Evolution A PROGRESSIVE evolution of the visible and invisible instruments of the Spirit is the whole law of the earth nature; that too is the fundamental value which underlies all the other values of its existence and its process and gives them their significance. Spirit has concealed itself in inconscient matter. It evolves, for itself first of all and as if that were its only preoccupation, forms of matter by the working of matter forces. It is only when this has been sufficiently done, that it thinks of life. And yet a subconscient life and its imprisoned forces were there all the time in matter and its forces and are there even in its most apparently inanimate for

III ON YOGA The Way FIRST be sure of the call and of thy soul’s answer. For if the call is not true, not the touch of God’s powers or the voice of his messengers, but the lure of thy ego, the end of the endeavour will be a poor spiritual fiasco or else a deep disaster. And if not the soul’s fervour, but only the mind’s assent or interest replies to the divine summons or only the lower life’s desire clutches at some side attraction of the fruits of Yoga-power or Yoga-pleasure or only a transient emotion leaps like an unsteady flame moved by the intensity of the Voice or its sweetness or grandeur, then too there can be little surety for thee in the difficult path of Yo

The Supermind THERE are three layers of the Supermind corresponding to three activities of the intuitive mind: 1. Interpretative Supermind First is what I call Interpretative Supermind, corresponding to Intuition. I call it interpretative, because what is a possibility on the mental plane becomes a potentiality on the supramental plane and the Interpretative puts all the potentialities before you. It shows the root cause of events that may become true on the physical plane. When Intuition is changed into its supramental value, it becomes Interpretative Supermind. 2. Representative Supermind First is what I call Interpretative Supermind, corresponding

Bal Gangadhar Tilak NEITHER Mr. Tilak nor his speeches really require any presentation or foreword. His speeches are, like the featureless Brahman, self-luminous. Straightforward, lucid, never turning aside from the point which they mean to hammer in or wrapping it up in ornamental verbiage, they read like a series of self-evident propositions. And Mr. Tilak himself, his career, his place in Indian politics are also a self-evident proposition, a hard fact baffling and dismaying in the last degree to those to whom his name has been anathema and his increasing pre-eminence figured as a portent of evil. The condition of things in India being given, the one possible aim

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 Karmayoga. 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 is and physical preference, but to be moved by God only, by the highest Truth only, this Karmayoga. To live and act no longer in the

II EVOLUTION - PSYCHOLOGY THE SUPERMIND 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 to a divine supermanhood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but trouble

X HISTORICAL IMPRESSIONS The French Revolution THE greatness of the French Revolution lies not in what it effected, but in what it thought and was. Its action was chiefly destructive. It prepared many things, it founded nothing. .Even the constructive activity of Napoleon only built a half-way house in which the ideas of 1789 might rest until the world was fit to understand them better and really fulfil them. The ideas themselves were not new; they existed in Christianity and before Christianity they existed in Buddhism; but in 1789 they came out for the first time from the Church and the Book and sought to remodel government and society. It was an u

Purna Yoga THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF YOGA  By YOGA we can rise out of falsehood into truth, out of weakness into force, out of pain and grief into bliss, out of bondage into freedom, out of death into immortality, out of darkness into light, out of confusion into purity, out of imperfection into perfection, out of self-division into unity, out of Maya into God. All other utilisation of Yoga is for special and fragmentary advantages not always worth pursuing. Only that which aims at possessing the fullness of God is Purna Yoga; the Sadhaka of the Divine Perfection is the Purna Yogin.                       Our aim must be to be perfect as God in His being and bliss is perfect

I. EARLY LIFE IN ENGLAND: 1879-1893 aurobindo was born on August 15th, 1872, in Calcutta. His father, a man of great ability and strong personality, had been among the first to go to England for his education. He returned entirely anglicised in habits, ideas and ideals,— so strongly that his Aurobindo as a child spoke English and Hindustani only and learned his mother-tongue only after his return from England. He was determined that his children should receive an entirely European upbringing. While in India they were sent for the beginning of their education to an Irish nuns' school in Darjeeling and in 1879 he took his three sons to