Sri Aurobindo:   The nature of the physical ﬁeld is the ﬁrst fact; it determines everything else; it gives the impacts which awaken the consciousness, the impressions, images, subjects which are its matter, the starting-point and basis of all its conceptions, the body which is its support, instrument, fulcrum of action, the physical occasion of the sense of self.  Everything appears to be in the body or by the body and either for the body or for the I-sense in the body.  The body seems to be the principal if not the only cause or determinant of individual consciousness.  What is not of the body is of the physical ﬁeld outside the body.


Sri Aurobindo: Whatever in consciousness seems not to be of the physical ﬁeld, yet appears to be derived from it, to be a resultant, development or deformation from physical experience.    The life in the body is the necessary modiﬁcation of the ﬁrst fact of material being, without whose intervention consciousness is unable to manifest in any material form. The atom is a form of matter, the stone is a material body, but life in these things is either nil or not developed to the point where manifestation of consciousness becomes possible. Consciousness in the atom and the stone is either latent, non-manifest to us, suppressed, potential or nil.


Sri Aurobindo: Life in any degree is not sufﬁcient for the manifestation of mental consciousness. A certain high degree of it or else a certain indispensable kind of organisation is needed for this third tone of the scale. Plants are living, even in a degree intensely living, they have a nervous organisation, but consciousness is either nil or latent, non-manifest at least to us, suppressed or else of another kind than ours, a submental nervous consciousness and not mentality.  Life supplies certain biological conditions and certain physiological processes which physically underlie the operations of conscious mental being.  Life gives the intermediate dynamic link between mind and body.


Sri Aurobindo: Life has two operations which serve the purpose of mentality, a necessary life power in a nervous apparatus and a capacity of instrumental development and modiﬁcation. Without the power of life in the nervous apparatus consciousness in the body is impossible; without the power of developing modiﬁcations it might exist as in the lower animals, but it could not expand as in man.  The nervous apparatus is the initial biological fact necessary to mentality. Life power consists not of the nervous system, which is a physical element, but of a new power or energy of which the system is the vehicle, — the power of nervous communication, nervous charge, nervous discharge. This power is not sufﬁcient to create mentality, for the plant too possesses them, yet does not appear to be a mental being, but it is the ﬁrst condition of embodied mentality.


Sri Aurobindo: A power of biological and physiological development is the secondary, continuative factor necessary to farther evolution of mentality. Once the nervous vital power appears in material body, it shows a biological power of developing a more complex physical instrumentation for a more complex nervous activity.  Once it has attained a certain complexity of physical instrumentation, life seems able indeﬁnitely to reﬁne in some subtle way its action of nervous power so as to support a more and more ﬁne and complex action of mentality.  How far this development of mentality can go and how far it is dependent on the physical apparatus and the nervous action is one of the capital questions of psychology.


Sri Aurobindo:  Mental being, power and operation of mental consciousness is the third note of the scale of being.  Mind cannot certainly be said to be constituted of life and body, nervous action and reaction in a physical body. Nervous action does not appear to constitute of itself consciousness, any more than physical impact and consequent atomic disturbance appears of itself to constitute nervous action. As a correspondent or resultant nervous communication, charge and discharge is necessary to manifest life, so a resultant or correspondent conscious action, — sensation, perception, thought, conscious motiving impulsion, desire, intention, will, — are necessary to manifest mind.  Mind may or may not be an exact result, reﬂection or correspondence of life action in body, life thinking itself out in body, body living and thinking out its experience in mind, but it is not the same thing as life and body.


Sri Aurobindo: Life is a new or second power emerging from or in material energy. Mind is a new or third power emerging from or in the life-energy.    But this is only the ascending scale.  Mind is not only awakened by life-action in the body at a certain evolutionary pitch of its operations; mind reacts upon and in certain ways uses, for its own characteristic purpose, modiﬁes by its will to act and increase the life action and the ways of the body.


Sri Aurobindo: Mind is not limited in its thoughts by the life and body.  There is an action in it which is more than a creative stress of life, an attempt to image supraphysical realities, which we may dismiss as an illusion or a result of abnormal physiological states, but may also follow as ﬁrst clues to a greater truth and possibly a higher tone or tones of the scale of being.  In that case, mind appears as a larger thing than life and material being. Though apparently an evolution from life and the body, it may have been in reality a prior power, life and body only its occasions and means for self-manifestation on the material plane of being.


Sri Aurobindo: At any rate, psychology has to regard the scale not only from the upward point of view of body creating life, life creating mind, but from the downward point of view of mind creating new life in body.  Evidently mind is a greater thing, higher than life and body.  In that case, besides the ascending scale of the lower rising to a highest possibility, we must regard a possibility of the descending scale, the highest reality involving itself in the lower conditions of being.  But the question arises whether mind itself is the highest possibility or the highest reality[.]


Sri Aurobindo:   Vedantic psychology explores the idea and intuition of a higher reality than mind.  The intuition can only be veriﬁed by psychological experience exceeding the normal action of mind. This experience may lead to constantly ascending intuitions veriﬁed by an ascent of experience to some summit of being.  Beyond mind psychological experience ﬁnds another power of energy, another note in the scale of being.


Sri Aurobindo: This we will call the supermind. This supermind lives and acts natively in a domain of experience of which the mind becomes aware by a reﬂective experience and calls vaguely spirit or spiritual being.  Spirit is found to have three tones of its being. Triune, it makes each successively a power of its energy, a status of spiritual experience and form of its action. Triune, they are inseparable, but one or other can be so stressed as to appear a leading principle.


Sri Aurobindo: But we have to note three essential facts about spirit: —  Spirit is inﬁnite consciousness, even when it dwells upon ﬁnite formulations of conscious being.  Awareness of spirit is inﬁnite self-awareness.  All its three essential principles must have this character of inﬁnity.


Sri Aurobindo: Inﬁnite self-conscious bliss is the ﬁrst; inﬁnite self-conscious conscious energy is the second; inﬁnite self-conscious existence the third principle of spirit. Existence, consciousness, bliss are the three tones of inﬁnity, the three basic colours of the Absolute.    The ascending scale of being presents then seven notes, matter, life, mind, supermind, bliss self, self of conscious energy, self of primary conscious existence.  But the experience we get as we ascend in the scale leads us to the discovery that what in evolution appears subsequent is prior in reality. Life evolves in matter, but was preexistent to matter, latent, omnipresent, waiting for matter to be ready to be manifest — which it does when the movement of energy reaches a certain intensity.


Sri Aurobindo: Mind evolves in embodied life, but was preexistent to matter and life, latent, omnipresent, involved, a hidden cause of action waiting for life and matter to be ready for its manifestation which comes when the movement of energy has reached a greater intensity. So supermind is prior to mind, latent, omnipresent, involved even in matter and life, a hidden cause of action and waits for mind to be ready for its manifestation, and since supermind acts only in spirit spirit too must be there latent, omnipresent, involved, a hidden cause of action. But spirit is not dependent on the evolution of supermind for its manifestation; it can appear to our mentality, to our life-consciousness, even to our physical mind.  The true nature and rationale of this priority appear in the descending scale. There we see the true development of the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: Spirit of self-being develops self of conscious energy which supports its self of cosmic bliss, which acts on the ﬁnite by supermind, which offers its differentiations to mind, relates them in life, ﬁxes them phenomenally in body of material substance.  This is the descending scale by which universe is created or made sensible to embodied soul.  But in the material world, all is ﬁrst involved in matter and has to ﬁnd itself by a development from material being and with material being as its support and basis. The evolving process of this self-discovery of the universal existence produces the phenomenon of evolution of higher and greater from lower and lesser principles which we call the ascending scale of being.  This phenomenon bafﬂing now to the reason becomes a selfevident proposition when we observe the descending scale and ﬁnd involution to have preceded evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: The phenomenon  arises inevitably from the nature of our being.   Schema of being has to be formulated from these two points of view, the results, though data of experience, being at ﬁrst taken as a working hypothesis, subject to veriﬁcation. We follow actually the ascending scale, but the descending scale has ﬁrst to be shown, as otherwise the possible explanations of psychological phenomenon which result from this line of experience, would be unintelligible and would have either to be excluded or the whole enquiry restated in altered detail in the end.  All questions of the reality or unreality of the world, its fundamental or ultimate purpose or want of purpose, the destiny of the soul, must be left over till the psychological data have been understood.


Sri Aurobindo: To proceed otherwise would be to determine them by metaphysical reasoning; but the object before us is to arrive at them by the road of psychology.  The whole psychology of Vedanta depends upon this double scale and without it could have no complete scientiﬁc veriﬁcation. Because it exists experience of consciousness can give a clue to the nature of world existence. Metaphysical reasoning by itself could only give us philosophical opinions, psychological veriﬁcation makes Vedantic truth a ﬁrm guide in life. It gives us a tangible ladder of ascension by which we rise to our highest truth of being[.]


Sri Aurobindo: 105  The knowledge at which psychology arrives in its largest generalisations, is that there is one absolute and indeﬁnable Reality which we call for psychological purposes the Self one, indivisible and common to all existence which manifests itself with an inﬁnite variety in the universe and that every soul is an individual personality — we will use the word for want of a better — of that Self manifesting itself with a variety not precisely inﬁnite, but indeﬁnite, but in accordance with its individual nature which provides the principle of harmony, regulates the variety, casts it into a certain mould of unity. All existence is one, but with a constantly active principle of variation and individuation. There is a universal nature of things, but man while abiding within the principles of that nature, has also a nature of his own which distinguishes him from the animal and from lower forms of life. There is therefore this general individuality of Man which the totality of mankind represents in its full play of oneness and variety.


Sri Aurobindo: Within that general individuality there are typal, racial, national, class individualities and each man has his own individual nature, one indeed in its general basis and materials with general human nature and with his type, race, class, nation, but yet possessed of its own principle of particular individuation.  It is this which reigns in his mentality, vital being, physical being and stamps itself upon them, but in itself it is neither mental, vital nor physical, but proceeds from a secret principle superior to all these ; mind, life and body are only means and values of his self-expression. So is it with every community, nation or other natural grouping of men.


Sri Aurobindo: 106  When the ancient thinkers of India set themselves to study the soul of man in themselves and others, they, unlike any other nation or school of early thought, proceeded at once to a process which resembles exactly enough the process adopted by modern science in its study of physical phenomena. For their object was to study, arrange and utilise the forms, forces and working movements of consciousness, just as the modern physical Sciences study, arrange and utilise the forms, forces and working movements of objective Matter. The material with which they had to deal was more subtle, ﬂexible and versatile than the most impalpable forces of which the physical Sciences have become aware; its motions were more elusive, its processes harder to ﬁx; but once grasped and ascertained, the movements of consciousness were found by Vedic psychologists to be in their process and activity as regular, manageable and utilisable as the movements of physical forces. The powers of the soul can be as perfectly handled and as safely, methodically and puissantly directed to practical life-purposes of joy, power and light as the modern power of electricity can be used for human comfort, industrial and locomotive power and physical illumination; but the results to which they give room and effect are more wonderful and momentous than the results of motorpower and electric luminosity.


Sri Aurobindo: For there is no difference of essential law in the physical and the psychical, but only a difference and undoubtedly a great difference of energy, instrumentation and exact process.  The Supreme Existence which expresses itself equally in soul and matter, moves upon one fundamental principle on all its sevenfold levels, and even by one set of medial processes, but It varies their minute arrangement and organic functioning to suit the material which it is using and the objective which it has set before Itself in Its divine movement.  Exact observation and untrammelled, yet scrupulous experiment are the method of every true Science. Not mere observation by itself — for without experiment, without analysis and new-combination observation leads to a limited and erroneous knowledge; often it generates an empirical classiﬁcation which does not in the least deserve the name of science. The old European system of psychology was just such a pseudo-scientiﬁc system.


Sri Aurobindo: Its observations were superﬁcial, its terms and classiﬁcation arbitrary, its aim and spirit abstract, empty and scholastic. In modern times a different system and method are being founded; but the vices of the old system persist. The observations made have been incoherent, partial or morbid and abnormal; the generalisations are far too wide for their meagre substratum of observed data; the abstract & scholastic use of psychological terms and the old metaphysical ideas of psychological processes still bandage the eyes of the infant knowledge, mar its truth and hamper its progress. These old errors are strangely entwined with a new fallacy which threatens to vitiate the whole enquiry, — the fallacy of the materialistic prepossession.  107


Sri Aurobindo: Psychology ought to be rather than is the science of consciousness and of the motions of consciousness as distinguished from the science of form and of the motions of form. We are dealing, therefore, in psychology with a more subtle, ﬂexible and versatile material than in the physical sciences; its motions are more elusive, its processes harder to ﬁx; but when once grasped and ascertained, its laws and activities are found to be quite as regular, manageable and utilisable as the processes of physical Nature. They give room to even more wonderful and momentous results. There is no difference of essential law in the physical & psychical, but a great difference of instrumentation and exact process. For the Supreme Existence moves on one fundamental principle or one set of principles in all its manifestations, but varies its organic arrangement and functioning of the principles to suit the material which It is using & the objective which It intends to reach.


Sri Aurobindo: In both ﬁelds observation & experiment are the only sound foundation of knowledge. But observation without experiment leads only to a limited and erroneous science, often to an empirical system of surface rules which do not deserve the name of science at all. It is this defect which has so long kept European psychology in the status of a pseudo-science; and, even now when real observation has begun & experimentation of an elementary kind is being attempted, the vices of the perishing sciolism mar and hamper this infant knowledge. It has not rid itself of all its old scholastic swaddling clothes; therefore it still walks on all fours and cannot yet learn to stand up erect and walk.  108


Sri Aurobindo: Psychology is the science of consciousness and its status and operations in Nature and, if that can be glimpsed or experienced, its status and operations beyond what we know as Nature.  It is not enough to observe and know the movements of our surface nature and the superﬁcial nature of other living creatures just as it [is] not enough for Science to observe and know as electricity only the movements of lightning in the clouds or for the astronomer to observe and know only those movements and properties of the stars that are visible to the unaided eye. Here as there a whole world of occult phenomena have to be laid bare and brought under control before the psychologist can hope to be master of his province.  Our observable consciousness, that which we call ourselves, is only the little visible part of our being. It is a small ﬁeld below which are depths and farther depths and widths and ever wider widths which support and supply it but to which it has no visible access.


Sri Aurobindo: All that is our self, our being, — what we see at the top is only our ego and its visible nature.  Even the movements of this little surface nature cannot be  understood nor its true law discovered until we know all that is below or behind and supplies it — and know too all that is around it and above.  For below this conscient nature is the vast Inconscient out of which we come.


Sri Aurobindo: The Inconscient is greater, deeper, more original, more potent to shape and govern what we are and do than our little derivative conscient nature. Inconscient to us, to our surface view, but not inconscient in itself or to itself it is a sovereign guide, worker, determinant, creator. Not to know it is not to know our nether origins and the origin of the most part of what we are and do.  And the Inconscient is not all. For behind our little frontal ego and nature is a whole subliminal kingdom of inner consciousness with many planes and provinces.


Sri Aurobindo: There are in that kingdom many powers, movements, personalities which are part of ourselves and help to form our little surface personality and its powers and movements. This inner self, these inner persons we do not know, but they know us and observe and dictate our speech, our thoughts, feelings, doings even more directly than the Inconscient below us.  Around us too is a circumconscient Universal of which we are a portion. This Circumconscience is pouring its forces, suggestions, stimulus, compulsions into us at every moment of our existence.  Around us is a universal Mind of which our mind is a formation and our thoughts, feelings, will, impulses are continually little more than a personally modiﬁed reception and transcription of its thought-waves, its force-currents, its foam of emotion and sensation, its billows of impulse.


Sri Aurobindo: Around us is a permanent universal life of which our petty ﬂow of life-formation that begins and ceases is only a small dynamic wave.  109  Psychology is the science of Consciousness; it is the knowledge of its nature, its processes and the aim or results of its processes, its law or laws of being, its habitat and instruments, its what, why, where, whence and whither.  But what is consciousness and can there be a science of consciousness?


Sri Aurobindo: We are not in presence of a body of concrete, visible or sensible facts, veriﬁable by all, which form an indisputable starting-point, are subject to experiment and proof, where theories can be tested at every point and discarded if they do not accord with the facts, with all the facts. The data here are subjective, ﬂuid, elusive. They do not subject themselves to exact instruments, can lend themselves to varying theories, do not afford proofs easily veriﬁable by all. Their presentation is difﬁcult and can hardly be more than scanty and often infantile in their insufﬁciency. Theories are numerous, but few or none have any solidity or permanence.


Sri Aurobindo: To understand the psychology of others we depend upon our observation of them and our own interpretation of the movements we observe and our comparison with our own psychological actions and reactions. But our observation is limited by the fact that what we observe is not the psychological events we wish to study but signs of speech, action, facial or bodily expression which seem to us to indicate them; but it is still more limited by the possibility of error in our observation and still more in our interpretation. Errors of wrong attribution, exaggeration, diminution, false [?evidence], false valuation, crop up at every turn; indeed, the whole observation may be nothing but error, the interpretation purely personal and mistaken. Comparison with ourselves may be a fruitful fountain of mistakes; there is no doubt a general similarity in the mass of human reactions, but the differences and variations are also marked and striking; there is here no source of certitude.  A direct experiential and experimental psychology seems to be demanded if psychology is to be a science and not merely a mass of elementary and superﬁcial generalisations with all the rest guesswork or uncertain conclusion or inference.


Sri Aurobindo: We must see, feel, know directly what we observe; our interpretations must be capable of being sure and indubitable; we must be able to work surely on a ground of sure knowledge.    Modern psychologists have aimed at certitude in their knowledge, have found it or thought they found it by mixing up psychology and physiology; our physiological processes are supposed to be not only the instrumentation or an instrumentation of our consciousness, but the base or constituents of our psychological processes. But by this method we can only arrive at an extended physiological, not at a true psychological knowledge.  We learn that there is a physical instrumentation by which physical things and their contacts work upon our consciousness, reach it through the nerves and the brain and awake certain reactions in it which may however vary with the brain and the consciousness contacted; we learn that the consciousness uses certain physiological processes as well as physical means to act upon outward things and conditions; we learn too that physical conditions have an action upon our state of consciousness and its functionings.


Sri Aurobindo: But all this was to be expected, since we are a consciousness embodied and not disincarnate, acting through a body and with a body as a habitation and instrument and not a pure consciousness acting in its own right[.]   110  The problem of consciousness can only be solved if we go back to a radical state of our existence in which things get back to their reality. For there they are no longer a mass of phenomena which have to be cleared up, classiﬁed, organised by the perceptions, conceptions and relative logic of the human intellect.


Sri Aurobindo: These perceptions, these concepts, this logic belong to an imperfect instrument and the arrangements they make can only be provisional and, at that, onesided and only half-true or a good deal less than half-true — and even that truth is of an inferior kind, a constructed representation and not truth itself in its own nature. In fact the intellect sees only the phenomenon, it cannot go back behind it; when it tries, it only arrives at other and more occult phenomena. The truth of things can only be perceived when one gets to what may be called summarily the spiritual vision of things and even there completely only when there is not only vision but direct experience in the very substance of one’s own being and all being.  111  Consciousness is not an unaccountable freak or a chance growth or a temporary accident in a material and inconscient universe.


Sri Aurobindo: It may so appear on the surface and physical science, since by its very terms it is limited to the examination of appearances and must start from the surface phenomenon, may choose or may have no alternative but to treat it on that basis. But surface appearances are not the reality of things, they may be a part of the truth but they are not the whole reality. One must look beyond the external appearances of things before one can know things in themselves: especially ﬁrst appearances are apt to be deceptive. It is not by regarding a ﬂash of lightning as a chance ebullition of ﬁery temper in a cloud that one can know the truth of electricity. We must go far and dig deep before we can get at the truth about the Force that manifested the lightning.


Sri Aurobindo: Consciousness may similarly appear as a phenomenon, an outbreak of sentience in the obscurity of an originally nescient being; but we must go far beyond that specious appearance if we would know the true nature and origin and discover the entire possibilities of this apparently strange and anomalous force. For anomalous it is, since it occurs in a fundamentally inconscient universe of Matter and strange and curious it is in its reactions, aberrations, workings, destiny.  Physical science — and psychology in its present methods is only an extension of physical science — conducts its search into things from down upwards; it regards Matter as the foundation and the bottom of things and having searched into that foundation, got as it thinks to the very bottom, it believes, or once believed, it has by that very fact understood their depths, their centre, their height and top. But this is a naive error. The truth of things is in their depths or at their centre and even at their top.


Sri Aurobindo: The truth of consciousness also is to be found at its top and in its depths or at its centre; but when we enter into the depths of consciousness or when we try to reach its centre, we go off into trance and likewise before we get to its top, we go off into trance.  Our searches into Matter also are vitiated by the fact that in Matter consciousness is in a trance and gives no apparent response to our probings. In living Matter, not yet mental, still subconscious, it does give sometimes a reply, but not one that we can understand, and, as for mind in the animal, it is only consciousness half awakened out of the original trance of inconscient Matter: even in the human being it starts from an original nescience, its expressions, its data, all that we can ordinarily observe of it, are the movements of Ignorance fumbling for knowledge. We cannot understand from these alone what consciousness really is nor discover its source or its supreme possibilities or its limits, if indeed it has any limits and is not like being itself inﬁnite and illimitable. Only if we can get away from this imperfection and ignorance to some top of its possibilities or to its latent depths or some hidden centre, can we discover its true nature and through it the very self and reality of our being.


Sri Aurobindo: How do we know that there is a top to consciousness or an inner centre, since these are not apparent on the face of things?  By its supernormal, not its normal manifestations and phenomena, for the top of things is always supernormal, it is only the bottom and what is near to the bottom that are normal, at any rate to our ordinary consciousness in the material universe.  Especially we can know by the supernormal becoming normal to us — by Yoga.  112  I mean by Yogic psychology an examination of the nature and movements of consciousness as they are revealed to us by the processes and results of Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: This deﬁnition at once takes us out of the ﬁeld of ordinary psychology and extends the range of our observation to an immense mass of facts and experiments which exceed the common surface and limited range very much as the vastly extended range of observation of Science exceeds that of the common man looking at natural external phenomena only with the help [of] his unaided mind and senses. The ﬁeld of Yoga is practically unlimited and its processes and instrumentation have a plasticity and adaptability and power of expansion to which it is difﬁcult to see or set any limit.  It is true that modern psychology has probed the internal law of living matter and consciousness and arrived at results which are remarkable but limited and fundamentally inconclusive. We know from it that the movements of consciousness are affected and on a certain side determined by the functioning of the physical organs. But still the nature, origin and laws of consciousness remain unknown; all that has been proved is that the body provides for it an engine or instrumentation for its manifestation in living physical bodies and that certain lesions, alterations or deteriorations of the engine may lead to considerable or serious results in the functioning of the embodied consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: This was to be expected and can at once be conceded; but there is no proof that consciousness is a function of matter or that it was originated by the chemical or biological processes of the body or that it perishes with the dissolution of life in the body. The cessation of its functioning in the body at death proves nothing, for that was to be expected whatever the origin of consciousness or its fundamental nature. Its disappearance may be a departure, a disappearance from the body, but not a disappearance from existence.  It is true also that modern inquiry probing into psychological (as opposed to physiological) phenomena has discovered certain truths that are equally discovered by Yogic process, the role of the subconscient, the subliminal, double or multiple personality; but its observations in these ﬁelds are of an extremely groping and initial character and one does not see easily how it can arrive at the same largeness of results here as in physiology, physics, chemistry or other departments of physical Science.  It is only by Yoga process that one can arrive at an instrumentation which will drive large wide roads into the psychological Unknown and not only obscure and narrow tunnels.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁeld of psychology needs a direct inner psychological instrumentation by which we can arrive at sure data and sure results in ourselves veriﬁed [by] equally sure data [and] results in our observation of others and of the hidden psychological world and its play of unseen forces. The physical is the outwardly seen and sensed and needs physical instruments for its exploration; the psychological is the physically unseen and unsensed, to be discovered only by an organisation of the inward senses and other now undeveloped and occult means. It is through consciousness, by an instrumentation of consciousness only that the nature and laws and movements of consciousness can be discovered — and this is the method of Yoga.  113  Yoga is a means by which one arrives at union with the Truth behind things through an inner discipline which leads us from the consciousness of the outward and apparent to the consciousness of the inner and real.


Sri Aurobindo: Yoga consciousness does not exclude the knowledge of the outer apparent world but it sees it with the eyes of an inner, not an outer seeing and experience, alters and sets right all its values in the light of an inner deeper greater truer consciousness and applies to it the Law of the reality, exchanging the law of the creature’s Ignorance for the rule of a divine Will and Knowledge.  A change of consciousness is the whole meaning of the process of Yoga[.]  114  Yoga is the science, the process, the effort and action by which man attempts to pass out of the limits of his ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness[.]


Sri Aurobindo: 115  All yoga is in its essential [ . . . . . . . . . ] heightening or deepening of our consciousness so that it may become capable of something beyond our ordinary consciousness and our normal Nature. It is an entering into depths, an ascent towards heights, a widening beyond. Or it is contact with depths within, heights above, vastnesses beyond us, an opening to their greater inﬂuences, beings, movements or a reception of them into our surface consciousness and being so that the outer [is] altered, enveloped, governed by what is not our ordinary self. For the Reality which we are seeking does not lie on our surface or, if it is there, it is concealed and only a deeper, higher or wider consciousness than any to which we now have access can reach, touch or know and possess it.


Sri Aurobindo: Even if we dive below our normal consciousness to ﬁnd what is there it is some aspect of the Reality into which we enter.  116  By Yoga is meant — the word is not here used in the limited sense given to it in the disputations of Pandits — the use and [? ] of certain processes of self-discipline [and] self-exercise or spontaneous and automatic self-intensiﬁcation and self-extension of the mind and whatever in us is limited and that by which we enter into a larger deeper consciousness than is ordinarily ours.  This consciousness is aware of external things not only through the physical mind and senses but by other though often similar means of Mind, an inner sense or senses, an inner tact or feeling such as a projective or responsive awareness of things at a slight or great distance, a premonitory sense of things about to happen [or] preparing to happen, a feeling of things or persons not seen, an inner vision of physical objects and happenings not before the eye and hundreds of other phenomena not normal to the ordinary mind. These phenomena are ordinarily labelled occult or psychic or described as hallucinatory according to the point of view of the speaker, but such epithets explain nothing.


Sri Aurobindo: This range of phenomena exists and for anyone who would know the nature and origin and possibilities of consciousness an examination of them is imperative.  This range of phenomena is however only an outer fringe of Yoga. It is more important that it admits to an inner ﬁeld of experiences of the utmost import, to a growth of psyche and spirit, to deepest realities and [?ﬁnally] to the deepest of all; [ . . . . . . ]  But what precisely do we mean by the word Yoga? It is used here in the most general sense possible as a convenient name including all processes or results of processes that lead to the unveiling of a greater and inner knowledge, consciousness, experience.


Sri Aurobindo: Any psychic discipline by which we can pass partly or wholly into a spiritual state of the consciousness, any spontaneous or systematised approach to the inner Reality or the supreme Reality, any state of union or closeness to the Divine, any entry into a consciousness larger, deeper or higher than the normal consciousness common to humankind, fall automatically within the range of the word Yoga. Yoga takes us from the surface into the depths of our consciousness or it admits us into its very centre; it takes us up to the hidden topmost heights of our conscious being. It shows to us the secrets of the Self and the secret of the Divine. It gives us the knowledge, the vision, the presence of the Immanent and the Cosmic and the Transcendent Reality; that is its supreme purpose. On a lower grade it gives us the key to an inner and larger consciousness that is subliminal to us and brings out its experiences, its powers and possibilities


Sri Aurobindo: and unless we know these things the secret of Consciousness and the knowledge of our whole being must escape us. It is through this door that we pass from a nescience of our true nature into a full light of self-knowledge.  But there are methods, schools, disciplines of Yoga that are turned towards one restricted aim, follow each a different path, win control of a separate province and by following that exclusive path we shall know that province of our being only or reach a single summit. It is by the integrality of Yoga that one can attain the integrality of consciousness. Our aim must be to embrace in this new knowledge all the planes of consciousness and all its summits.


Sri Aurobindo: Then in the light of the knowledge brought to us and its widening and heightening of our consciousness, it is in the light of the top of things that we have to see and know all. It is then only that our ignorance or a very partial and surface awareness of ourselves can be ﬂooded by a light of self-revelation and turn into selfknowledge.  117  Yoga is in its essence a passage from the ordinary consciousness in which we are aware only of appearances into a higher wider deeper consciousness in which we become aware of realities and of the one Reality. Not only do we become aware of it, but we can live in it and act from it and according to it instead of living in and according to the appearance of things.


Sri Aurobindo: Yoga is a passage from ignorance to self-knowledge, from our apparent to our true being, from an outer phenomenal mental vital material life-existence to an inner spiritual existence and a spiritualised nature.  By Yoga we pass from the phenomenal to the real Man, from the consciousness of our own apparent outer nature to the consciousness of our real self, Atman, an inner and inmost man, Purusha, that which we truly and eternally are.  This self or true being remains constant through all the changes of our phenomenal being, changes of the mind, life or body or changes of our apparent personality; it is permanent, perpetual and immortal, a portion or manifestation of the Eternal.  By Yoga we pass also from our consciousness of the phenomenal appearance or appearances of the cosmos or world around us to a consciousness of its truth and reality. We become aware of the world as a manifestation of or in universal being who is the true truth of all that we see, hear, experience.


Sri Aurobindo: We become aware of a cosmic Consciousness which is the secret of the cosmic Energy, a cosmic Self or Spirit, the cosmic Divine, the universal Godhead.  But by Yoga we become aware also that our own Self or true being is one with the cosmic Self and Spirit, our nature a play of the cosmic Nature; the wall between ourselves and the universe begins to disappear and vanishes altogether. We realise the selfsame Pantheos in ourselves, in others and in all universal existence.  But also by Yoga we become aware of something that is more than our individual being and more than the cosmic being, a transcendent Being or Existence which is not dependent on ours or the existence of the universe. Our existence is a manifestation of and in that Being, the cosmos also is a manifestation of and in that one Supreme Existence.


Sri Aurobindo: This then is the Truth or Reality to which we arrive by Yoga, a one and supreme Being or Existence and Power of Being which manifests as a cosmic Self or Spirit and a cosmic Energy or Nature and in that again as our own self or spirit which becomes aware of itself as an individual being and nature.  118  It is the aim of all Yoga to pass by a change of consciousness into the Reality that is behind things and live no longer in their appearance. To enter into some kind of union or communion or participation in that is the common object of all Yoga.  But the Reality presents itself to the consciousness of man the mental being under many aspects.


Sri Aurobindo: We seek after union or closeness to the Divine, whatever the Divine may be. We see the Divine as a personal Godhead or as an impersonal Existence.   A God of Love or compassion attracts us or a God of might and power. It is a divine Friend who meets us or a Divine Master or a World Father or World Mother or an almighty Lord of all or a Divine Lover.


Sri Aurobindo: We are in the presence of a Cosmic Spirit in whose universal consciousness we lose our separate ego or a Supracosmic Absolute in whom we lose altogether our cosmic as well as our individual existence. We ﬁnd our own highest Self or the Self of all or we pass into a sublime Mystery without relation or feature where neither self nor all can exist any longer. Or it may be the inexpressible mystery of an original Nihil that abolishes for us all suffering along with all existence — or else that Nihil may be a mystic All that is far other than the false and illusory being created for us by mind and life experience.  119  Yoga is our union with some Being or some Reality, which is greater than ourselves or is our own greatest and real Self; it is That which by Yoga we join, enter into or become.


Sri Aurobindo: 120  All Yoga strives towards union with the Highest, the Spirit, the Self, the Divine, or whatever other name or aspect we seize of the One Eternal and Inﬁnite.  And by union we mean, ﬁrst, contact constant and increasing with the consciousness of the Divine or Inﬁnite, then to assimilate it or assimilate ourselves to it, then to become not only like to it and full of it, but to enter into it and dwell in it, to become that divine consciousness and being, essence of its essence and so abolish all division that separates us from the Divinity from whom we came.  121  To be one with the Eternal is the object of Yoga; there is no other object, because all other aims are included in this one divine perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: To be one with the Eternal is to be one with him in being, consciousness, power and delight. All that is is summed in these four terms of the inﬁnite, for all else are but their workings.  To be one with the Eternal is also to live in the Eternal and in his presence and from his inﬁnite nature, — sayujya, salokya, samipya, sadrishya. These four together are one way of being and one perfection.  To live in the Eternal is also to live with the Eternal within us.


Sri Aurobindo: Whosoever consciously inhabits his being, his conscious presence inhabits. God lives and moves and acts in us when we live and move and act in him[.]  122  Yoga is the contact of the humanity in us with the deity in which it dwells, of the ﬁnite with the Inﬁnite, of the as yet accomplished evolving & imperfect humanity with its yet unevolved attainable perfection, of the outwardly active waking consciousness which is controlled with the inwardly active controlling consciousness, of man with God, of the changing outward apparent ego with the secret real and immutable Self. By that contact the lower rises to the higher, the unevolved evolves, the unborn is created, humanity assumes some part of godhead, man moves upward to God.


Sri Aurobindo: This upward and self-expanding movement is the utility of Yoga.  123  To be one in all ways of thy being with that which is the Highest, this is Yoga. To be one in all ways of thy being with that which is the All, this is Yoga. To be one in thy spirit and with thy understanding and thy heart and in all thy members with the God in humanity, this is Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: To be one with all Nature and all beings, this is Yoga. All this is to be one with God in his transcendence and his cosmos and all that he has created in his being. Because from him all is and all is in him and he is all and in all and because he is thy highest Self


Sri Aurobindo: and thou art one with him in thy spirit and a portion of him in thy soul and at play with him in thy nature, and because this world is a scene in his being in which he is thy secret Master and lover and friend and the lord and sustainer and aim of all thou art, therefore is oneness with him the perfect way of thy being[.] 124  The human being on earth is God playing at humanity in a world of matter under the conditions of a hampered density with the ulterior intention of imposing law of spirit on matter & nature of deity upon human nature. Evolution is nothing but the progressive unfolding of Spirit out of the density of material consciousness and the gradual self-revelation of God out of this apparent animal being.  Yoga is the application, for this process of divine selfrevelation, of the supreme force of tapas by which God created the world, supports it & will destroy it. It substitutes always some direct action of an inﬁnite divine force for the limited workings of our fettered animal humanity.


Sri Aurobindo: It uses divine means in order to rise to divinity.  All Yoga is tapasya and all siddhi of Yoga is accomplishment of godhead either by identity or by relation with the Divine Being in its principles or its personality or in both or simultaneously by identity and relation.  Identity is the principle of Adwaita, relation of Dwaita, relation in a qualiﬁed identity of Visishtadwaita. But entire perfection comes by identity with God in essential experience & relation of difference with Him in experience of manifestation.  125


Sri Aurobindo: In the end a union, a closeness, a constant companionship in the soul with the Divine, and a yet more wonderful oneness and inliving[.]   126  Yoga means union and the whole object of Yoga is the union of the human soul with the supreme Being and of the present nature of humanity with the eternal, supreme or divine Nature.  The greater the union, the greater the Yoga, the more complete the union, the more complete the Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: There are different conceptions of the supreme Being and to each conception corresponds a school of Yoga with its separate idea and discipline. But these are partial and not complete systems; or rather they are complete in themselves, but do not cover the whole human being and nature. Most of them lead away from life and are useful only to the few who are moved to turn away from human existence and seek the bliss of some other state of being. To humanity at large this kind of Yoga has no real message. The complete Yoga will be one which accepts God in the world and oneness with all beings and solidarity with the human kind, ﬁlls life and existence with the God-consciousness and not only raises man the individual but leads man the race towards a total perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: 127  The aim put before itself by Yoga is God; its method is tapasya.  God is the All and that which exceeds & transcends the All; there is nothing in existence which is not God but God is not anything in that existence, except symbolically, in image to His own consciousness. Humanity also is a symbol or eidolon of God, we are made in His image; and by that is meant, not a formal image, but in the image of His being and personality, the essence of divinity & its quality, the divine being & divine knowledge.  There are in every thing existing phenomenally or, as we shall say, symbolically, two parts, the thing in itself & the symbol, Self & Nature, res (thing that is) & factum (thing that is made), immutable being & mutable becoming, that which is supernatural in it & that [which] is natural.


Sri Aurobindo: Everything in existence has something in it which seeks to transcend itself ; Matter moves towards becoming Life, Life moves towards becoming Mind, Mind moves towards becoming ideal Truth, ideal Truth rises to become divine & inﬁnite Spirit.  The reason is that every symbol, being a partial expression of God, reaches out to & seeks to become its own entire reality; it aspires to become its real self by transcending its apparent self.  Thing that is made is attracted towards Thing that is, becoming towards being, the natural to the supernatural, symbol towards Thing in itself, Nature towards God.  The upward movement is the means towards fulﬁlment of existence in the world; downward movement is destruction, Hell, perdition.


Sri Aurobindo: Everything tends [to] move upward; once it is assured of its natural existence, it seeks the supernatural. Every nature is a step towards some supernature, something natural to itself but supernatural to what is below it. Life is supernatural to Matter, Mind supernatural to Life, ideal being supernatural to mental being, inﬁnite being supernatural to ideal being. So too man is supernatural to the animal, God is supernatural to man. Man too as soon as he has assured his natural existence, must insist on his upward movement towards God.


Sri Aurobindo: The upward movement is towards Heaven, the downward movement towards Hell.  The animal soul fulﬁls itself when it transcends animality & becomes human. Humanity also fulﬁls itself when it transcends humanity & becomes God.  By yielding to Nature, we fall away both from Nature & from God; by transcending Nature we at once fulﬁl all the possibilities of Nature & rise towards God. The human touches ﬁrst the divine & then becomes divine.


Sri Aurobindo: There are those who seek to kill Nature in order to become the Self; but that is not God’s intention in humanity. We have to transcend Nature, not to kill it.  Every movement of humanity which seeks to destroy Nature, however religious, lofty or austere, of whatever dazzling purity of ethereality, is doomed to failure, sick disappointment, disillusionment or perversion. It is in its nature transient, because it contradicts God’s condition for us. He has set Nature there as a condition of His self-fulﬁlment in the world.


Sri Aurobindo: Every movement of humanity which bids us be satisﬁed with Nature, dwell upon the earth & cease to look upwards, however rational, clearsighted, practical, effective, comfortable it may be is doomed to weariness, petrifaction & cessation. It is in its nature transient because it contradicts God’s intention in us. He dwells secret in Nature & compels us towards Him by His irresistible attraction.  Materialistic movements are as unnatural & abnormal as ascetic & negatory religions & philosophies. Under the pretence of bringing us back to Nature, they take us away from her entirely; for they forget that Nature is only phenomenally Nature but in reality she is God.


Sri Aurobindo: The divine element in her is that which she most really is; the rest is only condition, process & stage in her development of the secret divinity.  Not to be ensnared, emmeshed and bound by Nature, not to hate & destroy her, is the ﬁrst thing we must learn if we would be complete Yogins & proceed towards our divine perfection.  Being still natural in the world to transcend Nature internally so that both internally & externally we may master & use her as free & lord, swarat samrat, is our fulﬁlment.  Being still the symbol to reach through it the thing that symbolises itself, to realise the symbol, is our fulﬁlment.  Being still a ﬁgure of humanity, man among men, a living body among living bodies, though housed in life & matter yet a mental being among mental beings, being & remaining all this that we are apparently, yet to exceed all this apparent manhood and become in the body what we are really, God, spirit, supreme & inﬁnite, pure Bliss, pure Force, pure Light, this is our fulﬁlment.


Sri Aurobindo: Our whole apparent life is a becoming, but all becoming has for its goal & fulﬁlment being & God is the only being; to become divine in the nature of the world, in the symbol of humanity is our fulﬁlment.  Yoga in its practice may be either perfect or partial, either selective or comprehensive. Perfect and comprehensive Yoga avoids limitations by aspects and leads to entire divinity.  If we are to exceed our human stature and become divine, we must ﬁrst, in our Indian phrase, get God; for this human ego is the lower imperfect term of our being, God is its higher perfect term. God in us is the possessor of our super-nature and without Him there is no effectual rising.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁnite cannot become inﬁnite, unless it perceives & desires to touch its own secret inﬁnity; nor can the symbol-being, unless it knows, loves and pursues its Self-Reality, overcome the present limits of its merely apparent nature. This necessity is the imperative justiﬁcation of religion, — not of a church, creed or theology; for these things are all outward religiosity rather than the truth of religion, but of that personal and intimate religion, a thing of temper and spirit and life, not of views or ceremonies which draws each man to his own vision of the Supreme or his own idea of something higher than himself. Without the worship of the Supreme in the heart, the aspiration towards it in the will or the thirst for it in the temperamental cravings we shall not have the impulse or the strength for the difﬁcult and supreme effort demanded of us.  Therefore have the prophets spoken and the Avatars descended, so that mankind may be inspired to this great call upon its upward-straining energies. The aim of rationalism & Science is to make man content with his humanity and contradict Nature, bafﬂing her evolution; the aim of religion, — but not unhappily of the creeds & Churches — is to farther the great aim of Nature by pushing man towards his evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: The attainment of God is the true object of all human effort for which all his other efforts political, social, literary, intellectual, are only a necessary condition & preparation of the race; but then there are both differences in the state of the attainment, differences in its range & effectivity. Three states of divine attainment may usefully be distinguished, touch with God, indwelling in Him & becoming He. The ﬁrst is initial & elementary; unless passing the veil of our ordinary nature we touch the divine Being or He leaning down impose His touch [on] us, unless we come ﬁrst into contact with Him either in our heart, our mind, our works or our being, we cannot go on to indwell in Him. If we are strong in spirit, the touch may indeed be rapid & summary & we may wake at once & stride forward to the state of divine indwelling, soul of man in the soul of God, the individual in the universal; but the touch must be there. To enforce this preliminary step, to bring man into some kind of contact with God, is the common and sometimes the sole preoccupation of human religions.


Sri Aurobindo: It does not matter greatly to Nature for her purpose how it is done, — in however crude & elementary a way, through whatever intellectual errors & emotional blunders or ethical outrages, the touch must be established; this imperatively & above all things the religious spirit demands. Nature, as is always her way, presses on to her all-important, immediate steps and is willing to purchase a single great & general gain by any number of particular losses. Man, besides, is so various in the arrangement of his human qualities, the master spring as well as the peculiar temperament differs so greatly or so subtly in each individual that there can never be, for this purpose of Nature’s, too many sects, disciplines or different religions. Swami Vivekananda has well seen the consummation of religion in a state when each human individual has his own religion dictated by his own spiritual needs & nature; for collective creeds, Churches & theologies, in spite of their temporary necessity & some undeniable permanent advantages, help to formalise the upward effort & deprive it of its adaptability, freedom & perfect individual sincerity. The priest & dogma will seldom leave God & the soul free to meet each other in that solitude & spontaneity which gives the union its highest force & delight.


Sri Aurobindo: They are always pressing in to control & preside at the marriage & legitimise it with formulas, rites & ofﬁcial registration.  Moreover the intellect of natural man is narrow, his effort soon exhausted & easily satisﬁed with imperfection. If he is led to think that his way of contact with the Divine is the only way, his own freedom of higher development is fettered or entirely taken away from him & in his intellectual & religious egoism he militates against the freedom of others. Most religions tend easily to believe that the contact with God once established, no matter with what limitations or of what kind, all is done that needs to be done, all fulﬁlled that God demands of us.  Popular religions tend naturally to be dualistic and to preserve a trenchant distinction between man & God dividing the symbol being from That which expresses itself in him; while with one hand they raise man towards his super-nature, with the other they hold him down to his ordinary nature.


Sri Aurobindo: The lower is suffused with the glow of the higher & touched with its power & rapture, but it does not itself rise into & dwell within it. At its lowest the dualistic soul cherishes the taint of its imperfections, at its highest, unless in rare self-transcending moments, keeps itself distinct in awe & reverence from the divine Lover, worships at His feet but cannot hide itself in His bosom.  Therefore Nature, still following her upward surge, has provided a mightier rank of human souls who are capable of going forward beyond this preliminary effort & having entered into the very being of God, of dwelling there in beatitude. Entering into the consciousness of the Inﬁnite, feeling it all around them & in them, ever thrilling with its touch, aware of identity with It in nature, joy and inner awareness, they yet preserve a constant separateness of their special being in that identity. They do not plunge themselves wholly into the divine ocean or, if they go down into it, they keep hold on a fathomline which will preserve their touch with the surface.


Sri Aurobindo: In their nature — whatever be their opinions — such men are Visishtadwaitins, souls not drawn towards entire oneness. But unless man plunges himself wholly into God caring not whether he reemerge, unless the human sacriﬁces himself wholly to the divinity, keeping back no particle of his being, not even the least particle of separateness of the individual ego, jivatman, the divine purpose in man cannot be utterly accomplished. Therefore Nature or the Will of God — for Nature is nothing but the Will of God in action — has  provided that some, having indwelt in God, human soul in divine soul, shall be irresistibly called immediately, with brief respite or at long & last to the utter immersion. These go onward & throw away the last trace of Ego into God.


Sri Aurobindo: Some of us, it has been said by a great teacher, are jivakotis, human beings leaning so preeminently to the symbol-nature that, if they have lost it utterly for a while in the Reality, they lose themselves; once immersed, they cannot return; they are lost in God to humanity; others are ishwarakotis, human beings whose centre has already been shifted upwards or, elevated in the superior planes of our conscious-existence from the beginning, was established in God rather than in Nature. Such men are already leaning down from God to Nature; they, therefore, even in losing themselves in Him yet keep themselves since in reaching God they do not depart from their centre but rather go towards it; arrived they are able to lean down again to humanity. Those who can thus emerge from this bath of God are the ﬁnal helpers of humanity & are chosen by God & Nature to prepare the type of supernatural man to which our humanity is rising.  There are, then, these three divine conditions, states separately conceived of humanity’s God attainment. Man being limited in energy & discriminative rather than catholic in intellect, fastens usually on this separate conception & limits himself to one or other of these conditions; Yogic method, also, being careful of the different natures of men, suits itself to their limitations, becomes selective and concentrates upon one of these conditions or another.


Sri Aurobindo: Or even it becomes partial as well as selective; for in its contact with God, it relates itself to a part of divine quality rather than the perfect divinity, to a God of mercy, the God of Justice, the Divine Master, the Divine Friend, or else with some aspect of divine impersonal being, to Inﬁnite Rapture, to Inﬁnite Force or to Inﬁnite Calm & Purity. In the indwelling there may be the same limitations, in the becoming also they may persist. There is no fault to be found with this selective process or with this partiality. They are necessary; human limitations demand this device; human perfectibility itself ﬁnds its account in these concessions. Nature knows her task & she proceeds to it with a wide, ﬂexible & perfect wisdom which smiles at our impatient logical narrownesses & rigid, onesighted consistencies.


Sri Aurobindo: She knows she has an inﬁnitely complex & variable material to deal with & must be inﬁnitely complex & variable in her methods.  We only consider precise method & ultimate fulﬁlment; she has to reckon on her way with thousand-armed struggles & inﬁnite possibilities.  Nevertheless, her ultimate aim & the perfect & comprehensive Yoga is that which embraces rather than selects. We are meant to be within the symbol of humanity what God is in Himself & universally. Now God is free, absolute from these limitations & all-comprehensive.


Sri Aurobindo: He is always one in his being, yet both one with & separate from his symbols & in that differentiated oneness able to stand quite apart from them. So we too in our ultimate divine realisation when we have become one with our divine Self, may & should be able also to stand out as the self still one in all things and beings, yet differentiated in the symbol, so as to enjoy a blissful divided closeness such as that of the Lover & Beloved mingling yet separate in their rapture; & may & should even be able to stand away from God with a sort of entire separateness holding His hand still, unlike the pure dualist, but still standing away from Him so that we may enjoy that inﬁnity of human relation with God which is the wonder & beauty & joy of dualistic religions. To accomplish this is the full, the purna Yoga, and the sadhak who can attain to it, is in his condition the complete Yogin.  Is such a triune condition of the soul possible? Logically, it would seem impossible; logically, all trinities are chimeras and a thing must be one thing at a time & cannot combine three such divergent states as oneness, differentiated oneness & effective duality.


Sri Aurobindo: But in these matters an inch of experience runs farther than a yard of logic, & experience, you will ﬁnd, afﬁrms that the triune God-state is perfectly possible & simple once you have attained God’s fullness. We must not apply to the soul a logic which is based on the peculiarities of matter. It is true of a clod that it cannot be at the same time a clod hanging up or pasted on some bough, a clod protruding from the earth and a shapeless mass trodden into the mother soil. But this is because the clod is divided from the earthly form. The soul is not divided from God by these barriers of material & dimension.


Sri Aurobindo: What is true [of] matter is not true of Spirit, nor do the standards of form become facts applied to the formless. For matter is conscious being conﬁned in form, the spirit is conscious being using form but unconﬁned in it; & it is the privilege of Spirit that though indivisible in its pure being, it is freely self-divisible in its conscious experience & can concentrate itself in many states at a time. It is by this tapas, by this varied concentration of selfknowledge that Divine Existence creates & supports the world & is at one & the same [time] God & Nature & World, Personal & Impersonal, Pure & Varied, Qualitied & without Qualities, Krishna & Kali, Shiva & Brahma & Vishnu, man & animal & vegetable & stone, all aspects of Himself & all symbols. We need not doubt therefore that we, recovering our divine reality, shall not be bound to a single condition or aspect but can command a triune or even a multiple soul-experience. We, becoming God, become that which is the All & exceeds & transcends the All.


Sri Aurobindo: Sarvabhutani atmaivabhud vijanatah. The soul of the perfect knower becomes all existent things & That transcendental in which all things have their existence, ihaiva, without ceasing to possess his human centre of separate experience. For this is the entire divinity that is the result of the perfect & comprehensive Yoga.  128


Sri Aurobindo: All existence is the existence of the One, the Eternal and Inﬁnite, the beginning and middle and end, the source and substance and continent and support of all things. There is not and cannot be any other existence, anything that is other than or outside of or above or below or beyond or in any way separate from the existence of the one Eternal and Inﬁnite. All that appears as ﬁnite, temporal, multiple and phenomenal is still in reality being of the being of the Inﬁnite and the Eternal..  This is the ﬁrst and abiding truth without which no other can be understood in the truth of things or put in its proper place in the integrality of the Whole. It is therefore the fundamental realisation at which the seeker of the Yoga must arrive.


Sri Aurobindo: 129  God is, is the ﬁrst seed of Yoga. It is Tat Sat of the Vedanta. I am, is the second seed. It is So’ham of the Upanishads.


Sri Aurobindo: God is inﬁnite self-existence, self-conscious force of existence, self-diffused or self-concentrated delight of existence; I too am that inﬁnite self-existence, self-consciousness, self-force, self-delight; this is the double third seed. It is Sachchidananda of the worldwide transcendental conclusion of all human thinking.  130  Self-knowledge is the foundation of the complete Yoga. Afﬁrm in yourselves self-knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: Self-knowledge and knowledge of the Brahman is one; for I am He. Of this let there be no doubt in thy mind.  Self is twofold, essential and phenomenal, being & becoming[.]   131


Sri Aurobindo: First be aware of thy inner self and spirit. Next be aware of that self and spirit one with thine in others.   132  All Yoga starts from the perception that what we are now or rather what we perceive as ourselves and so call is only an ignorant partial and superﬁcial formulation of our nature.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not our whole self, it is not even our real self; it is a little representative personality put forward by the true and persistent being in us for the experience of this brief life; we not only have been in the past and can be in the future but we are much more than that in the present secret totality of our being and nature.  Especially, there is a secret soul in us that is our true person; there is a secret self that is our true impersonal being and spirit.  To unveil that soul and that self is one of the most important movements of Yoga[.]   133


Sri Aurobindo: The sense of a greater or even of an ultimate Self need not be limited to a negative and empty wideness whose one character is to be without limitation or feature. The ﬁrst extreme push of our recoil from what we now are or think ourselves to be may and does often at ﬁrst carry us over into this annihilating experience. A negation of our present error, a release from our petty irksome aching bonds may seem to be the only thing worth having, the only thing true. The rest is inﬁnity, freedom, peace.  We feel an Inﬁnity that needs nothing but its own inﬁnite to ﬁll it.


Sri Aurobindo: We rejoice in a freedom of which any form, name or description, any creative activity, any movement, any impulse would be a disturbing denial and the beginning of a relapse into the error of will and desire, the ignorance of the illusory ﬁnite.  To accept nothing but the bare bliss of inﬁnity is the condition of this peace. The mind escaping from itself denies all thought, all form-making, all motion or play of any kind; for that would be a grievous return to itself, a miserable imprisonment and renewed hard-labour. The life released from the toil of labouring and striving and living, demands only immobility and no more to be, a sleep of force, the surety and rest of an immutable status.  The body accepts denial and dissolution, for to be dissolved is to cease to breathe and suffer.


Sri Aurobindo: A bodiless, lifeless, mindless inﬁnite breadth and supreme silence shows to us that we are in contact with the Absolute.  134  This method of extinction is imposed on our mind and our mental ego, because all that is eternal, inﬁnite, absolute is superconscient to mind; mind and its ego cannot remain awake in that greater consciousness, they must disappear. But if we can change or evolve from mental into supramental beings, then the superconscient becomes our normal consciousness. We can then hope to wake in That and not fall asleep in it, to grow into it and not abolish ourselves in it, to last in identity and not lose ourselves in identity with the supreme Existence.


Sri Aurobindo: 135  It is possible for the reason, the thinker in us to rest and cease satisﬁed in this sole spiritual experience and to discard all others on the ground that they are in the end illusory or of a minor phenomenal signiﬁcance. The logical mind drives naturally towards a pursuit of the abstract, towards pure essences, an indeﬁnable substratum of all experiences, a nameless X without contents, an ineffable and featureless Absolute. Itself a creator of deﬁnitions without which it cannot think but none of which can give it any abiding sense of an ultimate, it escapes from itself with a sense of relief into the Indeﬁnable. But if the mind ﬁnds its account in cessation and release, the other parts of our being have in this solution to be cast away from us or put to silence.


Sri Aurobindo: The heart remains atrophied and unfulﬁlled; the will is baulked of its last dynamic signiﬁcances. These too tend towards an absolute, the heart towards an absolute of ineffable Love and Bliss, the will towards an absolute of ineffable Power. And there is nothing to prove that the knowledge at which the reason arrives is alone true. There is no reason to suppose that the heart and will and the deeper soul within us have not too their own sufﬁcient doors opening upon the Supreme, their key to the mystery of the Eternal.  136


Sri Aurobindo: The integral Yoga of Devotion proceeds through seven stages each of which opens out from the one that precedes it: Aspiration and self-consecration; devotion; adoration and worship; love; possession of the whole being and life by the Divine; joy of the Divine Love and the beauty and sweetness of the Divine; the absolute Bliss of the Absolute.  Faith is our ﬁrst need; for without faith in the Divine, in the existence and the all-importance of the Divine Being there can be no reason to aspire or to consecrate, there can be no power in the aspiration or force behind the consecration.  Doubts do not matter, if the faith central and fundamental is there. Doubts may come, but they cannot prevail against [the rock] of faith in the centre of the being. The rock may be covered awhile by surges of doubt and despondency, but the rock will emerge ﬁrm and indestructible.


Sri Aurobindo: Faith is of the heart, the inner heart where lives the psychic being. The outer heart is the seat of the vital being, the life personality. That like the mind may believe and then lose its belief, doubt comes from the mind, the vital and the physical consciousness. [The greater the intensity] of the psychic ﬁre, the less will be the power of doubt to soil and darken the mind, the life and the consciousness of the body.  137


Sri Aurobindo: Three are the words that sum up the ﬁrst state of the Yoga of devotion, faith, worship, obedience.  Three are the words that sum up the second state of the Yoga of devotion, adoration, delight, self-giving.  Three are the words that sum up the supreme state of the Yoga of devotion, love, ecstasy, surrender.


Sri Aurobindo: These are the seven ecstasies of Love — The ecstasy of the body in the clasp of the Lover.  The ecstasy of the life consecrated and self-given to the Lord.  The ecstasy of the Mind made one in idea and [will] with the divine Consort.   The ecstasy of the supermind united with mind and body and enjoying the bliss of difference.


Sri Aurobindo: The ecstasy [of the] soul in the pure bliss of the Beatiﬁc.   The ecstasy of the spirit united in consciousness and force with the Universal.   The ecstasy of the pure being absolute and one with the Transcendent.


Sri Aurobindo: 138  All spiritual paths lead to a higher consciousness and union with the Divine and among the many paths one of the greatest is the Way of Works : it is as great as the Way of Bhakti or the Way of Knowledge.  Do not imagine that works are in their nature nothing but a bondage, they can be a powerful means towards liberation and divine perfection. All depends on the spirit in our works and their orientation towards the inner and the higher Light away from desire and ego.


Sri Aurobindo: Works are a bondage when they are done out of desire or for the sake of the ego, by a mind turned outwards, involved in the act and not detached and free, bound to the ignorance of this lower nature.   139  To create the union of his soul with the Divine Presence and Power through a perfect surrender of the will in all his activities, is the high aspiration of the seeker on the Way of Works.  To put off like a worn-out disguise the ignorant consciousness and stumbling will that are ours in our present mind and life-force and to put on the light and knowledge, the purity and power, the tranquillity and ecstasy of the divine Essence, the spiritual Nature that awaits us when we climb beyond mind, is the victory after which he reaches.


Sri Aurobindo: To make mind and heart and life and body conscious, changed and luminous moulds of this supramental Spirit, instruments of its light and power and works, vessels of its bliss and radiance, is the glory he assigns to his transﬁgured human members.  On one side a darkened mind and life, ignorant, suffering, spinning like a top whipped by Nature always in the same obscure and miserable rounds, on the other a soul touched by a ray from the hidden Truth, illumined, conscious, concentrated in a single unceasing effort towards its own and the world’s Highest, — this is the difference between man’s ordinary life and the way of the divine Yoga[.]     It is not a mental or moral ideal to which is turned the seeker of the Way, but a truth of the spirit, the experience of a hidden Reality living and concrete, a Light, a Power, a Joy that surpasses the mental understanding and is beyond any merely mental experience.


Sri Aurobindo: The ideals created by the mind are constructions in the air that have no sufﬁcient foundation in our vital and physical nature; therefore they can change a side of our mind and colour a part of our actions, but they cannot transform our lives, cannot ﬁnd here their physical body. Ideals touch and pass, mankind remains the same; after religions, ideals, moralities without end we keep always the same ignorant and imperfect human nature.  Moral rules and ideals are a harness for the ignorant soul, bridle and bit for the passions, reins that compel it to an assigned road, yoke and poles and traces that bind it to be faithful to the burden it carries. Morality checks and controls but does not purify or change the vital nature.  In ethics there is an artiﬁcial shaping of the mind’s surfaces, but no spiritual freedom, no satisfying perfection of the whole dynamic nature.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind’s ideals like the life’s seekings are at once absolute each in its own demand and in conﬂict with one another; neither mind nor life knows the means either of their complete or their harmonised fulﬁlment. The mind labours through the centuries but human nature remains faithful to its imperfections and man’s life amid its changes always the same.  Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transﬁgure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.    The ﬁrst secret of Yoga is to get back behind the mind to the spirit, behind the surface emotional movements to the soul, — behind the life to the universal force that builds these outward shapes and movements, — behind matter to the eternal Existence that puts on the robe of the body.


Sri Aurobindo: The second secret of Yoga is to open these discovered powers to their own supreme Truth above matter, above life, above the mind. This Truth, secret in the Superconscient, has four gradations or movements of its power, inﬁnite supermind or Gnosis, inﬁnite Bliss, Ananda, inﬁnite Consciousness and Power, Chit-Tapas, inﬁnite Being — Sat-Chid-Ananda.   The third secret of Yoga is, once arisen beyond mind, to bring down the power [] 140  The progressive surrender of our ignorant personal will and its merger into a greater divine or on the highest summits greatest supreme Will is the whole secret of Karma Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: To bring about the conditions in which alone this vast and happy identity becomes possible and to work out the lines we must follow to their end if we are to reach it, is all the deeper purpose of this discipline. The ﬁrst condition is the elimination of personal vital desire, for if desire intervenes, all harmony with the supreme Divine Will becomes impossible. Even if we receive it, we shall disﬁgure its working and distort its dynamic impulse. To give up all desire, all insistence upon fruit and reward and success must be renounced from our will and all vital attachment to the work itself excised from our nature; for attachment makes it our own and no longer the Godhead’s. The elimination of egoism is the second condition, not only of the rajasic and tamasic egoisms that twine around desire, but of the sattwic egoism that takes refuge in the idea of the I as the worker.


Sri Aurobindo: The ordinary consciousness of man cannot accept this difﬁcult renunciation or, if it accepts it, cannot achieve this tremendous change. The human mind is too ignorant, narrow and chained to its own limited movements, the human life-instincts too blind, selﬁsh, obscure, shut up in their own earth-bound pursuits and satisfactions, the human body too clumsy and hampering a machine. There is here no freedom, no large and inﬁnite room, no willing and happy plasticity for the greater play of the Divine in Nature. A certain half-seeing and imperfect subordination of the personal will to an ill-understood greater Will and Power, a stumbling and occasional intuition or at best a brilliant lightninglike intimation of its commands and impulsions, a confused, clouded and often grossly distorted execution of the little one seizes of a divine Mandate seems to be the uttermost that the human consciousness as it is at its best seems able to accomplish.  Only by a growth into a greater superhuman and supramental consciousness whose very nature is to be attuned to the Divine can we achieve the true and supreme Karma Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: This transformation is only possible after certain steps of a divine ascent have been mastered and to climb these steps is the object of the Yoga of Works as it is conceived by the Gita. The extirpation of desire, a wide and calm equality of the mind, the life soul and the spirit, annihilation of the ego, an inner quietude and expulsion or transcendence of ordinary Nature, the Nature of the three gunas and a total surrender to the Supreme are the successive steps of this preliminary change. Only after all this has been done, can we live securely in an inﬁnite consciousness not bound like our mental human nature. And only then can we receive the Light, know perfectly the will of the Supreme, attune all our movements to the rhythm of its Truth and execute perfectly from moment to moment its imperative commandments.  Till then there is no ﬁrm achievement, but only an endeavour, seeking and aspiration, all the stress and struggle of a great and uncertain spiritual adventure.


Sri Aurobindo: Only when these things are accomplished is there for the dynamic parts of our nature the beginning of a divine security in its acts and a transcendent peace.  141  Desire is always sinning against the Truth; it thins it and prevents it from taking body. Desire does not eternalise descending Truth; it disintegrates, makes temporal, minimises and soon or at last abandons from dissatisfaction (vairagya) its maimed creation.  142


Sri Aurobindo: To do works in a close union and deep communion with the Divine in us, the Universal around us and the Transcendent above us, not to be shut up any longer in the imprisoned and separative human mind, the slave of its ignorant dictates and narrow suggestions, this is Karmayoga.  To work in obedience to a divine command, an eternal Will, a transcendent and universal impulsion, not to run under the whips of ego and need and passion and desire, and not to be goaded by the pricks of mental and vital and physical preference, but to be moved by God only, by the highest Truth only, this is Karmayoga.  To live and act no longer in human ignorance, but in divine Knowledge, conscient of individual nature and universal forces and responsive to a transcendent governance, this is Karmayoga.  To live, be and act in a divine, illimitable and luminous universal consciousness open to that which is more than universal, no longer to grope and stumble in the old narrowness and darkness, this is Karmayoga.  Whosoever is weary of the littlenesses that are, whosoever is enamoured of the divine greatnesses that shall be, whosoever has any glimpse of the Supreme within him or above him or around him let him hear the call, let him follow the path.


Sri Aurobindo: The way is difﬁcult, the labour heavy and arduous and long, but its reward is habitation in an unimaginable glory, a fathomless felicity, a happy and endless vastness.  Find the Guide secret within you or housed in an earthly body, hearken to his voice and follow always the way that he points. At the end is the Light that fails not, the Truth that deceives not, the Power that neither strays nor stumbles, the wide freedom, the ineffable Beatitude.  The heavens beyond are great and wonderful, but greater and more wonderful are the heavens within you. It is these Edens that await the divine worker.


Sri Aurobindo: 143  A peace and bliss inconceivable to the pleasure-bound and painracked mind, and immeasurable by the limited capacities of our present bodily sense, is the reward of the seeker’s insistent self-discipline, his painful struggle, his untiring endeavour.    At ﬁrst a consecration, then a surrender and subordination of our human personal will, then its merger in a greater divine or greatest supreme Will is the central secret and core of intention of the Karmayoga. But this cannot be entirely done by our mental consciousness in its little human boundaries.


Sri Aurobindo: Our Yoga must help us to leave it and enter into a greater consciousness enlightened by a truer radiance of knowledge, armed with a mightier unerring strength, open to that vaster delight in which are drowned for ever our petty human pain and pleasure.  Still even what can be done within the limits of our human consciousness brings a great liberation.  But even to do that little is not easy to the physical mind of man, even when his higher mind and will consent and demand it. There is something in us wedded to ignorance, eternally in revolt against all surrender, attached to its own blind activity, its own freedom of will, a “freedom” that rattles its hundred chains at every step; — but to that element in us even that seems a divine music. And our human mind will invent a hundred good reasons against any such surrender to something not ourselves or even to our highest Self, — unless that be nothing more than a magniﬁed reﬂection of our ego; for then it will be willing enough to surrender.


Sri Aurobindo: And even our highest spiritual achievement on the mental plane is tainted and limited, when it is not distorted, by this ever unredeemed element in our nature.  Our only safety is to push on beyond the mind to a Truthconsciousness with a larger dynamic light in it that is ever free by its inherent knowledge and illumined power from these pettinesses and this egoistic darkness. For in this supramental consciousness is the Truth and there we meet it and its Master.  The supermind is the primal creative and organic instrument of the Supreme Will, the Will that is free from error because eternal, one and inﬁnite.  144


Sri Aurobindo: Most Yoga has for its aim one or other of two great ends, either the abandonment of the world and departure into some reality of supracosmic existence or some form of limited perfection, knowledge, bliss or mastery in the world. But there is a third objective of Yoga in which there is a harmony between world existence & supracosmic freedom. God is possessed; the world is not renounced or rather renounced as an aim in itself, but possessed as the play of God. A selﬂess and transcendent perfection in the divine existence is the goal in this path of Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: 145  There are many Yogas, many spiritual disciplines, paths towards liberation and perfection, Godward ways of the spirit. Each has its separate aim, its peculiar approach to the One Reality, its separate method, its helpful philosophy and its practice. The integral Yoga takes up all of them in their essence and tries to arrive at a uniﬁcation (in essence, not in detail) of all these aims, methods, approaches; it stands for an all-embracing philosophy and practice.


Sri Aurobindo: 146  To enter into the entire consciousness of the Divine Reality with all our being and all parts and in every way of our being and to change all our now ignorant and limited nature into divine nature so that it shall become the instrument and expression of the Divine Reality that in our self and essence we are, — this is the complete fulﬁlment of our existence and this is the integral Yoga.  To enter into the Divine either by the way of the thinking mind or by the way of the heart or by the way of the will in works or by a change of the psychological nature-stuff or a freeing of the vital force in the body is not enough; all this is not enough. Through all these together it must be done and by a change of our very sense and body consciousness even to the material inconscience which must become aware of the Divine and luminous with the Divine.  To be one with the Divine, to live in and with the Divine, to be of one nature with the Divine, this should be the aim of our Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: 147  The integral Yoga is so called because it aims at a harmonised totality of spiritual realisation and experience. Its aim is integral experience of the Divine Reality, what the Gita describes in the words, “the whole Me” of the Divine Being.  Its method is an integral opening of the whole consciousness, mind, heart, life, will, body to that Reality, to the Divine Existence, Consciousness, Beatitude, to its being and its integral transformation of the whole nature[.]


Sri Aurobindo: 148  Our Yoga is the integral Yoga. Its object is the harmony of a total spiritual realisation and experience, a supreme consummation of the spirit and the nature.   149


Sri Aurobindo: This Yoga is called the integral Yoga, ﬁrst because its object is integral covering the whole ﬁeld of spiritual realisation and experience. It takes existence at its centre and in all its aspects and turns it into a harmony at once single and entire. It is the method of an integral God realisation, an integral self-realisation, an integral fulﬁlment of the being, an integral transformation and perfection of the nature[.]   150


Sri Aurobindo: What is the integral Yoga?  It is the way of a complete God-realisation, a complete Self-realisation, a complete fulﬁlment of our being and consciousness, a complete transformation of our nature — and this implies a complete perfection of life here and not only a return to an eternal perfection elsewhere.  This is the object, but in the method also there is the same  integrality , for the entirety of the object cannot be accomplished without an entirety in the method, a complete turning, opening, self-giving of our being and nature in all its parts, ways, movements to that which we realise.


Sri Aurobindo: Our mind, will, heart, life, body, our outer and inner and inmost existence, our superconscious and subconscious as well as our conscious parts, must all be thus given, must all become a means, a ﬁeld of this realisation and transformation and participate in the illumination and the change from a human into a divine consciousness and nature.  This is the character of the integral Yoga.  151  The integral Yoga is a single but many-sided way of the growth of our spirit and development of our nature. A total experience and a single and all embracing realisation of the integral Divine Reality is its consequence.


Sri Aurobindo: There is too implied in it a radical change and transformation of the whole being and of every part of the nature. Our being is a nexus of the human mental-vitalphysical nature of Ignorance, it is transmuted into a spiritual and supramental consciousness: it becomes a divine unity in a harmony of the inﬁnite and universal and integrated will, love, bliss and knowledge.  The Inﬁnite Reality presents itself to our limited consciousness in an inﬁnity of aspects; different ways of Yoga try to realise one or other of these aspects. The integral Yoga takes all of them in its movement, but it limits itself to no aspect; its sole desire is to embrace the whole Divinity (samagram mam — Gita).  A highest aspect of the inﬁnite Reality is the supracosmic Absolute, unthinkable, ineffable, without relation to the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a path of Yoga that [] 152  The heart of the integral Yoga is in a triple spiritual endeavour. It is a realisation of the Divine, of all the Divine by our whole being and through all the parts of our being. It includes a discovery and harmonisation, a uniﬁcation of our total consciousness subliminal as well as supraliminal, the now superconscient and subconscient as well as the now conscient and its surrender to the Divine for a spiritual instrumentation here; it culminates in an evolution of this consciousness []  The integral Yoga is integral by the totality or completeness of its aim, the completeness of its process and the completeness of the ground it covers in its process.


Sri Aurobindo: This kind of integrality must by its nature be complex, manysided and intricate; only some main lines can be laid down in writing, for an excess of detail would confuse the picture.  The aim the Yoga puts before itself is in essence the same as the object of other Yogas — the realisation of the Divine. But it is not the Divine in one of its aspects, personal or impersonal, cosmic or transcendent, Self or Lord or [] 153  That Yoga is full or perfect which enables us to fulﬁl entirely God’s purpose in us in this universe.  All Yoga which takes the soul entirely out of worldexistence, is a high but narrow specialisation of divine tapasya.


Sri Aurobindo: God’s purpose in us is that we should fulﬁl His divine being in world-consciousness under the conditions of the Lila.  With regard to the universe God manifests Himself triply, in the individual, in the universe, in that which transcends the universe.  In order to fulﬁl God in the individual, we must exceed the individual. The removal of limited ego and the possession of cosmic consciousness is the ﬁrst aim of our sadhana.  In order to fulﬁl God in the cosmos, individually, we must transcend the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: The ascension into transcendent consciousness is the second aim of our sadhana.  154  All Yoga aims at oneness or union or a close communion or contact with the Divine, inﬁnite and eternal. To reach to this union or come by this contact it is necessary to enter or at least open into a greater consciousness than that of the human mental being who is shut up in the limitations of an individualised living body. To arrive wholly at the union or the constant communion one must enter the consciousness of the Divine, — whether into its inﬁnite cosmic consciousness or that of its supracosmic eternity.


Sri Aurobindo: Or else, uniting both these terms, one may add to them that of the individualised Divine in oneself and through this trinity arrive at a perfect union, one, satisfying and complete.  But the Divine Consciousness can manifest itself through any and every plane, on the mental, on the vital, on the physical, or on those which are higher than the mental[.]  155  All Yoga done through the mind alone or through the heart or the will or the vital force or the body ends in some one aspect of the inﬁnite and eternal Existence and rests satisﬁed there, as the mind imagines for ever. Not through these alone shall thy Yoga move, but through all these at once and, supremely, through that which is beyond them


Sri Aurobindo: . And the end of thy Yoga shall be the integrality of thy entrance not into one aspect, but into all the Inﬁnite, all the Eternal, all the Divine in all its aspects indivisibly uniﬁed together.  Whatever is beyond mind and life and body is spirit. But spirit can be realised even on these lower levels, in the spiritualised mind, in the spiritualised life-force, even in the spiritualised physical consciousness and body. But if thou rise not up beyond the mind-level, then in these realisations the spirit must needs be modiﬁed by the medium through which thou attainest to it and its supreme truth can only be seized in a reﬂection, partial even in widest apparent universality, and the utmost essential integrality will escape thy seizure.


Sri Aurobindo: Rise rather into the supramental levels and then all the rest shall remain a part of thy experience, but wonderfully changed, transﬁgured by a supreme alchemy of consciousness into an element of the supramental glory. All that other Yogas can give thee, thou shalt have, but as an experience overpassed, put in its place in the divine Whole and delivered from the inadequacy of an exclusive state or experience.  156  All Yoga is in its very nature a means of passing out of our surface consciousness of limitation and ignorance into a larger and deeper Reality of ourselves and the world and some supreme or total Existence now veiled to us by this surface.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a Reality which underlies everything, permeates perhaps everything, is perhaps everything but in quite another way than the world now seen by us; to It we are obscurely moving by our thought, life and actions; we attempt to understand and approach by our religion and philosophy, at last we touch directly in some partial or, it may be, some complete spiritual experience. It is that spiritual experience, it is the method, it is the attainment of this realisation that we call Yoga.  But the Reality is an Absolute or an Inﬁnite; our consciousness, even our spiritualised consciousness is that of a ﬁnite being.  It is inevitable therefore that our spiritual experience should be not that of a concrete integrality of this Absolute or Inﬁnite, but of aspects of it; we are, so long at least as we are mental beings, the blind men of the story trying to tell what the Elephant Inﬁnite is in its totality by our touch upon a part of it, some member of its spiritual body, tanum svam. One experiences it as Self or Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: It may be a Self of himself in which he ﬁnds his spiritual consummation, integrality, inﬁnity, perfection. It may be a Self of the universe in which his individuality loses itself forever. It may be a Self transcendent in which the Ego disappears, but cosmos too is annulled forever in a formless Eternal and Inﬁnite. Another may experience it as God; and God may be either the All of the Pantheist, a cosmic Spirit, an individual Deity, a supracosmic Creator; or all of these together. A Personal Godhead may be the spiritual Form in which He presents Himself to us or rather He may reject forms from his being [and] resolve Himself into an impersonal Existence.


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover each of these aspects of the Reality can be variously experienced; for each suits itself to the grasp of our consciousness, even though it can be very apparent that it is the same Reality that these variations differently account for. But also there may [be] other realisations of the Reality such as the Zero of the Nihilistic Buddhists which is yet a mysterious All, a negation that is a positive Permanence. It is an error to take these variations as a proof that spiritual experience is unreliable. All religions, all philosophies are equally desperate in their attempts to give an account of the Real and Ultimate; science itself for all its matter of fact physical positivism draws back bewildered from the attempt to touch the Real and Ultimate. It is the nature of Mind to arrive at this result of uncertain certainty; our experience is true but it is not and cannot be the sole possible integral experience.


Sri Aurobindo: 157  All human Yoga is done on the heights or levels of the mental nature; for man is a mental being in a living body. But mind if it is able to reﬂect some light of the divine Truth or even admit some emanations from her power, is incapable of embodying her.  There is an eternal dynamic Truth-consciousness beyond mind; this is what we call supermind or gnosis.


Sri Aurobindo: For mind is or can be a truth seeker, but not truth-conscious in its inherent nature; its original stuff is made not of knowledge, but of ignorance.  158  All Yoga has one supreme object; a permanent liberation from the ignorance and weakness of this limited and suffering human  and earthly consciousness is its purpose and either an escape or a growth and swift ﬂowering into a greater consciousness beyond mind, life and body, into a wider and diviner existence.  But this greater consciousness is differently conceived by different seekers, for in itself it is to the mind unseizably inﬁnite.