The Ascetic's Fortress "Seeking heaven’s rest or the spirit’s worldless peace," Savitri-642 “The peculiarity of this (integral) Yoga is that until there is siddhi above, the foundation does not become perfect. Those who have been following my course (integral Yoga) had kept many of the old samskaras ; some of them have dropped away, but others still remain. There was the samskara of Sannyasa , even the wish to create an Arabinda Matha (Sri Aurobindo Monastery). Now the intellect has recognised that Sannyasa is not what is wanted, but the stamp of the old idea has not yet been effaced from prana (breath, life energy). So there was next this talk of remaining in the midst of the world, as a man of worldly activities and yet a man of renunciation. The necessity of renouncing desire has been understood, but harmony of renunciation of desire with enjoyment of Ananda has not been rightly seized by the mind.” Sri Aurobindo The Mother’s Agenda/Vol-3/p-271, “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. ” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II-389 (The above passage suggests that one has to reject life as it is in every form because if we support any of the activities of ordinary life, we deprive ourselves of the possibility of Divine Life.) The Agenda of the Ascetics’ Fortress “I would myself say that no man can be spiritually complete if he cannot live ascetically or follow a life as bare as the barest anchorites.”¹ Sri Aurobindo “In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.”² Sri Aurobindo “This surrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves the ordinary life of men and devotes his days solely to prayer and praise and worship or to ecstatic meditation, gives up his personal possessions and becomes the monk or the mendicant whose one and only possession is the Divine, gives up all actions in life except those only which help or belong to the communion with the Divine and communion with other devotees, or at most keeps the doing from the secure fortress of the ascetic life of those services to men which seem peculiarly the outflowing of the divine nature of love, compassion and good.”³ Sri Aurobindo “It secured in India a society which lent itself to the preservation and the worship of spirituality, a country apart in which as in a fortress the highest spiritual ideal could maintain itself in its most absolute purity unoverpowered by the siege of the forces around it.”⁴ Sri Aurobindo “The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the secret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and utilities.”⁵ Sri Aurobindo There is something in the composition of our Nature which goes beyond the first material need of humanity, of his entire preoccupation in the terrestrial needs, interests, desires, and ideals of the individual and the race. So the race cannot accept or follow for a long time to confine us entirely to a purely terrestrial way of living. So the formula of a beyond intellect Intuition and a feeling of a Soul and Spirit return upon us and end by their complete possession. The moderate Soul seeker satisfies this appetite by devoting to it in his leisure moments or exceptional hours or latter part of his life when age shall have dulled the enthusiasm of his earthly nature or he recognises it as something behind and above his normal Nature to which he can more or less imperfectly direct his natural being. The Ascetic turns to this supraterrestrial urge as the one and only aim and law of living by diminishing and mortifying as much as possible his earthly parts in the hope of developing his celestial Nature. This also includes prolonged fasting.³ ¹ There has been a period in which this ascetic view has gained momentum and a part of humanity dwindles between the imperfect moderate living, which cannot take a large Spiritual plunge and a sick ascetic longing for celestial living, which also cannot acquire in more than a few of its best pure and happy movements. Thus, in this transition, the law of evolutionary capacity is ignored and humanity misses a reconciling equation between the Matter and the Spirit, which must exist somewhere in the Divine dispensation of our Nature. Ascetics’ Fortress is the Divine Mother’s intermediate perfect shrine of collective living developed through the practice of traditional schools of Yoga. An Ascetic is a Soul who has taken retirement from the world and the Divine Mother chooses this state for Her brief felicitous hour in the world’s play of joy and strife and discloses some of Her mystic secrets, anchorite solitude, forests with their multitudinous chant, and the lurking doors of beauty, sweetness and surprise and masked divinity’s door. He is a stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time and immortal under the yoke of death and fate. An Ascetic is a Soul seeker who climbs above his mind and lives in the calm vastness of the One. It offers a severe noble atmosphere to work and thought and measured delight as steps to climb God’s far secret height. After this realisation, our life becomes a tranquil pilgrimage and we consider each year as a mile upon the heavenly way and each dawn opens into larger light, and waking and sleep are opportunities of Soul flowerings and so can we rise to the pure unvanquished Spirit of wide vesper calm, gentle as sky and soft as flower. Asceticism or rejection of material life is a temporary necessity and a short cut, not the true solution of the problem of existence for the ascending Soul, because material life seems so much the negation of all Spiritual existence. Practice of Integral Yoga begins²⁰ with the mind’s method of abstraction, which can be followed by the practice of one or many traditional schools of Yoga. The traditional system of Yoga gives exclusive importance to the rejection of one part of the lower nature to the exclusion of others and uses that as a lever to escape into the higher nature. Brotherhood of Saints: “The aim of religion may include a social change, but it is then a change brought about by the acceptance of a common religious ideal and way of consecrated living, a brotherhood of saints , a theocracy or the kingdom of God reflecting on earth the kingdom of heaven.”⁶ Sri Aurobindo “It is the divine love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be.”⁷ Sri Aurobindo “Another possible conception akin to the religious solution is the guidance of society by men of spiritual attainment, the brotherhood or unity of all in the faith or in the discipline, the spiritualisation of life and society by taking up of the old machinery of life into such a unification or inventing a new machinery.”⁸ Sri Aurobindo Brotherhood can be divided into two parts as the brotherhood of Mind and brotherhood of the Spirit; firstly, its mental concept attained momentum in the French revolution which later took refuge in Indian asceticism and Russian Marxism as mere sympathy created by love and understanding of mental knowledge; secondly, brotherhood is a weak binding force invented by the mind and cannot hold the burden of Divine Love; thirdly it does not represent the original seven fold personalities of the Divine, which needs attention for integral human development, rather brotherhood is considered as a derivative of God’s original faculty of Fatherhood; fourthly, it was also observed from The Mother’s writings, that She gave the name of the physical mind or material mind as ‘big brother’ who has the capacity to turn nectar into poison and crystalline water into muddy water instantly. In integral Yoga, the mental brotherhood of mere sympathy is to be substituted by the fundamental Spiritual equality, or the realisation of unity of all, realisation of all as brother Soul for a Divine purpose. The significance of brotherhood is heightened in Spirit when the Supreme instructs Savitri not to ‘shrink from any brother soul’²¹ and Savitri’s extension of hope as ‘sister of thy soul’²² during the critical hour of escape of Satyavan’s death in the midst of all difficulties. We must arrive at conscious unity of brotherhood with sunshine and the sky and with our fellow beings and the fullness of this universal relation is established in Supermind. The Law of Renunciation or The Law of Tapasya -1: “In her illumined script, her fanciful Translation of God’s pure original text, He thinks to read the Scripture Wonderful, Hieratic key to unknown beatitudes.” Savitri-193 “He saw through depths that reinterpret all, Limited not now by the dull body’s eyes, New-found through an arch of clear discovery, This intimation of the world’s delight, This wonder of the divine Artist’s make Carved like a nectar-cup for thirsty gods, This breathing Scripture of the Eternal’s joy, This net of sweetness woven of aureate fire.” Savitri-372 The whole effort of Nature through Philosophy, Religion, Science, Spiritual and Occult Science attempts to get at the right data upon which it will be possible to resolve all problems of existence as satisfactorily as the best available knowledge. Integral Yoga excludes none of them but rather uncovers their central truth, central purpose, and central faith and welds them strongly to the harmony of their eternal Source. Integral Yoga accepts and recommends the practice of the traditional Shastra wholly to experience the basic Divine realisation of Jivatma's union with Paramatma , till integral Shastra and integral methods are evolved to experience comprehensive, all-inclusive and all the revelatory aspects of Divine realisations. The advantages of traditional Shastra are; firstly, the traditional teachings are supposed to be fixed, gives the name of the high roads of destination and the already explored directions and expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner; secondly, the ancient wisdoms of the East are all the right means of the basic truths or root Knowledge of all existence which ought to be the guiding principle of all Time; thirdly, the character of the higher states of the Soul and their greater worlds of Spiritual Nature are shadowed in the Gita, the Upanishad and the Veda in figures, hints and symbols and these can be utilised towards the ascension of the Soul from physical into vital, from the vital into the mental Purusha , from mental into Knowledge-Soul and from that Self of Knowledge into the bliss Purusha , thus, completing the Soul’s ascension; fourthly the Gita declares that the Yogin in his progress must pass beyond the written truth, sabdabrahmativartate , beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, srotavyasya srutasya ca ; fifthly, Indian Spiritual writings lay stress upon the quality of the four-fold Soul force, chaturvarna, from which the four-fold action flows, and upon its truth, fearlessness, purity, love, compassion, benevolence, absence of will to hurt and opens the passage of actions of their free out flowing; sixthly, a sadhaka of Integral Yoga can include a good part of his development a richly varied experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past; lastly, he will accept all the ancient disciplines as they rest upon eternal truths and he will give them an orientation in conformity with his integral aim of perfecting life, consciousness and Self. The disadvantage of traditional Shastra is that, firstly, if we turn always to few distinct truths, symbols or particular discipline into hard and fast dogmas then our Spirituality is arrested in infancy and deprives itself from entry into the science of the Infinite; secondly, a sadhaka of integral Yoga will use but cannot bind himself to any written truth as all written truth is a partial manifestation of the Infinite knowledge and endless Truth and he organises it anew for the present and future and the same problem is approached from a new starting point; thirdly, in traditional teaching all the lines of Yoga oppose and object against a new practice, the new Yogic teaching, the adoption of a new formula as it is not consistent with the fixed norms of Shastra ; so a Sadhaka of integral Yoga must be fully aware of the compelling cause of refusal of so many other schools of self-discipline to regard even the possibility of realising the new and difficult object of integral Yoga wholly; fourthly, there are certain traditional teachings in which Yoga can be used for self-indulgence and hurting others instead of self-conquest and doing of good of all creatures. In Integral Yoga, self-conquest is realised through rigorous self-control and doing good to all creatures is activated by the inner movement of universal Consciousness. The Shastra of integral Yoga recommends that ‘each man in this path has his own method of Yoga’¹¹ or ‘each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga;’¹² secondly, there are certain broad catholic norms common for all Sadhakas which enable us to construct a scientific method of synthetic Yoga and these must take as much as possible the form of general truths, general statements of principle, the most powerful broad directions of effort and development rather than a fixed system which has to be followed mechanically as a routine; thirdly, it provides further guideline that all written truth and practices cannot be too strictly formulated and it must be constantly renovated and revived by a fresh instreaming of Spiritual experience and descended overhead knowledge; fourthly integral Yoga authorises absolute freedom to each sadhaka to restate knowledge in new terms and new combinations²⁸ and since it not only seeks the Divine but also calls upon the Divine to unfold in human life, so the Shastra of integral Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human Soul to extend his unending Spiritual experience; fifthly, this Shastra ‘will not lend itself either to any predilection or distaste for any particular idea or truth, and refuse to be attached even to those ideas of which it is most certain or to lay on them such an undue stress as is likely to disturb the balance of truth and depreciate the values of other elements of a complete and perfect knowledge;’¹³ sixthly, all editing work of books intended to pursue integral Yoga must confirm its norm that emphasizes, “We must hate none, despise none, be repelled by none; for in all we have to see the One disguised or manifested at his pleasure. He is little revealed in one or more revealed in another or concealed and wholly distorted in others according to His will and His knowledge of what is best for that which He intends to become in form in them and to do in works in their nature;”¹⁴ seventhly, the Shastra of integral Yoga will integrate our fragmented personality and fragmented knowledge and discover unity and universalisation of all Deity, Guru , Avataras, Shastra and Teachings by uncovering their central truth, central faith and central dynamic force; it does not cut the roots of the Sciences, the Arts and the Life but to lift them out of their limitations, supply a new source of creative Spiritual power and illumination by which they can be carried more swiftly and profoundly towards their absolute light in knowledge and their yet undreamed possibilities and the most dynamic energy of content and form and practice; eighthly, it reminds us that the Spirit’s unending riches, opulences and splendours cannot be exhausted by all the inspired narrations, exulted writings of Seers and Saints of all Time and all the mental formulations of truth born out of exclusive concentration and higher formulations can break down under the test of new suggestions from the Infinite; ninthly the Shastra of an integral Yoga recommends that during this endeavour and tapasya the integral Yogi will transcend all effort, all self-discipline, all set method and it will be replaced by ‘natural, simple, powerful and happy disclosing of the flower of the Divine out of the bud of a purified and perfected nature;’¹⁵ he will also transcend all set goals because the progress, the growth and expansion are identified as infinite and lastly in the final journey of the Soul’s infinity and freedom all outward standards are replaced or laid aside and there is left only a spontaneous and integral obedience to the Divine with whom he is in conscious union and a spontaneous action fulfilling the integral Spiritual truth of his Being and Nature. The Law of Renunciation or The Law of Tapasya -2: “A matted forest head invaded heaven As if a blue-throated ascetic peered From the stone fastness of his mountain cell Regarding the brief gladness of the days; His vast extended spirit couched behind.” Savitri-391 “The strong king-sages from their labour done, Freed from the warrior tension of their task, Came to her serene sessions in these wilds; The strife was over, the respite lay in front. Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves, And heard the wild winds wandering in the night, Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks, And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents, And with the glory of the noons were one.” Savitr-381 “I (Satyavan) sat with the forest sages in their trance: There poured awakening streams of diamond light, I glimpsed the presence of the One in all. But still there lacked the last transcendent power And Matter still slept empty of its Lord.” Savitri-405 “A curse is laid on the pure joy of life: Delight, God’s sweetest sign and Beauty’s twin, Dreaded by aspiring saint and austere sage, Is shunned, a dangerous and ambiguous cheat, A specious trick of an infernal Power It tempts the soul to its self-hurt and fall.” Savitri-629 All traditional Yoga aims at escape into higher Nature by rejection of lower Nature. Integral Yoga aims at the transformation of the lower Nature and its elevation into higher Nature by the descent of the Divine Shakti . Lower Nature is that which acts through limitation and division of the three gunas and is of the nature of Ignorance and culminates in the life of the ego. Higher nature is that which acts by unification and transcendence of limitation and is of the nature of Knowledge and culminates in the Life Divine. All traditional Yoga aims at individual liberation and perfection through great solitaries and after attaining it, we have the great spiritual Teachers who have liberated others. Integral Yoga aims at universalisation of the above realisation through ‘great dynamic Souls’¹⁶ who feel themselves stronger in the might of the Spirit than all the forces of material life and have thrown themselves upon the world, grappled with it in loving wrestle and striven to compel its consent to its own transfiguration. The condition in which all traditional Yoga proceeds is seclusion from ordinary activities, isolation from the mass through the garb of Sannyasin ; the condition in which integral Yoga proceeds by accepting and embracing this garb of the world, its problems and its difficulties and its complexities entirely where seclusion and isolation are a provisional necessity. The former culminates in renunciation of life because the ordinary mentalised human-animal life is either demoniac or Divine and undivine mixed whereas the latter culminates in the fulfilment of life, a life released, transformed and uplifted. The difficult and unavoidable task of integral Yoga differs from other world-shunning or heaven-seeking disciplines in the sense that it cannot afford to leave unsolved the problem of outward works of Life and ally it firmly to the divinities of Love and Knowledge. Hathayoga ²⁵ aims at the conquest of life and the body by combining the food sheath and the vital sheath, whose equilibrium is the foundation of all Nature’s workings in the human being. It aims at the supernormal perfection of physical life and its capacities, and goes beyond it into the domain of mental life. The whole aim of the Hathayoga is the fixed scientific processes to give to the Soul in the physical body the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales of Spiritual experience which would naturally be open to it, if it dwelt here in the subtle and the developed causal vehicle. The object of the Asana is to get rid of the restlessness imposed on the body and to force it to hold the Pranic energy instead of dissipating and squandering it. The object of Pranayama is to purify the nervous system, to circulate the life-energy through all the nerves without obstruction, disorder or irregularity, and to acquire a complete control of its functioning, so that the mind and will of the Soul inhabiting the body may be no longer subject to the body or life or their combined limitations. Rajayoga aims at the liberation and perfection of the mental being, the control of emotional and sensational life, and the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness. It aims at a supernormal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the mental life and goes beyond it into the Spiritual existence which withdraws into a subliminal plane at the back of our normal experiences without descending and possessing our whole outer existence. The object of Rajayoga is also to draw away the mind from the outward and the mental world into silent communion of Soul and unity with the Divine and it sometimes deviates from the main purpose to the practice and use of occult powers, siddhis . The object of self-discipline Yama of Rajayoga is to create a moral calm, a void of the passions, and so prepare for the death of rajasic egoism and the conquest of passions and desires in the human being. The object of self-discipline Niyamas of Rajayoga are equally a discipline of the mind by regular practices of which the highest is meditation on the Divine Being, and to create a sattwic calm, purity and preparation for concentration upon which the secure pursuance of the rest of the Yoga can be founded. The Karmayoga 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 Divine centre of action, wisdom and love. The choice and direction of the act are more and more consciously left to the 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. The traditional Jnana Yoga leads to the rejection of phenomenal worlds from the consciousness as creation of Maya , an illusion and the final emergence without return of the individual Soul in the Supreme. This Yoga begins²⁰ by the method of intellectual reflection, vicara , to arrive at right discrimination, viveka . The path of Integral Jnana Yoga aims at realisation and identification with the pure, unique, immutable and imperishable 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. The Bhaktiyoga, the path of Devotion, 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. This path, too, as ordinarily practiced, leads away from world-existence to absorption of another kind than the Monist’s in the Transcendent and Supra-cosmic. The Tantric system aims at liberation, full perfection and enjoyment of the Spiritual power, light and joy in human existence, and experience in which liberation and cosmic action and enjoyment are unified in a final overcoming of all oppositions and dissonances. The aim of Integral Yoga is to make the Spiritual life and its Spiritual experiences fully active and utilisable in the waking state, extending over all the functions of normal life. The perfection of the body, the highest results of Hathayoga and the perfection of the mind, the highest achievement of Rajayoga and the development of general physical and mental faculties and experiences attainable by humanity are also included in the scope of integral Yoga. Each school of Yoga selects their own gate of escape by turning certain activities of lower Nature towards the Divine. Hathayoga ² ⁵ selects the body and vital functioning, Rajayoga selects chitta, psychic prana, the triple path of Works, of Knowledge and of Love uses will, intellect and emotion as starting point and seeks by their conversion, to arrive at the liberating Truth. The Gita proposes rejection of five things that of desire, kama , attachment, sangam , ego, ahamkara , dualities dwanda and the three gunas as conditions of attaining liberation, mukti . The Tantric Yogin, instead of rejecting the lower Nature, confronts, seizes and conquers it. Integral Yoga, in its preliminary state, recommends renunciation of three things utterly, that of the desire, ego and attachment and with the Soul development, Tantric method can complement it. Man, in his effort at self-transcendence, has to seize on some one spring or some powerful leverage in the complicated and complex instrument of his nature; this spring or lever he touches in preference to others and uses it to set the human machine in motion towards the end he has in view. In his choice, it is always Nature that should be his guide. The lever action of Japa Yoga is physical mind; Hathayoga depends on the nervous system of vital mind; Rajayoga leans on purification of chitta ; Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga use will, intellect and emotion; Tantra disciplines desire as its most powerful leverage. The distinct character of man is that he is a mental being and not merely a vital creature and here Nature should turn at her highest and widest in him. Integral Yoga centres its consciousness on the Psychic being, the inner heart of deepest feeling and the Spiritual being, the highest mind of thought and light and will and uses either of them as our leverage to lift the nature wholly towards the Divine. With the opening of the Psychic and Spiritual being, the self-control becomes rigorous²³ and with the opening of the Supramental being, this self-control becomes absolute.²⁴ Each Schools of Yoga has its own method, processes of which Hathayogic is of psycho-physical science, Rajayogic is that of mental and psychic, its method is the stilling of the waves of consciousness, its manifold activities, cittvrutti , first, through a habitual replacing of the turbid rajasic activities by the quiet and luminous sattwic , then, by the stilling of all activities; the way of Karma Yoga is of Spiritual and Dynamic, the way of Jnana Yoga is that of Spiritual and Cognitive, the way of Bhakti Yoga is that of Spiritual, aesthetic and emotional, the method of Tantra is to raise nature in man into manifest power of Spirit and apply the intimate secrets of the Will-in-Power; the way of Tantric Dakshina marga is Nature in man liberating itself by right discrimination in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities and the Tantric Vama marga is the Nature in man liberating itself by a joyous acceptance in power and practice of its own energies, elements and potentialities; the method of Sankhya is that the Purusha learns not to identify himself with Prakriti. The Monist fixes his path on the exclusive knowledge; the Dualist or the partial Monist turns to the path of Devotion and directs us to shed the lower ego and material life. The method of Integral Yoga is Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental which is derived from the central principles of Vedantic school whose methods are in knowledge; it is either knowledge through discernment or knowledge of the heart expressed in love and faith or a knowledge in the will working out through action. The point of contact of the individual consciousness with the Divine decides the type of Yoga we practice. Yoga is the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality. This contact may take place at any point of the complex and intricately organised consciousness which we call our personality. It may be effected in the physical through the body; in the vital through the action of those functioning which determine the state and the experiences of our nervous being; through the mentality, whether by means of the emotional heart, the active will or the understanding mind, or more largely by a general conversion of the mental consciousness in all its activities. Tantra lays its hand firmly on many of the main springs of human quality, desire, action and it subjects them to an intensive discipline. Integral Yoga is accomplished through a direct awakening to the Universal or Transcendent Truth and Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. Its three progressive stages are that of (1) attempt of ego to enter contact with the Divine through personal effort, (2) laborious preparation and working of the Divine Force in the whole lower Nature to become higher Nature and (3) wholly blissful and rapid eventual transformation. Integral knowledge unifies Sachchidananda in all the manifest planes, whereas traditional knowledge admits this truth in theory but practically fails, as if oneness were not equal everywhere. It finds it in the unmanifest Absolute and rejects it in the manifestation; finds it purer in Impersonal than in Personal; complete in Nirguna and not so complete in Saguna ; satisfyingly present in the silent and inactive Brahman and not so satisfyingly present in the active Brahman . The Integral Yoga of knowledge makes no such division. It finds (1) the same absolute oneness in the Unmanifest and the Manifest (2) in the Impersonal and the Personal, (3) in Nirguna and Saguna , (4) in the infinite depths of universal silence and the infinite largeness of the universal action, (5) in the Purusha and Prakriti ; (6) in the Divine Presence and the works of the Divine Power and Knowledge; (7) in the eternal manifestness of the one Purusha and the constant manifestation of many Purushas ; (8) in the inalienable unity of Sachchidananda keeping constantly real to itself its own manifold oneness and in the apparent divisions of mind, life and body in which oneness is constantly, if secretly real and constantly seeks to be realised; (9) to possess Him and be possessed by Him in ourselves and in all things in the term of self-mastery, swarat and all-empire, samrat; (10) to enjoy Him in all experience of passivity and activity, of peace and power, of unity and difference. (11) For it, Personality and Impersonality are two wings of its Spiritual ascension. (12) All unity is to it an intense, pure and infinite realisation, all difference an abundant, rich and boundless realisation of the same Divine and Eternal Being. (13) All that is mystic, true and Divine behind polytheism and monotheism falls within the scope of its seeking. (14) It accepts all jarring sects, religions, science and philosophies as one of the faces of the Eternal Reality and discovers the One Truth that binds them together. All Religions and Yogic Schools in India use largely psycho-physical methods or external self-disciplines for inner development and depend more or less upon it for their practices. The secret power of Mantra, Japa, sacred syllable, name of the mystic formula is the central truth of all the complex psycho-physical Science and practice of which Rajayoga and Tantra give us a comprehensive method. These are preparatory objects of thought concentration, forms, and verbal formulas of thought, significant names, all of which have to be used by the mind and transcended. The mystic formula AUM represents the Brahman in three statuses, the Waking Self, the Dream Self, the Sleep Self and the whole potent sound rises to beyond the three states, the fourth of Turiya , of which all these are derivations of relative experience. The Self-disciplines of Integral Yoga ‘must be mainly spiritual and dependence on fixed psychic or psycho-physical process on large scale would be the substitution of a lower for a higher action.’² ⁷ All traditional 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, vital, moral, aesthetic, emotional, ethical and intellectual mind; 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 bound nature. Concentration has two necessities, the first is the one pointed concentration by fixing the will and thought on the Eternal and Real by turning the mind from dispersed movement of thought, running after many branching desires, led away in the track of the senses and the outward mental response to the phenomena; secondly, the inner, hidden and higher truth can only be seized by an absolute concentration of the mind and will on its object and, once attained, to hold it habitually and securely unite oneself with it. Rajayogic concentration is divided into four stages; (1) it commences with the drawing both the mind and senses from outward things, (2) proceeds to the holding of the one object of concentration to the exclusion of all other ideas and mental activities, (3) then to the prolonged absorption of the mind in this object, finally, (4) to the complete ingoing of the consciousness by which it is lost to all outward mental activity in the oneness of Samadhi . The concentration of Integral Yoga is divided into three stages; 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 then use this power to transcend above all things, above all attributes, and become the pure and absolute Being. Recapitulation: “This, the final aim of the ascetic Yoga which refuses life, is evidently not our aim (aim of Integral Yoga). By alternative choice we can have an activity perfect enough in outward appearance along with an entire inner passivity, peace, mental silence, indifference and cessation of the emotions, absence of choice in the will.”⁹ Sri Aurobindo “India had three fortress of a communal life, the village community, the larger joint family and the order of the Sannyasins ; all these are broken or breaking with the stride of egoistic conceptions of social life; but is not this after all only the breaking of these imperfect moulds on the way to a larger and diviner communism?”¹⁰ Sri Aurobindo “The real Tyaga is action with a renunciation of desire and that too is the real Sannyasa . ”¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo “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.”¹⁸ Sri Aurobindo “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 , brahmanyadhya karmani, is not stained by sin even as water clings not to the lotus-leaf.” 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 tyaktva atmasuddhaye . 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.”¹ ⁹ Sri Aurobindo "Renunciation is the way to this perfection and the man who has thus inwardly renounced all is described by the Gita as the true Sannyasin ."²⁶ Sri Aurobindo The above message hints that before the pressure of a Supramental energy, all the intermediate creations of village community, large and small family life and ascetic unfulfilled life will break and it will pave the passage clear for the Divine collectivity where each individual inmate will have direct contact with the Divine. He will be related with other individuals of the same community only with the Divine Consciousness, Love, Beauty, Peace, Silence and Joy. Savitri epic projects³⁰ Mundane perfection, Moderate Spirituality, Illusionists and Nirvanists as escapists and their truth as 'soul slaying' and recognises ancient Vedantic doctrine, which can resolve all problems of existence and its truth as 'Soul saving.' If humanity aspires to attain the highest state of Godhead, then he has to come across the rigorous training of The Mother’s intermediate station of the Ascetics’ Retreat. The central Truth of ascetic living is identified as Concentration, samyama , and the increase of concentration is related with increase of consecration of a Divine centre. Thus, Ascetics’ Fortress can rightly confront the compromise of insistent animalism of mundane and moderate living and give way to consecrated Spirituality of the Divine Centre. The importance of the Ascetics’ Fortress and its indispensability in the world has to be realised in its own realm of conquest of the Divine by renunciation of all lower and divided consciousness. Apart from the traditional ascetic’s recoil from physical life there is another exaggeration of belittling and degradation of both the individual and the universe and there is a natural consequence of cessation of both cosmos and individuality by attainment of the Transcendent. He is disgusted with the mud of the Matter, revolted by the animal grossness of Life, impatient of the self-imprisoned narrowness and downward vision of Mind. Integral Yoga of unity of Brahman avoids these divisions. Here, an Integral Ascetic need not give up bodily and mental life to attain the Spiritual experiences and preservation of individual activities are consistent with his comprehension of Cosmic Consciousness and his attainment of the Transcendent and Supracosmic reality. Similarly he has to exceed the traditional ascetic’s limitation (1) of saintly inactivity by dynamisation of Divine will and realise God as the Doer of all action who demands action from all; (2) the traditional ascetic’s realisation of God’s bright shadow or brief illumination in sainthood’s brilliant cell is to be substituted by the direct contact with the Divine All; (3) the integral Ascetic will not reject the life of the world but attain the fullness of surrender by accepting, uplifting and transforming life; his realisation involves a complete and absolute recognition of his unity and oneness with man; (4) and he regards the world not as an invention of the devil or a self-delusion of the Soul, but as a partial manifestation of the Divine and he will realise the fullness of Divine Love by integrating the Personal and Impersonal aspects of the Divine. (5) Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "Every ascetic movement since the time of Buddha has left India weaker and for a very obvious reason . Renunciation of life is one thing, to make life itself, national, individual, world-life greater & more divine is another. You cannot enforce one ideal on the country without weakening the other. You cannot take away the best souls from life & yet leave life stronger & greater. Renunciation of ego, acceptance of God in life is the Yoga I teach, — no other renunciation."²⁹ The best and intense figure of sainthood clamped in rigid hieratic lines is not the ideal of an integral Ascetic and he enters a larger Psychic and Spiritual relation with World, Self and God, more deep and plastic in its essence, more wide and all-embracing action in its movements, awakens himself towards streams of diamond light, glimpses the presence of the One and the extension of his liberty and its results in others and ultimately complete generalisation in mankind would be the inevitable outcome as well as the broadest utility of his liberation and perfection. OM TAT SAT References: 1: SABCL-26/On Himself/p-130, 2: CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-27, 3: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-573-74, 4: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-28-29, 5: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-5, 6: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-617, 7: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-166, 8: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1096, 9: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-403, 10: SABCL-17/The Hour of God/p-118, 11: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-46, 12: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-57, 13: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-315, 14: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-223, 15: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-87, 16: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-27, 17: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-494 , 18: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-497, 19: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-185, 20: “One must first find one’s soul, this is absolutely indispensable, and identify oneself with it. Later one can come to the transformation. Sri Aurobindo has written somewhere: “Our Yoga begins where the others end.” Usually yoga leads precisely to this identification, this union with the Divine — that is why it is called “yoga”. And when people reach this, well, they are at the end of their path and are satisfied. But Sri Aurobindo has written: we begin when they finish; you have found the Divine but instead of sitting down in contemplation and waiting for the Divine to take you out of your body which has become useless, on the contrary, with this consciousness you turn to the body and to life and begin the work of transformation — which is very hard labour. It’s here that he compares it with cutting one’s way through a virgin forest; because as nobody has done it before, one must make one’s path where there was none. But to try to do this without having the indispensable directive of the union with the Divine within, within one’s soul, is childishness.” TMCW-7/Questions and Answers-1955/p-350-351, 21: Savitri-701, 22: Savitri-720, 23: “Many times in his writings, particularly in The Synthesis of Yoga , Sri Aurobindo warns us against the imaginings of those who believe they can do sadhana without rigorous self-control and who heed all sorts of inspirations, which lead them to a dangerous imbalance where all their repressed, hidden, secret desires come out into the open under the pretence of liberation from ordinary conventions and ordinary reason.” The Mother's Centenary Works (second edition)/Vol-10/p-15, 24: "Nevertheless, there is somewhere an absolute control, a real Ishwara. He is aware of it and knows that if he can find it, he will enter into control, become not only the passive sanctioning witness and upholding soul of her will, but the free powerful user and determiner of her movements. But this control seems to belong to another poise than the mentality. Sometimes he finds himself using it, but as a channel or instrument; it comes to him from above. It is clear then that it is supramental, a power of the Spirit greater than mental being which he already knows himself to be at the summit and in the secret core of his conscious being. To enter into identity with that Spirit must then be his way to control and lordship. He can do it passively by a sort of reflection and receiving in his mental consciousness, but then he is only a mould, channel or instrument, not a possessor or participant in the power. He can arrive at identity by an absorption of his mentality in inner spiritual being, but then the conscious action ceases in a trance of identity. To be active master of the nature he must evidently rise to some higher supramental poise where there is possible not only a passive, but an active identity with the controlling spirit . To find the way of rising to this greater poise and be self-ruler, Swarat , is a condition of his perfection." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-637-638, 25: "There are successive curves, each second of which would have to be noted down; and in the course of one of these curves, something is suddenly found. For example, at the beginning of The Yoga of Self-Perfection, Sri Aurobindo reviews other yogas, beginning with Hatha Yoga. I had just translated this when I remembered Sri Aurobindo saying that Hatha Yoga was very effective but that it amounted to spending your whole life training your body, which is an enormous time and effort spent on something not essentially very interesting. Then I ‘looked’ at it and said to myself, ‘But after all,’ (I was looking at life as it is, as people ordinarily live it) ‘one spends at least 90% of one’s life merely to PRESERVE one’s body, to keep it going! All this attention and concentration on an instrument which is put to hardly any use.’ Anyway, I was looking at it with that attitude, when suddenly all the cells of my body responded, in such a spontaneous and WARM way.... How to say it? Something so ... so moving. They told me, ‘But it’s the Lord who is looking after Himself in us!’ Each one was saying: ‘But it’s the Lord who is looking after Himself in us!’" The Mother's Agenda/May 19, 1961, 26: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-530, 27: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-542, 28: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-56, 29: CWSA-36/Autobiographical Notes/p-222, "In The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo says that this idea of good and bad, of pure and impure, is a notion needed for action; but the purists, such as Chaitanya, Ramakrishna and others, do not agree. They do not agree that it is indispensable for action. They simply say: your acceptance of action as a necessary thing is contrary to your perception of the Divine in all things . (Q): How can the two be reconciled? I recall that once I tried to speak of this, but no one followed me, no one understood, so I did not insist. I left it open and never pursued it further, for they could not decipher anything or find any meaning in what I was saying. But now I could give a very simple answer: Let the Supreme do the work. It is He who has to progress, not you! (Q): Ramdas does not at all consider that the world as it is, is good. No, but I know all these people, I know them thoroughly! I know Chaitanya, Ramakrishna and Ramdas thoroughly. They are utterly familiar to me. It doesn’t bother them. These are people who live with a certain feeling, who have an entirely concrete experience and live in this experience, but they don’t care at all if their formation – they have not even crystallized it, they leave it like that, vague – contains things that are mutually contradictory, because, in appearance, they reconcile them. They do not raise any questions, they do not have the need for an absolutely clear vision; their feeling is absolutely clear, and that’s enough for them. Ramakrishna was like that; he said the most contradictory things without being bothered in the least, and they are all exactly and equally true...But this crystal clear vision Sri Aurobindo had, where everything is in its place, where contradictions no longer exist – they never soared to that height. This was the thing, this really crystalline, perfect supramental vision, even from the standpoint of understanding and knowledge. They never went that far." The Mother's Agenda/June 22, 1958, “Sri Aurobindo shows us that one can be an ascetic by preference and not out of abnegation (or renunciation); and so he makes us understand that to be a servant of the Lord and to act only according to His will is a far higher state than any personal choice , no matter how saintly it may seem.” The Mother/The Mother’s Centenary Works (second edition)/Vol-10/p-300 30: “I think Sri Aurobindo deliberately made this Death very vulgar to discourage all the Illusionists and Nirvanists.” The Mother/The Mother’s Agenda-6/164, (Death said) “But Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky, Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow; Hardly he can mould the life’s rebellious stuff, Hardly can he hold the galloping hooves of sense:” Savitri-615 (Mundane personality of Death) Death said to Para-prakriti Savitri : “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 (human admirers) the empty chambers fill.” Savitri-637, (Moderate persanality of Death) (Death said) “If thou desirest immortality, Be then alone sufficient to thy soul: Live in thyself; forget the man thou lov’st. My last grand death shall rescue thee from life; Then shalt thou rise into thy unmoved source.” Savitri-594 (Ascetic personality of Death) 31: “Ascetic methods are things like repeated fasting , compelling yourself to endure the cold...in fact, to torture your body a little. This indeed gives you only a spiritual pride, nothing more. It masters nothing at all. It is infinitely easier. People do it because it is very easy, it is simple. Just because the pride is quite satisfied and the vanity can get puffed up, it becomes very easy. One makes a great demonstration of his ascetic virtues, and so considers himself an extremely important personage, that helps him to endure many things.” The Mother/TMCW/6/428-429, “Prolonged fasting may lead to an excitation of the nervous being which often brings vivid imaginations and hallucinations that are taken for true experiences; such fasting is frequently suggested by the vital Entities because it puts the consciousness into an unbalanced state which favours their designs. It is therefore discouraged here. The rule to be followed is that laid down by the Gita which says that “Yoga is not for one who eats too much or who does not eat”; a moderate use of food sufficient for the maintenance and health and strength of the body.” Sri Aurobindo/ CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I-575-576, “But fasting i s above all good for those who believe in it — as everything. When you have the faith that this will make you progress, is going to purify you, it does you good. If you don’t believe in it, it doesn’t do much, except that it makes you thin.” The Mother/TMCW-7/Questions and Answers-1955/p-62, “To make your sadhana depend upon not eating is to make a great mistake. When people fast like that, they get into an abnormal condition and can easily mistake imaginations and delusions for true experiences. Much fasting in the end weakens the nervous system. So you must drop this habit of not eating for days together. For Yoga it is a mistake to eat too much but a mistake also to eat nothing or too little. If you eat too much, you become heavy and tamasic; if you fast or eat too little, you excite the vital energies and finally overexcite them, but at the same time you weaken the body and the nerves; both are bad for sadhana. You should eat regularly a moderate but sufficient amount of food; it is only if there is illness or disturbance of digestion that a low diet or not eating sometimes becomes necessary, but fasting even for the purpose of resting the stomach should not last more than a day… For your sadhana you have to use, not outward means like this , but quietness, sincere peaceful aspiration, openness to the Mother.” CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-430-431, “The spiritual seeker often, like the Jain ascetics, seeks refuge in long and frequent fasts which lift him temporarily at least out of the clutch of the body’s demands and help him to feel in himself a pure vacancy of the wide rooms of the spirit. But all this is not liberation and the question may be raised whether, not only at first but always, the divine life also must submit to this necessity. But it could only deliver itself from it altogether if it could find out the way so to draw upon the universal energy that the energy would sustain not only the vital parts of our physicality but its constituent matter with no need of aid for sustenance from any outside substance of Matter. It is indeed possible even while fasting for very long periods to maintain the full energies and activities of the soul and mind and life, even those of the body, to remain wakeful but concentrated in Yoga all the time, or to think deeply and write day and night, to dispense with sleep, to walk eight hours a day, maintaining all these activities separately or together, and not feel any loss of strength, any fatigue, any kind of failure or decadence. At the end of the fast one can even resume at once taking the normal or even a greater than the normal amount of nourishment without any transition or precaution such as medical science enjoins, as if both the complete fasting and the feasting were natural conditions, alternating by an immediate and easy passage from one to the other, of a body already trained by a sort of initial transformation to be an instrument of the powers and activities of Yoga.” CWSA-13/ Essays in Philosophy and Yoga-544-545, Download this WEB PAGE in PDF format: “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.” 7 June 1928 Sri Aurobindo CWSA-32/The Mother and Letters on the Mother-142-143 “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 and the Supreme Nature can become total and absolute.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-963-964 "In fact, the first victory is to create an individuality (separative identity). And then later, the second victory is to give this individuality to the Divine. And the third victory is that the Divine changes your individuality into a divine being... There are three stages : the first is to become an individual; the second is to consecrate the individual, that he may surrender entirely to the Divine and be identified with Him; and the third is that the Divine takes possession of this individual and changes him into a being in His own image, that is, he too becomes divine... Generally, all the yogas stopped at the second. When one had succeeded in surrendering the individual and giving him without reserve to the Divine to be identified with Him, one considered that his work was finished, that all was accomplished.... But we begin there, and we say, “No, this is only a beginning. We want this Divine with whom we are identified to enter our individuality and make it into a divine personality acting in a divine world.” And this is what we call transformation. But the other precedes it, must precede it. If that is not done, there is no possibility of doing the third. One can’t go from the first to the third; one must pass through the second." The Mother The Mother's Centenary Works/Vol-7/p-402-403

Objective in Brief “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... 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... 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... 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.... The true business of man upon earth is to express in the type of humanity a growing image of the Divine; whether knowingly or unknowingly, it is to this end that Nature is working in him under the thick veil of her inner and outer processes.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-48 CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-917-918 CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-327 CWSA-25/The Human Cycle/p-47-48 CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p- 193 “This object (1: A discovery of the Divinity in oneself; 2: discovery of the Divinity in the world behind the appa rent denial; 3: a total discovery of the dynamism of some transcendent Eternal) of the integral Yoga must be accepted wholly by those who follow it, but the acceptance must not be in ignorance of the immense stumbling-blocks that lie in the way of the achievement; on the contrary we must be fully aware of the compelling cause of the refusal of so many other disciplines to regard even its possibility, much less its imperative character, as the true meaning of terrestrial existence.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-170 Man’s attraction towards world strengthens the knowledge of the Becoming, this terrestrial existence; attraction towards heaven strengthens the knowledge of our Source, the Supracosmic origin; attraction of heaven on earth strengthens the knowledge of the intermediate Supra-terrestrial link of subtle, Superconscient, Universal and Supramental plane and attraction towards His ecstatic oneness, order and harmony transforms Matter into image of the Spirit or material transfiguration , eliminating the permanent division between terrestrial, Supra-cosmic and Supra-terrestrial world or bridging the gulf between, the Creation and the Creator. It is true that the deficiencies of the above four institutions are to be rightly related to the total harmony of Existence. In the past, the above evolutionary synthesis had failed due to exaggeration and exclusive importance of either one or another school of thought and now a time has come in the recent development of integral Yoga, as another opportunity and a trying ground of equal importance and regard for all four schools of thought and their utmost Spiritual consummation. The secret truth behind the material existence of physical Science and the truth of pure devotion of all Religious movements are to be reconciled with the Ascetic affirmation of a pure Spiritual impulse. The Ascetic or Sannyasin aspiration upward to unite with the Divine is to be rightly and sufficiently related with the ancient Vedantic approach of descending movement of the Divine Shakti to embrace its manifestation. The ancient Vedantic quest to reconcile Matter and Spirit, One and Many in its comprehensiveness is to be sufficiently related with the Vedic representation of the Divine Mother, the daughter of the Sun, Savitri , who is concerned with the final aim of the Vedic discipline, Divine perfection of material life and physical Immortality of the mutable substance. Thus, earth life can be transformed into an ecstatic playfield of her Divine children. In Integral Spiritual Evolution, Supracosmic is accepted as a source, origin and support , the Supra-terrestrial or other intermediate world for a condition and connecting link of bridging the gulf between Supracosmic Source and the nether material life and the Terrestrial for its field and circumstance , and with human Body, Life and Mind for its nodus, turning point and dynamic mould into which Divine existence can be poured in for a higher and even highest perfection. The whole aim of the evolution is the continuous enlargement of the existing human vessel. The force or energy that moves the stars and planets, the same force also moves our thoughts and actions. When this inrush of ‘energy is the highest in kind and the fullest in amount’³⁴ and works in a perfected human vessel, then he has attained the complete and utmost development. To this height all humanity is aspiring, knowingly or unknowingly. Mother Nature attempts through each individual formation to bridge the gulf between the existing material living and the future Supramental world. She attempted and reattempted this with her best Master Souls and succeeded with Sri Aurobindo . Now, after Mother Nature’s success in creating a single Sri Aurobindo , who is a symbol of the movement of comprehensive Consciousness, her next great and difficult task is ‘to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others.’²⁸ Now it is time for her to universalise her success, by providing the best surrounding atmosphere to the receptive human Souls with perfected minds and bodies who will be able initially to unveil the transcendent activities of the Spirit and finally hold and carry Sri Aurobindo’s Consciousness or the total consciousness of the Eternal by the simple formula though difficult to execute, that of initially living and experiencing all the norms of Integral Yoga, Dharma, and finally, the outer law is substituted by the inner plastic Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Law. This intensive evolution of the individual must be preoccupied in entirely changing the mind, life and body in conformity with the truth of the Spirit. This multiplication of total Consciousness of the Eternal may be understood in Sri Aurobindo's language, "The divine manifestation of a Christ, Krishna, Buddha in external humanity has for its inner truth the same manifestation of the eternal Avatar within in our own inner humanity. That which has been done in the outer human life of earth may be repeated in the inner life of all human beings. "³³ After bridging the gulf between ordinary living and Supramental life, Mother Nature attempted again to experience the cellular transformation of her animal evolutionary form through The Mother’s body. This is another intermediate adventure which has opened for the race another possibility of physical change and a journey toward the ultimate adventure and victory of Spirit over Matter. The simple formula to repeat The Mother’s Cellular transformation experience or discovery of immortal principles concealed within the body's cells is to purify the physical substance to the extent of bearing the pressure of All Delight and the burden of the earth’s Inconscient negations. Or “The dire delight that could shatter mortal flesh,”³⁰ and “Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.”³¹ The next difficult task of Mother Nature related to the multiplication of individual Cellular transformation may be understood in The Mother’s language, “If, for any reason this body (The Mother’s body) becomes unusable, the universal Mother will again start manifesting in hundreds of individualities according to their capacity and receptivity, each one being a partial manifestation of the Universal Consciousness .”²⁹ We may note the Mother's observation related to physical transformation, which is identified as one of the immediate difficult objectives of Integral Yoga. "When you follow the ascending path, the work is relatively easy. I had already covered this path by the beginning of the century and had established a constant relationship with the Supreme – That which is beyond the Personal and the gods and all the outward expressions of the Divine, but also beyond the Absolute Impersonal. It’s something you cannot describe; you must experience it. And this is what must be brought down into Matter. Such is the descending path, the one I began with Sri Aurobindo ; and there, the work is immense. The thing can still be brought down as far as the mental and vital planes (although Sri Aurobindo said that thousands of lifetimes would be needed merely to bring it down to the mental plane, unless one practiced a perfect surrender’). With Sri Aurobindo , we went down below Matter, right into the Subconscient and even into the Inconscient. But after the descent comes the transformation, and when you come down to the body, when you attempt to make it take one step forward – oh, not even a real step, just a little step! – everything starts grating; it’s like stepping on an anthill ... And yet the presence, the help of the supreme Mother, is there constantly; thus you realize that for ordinary men such a task is impossible, or else millions of lives would be needed – but in truth, unless the work is done for them and the sadhana of the body done for the entire earth consciousness, they will never achieve the physical transformation, or else it will be so remote that it is better not even to speak of it. But if they open themselves, if they give themselves over in an integral surrender, the work can be done for them – they have only to let it be done. 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) Now, most of humanity is suffering from the slavery of lower Nature and the slavery of ordinary action. So, first, very few should go beyond these two slaveries by ascending their consciousness to the Psychic, Spiritual and Universal planes and their Spiritual Influence should spread beyond the individual Soul Centre. Sri Aurobindo confirms, "whenever even a single soul is liberated, there is a tendency to an extension and even to an outburst of the same divine self-consciousness in other individual souls of our terrestrial humanity..."³² Thus, in the long run, the whole of humanity can be liberated and their life can be Divinised. OM TAT SAT The References of the above extraction are taken from the manuscript ‘The Integral Yoga and Sanatana Dharma ’ (Page-14, 136) THE PSYCHIC & SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION "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. " Sri Aurobindo CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-943 “As the psychic change has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual change has to call in the supramental transformation to complete it.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-951 “The psychic transformation after rising into the spiritual change has then to be completed, integralised, exceeded and uplifted by a supramental transformation which lifts it to the summit of the ascending endeavour.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-242 "A purified mind and heart and a strong and fine psychical intuition may do much to protect from perversion and error, but even the most highly developed psychical consciousness cannot be absolutely safe unless the psychical is illumined and uplifted by a higher force than itself and touched and strengthened by the luminous intuitive mind and that again raised towards the supramental energy of the spirit." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-896 In our ancient tradition, a liberated Soul leaves the untransformed Nature as it is. Sri Aurobindo was absolutely against it. Regarding this, He had written the most ironic thing in His poem “THE SELF.”⁸ The Psychic Being and the Spiritual Being are the delegates of Supermind working from the heart centre and above the head, respectively. Both have the capacity to call down brief Supramental energy by their dynamic movement. It has been observed that there is wide misuse of the word ‘Supermind’¹ and ‘transformation of Nature’¹ by devotees and disciples in their writings and orations. This was not acceptable to Sri Aurobindo as they are related with the last perfection of integral Yoga and can be attained only after the long movement² of Consciousness between Psychic and Spiritual planes and after the universalisation of Psychic and Spiritual Consciousness. So, as we understand, an isolated individual transformation is not practicable. ‘Here the Yoga of self-perfection coincides with the Yogas of knowledge, works and devotion; for it is impossible to change the human nature into the divine or to make it an instrument of the divine knowledge, will and joy of existence, unless there is a union with the supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and a unity with its universal Self in all things and beings . A wholly separative possession of the divine nature by the human individual, as distinct from a self-withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible .’³ ‘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.’⁴ He further confirmed that at present, the Psychic and Spiritual transformation and perfection is possible ‘only by a small number of human beings .’⁵ What Sri Aurobindo proposes to them is, ‘one must first have the self-realisation, the full action of the spiritualised mind and heart, the psychic awakening, the liberation of the imprisoned consciousness, the purification and entire opening of the adhara. Do not think now of those ultimate things (Overmind, Supermind), but get first these foundations in the liberated nature.’⁶ ‘At present the necessity is to prepare the physical consciousness; for that a complete equality and peace and a complete dedication free from personal demand or desire in the physical and the lower vital parts is the thing to be established.’⁶ There are very few Sadhakas who are concerned with Supramental energy that The Mother and Sri Aurobindo intended to call down to earth’s atmosphere. Apart from it, most of the Ashramite Sadhakas ‘are seeking realisation through meditation, through love and worship or through activity and work.’⁷ In this Yoga, if a Sadhak will not learn the lesson sufficiently to transform the nature by movement of ascending and descending Psychic and Spiritual Consciousness, then he will have to be satisfied with partial intermittent Divine union. The vision of complete and constant Divine union through activation of the Supramentalised Psychic Self will remain as a distant and remote objective of integral Yoga. Spiritual life is for those who are not satisfied with life as it is. They enjoy Divine’s single protection by partial Psychic opening (“Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:” Savitri-211), double protection by full opening of Psychic being which can discover Ocean of Light above the head and bellow the feet (“Our life is entrenched between two rivers of Light,” Savitri-531) and multiple protection by opening all the ten Selves. (“It (dynamic Spirit) is within, below, without, above.” Savitri-98, "Heaven’s leaning down to embrace from all sides earth," Savitri-716) OM TAT SAT References: 1 (59 is the reference in the Manuscript): “Transformation is a word that I have brought in myself (like supermind) to express certain spiritual concepts and spiritual facts of the integral Yoga. People are now taking them up and using them in senses which have nothing to do with the significance which I put into them…” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/-p-403, CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-174, “The words supermind and supramental were first used by me, but since then people have taken up and are using the word supramental for anything above the mind.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-144, ‘It is a common mistake. Even the word supermind (which I invented) has been taken up by several people (writers in the Prabuddha Bharata and elsewhere) and applied generally to the spiritual consciousness.” CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-142-143, “People talk very lightly of the overmind and the supermind as if it were quite easy to enter into them and mistake inferior movements for the overmental or supramental, thereby confusing the Truth and delaying the progress of the sadhana .” CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-408, "For if it is some inferior state that we thus mistake for the supermind, it lays us open to all the dangers we have seen to attend a presumptuous egoistic haste in our demand for achievement. If it is one of the higher states that we presume to be the highest, we may, though we achieve much, yet fall short of the greater, more perfect goal of our being; for we shall remain content with an approximation and the supreme transformation will escape us. Even the achievement of a complete inner liberation and a high spiritual consciousness is not that supreme transformation; for we may have that achievement, a status perfect in itself, in essence, and still our dynamic parts may in their instrumentation belong to an enlightened spiritualised mind and may be in consequence, like all mind, defective even in its greater power and knowledge, still subject to a partial or local obscuration or a limitation by the original circumscribing nescience." CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-284, "If spiritual and supramental were the same thing, as you say my readers imagine, then all the sages and devotees and Yogis and sadhaks throughout the ages would have been supramental beings and all I have written about the supermind would be so much superfluous stuff, useless and otiose. Anybody who had spiritual experiences would then be a supramental being; the Asram would be chock-full of supramental beings and every other Asram in India also. Spiritual experiences can fix themselves in the inner consciousness and alter it, transform it, if you like; one can realise the Divine everywhere, the Self in all and all in the Self, the universal Shakti doing all things; one can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic bhakti or Ananda. But one may and usually does still go on in the outer active parts of Nature thinking with the intellect or at best the intuitive mind, willing with a mental will, feeling joy and sorrow on the vital surface, undergoing physical afflictions and suffering the struggle of life in the body with death and disease. The change then only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, with a perfect equality, taking it as an inevitable part of Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature. That is not the transformation I envisage. It is quite another power of knowledge, another kind of will, another luminous nature of emotion and aesthesis, another constitution of the physical consciousness that must come in by the supramental change." CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-273-274 2 (147): "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-148, “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. One must (1) 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, (6) 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/p-281-282, "It follows that the psychic and the spiritual transformation must be far advanced, even as complete as may be, before there can be any beginning of the third and consummating supramental change; for it is only by this double transmutation that the self-will of the Ignorance can be totally altered into a spiritual obedience to the remoulding truth and will of the greater Consciousness of the Infinite. 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 and the Supreme Nature can become total and absolute." CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-963-964, "If (1) this first (Psychic) change establishing the being in the inner and larger, a Yogic in place of an ordinary consciousness has not been done, the greater transmutation is impossible. Moreover the individual must have sufficiently universalised himself, he must have recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a cosmic mentality, enlarged and vivified his individual life into the immediate sense and direct experience of the dynamic motion of the universal life, opened up the communications of his body with the forces of universal Nature, before he can be capable of a change which transcends the present cosmic formulation and lifts him beyond the lower hemisphere of universality into a consciousness belonging to its spiritual upper hemisphere. (2) (second Spiritual change ) Besides he must have already become aware of what is now to him superconscient; he must be already a being conscious of the higher spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Ananda , penetrated by its descending influences, new-made by a spiritual change. It is possible for the spiritual opening to take place and its action to proceed before the psychic is far advanced or complete; for the spiritual influence from above can awaken, assist and complete the psychic transmutation: all that is necessary is that there should be a sufficient stress of the psychic entity for the spiritual higher overture to take place. But the third, the supramental change does not admit of any premature descent of the highest Light; for it can only commence when the supramental Force begins to act directly, and this it does not do if the nature is not ready. For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme Force and the capacity of the ordinary nature; the inferior nature would either be unable to bear or, bearing, unable to respond and receive or, receiving, unable to assimilate. Till Nature is ready, the supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of overmind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially responsive." CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-965-966 3 (143): CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-622, “The individual must be the instrument and first field of the transformation; but an isolated individual transformation is not enough and may not be wholly feasible. Even when achieved, the individual change will have a permanent and cosmic significance only if the individual becomes a centre and a sign for the establishment of the supramental Consciousness-Force as an overtly operative power in the terrestrial workings of Nature, — in the same way in which thinking Mind has been established through the human evolution as an overtly operative power in Life and Matter. This would mean the appearance in the evolution of a gnostic being or Purusha and a gnostic Prakriti , a gnostic Nature. There must be an emergent supramental Consciousness- Force liberated and active within the terrestrial whole and an organised supramental instrumentation of the Spirit in the life and the body, — for the body consciousness also must become sufficiently awake to be a fit instrument of the workings of the new supramental Force and its new order. Till then any intermediate change could be only partial or insecure; an overmind or intuitive instrumentation of Nature could be developed, but it would be a luminous formation imposed on a fundamental and environmental Inconscience. A supramental principle and its cosmic operation once established permanently on its own basis, the intervening powers of Overmind and spiritual Mind could found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection; they would become in the earth-existence a hierarchy of states of consciousness rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme spiritual level.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-997-998, "A perfect self- expression of the spirit is the object of our terrestrial existence. This cannot be achieved if we have not grown conscious of the supreme Reality; for it is only by the touch of the Absolute that we can arrive at our own absolute. But neither can it be done to the exclusion of the cosmic Reality: we must become universal, for without an opening into universality the individual remains incomplete. The individual separating himself from the All to reach the Highest, loses himself in the supreme heights; including in himself the cosmic consciousness, he recovers his wholeness of self and still keeps his supreme gain of transcendence; he fulfils it and himself in the cosmic completeness. A realised unity of the transcendent, the universal and the individual is an indispensable condition for the fullness of the self-expressing spirit : for the universe is the field of its totality of self-expression, while it is through the individual that its evolutionary self-unfolding here comes to its acme." CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-706, " But this experience with X was really interesting. I learned many things that day, many things ... If you concentrate long enough on any one point, you discover the Infinite (and in his own experience he found the infinite), what could be called your own Infinite. But this is not what WE want, not this; what we want is the direct and integral contact between the manifested universe and the Infinite out of which this universe has emerged. So then it is no longer an individual or personal contact with the Infinite, it’s a total contact. And Sri Aurobindo insists on this, he says that it’s absolutely impossible to have the transformation (not the contact, but the supramental transformation) without becoming universalized – that is the first condition. You cannot become supramental before being universal. And to be universal means to accept everything, be everything, become everything – really to accept everything. And as for all those who are shut up in a system, even if it belongs to the highest regions of thought, it is not THAT." The Mother's Agenda/20.09.1960, "He must accept everything, but cling to nothing, be repelled by nothing however imperfect or however subversive of fixed notions, but also allow nothing to lay hold on him to the detriment of the free working of the Truth-Spirit. This equality of the intelligence is an essential condition for rising to the higher supramental and spiritual knowledge." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-718, 4 (133): "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, “The questions about the supermind cannot be answered profitably now. Supermind cannot be described in terms that the mind will understand, because the terms will be mental and mind will understand them in a mental way and mental sense and miss their true import. 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. Let the whole dynamic nature led by the psychic make itself full of the dynamic spiritual light, peace, purity, knowledge, force; let it afterwards get experience of the intermediate spiritual planes and know, feel and act in their sense; then it will be possible to speak last of the supramental transformation.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I-289-290, “Otherwise what will be ultimately accomplished is an achievement by the few initiating a new order of beings, while humanity will have passed sentence of unfitness on itself and may fall back into an evolutionary decline or a stationary immobility; for it is the constant up ward effort (of the few) that has kept humanity alive and maintained for it, Its plays in the front of creation.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-752, “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, "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, "When external difficulties subside, when the body becomes passive and quiet, when it is not constantly demanding attention, then you can LIVE in this supramental consciousness and it does not seem so difficult; you feel it is so victorious in its essence that it will end all difficulties ." The Mother’s Agenda/ December 13, 1960, 5 (144): “The Psychic transformation and the first stages of the spiritual transformation are well within our conception; their perfection would be the perfection, wholeness, consummated unity of a knowledge and experience which is already part of things realised, though only by a small number of human beings. But the supramental change in its process carries us into less explored regions; it initiates a vision of heights of consciousness which have indeed been glimpsed and visited, but have yet to be discovered and mapped in their completeness.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-953, “But the real soul, the real psychic entity which for the most part we see little of and only a small minority in mankind has developed, is an instrument of pure love, joy and the luminous reaching out to fusion and unity with God and our fellow-creatures. This psychic entity is covered up by the play of the mentalised Prana or desire-mind which we mistake for the soul; the emotional mind is unable to mirror the real soul in us, the Divine in our hearts, and is obliged instead to mirror the desire-mind.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-351 6 (76): CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II-p-413, CWSA-32/The Mother and Letters on the Mother/p-492, 7 (10): “There are very few among the sadhaks here who at all concern themselves with the supermind or know anything about it except as something which the Mother and I will bring down some day and establish here. Most are seeking realisation through meditation, through love and worship or through activity and work. Meditation and silence are not necessary for everyone; there are some, even among those spoken of by you and others as the most advanced sadhaks, who do their sadhana not through meditation, for which they have no turn, but through activity, work or creation supported or founded on love and bhakti . It is not the credo but the person who matters. We impose no credo; it is sufficient if there is an established and heart-felt relation between ourselves and the disciple.” CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II-p-210, “I may say generally that to bring down the supermind is my aim in the yoga or that to do that one has first to rise out of mind into overmind, but if on the strength of that, anybody and everybody began trying to pull down the supermind or force his way immediately out of mind into overmind, the result would be disaster.” CWSA-32/The Mother with Letters on the Mother/p-349, 8: “No, it’s the old tradition – you step back from Nature and Nature does whatever she wants. It doesn’t concern you, you have no responsibility, ‘you are not that.’ It’s the old idea... Sri Aurobindo was completely against it. Somewhere he makes fun of a man who said he was the Supreme and that whatever he did, it wasn’t he himself doing it – and then he was angry when his meal was late! But of course it wasn’t him: the stomach-nature was angry!... It’s one of the most ironic things Sri Aurobindo has written.... I’ve known that and have always taken great care to avoid it, for it opens the door to all deformations. Lele was like that – Lele did the same thing: he behaved like a lout; he said it wasn’t himself, it was Nature – he had nothing to do with it. This is all very well, but still there’s a sort of affinity between your physical comportment and what you are inside, isn’t there?!... Sri Aurobindo didn’t accept this tradition at all.” The Mother’s Agenda/ June 20, 1961 Sri Aurobindo’s Poem "THE SELF" He said, “I am egoless, spiritual, free,” Then swore because his dinner was not ready. I asked him why. He said, “It is not me, But the belly’s hungry god who gets unsteady.” I asked him why. He said, “It is his play. I am unmoved within, desireless, pure. I care not what may happen day by day.” I questioned him, “Are you so very sure?” He answered, “I can understand your doubt. But to be free is all. It does not matter How you may kick and howl and rage and shout, Making a row over your daily platter. To be aware of self is liberty. Self I have got and, having self, am free.”” CWSA-2/Collected Poems/p-620 The References of the above extractions are taken from the manuscript ‘The Mother's Manifestation ’ (Page-267) Download this WEB PAGE as a PDF file: OBJECTIVE IN DETAIL "To be conscious of him (Divine) in all parts of our being and equally in all that the dividing mind sees as outside our being, is the consummation of the individual consciousness. To be possessed by him and possess him in ourselves and in all things is the term of all empire and mastery. To enjoy him in all experience of passivity and activity, of peace and of power, of unity and of difference is the happiness which the Jiva, the individual soul manifested in the world, is obscurely seeking. This is the entire definition of the aim of integral Yoga ..." Sri Aurobindo CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-63 THE DIVINE CENTRE “There must be, first, the effort towards at least an initial and enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine; next , the reception of that which transcends, that with which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of our whole conscious being; last , the utilisation of our transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world...It is when this identification and this self-merging are complete that the divine centre in the world is ready. Purified, liberated, plastic, illumined, it can begin to serve as a means for the direct action of a supreme Power in the larger Yoga of humanity or superhumanity, of the earth’s spiritual progression or its transformation.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-58 THE AGENDA OF COLLECTIVE LIVING “Therefore, whenever even a single soul is liberated, there is a tendency to an extension and even to an outburst of the same divine self-consciousness in other individual souls of our terrestrial humanity and, who knows?—perhaps even beyond the terrestrial consciousness.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-45, “We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God’s intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and universalise it in others." Sri Aurobindo CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-29 The Conditions of the Path: "The goal is not to lose oneself in the Divine Consciousness. The goal is to let the Divine Consciousness penetrate into Matter and transform it." The Mother The Mother's Centenary Works-15/Words of the Mother-III/p-84 “Then I thought: now, Sri Aurobindo , it is quite clear; for him, the goal was Perfection . Perfection not in the sense of a summit but of an all-inclusive totality in which everything is represented, has a place. And I saw that this Perfection would come—must come—in stages. He announced something the realisation of which will stretch over thousands of years. So it must come in stages.” The Mother The Mother’s Agenda-4/p-101 “We find that it progresses towards a greater completeness in proportion as we arrive at two kinds of perfection; (1) first, a greater and greater detachment from the control of the lower suggestions; (2) secondly, an increasing discovery of a self-existent Being, Light, Power and Ananda which surpasses normal humanity…The movement of perfection is (1) away from all domination by the lower nature and (2) towards a pure and powerful reflection of the being, power, knowledge and delight of the Spirit and Self in the buddhi. The Yoga of self-perfection is to make this double movement as absolute as possible .” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-668-669 "But on the other hand incapacity of force is also an imperfection. Laxity and weakness, self-indulgence, a certain flabbiness and limpness or inert passivity of the psychical being are the last result of an emotional and psychic life in which energy and power of assertion have been quelled, discouraged or killed. Nor is it a total perfection to have only the strength that endures or to cultivate only a heart of love, charity, tolerance, mildness, meekness and forbearance. The other side of perfection is a self-contained and calm and unegoistic Rudra -power armed with psychic force, the energy of the strong heart which is capable of supporting without shrinking an insistent, an outwardly austere or even, where need is, a violent action. An unlimited light of energy, force, puissance harmonised with sweetness of heart and clarity, capable of being one with it in action, the lightning of Indra starting from the orb of the nectarous moon-rays of Soma is the double perfection . And these two things saumyatva, tejas , must base their presence and action on a firm equality of the temperament and of the psychical soul delivered from all crudity and all excess or defect of the heart’s light or the heart’s power." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-736-737

Public ati ons Integral Education is the utilitarian attribute of Integral Yoga which is neither a popular Religion nor a popular Yoga; so Education is accepted here as a field of rigorous self-control, samyama, and this central truth of seven-fold ceaseless concentration, nitya samyama, is utilised here as a means of arriving at the aim of Integral Perfection in successive births known as All Life and this whole life is accepted here as a small fragment of all Time of all Life. The first object of Integral Education is discovery of its true centre which must be always identified as the dynamic Soul, the Psychic being in the heart, the need of its growth and experience, its aspiration towards possession of pure power of Light, Love, Joy, Beauty, Wisdom and Harmony and elimination of all imperfection. All that helps this Soul growth, Mental, Vital and Physical Education are identified as its accessory or a subsidiary helpful process; by the pressure of Soul force these modern learning materials are lifted out of their limitations and carried more swiftly and profoundly to discover their Mighty Source, Subtle Mental, Subtle Vital and Subtle Physical Education; they subsequently are drawn towards the supreme Light in Knowledge, integral Completeness and their detailed and yet undreamed potentialities. The second object of Integral Education is the discovery of its second centre or second Soul, which is the discovery of the Spiritual Self above the head, a vast static and silent Self, enters into contact with greater immutable Reality beyond and pervading the universe; it is also a turning, conversion and transformation of our whole being through a large dynamic descent of Divine Light, Knowledge, Power, Bliss or other supernormal affirmative Energies into untransformed Nature. This Spiritual Self uncovers the passage to Cosmic Consciousness where the Matter is real to the Spirit and Spirit is real to the Matter and both find their true reconciliation through enlargement and universalisation of Subtle Mental, Subtle Vital and Subtle Physical Sheaths. After the prolonged movements between the above two Selves, the third object of Integral Education is traced by discovery of its third centre or third Soul, the discovery of a Supramental Self, Vijnanamaya Purusha, the limitless Consciousness in which the individual, the Cosmic and the Transcendent live eternally in each other; it has come for the adventure of the Soul lapsing into Inconscience and emerging out of its darkness and this adventure proceeds to capture all other sheaths without disturbing the poise which is kept firm from summit of Consciousness to its base; the experiencing Consciousness must preserve a calm balance, supreme harmony and a high Spiritual positivism. The fourth aim of Education is concentrated around a centre of Infinity, must be all-inclusive perfection directed to resolve all the problems of existence including the ultimate, lasting and permanent solutions and utilise the Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Education towards transformation of human collectivity and a journey towards the discovery of the source of Ananda from which this whole creation is originated. The last aim of integral Education is the perfect self-expression of the Spirit in the material life of our terrestrial existence by purifying, perfecting and transforming the nether dark worlds through Subconscient and Inconscient Education or restoration of all-perfection of Sachchidananda Consciousness in the whole of humanity through activation and discovery of Subconscient and Inconscient Self. OM TAT SAT Savitri book asks a Sadhak to always remember the most adverse condition of Soul history, “This was the day when Satyavan must die.” (Savitri-10) Or “An absolute supernatural darkness falls on man sometimes when he draws near to God:” (Savitri-11) This remembrance helps him to utilise time and small habitation of space exclusively to accumulate Spiritual energy. Through opening and activation of Psychic and Spiritual Self, the capacity to do work, to gain knowledge, to love, to discern truth from falsehood multiplies and the fixed fate of doom can be confronted and changed to luminous Spiritual destiny. He meets the dynamic Divine Mother during the extreme adversity and it draws his life directly towards the Source of existence, overhead solution of the problem of existence and meets life ‘like a tree recovering from a wind.’ (Savitri-574) The message of Savitri is like a ‘sealed order’ (Savitri-72) or ‘fiery seal’ (Savitri-76) from the unknown immortal Light that has to be opened in addition to its invasion into the nether ‘drowsy seal’ (Savitri-84) and ‘inconscient seal’ (Savitri-108) for the concentration and expansion of an existing human vessel to hold the ever growing intensities of the Divine faculties. The Sadhak of this integral Yoga is like a Navigator exploring the ten inner Oceans and a Cosmologist exploring three surface worlds. His Soul has descended to earth as ‘scout and voyager from Eternity’ for world-adventure. The ‘secret mission’ which the Divine Mother insists is the adventure into obscure geographies of the three firm lands that of surface physical, surface vital, surface mental; explore and sail into the ten deep larger seas or inner oceans that of Inconscient, Subconscient, Subtle Physical, Subtle Vital, Subtle Mental, Psychic, Spiritual, Universal, Supramental and Bliss Ocean/Sheath, through thunder’s roar, windless hush, fog and mist where nothing more is seen; intended towards the discovery of ten Selves contained in the inmost core of above ten sheaths and through their huge working of Soul Forces, purify, transform, perfectly build the Immortal’s secret house of ten Sheaths enveloping and overlapping these ten Selves, and unwound and liberate the triple dominance and downward pull of untransformed surface physical, vital and mental domains, bringing the greatness of Spiritual dawn; this exercise will follow the great Mother’s directive to finally uncover the city of God with new body and mind and enshrine the Immortal in his glory’s house. Our Soul’s task in integral Yoga is to reveal Savitri’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. A Psychic being is identified here as a greater God. That means if a Sadhak has realised his Psychic Being in the heart centre, then his status is greater than Overmental God and he can call down Divine Love to earth and men. If he calls down permanently Paramatma/Purushottama/Supramental Purusha to the heart centre then he begins to ‘wear the face of Satyavan’ (Savitri-614) and experiences static union of the Supreme Bliss Self. With the prolongation of this Divine union, dynamic Brahman/Paraprakriti/Supramental and Bliss Mother comes down permanently to stay in the heart centre. Then heart centre becomes the meeting ground of Paramatma Satyavan and Paraprakriti Savitri and this dynamic union possesses material life and the cellular transformation begins the action. To Love and Possess equally Paramatma Satyavan and Paraprakriti Savitri in the heart centre is the supreme Word of Savitri and this status is extended towards World transformation through the mighty descent of Divine Force. This is the condition put before a Sadhak of receiving Savitri’s comprehensive Divine Love. The moral message of Vyasadeva’s Savitri in Mahabharata is that if a woman has single-minded devotion towards her husband, then the divisible Consciousness of widowhood cannot touch her. The Spiritual message of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri is that if a Sadhak has brought down permanently the Supreme Self to heart centre, then his aim, joy, charm, glory and source of life are free from sorrow of widowhood. A Sadhak, who does not wear the face of Paramatma Satyavan within the heart centre has no issue, no charm and glory and his life is symbolically revealed as experiencing the sorrow of widowhood or 'Like love when the beloved's face is gone' (Savitri-306) or as Death God said to Savitri ‘Leave then thy dead (husband), O Savitri, and live.” (Savitri-656) To know and hold this origin of Existence, Supreme Self in the heart centre, is the most difficult Spiritual task before a Sadhak and The Mother confirms, “They alone, who by their aspiration are able to pass through to the Divine Origin, will escape catastrophes…Only those who have an aspiration, a sincere and unconditional aspiration towards the Divine, only they will escape – they will stand in a golden glory.” (The Mother’s Agenda/May 4, 1972) OM TAT SAT This book ‘The Bhagavad Gita and Integral Yoga’ is the utilitarian interpretation of Sri Aurobindo’s book ‘Essays on the Gita’ which gives the message of strong Spirituality and the Mother hinted that this book is a gold mine. Our task here is to extract the gold (or the descent of Supreme Will, supreme Wisdom and supreme Love) from the limitless gold mines. In the Bhagavad Gita, the truth initiated and developed are identified as easier truth and the truth initiated and hinted (not developed) are identified as difficult truth and the former is experienced as Jivatma’s union with static Paramatma and the latter is experienced as Jivatma’s union with dynamic Paraprakriti. In Integral Yoga, this universalisation of Consciousness, is further extended as union between supreme Self and supreme Nature and Divine union between Supreme Nature, Para-prakriti and lower Nature, Apara-prakriti. 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 opening the Supreme Self of becoming God, Brahmabhutah; ‘and if now personality seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite;” secondly it stresses on His universal Consciousness and opening of Cosmic Self, Vasudeva sarvam iti, in which all moves and acts and through this Divine extends His faculty of universal Divine action, good of all creatures, sarvabhuta-hite ratah; and holding together the race, lokasangraha, leading them towards right living, dharma, best standard; for the Lord declares, “it is my path that men follow in every way;” thirdly, it emphasizes on the acceptance of Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body, manusim tanumasritam; for He is the Immanent in all this existences as Kshara Purusha, Psychic being, ‘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.’ Fourthly, ‘man’s way to liberation and perfection lies through an increasing impersonality’ by opening of his Akshara Purusha, Spiritual Being above the head, which is identified as ‘the first Spiritual necessity’ of a seeker of Truth and fifthly, the Gita 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 lastly the final object of this Yoga is then a self-completing union of Soul, Jiva, 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. The Gita also reconciles the movements of Kshara, Akshara and Purushottama or reconciles the movements of Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental planes, ‘atmani atmanam atmana.’ through which the Divine perfection can be attained. 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 multiple subtle planes are 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. An integral Sadhak will learn four lessons from the Gita. (1) Firstly, 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) Secondly, the perfection and extreme accumulation of fourfold Soul-forces, chaturvarna, and fourfold Spiritual forces, chatwaro manobastatha and their integration and reconciliation are felt indispensable to pursue Yoga of Self-perfection. These Soul forces and Spiritual forces he will carry with him to next successive births which is utilised as doing good of all creatures and world transformation. (3) Thirdly, the power of consecration has to be intensified through self-control or persistent rejection of lower Nature, which 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) Lastly, 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.’ This is Integral Yoga's Mokshya or Integral Liberation. OM TAT SAT Sri K. Anurakta is recognised as one of the flame-buoyant and foremost potential Sadhakas of integral Yoga. He has realised some rare Spiritual height to become a part of The Mother’s most difficult Subconscient transformation action and his difficult task was to climb one known peak of Consciousness to another unknown peak and as a result his capacity to bear world’s suffering and blow increased proportionately. He served the next purpose of elevating the general Consciousness of the race by pouring the Mother’s Love and Grace on the bereaved Souls and awakened in them the spark of living Psychic Fire and the Divine Bliss. Devotees gathered around him to dump all their earthly problems and Karma and he bore and relieved most of their sufferings, miseries and sorrows by identifying them with the Divine and yet remained established in a state of absolute calm, complete surrender and highest plane of Turiya for several years. In Savitri, this highest state beyond Supramental is described as ‘the brooding bliss of the Infinite’’ or ‘The bliss that made the world in his body lived.’ The change of his physical appearance of luminous body, jyotirmaya deha, Divine beauty, divya saundarya, and capacity of eternal Love, prema samarthya, confirms that he was firm in the Yoga of cellular transformation. He was at once an Ashramite in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, who had the responsibilities of increasing persistent zeal to become one and possess the Divine Mother and the Lord, utsaha, a Sadhaka, while exploring new vistas of ascending peaks of Consciousness felt the need of much more still to be done, bhuri kartvam and increasing his capacity to bear the earth’s burden through static Divine union, titikshya, a consecrated Child of resolving human problems in large scale through dynamic Divine union, sarvabhutahiteratah, and an integral Yogi of becoming a transparent channel of Divine’s vast ascent and descent, divya aroha and avaroha. OM TAT SAT This book partly fulfils Sri Aurobindo's requirement that those who will follow integral Yoga must have full account of earth's Spiritual history, its Spiritual rise and fall of Consciousness and also well informed about the limitations of all modern Knowledge and to create an opportunity to transform all unconsecrated mundane Knowledge into consecrated Spiritual Wisdom. This account will not exclude the recent Spiritual history of Integral Sadhakas, their Spiritual possibility in Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga and limitations and difficulties witnessed in transforming the tamasic, rajasic and sattvic mind. The editor of this book believes that apart from the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita, Sri Aurobindo’s principal Teaching, The Synthesis of Yoga is one of the best standards of the race. Its Teaching is so vast, catholic and impersonal that all can accept but only a few aspirant Souls can live it’s message which is the reconciliation of perfect Spirit with imperfect Matter. 'The Mother’s Manifestation’ book is a utilitarian interpretation of the book The Synthesis of Yoga. It insists on a Sadhaka of becoming accountable for his sadhana to his own Self, to the World and to the Divine in three stages. Firstly, he will trace a path of his own sadhana by constantly renewing, reshaping, reliving and restating the best written standard available to the race and by noting the full account of his human imperfection and Self-perfection. Secondly, during the concentration, contemplation and meditation of these formative truths extending over decades, he receives new overhead Divine Wisdom, Divine Will and Divine Love and the unending instrumental exercise of a Sadhaka is to learn this lesson of the Infinite which gets precedence over all other appetite and interest. Lastly, he will be a Divine Centre of the world by receiving the Divine energies, of holding them in the purified and transformed human vessel, of transmitting them to the surrounding world and of fulfilling the deficiencies of men. His Soul strength is weighed and augmented from his capacity for ceaseless action, ceaseless concentration to hold and transmit ceaseless Divine Love, Delight and Beauty and finally the capacity to remember the Divine uninterruptedly through ceaseless Japa. The perfect utilisation of the opportunities of integral Yoga is identified as to use the time and space exclusively for the ascent and descent of Consciousness and by this vertical movement through the assistance of the triple Yoga of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti, one arrives at the birth of experiencing Timeless Eternity and Spaceless Infinity and their manifestation through new birth of time and space. The Mother’s Consciousness is that which rests on the One and acts in all existence and this consciousness manifests on earth by penetrating into finite things, phenomena and forms to produce infinite harmony, freedom and perfection. OM TAT SAT This poetry book “Tattvamasi” is the "Song of Soul..." of S. A. Maa Krishna and parts aside the veil slightly to give a brief glimpse of her intense Sadhana and of her Soul’s triple union of the Divine in Supra-Physical, Supra-Terrestrial and Supra-Cosmic planes. The Seeker will be able to identify that all the personal relationships with the Divine as Play-mate, Friend, Master, Mother, Lover and Beloved have been experienced. In it stands the realisation of the Divine as the Impersonal and Absolute Brahman as well as the child in the lap of his Mother to the union with the Supreme as the Beloved. The poems voice the integral aspiration of the Soul within each of us and marks the journey to experience the Individual, Cosmic and Transcendent Divine that awaits us all as we plunge into the Yoga of the Lord Sri Aurobindo and the Divine Mother. To read, contemplate and meditate in the atmosphere of this book will allow the Sadhaka to be open to the transformative higher Consciousness of the Divine Mother that descends, purifies and spreads within all. “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, “The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality. “It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.” The Mother TMCW-8/Questions and Answers-1956/p-126, The Mother further affirmed, in relation to her book carrying the Supramental Presence: “…any fool could read it like a story and feel perfectly satisfied – and he wouldn’t even notice it taking hold of him inside and changing him.” The Mother The Mother’s Agenda/ December 20, 1961 And again: “When the Supramental manifests, an unequalled joy spreads over the earth.” The Mother TMCW-15/Words of the Mother-III/p-91 Religion and Spirituality are the husk and kernel of Sanatana Dharma respectively; the former develops by Self-diffusion and the latter by Self-concentration and both are reconciled and perfected in its single body. The victory of the Spirit is secured by generalisation of its highest truth in humanity. Similarly, the action of Sanatana Dharma can be secured and progressive when Self-expansion becomes a willing subordinate and conscious outcome of its Self-concentration. The wide and supple method of the evolutionary Nature must provide ample scope to preserve the true intention of all religious seeking; the development of Religion in India has witnessed that any number of religious formulations, cults and disciplines have been nurtured, allowed and even encouraged to subsist side by side and ‘each man was free to accept and follow his own Religion which is congenial to his thought, feeling, temperament and build of Nature.,’ (CWSA/22/The Life Divine/p-897) It would allow all to live as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or assign to each its field of realisation or of endeavour. A unity behind diversity and discord is the secret of the variety of human Religions, Sciences and Philosophies; for they all get at some image or some side clue, touch some portion of the one Truth or envisage any one of its countless aspects. All Religions are forms and fragments descended from the one eternal Religion, Sanatana Dharma or all Religion would be true as developments that converge on one eternal Religion, all philosophies of divergent viewpoints would be valid each in its own field as different aspects of a single Reality, all Sciences must be drawn irresistibly to merge with supreme Science. Unity of all the Religions is possible when each man is said to have his own Religion; he is not bound by any sect or restrict to any traditional form rather he will follow a free self-adaptation of his Nature in its relation with the Supreme. So the true purpose of Religion is to link the human with the Divine and in so doing sublimate the thought, life and the flesh to admit the Spirit’s law. It was felt necessary that man must approach God through an endless variety in order that he might come to know Him entirely. Integral Yoga proposes that the greatest unity of all Religion is possible through a most conscious individual when he is perfectly capable of every kind of Spiritual experience, embraces the whole universe in his Consciousness and possesses the highest Integral Knowledge. And he calls down the ultimate Divine Truth to elevate the things and creatures to their highest and widest Divine manifestation. Integral Yoga recommends that every thinking and living being should dwell in the Soul, the seat of Integral Knowledge, All Truth, the Eternal Veda, and Sanatana Dharma. No written truth—whether Shastra or Religion, however great its scope or influence—can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge and a fragmentary manifestation of the All Truth. Integral Yoga is initially an exclusive specialised path and finally an all-inclusive comprehensive self-discipline for the full satisfaction of the endless and limitless expansion and concentration of Sanatana Dharma. The evolution of the Spiritual history of earth has been thoroughly studied in integral Yoga and its clear and distinct hierarchies have been evolved which can be accepted as basis for the further development and Spiritual unfolding of the endless truth of Sanatana Dharma. Integral Yoga is identified as the crown of rich Aryan Culture of Sanatana Dharma where an integral Yogi emerges as a perfect Arya with triune realisation of the Brahman which is a Consciousness at once Transcendental, Universal and Individual. Integral Yoga recognises the teachings of Sanatana Dharma as great while it identifies its own Teachings as the best because it ‘includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole: that knowledge is likely to be the highest knowledge which illumines, integralises, harmonises the significance of all knowledge and accounts for, finds the basic and, one might almost say, the justifying reason of our ignorance and illusion while it cures them; this is the supreme experience which gathers together all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness.’ (CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-485) In the Sanatana Dharma, the mighty Supramental Divine Presence is hinted as Vijnana, whereas in Integral Yoga this mighty Divine action is extensively developed and it further recognises this all-inclusive Supramental energy as accelerator of perfection and Divinisation of human race. Thus ‘no change can be more radical than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga’ (CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-72) and ‘No limit can be fixed to this revolution; for it is in its nature an invasion by the Infinite.’ (CWSA-22/ The Life Divine/p-947) OM TAT SAT The above seven books offer sevenfold promises before the Lord. They are also the infrastructure and cradle of our long Spiritual pursuit and our immediate objective here is to accommodate in these books whatever fresh overhead wisdom has descended through concentration, contemplation and meditation of the existing written Truth. The wisdom of Integral Yoga is not an unchangeable fixed monument but it 'can be thus constantly renewed, relived, their stuff of permanent truth constantly reshaped and developed in’ our inner thought and spiritual experience. It embraces all the knowledge of past Shastra and 'it seeks to organise it anew for the present and the future. ' The descent of wisdom from one plane necessitates change with the ascent of consciousness to still higher planes and if the descent of Truth and Light is from a very high impersonal and universal plane then ‘It lit the thoughts that glow through the centuries’ and the most foolish, 'the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.' Integral Yoga has identified that tracing one's own path through recorded revelations or Sruti is 'one of the four elements,' indispensable for the pursuance of sadhana of a twice-born Soul Sadhak . (Refer CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-5, CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-56-57, Savitri-259, TMCW-8/Questions and Answers-1956/p-126, CWSA-18/Kena and other Upanishads/p-169.) Sri Aurobindo proposes a Yoga extending over thousands of years through the Spiritual rise and fall of life and consciousness. So the movement of ascending and descending Consciousness must begin with twice-born Souls and must continue this exercise further to bridge the multiple gulfs in different planes of Consciousness that lie between the highest Supreme Self and the nether Inconscient Sheath. The Truth that is hinted but not developed in the Gita, the Upanishads and the Vedas are extensively developed in Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. Our task is to concentrate on the highest hinted Truth of Integral Yoga while remaining perfectly aware of its highest developed Truth. Thus, we have to be participants of that endless growth by constantly renewing, updating and enlarging the existing vision of the World, the Self and the Divine. We have noted Sri Aurobindo's observation while publishing the book 'The Secrets of the Veda ': "The publication of The Secret of the Veda as it is does not enter into my intention. It was published in a great hurry and at a time when I had not studied the Rig Veda as a whole as well as I have since done. Whole chapters will have to be rewritten or written otherwise and a considerable labour gone through; moreover, it was never finished and considerable additions in order to make it complete are indispensable. (30 June 1949)" (CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-140) We also have to remember the Mother's warning, "everything that is published is debased, otherwise people don’t understand....That’s why I heartily detest publicity." (Refer the Mother's Agenda, September 8, 1965, May 7, 1966.) The above passage hints that translations and restatement of Spiritual documents should be utilised for sadhana through self-concentration rather than the motive of self-expansion through publication. This further indicates that all writing must be directed for the sole satisfaction of the Divine, for tracing one's own unique Spiritual path and it is an important means for the accumulation of Soul force through the highest Divine union. "But this practically means that there is an ideal, an eternal Dharma which religion, philosophy, ethics and all other powers in man that strive after truth and perfection are constantly endeavouring to embody in new statements of the science and art of the inner and outer life, a new Shastra ." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-478 Download this WEB PAGE in PDF format:

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 Divine Call "Hearts touched by thy (Savitri's) love shall answer to my (Supreme Lord's) call," Savitri-701 “Two irrefutable signs prove that one is in relation with the Supramental : A perfect and constant equality: To be perfect, the equality must be invariable and spontaneous, effortless, towards all circumstances, all happenings, all contacts, material or psychological, irrespective of their character and impact. 2. An absolute certainty in the knowledge: The absolute and indisputable certainty of an infallible knowledge through identity." THE MOTHER TMCW-15/Words of The Mother-III/p-102, “The capacities required to gain access to the supramental world . Capacity for indefinite expansion of consciousness on all planes including the material. Limitless plasticity, to be able to follow the movement of becoming. Perfect equality abolishing all possibility of ego reaction." THE MOTHER The Mother’s Agenda/January 12, 1962. “The Divinity mentioned by Sri Aurobindo is NOT A PERSON, but a condition to be shared and lived by all those who prepare themselves for it." THE MOTHER TMCW-15/Words of The Mother-III/p-104 "All he had been and all towards which he grew Must now be left behind or else transform Into a self of That which has no name." Savitri-307 “And actually, to do Sri Aurobindo’s work is to realize the Supramental on earth. So I began that work and, as a matter of fact, this was the only thing I asked of my body. I told it, ‘Now you shall set right everything which is out of order and gradually realize this intermediate supermanhood between man and the supramental being or, in other words, what I call the superman.’... And this is what I have been doing for the last eight years, and even much more during the past two years, since 1956. Now it is the work of each day, each minute.” The Mother The Mother’s Agenda- 10th May 1958 “When the Supramental manifests, an unequalled joy spreads over the earth.” The Mother TMCW-15/Words of the Mother-III/p-91 “It seems to me that the purpose of the Supramental Yoga is to dissipate ignorance from the entire cosmos and remove the darkness of earthly nature, in order to make the divine life possible.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-279-280 All noble and high Religions aim at transfiguration of son of men into son of God and are having three fundamental ways or three essential affirmations of approaching life that can be adopted with regard to our existence: Firstly , the belief in the immortality, the eternal persistence of the individual human Spirit apart from the body, that is our Supra-terrestrial or other worldly existence or an occult link through which all things are ordered, governed and harmonised in their fundamental relations and process; secondly , it is in Heavens beyond that we must seek our entire Divine fulfilment, and their other assertion of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of the perfect upon Earth must be put aside as delusion, or in any case, the Absolute, the Parabrahman is the origin and goal of all existence, that is our Supracosmic view of things; thirdly, an emphasis on the development of the Ethical and Spiritual being as the means of ascension and therefore the one proper business of this brief life in this world of Matter; during this temporary stay from birth to death we have to study the laws of becoming and take the best advantage of them to realise the dynamism and potentiality in us, that is our cosmic and Terrestrial existence . It is practically impossible for man taken as a race to guide his life permanently or wholly by the leading motive of any of these three mental attitudes towards life to the exclusion of the other two claims on his nature. Thus, one of the above three does not harmonise with the other two and by this disharmony humanity is thrown into great perplexities of contradiction and hence subjects itself to doubt, division, denial and leap away from the problem. Integral Yoga rejects the above three limiting conclusions or unsatisfactory solutions that after liberating Mind, Life and Soul within one must turn from the unconquerable Material principle and from the intractable and unregenerated Earth to find elsewhere his Divine substance. The speciality and superiority of integral Yoga over all the Religious and Yogic schools is that a fourth fundamental theory is sufficiently nurtured¹⁹ which is integration, synthesis, mutual indwelling and reconciliation of the above three Religious factors and it is by knowing each in its completeness that the three reconcile to become one in our total Consciousness and total Knowledge. It recognises the other subtle states of Matter or an ascending series of the Divine gradations of substance and through acceptance of this higher law of ascending and descending Consciousness, the luminous and puissant material transfiguration is possible. In this last category would fall the view of Integral Spiritual Evolution where Supracosmic is accepted as source and support , the Supraterrestrial or otherworldly for a condition and connecting link (for bridging the gulf between Suparacosmic and terrestrial Matter) and the cosmic and Terrestrial for its field and circumstance, and with human Mind, Life and Body for its nodus, turning point and dynamic mould into which Supreme existence can be poured in, initially intermittently and finally continuously for a higher and even highest perfection. In India, three types of Divines are generally adored. The first type of Divine belongs to Moderate Spirituality, who is identified as the giver of boons and curses. Devotees worship Him with rapt attention with the intention of getting favour¹⁵ from Him and leading an easy²¹ and comfortable life. He is aware in his mind of the Divine’s personal form and oblivious of His Impersonal Spiritual form; thus, he transforms the high truth of swift Spiritual evolution into the slow evolution of religious movement. The second type of Divine belongs to later Vedantists , Illusionists and Nirvanists, where Brahman is experienced as That, which, being known, all becomes unreal and an incomprehensible mystery or as the Kena Upanishad recognises, ‘That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore.”⁴ This adoration of the Impersonal Divine of Jnana Yoga/Sankhya is identified as the principal motive and passage for higher Spiritual life for developing Souls/traditional Sadhakas /beginners of integral Yoga, dvija. The third type of Divine belongs to Ancient Vedantists where Brahman is experienced as That which being known all is known and nothing is lost¹⁶ or Brahman is experienced as the triple formula of Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Self. (1) The Self is in all things, which is the basis of our Psychic individuality in the universal; (2) all things are within the Self, which is the basis of our Spiritual oneness in difference and (3) all things are made up of the stuff of the Self, which is the basis of our Supramental oneness with all. In this quest, a relation between Spirit and Matter is worked out and the force of Brahman penetrates into material life. In this trend, adoration of the Divine’s personal form (as Purushottama , Supramental Self) is identified as more important than His impersonal form (as Akshara Purusha , Spiritual Being). This subordination of Impersonal Divine to Personal Divine is the basis of Sadhana for a developed Soul¹ or Sadhaka of integral Yoga. Thus, Matter and Spirit get equal attention and importance and are reconciled. The Moderate and later Vedantic Spirituality are identified as escapist Spirituality¹³ and they cannot confront Death. In ancient Vedantic Spirituality, four fold Spiritual energy are accumulated which later confronts with four imperfections or negations of Matter that of Ignorance, Falsehood, Suffering and Death; these imperfections are purified, transformed and perfected into Knowledge, Truth, Delight and Immortality. During the hour of death and extreme adversity, the ancient Vedantists confront them, whereas Moderates submit before them and later Vedantists accept Death as a passage to Param Dham . The God of popular Religion is a Power who must do favours to the devotees; they always want something, demand something, expect to get something and their whole life is a perpetual bargain to satisfy their desire. Their idea of the Divine is something that knows little more than they do and is at their exclusive service. The Gita confirms² that those who adore the Divine to satisfy their desire do not experience movement in higher planes of consciousness. In Spiritual life, this conditional worship is transformed into self-offering, self-giving, and self-consecration of what one has, what one is, and what one will become. Pulling of the Divine Force²⁰ is replaced with offering of oneself to the Divine. The self-fulfilment by (1) sacrifice with Self-control, atma-samyama ,⁶ and rejection of lower Nature, vairagya ⁹ or (2) motiveless sacrificial work by renouncing the fruit of work, phala tyagam ,⁷ or (3) desiring nothing from the supreme Lover and His creation, anapekhya ,⁸ leads one to higher planes of Consciousness and these three fundamental truths are less easily grasped by bound souls. A religious man wants to take something from the Divine, pull the Divine Force out of impatience, while a Spiritual man wants to give himself to the Divine, and waits all infinity without hurry for the fulfilment of his Divine mission. "The will of self-giving forces away by its power the veil between God and man; it annuls every error and annihilates every obstacle. "¹⁴ The basis of Spiritual life is an intense need to become one with the Divine, to melt in the Divine, and to disappear in the Divine. The aim of Spiritual and Supramental action is not miraculous realisations without lasting results filling the world with admiration but a frequent or constant natural miracle that alone effects a lasting transformation and by full mastery of constantly calling down of the luminous dynamic Divine Shakti one can face/solve all the problems of existence which is the logical, natural and inevitable consequence of intense aspiration, sincere endeavour and firm conviction. The Divinity visioned by Sri Aurobindo is an inherent all-pervading Consciousness-Force, ‘a half-veiled Manifestation present and near to us here in the universe’³ that does not reject but accepts and transcends the limitation of the personal God of popular Religion, which is a form restricted by his quality, representation, name, personality and is distinguished from all other Deities of other doctrines. The disadvantage of the gospel of personal extra-cosmic omnipotent Godhead who has created and governs this world in most of the religious schools is that this worship forms an unbridgeable gulf¹⁷ between God and man, Brahman and the world and the possibility of man ascending to the status of God becomes remote. The error created by man in his relation with God, a partial manifestation of the Divine, elevates an actual and practical differentiation in Being, Consciousness and Force into an essential division, confusion and ethical difficulty. If man has to ascend to the status of God, then he has to go beyond the paralysing division of the mind where Knowledge is not self-divided, Force is not self-divided, Being is not self-divided and there will be no idea clash with other ideas and no opposition of the will or force with other will or force. A Sadhak of integral Yoga has to realise Integral Godhead primarily as comprehensive Consciousness, Vijnana , the force of blissful Oneness, Harmony and Order, the harmonious invasion of 'fiery ocean of felicity ,'¹² Truth, and Light; secondarily as impersonal Spiritual truth of the multiple Divine Concentration, Jnana, and this Light has descended sea like into an evolutionary world of Cosmic Ignorance and tertiarily as apprehensive Consciousness, Prajnana, cosmic differentiation, mental adoration of personal aspect of monotheistic and polytheistic Deities, Brahman and an infinite multiplicity of ignorant and suffering beings unaware of the Self. The Divine or the Brahman of the East or the Absolute of the West has in its nature two sides or two terms of the Being, the fundamental Reality and the Becoming, an effectual Reality; it is only a pure infinite essence that can manifest in infinite ways. It is at once the supreme Person, the Being in its transcendental and cosmic Consciousness and Force, the Sachchidananda with infinite Quality and without any Quality, Saguna and Nirguna , Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent which informs, embraces and governs all existences, the Controller of all energies, the Conscious in all that is Conscient and Inconscient, the inhabitant of all souls, minds, hearts and bodies, the Ruler and Over-ruler of all works, the Seer and Overseer of all happenings, the Enjoyer of all Delight, the Creator who has built all things in His own being, the All Person of whom all beings are personalities; in His Consciousness-Force He is the Creatrix Divine Mother, a Power and Energy working out of the Being; in His Being He is the Creator Father of all that is; in His Beauty and Joy He is the All-Beloved and All-Lover; in His existence He is the Friend of all creature; in His dynamism of Will to light and vision and Will to power and works He is the Master of all action; in His wisdom of state of Knowledge and power of Knowledge, He is the All-Teacher; in His world play He is the Divine Playmate. The Unknowable is something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable by our mind-created speech, which continually formulates itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation it has made; but even when we are most aware of it, we cannot describe it because our language and thought can deal only with the relative. The Absolute does not deny the truth of His own existence but is so infinitely expansive that no finite positive iti iti (It is this, it is that) and finite negative, neti neti (It is not this, it is not that) can be formulated which can exhaust It or bind It to the limitation of the definition. So, the Divine can be limited neither by formlessness nor by form, neither by unity nor by multiplicity, neither by immobile stable status of Self nor by dynamic mobility of Nature; it can be restricted neither by these illimitable attributes nor by our most affirmative experiences which exceed all definitions, nor even can it be expressed by our largest conception of original self-concentration of Sachchidananda. Though the Unknowable is not knowable by the finite mind or to our limited 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 dark Inconscient plane to the highest plane of Sachchidananda to unravel the whole of the Unknowable and its complete Divine manifestation. The human liberated Soul carries within him the triune Consciousness of the Individual, the Universal and the Transcendent, can alone work out at its critical turning point the movement of Divine self-manifestation which appears to us as involution and evolution of the impersonal Divine Consciousness between two terms of Ignorance and Knowledge. He is no longer considered as a subordinate or minor circumstance in the Divine Play or Lila of the Nara-Narayana , but one with the total movement of the Infinite, capable of incarnating Godhead Consciousness in himself. The individual Soul in Becoming arrives at Infinite Self-Knowledge and All-Knowledge when it knows the Supreme and Absolute as Bliss of Existence, Bliss of Consciousness and Bliss of Force or Will and possesses the Nature and Consciousness of the Transcendent and the Universal, the unity of One Being and all Beings and to live in that Knowledge and to transform his life by the evolution of seven-fold Power of Being (Brahman, the ancient Seers said is the Matter, is the Life, is the Mind, is the Supermind, Vijnana and is the triune glory of Sachchidananda ) is his Divine destiny. The main method or the indispensable self-disciplines of integral Yoga are derived from Ancient Vedanta (for example, the Isha, Taittiriya, Kena Upanishads etc) with comprehensive concentration as the principal instrument of sadhana , whereas the substitute methods or the dispensable self-disciplines of this Yoga are derived from the later Vedanta and the Tantra , where exclusive concentration is the chief instrument of Sadhana. The difference between the two Vedantic quests are that in the former two great formulas of existence, “One without a second”, ekamevadvitiyam ¹⁰ and “All this is the Brahman” , sarvam khalu idam brahma ¹¹ are successfully combined and hence Brahman is experienced as That which being known all is known, yasmin vijnate sarvam idam vijnatam ; whereas in the latter quest exclusive importance is given to the first formula of existence to the total exclusion of the second formula and hence Brahman is experienced as That, which being known, all becomes unreal and an incomprehensible mystery, (mental) Maya. The exclusive quest of later Vedanta was a departure from the comprehensive quest of the ancient Vedanta, and the vehement, impatient longing of the former to possess the Divine exclusively gave birth to the psycho-physical methods of sadhana , whereas in the latter, integral faith, patience and courage to search the truth equally in Matter and Spirit gave birth to Spiritual methods of sadhana . The disadvantages of psycho-physical methods are that they stress the rise of the six Kundalini chakras from below, where the physical presence of the guru is indispensable in order to avoid any Spiritual fall and lower formulations are used for higher Spiritual gain. A dependency on psycho-physical methods only is to subject oneself to outer nature leading towards mechanised living, artificially constructed unity, and ‘will bring in a limitation and subjection to Prakriti, '¹⁸’ which can give birth to tamasic i mpatience and rajasic ambition of the exclusive kind. But if it can be an efficient subordinate of the Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental methods, then it will be the most powerful of all means for physical transformation. Integral Yoga through Savitri book proposes a Sadhaka to attain the highest status of Jnana and Bhakti Yoga by becoming Karma Yogi or by performing consecrated action. It proposes to pursue sadhana or Karma Yoga in double seclusion. Seclusion from the enjoyment of the five sense organs and seclusion from the attraction of the outer world. Karma Yoga establishes a Sadhaka in kinghood of possession of inner and outer kingdom; Jnana Yoga establishes a Sadhaka in becoming an adventurer and pioneer of new Consciousness and of protecting the Kingdom or of guarding Truth’s diamond throne; Bhakti Yoga fulfils life of outer kingdom by manifestation of Beauty, Delight and Love. It enlarges the inner kingdom as the Divine 'Love’s golden wings have power to ’⁵ bridge the void in Consciousness; ‘The feet of love tread naked hardest '’⁵ Subconscient and Inconscient worlds; Love labours in the depths of Inconscient, 'exults on the heights'⁵ of Sachchidananda ’ to divinise life. After one is established in the above three Yogas, he reconciles them and out of the effort of reconciliation a fourth Yoga is born, known as Yoga of Self-perfection. This higher instrumentation is responsible for Subconscient, Inconscient and Cellular transformation action. These are identified as the highest Call of integral Yoga through which the Divine Contact in the material world is established. OM TAT SAT References: 1: “Arjuna said: Those seekers of Bhakti Yoga who thus by a constant union seek after Thy personal Form and those seekers of Jnana Yoga who seek after Thy unmanifest Immutable impersonal Form, which of them are greater Yoga? The Blessed Lord said those who are most united with Me and adore Me through constant union, emotional mind is settled in Me and are possessed of the supreme faith of Bhakti Yoga , I consider them to be the greatest Yogi.” The Gita-12.1, 2, 2: “The sacrifices offered with a view of getting personal fruit and benefit and also for ostentation, know that to be rajasic sacrifice.” (The Gita-17.12) “If one does work with attachment to the fruits of work then that sacrifice does not go to the Divine but to the ego, to Asura, Yakshas and Rakshasas .” (The Gita-17.4) “They who desire the fulfilment of the fruit of their works, siddhi , on earth sacrifice to Gods because by that sacrificial work without knowledge, one gets easy and swift result, khipram siddhirbhabati ,” (The Gita-4.12). " Therefore without attachment perform ever the work that is to be done (done for the sake of the world, lokasangraha , as is made clear immediately afterwards); for by doing work without attachment man attains to the highest." (The Gita-3.19) Sacrificial work with knowledge of the wheel of Works, evam pravartitam chakram, (The Gita-3.16) and without attachment leads to higher planes of Consciousness. “To walk on the path you must have a dauntless intrepidity, you must never turn back upon yourself with this mean, petty, weak, ugly movement that fear is…An indomitable courage, a perfect sincerity, a total self-giving to the extent that you do not calculate or bargain, you do not give with the idea of receiving, you do not offer yourself with the intention of being protected, you do not have a faith that needs proofs, — this is indispensable for advancing on the path, — this alone can shelter you against all dangers.” Words Of The Mother/Volume-15/P-190, 3: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-74, 4: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-72, "On the other hand, the weakness of a contemplative quietistic spirituality is that it arrives at this result by a too absolute abstraction and in the end it turns into a nothing or a fiction the human soul whose aspiration was yet all the time the whole sense of this attempt at union; for without the soul and its aspiration liberation and union could have no meaning. The little that this way of thinking recognises of his other powers of existence, it relegates to an inferior preliminary action which never arrives at any full or satisfying realisation in the Eternal and Infinite. Yet these things too which it restricts unduly, the potent will, the strong yearning of love, the positive light and all-embracing intuition of the conscious mental being are from the Divine, represent essential powers of him and must have some justification in their Source and some dynamic way of self-fulfilment in him." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-339-340, 5: Savitri-592, 6: The Gita-4.27, 7: The Gita-12.11, 12, 8: The Gita-12.16, “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), “The true purpose of life —To live for the Divine, or to live for the Truth, or at least to live for one’s soul. And the true sincerity —To live for the Divine without expecting any benefit from Him in return.” TMCW-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-4, 9: The Gita-6.35, 13.8, 10: Chandogya Upanishad-6.2.1, 11: Chandogya Upanishad-3.14.1, 12: Savitri-237, 13: “To be was a prison, extinction the escape.” Savitri-288, (prison of Moderate Spirituality and extinction of Ascetic Spirituality) (Death said to Savitri) "Two only are the doors of man’s escape, Death of his body Matter’s gate to peace, Death of his soul his last felicity." Savitri-635, "Escape brings not the victory and the crown! Something thou cam’st to do from the Unknown, But nothing is finished and the world goes on Because only half God’s cosmic work is done. Only the everlasting No has neared And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart: But where is the Lover’s everlasting Yes, And immortality in the secret heart, The voice that chants to the creator Fire," Savitri-310 "An exit is shown, a road of hard escape From the sorrow and the darkness and the chain; But how shall a few escaped release the world? The human mass lingers beneath the yoke. Escape, however high, redeems not life, Life that is left behind on a fallen earth. Escape cannot uplift the abandoned race Or bring to it victory and the reign of God. A greater power must come, a larger light." Savitri-448 14: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-335, 15: "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, "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, va sudevah. sarvam iti sa maha tma sudurlabhah . (The Gita-7.19) Men are led away by various outer desires which take from them the working of the inner knowledge, ka mais tais tair hri tajn a na h . (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. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-285-286, "But the weakness of the kinetic and the emotional religions is that they are too much absorbed in some divine Personality and in the divine values of the finite. And, even when they have a conception of the infinite Godhead, they do not give us the full satisfaction of knowledge because they do not follow it out into its most ultimate and supernal tendencies. These religions fall short of a complete absorption in the Eternal and the perfect union by identity, — and yet to that identity in some other way, if not in the abstractive, since there all oneness has its basis, the spirit that is in man must one day arrive." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-339, "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." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-381, “It is difficult to acquire or to practise this faith and steadfastness on the rough and narrow path of Yoga because of the impatience of both heart and mind and the eager but soon faltering will of our rajasic nature. The vital nature of man hungers always for the fruit of its labour and, if the fruit appears to be denied or long delayed, he loses faith in the ideal and in the guidance. For his mind judges always by the appearance of things, since that is the first ingrained habit of the intellectual reason in which he so inordinately trusts. Nothing is easier for us than to accuse God in our hearts when we suffer long or stumble in the darkness or to abjure the ideal that we have set before us. For we say, “I have trusted to the Highest and I am betrayed into suffering and sin and error.” Or else, “I have staked my whole life on an idea which the stern facts of experience contradict and discourage. It would have been better to be as other men are who accept their limitations and walk on the firm ground of normal experience.” In such moments — and they are sometimes frequent and long — all the higher experience is forgotten and the heart concentrates itself in its own bitterness. It is in these dark passages that it is possible to fall for good or to turn back from the divine labour.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-244, "Sri Aurobindo is always there. At times he becomes very active, especially when people "pump" or pull or crush you under the weight of all their difficulties and all their desires. Then (these last few days have been like that), I might put it into the words he often used, but this is his attitude: "They accept the God only when they can crucify him." I find that so interesting, you know! They accept God – the Divine – only when they can crucify him. That is to say, they recognize the Divine in a body only if that body is fit to be crucified or tortured. And then, if things go wrong, "So he’s not divine!" He is not divine.... He always used to say, "The Divine takes care to veil himself so as not to crush them." And it’s true, I have noticed it: at times when the Force comes with really all its might, it’s terrible! Even for those who are most used to it, even for the most courageous ... it’s hard. So it’s always like that: it contains itself so as not to be ... unbearable." The Mother's Agenda-February 20, 1968, "I was looking at a problem....Basically, if you remove the veneer – the veneer of good manners – man admits the existence of the Divine only on condition that his sole occupation be to satisfy all of man’s needs and desires – it may be collective desires, even "planetary" desires as Y. would put it, but it boils down to that... And it’s like that especially, especially with the notion of a Divine who put on a body.... In fact, they found it quite natural that Christ should be crucified for their own salvation – I find it monstrous... I’ve always found it monstrous." The Mother's Agenda/June 8, 1968 16: "No God-knowledge can be integral, perfect or universally satisfying which leaves unfulfilled their absolute claim , no wisdom utterly wise which in its intolerant asceticism of search negates or in the pride of pure knowledge belittles the spiritual reality behind these ways of the Godhead... The greatness of the central thought of the Gita in which all its threads are gathered up and united, consists in the synthetic value of a conception which recognises the whole nature of the soul of man in the universe and validates by a large and wise unification its many-sided need of the supreme and infinite Truth, Power, Love, Being to which our humanity turns in its search for perfection and immortality and some highest joy and power and peace. There is a strong and wide endeavour towards a comprehensive spiritual view of God and man and universal existence. Not indeed that everything without any exception is seized in these eighteen chapters, no spiritual problem left for solution ; but still so large a scheme is laid out that we have only to fill in, to develop, to modify, to stress, to follow out points, to work out hint and illuminate adumbration in order to find a clue to any further claim of our intelligence and need of our spirit. The Gita itself does not evolve any quite novel solution out of its own questionings. To arrive at the comprehensiveness at which it aims, it goes back behind the great philosophical systems to the original Vedanta of the Upanishads; for there we have the widest and profoundest extant synthetic vision of spirit and man and cosmos. But what is in the Upanishads undeveloped to the intelligence because wrapped up in a luminous kernel of intuitive vision and symbolic utterance, the Gita brings out in the light of a later intellectual thinking and distinctive experience. " CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-340, 17: “For myself it was Ramakrishna who personally came & first turned me to this Yoga. Vivekananda in the Alipore jail gave me the foundations of that knowledge which is the basis of our sadhana. The error of the Mission is to keep too much to the forms of Ramakrishna & Vivekananda & not keep themselves open for new outpourings of their spirit, — the error of all “Churches” and organised religious bodies. ” CWSA-36/Autobiographical Note/p-177-178, “But I can tell you about my own experience. Until the age of about twenty-five, all I knew was the God of religions, God as men have created him, and I did not want him at any price. I denied his existence but with the certitude that if such a God did exist, I detested him …When I was about twenty-five I discovered the inner God and at the same time I learned that the God described by most Western religions is none other than the Great Adversary…When I came to India, in 1914, and became acquainted with Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, everything became very clear.” The Mother/TMCW-10/On Thoughts and Aphorisms-331-332, “That is precisely the distortion in the Western attitude as opposed to the attitude of the Gita. It is extremely difficult for the Western mind to understand in a living and concrete manner that everything is the Divine.” The Mother/TMCW-10/On Thoughts and Aphorisms/p-101, 18: "The Prana is not only a force for the action of physical and vital energy, but supports also the mental and spiritual action. Therefore the full and free working of the pranic shakti is required not only for the lower but still necessary use, but also for the free and full operation of mind and supermind and spirit in the instrumentality of our complex human nature. That is the main sense of the use of exercises of Pranayama for control of the vital force and its motions which is so important and indispensable a part of certain systems of Yoga. The same mastery must be got by the seeker of the integral Yoga; but he may arrive at it by other means and in any case he must not be dependent on any physical or breathing exercise for its possession and maintenance, for that will at once bring in a limitation and subjection to Prakriti . Her instrumentation has to be used flexibly by the Purusha, but not to be a fixed control on the Purusha . The necessity of the pranic force, however, remains and will be evident to our self-study and experience. It is in the Vedic image the steed and conveyance of the embodied mind and will, vahana . If it is full of strength and swiftness and a plenitude of all its powers, then the mind can go on the courses of its action with a plenary and unhampered movement. But if it is lame or soon tired or sluggish or weak, then an incapacity is laid on the effectuation of the will and activity of the mind. The same rule holds good of the supermind when it first comes into action. There are indeed states and activities in which the mind takes up the pranic shakti into itself and this dependence is not felt at all; but even then the force is there, though involved in the pure mental energy. The supermind, when it gets into full strength, can do pretty well what it likes with the pranic shakti , and we find that in the end this life power is transformed into the type of a supramentalised prana which is simply one motor power of that greater consciousness. But this belongs to a later stage of the siddhi of the Yoga." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-733-734, 19: "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, 20: "(Q) Mother, what is the difference between an ardent aspiration and a pulling down of force? (Ans:) It is the vital that pulls down and the psychic that aspires." TMCW-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-77, "There is certainly a great difference between calling and pulling — you can and must always call for help and the rest — the answer will be proportionate to your capacity of reception and assimilation. Pulling is a selfish movement that may bring down forces quite disproportionate to your capacities and thus are harmful." TMCW-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-77, 21: "But actually, to tell you the truth, I think your lives are so easy that you don’t exert yourselves very much! How many among you have truly an INTENSE need to find their psychic beings? To find out truly who they are? To find out what their roles are, why they are here? ... You just let yourselves drift. You even complain when things aren’t easy enough! You just take things as they come. And sometimes, should an aspiration arise in you and you encounter some difficulty in yourself, you say, ‘Oh, Mother is there! She’ll take care of it for me!’ And you think about something else." The Mother's Agenda/August 25, 1954, Download this WEB PAGE in PDF format: The Mother's Call “Are there not still million fights to wage?” Savitri-687 The Mind's Method of Abstraction "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." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-723, The First Capacity of Mind: It is a habituated divider of the Indivisible and its whole nature is to dwell on one thing at a time to the exclusion of others. The ultimate unity and absolute infinity are to its conscience of things abstract notions and unseizable quantities, not something that is real to its grasp, much less something that is alone real. The first difficulty of the mind is identified as its inability to hold at once the unity and multiplicity of the existence. The Third Capacity of Mind: To train the mind as pure, clear and passive reflector of the Divine is identified as an important exercise in integral Yoga. The intellect cannot be a sufficient guide in the search for spiritual truth and realization and yet it has to be utilised in the integral movement of our nature. The third difficulty of the mind is identified as realization of all this as Sachchidananda. The Second Capacity of Mind: The characteristic energy of pure Mind is change through self-enlargement and self-improvement and moves continually from a smaller and simpler to a larger and more complex perfection. The second difficulty is that fear, desire and sorrow are recognized as diseases of the mind, born of its sense of division and limitation. The Fourth Capacity of Mind: The last gradation of thinking opens in us the pure ideative mind which lives disinterestedly in the truth of ideas for Divine action and Spiritual experience. The fourth difficulty is to unify without losing and integralise without rejecting. Read More The Sunlit and Golden Path Sun-lit Path: The pure in Soul can walk in Light. The Golden Path: Light re-enters life through multiple (ten) Selves. The Abysmal Night: Light re-enters Inconscient Night. The Double Twilight: The First Twilight is created due to the invasion of the Sea of Light above the head to the dark Subconscient Sheath and the Second Twilight is created due to the invasion of the Sea of Light of Inconscient and Subconscient Self below the Feet to the dark Subconscient Sheath. The Eternal Day: Permanent rise of consciousness to Sachchidananda plane of Everlasting Day. Earthly Return: Permanent descent of Sachchidananda consciousness through return to Subconscient and Inconscient Earth. Read More The Supramental Yoga “The conditions (of Supramental transformation) Sri Aurobindo gives in detail in The Synthesis of Yoga and in still greater detail in his last articles on the (book) Supramental Manifestation . So now it is only a question of realisation .” The Mother TMCW-8/The Questions and Answers-1956/p-322 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 the 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.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-290 "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. " Sri Aurobindo CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-655 "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." Sri Aurobindo CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-839 "It is only when mentality is overpassed and drops away into a passive silence that there can be the full disclosure and the sovereign and integral action of the supramental gnosis." Sri Aurobindo CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-861 "A true, sincere, spontaneous life, as in the supramental world, is a springing forth of things through the fact of conscious will, a power over substance that shapes this substance according to what we decide it should be. And he who has this power and this knowledge can obtain whatever he wants , whereas he who does not has no artificial means of getting what he desires." The Mother The Mother's Agenda/3.2.1958 "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." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-644-645, The First Character of this Supramental Change: is a complete reversal, a turning over, one might almost say, upside down of the whole activity… "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 The Second Character of the Supramental Change: is that the formation of the thought, will and delight can take place now wholly on the Supramental level and therefore there is initiated and reconciled an entirely luminous and effective Divine Will, Divine Wisdom and Divine Bliss or as hinted in Savitri “I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.” (Savitri-594) "The Unseen’s eye that looks at the unseen, When Light with a golden ecstasy fills his brain And the Eternal’s wisdom drives his choice And eternal Will seizes the mortal’s will.” Savitri-665 The Third Character of the Supramental Change: The third character of this action is the Brahmic consciousness and vision… “An invisible sunlight ran within her veins And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances That woke a wider sight (Supramental vision) than earth could know.” Savitri-356 The Fourth Character of the Supramental Change: 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 instinctive with its powers. The man then becomes wholly Superman. This is at least the natural and integral process. "A divinising stream possessed his veins, His body’s cells awoke to spirit sense, Each nerve became a burning thread of joy: Tissue and flesh partook beatitude. Alight, the dun unplumbed subconscient caves Thrilled with the prescience of her longed-for tread And filled with flickering crests and praying tongues." Savitri-334 "A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell And take the charge of breath and speech and act And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns And every feeling a celestial thrill." Savitri-710 OM TAT SAT Read More The Mother's Yoga Our Relation with the Mother: The Mother book written by Sri Aurobindo gives a detailed account of a Spiritual or Impersonal Mother and hints briefly about the personal Psychic Mother and personal Supramental Mother. We enter direct relation with Her four dynamic Spiritual attributes after our Spiritual Being or Akshara Purusha above the head opens. The Mother’s Mission: The Mother’s mission on earth is to build our Soul and Nature into the Divine Truth, consistent with the decrees of the Supreme and draws us irresistibly towards the supreme ecstasies, the highest heights, the noblest aims and the largest vistas. Through union with the mediatrix, Spiritual Mother, fourfold Soul Forces are accumulated, which help confront the Inconscient negative energies, and these accumulated Soul Forces accompany us in successive births. Our Mission: The one and only purpose for which our life is destined is the Divine Work without all desire and self-regarding ego, all our life and not a part of life must be an offering to the Supreme and we must give ourselves completely without condition, demand and reservation and our only object in action shall be (1) to serve selflessly, (2) to receive inner growth, (3) to fulfil the Mother’s Divine Presence, (4) to become a manifesting instrument of the Divine Shakti in her works. The Starting Point of The Mother’s Yoga: The starting point of the Mother’s Yoga is identified as to detect first what is false or obscure in us and persistently reject it. If we support little false action and false thought then we lose not only the Divine’s Grace but also the Divine in every way and in its entirety. Our relationship with the Divine Mother is conditional. When we are open towards overhead Truth or Soul Saving Truth She is very close to us and when we are open towards falsehood or Soul Slaying Truth of three Gunas, She is very far from us. The Perfection Sought by Us: The perfection sought by us is to be one with Her in Her highest Spiritual and Universal action and to realise and possess the fullness of Her Shakti in our individual life. OM TAT SAT Read More The Mighty Mother's Playmate The First Condition of Becoming the Playmate: First one has to open one’s Soul in the heart or the Psychic being and dynamise four Divine Shaktis that of the Brahma Shakti of wisdom, Kshetra Shakti of Courage, Vaisya Shakti of Mutuality and Shudra Shakti of service and self-surrender. The Second Condition of Becoming the Playmate: Secondly one has to open the soul in the mind above the head, the spiritual being and dynamise four Divine Shaktis that of Maheshwari representing Wisdom, Mahakali, representing Power, Mahalakshmi representing Harmony and Mahasaraswti representing perfection in work. The Third Condition of Becoming the Playmate: Thirdly one has to open the soul in Supermind and dynamise four Supramental Divine Shaktis having the attributes of Truth Supreme, Power Supreme, Supreme Delight and Will Supreme. The Fourth Condition of Becoming the Playmate: One has to rise to the source of the Ananda and meet the Mother’s absolute power of Chit Shakti. Read More “There is no difference between the Mother’s path and mine; we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same…The attempt to set up a division and opposition of this kind, putting the Mother on one side and myself on another and opposite or quite different side, has always been a trick of the forces of the Falsehood when they want to prevent a sadhaka from reaching the Truth. Dismiss all such falsehoods from your mind.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-32/The Mother with Letters on the Mother-81 “I wrote once before that these ideas about the separation between the Mother and myself and our paths being different or our goal different are quite erroneous. Our path is the same; our goal too is the same — the Supramental Divine .” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-32/The Mother with Letters on the Mother-81, The Mother's Teachings complements Sri Aurobindo's Teachings and The Mother's Yoga completes and fulfills Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. A thorough knowledge of The Mother’s Teachings preconditions a thorough knowledge of Sri Aurobindo. Similarly, a thorough knowledge of Sri Aurobindo’s Teachings preconditions a thorough knowledge of traditional Schools of Yoga and the subjective and objective knowledge of the whole Spiritual history of Earth. A thorough Spiritual knowledge of Their dual Divinities of a purified vessel dynamises limitless movements of ascending and descending Consciousness and an inflow of an incalculable quantum of continuous overhead Wisdom, Love, Light, Peace, Bliss, Force and Silence to earth's nether atmosphere.

Universal Education "Yet still, a captive in her golden hands," Savitri-723 "If you concentrate long enough on any one point, you discover the Infinite, what could be called your own Infinite. But this is not what WE want, not this; what we want is the direct and integral contact between the manifested universe and the Infinite out of which this universe has emerged. So then it is no longer an individual or personal contact with the Infinite, it’s a total contact. And Sri Aurobindo insists on this, he says that it’s absolutely impossible to have the transformation (not the contact, but the supramental transformation) without becoming universalized – that is the first condition. You cannot become supramental before being universal. And to be universal means to accept everything, be everything, become everything – really to accept everything. And as for all those who are shut up in a system, even if it belongs to the highest regions of thought, it is not THAT." The Mother The Mother's Agenda/20.09.1960, "There is another point. You sent a message about an “Aurobindo Math” which seemed to show you had caught the contagion which rages in Bengal. You must understand that my mission is not to create maths , ascetics and Sannyasis; but to call back the souls of the strong to the Lila of Krishna & Kali . That is my teaching, as you can see from the Review, and my name must never be connected with monastic forms or the monastic ideal. Every ascetic movement since the time of Buddha has left India weaker and for a very obvious reason. Renunciation of life is one thing, to make life itself, national, individual, world-life greater & more divine is another. You cannot enforce one ideal on the country without weakening the other. You cannot take away the best souls from life & yet leave life stronger & greater. Renunciation of ego, acceptance of God in life is the Yoga I teach, — no other renunciation." Sri Aurobindo CWSA-36/ Autobiographical Note/p-222 "Mahakali and Kali are not the same, Kali is a lesser form. Mahakali in the higher planes appears usually with the golden colour. " Sri Aurobindo CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-460, , Universal Education: "The calm delight that weds one soul to all," Savitri-6 “The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.” Savitri-15 “As so he grew into his larger self, Humanity framed his movements less and less A greater being saw a greater world.” Savitri-26 “His inner self grew near to others’ selves And bore a kinship’s weight, a common tie, Yet stood untouched, king of itself, alone.” Savitri-27 “A splendour of self-creation from the peaks, A transfiguration in the mystic depths, A happier cosmic working could begin And fashion the world-shape in him anew, God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God.” Savitri-36-37 “The universal strengths were linked with his; Filling earth’s smallness with their boundless breadths, He drew the energies that transmute an age.” Savitri-44-45 “These signs are native to a larger self That lives within us by ourselves unseen; Only sometimes a holier influence comes, A tide of mightier surgings bears our lives And a diviner Presence moves the soul; Or through the earthly coverings something breaks, A grace and beauty of spiritual light, The murmuring tongue of a celestial fire.” Savitri-48 “A many-miracled Consciousness unrolled Vast aim and process and unfettered norms, A larger Nature’s great familiar roads.” Savitri-91 “Images in a supernal consciousness Embodying the Unborn who never dies, The structured visions of the cosmic Self Alive with the touch of being’s eternity Looked at him like form-bound spiritual thoughts Figuring the movements of the Ineffable.” Savitri-96 “Trembling with the first faint thrills of a World-Soul.” Savitri-157 “Obeying the Eternal’s deep command They (King-children) have built in the material front of things This wide world-kindergarten of young souls Where the infant spirit learns through mind and sense To read the letters of the cosmic script And study the body of the cosmic self And search for the secret meaning of the whole.” Savtri-266 “The psycho-analysis of cosmic Self Was traced, its secrets hunted down, and read The unknown pathology of the Unique.” Savitri-269 “A Wisdom knows and guides the mysteried world; A Truth-gaze shapes its beings and events; A Word self-born upon creation’s heights, Voice of the Eternal in the temporal spheres, Prophet of the seeings of the Absolute, Sows the Idea’s significance in Form And from that seed the growths of Time arise.” Savitri-271 “In that high realm where no untruth can come, Where all are different and all is one, In the Impersonal’s ocean without shore The Person in the World-Spirit anchored rode; It thrilled with the mighty marchings of World-Force, Its acts were the comrades of God’s infinite peace.” Savitri-301 “The great world-rhythms were heart-beats of one Soul, To feel was a flame-discovery of God, All mind was a single harp of many strings, All life a song of many meeting lives; For worlds were many, but the Self was one.” Savitri-323 “Mounting from mind’s last peaks to mate with gods, Making earth’s brilliant thoughts a springing-board To dive into the cosmic vastnesses,” Savitri-359 “Aware of the universal Self in all She turned to living hearts and human forms,” Savitri-362 “Her greater self lived sole, unclaimed, within.” Savitri-366 “We see beyond self’s walls our limitless self,” Savitri-485 “Across the threshold’s sleep she entered in And found herself amid great figures of gods Conscious in stone and living without breath, Watching with fixed regard the soul of man, Executive figures of the cosmic self, World-symbols of immutable potency.” Savitri-524 “This world is a vast unbroken totality, A deep solidarity joins its contrary powers; God’s summits look back on the mute Abyss.” Savitri-541 “Our consciousness is cosmic and immense, But only when we break through Matter’s wall In that spiritual vastness can we stand Where we can live the masters of our world And mind is only a means and body a tool.” Savitri-542-43 “An only centre now of consciousness, If centre could be where all seemed only space; No more shut in by body’s walls and gates Her being, a circle without circumference, Already now surpassed all cosmic bounds And more and more spread into infinity.” Savitri-554 “A Truth in which negation had no place, A being and a living consciousness, A stark and absolute Reality. There the unreal could not find a place, The sense of unreality was slain: There all was conscious, made of the Infinite, All had a substance of Eternity.” Savitri-555 “It was her self, it was the self of all, It was the reality of existing things, It was the consciousness of all that lived And felt and saw; it was Timelessness and Time, It was the Bliss of formlessness and form.” Savitri-555 “An individual, one with cosmic self In the heart of the Transcendent’s miracle And the secret of World-personality Was the creator and the lord of all.” Savtiri-556 “He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite, He meets the gods in great and sudden hours, He feels the universe as his larger self, Makes Space and Time his opportunity To join the heights and depths of being in light, In the heart’s cave speaks secretly with God.” Savitri-659 “Then stretches the boundless finite’s last expanse, The cosmic empire of the Overmind, Time’s buffer state bordering Eternity, Too vast for the experience of man’s soul:” Savitri-660 “A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless, In the truth of a moment, in the moment’s soul Can sip the honey-wine of Eternity.” Savitri-662 “There is a being beyond the being of mind, An Immeasurable cast into many forms, A miracle of the multitudinous One, There is a consciousness mind cannot touch, Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.” Savitri-705 “If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this level, we should have something on earth like the Golden Age of the traditions, Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of himself and others and therefore sure of true and right result; right reason, no longer mental but supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.”² Sri Aurobindo Universal Education begins after the discovery of Universal Self, which lies above the Spiritual Self and below the Supramental Self. This is a dynamic state of Consciousness activated by long movement of Consciousness between the Psychic and Spiritual planes. Integral Yoga proposes that Universalised Consciousness is an indispensable condition¹ for experiencing the transformation of Nature and ascending into Supramental Consciousness. Also in universalised Consciousness, surrender and self-offering becomes complete and exclusive concentration is replaced with the faculty of Multiple-concentrations. Thus, one is able to pursue the triple Yoga of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti simultaneously and ceaselessly. Integral Yoga is neither a popular Religion⁵ nor a popular Yoga;⁶ so it does not encourage gathering together of people, lakasangraha , by activation of mind.⁸ Rather, it proposes that if an individual’s consciousness is universalised, then by the movement of his Spiritual Influence, distant unknown Souls will attain liberation. So, 'the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and universalize it in others.’³ After one is established in the Psychic plane, one can save oneself and the world. ⁹ This is what we understand as the lokasangraha of integral Yoga. ⁸ Or Self-expansion is primarily the the outcome of Self-concentration and secondarily the outcome of active mind of three Gunas . The Manifestation of Universal Consciousness through activation of Mahakali Force: “Universal, the cosmic Mahashakti , she creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces.”⁴ “Terrible is her (Mahakali) face to the Asura , dangerous and ruthless her mood against the haters of the Divine; for she is the Warrior of the Worlds who never shrinks from the battle. Intolerant of imperfection, she deals roughly with all in man that is unwilling and she is severe to all that is obstinately ignorant and obscure; her wrath is immediate and dire against treachery and falsehood and malignity, ill-will is smitten at once by her scourge. Indifference, negligence and sloth in the divine work she cannot bear and she smites awake at once with sharp pain, if need be, the untimely slumberer and the loiterer.”⁴ “I wear the face of Kali when I kill, I trample the corpses of the demon hordes.” Savitri-509 “All reeled into a world of Kali’s dance.” Savitri-255 “I am Kali black and naked in the world,” Savitri-535 (Description of Sri Krishna changing into Mother Kali) “Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same, It grew a woman’s dark and beautiful Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds, A shadowy glory and a stormy depth, Turbulent in will and terrible in love.” Savitri-711 The Manifestation of Universal Consciousness in the Gita: “He who in action can see inaction and can see action still continuing in cessation from works, is the man of true reason and discernment among men; he is in Yoga and a many-sided universal worker (for the good of the world, for God in the world). The Gita-4.18, “After many births of preparation, a Jnana Yogi with a strong foundation of Karma and Bhakti Yoga , attains My Purushottama or Supramental state of Consciousness. He also realises the intermediate stair that all this existence is Divine, the Cosmic Consciousness, Vasudevah sarvamiti . Such a great Soul or integral Yogi is very rare.” The Gita-7.19 The Manifestation of Universal Consciousness in Savitri: Book-2, Canto-14 of the Savitri book, represents King Aswapati’s establishment of Spiritual experience of cosmic Self, which is identified as the dynamic state of the Spiritual being, all this existence is Brahman of the Gita (Vasudevah Sarvamiti) (The Gita-7.19), Para prakriti or the Divine Mother of Tantra . This is also identified as the preliminary stair of Supermind, where the World, Self and Divine are reconciled, home and training ground of dead Souls and one enters right relation with the world, fellow brothers and material things through direct contact with this higher consciousness. This is also the state of Consciousness, which is the outcome of Jivatma’s Divine union with the Para-prakriti, who holds together this whole universe, jagat dharayete (The Gita-7.5). In Cosmic consciousness, Matter and Spirit are reconciled and all negations of material life is Divinised by the universal Spirit’s touch. They are: “One who could love without return for love, Meeting and turning to the best the worst, It healed the bitter cruelties of earth, Transforming all experience to delight; Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth It rocked the cradle of the cosmic Child And stilled all weeping with its hand of joy; It led things evil towards their secret good, It turned racked falsehood into happy truth; Its power was to reveal divinity.” Savitri-291 In this cosmic Consciousness, the King Aswapati was able to have direct personal contact with the supreme Lord and supreme Mother and Their dual relation, which uplifted the King’s consciousness to the status of Avatara . “There he (King Aswapati ) beheld in their mighty union’s poise The figure of the deathless Two-in-One, A single being in two bodies clasped, (Spiritual being) A diarchy of two united souls, (Psychic being) Seated absorbed in deep creative joy; (Supreme relation of dual Godhead) Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.” Savitri-295 The above experience reveals King’s universalised Spiritual Consciousness, universalised Psychic Consciousness, and Supramentalised Psychic Consciousness, where the heart centre becomes the meeting ground of the Supreme Self and the Supreme Mother and the bliss born out of that intense Divine union can hold this mutable untransformed world. The Book-7, Canto-7, reveals the arrival of Savitri's Cosmic Self, after opening of her Psychic and Spiritual Being. It confirms that both Paramatma Satyavan and Para prakriti Savitri’s main method of Yoga was Spiritual or “Her divine emptiness was their instrument.” (Savitri-553) or “An impersonal emptiness walked and spoke in her.’ (Savitri-552) In the previous Canto Savitri’s main method of Sadhana was also confirmed as Spiritual. Or “Annul thyself that only God may be.” (Savitri-538) Or “In a simple purity of emptiness Her mind knelt down before the unknowable.” (Savitri-522) "Assent to the emptiness of the Supreme That all in thee may reach its absolute." (Savitri-536) "Banish all thought from thee and be God’s void." (Savitri-537) This Canto confirms that Savitri had the knowledge of past, present and future birth known as All Life, about which her surrounding world was little aware: “They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know What they had only glimpsed at times afar.” Savitri-553 Its complementary line from the Gita: “The Blessed Lord said: Many are my lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna ; all of them I know, but thou knowest not, O scourge of the foe.” The Gita-4.5 With the attainment of Cosmic Consciousness, the inner life changes but ‘daily human life,’ ‘outward body of the routine,’ ‘small unchanging works’ and ‘happy quiet of ascetic peace’ (Savitri-551) do not change. Cosmic consciousness is the dynamic state of the Divine where ‘living spirit’ clasps her body and in this state, Matter can reconcile with the Spirit and with the Spirit’s penetration into material life, Savitri experiences change in the form of purification, transformation and perfection in her outward life. She continues to pour her greatness, sweetness and light upon her surrounding little hermit world. In this Book-7, Canto-7, Savitri realised her cosmic Self which is identified as the second fundamental realisation of integral Yoga. In this Consciousness Divine becomes dynamic and one lives in waking trance. First fundamental realisation: Brahma satya jagat mithya, Divine is Real and world is an Illusion; second fundamental realisation: the world which appears to be false is created from Brahman ; third fundamental realisation: Brahma satya jagat satya and Brahman consciousness can penetrate material life and Divinise life. The characteristics of the second fundamental realisation are: “Her being, a circle without circumference,” Savitri-554 “A spirit, a being saw created things And cast itself into unnumbered forms” Savitri-554-55 “A Truth in which negation had no place,” Savitri-555 “Her spirit saw the world as living God;” Savitri-556 In the earlier Cantos it is confirmed that those who have a Mission (aim of life) and have realised their Psychic beings, their life is fully protected by the Divine. Savitri had both the awareness of her aim and Psychic realisation. This Canto proposes that if a Spiritual being is made open, then also it ensures protection to life. These developments are as follows: “Heaven’s tranquil shield guarded the missioned child.” Savitri-16 (Spiritual opening) “Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:” Savitri-211(Psychic opening) “And Savitri’s life was glad, fulfilled like earth’s; She had found herself, she knew her being’s aim.” Savitri-532 (Psychic being’s awareness) “Something perhaps unfelt, unseen, unknown Guarded the body for its future work,” Savitri-552 (Spiritual opening) “Guarded behind its face of ignorance:” Savitri-556 (Spiritual opening) This Canto also hints that the attainment of Cosmic consciousness is also the beginning of Subconscient transformation. So the opening of higher Selves like Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Selves are utilised exclusively for purification, transformation and perfection of untransformed Nature. “She was a subconscient life of tree and flower, The outbreak of the honied buds of spring; She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose, She was the red heart of the passion-flower, The dream-white of the lotus in its pool. Out of subconscient life she climbed to mind,” Savitri-557 These are the hidden agenda of cosmic Consciousness, which are utilised for both self-concentration and self-expansion. OM TAT SAT References: 1: “To open oneself to the supracosmic Divine is an essential condition of this integral perfection; to unite oneself with the universal Divine is another essential condition. Here the Yoga of self-perfection coincides with the Yogas of knowledge, works and devotion; for it is impossible to change the human nature i nto the divine or to make it an instrument of the divine knowledge, will and joy of existence, unless there is a union with the supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and a unity with its universal Self in all things and beings . A wholly separative possession of the divine nature by the human individual, as distinct from a self-withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-622, “The individual must be the instrument and first field of the transformation; but an isolated individual transformation is not enough and may not be wholly feasible. Even when achieved, the individual change will have a permanent and cosmic significance only if the individual becomes a centre and a sign for the establishment of the supramental Consciousness-Force as an overtly operative power in the terrestrial workings of Nature, — in the same way in which thinking Mind has been established through the human evolution as an overtly operative power in Life and Matter. This would mean the appearance in the evolution of a gnostic being or Purusha and a gnostic Prakriti, a gnostic Nature. There must be an emergent supramental Consciousness-Force liberated and active within the terrestrial whole and an organised supramental instrumentation of the Spirit in the life and the body, — for the body consciousness also must become sufficiently awake to be a fit instrument of the workings of the new supramental Force and its new order. Till then any intermediate change could be only partial or insecure; an overmind or intuitive instrumentation of Nature could be developed, but it would be a luminous formation imposed on a fundamental and environmental Inconscience. A supramental principle and its cosmic operation once established permanently on its own basis, the intervening powers of Overmind and spiritual Mind could found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection; they would become in the earth-existence a hierarchy of states of consciousness rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme spiritual level.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-997-998, “A perfect self-expression of the spirit is the object of our terrestrial existence. This cannot be achieved if we have not grown conscious of the supreme Reality; for it is only by the touch of the Absolute that we can arrive at our own absolute. But neither can it be done to the exclusion of the cosmic Reality: we must become universal, for without an opening into universality the individual remains incomplete. ” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-706, “No, you have to approach the problem from the other direction. Evolution begins with the Inconscient, complete Inconscience; and from this Inconscient a Subconscient gradually emerges – that is, a half or quarter-consciousness....There are two different things here. Consider life on earth (because the process is slightly different in the universe); earth-life begins with total Inconscience and little by little what was involved within it works out and changes this Inconscience into semi-consciousness or subconsciousness. At the same time, there is an individual working that awakens the INDIVIDUAL inconscient to an individual semiconsciousness, and here, of course, the individual has control although it’s not actually individualized because individualization begins with consciousness. The subconscient of plants or animals, for example, isn’t individualized; what we call an animal’s behavior doesn’t arise from individualization but from the genius of the species. Consequently, the individual subconscient is something already evolved out of the general Subconscient. But when one descends to accomplish a work of transformation -to bring Light into the different layers of life, for instance – one descends into a cosmic, terrestrial Subconscient, not an individual Subconscient. And the work of transformation is done within the whole – not through individualization, but through the opposite movement, through a sort of universalization. ” The Mother’s Agenda-2.8.1961, “Even Buddha said that if you have a vibration of desire, this vibration goes all around the terrestrial atmosphere. The opposite is what’s impossible! It’s impossible to separate yourself. You can have the idea of being separate, but you can’t be separate in reality. In fact, if you are trying to eliminate the Subconscient in yourself your movement must necessarily be general; it can’t be personal, you would never get anywhere… So it all keeps circling round and round in the earth’s atmosphere. But compared to the universe, the earth’s atmosphere is a very tiny thing. Well, all this keeps circling around within it. And in fact, because of the movement of evolution, there is a progress. The present Inconscient is not as unconscious as the initial Inconscient, and the present Subconscient is not as subconscious nor as generalized as it was at the beginning. This is the meaning of terrestrial evolution.” The Mother’s Agenda-02.08.1961, “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, 2: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-206-207, 3: “We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God’s intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and universalize it in others. Therefore from a concrete view of human life in its threefold potentialities we come to the same conclusion that we had drawn from an observation of Nature in her general workings and the three steps of her evolution. And we begin to perceive a complete aim for the synthesis of Yoga.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-29, “The divine soul reproduces itself in similar liberated souls as the animal reproduces itself in similar bodies. Therefore, whenever even a single soul is liberated, there is a tendency to an extension and even to an outburst of the same divine self-consciousness in other individual souls of our terrestrial humanity ...” CWSA/21/The Life Divine/p-45, 4: CWSA-32/The Mother with Letters on the Mother-p-14, p-19, 5: “Emotionally, the first form which this turning takes must be that of adoration. In ordinary religion this adoration wears the form of external worship and that again develops a most external form of ceremonial worship. This element is ordinarily necessary because the mass of men live in their physical minds, cannot realise anything except by the force of a physical symbol and cannot feel that they are living anything except by the force of a physical action.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/572, “Buddha never said he was an Avatar of a Personal God but that he was the Buddha. It is the Hindus who made him an Avatar. If Buddha had looked upon himself as an Avatar at all, it would have been as an Avatar of the impersonal Truth.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I-500, “You must not confuse a religious teaching with a spiritual one. Religious teaching belongs to the past and halts progress. Spiritual teaching is the teaching of the future—it illumines the consciousness and prepares it for the future realisation. Spiritual teaching is above religions and strives towards a global Truth. It teaches us to enter into direct relations with the Divine.” 12th February 1972/The Mother/TMCW/12/On Education-120, “Why do men cling to a religion? Religions are based on creeds which are spiritual experiences brought down to a level where they become more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth. The time of religions is over. We have entered the age of universal spirituality, of spiritual experience in its initial purity.” The Mother/14th October-1964/The Mother’s Agenda-5/237, “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, 6: “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, “"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. " CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II-27, “I do not very readily accept disciples as this path of Yoga is difficult one and it can be followed only if there is a special call.” Sri Aurobindo/The Mother’s Agenda-8/175, 7: “Above, beginning with the center between the eyebrows, the work has been done for a long time. There it is blank. For ages upon ages upon ages, the union with the Supreme has been realized and is constant… Below this center is the body. And this body has indeed the concrete sensation of the Divine in each of its cells; but it needs to become universalized. That’s the work to be done, center by center. I understand now what Sri Aurobindo meant when he repeatedly insisted, ‘Widen yourself.’ All this must be universalized; it is the condition, the basis, for the Supramental to descend into the body… According to the ancient traditions, this universalization of the physical body was considered the supreme realization, but it is only a foundation, the base upon which the Supramental can come down without breaking everything.” The Mother’s Agenda/21.04.1959, 8: “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/TMCW14/Words of The Mother-II/p-277, "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 (This line proposes a Sadhaka to accept Universalised Psychic being as the only and one and the best friend of this whole life and all life.) "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 “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 9: "To save the world from Ignorance she came." Savitri-250 "She only can save herself and save the world." Savitri-461 "One man’s perfection still can save the world." Savitri-531 "He who would save the world must share its pain." Savitri-537 "He who would save the world must be one with the world," Savitri-537 "I (Savitri) keep my will to save the world and man;" Savitri-692 Download this WEB PAGE in PDF format: “To open oneself to the supracosmic Divine is an essential condition of this integral perfection; to unite oneself with the universal Divine is another essential condition. Here the Yoga of self-perfection coincides with the Yogas of knowledge, works and devotion; for it is impossible to change the human nature into the divine or to make it an instrument of the divine knowledge, will and joy of existence, unless there is a union with the supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and a unity with its universal Self in all things and beings. A wholly separative possession of the divine nature by the human individual, as distinct from a self-withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-622, “The individual must be the instrument and first field of the transformation; but an isolated individual transformation is not enough and may not be wholly feasible. Even when achieved, the individual change will have a permanent and cosmic significance only if the individual becomes a centre and a sign for the establishment of the supramental Consciousness-Force as an overtly operative power in the terrestrial workings of Nature, — in the same way in which thinking Mind has been established through the human evolution as an overtly operative power in Life and Matter. This would mean the appearance in the evolution of a gnostic being or Purusha and a gnostic Prakriti, a gnostic Nature. There must be an emergent supramental Consciousness-Force liberated and active within the terrestrial whole and an organised supramental instrumentation of the Spirit in the life and the body, — for the body consciousness also must become sufficiently awake to be a fit instrument of the workings of the new supramental Force and its new order. Till then any intermediate change could be only partial or insecure; an overmind or intuitive instrumentation of Nature could be developed, but it would be a luminous formation imposed on a fundamental and environmental Inconscience. A supramental principle and its cosmic operation once established permanently on its own basis, the intervening powers of Overmind and spiritual Mind could found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection; they would become in the earth-existence a hierarchy of states of consciousness rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme spiritual level.” Sri Aurobindo CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-997-998,

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