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flowers
Their Spiritual significance
Photo Collection
Offering of the emotions
Emotions placed at the service of progress
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Alcea rosea L. (Malvaceae)
Common hollyhock
Lavender pink
Offering
Yoga means union with the Divine, and the union is effected through offering, is founded on the offering of yourself to the Divine. In the beginning you start by making this offering in a general way, as though once for all; you say, "I am the servant of the Divine; my life is given absolutely to the Divine; all my efforts are for the realisation of the Divine Life." But that is only the first step; for this is not sufficient. When the resolution has been taken, when you have decided that the whole of your life shall be given to the Divine, you have still at every moment to remember it and carry it out in all the details of your existence. You must feel at every step that you belong to the Divine; you must have the constant experience that, in whatever you think or do, it is always the Divine Consciousness that is acting through you. You have no longer anything that you can call your own; you feel everything as coming from the Divine, and you have to offer it back to its source. When you can realise that, then even the smallest thing to which you do not usually pay much attention or care, ceases to be trivial and insignificant; it becomes full of meaning and it opens up a vast horizon beyond.
This is what you have to do to carry out your general offering in detailed offerings. Live constantly in the presence of the Divine; live in the feeling that it is this presence which moves you and is doing everything you do. Offer all your movements to it, not only every mental action, every thought and feeling but even the most ordinary and external actions such as eating; when you eat, you must feel that it is the Divine who is eating through you. When you can thus gather all your movements into the One Life, then you have in you unity instead of division. No longer is one part of your nature given to the Divine, while the rest remains in its ordinary ways, engrossed in ordinary things; your entire life is taken up, an integral transformation is gradually realised in you.
In the integral Yoga, the integral life down even to the smallest detail has to be transformed, to be divinised. There is nothing here that is insignificant, nothing that is indifferent. You cannot say, "When I am meditating, reading philosophy or listening to these conversations I will be in this condition of an opening towards the Light and call for it, but when I go out to walk or see friends I can allow myself to forget all about it." To persist in this attitude means that you will remain untransformed and never have the true union; always you will be divided; you will have at best only glimpses of this greater life. For although certain experiences and realisations may come to you in meditation or in your inner consciousness, your body and your outer life will remain unchanged. An inner illumination that does not take any note of the body and the outer life, is of no great use, for it leaves the world as it is.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 3. - Questions and Answers (1929)
Emotion is a good element in yoga; but emotional desire becomes easily a cause of perturbation and an obstacle.
Turn your emotions towards the Divine, aspire for their purification; they will then become a help on the way and no longer a cause of suffering.
Not to kill emotion, but to turn it towards the Divine is the right way of the yoga.
But it must become pure, founded upon spiritual peace and joy, capable of being transmuted into Ananda. Equality and calm in the mind and vital parts, an intense psychic emotion in the heart can perfectly go together.
Awake by your aspiration the psychic fire in the heart that burns steadily towards the Divine - that is the one way to liberate and fulfil the emotional nature.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3
Emotion is an excellent and indispensable thing in human nature, in spite of all its shortcomings and dangers, - just as mental ideas are excellent and indispensable things in their own field in the human stage. But our aim is to go beyond mental ideas into the light of the supramental Truth, which exists not by ideative thought but by direct vision and identity. In the same way our aim is to go beyond emotion to the height and depth and intensity of the Divine Love and there feel through the inner psychic heart an inexhaustible oneness with the Divine which the spasmodic leapings of the vital emotions cannot reach or experience.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3