Thursday, November 24, 2011

Notes of Some wanderings With the Swami Vivekananda - by Sister Nivedita

Notes of Some wanderings With the Swami Vivekananda - by Sister Nivedita

Thursday, November 10, 2011

St. Bismillah placed at the head of the Koran


Oct 10--

St. Bismillah placed at the head of the Koran


The movement of the Siddhi is once again overcoming the Asiddhi. The second & first chatusthayas are being restored in their completeness. The faith that disregards immediate out- ward circumstances, is developing, although still combated by the suggestions of the intellectual environment

Outward circumstances of the moment have to be understood by the vijnana. But there must first be this general faith that they have all an intelligible purpose & an intelligible sense.


647

It is true that they are worked out through the Pranic world by the Dwayavins using conflicting energies, but the Power that gov- erns them in spite of their ignorance & mutual misunderstanding is One, who is neither a passive Being nor a blind Force.

The only question that remains is whether the immediate guide of the Yoga is the Ishwara himself or a Spirit who errs, the Manomaya Purusha in oneself or a Manishi outside.

The faith must be that it is the Ishwara, Anandamaya & Vijnanamaya who is the guide, although He still uses the im- pulsions & ideas of the Manishi & not yet the full Vijnanamaya harmony.

It is the replacement of the mental perceptions & impulses that is the work of the Vijnanachatusthaya. It is because that work is not yet done, that the first two chatusthayas are open to shocks & disturbances through the disappointment of the faith.

This is why it has always been said that the absolute finality of the first two chatusthayas depended on the fulfilment of the third.

But the entire fulfilment of the third implies the fulfilment of the fourth and fifth and therefore necessarily of the sixth and seventh.

Therefore it is an integral fulfilment that is being worked out & this aim prevents the separate perfection of each chatusthaya by itself without relation to the rest.

Faith & Ananda Brahman are the two keys to the perfect internal state, with dasya as the joining point. Knowledge & Power are the two keys to the perfect external state, with Daivi Prakriti as the joining point.

Utthapana Arms 1 hr 45 minutes, discontinued for want of time, not failure of power. More physical unwillingness & more defect of anima than day before yesterday..

Effectivity of tapas still acts against resistance and by lapse of time.


http://www.sriaurobindoashram.info/Content.aspx?ContentURL=_StaticContent/SriAurobindoAshram/-09%20E-Library/-01%20Works%20of%20Sri%20Aurobindo/-01%20English/-03_CWSA/-10_Record%20of%20Yoga/-32_29to30%20SEPTEMBER%2031%20DECEMBER%201914_1.htm

Bismillah al rahman al rahim

quran bismillah

The Arabic phrase shown above is pronounced as Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim, and is a beautifully poetic phrase which offers both deep insight and brilliant inspiration. It has often been said that the phrase Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim contains the true essence of the entire Qur'an, as well as the true essence of all religions.

Muslims often say this phrase when embarking on any significant endeavor, and the phrase is considered by some to be a major pillar of Islam. This expression is so magnificent and so concise that all but one chapter of the Qur'an begins with the words Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.

http://wahiduddin.net/words/bismillah.htm

Monday, October 31, 2011

Parabrahman




[Yusufali 2:255] Allah! There is no god but He,-the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who is there can intercede in His presence except as He permitteth? He knoweth what (appeareth to His creatures as) before or after or behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He willeth. His Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feeleth no fatigue in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme (in glory).


SRI AUROBINDO

Collected Poems

SHORT POEMS — 1895-1908

Parabrahman

These wanderings of the suns, these stars at play

In the due measure that they chose of old,

Nor only these, but all the immense array

Of objects that long Time, far Space can hold,

Are divine moments. They are thoughts that form,



They are vision in the Self of things august

And therefore grandly real. Rule and norm

Are processes that they themselves adjust.

The Self of things is not their outward view,

A Force within decides. That Force is He;

His movement is the shape of things we knew,

Movement of Thought is Space and Time. A free

And sovereign master of His world within,

He is not bound by what He does or makes,

He is not bound by virtue or by sin,

Awake who sleeps and when He sleeps awakes.

He is not bound by waking or by sleep;

He is not bound by anything at all.

Laws are that He may conquer them. To creep

Or soar is at His will, to rise or fall.

One from of old possessed Himself above

Who was not anyone nor had a form,

Nor yet was formless. Neither hate nor love

Could limit His perfection, peace nor storm.

He is, we cannot say; for Nothing too

Is His conception of Himself unguessed.

He dawns upon us and we would pursue,

But who has found Him or what arms possessed?

He is not anything, yet all is He;

He is not all but far exceeds that scope.

Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea:

Time is a wave and Space a wandering drop.

Within Himself He shadowed Being forth,

Which is a younger birth, a veil He chose

To half-conceal Him, Knowledge, nothing worth

Save to have glimpses of its mighty cause,

And high Delight, a spirit infinite,

That is the fountain of this glorious world,

Delight that labours in its opposite,

Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled.


Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

Purna Yoga

III. Parabrahman and Parapurusha

God or Para Purusha is Parabrahman unmanifest and inexpressible turned towards a certain kind of manifestation or expression, of which the two eternal terms are Atman and Jagati, Self and Universe. Atman becomes in self-symbol all existences in the universe; so too, the universe when known, resolves all its symbols into Atman. God being Parabrahman is Himself Absolute, neither Atman nor Maya nor unAtman; neither Being nor Not-Being (Sat, Asat); neither Becoming nor non-Becoming (Sambhuti, Asambhuti); neither Quality nor non-Quality (Saguna, Nirguna); neither Consciousness nor non-consciousness, (Chaitanya, Jada); neither Soul nor Nature (Purusha, Prakriti); neither Bliss nor non-Bliss; neither man nor god nor animal; He is beyond all these things, He maintains and contains all these things; in Himself as world He is and becomes all these things.

The only difference between Parabrahman and Parapurusha is that we think of the first as something beyond our universe-existence, expressed here indeed, but still inexpressible, and of the second as something approaching our universe-existence, inexpressible indeed, but still here expressed. It is as if, in reading a translation of the Ramayan or Homer's Iliad, we were to look at the unapproachable something no translator can seize and say “This is not the Ramayan”, “This is not the Iliad” and yet, looking at the comparative adequacy of the expressions which do succeed in catching something of the original spirit and intention, were at the same time to say “This is Homer”, “This is Valmekie.” There is no other difference except this of standpoint. The Upanishads speak of the Absolute Parabrahman as Tat; they say Sa when they speak of the Absolute Parapurusha.

Circa 1913

Thursday, September 15, 2011

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.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Darshan Day 15th Of August 2011



AUTOMATIC WRITINGS, c. 1920 [1] One of the guests of the future. . Millions of men are waiting for the day that comes but it comes not till the light has descended. And who shall make the light descend? Half lights will not do, they prepare and pass and fade. The whole light, the unveiled power. We behind the veil wait for our hour; not to a world such as is now can we come. We are the sons of the glory, the children of immortality, the flames of God. When the divine Light descends, then we descend. But we know that an hour approaches and the dawn is red, red as blood and red with blood, the fire is behind, the fire of the Angel of the Presence. Light first, strength with the light, joy with the strength, love with the joy, the fourfold splendour. Who shall contain it within himself and give harbourage to all the Godhead? Who shall have the unfathomable calm that shall support all the light and neither be blasted by the fire nor spill it like an insufficient vessel? The strength, who shall be bold enough to bear it, mighty enough not to shrink from the terror and marvel of its works, great and sweet enough to turn its lion forces into the path of the Lover? Who shall be the sea of the universal joy and swallow up into it the poisons of the universe and his throat not even be blackened by the fire of the poison?
Who shall know what the love is and take nothing out of it nor reject any face of love however strange and out of all experience it may be to the mind of the mortal? All this he must be before the Godhead of the future can descend. All else that promises to come are only glimpses of things that would intervene and take the great seat if they could or else flashes that mislead. The new age promises always, but is always the old age in another dress. This only can be the thing that is truly new born and the birth of a new humanity. One who has come near because some of the ways are opened.
(excerpt from Sri Auroibindo's record of yoga)

Sunday, July 3, 2011

The Secret Part1:Simultaneous Ascend And Descend


Mohammed, flying over Paradise, looks at the houris harvesting flowers and enjoying themselves. Persian, 15th century.


Mohammed, along with Buraq and Gabriel, visit Hell, and see a demon punishing "shameless women" who had exposed their hair to strangers. For this crime of inciting lust in men, the women are strung up by their hair and burned for eternity. Persian, 15th century.

"On the second part of his journey, he proceeded from this spot to the skies (heavens). Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw), then observed the stars and the systems of the world and conversed with the souls of the previous prophets, and also with the angels of the heavens, peace and blessing be upon them all. Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw) saw the centre of the tortures and the blessings (hell and heaven) and became fully aware of the secrets of creation, the extent of the universe and the signs of the Omnipotent Allah (swt)."
link

Divine consciousness Emerging
from the Inconscient


Chapter 14
The Secret

We can try to say something of this Secret, though keeping in mind that the experience is in progress. Sri Aurobindo began; he found the Secret in Chandernagore in 1910 and worked on it for forty years; he gave up his life to it. And so did Mother.

Sri Aurobindo has never told us the circumstances of his discovery. He was always extraordinarily silent about himself, not out of reserve but simply because the "I" did not exist. "One felt," his Chandernagore host reports with naive surprise, "one felt when he spoke as if somebody else were speaking through him. I placed the plate of food before him, – he simply gazed at it, then ate a little, just mechanically! He appeared to be inwardly absorbed even when he was eating; he used to meditate with open eyes."218 It was only later, from his writings and some fragments of conversations, that his experience could be pieced together. The first clue came from a chance remark made to one of his disciples. It shows that from Alipore onward he was on the trail: I was mentally subjected to all sorts of torture for fifteen days. I had to look upon pictures of all sorts of suffering.219 We must remember that in those worlds, seeing is synonymous with experiencing. Thus, as Sri Aurobindo ascended toward the overmind, his consciousness was descending into what we are used to calling hell.

This is also one of the first phenomena the seeker experiences, in varying degrees. This is not a yoga for the weak, as the Mother says, and it is true. For if the first tangible result of Sri Aurobindo's yoga is to bring out new poetic and artistic faculties, the second, perhaps even the immediate consequence, is to shine a merciless spotlight on all the undersides of the consciousness, first individual, then universal. This close, and puzzling, linkage between superconscient and subconscient was certainly the starting point of Sri Aurobindo's breakthrough

(excerpt from Satprem's "Sri Aurobindo or Adventure Of Consciousness")

Saturday, July 2, 2011

The Ocean Of White

Mohammed arrives on the shores of the White Sea. Also from the Apocalypse of Muhammad, written in 1436 in Herat, Afghanistan (now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris).
(Hat tip: Buck.)

"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.... 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 itself 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.174 Then, one day, because of our burning need, after being like a mass of compressed gas, the doors will finally burst open: The consciousness rises, says the Mother, breaking the kind of hard carapace, there, at the top of the head, and one emerges into the light."

Above was an ardent white tranquillity.175


(exceprt from Sri Aurobindo or Adventure Of Consciousness)