Sri Aurobindo     Bases of Yoga                   SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY 1955   First Edition ... 1936     Second Edition ... 1941 Third Edition ... 1944    Fourth Edition ... 1947 Fifth Edition ... 1949  Sixth Edition ... 1952      Seventh Edition ... 1955             All Rights Reserved            SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PRESS PONDICHERRY   PRINTED IN INDIA        PUBLISHERS' NOTE   These are extracts from letters written by Sri Aurobindo to his disciples in answer to their queries. They have been put toget

    III         In Difficulty         There are always difficulties and a hampered progress in the early stages and a delay in the opening of the inner doors until the being is ready. If you feel whenever you meditate the quiescence and the flashes of the inner Light and if the inward urge is growing so strong that the external hold is decreasing and the vital disturbances are losing their force, that is already a great progress. The road of Yoga is long, every inch of ground has to be won against much resistance and no quality is more needed by the sadhak than patience and single-minded perseverance with a faith that remains firm through ail difficulties, delays and apparent failures.

  I         Calm—Peace—Equality         It is not possible to make a foundation in Yoga if the mind is restless. The first thing needed is quiet in the mind. Also to merge the personal consciousness is not the first aim of the Yoga: the first aim is to open it to a higher spiritual consciousness and for this also a quiet mind is the first need.                   ⁂           The first thing to do in the sadhana is to get a settled peace and silence in the mind. Otherwise you may have experiences, but nothing will be permanent. It is in the silent mind that the true consciousness can be built.         A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no though

II         Faith—Aspiration—Surrender         This Yoga demands a total dedication of the life to the aspiration for the discovery and embodiment of the Divine Truth and to nothing else whatever. To divide your life between the Divine and some outward aim and activity that has nothing to do with the search for the Truth is inadmissible. The least thing of that kind would make success in the Yoga impossible.         You must go inside yourself and enter into a complete dedication to the spiritual life. All clinging to mental preferences must fall away from you, all insistence on vital aims and interests and attachments must be put away, all egoistic clinging to family, friends, cou

 IV         Desire—Food—Sex         All the ordinary vital movements are foreign to the true being and come from outside; they do not belong to the soul nor do they originate in it but are waves from the general Nature, Prakriti.         The desires come from outside, enter the subconscious vital and rise to the surface. It is only when they rise to the surface and the mind becomes aware of them, that we become conscious of the desire. It seems to us to be our own because we feel it thus rising from the vital into the mind and do not know that it came from outside. What belongs to the vital, to the being, what makes it responsible is not the desire itself, but the habit of respon

  INTRODUCTION   The December-1994 issue of the journal "Sri Aurobindo: Archives & Research" was the last to come out for the present. The Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo's Works, published in 1989, covers issues of the journal up to the year 1987. Relevant information occurring in the issues of 1988 to 1994 is given in this Supplement to the Glossary and Index. In addition, the Supplement corrects errors, supplies omissions, and provides improved versions of some of the glossary articles.     The name-entries are in alphabetical order, followed by the page numbers of the book in square brackets. Most of these entries are already list

CHAPTER VIII CIVILISATION AND BARBARISM   ONCE we have determined that this rule of perfect individuality and perfect reciprocity is the ideal law for the individual, the community and the race and that a perfect union and even oneness in a free diversity is its goal, we have to try to see more clearly what we mean when we say that self-realisation is the sense, secret or overt, of individual and of social development. As yet we have not to deal with the race, with mankind as a unity; the nation is still our largest compact and living unit. And it is best to begin with the individual, both because of his nature we have a completer and nearer knowledge and experience th

CHAPTER XV THE SUPRARATIONAL GOOD   WE BEGIN to see, through the principle and law of our religious being, through the principle and law of our aesthetic being, the universality of a principle and law which is that of all being and which we must therefore hold steadily in view in regard to all human activities. It rests on a truth on which the sages have always agreed, though by the intellectual thinker it may be constantly disputed. It is the truth that all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking for some highest self and deepest Reality secret within, behind and above ourselves and things, a seeking for the hidden Divinity: the truth which we glimpse through relig

CHAPTER XIV THE SUPRARATIONAL BEAUTY   RELIGION is the seeking after the spiritual, the supra- rational and therefore in this sphere the intellectual reason may well be an insufficient help and find itself, not only at the end but from the beginning, out of its province and condemned to tread either diffidently or else with a stumbling presumptuousness in the realm of a power and a light higher than its own. But in the other spheres of human consciousness and human activity it may be thought that it has the right to the sovereign place, since these move on the lower plane of the rational and the finite or belong to that border-land where the rational and the infraratio

Chapter Three   The Hostile Forces and Hostile Beings   The Existence of the Hostile Forces   The hostile forces exist and have been known to Yogic experience ever since the days of the Veda and Zoroaster in Asia (and the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldea and the Cabbala) and in Europe also from old times. These things of course cannot be felt or known so long as one lives in the ordinary mind and its ideas and perceptions —for there there are only two categories of influences recognisable, the ideas and feelings and actions of oneself and others and the play of environment and physical forces. But once one begins to get the inner view of thing