There is no harm in concentrating sometimes in the heart and sometimes above the head. But concentration in either place does not mean keeping the attention fixed on a particular spot; you have to take your station of consciousness in either place and concentrate there not on the place, but on the Divine. This can be done with eyes shut or with eyes open, according as it best suits you.
The concentration in the heart is what brings about the opening of the psychic which is your principal need. If the concentration has brought about a feeling which makes you judge clearly all the other movements and see their nature, then the psychic is already in action. For this is the psychic feeling which brings with it a clear insight into the nature of all movements that come and makes it easy to reject what has to be rejected and keep the right attitude and perception. It does not matter about the image of the Mother. It is her presence whether in form or not that has to be felt always and this the psychic opening will surely bring.
The Synthetic Method of Integral Yoga, Letters on Yoga – II, CWSA, Sri Aurobindo.
The mind is always in activity, but we do not observe fully what it is doing, but allow ourselves to be carried away in the stream of continual thinking. When we try to concentrate, this stream of self-moved mechanical thinking becomes prominent to our observation. It is the first normal obstacle (the other is sleep during meditation) to the effort towards Yoga.
The first thing to do is to realise that this thought-flow is not yourself, it is not you who are thinking, but thought that is going on in the mind. It is Prakriti with its thought-energy that is raising all this whirl of thought in you, imposing it on the Purusha. You as the Purusha must stand back as the witness observing the action, but refusing to identify yourself with it. The next thing is to exercise a control and reject the thoughts—though sometimes by the very act of detachment the thought-habit falls away or diminishes during the meditation and there is a sufficient silence or at any rate a quietude which makes it easy to reject the thoughts that come and fix oneself on the object of meditation. If one becomes aware of the thoughts as coming from outside, from the universal Nature, then one can throw them away before they reach the mind; in that way the mind finally falls silent. If neither of these things happens, a persistent practice of rejection becomes necessary—there should be no struggle or wrestling with the thoughts, but only a quiet self-separation and refusal. Success does not come at first, but if consent is constantly withheld, the mechanical whirl eventually lessens and begins to die away and one can then have at will an inner quietude or silence.
It should be noted that the result of the Yogic processes is not, except in rare cases, immediate and one must apply them with patience till they give a result which is sometimes long in coming if there is much resistance in the outer nature.
How can you fix the mind on the higher Self so long as you have no consciousness or experience of it? You can only concentrate on the idea of the Self. Or else one can concentrate on the idea of the Divine or the Divine Mother or on an image or on the feeling of devotion, calling the presence in the heart or the Force to work in the mind and heart and body and liberate the consciousness and give the self-realisation. If you concentrate on the idea of the Self, it must be with the conception of the Self as something different from mind and its thoughts, the vital and its feelings, the body and its actions—something standing back from all these, something that you can come to feel concretely as an Existence or Consciousness, separate from all that yet freely pervading all without being involved in these things.
The Synthetic Method of Integral Yoga, Letters on Yoga- II, CWSA, Sri Aurobindo.
But all is screened, subliminal, mystical; It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn, It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.
Else to our waking mind’s small moment look A goalless voyage seems our dubious course Some Chance has settled or hazarded some Will, Or a Necessity without aim or cause Unwillingly compelled to emerge and be.
In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure, Our very being seems to us questionable, Our life a vague experiment, the soul A flickering light in a strange ignorant world, The earth a brute mechanic accident, A net of death in which by chance we live.
All we have learned appears a doubtful guess, The achievement done a passage or a phase Whose farther end is hidden from our sight, A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.
Out of the unknown we move to the unknown.
Ever surround our brief existence here Grey shadows of unanswered questionings; The dark Inconscient’s signless mysteries Stand up unsolved behind Fate’s starting-line.
An aspiration in the Night’s profound, Seed of a perishing body and half-lit mind, Uplifts its lonely tongue of conscious fire Towards an undying Light for ever lost; Only it hears, sole echo of its call, The dim reply in man’s unknowing heart And meets, not understanding why it came Or for what reason is the suffering here, God’s sanction to the paradox of life And the riddle of the Immortal’s birth in Time.
Along a path of aeons serpentine In the coiled blackness of her nescient course The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.
A Being is in her whom she hopes to know, A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear, A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.
In her unconscious orbit through the Void Out of her mindless depths she strives to rise, A perilous life her gain, a struggling joy; A Thought that can conceive but hardly knows Arises slowly in her and creates The idea, the speech that labels more than it lights; A trembling gladness that is less than bliss Invades from all this beauty that must die.
Alarmed by the sorrow dragging at her feet And conscious of the high things not yet won, Ever she nurses in her sleepless breast An inward urge that takes from her rest and peace.
Ignorant and weary and invincible, She seeks through the soul’s war and quivering pain The pure perfection her marred nature needs, A breath of Godhead on her stone and mire.
A faith she craves that can survive defeat, The sweetness of a love that knows not death, The radiance of a truth for ever sure.
A light grows in her, she assumes a voice, Her state she learns to read and the act she has done, But the one needed truth eludes her grasp, Herself and all of which she is the sign.
A light grows in her, she assumes a voice, Her state she learns to read and the act she has done, But the one needed truth eludes her grasp, Herself and all of which she is the sign.
An inarticulate whisper drives her steps Of which she feels the force but not the sense; A few rare intimations come as guides, Immense divining flashes cleave her brain, And sometimes in her hours of dream and muse The truth that she has missed looks out on her As if far off and yet within her soul.
A change comes near that flees from her surmise And, ever postponed, compels attempt and hope, Yet seems too great for mortal hope to dare.
A vision meets her of supernal Powers That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze.
Then is she moved to all that she is not And stretches arms to what was never hers.
Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void, Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope, A Mind unvisited by illusion’s gleams, A Will expressive of soul’s deity, A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed, A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.
For these she yearns and feels them destined hers: Heaven’s privilege she claims as her own right.
The Secret Knowledge, Savitri I, CWSA, Sri Aurobindo.
What do you call meditation? Shutting the eyes and concentrating? It is only one method for calling down the true consciousness. To join with the true consciousness or feel its descent is the only thing important and if it comes without the orthodox method, as it always did with me, so much the better. Meditation is only a means or device, the true movement is when even walking, working or speaking one is still in sadhana.
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If the difficulty in meditation is that thoughts of all kinds come in, that is not due to hostile forces but to the ordinary nature of the human mind. All sadhaks have this difficulty and with many it lasts for a very long time. There are several ways of getting rid of it. One of them is to look at the thoughts and observe what is the nature of the human mind as they show it but not to give any sanction and to let them run down till they come to a standstill—this is a way recommended by Vivekananda in his Rajayoga. Another is to look at the thoughts as not one’s own, to stand back as the witness Purusha and refuse the sanction—the thoughts are regarded as things coming from outside, from Prakriti, and they must be felt as if they were passers-by crossing the mind-space with whom one has no connection and in whom one takes no interest. In this way it usually happens that after a time the mind divides into two, a part which is the mental witness watching and perfectly undisturbed and quiet and a part which is the object of observation, the Prakriti part in which the thoughts cross or wander. Afterwards one can proceed to silence or quiet the Prakriti part also. There is a third, an active method by which one looks to see where the thoughts come from and finds they come not from oneself, but from outside the head as it were; if one can detect them coming, then, before they enter, they have to be thrown away altogether. This is perhaps the most difficult way and not all can do it, but if it can be done it is the shortest and most powerful road to silence.
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If you try to apply everything you read, there will be no end to your new beginnings. One can stop thinking by rejecting the thoughts and in the silence discover oneself. One can do it by letting the thoughts run down while one detaches oneself from them. There are a number of other ways. This one related in Brunton’s book seems to me the Adwaita-jnani method of separating oneself from body, vital, mind, by viveka, discrimination, “I am not the body, I am not the life, I am not the mind” till he gets to the self, separate from mind, life and body. That also is one way of doing it. There is also the separation of Purusha from Prakriti till one becomes the witness only and feels separate from all the activities as the Witness Consciousness. There are other methods also.
The Synthetic Method of Integral Yoga, Letters on Yoga – II, CWSA, Sri Aurobindo.
In moments when the inner lamps are lit And the life’s cherished guests are left outside, Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.
A wider consciousness opens then its doors; Invading from spiritual silences A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile To commune with our seized illumined clay And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.
In the oblivious field of mortal mind, Revealed to the closed prophet eyes of trance Or in some deep internal solitude Witnessed by a strange immaterial sense, The signals of eternity appear.
The truth mind could not know unveils its face, We hear what mortal ears have never heard, We feel what earthly sense has never felt, We love what common hearts repel and dread; Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient; A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul; We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead’s touch In golden privacies of immortal fire.
These signs are native to a larger self That lives within us by ourselves unseen; Only sometimes a holier influence comes, A tide of mightier surgings bears our lives And a diviner Presence moves the soul; Or through the earthly coverings something breaks, A grace and beauty of spiritual light, The murmuring tongue of a celestial fire.
It is the origin and the master-clue, A silence overhead, an inner voice, A living image seated in the heart, An unwalled wideness and a fathomless point, The truth of all these cryptic shows in Space, The Real towards which our strivings move, The secret grandiose meaning of our lives.
A treasure of honey in the combs of God, A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak, It is our glory of the flame of God, Our golden fountain of the world’s delight, An immortality cowled in the cape of death, The shape of our unborn divinity.
It guards for us our fate in depths within Where sleeps the eternal seed of transient things.
Always we bear in us a magic key Concealed in life’s hermetic envelope.
A burning Witness in the sanctuary Regards through Time and the blind walls of Form; A timeless Light is in his hidden eyes; He sees the secret things no words can speak And knows the goal of the unconscious world And the heart of the mystery of the journeying years.
The Secret Knowledge, Savitri I, CWSA, Sri Aurobindo
On a height he stood that looked towards greater heights.
Our early approaches to the Infinite Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun.
What now we see is a shadow of what must come.
The earth’s uplook to a remote Unknown Is a preface only of the epic climb Of human soul from its flat earthly state To the discovery of a greater self And the far gleam of an eternal Light.
This world is a beginning and a base Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams; An unborn Power must build reality.
A deathbound littleness is not all we are: Immortal our forgotten vastnesses Await discovery in our summit selves; Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours.
Akin to the ineffable Secrecy, Mystic, eternal in unrealised Time, Neighbours of Heaven are Nature’s altitudes.
To these high-peaked dominions sealed to our search, Too far from surface Nature’s postal routes, Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe, Deep in us a forgotten kinship points And a faint voice of ecstasy and prayer Calls to those lucent lost immensities.
Even when we fail to look into our souls Or lie embedded in earthly consciousness, Still have we parts that grow towards the light, Yet are there luminous tracts and heavens serene And Eldorados of splendour and ecstasy And temples to the godhead none can see.
A shapeless memory lingers in us still And sometimes, when our sight is turned within, Earth’s ignorant veil is lifted from our eyes; There is a short miraculous escape.
This narrow fringe of clamped experience We leave behind meted to us as life, Our little walks, our insufficient reach.
Our souls can visit in great lonely hours Still regions of imperishable Light, All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss And calm immensities of spirit space.
In the unfolding process of the Self Sometimes the inexpressible Mystery Elects a human vessel of descent.
A breath comes down from a supernal air, A Presence is born, a guiding Light awakes, A stillness falls upon the instruments: Fixed, motionless like a marble monument, Stone-calm, the body is a pedestal Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.
Or a revealing Force sweeps blazing in; Out of some vast superior continent Knowledge breaks through trailing its radiant seas, And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.
A greater Personality sometimes Possesses us which yet we know is ours: Or we adore the Master of our souls.
Then the small bodily ego thins and falls; No more insisting on its separate self, Losing the punctilio of its separate birth, It leaves us one with Nature and with God.
In moments when the inner lamps are lit And the life’s cherished guests are left outside, Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.
The Secret Knowledge, Savitri I, CWSA, Sri Aurobindo.
We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life. As there, so here, the impulse exists more or less obscurely in her different vessels with an ever-ascending series in the power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is gradually evolving and bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties. As the impulse towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in the metal and the plant up to its full organisation in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is. We cannot, then, bid her pause at a given stage of her evolution, nor have we the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.
Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind. Attempts are sometimes made to have done finally with questionings which have so often been declared insoluble by logical thought and to persuade men to limit their mental activities to the practical and immediate problems of their material existence in the universe; but such evasions are never permanent in their effect. Mankind returns from them with a more vehement impulse of inquiry or a more violent hunger for an immediate solution. By that hunger mysticism profits and new religions arise to replace the old that have been destroyed or stripped of significance by a scepticism which itself could not satisfy because, although its business was inquiry, it was unwilling sufficiently to inquire. The attempt to deny or stifle a truth because it is yet obscure in its outward workings and too often represented by obscurantist superstition or a crude faith, is itself a kind of obscurantism. The will to escape from a cosmic necessity because it is arduous, difficult to justify by immediate tangible results, slow in regulating its operations, must turn out eventually to have been no acceptance of the truth of Nature but a revolt against the secret, mightier will of the great Mother. It is better and more rational to accept what she will not allow us as a race to reject and lift it from the sphere of blind instinct, obscure intuition and random aspiration into the light of reason and an instructed and consciously self-guiding will. And if there is any higher light of illumined intuition or self-revealing truth which is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or works with intermittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional displays as of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we need not fear to aspire. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever highest state is humanity’s ultimate resting-place.
The Human Aspiration, Life Divine – I, CWSA, Sri Aurobindo.
In order to be always near me really and effectively you must become more and more sincere, open and frank towards me. Cast away all dissimulation and decide to do nothing that you could not tell me immediately.
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Do only what you could do before me without feeling embarrassed, say only what you could repeat to me without difficulty.
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Be very sincere and straightforward, harbour nothing within yourself which you cannot show me without fear, do nothing which you would be ashamed of before me.
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Try to be spontaneous and simple like a child in your relations with me―it will save you from many difficulties.
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Be simple, Be happy, Remain quiet, Do your work as well as you can, Keep yourself always open towards me― This is all that is asked from you.
We surrender to Thee this evening all that is artificial and false, all that pretends and imitates. Let it disappear with the year that is at an end. May only what is perfectly true, sincere, straight and pure subsist in the year that is beginning.
All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner being. No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger spiritual existence. The soul that is called to this deep and vast inward change, may arrive in different ways to the initial departure. It may come to it by its own natural development which has been leading it unconsciously towards the awakening; it may reach it through the influence of a religion or the attraction of a philosophy; it may approach it by a slow illumination or leap to it by a sudden touch or shock; it may be pushed or led to it by the pressure of outward circumstances or by an inward necessity, by a single word that breaks the seals of the mind or by long reflection, by the distant example of one who has trod the path or by contact and daily influence. According to the nature and the circumstances the call will come.
But in whatever way it comes, there must be a decision of the mind and the will and, as its result, a complete and effective self-consecration. The acceptance of a new spiritual idea-force and upward orientation in the being, an illumination, a turning or conversion seized on by the will and the heart’s aspiration,—this is the momentous act which contains as in a seed all the results that the Yoga has to give. The mere idea or intellectual seeking of something higher beyond, however strongly grasped by the mind’s interest, is ineffective unless it is seized on by the heart as the one thing desirable and by the will as the one thing to be done. For truth of the Spirit has not to be merely thought but to be lived, and to live it demands a unified single-mindedness of the being; so great a change as is contemplated by the Yoga is not to be effected by a divided will or by a small portion of the energy or by a hesitating mind. He who seeks the Divine must consecrate himself to God and to God only.
If the change comes suddenly and decisively by an overpowering influence, there is no further essential or lasting difficulty. The choice follows upon the thought, or is simultaneous with it, and the self-consecration follows upon the choice. The feet are already set upon the path, even if they seem at first to wander uncertainly and even though the path itself may be only obscurely seen and the knowledge of the goal may be imperfect. The secret Teacher, the inner Guide is already at work, though he may not yet manifest himself or may not yet appear in the person of his human representative. Whatever difficulties and hesitations may ensue, they cannot eventually prevail against the power of the experience that has turned the current of the life. The call, once decisive, stands; the thing that has been born cannot eventually be stifled. Even if the force of circumstances prevents a regular pursuit or a full practical self-consecration from the first, still the mind has taken its bent and persists and returns with an ever-increasing effect upon its leading preoccupation. There is an ineluctable persistence of the inner being, and against it circumstances are in the end powerless, and no weakness in the nature can for long be an obstacle.
But this is not always the manner of the commencement. The sadhaka is often led gradually and there is a long space between the first turning of the mind and the full assent of the nature to the thing towards which it turns. There may at first be only a vivid intellectual interest, a forcible attraction towards the idea and some imperfect form of practice. Or perhaps there is an effort not favoured by the whole nature, a decision or a turn imposed by an intellectual influence or dictated by personal affection and admiration for someone who is himself consecrated and devoted to the Highest. In such cases, a long period of preparation may be necessary before there comes the irrevocable consecration; and in some instances it may not come. There may be some advance, there may be a strong effort, even much purification and many experiences other than those that are central or supreme; but the life will either be spent in preparation or, a certain stage having been reached, the mind pushed by an insufficient driving-force may rest content at the limit of the effort possible to it. Or there may even be a recoil to the lower life,—what is called in the ordinary parlance of Yoga a fall from the path. This lapse happens because there is a defect at the very centre. The intellect has been interested, the heart attracted, the will has strung itself to the effort, but the whole nature has not been taken captive by the Divine. It has only acquiesced in the interest, the attraction or the endeavour. There has been an experiment, perhaps even an eager experiment, but not a total self-giving to an imperative need of the soul or to an unforsakable ideal. Even such imperfect Yoga has not been wasted; for no upward effort is made in vain. Even if it fails in the present or arrives only at some preparatory stage or preliminary realisation, it has yet determined the soul’s future.
But if we desire to make the most of the opportunity that this life gives us, if we wish to respond adequately to the call we have received and to attain to the goal we have glimpsed, not merely advance a little towards it, it is essential that there should be an entire self-giving. The secret of success in Yoga is to regard it not as one of the aims to be pursued in life, but as the one and only aim, not as an important part of life, but as the whole of life.
The Yoga of Divine Works, Synthesis of Yoga – I, CWSA, Sri Aurobindo.
