The Illuminate Spiritual Genius of Sri Aurobindo
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What a delight to discover the very fundamental admission of the inevitability of single universal creating Mind, along with all of |
See how the divinely innate, wholly intrinsic particulars of the entire Text, Workbook,
and Teacher's Manual of A Course in Miracles are never more inspirationally reasoned
or poetically encapsulated than in his (Aurobindo's) Essays on the Gita.
The Supreme Secret
Not by denying all relations, but through all relations is the Divine Infinite naturally approachable to man and most easily, widely, intimately seizable. There are a thousand relations by which the supreme Eternal is secretly in contact and union with our human existence and by all essential ways of our nature and of the world's nature, sarva-bhavena, can that contact be made sensible and that union made real to our soul, heart, will, intelligence, spirit. God does not make himself difficult of approach to us.
How Many Teachers of God Are Needed to Save the World
The prerequisites of the age of Truth may seem strict–the perilous descent into the Inconscient, the battle against Darkness, Death at every bend of the road. But haven't we risked our lives for lesser undertakings? Man's greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible. The Victory must be won once, in one body. When one man has won that Victory, it will be a victory for all mankind and in all the worlds. For this little earth, so insignificant in appearance, is the symbolic ground of a battle involving all the cosmic hierarchies, just as a conscious human being is the symbolic ground of a battle fought in all mankind–if we conquer here, we conquer everywhere; we are the deliverers of the dead, we are the deliverers of life. By becoming conscious, each of us becomes a builder of heaven and a redeemer of the earth. That is why this life on earth takes on such an exceptional significance among all our other forms of life, and also why the guardians of Falsehood persist on preaching to us the hereafter.
We must not waste a minute to do our work here because it is here that we can really do it. Don't expect anything from death; life is your salvation. It is in life that transformation must be achieved; it is on earth that one progresses, on earth that one realizes. It is in the body that the Victory is won. Then the law of evolution will no longer be made up of opposites forever spurring us to wrest us from our human childishness. It will be a law of light and endless progress–a new evolution in the joy of Truth. The Victory must only be won once. One glorious body–one body must break the iron law for all bodies. And all men must collaborate to achieve that one Victory. The strategic difficulty of the transformation is fully before us. If earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now.
Living in the Holy Instant
There is Joyously No Turning Back
Gradually he realizes that all his acts, even the most insignificant, can be supremely guided by the silent source above, that all his thoughts come from there, luminous and beyond dispute, and that a kind of spontaneous knowledge dawns within him. He begins to live a life of constant miracles. If mankind only caught a glimpse of what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, and fear, distrust and scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature to forbid the turning away of our feet from less ordinary pastures.
Once the expanse above becomes concrete and alive, like a spread of light overhead, the seeker feels the urge to enter into more direct communication with it, to emerge into the open, for he begins to feel with painful acuteness how narrow and false the mind and life below are, a sort of caricature. He feels he is clashing with everything, he is not at home anywhere. Everything–words, ideas, feelings–is false and grating. That's not it, that's never it–it's always beside the point, always approximate, always below the mark.
All Power is Given to You in Heaven and Earth
There is Nothing You Can Not Do
It is a mistake of the ethical or religious mind to condemn Power as in itself a thing not to be accepted or sought after because naturally corrupting and evil; in spite of its apparent justification by a majority of instances, this is at its core a blind and irrational prejudice. However corrupted and misused, as Love and Knowledge too are corrupted and misused, Power is divine and put here for a divine use. Shakti, will, Power is the driver of the worlds and whether it be Knowledge-Force or Love-Force or Life-Force or Action-Force or Body-Force, is always spiritual in its origin and divine in its character. It is the use made of it in the Ignorance by brute, man or Titan that has to be cast aside and replaced by its greater natural–even if to us supernormal–action led by an inner consciousness which is in tune with the Infinite and the Eternal. The integral Yoga cannot reject the works of Life and be satisfied with an inward experience only; it has to go inward in order to change the outward.
The Resurrection
This is what is meant by "Transformation." And to begin with our own immediate matter, the body: In the spiritual tradition the body has been regarded as an obstacle, incapable of spiritualisation or transmutation and a heavy weight holding the soul to earthly nature and preventing its ascent either to spiritual fulfilment in the Supreme or to the dissolution of its individual being in the Supreme. But while this conception of the role of the body in our destiny is suitable enough for a sadhana [discipline] that sees earth only as a field of the ignorance and earth-life as a preparation for a saving withdrawal . . . it is insufficient for a sadhana which conceives of a divine life upon earth and liberation of earth-nature itself as part of a total purpose of the embodiment of the spirit here. If a total transformation of the being is our aim, a transformation of the body must be an indispensable part of it; without that no full divine life on earth is possible.
Your Body Becomes a Vehicle of Communication
Such will be the natural attributes of supramental Matter. The body could become a revealing vessel of a supreme beauty and bliss, –casting the beauty of the light of the spirit suffusing and radiating from it as a lamp reflects and diffuses the luminosity of its in dwelling flame, carrying in itself the beatitude of the spirit, its joy of the seeing mind, its joy of life and spiritual happiness, the joy of Matter released into a spiritual consciousness and thrilled with a constant ecstasy. The Veda has already said it: "Then shall thy humanity become as if the workings of the gods; it is as if the visible heaven of light were founded in thee."
(Rig Veda)