absolute quiet, great calm and peace are settled, one experiences the all-pervading silent Brahman and the knowledge of the Divine take possession on all the planes of Consciousness. 3) The Three Central Secrets¹⁰ of integral Yoga: The highest mystery of absolute surrender to the Divine and His Shakti is the first central secret of Vedantic teachings and Integral Yoga. The Gita indicated that the All-Father created these people with sacrifice as their companion and acceptance of this law of sacrifice, this sacrifice of the Purusha submitting itself to the Force and Matter is a practical recognition of ego towards the descent of a saving Divine power to gradually correct and eliminate the errors of an egoistic and self-divided creation and illuminate them. Even if the practice of this consecration is begun without devotion, it leads straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible, the completest adoration imaginable and the most profound God-love. There are three stages through which this self consecration will be effective; firstly, it is the period of self-preparation, personal effort of entire consecration of all that we are, think, feel and do and its turn must culminate in an integral self-giving to the Highest by constant rejection of all that is not the true truth; secondly, during this transition there will supervene an increasing purified and vigilant passivity, the growing inrush of a great and conscious miraculous working of Divine Force from above, but not any other; and lastly all effort, method and fixed sadhana are transcended by simple, natural, spontaneous, powerful and happy disclosing of the Divine. The second central secret of integral Yoga is the demand of constant inward and outward remembrance of the one central liberating knowledge that (a) the Divine is in all things and beings, (b) all are in the Divine and (c) all are made up of the stuff of the Divine and there is nothing else in the universe. This thought, faith, memory and a self-dynamising meditation become the whole substance of the Consciousness of a Sadhaka and it will turn into a profound and uninterrupted vision and a vivid and all-embracing Consciousness. In these three terms the highest relation of the Soul to existence through the Purusha’s possession of Prakriti is established substituting the false relation created by the limiting ego through Purusha’s subjection to Prakriti. This is the new vision, sense of infinite being and foundation of unity that we have to acquire and establish. The third central secret of integral Yoga will be that the Sadhaka will renounce all the inner supports of egoism along with its seed and influence. Ego sense is active in the world-play and falsifies the truth of things. He has first to seize on the egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right; once turned he has to educate them to recognise, accept and follow that. His ego will be annulled by realising three things simultaneously that when inwardly the individualised consciousness of the Jiva rises to live in the truth and possess the One and outwardly he becomes a slave of Divine revealed in all mankind and disciple of the Master who is the source, energy and dynamism of all his action. To rise beyond the desire of personal salvation is necessary for the complete rejection of this basis of ego. ‘If we seek the Divine, it should be for the sake of the Divine and for nothing else, because that is the supreme call of our being, the deepest truth of the Spirit.’²³ All must be directed towards the Divine. Nothing must be attempted for our family, friends, country and mankind because they are connected with our personal life, thought and sentiment ‘or ego takes a preferential interest in their welfare.’²⁴ Thus all life and works becomes an adoration, service and daily dynamic worship to the Divine who dwells in all. A divine Force substitutes the ego and will choose at each moment what has to be done and what has not to be done, what has to be momentarily or permanently taken up and abandoned, that Force is alone sufficient and competent to lead us towards the ultimate goal through the arduous, difficult and dangerous path of integral Yoga. 4) The Three Central Dynamic Processes⁹ of integral Yoga: The first central dynamic process is the emergence of true Psychic being as the leader of the sacrifice brings with it the full power of the Spirit in the action. At a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently quieted, clear, passive and pure by renunciation of mental activities, when the vital has been steadied and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own rash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been sufficiently altered not to bury altogether the inner flame under the mass of its outwardness, obscurity or inertia, an inmost being, long hidden within and felt only in its rare influences, is able to come forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead of the Sadhana. Its character is a one-pointed orientation towards the Divine or the Highest, one-pointed and yet plastic in action and movement; it does not create a rigidity of direction like the one-pointed intellect or a bigotry of the regnant idea or impulse like the one-pointed vital force; it is at every moment and with a supple sureness that it points the way to the Truth, automatically distinguishes the right step from the false, extricates the Divine or Godward movement from the clinging mixture of the undivine. It alone can assure the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol, catches, exposes, repels the mind’s and the life’s falsehoods, seizes, hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind’s ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life force. The second central dynamic process is the sublimation of exclusive enjoyment of human love into an all-inclusive Divine Love. The widest love is fulfilled in knowledge that sees the world and all creatures as the being of the Beloved. And since love is the effective power and Soul-symbol of bliss-oneness, one will approach and enter into this oneness by the gate of universal Love, a heightening of human love at first, afterwards a Spirit of Divine Love can enter, the hardness of the way diminishes, the tension is lightened, there is a sweetness and joy even in the core of difficulty and struggle. It is this Divine Love, the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces, poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in terrestrial Nature. He will be one in Bliss-consciousness with all the world-play and its powers and happenings and there will be banished forever the sorrow and fear, the hunger and pain of our poor and darkened mental and vital and physical existence. He will get the power of the Bliss-freedom in which all the conflicting principles of our being shall be unified in their absolute values. All evil shall perforce change itself into good; the universal beauty of the All-Beautiful will take possession of its fallen kingdoms; every darkness will be converted into a pregnant glory of Light and discords which the mind creates between Truth and Good and Beauty, Power and Love and Knowledge will disappear on the Eternal summit, in the Infinite extensions where they are always one. Human nature has been unable to bear the pressure of Divine Love in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the Divine energies that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. A little of it seized in an impure vessel has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism. For this reason Divine Love has been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive and the least creative. The third central dynamic process is to Spiritualise his being by the power of the Soul in mind opening itself directly to a Spiritual force and being above the head and to invert that higher force so possessed and brought into action the whole of his nature. All Psychic experience gets its stability through repetition of its corresponding experiences in the Spiritual plane and receives completeness and absoluteness by similar repetition of experience in the Supramental plane. We have to Spiritualise the Psychic being in its entirety by a descent of a Divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, Freedom and Wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the personal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into the Cosmic Consciousness, realise the Self, and acquire a Spiritualised and Universalised mind and heart, life-force, physical consciousness. Then only the passage into Supramental Consciousness begins to become possible, and even then, there is a difficult ascent to make each stage of which is a separate arduous achievement. 5) The Three Central Methods⁸ of integral Yoga: The methods of integral Yoga are dynamised after the dynamisation of its processes. The first central method of higher Divine force working in the lower nature does not act according to a fixed routine system but a sort of free, scattered and gradually intensive, purposeful, scientific and synthetic Yoga with some broad lines of working common to all, determined by the temperament of the individual Sadhaka and the helpful materials his nature offers and the obstacle it presents to purification and perfection. Therefore each Sadhaka in this path has his own method of Yoga. The second central method is the integral process which accepts our nature as organised by our past evolution without rejecting any untransformed nature and compels all to undergo Divine transformation. In this ever-progressive experience the Sadhaka will know how this lower manifestation is constituted and how they are deformed or more or less distorted from the element of action in the harmony of the Divine Nature. He will understand how the Divine force will change individual human nature like a smith who forges the crude material in his smithy. The third central method is that the Divine power will use all life as means of world transformation in cosmic Consciousness . Every experience of outer contact with the world-environment, the most trifling and repellent suffering or most humiliating Spiritual fall are accepted as a step on the path of perfection. The God’s method in the world is the same in the lower and higher Nature; only it works tardily and obscurely in the former and works swiftly and consciously in the latter. All life is a Yoga of Nature capable of self-awareness, seeking to manifest God within and without. 6) The Three Central Vedantic Principles of integral Yoga: Firstly, an individual is considered fit to pursue Integral Karma Yoga if he has no distinction of work in terms of high and low and loves all work equally. The success of Integral Karma Yoga can come when each karmi is able to discover in the smallest work, the God’s vast intention and is able to turn all work as means of God union and all work is initiated not by desire but by the Divine Will through intense experience of Divine union and he can arrive at the highest perfection, siddhi, of Karmayoga, which is Sadharmya mukti, complete and final liberation and transformation of whole nature. Secondly, an individual seeker can be considered fit to pursue Integral Jnana Yoga if he has developed the capacity to live in isolation or seclusion for an indefinite period without attachment to action and thought. The success of Integral Jnana Yoga can come when each Jnani , will be able to turn and transform all mundane knowledge into God Knowledge and discover his utter Oneness with the existence and he can arrive at the highest perfection, siddhi, of Jnanayoga, which is Sayujya Mukti , the identification of the individual being in all its parts with the Supreme. Thirdly, an individual seeker can be considered fit to pursue Integral Bhakti Yoga if his adoration of the Creator does not exclude His creation or if his love, adoration and seeking of the Divine becomes equal and all-embracing in all deities, creatures and objects. The success of Integral Bhakti Yoga can come when each Bhakta is able to turn all human emotions God-ward and is able to see, identify and realise the one Divine integrally in all godheads, men, creatures and objects and in all His names and forms and qualities. He can attain the highest perfection, siddhi, of Bhaktiyoga, which is Salokya-Mukti; the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine. 7) The Three Central Vedic Principles of integral Yoga: The first Vedic principle is identified as Hathayoga. The aim of Hathayoga is ‘to give to the soul in the physical body (Annamaya Purusha) the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales of spiritual experience…’¹⁴ in order to develop subtle and causal body. Integral Yoga can partially utilise the Hathayoga for the initial perfection of the body through simple Asana and final perfection of body through simple Pranayama . ‘The ordinary method is the opening up of the cakras by the physical processes of Hathayoga (of which something is also included in the Rajayoga) or by the methods of the Tantric discipline. But while these may be optionally used at certain stages by the integral Yoga, they are not indispensable; for here (in integral Yoga) the reliance is on the power of the higher being to change the lower existence, a working is chosen mainly from above downward and not the opposite way, and therefore the development of the superior power of the gnosis will be awaited as the instrumentative change in this part of the Yoga.’¹⁵ The disadvantage of Hathayoga is that it arrives at the Supreme by 'long, difficult and meticulous movement,'¹³ and the body demands a 'great and absorbing... attention.'¹³ The Second Vedic principle is identified as Rajayoga . The Rajayoga ‘aims at the liberation and perfection not of the bodily, but of the mental being, the control of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness.”¹⁶ “The preliminary movement of Rajayoga is a careful self-discipline by which good habits of mind are substituted for the lawless movements that indulge the lower nervous being. By the practice of truth, by renunciation of all forms of egoistic seeking, by abstention from injury to others, by purity, by constant meditation and inclination to the divine Purusha who is the true lord of the mental kingdom, a pure, glad, clear state of mind and heart is established. This is the first step only. Afterwards, the ordinary activities of the mind and sense must be entirely quieted in order that the soul may be free to ascend to higher states of consciousness and acquire the foundation for a perfect freedom and self-mastery.’¹⁶ Thus a Rajayogi attains the state of Samadhi . ‘For the ancient system of Rajayoga aimed not only at Swarajya , self-rule or subjective empire, the entire control by the subjective consciousness of all the states and activities proper to its own domain, but included Samrajya as well, outward empire, the control by the subjective consciousness of its outer activities and environment.’¹⁶ The deficiency of Rajayoga is ‘its excessive reliance on abnormal states of trance,’¹⁶ whereas in integral Yoga spiritual life and its experiences are ‘fully active and fully utilisable in the waking state.’¹⁶ The third Vedic principle is identified as Tantra . The fourfold aim of Tantra is purification, Suddhi, liberation, Mukti, perfection, Siddhi , and enjoyment, Bhukti . ‘Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he (Tantric Sadhak ) confronted them, seized and conquered. But in the end, as is the general tendency of Prakriti, Tantric Yoga largely lost its principle in its machinery and became a thing of formulae and occult mechanism still powerful when rightly used but fallen from the clarity of their original intention.’¹⁷ ‘There is yet another, the Tantric, which though less subtle and spiritually profound, is even more bold and forceful than the synthesis of the Gita, — for it seizes even upon the obstacles to the spiritual life and compels them to become the means for a richer spiritual conquest and enables us to embrace the whole of Life in our divine scope as the Lila of the Divine; and in some directions it is more immediately rich and fruitful, for it brings forward into the foreground along with divine knowledge, divine works and an enriched devotion of divine Love, the secrets also of the Hatha and Raja Yogas, the use of the body and of mental askesis for the opening up of the divine life on all its planes, to which the Gita gives only a passing and perfunctory attention.’¹⁸ Integral Yoga begins with methods of Vedanta in order to arrive at the aims of Tantra. For a Sadhak of integral Yoga, Soul is the static Lord and Nature is the dynamic executive Energy. ‘The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed in the bliss of conscious self-existence, there is rest; when the Purusha pours itself out in the action of its Energy, there is action, creation and the enjoyment or Ananda of becoming.’¹⁹ The disadvantage of Tantra is that it 'has fallen into discredit with those who are not Tantrics ; and especially owing to the developments of its left-hand path, the Vama Marga , which not content with exceeding the duality of virtue and sin and instead of replacing them by spontaneous rightness of action seemed, sometimes, to make a method of self-indulgence, a method of unrestrained social immorality.'²⁹ 8) The Three Central Inner Revolutions⁷ of integral Yoga: The first central inner revolution is that annulment from life all movement of brief desire, which is an insecure limitation, an ambiguous fire, a dwarf lust, hunger for pleasure and satisfaction. It has built in us at its centre a desire-soul which refers to itself all the motions of life and puts in them its own lower note of troubled hue and pain of an ignorant, half-lit, baffled endeavour: for a divine living, desire must be abolished and replaced by a purer and firmer celestial joy, the tormented soul of desire dissolved and in its stead there must emerge the calm, strength, endless charm, seeking after Divine Delight in things and happiness of a true vital being now concealed within us. The second central inner revolution is that life as it is, is driven or led partly by the impulse of the life-force, partly by a mind which is mostly a servant and abettor of the ignorant life-impulse, but in part also its uneasy and not too luminous or competent guide and mentor; for a Divine Life the mind and life-impulse must cease to be anything but docile instruments and the inmost Psychic being must take their place as the leader on the path and the indicator of a Divine guidance. It is only when we open ourselves to the Divine Shakti transcending the lower untransformed Nature, then we will be a perfect instrument of her Will, Power and Knowledge. The third central inner revolution is that not the ego but ‘Truth of Being must govern truth of life.’² The life as it is, is turned towards the satisfaction of the separative ego; the small ego sense must be starved by renouncing the impulse to act, sarbarambha parityagi ,³ or rooted away from our nature by rejecting all motive forces other than the Divine Will or to kill it by cutting away from us all movement of personality and be replaced by the true Spiritual person, the central Spiritual being; it must feel a Divine Force awakens within it and become an obedient instrumentation of its purpose. The extinction of egoism eliminates the very origin of desire followed by the establishment of the Soul’s nature of equality. 9) The Three Basic or Fundamental Realisations⁶ of integral Yoga: The first basic realisation, is the experience of fundamental impersonality awakening to an ineffable high transcendent Unknowable above the Self and above this world in which he seems to move, a timeless and spaceless condition or entity which is at once, in some way compelling and convincing to an essential Consciousness in him, the one thing that is to it overwhelmingly real and an immense liberating force. It releases his knowledge from the narrowness of personal mind, his will from the clutch of personal desire, his heart from the bondage of petty mutable emotions, his life from its petty personal groove, his soul from ego, and it allows them to embrace calm, equality, wideness, universality and infinity. There will still remain on this foundation of the first basic realisation of immeasurable silence and quietude, the infinitely proceeding self-fulfilment of the Brahman , its dynamic divine manifestation in the individual and its extension by his presence, example and action in others and in the universe at large. The second basic realisation is usually accompanied by an equally compelling sense either of the dreamlike or shadowy illusoriness of all things here or else of their temporary, derivative and only half-real character. For a time at least all around him may seem to be a movement of cinematographic shadow forms or surface figures and his own action may appear as a fluid formulation from some Source ungrasped as yet and perhaps unseizable above or outside him. To remain in this consciousness, to carry out this initiation or follow out this first suggestion of the character of things would be to proceed towards the goal of dissolution of the Self and the World in the Unknowable, this is the Laya, Moksha , and Nirvana. This may extend itself to the dissolution of mind, life and body itself into the silent Self or absolute Existence; but the essence of the liberation is that the individual has lost the sense of division in the boundlessness of an infinite Consciousness. The third basic realisation is that it is possible, on the contrary, for him to wait till through the silence of this timeless unfilled liberation he begins to enter into relations with that yet ungrasped Source of himself and his actions; then the void begins to fill, there emerges out of it or there rushes into it all the manifold Truth of the Divine, all the aspects and manifestations and many levels of a dynamic Infinite. At first this experience imposes on the mind and then on all his being an absolute, a fathomless, almost an abysmal peace and silence. If there were not that Source of all things, there could be no universe; all powers, all works and activities would be an illusion, all creation and manifestation would be impossible. 10) The Three inner and Central Intuition: As witness, sakhi, a Spiritual man observes the action of Nature without attachment, as approver, anumanta, he rejects the action of falsehood and ignorance of lower Nature and accepts overhead wisdom and Truth, as master of Nature , Ishwara, he perfectly controls the action of lower Nature and acts from the dictation of higher Nature ‘His way to perfection is not to involve himself in the outward or superficial existence, nor is it to place himself in the soul of life or the soul of body, but to insist on the three mental intuitions by which he can lift himself eventually above the physical, vital and mental levels. (1) This insistence may take two quite different forms, each with its own object and way of proceeding. It is quite possible for him to accentuate it in a direction away from existence in Nature, a detachment, a withdrawal from mind, life and body. He may try to live more and more as the witness Purusha , regarding the action of Nature, without interest in it, without sanction to it, detached, rejecting the whole action, withdrawing into pure conscious existence. This is the Sankhya liberation. (2) He may go inward into that larger existence of which he has the intuition and away from the superficial mentality into a dream-state or sleep-state which admits him into wider or higher ranges of consciousness. (3) By passing away into these ranges he may put away from him the terrestrial being. There is even, it was supposed in ancient times, a transition to supramental worlds from which a return to earthly consciousness was either not possible or not obligatory. But the definite and sure finality of this kind of liberation depends on the elevation of the mental being into that spiritual self of which he becomes aware when he looks away and upward from all mentality. That is given as the key to entire cessation from terrestrial existence whether by immergence in pure being or a participation in supracosmic being.’²² 11) The Three Central Object⁴ of integral Yoga: The first central object of Integral Yoga is the discovery of the Divinity in oneself; realise the Divine in its essential Self, truth unaltered by form, phenomena and appearance and true relation of this Self with its own created existences. This is necessary for an individual to arrive at the highest truth of his own being, to set right its disorders, confusions, false identifications, to arrive at its right concentration and purity and to know and mount to its Source. He finds the right basis for all the members to live in the highest Self and obey no other law than that which proceeds from his highest Self and is given to his purified being without any falsification in the transmitting mentality and without shutting up in a mental formula of limited personal experience. The second central object is the total discovery of the Divinity in the world behind the apparent denial offered by its schemes and figures. An individual salvation is not sufficient for him; for he must break through all separative boundaries and narrower intensity of a limited individual fulfilment and open to a cosmic Consciousness by universalistation of Psychic and Spiritual Being and spread himself in the world-Nature. Without universalisation of Consciousness, 'it is impossible to change the human nature into the divine'²⁷ and 'an isolated individual transformation is not enough and may not be wholly feasible.'²⁸ The third central object is the total discovery of the dynamism of the Transcendent Force by whose descent this World and Self will be empowered to break their disguising envelopes and become Divine in revealing form. The cosmic Consciousness is not integral for him; for above it, there is urgent upon him a dynamic realisation of the Transcendent pressing from the Supreme upon this world of beings, and only some encompassing and exceeding of the cosmic Consciousness can release into manifestation here that yet unlavished splendour of embodied Transcendence. An ascent into the Supramental Truth raises our Spiritual and Psychic Consciousness to a height that brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All this Existence then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness, dynamises Divine in every possible way of our being, its highest intensities and largest widenesses and in every range and turn and nook and recess of our Nature, is the ultimate aim of this Yoga. Recapitulation: Mind is exclusive. It will not permit to undergo manyfold pursuit, multiple concentration and hence incapable of any integral purification, integral concentration, integral transformation and integral perfection. It is only by opening of Psychic Being and Spiritual Being, a movement in all the planes of Consciousness is practicable. This movement is not required by Sadhakas of traditional Yoga, because they are satisfied with their partial union with the Divine and wait through the ascent into Purushottama consciousness, which is treated as a passage to supreme abode of Param Dham . But, in integral Yoga, openings of Psychic, Spiritual, Universal and Supramental Beings are utilised exclusively for purification, transformation and perfection of untransformed Nature. So, it is felt to understand the main Frame of Integral Yoga, and our acceptance of its many branching pursuits and awareness and the wholehearted acceptance of the objective of Integral Yoga. It is necessary from the beginning for those who attempt this Yoga must develop firstly , three basic requisites of unflinching patience, absolute courage and colossal faith; secondly , three basic inward concentrations that of exclusive concentration of the one object worthy of pursuit, contemplation and silencing of mind; thirdly , three central secrets of entire consecration, constant inward remembrance of one central liberating knowledge and renounce all the inner support of central egoism; fourthly , integral Yoga refuses to rely on the fragile stuff of mental and moral ideals, puts its whole emphasis in the field of the three central dynamic processes that of development of true Psychic being, sublimation of human into Divine Love and elevation of Mental consciousness into Spiritual and Supramental plane; fifthly, the three central methods of Integral Yoga are that (1) of gradually intensive and purposeful working of Divine force, (2) which subsequently compels all individual Nature to undergo a Divine change and (3) the universalised Divine Power uses all life as means of world transformation; sixthly, the three central Vedantic principles of integral Yoga are derived from the three Vedantic methods of knowledge; it is either a knowledge in the will working out through action or knowledge in the intellect through discernment or knowledge of the heart expressed through love and faith. Integral Yoga proposes ceaseless practice of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga which are identified as Spiritual Science. Seventhly, the three central Vedic principles of integral Yoga are perfection of body by Psycho-physical method of Hathayoga; perfection of mind and psychic being by disciplining of mind through Rajayoga and transformation of Nature by synthetic Yoga of Tantra . Integral Yoga does not propose ceaseless practice of Psycho-physical Sciences of Hathayoga and Tantra and ceaseless practice of Psychic Science of Rajayoga, ‘but their methods can either altogether be dispensed with or used only for a preliminary or else a casual assistance.’¹⁴ In integral Yoga the utility²⁰ of Psycho-physical Science is felt after Spiritual foundation is established through Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga. Eighthly , the integral Yoga proposes to change life from troubled and ignorant into a luminous and harmonious movement of Nature through three central inner revolutions, that of abolition of desire, to make life an instrument by opening of Psychic being²⁵ and disappearance of ego by opening of the Spiritual being;²⁵ ninthly, one will arrive at three basic or fundamental realisations that of (1) experience of Timeless, Spaceless and Silent Brahman , (2) of dissolution of the Self and the world in the Unknowable, --Moksha, Nirvana and (3) the Source of Being and its relation with Becoming through penetration of dynamic Brahman Consciousness, which build a strong foundation of integral Yoga. Tenthly, there will develop three inner or central Intuitions²¹ which are indispensable for perfection of Spiritual being acting directly on earth Nature; they are awareness of witness Purusha, sakhi, who watches the action of Nature, to give them new directions, refinement and extension related with subtle and flexible creation, and an inner awareness of his Spiritual and Supramental being who are master of his Nature. Here Intuition is at once witness, sakhi, source of consent, anumanta, and almighty Lord of the Nature, Maheswara . Finally, the three central objects⁴ of integral Yoga must be accepted wholly by those who follow it and they are the Divinity in one-Self, total discovery of the Divinity in the world and total discovery of the dynamism of some transcendent Eternal. OM TAT SAT References: 1: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-771, 2: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-693, 3: The Gita-12.16, 4: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-170, 5: CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-613-614, 6: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-117, 7: “There are three conditions which are indispensable for the achievement of this central inner revolution and new formation; none of them is altogether sufficient in itself, but by their united threefold power the uplifting can be done, the conversion made and completely made. For, first, life as it is is a movement of desire and it has built in us as its centre a desire-soul which refers to itself all the motions of life and puts in them its own troubled hue and pain of an ignorant, half-lit, baffled endeavour: for a divine living, desire must be abolished and replaced by a purer and firmer motive- power, the tormented soul of desire dissolved and in its stead there must emerge the calm, strength, happiness of a true vital being now concealed within us. Next, life as it is is driven or led partly by the impulse of the life-force, partly by a mind which is mostly a servant and abettor of the ignorant life-impulse, but in part also its uneasy and not too luminous or competent guide and mentor; for a divine life the mind and the life-impulse must cease to be anything but instruments and the inmost psychic being must take their place as the leader on the path and the indicator of a divine guidance. Last, life as it is is turned towards the satisfaction of the separative ego; ego must disappear and be replaced by the true spiritual person, the central being, and life itself must be turned towards the fulfilment of the Divine in terrestrial existence; it must feel a Divine Force awaking within it and become an obedient instrumentation of its purpose.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-176-177, 8: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-46-47, 9: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-153, 10: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-111-113, 11: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-46, 12: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-323-325, 13: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-530, 14: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-528-29, 15: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-695, 16: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-35 to37, 17: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-43, 18: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-9-10 19: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-44, 20: “In other words we must arrive at and use a psycho-physical knowledge with a spiritual foundation.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-624, 21: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-633-634, 22: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-635, 23: “The desire of personal salvation, however high its form, is an outcome of ego; it rests on the idea of our own individuality and its desire for its personal good or welfare, its longing for a release from suffering or its cry for the extinction of the trouble of becoming and makes that the supreme aim of our existence. To rise beyond the desire of personal salvation is necessary for the complete rejection of this basis of ego. If we seek the Divine, it should be for the sake of the Divine and for nothing else, because that is the supreme call of our being, the deepest truth of the spirit. The pursuit of liberation, of the soul’s freedom, of the realisation of our true and highest self, of union with the Divine, is justified only because it is the highest law of our nature, because it is the attraction of that which is lower in us to that which is highest, because it is the Divine Will in us. That is its sufficient justification and its one truest reason; all other motives are excrescences, minor or incidental truths or useful lures which the soul must abandon, the moment their utility has passed and the state of oneness with the Supreme and with all beings has become our normal consciousness and the bliss of that state our spiritual atmosphere.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-269, 24: “Nothing must be attempted for ourselves as a separate existence; nothing done for others, whether neighbours, friends, family, country or mankind or other creatures merely because they are connected with our personal life and thought and sentiment or because the ego takes a preferential interest in their welfare. In this way of doing and seeing all works and all life become only a daily dynamic worship and service of the Divine in the unbounded temple of his own vast cosmic existence.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-113, 25: “The first step on this long path is to consecrate all our works as a sacrifice to the Divine in us and in the world; this is an attitude of the mind and heart, not too difficult to initiate, but very difficult to make absolutely sincere and all-pervasive. The second step is to renounce attachment to the fruit of our works; for the only true, inevitable and utterly desirable fruit of sacrifice— the one thing needful — is the Divine Presence and the Divine Consciousness and Power in us, and if that is gained, all else will be added. This is a transformation of the egoistic will in our vital being, our desire-soul and desire-nature, and it is far more difficult than the other. The third step is to get rid of the central egoism and even the ego-sense of the worker. That is the most difficult transformation of all and it cannot be perfectly done if the first two steps have not been taken; but these first steps too cannot be completed unless the third comes in to crown the movement and, by the extinction of egoism, eradicates the very origin of desire. Only when the small ego sense is rooted out from the nature can the seeker know his true person that stands above as a portion and power of the Divine and renounce all motive-force other than the will of the Divine Shakti.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-247-48, “The Divine Life-Power too will be a will for growth, a force of self-affirmation, but affirmation of the Divine within us, not of the little temporary personality on the surface, — growth into the true divine Individual, the central being, the secret imperishable Person who can emerge only by the subordination and disappearance of the ego. This is life’s true object: growth, but a growth of the spirit in Nature, affirming and developing itself in mind, life and body; possession, but a possession by the Divine of the Divine in all things, and not of things for their own sake by the desire of the ego; enjoyment, but an enjoyment of the divine Ananda in the universe; battle and conquest and empire in the shape of a victorious conflict with the Powers of Darkness, an entire spiritual self-rule and mastery over inward and outward Nature, a conquest by Knowledge, Love and Divine Will over the domains of the Ignorance.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-175-176 “If you want to be a true doer of divine works, your first aim must be to be (1) totally free from all desire and self-regarding ego. (2) All your life must be an offering and a sacrifice to the Supreme; your only object in action shall be (3) to serve, (4) to receive, (5) to fulfil, (6) to become a manifesting instrument of the Divine Shakti in her works. You must grow in the divine consciousness till (7) there is no difference between your will and hers, (8) no motive except her impulsion in you, (9) no action that is not her conscious action in you and through you.” The Mother-20 (The above nine characteristic in active nature is sign of complete dynamic union with the Divine.) ‘Until you are capable of this complete dynamic identification, you have to regard yourself as a soul and body created for her service, one who does all for her sake. Even if the idea of the separate worker is strong in you and you feel that it is you who do the act, yet it must be done for her. All stress of egoistic choice, all hankering after personal profit, all stipulation of self-regarding desire must be extirpated from the nature.’ The Mother/p-20-21, 26: Savitri-264, 27: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-622, 28: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-997-998, 29: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-42, Sri Matriniketan Ashram, Managed by The Mother’s International Centre Trust, Regd.No-146/24.11.97. Vill: Ramachandrapur, PO: Kukudakhandi-761100, Via: Brahmapur, Dist: Ganjam, State: Odisha, India https://www.srimatriniketanashram.com/new-research Download this WEB PAGE as a PDF file: "WILL, KNOWLEDGE and LOVE are the three divine powers in human nature and the life of man, and they point to the three paths by which the human soul rises to the divine. The integrality of them, the union of man with God in all the three , must therefore, as we have seen, be the foundation of an integral Yoga ." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-545

The Call in Detail "The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm... The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife," Savitri-661 “And no change can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga.”¹ Sri Aurobindo CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-72 “No limit can be fixed to this revolution; for it is in its nature an invasion by the Infinite. ”² Sri Aurobindo CWSA/22/ The Life Divine/p-947 “There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this : “I invite you to the great adventure.”... It is not a question of repeating spiritually what others have done before us, for our adventure begins beyond that. It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails — a real adventure, whose goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something that has never been in this present universe and that will never be again in the same way. If that interests you... well, let us embark. What will happen to you tomorrow — I have no idea. One must put aside all that has been foreseen, all that has been devised, all that has been constructed, and then... set off walking into the unknown. And — come what may! There." The Mother The Mother's Centenary Works/Vol-9/page-152 The Call in Detail There is a higher plan of our Spiritual destiny which is the cause of our greater existence and holds the key of our ascending fate. The perfect Spirit is called out of the dense imperfect mortality and is nurtured, fostered and moulded in the Matter’s house by the influence of the sun-eyed Guardians of conscious Truth planes, Godheads of the unseen reality and men of Spiritual attainment. This material birth is a long transition of fourfold Soul adventure, self-evolution and illumination through which Nature ascends in the ladder and climbs to become the Spirit. Man arrives at greater perfection when he enlarges himself by opening his Nature towards all these four Soul powers. Thus, our life is at once (1) to know and grow into self-truth and self-knowledge, (2) to raise slow outer life energy and the surface consciousness into swift movement of Divine energy and Divine Consciousness, 'a struggle and battle of our will with ourselves and surrounding forces,' (3) a constant production, adaptation, application of ecstatic skill and harmony to material life and to lift the surface pleasure into Divine Delight of Being and (4) to live and act in a complete self-giving, sacrifice, service and elevate the surface lower Nature into Divine Nature. The ancient thoughts of India were conscious of these four-fold Spiritual turns, chaturvarna, ⁶ of active human personality and nature which precipitated as fixed mechanical function in the society of traditional ideal of Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Shudra , whose full consummation and large Divine manifestation must be called down from the Universal and Transcendent plane by those who practice integral Yoga. A Sadhak 'opens his nature more and more into the rounded fullness and universal capacity of the fourfold spirit.' ³³ Brahmana or Soul of Self-knowledge and World-knowledge: The ancient Indian Teaching insists to regenerate ethical and Spiritual culture in all men and ‘their highest inner self are Brahmanas capable of the full (growth of) spirit and godhead.’²⁶ The study of Scriptures, calm self-control, purity, a way of truth-seeking and capture it for outward use, long-suffering, kindness, honesty, aversion to fault finding, the ceaseless quest for knowledge, freedom from prejudice, hard-won mind’s silence, sweet smiling quietude of life, constant practice of non-attachment towards son, wife and home, high thinking, pure living, heavenward flight through saintly inactivity, free from attachment to action and inaction, detachment of desire-mind and renunciation of its passion, raise the mental consciousness into clarity, fixing the mind in the central vision, nearing of Spiritual truth within by purified buddhi and ethical change in the outside surface life are the natural and spontaneous task of the traditional Brahmin Soul force. Thus, a traditional Brahmin lives a double life, Spiritual within or above and mental and material in outward active earthly living; thus he does not bridge the gulf between imperfect Matter and perfect Spirit. The exclusive nature of the Soul force of the ancient traditional Brahmin is extended and enlarged in integral Yoga to go beyond the partial views and egoistic motives of human ignorance and becomes the master of own kingdom of life, swarat, master over the surrounding world, samrat, the fullness of the divine union of Truth-Light, Brahma-yoga, Power and glory of Spiritual force, Brahma-tejas , comprehensive Knowledge, Brahma-varcas, perfection of Spiritual Law, Dharma , enlarge and raise the whole seeing and living of active consciousness by trance, Samadhi , the accomplished Brahminhood of the complete Brahmana and grows into impersonalised universal personality, sarva-bhutatma-bhutatma.(The Gita-5.7) The exclusive concentration, samyama , pursued by all traditional schools of Yoga is used as a temporary instrument for the beginners of integral Yoga and further extended and culminated as an all-receiving or all-inclusive concentration, samjnana . The perfection of Brahmana Soul-force is the treasure house of miraculous knowledge which is open to every kind of Revelation, intimate Vision, many-sided wideness of Spiritual Attainment, Inspiration, Intuition, Identity; opens us to Supramental Infinities, Largeness, unalterable Silence, absolute quietude and Solitude, impersonal Vastness, right Discrimination of Truth, unspoken great Word, shadow-less Love, original Delight of existence, self-defusing Peace and a reconciling Wisdom to perfect life. Its 'illimitable calm upholds all the illumination, movement, action as on some rock of ages, equal, unperturbed, unmoved, acyuta. '³³ An Integral Brahmin calls down the Divine Mother’s swift invasion of mightier Light, calm wideness, Truth of eternity, blaze of comprehensive wisdom, inevitable Word, tranquil benignity, sovereign and surpassing majesty and all ruling greatness to life’s closed and obscure room and transforms all triple lower mechanical energies of sattwa, rajas and tamas into energies of illumined Seer and subsequently to Supramental Nature, madbhava .⁷ Not by rejecting life and action but by accepting and uplifting them he will realise the supreme Self in his own being and subsequently in all beings and transform all mundane knowledge into activities of self-existent infinite Divine Consciousness. Thus God-Knowledge and World-Knowledge become two sides of one Transcendent seeking. She is the Maheswari aspect, the mediatrix universal Mother that draws her child to her arms to link earth consciousness with supreme Truth Consciousness and we adore her as Mother of all Godheads, ancient Mother, infinite Mother, a wonderful Mother of unnumbered species and an embodiment of mighty Mother. A force in her toiled since the beginning of creation to reverse destiny’s cold dead turn, forced to open the door of multiple Selves that are denied and closed and when the earth will be ready she shall again take birth in Time as last Avatara to vanquish Fate and Death and establish Truth’s victory. Kshatriya or Soul of Strength and Power: The heroism, high spirit ambition, strong helpfulness, armour of courage, resolution, ability, steadfastness in Yoga, giving, harmlessness, sword-like faith, forgiveness, leadership, lordship at all workings, Isvara-bhava , straightforwardness, gracious nobility, well-armed disciplined warrior and hunter of unknown and beautiful creation, a wrestler with destiny are the natural work of traditional Kshatriya Soul force. Thus a traditional Kshatriya is only the outward manifestation necessary to complete the urge of human perfection and he does not adventure much into higher planes of Consciousness and call down consciously their Divine energy to the limitation of tamasic, rajasic and sattwic Nature. These virtues of traditional Kshatriya are extended in integral Yoga to Divine fullness, calm mastery, self-possession, timeless purity, high plasticity towards change, forbidden to shrink from difficulties of life, opulence, expansion of Spiritual kingdom within and without and a faith and conviction that nothing can prevent a Sadhaka from discovering the Truth’s wide and golden path and in arriving at the end of integral Perfection. He has to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood, ignorance and suffering and manifest Divine Truth-movement in the spirit of a lion-like warrior and further extend them towards the conquest of the same adverse and inexhaustible dark forces in the world. The perfection of Kshatriya Soul-force is the severest austerity of tapas. This great action can unlock the doors of fate by adventure of Consciousness in ascending and descending order capturing ‘the last inviolate secret’⁹ Source and invasion of its large white Divine Presence to all the nether dark planes of existence. 'An absolute calm fearlessness of the free spirit, an infinite dynamic courage which no peril, limitation of possibility, wall of opposing force can deter from pursuing the work or aspiration imposed by the spirit, a high nobility of soul and will untouched by any littleness or baseness and moving with a certain greatness of step to spiritual victory or the success of the God-given work through whatever temporary defeat or obstacle, a spirit never depressed or cast down from faith and confidence in the power that works in the being, are the signs of this perfection.'³ ³ An Integral Kshatriya casts his transparent Soul upon the Divine Mother’s lap and calls down her sweet Presence of violent loving heart, intolerant flame, splendid strength, the irresistible white passion of her mighty Force. She leads his small beginning of Sadhana towards a mighty end, initially through slow mental evolution and finally towards complete enjoyment, possession and transformation of Nature of Divine Soul through swift Spiritual evolution; she fulfills Ananda with its most absolute intensities, drags knowledge towards conquering glories and shortens the long way of perfection. He reconciles the gentle soul of Love with the formidable need for Power; and fuses the Soul’s passive nature that lives satisfied with transcendent calm with the perfect activity of Divine worker and warrior. He shall possess God’s infinite Wisdom and King Idea which the dwarf mind cannot imagine and shall open God’s Supramental door which the heart of the mortal cannot dare. She is the Mahakali who holds her perennial child upon her knees and we meet her warrior mood, overwhelming turbulent will, terrible in love, sovereign gaze, all-seeing Power to trace its path, impetus swiftness, flaming silence of her heart of violent Love, her mind free from all twilight thought and her world-shaking force that can transform Time’s black dragon base of Inconscient Sheath and can trample the Nature’s Iron Law of Death. Her unerring golden Hand can lift our Being and Nature to unimaginable heights and calls down her infinite Ray. Her Timeless mighty action accomplishes centuries’ toil in a day and if she is allowed to intervene in her almighty strength, then in one moment she slays many longing desires, destroys all that are false and obscure, saves all that are pure and true and Divinises all Time and all Space. Vaisya or Soul of Mutuality and New Creation: The outward action of the traditional Vaisya Soul force is agriculture, cattle keeping, skillful devising intelligence, legal order, professional skill, commercial negotiation of self-interest, scientific, technical and utilitarian bent of mind, a power of giving, ample creative liberality, mutual helpfulness and the ecstatic skill in works. Thus, a traditional Vaisya does not feel the privilege to call down the highest planes of Bliss vibration to transform the recalcitrant lowest Nature. These traditional Vaisya faculties are extended in integral Yoga into a largeness of mutuality, a generous fullness of the relations of life, a lavish self-spending and return and ample interchange between existence and existence, a deathless sweetness chanting the unknown anthem of Soul, a full enjoyment and use of rhythm and balance of fruitful, aesthetic, beautiful and productive life. In this Yoga, one comes to see the Divine everywhere and in all equally and pours out the realisation of the Divine sweetness in all one’s inner activities and outward actions. All is supported by the primary force of emotional Divine union; for it is by Divine Love that the entire self-consecration and the entire self-possession are accomplished, and thought and action become shapes and figures of the Divine Delight which possesses the Spirit and its members. The perfection of Vaisya Soul-force is an efficient builder, organiser, free self-giving of Divine Beauty, Delight and Love to all, a subtle opulence, joy and gladness born of inner unification with chosen Divine destined Souls, discoverer of beauty’s golden path and fine rhythm of life. 'There comes too to fulfilment a large godhead, a soul-power of mutuality, a free self-spending and spending of gift and possession in the work to be done, lavished for the production, the creation, the achievement, the possession, gain, utilisable return, a skill that observes the law and adapts the relation and keeps the measure, a great taking into oneself from all beings and a free giving out of oneself to all, a divine commerce, a large enjoyment of the mutual delight of life.'³ ³ An Integral Vaisya calls down the Divine Mother’s deep, secret, vivid, wonderful and fine rhythm of beauty, healing touch of love, truth and delight, alchemist energy, sunlit sweetness and harmony, her intricate and subtle opulence, compelling attraction of beatitude, bound all the decreed Souls with her golden tie and captivating magic Grace. He does all action in the love of Divine and in love of the world and transforms all transient earthly emotional human relation into the joy of the All-Loving, the All-Blissful and the All-Beautiful. She is Mahalakshmi, whose worshiped feet have the power to heal the pain of life, breaks the seal of Ignorance to kindle rapturous Psychic fire, transforms earth’s floor into her sweetness’ home and one human moment is drawn towards all eternity. Her single glance makes the whole day marvellous; a strange new world peeps in her look; her clasp transforms all pain into ecstasy, fills our limbs with the rapture of things, lifts wisdom, strength and perfection to pinnacles of wonder, builds a golden passage to our heart and brings into life’s closed and obscured room a sense of Infinite Beauty and Harmony. Shudra or Soul of Works and Service: The ancient Indian Teaching insists ‘that all men are born in their lower nature as Shudras ’²⁶ and the well developed traditional Shudra has the instinct of toil and capacity of labour and service for maintenance of his existence, charity, absence of envy and pride, the gratification of his primal needs, self-indulgence of the instincts, unreflective obedience, imperfect worker and mechanical discharger of duty. His prayer is too weak to climb to the Supreme. The modern mind is attracted to create a purely productive and commercial society, ‘a Shudra society of labour, of the proletariate,’²⁷ preoccupied more and more with enjoyments of transient and short-lived nature. Their disproportionate increase is disturbing to social balance and stands as a danger to the survival of the human race. The limitation of a traditional Shudra is that he does not call down consciously the highest perfection of Sachchidananda Consciousness to his imperfect human Nature. In integral Yoga, these Shudra qualities are extended to the most necessary and beautiful elements of our greater perfection and the key to the much of the secret of highest Spiritual evolution. The full development of this Soul force is to become the architect of Immortality, an efficient builder, the power of motiveless consecrated service to others, personal will is converted to a single-minded Spiritual pursuit, a capacity for all kinds of Divine action demanded from an instrument, to obey and follow whatever great discipline and Spiritual Influence, a free identity and spontaneous harmony with the universal Divine Will, the love which consecrates service and asks for no return, a power for complete self-surrender and self-giving of what one does, thinks and feels. One can offer every detail of life’s manifestation and every incident of life’s movements as food for the inner sacrificial Fire. The perfection of Shudra Soul-force is the the entire renunciation of attachment, sangam tyaktwa, desire, kama, ego, ahamkaram , duality, dwanda , three modes of nature, gunas , initiation of work, sarbarambha parityagi , attachment to home and old association, aniketa. A perfection of faith, sraddha, is to be developed which believes that nothing done in us and around us is in vain and all things are accomplished when Divine Will takes up the burden of all life and all movement. 'And finally there comes to perfection the godhead, the soul-power of service, the universal love that lavishes itself without demand of return, the embrace that takes to itself the body of God in man and works for help and service, the abnegation that is ready to bear the yoke of the Master and make the life a free servitude to Him and under his direction to the claim and need of his creatures, the self-surrender of the whole being to the Master of our being and his work in the world.'³ ³ An Integral Shudra is not satisfied with his exclusive liberation, lonely freedom and solitary joy and asks the Divine Mother’s Light, Peace and Perfection for earth and men. He calls down her persistent, flawless and integral action, efficient technical knowledge, competent administrative skill, Truth of order, close and profound intimate knowledge, power of silence and quiet and exact perfection in all things. A vast surrender or wide self-giving is his only source of strength to confront Time and Space. While accepting all works of life, he is able to transform even the smallest and meanest work into glad and glorious golden sacrifice; a higher knowledge is applied to all the activities of existence to lift all common ordinary work into strange Divinity and in every simplest movement of will, action and thought he fills the Divine Presence and can bring her Divine oneness. His object in Arts and Crafts is not mere mental, vital and aesthetic gratification but to adore and manifest the Divine Artist everywhere. His aim and object in Science and Technology is not mechanical and mental manipulation of the energies and opulence of Nature but to enter into the processes and workings of the faultless Divine mysteries. He must always remember that he carries within him a fragment of integral Godhead and its total revelation in his bodily all-life is the inevitable consequence of his integral faith. She is Mahasaraswati and h er sacred voice is attuned with the harps of the perfect and rhythms of infinity, her sight breaks the transient sense to liberate the inner Godhead; her outstretched Hand of protection and ever-present help is extended over all life; she is the Mother of our longing Nature, the Mentor who insists even after repeated and prolonged failure, sister of our ascending Soul, comrade of our undying hope and golden Messenger to untransformed Nature. She claims from all Time her Will’s eternity overruling cosmic Law and manifestation of complete Godhead from passing and fleeting moments. For the fullness and perfect perfection of this blind struggling creation, she is ready for arduous labour, long-suffering and waits patiently for all eternity. All the above fourfold traditional personalities of ‘(1) Thought and knowledge, (2) war and government, (3) production and distribution, (4) labour and service’²⁵ are raised up to fullness and harmony in a traditional seeker of Truth and extended as 'a soul of knowledge, a soul of strength and of power, a soul of mutuality and interchange, a soul of works and service'²⁵ in a sane and perfected Society. Similarly, the perfection of all the above fourfold Soul personalities of (1) integral Truth destructive of falsehood, (2) adventure of Consciousness, (3) overhead descent of Love, Beauty and Delight and (4) skill in work are integrated in an integral seeker of Truth and extended its large manifestation in a Divine Centre, the Ashram. Traditional Yoga succeeds with the evolution of a strong Spiritual Being whereas integral Yoga succeeds with the evolution of a strong Spiritual Being subordinated by the evolution of a strong Mental Being; the former helps in building a Spiritual foundation and the latter helps in the integration of Being and Nature and reconciliation of Spirit with Matter. For example, one of the mind's roles, as hinted in Savitri , "The Inconscient could not read without man’s mind."³⁴ How the above four-fold traditional personalities are linked with each other for integration of being and Nature are as follows: ‘Through four soul-stages a man must pass before he can be perfect; first, as a Sudra, by service and obedience to tame the brute in his being; then, as a Vaishya to satisfy within the law of morality the lower man in him and evolve the higher man by getting the first taste of delight in well-doing to others than himself and his; then, as the Kshatriya , to be trained in those first qualities without which the pursuit of the Eternal is impossible, courage, strength, unconquerable tenacity and self-devotion to a great task; last, as the Brahmin, so to purify body & mind and nature that he may see the Eternal reflected in himself as in an unsoiled mirror. Having once seen God, man can have no further object in life than to reach and possess Him.’³¹ " And in the end to arrive at the divinest figure and most dynamic soul-power of this fourfold activity is a wide doorway to a swiftest and largest reality of the most high spiritual perfection. This we can do if we turn the action of the Swadharma into a worship of the inner Godhead, the universal Spirit, the transcendent Purushottama and, eventually, surrender the whole action into His hands, mayi sannyasya karmani .³⁶ Then, as we get beyond the limitation of the three gunas, so also do we get beyond the division of the fourfold law and beyond the limitation of all distinctive dharmas , sarvadharman parityajya . The Spirit takes up the individual into the universal Swabhava , perfects and unifies the fourfold soul of nature in us and does its self-determined works according to the divine will and the accomplished power of the godhead in the creature."³² ‘Every individual Jivatman must become the perfect Kshatriya before he can become the Brahmin .’² The ‘true Brahmin is samo manapamanayoh, he accepts indifferently worldly honour and dishonour and cares only for the truth and the right.’¹⁹ A Sadhaka of integral Yoga will pursue sadhana in four stages (1) that concentrates on the glories of the second new birth (material birth is considered as first birth, once born) of the Soul, a decisive and irreversible break in consciousness, twice-born, Dvija , (2) individual strong Soul power on the surface, Instrument, Yantra , (3) manifestation of special Divine Force from behind the veil, Emanation, Vibhuti, and (4) a Sadhaka can have the aspiration to become one, possess and hold together the dual Godhead, Avatara, in the heart. So, a Sadhaka of integral Yoga will be like Arjuna of the Gita and he will ascend the seven stairs of Consciousness that are of tamasic man, rajasic man, sattwic man, Dvija, Yantra, Vibhuti and Purushottam or Supramental Consciousness of Avatara . In a tamasic man inertia aspect of the three modes of Nature is strong. In a rajasic man desire and personal will to do action is strong. A sattwic man attains limited harmony, wisdom and happiness within three Gunas . In a Dvija , the Psychic and Spiritual being open intermittently and in him, the double evolution of Spirit and Intellect resume action. In a Yantra, the movement of consciousness between Psychic and Spiritual beings is established. In a Vibhuti, Psychic and Spiritual beings are universalised. And beyond it is the Consciousness of Avatar. Twice-born Soul, Dvija : ²⁰ The common initial object fixed for beginners of all traditional Yoga is the liberation of the Soul in the heart from Ignorance, the release of Spiritual being above the head and their union with the supreme Self and one life span seems to be sufficient to realise these objectives. This is further extended for the beginners of integral Yoga who are identified as ‘unconquerable pilgrim souls’¹⁴ in Spirit’s endless journey extending over many births and bodies. Their outstanding object of Yoga is the possession of mind, life and body by a hierarchy of higher Consciousness, to live without ego and enlargement of partial being and consciousness into complete being and comprehensive consciousness. They must reject the opposition of their own sceptical instrumental Nature and begin their long slow preparation with the faith that nothing can prevent them from overcoming the present imperfection and constantly filling them with more Spiritual experiences leading to this inevitable goal. They do not accept themselves as conscious creatures crawling on the globe with aimless circling, nor cling to half way resting place or half-found truth between Matter and Spirit, nor weeping earth, a senseless whirling around sun to serve a purposeless task in the grooves of Ignorance. Both the individual and the earth are an incomplete account of integral Truth and they have a mystic motive, a golden glorious Spiritual future, the Divine destiny and fulfilled happy completeness waiting for their ecstatic manifestation. Instrument, Yantra :²¹ The principal support of a Sadhaka of integral Yoga is equality, surrender and oneness by which he gets unchanging silence, eternal peace, immense calm, liberated purity and power of concentration. He does not permit any exulted abnormality, great excitation of power, over-eager to accomplish any work, impose any partial will, infra-rational and irrational movement of any kind and the experiencing Consciousness must preserve a calm balance, the sufficiently vigilant passive mind which is obedient to overhead guidance, an unfailing clarity, power of self-criticism, right discrimination, intellectual deliberation, a vivid perception, coordination, firm vision of things, pace of time must be respected, a sane grasp of facts, understands with sympathy the actuality of all energies behind the present appearance, a high Spiritual optimism, one pointed integral process with whole and many-sided progress and moves forward towards the unfurling of their Divine possibilities. He can have no dealings with weakness, selfishness, claim of violent personal will and motive of personal fame; a Divine strength and courage, a passivity of the mind calmly and strongly open to the high Spirit, a Divine compassion and helpfulness are the very stuff of that which he would become in his continuous effort. He has the patience and courage to uncover the truth of existence, clarity and humility to admit the limitation of his existing knowledge, Spiritualised intelligence to develop an intermediate necessity of intuitive discrimination which dispels all darkness of understanding and dazzling confusion, Spirit’s deep quietude which can reunite existence and consciousness with the Divine Ananda, higher aspiration that can call down true knowledge, open-hearted to face and overcome the problem of integration, equal effort for Divine fulfillment of his volitional, emotional and intellectual parts and bringing in persistently the Psychic and Spiritual Light into recalcitrant parts of Nature. Accepting life and as per the capacity of his universalised body, he has to bear the great part of earth’s burden in addition to his own heavy burden of surface and Subconscient sheath. In the Spiritual harmony of existence, the greater he accepts and embraces the world’s problems, miseries and sufferings, the greater the Divine Grace that seeks to descend upon his vessel and he has the responsibility of manifesting and calling down the Divine Shakti much more than his existing individual capacity. The instrumental action of a Divine Worker culminates in an inner and not in an outer action, a Spiritual action and not giving up of physical works into the Brahman . When the works are reposed on the Brahman, brahmanyadhaya, ¹⁷ the personality of the instrumental doer ceases; though he does all works he does nothing; for he has consecrated the work, doership of work and fruits of work and his highest realisation is that the Divine becomes the action, the result of action and doer of the action. A perfect and integral Divine instrument is at once the receiver of overhead Wisdom and Light of Integral Jnana Yoga and "We cease to think and see for ourselves, but think only what he wills to think for us and see only what he sees for us."³⁰ His own personal will is tuned and identified with the Divine Will of Integral Karma Yoga and his heart becomes the centre of overflow of Divine Love, Delight and Beauty of Integral Bhakti Yoga . Emanation, Vibhuti : ²² Instead of isolation from mankind through the ochre robe of Sannyasin, which is a symbol of refusal of all compromise with falsehood and complete surrender of lower Nature, an integral Yogi wears the garb of the world and his robe is a radiating Light, Beauty and all-inclusive Love of which he is an emanation of ‘garb-less deity.’¹¹ In him the Soul and Nature reveal equal Divine Presence and Balance and fuse in a wide harmony which lives in God’s extreme perfection that can exist by an ever-extending scroll of the Infinite. Thus, he establishes a Spiritual consciousness in the Being followed by an extension of this Spirituality to all the parts of Nature. He can create what his Spirit has dreamed and his perfect action is the outcome of his perfect inner passivity. His dream of Beauty’s sunlit passage is realised in an eternal Love, Beauty and Delight, self-existent, all-pervading and equal behind all outer appearances; his dream of perfect Truth in the eternal variation of existence is invariable and is the secret of all change and goal of all wisdom; his dream of comprehensive Divine Action in the omnipotent and self-revealed Will is inherent forever in all things and all creatures and translates itself in the eternal rhythm of the world movement. Consciousness of the dual Avatara : ²³ “And it (Matter becoming conscious of the Spirit) will go on multiplying and intensifying until the entire universe becomes the total Avatar of the Supreme.”²⁸ The Mother The Lord will possess his universe only when the universe will have consciously become the Lord."³⁷ The Mother An Avatara is a special manifestation of Supreme, Parameswar, whereas a Vibhuti realises himself as 'as the child, the son of God, the Bhakta '³⁵ when his Psychic being is awake and 'as one centre of the multiple Divine'³ ⁵ when his Spiritual being is awake. A Sadhaka of integral Yoga must remember this distinction; 'for, otherwise, if there is the least vital egoism, one may begin to think of oneself as an Avatara …'³⁵ In the fourth stage, a Sadhaka realises the eternal and universal Self, an increasing manifestation of the Divine, the Ishwara in all his being, nature and action. Now he is constantly and uninterruptedly aware of the Divine Presence in him. The Divine is felt as the possessor of his Being and Nature, above him as the Ruler and Over-ruler of all the workings. All his consciousness becomes Divine Consciousness, all his knowledge becomes Divine Knowledge, all his will becomes Divine Will, all his feeling becomes Divine Love and all his action becomes Divine action. The distinction between Shakti and Ishwara begins to disappear in their sole Oneness, there is only the conscious Indwelling, Over-dwelling and Identity with the Divine. The Ignorance of the ego is entirely removed and there is only the eternal portion of the Self, amsa sanatana¹⁵ and he becomes a conscious centre of unity and freedom. He lives fulfilled in the complete Presence, Power and Joy of the Divine. His emanative identity uplifts to the Consciousness of the Supreme in His totality where his meeting of Shakti and Ishwara in Spiritual plane is further elevated as Maya and Brahman in the Supramental plane, Vijnana ; he emerges and establishes himself in holding together the dual Avatara consciousness of Para-Shakti and Purushottama state, assumes a human name and form and extends his greatest world action and Divine Lila .¹⁸ Such ascension of Consciousness is observed from the state of Vibhuti to the state of dual Avatara in King Aswapati’s following Spiritual experience: “There he beheld in their mighty union’s poise (a) The figure of deathless Two-in-One, (b) A single being in two bodies clasped, (c) A diarchy of two united souls, (d) Seated absorbed in deep creative joy; (e) Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.” (f) Savitri-295 (a: dual Avatar’s Divine union, b: symbol of Supramental Oneness, c: symbol of Spiritual Oneness, d: symbol of Psychic Oneness, e: symbol of Bliss Oneness, f: symbol of dual Avatara’s new creation and holding together the race.) Through these four stairs mankind can develop the capacity for indefinite ascending and descending movement of comprehensive Consciousness, ‘which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body, --the universal Incarnation ’¹⁶ Or he ‘shall yet grow to supermind and spirit and become the Godhead in man who is aware of his true and integral self and the divine universality of his nature.’¹ Thus, the vision of universal incarnation of Godhead concealed in all humanity is revealed and realised in all life by Jivatma’s union and oneness with Paramatma, superseding Mother Nature’s earlier success of manifesting the individual Incarnation of Godhead in man. The eye of the spirit can see and mark out ‘the rising godhead of man in the great Vibhuti.’ ²⁴ The future ‘high task’ ¹² of integral Yoga is to call down the Supreme Lord and His magic Will in its entirety that can break down all established laws, all the limitations of mortal life instantly; search for that fire of Love which can bring the dead back to life; that Power which can cancel the things once done; that supreme Consciousness which can arrest the advance of time and slipping moments and that Bliss which can persuade the past perfect hours to live again with greater intensity. If we examine deeply into the problem of existence, we conclude that every physical law and resistance are nothing for Him. But this kind of comprehensive direct Divine intervention can take place only at the extreme limit of ascension and descent of Consciousness in a universalised subtle and causal body and all are pressed towards the very last second to reach an apex fire of Consciousness of world destiny where all is won and saved by dynamic Divine intervention or all is lost and destroyed by static Divine non-intervention or Divine’s witness state for the race. “And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.” Savitri-18 “Abolished were the scripts of destiny.” Savitri-82 “No silent peak is found where Time can rest.” Savitri-197 “A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.” Savitri-256 “A new beginning flowers in word and laugh, A new charm brings back the old extreme delight:” Savitri-275 “A passion of the flesh becoming spirit,” Savitri-278 “And with one gesture change all future time.” Savitri-345 “A Magician’s formulas have made Matter’s laws… All here can change if the Magician choose.” Savitri-457 “All now is changed, yet all is still the same.” Savitri-719 The ‘mighty task ’³ of integral Yoga is to call down the entire truth and purity of Supreme Divine Love through immense, formidable and stupendous pulsation carrying the universe further in its manifestation, to heal all the painful vibration of life, deliver the mental, vital, physical love from their utter limitations and deficiencies to the extent of realisation of deathless Love with all unreality of mortality, disease, decay and accident and reveal to them their true abounding share of the universal intimacy and the oneness, the ascending ecstasy and the descending rapture. In the Supramental consciousness, the object of all transient emotion would be fully satisfied by embracing all contact of human relation in a purified flame Force. “The calm delight that weds one soul to all,” Savitri-6 “Proclaiming a panacea for all Time’s ills” Savitri-198 “Healed were all things that Time’s torn heart had made” Savitri-232 “Wrong could not come where all was light and love.” Savitri-314 “All-Love throb single in one human heart.” Savitri-345 “Loved all and spoke no word and made no sign,” Savitri-358 “They reached the one-self in all through boundless love.” Savitri-381 “He is still the godhead by which all can change.” Savitri-397 “All-love was hers and its one heavenly cord” Savitri-471 “He labours in the depths, exults on the heights; He shall remake thy universe, O Death.” Savitri-592 “And all is known and all is clasped by Love” Savitri-633 “The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife,” Savitri-661 The ‘enormous task ’⁴ of integral Yoga is to call down the Supreme relation of Sri Radha and Sri Krishna, the Mother and the Master of all life through Their Supramental Incarnation, Emanation and Instrumentation to the nether darkest land of Inconscient plane through prepared vessels and flooding the physical substance of Their manifestation, the Gopis, with intensest and completest Ananda , Love and Beauty. They have suffered human birth to bear the earth’s burden of million wounds with Their ‘imperishable eyes of veilless love.’⁸ “This whole wide world is only he and she.” Savitri-63 “The Two who are one are the secret of all power,” Savitri-63 “She burned in his sweet intolerable blaze.” Savitri-125 “He stood with her on meditating peaks … And saw her loose into infinity ” Savitri-191 “He is lost in her, she is his heaven here.” Savitri-275 “Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.” Savitri-295 “Her consciousness grew aware of him alone” Savitri-410 “The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse Took place again on earth in human forms:” Savitri-411 “A burning of two bodies in one flame.” Savitri-468 “And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,” Savitri-525 “The Master and the Mother of all lives” Savitri-525 “Inscribe the long romance of Thee (Savitri) and Me (Supreme).” Savitri-699 “The incarnate dual Power shall open God’s door,” Savitri-705 The highest secret and seemingly 'impossible task ’¹⁰ of integral Yoga is to call down Truth supreme which is identified as the ‘earth’s last salvation,’¹³ param siddhi, of integral Yoga by whose intervention the universal Subconscient and Inconscient sheath of the earth will be wholly transformed and illumined with Divine Light, Power and Bliss. All the forces of lower nature, nether dark adverse universal Subconscient and Inconscient sons of falsehood and mother of evil hostile forces will either suffer illumination of Divine transformation or will be destroyed by the pressure of the descending Divine Truth-Light. “It left mind’s distance from the Truth supreme” Savitri-44 “A greater power must come, a larger light. Although Light grows on earth and Night recedes, Yet till the evil is slain in its own home And Light invades the world’s inconscient base And perished has the adversary Force, He (last Avatar ) still must labour on, his work half done.” Savitri-448-49 “A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast:” Savitri-484 "Beyond the earth, but meant for delivered earth, Wisdom and joy prepare their perfect crown; Truth superhuman calls to thinking man." Savitri-631 “A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;” Savitri-658 “Fragments of Truth supreme have lit his soul,” Savitri-659 “All-ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,” Savitri-661 “The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal” Savitri-662 “O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme ” Savitri-663 “If Truth supreme transcends her shadow here” Savitri-663 "But when the hour of the Divine draws near The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time (as the last Avatar ) And God be born into the human clay In forms made ready by your human lives Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men:” Savitri-705 All the revelatory aspects of the Divine, myriad modes of His self-manifestation, and all the Soul’s greatest, highest and fullest Spiritual experiences must be called down as partial fulfillment of the unending, numerous and exhaustless riches and splendours of the Spirit. Then we are capable of integrating the Divine Call through absolute surrender that could dare to clasp the body of the Brahman and hold between our hands the World-Mother’s Feet and all contact of the world is experienced as His single touch in blissful equality. OM TAT SAT References: 1: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-789, 2: CWSA-17/Isha Upanishad/p-195-196, 3: Savitri-460, 4: Savitri- 58, 5: The Gita-4.24, 6: The Gita-4.13, 7: The Gita-13.18, 10.6, 8: Savitri-677, 9: Savitri-311, 10: Savitri-177, 11: Savitri- 430, 12: Savitri- 366, 13: Savitri-135, 14: Savitri-683, 15: The Gita-15.7, 16: “We have the emergence of that Conscious Being in an involved and inevitably evolving Life, Mind and Supermind as the condition of our activities; for it is this evolution which has enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this evolution which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body, — the universal Incarnation. ” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-64, “The man is not, when we look closely, himself alone, a rigidly separate self-existent individual, but humanity in a mind and body of itself; and humanity too is no rigidly separate self-existent species or genus, it is the All-existence, the universal Godhead figuring itself in the type of humanity; there it works out certain possibilities, develops, evolves, as we now say, certain powers of its manifestations.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-152-153, “The seed of Godhead sleeps in mortal hearts, The flower of Godhead grows on the world-tree: All shall discover God in self and things .” Savitri-446, "The two opposed each other with their eyes, Woman (Savitri) and universal god (Death God): around her," Savitri-574 "Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights; The universal Mother’s love was hers." Savitri-8 17: The Gita-5.10, 18: CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-770, 19: CWSA-18/Kena and other Upanishads/p-267, “Equal to friend and enemy, equal to honour and insult, mana-apamanoh , pleasure and pain, praise and blame, grief and happiness, heat and cold (to all that troubles with opposite affections the normal nature), silent, content and well-satisfied with anything and everything, not attached to person or thing, place or home, firm in mind (because it is constantly seated in the highest self and fixed for ever on the one divine object of his love and adoration), that man is dear to Me.” The Gita-12.18-19, 20: “In the ancient Indian distinction between the once born and the twice born (Dvija), it is to this material man that the former description can be applied. He does Nature’s inferior works; he assures the basis for her higher activities; but not to him easily are opened the glories of her second birth.” Sri Aurobindo/ CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-23, 21: “Men in the world have two lights, duty and principle; but he who has passed over to God, has done with both and replaced them by God’s will. If men abuse thee for this, care not, O divine instrument, but go on thy way like the wind or the sun fostering and destroying.” Sri Aurobindo/The Mother’s Centenary Works (second edition)/Vol-10/p-285 22: “It is the Godhead who manifests himself in the great thinker, the hero, the leader of men, the great teacher, sage, prophet, religious founder, saint, lover of man, the great poet, the great artist, the great scientist, the ascetic self-tamer, the tamer of things and events and forces.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita/p-374, " Men of a stronger force get more of the soul-power to the surface and develop what we call a strong or great personality, they have in them something of the Vibhuti as described by the Gita , vibhutimat sattvam srımad urjitam eva va, a higher power of being often touched with or sometimes full of some divine afflatus or more than ordinary manifestation of the Godhead which is indeed present in all, even in the weakest or most clouded living being, but here some special force of it begins to come out from behind the veil of the average humanity, and there is something beautiful, attractive, splendid or powerful in these exceptional persons which shines out in their personality, character, life and work." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-741 23: “When in your heart and thought you will make no difference between Sri Aurobindo and me, when to think of Sri Aurobindo will be to think of me and to think of me will mean to think of Sri Aurobindo inevitably, when to see one will mean inevitably to see the other, like one and the same Person, - then you will know that you begin to be open to the supramental force and consciousness.” The Mother/The Mother’s Centenary Works/13/p-32, 24: “Finally, it (the liberated man) sees the upward urge of the striving powers of the Will to be towards Godhead; it respects, welcomes, encourages all high manifestations of energy and quality, the flaming tongues of the Divinity, the mounting greatnesses of soul and mind and life in their intensities uplifted from the levels of the lower nature towards heights of luminous wisdom and knowledge, mighty power, strength, capacity, courage, heroism, benignant sweetness and ardour and grandeur of love and self-giving, preeminent virtue, noble action, captivating beauty and harmony, fine and godlike creation. The eye of the spirit sees and marks out the rising godhead of man in the great Vibhuti .” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-373-74, 25: "Thought and knowledge, war and government, production and distribution, labour and service were carefully differentiated functions of society, each assigned to those who were naturally called to it and providing the right means by which they could individually proceed towards their spiritual development and self-perfection." Sri Aurobindo/CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita/p-50, "Each Jiva possesses in his spiritual nature these four sides , is a soul of knowledge, a soul of strength and of power, a soul of mutuality and interchange, a soul of works and service, but one side or other predominates in the action and expressive spirit and tinges the dealings of the soul with its embodied nature; it leads and gives its stamp to the other powers and uses them for the principal strain of action, tendency, experience." CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita/p-523, "All action must be made in it part of the God-life, our acts of knowledge, our acts of power and production and creation, our acts of joy and beauty and the soul’s pleasure, our acts of will and endeavour and struggle and not our acts only of love and beneficent service. Its way to do these things will be not outward and mental, but inward and spiritual, and to that end it will bring into all activities, whatever they are, the spirit of divine love, the spirit of adoration and worship, the spirit of happiness in the Divine and in the beauty of the Divine so as to make all life a sacrifice of the works of the soul’s love to the Divine, its cult of the Master of its existence." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-162, “At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil its movement in the sadhaka according to the essential law or way of his own nature. For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the particular power of the supreme Shakti , out of which his soul has emerged into the Play, not limited indeed by the forms of this law or way, for the soul is infinite. But still its stuff of nature bears that stamp, evolves fluently along those lines or turns around the spiral curves of that dominating influence. He will manifest the divine Truth-movement according to the temperament of the sage or the lion-like fighter or the lover and enjoyer or the worker and servant or in any combination of essential attributes (of fourfold Soul force replacing the three gunas) that may constitute the form given to his being by its own inner urge. It is this self-nature playing freely in his acts which men will see in him and not a conduct cut, chalked out, artificially regulated, by any lesser rule or by any law from outside.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-212-213 26: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-747, 27: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-523, 28: “The intervals separating these various incarnations seem to become shorter and shorter, as if, to the extent that Matter became more and more ready, the action could accelerate and become more and more rapid in its movement, more and more conscious too, more and more effective and decisive. And it will go on multiplying and intensifying until the entire universe becomes the total Avatar of the Supreme. ” The Mother’s Centenary Works (second edition)/Vol.9/p-333-334, 29: 28th March-1964, The Mother’s Agenda-5/100, 30: “Especially, in proportion as the partial lights of the mind become transformed into lights of gnosis, in whatever slighter or greater degree that may happen, we feel it as a transformation of our mentality into his and more and more he becomes the thinker and seer in us. We cease to think and see for ourselves, but think only what he wills to think for us and see only what he sees for us. And then the teacher is fulfilled in the lover; he lays hands on all our mental being to embrace and possess, to enjoy and use it.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-603, 31: CWSA-17/Isha Upanishad/p-195, 32: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-524, 33: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-750-751, 34: Savitri-690, 35: “The phrase “central being” in our Yoga is usually applied to the portion of the Divine in us which supports all the rest and survives through death and birth. This central being has two forms — above, it is the Jivatman, our true being, of which we become aware when the higher self-knowledge comes, — below, it is the psychic being which stands behind mind, body and life. The Jivatman is above the manifestation in life and presides over it; the psychic being stands behind the manifestation in life and supports it…The natural attitude of the psychic being is to feel itself as the child, the son of God, the Bhakta ; it is a portion of the Divine, one in essence, but in the dynamics of the manifestation there is always even in identity a difference. The Jivatman, on the contrary, lives in the essence and can merge itself in identity with the Divine; but it too, the moment it presides over the dynamics of the manifestation, knows itself as one centre of the multiple Divine, not as the Parameshwara . It is important to remember this distinction ; for, otherwise, if there is the least vital egoism, one may begin to think of oneself as an Avatara…” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-61, “But still the Vibhuti is not the Avatar; otherwise Arjuna, Vyasa, Ushanas would be Avatars as well as Krishna, even if in a less degree of the power of Avatarhood. The divine quality is not enough; there must be the inner consciousness of the Lord and Self governing the human nature by his divine presence. The heightening of the power of the qualities is part of the becoming, bhutagrama, (The Gita-8.19, 9.8) an ascent in the ordinary manifestation; in the Avatar there is the special manifestation, the divine birth from above, the eternal and universal Godhead descended into a form of individual humanity, atmanam srijami , (The Gita-4.7) and conscious not only behind the veil but in the outward nature. ” CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita/p-161 36: "Giving up thy works to Me, with thy consciousness founded in the Self, free from desire and egoism, fight delivered from the fever of thy soul." The Gita-3.30, 37: The Mother's Agenda/October 10, 1958, “The difficulty is that she seems to have only vairagya for worldly life without any knowledge or special call for this Yoga and this Yoga and the life here are quite different things from ordinary Yoga and ordinary Asrams . It is not a life of meditative retirement as elsewhere. Moreover it would be impossible for us to decide anything without seeing her and knowing at close hand what she is like. We are not just now for taking more inmates into the Asram except in a very few cases.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-556, “Reply that residence in the Asrama is only allowed to sadhakas who have been accepted into Sri Aurobindo’s path of Yoga, and not to all of them. This path is a special way of Yoga, difficult and different from others ; only those are accepted who have a special call to it.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-559, “All are not equally capable of practising Yoga and in Yoga itself some paths are more difficult than others. There are some who have a special call to a path; others have no call; though they may feel drawn to Yoga , it is to other disciplines that they must go. This path is especially difficult and even some of those admitted to it find great difficulty in following it. Therefore Sri Aurobindo is not willing to admit any new disciples unless he has reason to think that they have a special call for it or a special capacity.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-560-561

The New Research “Yoga is not a matter of theory or dogma, like philosophy or popular religion, but a matter of experience. Its experience is that of a conscient universal and supracosmic Being with whom it brings us into union, and this conscious experience of union with the Invisible, always renewable and verifiable, is as valid as our conscious experience of a physical world and of visible bodies with whose invisible minds we daily communicate.” SRI AUROBINDO CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-555 Emergence of Integral Personality Read More 1 The Agenda of Sri Matriniketan Ashram Research: The First Objective of Research: It will include in its scope the richly varied objective Material and subjective Spiritual experience, reconcile them in the beyond intellect Cosmic Self through the movement of vertical Consciousness and make the future opulent with all that is the best in the past and present. Thus the following promise is concentrated: "Content abide not with one conquered realm; Adventure all to make the whole world thine, To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force." Savitri-536 The Second Objective of Research: It will accumulate in itself all that is the most affirmative and the completest invisible energies and pour them out on the surrounding by an intense Aspiration, a Master Action and a King Idea so that one mighty Deed in the Occult plane can change the whole course of world events and external things. "A prayer, a master act, a king idea Can link man’s strength to a transcendent Force. Then miracle is made the common rule, One mighty deed can change the course of things; A lonely thought becomes omnipotent." Savitri-20 "Knows that one high step might enfranchise all" Savitri-371 The Third Objective of Research: The unending opulence of the Matter and Spirit cannot be exhausted by all the Saints, Seers and Scientists of all Time and the continuous uncovering and working out of Their unending secrets, endless truths and timeless mystery are the constant preoccupations of subjective Research. " He (Avatar) must call light into its dark abysms, Else never can Truth conquer Matter’s sleep And all earth look into the eyes of God. All things obscure his knowledge must relume, All things perverse his power must unknot: He must pass to the other shore of falsehood’s sea, He must enter the world’s dark to bring there light. The heart of evil must be bared to his eyes, He must learn its cosmic dark necessity, Its right and its dire roots in Nature’s soil." Savitri-450 The Fourth Objective of Research: It will strive to provide the utmost fulfillment and perfection of objective and subjective living by entry into Supraphysical experience which lies behind our gross physical, vital and mental living and humanity will be liberated from all subjection of life to the multiplication of new wants, exaggeration of ambitious activities and an aggressive expansion of the collective ego. Thus life can become 'a marvellous journey of the spirit.' (Savitri-301) " In the kingdom of the Spirit’s power and light, As if one who arrived out of infinity’s womb He came new-born, infant and limitless And grew in the wisdom of the timeless Child; He was a vast that soon became a Sun." Savitri-301 OM TAT SAT Read More 2 Serving Humanity: The Scope of helping humanity: “Patriotism, cosmopolitanism, service of society, collectivism, humanitarianism, the ideal or religion of humanity are admirable aids towards our escape from our primary condition of individual, family, social, national egoism into a secondary stage in which the individual realises, as far as it can be done on the intellectual, moral and emotional level, —on that level he cannot do it entirely in the right and perfect way, the way of the integral truth of his being, — the oneness of his existence with the existence of other beings. But the thought of the Gita reaches beyond to a tertiary condition of our developing self-consciousness towards which the secondary is only a partial stage of advance.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-136 The Necessity of Leadership: “The best, the individuals who are in advance of the general line and above the general level of the collectivity, are the natural leaders of mankind, for it is they who can point to the race both the way they must follow and the standard or ideal they have to keep to or to attain. But the divinised man is the Best in no ordinary sense of the word and his influence, his example must have a power which that of no ordinarily superior man can exercise.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-138 The Necessity of Spiritual Leadership: “This too the divinised man becomes in the measure of his attainment, impersonal in his personality, unbound by quality or action even when maintaining the most personal and intimate relations with men, unbound by any dharma even when following in appearance this or that dharma . Neither the dynamism of the kinetic man nor the actionless light of the ascetic or quietist, neither the vehement personality of the man of action nor the indifferent impersonality of the philosophic sage is the complete divine ideal. These are the two conflicting standards of the man of this world and the ascetic or the quietist philosopher, one immersed in the action of the Kshara, the other striving to dwell entirely in the peace of the Akshara; but the complete divine ideal proceeds from the nature of the Purushottama which transcends this conflict and reconciles all divine possibilities.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-141 The Necessity of Supramental Leadership: “The supramental man on the contrary will think more with the universal mind or even may rise above it, and his individuality will rather be a vessel of radiation and communication to which the universal thought and knowledge of the Spirit will converge than a centre. The mental man thinks and acts in a radius determined by the smallness or largeness of his mentality and of its experience. The range of the supramental man will be all the earth and all that lies behind it on other planes of existence. ..Ordinarily the supramental knowledge will be organised first and with the most ease in the processes of pure thought and knowledge, jnana , because here the human mind has already the upward tendency and is the most free. Next and with less ease it will be organised in the processes of applied thought and knowledge because there the mind of man is at once most active and most bound and wedded to its inferior methods. The last and most difficult conquest, because this is now to his mind a field of conjecture or a blank, will be the knowledge of the three times, trikaladrsti .” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-837, 839 The Permanent Help: “Someone had written to (the) Mother, “I want my money to be used exclusively to conquer the causes of our sufferings and misery.” (The) Mother had replied, “That is what we are working towards here, but not in the artificial way of the philanthropists, who only deal with the outward effects. We want to eliminate forever the CAUSE of suffering, by divinizing matter through integral transformation.” The Mother's Agenda/10th April-1968. The permanent help and panacea of all problems of existence is possible through a triple reversal of Consciousness and inner change of Nature. All of the issues of humanity can be resolved by the permanent elevation of individual and collective Consciousness through Integral Evolution and Supramental Influence initially dynamised through a few individuals (A few can climb to an unperishing sun, (Savitri-689)) and finally spreads to elevate the general Consciousness of the race (His gates to the world were swept with seas of light. (Savitri-236)). OM TAT SAT Read More 3 The Agenda of Integral Tantra Yoga : First Agenda: Integral Yoga begins with the method of Vedanta to arrive at the aims of Tantra . In the integral Yoga Psychical experience, especially of the kind associated with what is often called occultism and savours of the miraculous, should be altogether subordinated to Spiritual truth and wait upon that for its own interpretation, illumination and sanction. The Second Agenda: In Vedantic method the Spirit is all important means of arriving at the Shakti. In Tantric method the Shakti is the all important means of arriving at the Spirit. The Third Agenda: Integral Tantra Yoga of Knowledge, Dakshina Marga begins with the descent of fragments of Truth Supreme. Integral Tantra Yoga of Love, Vama Marga begins with the descent of fragments of Supreme Love. The Fourth Agenda: Integral Yoga is a combination of Vedantic Sacrifice ‘the Brahman is offered to the Brhaman by the Brhaman ’ (The Gita-3.24) or 'Living for me, by me, in me they shall live' (Savitri-699) and Vedic or Tantric Sacrifice ‘the Shakti is offered to the Shakti by the Shakti ’. OM TAT SAT Read More 4 The Root Formula of Integral Yoga : The Root Formula One: All the problems of existence can be resolved by the discovery of the Inconscient Self. “For the key is hid and by the Inconscient kept; The secret God beneath the threshold dwells.” Savitri-68 The Root Formula Two: Desire is identified as the 'Keyword' and root problem that takes shelter in the Inconscient sheath. “Then lest a human cry should spoil the Truth He tore desire up from its bleeding roots And offered to the gods the vacant place. Thus could he bear the touch immaculate. A last and mightiest transformation came. His soul was all in front like a great sea Flooding the mind and body with its waves; His being, spread to embrace the universe, United the within and the without To make of life a cosmic harmony, An empire of the immanent Divine.” Savitri-318 The Root Formula Three: Inconscient Self can be opened by massive Supramental Intervention. “This ever she meant since the first dawn of life, This constant will she covered with her sport, To evoke a Person in the impersonal Void, With the Truth-Light strike earth’s massive roots of trance, Wake a dumb self in the inconscient depths And raise a lost Power from its python sleep That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time And the world manifest the unveiled Divine.” Savitri-72-73, “As when a searchlight stabs the Night’s blind breast And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness, All lurking things were torn out of their veils And held up in his vision’s sun-white blaze.” Savitri-151, The Root Formula Four: All the problems of existence can be resolved by the intervention of Divine Force from above the head and below the feet…. Or it can be also resolved by the intervention of dynamic Spirit from within the heart, below the feet, around the world and above the head. “Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light , We have turned space into a gulf of peace And made the body a Capitol of bliss.” Savitri-531 “It (dynamic Spirit) is within, below, without, above.” Savitri-98 OM TAT SAT Read More 5 The Main Formula (Maha Mantra ) of Integral Yoga: The First Formula: All Life is Yoga. (Maha Mantra) The Second Formula: All Yoga is a compression of one’s Evolution by all possible ways of union with the Divine. The Third Formula: All Evolution is the awakener of higher states of Consciousness. The Fourth formula: All Consciousness is one but in action, it involves in many-fold concentrated Effort and spontaneous movement of Shakti to realize every possible line of Spiritual experience. The Fifth Formula: All Effort is the synthesis of all the wide and supple Methods. The Sixth Formula: All the method is the synthesis of central Truth of self-discipline. The Seventh Formula: The practice of all self-discipline leads to continuous union with the Self. The Eighth Formula: All Dispensable self-disciplines are termed as Psycho-physical methods, which mean to pursue inner development with the help of outer aid, support. The Ninth Formula: All Indispensable self-disciplines are termed as Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental methods which mean to pursue inner development without the support of any outer aid. The Tenth Formula: All Dispensable self-disciplines are used to subordinate all Indispensable self-disciplines, and its indispensability is felt after the Spiritual foundation is established on a secure basis. OM TAT SAT Read More 6 The Main Frame of Integral Yoga: The Three Basic Requisites: are of (1) unflinching patience, (2) absolute courage and (3) colossal faith. The Three Basic Inward Concentrations: are (1) of exclusive concentration of the one object worthy of pursuit, (2) contemplation and (3) silencing of mind. The Three Central secrets: are of entire consecration, constant inward remembrance of one central liberating knowledge and renounce all the inner support of central egoism. The Three Central Dynamic Processes: are that of development of true psychic being, sublimation of human into Divine Love and elevation of mental consciousness into spiritual and Supramental plane. The Three Central Methods: of Integral Yoga are that of gradually intensive and purposeful working of divine force, which subsequently compels all Nature to undergo a Divine change and the Divine Power uses all life as means of world transformation. The Three Central Vedantic Principles of Integral Yoga: are derived from the three Vedantic method of knowledge; it is either knowledge in the will working out through action or knowledge in the intellect through discernment or knowledge of the heart expressed in love and faith. The Three Central Vedic Principles of Integral Yoga: are the perfection of the body by the Psycho-physical method of Hathayoga ; the perfection of the mind and Psychic being by disciplining of mind through Rajayoga and the transformation of Nature by synthetic Yoga of Tantra . Integral Yoga does not propose the ceaseless practice of Psycho-physical Sciences of Hathayoga and Tantra and ceaseless practice of Psychic Science of Rajayoga , ‘but their methods can either altogether be dispensed with or used only for a preliminary or else a casual assistance.’ In integral Yoga the utility of Psycho-physical Science is felt after Spiritual foundation is established through Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga . The Three Central Inner Revolutions: are that of the abolition of desire, making life an instrument and the disappearance of ego. The Three Basic or Fundamental Realisations: are that of (1) experience of Timeless, Spaceless and Silent Brahman, (2) of dissolution of self and world in the Unknowable, --Moksha, Nirvana and (3) the Source of Being and its relation with Becoming which builds a strong foundation of integral Yoga. The Three Inner or Central Intuitions: These are indispensable for the perfection of Spiritual being acting directly on earth Nature; they are the awareness of witness Purusha, sakhi, who watches the action of Nature, to give them new directions, refinement and extension related with subtle and flexible creation, and an inner awareness of his Spiritual and Supramental being who are master of his Nature. Here Intuition is at once (1) witness, sakhi, (2) source of consent, anumanta , and (3) almighty Lord of the Nature, Maheswara. The Three Central Objects of Integral Yoga: The object of integral Yoga must be accepted wholly by those who follow it and they are the Divinity in one Self, total discovery of the Divinity in the world and total discovery of the dynamism of some transcendent Eternal. OM TAT SAT Read More 7 From Puri to Pondicherry : The Preliminary Teaching: The stages through which the Gita has developed its preliminary teachings are that firstly, it spoke of the destruction of desire and attachment and conquest of senses by stilling the mind; secondly of equality and peace; thirdly of passionless, impersonal and sacrificial action and recognition of the Supreme as the doer of all work; fourthly of inner renunciation of desire and ego preferable to the outer renunciation of life and action; fifthly, the doctrine of Avatara and the Divine birth. The Higher Teaching: The Gita’s higher teachings are that of Divine work by rising above the gunas ; secondly, besides its earlier declaration that Knowledge is greater than Works, Bhakti is considered the greatest element in Yoga; thirdly the relation between Works, Knowledge and Divine Love and their synthesis as means of supreme realisation; fourthly, the vision of Universal Purusha , which ‘can be seen, known, entered into only by that Bhakti which regards, adores and loves Me alone in all things’; fifthly, the inter-relation between the multiple Soul, Kshara , immutable Self, Akshara , and the Supreme Self, Purushottama who is the Master of Works, Knowledge and Love; sixthly, Sraddha , faith, as an important aid for the manifestation of Para Prakriti . The Highest Teaching: The most secret teaching of the Gita is the Knowledge of the whole Godhead, samagram mam, which can be gained by four gradations of exclusive knowledge attended with five gradations of all-inclusive knowledge, by knowing which will leave nothing yet to be known. The Highest Teaching hinted but not developed: It has been hinted constantly in myriad terms of Vasudevah sarvamiti , the Godhead is all that is the universe and all that is in the universe, Prakritm mamikam, into My Divine nature, Prakritim me param , My supreme nature, Prakritim swam, My own nature, Prakritir jiva-bhuta , Divine Nature which has become the jiva, Madbhavam agatah , have arrived at My nature of being, daivi prakriti, (The Gita-9.13) Divine nature and Param bhavam , Supreme nature or the ultimate becoming, sadharmyam agatah , those who have become of like nature and law of being with the Divine; but these terminologies were nowhere explained entirely. These are left as clues for the greatest Spiritual developments, which can be resolved fully through ascending advance of spiritual experience. OM TAT SAT Read More 8 The Seven Fold Self Ignorance: 1: Original Ignorance: Not knowing the origin, Source of our existence, the Supramental Self or extending ahead to Bliss Self. 2: Cosmic Ignorance: Not knowing the immobile and immutable Self, the Spiritual Self. 3: Egoistic Ignorance: Not knowing the Universal Self, the Cosmic Self. 4: Temporal Ignorance: Not knowing the Psychic Being. 5: Psychological Ignorance: Not knowing the subliminal Self which constitutes our true physical being, true vital being and true mental being. 6: Constitutional Ignorance: Not knowing the Subconscient Self, Inconscient Self and their influence on the waking Self. 7: Practical Ignorance: Not knowing the right relation of the surface physical, vital and mental Nature with the above ten Selves. To understand practical Ignorance we can concentrate on the following lines of Savitr i: "Our outward happenings have their seed within,” Savitri-52 “This earth is not alone our teacher and nurse; The powers of all the worlds have entrance here.” Savitri-153 “In a contrary balance to earth’s truth of things The gross weighs less, the subtle counts for more; On inner values hangs the outer plan.” Savitri-186 OM TAT SAT Read More 9 An Inspiration from Sri Aurobindo's Writings : 1: All of Sri Aurobindo’s writings from the early days of Baroda to the last days of Pondicherry are identified as the accumulation of overhead descended knowledge. 2: Out of them The Synthesis of Yoga, The Life Divine, The Mother and Savitri are identified as high-concentration approved writings or the best standard available to the race to pursue integral Yoga. 3: All his other writings are extremely helpful to those who are entirely conscious of the whole aim and the final Spiritual destination. They will be able to trace the sequential change of His world vision and world action with the growth and expansion of His Divine Consciousness. 4: The Mother confirmed, “Thus, Sri Aurobindo represented a totality of comprehension and knowledge and power; and every one of his books is at once a symbol and a representation. Every one of his books contains symbolically, potentially, what is in him. Therefore, if you concentrate on the book, you can, through the book, go back to the source . And even, by passing through the book, you will be able to receive much more than what is just in the book. ” TMCW-8/Questions and Answers-1956/p-163, A sincere entry into His Teachings (or Their Teachings) confirms a brief Supramental touch and this touch can be prolonged by the formation, development and densification of multiple subtle bodies. The Mother confirms, "It's only at the time of having the experience that you can really understand what you read." (The Mother's Agenda//November 23, 1965.) OM TAT SAT Read More 10 Sri Aurobindo's Hope on Woman : “I am beginning to understand why Sri Aurobindo always said it was woman that could build a bridge between the two. I am beginning to understand. One day, I will explain. I am beginning to understand. Sri Aurobindo used to say: it is woman that can build a bridge between the old world and the supramental world. Now I understand.” The Mother The Mother’s Agenda-26.04.1972 “After I knew that God was a woman, I learned some-thing from far-off about love; but it was only when I became a woman and served my Master and Paramour that I knew love utterly.” Sri Aurobindo TMCW-10/On Thoughts and Aphorisms/p-329 “God has so arranged life that the world is the soul’s husband; Krishna its divine paramour. We owe a debt of service to the world and are bound to it by a law, a compelling opinion, and a common experience of pain and pleasure, but our heart’s worship and our free and secret joy are for our Lover.” Sri Aurobindo TMCW-10/On Thoughts and Aphorisms/p-340 Sri Aurobindo had great hope in women in building the future. Their main objective in life is not procreation or enjoyment of life with men but to accumulate Spiritual energy. The ‘virgin bridals of the dawn’ (Savitri-401) are identified as the future of the Nation and they can keep their mind, life and body untouched and pure to enter union with the Divine in all the ten planes of Consciousness and realise the full delight and perfection of all those planes or ‘virgin who comest perfected by joy.’ (Savitri-424) They are also representative symbols of pure Spiritual fosterer or the ‘citizens of that mother state.’ (Savitri-262) Thus Para-prakriti dominated Indian women can dream of the emergence of 'a virgin earth' or 'Heaven’s joys might have been earth’s if earth were pure.' (Savitri-123) OM TAT SAT Read More: The All Orissa Girls Meet 11 Questions Raised By the Death God in Savitri : Before conquering Death from without, which is an issue of all life, a Sadhak is given the triple task of conquering Death from within (1) by universalisation of Consciousness, (2) by illuminating the Subconscient and Inconscient planes and (3) by change of Nature through activation of 'Yoga of Self-perfection' and dynamic Sachchidananda Consciousness: The First Task of Conquering Death by Universalisation of Consciousness: This experience will be followed by static Viswarupa Darshana as witnessed by the Arjuna of the Gita (Chapter-10) and dynamic Viswarupa Darshana as witnessed by Death God in Savitri , Book-10, Canto-4. "A Mother-wisdom works in Nature’s breast To pour delight on the heart of toil and want And press perfection on life’s stumbling powers, Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss And make dumb Matter conscious of its God. Although our fallen minds forget to climb, Although our human stuff resists or breaks, She keeps her will that hopes to divinise clay; Failure cannot repress, defeat o’erthrow; Time cannot weary her nor the Void subdue, The ages have not made her passion less; No victory she admits of Death or Fate." Savitri-353-354 “In the enormous emptiness of thy mind Thou shalt see the Eternal’s body in the world, Know him in every voice heard by thy soul, In the world’s contacts meet his single touch; All things shall fold thee into his embrace. Conquer thy heart’s throbs, let thy heart beat in God: Thy nature shall be the engine of his works, Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word: Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death .” Savitri-476 The Second Task of illumining the Subconscient and Inconscient planes: " He (Narad) sang the Inconscient and its secret self, (Discovery of Inconscient Self) Its power omnipotent knowing not what it does, All-shaping without will or thought or sense, Its blind unerring occult mystery, And darkness yearning towards the eternal Light, And Love that broods within the dim abyss And waits the answer of the human heart, And death that climbs to immortality." Savitri-416 “O Death , I have triumphed over thee within; I quiver no more with the assault of grief; A mighty calmness seated deep within Has occupied my body and my sense: It takes the world’s grief and transmutes to strength, It makes the world’s joy one with the joy of God. My love eternal sits throned on God’s calm; For Love must soar beyond the very heavens And find its secret sense ineffable; It must change its human ways to ways divine, Yet keep its sovereignty of earthly bliss.” Savitri-633 The Third Task of Permanent Descent of Sachchidananda Consciousness: " His living cosmic spirit shall enring, Annulling the decree of death and pain, Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance, With the deep meaning of beauty and life’s hid sense, The being ready for immortality," Savitri-706 “Even there shall come as a high crown of all The end of Death, the death of Ignorance. But first high Truth must set her feet on earth And man aspire to the Eternal’s light And all his members feel the Spirit’s touch And all his life obey an inner Force. This too shall be; for a new life shall come, A body of the Superconscient’s truth, A native field of Supernature’s mights: It shall make earth’s nescient ground Truth’s colony, Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth And Truth shall be a sun on Nature’s head And Truth shall be the guide of Nature’s steps And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps.” Savitri-708 "The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede, More and more souls shall enter into light, Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight And human wills tune to the divine will, These separate selves the Spirit’s oneness feel, These senses of heavenly sense grow capable, The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy And mortal bodies of immortality." Savitri-710 Death will exist for him as there are gulfs between multiple planes of intermediate Consciousness. His task in this birth is to bridge as many gulfs as possible through the movement of vertical Consciousness or through a four-fold union with the Divine. When all the gulfs are bridged, then there will be a free flow of the highest energy to the Lowest planes and that is the hour of closure to physical immortality. This is a task for him left in All Life to attain. OM TAT SAT Read More To discover new things in material life is the object of mental Research. Behind the material life there is a vast domain of subtle physical, subtle vital and subtle mental planes. To discover the truths of that world is the object of Spiritual Research. This discovery will be still extended to Psychic within, Spiritual, universal, Supramental and Bliss planes above the head and Subconscient and Inconscient planes below the feet. The Mother confirms that when our discovery of new wisdom is a ‘ direct expression and creation of a light which is above us’ then ‘That is the only case in which one can say that the thought is our own.’ In this creation nothing is our own except what has descended to us through Divine Will, Divine Knowledge and Divine Love. We carry that wealth as Soul Force in succeeding births and bodies. (Refer: The Mother/TMCW-8/Questions and Answers-1956/p-345) "The greatest inner discoveries, the experience of self-being, the cosmic consciousness, the inner calm of the liberated spirit, the direct effect of mind upon mind, the knowledge of things by consciousness in direct contact with other consciousness or with its objects, most spiritual experiences of any value, cannot be brought before the tribunal of the common mentality which has no experience of these things and takes its own absence or incapacity of experience as a proof of their invalidity or their non-existence. " Sri Aurobindo CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-677 “The work of achieving a continuity which permits one to go up and down (in Consciousness) and bring into the material what is above, is done inside the consciousness. He who is meant to do it, the Avatar, even if he were shut up in a prison and saw nobody and never moved out, still would he do the work, because it is a work in the consciousness, a work of connection between the Supermind and the material being. He does not need to be recognised, he need have no outward power in order to be able to establish this conscious connection. Once, however, the connection is made, it must have its effect in the outward world in the form of a new creation, beginning with a model town and ending with a perfect world.” The Mother The Mother’s Centenary Works/Vol.3/p-179,

" No victory she admits of Death or Fate. Always she drives the soul to new attempt;" Savitri-354 Moderate Spirituality "An ordinary religious teaching or philosophical doctrine is well enough satisfied to seize on certain great and vital aspects of truth and turn them into utilisable dogma and instruction, method and practice for the guidance of man in his inner life and the law and form of his action; it does not go farther, it does not open doors out of the circle of its own system, does not lead us out into some widest freedom and unimprisoned largeness. This limitation is useful and indeed for a time indispensable. Man bounded by his mind and will has need of a law and rule, a fixed system, a definite practice selective of his thought and action; he asks for the single unmistakable hewn path hedged, fixed and secure to the tread, for the limited horizons, for the enclosed resting-places. It is only the strong and few who can move through freedom to freedom.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita/p-526-527 The Agenda of Moderate Spirituality “Nevertheless it is possible to make the material man and his life moderately progressive by imprinting on the material mind (physical mind) the custom of progress, the habit of conscious change, the fixed idea of progression as a law of life… It is possible to give the material man and his life a moderate spirituality by accustoming him to regard in a religious spirit all the institutions of life and its customary activities.”⁹ Sri Aurobindo “Nor can the ideal of human life be simply the animal repeated on a higher scale of mentality. Otherwise, a moderate mental satisfaction would have stayed our advance.”¹⁰ Sri Aurobindo “When we attain this perfection (master of the physical), then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But this state of perfection arrives later in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental and physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts unfavourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty.”¹¹ (This line indicates that till one discovers Psychic being and Spiritual being, the law of moderation is good; but after that discovery, one should pursue rigorous self-control, ceaseless consecrated action, hard sacrifice.) Sri Aurobindo If one is comfortable and satisfied⁶⁶ with one part of his being and Nature having contact with the Divine, excluding the rest of his being and nature, then he is identified as a Moderate. Integral Yoga promises that an ordinary earth-bound life can be transformed into Divine life, but it cannot be reconciled with Divine life. This means in order to arrive at Divine life, one has to renounce ordinary earth-bound life.⁶⁷ We can confirm it by the Mother's following observation, "But, in the beginning (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry in 1926), the first condition for coming here was that you would have nothing more to do with your family!.... In the beginning, it was very, very strict – for a long time... The first condition was: ‘Nothing more to do with your family ...’ ...this is an indispensable condition because as long as you hang on to all these cords which bind you to ordinary life, which make you a slave to the ordinary life, how can you possibly belong to the Divine alone?"⁶⁵ Moderate philosophy considers man as above the brute and below God and he is given the calm reason as his guide. He chooses a middle path of reason’s vigilant light which is neither that of Gods with their superhuman thought and power nor that of Titans with their furious march to conquer the kingdom of heaven and dash their life against the eternal Law and fall and break by their own violent mass, nor is he driven by an unthinking will of the bird and beast, nor is he moved senselessly by the stark necessity of Inconscient things. The Moderate Spirituality begins when there is an instreaming of exceptional light of experience into the great mass of normal unenlightened human mind, vitality and physicality which forms the outer self and engrosses the natural preoccupation of a moderate seeker. Integral Yoga recognises man’s hunger for immediate solutions of all his practical problems and does not rest content with unsolved discord, unillumined compromise, patched with failure but sets out in its mission to resolve all problems of existence through integral Evolution or existence fully aware of itself. It accepts all life as Yoga of the Mother-nature, evolving through the concentration of the individual or the secret will of Sachchidananda appearing as the individual in a world. It uses all the means of Religion, Science, Occult knowledge and Spiritual thought as a starting point and the evolutionary endeavour of Nature has experimented on all lines in order to find her true way and her whole way. It accepts the developmental urge of all Religion as ‘a sort of unconscious Yoga of devotion’, and Science as ‘a sort of unconscious Yoga of intellect’; it is the first approach of mind to the Spirit and Nature’s means of slow evolution and are relevant for the beginners. Integral Yoga accepts all Religion as part of the eternal Religion, Sanatana Dharma, and adoration of the personal God of all Religion as passage of partial realisation of the Divine, helping one towards the realisation of the Divine in its entirety. All Science is accepted as part and portion of Supreme Science and the rationalistic Materialism can safely enter the vast field of evidence and experience when the intellect has been severely trained to clear austerity. It served humanity greatly through a clean sweep at once of truth of liberated intelligence, a new departure and a surer advance of perfect experience and liberates humanity from the dualities of the sensational partial conceptions. Who is a moderate?: “So must the dim being grow in light and force And rise to his higher destiny at last, Look up to God and round at the universe, And learn by failure and progress by fall And battle with environment and doom, By suffering discover his deep soul And by possession grow to his own vasts.” Savitri-146 (by possession of Psychic being) “He is satisfied with his common average kind; Tomorrow’s hopes and his old rounds of thought, His old familiar interests and desires He has made into a thick and narrowing hedge Defending his small life from the Invisible; His being’s kinship to infinity He has shut away from him into inmost self, Fenced off the greatness of hidden God.” Savitri-165-66 “Man’s eyes could look into the inner realms; His scrutiny discovered number’s law And organised the motions of the stars, Mapped out the visible fashioning of the world, Questioned the process of his thoughts or made A theorised diagram of mind and life.” Savitri-361 A moderate’s width of life is all that he can think and act and to enjoy and to breathe is the height of his mortal hope. He meets a strange portion of his self that seeks for fragments and lives satisfied in the fragments. He lives in himself and for himself alone and with the rest joins only fleeting ties. His passion over short-lived surface joy and grief is his Shudra identity and his high thought cannot prevent him from the trap of inferior lower Nature which is ‘lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl’⁴⁵ and thus, he is unable to discover the Eternal in his secret house. He pursues the Divine Mother with life’s blind desire and claims all of Her as his lonely own and hastens to engross Her sweetness meant for all and hopes to bind Her with his longing cords. He finds Her Divine touch too strong to bear; intolerant of a Force he could not house and shrank into himself as from too bright a Sun. His mind’s light hides from him the Eternal’s thought; his heart’s hope conceals from him the Eternal’s will and earthly joy shuts from him the Eternal’s Bliss. The Spirit of a Moderate: “For swift and easy is the downward path,” Savitri-211 “Inviting to their high and exquisite sphere, To their secure and fine extremities This creature who hugs his limits to feel safe, These heights declined a greater adventure’s call. A glory and sweetness of satisfied desire Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss. It could not house the wideness of a soul Which needed all infinity for its home.” Savitri-238 “Man turns aside or chooses easier paths;” Savitri-449 (turns aside difficult adventure) “Only in limits can man’s strength be safe, Yet is infinity thy spirit’s goal, Its bliss is there behind the world’s face of tears.” Savitri-453 “Yet is he (intellect of man) visited by intuitive light And inspiration comes from the Unknown; But only reason and sense he feels as sure, They only are his trusted witnesses.” Savitri-517 “Our mortal vision peers with ignorant eyes; It has no gaze on the deep heart of things.” Savitri-626 Moderate Spirituality is the first preliminary form of seeking with a certain kind of religiosity which is not a pure Spiritual temperament but is of the nature of mind or life finding in itself a Spiritual support. In this stage, man is mostly preoccupied with the utilisation of such contacts as he can construct with what is beyond him to help or serve his mental ideas or moral ideals or his vital and physical interests and true turn to some Spiritual change has not yet come. Through small joys and grief, he moves towards God. His consciousness forgets to be Divine and cannot bear the Divine’s tremendous touch and cannot experience radical transformation of Nature. He experiences God with His cruel indifferent bitter law and pitiless gaze, meets love with his own agony and short-lived passion and an unknown face of Fate visits with ominous terror and shadowy doom. Now he walks in Nature’s doubtful ray. If his will could be made one with the Divine will and if his thought could echo the thoughts of God, then he might be all-knowing and omnipotent. If his mind can receive God’s light and his force be driven by God’s force then he is a miracle doing miracles. Effort has been made to accommodate the moderate seekers in the main streams of integral Yoga regardless of their past trend, fixed belief and exclusive methods. They will be conversant with its many fold Spiritual practices from the very beginning of their sadhana life and make their life opulent with the fresh inflow of Spiritual experiences. Their natural recoil from the difficult road, high truth, concentrated writings, great adventure within and without and practice of large-scale Spiritual disciplines are corrected, enlarged and transcended through the practice of inner adoration, sacrifice and consecrated action. An awareness comes of an inner light, of guidance or a communion, a greater control than the mind and will to which something in him obeys but all is not yet recast in the mould of that experience. The final aim of the evolutionary Nature in mental man is Spiritual change by the influence of the inner being and higher Spiritual mind but this by itself can lead to an illumined mental idealism to the growth of a religious mind, a religious temperament and some devotion in the heart and piety in the conduct. It is a first approach of Mind to the Spirit but it cannot enter the radical transformation of life and nature. Thus, a moderate Devotee has more responsibility to live deeper within, to exceed his present consciousness and raise the Spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its inner seeking. His faith in the Divine is indispensable; for without it he cannot pursue his path through the Unknown and this need not be imposed on him but must come as free perception and imperative direction, adesh, from the inner Spirit. The Limitation of Moderate Spirituality: "He is a smallness trying to be great, An animal with some instincts of a god, His life a story too common to be told, His deeds a number summing up to nought, His consciousness a torch lit to be quenched, His hope a star above a cradle and grave." Savitri-78 “A slowly changing order binds our will. This is our doom until our souls are free.” Savitri-154 “As long as the human animal is lord And a dense nether nature screens the soul, As long as intellect’s outward-gazing sight Serves earthy interest and creature joys, An incurable littleness pursues his days.” Savitri-163-164 “A little bliss is lent thee from above, A touch divine upon thy human days. Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage, For through small joys and griefs thou mov’st towards God.” Savitri-451 “He sees his little self as very God. His little ‘I’ has swallowed the whole world, His ego has stretched into infinity.” Savitri-453 Narad said: “Because thy strength is a part not God’s whole, Because afflicted by the little self Thy consciousness forgets to be divine As it (consciousness) walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh And cannot bear the world’s tremendous touch, Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain.” Saviti-454 “Imprisoned in his body and his brain The mortal cannot see God’s mighty whole, Or share in his vast and deep identity Who (Divine) stands unguessed within our ignorant hearts And knows all things because he (Divine) is one with all.” Savitri-517 “The doctrine “No belief without proof” applies to physical science, it would be disastrous in the field of spirituality — or for that matter in the field of human action. The saints or bhaktas have the faith in God long before they get the experience of God — the man of action has the faith in his cause long before his cause is crowned with success — otherwise they would not have been able to struggle persistently towards their end in spite of defeat, failure and deadly peril.”³⁸ Sri Aurobindo Since moderate Spirituality is Nature’s unconscious Yoga through slow evolution, so it cannot transform the impending doom or fixed destiny into a higher Spiritual destiny. A moderate gains the hard-won quietude, silence, partial Divine realisation and falls into mortal grief and Nature’s Law during transitional or critical moments of life. During the period of extreme adversity, he does not lean on the pure and tranquil Spirit for all the necessary aid and help; rather, he opens himself towards murmurs of inhuman solitudes and prefers to find a gate of escape⁴⁶ from all real problems. All Religions and all Sciences have their own countless stories of doing harm and evil to mankind and the world. “To adopt a religion because one is born in that religion or because the people one loves and trusts practise that religion or because when one goes to a particular place where others pray and worship, one feels helped in one’s own prayer and worship, is not the sign of a very strong nature; I should say it is rather the sign of a weakness or at any rate of a lack of originality.” The Mother/The Mother’s Centenary Works (second edition)/8/246, The Law of Moderation-1: Or Practice of Moderate Spirituality through Science: “(Scientific) Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall be prepared for those more puissant, direct and rapid faculties which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine mind. It is not, then, a freak, an inexplicable phenomenon, but a perfectly natural next step in the right line of her (Nature’s) evolution.”¹⁵ Sri Aurobindo “It is the Godhead who manifests himself in the great thinker, the hero, the leader of men, the great teacher, sage, prophet, religious founder, saint, lover of man, the great poet, the great artist, the great scientist, the ascetic self-tamer, the tamer of things and events and forces.”¹⁶ Sri Aurobindo “Our human knowledge is a candle burnt On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth;” Savitri-280 “And Science tears out Nature’s occult powers,” Savitri-627 “And sciences omnipotent in vain By which men learn of what the suns are made, Transform all forms to serve their outward needs, Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea, But learn not what they are or why they came….” Savitri-644 Science begins its journey from an obscure and ignorant perception of the hidden realities of Nature and proceeds towards more luminous and more potential vision of the Truth. It is the outcome of the development of man’s faculty of exclusive concentration and vast extension of practical physical mind. Integral Evolution considers Science as a part of occultism as it brings to light the Nature’s hidden formulas and uses its knowledge to set free the operation of her energies and place all its inventions and discoveries at the service of mankind. Science represents a vast system of physical magic through utilisation of secret truths of being and secret power and processes of Nature and it cannot rest content with the barriers of sense knowledge. Integral Evolution further provides this input that success and completion of physical knowledge of Science can be arrived at in its range of inquiry by discovery of what lies beyond, the Supraphysical knowledge because behind the process of physical Nature there is a vast inner kingdom of Supraphysical fact which can be accessed through Subliminal and Spiritual vision and entry into the Occult movement of the Force. Science dreams of physical conquest of death, discovers the necessary conditions or means for an indefinite survival of the body, has insatiable thirst for power and knowledge to capture God’s Omnipotence and Omniscience, contracting Space and Time to vanishing point and it strives in a thousand ways to make man the master of the circumstance and it is arriving at the border where material is divided from the immaterial and the highest achievement of utilitarian Science has even reduced the dependency on external aid of machinery to a vanishing point. In the wireless telegraphy and telephonic communication, the sensible physical means for the intermediate transmission of physical force is removed and it is preserved only at the point of transmission and reception. The development of Supraphysical science ensures that dependency even on these machineries will disappear and direct communication can be established between mind and mind without the aid of the physical organs and limitation they impose on our surface consciousness. If we can recognise this fact, then an enormous vista to the future will open wide through Supraphysical Science. Since the very Soul of scientific enquiry is the search for knowledge, so it cannot cry a halt at sense-dominated knowledge and reasoning from sense knowledge and shall strive to go beyond the limitation and error of sense²¹ by revealing the facts and realities not seizable by corporeal organs. Science confirms the Vedic and the Upanishadic idea ‘of the one essence with its many becomings’. The dualist appearance of Matter and Energy are reconciled in Science as matter is energy or E= mc² and are reconciled in the Vedanta as the Matter is Brahman Energy, annam brahma . It is evident that essential Matter is a thing non-existent to senses and is only a conceptual form of substance, and a point is reached where the arbitrary distinction in thought divides the form of substance from the form of energy. With the increase of scientific knowledge, man becomes capable of regulating and indefinitely prolonging life, though not capable of an entire conquest of death. Science is capable of envisaging only external or secondary causes of removing death and disease to a distance and is not capable of the root knowledge of eliminating it; it knows the process of things but not the essence; thus, it arrives at more powerful manipulation of circumstance without experiencing the essential control. But if we could go behind the surface nature and grasp the essential subtle nature and cause of error, suffering and death, we might hope to arrive at a mastery over them which should be not relative but entire. We can even hope to eliminate them altogether and justify the dominant instinct of our nature by the conquest of that absolute good, bliss, knowledge and immortality which our intuitions perceive as the true and ultimate condition of the human being. So the solution of the whole problem of existence cannot be realised by exclusive one-sided knowledge and the process of science, but we must know the process of mind, life, Soul and Spirit and all that are behind the material surface, and then only we have sufficiently integral knowledge for the total solution of the problem. Science is keen to take minute care, intelligent approach and one-pointed concentration on the smallest and largest of its works. This mighty energy is an equal and impartial mother and its intensity and force of movement is the same in the formation and upholding of a system of suns and the organisation of the life of an ant-hill. We have already seen how greatly and scrupulously Science has served the ends of the Divine and we must preserve all the truths of material Science and its real utilities in the final harmony, even if many or even if all of its existing forms have to be broken or left aside. Reason corrects the error and limitation of the sense mind and is therefore one of the most powerful faculties developed by Science and that is the chief cause of his superiority among the terrestrial beings. The reason of the enormous success of physical Science is that it works best and with a firm confidence, the truth and potentiality already contained in Nature, when it is given a substance to work or handle the cosmic force through acquired knowledge, deals objectivised actualities with sure steps of verification by positive reason and objective evidence, erects formulas and standards based on the objective and phenomenal reality and proceeds from them for new invention and new discovery and it accepts the actual, physical and objective fact as self-evident truth beyond question. Physical Science enlarged the discoveries and released the huge secret material energy into action and for it physical actuality alone is real and Mind and Life are only the departmental activities of Matter and material instrumentation and it ignores the Spiritual, considering it as one form and fragment of Mind and it accepts all other subjective beings and things on the same condition in so far as they can become objects of our external evidence or acceptable to that part of the reason which builds upon the data supplied by them that relies upon as one solid basis of objective knowledge. Certain scientific discoveries are misused and clumsily used by humanity who are mentally and morally unready and unfit to handle powers great and perilous; for it would be an artificial control without any true knowledge of the secret energy that underlies and sustains our creation. The ancient Indian Physicists had identified the hierarchies through which the pure Energy has condensed as pure Matter and the elementary state of material Force is a condition of pure material extension in space. The Material force first modified its ethereal status, akasha , and from this vibration the sense of sound is born and it further modified into a second state which is called in the old language the aerial, vayu , of which a special property of contact between force and force has emerged and from this vibration of force the sense of touch is born. The third self-modification of the primitive force is the principle of light, electricity, fire and heat. Agni, which is again manifested in earth’s atmosphere as sight. A fourth state is characterized by diffusion, is termed as water or the liquid state, jala, accompanied by the birth of the fourth element of sense, the taste and the final modification is termed as earth of the solid state, bhumi, accompanying with it the faculty of sense, the smell. This is the attitude of ordinary consciousness towards Matter that in proportion as Matter is more subtle, less densely resistant and enduringly seizable by the sense, it appears to us less material. Thus, the ancient thinking satisfied the query of the ordinary human mind, about how these forms which are so real, durable and solid to the sense can be in truth only temporary phenomena and things like pure energy are nonexistent, intangible and incredible to sense organs. The integral Vedantic affirmation of universe confirms that the delight of its existence is at (1) first self-gathered, absorbed, sub-conscious in the basis of the physical universe giving birth to the five states of Matter, akasha, vayu, agni, jala and bhumi ; (2) then evolves the five subtle sense of life that of sabda, sparsa, dristi, rasa and gandha ; this Life is Force and Force is Power and Power is Will and Will is the working of the master Consciousness; (3) then the life of sensation further emerges as growth of mind and ego in the triple vibration of pain, pleasure and indifference which is the limitation of the force of consciousness in the form and from its exposure to shocks of the universal Force which it finds alien to it and out of harmony with its own measure and standard; (4) finally, the distortion of original consciousness emerges as the full Sachchidananda consciousness in its creations by movement of ascending and descending Consciousness whose pace is regulated (a) by universality, (b) by equality, (c) by self-possession and (d) by conquest of Nature. This is the normal course, evolution and movement of the world. To realise its own power and to master and to know its world is therefore the increasing impulse of all individual life and that impulse is identified as the essential aspect of growing self-manifestation of Sachchidananda in cosmic existence or universalisation of the individual Being and Nature. His limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love; his restricted vital being has to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his recalcitrant physical being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself the whole flow of the indivisible Force that is all things. The Divine Life is born out of the deeper and wider truth of our being which is extended as life of unity, mutuality and harmony, which will again replace the imperfect mental consciousness of artificially arranged and mechanized unity of material life into the oneness-in-all of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. Reason and Science bind man within the limitations of Space and Time. The Space is defined as a stable extension measured out by divisibility of substance and mind places itself at certain point in that divisible extension and regards the disposition of substance around it. Time is defined as a mobile extension measured out by succession of the past, present and future in which mind places itself at a certain point from which it can look back and ahead. This experience of space and time in our waking state is what we call as a surface mental consciousness, and is only a small selection from our entire conscious Being. Behind this surface consciousness, there is a much vaster Subliminal and Subconscient mind, which is the greater part of our identity and contains heights, depths, and profundities to which no man can measure or fathom. This knowledge gives us the starting point of the true Science and also the starting point of true Spirituality. This knowledge will deliver us from the circumscription by the material and illusion of the obvious. Modern thought is unaware of invisible forces other than those revealed or constructed by Science; it does not believe that Nature is capable of creating any physical, vital and mental beings other than those around us in the physical world, men, beasts, birds, reptiles, fish, insects, germs and animalculae. These cosmic forces whose subtler substance is invisible to us, form conscious beings or use persons to embody them in physical forms and in a physical world and can act upon Matter and through Matter. As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of Light and Truth, so there are Powers of Ignorance, tenebrous Forces of the Darkness, Falsehood and Evil whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Suffering. The transformation of these universal forces attached to present unstable creation is beyond the scope and control of Physical Science. Science is oblivious and unaware of the Being, the Self and it experiences the separateness in the multiplicity and a dwelling or circling in the ill-understood maze of becomings but this limitation can be cured by the Soul in the Becoming growing into knowledge, into the awareness of the Being which in the multiplicity holds all these existences and their truth is already there in the Being’s timeless existence. The Divine Being is capable of becoming innumerable forms, though He is beyond all form, He does not lose His Divinity in these multitude of forms but pours out in them the delight of His Being and glories of His Godhead; this Earth-power, principle of all this figured material existence, does not lose her immutable divinity because she forms into habitable worlds, throws herself out in the hills and hollows and allows herself to be shaped into utensils or the hearth and the household or as hard metal into weapon, engine, electrical and electronic appliances. The material substance, either subtle like air, ether, heat, electricity and light or rather denser in water, soil, rock and hard metal, are form and body of the Spirit and would never have been created if it could not be made a basis for the self-expression of the Spirit. Science itself is a mental construction, a multitude of pragmatically correct formulas and devices, masterful in the creation of apt machinery, automatically infallible in its own field, but is entirely ignorant of the foundations of our being and of world-being and it does not throw any light on the major question of original cosmic process of how these determinates were created out of the original Indeterminate Existence. It cannot transform and perfect our nature and therefore cannot perfect our life. Rather it transforms all forms to serve their outward need. We do not gain essentially anything most needful by utmost widening of a physical objective knowledge like embracing the most distant solar systems, ride through the sky, exploring the deepest layers of earth, sail beneath the sea and tracing the most subtle powers of material energy. That is why in spite of dazzling triumphs of physical science with all its achievements of making life of humanity materially one, proves itself always in the end a vain and helpless creed by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and mechanised unity of material life and can never achieve happiness and fullness of being for humanity. Our true happiness and completeness lies in the true growth of our whole being and the transcendence of our existing Nature. So first we must grow into our full mental being which is the first transitional movement towards human perfection, mastery and freedom; it does not actually liberate the Soul from increased servitude but prepares loosening of the hold of material and vital absorption. The Integral Yogi’s distinction from other mental men is that he lives and acts in a greater vision and vaster Spiritual Consciousness that he has to express or rather that presses to express itself through him and moulds his works. After realisation of the Integral Divine, the static highest Oneness and the Dynamic greatest Power, an Integral Yogi returns to intermediate worlds for multiple perfection, siddhis , and again returns to earth and its multitude of problems, bears the burden of the world, enjoys Divinely its Self and Universe by renouncing the egoistic sense of desire and possession, tyaktena bhunjithah and transforms humanity. For his Spiritual Consciousness, existence appears as a world of Spirit, mayi vartate, ¹⁷ not a world of Matter but a God manifested in the form, not a world of life but a God manifested in the force, not a world of mind but a God manifested in the thought. His entry in Occultism is not confined to a subordinate action of astonishingly effective use of mind power and life power by mechanisation of latent forces but mind and life forces are made plastic, subtle, variable in their action and have not the material rigidity and they have developed a subtle and plastic Intuition in the knowledge for the interpretation of all their action, process and application of established formulas. He enters Arts with the aim of a more glorious and beautiful manifestation; there the delight of the Spirit is ever new, the forms of beauty are innumerable, the godhead adored is ever young and the taste of the delight is eternal and inexhaustible and attains to something of this true capacity for variable but universal delight in the aesthetic reception of things. His aim in utilitarian Science is to enter the ways and processes of the Divine, to know the material and means of work to utilise that knowledge for the conscious and faultless expression of the Spirit’s mystery, joy and self-fulfilment. His aim in Science is to discover, understand and execute the working of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in men, creatures and in Nature’s myriad manifestations. His aim in medical Science is to discover integral healing through the intervention of the Divine Grace or Nature’s all-powerful suprarational remedy which can be subordinated by the support of medicines and doctors. Science discovers the fundamental truth of existence that the Matter resolves itself into form of Energy and studies opaque Force and Matter. This force is fundamentally the Chit-Tapas or Chit-Shakti , Consciousness-force of the Vedanta which builds up and constitutes the Matter. Traditional Spirituality discovers the greater and completer fundamental truth that the Matter exists as a substantial appearance of Consciousness and the only reality is a pure Spirit or the Conscious Being. Integral Spirituality finds a link principle of Consciousness which is veiled as subconscious form in Matter and revealed as superconscious form in Spirit. Since to Science, Matter is the beginning and end of all knowledge so it shows reluctance to accept Consciousness as the mother of intelligence and material Energy or blind Nature-Force is now ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things and the sole instrumentation of the World-Force. Science has worked marvels by organising the instrumentation of material forces and created an unlimited prospect of our existence and it does not accept the instrumentation of the powers of Consciousness and Spiritual and Occult forces exceeding and overpassing the limitation of existing Nature. When Science will be able to mend its earlier stand of recognising a subconscious mind or intelligence as creator of material universe but accepts an involved Truth Consciousness behind all material existence, then it will be able trace the hierarchies of higher Consciousness and gives way to the higher Spiritual appetite of integral Yoga and its unconscious wandering within Matter ends and it will recognise life, mind and Supermind as evolution of veiled Truth Consciousness in Matter or different grades of same energy, different organisations of the one conscious force of Existence. Purified Intelligence is an intermediate consciousness and it can trace the passage of Spiritualised Intelligence and Intuition of higher Consciousness. Science can find its full sense and justification by illuminating itself with the Light and Truth preserved in the ancient Vedantic Scripture. Thus, we cease to reason and go deep into ourselves by stilling the mind. Knowledge of luminous vastness with illimitable self-vision awaits and is seated beyond mind and intellectual reasoning. Thus, we can hope that a great progression of Science starting from the rudimentary beginnings of an awakening of the material forces, continuing with this mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by fusion of old Eastern and modern Western wisdom, might lead to another immense development and departure. The Law of Moderation-2: Or Practice of Moderate Spirituality through Religion: “Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nanyad astıti vadinah (those who are devoted to the Veda whose creed is that there is nothing else.¹³ ). This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars , still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul.”¹⁴ Sri Aurobindo “All powers of Life towards their godhead tend In the wideness and the daring of that air, Each builds its temple and expands its cult, And Sin too there is a divinity.” Savitri-185 The objective of all Religion is to generalise the highest available Spiritual Truth for the largest benefit of humanity and its greatest utility is to act as an intermediary between the perfect Spirit and imperfect Nature. The objective of all Spirituality is to trace the endless unfolding of the opulence of the Spirit and preserve its highest discovered truth in some casketed secret symbolic formulas and given only to a few fit initiated Souls living within the secret Schools of Spiritual Fortress for the present and future benefit of humanity. In integral Yoga, both objectives are reconciled. But in our separative consciousness each Religion takes on the appearance of opposing forces; each exists as opposites through rituals, ceremony and sacraments; each claims to be the Truth and superior and taxes the others with error and inferior Truth-expressions; each feels impelled to destroy, clash or refuse the others in order that it alone may survive, fulfill itself and spread the message of the Truth. The religious emotions are often invaded by turmoil, obscurity, self-assertive narrowness, challenging egoism and are either crude or narrow or fanatical or mixed with movements that are not signs of the Spirit’s freedom and draw back Religion of its higher Spiritual aim and character. The necessity of mutually destructive schools of philosophy arises when human mentality lays an exclusive emphasis on one side of the Spiritual experience, affirms that as the sole eternal Truth of existence and states it in terms of all dividing mental logic. Again if we give support to this play of difference, then we assert that the Supreme and the human Soul are eternally different and reject the validity of a Spiritual experience which transcends their difference. Integral Yoga proceeds towards all-inclusive Knowledge, not by setting one truth against other truth to see which will survive and flourish, but complements one exclusive truth by another exclusive truth in the light of the vision that each are special aspect of one all-inclusive Truth. All truth idea, truth vision, truth perception and truth discernment have this character of large integrating knowledge, a whole working out of the process of self-awareness in a self-executing harmony of truth-being. The quest of man for God, which becomes in the end most ardent and enthralling of all his quests, begins with his first vague questionings of Nature, thus, the primitive form of Religion started from animism, spirit-worship, demon-worship and deification of the natural forces, an obscure and ignorant feeling of hidden influences and incalculable forces, or a vague sense of being, will, intelligence in what seems to us Inconscient, of the invisible behind the visible, of the secretly conscious Spirit in things distributing itself in every working of energy. This obscurity, inferior stage and primitive inadequacy of the first perceptions do not detract from the value of the truth of this great quest of the human heart and mind, and it must start from an obscure and ignorant perception of hidden Realities and proceed to the more and more luminous vision of the Truth and sheer contact of the Spiritual Reality which at first comes to us masked, draped, veiled by the mists of the Ignorance. In India , the age of Intuitive knowledge, Intuitive seeing and Intuitive expression was represented by fathomless thought and profound language of early Vedantic thinking of the Upanishads; the Intuition was unable to give us direct knowledge because the surface nature was not trained and well organised to fully assimilate its messages. In order to organise the surface being the age of Intuitive knowledge had to give place to the age of rational knowledge, inspired Scriptures, intellectual account which made room for metaphysical philosophy and logical justification of what has been found by inner realisation as represented in The Gita and afterwards metaphysical philosophy gave birth to systematized method for realisation and experience through experimental psycho-physical Science of Hathayoga , experimental occult science of Tantra and experimental Psychic Science of Rajayoga . In the West, this synthetic and illumined tendency of consciousness was replaced by the separative and analytic, Spiritual urge parted company from intellectual reason, and philosophy took the form of purely intellectual and ratiocinative explanation for things. The dynamic thought and conduct developed a discipline, an effort at inner perfection of the being through systems like the Pythagorean, Stoic and Epicurean; this reached a higher Spiritual plane of knowledge through the later Christian and Neo-pagan thought structures where the Eastern and Western experiences were reconciled. In the age of rationalistic speculation, the Indian philosophers were respectful of a double attitude, that of (1) inspired revelation through Intuition, an authority superior to reason and (2) testing the result of Intuition through Reason. In this way they avoided the metaphysical sin and the tendency to battle in the cloud. Their speculations proceeded towards the highest Spiritual experience by united consent of two great authorities, the Intuition and the Reason. Subsequently, in the passage of time the trend of the reason to assert its own supremacy prevailed in effect over the theory of its subordination. So the old catholicity and unity of intuitive Knowledge which sees things in the whole, suffered through the intervention of reason’s analysis and division and natural tendency of the reason to affirm some and negate others which conflict with its own chosen conclusion and hence each school of thought founded on Vedic or Vedantic theory use its texts as weapons of opposition against others. In the West the later Religion was not supported by philosophy but by credal theology. There Spiritual philosophy emerged by the sheer force of the individual genius and it was observed that the critical control of the intellect over Spiritual experience was hampered and was unreliable due to an inferior light of reason turned upon a field of higher Spiritual illumination. The real business of Religion is to prepare man’s mind, life and bodily existence for a Spiritual evolution and gives each one a mould of Spiritual discipline, a way of intense aspiration, a discernment and possession of Truth and has to lead him to that point where the inner Spiritual light begins to fully emerge. The Religions in India accepted a vast number of difficult formulations and all the elements that have grown in the course of the evolution of Religion and refused to ban or excise any. It developed occult Science to its utmost limit, accepted Spiritual philosophies of all kinds, every possible line of highest, deepest and largest Spiritual realisation, Spiritual experience and Spiritual self-discipline; followed all ways of communication between man and the Supreme Divine and every possible way of advance to the goal. Thus, a larger psychic and emotional relation, more deep and plastic in its essence and all embracing relation with God became imperative. It is by such plasticity and catholicity that the wider aim of the evolution of Religion can work with an unexampled multitudinous richness, impregnable durability, generality, universality, height, subtlety and all possible fullness. All the post-Buddhistic era lived in the shadow of the great Refusal and the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic. It disturbed two thousand years of old Vedic Aryan balance between Matter and Spirit and has increasingly dominated Indian minds of the ascetics and the religionists for many centuries with the idea that (1) renunciation and condemnation of earthly life is the sole path of knowledge, (2) acceptance of life as the act of ignorant Maya , (3) the cessation of birth and withdrawal to happier worlds is the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit to recoil from Matter. It was in the integral Yoga, the three great formulas of negations of interim solution, (1) the chain of karma , (2) escape from wheel of rebirth and (3) cosmic illusion, Maya, which had permeated and predominated the general conception of the mind of the race through most of the Religious and Spiritual disciplines of India, were transcended and it was felt necessary to find a true solution and to look afresh at the Idea or Truth behind the Hindu negation of this cosmic existence. In the new orientation, in its ultimate objective, the limitations of Universal Illusionism behind these theories were traced and they were transformed to their full significance of a universal Realism, a real universe reposing on a Reality at once Universal, Transcendent and Absolute. The law or the chain of karma is Divine Will acting through the limitation of mind, producing mechanised living and bondage. Each being reaps what he sows. Karma is further projected as the outcome of past good or evil thoughts, feelings and actions which determine and construct his fixed physical fate. They are the chief or the most forceful determinants of his being and his future. This idea of Karma is a construction of the narrow but practical human physical mind and vital mind concerned with its petty rules of life and its desires and joys and sorrows and erecting their puny standards into the law and aim of the cosmos. These ignorant notions cannot be acceptable to the human intellect and still less to the law of Divine living. The true liberating karma as proposed in integral Yoga is the action of direct Divine will received through the Psychic or Spiritual being whose outcome is intense creative joy of Spirit, the harmony of the eternal musician and the play of the Divine Playmate. The higher law of karma is ultimately the law of Spiritual evolution and with the emergence of our Soul, the primary plan of fixed destiny is partly modified by the intervention of the mind and wholly changed to Psychic and Spiritual destiny and the binding law of karma is replaced with the Spiritual freedom or the law of the Self. The past mechanized action of man gives birth to the present man of fixed fate and the present mental action of man gives birth to a future Spiritual man with an unimaginable Spiritual destiny. Those who are bound to the chain of karma are bound to the principle of rebirth and in all traditional schools, the freedom from rebirth is projected as the highest and ultimate objective. The methods by which they can escape into the Purushottama State and rest there permanently, for that they must satisfy three conditions; firstly, they must mould themselves towards this ideal their whole inner life in their earthly living; secondly, they must have the capacity to go to the highest state of Purushottama either in trance or waking state while continuing in this earthly body and thirdly, they must be faithful to this aspiration during the hour of departure of the earthly body. In integral Yoga, rebirth is not considered as the Soul’s circling in the net of desire, but an opportunity of Spiritual evolution and through it the mind, life and body repeat the lesson of manifesting their involved Divinity till the recovery of their complete and undivided Divine life. It is for ever-increasing upward experience of the individual being from life to life; the growth of the Soul is a growth out of darkness into Light, out of falsehood into Truth, out of suffering into its own supreme and universal Ananda. It is through joy and grief, pain and suffering, fortune and misfortune that the Soul enters into rebirth. The theory of Maya, the Illusionist theory, as proposed by Shankara is the sense of illusion or unreality of cosmic existence as formulated by the mind; it really cuts the knot of the world problem; it is an escape, a separation from Nature. This sense of unreality powerfully seizes the consciousness of a Spiritual seeker with great force when the mind withdraws from its constructions; one passes into pure Selfhood void of all sense of individuality and Consciousness is plunged into a trance of pure Superconscient existence. Buddha took one step farther to declare the unreality of the Self and God; for they too are constructions of the mind. Any error, division and confusion of mind between the activities of Saguna Brahman and quiescence of Nirguna Brahman would not be a creative cosmic Illusion, Maya, but only a wrong understanding of realities of Existence and a wrong relation created by Ignorance. A real solution of existence and world-existence can only stand upon the truth that accounts for their validity, integralises, harmonises and gathers together all their experience in the supreme all-reconciling Oneness. Still there are other decisive Spiritual experiences, that of greater Divine union with the double Spiritual experience of Cosmic Consciousness and Nirvana of world-consciousness, which can undo the whole theory of (mental) Maya , which can remove Ignorance and Falsehood from material life and this world is experienced as real as Brahman . The illusionist word Maya , of the later Vedantist , which means cunning, fraud and illusion, has declined from its original meaning of knowledge, skill and intelligence of the Ancient Vedantist. Integral Yoga retains the ancient original Vedantic sense of Maya, which is all-comprehending, all-containing and all-embracing Consciousness of the Supreme, that affirms and includes the truth of all Spiritual experience, integralises all Knowledge, and experiences That which being known all is known. (Supramental) Maya is the supreme and universal Consciousness and Force of the Eternal and Infinite and it is at once transcendental, universal and individual and it can put forth many states of Consciousness at a time. The world appears to be an Illusion (mental) Maya by virtue of the presence of lower Nature and apparent denial of Ignorance which seeks to become affirmation and this Illusion-Power which creates appearances can be removed by ascending into the higher Consciousness and Matter can be the solid ground for manifestation of the highest Divine. The shadow of the great Refusal or principle of negation prevailing over principle of affirmation of post Buddhistic era of the East was reincarnated in the West as Christian negation⁴¹ which was born out of fear of hell and long subconscient memory of suppression, anguish, oppression, aggression, intolerance, use of violence, atrocity, paid the price of blood and suffering and death of Christian martyrs in thousands of its religious history. The accumulated Soul forces¹² of these martyrs conquered against the empire-force so that the oppression of Christianity prevailed but not the compassionate Christ. The victorious religion became a militant and dominant Church and Christianity organise themselves into mutual strife and they battled together fiercely to live, grow and possess the world as much as possible to their utmost capacity. They limit the Infinite as one and only Incarnation.⁴⁰ This monotheistic doctrine was again further aggravated as religious obscurantism of opposing the enquiry and extension of endless scientific discovery. The latter limitation was overcome with the advent of modern Science and the former can be transcended by the advent of Spiritual Science and the entry of a caravan of Light into the body of an individual Spiritual seeker and his greatest difficulty is that he still seeks happiness and fulfilment in Heaven beyond and not on earth. In order to overcome this exclusive Spirituality where this creation is identified as reprehensible;³⁹ he will have to fight strongly in order to establish himself here in the external life the Supreme Bliss from which all creation is born. He will weld strongly the central truth, central dynamic principle, central secret of his Religion with the all truth of Eternal Religion, Sanatana Dharma , from which all religions have evolved. He will realise the gospel of Divine love, service, benevolence and action that dominates his outer Christian living, which has its Transcendent source in Sachchidananda , the triple Divine principle of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss, and he will further realise that elevating himself to the Transcendent Source of all is a more important and relevant issue than the minor factor of serving the individual or the race. The division of Catholic and Protestant Christianity is identified in integral Yoga as the former is the original plasticity in nature with many-sided catholicity extended towards the growth of whole Nature of human being and the latter is disruptive of this wide-reaching tendency and insists on pure dependency on belief, monotheistic adoration of God, who lives as Immanent Being within and simplified law of good so as to make quick appeal to common intellect, heart and ethical will. The specialty of Catholicism is that they worship virgin Mother, Para-prakriti, and have the occult knowledge of the Subliminal plane and Protestants have something of the inner Divine Presence. . Integral Yoga accepts and adores the compassionate Christ as Divine Incarnation. The Cross,¹⁹ which symbolises purification and suffering, is transformed in integral Yoga²² into a symbol of strong and perfect union between the Soul and Nature and all that purified humanity is culminated by its fulfillment. The Mother force in Virgin Mary is extended in integral Yoga as Virgin Savitri, the descent of Supreme nature, Para-prakriti, into human form, who promises that Earth life can be made an equal and peer of Heaven and Heaven’s joy can natively grow on mortal soil if Earth can be made pure and virgin. Savitri further promises to transform the seven-fold sorrows of the Subconscient world (this can be linked with Mother Mary’s seven sorrows) into seven-fold Bliss and ‘Misery shall pass abolished from the earth.’²⁰ Integral Yoga accepts Shankar’s theory of ‘Brahman is Real and World is an Illusion’ as the initial Spiritual experience and rejects it in the final journey with the realisation of World is as real as Brahman and Brahman Force can penetrate into material life and Divinise it. It accepts the Buddhistic doctrine of Nirvana and the eightfold path⁵⁵ as the initial Spiritual realisation and rejects its negation that the world, the Self and the Divine are the construction of Mind and hence are unreal. It accepts the Gita’s self-discipline of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga and rejects its objective of escape into the Supreme abode of Param Dham . It accepts the inner renunciation of desire and ego of ascetic living and rejects saintly inactivity and renunciation of outer life. It accepts the exclusive Spiritual quests of later Vedantists as the starting point of Yoga and rejects their dependency on Psycho-physical means of self-discipline. It accepts initially Patanjali's eight limbs of Yoga⁵⁶ and its highest objective of Samadhi, which 'tends to withdraw into a subliminal plane at the back of our normal experiences instead of (objective of Integral Yoga) descending and possessing our whole existence.'⁶³ It accepts Chris t as the Divine Incarnation, its gospel of universal Love, brotherhood, equality and charity and rejects the Christian doctrine of limiting the infinite to one and only Divine Incarnation, solution of all problems of existence in the Heaven beyond, long Subconscient memory of oppression, miseries and acceptance of creation as the error of God. Integral Yoga accepts the fundamental truth of all religions and rejects their narrow customs and creeds. Integral Yoga accepts the ancient Vedantic doctrine of searching for the truth of existence in both Matter and Spirit and finds a reconciling equation in which Brahman consciousness penetrates material life. The above Eastern and Western negations are further fragmented through the apparent negations and divisions between mind, life and body. The three negations of mind are identified as limitation of Consciousness (which gave birth to Pleasure, Pain and Indifference), Ignorance and Dualities transformed in integral Yoga into Infinite Consciousness, integral Knowledge and Oneness; of life are identified as Death, Desire or Hunger and Incapacity transformed in integral Yoga into Immortality, satisfied Delight and Omnipotence and of physical are Ignorance, Inertia and Division transformed in integral Yoga into Omniscience, Divine peace and tranquility and Unity. Conscious unity and perfect harmony of mind, life and body can be arrived at by discovering the triple Soul of Manomaya, Pranamaya and Annamaya Purusha , and further pushing to discover the Psychic Being in the heart and Spiritual and Supramental Being above the head. Spiritual experience born out of World Negation as developed by Buddha and later further extended by the Indian Saint Shankara is the Nirvana and Brahma Nirvana, respectively. For the Buddha , the world, Self and God are constructions of the mind and by withdrawing from such constructions, one arrives at the ineffable Delight of the Nirvana . If this experience is further extended one realises the featureless, immutable, silent and absolute state of One and indivisible Brahma Nirvana . And the Ananda becomes so intense and pure that to the mind this phenomenal world seems to be an illusion. The Spiritual experience born out of Positive Affirmation of World or considering world as the body of the Divine, Vasudev Sarvamiti, is the Cosmic Consciousness which is possible by raising and widening the mind to the state of Truth Thought, Truth Vision, Truth Hearing, Truth Discernment and Truth Touch or developing the faculty of Higher Mind, illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and finally Mind is universalized to experience Overmind state of Consciousness. In this cosmic Consciousness of Overmind the Matter is real to the Spirit and the Spirit is real to the Matter and their reconciliation is practicable. In this Cosmic consciousness Mind, Life and Body are no longer considered as agents of separation and fomenters of an artificial quarrel but as conscious Intermediaries and Instruments of evolving Consciousness, where Mind is self-fulfilled when it becomes a pure mirror of the Truth of Being; Life is self-fulfilled when it consciously lends its energies to the perfect self-figuration of the Divine in ever-new forms and activities of the universal existence and body is self-fulfilled when its substance is plastic and malleable enough to the pure Divine touch and its Light. In integral Yoga, the negative Spiritual experience of Nirvana and the positive or affirmative Spiritual experience of Cosmic Consciousness are accepted as expressions of Self and are reconciled and transcended, where the former asks the pacification of the mind and the latter asks the activation and illumination of Mind. These two Spiritual experiences are the basis of static and dynamic Brahman , beyond which the greater Divine union and integral Divine realisation stand. In conclusion, Integral Yoga has nothing to do with Hindu religions or any other Religions. It recognises two things. (1) It accepts the 'Truth of the Divine which is the spiritual reality behind all religions'⁵² and (2) dynamic Divine union and its highest form identified as Supramental truth, which is not known to any Religion. These two things are identified as the foundation of all future action of integral Yoga and by their help all problems of existence can be resolved, all impurity can be purified, all untransformed Nature can be Divinised and all imperfections of existence can be perfected. The Law of Moderation-3: Or Eightfold Concentration for the beginners of Integral Yoga: “Detect first what is false (countless rajasic imperfections) or obscure (countless tamasic imperfections) in you and persistently reject it, then alone can you rightly call for the divine Power to transform you.....But whatever his (Sadhak's ) aim, however exalted his aspiration, he has to begin from the law of his present imperfection, to take full account of it and see how it can be converted to the law of a possible perfection.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-32/The Mother with letters on the Mother/p-4 CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-631 Those whose Psychic being in the heart and Spiritual being above the head have partly opened are identified as beginners of Integral Yoga. Before this opening, they can pursue this Yoga with the aid of purified intellect. These seekers are issued with injunctions in Savitri to renounce 'rest and earthly ease' (Savitri-339) till they find their Psychic and Spiritual being. Those who have found the Psychic being and Spiritual being are issued with injunctions in Savitri to renounce 'the glory and felicity.' (Savitri-136) Because during the transformation of Nature, pain and suffering are treated not as a curse, but as a transitional mechanism and a privilege ("It keeps for her her privilege of pain...But must cross on stones of suffering to its goal." (Savitri-457)) used by the universalized consciousness to shock the inert matter into waking up and evolving. Apprentice Sadhakas will begin this Yoga with the triple wheels of Vedantic method of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga with limited will, intellect and emotion, integral in its aim and process and many-sided in progress, but starting from works and proceeding by works aided at each step with more and more illumined Divine knowledge and vivifying Divine love. At the beginning and for a long period on the way, limitations and exclusiveness will be there, but the integral Yoga will wear them more loosely than the more exclusive ways of seeking and will soon emerge from the limitations of exclusive concentration. And lastly, they will keep this in mind that integral Yoga can be further pursued through integral method by activation of Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental self-discipline through dynamisation of an essential, multiple and Integral concentration and they can gradually withdraw dependency from the following eight disciplines of exclusive concentration as soon as higher concentrations intervene; for in higher concentrations these disciplines retain their spontaneous absolute state. Here, in this paper, a passing reference is given to these absolute states. These eight self-disciplines can be compared with the Buddha's Āryāṣṭāṅgamārga, the Noble Eightfold Path⁵⁵ and Patanjali's system of Aṣṭāṅgayoga, the Eight Limbs of Yoga.⁵⁶ Here the Buddha's Path is Ethical/Mental, Patanjali's Path is in Ascending Limbs, and the Integral Yoga Path is Spiritual and Supramental Integration. i) All Renunciation, Sarva Aparigraham, Sarva-Tyāga, Sarva-Sannyāsa : "Therefore attachment and desire must be utterly cast out; there is nothing in the world to which we must be attached, not wealth nor poverty, nor joy nor suffering, nor life nor death, nor greatness nor littleness, nor vice nor virtue, nor friend, nor wife, nor children, nor country, nor our work and mission, nor heaven nor earth, nor all that is within them or beyond them."³⁴ Sri Aurobindo Renunciation is a self-discipline of negative practice in order to arrive at the positive aim of integral Yoga. All renunciation includes external and inner renunciation necessary during the formative stage of integral Yoga and its utility is no longer felt when the Soul no longer seeks pleasure but possesses the delight of the Divine in all things and obeys consciously the will of one Self in all beings. In integral Yoga, complete external renunciation of life is a provisional stage through which the Soul must pass at some period of its progress. And inner renunciation is experienced in the three stages, that of renunciation of triple attachment in the senses, the heart, the intellect; ‘for attachment is the egoism in love and not love itself;’³⁴ secondly renunciation of triple self-will or desire in the thought, emotion and action; for ‘desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in things;’³⁴ and thirdly, renunciation of triple egoism in the intellect, heart and volition; for ‘ego must either disappear in impersonality or fuse into a larger I.’³⁵ So from the very beginning of this Yoga one has to teach oneself to renounce desire in three stages; first, renounce all lower forms of desire and concentrate on the higher desire of passion for the Divine manifested as Purity, Peace, Ananda , Love, Beauty etc.; secondly, one has to be taught not to desire anything for one’s own separate sake, not to desire even personal salvation, but for the manifestation of God in the world and for the Divine in ourselves and lastly, one must learn to desire, not in its own egoistic way, but in the way of the Divine, it must yearn to fulfill a larger and greater Will. Thus, through this training, the desire, which is a great harasser of man and cause of every kind of stumbling, can be fit to be transformed into its Divine counterpart of Delight in things. This desire has its root in the Inconscient Sheath and can be removed from its root by Supramental Invasion. It is identified in Savitri as 'A last and mightiest transformation."⁵⁴ The will in us takes various forms of will of life, will of intellect, and a will of emotion, covering every part of nature that reacts with incapacity, limitations, wrong or perverted will. These are to be renounced in order to tune oneself with the Divine will. Purification of egoism through renunciation is indispensable for inner purity, peace and joy. When one realises that the one Divine power works in his mind, life and body and the same works in all other men, animals, plants and things animate and inanimate, then one is liberated from egoism, - ‘When the human ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant’s groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation.’³³ Through the practice of renunciation, falsehood is rooted out and one arrives at a desireless state, which is the essential condition for arriving at equality and complete surrender. As long as falsehood is there penetrated within the Matter, things will end badly. To remove it is the direct task of Supramental action.⁵³ ii) All Equality, Sarva-Samatā : “Attaining to a perfect equality in the soul, mind and heart, we realise our true self of oneness, one with all beings, one too with That which expresses itself in them and in all that we see and experience. This equality and this oneness are the indispensable twin foundation we must lay down for a divine being, a divine consciousness, a divine action. Not one with all, we are not spiritual, not divine. Not equal-souled to all things, happenings and creatures, we cannot see spiritually, cannot know divinely, cannot feel divinely towards others.”²³ Sri Aurobindo “It has been best formulated in the already expressed doctrine of the Gita by which a complete renouncement of desire for the fruits as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the complete achievement of a perfect equality are put forward as the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual equality is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire, — to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success or failure, to look with an equal eye on high and low, friend and enemy, the virtuous and the sinner, to see in all beings the manifold manifestation of the One and in all things the multitudinous play or the slow masked evolution of the embodied Spirit.”²⁴ Sri Aurobindo “The first business of the sadhaka is to see whether he has the perfect equality , how far he has gone in this direction or else where is the flaw, and to exercise steadily his will on his nature or invite the will of the Purusha to get rid of the defect and its causes.”²⁵ Sri Aurobindo “A perfect equality not only of the self, but in the nature is a condition of the Yoga of self-perfection. The first obvious step to it will be the conquest of our emotional and vital being, for here are the sources of greatest trouble , the most rampant forces of inequality and subjection, the most insistent claim of our imperfection. The equality of these parts of our nature comes by purification and freedom.”²⁶ Sri Aurobindo “A perfect equality of our spirit and nature is a means by which we can move back from the troubled and ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven and possess the spirit’s eternal kingdoms, rajyam samruddham , of greatness, joy and peace. That self-elevation to the divine nature is the complete fruit and the whole occasion of the discipline of equality demanded from us by the self-perfecting aim in Yoga.”²⁷ Sri Aurobindo “A perfect equality and peace of the soul is indispensable to change the whole substance of our being into substance of the self out of its present stuff of troubled mentality. It is equally indispensable if we aspire to replace our present confused and ignorant action by the self-possessed and luminous works of a free spirit governing its nature and in tune with universal being. A divine action or even a perfect human action is impossible if we have not equality of spirit and an equality in the motive-forces of our nature.”²⁸ Sri Aurobindo Integral Yoga demands complete equality not only of Nature, which constitutes our mind, heart and body but also of the Self, as a first necessity of Spiritual perfection, which can be attained by entire renunciation of desire, attachment and ego. The first obvious step to equality will be purification of the vital and emotional being as they are the sources of greatest trouble, the most rampant forces of inequality, subjection and imperfection. The last and most difficult step is the equality of thinking mind, buddhi, the entire purification of it is an indispensable condition for rising to Spiritual and Supramental heights. All things move towards Divine fulfillment, each experience of suffering and joy, creation and destruction, ignorance and knowledge, hatred and love, is a necessary link in carrying out the universal movement and it is our business here to understand and support it and see all things as the manifestation of the Divine without anger, impatience and trouble; any least revolt or reaction is a violence against the Master of the world and ‘this little pebble of imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the Yoga.’⁶⁴ Equality in Integral Yoga is a Spiritual way of replying to life and compelling it to become perfect through use of three passive methods and three active methods. The passive equality of Karma Yoga is titiksha , endurance, which is a teaching of the system to bear steadily and calmly of all contacts of pleasant and unpleasant, heat and cold, health and disease etc. The active equality of Karma Yoga is sama bhoga , which is an equal enjoyment of all things, happenings, experiences, objects, etc. The passive equality of Jnana Yoga is udasinata , indifference, which is a teaching of the system to remain indifferent to all touches of joy and grief, pleasure and pain or to seat above, superior to all physical and mental touches. The active equality of Jnana Yoga is sama rasa, which is a flow of equal Spiritual, Supramental rasa to all things, happenings, experiences and objects. The passive equality of Bhakti Yoga is nati , which is a joyful submission of the Soul to the will of God; it experiences all touches as His ecstatic touch and all experiences as His play. The active equality of Bhakti Yoga is sama ananda , which is a joy of Unity in everything and with everything. After equality is established the other three siddhis of Integral Yoga to which one may pursue are: - shanti, peace, sukha , spiritual ease in all circumstances and hasya , joy and laughter of the Soul. iii) All Consecration, Complete Surrender, Sarva-Yajña, Sarva-Samarpaṇa : “A long, difficult stage of constant effort, energism, austerity of the personal will, tapasya , has ordinarily to be traversed before a more decisive stage can be reached in which a state of self-giving of all the being to the Supreme Being (Vedantic Sacrifice) and the Supreme Nature (Vedic Sacrifice) can become total and absolute.”⁶¹ Sri Aurobindo “Our sacrifice is not a giving without any return or any fruitful acceptance from the other side; it is an interchange between the embodied soul and conscious Nature in us and the eternal Spirit. For even though no return is demanded, yet there is the knowledge deep within us that a marvellous return is inevitable. The soul knows that it does not give itself to God in vain; claiming nothing, it yet receives the infinite riches of the divine Power and Presence.”⁶² Sri Aurobindo Integral Yoga insists on the buddhi, will and emotion to dwell constantly on the master idea of surrender and must discourage all other lesser preferences of personal will, desire in the prana and separative ego and teach the whole being that any kind of grief, revolt, fear, impatience and trouble is a violence against the Master of existence.³⁶ The act of triple sacrifice has to be practiced every moment and every movement of our action, intellect and emotion, from the smallest, most ordinary, trifling to the greatest and most uncommon and noble acts, and it can begin by offering a flower, a leaf, our food, action, sleep and askesis to the Lord of sacrifice and if there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within with the Soul’s awakening, then these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for Divine purpose. ‘Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man’s avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.’⁵¹ With the growth of surrender, one becomes more powerful and all other opposing hostile forces lose their strength and two important inner changes are experienced. The secret inmost Soul in the heart comes to the front which was veiled by the restless activity of mind, the turbulent impulse of vital being and the obscurity of physical consciousness. Secondly, the Spiritual being above the head liberates the Divine Presence and Light and permeates them to our conscious and subconscious nature. The unveiling of the Psychic and Spiritual being paves the path open in the long run for more intense and comprehensive action of Universal Self and Supramental Self. Then, Integral Yoga is pursued by the direct interference and guidance of these four Selves and the integral method is evolved. iv) All Purification, Sarva-Śuddhi : "Purity is perfect sincerity and one cannot have it unless the being is entirely consecrated to the Divine." ⁴⁷ The Mother "Power of integral purity: the power to accept nothing but the divine influence." ⁴⁷ The Mother "Integral purity: the whole being is purified of the ego." ⁴⁷ The Mother "If one lives only for the Divine and by the Divine, there follows a perfect purity." The Mother The object of purification is to make the whole mental being a clear mirror in which the Divine reality can be reflected, a clear vessel and an unobstructing channel into which the Divine presence and through which the Divine influence can be poured, a subtilised stuff which the Divine nature can take possession of, shape anew and use for Divine issues. All impurity is a wrong discrimination, a departure from the law of nature, dharma , and an ignorant confusion of the disordered being. We have to primarily root out all impurity after a deeper diagnosis and secondarily treat its symptoms. There are two forms of impurity; (1) one is a defect born of the nature of our past evolution; this defect is a radically wrong and ignorant form given to all the four instrumental beings that of physical, vital, sensory and intellectual mind; (2) the second impurity is born of the successive emergence of evolving faculties like physical, vital, mental, Soul and Supermind and the defect is created by dependence of higher instruments on the lower which add the imperfection of embarrassment, wrong direction and confusion. We have to deal with all these four instruments and set about their purification. The complete purification of one instrument depends on the complete purification of other instruments and that is the source of great difficulty. The Integral Yoga proposes to begin with the purification and perfection of Buddhi, which will bring about the most easily and effectively or can add with a most powerful rapidity the purification of the rest. All purification is a release, a delivery, a throwing away of limiting, binding, obscuring imperfections and confusions of the four instrumental nature that (1) of purification from impatience, fear and doubt brings freedom of physical mind, (2) of purification from desire brings the freedom of the psychic prana , of purification from wrong emotions and troubling reactions the freedom of the heart, (3) of purification from the obscuring limited thought brings freedom of the sense mind and (4) of the purification from thought power and will power subjected to lower mind brings the freedom of the intelligence, freedom from mere intellectuality. The root source of impurity is in the physical mind in the form of incoherent desire, doubt, narrowness and fear. It is irresponsible and careless of all rules, properties, and harmonies. This tamasic mind adores small earth-gods, aspires for greater comfort, order, and pleasure, but is skeptical about the direct Spiritual experience and Spiritual deliverance and to enlighten it by higher Spiritual and Supramental planes is one of the difficult objectives of the Integral Yoga. Purification of the physical mind is possible either by silencing the mind and by becoming a witness or by developing concentration through single-minded thought. Purification of the physical mind can also be pursued either by the method of constant concentration of psycho-spiritual Mantra, constant repetition of psycho-physical, Japa ; as the Words have a direct harmonious effect on the vibration of the physical substance, or the method of changing the centre of living from below the naval to the centre above the head and directing the inverted Spiritual force to possess the physical mind and vital mind. In addition to it, Psychic influence can also purify the physical mind. It trains the body to become a passive field and instrument of greater light and force, responds and supports every demand of the Spirit’s force and every variety of new Divine experience. The second cause of impurity, ‘the sources of greatest trouble,’⁴ ² is the inter-penetration and mixture of sensational hungering of vital and emotional reaction in the heart in the thinking process, is unable to mirror the real Soul, which creates in man a false soul of desire, the deformed Divine will in dominant bodily life and the physical mind. All indulgence of the emotions of the soul of desire is an impurity and it distorts both knowledge and action. It becomes a hurtling field of joy and grief, love and hatred, likes and dislikes, content and discontent, hopes and disappointments, and all the stupendous play of passion which is the drama of life in the world. Desire is the impurity of prana, the root of all sorrow, disappointment, affliction, a rapid subjection to fatigue, dissatisfaction and early disappointment of all its gains, a ceaseless morbid stimulation, trouble, disquiet, asanti. To get rid of the desire soul or emotional mind is one of the firm, indispensable negative methods of purification of psychical prana . The vital being must be trained of the positive method of enjoying life out of a right functioning in obedience to the working of Divine Will in order to get rid of its impurity in the form of attachment and craving; heart must be purified from false emotions of fear, wrath, hatred and lust by the touch of Divine love and joy in depth and intensity and the luminous reaching out to fusion and unity with God and our fellow creatures. The tranquillization, sama, equality, samata and mastery, dama , of these members are the essential conditions of the purification of buddhi from error, ignorance and perversion. This purification spells an entire equality in the nervous being and heart. The Gita’s rule of purification of the vital being is attained not by mental control but by the strong immobility of an immortal Spirit. The third cause of impurity is the inter-penetration of pain and pleasure of sense mind into the thinking process in the form of attractions and repulsions, the acceptances and refusals, the satisfactions and dissatisfaction, the capacities and incapacities of the life-energy in the body. Sense mind is a constant blind, purposeless repetition in a circle, disorder, restless, unintelligent subjection to habit. With the development of Science, Philosophy and Spiritual knowledge, the limitation of sense mind and its discord of the life in matter are overcome and they can be purified when buddhi stands back from the action of sense mind, sakhi, then withdraws support, then reducing it to stillness or by concentration on this thought, the alien and confusing elements are rejected. "A pure celestial joy is the" (Savitri-663) right use of sense. The true function of the sense mind or the right relation of the sense mind with the Psychic being is to lie upon passively, luminously to the contacts of Super Life and transmit their right taste, rasa , and principle of delight in them to the higher function. Or “Heaven’s joys might have been earth’s if earth were pure. There could have reached our Divinised sense and heart Some natural felicity’s bright extreme, Some thrill of Supernature’s absolutes:” Savitri-123 The fourth cause of impurity has its source in the intellect, buddhi, due to (1) inrush of desire into the thinking function, (2) illusion of senses and inrush of the sense mind into thinking functions, (3) improper action of will to know or the disparity between knowledge and will is one of the principal defects of the human buddhi. Buddhi has the tendency to cling to fragments of truth and knowledge to the exclusion of the whole truth and comprehensive knowledge and hence is deprived of the fullness and perfection of life. Its purification is achieved by the habit of right thought free from sense error, desire, old association and intellectual prejudgment and cultivation of an entire intellectual rectitude and in the perfection of mental disinterestedness. Purified Buddhi does not involve in lower movements of Nature, but stands back from the object, observes disinterestedly, puts itself in the right place by force of comparison, contrast, analogy, reason from its rightly observed data by deduction, induction, interference and holding all its gains in memory and supplementing them by a chastened and rightly-guided imagination to view all in the light of a trained and disciplined judgment. Such is the pure intellectual understanding of which disinterested observation, judgment and reasoning are the law and characterising action. But in order to acquire real knowledge, buddhi has to cultivate two different kinds of passivity. Firstly, the intellect has to train to discriminate the true intuition from all other false vibrations and open itself upward towards the former true state; secondly, to develop complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, na kinchit api chintayet . (The Gita-6.25) The stilling of this repeating, circling thought mind is one of the most effective disciplines of Yoga. The complete detachment with the aid of (1) an entire self-government, sama , (2) equality, samata , (3) calm, shanti, is the surest step of purification of buddhi . Buddhi is one important instrument, if sufficiently purified, and then it will most easily and effectively purify other instruments. Once our buddhi and will are well purified, then it can open up to perfect illumined discernment, intuitions and revelations of the Supermind. To arrive at the whole truth of Integral Yoga must be the object of purification of the buddhi. All other methods of purification are as follows: (1) All pursuit of knowledge, if not vitiated by a too earthward tendency, tends to refine, to subtilise, and to purify the being. (2) In proportion as we become more mental, we attain to a subtler action of our whole nature which becomes more apt to reflect and receive higher thoughts, a purer will, a less physical truth and more inward influences. (3) The power of ethical knowledge and the ethical habit of thought and will to purify is obvious. (4) Philosophy not only purifies the reason and predisposes it to the contact of the universal and the Infinite, but tends to stabilize the nature and create the tranquility of the sage; and tranquility is a sign of increasing self-mastery and purity. (5) The preoccupation with universal beauty even in its aesthetic forms has an intense power for refining and subtilising the nature, and at its highest it is a great force of purification. (6) Even the scientific habit of mind and the disinterested preoccupation with the cosmic law and truth not only refine the reasoning and observing faculty, but have, when not counteracted by other tendencies, a steadying, elevating and purifying influence on the mind and moral nature which has not been sufficiently noticed. (7) The systematic purification of the whole being for an integral reflection and taking in of the Divine reality can only be done by the special methods of Yoga. v) All Concentration, Sarva-Saṃyama: "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."⁵⁸ Sri Aurobindo "This power, says Patanjali, comes by “samyama” on an object. That is for the mentality, in the gnosis there is no need of samyama . For this kind of perception (absolute self-control) is the natural action of the Vijnana ."⁵⁹ Sri Aurobindo "This process is the basis of what Patanjali calls samyama , a concentration, directing or dwelling of the consciousness, by which, he says, one can become aware of all that is in the object. But the necessity of concentration becomes slight or nil when the active oneness grows (or development of Integral Concentration); the luminous consciousness of the object and its contents becomes more spontaneous, normal, facile."⁶⁰ Sri Aurobindo The concentration of an enlightened will, thought and heart turned towards one luminous and infinite source of action, knowledge and delight is the starting point of the Yoga. There must be a strong and immovable concentration of will on attainment, fulfillment and manifestation of the Divine, a large, many-sided yet single concentration of the thought on the idea, the perception, the vision, the awakening touch, the soul’s realisation to the one Divine, a flaming concentration of the heart on the seeking of the All and Eternal and the possession and ecstasy of the All-Beautiful. In integral Yoga, purity and concentration are complementary to each other, feminine and masculine, passive and active sides and the two must proceed together till we arrive at Integral concentration, where the essential, multiple, absolute, all-inclusive state will replace the concentration in thought and effort. Mind is unable to hold at once the unity and multiplicity, but the same is the normal state of integral concentration. Mind has the capacity to dwell on one thing at a time to the exclusion of others, so within this limitation, we have to depend on exclusive concentration for the development of other higher faculties. Exclusive concentration has three powers by which the aim of Integral Yoga can be affected. Firstly , with the help of concentration we can know the secret behind anything or all things, but here we must use this power to know the one Thing-in itself, the Divine ; secondly , by concentration the whole will can be gathered up for the acquisition of all that are still beyond us, this power in us can be sufficiently trained, single-minded, sufficiently sincere and faithful towards the acquisition of the One object worthy of pursuit; thirdly, by concentration the mass of weakness, fear, perversion can become strength, courage, a great purity or a single universal soul of Love; we can use this power to transcend above all things, above all attributes, and become the pure and absolute Being. By this exclusive concentration, we can arrive through uncompromising renunciation of the lower nature at an entire self-consecration to the One. The ultimate objective of concentration culminates in Samadhi , a settled Divine status. This can be arrived at by (i) strenuous method of concentrated meditation on the one subject of Integral Divine either in the mystic syllable AUM with representation of the Brahman in waking, dream, sleep and Turiya state or triple formula of the Brahman, “Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman and all things are Brahman ;”⁴³ (ii) the more strenuous method is the concentrated contemplation, which is the fixing the whole mind in concentration on the essence of the idea of Integral Divine only; in this process thought ceases and one enters in an inner Samadhi , then subsequently samadhi experience is dynamised in our lower being to shed its power, light and bliss on our ordinary consciousness; (iii) the most strenuous method is the silencing of the mind altogether, either by standing back from mental action or by rejecting the thought-suggestions, by this a great peace is unveiled and one experiences the all-pervading Brahman . For integral Yoga, these three methods are the most direct and powerful disciplines. vi) All Scripture, Sarva-Śāstra : “The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past, but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future…” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-480, All Shastra is the outcome and record of past Spiritual exercises on the secrets of Nature and Soul or it is ‘An occult document of the All-Wonderful’s art’⁷ and is helpful for all future exploration. All the lines of the traditional Yoga ‘are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher who has received the Shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the disciple along the immemorial tracks.’⁵ ‘The written or traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner.’⁵ Integral Shastra differs from traditional Shastra in the sense that its method is not an imperative formula, fixed routine and mechanising process, but ‘each man in this path has his own method of Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic Yoga.’³⁷ The seeker of integral Yoga will accept ancient disciplines, for they rest upon eternal truths and their practice will reinforce the practice of integral Shastra . The aims arrived at by the ancient teachings like Sankhya, Tantra, Karma, Jnana, Bhakti, Hatha and Raja Yoga are included in integral Yoga or the seeker will give ‘them an orientation in conformity with his aim.’⁸ All Yoga schools of India proposes the psycho-physical methods for practice whereas the method of Integral Yoga will be mainly Spiritual and for this he can depend on the Gita, the four main Upanishads that of the Isha, Kena, Taitariaya and Aiteriya Upanishads and the portion of the Vedas where hymns were offered to mystic Fire, Agni . First, we can do a systematic study of different Spiritual experiences and find an interrelation with each other and how these experiences drive towards the Supramental realm; thus, their various aspects are explored in The Synthesis of Yoga. Then the extension of these experiences explored in The Life Divine will be worked out. The hierarchies between Ignorance to Integral Knowledge, exclusive concentration to Integral concentration, mind to Supermind, Matter to Spirit, Life as it is to Divine Life that are hinted in The Synthesis of Yoga , are sufficiently explored in The Life Divine . And also the issues that Sri Aurobindo left unfinished in the unrevised chapters of ‘Yoga of Self-perfection’ can be further traced and developed from The Life Divine . Then, finally, we will study Savitri in search of all missing links and connect them strongly to the point where we can open to the new vistas. The Supramental principles are shadowed out by the Gita, the Upanishads and the Vedas in figures, hints and symbols. The envisaging mind can enter into relation with the Supramental in three successive stages. Firstly, with the activation of mental self or manomaya Purusha , the mental sheath or the manomaya kosha is able to receive into it from above infinite existence, consciousness, bliss of the Supramental plane or Vijnanamaya Purusha. The mental perception, ideation, will, pleasure are transformed into radiances of the Divine knowledge, pulsation of Divine will, waves and floods of Divine delight; secondly, the manomaya kosha is transformed into dense self-luminous consciousness, chaitanyaghana or chidghana. This Divine Consciousness contains all the immutable and inviolable truths of the Divine being and Divine nature. Thirdly, this luminous manomaya kosha is further illumined in the image of the Supramental sheath or Vijnanamaya kosha. It brings authentic identities of Divine wisdom, movement of Divine will and vibration of the Divine delight intensities. Our objective in concentrating the Veda, the Upanishad and the Gita is to repeat the Spiritual experience of the great past. Our objective in concentrating on The Synthesis of Yoga, The Life Divine, The Mother, and Savitri is, initially, to repeat brief Spiritual experiences and, finally, to be established in the multitude of Spiritual experiences developed in those integral Shastra, which will lead us towards a greater unknown future. One 'must pass beyond the written Truth, — sabdabrahmativartate — beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, — srotavyasya srutasya ca .'³ vii) Divine All Teacher, Sarva-Guru-Śakti: “A strict obedience to the wise and intuitive leading of a Guide is also normal and necessary for all but a few specially gifted seekers.”¹ Sri Aurobindo "Teaching, example, influence, -- these are three instruments of the Guru ... The example is more powerful than the instruction... Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another, infusing into it, even though in silence, that which he himself is and possesses..."² Sri Aurobindo “I do not see anybody in the world more qualified than Sri Aurobindo to lead you to the feet of the Mahashakti .”¹⁸ The Mother “For the disciple of an integral Yoga there can be no hesitation; as a seeker of knowledge it is the integral knowledge and not anything either half-way and attractive or high-pinnacled and exclusive he must seek. He must soar to the utmost height, but also circle and spread to the most all-embracing wideness, not binding himself to any rigid structure of metaphysical thought, but free to admit and combine all the soul’s highest and greatest and fullest and most numerous experiences.”³⁰ Sri Aurobindo “This can be done by a spiritual meaning and use in our psychical interchange with others, and it is largely by a psycho-spiritual interchange of this kind that a master in Yoga helps his disciple.”²⁹ Sri Aurobindo The Guru of a traditional school of Yoga is a representative of the Divine with the combination of part Divine realisation and ego born of exclusive knowledge and individual liberation of Soul and he reinforces and illumines the truth of traditional Shastra . The Guru of Integral Yoga combines in Him the realisation of the Divine in its entirety, followed by the annihilation of ego through constant sense of discipleship to the Supreme Master as everything pours in constantly from above without any personal effort and the sense of becoming a slave of God in all humanity through universalisation of Consciousness. For the beginners the aid of the Guru, Ista Devata or past Avataras in the form of Buddha, Christ or Sri Krishna or living influence, a living example and a present instruction is needed and with the development of Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental faculties, the dependency on external aid is reduced and one receives everything directly from the inner Divine, inner Chaitya Guru , the Psychic Being in the heart and subsequently from the Universal Divine, Jagad Guru, Spiritual Being, pervading this whole existence and Transcendent Supreme Divine, Param Guru, Supramental Being beyond this existence. A living Teacher of Integral Yoga does not arrogate himself to the pride of Guruhood with his partial realisation and in a humanly futile and self-exalting spirit. He will stimulate the aspiration of his disciples through the central Supramental Influence of Integral Divine realisation within him reconciling their Nature, Self and God which will be subordinated by less powerful Spiritual influence of awakening the exclusive power of the Spirit by losing the splendours of life and least powerful means of direct examples, suggestions and psycho-physical instructions and help at the growth of faculties and experiences by a natural process and free expansion. His whole business is to awaken the Divine light and set working the Divine force of which he himself is a living channel and representative. In the preliminary stage as a Sadhaka of integral Yoga cannot reject the practice of traditional Shastra, like the Gita, the Upanishad , and the Veda as they contain the basic truth and experiences of many centuries leading one towards systematic development of the comprehensive truth of Integral Yoga; similarly ‘a representative influence occupies a much larger place in the life of the sadhaka .’³ This representative living of Spiritual Influence ‘is a narrower practice, but safe and effective within its limits, because it follows a well beaten track to a long familiar goal.’⁴ ‘In India a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to the written or traditional teaching.’⁵ So it is an exceedingly good fortune for a Sadhaka⁵⁷ to accept the dominant Influence of a Shastra or living Teacher to repeat the truth of his Spiritual experience and can utilise that as an opportunity to strengthen and intensify his already possessed experiences of a similar kind. A privileged Sadhak of integral Yoga⁵⁷ finds Psychic being in the heart as the true Guru within and a very pure vital and very strong character as true Guru without who can hammer the disciple to remove his falsehood and Ignorance. A Sadhaka can enter relation with the Guru or the Ista Devata or living Influence in three successive stages; firstly He is conceived with a particular Divine form or particular Divine qualities of which He is a true and dynamic representative, towards which our nature or personality has affinity; secondly He is considered as one real Person, yet multiple personality, nirguno guni, the All Personality capable of infinite quality, the Ananta-guna , the qualitiless, Impersonal, nirguna, the Akshara Purusha, not divisible by any sect, schools of Yoga or nationality etc; thirdly we go back to the ultimate source of all idea and fact that goes beyond all Personality and all Impersonality, in which the Upanishad and the Veda describe by single word He or That, Tat . A Sadhaka of integral Yoga cannot be satisfied with the one or many Divine qualities of the Guru or the personal Deity, but he shall realise Him integrally in all His names and forms and Divine qualities; sees and realises his Guru in all other Deities, Avataras and ancient Shastras and not mistake the front of Him which is prominent in his attitude to the world for all the infinite Godhead. He will shun all sectarian and fanatic attitudes of crying, “My God, my Incarnation, my Prophet, my Guru ,”⁶ and leave behind the one-sided and limited tendency of mind in recognising that exclusive aspect of the Divine. For him the experience of Divine Oneness is carried to its extreme, amply fathomed and more deeply embraced to the full experience of the Divine Multiplicity. He can realise the Divine entirely by approaching Him with His endless variety, never-ending form and infinite manifestation. viii) All Mother Force, Sarva-Parā-Śakti: - “It is not as a Guru that I love and bless, it is as the Mother who asks nothing in return for what she gives.”¹ ⁸ The Mother “I am not eager to be the Guru of anyone. It is more spontaneously natural for me to feel the Mother of all and to carry them forward silently through the power of love.”¹ ⁸ The Mother “But in the later transitional stage of this movement our personal and necessarily ignorant effort more and more dwindles and a higher Nature acts; the eternal Shakti descends into this limited form of mortality and progressively possesses and transmutes it.”³¹ Sri Aurobindo “If a spiritual transformation, not a mere illumining modification of our nature, is to be done at all, we must call in the Divine Shakti to effect that miraculous work in the individual; for she alone has the needed force, decisive, all-wise and illimitable. But the entire substitution of the divine for the human personal action is not at once entirely possible.”³¹ Sri Aurobindo “For the Ishwari Shakti , divine Conscious-Force and World-Mother, becomes a mediatrix between the eternal One and the manifested Many.”³² Sri Aurobindo (Supreme said) " O Savitri, thou art my spirit’s Power, The revealing voice of my immortal Word, The face of Truth upon the roads of Time Pointing to the souls of men the routes to God." Savitri-703 The adoration of the exclusive Mother can begin with exclusive concentration and shall culminate in identity with the all-inclusive Mother or All Mother in integral Concentration. The Mother as the nether Executrix Power works in the Ignorance and Inconscience as the four-fold Soul-force of Brahma-Shakti, Kshetra-Shakti, Vaisya-Shakti and Shudra-Shakti in the form of Wisdom, Courage, Opulence and Service respectively. As the intermediate Mediatrix Power, She works as four-fold Spiritual Powers of Maheswari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati, working in Knowledge, Power, Harmony and Perfection respectively, linking the Sachchidananda Consciousness with the manifested Many and returns towards Her Supreme Creatrix Power of Truth Supreme, Power Supreme, Supreme Delight and Will Supreme respectively through evolving endless appearances out of Her revealing substances. Her Executrix Power in Ignorance of the Purusha-Prakriti play ascends to Mediatrix Power in Knowledge of the Ishwara-Shakti play, culminates in the Creatrix Power in Vijnana of the Brahman-Maya play for the complete Divine action in all the planes. The Divine Mother is the manifesting Power of Purushottama, appearing in the Play, Lila as the dual Power of Ishwara and Shakti, containing each other in the higher Divine nature, revealed in the lower nature of Ignorance as dual power of Purusha and Prakriti , separate from each other. The relation between the Purusha and Prakriti emerges as one advances in the Yoga. The Sankhya liberation proposes that, when Purusha learns not to identify himself, the Prakriti begins to fall away from its impulse of movement and returns towards equilibrium and rest. Tantra confirms that worship to Para-Prakriti or Shakti is the sole effective force for all Spiritual attainment. In the Vedantic teaching, Prakriti is considered as the power of illusion, maya , and hence the search after the silent inactive Purusha is the means towards liberation. In Karma Yoga, Prakriti is the doer of all work and Purusha is the Lord, witness, knower, enjoyer and the source of sanction of her work. Purusha-Prakriti realisation in ignorance is the first siddhi of Karma Yoga , where Purusha is liberated and is capable of Spiritual control over the lower nature. The next siddhi of Karma Yoga is the Ishwara-Shakti realisation, which can participate in higher dynamism of Divine work and total unity and harmony of the being in a Spiritual nature. In Integral Yoga, Purusha is the Lord and is of the nature of Sat, the being of conscious self-existence; Prakriti is his executive energy and is of the nature of Chit. The relation between Purusha and Prakriti exists in two states of rest and action. When Prakriti is absorbed in the bliss of the Purusha, there is rest; when the Purusha pours itself out into the Prakriti , there is action, creation, enjoyment and Ananda of becoming. And in the Supramental plane, the supreme and universal Purusha and the supreme and universal Prakriti arrive at their perfect relation. The Supreme Spirit is one as Purusha or as Prakriti . Jiva in the essence of self is one with the Supreme Purusha , mamaibansa jivabhuta (The Gita-15.7), so on the side of Nature, in the power of self, Jiva is one with Shakti, para prakritir jivabhuta (The Gita-7.5). The realisation of this double oneness confirms that Jiva is the meeting place of Supreme Purusha and Supreme Prakriti and is the condition of integral self-perfection. All the above methods can be utilised in integral Yoga. There are three successive stages through which the action of the Mother’s force is intensified. First, Jiva receives the power of the Mother , and the sadhaka feels that the Divine Shakti is driving behind and shaping all his thoughts, will, feelings and actions. He may feel the Master of the Shakti, Ishwara , sometimes or continually in three ways to his consciousness; (i) himself as servant to the Ishwara , (ii) a great Shakti is supplying the energy, shaping the action, formulating the results, (iii) the Ishwara above determining by his will the whole action. In the second stage, the individual doer disappears. The Shakti possesses his thought, will, feeling, and action. The Master of existence appears in three ways, (i) the Shakti carrying on all knowledge, thought, will, feeling and action for the Ishwara in an instrumental form; (ii) the Master of existence, Ishwara , compelling all Her action and our Soul enjoys all relation with Him which are created by Her workings, (iii) There is the intensest form of realisation of Jiva disappearing into the Shakti and there is the play of the Shakti with the Ishwara, Mahadeva with Kali, Krishna with Radha. In the last stage, there is an increasing manifestation of Ishwara in all things and beings, in all thought, will and action. The distinction between Ishwara and Shakti begins to disappear, the maya of the ego is removed and complete joy and presence of the Divine is manifested in the being. This is the highest realisation of perfection and delight of active Oneness. Recapitulation: “Abandoning the dubious middle Way, (of Moderate Spirituality) A few shall glimpse the miraculous Origin (Few are Bliss Souls) And some shall feel in you (Savitri) the secret Force (Some are Gnostic Souls) And they shall turn to meet a nameless tread, Adventurers into a mightier Day.” Savitri-704 (1) Rejection is defined as the withdrawal of support of the deformed lower nature, apara Prakriti , by the indwelling Purusha. The rejection is the condition of arriving at the state of equality and surrender. (2) The equilibrium status of Purusha and Prakriti is defined as equality. (3) Surrender is defined as Prakriti’s submission to Purusha . (4) Concentration is born when this submission causes Prakriti to merge with Purusha. Concentration is defined as gathering back of the thought into the Self. Concentration is the active status of Purusha . (5) Purity is the passive status of Purusha which witnesses the action of Prakriti. (6) Shastra defines the right relation of the Purusha and Prakriti i n Ignorance and their play in the higher planes of Consciousness. (7) The Guru is the static state of Purusha in Ignorance, Ishwara in the Knowledge and Brahman in the Supramental State. (8) The Mother is the dynamic state of Purusha , revealed as the Psychic executrix Mother power in Prakriti and doer of all action in Ignorance, Shakti or Mediatrix Spiritual Mother Power in Knowledge and Maya or Creatrix Mother Power in the Supramental and Bliss plane. The Spiritual Future of a Moderate: “Uplifted towards luminous secrecies Or conscious of some splendour hidden above They leaped to find her in a moment’s flash, Glimpsing a light in a celestial vast, But could not keep the vision and the power And fell back to life’s dull ordinary tone.” Savitri-362 “They slide back to the mud from which they climbed; In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know They joy in safe return to a friendly base, … To be the common man they think the best, To live as others live is their delight. For most are built on Nature’s early plan And owe small debt to a superior plane The human average is their level pitch, The thinking animal’s material range.” Savitri-689 The Mother observed that the attitude of the most developed class, the most intellectual elite, towards immense transformation work, "Ah, no! I don’t want to bother about that, I just want to live peacefully, as well as I can. We’ll see once the world has been transformed, then we can start bothering about it."⁴⁴ Moderate Spirituality with its partial self-giving, is prone to Soul-slaying truth.⁴⁸ It cannot confront extreme adversity and Death, cannot reconcile Spirit with Matter and hence submits and surrenders before negative energies like Ignorance, Falsehood, Suffering and Death. It must learn the lesson to accumulate Spiritual energies or Soul Saving Truth⁴⁹ and ascend to the state of ancient Vedantic Seers of Brahma Satya Jagat Satya, through later Vedantic Spiritual Seekers, with the realization of Brahma Satya Jagat Mithya . It is only through moderate Spirituality, Spiritual life can be generalised in humanity. 'The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, ("Our minds are starters in the race to God," Savitri-169) so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth , the spiritual existence.'⁵ ⁰ OM TAT SAT References: 1: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-941, 2: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-66, 3: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-55, 4: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-55, 5: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-56, 6: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-66, 7: Savitri-623, 8: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-342, 9: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-23, 10: CWSA-21/The Life Divine-51, 11: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-348, 12: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-44, 13: "This flowery word which they declare who have not clear discernment, devoted to the creed of the Veda, whose creed is that there is nothing else, souls of desire, seekers of Paradise, – it gives the fruits of the works of birth, it is multifarious with specialities ofrites, it is directed to enjoyment and lordship as its goal." The Gita-2.42-43, 14: CWSA-19 /Essays on the Gita/p-92-93, 15: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-13, 16: CWSA-19 /Essays on the Gita/p-374, 17: The Gita-6.31, 18: The Mother’s Centenary Works/Vol-16/p-207, The Mother’s Centenary Works/Vol-13/p-82, 19: “The cross is the symbol of transformation, you know: Matter (transversal gesture) penetrated by the Spirit; and the junction is the transformation. A tremendous Force came, like that, for this cross to become truly … the flower of transformation.” The Mother’s Agenda/10/498, “The cross is the sign of the triple being, transcendent, universal and individual.” CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-183, 20: Savitri-507, 21: “It admits philosophy in a still more remote fashion; and if nowadays it eagerly seeks after science, that is because science helps prodigiously the satisfaction of its vital desires, needs and interests: but it does not turn to seek after an entirely scientific life any more than after an entirely ethical life. A more complete effort in any one of these directions it leaves to the individual, to the few, and to individuals of a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man of religion; it gives them a place, does some homage to them, assigns some room to the things they represent, but for itself it is content to follow mainly after its own inherent principle of vital satisfaction, vital necessity and utility, vital efficiency.” CWSA-25/The Human Cycle/p-156, 22: "All true Truth of love and of the works of love the psychic being accepts in their place: but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns it into a stake of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-157, 23: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-96, 24: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-177, 25: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-722, 26: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-702, 27: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-699, 28: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-699-700, 29: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-879, 30: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-361, 31: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-86, 32: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-124, 33: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-59, 34: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-329-330, 35: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-358, 36: “The buddhi dwelling always in this master idea must discourage all its own lesser insistences and preferences and teach the whole being that the ego whether it puts forth its claim through the reason, the personal will, the heart or the desire-soul in the prana, has no just claim of any kind and all grief, revolt, impatience, trouble is a violence against the Master of the being.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-723, “A drive for fulfilment of falsehood or wrong will would be felt by him, not as a movement towards freedom, but as a violence done to the liberty of the spirit, an invasion and imposition, an inroad upon his supernature, a tyranny of some alien Nature.” CWSA/22/The Life Divine/p-1039, 37: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-46-47, 38: CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-94-95, 39: “This is precisely how the modern Western attitude has become twisted compared to the ancient attitude, the attitude – it isn’t exactly ancient – of the Gita. It’s extremely difficult for the Western mind to comprehend vividly and concretely that ALL is the Divine. It is so impregnated with the Christian spirit, with the idea of a ‘Creator’ – the creation on one side and God on the other! Upon reflection, one rejects this, but ... it has entered into our sensations and feelings, and so – spontaneously, instinctively, almost subconsciously – one credits God with all one considers to be the best, the most beautiful, and especially with what one wishes to attain, to realize. (Each individual, of course, changes the content of his God according to his own consciousness, but it’s always what he considers to be the best.) And just as instinctively, spontaneously and subconsciously, one is shocked by the idea that things one doesn’t like or doesn’t approve of or which don’t seem to be the best, could also be God…I am putting this purposely into rather childish terms so that it will be clearly understood. But this is the way it is. I am sure of it because I have observed it in myself for a VERY long time, and I had to.... Due to the whole subconscious formation of childhood – environment, education, and so forth – we have to DRUM into this (Mother touches her body) the consciousness of Unity : the absolute, EXCLUSIVE unity of the Divine – exclusive in the sense that nothing exists apart from this Unity, even the things which seem most repulsive…Sri Aurobindo also had to struggle against this because he too received a Christian education. And these Aphorisms are the result – the flowering – of the necessity to struggle against the subconscious formation which has produced such questions (Mother takes on a scandalized tone): ‘How can God be weak? How can God be foolish? How....’ But there is nothing but God! He alone exists, there is nothing outside of Him. And whatever seems repugnant to us is something He no longer wishes to exist – He is preparing the world so that this no longer manifests, so that the manifestation can pass beyond this state to something else. So of course we violently reject everything in us that is destined to leave the active manifestation. There is a movement of rejection…Yet it is He. There is nothing other than He! This should be repeated from morning to night, from night to morning, because we forget it every minute. There is only He, there is nothing other than He. He alone exists, there is no existence without Him. There is only He!” The Mother’s Agenda-07.07.1961, “Yet Sri Aurobindo says (in simple terms), ‘God created the world for the Joy of the creation,’ or rather, ‘He brought forth the world from Himself for the Joy of living an objective life.’ This was Theon’s thesis too, that the world is the Divine in an objective form, but for him the origin of this objective form was the desire to be. All this is playing with words, you understand, but it turns out that in one case the world is reprehensible and in the other it is adorable! And that makes all the difference. To the whole European mind, the whole Christian spirit, the world is reprehensible. And when THAT is pointed out to them, they can’t stand it.” The Mother’s Agenda-20.12.1961, “The only way to make life perfect (I mean here life on earth, of course) is to look at it from a sufficient height to see it in its totality, not only its present totality, but over the whole past, present and future: what it has been, what it is, what it must be – you must be able to see it all at once. Because that's the only way to put everything in its place. Nothing can be done away with, nothing SHOULD be done away with, but each thing must find its own place in total harmony with the rest. Then all those things that appear so "evil," so "reprehensible" and "unacceptable" to the puritan mind would become movements of joy and freedom in a totally divine life. And then nothing would stop us from knowing, understanding, feeling and living this wonderful Laughter of the Supreme who takes infinite delight in watching Himself live infinitely. This delight, this wonderful Laughter which dissolves all shadows, all pain, all suffering ... We only have to go deep enough into ourselves to find the inner Sun and let ourselves be bathed in it. Then everything is but a cascade of harmonious, luminous, sun-filled laughter which leaves no room for shadow and pain. In fact, even the greatest difficulty, even the greatest grief, even the greatest physical pain, if you can look at them from THERE, take your stand THERE, you see the unreality of the difficulty, the unreality of the grief, the unreality of the pain – and all becomes a joyful and luminous vibration. It is ultimately the most powerful means of dissolving difficulties, overcoming grief and getting rid of pain. The first two [difficulties and grief] are relatively easy (relatively), the last [pain] is more difficult because of our habit of regarding the body and its sensations as extremely concrete and positive – but actually it is the same thing, it's just that we haven't been taught and accustomed to seeing our body as something fluid, plastic, uncertain, malleable. We haven't learned to permeate it with this luminous Laughter which dissolves all shadows and difficulties, all discords, all disharmony, all that grates, cries and weeps.” The Mother’s Agenda-14.01.1963, 40: “Oh, if you mean the puritans, the Protestants ... dreadful! They're the worst. Catholicism still retains something of the occult sense, and after all, they have a certain adoration for the Virgin, which keeps them in contact with something that's not asuric. The last Pope, who's dead now [Pius XII], had broadened both his own mind and Church doctrine a lot: he was a devotee of the Virgin. But the Protestants turned back to the Father, and so their worship became exactly the worship of a one and only, personal God, an asuric God. And they have fabricated and distorted everything: like asceticism, for instance, and all that sort of thing – everything they touched was twisted and spoiled.” The Mother’s Agenda-15.12.1962, 41: “The entire West is convinced, of course, that the earth has to be taken as it is and that it's a preparation for a life in another world, which according to your "faults" or "qualities" will be a heaven or a hell. But anyway, doing away with hell, all those who have goodwill will go to a beatific heaven.” The Mother’s Agenda/November 30, 1965, 42: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-702, 43: CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-149, 44: The Mother’s Agenda-7/p-294-295, “In human beings, along with the growth of the mental activities grows the subtlety of self-deception. The more they are intellectual the more they are, in their self-deception, completely candid and insincere at the same time.” The Mother/TMCW-14/p-341 45: Savitri-215 46: "That’s very important. Because all those who begin by being disgusted with life, their first movement is to get away – all of them. I receive truckloads of letters: as soon as they are disgusted with life, as soon as it stops being something marvelous, "Oh, enough! I want to get away, I want to get away." That’s indeed the first movement: you climb up above, but it will be to come back down and change things HERE – it’s not to abolish them, but to change them." The Mother's Agenda/November 9, 1966, 47: TMCW/Vol-14(Words of the Mother-II/p-149-150, 48: “Awaits him armed with soul-slaying word:” Savitri-336, “Or lie with the harlot Power that slays the soul.” Savitri-185, “A strong and fallen goddess without hope, Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell, As might a harlot empress in a bouge, Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts, Allured to their abyss the spirit’s fall.” CWSA-33/Savitri-212, “Threefold are the doors of Hell, destructive of the soul – desire, wrath and greed: therefore let man renounce these three.” The Gita-16.21, “The Asuric Prakriti is the rajasic at its height; it leads to the slavery of the soul in Nature, to desire, wrath and greed, the three powers of the rajasic ego, and these are the three-fold doors of Hell, the Hell into which the natural being falls when it indulges the impurity and evil and error of its lower or perverted instincts.” CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-474, 49: “O Death, thou speakest truth but truth that slays, I answer to thee with the Truth that saves.” Savitri-621, "Whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth as Soul Saving Truth, atmanam srijamyaham." The Gita-4.7 "Therefore the Yogins do works with the body, mind, understanding, or even merely with the organs of action, abandoning attachment, for self-purification, atma suddhaye. " The Gita-5.11 (self-purification is here Soul saving Truth.) 50: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-30, 51: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-82, 52: “The Asram has nothing to do with Hindu religion or culture or any religion or nationality. The Truth of the Divine which is the spiritual reality behind all religions and the descent of the supramental which is not known to any religion are the sole things which will be the foundation of the work of the future.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram-701, 53: "The supermind uses the physical organs and confirms their way of action, but it develops behind them the inner and deeper senses which see what are hidden from the physical organs and farther transforms the new sight, hearing, etc. thus created by casting it into its own mould and way of sensing. The change is one that takes nothing from the physical truth of the object, but adds to it its supraphysical truth and takes away by the removal of the physical limitation the element of falsehood in the material way of experience." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-868, 54: "Then lest a human cry should spoil the Truth He tore desire up from its bleeding roots And offered to the gods the vacant place. Thus could he bear the touch immaculate. A last and mightiest transformation came." Savitri-318, 55: Buddha’s Eightfold Path (Āryāṣṭāṅgamārga) In the Buddhist tradition, each step of the path is prefaced with the term Samyak (meaning "Right," "Correct," or "Wholesome"). They are grouped into three divisions: Wisdom (Prajñā), Ethical Conduct (Śīla), and Mental Discipline (Samādhi). [1 , 2 , 3 ] Samyag-dṛṣṭi — Right View / Understanding Samyak-saṅkalpa — Right Resolve / Intention Samyag-vāc — Right Speech Samyak-karmānta — Right Action / Conduct Samyag-ājīva — Right Livelihood Samyag-vyāyāma — Right Effort Samyak-smṛti — Right Mindfulness Samyag-samādhi — Right Concentration / Absorption. 56: Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga (Aṣṭāṅgayoga) Outlined in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, these steps provide a structural framework that moves from external ethical disciplines to internal spiritual absorption. [1 , 2 ] Yama — Restraints / Moral Codes Niyama — Observances / Self-Disciplines Āsana — Posture Prāṇāyāma — Breath Control / Expansion of Life-force Pratyāhāra — Withdrawal of Senses Dhāraṇā — Concentration Dhyāna — Meditation Samādhi — Absorption / Total Integration The 5 Yamas (Social Ethics & Restraints) The Yamas are universal ethical vows that apply regardless of time, place, or circumstance. They regulate your external behavior to prevent the fragmentation of personal energy. [1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] Ahimsa (Non-violence): Practicing harmlessness in thought, speech, and action toward all living beings. Satya (Truthfulness): Committing to absolute honesty and sincerity; avoiding falsehoods that lead to internal disintegration. Asteya (Non-stealing): Desisting from taking what is not freely given, whether it is physical items, time, or credit. Brahmacharya (Right Use of Energy): Directing vital life-force and creative energy toward spiritual growth, often interpreted as moderation or continence. Aparigraha (Non-possessiveness): Practicing non-greed, non-attachment, and avoiding the unnecessary accumulation of physical things. The 5 Niyamas (Personal Practices & Observances) The Niyamas build internal discipline and structure a healthy, harmonious inner life. The final three components collectively establish the foundation of Kriya Yoga (the yoga of action). [1 , 2 , 3 ] Saucha (Purity): Maintaining both external cleanliness of the body and environment, and internal purity of the mind. Santosha (Contentment): Cultivating stable, unconditional happiness and gratitude for what is present in the moment. Tapas (Disciplined Austerity): Igniting a "burning enthusiasm" and self-discipline to purify your habits and withstand life's friction. Svadhyaya (Self-Study): Observing your own behavior patterns and studying sacred texts to deepen self-awareness. Ishvara Pranidhana (Surrender): Dedicating your actions to a higher power, cosmic intelligence, or the absolute divinity. 57: “This will be to him (a Sadhaka of Integral Yoga) his exceeding good fortune if he can meet one who has realised or is becoming That which he seeks for and can by opening to it in this vessel of its manifestation himself realise it.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-130, "Two rules alone there are that will diminish the difficulty and obviate the danger. (1) One must reject all that comes from the ego, from vital desire, from the mere mind and its presumptuous reasoning incompetence, all that ministers to these agents of the Ignorance. (2) One must learn to hear and follow the voice of the inmost soul, the direction of the Guru , the command of the Master, the working of the Divine Mother. Whoever clings to the desires and weaknesses of the flesh, the cravings and passions of the vital in its turbulent ignorance, the dictates of his personal mind unsilenced and unillumined by a greater knowledge, cannot find the true inner law and is heaping obstacles in the way of the divine fulfilment. Whoever is able to detect and renounce those obscuring agencies and to discern and follow the true Guide within and without will discover the spiritual law and reach the goal of the Yoga ... A radical and total change of consciousness is not only the whole meaning but, in an increasing force and by progressive stages, the whole method of the integral Yoga." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-187, "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." Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-64, 58: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-85, 59: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-493, 60: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-858, 61: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-963-64, 62: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-109, 63: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-37, 64: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-103, 65: "(Q) Mother, previously things were very strict in the Ashram, but not now. Why? Yes, I have always said that it changed when we had to take the very little children. How can you envision an ascetic life with little sprouts no bigger than that? It’s impossible! But that’s the little surprise package the war left on our doorstep. When it was found that Pondicherry was the safest place on earth, naturally people came wheeling in here with all their baby carriages filled and asked us if we could shelter them, so we couldn’t very well turn them away, could we?! That’s how it happened, and in no other way ... But, in the beginning, the first condition for coming here was that you would have nothing more to do with your family! If a man was married, then he had to completely overlook the fact that he had a wife and children – completely sever all ties, have nothing further to do with them. And if ever a wife asked to come just because her husband happened to be here, we told her, ‘You have no business coming here!’ In the beginning, it was very, very strict – for a long time. The first condition was: ‘Nothing more to do with your family ...’ Well, we are a long way from that! But I repeat that it only happened because of the war and not because we stopped seeing the need to cut all family ties; on the contrary, this is an indispensable condition because as long as you hang on to all these cords which bind you to ordinary life, which make you a slave to the ordinary life, how can you possibly belong to the Divine alone? What childishness! It is simply not possible. If you have ever taken the trouble to read over the early ashram rules, you would find that even friendships were considered dangerous and undesirable ... We made every effort to create an atmosphere in which only ONE thing counted: the Life Divine." The Mother's Agenda/August 25, 1954, "Only, the whole thing is that the time must have come, there must be only That left – all the rest spoils, whatever it is, even the highest, purest, noblest, most beautiful and marvelous things: all that spoils. Only That.” (The Mother's Agenda/ March 26, 1966), “A decisive choice has to be made between lending the body to nature’s ends in obedience to her demand to perpetuate the race as it is, and preparing this very body to become a step towards the creation of a new race. The two cannot go together; at every minute you have to decide whether you wish to remain within the manhood of yesterday or belong to the supermanhood of tomorrow. ” The Mother/TMCW/Vol-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-127, TMCW/Vol-12/On Education/p-54-55, 66: "He is satisfied with his common average kind; Tomorrow’s hopes and his old rounds of thought, His old familiar interests and desires" Savitri-165 “They live content with some small greatness won.” Savitri-184 "That with a little happiness is content," Savitri-204 "Content abide not with one conquered realm; Adventure all to make the whole world thine, To break into greater kingdoms turn thy force." Savitri-536, 67: "Happiness is not the aim of life. The aim of ordinary life is to carry out one’s duty, the aim of spiritual life is to realise the Divine." The Mother/TMCW-14/p-7, CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-367, "To bring the psychic forward, selfishness and demand (which is the base of the vital feelings) must be got rid of — or at least never accepted." CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-361 Download this WEB PAGE as PDF file: “It is binding on the developing (Soul) but not yet perfectly developed individual in the shape of social duty, family obligation, communal or national demand, so long as it is not in conflict with his growing sense of the higher Right. But the sadhaka of the Karmayoga will abandon this also to the Lord of works. After he has made this surrender, his social impulses and judgments will, like his desires, only be used for their exhaustion or, it may be, so far as they are still necessary for a time to enable him to identify his lower mental nature with mankind in general or with any grouping of mankind in its works and hopes and aspirations. But after that brief time is over, they will be withdrawn and a divine government will alone abide. He will be identified with the Divine and with others only through the divine consciousness and not through the mental nature.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-210-211 “(1) Hatred and (2) disliking and (3) scorn and (4) repulsion, (5) clinging and (6) attachment and (7) preference are (seven deformations, vicaras, of integral Yoga) natural, necessary, inevitable at a certain stage: they attend upon or they help to make and maintain Nature’s choice in us. But to the Karmayogin they are a survival, a stumbling-block, a process of the Ignorance and, as he progresses, they fall away from his nature. The child-soul needs them for its growth ; but they drop from an adult (Soul) in the divine culture.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-223