Daily Offerings
The subtle physical world
All that here seems has lovelier semblance there.
Whatever our hearts conceive, our heads create,
Some high original beauty forfeiting,
Thence exiled here consents to an earthly tinge.
Whatever is here of visible charm and grace
Finds there its faultless and immortal lines;
All that is beautiful here is there divine.
Figures are there undreamed by mortal mind:
Bodies that have no earthly counterpart
Traverse the inner eye’s illumined trance
And ravish the heart with their celestial tread
Persuading heaven to inhabit that wonder sphere….
Imagined vainly in our mind’s thin air
An abstract phantasm mould of mental make,
It feels what earthly bodies cannot feel
And is more real than this grosser frame.
After the falling of mortality’s cloak
Lightened is its weight to heighten its ascent;
Refined to the touch of finer environments
It drops old patterned palls of denser stuff,
Cancels the grip of earth’s descending pull
And bears the soul from world to higher world,
Till in the naked ether of the peaks
The spirit’s simplicity alone is left,
The eternal being’s first transparent robe.
But when it must come back to its mortal load
And the hard ensemble of earth’s experience,
Then its return resumes that heavier dress.
Savitri: Book 2 Canto 2
To be conscious of Thee
January 31, 1914
Every morning may our thought rise fervently towards Thee, asking Thee how we can manifest and serve Thee best. At every moment in the manifold choices which we can make and which, despite their apparent insignificance, are always of great importance—since according to our decision we become subject to one category of determinisms or another—at every moment may our attitude be such that Thy divine Will may determine our choice and that thus it may be Thou who directest our entire life. According to the consciousness in which we are when taking a decision, we become subject to the determinism of the order of realities in which we are conscious; whence the consequences, often unforeseen and troublesome, that are contradictory to the general orientation of one’s life and form obstacles which are sometimes terrible to overcome later. Therefore, O Lord, Divine Master of love, we want to be conscious of Thee and Thee alone, be identified with Thy supreme law each time we take a decision, each time we choose, so that it may be Thy Will which moves us, and that our life be thus effectively and integrally consecrated to Thee.
In Thy Light we shall see, in Thy Knowledge we shall know, in Thy Will we shall realise.
[Prayers and Meditations]
Keep the will firm
What is the way to establish unity and homogeneity in our being?
Keep the will firm. Treat the recalcitrant parts as disobedient children. Act upon them constantly and patiently. Convince them of their error.
In the depths of your consciousness is the psychic being, the temple of the Divine within you. This is the centre round which should come about the unification of all these divergent parts, all these contradictory movements of your being. Once you have got the consciousness of the psychic being and its aspiration, these doubts and difficulties can be destroyed. It takes more or less time, but you will surely succeed in the end. Once you have turned to the Divine, saying, “I want to be yours”, and the Divine has said, “Yes”, the whole world cannot keep you from it. When the central being has made its surrender, the chief difficulty has disappeared. The outer being is like a crust. In ordinary people the crust is so hard and thick that they are not conscious of the Divine within them. If once, even for a moment only, the inner being has said, “I am here and I am yours”, then it is as though a bridge has been built and little by little the crust becomes thinner and thinner until the two parts are wholly joined and the inner and the outer become one.
[The Mother, CWM 3: 14th April 1929]
Songs of the Soul (2024 09 10)
Come Mother, come! Come, O Mother Divine, Mother of Beauty, Love and Delight, come in Thy gracious form of Mahalakshmi, as the eternal charmer who holds the key to the mystic doors of love. O Beauty unparalleled whose heart is the flaming door to ecstasies, come to O Mother of Beauty and Bliss, open our heart to Thy sweetness and love. Sweet Harmony that dwells in all things, hidden behind the outer crust of hardness and harshness, come, O Mother, make us entirely plastic to Your touch, melt us, refine us, remould us, join us forever to Thee in the smithy of Thy Love. Forge our life into a beautiful and harmonious rhythm of Thy delight. Rebuild us with the substance of Thy Light.
May all grow harmonious and beautiful.
May all grow tranquil and happy.
May all open to Thy Sweetness and Love.
The Need of Wideness and Plasticity
We must have a synthetic understanding with as total a vision as possible of their complete vision and yet be plastic enough to admit that all that we understand today is nothing compared to what we will understand tomorrow and the day after. This wideness and plasticity is most needed when we deal with their writings that cover every aspect of life from every angle of vision without losing, even for a moment, the total picture. It is as if a Master-artist was filling a vast canvas with a meticulous eye on each detail but all the time keeping the full picture and every other detail in it constantly in his universal mind. Everything is there but in its just place and right proportion. If we take the word or the sentence out of this totality and put it as an exclusive truth then it turns into a falsehood by such misplacement. A certain understanding and formulation may have been needed for us at a certain point of time and a certain stage of development but if we do not constantly enlarge our vision and scope then this understanding begins to get petrified and turns the high spiritual truths contained within a body of words into a fixed and narrow formula or a dogmatic religion. Or worse still by repeating it too often, especially without an effort to live it, we turn the living body of Truth into a dead and sterile corpse whose carcass we carry as Shiva carrying Sati on his shoulders until Vishnu breaks the dead body into pieces so that Sati may be reborn as Parvati, Sati must pass through the flames of sacrifice to be thus reborn. So too, the word must pass through the flames of our inner aspiration to reveal its inmost truth.
When we thus make an effort we shall ourselves see how Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Works are arranged in a hierarchical manner. There is a context to everything, a context at once inner and outer; and a purpose, a purpose that goes beyond mere understanding and living. It is to lead us to the heart of Love that the Divine Incarnate embodies. Each of Sri Aurobindo’s Works is a step of the Infinite Shakti that leads us closer and closer to Her and it is only when we have found Her that the real truth behind the luminous words is revealed to us by Her Grace. It is Her Grace that leads us to the vast and luminous heart of the Lord where the word stands self-revealed. This, after all, is the real, if not the only, purpose of his words, – to take us closer to the Divine and His workings in creation and all these countless revelations to lead us to Her Feet where knowledge rests in a blissful Silence. This is the grand revelation towards which the all-powerful Word of the Avatar leads us.
Indeed it is only to the degree that we grow close to Her that we can truly understand. Words of Sri Aurobindo are like illuminated stairs that lead us towards Her. Of course the world experiences are also a staircase that takes us to Her but it is a dark and dangerous staircase. The ascension through the Word is swifter and safer provided we read it with the fire of aspiration to grow closer to the Divine. But if we get lost in mere outer meanings and pedagogy and analysis of the structure and the sentence then we shall be like the man who kept staring and appreciating a mountain from the foothills but never really tasted the bliss of rising into the skies which is where the mountains were meant to lead him. The more we ascend, the better we understand the mountain, in its totality and its specific details. The same is true of Sri Aurobindo’s books. The more we read about a given subject from different works of his, the better we understand the many-sided and all-encompassing vision contained within them. The more we put into practice what we read, the more we grow closer to the intrinsic sense of the Word rather than its outer meaning. The more we let the power within the Words penetrate deeper into the different layers of our consciousness, the more they do the work of illumining and awakening different parts of our being to the greater Truth-Light. Sound and sense is our mind’s contact with the Word. The soul however opens out to the state of consciousness contained within it and grows by this strengthening wine ‘born from the presses of Light’.
The Mother reminds us:
“There is a world of ideas without form and it is there that you must enter if you want to seize what is behind the words. So long as you have to draw your understanding from the forms of words, you are likely to fall into much confusion about the true sense; but if in a silence of your mind you can rise into the world from which ideas descend to take form, at once the real understanding comes. If you are to be sure of understanding one another, you must be able to understand in silence. There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the other without any necessity of words. But if there is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the word means to you. This is true not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in the mind’s silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its surface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression.” [CWM 3:64–65]
Do you have any practical evidence of truth of the Integral Yoga teaching?
I would like to know as to what kind of evidence would you look for in the subjective psychological domain where you are dealing with states of consciousness that do not lend themselves to quantification and measurement. If it is a testimony of one’s own personal experience as in autoethnography, which is acceptable now, then there is enough evidence that states of consciousness exist that transcend the normal workings of the human mind. These states of consciousness and their objective effects have been the subject of studies all over the world since the sixties with promising results.
Secondly, there is enough empirical evidence that different forms of yoga help their individual practitioners in ways that we may not fully understand. Yogis speak about subtle laws and transactions of consciousness and energy that takes place behind our tangible observable behaviours observable by the senses as presently organised in the human body. However mysterious it may sound, it is not beyond the scope of logical possibility that there may be other and different types of sense organisation that may glimpse the forces behind the normal sense notations. Just as the animal senses the world differently, just as each human being brings his own perspective that colours the world as it reflects within his own consciousness, so too the yogi climbs beyond the limits of our ordinary perception and discovers realities behind and beyond our normal range.
Are they false evidence just because the average normal humanity does not experience it? Well, he would if he undertook the experiment that the yogi engages in, the experiment of transcending the human formula, of course if he fulfils the conditions of the particular yoga. This is only reasonable since every experiment needs certain conditions and even when all conditions. So, if we take it that direct experience is the only valid evidence in the psychological field then the only way to prove or ‘disprove’ would be to sincerely undertake the experiment and find it out for oneself. That at least is a fair enough requirement from a strictly scientific point of view. The fact that most yoga practitioners who sincerely undertake the yogic journey do experience some change in their consciousness, of varying degrees, which is why they continue to hold on. This is also the reason why yoga has never died unlike religions and belief systems since it is a science that asks us to engage and participate and not accept anything merely as a belief. Though it is unfair to use the methods used in physical sciences to the psychological operations, yet whatever scientific studies have been done till date using different paradigms have shown positive and promising results.
If all this is not evidence enough then I am not sure what exactly is meant by evidence. Yoga, unlike a belief system, is practicable, observable, with its results replicable. But the scientist has to undertake the journey first himself making his own inner field the laboratory of evolution through yoga. Most are not ready to undertake this journey and pass their judgments on a priori denials and ideological beliefs and under the spell of scientific dogmas like the adherents of any religion. Well naturally they do not find any evidence. The blind does not see the sun nor the ape understand the man though the two appear similar in certain ways. But their lack of vision and understanding is not a proof that either does not exist. As to majority, the beliefs of majority has often contradicted scientific evidence and there still people who believe that earth is flat. There are also people who combine an intuitive sense to fill in gaps of understanding and accept evolution as valid though the strictest scientific evidence may be missing like the missing links. Yet we do not discard it as fiction. So too with yoga.
We have the right to ignore the yogic knowledge provided we have put in our efforts in that direction to understand its processes through direct personal application. If not then both science and humility demand that we stay within the boundaries of our ignorance and leave others to follow their faith and see where it leads them. To each his own faith, whether it be a faith in science and its methods, a faith in yoga and its methods, or both.
Recent Posts
About Savitri | B1C2-08 The Ordinary Human and the Missioned Soul (pp.17-18)