Good And Evil

We may think that this is an altogether mystical vision of the universe, with very little in common with our daily reality; at every step we encounter ugliness and evil; this world is riddled with pain, saturated with strangled cries. Where is the Divine in all this? Is the Divine that barbarism ever ready to open its torture camps? Or that pervading egoism? Or that villainy, concealed or flaunted? God is innocent of all these crimes. He is perfect. He cannot be a party to this – neti neti – God is so pure that He is not of this world. There is simply no place for Him in all this suffocating squalor! We must look existence in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right solution whatever that solution may be. And to look existence in the face is to look God in the face; for the two cannot be separated.... This world of our battle and labor is a fierce dangerous destructive devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward, whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as a part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices.... We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a God of good, a God just, righteous and virtuous according to our own moral conceptions of justice, virtue and righteousness, and all the rest, we say, is not He or is not His, but was made by some diabolical Power which He suffered for some reason to work out its wicked will or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God.... We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in His being and that so He has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra¹³⁵ forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the complete union and feel this truth in the depths of our being that we can entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The discords of the world are God's discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and thrilled vastness of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda....¹³⁶ For truth is the foundation of real spirituality and courage is its soul.¹³⁷

Then the wound is healed that seemed forever to divide the world between Satan and Heaven, as if there were nothing else but Good and Evil, with us in between like an infant coddled and whipped into virtuous ways.¹³⁸ All duality is a vision based on Ignorance. There is nothing but the innumerable One¹³⁹ everywhere, and "God's discords" to help the Godhead grow within us.

Soul Surrender

[Yusufali 11:101] "O my Lord! Thou hast indeed bestowed on me some power, and taught me something of the interpretation of dreams and events,- O Thou Creator of the heavens and the earth! Thou art my Protector in this world and in the Hereafter. Take Thou my soul (at death) as one submitting to Thy will (as a Muslim), and unite me with the righteous."
(FROM AL QURAN)


Nati

Nati is the submission of the soul to the will of God; its ac- ceptance of all touches as His touches, of all experience as His play with the soul of man. Nati may be with titiksha, feeling the sorrow but accepting it as God’s will, or with udasinat´

a, rising superior to it and regarding joy and sorrow equally as God’s working in these lower instruments, or with ananda, receiving everything as the play of Krishna and therefore in itself delightful. The last is the state of the complete Yogin, for by this continual joyous or anandamaya namaskara to God constantly practised we arrive eventually at the entire elimination of grief, pain etc, the entire freedom from the dwandwas, and find the Brahmananda in every smallest, most trivial, most apparently discordant detail of life & experience in this human body. We get rid entirely of fear and suffering; Anan- dam Brahmano vidv´

an na bibheti kutaschana. We may have to begin with titiksha and udasinata but it is in this ananda that we must consummate the siddhi of samata. The Yogin receives victory and defeat, success and ill-success, pleasure and pain, honour and disgrace with an equal, a sama ananda,first by buddhi-yoga, sep- arating himself from his habitual mental & nervous reactions & insisting by vichara on the true nature of the experience itself and of his own soul which is secretly anandamaya,full of the sama ananda in all things. He comes to change all the ordinary values of experience; amangala reveals itself to him as mangala, defeat & ill-success as the fulfilment of God’s immediate purpose and a step towards ultimate victory, grief and pain as concealed and perverse forms of pleasure. A stage arrives even, when physical pain itself, the hardest thing for material man to bear, changes its nature in experience and becomes physical ananda; but this is only at the end when this human being, imprisoned in matter, subjected to mind, emerges fromhis subjection, conquers his mind and delivers himself utterly in his body, realising his true anandamaya self in every part of the adhara´
(EXCERPT FROM SRI AUROBINDO'S RECORD OF YOGA)

Sin,Virtue And Evil Part1

We may think that this is an altogether mystical vision of the universe, with very little in common with our daily reality; at every step we encounter ugliness and evil; this world is riddled with pain, saturated with strangled cries. Where is the Divine in all this? Is the Divine that barbarism ever ready to open its torture camps? Or that pervading egoism? Or that villainy, concealed or flaunted? God is innocent of all these crimes. He is perfect. He cannot be a party to this – neti neti – God is so pure that He is not of this world. There is simply no place for Him in all this suffocating squalor! We must look existence in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right solution whatever that solution may be. And to look existence in the face is to look God in the face; for the two cannot be separated.... This world of our battle and labor is a fierce dangerous destructive devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward, whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as a part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices.... We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a God of good, a God just, righteous and virtuous according to our own moral conceptions of justice, virtue and righteousness, and all the rest, we say, is not He or is not His, but was made by some diabolical Power which He suffered for some reason to work out its wicked will or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God.... We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in His being and that so He has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra¹³⁵ forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the complete union and feel this truth in the depths of our being that we can entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The discords of the world are God's discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and thrilled vastness of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda....¹³⁶ For truth is the foundation of real spirituality and courage is its soul.¹³⁷

Then the wound is healed that seemed forever to divide the world between Satan and Heaven, as if there were nothing else but Good and Evil, with us in between like an infant coddled and whipped into virtuous ways.¹³⁸ All duality is a vision based on Ignorance. There is nothing but the innumerable One¹³⁹ everywhere, and "God's discords" to help the Godhead grow within us. Even so, quite a gap remains between this perhaps divine imperfection and the ultimate Perfection. Is not this cosmic Divine a lesser Divine? Should we not try to find elsewhere an untarnished, transcendent, and perfect Divine? If there is an opposition between the spiritual life and that of the world, it is that gulf which he [the integral seeker] is here to bridge, that opposition which he is here to change into harmony. If the world is ruled by the flesh and the devil, all the more reason that the children of Immortality should be here to conquer it for God and the Spirit. If life is an insanity, then there are so many million souls to whom there must be brought the light of divine reason; if a dream, yet it is real within itself to so many dreamers who must be brought either to dream nobler dreams or to awaken; or if a lie, then the truth has to be given to the deluded.¹⁴⁰

http://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/satprem/adventure_of_consciousness_e.htm#036

The Importance Of The Psychic Attitude

Who Are We?Part1

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS WITHIN US.GOD IS WITHIN US.HE IS THE SOUL OF OUR SOULS.SEE HIM IN YOUR OWN SOUL.THAT IS PRACTICAL RELIGION.THAT IS FREEDOM.
(SWAMI VIVEKANANDA)

The Vedic Age

The problem is to find one's soul and unite with the Divine.



But, Mother, was it the same during the Vedic times also?



To find their soul and the Divine? Of course.

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But they did not succeed?



No, Sri Aurobindo says that in the Vedic age they tried to bring the spiritual life into the physical life, but he says that the means they employed, the paths they followed at that time are no longer any good now. Just imagine us before an altar making a Puja!... It won't do now, it is not suitable.



Is their goal and ours the same?



I think so.



In any case, there were several ages in the earth's history in which there was given a kind of example, as a promise, of what would be there one day. These were called the golden ages. But certainly there were times in which a more or less complete representation of what had to be was as though lived out. Only it was just a demonstration, an example, which the world was completely unfit to take up as a realisation.

It was only to say: you see, this is how it will be, but not like this in all its details, like this in essence. And I think it did not last very long. In any case the memory of the thing is very limited, very localised and extremely short. There was an intensity, there was a great beauty in the expression, but it was something as though altogether independent of the whole of terrestrial life: an example... almost an example which is not to be followed, which cannot be followed, and which was always accompanied by a promise: “It will be like this”... a promise which has been repeated in very different words, of the New Earth or the Divine World or a New Creation, etc.

And I think it was perhaps at the beginning... not exactly the beginning of humanity but the beginning of the conscious evolution of humanity towards a realisation. We said last time that for a very long time humanity was very static and as though undergoing a preparation so slow, so invisible that it has taken perhaps millions of years. But these promises and examples

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were like starting-points, like the first push given to begin the evolution of the consciousness towards a higher realisation.

I think the Vedic age was the latest. There were others before it, but of a very short duration.

Something over there?

A question?... Is that all?

Mother, you said that the Vedic age was like a promise. A promise to whom?

To the Earth and men.
They left a kind of oral document of their experience. It was transmitted – and this was the promise.
They used an imaged language. Some people say that it was because they wanted it to be an initiation which would be understood only by the initiates. But it could also be an absolutely spontaneous expression without a precise aim to veil things, but which could not be understood except by those who had the experience. For it is quite obviously something that is not mental, which came spontaneously – as though it sprang from the heart and the aspiration – which was the completely spontaneous expression of an experience or knowledge, and naturally, an expression which was poetic, which had its own rhythm, its own beauty and could be accessible only to those who had an identical experience. So it was veiled of itself, there was no need to add a veil upon it. It is more than likely that it happened like that.
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When one has a true experience which is not the result of a preliminary thought constructing and obtaining the experience by a special effort, when it is a direct and spontaneous experience, an experience that comes from the very intensity of the aspiration, it is spontaneously formulated into words. When it is total and complete enough, it is formulated into words... which are not thought out, which are spontaneous, which come out spontaneously from the consciousness. Well, it is more than likely that the Vedas were like that. But only those who have had the experience, had the same state of consciousness, can understand what it means.
There are those sentences which seem absolutely banal and ordinary, in which things seem to be said in an almost childish way and which are written out or heard and then noted down, like that. Well, when read with an ordinary consciousness, they seem sometimes even altogether banal. But if one has the experience, one sees that there is a power of realisation and a truth of expression which give you the key to the experience itself.
But it seems obvious that the modern equivalent, at present, of the Rishi of the olden days... even his spontaneous Vedic expression will be very different in its formulation. For the terrestrial development and human development change the conditions of expression. The way of saying of those times and the way of saying today cannot be the same; and yet the experience can be the same experience of something which cannot be thought about but comes as its living expression.

Mother, were the Vedic Rishis men who had evolved to that state or were they special manifestations?

What do you mean? Whether they were evolutionary beings or involutionary beings?

They were probably... no... they were surely involutionary beings. But the body was the result of evolution.
But it is absolutely certain that they were involutionary beings,
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that is, beings who had come down from higher regions and used these bodies, who had identified themselves with these bodies.
This is it, what I said the other day, you know, that what has changed the course of terrestrial and human development totally is bodies becoming perfected enough to be able to serve as instruments for beings of higher regions who have come to incarnate in them in order to use them. And it seems obvious that the Rishis were of these – if not all at least those who were the leaders, those who were at the head. But very probably they formed a group which must have had its own realisation, very independent of the surroundings. They lived, besides, quite isolated, if what is reported is correct.

(Silence)

Vedas Vedanta

WHOEVER is still under the influence of intellectual pride, is shocked when people depreciate the reason as the supreme guide. He asks how is it posssible for a man of culture to depreciate the reason and exalt some extraneous influence like that which people call God? But these doubters are under the influence of European materialism which tries to confine man to his material portion and deny him the possibility of a divine origin and a divine destiny. When Europe left Christianity to the monk and the ascetic and forgot the teachings of the Galilean, she exposed herself to a terrible fate which will yet overtake her. God in man is the whole revelation and the whole of religion. What Christianity taught dimly, Hinduism made plain to the intellect in Vedanta. When India remembers the teaching she received from Shankaracharya, Ramanuja and Madhva, when she realises what Sri Ramakrishna came to reveal, then she will rise. Her very life is Vedanta.

If anyone thinks that we are merely intellectual beings, he is not a Hindu. Hinduism leaves the glorification of intellectuality to those who have never seen God. She is commissioned by Him to speak only of his greatness and majesty and she has so spoken for thousands of years. When we first received a European education, we allowed ourselves to be misled by the light of science. Science is a light within a limited room, not the sun which illumines the world. The aparā vidyā is the sum of science but there is a higher vidyā, a mightier knowledge. When we are under the influence of the lower knowledge, we imagine that we are doing everything and try to reason out the situation we find ourselves in, as if our intellect were sovereign and omnipotent. But this is an attitude of delusion and māyā. Whoever has once felt the glory of God within him can never again believe that the intellect is supreme. There is a higher voice, there is a more unfailing oracle. It is in the heart where God resides. He works through the brain, but the brain is only one of His instru-

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ments. Whatever the brain may plan, the heart knows first and whoever can go beyond the brain to the heart, will hear the voice of the Eternal. This is what Srijut Aurobindo Ghose said in his Bombay speech. But our contemporary, the Indian Patriot, has lamented his downfall from the high pedestal of culture he once occupied. Our contemporary has forgotten the teachings of Vivekananda which were once so powerful in Madras.

Vedanta Brain Islamic Power

"..The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a vital schism. The denial of the Vedas by itself, perhaps, would not be serious, but it became so, as it was symptomatic of a deeper divergence. Denying the Vedas, the Buddhistic spirit denied life. It was quite a new thing in the. Indian consciousness and spiritual discipline. And it left such a stamp there that even today it stands as the dominant character of
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the Indian .."

"..India today presents the problem on a larger scale and on a higher or deeper level. The demand is for a spiritual fusion and unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is the true bed-rock of unity – since, at bottom, it means identity – it is on this plane that mankind has not yet been able to really meet and coalesce. India's genius has been precisely working in the line of a perfect solution of this supreme problem.
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. The Islamic dispensation, however, brings with it not only something comple-
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mentary, but also something contradictory, if not for anything else, at least for the strong individuality which does not easily yield to assimilation. Still, in spite of great odds, the process of assimilation was going on slowly and surely. But of late it appears to have come to a dead halt; difficulties have been presented which seem insuperable..."

The solution can come, first, by going to the true religion of the Spirit, by being truly spiritual and not merely religious, for, as we have said, real unity lies only in and through the Spirit, since Spirit is one and indivisible; secondly, by bringing down something – a great part, indeed, if not the whole – of this puissant and marvellous Spirit into our life of emotions and sensations and activities.
If it is said that this is an ideal for the few only, not for the mass, our answer to that is the answer of the Gita – Yad yad acharati sreshthah. Let the few then practise and achieve the ideal: the mass will have to follow as far as it is possible and necessary. It is the very character of the evolutionary system of
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Nature, as expressed in the principle of symbiosis, that any considerable change in one place (in one species) is accompanied by a corresponding change in the same direction in other contiguous places (in other associated species) in order that the poise and balance of the system may be maintained.
It is precisely strong nuclei that are needed (even, perhaps, one strong nucleus is sufficient) where the single and integrated spiritual consciousness is an accomplished and established fact: that acts inevitably as a solvent drawing in and assimilating or transforming and re-creating as much, of the surroundings as its own degree and nature of achievement inevitably demand.
India did not and could not stop at mere cultural fusion – which was a supreme gift of the Moguls. She did not and could not stop at another momentous cultural fusion brought about by the European impact. She aimed at something more. Nature demanded of her that she should discover a greater secret of human unity and through progressive experiments apply and establish it in fact. Christianity did" not raise this problem of the greater synthesis, for the Christian peoples were more culture-minded than religious-minded. It was left for an Asiatic people to set the problem and for India to work out the solution.

Nolini Kanta Gupta > Volume-1 > The Basis Of Unity

Soul Power

In Sri Aurobindo's words:
Each Yoga in its process has the character of the instrument it uses; thus the Hathyogic process is psycho-physical, the Rajayogic mental and psychic, the way of knowledge is spiritual and cognitive, the way of devotion spiritual, emotional and aesthetic, the way of works spiritual and dynamic by action. Each is guided in the ways of its own characteristic power. But all power is in the end one, all power is really soul-power.

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The True Spirit Of Communism

If communism ever reestablishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a foundation of soul's brotherhood and the death of egoism. A forced association and a mechanical comradeship would end in a worldwide fiasco-Sr Aurobindo

Vedanta realised is the only practicable basis for a communistic society.
It is the kingdom of the saints dreamed of by Christianity, Islam and Puranic Hinduism-Sri Aurobindo