Chapter Two Doubt and Faith Doubt and Yoga   As to doubts and argumentative answers to them I have long given up the practice as I found it perfectly useless. Yoga is not a field for intellectual argument or dissertation. It is not by the exercise of the logical or the debating mind that one can arrive at a true understanding of Yoga or follow it. A doubting spirit, "honest doubt" and the claim that the intellect shall be satisfied and be made the judge on every point is all very well in the field of mental action outside. But Yoga is not a mental field, the consciousness which has to be established is not a mental, logical or debating consciousness —it is even

Section Three   The Jivatman and the Psychic Being   Chapter One   The Jivatman in the Integral Yoga   The Jivatman or Individual Self   By Jivatma we mean the individual self. Essentially it is one self with all others, but in the multiplicity of the Divine it is the individual self, an individual centre of the universe —and it sees everything in itself or itself in everything or both together according to its state of consciousness and point of view.   *   The self, Atman, is in its nature either transcendent or universal (Paramatma, Atma); when it individualises and becomes a central being, it is

Chapter Four   Transformation and the Body   The Transformation of the Body   It is quite true that the surrender and the consequent transformation of the whole being is the aim of the Yoga —the body is not excluded, but at the same time this part of the endeavour is the most difficult and doubtful —the rest, though not facile, is comparatively less difficult to accomplish. One must start with an inner control of the consciousness over the body, a power to make it obey more and more the will or the force transmitted to it. In the end as a higher and higher Force descends and the plasticity of the body increases, the transform

Part Three   The Evolutionary Process and the Supermind        Section One   The Supramental Evolution      Chapter One   The Problem of Suffering and Evil   The Riddle of This World   It is not to be denied, no spiritual experience will deny that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory world, strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering, evil. Indeed this perception is in a way almost the starting-point of the spiritual urge —except for the few to whom the greater experience comes spontaneously without being forced to seek it by the strong or overwhelming, the afflicting and detaching se

Chapter Three   Human Greatness   Greatness   Why should the Divine not care for the outer greatness? He cares for everything in the universe. All greatness is the Vibhuti of the Divine, says the Gita.   *   Obviously outer greatness is not the aim of Yoga. But that is no reason why one should not recognise the part played by greatness in the order of the universe or the place of great men of action, great poets and artists etc.   *   People have begun to try to prove that great men were not great, which is a very big mistake. If greatness is not appreciated by men, the world will become mean, small, dull, narro

Chapter Three   Philosophical Thought and Yoga   Metaphysical Thinkers, East and West   European metaphysical thought —even in those thinkers who try to prove or explain the existence and nature of God or of the Absolute —does not in its method and result go beyond the intellect. But the intellect is incapable of knowing the supreme Truth; it can only range about seeking for Truth and catching fragmentary representations of it, not the thing itself, and trying to piece them together. Mind cannot arrive at Truth; it can only make some constructed figure that tries to represent it or a combination of figures. At the end of European thought, there

Chapter Two   Descent and Transformation   A World-Changing Yoga   What is a perfect technique of Yoga or rather of a world changing and Nature-changing Yoga? Not one that takes a man by a little bit of him somewhere, attaches a hook and pulls him up by a pulley into Nirvana or Paradise. The technique of a world-changing Yoga has to be as multiform, sinuous, patient, all-including as the world itself. If it does not deal with all the difficulties or possibilities and carefully deal with each necessary element, has it any chance of success? And can a perfect technique which everybody can understand do that? It is not like writing a small poem in a fixed me

  VOLUME 28 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2012 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA     Letters on Yoga —I   Foundations of the Integral Yoga   Publisher's Note   Letters on Yoga —I comprises letters written by Sri Aurobindo on the philosophical and psychological foundations of the Integral Yoga. It is the first of four volumes of Letters on Yoga, arranged by the editors as follows: I. Foundations of the Integral Yoga II. Practice of the Integral

Chapter Two   Karma and Heredity   Karma   Karma is not luck, it is the transmission of past energies into the present with their results.   *   All energies put into activity —thought, speech, feeling, act —go to constitute Karma. These things help to develop the nature in one direction or another, and the nature and its actions and reactions produce their consequences inward and outward: they also act on others and create movements in the general sum of forces which can return upon oneself sooner or later. Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their effects. It is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have ef

Sri Aurobindo, 1950 Part One   The Divine, the Cosmos and the Individual     Section One   The Divine, Sachchidananda, Brahman and Atman     Chapter One   The Divine and Its Aspects   The Divine   The Divine is the Supreme Truth because it is the Supreme Being from whom all have come and in whom all are.   *     The Divine is that from which all comes, in which all lives, and to return to the truth of