IV TRANSFIGURATION The Divine attributes—such as Peace and Joy, Consciousness and Power, Freedom, etc.—each and all of them are self-existent realities, existing by themselves in their fullness and perfection. They are not mere qualities that are acquired by effort through gradual culture and development, they are not acquired piecemeal as other human possessions, material or mental. They are there near us, about us in their fullness and wholeness. We do not see them or seize them as there happens to be a veil in between. We need not strain and struggle, labour and sweat, go through all the pains of the world in order to find them, realise them. It is, as

VIII THE MYSTERY OF THE FIVE ELEMENTS The material world, as the ancient sages viewed it, is composed of five elements. They are, as we know, (i) earth (kṣiti), (2) water (ap), (3) fire (tej), (4) air (maruf), and (5) space or ether (vyom), mounting from the grossest to those that are more and more subtle. The subtlest, the topmost in the scale is space or ether. As we descend in the scale, each succeeding element becomes more and more concrete than the preceding one. Thus air is denser than space, fire is denser than air, water is denser than fire and earth is the densest of all—solidity belongs to earth alone. Water is liquid, fire gaseous, air i

XI THE MORAL AND THE SPIRITUAL Is there anything essentially wrong, evil in its very being and nature? Some religious traditions say, there is: Satan is such a thing, Ahriman is such a thing, and what else is māyā or mārā? However that may be, the sense of something essentially wrong is the fount and origin of the moral sense. The moral sense stems from and lives on the sense of sin and guilt. The sense of sin is the fundamental inspiration behind some religious disciplines, even the sense of something irrevocably bad or something irreparable; for that gives a stronger impetus, a more dynamic urge to the spur of the religious consciousness.

IX ON DISCIPLINE The Mother says: "No big creation is possible without discipline". The true and original meaning of discipline is to be a disciple. And a disciple is one who learns, is ready to learn from a master. So the first requisite for a disciple or a learner is to obey. Obedience then is the beginning and the very basis of discipline. We know from ancient stories and legends how this discipline of obedience was exacted from a disciple or learner. For knowledge or learning was not considered at that time as a bundle of information to be acquired or collected by the pupil. It is not a mass of dead materials that is laid before the learner to possess and store;

IX EDUCATION AS THE GROWTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS All knowledge is within you. Information you get from outside, but the understanding of it? It is from within. The information from outside gives you dead matter. What puts life into it, light into it is your own inner light. All education, all culture means drawing this inner light to the front. Indeed the word 'education' literally means, 'to bring out.' Plato also pointed to the same truth when he said that education is remembrance. You remember what is imbedded or secreted within, you bring to the light, the light of your physical mind, what you have within, what you already

II A TRUE PROFESSOR The Mother says a professor, a true professor, must be truly a yogi. That is to say, a teacher, even a schoolteacher, one imparting what is called secular education, has to be nothing less than a yogi. The Indian term for teacher is 'guru' and 'guru' meant a teacher both spiritual and secular. This distinction of the two words is made by the modern spirit, it did not belong to the ancient culture. The secular knowledge was also considered a necessary part of the spiritual knowledge, that which prepared for it and led towards it. The 'apara vidaya' or the 'vedangas' were but limbs of the supreme knowledge 'para vidya' and 'veda'. A teache

III CONSCIOUSNESS I spoke of consciousness and dimensions of consciousness. What then is consciousness itself? Well, we may begin by knowing what it is not, what is not consciousness. Not consciousness means the absence of consciousness, otherwise unconsciousness. You are conscious, conscious of things when you are aware, aware of their presence; when you are not aware, when you do not perceive, you are unconscious, you do not have consciousness. It is the difference between being asleep and being awake. When you are asleep things are lost, you become unconscious of them; when you are awake, things reappear and you are conscious of them. The difference is analogous t

Section Two VIII CONSCIOUSNESS AS FREEDOM Consciousness is liberty, unconsciousness is slavery. When you are unconscious you are a prey to all kinds of forces and beings outside yourself and over which you have no control. You are a plaything in the hands of any power or influence that seeks to possess you and when you are in such a state it is the undesirable powers that seek and secure hospitality in you. It is only when you become conscious that you begin to react to the outside forces that try to control you or utilise you. In the lower creation it is always a play of divergent forces and the individual being is only a field, a

THE YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO PART TEN SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY First Edition: 1969 January 13, 1969 © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1969 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA 1969

Series Two I HOW TO READ SRI AUROBINDO AND THE MOTHER Why do we read the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother? And if we read them, how to read them? Do we read for the sake of study? to know things? to acquire knowledge? That is a secondary aspect, a profit gained by the way. The real purpose of coming in contact with the words of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is to become conscious, to acquire consciousness, to be more and more conscious, increase more and more the consciousness. To understand, that is to say, to seize by the mind, to grasp intellectually the writings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is rather difficult. The easier, th