CHAPTER XVII KARMA YOGA AND ITS INDISPENSABILITY PART I THE BASIS OF KARMA YOGA KARMA YOGA or the yoga of divine works starts from the foundation of a faith or inner perception that the Divine is not only the incommunicable, featureless Absolute with whom one can be united by the abolition of one's individuality and temporal existence, but the omnipresent Reality, the all-creating, all-constituting and all-exceeding eternal Person, at once transcendent, universal and individual, who has to be realised in all His statuses and aspects in a union simultaneously static and dynamic. To be united with Him only in His ineffable tra

CHAPTER XII MIND AND ITS PURIFICATION PART I MANY things are meant by the general term mind. It is indiscriminately used for the intellect, intelligence, reason, thought, understanding etc., and is even stretched to cover feeling and emotion. It is, therefore, essential that it should be properly defined and classified, its various functions described with precision, and their hierarchical order clearly indicated, if we are to embark upon the work of its Yogic as distinguished from ethical purification. A certain amount of detailed knowledge of the psychology of our nature is a great help in the beginning of the spiritual life, and saves us many a st

CHAPTER XI THE PURIFICATION OF NATURE PURIFICATION has a special sense in the Integral Yoga. In the other Yoga's except the Tantra, it means the simplification or stilling of most of the functions of antaḥkaraṇa, which comprises citta or the basic consciousness, manas or the sense-mind, buddhi or the intelligence, and ahankāra or the ego. There are different processes in the different Yogas for the purpose of this stilling and simplification, but the common, ultimate objective is a release of the central being from the complex working of nature, and its union either with the immutable Brahman or with God or with its own unconditioned Self or Status, as the

CHAPTER VI THE MOTHER IN HER TRIPLE POISE SRI Râmakrishna expressed one of the cardinal truths of the integral spiritual realisation when he said that it is the Mother who holds the key to the abode of Brahman, and unless She delivered it as a Grace, none could see Brahman face to face. Sri Râmakrishna's own self-consecration to the Mother was unimpeachable and inviolate to the last day of his life, in spite of his Vedantic initiation and the definitive Vedântic experience of the supreme status of the undifferentiated Absolute. Vaishnava, Tântrie, Vedântic, Christian, Moslem, all in one, he remained. the Mother's child, divinely free in his unques

CHAPTER XVI THE PHYSICAL NATURE AND ITS PURIFICATION PART II No purification of the physical being can be complete unless it deals effectively and radically with the subconscient and the inconscient; for, as I have already said, the roots of our physical being lie in them, and most of the habits, tendencies and impulses of our nature derive from them, and are fed and fortified by their force of inertia. If our physical being is irresponsive to any higher light or any supersensory truth, it is due to the grossness and denseness of its texture, which is mostly a product of the subconscient and the inconscient. If it is mec

CHAPTER III AN EPOCHAL SYNTHESIS PART I AGES ago, when the natural unity of the spiritual vision and culture of the Vedas and the Upanishads began to give way before the developing complexity and individualistic self-affirmation of the parts of the being of man, each of which sought its own separate spiritual satisfaction and characteristic fulfilment to the neglect : and exclusion of the others, the Gitâ propounded a magnificent synthesis, and paved the way for a harmonious growth of the whole human personality into the fullness and perfection of the Divine. All the important strands of spiritual culture, current at the time or regarded as essential

CHAPTER XIII MIND AND ITS PURIFICATION PART II THE entanglement of the parts and functions of the antaḥkaraṇa being bafflingly great, we have to fix upon something in it which will lend itself more easily and with a better grace than the others to the work of purification; but it must be something which is the most evolved in the nature and able to lead it to a higher poise and a more efficient working. For, the secret of dealing successfully with the instrumental nature is to use the most developed part of it as the grappling hook for the hauling and overhauling of the other parts, and steadily diffuse its influence everywhere. If one

CHAPTER XXX THE INTEGRAL PERFECTION "A DIVINE perfection of the human being is our aim." It is not only the perfection of the soul—the soul is, indeed, eternally perfect in itself—but the harmonious perfection of the whole being, inner and outer, that is sought in the Integral Yoga. In the last chapter, we have traced the long, meandering course of the triple trans- formation. We can now say that the victorious consummation of that transformation is the perfection and fulfilment we aim at in this Yoga. "To be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect" is not an idle dream of the religious visionary, but the deepest, ineradicable urge of the human conscio

CHAPTER XXII KNOWLEDGE—THE LIGHT THAT FULFILS PART I WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE IN yogic parlance and spiritual philosophy knowledge does not mean mental knowledge. Mental knowledge is a knowledge of objects taken as separate integers or aspects, and not viewed as indivisible parts of a universal whole. Even when it arrives at a synthesis, it is an aggregate or a sum-total that it grasps, and never the essential unity of things. Besides, the mind can know only the surface of things, their appearances, and not their essential substance and reality. "Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the i

CHAPTER XV THE PHYSICAL NATURE AND ITS PURIFICATION PART I BY physical nature Sri Aurobindo means the physical mind, the physical part of life, called the physical-vital or nervous being, and the body. Before we enter upon the process of their purification, we had better be clear about what these terms signify. As I have already indicated elsewhere, there is no Hegelian obscurity about Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, nor an indefinite fluidity in the connotation of the terms he uses. There is, on the contrary, a remarkably scientific precision and definiteness, which disarms all fear of incomprehension in those who have the will, a subtle a