Top 256 Quotes & Sayings by Sri Aurobindo - Page 3

Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man's seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values.

The subliminal mind receives and remembers all those touches that delight the soul. Our soul takes joy in this right touching by the Essence of all experience.

The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity.

The mind is running on all sides to think about many things, - what we call thoughts coming from outside. We must withdraw the mind from these distractions and make it abide in the self. Thus guarding the peace within we shall have to do the work without.

The all-embracing vast being which is there behind the play of the universe and with which you will have to identify yourself - for this is your true self.

Ourselves within us lethal forces nurse; We make of our own enemies our guests.

The inside must be made entirely calm and quiet and there should reign an upward aspiration - a state of awaiting.

Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body? This first we ought to determine.

My God is love and sweetly suffers all.

What comes from outside, one mistakes it as coming from inside. So many thoughts etc. move about outside in the universal - these manifest inside you. All these you must push away as foreign to you and the inside must be made peaceful, calm and quiet; then it will start descending from above.

The progressive growth of the finite consciousness of man towards this Self, towards the universal , the eternal, the infinite, in a word his growth into spiritual consciousness by the development of his ordinary ignorant natural being into an illumined divine nature, this is for Indian thinking the significance of life and the aim of human existance.

The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself; but is the Theist any other? Well, perhaps; for he has seen the shadow of God and clutched at it.

The experiences of your past life which are stored within come up to the surface to be rejected. By rejecting all these by and by the inside will have to be cleansed.

Religions, creeds and forms are only a characteristic outward sign of the spiritual impulsion and religion itself is the intensive action by which it tries to find its inward force. Its expansive movement comes in the thought which it throws out on life, the ideals which open up new horizons and which the intellect accepts and life labours to assimilate.

You have however within you an inclination towards completeness.

The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge.

It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseeen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know, - and of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners, - is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole... to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble.

One has to do sadhana for the total manifestation of the Divine in oneself.

When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion.

Even in rags I am a god,fallen I am divine,high I triumph when down-trod,long I live when slain!

I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and 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.

Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it.

The navel region is the centre of the vital. It is from here that the movements of the vital rise upward. Above the navel and behind the chest is the centre of the play of emotions and below this takes place the play of the physical. Mul?dh?ra is the base of the physical. In between the Mul?dh?ra and the navel, there is another centre of the vital.

There is a veil between the Supermind above and the lower Prakriti below - the veil of ingrained formations. This veil may completely withdraw or be partially withdrawn. Thus even if there is some little opening, with the contact of Light from above the lower nature will get slowly changed.

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.

All desires and egoism will have to be banished from the being.

One must have first of all a solid foundation.

India saw from the beginning, - and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, - that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.

What you call the psychic being is the mind of the vital. The heart is the seat of this mind. And this mind is the essence of the senses. It receives things from outside, acts upon things that are outside - knows, gives consent, takes interest in them. But this mind cannot be the Ishwara, but it is the knower, the giver of the consent.

The one aim of [my] yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinize human nature.

Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.

The language of the Veda itself is sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that same vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit fot the impersonal knowledge.

Those who have advanced rise to the mind which is in the head, - they have the play of their mental movements in the head itself. But all these are inside the body; man is, as it were, shut up in a box, his entire consciousness is confined within the organism. This imprisonment has to be undone.

The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the door of the spirit.

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organization or status of existence as final. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature.

Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate.

Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. It is this dominant inclination of India which gives character to all the expressions of her culture. In fact, they have grown out of her inborn spiritual tendency of which her religion is a natural out flowering. The Indian mind has always realized that the Supreme is the Infinite and perceived that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an infinite variety of aspects.

Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.

The yogin becomes aware in part of the action of the supramental power organizing the lower vehicle (?dh?ra). A part of it remains behind the veil and prepares itself.

One can see light above the head; that indicates a consciousness outside the body. But that itself is not the Truth-Consciousness or Vijnana. But much light descending from there illumines this consciousness.

If Hell were possible, it would be the shortest cut to the highest heaven. For verily God loveth.

Terrorism thrives on administrative violence and injustice; that is the only atmosphere in which it can thrive and grow. It sometimes follows the example of indiscriminate violence from above; it sometimes, though very rarely, sets it from below. But the power above which follows the example from below is on the way to committing suicide.

Material things are not to be despised-without them there can be no manifestation in the material world.

We can arrive at a point of view where the preservation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment to the transcendent and supracosmic.

Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars.

All kinds of indications will come from above and whatever you do must be referred to the Above.

We are sons of God And must be even as he.

Death is but changing of our robes to wait in wedding garments at the Eternal's gate.

If India is to survive, she must be made young again. Rushing and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force.

Man's freedom is relative and it cannot be held solely responsible for the imperfection of his nature.

What do you want to do sadhana for? The aim should not be the satisfaction of egoism: "I want to be a great yogi; I shall have so much power and with that power I shall establish myself in the world." All such thoughts must be thrown far away.

India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma.

The Hindu religion appears ... as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.

After having stopped the lower activities of the mind, it must be made receptive; and, instead of weaving all kinds of empty and idle thoughts, the mind should receive intuitions from above.

You have a strong active nature. And this in you is a point of strength. If you can mould it rightly this will become a very great strength. On the other hand, this too is your weak point - a hindrance in sadhana.

An active mind needs an outlet. If it stops by itself from within, well and good; otherwise one should not try to stop this by force.

A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.

All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses.

Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future