Section   Three India     Renascent India   Everybody can feel, even without any need of a special sense for the hidden forces and tendencies concealed in the apparent march of things, for the signs are already apparent, that India is on the verge, in some directions already in the first movements of a great renascence, more momentous, more instinct with great changes and results, than anything that has gone before it. Every new awakening of the kind comes by some impact slight or great on the national consciousness which puts it in face of new ideas, new conditions, new ne

Towards Unification   The progress of distance-bridging inventions, our modern facility for the multiplication of books and their copies and the increase of human curiosity are rapidly converting humanity into a single intellectual unit with a common fund of knowledge and ideas and a unified culture. The process is far from complete, but the broad lines of the plan laid down by the great Artificer of things already begin to appear. For a time this unification was applied to Europe only. Asia had its own triune civilisation, predominatingly spiritual, complex and meditative in India, predominatingly vital, emotional, active and s

Additional Aphorisms   541. I know that the opposite of what I say is true, but for the present what I say is still truer.   542. I believe with you, my friends, that God, if He exists, is a demon and an ogre. But after all what are you going to do about it?   *    543. God is the supreme Jesuit Father. He is ever doing evil that good may come of it; ever misleads for a greater leading; ever oppresses our will that it may arrive at last at an infinite freedom.   544. Our Evil is to God not evil, but ignorance and imper

PURNA YOGA   I   The Entire Purpose of Yoga   By Yoga we can rise out of falsehood into truth, out of weakness into force, out of pain and grief into bliss, out of bondage into freedom, out of death into immortality, out of darkness into light, out of confusion into purity, out of imperfection into perfection, out of self-division into unity, out of Maya into God. All other utilisation of Yoga is for special and fragmentary advantages not always worth pursuing. Only that which aims at possessing the fullness of God is purna Yoga; the sadhaka of the Divine Perfection is the purna Yogin.

Section Four   Genius, Poetry, Beauty     The Origin of Genius   When the human being puts forth a force in himself which is considerable but acts normally, we call it talent; when it is abnormal in its working we call it genius. It would seem, therefore, that genius is in reality some imperfect step in evolution by which mankind in its most vigorous and forward individuals is attempting to develop a faculty which the race as a whole is not strong enough as yet to command or to acclimatise. As always happens in such a movement, there is a considerable irregularity in

Part One Essays   Divine and Human   The essays in this part have been arranged chronologically in five sections. The contents of several of the sections or subsections seem to have been intended by Sri Aurobindo to be published as series or collections of essays.      Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry   

The Fullness of Yoga—In Conditio The Fullness of Yoga—In Condition   We are to exceed our human stature and become divine; but if we are to do this, we must first get God; for the human ego is the lower imperfect term of our being, God is the higher perfect term. He is the possessor of our supernature and without His permission there can be no effectual rising. The finite cannot become infinite unless it perceives its own secret infinity and is drawn by it or towards it; nor can the symbol-being, unless it glimpses, loves and pursues the Real-being in itself, overcome by its own strength the limits of its apparent nature. It is a particular becoming & is fixed i

Section Two   1910 ­ 1913   Na Kinchidapi Chintayet   The cessation of thought is the one thing which the believer in intellect as the highest term of our evolution cannot contemplate with equanimity. To master the fleeting randomness of thought by regulating the intellectual powers and thinking consecutively and clearly is an ideal he can understand. But to still this higher development of thought seems to him the negation of human activity, a reversion to the condition of the stone. Yet it is certain that it is only by the stilling of the lower that the higher get

Man   The Shastras use the same word for man and the one divine and universal Being—Purusha—as if to lay stress upon the oneness of humanity with God. Nara and Narayana are the eternal couple, who, though they are two, are one, eternally different, eternally the same. Narayana, say the scholiasts, is he who dwells in the waters, but I rather think it means he who is the essence and sum of all humanity. Wherever there is a man, there there is Narayana; for the two cannot be separated. I think sometimes that when Christ spoke of himself as the Son of Man, he really meant the son of the Purusha, and almost find myself imagining that anthropos is only the clumsy Greek

Partial Systems of Yoga   Jnana Yoga: The Yoga of Knowledge   128   All existence is the existence of the One, the Eternal and Infinite, the beginning and middle and end, the source and substance and continent and support of all things. There is not and cannot be any other existence, anything that is other than or outside of or above or below or beyond or in any way separate from the existence of the one Eternal and Infinite. All that appears as finite, temporal, multiple and phenomenal is still in reality being of the being of the Infinite and the Eternal. Ekam evad