Are Not Dogs More Faithful Than Men? YES, for it is their nature to be faithful and they have not man's mental complications. What prevents men from becoming faithful is the complexes of their mind. Most men are not faithful because they are afraid of being dupes, afraid of being cheated, exploited. Also behind the faithfulness they have there is always a large dose of egoism hidden, there is a bargaining more or less conscious, a give and take: 'I am faithful to you. You too must be faithful to me, in other words, you must be nice to me, must not exploit me etc. Dogs do not have these complexities, for they have a very rudimentary mind. They have not thi

Personal Effort and Surrender THERE is no difference in the end between the two if the goal to be attained is the Impersonal Divine, that is to say, if you want to unite and identify yourself with the Impersonal Divine, merge into it. But if your aspiration is to reach what is beyond, what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental Reality, then there comes in a difference, a difference in. the goal as well as in the way. For the way to the supramental realisation is essentially the way of surrender. It is a question of temperament perhaps. And if One has the temperament, the disposition, the path of surrender is infinitely more easy: three-fourths of your trouble

Organise Your Life MORAL notions have nothing to do with the growth of the inner being. I regret to say it, but the two are ill-assorted mates and go opposite ways. You may fall totally sick by doing a very unselfish act, on the other hand you may continue to be hale and hearty while doing the most egoistic acts. There is a great difference between a moral consciousness and a consciousness that is the expression of truth. I tell you again it is infinitely more difficult to have a consciousness expressing the truth than to have a moral consciousness. For any blockhead who knows social rules and follows them has a moral consciousness, but to have a consciousness of the t

Body-Energy THE Mother spoke once of the body being like a fortress, a strong shelter protecting you against enemy-attacks, the forces that are around roaming in the open spaces, the forces of physical and even moral disruption. The ancients used to refer to the body as a walled city the gates of which are to be carefully guarded. It is also compared to a temple, a firm structure wherein God is to dwell, which is to be kept always clean, trim and tidy. The body itself was worshipped as a holy thing almost as a Divinity by certain schools of spiritual discipline. These are, so to say various dimensions of the body; one more, somewhat of a different category, may be added.

The Origin ONE has forgotten. From the fact of separation from Sat-Chit-Ananda comes forgetfulness of what one is. You believe you are, does not matter what, a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, a dog, a horse, anything: a stone, the sea or the sun. You think you are all that, instead of thinking that you are the One Divine. Indeed, if you had continued to think that you are the One Divine, there would have been no universe at all. The phenomenon of separation seems to have been indispensable, otherwise it would have remained always as it was. But once the curve has been followed up and the Unity re-established, having profited by the multiplicity and division, the Unity found is o

The Golden Life – line As slow our ship her foaming track Against the wind was cleaving, Her trembling pennant still looked back To that dear isle 't was leaving. So loth we part from all we love, From all the links that bind us, So turn our hearts as on we rove, To those we've left behind us. THIS is not merely children's homesickness; it is a fundamental note of the human nature as it is at present constituted. We always look backward, we always are tied to our roots and it is with great difficulty and much effort that we advance and go forward or upward away from our origins. In a nobler language this is called tradition. Often traditi

Prayer and Aspiration (1) PRAYERS are of many kinds. There is a prayer, purely mechanical and physical, that is to say, merely words learnt by rote and repeated mechanically. It does not mean much and generally has only one effect, making the person calm who prays; if you repeat a prayer several times, it calms you in the end. There is a prayer which is a formula welling out spontaneously in order to give expression to something very precise which you ask for. You may pray for something, for some person; you may pray even for certain circumstances; you may pray for yourself also. Or you may pray to express your gratitude to the Divine for what He has do

The True Teaching You must have observed that my way of talking to you is not always the same. I don't know whether you are very sensitive to the difference, but for me it is considerable. Sometimes, on rare occasions, because of something read or for another reason, there comes to me in the wake of a question what is called an experience but what is simply the fact of entering into a certain state of consciousness and, having entered into it, describing that very state. In such a case, the Force, the Consciousness that express themselves pass across the individual mind, use it like a storehouse of words and draw from it by a sort of affinity the words necessary for the

The Sorrows of God THE Son of Man – the Avatar – suffers with and suffers for the suffering humanity. The Christ with his cross, Ramakrishna with his cancer, Socrates with the hemlock creeping up and benumbing his limbs and Mohammed being hunted from place to place are familiar and poignant pictures. "Verily, verily, the foxes have their holes, the birds their nests, but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head." And this is bound to be so, for it is the inexorable law of nature: one who has identified himself with Nature, ignorant nature, of which the ignorant and suffering humanity is part and parcel, one whose body and soul are in unison and union with the body an

How Can Time Be a Friend? IT depends on the way you look at it. It depends on the relation you have with it. If you take it as a friend, it becomes a friend, if you consider it as an enemy, it becomes an enemy. But, perhaps, what you wanted to ask is how to feel when it is an enemy and when it is a friend. Well, when you are impatient and say, "Oh, I cannot get to the end of the thing, oh, when shall I finish it?" and when you are not able to do the thing immediately and get desperate, then time is your enemy. But when you say, "Well and good, I have not done it this time, I shall do it next time, and I am sure, one day or another, I shall do it," then it becomes