John (Dacre) a character - illegitimate son of Sir Gerald Curran by his sister-in-law Matilda Dacre - in Sri Aurobindo's story "The Devil's Mastiff", 7:1049-51   John (Lancaster) a character - Richard Lancaster's brother - in Sri Aurobindo's short story "The Door at Abelard".  7:1027, 1041-42, 1044-45   Johnson, Samuel (1709-84), English poet, essayist, critic, journalist, lexicographer, and conversationalist, regarded as one of the outstanding figures of English 18th-century life and letters. (Enc. Br.) Der: Johnsonian; Johnsonianly  3: 231 9-. 317 16:265 29:744-45, 753 1:9-10 11:11, 14-17   Johnson, Lionel Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867-1902), English

SRI AUROBINDO BIRTH CENTENARY LIBRARY Volume  No.                   Title 1                             Bande Mataram 2                             Kannayogin 3                            The Harmony of Virtue 4                            Writings in Bengali 5                            Collected Poems 6                            Collected Plays 7                            Collected Plays 8                            Translations 9                            The Future Poetry   10                          The Secret of the Veda 11                  

Conrad, Count a character - a young nobleman - in Sri Aurobindo's play The Maid in the Mill.  7: 821, 825,834-36,840, 876,880   Conservative Party in Great Britain, the political party associated with the maintenance of institutions, confidence in private enterprise, and a preference for a pragmatic, rather than ideological, approach to the problems of government. The party is the heir, and in some measure the continuation, of the old Tory Party. (Enc. Br.) Der: Conservatism  I: 104-05,143,323,384,409,419.448,573 2: 56, 101, 195, 234, 267-72, 285, 299. 306-07, 379-80 4:205,212-14,221,233,248 27:4,54 XXII: 126   Constable, John (1776-1837). English painter who, with J.M.W. T

VII   THE SUPREME WORD OF THE GITA   WE HAVE now got to the inmost kernel of the Gita's Yoga, the whole living and breathing centre of its teaching. We can see now quite clearly that the ascent of the limited human soul, when it withdraws from the ego and the lower nature into the immutable Self calm, silent and stable, was only a first step, an initial change. And now too we can see why the Gita from the first insisted on the Ishwara, the Godhead in the human form, who speaks always of himself, aham, mām, as of some great secret and omnipresent Being, lord of all the worlds and master of the human soul, one who is greater even than that

XVI   THE FULLNESS OF SPIRITUAL ACTION   THE DEVELOPMENT of the idea of the Gita has reached a point at which one question alone remains for solution,—the question of our nature bound and defective and how it is to effect, not only in principle but in all its movements, its evolution from the lower to the higher being and from the law of its present action to the immortal Dharma. The difficulty is one which is implied in certain of the positions laid down in the Gita, but has to be brought out into greater prominence than it gets there and to be put into a clearer shape before our intelligence. The Gita proceeded on a psychological kno

X   THE VISION OF THE WORLD-SPIRIT   TIME THE DESTROYER   THE VISION of the universal Purusha is one of the best known and most powerfully poetic passages in the Gita, but its place in the thought is not altogether on the surface. It is evidently intended for a poetic and revelatory symbol and we must see how it is brought in and for what purpose and discover to what it points in its significant aspects before we can capture its meaning. It is invited by Arjuna in his desire to see the living image, the visible greatness of the unseen Divine, the very embodiment of the Spirit and Power that governs the universe. He has heard the hi

XXI   THE DETERMINISM OF NATURE   WHEN WE can live in the higher Self by the unity of works and self-knowledge, we become superior to the method of the lower workings of Prakriti. We are no longer enslaved to Nature and her gunas, but, one with the Ishwara, the master of our nature, we are able to use her without subjection to the chain of Karma, for the purposes of the Divine Will in us; for that is what the greater Self in us is, he is the Lord of her works and unaffected by the troubled stress of her reactions. The soul ignorant in Nature, on the contrary, is enslaved by that ignorance to her modes, because it is identified there, not feli

VII   THE CREED OF THE ARYAN FIGHTER*    THE ANSWER of the divine Teacher to the first flood of Arjuna's passionate self-questioning, his shrinking from slaughter, his sense of sorrow and sin, his grieving for an empty and desolate life, his forecast of evil results of an evil deed, is a strongly-worded rebuke. All this, it is replied, is confusion of mind and delusion, a weakness of the heart, an unmanliness, a fall from the virility of the fighter and the hero. Not this was fitting in the son of Pritha, not thus should the champion and chief hope of a righteous cause abandon it in the hour of crisis and peril or suffer the sudden amazem

II   THE SYNTHESIS OF DEVOTION AND KNOWLEDGE   THE GITA is not a treatise of metaphysical philosophy, in spite of the great mass of metaphysical ideas which arise incidentally in its pages; for here no metaphysical truth is brought into expression solely for its own sake. It seeks the highest truth for the highest practical utility, not for intellectual or even for spiritual satisfaction, but as the truth that saves and opens to us the passage from our present mortal imperfection to an immortal perfection. Therefore, after giving us in the first fourteen verses of this chapter a leading philosophical truth of which we stand in need,

XV   THE POSSIBILITY AND PURPOSE OF AVATARHOOD   IN SPEAKING of this Yoga in which action and knowledge become one, the Yoga of the sacrifice o£ works with knowledge, in which works are fulfilled in knowledge, knowledge supports, changes and enlightens works, and both are offered to the Purushottama, the supreme Divinity who becomes manifest within us as Narayana, Lord of all our being and action seated secret in our hearts for ever, who becomes manifest even in the human form as the Avatar, the divine birth taking possession of our humanity, Krishna has declared in passing that this was the ancient and original Yoga which he gave to