Perfection of the Body   THE PERFECTION of the body, as great a perfection as we can bring about by the means at our disposal, must be the ultimate aim of physical culture Perfection is the true aim of all culture, the spiritual and psychic, the mental, the vital and it must be the aim of our physical culture also If our seeking is for a total perfection of the being, the physical part of it cannot be left aside; for the body is the material basis, the     body is the instrument which we have to use Sarīram khalu  dharmasādhanam, says the old Sanskrit adage, —the body is the means of fulfilment of dharma, and dharma means every ideal w

Yoga and Human Evolution   THE WHOLE burden of our human progress has been an attempt to escape from the bondage to the body and the vital impulses According to the scientific theory, the human being began as the animal, developed through the savage and consummated in the modern civilised man The Indian theory is different God created the world by developing the many out of the One and the material out of the spiritual From the beginning, the objects which compose the physical world were arranged by Him in their causes, developed under the law of their being in the subtle or psychical world and then manifested in the gross or material world From kārana to sū

APPENDIX I   The Tangle of Karma   OBVIOUSLY we must leave far behind us the current theory of Karma and its shallow attempt to justify the ways of the Cosmic Spirit by forcing on them a crude identity with the summary notions of law and justice, the crude and often savagely primitive methods of reward and punishment, lure and deterrent dear to the surface human mind There is here a more authentic and spiritual truth at the base of Nature's action and a far less mechanically calculable movement Here is no rigid and narrow ethical law bound down to a petty human significance, no teaching of a child soul by a mixed system of blows and lollipops, no unpr

Stead and the Spirits   CONSIDERABLE attention has been attracted and excitement created by the latest development of Mr W T Stead's agency for communicant spirits which he calls Julia's Bureau The supposed communications of Mr Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield and other distinguished politicians on the question of the Budget have awakened much curiosity, ridicule and even indignation The ubiquitous eloquence of Lord Curzon has been set flowing by what he considers this unscrupulous method of pressing the august departed into the ranks of Liberal electioneering agents, and he has penned an indignant letter to the papers in which there is much orn

The Principle of Evil   THE PROBLEM of evil is one that has taxed human thought and evolved various and conflicting solutions To the rationalist who does not believe in anything not material, the problem does not exist Everything is in nature as the result of evolution Nature is blind and unintelligent and has therefore no conception of good or evil; the conception belongs to the human mind and is the result of the social sense and the ideas of pleasure and pain developed in human beings by a perfectly intelligible natural process It is to men who believe in Intelligence as governing and developing the world that the problem exists Why did evi

Thoughts and Glimpses   Some think it presumption to believe in a special Providence or to look upon oneself as an instrument in the hands of God, but I find that every man has a special.   Providence and I see that God uses the mattock of the labourer and babbles in the mouth of a little child Providence is not only that which saves me from the shipwreck in which everybody else has foundered Providence is also that which while all others are saved snatches away my last plank of safety and drowns me in the solitary ocean.   The delight of victory is sometimes less than the attraction of struggle and suffering; nevertheless the laurel

'Essays in Philosophy and Yoga' by Sri Aurobindo - Page1 of 50 Part Two   The Yoga and Its Objects   Circa 1912         The Yoga and Its Objects   THE YOGA we practise is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; its aim is to work out the will of the Divine in the world, to effect a spiritual transformation and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity Its object is not personal Mukti, although Mukti is a necessary condition of the yoga, but the liberation and transformation of the human being It is not personal A

Supermind in the Evolution   A NEW humanity would then be a race of mental beings on the earth and in the earthly body, but delivered from its present conditions in the reign of the cosmic Ignorance so far as to be possessed of a perfected mind, a mind of light which could even be a subordinate action of the supermind or Truth-consciousness, and in any case capable of the full possibilities of mind acting as a recipient of that truth and at least a secondary action of it in thought and life It could even be a part of what could be described as a divine life upon earth and at least the beginnings of an evolution in the Knowledge and no longer e

The Ascending Unity   THE HUMAN mind loves a clear simplicity of view; the more trenchant a statement, the more violently it is caught by it and inclined to acceptance This is not only natural to our first crudity of thinking, and the more attractive because it makes things delightfully easy to handle and saves an immense amount of worry of enquiry and labour of reflection, but, modified, it accompanies us to the higher levels of a more watchful mentality Alexander's method with the fateful knot is our natural and favourite dealing with the tangled web of things, the easy cut, the royal way, the facile phil

The Problem of Rebirth   Section I   Rebirth and Karma   Rebirth   THE THEORY of rebirth is almost as ancient as thought itself and its origin is unknown We may according to our prepossessions accept it as the fruit of ancient psychological experience always renewable and verifiable and therefore true or dismiss it as a philosophical dogma and ingenious speculation; but in either case the doctrine, even as it is in all appearance well-nigh as old as human thought itself, is likely also to endure as long as human beings continue to think. In former times the doctrine used to pas