MEAT-EATING What happens when one eats meat? I will tell you then a story. I knew a young woman, a Swedish, who was doing Sadhana. Normally she was a vegetarian, by habit as well as by inclination. One day she was invited to a dinner. She was given fowl to eat. She did not like to make a fuss and quietly ate her fowl. Now at night she found herself, in dream of course, in a basket and her head in between two bits of sticks and being shaken, shaken to and fro. She felt very unhappy, very miserable. And then she saw herself head down and legs up in the air and being shaken, shaken continually. She was thoroughly miserable. All on a sudden she felt she was being skinned, p

II THOUGHT AND THOUGHT-POWER THOUGHT THE CREATOR Human thought always creates forms in the mental world. It is a creative force. You are creating thought-forms constantly and sending them out into the atmosphere around; they go abroad to do their work. You are yourself surrounded always by such formations. No doubt there are people who cannot think clearly; they form around them only a kind of whirl. But they who think clearly and strongly create thought-forms that go out to accomplish their task and return when they are re-thought. There are cases of people who are troubled by their own formations that return to them or upon them as if to possess t

ORDER AND DISCIPLINE I You must become conscious of yourself, conscious in every detail. You must organise what you call yourself around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being so that you can possess a single, cohesive, fully conscious being: as this centre is wholly consecrated to the Divine, if all the elements are organised harmoniously around it, they too get consecrated to the Divine. Thus, when the Divine wills it, when the time comes, when the work of individualisation is complete, then the Divine permits you to let your ego melt in Him, so that you may exist for the Divine alone. But it is the Divine that takes the decision. You should hav

THE ORIGIN OF DESIRE From where does desire come? Buddha said that it came from Ignorance. It is almost that. Desire is something in the being which imagines that it requires an object other than itself for its satisfaction. This is sheer ignorance, proved by the fact that in 99 cases out of a hundred when one has the thing desired, one no more cares for it. At its very origin, I think, it was an obscure need for growth or increase. In the lowest forms of life we find love transformed into an instinctive and irresistible need for enlarging, swelling, absorbing, adding to it another body. This need to take in is desire. So perhaps if you go back far enough into

DOING FOR HER SAKE Whatever you do—study or sports—you must think of the Divine in doing it. It is not a very difficult thing after all. At first you may do it as a kind of preparation to make you capable of receiving the divine force, and then as service to help in the collective work. You can do it not for personal gain but in order to be ready for the Divine Work. This seems to me indispensable. If you keep the ordinary point of view, you will always find yourself in conditions that are not wholly satisfactory and incapable of receiving all the forces that you can receive. If you are doing long jump, for example, it should not be merely for the pleasure

TO MELT INTO THE DIVINE How to melt into the Divine? That is to say, how to get dissolved in the Divine, lose one's ego ? First of all, one must wish for it, will for it, aspire for it with perseverence. Everytime the ego shows itself, you must give it a tap on the nose, until it receives so much of it that it gets tired and gives up. Generally, however, one does not administer the tap but cherishes the miscreant, justifies its presence. When it shows itself, one says, "After all it is right"; although in most cases, one does not even know it is the ego, one takes it for one's self. The first condition then is to consider it essential that one should have no

Spirits in Trees You told us the other day that there are spirits who remain bound to trees. How are they to get free ? Why should they get free? You told us how the spirits in the trees got freed when someone was kind to them and said prayers on their behalf. Yes, but that was in the story. It was a Christian legend and put in that way to illustrate a lesson. It was to show that if you are wicked you suffer even after death, that it is a virtuous life that saves you from misery. In reality, however, there is no question here of sin and punishment; it is not that spirits get attached to trees in order to be punished. When a person dies, his vital b

THE YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO Part Eight NOLINI KANTA GUPTA. SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY 1956 Publishers: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry First Edition...... November, 1956 All rights reserved Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press Pondicherry printed in India

DIVINE LIVING We always give the name "Divine" to all that we are not and want to become, all that seems infinitely higher than not only everything we have done but everything we can possibly do, all that is beyond our present capacity and conception. I am perfectly sure that if we went back into the past a few thousands of years, we would find that when one spoke of the Divine it was of a being somewhat like one of the "overmental" gods. But now, the way of living proper to these overmental divinities who governed the earth and created many things upon earth for a very long time, seems to us very inferior to what we conceive as the Supramental. This Supramental again

THE WORK HERE From the worldly standpoint, from the point of view of result achieved, certainly things can be done better. But I am speaking of the effort put in, effort in the deepest sense of the word. Work is prayer done with the body. With that effort in your work the Divine is satisfied, the eye of the Consciousness that has viewed it is indeed pleased. Not that from the human standpoint one cannot do better. For us, however, this particular endeavour is one among many; it is only one movement in our sadhana. We are engaged in many other things. To raise one particular item of work to something like perfection requires time and means and resources which are not at our d