Apocalyptic (literature)

For a modern mind, the word "apocalypse" means a great world disaster. But in fact, it is the transcription of αποκαλυψιζ a Greek term which simply means "laying bare," "unveiling." Uncommonly used in non-religious Greek, it appears rather often in the biblical translation of the Septuagint, where it refers to a "laying bare" in the material sense, but above all, in the figurative sense, to the "revelation" of human or divine secrets.

To Sujata
with whom, step by step, we went through those terrible ordeals, supported by our sole love for Mother
and our desperate will to continue Their Work until the end

http://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/satprem/carnets_of_an_apocalypse_0002_e.htm 

Islam And Supramnetal Consciousness Part3

3) But (later generations) cut off their affair (of unity), one from another: (yet) will they all return to Us. 

(  سورة الأنبياء  , Al-Anbiya, Chapter #21, Verse #93)

 A life of unity, mutuality, and harmony alone, emerging from individuals who are in integral relationship with themselves, others, and the transcendent spirit, can deal with the overwhelming needs of the collective life. The gnostic beings would help establish this integral, unifying gnostic consciousness on earth, which would provide a far greater power and knowledge than man now has for understanding and acting on the needs of the emerging collective. The one rule of this divine life would be the self-expression of the spirit, of the divine, in all aspects of life.

This then must be the nature of the third and final transformation which finishes the passage of the soul through the Ignorance and bases its consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete and completely effective self-knowledge. The Truth-Consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate the supramental principle within her; so must be created the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 918, 10th ed.

Allah (swt) is Omnipotent and Omnipresent (Having infinite power and being present everywhere) Surah Qaaf, 50:16




We define God necessarily as being “omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent.” These terms correspond to Sat–Existence, and Chit–Consciousness/Force. This implies that all forms are forms of the conscious Being of God. This Divine Consciousness can and does manifest many different things at the same time, things which to our human view are in conflict or contention with one another, but from a different view are simply essential pieces to a larger harmony and working beyond our mental framework’s capability of understanding.

This leads us to the three poises or statuses of the Supermind that all must be co-existent. First, a foundation in the unity of all things; second, a modification that allows the multiplicity to manifest within the Oneness and the Oneness to be inherent in the multiplicity; and third, an action that supports “the evolution of a diversified individuality which, by the action of Ignorance, (which may be called an exclusive concentration), becomes in us at a lower level the illusion of the separate ego.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 16, The Triple Status of Supermind

Islam And Supramental Consciousness Part2

(10) He is Allah, the Creator, the Evolver, the Bestower of Forms (or colours). To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names: whatever is in the heavens and on earth, doth declare His Praises and Glory: and He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise.

( سورة الحشر , Al-Hashr, Chapter #59, Verse #24)

(2) Allah, the Eternal, absolute;

( سورة الإخلاص , Al-Ikhlas, Chapter #112, Verse #2)

(274) In an Assembly of truth, in the Presence of a Sovereign Omnipotent.

( سورة القمر , Al-Qamar, Chapter #54, Verse #55)

(1) It is He Who hath created for you all things that are on earth; Moreover His design comprehended the heavens, for He gave order and perfection to the seven firmaments; and of all things He hath perfect knowledge.

( سورة البقرة , Al-Baqara, Chapter #2, Verse #29)

"Like an eye extended in heaven," says the Rig Veda (I.17.21).

"The Absolute is everywhere... every finite is an infinite".-Sri Aurobindo

Chapter 15
The Supramental Consciousness

It is quite difficult to define the supramental consciousness in mental terms, for it is nonmental by definition, and it defies all our three-dimensional laws and perspectives. The word itself may mislead us, because it is not an epitome of human consciousness, but another type of consciousness....The supramental being sees things not as one on the levels surrounded by a jungle of present facts and phenomena but from above, not from outside and judged by their surfaces, but from within and viewed from the truth of their centre...Supermind does not set truth against truth to see which will stand and survive, but completes truth by truth in the light of the one Truth of which all are the aspects....261 And he spoke of the light of the Thought that carries in it its own opposites.262 This is what the Mother calls thinking spherically...Nothing to the supramental sense is really finite: it is founded on a feeling of all in each and of each in all: its sense definition... creates no walls of limitation; it is an oceanic and ethereal sense in which all particular sense knowledge and sensation is a wave or movement or spray or drop that is yet a concentration of the whole ocean and inseparable from the ocean.... It is as if the eye of the poet and artist had replaced the vague or trivial unseeing normal vision, but singularly spiritualized and glorified, – as if indeed it were the sight of the supreme divine Poet and Artist in which we were participating and there were given to us the full seeing of his truth and intention in his design of the universe and of each thing in the universe. There is an unlimited intensity which makes all that is seen a revelation of the glory of quality and idea and form and colour. The physical eye seems then to carry in itself a spirit and a consciousness which sees not only the physical aspect of the object but the soul of quality in it, the vibration of energy, the light and force and spiritual substance of which it is made.... There is at the same time a subtle change which makes the sight see in a sort of fourth dimension, the character of which is a certain internality, the seeing not only of the superficies and the outward form but of that which informs it and subtly extends around it. The material object becomes to this sight something different from what we now see, not a separate object on the background or in the environment of the rest of Nature but an indivisible part and even in a subtle way an expression of the unity of all that we see. And this unity... is that of the identity of the eternal, the unity of the Spirit. For to the supramental seeing the material world and space and material objects cease to be material in the sense in which we now on the strength of the sole evidence of our limited physical organs... receive [them];... they appear and are seen as Spirit itself in a form of itself and a conscious extension.
http://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/satprem/adventure_of_consciousness_e.htm#053

Islam And Supramental Consciousness-Part1

Islam comes with a full-fledged spiritual soul and a mental and vital formation commensurable with that inner being and consciousness. It comes with a dynamic spirit, a warrior mood, that aims at conquering the physical world for the Lord, a temperament which Indian spirituality had not, or had lost long before, if she had anything of it. This was, perhaps, what Vivekananda meant when he spoke graphically of a Hindu soul with a Muslim body-Sri Aurobindo

 The Truth-Consciousness is not only a power of knowledge; it is a being of consciousness and knowledge, a luminous many-sided dynamis and play of the omniscient Spirit; in it there can be a spiritual feeling, a spiritual sensation, a spiritual essentiality of substance that knows and reveals, that acts and manifests in an omniscience which is one with omnipotence-Sri Aurobindo

 (1) In an Assembly of Truth, in the Presence of a Sovereign omnipotent. 

(  سورة القمر  , Al-Qamar, Chapter #54, Verse #55)

(1) He it is that cleaveth the day-break (from the dark): He makes the night for rest and tranquillity, and the sun and moon for the reckoning (of time): Such is the judgment and ordering of (Him), the Exalted in Power, the omniscient. 

(  سورة الأنعام  , Al-Anaam, Chapter #6, Verse #96)

Sri Aurobindo "The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth"

Supermind and Mind of Light
 
The essential character of Supermind is a Truth-Consciousness which knows by its own inherent right of nature, by its own light; it has not to arrive at knowledge but possesses it. It may indeed, especially in its evolutionary action, keep knowledge behind its apparent consciousness and bring it forward as if from behind the veil; but even then this veil is only an appearance and does not really exist: the knowledge was always there, the consciousness its possessor and present revealer. This too is only in the evolutionary play and on the supramental plane itself the consciousness lives always in an immediacy of knowledge and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge. In Mind as we see it here the action is very different; it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at all immediate but rather knowledge at first seems utterly impossible and foreign to the very substance of this Matter. Yet, in the blindness of Matter itself there are signs of a concealed consciousness which in its hidden fundamental being sees and has the power to act according to its vision and even by an infallible immediacy which is inherent in its nature. This is the same Truth that is apparent in Supermind but is here involved and seems not to be. The Mind of Light is a subordinate action of Supermind, dependent upon it even when not apparently springing direct from it, in which the secret of this connection becomes evident and palpable.
The Truth-Consciousness is not only a power of knowledge; it is a being of consciousness and knowledge, a luminous many-sided dynamis and play of the omniscient Spirit; in it there can be a spiritual feeling, a spiritual sensation, a spiritual essentiality of substance that knows and reveals, that acts and manifests in an omniscience which is one with omnipotence. In Mind this Truth-Consciousness and these workings of the Truth-Consciousness can be there and even though it limits itself in Mind and has a subordinate or an indirect working, its action can be essentially the same. There can even be a hidden immediacy which hints at the presence of something absolute and is evidence of the same omnipotence and omniscience. In the Mind of Light when it becomes full-orbed this character of the Truth reveals itself though in a garb that is transparent even when it seems to cover: for this too is a truth-consciousness and a self-power of knowledge. This too proceeds from the Supermind and depends upon it even though it is limited and subordinate. What we have called specifically the Mind of Light is indeed the last of a series of descending planes of consciousness in which the Supermind veils itself by a self-chosen limitation or modification of its self-manifesting activities, but its essential character remains the same: there is in it an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge; we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-conscious into ignorance. The methods also are those of a self-luminous knowing and seeing and feeling and a self-fulfilling action within its own borders; there is no need to seek for something missing, no fumbling, no hesitation: all is still a gnostic action of a gnostic power and principle. There has been a descent from full Supermind into Mind, but this Mind though a self-limited is not yet an agnostic consciousness unsure of itself or unsure of its workings; there is still a comprehending or an apprehending consciousness which goes straight to its object and does not miss its mark or have to hunt for it in the dark or in insufficient light: it sees, knows, puts its hand immediately on things of self and things of Nature. We have passed into Mind but Mind has still not broken its inherent connection with the supramental principle.
Still there is an increasing self-limitation which begins even with Overmind: Overmind is separated by only a luminous border on the full light and power of the supramental Truth and it still commands direct access to all that Supermind can give it. There is a further limitation or change of characteristic action at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind: the Mind of Light is a transitional passage by which we can pass from supermind and superhumanity to an illumined humanity. For the new humanity will be capable of at least a partly divinised way of seeing and living because it will live in the light and in knowledge and not in the obscuration of the Ignorance.
Still, again there will be a difference between the superhuman and the human, a difference in nature and power but a difference especially in the access and way of admission to the Truth-Consciousness and its activities: there may indeed be two orders of its truth, direct and half-direct, immediate and near or even only a reception at a distance. But this we must consider afterwards; at present it is sufficient to mark certain differences in the descending order of gnostic mind which culminates here. We may say that there is a higher hemisphere of our being in which Mind luminous and aware of its workings still lives in the Light and can be seen as a subordinate power of the Supermind; it is still an agent of the Truth-Consciousness, a gnostic power that has not descended into the mental ignorance; it is capable of a mental gnosis that preserves its connection with the superior light and acts by its power. This is the character of Overmind in its own plane and of all the powers that are dependent on the Overmind: the Supermind works there but at one remove, as if in something that it has put forth from itself but which is no longer entirely itself but is still a delegate of the Truth and invested with its authority. We are moving towards a transitional border beyond which lies the possibility of the Ignorance, but the Ignorance is not yet here. In the order of the evolutionary descent we stand in the Mind of Light on that border and a step downward can carry us beyond it into the beginnings of an ignorance which still bears on its face something of the luminosity that it is leaving behind it. On the other hand, in the ascending order of the evolution we reach a transition in which we see the light, are turned towards it, reflected in our consciousness and one further step carries us into the domain of the Light. The Truth becomes visible and audible to us and we are in immediate communication with its messages and illuminations and can grow into it and be made one with its substance. Thus there is a succession of ranges of consciousness which we can speak of as Mind but which belongs practically to the higher hemisphere although in their ontological station they are within the domain of the lower hemisphere. For the whole of being is a connected totality and there is in it no abrupt passage from the principle of Truth and Light into their opposite. The creative truth of things works and can work infallibly even in the Inconscient: the Spirit is there in Matter and it has made a series of steps by which it can travel from it to its own heights in an uninterrupted line of gradations: the depths are linked to the heights and the Law of the one Truth creates and works everywhere.
Even in the material world which seems to us a world of ignorance, a world of the workings of a blind and inconscient Force starting from inconscience and proceeding through Ignorance and reaching with difficulty towards an imperfect Light and Knowledge, there is still a secret Truth in things which arranges all, guides towards the Self many contrary powers of being and rises towards its own heights where it can manifest its own highest truth and fulfil the secret purpose of the universe. Even this material world of existence is built upon a pattern of the truth in things which we call Law of Nature, a truth from which we climb to a greater truth until we emerge in the Light of the Supreme. This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence of the supreme Truth is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts infallibly and the steps of the Ignorance itself are guided even when they seem to stumble; for, what we call the Ignorance is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery. This Knowledge is the covert Supermind which is the support of the creation and is leading all towards itself and guides behind this multitude of minds and creatures and objects which seem each to be following its own law of nature; in this vast and apparently confused mass of existence there is a law, a one truth of being, a guiding and fulfilling purpose of the world-existence. The Supermind is veiled here and does not work according to its characteristic law of being and self-knowledge, but without it nothing could reach its aim. A world governed by an ignorant mind would soon drift into a chaos; it could not in fact come into existence or remain in existence unless supported by the secret Omniscience of which it is the cover; a world governed by a blind inconscient force might repeat constantly the same mechanical workings but it would mean nothing and arrive nowhere. This could not be the cause of an evolution that creates life out of Matter, out of life mind, and a gradation of planes of Matter, Life and Mind culminating in the emergence of Supermind. The secret truth that emerges in Supermind has been there all the time, but now it manifests itself and the truth in things and the meaning of our existence.
It is in this series of the order of existence and as the last word of the lower hemisphere of being, the first word of the higher hemisphere that we have to look at the Mind of Light and see what is its nature and the powers which characterise it and which it uses for its self-manifestation and workings, its connection with Supermind and its consequences and possibilities for the life of a new humanity.

Bulletin - November 1950

---

The Gita's Limitations

Sri Aurobindo: There is no transformation there. The supramental transformation is not at all hinted at in the Gita. The Gita lays stress on certain broad lines of the integral supramental yoga: For instance: 1. Acceptance of life and action.

2. Clarification of the nature of the Transcendent Divine.

3. The Divine Personality and its Transcendence.

4. Existence of two Natures — para and apara. Disciple: It speaks of the Para Prakriti and says that advanced souls attain to the Para Prakriti.

A. wrote an article in the Calcutta Review about ''The Advaita in the Gita".

Sri Aurobindo: He finds the idea of transformation of nature in the Gita and also other things contained in The Life Divine. I don't see all that in the Gita myself.

Disciple: A's contention is that there are hints and suggestions in the Gita that can mean transformation. For instance, it says that one must become the instrument in the hands of the Divine. Then it says: put a madbhavamagata — "those who strive become pure and attain to my nature of becoming". Also: nistraigunyo bhava — "becomes free from the three modes."

Sri Aurobindo: There is no transformation there. The supramental transformation is not at all hinted at in the Gita. The Gita lays stress on certain broad lines of the integral supramental yoga: For instance: 1. Acceptance of life and action.

2. Clarification of the nature of the Transcendent Divine.

3. The Divine Personality and its Transcendence.

4. Existence of two Natures — para and apara. Disciple: It speaks of the Para Prakriti and says that advanced souls attain to the Para Prakriti.

Sri Aurobindo: The Para Prakriti there is used in general terms.

Disciple: Yes. I don't find the transformation in the Gita. The exposition of the levels of consciousness beyond mind, their functions, a clear, rational statement of intuitive consciousness, inspiration, revelation, and the ascent of the consciousness through the Overmind to the supermind — these things are quite new and not found even in the Upanishads.

Sri Aurobindo: I think so; the Gita only opens out the way to our yoga and philosophy. Among the Upanishads only the Taittiriya has some general idea of the higher terms. The Veda treats symbolically the same subject.

Disciple: Suppose there is transformation in the Gita, one can ask what kind of transformation it is, — spiritual, psychic or Supramental?

Sri Aurobindo: It does not speak of transformation; it speaks of the necessity of action from a spiritual consciousness-according to it all action must proceed from a certain spiritual consciousness.

As the result of that action some change may come about in the nature which might amount to what may be called transformation. But in the Gita the instruments of action remain human throughout (the Buddhi etc.). In does not speak of the intuitive consciousness.

In our ancient works there is no conception about the evolutionary nature of the world, or rather, they do not have the vision of humanity as an evolutionary expression of the Divine in which new levels of consciousness gradually open up, or are bound to open up. There is no clear idea of the new type of being that would evolve out of man.

If all that is contained in The Life Divine is found entirely in the old systems then it contradicts the claim that this yoga is new, or at any rate, different from the traditional methods. Perhaps A. was trying to synthesise the Gita and The Life Divine, (laughter).

source: http://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/purani/evening_talks/1-0050.htm

Harmonzing The Body

Those who harmonize their whole being with the Messenger of Allah are harmonizing and unifying with Allah.

~ 4:80

Into The LIght

 

“That you may bring forth your people from the darkness into the light ...” (14:5)-THE HOLY QURAN

This Divine may lead us often through darkness, because the darkness is there in us and around us, but it is to the Light he is leading and not to anything else.-Sri Aurobindo
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Whatever the motive immediately pushing the mind or the vital, if there is a true seeking for the Divine in the being, it must lead eventually to the realisation of the Divine. The soul within has always the inherent (ahaitukī) yearning for the Divine; the hetu or special motive is simply an impulsion used by it to get the mind and the vital to follow the inner urge. If the mind and the vital can feel and accept the soul's sheer love for the Divine for his own sake, then the sadhana gets its full power and many difficulties disappear; but even if they do not, they will get what they seek after in the Divine and through it they will come to realise something, even to pass beyond the limit of the original desire.... I may say that the idea of a joyless God is an absurdity, which only the ignorance of the mind could engender! The Radha love is not based upon any such thing, but means simply that whatever comes on the way to the Divine, pain or joy, milana or viraha, and however long the sufferings may last, the Radha love is unshaken and keeps its faith and certitude pointing fixedly like a star to the supreme object of Love.

What is this Ananda, after all? The mind can see in it nothing but a pleasant psychological condition, – but if it were only that, it could not be the rapture which the bhaktas and the mystics find in it. When the Ananda comes into you, it is the Divine who comes into you, just as when the Peace flows into you, it is the Divine who is invading you, or when you are flooded with Light, it is the flood of the Divine himself that is around you. Of course, the Divine is something much more, many other things besides, and in them all a Presence, a Being, a Divine Person; for the Divine is Krishna, is Shiva, is the Supreme Mother. But through the Ananda you can perceive the Anandamaya Krishna, for the Ananda is the subtle body and being of Krishna; through the Peace you can perceive the Shantimaya Shiva; in the Light, in the delivering Knowledge, the Love, the fulfilling and uplifting Power you can meet the presence of the Divine Mother. It is this perception that makes the experiences of the bhaktas and mystics so rapturous and enables them to pass more easily through the nights of anguish and separation; when there is this soul-perception, it gives to even a little or brief Ananda a force or value it could not otherwise have, and the Ananda itself gathers by it a growing power to stay, to return, to increase.

I cannot very well answer the strictures of Russell, for the conception of the Divine as an external omnipotent Power who has “created” the world and governs it like an absolute and arbitrary monarch – the Christian or Semitic conception – has never been mine; it contradicts too much my seeing and experience during thirty years of sadhana. It is against this conception that the atheistic objection is aimed, – for atheism in Europe has been a shallow and rather childish reaction against a shallow and childish exoteric religionism and its popular inadequate and crudely dogmatic notions. But when I speak of the Divine Will, I mean something different, – something that has descended here into an evolutionary world of Ignorance, standing at the back of things, pressing on the Darkness with its Light, leading things presently towards the best possible in the conditions of a world of Ignorance and leading it eventually towards a descent of a greater power of the Divine, which will be not an omnipotence held back and conditioned by the law of the world as it is, but in full action and therefore bringing the reign of light, peace, harmony, joy, love, beauty and Ananda, for these are the Divine Nature. The Divine Grace is there ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the Law of Ignorance into the Law of Light, and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers. If we take the facts of the world as they are and the facts of spiritual experience as a whole, neither of which can be denied or neglected, then I do not see what other Divine there can be. This Divine may lead us often through darkness, because the darkness is there in us and around us, but it is to the Light he is leading and not to anything else.
(source: Sri Aurobindo. Archives and Research. April 1977, P.61-65)

Between Two Realms HE Stood Not Wavering

B9 C1 Between Two Realms He Stood, Not Wavering ...http://www.sriaurobindoashram.com/Content.aspx...