THOUGHT AND IMAGINATION When you think of a person or a thing you are immediately there and come into contact with the object of your thought. But this happens in the thought world only; you know nothing of the vital or physical context of the object. Thought is conscious of thought only in the mental world; by your thought you can be conscious of the mental atmosphere of the distant object, of the thought of the person to whom you go, but nothing else, absolutely nothing of his vital or physical. If you want to know of the vital you must go to the object vitally; it means an exteriorisation that leaves the body at least three-fourths in trance. And if you w

THE YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO I TO THE CHILDREN OF THE ASHRAM CHOOSING TO DO YOGA To do Sri Aurobindo's Yoga means to seek to transform oneself integrally, to have this single aim in one's life: that alone exists, nothing else. You feel it in yourself whether you want it or not. If you do not, you can have a life of good will, service, understanding; you can work in many other ways. But between that and doing Yoga there is a great difference. To do Yoga you must want it consciously, you must know first of all what it is,—know what it is and then take the resolution. And once the resolution is taken you must waver no more.

-002_Publisher^s Note.htm PUBLISHERS' NOTE The writings included in this volume, like those in the three preceding volumes of the series, are based on talks given by the Mother to the young children of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. They were originally published in Journals connected with the Ashram, during the years 1955—1956.

ON FOOD I believe the primitive man was very near to the animal. He lived more by instinct than by intelligence. He ate when he was hungry without any kind of fixed rule. He might have had his own tastes and preferences, we do not know much about it; but we know that he lived much more physically, much less mentally or even vitally as now. Originally very material in nature, much like the animal, man in the course of his progress through centuries or millenniums became more and more mental, more and more vital. And as he grew more mental and more vital, refinement became possible, the intelligence increased, but the possibility too of perversion and deformation. It

-010_The Mind^s Bazar.htm THE MIND'S BAZAR You can't imagine what a bazar there is in the head. It is something terrible. If you look truly objectively at what passes there you will be shocked. You have then to put it in order, see into it clearly and arrange; you have to note that two contradictory ideas do not run together on parallel lines. I know a considerable number of persons who shelter in their head contrary ideas, not at all synthesised— there is no question of synthesis here—but cohabiting like two brothers engaged in eternal quarrels and contradictions, that is to say, the two ideas cannot live together, unless you lift them up and reconcile and unify in a higher and wider view;

MEAT-EATING What happens when one eats meat? I will tell you then a story. I knew a young woman, a Swedish, who was doing Sadhana. Normally she was a vegetarian, by habit as well as by inclination. One day she was invited to a dinner. She was given fowl to eat. She did not like to make a fuss and quietly ate her fowl. Now at night she found herself, in dream of course, in a basket and her head in between two bits of sticks and being shaken, shaken to and fro. She felt very unhappy, very miserable. And then she saw herself head down and legs up in the air and being shaken, shaken continually. She was thoroughly miserable. All on a sudden she felt she was being skinned, p

II THOUGHT AND THOUGHT-POWER THOUGHT THE CREATOR Human thought always creates forms in the mental world. It is a creative force. You are creating thought-forms constantly and sending them out into the atmosphere around; they go abroad to do their work. You are yourself surrounded always by such formations. No doubt there are people who cannot think clearly; they form around them only a kind of whirl. But they who think clearly and strongly create thought-forms that go out to accomplish their task and return when they are re-thought. There are cases of people who are troubled by their own formations that return to them or upon them as if to possess t

ORDER AND DISCIPLINE I You must become conscious of yourself, conscious in every detail. You must organise what you call yourself around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being so that you can possess a single, cohesive, fully conscious being: as this centre is wholly consecrated to the Divine, if all the elements are organised harmoniously around it, they too get consecrated to the Divine. Thus, when the Divine wills it, when the time comes, when the work of individualisation is complete, then the Divine permits you to let your ego melt in Him, so that you may exist for the Divine alone. But it is the Divine that takes the decision. You should hav

THE ORIGIN OF DESIRE From where does desire come? Buddha said that it came from Ignorance. It is almost that. Desire is something in the being which imagines that it requires an object other than itself for its satisfaction. This is sheer ignorance, proved by the fact that in 99 cases out of a hundred when one has the thing desired, one no more cares for it. At its very origin, I think, it was an obscure need for growth or increase. In the lowest forms of life we find love transformed into an instinctive and irresistible need for enlarging, swelling, absorbing, adding to it another body. This need to take in is desire. So perhaps if you go back far enough into

DOING FOR HER SAKE Whatever you do—study or sports—you must think of the Divine in doing it. It is not a very difficult thing after all. At first you may do it as a kind of preparation to make you capable of receiving the divine force, and then as service to help in the collective work. You can do it not for personal gain but in order to be ready for the Divine Work. This seems to me indispensable. If you keep the ordinary point of view, you will always find yourself in conditions that are not wholly satisfactory and incapable of receiving all the forces that you can receive. If you are doing long jump, for example, it should not be merely for the pleasure