Section Four   Remarks on Contemporaries  and on Contemporary Problems       Remarks on Spiritual Figures in India   Ramakrishna Paramhansa   I would have been surprised to hear that I regard (in agreement with an advanced sadhak) Ramakrishna as a spiritual pigmy, if I had not become past astonishment in these matters. I have said, it seems, so many things that were never in my mind and done too not a few that I have never dreamed of doing! I shall not be surprised or perturbed if one day I am reported to have declared, on the authority of advanced or even unadvanced sadhaks, that Buddha wa

Letters on Himself and the Ashram   VOLUME 35 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2011 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA     Letters on Himself and the Ashram   Publisher's Note   This volume contains letters in which Sri Aurobindo referred to his life and works, his sadhana or practice of yoga, and the sadhana of members of his ashram. Many of the letters appeared earlier in Sri Aurobindo on Himself

Life in England, 1879 ­ 1893   An Early Memory     I am not at all concerned about Nicodemus and what seems to me his stupid and ignorant question; he brings a fantastic physical notion across Christ's teaching and I am afraid I must hold him partially responsible for Freud's sexual meanderings and his craze for going back into his mother's womb. I don't myself remember any blissful sojourn in that locality in my case and I don't believe in it and I am quite sure I never felt any passion for returning there. The great Sigismund must have had it, I suppose, and remembered that blissful period and felt a longing for beatific return and I suppose o

Contact with People Outside the Ashram   Correspondence with Outsiders   You can tell him about the arrangements for correspondence. We do not write ourselves. He can always write to the Mother or to myself (we have received his letters); but answers, if any, are given on our instructions to Nolini who has the general charge of the correspondence or in certain cases by someone else specially deputed for the purpose. 21 August 1931   Does Not Give Advice on Mundane Matters   Since he has sent a stamped envelope, you can write to him (in Bengali) that it is no use putting t

Mantras Written by Sri Aurobindo   Sanskrit Mantras       OM anandamayi chaitanyamayi [satyamayi parame]1 circa 1927 * 1 Sri Aurobindo wrote this mantra around 1927 as one of several miscellaneous notations connected with Record of Yoga. See Record of Yoga, volume 11 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO, page 1352. Note that he did not complete the transliteration in Latin script. The text was first published as a message in November 1955. Still later the Mother completed the transliteration in her own hand; see the facsimile below. —Ed.     Page – 829     OM Tat Sat Jyotir Aravinda    

Discipline in the Ashram   Discipline Defined   What is discipline?   To act according to a standard of Truth or a rule or law of action (dharma) or in obedience to a superior authority or to the highest principles discovered by the reason and intelligent will and not according to one's own fancy, vital impulses and desires. In Yoga obedience to the Guru or to the Divine and the law of the Truth as declared by the Guru is the foundation of discipline. 12 June 1933   *   What is discipline and how does it apply here, in our Yoga?   It is not the discipline of Yoga,

Political Career, 1906 - 1910   Mother India     When you wrote that you looked upon India not as an inert, dead mass of matter, but as the very Mother, the living Mother, I believe that you saw that Truth.   My dear sir, I am not a materialist. If I had seen India as only a geographical area with a number of more or less interesting or uninteresting people in it, I would hardly have gone out of my way to do all that for the said area.   Is there something in what you wrote? Or was it just poetic or patriotic sentiment?   Merely a poetic or patriotic sentiment just as in yourself only your flesh, skin, bone

The Supramental Yoga and Other Spiritual Paths   Indian Systems and the Cabbala   I do not think exact correlations can always be traced between one system of spiritual and occult knowledge and another. All deal with the same material, but there are differences of stand point, differences of view-range, a divergence in the mental idea of what is seen and experienced, disparate pragmatic purposes and therefore a difference in the paths surveyed, cut out or followed; the systems vary, each constructs its own schema and technique. I have looked at the diagrams you sent me; I do not know whether I have grasped them rightly an

Part Two   Translations and Commentaries from Manuscripts   These texts written between c. 1900 and 1914 were found among Sri Aurobindo's manuscripts and typescripts. He did not revise them for publication.     Section One   Introduction     On Translating the Upanishads   OM TAT SAT   This translation of a few of the simpler & more exoteric Upanishads to be followed by other sacred and philosophical writings of the Hindus not included in the Revealed Scriptures, all under the one title of t

The Means of Realisation   Vedanta is merely an intellectual assent, without Yoga. The verbal revelation of the true relations between the One and the Many, the intellectual acceptance of the revelation and the dogmatic acknowledgement of the relations do not lead us beyond metaphysics, and there is no human pursuit more barren and frivolous than metaphysics practised merely as an intellectual pastime, a play with words & thoughts, when there is no intention of fulfilling thought in life or of moulding our inner state and outer activity by the knowledge which we have intellectually accepted. It is only by Yoga that the fulfilment and moulding of our