The progressive self-manifestation of Nature in man, termed in modern language
his evolution, must necessarily depend upon three successive elements, that
which is already evolved, that which is persistently in the stage of conscious
evolution and that which is to be evolved and may perhaps be already displayed,
if not constantly, then occasionally or with some regularity of recurrence,
in primary formations or in others more developed and, it may well be, even
in some, however rare, that are near to the highest possible realisation
of our present humanity. For the march of Nature is not drilled to a regular
and mechanical forward stepping. She reaches constantly beyond herself even
at the cost of subsequent deplorable retreats. She has rushes; she has splendid
and mighty outbursts; she has immense realisations. She storms sometimes
passionately forward hoping to take the kingdom of heaven by violence. And
these self-exceedings are the revelation of that in her which is most divine
or else most diabolical, but in either case the most puissant to bring her
rapidly forward towards her goal.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Three Steps of Nature, pg. 5-6
The characteristic energy of bodily Life is not so much in progress as in persistence,
not so much in individual self-enlargement as in self-repetition. There is,
indeed, in physical Nature a progression from type to type, from the vegetable
to the animal, from the animal to man; for even in inanimate Matter Mind
is at work. But once a type is marked off physically, the chief immediate
preoccupation of the terrestrial Mother seems to be to keep it in being by
a constant reproduction. For Life always seeks immortality; but since individual
form is impermanent and only the idea of a form is permanent in the consciousness
that creates the universe, —for there it does not perish,— such
constant reproduction is the only possible material immortality. Self-preservation,
self-repetition, self-multiplication are necessarily, then, the predominant
instincts of all material existence.
The characteristic energy of pure Mind is change and the more it acquires elevation and organisation, the more this law of Mind assumes the aspect of a continual enlargement, improvement and better arrangement of its gains and so of a continual passage from a smaller and simpler to a larger and more complex perfection. For Mind, unlike bodily life, is infinite in its field, elastic in its expansion, easily variable in its formations. Change, then, self-enlargement and self-improvement are its proper instincts. Its faith is perfectibility, its watchword is progress.
The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the imperfections and limitations of the forms and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Threefold Life, pg. 16
The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply distinguished
or separate, but in a certain measure successive. There must be, first, the
effort towards at least an initial and enabling self-transcendence and contact
with the Divine; next, the reception of that which transcends, that with
which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of
our whole conscious being; last, the utilisation of our transformed humanity
as a divine centre in the world. So long as the contact with the Divine is
not in some considerable degree established, so long as there is not some
measure of sustained identity, sdyujya, the element of personal effort must
normally predominate. But in proportion as this contact establishes itself,
the Sadhaka must become conscious that a force other than his own, a force
transcending his egoistic endeavour and capacity, is at work in him and to
this Power he learns progressively to submit himself and delivers up to it
the charge of his Yoga. In the end his own will and force become one with
the higher Power; he merges them in the divine Will and its transcendent
and universal Force. He finds it thenceforward presiding over the necessary
transformation of his mental, vital and physical being with an impartial
wisdom and provident effectivity of which the eager and interested ego is
not capable. It is when this identification and this self-merging are complete
that the divine centre in the world is ready. Purified, liberated, plastic,
illumined, it can begin to serve as a means for the direct action of a supreme
Power in the larger Yoga of humanity or superhumanity, of the earth's spiritual
progression or its transformation.
Always indeed it is the higher Power that acts. Our sense of personal effort and aspiration comes from the attempt of the egoistic mind to identify itself in a wrong and imperfect way with the workings of the divine Force. It persists in applying to experience on a supernormal plane the ordinary terms of mentality which it applies to its normal experiences in the world. In the world we act with the sense of egoism; we claim the universal forces that work in us as our own; we claim as the effect of our personal will, wisdom, force, virtue the selective, formative, progressive action of the Transcendent in this frame of mind, life and body. Enlightenment brings to us the knowledge that the ego is only an instrument; we begin to perceive and feel that these things are our own in the sense that they belong to our supreme and integral Self, one with the Transcendent, not to the instrumental ego. Our limitations and distortions are our contribution to the working; the true power in it is the Divine's. When the human ego realises that its will is a tool, its wisdom ignorance and childishness, its power an infant's groping, its virtue a pretentious impurity, and learns to trust itself to that which transcends it, that is its salvation. The apparent freedom and self-assertion of our personal being to which we are so profoundly attached, conceal a most pitiable subjection to a thousand suggestions, impulsions, forces which we have made extraneous to our little person. Our ego, boasting of freedom, is at every moment the slave, toy and puppet of countless beings, powers, forces, influences in universal Nature. The self-abnegation of the ego in the Divine is its self-fulfilment; its surrender to that which transcends it is its liberation from bonds and limits and its perfect freedom.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Four Aids, pg. 52-53
Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority
of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence,
of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another, infusing into it, even
though in silence, that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme
sign of the Master. For the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a
Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and
power and purity and bliss into all who are receptive around him.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Four Aids, pg. 61
The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind
which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in
the old externalised order of things. It is imperative to exchange this surface
orientation for the deeper faith and vision which see only the Divine and
seek only after the Divine. The next need is to compel all our lower being
to pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. All our nature must make
an integral surrender; it must offer itself in every part and every movement
to that which seems to the unregenerated sensemind so much less real than
the material world and its objects. Our whole being —soul, mind, sense,
heart, will, life, body— must consecrate all its energies so entirely
and in such a way that it shall become a fit vehicle for the Divine. This
is no easy task; for everything in the world follows the fixed habit which
is to it a law and resists a radical change. And no change can be more radical
than the revolution attempted in the integral Yoga. Everything in us has
constantly to be called back to the central faith and will and vision. Every
thought and impulse has to be reminded in the language of the Upanishad that "That
is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore." Every vital fibre
has to be persuaded to accept an entire renunciation of all that hitherto
represented to it its own existence. Mind has to cease to be mind and become
brilliant with something beyond it. Life has to change into a thing vast
and calm and intense and powerful that can no longer recognise its old blind
eager narrow self or petty impulse and desire. Even the body has to submit
to a mutation and be no longer the clamorous animal or the impeding clod
it now is, but become instead a conscious servant and radiant instrument
and living form of the spirit.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —Self-Consecration, pg. 66
The higher mind in man is something other, loftier, purer, vaster, more powerful
than the reason or logical intelligence. The animal is a vital and sensational
being; man, it is said, is distinguished from the animal by the possession
of reason. But that is a very summary, a very imperfect and misleading account
of the matter. For reason is only a particular and limited utilitarian and
instrumental activity that proceeds from something much greater than itself,
from a power that dwells in an ether more luminous, wider, illimitable. The
true and ultimate, as distinguished from the immediate or intermediate, importance
of our observing, reasoning, inquiring, judging intelligence is that it prepares
the human being for the right reception and right action of a Light from
above which must progressively replace in him the obscure light from below
that guides the animal. The latter also has a rudimentary reason, a kind
of thought, a soul, a will and keen emotions; even though less developed,
its psychology is yet the same in kind as man's. But all these capacities
in the animal are automatically moved and strictly limited, almost even constituted
by the lower nervous being. All animal perceptions, sensibilities, activities
are ruled by nervous and vital instincts, cravings, needs, satisfactions,
of which the nexus is the life-impulse and vital desire. Man too is bound,
but less bound, to this automatism of the vital nature. Man can bring an
enlightened will, an enlightened thought and enlightened emotions to the
difficult work of his self-development; he can more and more subject to these
more conscious and reflecting guides the inferior function of desire. In
proportion as he can thus master and enlighten his lower self, he is man
and no longer an animal. When he can begin to replace desire altogether by
a still greater enlightened thought and sight and will in touch with the
Infinite, consciously subject to a diviner will than his own, linked to a
more universal and transcendent knowledge, he has commenced the ascent towards
the superman; he is on his upward march towards the Divine.
It is, then, in the highest mind of thought and light and will or it is in the inner heart of deepest feeling and emotion that we must first centre our consciousness, —in either of them or, if we are capable, in both together,— and use that as our leverage to lift the nature wholly towards the Divine. The concentration of an enlightened thought, will and heart turned in unison towards one vast goal of our knowledge, one luminous and infinite source of our action, one imperishable object of our emotion is the starting-point of the Yoga. And the object of our seeking must be the very fount of the Light which is growing in us, the very origin of the Force which we are calling to move our members. Our one objective must be the Divine himself to whom, knowingly or unknowingly, something always aspires in our secret nature. There must be a large, many-sided yet single concentration of the thought on the idea, the perception, the vision, the awakening touch, the soul's realisation of the one Divine. There must be a flaming concentration of the heart on the All and Eternal —and, when once we have found him, a deep plunging and immersion in the possession and ecstasy of the All-Beautiful. There must be a strong and immovable concentration of the will on the attainment and fulfilment of all that the Divine is and a free and plastic opening of it to all that he intends to manifest in us. This is the triple way of the Yoga.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —Self-Consecration, pg. 73-74
It is true that the path alone, as the ancients saw it, is worked out fully;
the perfect fulfilment, the highest secret is hinted rather than developed;
it is kept back as an unexpressed part of a supreme mystery. There are obvious
reasons for this reticence; for the fulfilment is in any case a matter of
experience and no teaching can express it. It cannot be described in a way
that can really be understood by a mind that has not the effulgent transmuting
experience. And for the soul that has passed the shining portals and stands
in the blaze of the inner light, all mental and verbal description is as
poor as it is superfluous, inadequate and an impertinence. All divine consummations
have perforce to be figured by us in the inept and deceptive terms of a language
which was made to fit the normal experience of mental man; so expressed,
they can be rightly understood only by those who already know, and, knowing,
are able to give these poor external terms a changed, inner and transfigured
sense. As the Vedic Rishis insisted in the beginning, the words of the supreme
wisdom are expressive only to those who are already of the wise.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —Self-Surrender in Works, pg. 87
All things here are the one and indivisible eternal transcendent and cosmic
Brahman that is in its seeming divided in things and creatures; in seeming
only, for in truth it is always one and equal in all things and creatures
and the division is only a phenomenon of the surface. As long as we live
in the ignorant seeming, we are the ego and are subject to the modes of Nature.
Enslaved to appearances, bound to the dualities, tossed between good and
evil, sin and virtue, grief and joy, pain and pleasure, good fortune and
ill fortune, success and failure, we follow helplessly the iron or gilt and
iron round of the wheel of Maya. At best we have only the poor relative freedom
which by us is ignorantly called free will. But that is at bottom illusory,
since it is the modes of Nature that express themselves through our personal
will; it is force of Nature, grasping us, ungrasped by us that determines
what we shall will and how we shall will it. Nature, not an independent ego,
chooses what object we shall seek, whether by reasoned will or unreflecting
impulse, at any moment of our existence. If, on the contrary, we live in
the unifying reality of the Brahman, then we go beyond the ego and overstep
Nature. For then we get back to our true self and become the spirit; in the
spirit we are above the impulsion of Nature, superior to her modes and forces.
Attaining to a perfect equality in the soul, mind and heart, we realise our
true self of oneness —one with all beings, one too with that which expresses
itself in them and in all that we see and experience. This equality and this
oneness are the indispensable twin foundation we must lay down for a divine
being, a divine consciousness, a divine action. Not one with all, we are
spiritually not divine. Not equal-souled to all things, happenings and creatures,
we cannot see spiritually, cannot know divinely, cannot feel divinely towards
others. The Supreme Power, the one Eternal and Infinite is equal to all things
and to all beings, and because it is equal, it can act with an absolute wisdom
according to the truth of its works and its force and according to the truth
of each thing and of every creature.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —Self-Surrender in Works, pg. 88-89
In the field of action desire takes many forms, but the most powerful of all
is the vital self's craving or seeking after the fruit of our works. The
fruit we covet may be a reward of internal pleasure; it may be the accomplishment
of some preferred idea or some cherished will or the satisfaction of the
egoistic emotions, or else the pride of success of our highest hopes and
ambitions. Or it may be an external reward, a recompense entirely material, —wealth,
position, honour, victory, good fortune or any other fulfilment of vital
or physical desire. But all alike are lures by which egoism holds us. Always
these satisfactions delude us with the sense of mastery and the idea of freedom,
while really we are harnessed and guided or ridden and whipped by some gross
or subtle, some noble or ignoble, figure of the blind Desire that drives
the world. Therefore the first rule of action laid down by the Gita is to
do the work that should be done without any desire for the fruit, niskama
karma.
The test it lays down is an absolute equality of the mind and the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view, not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any spot of the nature, then we have the absolute liberation to which the Gita points us, but not otherwise.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —Self-Surrender in Works, pg. 94-95
In all is the one Self, the one Divine is all; all are in the Divine, all are
the Divine and there is nothing else in the universe, —this thought
or this faith is the whole background until it becomes the whole substance
of the consciousness of the worker.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Sacrifice, pg. 104
To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive
this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness
all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which
must englobe all other knowledges.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Sacrifice, pg. 107
For on one side he is aware of this Self everywhere, this everlasting Spirit-Substance —Brahman,
the Eternal— the same self-existence here in time behind each appearance
he sees or senses and timeless beyond the universe. He has this strong overpowering
experience of a Self that is neither our limited ego nor our mind, life or
body, world-wide but not outwardly phenomenal, yet to some spirit-sense in
him more concrete than any form or phenomenon, universal yet not dependent
for its being on anything in the universe or on the whole totality of the universe;
if all this were to disappear, its extinction would make no difference to this
Eternal of his constant intimate experience. He is sure of an inexpressible
Self-existence which is the essence of himself and all things; he is intimately
aware of an essential Consciousness of which thinking mind and life-sense and
body-sense are only partial and diminished figures, a Consciousness with an
illimitable Force in it of which all energies are the outcome, but which is
yet not explained or accounted for by the sum or power or nature of all these
energies together; he feels, he lives in an inalienable self-existent Bliss
which is not this lesser transient joy or happiness or pleasure. A changeless
imperishable infinity, a timeless eternity, a self-awareness which is not this
receptive and reactive or tentacular mental consciousness, but is behind and
above it and present too below it, even in what we call Inconscience, a oneness
in which there is no possibility of any other existence, are the fourfold character
of this settled experience. Yet this eternal Self-Existence is seen by him
also as a conscious Time-Spirit bearing the stream of happenings, a self-extended
spiritual Space containing all things and beings, a Spirit-Substance which
is the very form and material of all that seems non-spiritual, temporary and
finite. For all that is transitory, temporal, spatial, bounded, is yet felt
by him to be in its substance and energy and power no other than the One, the
Eternal, the Infinite.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Sacrifice, pg. 111
Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works,
art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly,
religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction
itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed
the disease.... On the other side, Science and Art and the knowledge of life,
although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by
emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled
with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold,
barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to
which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce
has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could
make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt
at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life
a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and
without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich,
free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice
offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the
end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony
material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment.
A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a
half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Ascent of the Sacrifice -1, pg. 131-132
All love, indeed, that is adoration has a spiritual force behind it; even when
it is offered ignorantly and to a limited object, something of that splendour
appears through the poverty of the rite and the smallness of its issues.
For love that is worship is at once an aspiration and a preparation: it can
bring even within its small limits in the Ignorance a glimpse of a still
more or less blind and partial but surprising realisation; for they are moments
when it is not we but the One who loves and is loved in us, and even a human
passion can be uplifted and glorified by a slight glimpse of this infinite
Love and Lover. It is for this reason that the worship of the god, the worship
of the idol, the human magnet or ideal are not to be despised; for these
are steps through which the human race moves towards that blissful passion
and ecstasy of the Infinite which, even in limiting it, they yet represent
for our imperfect vision when we have still to use the inferior steps Nature
has hewn for our feet and admit the stages of our progress. Certain idolatries
are indispensable for the development of our emotional being, nor will the
man who knows be hasty at any time to shatter the image unless he can replace
it in the heart of the worshipper by the Reality it figures.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Ascent of the Sacrifice -2, pg. 149
Once the nature-bound soul realises this truth, it is delivered from the duality
of good and evil. For good is all that helps the individual and the world
towards their divine fullness, and evil is all that retards or breaks up
that increasing perfection. But since the perfection is progressive, evolutive
in Time, good and evil are also shifting quantities and change from time
to time their meaning and value. This thing which is evil now and in its
present shape must be abandoned was once helpful and necessary to the general
and individual progress. That other thing which we now regard as evil may
well become in another form and arrangement an element in some future perfection.
And on the spiritual level we transcend even this distinction, for we discover
the purpose and divine utility of all these things that we call good and
evil. Then we have to reject the falsehood in them and all that is distorted,
ignorant and obscure in that which is called good no less than in that which
is called evil. For we have then to accept only the true and the divine,
but to make no other distinction in the eternal processes.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, pg. 180
For the desires and free seekings of the individual, however egoistic, however
false or perverted they may be in their immediate form, contain in their
obscure cells the seed of a development necessary to the whole; his searchings
and stumblings have behind them a force that has to be kept and transmuted
into the image of the divine idea. That force needs to be enlightened and
trained but must not be suppressed or harnessed exclusively to society's
heavy cartwheels. Individualism is as necessary to the final perfection as
the power behind the group-spirit; the stifling of the individual may well
be the stifling of the god in man. And in the present balance of humanity
there is seldom any real danger of exaggerated individualism breaking up
the social integer. There is continually a danger that the exaggerated pressure
of the social mass by its heavy unenlightened mechanical weight may suppress
or unduly discourage the free development of the individual spirit. For man
in the individual can be more easily enlightened, conscious, open to clear
influences; man in the mass is still obscure, half-conscious, ruled by universal
forces that escape its mastery and its knowledge.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, pg. 185
There are three stages of the ascent, —at the bottom the bodily life enslaved
to the pressure of necessity and desire, in the middle the mental, the higher
emotional and psychic rule that feels after greater interests, aspirations,
experiences, ideas, and at the summits first a deeper psychic and spiritual
state and then a supramental eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations
and seekings discover their own intimate significance. In the bodily life first
desire and need and then the practical good of the individual and the society
are the governing consideration, the dominant force. In the mental life ideas
and ideals rule, ideas that are half-lights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals
formed by the mind as a result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and
experience. Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes its
brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the urge of mental Nature
to mould in the sense of the idea or the ideal the life of the individual,
and in the end even the vaguer more complex life of the society is forced to
undergo this subtle process. In the spiritual life, or when a higher power
than Mind has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited
motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or supramental
Self, the Divine Being, the supreme and immanent Reality, must be alone the
Lord within us and shape freely our final development according to the highest,
widest, most integral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the
end that nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for
it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual has nothing
further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has become a portion of the impersonality
or the universal personality of the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation
and play of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of the
world in its march towards the divine goal can move him to action. Mental ideas,
opinions, constructions are his no more; for his mind has fallen into silence,
it is only a channel for the Light and Truth of the divine knowledge. Ideals
are too narrow for the vastness of his spirit; it is the ocean of the Infinite
that flows through him and moves him for ever.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Supreme Will, pg. 197-198
This ego or "I" is not a lasting truth, much less our essential part; it is
only a formation of Nature, a mental form of thought-centralisation in the
perceiving and discriminating mind, a vital form of the centralisation of feeling
and sensation, in our parts of life, a form of physical conscious reception
centralising substance and function of substance in our bodies. All that we
internally are is not ego, but consciousness, soul or spirit. All that we externally
and superficially are and do is not ego but Nature. An executive cosmic force
shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality
so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our
actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought
occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense
gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities.
It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will,
imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force
in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed. The Sadhaka
in his progress towards truth and self-knowledge must come to a point where
the soul opens its eyes of vision and recognises this truth of ego and this
truth of works. He gives up the idea of a mental, vital, physical "I" that
acts or governs action; he recognises that Prakriti, Force of cosmic nature
following her fixed modes, is in him and in all things and creatures the one
and only worker.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Supreme Will, pg. 203
If this is the truth of works, the first thing the Sadhaka has to do is to
recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that
acts. He has to see and feel that every thing happens in him by the plastic
conscious or subconscious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental
and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and
physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills,
submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature,
but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated,
driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression
of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self,
his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary
constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person
that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach
himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play
of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption
in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and
a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes
the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds
his sanction from the impulse to her acts.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Supreme Will, pg. 205
The vital nature of man hungers always for the fruit of its labour and, if
the fruit appears to be denied or long delayed, he loses faith in the ideal
and in the guidance. For his mind judges always by the appearance of things,
since that is the first ingrained habit of the intellectual reason in which
he so inordinately trusts. Nothing is easier for us than to accuse God in
our hearts when we suffer long or stumble in the darkness or to abjure the
ideal that we have set before us. For we say, "I have trusted to the Highest
and I am betrayed into suffering and sin and error." Or else, "I have staked
my whole life on an idea which the stern facts of experience contradict and
discourage. It would have been better to be as other men are who accept their
limitations and walk on the firm ground of normal experience." In such moments
- and they are sometimes frequent and long - all the higher experience is
forgotten and the heart concentrates itself in its own bitterness. It is
in these dark passages that it is possible to fall for good or to turn back
from the divine labour.
It is therefore necessary from the beginning to understand and accept the arduous difficulty of the path and to feel the need of a faith which to the intellect may seem blind, but yet is wiser than our reasoning intelligence. For this faith is a support from above; it is the brilliant shadow thrown by a secret light that exceeds the intellect and its data; it is the heart of a hidden knowledge that is not at the mercy of immediate appearances. Our faith, persevering, will be justified in its works and will be lifted and transfigured at last into the self-revelation of a divine knowledge.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Master of the Work, pg. 232-233
Behind the traditional way of Knowledge, justifying its thought-process of
elimination and withdrawal, stands an over-mastering spiritual experience.
Deep, intense, convincing, common to all who have overstepped a certain limit
of the active mind-belt into the horizonless inner space, this is the great
experience of liberation, the consciousness of something within us that is
behind and outside of the universe and all its forms, interests, aims, events
and happenings, calm, untouched, unconcerned, illimitable, immobile, free,
the uplook to something above us indescribable and unseizable into which
by abolition of our personality we can enter, the presence of an omnipresent
eternal witness Purusha, the sense of an Infinity or a Timelessness that
looks down on us from an august negation of all our existence and is alone
the one thing Real. This experience is the highest sublimation of spiritualised
mind looking resolutely beyond its own existence. No one who has not passed
through this liberation can be entirely free from the mind and its meshes,
but one is not compelled to linger in this experience for ever. Great as
it is, it is only the Mind's overwhelming experience of what is beyond itself
and all it can conceive. It is a supreme negative experience, but beyond
it is all the tremendous light of an infinite consciousness, an illimitable
Knowledge, an affirmative absolute Presence.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Object of Knowledge, pg. 278-279
But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power, of a complete
intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of
the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This
is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest
thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think,
its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence
is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a
profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still,
like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of
the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds
and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words
are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections
manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only
is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore
to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Purified Understanding, pg. 302
The Soul identifies itself with this mental dynamo or station and says "I am
this mind." And since the mind is absorbed in the bodily life, it thinks "I
am a mind in a living body" or, still more commonly, "I am a body which lives
and thinks." It identifies itself with the thoughts, emotions, sensations of
the embodied mind and imagines that because when the body is dissolved all
this will dissolve, itself also will cease to exist. Or if it becomes conscious
of the current of persistence of mental personality, it thinks of itself as
a mental soul occupying the body whether once or repeatedly and returning from
earthly living to mental worlds beyond; the persistence of this mental being
mentally enjoying or suffering sometimes in the body, sometimes on the mental
or vital plane of Nature it calls its immortal existence. Or else, because
the mind is a principle of light and knowledge, however imperfect, and can
have some notion of what is beyond it, it sees the possibility of a dissolution
of the mental being into that which is beyond, some Void or some eternal Existence,
and it says, "There I, the mental soul, cease to be." Such dissolution it dreads
or desires, denies or affirms according to its measure of attachment to or
repulsion from this present play of embodied mind and vitality.
Now, all this is a mixture of truth and falsehood. Mind, Life, Matter exist and mental, vital, physical individualisation exists as facts in Nature, but the identification of the soul with these things is a false identification. Mind, Life and Matter are ourselves only in this sense that they are principles of being which the true self has evolved by the meeting and interaction of Soul and Nature in order to express a form of its one existence as the Cosmos. Individual mind, life and body are a play of these principles which is set up in the commerce of Soul and Nature as a means for the expression of that multiplicity of itself of which the one Existence is eternally capable and which it holds eternally involved in its unity. Individual mind, life and body are forms of ourselves in so far as we are centres of the multiplicity of the One; universal Mind, Life and Body are also forms of our self, because we are that One in our being. But the self is more than universal or individual mind, life and body and when we limit ourselves by identification with these things, we found our knowledge on a falsehood, we falsify our determining view and our practical experience not only of our self-being but of our cosmic existence and of our individual activities.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Synthesis of the Disciplines, pg. 322-323
There is no happiness in smallness of the being, says the Scripture, it is
with the large being that happiness comes. The ego is by its nature a smallness
of being; it brings contraction of the consciousness and with the contraction
limitation of knowledge, disabling ignorance, —confinement and a diminution
of power and by that diminution incapacity and weakness, —scission of
oneness and by that scission disharmony and failure of sympathy and love
and understanding, —inhibition or fragmentation of delight of being
and by that fragmentation pain and sorrow. To recover what is lost we must
break out of the worlds of ego. The ego must either disappear in impersonality
or fuse into a larger I: it must fuse in the wider cosmic 'I' which comprehends
all these samller selves or the transcendent of which even the cosmic self
is a diminished image.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Release from the Ego, pg. 342-343
Our first imperative aim when we draw back from mind, life, body and all else
that is not our eternal being, is to get rid of the false idea of self by
which we identify ourselves with the lower existence and can realise only
our apparent being as perishable or mutable creatures in a perishable or
ever mutable world. We have to know ourselves as the self, the spirit, the
eternal; we have to exist consciously in our true being. Therefore this must
be our primary, if not our first one and all-absorbing idea and effort in
the path of knowledge. But when we have realised the eternal self that we
are, when we have become that inalienably, we have still a secondary aim,
to establish the true relation between this eternal self that we are and
the mutable existence and mutable world which till now we had falsely taken
for our real being and our sole possible status.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Realisation of the Cosmic Self, pg. 352
If the truth of our being is an infinite unity in which alone there is perfect
wideness, light, knowledge, power, bliss, and if all our subjection to darkness,
ignorance, weakness, sorrow, limitation comes of our viewing existence as
a clash of infinitely multiple separate existences, then obviously it is
the most practical and concrete and utilitarian as well as the most lofty
and philosophical wisdom to find a means by which we can get away from the
error and learn to live in the truth. So also, if that One is in its nature
a freedom from bondage to this play of qualities which constitute our psychology
and if from subjection to that play are born the struggle and discord in
which we live, floundering eternally between the two poles of good and evil,
virtue and sin, satisfaction and failure, joy and grief, pleasure and pain,
then to get beyond the qualities and take our foundation in the settled peace
of that which is always beyond them is the only practical wisdom. If attachment
to mutable personality is the cause of our self-ignorance, of our discord
and quarrel with ourself and with life and with others, and if there is an
impersonal One in which no such discord and ignorance and vain and noisy
effort exist because it is in eternal identity and harmony with itself, then
to arrive in our souls at that impersonality and untroubled oneness of being
is the one line and object of human effort to which our reason can consent
to give the name of practicality.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Realisation of Sachchidananda, pg. 367-368
Still there is the likelihood of a partial, superficial and temporary relapse
into the old mental movement when he attempts again to ally himself to the
activity of the world. To prevent this relapse or to cure it when it arrives,
he has to hold fast to the truth of Sachchidananda and extend his realisation
of the infinite One into the movement of the infinite multiplicity. He has
to concentrate on and realise the one Brahman in all things as conscious
force of being as well as pure awareness of conscious being. The Self as
the All, not only in the unique essence of things, but in the manifold form
of things, not only as containing all in a transcendent consciousness, but
as becoming all by a constituting consciousness, this is the next step towards
his true possession of existence.
The Self will be realised as the all in its double aspect of immutable status and mutable activity and it is this that will be seen as the comprehensive truth of our existence.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Passive and the Active Brahman, pg. 391
We are no longer limited and shut in by what we inhabit, but like the Divine
contain in ourselves all that for the purpose of the movement of Nature we
consent to inhabit. We are not mind or life or body, but the informing and
sustaining Soul, silent, peaceful, eternal, that possesses them; and this
Soul we find everywhere sustaining and informing and possessing all lives
and minds and bodies and cease to regard it as a separate and individual
being in our own. In it all this moves and acts; within all this it is stable
and immutable. Having this, we possess our eternal self-existence at rest
in its eternal consciousness and bliss.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Cosmic Consciousness, pg. 393
Therefore an individual salvation in heavens beyond, careless of the earth,
is not our highest objective; the liberation and self-fulfilment of others
is as much our own concern, —we might almost say, our divine self-interest,— as
our own liberation. Otherwise our unity with others would have no effective
meaning. To conquer the lures of egoistic existence in this world is our
first victory over ourselves; to conquer the lure of individual happiness
in heavens beyond is our second victory; to conquer the highest lure of escape
from life and a self-absorbed bliss in the impersonal infinity is the last
and greatest victory. Then are we rid of all individual exclusiveness and
possessed of our entire spiritual freedom.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Soul and Its Liberation, pg. 425
Somehow or other a soul or mind has come to exist in a body and it stumbles
about among things and forces which it does not very well understand, at
first preoccupied with the difficulty of managing to live in a dangerous
and largely hostile world and then with the effort to understand its laws
and use them so as to make life as tolerable or as happy as possible so long
as it lasts. If we were really nothing more than such a minor movement of
individualised mind in Matter, existence would have nothing more to offer
us; its best part would be at most this struggle of an ephemeral intellect
and will with eternal Matter and with the difficulties of Life supplemented
and eased by a play of imagination and by the consoling fictions presented
to us by religion and art and all the wonders dreamed of by the brooding
mind and restless fancy of man.
But because he is a soul and not merely a living body, man can never for long remain satisfied that this first view of his existence, the sole view justified by the external and objective facts of life, is the real truth or the whole knowledge: his subjective being is full of hints and inklings of realities beyond, it is open to the sense of infinity and immortality, it is easily convinced of other worlds, higher possibilities of being, larger fields of experience for the soul. Science gives us the objective truth of existence and the superficial knowledge of our physical and vital being; but we feel that there are truths beyond which possibly through the cultivation of our subjective being and the enlargement of its powers may come to lie more and more open to us. When the knowledge of this world is ours, we are irresistibly impelled to seek for the knowledge of other states of existence beyond, and that is the reason why an age of strong materialism and scepticism is always followed by an age of occultism, of mystical creeds, of new religions and profounder seekings after the Infinite and the Divine. The knowledge of our superficial mentality and the laws of our bodily life is not enough; it brings us always to all that mysterious and hidden depth of subjective existence below and behind of which our surface consciousness is only a fringe or an outer court. We come to see that what is present to our physical senses is only the material shell of cosmic existence and what is obvious in our superficial mentality is only the margin of immense continents which lie behind unexplored. To explore them must be the work of another knowledge than that of physical science or of a superficial psychology.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Lower Triple Purusha, pg. 438-439
There are two kinds of knowledge, that which seeks to understand the apparent
phenomenon of existence externally, by an approach from outside, through
the intellect, —this is the lower knowledge, the knowledge of the apparent
world; secondly the knowledge which seeks to know the truth of existence
from within, in its source and reality, by spiritual realisation. Ordinarily,
a sharp distinction is drawn between the two, and it is supposed that when
we get to the higher knowledge, the God-knowledge, then the rest, the world-knowledge,
becomes of no concern to us: but in reality they are two sides of one seeking.
All knowledge is ultimately the knowledge of God, through himself, through
Nature, through her works. Mankind has first to seek this knowledge through
the external life; for until its mentality is sufficiently developed, spiritual
knowledge is not really possible, and in proportion as it is developed, the
possibilities of spiritual knowledge become richer and fuller.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Higher and the Lower Knowledges, pg. 491-492
Even now it is possible for some to believe in a Creator who has made heaven
and hell, an eternal heaven and an eternal hell, the two poles of his creation,
and has even according to some religions predestined the souls he has created
not only to sin and punishment, but to an eternal damnation. But even apart
from these extravagances of a childish religious belief, the idea of the
almighty Judge, Legislator, King, is a crude and imperfect idea of the Divine,
when taken by itself, because it takes an inferior and an external truth
for the main truth and it tends to prevent a higher approach to a more intimate
reality. It exaggerates the importance of the sense of sin and thereby prolongs
and increases the soul's fear and self-distrust and weakness. It attaches
the pursuit of virtue and the shunning of sin to the idea of rewards and
punishment, though given in an after life, and makes them dependent on the
lower motives of fear and interest instead of the higher spirit which should
govern the ethical being. It makes hell and heaven and not the Divine himself
the object of the human soul in its religious living. These crudities have
served their turn in the slow education of the human mind, but they are of
no utility to the Yogin who knows that whatever truth they may represent
belongs rather to the external relations of the developing human soul with
the external law of the universe than any intimate truth of the inner relations
of the human soul with the Divine; but it is these which are the proper field
of Yoga.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Godward Emotions, pg. 538-539
The sense, the idea, the experience that I am a separately self-existent being
in the universe, and the forming of consciousness and force of being into
the mould of that experience are the root of all suffering, ignorance and
evil. And it is so because that falsifies both in practice and in cognition
the whole real truth of things; it limits the being, limits the consciousness,
limits the power of our being, limits the bliss of being; this limitation
again produces a wrong way of existence, wrong way of consciousness, wrong
way of using the power of our being and consciousness, and wrong, perverse
and contrary forms of the delight of existence. The soul limited in being
and self-isolated in its environment feels itself no longer in unity and
harmony with its Self, with God, with the universe, with all around it; but
rather it finds itself at odds with the universe, in conflict and disaccord
with other beings who are its other selves, but whom it treats as not-self;
and so long as this disaccord and disagreement last, it cannot possess its
world and it cannot enjoy the universal life, but is full of unease, fear,
afflictions of all kinds, in a painful struggle to preserve and increase
itself and possess its surroundings, —for to possess its world is the
nature of infinite spirit and the necessary urge in all being. The satisfactions
it gets from this labour and effort are of a stinted, perverse and unsatisfying
kind: for the one real satisfaction it has is that of growth, of an increasing
return towards itself, of some realisation of accord and harmony, of successful
self-creation and self-realisation, but the little of these things that it
can achieve on the basis of ego-consciousness is always limited, insecure,
imperfect, transitory. It is at war too with its own self, —first because,
since it is no longer in possession of the central harmonising truth of its
own being, it cannot properly control its natural members or accord their
tendencies, powers and demands; it has not the secret of harmony, because
it has not the secret of its own unity and self-possession; and, secondly,
not being in possession of its highest self, it has to struggle towards that,
is not allowed to be at peace till it is in possession of its own true highest
being. All this means that it is not at one with God; for to be at one with
God is to be at one with oneself, at one with the universe and at one with
all beings. This oneness is the secret of a right and a divine existence.
But the ego cannot have it, because it is in its very nature separative and
because even with regard to ourselves, to our own psychological existence
it is a false centre of unity; for it tries to find the unity of our being
in an identification with a shifting mental, vital, physical personality,
not with the eternal self of our total existence. Only in the spiritual self
can we possess the true unity; for there the individual enlarges to his own
total being and finds himself one with universal existence and with the transcending
Divinity.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Liberation of the Spirit, pg. 652-653
The object of Yoga is to raise the human being from the consciousness of the
ordinary mind subject to the control of vital and material Nature and limited
wholly by birth and death and Time and the needs and desires of the mind,
life and body to the consciousness of the spirit free in its self and using
the circumstances of mind, life and body as admitted or self-chosen and self-figuring
determinations of the spirit, using them in a free self-knowledge, a free
will and power of being, a free delight of being. This is the essential difference
between the ordinary mortal mind in which we live and the spiritual consciousness
of our divine and immortal being which is the highest result of Yoga. It
is a radical conversion as great as and greater than the change which we
suppose evolutionary Nature to have made in its transition from the vital
animal to the fully mentalised human consciousness. The animal has the conscious
vital mind, but whatever beginnings there are in it of anything higher are
only a primary glimpse, a crude hint of the intelligence which in man becomes
the splendour of the mental understanding, will, emotion, aesthesis and reason.
Man elevated in the heights and deepened by the intensities of the mind becomes
aware of something great and divine in himself towards which all this tends,
something he is in possibility but which he has not yet become, and he turns
the powers of his mind, his power of knowledge, his power of will, his power
of emotion and aesthesis to seek out this, to seize and comprehend all that
it may be, to become it and to exist wholly in its greater consciousness,
delight, being and power of highest becoming. But what he gets of this higher
state in his normal mind is only an intimation, a primary glimpse, a crude
hint of the splendour, the light, the glory and divinity of the spirit within
him. A complete conversion of all the parts of his being into moulds and
instruments of the spiritual consciousness is demanded of him before he can
make quite real, constant, present to himself this greater thing that he
can be and entirely live in what is now to him at best a luminous aspiration.
He must seek to develop and grow altogether into a greater divine consciousness
by an integral Yoga.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Nature of the Supermind, pg. 754-755
All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being,
out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining,
self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The infinite, we may say, organises
by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its own manifestation of being
in the universe, not only the material universe present to our senses, but
whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence.
The Spirit is one everywhere and it knows all things as itself and in itself, so sees them always and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in their reality as well as their appearance, in their truth, their law, the entire spirit and sense and figure of their nature and their workings.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Nature of the Supermind, pg. 756-757
The mind of man, capable of reflection and a coordinated investigation and
understanding of itself and its basis and surroundings, arrives at truth
but against a background of original ignorance, a truth distressed by a constant
surrounding mist of incertitude and error. Its certitudes are relative and
for the most part precarious certainties or else are the assured fragmentary
certitudes only of an imperfect, incomplete and not an essential experience.
It makes discovery after discovery, gets idea after idea, adds experience
to experience and experiment to experiment, —but losing and rejecting
and forgetting and having to recover much as it proceeds,— and it tries
to establish a relation between all that it knows by setting up logical and
other sequences, a series of principles and their dependences, generalisations
and their application, and makes out of its devices a structure in which
mentally it can live, move and act and enjoy and labour. This mental knowledge
is always limited in extent: not only so, but in addition the mind even sets
up other willed barriers, admitting by the mental device of opinion certain
parts and sides of truth and excluding all the rest, because if it gave free
admission and play to all ideas, if it suffered truth's infinities, it would
lose itself in an unreconciled variety, an undetermined immensity and would
be unable to act and proceed to practical consequences and an effective creation.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Nature of the Supermind, pg. 760-761
A limited mental intelligence enlightening a limited mind of sense and the
capacity not always well used of a considerable extension of it by the use
of the reason are the powers by which he is at present distinguished from
all other terrestrial creatures. This sense mind, this intelligence, this
reason, however inadequate, are the instruments in which he has learned to
put his trust and he has erected by their means certain foundations which
he is not over-willing to disturb and has traced limits outside of which
he feels all to be confusion, uncertainty and a perilous adventure. Moreover
the transition to the higher principle means not only a difficult conversion
of his whole mind and reason and intelligence, but in a certain sense a reversal
of all their methods. The soul climbing above a certain critical line of
change sees all its former operations as an inferior and ignorant action
and has to effect another kind of working which sets out from a different
starting-point and has quite another kind of initiation of the energy of
the being. If an animal mind were called upon to leave consciently the safe
ground of sense impulse, sense understanding and instinct for the perilous
adventure of a reasoning intelligence, it might well turn back alarmed and
unwilling from the effort. The human mind would here be called upon to make
a still greater change and, although self-conscious and adventurous in the
circle of its possibility, might well hold this to be beyond the circle and
reject the adventure. In fact the change is only possible if there is first
a spiritual development on our present level of consciousness and it can
only be undertaken securely when the mind has become aware of the greater
self within, enamoured of the Infinite and confident of the presence of guidance
of the Divine and his Shakti.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Intuitive Mind, pg. 770-771
As the intuition is of the nature of a memory, a luminous remembering of the
self-existent truth, so the inspiration is of the nature of truth hearing:
it is an immediate reception of the very voice of the truth, it readily brings
the word that perfectly embodies it and it carries something more than the
light of its idea; there is seized some stream of its inner reality and vivid
arriving movement of its substance. The revelation is of the nature of direct
sight, pratyaksa-drsti, and makes evident to a present vision the
thing in itself of which the idea is the representation. It brings out the
very spirit and being and reality of the truth and makes it part of the consciousness
and the experience.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Gradations of the Supermind, pg. 785
Even at the best the arrangement made by the reason has always in it something
of artificiality and imposition, for in the end there are only two spontaneous
harmonic movements, that of the life, inconscient or largely subconscient,
the harmony that we find in the animal creation and in lower Nature, and
that of the spirit. The human condition is a stage of transition, effort
and imperfection between the one and the other, between the natural and the
ideal or spiritual life and it is full of uncertain seeking and disorder.
It is not that the mental being cannot find or rather construct some kind
of relative harmony of its own, but that it cannot render it stable because
it is under the urge of the spirit. Man is obliged by a Power within him
to be the labourer of a more or less conscious self-evolution that shall
lead him to self-mastery and self-knowledge.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, pg. 798-799
The reasoning intelligence is an intermediate agent between the life-mind and
the yet undeveloped supramental intuition. Its business is that of an intermediary,
on the one side to enlighten the life-mind, to make it conscient and govern
and regulate as much as may be its action until Nature is ready to evolve
the supramental energy which will take hold of life and illumine and perfect
all its movements by converting its obscurely intuitive motions of desire,
emotion, sensation and action into a spiritually and luminously spontaneous
life manifestation of the self and spirit. On the other higher side its mission
is to take the rays of light which come from above and translate them into
terms of intelligent mentality and to accept, examine, develop, intellectually
utilise the intuitions that escape the barrier and descend into mind from
the superconscience. It does this until man, becoming more and more intelligently
conscient of himself and his environment and his being, becomes also aware
that he cannot really know these things by his reason, but can only make
a mental representation of them to his intelligence.
The reason, however, tends in the intellectual man to ignore the limitations of its power and function and attempts to be not an instrument and agent but a substitute for the self and spirit. Made confident by success and predominance, by the comparative greatness of its own light, it regards itself as a thing primary and absolute, assures itself of its own entire truth and sufficiency and endeavours to become the absolute ruler of mind and life. This it cannot do successfully, because it depends on the lower life intuition and on the covert supermind and its intuitive messages for its own real substance and existence. It can only appear to itself to succeed because it reduces all its experience to rational formulas and blinds itself to half the real nature of the thought and action that is behind it and to the infinite deal that breaks out of its formulas. The excess of the reason only makes life artificial and rationally mechanical, deprives it of its spontaneity and vitality and prevents the freedom and expansion of the spirit.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Supramental Instruments, pg. 819-820
It is more and more perceived that the knowledge of phenomena increases, but
the knowledge of reality escapes this labourious process. A time must come,
is already coming when the mind perceives the necessity of calling to its
aid and developing fully the intuition and all the great range of powers
that lie concealed behind our vague use of the word and uncertain perception
of its significance. In the end it must discover that these powers can not
only aid and complete but even replace its own proper action. That will be
the beginning of the discovery of the supramental energy of the spirit.
—The Synthesis of Yoga —The Supramental Instruments, pg. 824