Children and Child Mentality, CHILDREN are often found to be very cruel to animals. Why is it so? Their treatment of birds especially is notorious. To seek out nests and pull them down, to capture nestlings and put them to all kinds of torture, to pick up eggs and dash them to pieces are for children most interesting games. They seem to take particular delight in varying and enhancing as much as possible the torture they can inflict. One reason that can be adduced for the callousness of a child's sensibility is his self-centredness: he is wholly himself, isolated from others, has not yet learnt the social needs and virtues. All he does and feels is for himself

PART TWO Our Ideal OUR ideal – the ideal of Sri Aurobindo – we may say without much ado, is to divinise the human, immortalise the mortal, spiritualise the material. Is the ideal possible? Is it practicable? Our task will be precisely, first of all, to show that it is possible, next that it is probable and finally that it is inevitable. Now to the first question. It is usually contended that the ideal is an impossibility, a chimera, since it involves on the face of it a self-contradiction. For, is not divinity the very opposite of humanity, immortality that of mortality and Matter that of the Spirit? These pairs, all of them, are formed of two mutually exclusive terms. Th

Things Significant and Insignificant ALL things are insignificant in ordinary life. The thoughts you think, the actions you do, the feelings you experience, all your movements have no significance at all, they possess no value. They belong to the superficial part of your being, they come and pass away, like ripples on the sea, leaving no trace or effect in the depths. Only at a rare moment, if ever you come in contact with a corner of your soul, if something of that inmost consciousness touches or gazes at any limb of yours, that flash of a moment is the only significant thing that happens in the midst of all the useless mass that is your life. This is the

To Learn and to Understand IT is one thing to learn (apprendre), quite another to understand (comprendre). In learning you take in a thing by your surface mind and it is a thing that comes in from outside like a foreign body; it is put into you, almost driven and thrust into you. You do not absorb it, make it wholly your own. If you are not mindful, leave it aside for sometime, it goes clean out of your memory. Understanding a thing, on the other hand, means, you absorb it, get it into the stuff of your being, you live it in your consciousness within. When you have understood a thing you never forget it; it has become an element of your consciousness. Years and year

The Inner and the Outer THE external part of the being is turned to the Divine: you are conscious of your ideal and as much as possible you conform your behaviour to it. You appear what you want to be. But just behind the line, on the other side of your consciousness – ­in the subconscious, as it is called – the picture is different. The light has not touched there: the movements go the other way. Things – thoughts, impulses, feelings – hide which you would not like to own. Not that you consciously and deli­berately hide them: but they are there as inevitable part and parcel of the original ordinary nature. They form the backyard of the consciousness; there are all k

-024_The Soul^s Odyssey.htm The Soul's Odyssey Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home ¹: . . . RARELY has a poet – a secular poet, I mean – given utterance to deep spiritual and occult truth with such clarity and felicity. It is, however, quite open to doubt whether Wordsworth himself was fully cognisant of the truth he expressed; the words that were put into his mouth carry a significance and a symbolism considerably beyond what his mind seemed to

THE FLOWERS   [1]   Who will conquer this Earth and this world of Death and the world of the gods as well?  Page – 204 Who will find out and show the Right Path even like an expert florist?   [2]   The Disciple will conquer the Earth and this world of Death and the world of the gods as well. The Disciple will find out and show the Right Path even like an expert florist.   [3]   He knows this body to be like foam, he recognises it to be of the same nature as a mirage. He cleaves the flowery shafts of the Tempter, he passes beyond the sight of King Death.  [4]   As a mighty flood overtakes a sleeping village, even so

A PARABLE OF SEA-GULLS   ON a sea-coast – a fairly large tract of land opening out on the vast sea and the infinite sky – among rocks and cliffs there lived a flock of sea-gulls, rather flocks of sea-gulls, – for they were almost innumerable, in hundreds and perhaps in thou sands – a whole colony of them. Have you seen a sea-gull, at least in a picture? This beautiful bird, spotlessly white end to end, and when in flight with outspread wings and its delicate supple body so pleasing, so wonderful to look at! Do you know their routine, their daily preoccupations? Of course, the first thing in the morning for them to do was to fly out and look for food. Their food is naturally

Index  ACHERON, 103 Aditi, 131-2 Adityas, the, 144­ Aesop, 21 Agastya, 74 Agni, 133, 138-40, 144 Ajdeb, 277 Algeria, 12 Amrita, 38, 192, 194 Andamans, the, II Androgyne, 296-7 Anu, 71n       Arabia (L'Arabie), 1I8 Arcturus, 297       Arjuna, 38, 68, 112 Asura, 148,272 Aswins, the, 144­ Ashram (Sri Aurobindo), Iin., 63, 70-1   BACH, Richard, 82n. –Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 82n. Bajula, 280 Bali, 148-9 Baroda, 10-11 Bengal, 11, 164-5, 281 Bhade,280 Bhaskara, Guru, 151 Bhasunaka, 77 Bhattacharya, Purnenduprasad, 172 Bhattacharya, Sanjoy, 175, 177

  A Note on Supermind   I SUPERMIND is not a function, an extended function of the mind as someone seems to have presumed. Is Life then a function, an extended function of Matter? Is Mind also in its turn" a function, an extended function of Life? With equal reason one might conclude that God is an extended function of man and even Heaven an extended function of Earth! A Sanskrit wit in trying to portray a pig for the benefit of one who has never seen the animal said (in joke or in earnest, one does not know): a pig is an elephant reduced or a mouse enlarged; it would be equally cogent or correct to say that the mind is the Supermind in reduced proportions or that the Sup