Work in the Ashram   Work and Sadhana   I have read in The Synthesis of Yoga and the Mother's Conversations that every act and movement, thought and word should be an offering. Even if this is a strictly mental effort without the heart's devotion, as it may be at first, it is sure to lead to devotion, provided the effort is sincere. This discipline is quite possible in acts of a more or less mechanical nature like walking or eating, but where the work involves mental concentration, as in reading or writing, it seems well nigh impossible. If the consciousness has to be busy with the remembrance, the attention will get divided and the work will not b

Part Five   Mantras and Messages     Section One   Mantras   On Mantras   Mantras in the Integral Yoga   The idea of your friend that it is necessary to receive a mantra from here and for that he must come is altogether wrong. There is no mantra given in this Yoga. It is the opening of the consciousness to the Mother from within that is the true initiation and that can only come by aspiration and rejection of restlessness in the mind and vital. To come here is not the way to get it. Many come and get nothing or get their difficulties raised or even fall away from the Yoga. It is no use coming before one

Human Relations and the Ashram   Right Relations between Sadhaks   The sadhaks of this Asram are not perfect —  they have plenty of weaknesses and wrong movements. It is blindness not to be able to see that; only it should not lead to a criticising or condemnatory attitude on persons —  it should be regarded as the play of forces which have to be overcome. 1933   *   To be turned wholly to the Mother and have nothing but friendly relations with the sadhaks, the same for all, is a counsel of perfection; but not many can carry it out, hardly one here and there. Yet to have that tendency is

His Temperament and Character   The Battle of Life   But what strange ideas again —  that I was born with a supramental temperament and had never any brain or mind or any acquaintance with human mentality —  and that I know nothing of hard realities. Good God! my whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from hardship and semi-starvation in England through the fierce difficulties and perils of revolutionary leadership and organisation and activity in India to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, internal and external. My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle, —  the fact that

Part Two   His Sadhana or Practice of Yoga     Section One   Sadhana before Coming to Pondicherry in 1910   Ordinary Life and Yoga   Faith and Knowledge   Is it true that only those who have obtained a clear knowledge of their spiritual possibility through a definite glimpse, received by the Grace of the Divine, are able to stick to the path till the end?   At least I had no such glimpse before I started Yoga. I can't say about others —  perhaps some had —  but the glimpse could only bring faith, it could not possibly bring knowledge; knowledge comes by Yoga, not be

Chapter VI   The National Evolution of Poetry   THE WORK of the poet depends not only on himself and his age, but on the mentality of the nation to which he belongs and the spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic tradition and environment which it creates for him. It is not that he is or need be entirely limited or conditioned by his environment or that he must regard himself as only a voice of the national mind or bound by some past national tradition and debarred from striking out a novel and original road of his own. In nations which are returning under difficulties to a strong self-consciousness, like the Irish or the Indians at the present mom

Chapter V   Poetic Vision and the Mantra   THIS HIGHEST intensity of style and movement which is the crest of the poetical impulse in its self-expression, the point at which the aesthetic, the vital, the intellectual elements of poetic speech pass into the spiritual, justifies itself perfectly when it is the body of a deep, high or wide spiritual vision into which the life-sense, the thought, the emotion, the appeal of beauty in the thing discovered and in its expression — for all great poetic utterance is discovery, — rise on the wave of the culminating poetic inspiration and pass into an ecstasy of sight. In the lesser poets these moments are

'The Future Poetry' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 10 Chapter II   The Essence of Poetry   WHAT THEN is the nature of poetry, its essential law? what is the highest power we can demand from it, what the supreme music that the human mind, reaching up and in and out to its own widest breadths, deepest depths and topmost summits, can extract from this self-expressive instrument? and how out of that does there arise the possibility of its use as the mantra of the Real? Not that we need spend any energy in a vain effort to define anything so profound, elusive and indefinable as the breath of poetic creation; to take the myriad-stringed harp of Saraswati to pieces for t

Chapter III   Rhythm and Movement    THE MANTRA, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought-substance, of style, and a highest intensity of the soul's vision of truth. All great poetry comes about by a unison of these three elements; it is the insufficiency of one or another which makes the inequalities in the work of even the greatest poets, and it is the failure of some one element which is the cause of their lapses, of the scoriae in their work

Chapter IV    The Soul of Poetic Delight  and Beauty   THE LIGHT of truth, the breath of life, great and potent things though they are, are insufficient to give poetry the touch of immortality and perfection, even a little of which is enough to carry it safe through the ages, unless the soul and form of delight and beauty take possession of the seeing of truth and give immortality to the breath and body of the life. Delight is the soul of existence, beauty the intense impression, the concentrated form of delight; and these two fundamental things tend to be one for the mind of the artist and the poet, though they are often enough separated in