Chapter Three   Philosophical Thought and Yoga   Metaphysical Thinkers, East and West   European metaphysical thought —even in those thinkers who try to prove or explain the existence and nature of God or of the Absolute —does not in its method and result go beyond the intellect. But the intellect is incapable of knowing the supreme Truth; it can only range about seeking for Truth and catching fragmentary representations of it, not the thing itself, and trying to piece them together. Mind cannot arrive at Truth; it can only make some constructed figure that tries to represent it or a combination of figures. At the end of European thought, there

Chapter Two   Descent and Transformation   A World-Changing Yoga   What is a perfect technique of Yoga or rather of a world changing and Nature-changing Yoga? Not one that takes a man by a little bit of him somewhere, attaches a hook and pulls him up by a pulley into Nirvana or Paradise. The technique of a world-changing Yoga has to be as multiform, sinuous, patient, all-including as the world itself. If it does not deal with all the difficulties or possibilities and carefully deal with each necessary element, has it any chance of success? And can a perfect technique which everybody can understand do that? It is not like writing a small poem in a fixed me

  VOLUME 28 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2012 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA     Letters on Yoga —I   Foundations of the Integral Yoga   Publisher's Note   Letters on Yoga —I comprises letters written by Sri Aurobindo on the philosophical and psychological foundations of the Integral Yoga. It is the first of four volumes of Letters on Yoga, arranged by the editors as follows: I. Foundations of the Integral Yoga II. Practice of the Integral

Chapter Two   Karma and Heredity   Karma   Karma is not luck, it is the transmission of past energies into the present with their results.   *   All energies put into activity —thought, speech, feeling, act —go to constitute Karma. These things help to develop the nature in one direction or another, and the nature and its actions and reactions produce their consequences inward and outward: they also act on others and create movements in the general sum of forces which can return upon oneself sooner or later. Thoughts unexpressed can also go out as forces and produce their effects. It is a mistake to think that a thought or will can have ef

Sri Aurobindo, 1950 Part One   The Divine, the Cosmos and the Individual     Section One   The Divine, Sachchidananda, Brahman and Atman     Chapter One   The Divine and Its Aspects   The Divine   The Divine is the Supreme Truth because it is the Supreme Being from whom all have come and in whom all are.   *     The Divine is that from which all comes, in which all lives, and to return to the truth of

    BOOK EIGHT   The Book of Death   Canto Three ¹   Death in the Forest   NOW it was here in this great golden dawn. By her still sleeping husband lain she gazed Into her past as one about to die Looks back upon the sunlit fields of life Where he too ran and sported with the rest, Lifting his head above the huge dark stream Into whose depths he must for ever plunge. All she had been and done she lived again. The whole year in a swift and eddying race Of memories swept through her and fled away Into the irrecoverable past. Then silently she rose and, service done, Bowed down to the great g

  BOOK SIX   The Book of Fate   Canto One   The Word of Fate   IN SILENT bounds bordering the mortal's plane Crossing a wide expanse of brilliant peace Narad the heavenly sage from Paradise Came chanting through the large and lustrous air. Attracted by the golden summer-earth That lay beneath him like a glowing bowl Tilted upon a table of the Gods, Turning as if moved round by an unseen hand To catch the warmth and blaze of a small sun, He passed from the immortals' happy paths To a world of toil and quest and grief and hope, To these rooms of the see-saw game of death with lif

  PART TWO BOOKS IV ­ VIII   BOOK FOUR   The Book of Birth and Quest     Canto One   The Birth and Childhood of the Flame   A MAENAD of the cycles of desire Around a Light she must not dare to touch, Hastening towards a far-off unknown goal Earth followed the endless journey of the Sun. A mind but half-awake in the swing of the void On the bosom of Inconscience dreamed out life And bore this finite world of thought and deed Across the immobile trance of the Infinite. A vast immutable silence with her ran: Prisoner of speed upon a jewelled wheel, She co

  Canto Two   Satyavan   ALL SHE remembered on this day of Fate, The road that hazarded not the solemn depths But turned away to flee to human homes, The wilderness with its mighty monotone, The morning like a lustrous seer above, The passion of the summits lost in heaven, The titan murmur of the endless woods. As if a wicket gate to joy were there Ringed in with voiceless hint and magic sign, Upon the margin of an unknown world Reclined the curve of a sun-held recess; Groves with strange flowers like eyes of gazing nymphs Peered from their secrecy into open space, Boughs whispering to a constancy of light Sheltered

  Canto Seven   The Descent into Night   A MIND absolved from life, made calm to know, A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang, The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance, He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause. Away he looked from Nature's visible face And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast, The formidable unknown Infinity, Asleep behind the endless coil of things, That carries the universe in its timeless breadths And the ripples of its being are our lives. The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers, Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams