Sri Aurobindo: What was Ramakrishna? God manifest in a human being; but behind there is God in His inﬁnite impersonality and His universal Personality. And what was Vivekananda? A radiant glance from the eye of Shiva; but behind him is the divine gaze from which he came and Shiva himself and Brahma and Vishnu and OM all-exceeding.  159.


Sri Aurobindo: He who recognises not Krishna, the God in man, knows not God entirely; he who knows Krishna only, knows not even Krishna. Yet is the opposite truth also wholly true that if thou canst see all God in a little pale unsightly and scentless ﬂower, then hast thou hold of His supreme reality.   160 .


Sri Aurobindo: Shun the barren snare of an empty metaphysics and the dry dust of an unfertile intellectuality. Only that knowledge is worth having which can be made use of for a living delight and put out into temperament, action, creation and being.  161. Become & live the knowledge thou hast; then is thy knowledge the living God within thee.


Sri Aurobindo: 162. Evolution is not ﬁnished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme ﬁgure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.  163. The power to observe law rigidly is the basis of freedom; therefore in most disciplines the soul has to endure & fulﬁl the law in its lower members before it can rise to the perfect freedom of its divine being.


Sri Aurobindo: Those disciplines which begin with freedom are only for the mighty ones who are naturally free or in former lives have founded their freedom.  164. Those who are deﬁcient in the free, full and intelligent observation of a self-imposed law, must be placed in subjection to the will of others. This is one principal cause of the subjection of nations. After their disturbing egoism has been trampled under the feet of a master, they are given or, if they have force in them, attain a fresh chance of deserving liberty by liberty.


Sri Aurobindo: 165. To observe the law we have imposed on ourselves rather than the law of others is what is meant by liberty in our unregenerate condition. Only in God & by the supremacy of the spirit can we enjoy a perfect freedom.  166. The double law of sin & virtue is imposed on us because we have not that ideal life & knowledge within which guides the soul spontaneously & infallibly to its self-fulﬁlment.


Sri Aurobindo: The law of sin & virtue ceases for us when the sun of God shines upon the soul in truth & love with its unveiled splendour. Moses is replaced by Christ, the Shastra by the Veda.  167. God within is leading us always aright even when we are in the bonds of the ignorance; but then, though the goal is sure, it is attained by circlings & deviations.  168.


Sri Aurobindo: The Cross is in Yoga the symbol of the soul & nature in their strong & perfect union, but because of our fall into the impurities of ignorance it has become the symbol of suffering and puriﬁcation.  169. Christ came into the world to purify, not to fulﬁl. He himself foreknew the failure of his mission and the necessity of his return with the sword of God into a world that had rejected him.


Sri Aurobindo: 170. Mahomed’s mission was necessary, else we might have ended by thinking, in the exaggeration of our efforts at selfpuriﬁcation, that earth was meant only for the monk and the city created as a vestibule for the desert.   171. When all is said, Love & Force together can save the world eventually, but not Love only or Force only.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore Christ had to look forward to a second advent and Mahomed’s religion, where it is not stagnant, looks forward through the Imams to a Mahdi.  172. Law cannot save the world, therefore Moses’ ordinances are dead for humanity & the Shastra of the Brahmins is corrupt & dying. Law released into Freedom is the liberator. Not the Pandit, but the Yogin; not monasticism, but the inner renunciation of desire and ignorance & egoism.


Sri Aurobindo: 173. Even Vivekananda once in the stress of emotion admitted the fallacy that a personal God would be too immoral to be suffered and it would be the duty of all good men to resist Him.  But if an omnipotent supra-moral Will & Intelligence governs the world, it is surely impossible to resist Him; our resistance would only serve His ends & really be dictated by Him. Is it not better then, instead of condemning or denying, to study and understand Him?


Sri Aurobindo: 174. If we would understand God, we must renounce our egoistic & ignorant human standards or else ennoble and universalise them.   175.


Sri Aurobindo: Because a good man dies or fails & the evil live & triumph, is God therefore evil? I do not see the logic of the consequence. I must ﬁrst be convinced that death & failure are evil; I sometimes think that when they come, they are our supreme momentary good. But we are the fools of our hearts & nerves & argue that what they do not like or desire, must of course be an evil!


Sri Aurobindo: 176. When I look back on my past life, I see that if I had not failed & suffered, I would have lost my life’s supreme blessings; yet at the time of the suffering & failure, I was vexed with the sense of calamity. Because we cannot see anything but the one fact under our noses, therefore we indulge in all these snifﬂings and clamours. Be silent, ye foolish hearts! slay the ego, learn to see & feel vastly & universally.


Sri Aurobindo: 177. The perfect cosmic vision & cosmic sentiment is the cure of all error & suffering; but most men succeed only in enlarging the range of their ego.   178. Men say & think “For my country!”


Sri Aurobindo: “For humanity!”  “For the world!” but they really mean “For myself seen in my country!” “For myself seen in humanity!” “For myself imaged to my fancy as the world!” That may be an enlargement, but it is not liberation.


Sri Aurobindo: To be at large & to be in a large prison are not one condition of freedom.  179. Live for God in thy neighbour, God in thyself, God in thy country & the country of thy foeman, God in humanity, God in tree & stone & animal, God in the world & outside the world, then art thou on the straight path to liberation.  180. There are lesser & larger eternities, for eternity is a term of the soul & can exist in Time as well as exceeding it.


Sri Aurobindo: When the Scriptures say “´sa´swatih samah”, they mean for a long space & permanence of time or a hardly measurable aeon; only God Absolute has the absolute eternity. Yet when one goes within, one sees that all things are secretly eternal; there is no end, neither was there ever a beginning.  181. When thou callest another a fool, as thou must, sometimes, yet do not forget that thou thyself hast been the supreme fool in humanity.  182.


Sri Aurobindo: God loves to play the fool in season; man does it in season & out of season. It is the only difference.  183. In the Buddhists’ view to have saved an ant from drowning is a greater work than to have founded an empire. There is a truth in the idea, but a truth that can easily be exaggerated.


Sri Aurobindo: 184. To exalt one virtue, — compassion even, — unduly above all others is to cover up with one’s hand the eyes of wisdom.  God moves always towards a harmony.  185. Pity may be reserved, so long as thy soul makes distinctions, for the suffering animals; but humanity deserves from thee something nobler;


Sri Aurobindo: it asks for love, for understanding, for comradeship, for the help of the equal & brother.  186. The contributions of evil to the good of the world & the harm sometimes done by the virtuous are distressing to the soul enamoured of good. Nevertheless be not distressed nor confounded, but study rather & calmly understand God’s ways with humanity.  187.


Sri Aurobindo: In God’s providence there is no evil, but only good or its preparation.  188. Virtue & vice were made for thy soul’s struggle & progress; but for results they belong to God, who fulﬁls himself beyond vice & virtue.  189. Live within; be not shaken by outward happenings.


Sri Aurobindo: 190. Fling not thy alms abroad everywhere in an ostentation of charity; understand & love where thou helpest. Let thy soul grow within thee.  191. Help the poor while the poor are with thee; but study also & strive that there may be no poor for thy assistance.


Sri Aurobindo: 192. The old Indian social ideal demanded of the priest voluntary simplicity of life, purity, learning and the gratuitous instruction of the community, of the prince, war, government, protection of the weak & the giving up of his life in the battleﬁeld, of the merchant, trade, gain and the return of his gains to the community by free giving, of the serf, labour for the rest & material havings. In atonement for his serfhood, it spared him the tax of self-denial, the tax of blood & the tax of his riches.  193. The existence of poverty is the proof of an unjust & illorganised society, and our public charities are but the ﬁrst tardy awakening in the conscience of a robber.


Sri Aurobindo: 194. Valmekie, our ancient epic poet, includes among the signs of a just & enlightened state of society not only universal education, morality and spirituality but this also that there shall be “none who is compelled to eat coarse food, none uncrowned & unanointed or who is restricted to a mean and petty share of luxuries.”  195. The acceptance of poverty is noble & beneﬁcial in a class or an individual, but it becomes fatal and pauperises life of its richness & expansion if it is perverted into a general or national ideal.


Sri Aurobindo: Athens, not Sparta, is the progressive type for mankind.  Ancient India with its ideal of vast riches & vast spending was the greatest of nations; modern India with its trend towards national asceticism has ﬁnally become poor in life & sunk into weakness & degradation.   196. Poverty is no more a necessity of organised social life than disease of the natural body; false habits of life & an ignorance of our true organisation are in both cases the peccant causes of an avoidable disorder.


Sri Aurobindo: 197. Do not dream that when thou hast got rid of material poverty, men will even so be happy or satisﬁed or society freed from ills, troubles & problems. This is only the ﬁrst & lowest necessity. While the soul within remains defectively organised, there will always be outward unrest, disorder & revolution.  198.


Sri Aurobindo: Disease will always return to the body if the soul is ﬂawed; for the sins of the mind are the secret cause of the sins of the body. So too poverty & trouble will always return on man in society, so long as the mind of the race is subjected to egoism.  199. Religion & philosophy seek to rescue man from his ego; then the kingdom of heaven within will be spontaneously reﬂected in an external divine city.  200.


Sri Aurobindo: Mediaeval Christianity said to the race, “Man, thou art in thy earthly life an evil thing & a worm before God; renounce then egoism, live for a future state and submit thyself to God & His priest.” The results were not over-good for humanity. Modern knowledge says to the race, “Man, thou art an ephemeral animal and no more to Nature than the ant & the earthworm, — a transitory speck only in the universe. Live then for the State & submit thyself antlike to the trained administrator & the scientiﬁc expert.” Will this gospel succeed any better than the other?


Sri Aurobindo: 201. Vedanta says rather, “Man, thou art of one nature & substance with God, one soul with thy fellow-men. Awake & progress then to thy utter divinity, live for God in thyself & in others.” This gospel which was given only to the few, must now be offered to all mankind for its deliverance.  202.


Sri Aurobindo: The human race always progresses most when most it asserts its importance to Nature, its freedom & its universality.  203. Animal man is the obscure starting-point, the present natural man the varied & tangled mid-road but supernatural man the luminous & transcendent goal of our human journey.   204.


Sri Aurobindo: Life and action culminate and are eternally crowned for thee when thou hast attained the power of symbolising & manifesting in every thought & act, in wealth getting, wealth having or wealth spending, in home & government & society, in art, literature and life, the One Immortal in this lower mortal being.  205. God leads man while man is misleading himself, the higher nature watches over the stumblings of his lower mortality; this is the tangle & contradiction out of which we have to escape into the [?self-unity] to which alone is possible a clear knowledge & a faultless action.  206. That thou shouldst have pity on creatures, is well, but not well, if thou art a slave to thy pity.


Sri Aurobindo: Be a slave to nothing except to God, not even to His most luminous angels.   207. Beatitude is God’s aim for humanity; get this supreme good for thyself ﬁrst that thou mayst distribute it entirely to thy fellow-beings.


Sri Aurobindo: 208. He who acquires for himself alone, acquires ill though he may call it heaven and virtue.   209. In my ignorance I thought anger could be noble and vengeance grandiose; but now when I watch Achilles in his epic fury, I see a very ﬁne baby in a very ﬁne rage and I am pleased and amused.


Sri Aurobindo: 210. Power is noble, when it overtops anger; destruction is grandiose, but it loses caste when it proceeds from vengeance.   Leave these things, for they belong to a lower humanity.


Sri Aurobindo: 211. Poets make much of death and external afﬂictions; but the only tragedies are the soul’s failures and the only epic man’s triumphant ascent towards godhead.  212. The tragedies of the heart & the body are the weeping of children over their little griefs & their broken toys. Smile within thyself, but comfort the children; join also, if thou canst, in their play.


Sri Aurobindo: 213. “There is always something abnormal and eccentric about men of genius.” And why not? For genius itself is an abnormal birth and out of man’s ordinary centre.  214.


Sri Aurobindo: Genius is Nature’s ﬁrst attempt to liberate the imprisoned god out of her human mould; the mould has to suffer in the process. It is astonishing that the cracks are so few and unimportant.   215. Nature sometimes gets into a fury with her own resistance, then she damages the brain in order to free the inspiration; for in this effort the equilibrium of the average material brain is her chief opponent.


Sri Aurobindo: Pass over the madness of such and proﬁt by their inspiration.  216. Who can bear Kali rushing into the system in her ﬁerce force and burning godhead? Only the man whom Krishna already possesses.  217.


Sri Aurobindo: Hate not the oppressor, for, if he is strong, thy hate increases his force of resistance; if he is weak, thy hate was needless.   218. Hatred is a sword of power, but its edge is always double.  It is like the Kritya of the ancient magicians which, if baulked of its prey, returned in fury to devour its sender.


Sri Aurobindo: 219. Love God in thy opponent, even while thou strikest him; so shall neither have hell for his portion.   220. Men talk of enemies, but where are they?


Sri Aurobindo: I only see wrestlers of one party or the other in the great arena of the universe.  221. The saint and the angel are not the only divinities; admire also the Titan and the giant.  222. The old writings call the Titans the elder gods.


Sri Aurobindo: So they still are; nor is any god entirely divine unless there is hidden in him also a Titan.  223. If I cannot be Rama, then I would be Ravana; for he is the dark side of Vishnu.   224.


Sri Aurobindo: Sacriﬁce, sacriﬁce, sacriﬁce always, but for the sake of God and humanity, not for the sake of sacriﬁce.  225. Selﬁshness kills the soul; destroy it. But take care that your altruism does not kill the souls of others.  226.


Sri Aurobindo: Very usually, altruism is only the sublimest form of selfishness.   227. He who will not slay when God bids him, works in the world an incalculable havoc.  228.


Sri Aurobindo: Respect human life as long as you can; but respect more the life of humanity.   229. Men slay out of uncontrollable anger, hatred or vengeance; they shall suffer the rebound now or hereafter; or they slay to serve a selﬁsh end, coldly; God shall not pardon them. If thou slay, ﬁrst let thy soul have known death for a reality & seen God in the smitten, the stroke & the striker.


Sri Aurobindo: 230. Courage and love are the only indispensable virtues; even if all the others are eclipsed or fall asleep, these two will save the soul alive.  231. Meanness & selﬁshness are the only sins that I ﬁnd it difﬁcult to pardon; yet they alone are almost universal. Therefore these also must not be hated in others, but in ourselves annihilated.


Sri Aurobindo: 232. Nobleness and generosity are the soul’s ethereal ﬁrmament; without them, one looks at an insect in a dungeon.  233. Let not thy virtues be such as men praise or reward, but such as make for thy perfection and God in thy nature demands of thee.


Sri Aurobindo: 234. Altruism, duty, family, country, humanity are the prisons of the soul when they are not its instruments.  235. Our country is God the Mother; speak not evil of her unless thou canst do it with love and tenderness.


Sri Aurobindo: 236. Men are false to their country for their own proﬁt; yet they go on thinking they have a right to turn in horror from the matricide.  237. Break the moulds of the past, but keep safe its gains and its spirit, or else thou hast no future.  238.


Sri Aurobindo: Revolutions hew the past to pieces and cast it into a cauldron, but what has emerged is the old Aeson with a new visage.  239. The world has had only half a dozen successful revolutions and most even of these were very like failures; yet it is by great & noble failures that humanity advances.  240. Atheism is a necessary protest against the wickedness of the Churches and the narrowness of creeds.


Sri Aurobindo: God uses it as a stone to smash these soiled card-houses.  241. How much hatred & stupidity men succeed in packing up decorously and labelling “Religion”!  242. God guides best when He tempts worst, loves entirely when He punishes cruelly, helps perfectly when violently He opposes.


Sri Aurobindo: 243. If God did not take upon Himself the burden of tempting men, the world would very soon go to perdition.  244. Suffer yourself to be tempted within so that you may exhaust in the struggle your downward propensities.  245.


Sri Aurobindo: If you leave it to God to purify, He will exhaust the evil in you subjectively; but if you insist on guiding yourself, you will fall into much outward sin and suffering.  246. Call not everything evil which men call evil, but only that reject which God has rejected; call not everything good which men call good, but accept only what God has accepted.   247.


Sri Aurobindo: Men in the world have two lights, duty and principle; but he who has passed over to God, has done with both and replaced them by God’s will. If men abuse thee for this, care not, O divine instrument, but go on thy way like the wind or the sun fostering and destroying.   248. Not to cull the praises of men has God made thee His own, but to do fearlessly His bidding.


Sri Aurobindo: 249. Accept the world as God’s theatre; be thou the mask of the Actor and let Him act through thee. If men praise or hiss thee, know that they too are masks & take God within for thy only critic and audience.  250. If Krishna be alone on one side and the armed & organised world with its hosts and its shrapnel and its Maxims on the other, yet prefer thy divine solitude.


Sri Aurobindo: Care not if the world passes over thy body and its shrapnel tear thee to pieces and its cavalry trample thy limbs into shapeless mire by the wayside; for the mind was always a simulacrum and the body a carcass. The spirit liberated from its casings ranges and triumphs.  251. If thou think defeat is the end of thee, then go not forth to ﬁght, even though thou be the stronger. For Fate is not purchased by any man nor is Power bound over to her possessors.


Sri Aurobindo: But defeat is not the end, it is only a gate or a beginning.  252. I have failed, thou sayest. Say rather that God is circling about towards His object.  253.


Sri Aurobindo: Foiled by the world, thou turnest to seize upon God. If the world is stronger than thou, thinkest thou God is weaker? Turn to Him rather for His bidding and for strength to fulﬁl it.  254. So long as a cause has on its side one soul that is intangible in faith, it cannot perish.


Sri Aurobindo: 255. Reason gives me no basis for this faith, thou murmurest.  Fool! if it did, faith would not be needed or demanded of thee.  256.


Sri Aurobindo: Faith in the heart is the obscure & often distorted reﬂection of a hidden knowledge. The believer is often more plagued by doubt than the most inveterate sceptic. He persists because there is something subconscient in him which knows. That tolerates both his blind faith & twilit doubts and drives towards the revelation of that which it knows.  257.


Sri Aurobindo: The world thinks that it moves by the light of reason but it is really impelled by its faiths and instincts.  258. Reason adapts itself to the faith or argues out a justiﬁcation of the instincts, but it receives the impulse subconsciously; therefore men think that they act rationally.  259. The only business of reason is to arrange and criticise the perceptions.


Sri Aurobindo: It has neither in itself any means of positive conclusion nor any command to action. When it pretends to originate or impel, it is masking other agencies.  260. Until Wisdom comes to thee, use the reason for its Godgiven purposes and faith and instinct for theirs. Why shouldst thou set thy members to war upon each other?


Sri Aurobindo: 261 . Perceive always and act in the light of thy increasing perceptions, but not those of the reasoning brain only. God speaks to the heart when the brain cannot understand him.


Sri Aurobindo: 262. If thy heart tell thee, Thus & by such means and at such a time it will happen, believe it not. But if it gives thee the purity and wideness of God’s command, hearken to it.  263. When thou hast the command, care only to fulﬁl it.


Sri Aurobindo: The rest is God’s will and arrangement which men call chance and luck and fortune.  264. If thy aim be great and thy means small, still act; for by action alone these can increase to thee.  265. Care not for time and success.


Sri Aurobindo: Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper.  266. There are three forms in which the command may come, the will and faith in thy nature, thy ideal on which heart and brain are agreed and the voice of Himself or His angels.   267.


Sri Aurobindo: There are times when action is unwise or impossible; then go into tapasya in some physical solitude or in the retreats of thy soul and await whatever divine word or manifestation.  268. Leap not too quickly at all voices, for there are lying spirits ready to deceive thee; but let thy heart be pure and afterwards listen.   269.


Sri Aurobindo: There are times when God seems to be sternly on the side of the past; then what has been and is, sits ﬁrm as on a throne and clothes itself with an irrevocable “I shall be”. Then persevere, though thou seem to be ﬁghting the Master of all; for this is His sharpest trial.   270. All is not settled when a cause is humanly lost and hopeless; all is settled, only when the soul renounces its effort.


Sri Aurobindo: 271. He who would win high spiritual degrees, must pass endless tests and examinations. But most are anxious only to bribe the examiner.  272. Fight, while thy hands are free, with thy hands and thy voice and thy brain and all manner of weapons.


Sri Aurobindo: Art thou chained in the enemy’s dungeons and have his gags silenced thee? Fight with thy silent all-besieging soul and thy wideranging will-power and when thou art dead, ﬁght still with the world-encompassing force that went out from God within thee.  273. Thou thinkest the ascetic in his cave or on his mountaintop a stone and a do-nothing? What dost thou know?


Sri Aurobindo: He may be ﬁlling the world with the mighty currents of his will & changing it by the pressure of his soul-state.   274. That which the liberated sees in his soul on its mountaintops, heroes and prophets spring up in the material world to proclaim and accomplish.  275.


Sri Aurobindo: The Theosophists are wrong in their circumstances but right in the essential. If the French Revolution took place, it was because a soul on the Indian snows dreamed of God as freedom, brotherhood and equality.  276. All speech and action comes prepared out of the eternal Silence.  277.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no disturbance in the depths of the Ocean, but above there is the joyous thunder of its shouting and its racing shoreward; so is it with the liberated soul in the midst of violent action. The soul does not act; it only breathes out from itself overwhelming action.  278. O soldier and hero of God, where for thee is sorrow or shame or suffering? For thy life is a glory, thy deeds a consecration, victory thy apotheosis, defeat thy triumph.


Sri Aurobindo: 279. Do thy lower members still suffer the shock of sin and sorrow? But above, seen of thee or unseen, thy soul sits royal, calm, free and triumphant. Believe that the Mother will ere the end have done her work and made the very earth of thy being a joy and a purity.  280.


Sri Aurobindo: If thy heart is troubled within thee, if for long seasons thou makest no progress, if thy strength faint and repine, remember always the eternal word of our Lover and Master, “I will free thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve.”   281. Purity is in thy soul; but for actions, where is their purity or impurity?


Sri Aurobindo: 282. O Death, our masked friend and maker of opportunities, when thou wouldst open the gate, hesitate not to tell us beforehand; for we are not of those who are shaken by its iron jarring.   283. Death is sometimes a rude valet; but when he changes this robe of earth for that brighter raiment, his horseplay and impertinences can be pardoned.


Sri Aurobindo: 284. Who shall slay thee, O soul immortal? Who shall torture thee, O God ever-joyous?  285. Think this when thy members would fain make love with depression and weakness, “I am Bacchus and Ares and Apollo; I am Agni pure and invincible; I am Surya ever burning mightily.”


Sri Aurobindo: 286. Shrink not from the Dionysian cry & rapture within thee, but see that thou be not a straw upon those billows.  287. Thou hast to learn to bear all the gods within thee and never stagger with their inrush or break under their burden.  288.


Sri Aurobindo: Mankind have wearied of strength and joy and called sorrow and weakness virtue, wearied of knowledge and called ignorance holiness, wearied of love and called heartlessness enlightenment and wisdom.  289. There are many kinds of forbearance. I saw a coward hold out his cheek to the smiter; I saw a physical weakling struck by a strong and self-approving bully look quietly & intently at the aggressor; I saw God incarnate smile lovingly on those who stoned him. The ﬁrst was ridiculous, the second terrible, the third divine and holy.


Sri Aurobindo: 290. It is noble to pardon thine own injurers, but not so noble to pardon wrongs done to others. Nevertheless pardon these too, but when needful, calmly avenge.  291. When Asiatics massacre, it is an atrocity; when Europeans, it is a military exigency.


Sri Aurobindo: Appreciate the distinction and ponder over this world’s virtues.  292. Watch the too indignantly righteous. Before long you will ﬁnd them committing or condoning the very offence which they have so ﬁercely censured.  293.


Sri Aurobindo: “There is very little real hypocrisy among men.” True, but there is a great deal of diplomacy and still more of selfdeceit. The last is of three varieties, conscious, subconscious and half-conscious; but the third is the most dangerous.  294. Be not deceived by men’s shows of virtue, neither disgusted by their open or secret vices.


Sri Aurobindo: These things are the necessary shufﬂings in a long transition-period of humanity.  295. Be not repelled by the world’s crookednesses; the world is a wounded and venomous snake wriggling towards a destined off-sloughing and perfection. Wait; for it is a divine wager, and out of this baseness, God will emerge brilliant and triumphant.  296.


Sri Aurobindo: Why dost thou recoil from a mask? Behind its odious, grotesque or terrible seemings Krishna laughs at thy foolish anger, thy more foolish scorn or loathing and thy most foolish terror.  297. When thou ﬁndest thyself scorning another, look then at thy own heart and laugh at thy folly.  298.


Sri Aurobindo: Avoid vain disputing; but exchange views freely. If dispute thou must, learn from thy adversary; for even from a fool, if thou listen not with the ear and the reasoning mind but the soul’s light, thou canst gather much wisdom.  299. Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.  300.


Sri Aurobindo: Private dispute should always be avoided; but shrink not from the public battle; yet even there appreciate the strength of thy adversary.   301. When thou hearest an opinion that displeases thee, study and ﬁnd out the truth in it.


Sri Aurobindo: 302. The mediaeval ascetics hated women and thought they were created by God for the temptation of monks. One may be allowed to think more nobly both of God and of woman.  303. If a woman has tempted thee, is it her fault or thine?


Sri Aurobindo: Be not a fool and a self-deceiver.  304. There are two ways of avoiding the snare of woman; one is to shun all women and the other to love all beings.  305. Asceticism is no doubt very healing, a cave very peaceful and the hill-tops wonderfully pleasant; nevertheless do thou act in the world as God intended thee.


Sri Aurobindo: 306. Three times God laughed at Shankara, ﬁrst, when he returned to burn the corpse of his mother, again when he commented on the Isha Upanishad and the third time when he stormed about India preaching inaction.   307. Men labour only after success and if they are fortunate enough to fail, it is because the wisdom and force of Nature overbear their intellectual cleverness.


Sri Aurobindo: God alone knows when & how to blunder wisely and fail effectively.  308. Distrust the man who has never failed and suffered; follow not his fortunes, ﬁght not under his banner.  309. There are two who are unﬁt for greatness and freedom, the man who has never been a slave to another and the nation that has never been under the yoke of foreigners.


Sri Aurobindo: 310. Fix not the time and the way in which the ideal shall be fulﬁlled. Work and leave time and way to God all-knowing.  311. Work as if the ideal had to be fulﬁlled swiftly & in thy lifetime; persevere as if thou knewest it not to be unless purchased by a thousand years yet of labour.


Sri Aurobindo: That which thou darest not expect till the ﬁfth millennium, may bloom out with tomorrow’s dawning and that which thou hopest and lustest after now, may have been ﬁxed for thee in thy hundredth advent.   312 . Each man of us has a million lives yet to fulﬁl upon earth.


Sri Aurobindo: Why then this haste and clamour and impatience?  313. Stride swiftly for the goal is far; rest not unduly, for thy Master is waiting for thee at the end of thy journey.  314. I am weary of the childish impatience which cries & blasphemes and denies the ideal because the Golden Mountains cannot be reached in our little day or in a few momentary centuries.


Sri Aurobindo: 315. Fix thy soul without desire upon the end and insist on it by the divine force within thee; then shall the end itself create its means, nay, it shall become its own means. For the end is Brahman and already accomplished; see it always as Brahman, see it always in thy soul as already accomplished.  316. Plan not with the intellect, but let thy divine sight arrange thy plans for thee.


Sri Aurobindo: When a means comes to thee as thing to be done, make that thy aim; as for the end, it is, in world, accomplishing itself and, in thy soul, already accomplished.  317. Men see events as unaccomplished, to be striven for and effected. This is false seeing; events are not effected, they develop. The event is Brahman, already accomplished from of old, it is now manifesting.


Sri Aurobindo: 318. As the light of a star reaches the earth hundreds of years after the star has ceased to exist, so the event already accomplished in Brahman at the beginning manifests itself now in our material experience.  319. Governments, societies, kings, police, judges, institutions, churches, laws, customs, armies are temporary necessities imposed on us for a few groups of centuries because God has concealed His face from us. When it appears to us again in its truth & beauty, then in that light they will vanish.


Sri Aurobindo: 320. The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.   321. The communistic principle of society is intrinsically as superior to the individualistic as is brotherhood to jealousy and mutual slaughter; but all the practical schemes of Socialism invented in Europe are a yoke, a tyranny and a prison.


Sri Aurobindo: 322. If communism ever reestablishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a foundation of soul’s brotherhood and the death of egoism. A forced association and a mechanical comradeship would end in a worldwide ﬁasco.  323.


Sri Aurobindo: Vedanta realised is the only practicable basis for a communistic society. It is the kingdom of the saints dreamed of by Christianity, Islam and Puranic Hinduism.  324. “Freedom, equality, brotherhood,” cried the French revolutionists, but in truth freedom only has been practised with a dose of equality; as for brotherhood, only a brotherhood of Cain was founded — and of Barabbas. Sometimes it calls itself a Trust or Combine and sometimes the Concert of Europe.


Sri Aurobindo: 325. “Since liberty has failed,” cries the advanced thought of Europe, “let us try liberty cum equality or, since the two are a little hard to pair, equality instead of liberty. For brotherhood, it is impossible; therefore we will replace it by industrial association.” But this time also, I think, God will not be deceived.  326.


Sri Aurobindo: India had three fortresses of a communal life, the village community, the larger joint family & the orders of the Sannyasins; all these are broken or breaking with the stride of egoistic conceptions of social life; but is not this after all only the breaking of these imperfect moulds on the way to a larger & diviner communism?  327. The individual cannot be perfect until he has surrendered all he now calls himself to the divine Being. So also, until mankind gives all it has to God, never shall there be a perfected society.  328.


Sri Aurobindo: There is nothing small in God’s eyes; let there be nothing small in thine. He bestows as much labour of divine energy on the formation of a shell as on the building of an empire. For thyself it is greater to be a good shoemaker than a luxurious and incompetent king.  329. Imperfect capacity & effect in the work that is meant for thee is better than an artiﬁcial competency & a borrowed perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: 330. Not result is the purpose of action, but God’s eternal delight in becoming, seeing and doing.  331. God’s world advances step by step fulﬁlling the lesser unit before it seriously attempts the larger. Afﬁrm free nationality ﬁrst, if thou wouldst ever bring the world to be one nation.


Sri Aurobindo: 332. A nation is not made by a common blood, a common tongue or a common religion; these are only important helps and powerful conveniences. But wherever communities of men not bound by family ties are united in one sentiment and aspiration to defend a common inheritance from their ancestors or assure a common future for their posterity, there a nation is already in existence.  333. Nationality is a stride of the progressive God passing beyond the stage of the family; therefore the attachment to clan and tribe must weaken or perish before a nation can be born.


Sri Aurobindo: 334. Family, nationality, humanity are Vishnu’s three strides from an isolated to a collective unity. The ﬁrst has been fulﬁlled, we yet strive for the perfection of the second, towards the third we are reaching out our hands and the pioneer work is already attempted.  335. With the present morality of the human race a sound and durable human unity is not yet possible; but there is no reason why a temporary approximation to it should not be the reward of strenuous aspiration and untiring effort.


Sri Aurobindo: By constant approximations and by partial realisations and temporary successes Nature advances.  336. Imitation is sometimes a good training-ship; but it will never ﬂy the ﬂag of the admiral.  337. Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.


Sri Aurobindo: 338. Tangled is the way of works in the world. When Rama the Avatar murdered Vali or Krishna, who was God himself, assassinated, to liberate his nation, his tyrant uncle Kansa, who shall say whether they did good or did evil? But this we can feel, that they acted divinely.


Sri Aurobindo: 339. Reaction perfects & hastens progress by increasing & purifying the force within it. This is what the multitude of the weak cannot see who despair of their port when the ship is ﬂeeing helplessly before the storm wind, but it ﬂees, hidden by the rain & the Ocean furrow, towards God’s intended haven.  340. Democracy was the protest of the human soul against the allied despotisms of autocrat, priest and noble; Socialism is the protest of the human soul against the despotism of a plutocratic democracy; Anarchism is likely to be the protest of the human soul against the tyranny of a bureaucratic Socialism.


Sri Aurobindo: A turbulent and eager march from illusion to illusion and from failure to failure is the image of European progress.  341. Democracy in Europe is the rule of the Cabinet minister, the corrupt deputy or the self-seeking capitalist masqued by the occasional sovereignty of a wavering populace; Socialism in Europe is likely to be the rule of the ofﬁcial and policeman masqued by the theoretic sovereignty of an abstract State. It is chimerical to enquire which is the better system; it would be difﬁcult to decide which is the worse.  342.


Sri Aurobindo: The gain of democracy is the security of the individual’s life, liberty and goods from the caprices of the tyrant one or the selﬁsh few; its evil is the decline of greatness in humanity.  343. This erring race of human beings dreams always of perfecting their environment by the machinery of government and society; but it is only by the perfection of the soul within that the outer environment can be perfected. What thou art within, that outside thee thou shalt enjoy; no machinery can rescue thee from the law of thy being.  344.


Sri Aurobindo: Be always vigilant against thy human proneness to persecute or ignore the reality even while thou art worshipping its semblance or token. Not human wickedness but human fallibility is the opportunity of Evil.  345. Honour the garb of the ascetic, but look also at the wearer, lest hypocrisy occupy the holy places and inward saintliness become a legend.  346.


Sri Aurobindo: The many strive after competence or riches, the few embrace poverty as a bride; but, for thyself, strive after and embrace God only. Let Him choose for thee a king’s palace or the bowl of the beggar.  347. What is vice but an enslaving habit and virtue but a human opinion? See God and do His will; walk in whatever path He shall trace for thy goings.


Sri Aurobindo: 348. In the world’s conﬂicts espouse not the party of the rich for their riches, nor of the poor for their poverty, of the king for his power & majesty, nor of the people for their hope and fervour, but be on God’s side always. Unless indeed He has commanded thee to war against Him! then do that with thy whole heart and strength and rapture.  349.


Sri Aurobindo: How shall I know God’s will with me? I have to put egoism out of me, hunting it from every lair & burrow, and bathe my puriﬁed and naked soul in His inﬁnite workings; then He himself will reveal it to me.  350. Only the soul that is naked and unashamed, can be pure and innocent, even as Adam was in the primal garden of humanity.  351.


Sri Aurobindo: Boast not thy riches, neither seek men’s praise for thy poverty and self-denial; both these things are the coarse or the ﬁne food of egoism.   352. Altruism is good for man, but less good when it is a form of supreme self-indulgence & lives by pampering the selﬁshness of others.  353.


Sri Aurobindo: By altruism thou canst save thy soul, but see that thou save it not by indulging in his perdition thy brother.  354. Self-denial is a mighty instrument for puriﬁcation; it is not an end in itself nor a ﬁnal law of living. Not to mortify thyself but to satisfy God in the world must be thy object.  355.


Sri Aurobindo: It is easy to distinguish the evil worked by sin & vice, but the trained eye sees also the evil done by self-righteous or self-regarding virtue.  356. The Brahmin ﬁrst ruled by the book & the ritual, the Kshatriya next by the sword and the buckler; now the Vaishya governs us by machinery & the dollar, & the Sudra, the liberated serf, presses in with his doctrine of the kingdom of associated labour. But neither priest, king, merchant nor labourer is the true governor of humanity; the despotism of the tool and the mattock will fail like all the preceding despotisms. Only when egoism dies & God in man governs his own human universality, can this earth support a happy and contented race of beings.


Sri Aurobindo: 357. Men run after pleasure and clasp feverishly that burning bride to their tormented bosoms; meanwhile a divine & faultless bliss stands behind them waiting to be seen and claimed and captured.  358. Men hunt after petty successes & trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion & weakness; meanwhile all the inﬁnite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal.  359.


Sri Aurobindo: Men burrow after little details of knowledge and group them into bounded & ephemeral thought systems; meanwhile all inﬁnite wisdom laughs above their heads & shakes wide the glory of her iridescent pinions.  360. Men seek laboriously to satisfy & complement the little bounded being made of the mental impressions they have grouped about a mean & grovelling ego; meanwhile the spaceless & timeless Soul is denied its joyous & splendid manifestation.   361.


Sri Aurobindo: O soul of India, hide thyself no longer with the darkened Pandits of the Kaliyuga in the kitchen & the chapel, veil not thyself with the soulless rite, the obsolete law and the unblessed money of the dakshina; but seek in thy soul, ask of God and recover thy true Brahminhood & Kshatriyahood with the eternal Veda; restore the hidden truth of the Vedic sacriﬁce, return to the fulﬁlment of an older & mightier Vedanta.  362. Limit not sacriﬁce to the giving up of earthly goods or the denial of some desires & yearnings, but let every thought and every work & every enjoyment be an offering to God within thee. Let thy steps walk in thy Lord, let thy sleep and waking be a sacriﬁce to Krishna.  363.


Sri Aurobindo: This is not according to my Shastra or my Science, say the men of rule, formalists. Fool! is God then only a book that there should be nothing true & good except what is written?  364. By which standard shall I walk, the word that God speaks to me, saying “This is My will, O my servant,” or the rules that men who are dead, have written?


Sri Aurobindo: Nay, if I have to fear & obey any, I will fear & obey God rather & not the pages of a book or the frown of a Pandit.   365. Thou mayst be deceived, wilt thou say, it may not be God’s voice leading thee? Yet do I know that He abandons not those who have trusted Him even ignorantly, yet have I found that He leads wisely & lovingly even when He seems to deceive utterly, yet would I rather fall into the snare of the living God than be saved by trust in a dead formulary.


Sri Aurobindo: 366. Act according to the Shastra rather than thy self-will & desire; so shalt thou grow stronger to control the ravener in thee; but act according to God rather than the Shastra ; so shalt thou reach to His highest which is far above rule & limit.  367. The Law is for the bound & those whose eyes are sealed; if they walk not by it, they will stumble; but


Sri Aurobindo: thou who art free in Krishna or hast seen his living light, walk holding the hand of thy Friend & by the lamp of eternal Veda.  368. The Vedanta is God’s lamp to lead thee out of this night of bondage & egoism; but when the light of Veda has dawned in thy soul, then even that divine lamp thou needest not, for now thou canst walk freely & surely in a high & eternal sunlight.  369. What is the use of only knowing?


Sri Aurobindo: I say to thee, Act and be, for therefore God sent thee into this human body.  370. What is the use of only being? I say to thee, Become, for therefore wast thou established as a man in this world of matter.  371.


Sri Aurobindo: The path of works is in a way the most difﬁcult side of God’s triune causeway; yet is it not also, in this material world at least, the easiest, widest & most delightful? For at every moment we clash against God the worker & grow into His being by a thousand divine touches.  372. This is the wonder of the way of works that even enmity to God can be made an agency of salvation. Sometimes God draws and attaches us most swiftly to Him by wrestling with us as our ﬁerce, invincible & irreconcilable enemy.


Sri Aurobindo: 373. Shall I accept death or shall I turn and wrestle with him and conquer? That shall be as God in me chooses. For whether I live or die, I am always.  374.


Sri Aurobindo: What is this thing thou callest death? Can God die? O thou who fearest death, it is Life that has come to thee sporting with a death-head and wearing a mask of terror.  375. There is a means to attain physical immortality and death is by our choice, not by Nature’s compulsion.


Sri Aurobindo: But who would care to wear one coat for a hundred years or be conﬁned in one narrow & changeless lodging unto a long eternity?  376. Fear and anxiety are perverse forms of will. What thou fearest & ponderest over, striking that note repeatedly in thy mind, thou helpest to bring about; for, if thy will above the surface of waking repels it, it is yet what thy mind underneath is all along willing, & the subconscious mind is mightier, wider, better equipped to fulﬁl than thy waking force & intellect. But the spirit is stronger than both together; from fear and hope take refuge in the grandiose calm and careless mastery of the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: 377. God made the inﬁnite world by Self-knowledge which in its works is Will-Force self-fulﬁlling. He used ignorance to limit His inﬁnity; but fear, weariness, depression, self-distrust and assent to weakness are the instruments by which He destroys what He created. When these things are turned on what is evil or harmful & ill-regulated within thee, then it is well; but if they attack thy very sources of life & strength, then seize & expel them or thou diest.  378.


Sri Aurobindo: Mankind has used two powerful weapons to destroy its own powers and enjoyment, wrong indulgence and wrong abstinence.  379. Our mistake has been and is always to ﬂee from the ills of Paganism to asceticism as a remedy and from the ills of asceticism back to Paganism. We swing for ever between two false opposites.  380.


Sri Aurobindo: It is well not to be too loosely playful in one’s games or too grimly serious in one’s life and works. We seek in both a playful freedom and a serious order.  381. For nearly forty years I believed them when they said I was weakly in constitution, suffered constantly from the smaller & the greater ailments & mistook this curse for a burden that Nature had laid upon me. When I renounced the aid of medicines, then they began to depart from me like disappointed parasites.


Sri Aurobindo: Then only I understood what a mighty force was the natural health within me & how much mightier yet the Will & Faith exceeding mind which God meant to be the divine support of our life in this body.  382. Machinery is necessary to modern humanity because of our incurable barbarism. If we must incase ourselves in a bewildering multitude of comforts and trappings, we must needs do without Art and its methods; for to dispense with simplicity & freedom is to dispense with beauty. The luxury of our ancestors was rich & even gorgeous, but never encumbered.


Sri Aurobindo: 383. I cannot give to the barbarous comfort & encumbered ostentation of European life the name of civilisation. Men who are not free in their souls & nobly rhythmical in their appointments, are not civilised.  384.


Sri Aurobindo: Art in modern times & under European inﬂuence has become an excrescence upon life or an unnecessary menial; it should have been its chief steward and indispensable arranger.  385. Disease is needlessly prolonged & ends in death oftener than is inevitable, because the mind of the patient supports & dwells upon the disease of his body.  386. Medical Science has been more a curse to mankind than a blessing.


Sri Aurobindo: It has broken the force of epidemics and unveiled a marvellous surgery; but, also, it has weakened the natural health of man and multiplied individual diseases; it has implanted fear and dependence in the mind and body; it has taught our health to repose not on natural soundness but a rickety & distasteful crutch compact from the mineral and vegetable kingdoms.  387. The doctor aims a drug at a disease; sometimes it hits, sometimes misses. The misses are left out of account, the hits treasured up, reckoned and systematised into a science.  388.


Sri Aurobindo: We laugh at the savage for his faith in the medicine man; but how are the civilised less superstitious who have faith in the doctors? The savage ﬁnds that when a certain incantation is repeated, he often recovers from a certain disease; he believes.  The civilised patient ﬁnds that when he doses himself according to a certain prescription, he often recovers from a certain disease; he believes. Where is the difference?  389.


Sri Aurobindo: The north-country Indian herdsman, attacked by fever, sits in the chill stream of a river for an hour or more & rises up free & healthy. If the educated man did the same, he would perish, not because the same remedy in its nature kills one & cures another, but because our bodies have been fatally indoctrinated by the mind into false habits.  390. It is not the medicine that cures so much as the patient’s faith in the doctor and the medicine. Both are a clumsy substitute for the natural faith in one’s own self-power which they have themselves destroyed.


Sri Aurobindo: 391. The healthiest ages of mankind were those in which there were the fewest material remedies.  392. The most robust and healthy race left on earth were the African savages; but how long can they so remain after their physical consciousness has been contaminated by the mental aberrations of the civilised?  393.


Sri Aurobindo: We ought to use the divine health in us to cure and prevent diseases; but Galen and Hippocrates & their tribe have given us instead an armoury of drugs and a barbarous Latin hocuspocus as our physical gospel.   394. Medical Science is well-meaning and its practitioners often benevolent and not seldom self-sacriﬁcing; but when did the well-meaning of the ignorant save them from harm-doing?  395.


Sri Aurobindo: If all remedies were really and in themselves efﬁcacious and all medical theories sound, how would that console us for our lost natural health and vitality? The upas-tree is sound in all its parts, but it is still an upas-tree.  396. The spirit within us is the only all-efﬁcient doctor and submission of the body to it the one true panacea.  397.


Sri Aurobindo: God within is inﬁnite and self-fulﬁlling Will. Unappalled by the fear of death, canst thou leave to Him, not as an experiment, with a calm & entire faith thy ailments? Thou shalt ﬁnd in the end that He exceeds the skill of a million doctors.  398. Health protected by twenty thousand precautions is the gospel of the doctor; but it is not God’s evangel for the body, nor Nature’s.


Sri Aurobindo: 399. Man was once naturally healthy and could revert to that primal condition if he were suffered; but Medical Science pursues our body with an innumerable pack of drugs and assails the imagination with ravening hordes of microbes.  400. I would rather die and have done with it than spend life in defending myself against a phantasmal siege of microbes. If that is to be barbarous [and] unenlightened, I embrace gladly my Cimmerian darkness.


Sri Aurobindo: 401. Surgeons save & cure by cutting and maiming. Why not rather seek to discover Nature’s direct all-powerful remedies?  402. It should take long for self-cure to replace medicine, because of the fear, self-distrust and unnatural physical reliance on drugs which Medical Science has taught to our minds & bodies & made our second nature.


Sri Aurobindo: 403. Medicine is necessary for our bodies in disease only because our bodies have learned the art of not getting well without medicines. Even so, one sees often that the moment Nature chooses for recovery is that in which the life is abandoned as hopeless by the doctors.  404. Distrust of the curative power within us was our physical fall from Paradise.


Sri Aurobindo: Medical Science and a bad heredity are the two angels of God who stand at the gates to forbid our return and reentry.  405. Medical Science to the human body is like a great Power which enfeebles a smaller State by its protection or like a benevolent robber who knocks his victim ﬂat and riddles him with wounds in order that he may devote his life to healing & serving the shattered body.   406.


Sri Aurobindo: Drugs often cure the body when they do not merely trouble or poison it, but only if their physical attack on the disease is supported by the force of the spirit; if that force can be made to work freely, drugs are at once superﬂuous.  407. I am not a Bhakta, for I have not renounced the world for God. How can I renounce what He took from me by force and gave back to me against my will? These things are too hard for me.


Sri Aurobindo: 408. I am not a Bhakta, I am not a Jnani, I am not a worker for the Lord. What am I then? A tool in the hands of my Master, a ﬂute blown upon by the divine Herd-Boy, a leaf driven by the breath of the Lord.  409.


Sri Aurobindo: Devotion is not utterly fulﬁlled till it becomes action and knowledge. If thou pursuest after God and canst overtake Him, let Him not go till thou hast His reality. If thou hast hold of His reality, insist on having also His totality. The ﬁrst will give thee divine knowledge, the second will give thee divine works and a free and perfect joy in the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: 410. Others boast of their love for God. My boast is that I did not love God; it was He who loved me and sought me out and forced me to belong to Him.  411. After I knew that God was a woman, I learned something from far-off about love; but it was only when I became a woman and served my Master and Paramour that I knew love utterly.


Sri Aurobindo: 412. To commit adultery with God is the perfect experience for which the world was created.  413. To fear God really is to remove oneself to a distance from Him, but to fear Him in play gives an edge to utter delightfulness.  414.


Sri Aurobindo: The Jew invented the God-fearing man; India the Godknower and God-lover.  415. The servant of God was born in Judaea, but he came to maturity among the Arabs. India’s joy is in the servant-lover.


Sri Aurobindo: 416. Perfect love casts out fear; but still keep thou some tender shadow and memory of the exile and it will make the perfection more perfect.  417. Thy soul has not tasted God’s entire delight, if it has never had the joy of being His enemy, opposing His designs and engaging with Him in mortal combat.  418.


Sri Aurobindo: If you cannot make God love you, make Him ﬁght you. If He will not give you the embrace of the lover, compel Him to give you the embrace of the wrestler.  419. My soul is the captive of God, taken by Him in battle; it still remembers the war, though so far from it, with delight and alarm and wonder.  420.


Sri Aurobindo: Most of all things on earth I hated pain till God hurt and tortured me; then it was revealed to me that pain is only a perverse and recalcitrant shape of excessive delight.  421. There are four stages in the pain God gives to us; when it is only pain; when it is pain that causes pleasure; when it is pain that is pleasure; and when it is purely a ﬁercer form of delight.   422.


Sri Aurobindo: Even when one has climbed up into those levels of bliss where pain vanishes, it still survives disguised as intolerable ecstasy.  423. When I was mounting upon ever higher crests of His joy, I asked myself whether there was no limit to the increase of bliss and almost I grew afraid of God’s embraces.  424. The next greatest rapture to the love of God, is the love of God in men; there, too, one has the joy of multiplicity.


Sri Aurobindo: 425. For monogamy may be the best for the body, but the soul that loves God in men dwells here always as the boundless & ecstatic polygamist; yet all the time — that is the secret — it is in love with only one being.  426. The whole world is my seraglio and every living being and inanimate existence in it is the instrument of my rapture.


Sri Aurobindo: 427. I did not know for some time whether I loved Krishna best or Kali; when I loved Kali, it was loving myself, but when I loved Krishna, I loved another, and still it was my Self with whom I was in love. Therefore I came to love Krishna better even than Kali.  428. What is the use of admiring Nature or worshipping her as a Power, a Presence and a goddess?


Sri Aurobindo: What is the use, either, of appreciating her aesthetically or artistically? The secret is to enjoy her with the soul as one enjoys a woman with the body.  429. When one has the vision in the heart, everything, Nature and Thought and Action, ideas and occupations and tastes and objects become the Beloved and are a source of ecstasy.  430.


Sri Aurobindo: The philosophers who reject the world as Maya, are very wise and austere and holy; but I cannot help thinking sometimes that they are also just a little stupid and allow God to cheat them too easily.  431. For my part, I think I have a right to insist on God giving Himself to me in the world as well as out of it. Why did He make it at all, if He wanted to escape that obligation?  432.


Sri Aurobindo: The Mayavadin talks of my Personal God as a dream and prefers to dream of Impersonal Being; the Buddhist puts that aside too as a ﬁction and prefers to dream of Nirvana and the bliss of nothingness. Thus all the dreamers are busy reviling each other’s visions and parading their own as the panacea. What the soul utterly rejoices in, is for thought the ultimate reality.   433.


Sri Aurobindo: Beyond Personality the Mayavadin sees indeﬁnable Existence; I followed him there and found my Krishna beyond in indeﬁnable Personality.  434. When I ﬁrst met Krishna, I loved Him as a friend and playmate till He deceived me; then I was indignant and could not forgive Him. Afterwards I loved Him as a lover and He still deceived me; I was again and much more indignant, but this time I had to pardon.  435.


Sri Aurobindo: After offending, He forced me to pardon Him not by reparation, but by committing fresh offences.  436. So long as God tried to repair His offences against me, we went on periodically quarrelling; but when He found out His mistake, the quarrelling stopped, for I had to submit to Him entirely.  437. When I saw others than Krishna and myself in the world, I kept secret God’s doings with me; but since I began to see Him and myself everywhere, I have become shameless and garrulous.


Sri Aurobindo: 438. All that my Lover has, belongs to me. Why do you abuse me for showing off the ornaments He has given to me?  439.


Sri Aurobindo: My Lover took His crown and royal necklace from His head and neck and clothed me with them; but the disciples of the saints and the prophets abused me and said, “He is hunting after siddhis.”   440. I did my Lover’s commands in the world & the will of my Captor; but they cried, “Who is this corruptor of youth, this disturber of morals?”


Sri Aurobindo: 441. If I cared even for your praise, O ye saints, if I cherished my reputation, O ye prophets, my Lover would never have taken me into His bosom and given me the freedom of His secret chambers.   442. I was intoxicated with the rapture of my Lover and I threw the robe of the world from me even in the world’s highways.


Sri Aurobindo: Why should I care that the worldlings mock and the Pharisees turn their faces?  443. To thy lover, O Lord, the railing of the world is wild honey and the pelting of stones by the mob is summer rain on the body.  For is it not Thou that railest and peltest, and is it not Thou in the stones that strikest and hurtest me?  444.


Sri Aurobindo: There are two things in God which men call evil, that which they cannot understand at all and that which they misunderstand and, possessing, misuse; it is only what they grope after half-vainly and dimly understand that they call good and holy. But to me all things in Him are lovable.  445. They say, O my God, that I am mad because I see no fault in Thee; but if I am indeed mad with Thy love, I do not wish to recover my sanity.  446.


Sri Aurobindo: “Errors, falsehoods, stumblings!” they cry. How bright and beautiful are Thy errors, O Lord! Thy falsehoods save Truth alive; by Thy stumblings the world is perfected.  447. Life, Life, Life, I hear the passions cry; God, God, God, is the soul’s answer.


Sri Aurobindo: Unless thou seest and lovest Life as God only, then is Life itself a sealed joy to thee.  448. “He loves her”, the senses say; but the soul says “God God God”. That is the all-embracing formula of existence.  449.


Sri Aurobindo: If thou canst not love the vilest worm and the foulest of criminals, how canst thou believe that thou hast accepted God in thy spirit?  450. To love God, excluding the world, is to give Him an intense but imperfect adoration.  451. Is love only a daughter or handmaid of jealousy?


Sri Aurobindo: If Krishna loves Chandrabali, why should I not love her also?   452. Because thou lovest God only, thou art apt to claim that He should love thee rather than others; but this is a false claim contrary to right & the nature of things. For He is the One but thou art of the many.


Sri Aurobindo: Rather become one in heart & soul with all beings, then there will be none in the world but thou alone for Him to love.  453. My quarrel is with those who are foolish enough not to love my Lover, not with those who share His love with me.   454.


Sri Aurobindo: In those whom God loves, have delight; on those whom He pretends not to love, take pity.  455. Dost thou hate the atheist because he does love not God?  Then shouldst thou be disliked because thou dost not love God perfectly.  456.


Sri Aurobindo: There is one thing especially in which creeds and churches surrender themselves to the devil, and that is in their anathemas.  When the priest chants Anathema Maranatha, then I see a devil worshipper praying.  457. No doubt, when the priest curses, he is crying to God; but it is the God of anger and darkness to whom he devotes himself along with his enemy; for as he approaches God, so shall God receive him.


Sri Aurobindo: 458. I was much plagued by Satan, until I found that it was God who was tempting me; then the anguish of him passed out of my soul for ever.   459. I hated the devil and was sick with his temptations and tortures; and I could not tell why the voice in his departing words was so sweet that when he returned often and offered himself to me, it was with sorrow I refused him.


Sri Aurobindo: Then I discovered it was Krishna at His tricks and my hate was changed into laughter.  460. They explained the evil in the world by saying that Satan had prevailed against God; but I think more proudly of my Beloved. I believe that nothing is done but by His will in heaven or hell, on earth or on the waters.  461.


Sri Aurobindo: In our ignorance we are like children proud of our success in walking erect and unaided and too eager to be aware of the mother’s steadying touch on the shoulder. When we wake, we look back and see that God was leading and upholding us always.  462. At ﬁrst whenever I fell back into sin, I used to weep and rage against myself and against God for having suffered it. Afterwards it was as much as I could dare to ask, “Why hast thou rolled me again in the mud, O my playfellow?”


Sri Aurobindo: Then even that came to my mind to seem too bold and presumptuous; I could only get up in silence, look at him out of the corner of my eyes — and clean myself.   463. God has so arranged life that the world is the soul’s husband; Krishna its divine paramour. We owe a debt of service to the world and are bound to it by a law, a compelling opinion, and a common experience of pain and pleasure, but our heart’s worship and our free and secret joy are for our Lover.


Sri Aurobindo: 464. The joy of God is secret and wonderful; it is a mystery and a rapture at which common sense makes mouths of mockery; but the soul that has once tasted it, can never renounce, whatever worldly disrepute, torture and afﬂiction it may bring us.   465. God, the world Guru, is wiser than thy mind; trust Him and not that eternal self-seeker & arrogant sceptic.


Sri Aurobindo: 466. The sceptic mind doubts always because it cannot understand, but the faith of the God-lover persists in knowing although it cannot understand. Both are necessary to our darkness, but there can be no doubt which is the mightier. What I cannot understand now, I shall some day master, but if I lose faith & love, I fall utterly from the goal which God has set before me.  467.


Sri Aurobindo: I may question God, my guide & teacher, & ask Him, “Am I right or hast Thou in thy love & wisdom suffered my mind to deceive me?” Doubt thy mind, if thou wilt, but doubt not that God leads thee.   468. Because thou wert given at ﬁrst imperfect conceptions about God, now thou ragest and deniest Him.


Sri Aurobindo: Man, dost thou doubt thy teacher because he gave not thee the whole of knowledge at the beginning? Study rather that imperfect truth & put it in its place, so that thou mayst pass on safely to the wider knowledge that is now opening before thee.  469. This is how God in His love teaches the child soul & the weakling, taking them step by step and withholding the vision of His ultimate & yet unattainable mountaintops. And have we not all some weakness?


Sri Aurobindo: Are we not all in His sight but as little children?  470. This I have seen that whatever God has withheld from me, He withheld in His love & wisdom. Had I grasped it then, I would have turned some great good into a great poison. Yet sometimes when we insist, He gives us poison to drink that we may learn to turn from it and taste with knowledge His ambrosia & His nectar.


Sri Aurobindo: 471. Even the atheist ought now to be able to see that creation marches towards some inﬁnite & mighty purpose which evolution in its very nature supposes. But inﬁnite purpose & fulﬁlment presupposes an inﬁnite wisdom that prepares, guides, shapes, protects & justiﬁes. Revere then that Wisdom & worship it with thoughts in thy soul if not with incense in a temple, and even though thou deny it the heart of inﬁnite Love and the mind of inﬁnite self-effulgence. Then though thou know it not it is still Krishna whom thou reverest & worshippest.


Sri Aurobindo: 472. The Lord of Love has said, “They who follow after the Unknowable & Indeﬁnable, follow after Me and I accept them.”  He has justiﬁed by His word the Illusionist & the Agnostic. Why then, O devotee, dost thou rail at him whom thy Master has accepted?


Sri Aurobindo: 473. Calvin who justiﬁed eternal Hell, knew not God but made one terrible mask of Him His eternal reality. If there were an unending Hell, it could only be a seat of unending rapture; for God is Ananda and than the eternity of His bliss there is no other eternity.  474. Dante, when he said that God’s perfect love created eternal Hell, wrote perhaps wiselier than he knew; for from stray glimpses I have sometimes thought there is a Hell where our souls suffer aeons of intolerable ecstasy & wallow as if for ever in the utter embrace of Rudra, the sweet & terrible.


Sri Aurobindo: 475. Discipleship to God the Teacher, sonship to God the Father, tenderness of God the Mother, clasp of the hand of the divine Friend, laughter and sport with our Comrade and boy Playfellow, blissful servitude to God the Master, rapturous love of our divine Paramour, these are the seven beatitudes of life in the human body. Canst thou unite all these in a single supreme & rainbow-hued relation? Then hast thou no need of any heaven and thou exceedest the emancipation of the Adwaitin.  476. When will the world change into the model of heaven?


Sri Aurobindo: When all mankind becomes boys & girls together with God revealed as Krishna & Kali, the happiest boy & strongest girl of the crowd, playing together in the gardens of Paradise. The Semitic Eden was well enough, but Adam & Eve were too grown up and its God himself too old & stern & solemn for the offer of the Serpent to be resisted.  477. The Semites have afﬂicted mankind with the conception of a God who is a stern & digniﬁed king & solemn judge & knows not mirth. But we who have seen Krishna, know Him for a boy fond of play and a child full of mischief & happy laughter.


Sri Aurobindo: 478. A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe.  479. God took a child to fondle him in His bosom of delight; but the mother wept & would not be consoled because her child no longer existed.  480.


Sri Aurobindo: When I suffer from pain or grief or mischance, I say “So, my old Playfellow, thou hast taken again to bullying me,” and I sit down to possess the pleasure of the pain, the joy of the grief, the good fortune of the mischance; then He sees He is found out and takes His ghosts & bugbears away from me.  481. The seeker after divine knowledge ﬁnds in the description of Krishna stealing the robes of the Gopis one of the deepest parables of God’s ways with the soul, the devotee a perfect rendering in divine act of his heart’s mystic experiences, the prurient & the Puritan (two faces of one temperament) only a lustful story. Men bring what they have in themselves and see it reﬂected in the Scripture.  482.


Sri Aurobindo: My lover took away my robe of sin and I let it fall, rejoicing; then he plucked at my robe of virtue, but I was ashamed and alarmed and prevented him. It was not till he wrested it from me by force that I saw how my soul had been hidden from me.  483. Sin is a trick & a disguise of Krishna to conceal Himself from the gaze of the virtuous. Behold, O Pharisee, God in the sinner, sin in thy self purifying thy heart; clasp thy brother.


Sri Aurobindo: 484. Love of God, charity towards men is the ﬁrst step towards perfect wisdom.  485. He who condemns failure & imperfection, is condemning God; he limits his own soul and cheats his own vision. Condemn not, but observe Nature, help & heal thy brothers and strengthen by sympathy their capacities & their courage.


Sri Aurobindo: 486. Love of man, love of woman, love of things, love of thy neighbour, love of thy country, love of animals, love of humanity are all the love of God reﬂected in these living images. So love & grow mighty to enjoy all, to help all and to love for ever.


Sri Aurobindo: 487. If there are things that absolutely refuse to be transformed or remedied into God’s more perfect image, they may be destroyed with tenderness in the heart, but ruthlessness in the smiting. But make sure ﬁrst that God has given thee thy sword and thy mission.   488.


Sri Aurobindo: I should love my neighbour not because he is neighbourhood, — for what is there in neighbourhood and distance? nor because the religions tell me he is my brother, — for where is the root of that brotherhood? but because he is myself. Neighbourhood and distance affect the body, the heart goes beyond them.  Brotherhood is of blood or country or religion or humanity, but when self-interest clamours what becomes of this brotherhood?  It is only by living in God & turning mind and heart & body into the image of his universal unity that that deep, disinterested and unassailable love becomes possible.  489.


Sri Aurobindo: When I live in Krishna, then ego & self-interest vanish and only God himself can qualify my love bottomless & illimitable.  490. Living in Krishna, even enmity becomes a play of love and the wrestling of brothers.  491. To the soul that has hold of the highest beatitude, life cannot be an evil or a sorrowful illusion; rather all life becomes the rippling love and laughter of a divine Lover & Playfellow.


Sri Aurobindo: 492. Canst thou see God as the bodiless Inﬁnite & yet love Him as a man loves his mistress? Then has the highest truth of the Inﬁnite been revealed to thee. Canst thou also clothe the Inﬁnite in one secret embraceable body and see Him seated in each & all of these bodies that are visible & sensible? Then has its widest & profoundest truth come also into thy possession.


Sri Aurobindo: 493. Divine Love has simultaneously a double play, an universal movement, deep, calm & bottomless like the nether Ocean, which broods upon the whole world and each thing that is in it as upon a level bed with an equal pressure, and a personal movement, forceful, intense & ecstatic like the dancing surface of the same Ocean, which varies the height & force of its billows and chooses the objects it shall fall upon with the kiss of its foam & spray and the clasp of its engulﬁng waters.  494. I used to hate and avoid pain and resent its inﬂiction; but now I ﬁnd that had I not so suffered, I would not now possess, trained and perfected, this inﬁnitely & multitudinously sensible capacity of delight in my mind, heart and body. God justiﬁes himself in the end even when He has masked Himself as a bully and a tyrant.


Sri Aurobindo: 495. I swore that I would not suffer from the world’s grief and the world’s stupidity and cruelty & injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me. Then God broke my heart and ploughed up my mind. I rose through cruel & incessant anguish to a blissful painlessness and through sorrow and indignation & revolt to an inﬁnite knowledge and a settled peace.


Sri Aurobindo: 496. When I found that pain was the reverse side & the training of delight, I sought to heap blows on myself & multiply suffering in all my members; for even God’s tortures seemed to me slow & slight & inefﬁcient. Then my Lover had to stay my hand & cry, “Cease; for my stripes are enough for thee.”  497. The self-torture of the old monks & penitents was perverse & stupid; yet was there a secret soul of knowledge behind their perversities.


Sri Aurobindo: 498. God is our wise & perfect Friend; because he knows when to smite as well as when to fondle, when to slay us no less than when to save & to succour.  499. The divine Friend of all creatures conceals His friendliness in the mask of an enemy till He has made us ready for the highest heavens; then, as in Kurukshetra, the terrible form of the Master of strife, suffering & destruction is withdrawn & the sweet face, the tender arm, the oft-clasped body of Krishna shine out on the shaken soul & puriﬁed eyes of his eternal comrade & playmate.  500.


Sri Aurobindo: Suffering makes us capable of the full force of the Master of Delight; it makes us capable also to bear the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude.  501. Yet, O soul of man, seek not after pain, for that is not His will, seek after His joy only; as for suffering, it will come to thee surely in His providence as often and as much as is needed for thee. Then bear it that thou mayst ﬁnd out at last its heart of rapture.


Sri Aurobindo: 502. Neither do thou inﬂict pain, O man, on thy fellow; God alone has the right to inﬂict pain; or those have it whom He has commissioned. But deem not fanatically, as did Torquemada, that thou art one of these.   503.


Sri Aurobindo: In former times there was a noble form of asseveration for souls compact merely of force and action, “As surely as God liveth.” But for our modern needs another asseveration would suit better, “As surely as God loveth.”  504. Science is chieﬂy useful to the God-lover & the Godknower because it enables him to understand in detail and admire the curious wonders of His material workmanship. The one learns & cries, “Behold how the Spirit has manifested itself in matter”; the other, “Behold, the touch of my Lover & Master, the perfect Artist, the hand omnipotent.”


Sri Aurobindo: 505. O Aristophanes of the universe, thou who watchest thy world and laughest sweetly to thyself, wilt thou not let me too see with divine eyes and share in thy worldwide laughters?   506.


Sri Aurobindo: Kalidasa says in a daring image that the snow-rocks of Kailasa are Shiva’s loud world-laughters piled up in utter whiteness & pureness on the mountaintops. It is true; and when their image falls on the heart, then the world’s cares melt away like the clouds below into their real nothingness.  507. The strangest of the soul’s experiences is this, that it ﬁnds, when it ceases to care for the image & threat of troubles, then the troubles themselves are nowhere to be found in one’s neighbourhood. It is then that we hear from behind those unreal clouds God laughing at us.


Sri Aurobindo: 508. Has thy effort succeeded, O thou Titan? Dost thou sit, like Ravana and Hiranyakashipou, served by the gods and the world’s master? But that which thy soul was really hunting after, has escaped from thee.  509.


Sri Aurobindo: Ravana’s mind thought it was hungering after universal sovereignty and victory over Rama; but the aim his soul kept its vision ﬁxed upon all the time was to get back to its heaven as soon as possible & be again God’s menial. Therefore, as the shortest way, it hurled itself against God in a furious clasp of enmity.  510. The greatest of joys is to be, like Naraka, the slave of God; the worst of Hells, being abandoned of God, to be the world’s master. That which seems nearest to the ignorant conception of God, is the farthest from him.


Sri Aurobindo: 511. God’s servant is something; God’s slave is greater.  512. To be master of the world would indeed be supreme felicity, if one were universally loved; but for that one would have to be at the same time the slave of all humanity.


Sri Aurobindo: 513. After all when thou countest up thy long service to God, thou wilt ﬁnd thy supreme work was the ﬂawed & little good thou didst in love for humanity.   514. There are two works that are perfectly pleasing to God in his servant; to sweep in silent adoration His temple-ﬂoors and to ﬁght in the world’s battleﬁeld for His divine consummation in humanity.


Sri Aurobindo: 515. He who has done even a little good to human beings, though he be the worst of sinners, is accepted by God in the ranks of His lovers and servants. He shall look upon the face of the Eternal.   516.


Sri Aurobindo: O fool of thy weakness, cover not God’s face from thyself by a veil of awe, approach Him not with a suppliant weakness.  Look! thou wilt see on His face not the solemnity of the King & Judge, but the smile of the Lover.   517.


Sri Aurobindo: Until thou canst learn to grapple with God as a wrestler with his comrade, thy soul’s strength shall always be hid from thee.  518. Sumbha ﬁrst loved Kali with his heart & body, then was furious with her and fought her, at last prevailed against her, seized her by the hair & whirled her thrice round him in the heavens; the next moment he was slain by her. These are the Titan’s four strides to immortality and of them all the last is the longest and mightiest.  519.


Sri Aurobindo: Kali is Krishna revealed as dreadful Power & wrathful Love. She slays with her furious blows the self in body, life & mind in order to liberate it as spirit eternal.  520. Our parents fell, in the deep Semitic apologue, because they tasted the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Had they taken at once of the tree of eternal life, they would have escaped the immediate consequence; but God’s purpose in humanity would have been defeated.


Sri Aurobindo: His wrath is our eternal advantage.  521. If Hell were possible, it would be the shortest cut to the highest heaven. For verily God loveth.  522.


Sri Aurobindo: God drives us out [of] every Eden that we may be forced to travel through the desert to a diviner Paradise. If thou wonder why should that parched & ﬁerce transit be necessary, then art thou befooled by thy mind and hast not studied thy soul behind and its dim desires and secret raptures.  523. A healthy mind hates pain; for the desire of pain that men sometimes develop in their minds is morbid and contrary to Nature. But the soul cares not for the mind & its sufferings any more than the iron-master for the pain of the ore in the furnace; it follows its own necessities and its own hunger.


Sri Aurobindo: 524. Pity is sometimes a good substitute for love; but it is always no more than a substitute.  525. Self-pity is always born of self-love; but pity for others is not always born of love for its object.


Sri Aurobindo: It is sometimes a selfregarding shrinking from the sight of pain; sometimes the rich man’s contemptuous dole to the pauper. Develop rather God’s divine compassion than human pity.  526. Not pity that bites the heart and weakens the inner members, but a divine masterful & untroubled compassion and helpfulness is the virtue that we should encourage.


Sri Aurobindo: 527. To ﬁnd that saving a man’s body or mind from suffering is not always for the good of either soul, mind or body, is one of the bitterest of experiences for the humanly compassionate.  528. Human pity is born of ignorance & weakness; it is the slave of emotional impressions. Divine compassion understands, discerns & saves.


Sri Aurobindo: 529. Indiscriminate compassion is the noblest gift of temperament, not to do even the least hurt to one living thing is the highest of all human virtues; but God practises neither. Is man therefore nobler and better than the All-loving?  530. Love and serve men, but beware lest thou desire their approbation.


Sri Aurobindo: Obey rather God within thee.  531. Not to have heard the voice of God and His angels is the world’s idea of sanity.  532. See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks.


Sri Aurobindo: Believe that all falsehood is truth in the making or truth in the breaking, all failure an effectuality concealed, all weakness strength hiding itself from its own vision, all pain a secret & violent ecstasy. If thou believest ﬁrmly & unweariedly, in the end thou wilt see & experience the All-true, Almighty & All-blissful.  533. Human love fails by its own ecstasy, human strength is exhausted by its own effort, human knowledge throws a shadow that conceals half the globe of truth from its own sunlight; but divine knowledge embraces opposite truths & reconciles them, divine strength grows by the prodigality of its self-expenditure, divine love can squander itself utterly, yet never waste or diminish.


Sri Aurobindo: 534. The rejection of falsehood by the mind seeking after truth is one of the chief causes why mind cannot attain to the settled, rounded & perfect truth; not to escape falsehood is the effort of divine mind, but to seize the truth which lies masked behind even the most grotesque or far-wandering error.  535. The whole truth about any object is a rounded & allembracing globe which for ever circles around, but never touches the one & only subject & object of knowledge, God.  536.


Sri Aurobindo: There are many profound truths which are like weapons dangerous to the unpractised wielder. Rightly handled, they are the most precious & potent in God’s armoury.  537. The obstinate pertinacity with which we cling to our meagre, fragmentary, night-besieged & grief-besieged individual existence even while the unbroken bliss of our universal life calls to us, is one of the most amazing of God’s mysteries. It is only equalled by the inﬁnite blindness with which we cast a shadow of our ego over the whole world & call that the universal being.


Sri Aurobindo: These two darknesses are the very essence & potency of Maya.  538. Atheism is the shadow or dark side of the highest perception of God. Every formula we frame about God, though always true as a symbol, becomes false when we accept it as a sufﬁcient formula. The Atheist & Agnostic come to remind us of our error.


Sri Aurobindo: 539. God’s negations are as useful to us as His afﬁrmations. It is He who as the Atheist denies His own existence for the better perfecting of human knowledge. It is not enough to see God in Christ & Ramakrishna & hear His words, we must see Him and hear Him also in Huxley & Haeckel.  540.


Sri Aurobindo: Canst thou see God in thy torturer & slayer even in thy moment of death or thy hours of torture? Canst thou see Him in that which thou art slaying, see & love even while thou slayest?  Thou hast thy hand on the supreme knowledge. How shall he attain to Krishna who has never worshipped Kali?  541.


Sri Aurobindo: I know that the opposite of what I say is true, but for the present what I say is still truer.  542. I believe with you, my friends, that God, if He exists, is a demon and an ogre. But after all what are you going to do about it?


Sri Aurobindo: 543. God is the supreme Jesuit Father. He is ever doing evil that good may come of it; ever misleads for a greater leading; ever oppresses our will that it may arrive at last at an inﬁnite freedom.   544


Sri Aurobindo: . Our Evil is to God not evil, but ignorance and imperfection, our good a lesser imperfection.  545. The religionist speaks a truth, though too violently, when he tells us that even our greatest and purest virtue is as vileness before the divine nature of God.  546.


Sri Aurobindo: To be beyond good and evil is not to act sin or virtue indifferently, but to arrive at a high and universal good.  547. That good is not our ethical virtue which is a relative and erring light in the world; it is supra-ethical and divine.


Sri Aurobindo: THE WORLD abounds with scriptures sacred and profane, with revelations and half-revelations, with religions and philosophies, sects and schools and systems. To these the many minds of a half-ripe knowledge or no knowledge at all attach themselves with exclusiveness and passion and will have it that this or the other book is alone the eternal Word of God and all others are either impostures or at best imperfectly inspired, that this or that philosophy is the last word of the reasoning intellect and other systems are either errors or saved only by such partial truth in them as links them to the one true philosophical cult. Even the discoveries of physical Science have been elevated into a creed and in its name religion and spirituality banned as ignorance and superstition, philosophy as frippery and moonshine. And to these bigoted exclusions and vain wranglings even the wise have often lent themselves, misled by some spirit of darkness that has mingled with their light and overshadowed it with some cloud of intellectual egoism or spiritual pride. Mankind seems now indeed inclined to grow a little modester and wiser; we no longer slay our fellows in the name of God’s truth or because they have minds differently trained or differently constituted from ours; we are less ready to curse and revile our neighbour because he is wicked or presumptuous enough to differ from us in opinion; we are ready even to admit that Truth is everywhere and cannot be our sole monopoly; we are beginning to look at other religions and philosophies for the truth and help they contain and no longer merely in order to damn them as false or criticise what we conceive to be their errors.


Sri Aurobindo: But we are still apt to declare that our truth gives us  supreme knowledge which other religions or philosophies have missed or only imperfectly grasped so that they deal either with subsidiary and inferior aspects of the truth of things or can merely prepare less evolved minds for the heights to which we have arrived. And we are still prone to force upon ourselves or others the whole sacred mass of the book or gospel we admire, insisting that all shall be accepted as eternally valid truth and no iota or underline or diaeresis denied its part of the plenary inspiration.  It may therefore be useful in approaching an ancient Scripture, such as the Veda, Upanishads or Gita, to indicate precisely the spirit in which we approach it and what exactly we think we may derive from it that is of value to humanity and its future. First of all, there is undoubtedly a Truth one and eternal which we are seeking, from which all other truth derives, by the light of which all other truth ﬁnds its right place, explanation and relation to the scheme of knowledge. But precisely for that reason it cannot be shut up in a single trenchant formula, it is not likely to be found in its entirety or in all its bearings in any single philosophy or scripture or uttered altogether and for ever by any one teacher, thinker, prophet or Avatar.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor has it been wholly found by us if our view of it necessitates the intolerant exclusion of the truth underlying other systems; for when we reject passionately, we mean simply that we cannot appreciate and explain. Secondly, this Truth, though it is one and eternal, expresses itself in Time and through the mind of man; therefore every Scripture must necessarily contain two elements, one temporary, perishable, belonging to the ideas of the period and country in which it was produced, the other eternal and imperishable and applicable in all ages and countries. Moreover, in the statement of the Truth the actual form given to it, the system and arrangement, the metaphysical and intellectual mould, the precise expression used must be largely subject to the mutations of Time and cease to have the same force; for the human intellect modiﬁes itself always; continually dividing and putting together it is obliged to shift its divisions continually and to rearrange its syntheses; it is always leaving old expression and symbol for new or, if it uses the old, it so changes its connotation or at least its exact content and association that we can never be quite sure of understanding an ancient book of this kind precisely in the sense and spirit it bore to its contemporaries. What is of entirely permanent value is that which besides being universal has been experienced, lived and seen with a higher than the intellectual vision.  I hold it therefore of small importance to extract from the Gita its exact metaphysical connotation as it was understood by the men of the time, — even if that were accurately possible.


Sri Aurobindo: That it is not possible, is shown by the divergence of the original commentaries which have been and are still being written upon it; for they all agree in each disagreeing with all the others, each ﬁnds in the Gita its own system of metaphysics and trend of religious thought. Nor will even the most painstaking and disinterested scholarship and the most luminous theories of the historical development of Indian philosophy save us from inevitable error. But what we can do with proﬁt is to seek in the Gita for the actual living truths it contains, apart from their metaphysical form, to extract from it what can help us or the world at large and to put it in the most natural and vital form and expression we can ﬁnd that will be suitable to the mentality and helpful to the spiritual needs of our present-day humanity.  No doubt in this attempt we may mix a good deal of error born of our own individuality and of the ideas in which we live, as did greater men before us,


Sri Aurobindo: but if we steep ourselves in the spirit of this great Scripture and, above all, if we have tried to live in that spirit, we may be sure of ﬁnding in it as much real truth as we are capable of receiving as well as the spiritual inﬂuence and actual help that, personally, we were intended to derive from it. And that is after all what Scriptures were written to give; the rest is academical disputation or theological dogma.  Only those Scriptures, religions, philosophies which can be thus constantly renewed, relived, their stuff of permanent truth constantly reshaped and developed in the inner thought and spiritual experience of a developing humanity, continue to be of living importance to mankind. The rest remain as monuments of the past, but have no actual force or vital impulse for the future.


Sri Aurobindo: In the Gita there is very little that is merely local or temporal and its spirit is so large, profound and universal that even this little can easily be universalised without the sense of the teaching suffering any diminution or violation; rather by giving an ampler scope to it than belonged to the country and epoch, the teaching gains in depth, truth and power. Often indeed the Gita itself suggests the wider scope that can in this way be given to an idea in itself local or limited. Thus it dwells on the ancient Indian system and idea of sacriﬁce as an interchange between gods and men, — a system and idea which have long been practically obsolete in India itself and are no longer real to the general human mind; but we ﬁnd here a sense so entirely subtle, ﬁgurative and symbolic given to the word “sacriﬁce” and the conception of the gods is so little local or mythological, so entirely cosmic and philosophical that we can easily accept both as expressive of a practical fact of psychology and general law of Nature and so apply them to the modern conceptions of interchange between life and life and of ethical sacriﬁce and self-giving as to widen and deepen these and cast over them a more spiritual aspect and the light of a profounder and more far-reaching Truth. Equally the idea of action according to the Shastra, the fourfold order of society, the allusion to the relative position of the four orders or the comparative spiritual disabilities of Shudras and women seem at ﬁrst sight local and temporal, and, if they are too much pressed in their literal sense, narrow so much at least of the teaching, deprive it of its universality and spiritual depth and limit its validity for mankind at large. But if we look behind to the spirit and sense and not at the local name and temporal institution, we see that here too the sense is deep and true and the spirit philosophical, spiritual and universal.


Sri Aurobindo: By Shastra we perceive that the Gita means the law imposed on itself by humanity as a substitute for the purely egoistic action of the natural unregenerate man and a control on his tendency to seek in the satisfaction of his desire the standard and aim of his life. We see too that the fourfold order of society is merely the concrete form of a spiritual truth which is itself independent of the form; it rests on the conception of right works as a rightly ordered expression of the nature of the individual being through whom the work is done, that nature assigning him his line and scope in life according to his inborn quality and his self-expressive function. Since this is the spirit in which the Gita advances its most local and particular instances, we are justiﬁed in pursuing always the same principle and looking always for the deeper general truth which is sure to underlie whatever seems at ﬁrst sight merely local and of the time. For we shall ﬁnd always that the deeper truth and principle is implied in the grain of the thought even when it is not expressly stated in its language.  Nor shall we deal in any other spirit with the element of philosophical dogma or religious creed which either enters into the Gita or hangs about it owing to its use of the philosophical terms and religious symbols current at the time.


Sri Aurobindo: When the Gita speaks of Sankhya and Yoga, we shall not discuss beyond the limits of what is just essential for our statement, the relations of the Sankhya of the Gita with its one Purusha and strong Vedantic colouring to the non-theistic or “atheistic” Sankhya that has come down to us bringing with it its scheme of many Purushas and one Prakriti, nor of the Yoga of the Gita, many-sided, subtle, rich and ﬂexible to the theistic doctrine and the ﬁxed, scientiﬁc, rigorously deﬁned and graded system of the Yoga of Patanjali.  In the Gita the Sankhya and Yoga are evidently only two convergent parts of the same Vedantic truth or rather two concurrent ways of approaching its realisation, the one philosophical, intellectual, analytic, the other intuitional, devotional, practical, ethical, synthetic, reaching knowledge through experience. The Gita recognises no real difference in their teachings. Still less need we discuss the theories which regard the Gita as the fruit of some particular religious system or tradition. Its teaching is universal whatever may have been its origins.