The Life Divine CHAPTER XXIII THE DOUBLE SOUL IN MAN         Wince shall he have grief, how shall have deluded who sees everywhere the Oneness ?                                                                                                                                     Isha Upanishad         He who knows this self who is the eater of the honey of existence and the lord of what is and shall be, has thence forward no shrinking.                                                                                                                                                                                                          Hath

  Section One The Hour of God THE HOUR OF GOD There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being ; there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weakness of their own egoism. The first are periods when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny ; the second are spaces of time when much labour goes to the making of a little result. It is true that the latter may prepare the former, may be the little smoke of sacrifice going up to heaven which calls down the rain of God's bounty. Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine

  Section Two On Yoga THE WEB OF YOGA To be one in all ways of thy being with that which is the Highest, this is Yoga. To be one in all ways of thy being with that which is the All, this is Yoga. To be one in thy spirit and. with thy understanding and . thy heart and in all thy members with the God in humanity, this is Yoga. To be one with all Nature and all beings, this is Yoga. All this is to be one with God in his transcendence and his cosmos and all that he has created in his being. Because from him all is and all is in him and he is all and in all and because he is thy highest Self and thou art one with him in thy spirit and

  THE HOUR OF GOD SRI AUROBINDO THE HOUR OF GOD         1964 SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM P

  Section Four Words of the Master WORDS OF THE MASTER To do works in a close union and deep communion with the Divine in us, the Universal around us and the Transcendent above us, not to be shut up any longer in the imprisoned and separative human mind, the slave of its ignorant dictates and narrow suggestions, this is Karma yoga. * * * To work in obedience to a divine command, an eternal Will, a universal impulse initiated by a transcendent compulsion, not to run under the whips of ego and need and passion and desire, and not to be guided by the pricks of mental and vital and physical preference, but to be moved by God only, by the highes

  Section Three Evolution—Psychology Notes MAN A TRANSITIONAL BEING Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that climb to a divine superman hood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but troubled and limited mundane existence. We mean by man mind imprisoned in a living body. But mind is not the highest possible power of consciousness; for mind is not in possession of Truth, but only its ignorant seeker. Beyond mind is a supramental or gnostic power of consciousness that is in eternal possession of Truth. This supermind is at its source the dynamic consciousnes

FOREWORD   This second series of Sri Aurobindo's letters is intended to be complementary to the volume published on his 75th birthday —the 15th August, 1947. It is a farther instalment from the vast store of his letters which yet remain to be published. Some idea of their immense quantity can be had from the fact that regularly for six to eight hours every day over a period of about ten years he gave replies to the innumerable inquiries addressed to him by the spiritual aspirants in his Ashram and elsewhere. The letters included in the first volume were selected with a view to giving a broad outline of the basic principles of his spiritual metaphysics and psychology an

SECTION TWO INTEGRAL YOGA AND OTHER SPIRITUAL PATHS Vedanta, Tantra and Integral Yoga   VEDA and Vedanta are one side of the One Truth; Tantra with its emphasis on Shakti is another; in this Yoga all sides of the Truth are taken up, not in the systematic forms given them formerly but in their essence, and carried to the fullest and highest significance. But Vedanta deals more with the principles and essentials of the divine knowledge and therefore much of its spiritual knowledge and experience has been taken bodily into the Arya*. Tantra deals more with forms and processes and organis

SECTION NINE DIVINE GRACE PERSONAL EFFORT AND GURU'S HELP   Three Possibilities in Sadhana   THERE are three main possibilities for the — sadhak—(1) To wait on the Grace and rely on the Divine, (2) To do everything himself like the Adwaitin and the Buddhist, (3) To take the middle path, go forward by aspiration and rejection etc. helped by the Force.   Divine Grace, Divine Compassion and Cosmic Law   I SHOULD like to say something about the Divine Grace—for you seem to think it should be something like a Divine Reason acting upon lines not very different from those of human intelligence. But it is not that. Also it is not a universal Divine Compassi

SECTION THREE Religion, Morality, Idealism & Yoga Spiritual Evolution—Positivist Scepticism and Faith   ALL that you say only amounts, on the general issue, to the fact that this is a world of slow evolution in which man has emerged out of the beast and is still not out of it, light out of darkness, and a higher consciousness out of first a dead and then a struggling and troubled unconsciousness. A spiritual consciousness is emerging and it is through this spiritual consciousness that one can meet the Divine. Religions, full of vital and mental, mixed, troubled and ignor