May 15, 2007

The force is anterior, not the physical instrument

“It is becoming always clearer that not only does the capacity of our total consciousness far exceed that of our organs, the senses, the nerves, the brain, but that even for our ordinary thought and consciousness these organs are only their habitual instruments and not their generators. Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness. . . Our physical organism no more causes or explains thought and consciousness than the construction of an engine causes or explains the motive-power of steam or electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument.” Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine
Each Thing Is All Itself April 12, 2007 at 5:27 pm In Spirituality, Quotes
“When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence . . . an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos . . . We instinctively act and feel and weave our life thoughts as if this stupendous world movement were at work around us as centre and for our benefit . . . When we begin to see, we perceive that it exists for itself, not for us . . . And yet let us not swing over to the other extreme and form too positive an idea of our own insignificance. . . Science reveals to us how minute is the care, how cunning the device, how intense the absorption it bestows upon the smallest of its works even as on the largest. . . To Brahman there are no whole and parts, but each thing is all itself and benefits by the whole of Brahman. . . The form and manner and result of the force of action vary infinitely, but the eternal, primal, infinite energy is the same in all. The force of strength that goes to make the strong man is no whit greater than the force of weakness that goes to make the weak. The energy spent is as great in repression as in expression, in negation as in affirmation, in silence as in sound.” Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine
“For the senses the sun goes round the earth; that was for them the centre of existence and the motions of life are arranged on the basis of a misconception. The truth is the very opposite, but its discovery would have been of little use if there were not a science that makes the new conception the centre of a reasoned and ordered knowledge putting their right values on the perceptions of the senses. So also for the mental consciousness: God moves round the personal ego and all His works and ways are brought to the judgment of our egoistic sensations, emotions, and conceptions and there are given values and interpretations which, through a perversion and inversion of the truth of things, are yet useful and practically sufficient in a certain development of human life and progress. They are a rough practical systematisation of our experience of things valid so long as we dwell in a certain order of ideas and activities. But they do not represent the last and highest state of human life and knowledge . . . The truth is not that God moves round the ego as the centre of existence and can be judged by the ego and its view of the dualities, but that the Divine is itself the centre and that the experience of the individual only finds its own true truth when it is known in the terms of the universal and the transcendent.” Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine
Evil as a Part of a Whole February 24, 2007 at 10:21 am In Spirituality, Quotes
“An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions . . . And if this Self, God, or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, . . . [there must be] some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion, . . . an ultimate victory and fulfillment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure . . . Brahman is indivisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been ultimately willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara, conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.” Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine
“The affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognize not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.” Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

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