Series XI
April 22, 2001
1) Modern prosperity of ancient values, communal peace of consummate harmony, and world leadership in supramental spirituality are at our door. They await our opening of the door.
Start at home, in your company or organisation. It is the right place to start.
2) Life never fails to warn us. It may not be seen or known. Or, when known, it would always be disregarded. Whoever takes the warning is sure to be saved. Maybe a long time ago things were spoiled. Would he now come forward to surrender his behaviour of that time?
3) Idealist
work has never been done by non-idealists.
5) An expansive mind of curiosity enjoys
learning, thus growing into knowledge. Mere intelligence has no such capacity.
Such minds get educated. They seek cultivation of mental faculties.
7) Life is full of so many pockets of dull
energy which will be dormant till it is stirred. Once stirred it acts. One needs to know their equilibrium and
must take pains to maintain it.
9) One can rise from very low levels to very high levels, but that will not grant perfection.
10) A few refractory rich men earlier
squandered. Now many more aspire to that status. Its first expression, rather the only expression is squandering.
11) Silence compels one to listen. In addition, it enables one to think, though silence is inimical to thinking.
12) God created the world for the joy of Self-discovery, but for that He first hid Himself within Himself. Every step in hiding gives Him joy, even as every stage of discovering Himself yields joy.
13) Before the vision of the MARVEL arises in full
splendour, it can present itself as a conception for one who has come into the
atmosphere of Mother. It starts as a cosy subconscious feeling, resolving the
existing problems gradually, offering greater and greater opportunities. The great beginning of a small glimpse is
the conception that life is always preparing through small joys for the final
bliss.
15) Gambling is to learn the skill of accurately forecasting the course of events as in a game or race by an energy not yet organised for simple physical actions.
17) Life exists in several layers of society, personality, pure energy and finally force before it is organised as energy. Beyond all that is the Being. What is failure in one level is not a failure at a level further below. Seeing this, feeling this and Being this, Man can SEE no loss any more.
18) Sri Aurobindo said that the World Forces had, sooner or later, never failed to fulfil His ideas. Anyone who has felt His force working in him will see the truth of Sri Aurobindo's statement in a large measure in his own world with respect to his own ideas or wishes.
One has accepted Him in the measure his own ideas have been fulfilled.
19) Any work has dozens of details to be learnt and to produce the result they have to be used in concert. This is true of spirituality also. In this respect, there is no virtue in yoga.
20) Fear is an unknown emotion to royalty. They
cannot even be taught it.
22) The greatest idea of the intellect or intelligence makes one a neo-thinker against the vision of the whole.
23) The surface being includes the body in man, the earth in creation.
27) Practical wisdom knows the equilibrium of
social forces that keep the house running. And it matters.
28) It is consummate efficiency of social survival to see through the intuition of the intransigent refractory negative individual.
29) Globalisation is Integralisation.
30) One has made his life that of an employee or householder. He can shift the needle and preside over a corporation or a nation.
32) Poisonous insects are the fit and necessary
raw material for transformation.
33) The car broke down the inertia of local loyalty.
34) The car is a must not as a status symbol, but as an instrument of breaking down the inertia.
Love is more impersonal than
personal.
40) What we know as life -- human life -- is what the soul chooses and wills, and not a whit beyond that.
41) The consummate knowledge of Integral yoga in life is learnt by thousands in their own fields effectively. It is learnt from below, partly. Now that the full theory of creation is available directly from Him, one can learn it fully, from above. That will still come to one as a total knowledge of a smaller whole, not a part.
43) Governments are becoming higher versions of local bodies and are no longer meant for the very strong. They were never meant for the bright and in future bright men are more likely to steer clear of governments.
45) When
involution reverses as evolution, the four above invert themselves into four
below, not in the same order. Reversal
requires a review of the previous order. As the Spirit issues out of Sat, the
psychic issues out of Matter not out of life.
Hence the reordering.
Lydia as Mrs. Wickham takes precedence over Jane.
46) In matters of high culture as well as spirituality, there are two stages of progress or growth.
Where one explanation of a high value is more useful than several disciplines, and
Where one discipline is more effective than a hundred explanations.
49) Appreciation is relationship. Spiritual relationship arises when appreciation ceases.
50) Even to fully understand one idea in The Life Divine is rich initiation into His yoga.
51) If a right context arises for a work it means the atmosphere is ripe for success.
52) Coordination by communication through a centre is meant for work organisation in the physical plane. In a subtle organisation, news can be received with the centre, not given out.
54) A million mouths may gossip. One single inner move will evaporate all
that.
56) Market is collective endorsement of individual achievement.
59) The
theory of relativity was not given the Noble Prize, nor did Gandhiji receive
it. No local pandit would pass the great poets when the passage is not
recognised. No saint was locally popular
nor was any genius recognised at home in the beginning.
61) When people are proud of their meanness and trickery, what can you think of one who longs for their applause? Their applause is a condemnation.
64) A man is wise by mistake.
A man is stupid by choice.
65) All-inclusive concentration includes the
substance of the body.
66) Spirit
and mystic emotion are clothed in poverty in Asia today for Matter and intellect
of Europe and America to seek it as market.
Man will seek Spirit as market.
67) Human
unconsciousness is the conscious awareness of the subliminal.
68) In life we 'surrender' to the professionals, workmen, and DRIVERS we employ. No developed mind can even consider surrender to the Divine.
69) Yogic
achievement can never be compared to achievements in life, as yoga tries to
accomplish more than all life can. But yoga of life goes beyond yoga. There is nothing beyond yoga in life.
Truth emerges when falsehood dissolves.
71) One's growth is in the measure of his right handling of the sore points of life as they arise. He who has failed has now a chance to do so. Would he be less unwilling now than before?
72) The
field of this yoga is the inner emotions and attitudes. Its method is
transformation. Its path is to the inner and to the subliminal. Its centre is
psychic. By giving up one's fixed poises, one goes down to rise.
73) Eternal adventure of emotions is romance.
74) The urge to break a discipline has the energy to implement it perfectly in the reverse.
75) When parents deeply regret or feel disgusted with the behaviour of their children, the truth is what the children do now only reflects the deep wishes of the parents which they could not enjoy.
76) Realities of life are not in the physical consciousness, but in the substance. Words, ideas, emotions, convictions will not touch it. Hard facts of life alone can touch it.
77) The human collective even in the smallest unit of family is there for ONE to shape himself in its image and the principle holds good for all such collectives big or small.
78) The hallmark of non-existent superiority – true inferiority – is to feel taking as giving.
Men who want LUCK to rush into their lives must give up even poverty consciousness. Let them truly acknowledge what they receive, if not with gratitude which they are incapable of
We are poor. Our perversity preserves our poverty.
Let us know we are false, low, poor and treat ourselves as such with HUMILITY.
Humility that is Gratitude
is LUCK.
79) Human success is no more valid than human failure.
80) When a brother is stealing, you want to prevent the stealing, not punish him. Thus, you are soft to the stealing in you, which is there in your brother. You cannot stop his stealing without his getting punished for it. You bail him out of difficulties each time and he never stops stealing. In fact, you protect the 'stealing' in you.
81) Learning is a curiosity. It has no end for any reason, nor is age a bar. There is no limit for knowing or learning or for that matter enjoying.
82) Emotions, at the least sign of a possibility, dream of the result, as emotions achieve at once.
83) Sri
Aurobindo's glory begins in the depth. He offers it in the depth as well as on
the surface as an integral expression. Man does not want the depth or the
integral expression. He asks for the Glory of the surface as the surface.
84) Surrender
opens up the subconscious vision.
85) A devotee, or better still a sadhak knows
it is he who always wins.
All the time he sees it is only victory.
86) Poisonous
creatures, catastrophes of Nature, the incarnation of Evil are the storehouses
of divine raw material for the Delight the soul seeks. Are not raw materials necessary?
87) Identifying with Sri Aurobindo's consciousness is to identify with the Transcendent in its aspect of manifestation.
88) Identifying with Mother is to be Her instrument in your life on earth.
89) You are available for any service in the
measure different urges have lost their power over you.
90) To become full, one should accept the negative side, appreciate the activities of children and recognise himself in his environment.
91) The greatest of spiritual service is still
the service to the ego. Service is to dissolve the ego.
92) Infinity:
Man is FINITE. God is INFINITE. Man is God in disguise. He should transform himself into God in mind, in feeling as well as in fact. To know that the parallel lines do meet, reason becomes intuition, logic becomes Logic of the Infinite, complete minus complete is complete, money expands like knowledge with spending and darkness and pain are their opposites is the beginning.
93) To give something away is great in a world where there are many who cannot part with trifles. Giving away the thing whose value one fully knows is true giving, which ends in Self-giving by one who has realised the Self.
People gather when attention is paid. They go away when it
is withdrawn.
Had there been strength in the
substance, they will not go away, but
cling faster to
you.
95) God has nothing to manage in the world of his creation but to watch with enjoyment. The organisation you create can be more and more self-managing with growing experience.
Enjoyable watching is Management.
Management is self-sustaining.
Organise and watch. Don't try to manage.
96) To
know that one's highest creative work is after all a kind of occupation is yogic insight.
97) However
little you know, consecration opens the entire knowledge to you. When you rely on your own knowledge, then
it is available in little quantities.
98) The world is there to learn self-preservation, not for you to serve. It is a dangerous idea to serve, unless you seek self-destruction.
99) Knowledge
To understand creation, understanding Ignorance is necessary.
The capacity to know a fool's thinking is intelligence.
Accomplishment needs knowledge of the crook.
These are all human achievements.
For the Divine to achieve in us, these are of no use. The Divine begins where Man ends.
Man's ending his efforts is Surrender.
Human accomplishment is by knowledge. For
the Divine to accomplish in us, it needs our surrender.
100) The outer politeness apart, the inner human attitude is, "I am the boss of everyone" which is ill-concealed. Should a man recognise that in himself, the best inner discipline for him is to acquire an inner attitude of "Everyone is my boss".
101) To
think is to think about objects outside. It is outgoing. Yoga is going inside.
To stop thinking is the beginning of yoga. Yoga
ends when one is unable to think having lost that faculty.
105) Offensive consciousness offers to hurt when praying for blessings.
106) The physical consciousness of the mind is elated by rating itself too high to recognise the real value of another.
108) Smallness hurts to please.
110) Friendship is neither social, nor spiritual, but psychological.
111) The physical attachment can never give up, but will never tolerate, will even tease to death.
112) Men
are free outside organisations. Inside them, they are under human control which
in the absence of values degenerates into tyranny. There is no other
tyranny.
113) "I don't want my I".
Man cannot even say this today because he is it and he is in it.
Gorbachev is the
Avatar come to destroy the ego.
114) Imagination
is the greatest faculty of man that abridges his future. It is an enchanting
experience to know the imagination of a superstitious person who conceives of a
man inside the radio.
115) Adoration of ancient wisdom and adherence to it is also from the fact one has not outgrown them.
116) The
emotional capacity to give up the relationships one has overgrown is
detachment.
117) One who is fully protected from the negative forces can be safe. When he enters public life, he will be able to command unanimity, if the negative forces he overcame turn around and support him.
118) Sacredness of a promise suggests a stagnant society.
119) Ego engages.
Psychic is essential.
120) Neither can an ignorant man give up ignorance nor can a poor man give up poverty at will, until and unless they rise above ignorance and poverty.
121) To know the different states of Self -- the four statuses of Upanishads included – is an intellectual feat. The Self-conscious Being, the Self at the gates of the Transcendent, the Transcendent Self, the cosmic Self that is beyond Time and Space and in Time and Space, beyond Subjective-objective differentiation, the immobile immutable Self, Purushothama are keen distinctions knowing which mind loses its rigidity, the self-willed intellect, to cross over.
The female attracts. Feminine richness fulfils the masculine abundance.
123) The physically dynamic man will be lazy psychologically and would even resist and frown on inner work, calling it laziness.
125) One can overcome his social personality to become an individual or overcome that too to become the spiritual entity, thus entering the plane of Timelessness. Sri Aurobindo wants us to go further to the psychic from where one's surrender is offered to Him. Man, in offering his surrender, crosses the determinism of Nature and cosmic determinism.
126) Until
a work, even a small work, becomes routine, either because the skill is
unlearnt or by the newness of interest, it occupies the consciousness. This is, in a way, the Infinite expressing
in the finite.
Can you ever assert that this thing won't happen because another thing had been there?
130) Callousness is independent and can coexist with any other quality of any measure.
131) Gandhiji's truth had a certain violence of fadism. Any truth will be rewarded for its strength in life to start with. When the same rigidity appeared in the Muslims as Jinnah, that proved itself more powerful. Nor could violence be avoided.
132) Gandhiji's fast was a success until 1947. It reached its climax in Calcutta because there was victory in the subtle plane behind. It is right for the consciousness to fulfil the achievement of substance instead of following its own inspiration, which is dissipation. In the end, the substance prevails.
133) Nature is a succession of soul moments in Time
.
134) Maya
is the self's experience of the Self.
The Self creates in the self by Maya.
135) God who sought the Lila of creation for Delight achieves it by the evolution of Spirit through several births, making the surface mind the crucial field and its crux.
136) Sri Aurobindo's writings are full of
humour. One will miss it, if he is unaware of His wider theme. No page of His
is without its touch. One such is His
euphemism for utter folly of the higher intellect – 'excess of logic'.
138) Secret of Success:
Success is of the totality, never of the part.
The secret of health lies
in the knowledge of disease.
The power of peaceful living of the good citizen lies in knowing the details of the underworld.
It is war that ensures peace.
Compassion rests on strength that nourishes the cruel.
Intensity of Love arises from the fact of avoiding the intensity of hatred.
Intelligence becomes useful when it
knows idiocy.
139) Man
will stir out of his laziness for gaining a hairbreadth of mastery over another
rather than for a bundle of money.
140) Buddha, Shankara, Sri Aurobindo.
No theory of evolution is complete without handling evil.
Buddha refused to do it. Shankara opened a way out, which is not a solution.
The answer lies at the root of creation and particularly in the nature of
Ignorance. Sri Aurobindo solves
the
mystery, going to the very purpose of creation.
141) What imperfect language finds difficult to express, imprecise emotion can convey so as to touch the reality of the situation.
142) It is a common experience that people
cooperate with anyone only within the limits of his authority over them. Beyond
that, he is in despair.
Is the experience of those who work for others as they ask far different? They too despair quite often when they have to act outside the scope of their authority. Authority is the limit, not the act.
143) Words, especially of prose, are not rich enough to convey the full power behind the thought that surpasses the emotion and embraces the act.
144) The
Indian economy is astir. We see the process of its expression. There is nothing
anyone can do with it, as the reality behind is not known. Science has been studying such processes, but never sought the Reality
behind.
145) Knowing the Reality, the process is revealed, not vice versa.
146) Memory understands the eternity of the Conscious Being in terms of Time.
Mother's prosperity grows abundantly when not noticed.
152) What
the mind sees is true, even if it is partial. When it begins to insist on that as the only truth and goes on denying
what others have seen, it becomes false.
153) Only
when we insist on knowing something new in terms of the old, there is
ununderstanding. By this man insists on being what he is. There is nothing he cannot understand when this insistence is not
there.
154) Meeting Mother is initiation. To us their words, spoken or written, are gospel, which means whatever we read from their writings must have the force of their initiation. It is such a relationship that will make one's stay here beneficial for yoga.
Taste of Ignorance is over.
156) Nature
is leisurely, purposely delaying evolution so that the taste of Ignorance can
be fully enjoyed. Emerging from
Ignorance into knowledge is greater than that taste. Man is poised between the
two.
157) The
intense joy of trance is the joy of being unconscious, which tastes the
Ignorance exclusively at its spiritual height.
158) Pain is only for the separative Ego, not for man. Man can come out of ego and enjoy in the subliminal the leisurely taste of Ignorance of Nature or become the psychic to spread over the universe.
159) Sri
Aurobindo has broken the mystery of the mystics and rendered the process of
creation intelligible. Two more things can be done. The scientist has vast
accumulations of facts that do not create a perspective. His philosophy can be
so defined to get all the pieces of the scientific puzzle in their places. Another is rendering life in His terms so
that the Science of Life will emerge.
-
Life Divine
-
Science of Life
-
Spirit of Science
160) To understand each aspect of a knowledge is an expertise that is valuable. To know each aspect in terms of another or every other is a wholesome knowledge not easily attainable .
161) An expert is an asset. The generalist who enriches the expertise of the expert by his overall view brings wisdom to knowledge.
163) The human choice at any given moment is between the continued leisurely enjoyment of the taste of Ignorance and the delight of emerging out of Ignorance.
164) The One is the Being. The Many are formed out of the divided Force of which the substratum is the Being. It is formed out of a double opening, very much as departments and offices are created out of the government which is the One.
165) When the Force of prosperity goes forth, it is the richest nation that booms until its leaders curb its economic growth.
166) The Upanishadic story of God asking the gods to move a blade of grass withdrawing Himself from it, illustrates that gods too forget God.
168) Depth for us is the depth of the surface.
169) The Truth that is all benevolence will also be extremely strong and more than fortified by any trickery or treachery of the evil forces.
170) When
Patience pervades all the planes it becomes equality. Equality is the higher spiritual version of infinite dimension of
patience at lower levels.
171) The emotional result for any work is the seeking of the lower vital, which is happiness. The Force that passes through one gives the thrill to the Being which is higher Joy, maybe higher than joy.
172) The
psychic makes the moment virginally creative.
Interest
makes energy lively. Soul makes life and substance lively. Emerging soul makes everything in the environment lively. It is
spiritual liveliness.
· Body is quiet or dull. Vital is on the move. Mind is active and energises the vital. Spirit is full of life but prefers quietness.
·
The psychic is unegoistic, energises
all parts of the being, renders them spiritually
lively.
· The energy of the psychic is not the coarse energy of human parts or the quiescent energy of the soul, but the energy of evolution without the stress of ego or coarseness of the parts.
· The psychic does not take over unless the dynamism of the others is absent.
·
The psychic is spiritually lively.
· The evolutionary energy of the psychic is AUÛ.
· The psychic collects behind the heart and awaits.
· It offers silently.
173) One
has several parts in himself. They differ. Some are high and others are low. It is he who chooses which part is to be
expressed when.
174) A system does not maintain itself. It has to be maintained. When a system maintains itself, it becomes technology.
175) When mind stops thinking, emotions start thinking.
176) The world is like a ship on the sea. The life of the world is the sea. The possibility of the world running out of resources does not exist.
177) Offering of service from one who has not earned money will not bring him money.
178) Past consecration for as many days as
the years you have lived is good.
179) Sri Aurobindo left us so that He can be of help to us in the way we may appreciate receiving.
180) As knowledge first enters the subtle plane, when something leaves, it leaves the subtle plane last.
181) If it is a good strategy not to take more, it is wisdom not to give more.
182) The
weak man's jealousy kills him.
183) To
place ourselves in the scale of knowledge–Ignorance is the first desirable step
in emerging out of Ignorance.
184) Seeing ourselves as the small version of God in our activities is the beginning of evolution.
185) All
processes of practical learning are the Mind patiently waiting on the mind in
the body to remember its origin is Mind, the same process of Lila. Man's delight in learning is the miniature
of God's Delight in Lila.
186) Nature
splits one phenomenon into two and presents them as contradictions in the
physical material plane. Man raising
himself to Mind, sees the material contradictions sublimating into a logical
opposition.
187) The Westerner who is dynamic is incapable of inner work. The best of Indians who are very much capable of intense inner work, prefer to be dynamic physically and active vitally in gossip.
188) The Psychic is quiet as it lives only in
the present.
The richness of the psychic is because of the fullness of the present.
Fullness of the present is the
richness of the psychic.
189) For the small mind, any capacity in anyone creates rivalry. For a great mind, those are clear occasions for his personality to expand by the experience of appreciation.
190) Work stagnates when we do not exhaust what we can directly do.
191) God descends through division that is contradictory and ascends through union that is reconciliation.
192) Silence
that is absence of thought gives the foundation for equality. Silence that is
absence of activity, gives the foundation for the strength of spirituality. There is a Silence behind the Silence.
193) The One seeing itself as Many is a subjective state.
194) A
great mind can be great, even shining, but will remain partial and outside the
scope of any use. His completion of
meaningfulness lies in complementing his insight with that of crass ignorance
when it fulfils the evolutionary purpose.
195) The
poor man needs money not for use but for dissipation. It is possible for us
to give people what they want not for their purpose, but for our aim.
196) Truth
is not a mere fact. It escapes a practical mind. In fact, Truth is objective
Existence. For one to whom the
subjective existence is sincere, Truth reveals. All over the world, in all
cultures, it is called values.
197) The surface is the summit of Ignorance. For the Spirit to emerge on the surface is the goal of yoga. The final conquest is on the surface and of Ignorance.
198) The desire to do good to others directly
ends in evil for you.
199) Many acts are interesting. Others are flat. We do those acts in spite of their being flat, because work has to be done. It is easy to see that no flat act has ever given results. Any possible trouble, one can see, has come only by doing those flat acts. This applies only to those who consciously endeavour to be non-egoistic.
200) The Rishis could see either the one side or the other side of the Self above. Sri Aurobindo desires us to see both sides together here.
Tapas is the nature of the consciousness.
202) Unsuspecting nature of security is of
status unquestioned.
Royalty was oblivious of danger.
Majesty of magnanimity thinks not of loss.
203) The
problems of the nation and the world are to be understood at home and at work. What is not learned here will never be
learnt.
204) Give up the immediate, in favour of the Ultimate.
-Dr.
Shyama Prasad Mukerjee. 24.4.1951
205) Idealism is based on ideas to be realised.
Work is to be based on inner
achievements that are to be expressed.
207) Lapse
in sex is a social deviation, not a sin on one's conscience, unless the
conscience believes it.
208) Equality is possible when the vital
physical restlessness calms down.
209) There are occasions when a genius expects the admiration of his ideas by his colleagues who are incapable of understanding it. A Napoleon looks for the approval of a Josephine, an Einstein expects another to applaud his formula. As a rule, invariably they withhold it.
Great minds look for approval of the small.
The small take pleasure in denying it.
212) Determination without discrimination is a violence committed on oneself and peters out sooner or later, either crushing the mind or spirit or frustrating them.
214) The
character in the underworld of thieves, robbers, scoundrels, rogues, cheats,
etc. is a true measure of a nation's
culture.
215) The
desire to benefit your family or friends or even the world when they do not
deserve it is the same desire for the
results without doing any work.
216) The
physical uses force where it lacks skill; the vital uses anger, while the mind
either curses or forms an opinion. One
must patiently acquire the skill.
217) Life is a slow journey along a field of "Snakes and Ladders".
Mother gives you dice that gives the scores you choose.
218) The source of energisation drains.
220) While
you are in Silence, most of the work that needs speech – really all the work –
is done without speaking, as others
speak your thoughts.
222)
The communal carnage of 1947 was a misfortune.
It was because of British duplicity.
It was due to Muslim intransigence.
We can say it was owing to Hindu short-sightedness.
Instead of seeing it as a past misfortune, we can see it as a past inevitability.
It is that which makes future glory possible.
To know it lies in our
attitude is to know Him and Her.
All errors are rich raw material for future higher culture.
224) Higher
human values converted into higher divine values in life can be exalted but
have nothing to do with divine life. What
appears unattainable in life is the least the devotee can aspire for.
225) The
world has not completed the available resources of knowledge, organisation,
technology and values. This backlog is vast.
Nor has it fully responded in utilising the new resources.
This is a golden rule for the individual
and the collective.
227) If the atmosphere is undisturbed and calm even without a mental effort on your part, it means your substance is calm.
228) Support is that which offers security not only where we are but in the deeper plane too.
230) Obedience can be enforced, not kindness.
231) A man, having committed an error for whatever reason, who is capable of inflicting on himself the punishment the rules enjoin can be called rational and just.
233) Sense of propriety becomes a sacred
sentiment in the physical man.
235) There are three levels of the capacity that can change the finite into the infinite.
A one-time capacity.
Capacity to do so consciously in many things.
A permanent state of this higher consciousness.
The first is enough to be lucky. The second will give one the capacity to create luck in others. The last is higher consciousness.
236) When
you call a liar truly a liar, he can falsely call you a liar, as verbal
expression permits falsehood. So, people catch hold of a liar and beat him. The
strength of Truth that cannot be expressed in words can overpower a liar and
shut his mouth.
238) Age
blunts the force of enjoyment or complaining, but the character remains.
Education and refinement change for the better the rigid structure of the
force. Neither is transformation. Transformation
reverses the structure of character into its opposite.
Creation
is Lila for Delight.
Discovery is Delight.
Self-discovery is ultimate Delight.
Delight in the descent, Delight in the ascent.
240) Practical concept of Infinity.
Concrete conception of Eternity.
241) Mother touches the depths of anyone who comes to Her, takes them to the heights for a split second, but we are oblivious of the experience when it happens and later completely forget it.
242) The sign of the whole is
Accomplishment that has the character of Infinity.
Causeless
Joy.
243) The idealist who passionately believes that
his idealism is of importance to the world subconsciously
cherishes his own importance to the world.
244) When we feel it is too much for us to
stand, it is the best occasion for us to
know what we can do.
Our
real inner possibilities will fully reveal only at a moment when we are
overwhelmed by stress.
245) The studios produce extraordinary films
that are faithful to life and history in spite of the very low atmosphere of
dissipated consciousness. It shows the
least can achieve the most by values in skills.
246) The arguments of The Life Divine which are explained explicitly at length, are
nowhere seen by the intellect in clear coherence. One who gets them in clear sequence will cross over from mind to
Supermind.
247) Human handling distorts the issues.
Thinking spoils understanding of it; feeling mutilates emotional appreciation;
doing destroys.
Mother
acts when Man is quiet.
248) If mind is quiet, even reading The Life Divine disturbs it. Even in such a situation, reading Savitri
can further quieten the mind.
It does not matter what you do, but it matters how you do it.
We touch the Brahman inside at that moment.
251) To know that HE loses Himself every moment a little bit more in the descent and He
emerges a little every moment in the ascent, is to know HIM.
252) When an official is acting, it is possible
to see the power of the entire organisation is behind him. The action of the surface man is seen only as his own action, not only
by the entire being behind, especially by his own self.
253) Man rarely knows what he wants. He aims at
one thing, but actively drives at another. It
will be a great moment in his life to know what he really wants, because that
knowledge will help him achieve it.
254) Any grand thing, plan, idea or project is of the ego. The sign of something being grand is a danger signal.
255) Occupation is there with things that are
not fully understood through experience enough for them to be shed. Preoccupations are by the disturbed
sensitivities.
258) One man's silence is an individual discipline. Silence descending on one man making him speak out Silence is universal Silence coming into its own, asking for permission for its rule.
259) Observing
the world as your reflection, you know the spots where you need to change.
261) The entire being is there behind every action. It is enough we perceive it. We can see the action itself as the entire conscious being.
262) Delight is discovery.
Discovery is Delight.
To discover he is God is the greatest delight for man.
263) Surrender is to give up that thing which we cannot part with for a moment.
Surrender of the conscious is impossible.
Surrender
of the unconscious is must.
Surrender of the conscious makes the surrender of the unconscious possible.
Surrender makes the impossible possible.
264) The Avatar can surrender to the Lord;
others cannot. It is to Mother the surrender is due.
There is a Silence behind the Silence.
270) Individual silence will be observed.
Universal silence will be infectious.
271) He
who is stung by another's Silence has a little of it.
273) No man understands another's motives,
though he sees his actions, as each man
has a motive for his own understanding.
274) Man who has lost six senses must regain them as higher senses, the senses of the spirit.
275) Legal justice is to decide one man's problems according to the understanding of all others except himself.
276) Man's surrender starts with his thoughts,
feelings, etc. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the surrender of Being, consciousness,
power and delight. When he surrenders
his thoughts, feelings, etc. he reaches his being and again as power and
delight his thoughts and feelings present themselves to be surrendered.
277) Man is capable of doing his yoga as occupation.
To
convert his very occupation and even preoccupation into yoga is a must.
278) Surrender
is difficult for one who thinks, even as controlling an emotion is difficult
while it possesses you.
279) To think and plan for the future is to constrain the future spiritual possibilities to the present limitation.
280) Human insistence:
People unconsciously insist on a certain way of life. All do so in one direction.
It is a negative
insistence of NOT being of the higher consciousness.
Each does it in his own unique way. The majority tries to conform to the society. The rest insist on dissipation.
The patterns of conformity are infinite, those of dissipation are equally infinite.
281) Psychological
laziness is tradition to the physical.
282) Things cannot be planned for in an unconscious atmosphere. To conceive of any planning there is to hasten the progress or hope for the non-existing.
283) Hostile beings are sincere enough to understand they are hostile, while negative, evil persons are not sincere and cannot realise their situation.
284) The more the surface likes, the more the
subconscious decides against. One must
learn to discern the very subtle symptoms that indicate a final decision of the
subliminal.
285) Man will do well to learn how Nature has so far accomplished. He will learn that She begins many things and gives the impression of working on one and wasting resources on others, whereas when the one is finished, we find all are completed.
286) Outer Silence achieves.
Inner Silence inspires achievement.
287) Work achieves. Deeply sincere work achieves in the subtle plane all over the world.
288) Energy
decides.
Energy
alone decides.
289) Formula for the Key
Basically it is energy.
Energy organised achieves.
Value achieves in organisation.
Idea gives value its value.
The level of idea is decided by the aspiration.
Energy decides aspiration.
How does energy decide energy?
Evolutionary energy decides energy of achievement.
Spiritual awakening decides evolutionary energy.
Is spiritual awakening fixed or can it be raised?
It is decided at birth and upheld by the atmosphere of life.
You can be decided by that atmosphere or you can decide that atmosphere.
That CHOICE is there.
Exercising that choice, you go up or are part of a group.
Choose and achieve.
290) Flatness
and dullness do not permit consecration. They are due to the presence of
negative or hostile forces below. Becoming
lively is the best way to overcome flatness.
291) It
takes the psychic one second to review the whole life. He will lead you quickly.
292)
It is time we stop needing anything.
It is better we stop needing to give.
It is to usurp God's role meant only for Him.
What are we to do?
Enjoy as HE enjoys, doing nothing.
293) What
makes life complete, a real whole, is the discovery that the negative is only
the other side. To transform the
negative and realise the completeness of life is one desirable goal, if not an
exalted ideal.
294) There
are two truths of life in yoga.
The past could not have been different.
The future can be anything.
295) Lifeless flat feeling arises when there is below the surface negative feelings or evil thoughts. Hostility is their base.
296) Generous self-giving is found in a limited circle even among frugal persons. Expansive self-giving is there on the surface for vanity or reasons of complex. Still they are issuing from a deeper source of the soul's self-giving. We need a self-giving where the Self gives itself for its sake in the other.
All-inclusive
concentration is for the Psychic, not mind.
Truth consciousness is the Treasure of Luck.
Truth is Luck.
Luck is Truth.
300) Values master social forces by their
inherent spiritual power. Pure spiritual
values are forces that can be completely masterful in society.
301) Mother's blessings work unfailingly. Sometimes when it is withheld, greater results issue as it makes man take greater effort.
302) Constant remembrance is a great tool of
yoga. Constant awareness of the native hostility makes that yoga siddhi real.
354) Life teaches the FOOL by violent tragedy. Mother teaches him giving the gift he has not asked for, thus enabling him to grow grateful in his subconscious.
368) It is the egoistic tyranny which the ego
lives by and cherishes.
369) They are like the animals that drop their
dung in a civilised human society. Still the cat is the personification of
cleanliness!
To know the whole creation inside presided over by the Transcendent and to live an external life subjecting it to this inner experience is the integral fullness of Sri Aurobindo. Before this mighty fullness of creation the moksha of the Jivatman in reaching the Immutable Brahman is partial. Even Buddha's Nirvana which is only the remainder of the Brahman when Sat was taken out is of course a partial experience. Shankara who took a part and rejected a part of it as Maya is beside the point.
379) If Mother's joy that is supramental exceeds its limit, it can adversely affect the balance of the prevailing atmosphere.
Faculties of a plane, when active, keep the centre of personality in that plane.
394)
§ Family came into existence long ago; it has also reached the point of dissolution. Not even a very small part of the population (say 5 or 10 %) has acquired the vital temperament that will sustain the family.
§ Members of a species do fully qualify physically, not so much vitally.
§
401) To know that a requirement
can be met by several different methods is to know Infinity as a fact of life.
402) People who do not like company bordering on misanthropy can be extremely friendly in their behaviour.
405) Yoga is to live the life of the world in your own life, better still inside.
406) Generosity in professional behaviour follows professional eminence in serious strong characters in a socially truthful atmosphere. Otherwise, their behaviour can give some scope for professional meanness.
407) Dissipation,
laziness, cruelty and all the negative traits receive the delight of involution which can be as nearly intense as the delight of
evolution.
408) You
can communicate to one or many, possibly a dozen by the spoken word. In the subtle plane the unspoken word
communicates to all men on earth.
409) To do what we know is to organise the physical. It is selfish, narrow, and prevents outgoing. Tradition is to enjoy being selfish. Done properly, selfishness can lead to Selfishness which is spiritual realisation.
410) The behaviour of orthodoxy, the closed minds of the fundamentalists, etc. are just like refusing to use the car, phone and computer. They are so rational!
411) The contact with The Mother, inner or outer, cannot be suspended for a minute, as it is the lifeline.
413) Life Response is the action of a deeper plane on its own, as we are, in our plane, full, saturated, mature.
414) The body learning a lot of useless things and breaking it is
revolution, while the body learning from the mind gradually is evolution.
415) Our effort is a reaction to the insistence of the Spirit.
416) When
a statement is made, a strategy is resorted to or an ideal is offered, it is in
the plane of life where we are. It will necessarily reflect the plane it is in.
Any such thing we do must be integral in
the sense that from every point of view our new stand must be vindicated.
One way of knowing that something is right is to verify it from every idea we know of.
417) One does not give up what he has outgrown.
It won't give him up even if he does. It is the substance, while he gives up in
consciousness.
418) A
writer comes to an understanding after crossing several steps. For his readers
to appreciate his writings, he must somehow lead them through a similar process
of thought experience. A vision of a
Seer needs the same formula for effective communication.
419) One characteristic of the higher consciousness, above the golden lid, is it is full of benevolence and compassion. It is felt by the fact of complete absence of violence. Its overwhelming strength enters us compassionately.
420) Achievement is possible only in the measure protection is established from the negative, evil, hostile forces.
421) Perfection
in any one aspect is known to have brought the ultimate social reward in spite
of the fact it is perfection in only one aspect. That perfection, if perfect perfection, is known to override even other
cardinal defects.
422)
Desire is emotional goal.
Aspiration is the organisation of emotions.
424) What makes life lively is not culture, but consciousness.
425) The
world has outlived culture. Just now it needs Consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo came to give us blind
men sight. Will we open our eyes and see?
427) The
same spirit looking at the world through different eyes sees the same OBJECT differently for
the purposes of evolving out of Ignorance and emerging as Knowledge. If the Spirit, instead of looking out,
looks inside, he will see all the knowledge he seeks. Hence the Delight.
428) The backward rustic is undeveloped not because there are no opportunities, but because he has not understood them as such. Those who are already introduced to Sri Aurobindo are exactly like the determined poor men in rich countries.
433)
When World Forces are studied closely, they disclose the LAWS Sri Aurobindo has enunciated.
As days pass by, one can
discern the life of the world more and more coming under the Supramental Force
that descended in 1956 and which is organising itself in the atmosphere of
earth.
One very striking phenomenon of the above is, old laws suddenly cease to be valid or start behaving in the very opposite way to the usual.
434) Waste
There is waste in our social life,
psychological life and finally in Life. It is obvious. All that man learns can,
in one sense, be explained as learning to avoid waste. To know there is no
waste is to know the fullness of life. Waste
is the appearance the efficiency of creation takes upon itself.
436) Luck
is withstood only by memories of unwanted person. They MUST be given up at all
costs. Decide to forget them and pray
for that.
437) Man succeeding in life with Mother's Force is like a genius taking an examination.
439) The longing for friendship
is because the vital enchantment holds its sway.
440) If the national leadership from any side is evil, it only means the evil should exhaust itself being at the top.
442) Mastery comes not from a mass of knowledge, but from the fact that that MASS covers ALL facets of existence represented in life, in other words, where work results in a RESULT. Based on this truth, we conclude that the extent of one's knowledge is seen by the extent of his accomplishments.
Accomplishment is knowledge;
rather, enjoyment is accomplishment.
443) Aspiration is emotional capacity for the goal.
445) Nature
enjoys its leisurely progress as she has the entire infinite field before her. She does so as Time is necessary to
consolidate the ascent and integration at all other levels. Otherwise her speed
will be rapid.
448) Paying attention to one's children or friends is to pay higher attention to him.
449) Intense desire for an inaccessible person can give rise to a perverse wish of desiring for a punishment from him so that an intense relationship can be had.
451) One who applies one's own standards to another won't have disharmony with him. Harmony in standards is harmony in action.
456) Physical
adventure is exacting, full of dangerous exploits, meant only for
those who love danger and adventure. Are the exploits of the mind, the
austerities of the spirit less arduous? Perhaps more arduous.
Efficiency is to address the emergent.
Creativity is to pay attention to each thing in its own time and wait for its result.
Waste for man is creativity for the society.
Creative society is wasteful for man.
459) The vital triumphs. The mental in the vital feels expansive joy.
Joy is the beauty of unassertive
triumph.
460) One word expressing several meanings is the growth of linguistic thought without verbal expansion which belongs to the next stage. In the third stage language becomes beautiful by one word meant in one way, expressing another shade of meaning making idiomatic growth. Language grows in thought, words, emotions, and finally in its idiom.
461) The SUN of
knowledge reveals. It is a rare possession, as Silence or Peace.
462) It is a small mind that
sees the person in the rule.
Relate to the issue, not to the person.
463) Translators
are masters of both the languages and often the translation is better than the
original. When the translation goes through the emotions of the translator, it
excels. When the ideas are translated,
it becomes transcreation.
464) Often the idealist writer does not have even one approving reader. Many have an immediate circle of a few readers. Idealism stands on its own -- reader or no readers.
465)
Let the Mother in you relate to the Mother in others. There will be ever present a JOY ever increasing,
unbound, unfettered.
The physical enjoys exertion, especially in learning a skill.
The vital expands in expressing itself.
Mind's happiness is in understanding.
The psychic Joy is in
emerging from the Becoming as Being.
466) When
a general is winning the war on our borders, a doctor is fighting to save a
life, a magician is driving away a spirit, when
a great work is being done, we concentrate on it, disregarding all the
rest. To God, all work is great work. He
is not bound by ethics or law.
467) Pronunciation is a social convention like grammar, which can at least be codified to some extent. The linguistic truth about pronunciation is the same as the fingerprint. Standardisation of pronunciation is a superstition, as there can be nothing sacred in it. A greater spiritual truth is neither pronunciation nor grammar nor ethics are sacred. They are all conventions.
468) Inner control of one more person is the same as the control of the universal vibration.
469) Life looks like a magician when it avoids a difficulty or throws up an opportunity in response to prayer.
470) To be disciplined is the best qualification for disqualification of social intercourse.
471) When Grace descends on you, receive it as it presents itself, without putting conditions.
Surrender is the inner spiritual Impulse of the Psychic that stands naked before God. It is not a method.
473) Consecration
should catch the movement not when it presents itself to the mind, but at the
point the impulses are born.
474) It is
true that the surrender of man can achieve anything instantaneously, but his
surrender is limited to the extent he is deconditioned. Man surrenders to God in the measure he is more attracted to him than
his own subconscious preoccupation.
475) Mother
does not need an instrument. SHE needs a surrendered instrument.
476) Surrender and planning do not go together. Surrender is purely an act of the soul. Allow it to come to the surface and act without interference.
477) Gradualness is not there for politicians to rise to the top, as the party has the power to put a man at the top. In surrender, that power to accomplish anything at any level is with us.
479) There is only one point where you can begin.
It is the point where you now are.
Theoretically, it is possible to complete it here.
What makes that practical is surrender.
480) The surrender we offer Mother can be offered to anyone else. It will reveal two things.
When you surrender to another, he will find himself your prisoner. He will not be able to ask you for anything which is not in your mind.
At a later stage, you find yourself a similar prisoner of his.
When Surrender is complete, it permits each
to surrender to the other.
481) Man surrenders to Mother with an idea and
what ultimately prevails is that Idea. When he surrenders to Her with no such Idea or better still the idea
that She knows better than all his ideas, She achieves in him.
Even surrender achieves in one what he is.
When he is NOT anything, She achieves.
· The only determination is us must be to let Her work through us, only HER.
Surrender
may be passive to eliminate oneself or active to endorse Her working in him.
483) The Being must be on the surface for SURRENDER to be constant.
484) Our life is routine which beyond a point
becomes dull and boring. Interest cures dullness. Interest for us is what we
are interested in. In other words, it is energy expressing a known skill.
Psychologically it is selfish. When we
take interest in others or work for its own sake, the interest is endless, as
it is unselfish.
485) Spiritual
life is to live by the Spirit what the mental man and physical man do by an
idea or an act.
To have life requirements fulfilled by the plane in which we are decides
what life we lead.
486) When
faced with a crisis, think what wise people would advise you, better still,
what in such situations you were advising others. The best of advices is what we give others.
487) The efficiency of low consciousness is unfailing. It will be crude, brutal, clumsy, forgetful of every other thing but will achieve its goal. It is the stamp of low consciousness.
488) Poverty
is low consciousness identifying with itself and is proud of itself. When he begins to be ashamed of poverty, very
soon he emerges out of it, far sooner than anyone else or anything else can do
it for him. The surest way of pulling
people out of poverty is to make them ashamed of it.
489) Learning
He who has to learn by himself is the physical man.
The vital man learns by another's example.
The mental man needs no example, but can learn by an explanation.
The spiritual man learns
from inside.
490) The spiritual power of Grace acts on its own up to a point, beyond which it can only respond to aspiration, appeal or prayer. It is ineffective in their absence.
491) Selfish
accomplishments raise resistance. Unselfish
accomplishments go unnoticed.
492) What potentials one has matters little.
Which capacity is exercised matters.
What capacity is needed for your evolution matters.
Not what you have, but
what you express matters.
493) You
cannot expend energy in enjoyment while you need energy for accomplishment. If accomplishment is enjoyment, the energy
spent on it will not diminish, but will increase.
When accomplishment becomes enjoyment, energy spent on one increases the energy for the other.
494) Giving generates in the receiver resistance.
The unregenerate vital does not like to feel obliged.
Egoistic giving is resented.
Small selfishness that gives against its inclination raises resistance.
If the receiver resents in several places the resistance is in him.
When the giver raises it everywhere, it is in him.
495) He who wants to achieve must overcome the lower attractions. Attractions overcome are accomplishments achieved.
496) One's effectivity in life does NOT depend upon how strong he is, but much depends on how much that strength is positively expressed overcoming his weakness.
497) Mechanical intelligence feels superior to mental intelligence because of practicality.
498) There is no misfortune or tragedy in
Spirituality or evolution. They are the
misgivings of the physical mind.
499) The tendency for the ego is to possess all
in return of a small bit. Ego will ask
for the whole even without offering that small bit.
500) More facilities than what the personality
can absorb do havoc to the personality is a truth of life. It is a greater truth in life when Spirit enters it.
503) The confidentiality that British professionals like lawyers ensure by their personal integrity, can only be secured in India on pain of utter physical punishment.
504) He who knew, in the days of old, the simple truths of today is a great mind indeed. Those who uttered wisdom in those days that still escapes us now were no ordinary souls. They were the great of soul.
505) One cannot fully acquire His wisdom without becoming Him.
507) Man exerts his utmost to enjoy what is. The heavens have opened before him. He can enjoy those heavens only if he cares to open his eyes.
Man was blind. The advent of Sri
Aurobindo has restored his eyesight. Now,
all that he should do is to open his eyes.
509) Politics
is to lead virile bodies or at least vitalised activities. Intellectual leadership is to evoke strong convictions in the mentally
superstitious.
Eye opened is karma dissolved.
512)
Conflict exhausts lower energies unrestrained.
Lower energies exhausted must use higher energies with restraint which is values.
Progress is to replace force by values.
He who is unable to explain The Life Divine says others will not understand.
514) Human mind attributes its inability to the Absolute and says it cannot determine and it cannot retain its unity in manifestation.
515) Human view sees eternal joy as everlasting pain.
522) Voting
in elections is based on the biological impulses of the society. It is entirely at variance with social,
political or even economic factors.
524) People
incapable of minimum discipline are offered in life opportunities that can be
availed of only by maximum discipline. The
potential is so great.
This means if the man takes the effort, he will make it.
525) Genius
does not always shine in the school. Sometimes he fails. The work of the genius is for posterity. The yogi's work is for the
ages to come.
526) Election is the occasion to know what the lower vital understands when the mind speaks to it.
527) Abomination is after all no disqualification. It may be a qualification in certain cases.
528) Freedom
has the greatest appeal, greater than power, money or sex. It appears man seeks freedom to get money, power or sex, but freedom
for its own sake is more attractive.
530) Partial concentration can be non-stop and
prolonged. For all-inclusive concentration to be non-stop, it is like non-stop
eating.
531) The
role and presence of medicine appears to be small, almost negligent, but its
consequences are immense. Technology that
is invisible brings about impossible changes in the society.
Engineering technology.
535) Social institutions, especially the family, do not appreciate so much the service rendered to them as the pleasing squeamish compliance to the then Authority.
536) Fear
is the aspiration of the timid.
537) Whether one swallow is not summer anywhere,
it is severely so in the SUBTLE plane. No action released
before the final event, not the symptom, will survive.
539) Those who believe that Mind has created the world will be committing the same error as in saying that the society is created by the government.
A plane can ripen in you when you cross it.
543) If we
are ashamed of stupidity and selfishness, are we not to be ashamed of
intelligence and self-giving? As long as
we are ashamed of something, we will be proud of something else.
544) Spiritual ego develops on social and
psychological goodness. It dies when it exhausts itself by touching the
ultimate victory. Gandhiji's greatest
victory in Calcutta was followed by his assassination.
546) To
expect recognition or even rewards for having achieved little is avarice; but
to expect recognition of true worth and work is to say the least unrealistic
and foolish, as he never understood that
the world recognises its own achievements in men, which means non-achievement.
547) Most of us do not know all the facts of our lives just around us for various reasons. That knowledge alone will avoid several serious losses.
548) For
an above-average person, which all devotees are by virtue of Mother's
Consciousness, there will be no problem in life, as problems arise out of lack
of energy. Is it evident to us that one
is inclined to create problems for the joy of it?
549) A system is governed by rules and written procedures. Still, in actual practice there exists beyond all the written words an area of activity given to the discretion of the man on the spot. If that is misused, the whole system will break down.
550) The perfect Form is the form Sat assumes in matter. When matter reveals as Sat, that Form emerges.
551) The becoming determines man; the Being can be commissioned successfully into action; The Being of the Becoming is always in action.
553) More
than possessing knowledge, capacity or wealth, man wants it to be recognised by
others. He rarely understands that his
own recognition alone matters, not his talents or its outside recognition.
554) Brahman
can be thought, felt and sensed as thought is Brahman, feeling is Brahman,
sense is Brahman. Brahman can be
explained in words as words are Brahman. It can be done by one who realises
that the words are Brahman.
555)
Shamelessness is equality of substance in the ascent.
What begins as
shamelessness ends in the descent as God's equality.
556) Intelligence is of value. Intelligence not appropriated by the ego is of ultimate value. It is ineffective in the measure ego usurps it.
Perfection is an ultimate concept. Anything that is perfect – without the taint of ego – effectuates.
557) Stable
security
Among the aristocrats, men, especially women, had several possibilities to be reduced to poverty.
Politicians have always enjoyed instability.
Disease that offered a stable insecurity is less so with the passing of time.
Instability of status,
prosperity, life, posts of power has always been there, but is less so now.
As greater organisation and technology have been offering greater stability because man moves from the surface to the depth, there is a KNOWLEDGE in life that can offer permanent security in any field.
Faith is different from expectation.
559) He who wants to move a section of the population should identify himself in emotion with that and act in his own life on his new conviction.
560) Man has a personal, local identity as well as a national, universal identity. He can move to the widest of identities, one with Brahman. To move to that is, to act from there is siddhi.
563) Man acts with reference to his world, which is ultimately himself
subjectively.
In the measure he outgrows that, he thinks.
When he is eliminated from his thinking, he becomes general, if not universal, and an effective writer.
His
universality is born when he thinks entirely without reference to himself. He becomes great.
565) When Infinity expresses itself in the finite, it makes sure that not only the finite appearance would express, but the infinity too will fully emerge.
566) Confidentiality
and privacy are emotions among the Englishmen which will not be given up even
if they have to go to the gallows. It is
extraordinary as character.
567) We
are unconsciously acting as Supermind or Absolute. To be conscious is only our part.
568) Thinking at any level is silence at the
previous level.
Money is power. Power absorbs bad name.
Money
is not an end in itself. It is a passport to status and culture.
570) To attempt to create genius in a university or make marriage express ideal love are the greatest follies man has attempted.
572) Ineffective people are imperfect.
Perfection is effectivity.
Perfect perfection is
perfect effectivity.
Perfection in one aspect is unattainable without all becoming perfect.
Faith in Mother, surrender to Her makes the imperfect perfect.
Mother perfects our
imperfections.
Perfection is amoral, mental and non-ethical.
Give your imperfections to Mother. She needs your perfections too to turn Her Grace into Supergrace.
573) Prayer of one of good will works through
the power of goodness. Prayer of a bad
man well disposed towards you works by eliminating his ill-will.
574) What
the yogi does in his inner discipline is to touch the higher consciousness of
the higher being. The same touch is obtained by the devotee in his prayer. The discriminating reader does the same by
following His arguments.
575) No
man need be persuaded to enjoy his maximum as he is at it. The one formula or strategy man is incapable of resisting is to enjoy
more.
Man can learn from the collective, can't teach it.
One
can lead the world, if he is strong, but can't teach it even if he is a genius,
as learning is from the collective to the individual.
576) The greatest newest knowledge that is several steps ahead of us is really powerful. When surrendered, the Force released will render this great knowledge meaningless. The greater the knowledge we surrender, the more powerful the surrender is.
· Any method, power or knowledge becomes nothing when it is surrendered.
· The greater the method, etc. surrendered, the greater is the power of surrender.
577) Each act of consecration is the exertion of the will to wean itself away from the evil and hostility inside.
578) To try for a greater discipline or even trying to understand more than our comprehension will permit will disturb the equilibrium and create insoluble problems.
579) The rounded perfection is not, as long as mind and vital are active.
580) All
that we ever need is inside is the formula of the Spirit. Let us extend it to life experience. All that we need is there
abundantly in our own practical experience.
581) Often, maybe always, one notices that a thought is accompanied by its opposite. Instead of the mind alternating from one to the other, one should steady the mind till the conflict gives way and the mind rises.
582) The character of outer acts is determined by the inner appreciation of those ideas. Those tricks of life you have mentally overcome will not bother you in life. Those great ideals your mind cherishes will serve you.
583) Mind knows the parts like a mechanic. Supermind is the creative design engineer.
584) Thought
Mind thinks aloud.
Higher mind understands silently.
Supermind acts without thought. Its thought is act.
At Sat, thought, a mental activity, becomes Existence.
Sensation of Ananda and Consciousness of Chit are thoughts of these planes.
The vital converts thought into feeling.
Matter's silence is its thinking.
Thought in the Absolute is
capacity to act withheld.
He who has a prerogative withheld unmanifest is Brahman in that respect.
Its manifestation is its CHOICE when it is mature.
For Brahman to be effective in the world, Brahman should manifest in the world directly as Brahman, not as Truth or Love.
Now Brahman manifests in the world as Ignorance.
585) Surrender achieves what the dissolution of the seven Ignorances will achieve.
586) One succeeds when he does what he was not able to do so far. Yoga realises when one surrenders what he has been unable to surrender so far.
587) Crossing over to Supermind – Methods.
By SILENCE.
Passing through the range of spiritual mind.
Taking another man's point of view.
Shedding ego.
Crossing over Time.
Acquiring the Knowledge of Supermind.
TOTAL SURRENDER.
588) As Mother gives no occasion to lie, She never gives you a single occasion to ask anyone for a favour.
589) One can be idealistic in love, not in marriage, as love is an ideal and marriage is a social custom.
590) Idealism
One can be an idealist which involves no action.
A practical idealist wishes the collective to act.
Action by the collective is by an organisation.
An organisation will be unidealistic and destroy any idealism.
An idealist who wants to practise must DO or ACT first, before he teaches others.
It must be an inner action.
The RULE is,
Act inwardly first – and preach outwardly next.
Such preaching may not be necessary.
591) Ill will against another is the vehicle to give our abilities and opportunities to another.
Intense hatred of another relates him to us intensely and through that the best in us goes to the best in him.
592) Generally a problem is solved by the one who
has created it. It may be the only rule with a rare exception.
593) All
gains are gains of the ego within the society, using social resources to
destroy the society. Man calls himself
successful when he becomes a successful anti-social parasite.
594) The ONLY mischief-maker in life is the Ego. It is the Ego who is searching for the culprit.
595) He
who sees man only as a bad character sees one section of his personality, as
his view is a mental view. One who sees
him ONLY
as a good person is again having a good view from his mind only.
596) The power of writing comes from the writer. Whatever Sri Aurobindo has written about, even if it is on ordinary affairs, contains His power in the writing.
597) Sadness is an emotion between incapacity and failure. Cheerfulness is an emotion between capacity and success.
598) To have a full conception of the Absolute as it applies to daily life even in ONE act is to begin this yoga.
599) This yoga cannot be done without changing consciousness. Changing consciousness means dizziness, disease, drastic changes in life circumstances and human relationships.
600) Discipline exercised in one place compensates in another place. Hence rhythm and balance are of importance.
602) If a
drop of Love comes down on earth, the earth will be crushed, which means no man
on earth has felt it till now. We know rational thinking is rare on earth. HE has offered Supramental consciousness in
these conditions.
604) Man lives a partial life. Problems arise when he insists on the partial nature. He quickly moves to the whole to solve the problem or life does so. This is unconscious. Becoming conscious, problems disappear.
605) To
locate every assumption HE has made in The Life Divine the first time HE mentions it and to remember it is one sure way of understanding the BOOK.
607) An aimless life is a waste, said Mother. SHE also says yoga is not meant for one who has an aim. Aim limits the scope of the limitless scope of transformation.
608) Society treats a pioneer as a band of
robbers would handle a victim. The pity
is the victim wants to rise to their expectation.
609) No man who could know the result will err in the beginning. The fullness of the spiritual vision sees that. Sri Aravindam gives at least the attitudes based on that vision. It is not so important to secure the result as to get that vision.
611) Intelligence is a product of primal matter.
It understands objects in its own terms. Hence it is limited. Intuition being a ray of the Spirit
understands things as they are. Integral experience becomes what the object is.
612) Existence is a whole.
Expression is partial.
613) Arrogance is the aspiration of lowness to knowledge of life.
614) People refuse to send children to school or avail of hospital facilities, escape vaccination and innoculation, and oppose fertilizers. They exercise their freedom to perish! Modern man resists spiritual knowedge, ridicules facilities to acquire intuition, escapes prayer and meditation, opposes values.
He insists on his freedom to be
irrational.
Vital intuition can see in life what The Life Divine says.
Intense GOOD WILL can reveal in life the insight of Sri Aurobindo.
617) Concentration is easier when one is trying to solve a problem or trying to remove an undesirable trait.
618) Corruption
that is rampant is the other side of uncivilised pride in denying the due to
the deserving. It cannot be defended on any score. Corruption has many other
explanations too, but this is
psychologically true.
621) Work needs work culture, not personal or social culture.
Work first, anything next.
622) Co-operation is conceived as recognition of one's authority more than helping the work to be completed. The administrative officer in a company is enabling the sales people to sell more by working in the office, whereas to the salesman cooperation is the other man coming with him and selling. This is based on Ignorance of the Whole and the insistence of the Ego.
624) Atma, Purusha, Ishwara are terms that grew out of intuition and exactly reflect what the Being is. It cannot err as a mental concept which sees partially or like a foreign word that tries to represent one concept in terms of another as Silence.
625) One who has faith in prayer sulks to pray and desires the results without prayer.
626) Man finds the right path but chooses to leave it for a while. Sticking to the path he has found, man finds it difficult.
627) One characteristic of monarchy was it was treason to aspire for the throne. Its extension to the public was progress was ambition and ambition was a sin. One would be shy of wishing to acquire a higher academic degree.
629) Thinking,
like any other human initiative, stands between God and work in Nature. Yoga is to let the Force work on Nature
with man as a docile willing instrument.
630) We see the work of the devotees spreads
universally. We also see the devotees are victims of their own temperament. When the latter vanishes, the goodness of
the devotees becomes self-existent Goodness.
631) With
one drop of the opposite you still belong to human perfection.
636) The soldier's body is full of wounds. The emotional body of the idealist is full of sores. The yogi fights the evil forces in the subtle plane. Nor can he escape the rewards of his mission.
639)
Infinity is neither the opposite of finite, nor the inexhaustible endless or boundless finite.
Infinity is a self-existing Infinity.
Infinity is that which refuses to be finite.
640) Selfishness is selfishness. It is uncompromising. Impulse is impulse. It is unrelenting.
652) Man asks for help without discrimination. As they say there is an invisible discrimination in their going about indiscriminately asking for help. One who is working to destroy a rival will happily ask him for help so that he will be more effectively destroyed.
653) Not having an emotional response is cause enough to feel frustrated. To feel the rise of emotions by itself and attribute it to those who have no idea of it is a sure way of investing in disappointment.
654) A good great emotion, on close scrutiny, reveals itself to be a selfish emotion. Beyond the self, nothing exists.
655) The greatest attraction for friendship is on the surface. It lasts till the depths rise and betray. Even after such an experience, with others the surface attraction survives.
Knowledge has so many facets. Till all are experienced, knowledge is not really useful.
659) Forgetfulness is unconscious while remembering is conscious. Memory is remembering the part and therefore it makes us unconscious of the Whole.
660) Problems arise ONLY when we insist on doing the wrong thing or passively allow such things to be done.
661) One
who knows all his opinions about others, will, on reflection be able to see
that all those opinions he actively has about others are his own passive
preparation of his own personality. His
own life and what has happened till then will bear out of the truth of it.
662)
The Rishis have told us that the Spirit can go back to its origin at any time it chooses.
Democracy has given us all the opportunities that can lead man to great prosperity whenever he chooses.
Temperament all the time SILENTLY tells us that the whole world can work for your greatness if you
choose to be pleasant, in true humility.
All those who have seen the truths of subtle life know man's choice – that he can choose to be the Divine at any moment.
It is the moment of Truth.
663) As long as success or failure faces you, it
means ego survives.
664) What
was meant for the rare few in the past centuries is now available for hundreds
and thousands. It is true of
spirituality too.
665) One qualification for doing yoga is absence of boredom. One should NOT need an occupation, nor should there be any preoccupation. One should normally be happy when he has nothing to do. This results as yoga advances, but even to start yoga, this is essential.
666) When you see the goodness of the good man, ignoring his other side, his goodness will be effective in your life. But it cannot bring out the GOOD in him which can emerge only when you accept his goodness alongside his evil and NOT react, maintaining equality.
667) In
all literature, especially great literature, whatever the different characters
try to secure, Life accomplishes either
through them or in spite of them its goal of fullness. Life never accomplishes
partly.
668) In a
wider view, the goals of the family, company, country are fixed and all
individuals submit to them. To fix the
goals of the organisation to serve individual interests and insist on everyone
else cooperating is a narrow view of the mind.
669) We accept the power of money however we have earned it. We fully accept power even when it is cruel and tyrannical. Can we accept life like that? Then life will become luck. We accept our body in spite of the filthy sickness it has. Women have accepted men all along like that. Man now accepts woman like that. To be able to see the Absolute as one that contains all that we see here is true knowledge.
670) We always live our lives as a whole, as without its being a whole it cannot exist for one minute. Every time there is a crisis, the whole reveals. Every time there is a success, the whole reveals. Yet we insist on the surface and live there to complain.
671) To refuse to think, to feel, to act is the path of yogic progress. For greater progress or fuller progress, one should think, feel and act for the Divine.
672) The ordinary man has access to concentration when a problem presses upon him.
To be
able to concentrate without such external pressure is yoga.
673) Absolute courage is demanded of Avatars, not all other idealists. Idealists have a great courage in the given circumstances. This is so because generally the idealist is one who builds on the foundations of the Avatar.
674) Among
the many civilised habits the world has developed stands foremost the
negotiation table that replaced the battlefront. Punctuality, egolessness,
respect for the other man, equality for the lowly, etc. are a formidable array
of civilised habits. Payment for
services due still brings up the rear.
675) The dark spot of the evil is the vital ego surfacing.
676) The confrontation with people and events will vanish in the measure it vanishes inside. One can feel a taste for such experiences inside. Not only the inner conflict should go, but the taste for it too must go.
677) Vital self-assertion expresses in the mind as taste for intellectual confrontation.
678) The earth-shaping and earth-shaking forces
are there inside.
679) Ages
on the outer field are years in the inner life.
680) Progress is made by trying to solve problems, never otherwise.
681) The
contradiction is there for us to understand as a complement. When done so, the
opposing forces begin to cooperate initially unwillingly. One can fail to
understand them and act in cooperation as far as possible. That leaves him an open field of betrayal.
683) At
times of crisis we do see that no one can help. But we fail to see that Mother alone helps and SHE has never failed to
help. Such a recognition is a beginning to know Her.
684) Meanness
by its total negative efficiency puts out the highest wisdom. We ignore the
wisdom as meanness hurts. Should it not
hurt, you will grow wise by the meanness and there is a chance of meanness
changing.
685) The negative bothers us. We reconcile to an ever living quarrel.
Next we can move away from it.
Initially the negative will triumph.
Never will it consent to go away from us.
It will wait for an occasion or excuse to return.
Unless the inner negative
is removed, it will persist.
The inner negative cannot be removed until you exhaust its evolutionary use for you when it dissolves and disappears.
Wishing to be of help or service to another is our link with the negative.
When that goes, the negative will stick to you for the prestige of it.
Negative leaving you
forever is pure GRACE.
686) SENSE of physical cleanliness is the first sign of prosperity. The next is orderliness which later becomes part of organisation.
687) Why God has created evil and poisonous insects is an eternal question. An answer is available in the process of creation of Self-absorption and the method of evolution and transformation. Good when self-absorbed becomes evil, nectar when self-absorbed turns into poison. Evil is necessary for something to be transformed into Good.
688) Finding the inner light opens a door. One more method, rather an easier one, is for those who are aware of the inner darkness – evil. It is to get rid of it by prayer. That too opens a door.
689) One call to Mother is equal or better than years of human effort.
A call is easier than destroying evil as the incoming light dissolves the evil. Some people may feel it easier to pull out a thorn and restore equilibrium.
691) Any endowment makes one superior. Be superior, do not FEEL superior. One's progress begins when existing endowments do not give a feeling of superiority.
692) When one forgets his own problem, whether it is a lost object or evil present inside, it only means he does not wish to get rid of it. He enjoys its presence in some way or some measure.
693) To have the prayers answered in consciousness is grace; to have it done in the substance is Supergrace.
694) Hostility
in the being becomes darkness in the body, resistance in the vital and finally
thought in the mind. Thought which rules
the world presently is at bottom hostility, while at the same time it has the
capacity to seek the Absolute.
· Any faculty belongs to the Absolute and the Hostility. The choice is ours.
·
It is given to man to entirely
belong to Her at any moment.
695) "All thought is evil" – The Mother.
Sri Aurobindo says Ego is reason.
Reason is coordinating intelligence.
Intelligence is expressed in thought.
As Ego is evil, thought is evil.
696) Man is bent upon not being conscious of his unconsciousness. He is quite conscious of that goal.
697) Yoga is not a cooperative affair. There is no guru who can help you. There is no question of your being assisted by anyone. You have to do it yourself, severely alone.
698) Self-defence
gives legitimacy even for violence. Ego's self-defence is to destroy others by
all possible means including treachery. Hence
any ego can be trusted to betray when its time for dissolution comes.
702) Popularity is an expansive movement while ego is a constrictive one. So far popularity is achieved mainly for the ego. It is true especially for the popularity during one's lifetime.
703) Mother called in may strengthen our own undesirable personality. She must be called in to dissolve the evil in us. It is true calling.
704) Those who are fully open down to the very physical bodies to their idealistic urges seek adventure, as it offers a fullness which is not in life. Heroism expresses in many ways. Romance is that heroism that seeks a great adventure of total sacrifice for a love that is an idealistic emotion that fills the being.
705) When the origin in our subconscious of an omen of a wrong type is recognised and reversed, it changes into a good omen by calling Mother.
706) The theory of The Life Divine and the practices of Synthesis of Yoga are blended into one poetic experience in yoga in Savitri.
707) The first realisation of the mental man is
to know that the subliminal moves the surface - and then he sees the .
708) As a huge machine comes to a dead halt by one important part breaking, the ascending human knowledge stops suddenly when one misinformation creeps in. Making impressions facts is one such source.
709) One
who has moved heaven and earth for long and achieved his goal, found out the same could have been achieved
in the beginning by sustained calling.
Our sitting for meditation is like writing. Meditation seeking us is inspiration.
Descending meditation is ascending inspiration.
714) I am Brahman. My body is Sat and my life is Chit. Brahman is beyond my body as the Inconscient. Moving from Mind to Body and beyond in true Spirit, I can realise the Brahman I am.
715) The physical mind can read an argument as mere words. It can only read like that as it is physical and can only relate to the physical form. Only the thinking mind can know what it says. Even the thinking mind cannot know what the words mean spiritually. Psychic alone knows.
717) Human life can be said to be a training ground to discover the unity of discords presented at a given moment.
718) Imagination that produces great literature is parallel in man to the subjective extension of consciousness that is Time. Withdrawing imagination, one can transcend Time and, instead of great literature, create immortal vibrations.
719) Initiative
is external; imagination is internal.
Imagination is inner initiative of thought.
720) Romance is the adventure of idealistic emotional opportunities.
722) An act is an integrated one, the integration
being one of planes. Man's unawareness of his act in the higher planes provides
him opportunities to develop those higher faculties.
723) Human civilisation has touched its acme in thought, feelings and culture a millennium ago. The most advanced culture today lacks its main elements. It will do well to acquire it fully.
724) The abilities and faculties of one can also
serve in their display to keep the festering sore he is down below. Maybe it is
one way of abilities to shape themselves.
726) To the emotional man, life reveals the whole future and the past in the given moment's experience. No mental opinion hitherto framed is now valid.
727) The physical man learns by experience and sticks to his learning. The vital
man sees the revelation of the moment. The mental man lives his opinions once formed.
728) To be able to talk freely in a conversation
is a stage to which one arrives through vital maturity as well as mental
ability in the use of language.
729) Luck is to have the vital urge under the vital intuition of the soul or psychic. Mother's Luck is to have the psychic as vital intuition.
734) When the known smatterings are saturated by the unknown classical cadence, the ignorant knowledge feels an evanescent elevation.
735) In
periods of social transition, the new need can be served by the old attitude.
Selfishness can now serve selflessness. One
can compete on the basis of wider cooperation.
736) Society
is resourceful. It can force selfishness to serve social selfishness, organise
corruption into a system, make cruelty a public duty, render self-abnegation of
an empire its own patriotic duty. Society
is resourceful enough to serve the individual or make the individual serve
itself, for good as well as its opposite.
737) Comprehensive preciseness is embodied in the all-inclusive concentration where the intensity of concentration at the centre is the same at all other points.
738) Five concepts and strategies
To know Infinity in the body.
To remember he is that Infinity in the body of the finite.
To recognise the hostility, evil, negative in himself.
To be ready for the transformation of each of them.
To avail of it through total
surrender.
These
are the FIVE concepts and strategies of this yoga.
Conceive, remember, recognise, be willing and then Surrender totally.
739) The five concepts and strategies of yoga come to us as 1) mind shifting to Supermind, 2) any great act you have done was done only by you unaided,
3) thought is bad, 4) humility, and 5) how fully you now use your opportunities.
To see the Infinity mind must move to Supermind.
To remember you are Brahman, know you can act only unaided.
Thought is bad, feelings are evil, sensations are hostile.
Humility enables transformation.
To surrender totally, you must have exhausted your opportunities here.
740) The Absolute expressed in our motive is surrender.
741) What
is to be surrendered is never a question, as everything is to be surrendered.
742) Mind gives its idea to the vital and body to execute. This is work. By consecration mind gives its idea to the Spirit and Supermind. Therefore, end results come in the beginning.
743) Surrender is the recognition of Brahman's remembering its hiding and emerging out of Ignorance.
744) Self-giving is to give oneself to others, not to oneself.
745) That surrender made with the understanding that the hostility that
stands between one and That would be transformed by Mother into That which is
Infinite in this world of ours, will be accepted by Her. It would be better that that surrender does not depend on that
understanding too.
746) Concentration to go into the inner being and subliminal comes from consecration.
747) Surrender arrests involution and reverses it to evolution.
748) Brahman that, by self-absorption, became matter and man, emerges by surrender. By surrender it regains the freedom voluntarily surrendered.
Brahman gave up its freedom to be Brahman. Surrender gives up the slow deliberate delight Nature offers in favour of instant freedom into Brahman.
751) Life compels a poor man to subsist on little food and do great work, ignore diseases and continue to work. The will rises to the occasion and releases the required energy. Hardness of the body and emotions is the result.
754) Capacity to reverse an ill-omen into a good omen is the capacity that transcends the human.
755) The perfection required for yogic action is the same perfection we see in subconscious life.
Technology is as efficient and
perfect as the subconscious perfection. One
can see the same perfection in Life Response. Capacity to evoke Life Response
is capacity for action.
Thought
that is inherently negative turns into an instrument of reaching the Absolute
in the mind.
762) It is
said that the absolute maintains its absoluteness always. We know of partial
systems and absolute systems, of partial chaos and absolute chaos. How does the
absolute show itself in the partial situation. The partial system and partial chaos offer to be absolutely partial.
System, chaos, partial nature or something must be absolute for the thing to exist. It cannot otherwise exist.
Communication presupposes connection.
There must be a medium of language or letters or sound or symbols for communication.
As everything is made
entirely of the Absolute, we must be able to see it in some form or other.
763) Decision,
the process of a decision, is the same in small as well as great acts. What
differs is the wisdom. The greater the
weight of the decision, more of wisdom gives way.
764) To
know the Absolute in life, to perceive the relative is the Absolute is to fill
life full, rich, whole, wholesome to overflowing. It will be richer for the human soul than for the divine soul in
Sachchidananda.
765) The
Vedic immortality of the Soul turns into the Immortality of the Soul in the
body in Integral Yoga. The divine body realises
the divine universality and Supreme Infinity.
767) If you are receiving more than you can assimilate, it is natural that you should widen your receptivity. Bring in a bigger receptacle when the smaller one is overflowing.
One line of Silence reveals one line of the subtle vision.
771) Power is power conceded.
No
one, neither the society nor the tyrannical mind, has any power over us if we
do not concede it.
772) The
level of current literature is a measure of education for two reasons. First,
it is a direct product of that educated mental culture. Next, excellent
literature without readership cannot survive.
773) Great writers remain great in spite of
their prejudices. The universality of their perception is not marred by their
topical prejudices which should be there ordinarily. Whether any writer has raised the current prejudices to his universal
greatness is not known, but is a possibility.
775) The efficacy of Mother's Mantras requires
that perfection of form.
776) Cycles of life do have a physical force.
Only the FORCE
can force it out.
778) Enjoyment denied is discipline which accomplishes.
Enjoyment accomplishes at a higher
level. One can dispense with accomplishment or enjoyment that leads to
accomplishment, but not enjoyment
itself, as enjoyment is existence.
779) Mind that conceives of Infinity becomes Supermind.
781) All or any movement in creation takes place because of the movement of knowledge-will of the Conscious Soul.
782) Meditation
is a path of spiritual realisation in yoga is a general truth. In His yoga meditation helps to complete in
the descent through all planes of being what was achieved by the ascent.
The governor acts as messenger for the Prime Minister.
783) If affection can be distinguished from charm, attachment, lure, lust or attraction, we see it is not any of them. Once it is there, it includes all of these. It is distinguished from Love in that it is two way, while Love can give itself without reciprocation.
784) Regretting the past, of course, sets one on the right path. One who does not regret, but desists from the habit of the past, can still progress based on his dynamism. Repeating the past in a greater measure, one can make a far greater progress along the lines of the past.
785) One may have great knowledge and may be unwilling to give it to others. It may even be wealth or joy, but it can be given only through Love, not as joy or wealth or wisdom. It must be Love that can never expect a return.
786) The first semblance of sincerity reveals the hostility of the mind and vital. To surrender these vibrations is more difficult than surrendering ideas.
787) By asking us to be open and receptive to the Truth He had moved from heaven, He only tells us NOT to enjoy the intensity of the hostile vibrations.
788) If
people oppose someone, he belongs to them at the level they oppose him.
789) Intellectuality is to organise sense impressions into infallible facts.
790) When She comes to you, She grants Her RIGHT to you fully. But we work it out through our belief in various things. She waits till our beliefs are out, rather the resistances of our beliefs.
A practical concept of Infinity is to know mind, body,
matter and everything created is truly Infinity.
The finite is the Infinite of finites.
792) Intense headache disappears when we recognise it as our resistance to the descending grace. Repetition of "I surrender my evil" removes it at once.
793) The
definition of selfishness is that which declares that one is a friend if he is
devoted only to himself holding all others as his enemy.
794) We learn and practise it to make the knowledge power. The Life Divine is written in such a fashion that as we read it with an open mind or open soul it becomes realisation. The entire yoga is to be open to the descending Truth.
795) In reading The Life Divine, it is our aim to reach Him through His writings. Therefore we concentrate on the ideas. It takes a very long time and great labour. Concentrate on Him, the Book at once reveals to you.
796) The greatest dynamism of selfishness is seen in its resourceful organisation to crush anything ideal, to tyrannise idealistic romance.
797) It is true anything is pardonable in anyone unless one has to defend himself against liquidation. As crimes are pardonable, crimes or non-crimes are punishable for the sake of self-defence.
798) Mind that strains at a discipline tires.
Vital that enjoys expands. It knows no strain.
Mental discipline that organises facts into ideas grows in curiosity and is ever expansive.
Mind that throws its ideas into emotional poetry knows no strain.
It is Spirit that
energises the physical sensation through emotional ideas that thrill the body.
799) To be
able to see another's lack of equipment as the other side of his great
potentials helps actualise your own inner potentials of infinite dimension. His lack of equipment then emerges as a
great link.
800) Perversity is surely one sign of hostility. It shows itself as when the thing desired comes, man has the ability to resent it.
801) Consciousness that aims at growth in a certain direction invites more organised forces to tease it out of its present organisation till it fully emerges. If, for any reason, the teasing stops in the middle, the pressure of aspiration developed expresses in several ways, one of which is human blood pressure.
805) Aspiration
opens the being to the descending Truth as the danger opens it to call from the
depths.
806) Privacy
is a vast domain. It is as wide as the outer life and is more intense and
interesting. Yogic life is private life
in every sense of the word.
807) Thinking is a function of the environment. Thinking of the future has no meaning as its environment is not there now.
808) Man who travels in a plane or listens to TV or for that matter uses any of the modern products, is allowing them to serve him. It is physical and indirect. With greater consciousness his enjoyment can be direct and it can be vital, mental, spiritual. At the (hrdaya samudra) supramental level, it becomes complete.
809) Knowledge starts as observed facts, known information, understood idea, formulated knowledge, etc. When the mind is saturated by the comprehension, the emotions endorse. Again, the body receives when emotions are saturated. At that stage, knowledge becomes power.
810) Behaviour becomes awkward when the mind knows the truth of a situation but the body is unable to act according to that knowledge.
811)
Human life seems to rest on such
flimsy things that make it often seem as if
nothing matters. At other times, any small turn in life appears to be of
the greatest significance. If both are
true, what next?
812) Hostile forces are very efficient and act instantaneously. To attack them in self-defence is possible or permissible. Wishing to attack them when they do not bother you would lead to their attacking you.
813) There can be tension if one is to choose
between Truth and Falsehood. To one to
whom both are the same, for a higher or lower reason there can be no tension.
814) Intellect becomes intuition when we know the several intermediate stages and are willing to change at the next stage to ours.
815) Man receiving God's gift and forgetting Him is the way of God in Man remembering his godhead. By his forgetting God in his surface, MAN tries to awaken that memory in his subconscious.
816) Ingratitude
is the gratitude of the subconscious.
817) When a servant calls his Queen 'woman' in public and it is acceptable to royalty, maybe enjoyable, it shows the extent to which liking and need can go to compromise for the sake of need and liking.
819) Knowledge of the ways of poverty is essential to build prosperity in theory. The economic response to cultural deprivations is abundant austerities.
820) The scientists explore matter and Nature to know of them, like the customer discovering the use of the computer himself.
821) Coarseness is falsehood in social accomplishment.
822) Great men are well known. Greater men are known only to those around and would be known to the world later. The greatest of men are unknown to the world. Their work upholds the world. Beyond that are men who can choose what they want to be.
824) The
physical asked to do something which it has not accepted or understood is
compulsion. Education of the mind preceding the physical action removes
compulsion or changes it into persuasion. Education
changes compulsion into persuasion.
825) He who is lecturing all his life about punctuality is always late. Unconsciousness is unable to see what it is consciously.
826) Obscenity that is vulgar which one avoids is not obscene intrinsically, as in extreme moments of privacy this has pure elements of intense rapture.
827) It is authority that achieves, creates discipline, efficiency. All culture is a result of authority, the inner authority. Physical authority rises through social, mental and psychological to spirituality. Spiritual authority is the ultimate.
Authority achieves.
There is no achievement without authority.
828) The progress or luck I talk of is not the progress of life or luck as we know in life. It is the progress in life with the higher force and it is the Luck of the higher consciousness expressed in life.
829) Capacity for suspicion in a character
otherwise true and honest, renders that truth untrue. Values are valueless unless perfect.
830) Man prides in being an instrument of grace in the world. No one prides when he is equally an instrument of God's wrath on others, but it is equally the grace of God. Instead of being an instrument of grace, he can be grace itself if only he agrees to express Love.
831) Transition is destructive or at least wasteful. A transition that is effected with the least waste or no waste indicates the mature stability of the society.
832) The
absolute freedom of Brahman that includes the freedom to be in fetters when
practised in human circumstances of vitiated motives, directly helps you to lose the freedom to be functional, as every
element in the structure enjoys that freedom negatively.
· God is FREEDOM in every sense.
· He wishes to extend it to man in fetters.
· God's freedom includes the right to lose it.
· Man offers God the fetters he is in.
· God ends up as man's slave.
833) The other side is the nether side.
What we consider the nether side is the side about which you should take delight, as it admits of transformation.
834) To be able to function without disturbing the equilibrium is to function in yogic consciousness.
Origin matters, not
appearance.
836) Methods offer temporary results that last
as long as the methods are followed; essence, permanent results.
837) A desirable progress may become a possibility. If the atmosphere does not support it or is not strong enough to stand it, there will be disturbances in the atmosphere.
838) Vacillation is the human way of recognising contradictions as complementaries.
839) Whether you serve a man or family or a cause, at the end it will give you up. It is better you know it before and give up service.
Give up Service which will give you up in
the end.
841) Prestige is power of ego.
Non-ego has greater prestige and greater power.
Money is sought not for its sake, but for its power.
Money cannot be an incentive in rich countries.
Money can make poor countries rich.
A country is rich in the measure it neglects money, having it in abundance.
The oppressed in several ways all over the world do so unconsciously. He who wants to serve the world must consciously represent people's wants.
Conscious representative aspiration is the future world leadership.
Oppression is unconscious aspiration.
Conscious
aspiration is collective evolution.
842) Rarely people understood Him; no one wanted to follow Him or Her.
844) Mind takes more use out of dull raw materials; the Spirit draws infinite delight out of dumb matter.
845) The self-preservative capacity of the parts of the being – vital, mental, etc – responds with sorrow when JOY is offered to them by grace.
Having long lived with sorrow, man has come to love it.
846) There are occasions when we know what is right but we never move to do it at all. It is the unconsciousness of the substance which moves not.
Clarity alone cannot act.
847) Health
can be diet-centred, but can also be centred around a clarity about health. Hunger and health are concepts of
consciousness which we often convert into concepts of diet or medicine.
848) Health is determined by food. Hunger is determined by the intake of food.
This is true, but not the whole truth.
Hunger is a habit; health is a long term habit.
Within limits, both are determined by the mind.
Health can improve on less food.
Hunger is a way of one giving attention to oneself.
Exceedingly good health on
less food or any food is possible for a mind of clarity on health.
849) Friendship is the capacity to delight in the company of another and honour its sacredness. It is delight in another as he is. It is purity of emotional relationship for its own sake.
850) It is not history but fiction that fulfils. Most want their history to be fiction too.
851) Man calls the grace
mostly when in distress, very rarely to make yogic progress. His response to the descending grace is
never complete, but is always minimal to remove the pressing problem.
853) The
Divine gives complete protection which is total in every sense except that it
is helpless when the wilful self-assertion of complete folly chooses to walk
out or turn against grace. Mother takes
it to greater richness.
854) If you intensely aspire for something, Life grants it perversely after a long time, and Mother fulfils it graciously in an unexpected fashion, rarely unpalatable.
The fulfilment is a marvel when one is full
of good will. In fulfilling it, Mother
avoids our perverse propensities, but we always insist till She grants them.
855) Ignorance is the greatest accomplishment in creation.
Taste of Ignorance is over.
To evolve, to emerge out of Ignorance as knowledge is Delight.
The choice is between Taste of Ignorance and Delight of emerging out of it as Knowledge.
Power should precede Love
that is Delight.
Power is the Force of Knowledge
Taste is sensation.
Sensation should lead to knowledge that is Force.
The Being tasted Ignorance and that sense should give it the knowledge by which power it should emerge out of ignorance.
The choice is between the present taste and future knowledge for
which one needs the power of knowledge to emerge.
Nature's taste of Ignorance changing into the knowledge of evolution by the power of emergence is transformation.
856) Someone betrays another. It means he has a need to betray another. The other has also a need to be betrayed. This is the way friendship fulfils itself in uncultured societies.
Betrayal fulfils friendship.
857) Knowledge
is Power
Supramental Knowledge need not be converted into power. It is Power.
The translation of that power or its effectivity is in the measure knowledge is true.
It extends or expresses in the gross or subtle plane depending on how the knowledge is received.
Subtle reception is possible when there is no conscious knowledge of receiving it.
Our own minds may resist or those to whom we give it may resist it, but those who are around the hearers would receive it subtly. There it effectuates.
To have effectivity in the gross material plane, it must be received in our gross material parts.
858) Anyone
coming out of a post, political or administrative, shrinks in power as it is
temporal power. One cannot quit
spiritual power. A spiritual person occupying temporal power quitting it will NOT lose a shade of what
he enjoyed.
859) Man
does not cherish his insufficiencies. This goes to the greatest length of man's
unwillingness to recognise a simple fact that he is illiterate. It will be intriguing to know a confirmed
idiot has never considered himself in that light. Nothing infuriates him more
than its recognition by anyone, especially himself.
860) The sea is not all waves nor is the sky all dawn. The brightest of lives will be bright only for a short period, not forever.
861) Man dividing the earth into his land does
not divide earth, nor is the atmosphere divided by the building of houses. Brahman is not and cannot be divided by
creation.
Betrayal does not destroy the basic unity.
Becoming
does not destroy the unity of Being.
862) Surrender restores the unity with the Absolute.
Transformation restores the original status of Spirit.
Universalisation removes the division of ego.
Transcendentalisation helps find the original centre.
Spiritual awakening is the great beginning.
Birth of the Supramental Being takes ego to the higher hemisphere.
Man in Knowledge moves to the Absolute through life, ascent, rebirth, self-awareness, transformation, all through surrender.
Surrender is the beginning and surrender is the end.
Surrender is the reversal of the original Self-conception.
Surrender
is the self-conception of the psychic.
Creation is the Self-conception of Brahman.
Surrender reverses creation into evolution.
Surrender reverses involution into evolution.
863) Mother says that it is not so difficult to change as to know where to change. As Brahman created Ignorance, each man has created his own version of ignorance. To know that is self-awareness. To change there is self-conception. According to Mother, to remember that one is God is more difficult than becoming God.
864) Horizontal expansion is existence.
Vertical expansion is growth.
Inner is growth, outer is existence.
865) We evaluate historical figures, great leaders, artists, geniuses by our norms. They deserve to be evaluated by a different standard. Everyone deserves to be evaluated on his terms, which means one should pass judgement on no one else.
866) Education
sublimates by knowledge. Experience sublimates by the weight of living. To know the real role played by an event in
one's life is to sublimate the reaction it generated.
867) One
becomes rough in language and behaviour when people around do not respond to
soft words. A hard atmosphere generates
a rough character.
Less energy in a hungry population necessitates harsh language.
Energy is the basis of culture, as in every other area of life.
Movement is energy. At bottom lies movement.
869) A decision will lead to right results if the inner attitude and outer factors are all right. If both are wrong or inadequate, it will be a non-starter. One can begin successfully but will lead to later failure if the outer alone is right. When the inner alone is right, ultimately it will be a success.
872) Responses received by one's own effort are not to be accepted as they are. It has to be sifted to separate the true ones.
873) He who successfully hides everything he does does not know it is his long-standing subconscious wish sanctioned by life.
874)
Socially chastity is for the woman to ensure her husband's property for her children.
Psychologically chastity for man or woman gives a rare intensity in the emotional relationship.
Spiritually "all in each and each in all" requires the highest emotional intensity in every relationship.
875) Life acts always in the most efficient way, expending the least energy. At those times we find the human instruments stingy, mean, cunning, etc. Seeing their evolutionary role, they may deserve praise.
Evolutionary praise is social condemnation.
876) Reaction
is inability; equality is capacity.
877) The first charge on any faculty is to preserve itself. Unconsciousness, to preserve itself, very quickly forgets whatever consciousness does to it. Ingratitude is the conscious effort of unconsciousness at self-preservation.
878) Silence makes the inner thought eloquent in
the world.
879) The work is INSIDE, only inside. There is NO work outside, except to express the inside.
880) A new technology needs only acceptance to countermand agelong ignorance. Time is not needed to adapt it. Mother acts if accepted, needs no time.
881) When self-formulation of knowledge is not saturated inside by becoming power, it seeks communication, endorsement outside.
882) As man is using only an infinitesimal part of his energy for his survival, when harnessed and organised it is easily and eminently possible to increase his energy a few hundred-fold. Anyone can rise a hundred-fold and any nation can rise by organisation ten-fold.
883) When no crime is unpardonable one becomes neutrally eligible to see the Marvel. The Marvel discloses to one who can reach the origin of the movement and evaluate it from the motive of that particular movement. Then each contradiction will disclose it is making for its exact complement on the other side.
884) Patience,
Equality, Sincerity are great concepts in yoga. Efficiency, luck are wide
concepts in life. One who seeks
efficiency or luck can try to acquire one of the yogic concepts within the
bounds of his projects, which will bring yogic force to life.
885) Often
we search for an answer for months and finally we arrive at it to our
satisfaction. Instead of acting on that
answer, it is better we surrender it.
886) The small vital's perverse thinking often considers the greatest future or present benefactor as the one who exploits it. As and when the vital is draining the benefactor dry, it can loudly proclaim the opposite.
887) Before man reaches the intensity he seeks in joy, it is available for him in grief which is rarely missed.
888) "Is not your offence sweet to me? Have you not the right to offend me? Don't you come closer to me by that offence?" is the language of love.
Who will refuse to God the right to anything, even betrayal?
889) Management is management of nether forces.
890) The
best of men in their best moments do not function at the peak of their
capacities. If they do, it is just for a small part of the day. Yoga cannot be done without the effort
being at the peak all through the day.
891) The greater the height man rises to, the lower the depths open. Heights do not increase perfection by themselves. Heights offer greater opportunities for higher perfection.
892) Man's mastery over circumstances is
partial. He moves up when it is complete. Outer mastery comes from inner
mastery. He can move up to rule the
entire world by entirely mastering his inner life.
Mastery is inner mastery.
You will have mastery over one against whom you don't complain.
It
comes either by submission or humility.
True humility is true mastery.
Mastery is absence of complaint.
893) Evolutionary enterprise is the enterprise
of the feminine energy.
Man releases energy, woman conserves it.
Organisation is woman's; man's part is to release it.
894) No man makes inner progress or any real progress in any work whether it is leading a nation or cooking a meal unless he really enjoys it.
Progress is from work enjoyed.
· Work that yields progress is that which you enjoy.
· To enjoy a work it must be constantly learned.
·
Drudgery keeps you where you are.
· There is greater scope to learn in anti-social activities.
· Oppressed people enjoy working as they constantly learn.
· One learns in new work.
·
896) Problems of life are very small before the higher consciousness. All of them are soluble only if the person desires to relate to the higher consciousness.
897) Reaction is reverse attachment.
898) Suppression is never elimination, nor is it sublimation. A vibration is sublimated to the extent one gains experience or knowledge.
899) Taking to consecration is like choosing an army career, not easy to choose, nor easy to keep.
900) When something refuses to consecrate, push
it aside and call Mother till it gets consecrated. Mostly it will be
accomplished. When you find yourself
unable to call Mother, it means you enjoy that problem subconsciously. Looking
inside, you can see when you called it in.
901) A medicine with subtle power prevents the disease it is meant to cure by its presence in the house. It is not necessary to take it.
902) Love is not a zero sum
game.
Sanction sanctions.
(Sanction to one is a sanction to all)
·
Give one, deny the other – zero sum
game.
·
Give one without denying the other
– Not a zero sum game.
·
Give one, give all – right sanctioned.
·
Give one, deny all – premature
enjoyment of right by one stealthily. Favouritism.
905) Between
perfect health and death there are several levels in which man can exist with a
local sense of comfort. At each level
man takes it as good health.
906) The
mean man offers a wise decision meanly.
The moral man is not so penetrating as the mean one.
Meanness is wisdom perverted.
907) When changes arrive at the society for greater freedom, it should ensure greater discipline in a more sublimated way.
908) The wisdom of the hour is the wisdom of the vital.
909) The safest way to everlasting happiness is to get out of human consciousness, at least human values.
910) People understand each other essentially in the first important contact.
913) Family is an emotional edifice built on the physical security of property and social security of respect.
Its lifeline is created out of a matrix of
non-wounding sensitivities of the physical emotion.
919) Idealistic children of unidealistic parents and idealistic parents with unidealistic children will taste what is known as the hell of emotional tension.
920) Affection is real when it utterly overcomes all that afflicts it.
Service is impersonal, not personal.
925) A thought that repeats, repeats in a richer and richer form each time.
No word that repeats repeats exactly.
926) Stress and tension come out of greater responsibilities for a smaller person. It comes out of stupidity or even evil. It never comes out of higher spiritual effort. It can, if it absorbs the other's evil.
928) Sore emotions make the being sore.
He convinces himself that it is good for him or he spites someone by doing a certain thing.
931) The revolutionary will be conservative in some parts and those parts will act with a vengeance. We can say that the revolutionary will be more conservative in his conservative parts than others.
The greater conservatism of the revolutionary.
935) Decision comes from understanding.
It comes from the will that endorses the understanding.
The quality of the decision depends on the quality of the will.
It is not a will that carries light.
The will that carries light is cheerful.
It is emotional will
behind the heart.
937) Secret remains till the marvel arises. The marvel makes all secrets public to become public secrets. Later the public secrets are not mentioned out of courtesy to become 'secrets'.
· Society moves from ignorant secrets to secrets of knowledge.
· Secrets becoming cultured courtesies is progress.
Secrets to Sensitivities.
938) The Being begins to enjoy when it realises itself in the Becoming as the base.
939) Civilisation can be traced along skills, attitudes, knowledge, values, accomplishments, strategies, cultural sensitivities and every possible line. All lines are parallel, integrated, converge on the same goal expanding the line of inquiry into the sphere of existence.
941) The first and the best beneficiary of
writing is the writer himself.
942) Valued
conception is accomplishment – creative conception.
Our energies are taken up by our interests.
947) A serious mind is one that can dwell on high ideas for long with great concentration.
Small minds cannot entertain high thoughts.
948) Once a work is initiated, we may not see the results of work, but the World Forces will be at work.
949) Where the Force is at work, the results rise from one to infinity. If it does not multiply like that, the Force cannot be there.
950) That which instinctively overcomes the usual bother in work or effort by the energy of the moment is interest.
951) When an act is done which enables us to forget consecration, it means the faith is in that act.
There is no act in society that will not reveal its evolutionary role in some way or other.
Expectancy is inner insufficiency.
954) The last man in an organisation acting in Her
consciousness, will excel all there.
955) If there is a work, it is to reach the light buried inside and examine the organisation outside. To bridge them by newer organisation is the WORK, the work of evolution where consciousness progresses by organisation.
956) Transformation converts torture into
rapture.
957) The Light of a great thought leads to meditation as it converts itself into energy of meditation.
958) The organisation based on freedom and self-discipline Mother requires can be created only in the measure the founder creates them inside himself.
959) Great souls sit in the Himalayas and create revolutions in France.
Great yogis win the wars from their places.
Copernicus discovers and gives us the results.
Results of Newton and Einstein do not come to us.
Shakespeare and Vyasa are
results themselves.
Sri Aurobindo brought down the Force.
The Mother offered the results in the subtle plane.
Applications need end results. Theories need only discovery.
960) Scientific knowledge comes to man as usable
products. Vyasa's attainments reach us as Mahabharata. Great minds open
a new field. Master technicians practice in the public. Initially Great Minds need to practise with the public for a social
field to be created.
961) Creation of a field is for great minds. Its practical use is brought to the public by the practitioners at the practical end. That great mind, which having discovered a field goes on to create the practical use at the other end, opens knowledge as power.
964) To know the subliminal event from the surface occurrence, one should be able to reverse pain into pleasure.
965) What is natural and good for those in life is not good or impossible for those in yoga. To understand the yogic point of view, one should go below and rise above, neither go up nor go deeply below, as going up is moksha and going below is subconscient.
To understand a tragedy as a marvel is necessary in yogic perception.
966) He who has a view of the whole creates a field of inquiry such as astronomy or medicine. Those who concentrate on the particulars are the professionals who enrich the field by their own experience. The field certainly does not belong to those professionals.
A field becomes useful to man when the perspective of the whole perceives the usefulness of the part.
967) To one who does not want to change, it is blatant that no one will change.
969) USA which defeated Hitler whose ambition was to dominate the world, received that in its national life. Today USA dominates the world.
970) When a great ideal or force is followed,
even if it is not fully useful, it will never fail to give some results.
978) If preoccupation is your nature, you shift from one to another.
Progress
is to cease to be preoccupied.
979) Life that moves through crises moves to progress. Life that meets no crises is lifeless.
980) The
society has no problems except the ones created by transgression of its own
rules. But all progress came by such
transgression.
981) One may be sincere, the world may not accept it.
Maybe the world is not sincere enough to accept it.
Maybe your own sincerity is insufficient for the work of giving your message to the world.
Whatever it is, the power
of Sincerity remains.
You may be vastly sincere;
but the work may demand more of it. Sincerity,
powerful though it is, cannot by itself serve the God in man.
982) Sri Aurobindo did not take initiative to ward off the Bengal famine or the communal riots without Bengal praying for help. The Divine offers grace up to a point and beyond that it is for the human to pray for help.
983) Empirical evidence is important in yoga. No assumptions of any great knowledge have any validity whatsoever.
Yoga is an exacting science that is based on facts, not hopes. Of
course, they are subtle facts.
984) To forget the greatest crisis or pain the moment it goes and emerge into laughter is given to the great of soul.
It is LOVE that dies for those who
wish to destroy you.
Man understands only in crisis; the idealist understands all the
time. The truth is man is a brute. A higher truth is man expresses LOVE by his brutal
behaviour.
987) The calm of the yogi is only the calm of the surface being, as man has not crossed the surface before Sri Aurobindo.
The
yogi's calm is only skin deep in the Being.
988) What man suppresses, the skin expresses. Skin eruptions are the irrepressible inner pressures.
989) Evil sheds its mark of evil and reveals itself as a marvel when you move from scorching it to understanding it, tolerating, appreciating and finally enjoying its play.
Enjoy the play, evil becomes Good.
990) Love after marriage is abiding passion sans
the excitement of the unattainable.
991) Sense of superiority real or imaginary
stands effectively in the way of service. It destroys service. Service is for the humble.
992) The
first King in any country was a robber. To this day, he survives in the rulers.
A
King is a representative of physical domination.
993) A low person would ignore the punishment he received from one in authority as well as forget the heinous crime he committed against him.
994) The mind articulates the consecration by words. The impulse comes forward by itself to consecrate. This is a total effort, as it is the being of the impulse.
It is self-consecration when the impulse learns to impel itself to action.
995) Mother is the creative force that translates the Self-conception of the Absolute into the realities of existence.
996) Spiritual technology can design formulas for every human relationship and human action. It will make the impossible possible, as the relationship of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The formula is one of non-egoistic strength of goodness.
997) Urge lies behind the impulse. Energy precedes urge. Energy perceived by the illumined mind is light. Ability to consecrate that energy that is light leads to intuition. It is an intuition that precipitates action.
For instantaneous results, one may reach the urge of energy and consecrate
it.
998) So far great minds have offered their wisdom to the world as poetry. Now the Spiritual technology can bring great knowledge as life formulas. The very last stage in the physical is the supramental being.
999) Prosperity is material, emotional, spiritual. It is there in all planes. Equilibrium in a plane makes it prosper. Any energy or activity withheld or starved impoverishes; expressed expands. When it goes beyond limits, it again hurts. This is important for domestic joy and prosperity.
1000) Be right, everything will be right.
To be
right is to be in the psychic. Sensation
changing into light and consciousness is right.