flowers
Their Spiritual significance

Photo Collection

Flame of aspiration

A flame which illumines but never burns.

Acer Spp. (Aceraceae)

Maple

Autumnal colourings

Additional information

Maple

This is for them the greatest joy.

And in that country, for each season there are known sites. For instance, in autumn leaves become red; they have large numbers of maple-trees (the leaves of the maple turn into all the shades of the most vivid red in autumn, it is absolutely marvellous), so they arrange a place near a temple, for instance, on the top of a hill, and the entire hill is covered with maples.

There is a stairway which climbs straight up, almost like a ladder, from the base to the top, and it is so steep that one cannot see what is at the top, one gets the feeling of a ladder rising to the skies - a stone stairway, very well made, rising steeply and seeming to lose itself in the sky - clouds pass, and both the sides of the hill are covered with maples, and these maples have the most magnificent colours you could ever imagine. Well, an artist who goes there will experience an emotion of absolutely exceptional, marvellous beauty. But one sees very small children, families even, with a baby on the shoulder, going there in groups. In autumn they will go there. In springtime they will go elsewhere.

The Mother

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 4. - Questions And Answers (1950-51)

Aspiration

[Aspiration] is the call of the being for higher things - for the Divine, for all that belongs to the higher or Divine Consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo. Guidance from Sri Aurobindo.- I.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Society, 1974, P.106.

This taste for supreme adventure is aspiration - an aspiration which takes hold of you completely and flings you, without calculation and without reserve and without a possibility of withdrawal, into the great adventure of the divine discovery, the great adventure of the divine meeting, the yet greater adventure of the divine Realisation.

The Mother

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 8. - Questions And Answers (1956)

Aspiration is like an arrow, like this (gesture). So you aspire, want very earnestly to understand, know, enter into the truth. Yes? And then with that aspiration you do this (gesture). Your aspiration rises, rises, rises, rises straight up, very strong and then it strikes against a kind of... how to put it? ... lid which is there, hard like iron and extremely thick, and it does not pass through. And then you say, "See, what's the use of aspiring? It brings nothing at all. I meet with something hard and cannot pass!" But you know about the drop of water which falls on the rock, it ends up by making a chasm: it cuts the rock from top to bottom. Your aspiration is a drop of water which, instead of falling, rises. So, by dint of rising, it beats, beats, beats, and one day it makes a hole, by dint of rising; and when it makes the hole suddenly it springs out from this lid and enters an immensity of light, and you say, "Ah, now I understand."

It's like that.

The Mother

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 7. - Questions And Answers (1955)

Aspiration is needed but there can be a sunlit aspiration full of light and faith and confidence and joy.

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4

Well, today there is something special. And these two flowers are just fine: Concentration in the Aspiration... But do you know how to aspire? Do you aspire a little?

Do you know where the aspiration comes from?

Yes, Mother, from the heart and from the psychic.

Yes, my little one, rather from the psychic, the true aspiration comes from there; but one first starts from the heart.

As long as you are not in contact with it, in the beginning you can aspire from the mind, saying: Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, and asking precisely what you want, as, for example, Peace, or let Peace be established within me. Then you silently concentrate and you remain open. You will see that you will be flooded with Peace.

Then you concentrate in the heart, and you aspire to come into contact with the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification and go there, very deeply, and remain silent and open like this (Mother opens Her hands like a flower above Her head).

Once there - but you must sincerely make a great effort to find it, - you are in contact with the central being; everything else becomes silent, and one has the feeling that the Divine is doing everything for oneself. An immutable joy and peace and freedom then seize you. And nothing in the world is interesting any more, but the aspiration that unites with the Divine.

Nor was it insignificant that fire, Agni, was the core of the Vedic mysteries: Agni, the inner flame, the soul within us (for who can deny that the soul is fire?), the innate aspiration drawing man towards the heights; Agni, the ardent will within us that sees, always and forever, and remembers; Agni, 'the priest of the sacrifice,' the 'divine worker,' the 'envoy between earth and heaven' (Rig-veda III, 3.2) 'he is there in the middle of his house' (1.70.2). 'The Fathers who have divine vision set him within as a child that is to be born' (IX.83.3). He is 'the boy suppressed in the secret cavern' (V.2.1). 'He is as if life and the breath of our existence, he is as if our eternal child' (I.66.1). 'O Son of the body' (III.4.2), 'O Fire, thou art the son of heaven by the body of the earth' (III.25. 1). 'Immortal in mortals' (IV.2. 1), 'old and outworn he grows young again and again' (11.4.5). 'When he is born he becomes one who voices the godhead: when as life who grows in the mother he has been fashioned in the mother he becomes a gallop of wind in his movement' (III.29.11). 'O Fire, when thou art well borne by us thou becomest the supreme growth and expansion of our being, all glory and beauty are in thy desirable hue and thy perfect vision. O Vastness, thou art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way; thou art a multitude of riches spread out on every side' (II. 1. 12). 'O Fire ... brilliant ocean of light in which is divine vision' (III.22.2), 'the Flame with his hundred treasures ... O knower of all things born' (I.59). [360]

But the divine fire is not our exclusive privilege - Agni exists not only in man: 'He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there...' (I.70.2).

............

But we have not yet reached the heart of the Vedic secret. The birth of Agni, the soul (and so many men are still unborn) is merely the start of the voyage. This inner flame seeks, it is the seeker within us, for it is a spark of the great primordial Fire and will never be satisfied until it has recovered its solar totality, 'the lost sun' of which the Veda incessantly speaks. Yet even when we have risen from plane to plane and the Flame has taken successive births in the triple world of our lower existence (the physical, vital and mental world), it will still remain unsatisfied - it wants to ascend, ascend further. And soon we reach a mental frontier where there seems to be nothing to grasp any longer, nor even to see, and nothing remains but to abolish everything and leap into the ecstasy of a great Light. At this point, we feel almost painfully the imprisoning carapace of matter all around us, preventing that apotheosis of the Flame; then we understand the cry, 'My kingdom is not of this world,' and the insistence of India's Vedantic sages - and perhaps the sages of all worlds and all religions - that we must abandon this body to embrace the Eternal. Will our flame thus forever be truncated here below and our quest always end in disappointment? Shall we always have to choose one or the other, to renounce earth to gain heaven?

Yet beyond the lower triple world, the Rishis had discovered 'a certain fourth,' touriam svid; they found 'the vast dwelling place,' 'the solar world, 'Swar: 'I have arisen from earth to the mid-world [life], I have arisen from the mid-world to heaven [mind], from the level of the firmament of heaven I have gone to the Sun-world, the Light' (Yajur-veda 17.67). And it is said, 'Mortals, they achieved immortality' (Rig-veda 1. 110.4). What then was their secret? How did they pass from a 'heaven of mind' to the 'great heaven' without leaving the body, without, as it were, going off into ecstasies?

The secret lies in matter. Because Agni is imprisoned in matter and we ourselves are imprisoned there. It is said that Agni is 'without head or feet,' that it 'conceals its two extremities': above, it disappears into the 'great heaven' of the supraconscient (which the Rishis also called 'the great ocean'), and below, it sinks into the 'formless ocean' of the inconscient (which they also called 'the rock'). We are truncated. [361] But the Rishis were men of a solid realism, a true realism resting upon the Spirit; and since the summits of mind opened out upon a lacuna of light - ecstatic, to be sure, but with no hold over the world - they set upon the downward way.234 Thus begins the quest for the 'lost sun,' the long 'pilgrimage' of descent into the inconscient and the merciless fight against the dark forces, the 'thieves of the sun,' the panis and vritras, pythons and giants, hidden in the 'dark lair' with the whole cohort of usurpers: the dualizers, the confiners, the tearers, the COVERERS. But the 'divine worker,' Agni, is helped by the gods, and in his quest he is led by the 'intuitive ray,' Sarama, the heavenly hound with the subtle sense of smell who sets Agni on the track of the 'stolen herds' (strange, 'shining' herds). Now and again there comes the sudden glimmer of a fugitive dawn ... then all grows dim. One must advance step by step, 'digging, digging,' fighting every inch of the way against 'the wolves' whose savage fury increases the nearer one draws to their den - Agni is a warrior. Agni grows through his difficulties, his flame burns more brilliantly with each blow from the Adversary; for, as the Rishis said, 'Night and Day both suckled the divine Child'; they even said that Night and Day are the 'two sisters, Immortal, with a common lover [the sun] ... common they, though different their forms' (1. 113.2,3). These alternations of night and brightness accelerate until Day breaks at last and the 'herds of Dawn'235 surge upward awakening 'someone who was dead' (1. 113.8). 'The infinite rock' of the inconscient is shattered, the seeker uncovers 'the Sun dwelling in the darkness' (111.39.5), the divine consciousness in the heart of Matter.... In the very depths of Matter, that is to say, in the body, on earth, the Rishis found themselves cast up into Light - that same Light which others sought on the heights, without their bodies and without the earth, in ecstasy. And this is what the Rishis would call 'the Great Passage.' Without abandoning the earth they found 'the vast dwelling place,' that 'dwelling place of the gods,' Swar, the original Sun-world that Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental World: 'Human beings [the Rishis emphasize that they are indeed men] slaying the Coverer have crossed beyond both earth and heaven [matter and mind] and made the wide world their dwelling place' (1.36.8). They have entered 'the True, the Right, the Vast,' Satyam, Ritam, Brihat, the 'unbroken light,' the 'fearless light,' where there is no longer suffering nor falsehood nor death: it is immortality, amritam.

The Mother

The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 2. - 1961

Agni is at once a fire of aspiration, a fire of purification, a fire of Tapasya, a fire of transformation.

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4

Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 11. - Hymns to the mystic Fire

Today You gave me a flower meaning "Psychic flame", but I really didn't understand what you mean to tell me.

Agni is the will for progress, the flame of purification that burns up all obstacles and difficulties. By giving you the flower, I am encouraging you to let it burn in you.

The Mother

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 17. - More answers from the Mother