Inner Voice (17-05-09) Inner Voice   So there seems to be only one way out and that is to go in search of one’s soul and to find it. It is there, it does not make a point of hiding itself, it does not play with you just to make things difficult; on the contrary, it makes great efforts to help you find it and to make itself heard. Only, between your soul and your active consciousness there are two characters who are in the habit of making a lot of noise, the mind and the vital. And because they make a lot of noise, while the soul does not, or, rather, makes as little as possible, their noise prevents you from hearing the voice of the soul. When you want to know what your soul knows, y

To know how to remain silent (03-06-09) When I found that pain was the reverse side & the training of delight, I sought to heap blows on myself & multiply suffering in all my members; for even God's tortures seemed to me slow & slight & inefficient. Then my Lover had to stay my hand & cry, "Cease; for my stripes are enough for thee." Sri Aurobindo (Thoughts and Aphorisms -496) To know how to remain silent From the point of view of individual development and for those who are still at the beginning of the path, to know how to remain silent before what one does not understand is one of the things which would help most in the progress – to know how to remain silent, not only externally, wit

The Great Discovery (29-03-09) The Great Discovery …The first thing to do in the sadhana is to get a settled peace and silence in the mind. Otherwise you may have experiences, but nothing will be permanent. It is in silent mind that the true consciousness can be built. Sri Aurobindo, SABCL Vol.23 p. 635 …To quiet the mind in such a way that no thoughts will come is not easy and usually takes time. The most necessary thing is to feel a quietude in the mind so that if thoughts come they do not disturb or hold the mind or make it follow them, but simply cross and pass away. The mind first becomes the witness of the passage of thought and not the thinker, afterwards it is able not to watch

The Godheads of the Little Life, The Birth and Childhood of the Flame (03-05-09) The Godheads of the Little Life, The Birth and Childhood of the Flame In this investiture of fleshly life A soul that is a spark of God survives And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine. In our body's cells there sits a hidden Power Sri Aurobindo SABCL Vol. 28, Page 169 A maenad of the cycles of desire Around a Light she must not dare to touch, Hastening towards a far-off unknown goal Earth followed the endless journey of the Sun. A mind but half-awake in the swing of the void On the bosom of Inconscience dreamed out life And bore this finit

The Great Discovery (05-04-09) The Great Discovery …The first thing to do in the sadhana is to get a settled peace and silence in the mind. Otherwise you may have experiences, but nothing will be permanent. It is in silent mind that the true consciousness can be built. Sri Aurobindo, SABCL Vol.23 p. 635 …To quiet the mind in such a way that no thoughts will come is not easy and usually takes time. The most necessary thing is to feel a quietude in the mind so that if thoughts come they do not disturb or hold the mind or make it follow them, but simply cross and pass away. The mind first becomes the witness of the passage of thought and not the thinker, afterwards it is able not to watch

Endurance (20-09-09) Endurance   …Let endurance be your watchword: teach the life-force in you - your vital being - not to complain but to put up with all the conditions necessary for great achievement. The body is a very enduring servant, it bears the stress of circumstance tamely like a beast of burden. It is the vital being that is always grumbling and uneasy. The slavery and torture to which it subjects the physical is almost incalculable. How it twists and deforms the poor body to its own fads and fancies, irrationally demanding that everything should be shaped according to its whimsicality! But the very essence of endurance is that the vital should learn to give up its capricious

 Aspiration (04-01-09)  Aspiration   … “How to awaken in the body an aspiration for the Divine.” Naturally, there are many ways of doing it and, in fact, each one should find his own. But the starting-point may be very different, apparently almost the very opposite. In former times, when yoga was a flight from life, it was a common practice for people, apart from a few predestined ones, not to think about yoga until they were old, when they had experienced much, known all the vicissitudes of life, its pleasures, its sorrows, its joys and miseries, its responsibilities, disillusionments, indeed all that life usually brings to human beings; and naturally, all this had disabused them

The inner effort needed to discover one’s soul (10-06-09) Distrust of the curative power within us was our physical fall from Paradise. Medical Science and a bad heredity are the two angels of God who stand at the gates to forbid our return and reentry.   Sri Aurobindo (404−Thoughts and Aphorisms) The inner effort needed to discover one’s soul.* What happens most often when one makes the inner effort that’s needed to discover one’s soul, to unite with it and allow it to govern one’s life, is a kind of marvellous enchantment with this discovery, as a result of which the first instinct is to tell oneself, “Now I have what I need, I have found infinite delight!” and no longer to be conce

Synthetic Method and Integral Yoga (15-04-09) Calvin who justified eternal Hell, knew not God but made one terrible mask of Him His eternal reality. If there were an unending Hell, it could only be a seat of unending rapture; for God is Ananda and than the eternity of His bliss there is no other eternity. Sri Aurobindo. (Thoughts and Aphorisms 473) Synthetic Method and Integral Yoga …. To cleave to the path means to follow it without leaving it or turning aside. It is a path of self-offering of the whole being in all its parts, the offering of the thinking mind and the heart, the will and actions, the inner and the outer instruments so that one may arrive at the experience of the Divine,

Our inmost being - The Psychic (11-02-09) They say that the Gospels are forgeries and Krishna a creation of the poets. Thank God then for the forgeries and bow down before the creators. Sri Aurobindo (Thoughts and Aphorism 42) Our inmost being - The Psychic …. The psychic is not above but behind – its seat is behind the heart, its power is not knowledge but an essential or spiritual feeling – it has the clearest sense of the Truth and a sort of inherent perception of it which is of the nature of soul-perception and soul-feeling. It is our inmost being and supports all the others, mental, vital, physical, but it is also much veiled by them and has to act upon them as an influence rather t