Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) – Fragments from his writings

From: The Synthesis of Yoga

· Rajayoga, operating with the mind, aims at a supernormal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the mental life and goes beyond it into the domain of the spiritual existence. But the weakness of the system lies in its excessive reliance on abnormal states of trance. This limitation leads first to a certain aloofness from the physical life which is our foundation and the sphere into which we have to bring our mental and spiritual gains. The spiritual life and its experiences tend to withdraw into a secondary plane at the back of our normal experiences instead of descending and possessing our whole existence. As opposed to the Triple Path (Synthetic Yoga) of devotion (Bhakti), Knowledge (Rajayoga) and works (Karma), each by itself, in choosing one of the three parallel paths exclusively antagonizes the others instead of effecting a synthetic harmony of the intellect, the heart and the will in an integral divine realization.

· Hatha yoga, by itself, provides physical results, increased vitality, prolonged youth, health and longevity but these gains are of small avail if they must be held by us as misers of ourselves, apart from the common life, for their own sake, not utilized, not thrown into the common sum of the world’s activities. Hatha yoga attains large results, but at an exorbitant price and to very little purpose. The equilibrium established by Nature is sufficient for the normal egoistic life; but it is not sufficient for the purpose of the Hatha yogin. For the normal equilibrium is calculated on the amount of vital or dynamic force necessary to drive the physical engine during the normal span of human life and to perform more or less adequately the various workings demanded of it by the individual life inhabiting this frame and the world environment by which it is conditioned.

· Through the Path of Devotion (Bhakti Yoga) the yogin conceives the supreme Lord in His personality as the divine Lover and enjoyer of the universe. The world is then realized as a play of the Lord, with our human life as its final stage, pursued through the different phases of self-concealment and self-revelation. A play of the divine consciousness.

· Spirit is the crown of universal existence; Matter is its basis; Mind is the link between the two. Spirit is that which is eternal; Mind and Matter are its workings. Spirit is that which is concealed and has to be revealed; mind and body are the means He has provided for reproducing that image in phenomenal existence. All Nature is an attempt at a progressive revelation of the concealed Truth, a more or less successful reproduction of the divine image.

· Time is a field of circumstances and forces meeting and working out a resultant progression whose course it measures. To the ego it is a tyrant or a resistance, to the Divine an instrument.

· The Divine Life: Power is a will for growth, a force for self-affirmation, but affirmation of the Divine within us, not of the little temporary personality on the surface, - growth into the true divine Individual, the central being, the secret imperishable Person who can emerge only by the subordination and disappearance of the ego. This is life’s true object: growth - but a growth of the spirit in Nature, affirming and developing itself in mind, life and body.

Firstly, life as it is, is a movement of desire and it has built in us as its center a desire-soul which refers to itself all the motions of life and puts them in its own troubled hue and pain of an ignorant half-lit, baffled endeavour; for a divine being, desire must be abolished and replaced by a purer and firmer motive power, the tormented soul of desire dissolved and in its stead there must emerge the calm, strength, happiness of a true vital being now concealed within us. For a divine life the mind and the life impulse must cease to be anything but instruments and the inmost psychic being must take their place as leader on the path and the indicator of a divine guidance.

· The spiritual position of the personal worker? What is his true relation in dynamic Nature to this one Cosmic Being and this one total movement? He is a center only – a center of differentiation of the one personal consciousness, a center of determination of the one total movement; his personality reflects in a wave of persistent individuality the one universal Person, the Transcendent, the Eternal.

· There are four main standards of human conduct which make an ascending scale. The first is personal need, preference and desire; the second is the law and good of the many; the third is the ideal ethic; the last is the highest divine law of Nature.

· From the Gita’s injunction to the Karmayogin - “Abandoning all Dharmas, all principles and laws and rules of conduct, take refuge in me alone”, we see that all standards and rules are temporary constructions founded upon the needs of the ego in its transition from Matter to Spirit.

· Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force; it is Nature which forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of the sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.

· Yoga is a rapid and concentrated conscious evolution of the being, but however rapid, even though it may effect in a single life what in an instrumented Nature might take centuries and millenniums or many hundreds of lives, still an evolution must move by stages; even the greatest rapidity and concentration of the movement cannot swallow up all the stages or reverse natural process and bring the end near to the beginning. A hasty and ignorant mind, a too-eager force easily forgets this necessity; they rush forward to make the Supermind an immediate aim and expect to pull it down with a pitchfork from its highest heights in the Infinite. This is an absurd expectation and full of danger.

· A hunt for supernatural powers leads to a fatal self inflation into an unnatural, unhuman and undivine bigness of magnified ego; the larger the being, the more danger of large-scale disaster.

· Love, devotion and worship are disciplines for the unripe soul, and at best only the best methods of the Ignorance. For they are offered to something other, higher and greater than ourselves; but in the supreme knowledge there can be no such thing, since there is either only one self or no self at all and therefore either no one to do the worship and offer the love and devotion or no one to receive it.

· The material movements are an exterior notation by which the soul represents its perceptions of certain truths of the Infinite and makes them effective in the terms of Substance.

· There are desirable states of the soul which it is dangerous to rest in after they have been mastered, because then we do not march on to the wider kingdoms of God beyond.

· The supreme state of human love is the unity of one soul in two bodies.

· The Spirit, the Divine has manifested itself as infinite self-extended being, self-existent, pure yet not subject to Time and Space, but supporting Time and Space as figures of its consciousness.

· We have to realize true existence (SAT), and true consciousness (CHIT) and true experience of existence and consciousness, i.e. Bliss (ANANDA).

· Tantric discipline is in its nature a synthesis. It has seized on the large universal truth that there are two poles of being whose essential unity is the secret of existence; Brahman and Shakti, Spirit and Nature, and that Nature is power of spirit – or rather is spirit as power.

· What we are is, physically, a soul asleep in matter which has evolved to the partial wakefulness of a living body pervaded by a crude stuff of external consciousness more or less alive and attentive to the outward impacts of the external world in which we are developing our conscious being.

· The three modes of human spirit are Tamas (principle and power of inertia); Rajas (principle of kinesis, passion, endeavour, struggle, initiation); and Sattwa (principle of assimilation, equilibrium and harmony). In its psychological and spiritual bearing these three principles enter into all things, combine to give them their turn of active nature, result, effectuation; and their unequal working in the soul experience is the constituent force of our active personality, our temperament, type of nature and response to experience.

· The soul flows into whatever moulds of intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, dynamic, vital and physical mind and type the developing nature takes and can act only in the way this formed Prakriti (Shakti, Nature) lays on it and move in its narrow groove or relatively wider circle.

· What we call the intuition is only a partial indication of the presence of the supermind which informs the whole action of material energy.

· The reason itself is only a special kind of application, made by a surface regulating intelligence, of suggestions which actually come from a concealed, but sometimes partially overt and active power of the intuitive spirit.

· Supramental time consciousness differs from that of the mental being, is not swept helplessly on the stream of the moments and clutching at each moment as a stay and a swiftly disappearing standpoint, but founded first on its eternal identity beyond the changes of time; secondly on a simultaneous eternity of Time in which past, present and future exist together forever in the self-knowledge and self-power of the Eternal; and thirdly, in a total view of the three Times as one movement singly and indivisibly seen even in their succession of stages, periods, cycles – and that only in the instrumental consciousness – in the step-by-step evolutions of the moments. It will therefore have the knowledge of the three times – TRIKALADRSTI, - held of old to be a supreme sign of the seer and the Rishi – not as an abnormal power, but as a normal way of time knowledge.

· Attachment and desire must be utterly cast out; there is nothing in the world to which we must be attached, not wealth or poverty, nor joy nor suffering, nor life nor death, nor greatness nor littleness, nor vice nor virtue, nor friend, nor wife, nor children, nor country, nor our work nor mission, nor heaven nor earth, nor all that is within them or beyond them. And this does not mean that there is nothing at all that we shall love, nothing in which we shall take delight; for attachment is egoism in love and not love itself, desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in things. A universal love we must have, calm and yet eternally intense beyond the brief vehemence of the most violent passion; a delight in things rooted in a delight in God that does not adhere to their forms but to that which they conceal in themselves and that embraces the universe without being caught in its meshes.

· Not only must we give up the ordinary attitude to the world and life to which the unawakened mind clings as its natural element; but we must not remain bound in any mental construction of our own or in any intellectual thought-system or arrangement of religious dogmas or logical conclusions; we must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state so as to reach the uppermost transcendence of the Divine and its utmost universality. Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit himself to any form or expression; always we must keep ourselves open to the higher Word from above that does not confine itself to its own sense and the light of the Thought that carries in it its own opposites.

· If the realization, fulfillment, service of the one Self demands from us an action that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egoistic sense or seems egoistic enjoyment or self-indulgence, that action we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment----is all delusion and vanity.

· The criterion is within, as the Gita insists. It is to have the soul free from craving and attachment, but free from the attachment to inaction as well as from the egoistic impulse to action, free from attachment to the forms of virtue as well as from the attraction to sin.

· The mind is really a reflector and a medium and none of its activities originate in themselves, none exist per se. The mind does not entirely possess the divine or become divine, but is possessed by it or by a luminous reflection of it so long as it remains in this pure passivity.

· To be a follower of the path of knowledge, there must be a sort of waking Samadhi. Whatever action is unavoidable, must be a purely superficial working of the organs of perception and motor action in which the quiescent mind takes eventually no part and from which it seeks no result or profit.

· To the planes of divine mentality it is possible for the developed human being to arise in the waking state; or it is possible for him to derive from them a stream of influences and experiences which shall eventually open to them and transform into their nature his whole waking experience.

· The awakening of the psychical consciousness liberates in us the direct use of the mind as a sixth sense, and this power may be made constant and normal. The physical consciousness can only communicate with the minds of others or know the happenings of the world around us through external means and signs and indications, and it has beyond this limited action only a vague and haphazard use of the mind's more direct capacities, a poor range of occasional presentiments, intuitions and messages. Our minds are indeed constantly acting and acted upon by the minds of others through hidden currents of which we are not aware, but we have no knowledge or control of these agencies. The psychical consciousness, as it develops, makes us aware of the great mass of thoughts, feelings, suggestions, will impacts, influences of all kinds that we are receiving from others or sending to others or imbibing from and throwing into the general mind atmosphere around us. As it evolves in power, precision and clearness, we are able to trace these to their source or feel immediately their origin and transit to us and direct consciously and with an intelligent will our own messages. It becomes possible to be aware, more or less accurately and discerningly, of the activities of minds whether near to us physically or at a distance, to understand, feel or identify ourselves with their temperament, character, thoughts, feelings, reactions, whether by a psychic sense or a direct mental perception or by a very sensible and often intensely concrete reception of them into our mind or on its recording surface. At the same time, we can consciously make at least the inner selves and, if they are sufficiently sensitive, the surface minds of others aware of our own inner mental or psychic self and plastic to its thoughts, suggestions, influences or even cast it or its active image in influence into their subjective, even into their vital and physical being to work there as a helping or moulding or dominating power and presence.

From: The Life Divine

· A tree evolves out of the seed in which it is already contained, the seed out of the tree; a fixed law, an invariable process reigns in the permanence of the form of manifestation which we call a tree. The mind regards this phenomenon, this birth, life and reproduction of a tree, as a thing in itself and on that basis studies, classes and explains it. It explains the tree by the seed, the seed by the tree; it declares a law of Nature. But it has explained nothing; it has only analysed and recorded the process of a mystery. Supposing even that it comes to perceive a secret conscious force as the soul, the real being of this form and the rest as merely a settled operation and manifestation of that force, still it tends to regard the form as a separate existence with its separate law of nature and process of development. In the animal and in man with his conscious mentality this separative tendency of the Mind induces it to regard itself also as a separate existence, the conscious subject, and other forms as separate objects of its mentality. This useful arrangement, necessary to life and the first basis of all its practice, is accepted by the mind as an actual fact and thence proceed all the errors of the ego.

· Another objection to the mystic and his knowledge is urged, not against its effect upon life but against his method of the discovery of Truth and against the Truth that he discovers. One objection to the method is that it is purely subjective, not true independently of the personal consciousness and its constructions, not verifiable. But this ground of cavil has no great value: for the object of the mystic is self-knowledge and God-knowledge, and that can only be arrived at by an inward and not by an outward gaze. Or it is the supreme Truth of things that he seeks, and that too cannot be arrived at by an outward inquiry through the senses or by any scrutiny or research that founds itself on outsides and surfaces or by speculation based on the uncertain data of an indirect means of knowledge. It must come by a direct vision or contact of the consciousness with the soul and body of the Truth itself or through a knowledge by identity, by the self that becomes one with the self of things and with their truth of power and their truth of essence. But it is urged that the actual result of this method is not one truth common to all, there are great differences; the conclusion suggested is that this knowledge is not truth at all but a subjective mental formation. But this objection is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of spiritual knowledge. Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach of the soul to a living reality, not to an abstraction or a constructed figure of things that can be petrified into a dead or stony formula. The hard logical and intellectual notion of truth as a single idea which all must accept, one idea or system of ideas defeating all other ideas or systems, or a single limited fact or single formula of facts which all must recognise, is an illegitimate transference from the limited truth of the physical field to the much more complex and plastic field of life and mind and spirit.

· In the phenomena of hypnosis not only can the hypnotised subject be successfully forbidden to feel the pain of a wound or puncture when in the abnormal state, but can be prevented with equal success from returning to his habitual reaction of suffering when he is awakened. The reason of this phenomenon is perfectly simple; it is because the hypnotiser suspends the habitual waking consciousness which is the slave of nervous habits and is able to appeal to the subliminal mental being in the depths, the inner mental being who is master, if he wills, of the nerves and the body. But this freedom which is effected by hypnosis abnormally, rapidly, without true possession, by an alien will, may equally be won normally, gradually, with true possession, by one's own will so as to effect partially or completely a victory of the mental being over the habitual nervous reactions of the body.

· There is indeed an inner sense in the subliminal nature, a subtle sense of vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste; but these are not confined to the creation of images of things belonging to the physical environment, - they can present to the consciousness visual, auditory, tactual and other images and vibrations of things beyond the restricted range of the physical senses or belonging to other planes or spheres of existence. This inner sense can create or present images, scenes, sounds that are symbolic rather than actual or that represent possibilities in formation, suggestions, thoughts, ideas, intentions of other beings, image-forms also of powers or potentialities in universal Nature; there is nothing that it cannot image or visualize or turn into sensory formations. It is the subliminal in reality and not the outer mind that possesses the powers of telepathy, clairvoyance, second sight and other supernormal faculties whose occurrence in the surface consciousness is due to openings or rifts in the wall erected by the outer personality's unseeing labour of individualisation and interposed between itself and the inner domain of our being. It should be noted, however, that owing to this complexity the action of the subliminal sense can be confusing or misleading, especially if it is interpreted by the outer mind to which the secret of its operations is unknown and its principles of sign-construction and symbolic figure-languages foreign; a greater inner power of intuition, tact, discrimination is needed to judge and interpret rightly its images and experiences. It is still the fact that they add immensely to our possible scope of knowledge and widen the narrow limits in which our sense-bound outer physical consciousness is circumscribed and imprisoned.

But more important is the power of the subliminal to enter into a direct contact of consciousness with other consciousness or with objects, to act without other instrumentation, by an essential sense inherent in its own substance, by a direct mental vision, by a direct feeling of things, even by a close envelopment and intimate penetration and a return with the contents of what is enveloped or penetrated, by a direct intimation or impact on the substance of mind itself, not through outward signs or figures, - a revealing intimation or a self-communicating impact of thoughts, feelings, forces. It is by these means that the inner being achieves an immediate, intimate and accurate spontaneous knowledge of persons, of objects, of the occult and to us intangible energies of world-Nature that surround us and impinge upon our own personality, physicality, mind-force and life-force. In our surface mentality we are sometimes aware of a consciousness that can feel or know the thoughts and inner reactions of others or become aware of objects or happenings without any observable sense-intervention or otherwise exercise powers supernormal to our ordinary capacity; but these capacities are occasional, rudimentary, vague. Their possession is proper to our concealed subliminal self and, when they emerge, it is by a coming to the surface of its powers or operations. These emergent operations of the subliminal being or some of them are now fragmentarily studied under the name of psychic phenomena, - although they have ordinarily nothing to do with the psyche, the soul, the inmost entity in us, but only with the inner mind, the inner vital, the subtle-physical parts of our subliminal being...

From: Letters on Yoga

· It is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul (psychic being) and the pure Atman, self or spirit. The pure self is unborn, does not pass through death or birth, is independent of birth or body, mind or life or this manifested Nature. It is not bound by these things, not limited, not affected, even though it assumes and supports them. The soul, on the contrary, is something that comes down into birth and passes through death - although it does not itself die, for it is immortal - from one state to another, from the earth plane to other planes and back again to the earth-existence. It goes on with this progression from life to life through an evolution which leads it up to the human state and evolves through it all a being of itself which we call the psychic being that supports the evolution and develops a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world-experience and of a disguised, imperfect, but growing self-expression. All this it does from behind a veil showing something of its divine self only in so far as the imperfection of the instrumental being will allow it. But a time comes when it is able to prepare to come out from behind the veil, to take command and turn all the instrumental nature towards a divine fulfillment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life. The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human - it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state.

Attributions to Sri Aurobindo’s writings from Other Writers

From: Father Bede Griffiths – “A New Vision of Reality”

· Ultimate reality is pure consciousness.

· This is Absolute Being, in pure consciousness, expressed as bliss.

· From this state, Absolute Being becomes “involved” in matter, withdrawing its consciousness and allowing matter to appear as being, without consciousness.

· As matter evolves through the SHAKTI, the energy already inherent in it, and develops more complex organisms, the divine consciousness manifests itself as life.

[Father Griffiths observes that there is evidence today of a kind of consciousness in plants, and in animals consciousness is beginning to manifest itself in sensations, feelings and instinctive intelligence. In Man, we emerge into rational - or mental - consciousness, in the process of evolving from mental consciousness to supermental consciousness.]

· Various stages lead from the first awakening of the intuitive mind, to the development of the “overmind”, to a meeting at supreme consciousness with the “descent of the Supermind”. As the human mind works upward toward God, it is met by a corresponding movement of descent from above; the Divine descends not only into the soul or psychic consciousness, but also into the physical body consciousness.

[Father Griffiths shows the correspondence of the Vedantic philosophy with Christianity, wherein the body is not simply seen as an extended substance but as a ‘field of energies’ which can be so penetrated and reorganized by higher consciousness as to obey a different law; such that the resurrection of Jesus would release the divine Spirit for communication with the disciples.]

From: Elmer & Alyce Green “Beyond Biofeedback”

· Think of spirit as the subtlest form of matter, and of matter as the densest form of spirit. (e.g. one basic energy appears in many different forms – physical bodies, emotions, thoughts and spirit are all interpenetrating energy structures).

From: Lama Govinda “Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism”

· [As to the role of the body in spiritual development] “The obstacle which the physical presents to the spiritual is no argument for the rejection of the physical; for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. Rather the perfecting of the body also should be the last triumph.” “Life has to change into a thing vast and calm and intense and powerful that can no longer recognize its old blind eager narrow self or petty impulse and desire. Even the body has to submit to a mutation and be no longer the clamorous animal or the impeding clod it now is, but instead become a conscious servant and radiant instrument and living form of the spirit.” (quoting from ‘The Synthesis of Yoga’)

· If the Indian saying is true that the body is the instrument provided for the fulfillment of the right law of our nature, then any final recoil from the physical life must be a turning away from the completeness of Divine Wisdom and a renunciation of its aim in earthly manifestation. It can be therefore no integral Yoga which ignores the body or makes its annulment or its rejection indispensable to a perfect spirituality. (ibid)

From: Aldous Huxley

· The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only really be mastered in its fullness – to its heights we can always reach – when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. “Earth is His footing” says the Upanishad, whenever He images the Self that manifests in the universe.

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