Vital Education Of all education, vital education is perhaps the most important, the most indispensable. Yet it is rarely taken up and pursued with discernment and method. There are several reasons for this: first, the human mind is in a state of great confusion about this particular subject; secondly, the undertaking is very difficult and to be successful in it one must have endless endurance and persistence and a will that no failure can weaken. Indeed, the vital in man's nature is a despotic and exacting tyrant. Moreover, since it is the vital which holds power, energy, enthusiasm, effective dynamism, many have a feeling of timorous respect for it and always tr

Foresight            To foresee destiny! How many have attempted it, how many systems have been elaborated, how many sciences of divination have been created and developed only to perish under the charge of charlatanism or superstition. And why is destiny always so unforeseeable? Since it has been proved that everything is ineluctably determined, how is it that one cannot succeed in knowing this determinism with any certainty? Here again the solution is to be found in Yoga. And by yogic discipline one can not only foresee destiny but modify it and change it almost totally. First of all, Yoga teaches us that we are not a single being, a simple entity which necessarily has a

Students  You who are young, are the hope of the country. Prepare yourselves to be worthy of this expectation. Blessings.  Of one thing you can be sure – your future is in your hands. You will become the man you want to be and the higher your ideal and your aspiration, the higher will be your realisation, but you must keep a firm resolution and never forget your true aim in life.  2 April 1963 *   To be young is to live in the future. To be young is to be always ready to give up what we are in order to become what we must be. To be young is never to accept the irreparable.   28 March 1967   * Only those years that are passed uselessly make

HOLIDAYS There are two rumours in the Ashram concerning holidays. The first is that You said that this time You are allowing us to go out during the holidays, but that You will not allow it next year. The second is that You do not want us to go out. I would like to know which rumour is true, be- cause many students have already received Your per- mission to go out during the holidays. Neither one nor the other is true. Neither one nor the other is false. Both of them, and many others, are the more or less distorted expression of my synthesising and harmonising will. To each one individually my reply, if he is sincere, is the expressio

General Messages and Letters Become Master of your body this will lead you to Freedom. Physical culture is the best way of developing the consciousness of the body, and the more the body is conscious, the more it is capable of receiving the divine forces that are at work to transform it and give birth to the new race.   (Concerning a room to be used for gymnastics} Does this room have air and light? Without air and light exercises do more harm than good.   5 October 1945   * It is an urgent and indispensable lesson to be learned. Nothing useful can be won without a team-spirit and a sporting discipline.  15 January 1947 * In what spirit should we t

Arts On the physical plane it is in beauty that the Divine expresses Himself.   In the physical world, of all things it is beauty that expresses best the Divine. The physical world is the world of form and the perfection of form is beauty. Beauty interprets, expresses, manifests the Eternal. Its role is to put all manifested nature in contact with the Eternal through the perfection of form, through harmony and a sense of the ideal which uplifts and leads towards something higher.   Let beauty be your constant ideal. The beauty of the soul The beauty of sentiments The beauty of thoughts The beauty of the action   The beauty in the work so that nothing

STUDY My dear child, The true wisdom is to be ready to learn from whatever source the knowledge can come. We can learn things from a flower, an animal, a child, if we are eager to know always more, because there is only One Teacher in the world – the Supreme Lord, and He manifests through everything. With all my love.  9 March 1967 * To do good work one must have good taste. Taste can be educated by study and the help of those who have good taste. To learn, it is necessary to feel first that one does not know.  15 December 1965   * When you feel that you know nothing then you are ready to learn.¹   December 1965 * The whole ques

The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations 1 To pursue an integral education that leads to the supramental realisation, four austerities are necessary, and with them four liberations. Austerity is usually confused with self-mortification, and when someone speaks of austerities, we think of the discipline of the ascetic who, in order to avoid the arduous task of spiritualising the physical, vital and mental life, declares it incapable of transformation and casts it away ruthlessly as a useless encumbrance, as a bondage and an impediment to all spiritual progress, in any case as something incorrigible, as a load that has to be borne more or less cheerfully u

STUDIES ELSEWHERE I intended to let you go for your studies to England without telling you anything about it, because each one must be free to follow the path he has chosen. But after what you have written I feel compelled to write to you. No doubt from the exterior point of view, you will find in England all that you want for learning what human beings generally call knowledge, but from the point of view of Truth and Consciousness, you can find nowhere the atmosphere in which you are living here. Elsewhere you can meet with a religious or a philosophic spirit, but true spirituality, direct contact with the Divine, constant aspiration to realise Him in life, mind and actio

We want to give the example of an action that is carried out according to the truth-vision, but unfortunately we are still very far from realising this ideal; and even if the truth-vision is expressed, it is immediately distorted in its implementation. So, in the present state of things, it is impossible to say: this is true and this is false, this leads us away from the goal, this leads us nearer to the goal. Everything can be used for the sake of progress; everything can be useful if one knows how to use it. The important thing is never to lose sight of the ideal you want to realise and to make use of every circumstance for this purpose. After all, it is alway