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flowers
Their Spiritual significance
Photo Collection
Offering of the most material vital
The first step towards transformation.
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Alcea rosea L. (Malvaceae)
Common hollyhock
Very dark red flowers with a blackish sheen, single or double
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)
By material vital we mean the vital so involved in Matter as to be bound by its movements and gross physical character; the action is to support and energise the body and keep in it the capacity of life, growth, movement, etc., also of sensitiveness to outside impacts.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 22. - Letters on Yoga.-P.1
I would like to know what You mean by "the most material vital".
It is the part of the vital that is closest to the physical consciousness, the part that gives life to the body.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 17. - More answers from the Mother
There is a whole zone in the most material vital which penetrates, as it were, the subtle physical - that's where illnesses are formed. You see swarms of completely crooked formations - a lack of sincerity. And it expresses itself in images: I see all kinds of people and do all kinds of things in a special zone - the same people who are elsewhere are here too under a special aspect. It's a mixture of the deformation of consciousness, the deformation of language, the deformation of forms - swarms and swarms!
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 4. - 1963
You carry with you, around you, in you, the atmosphere created by your actions, and if what you do is beautiful, good and harmonious, your atmosphere is beautiful, good and harmonious; on the other hand, if you live in a sordid selfishness, unscrupulous self-interest, ruthless bad will, that is what you will breathe every moment of your life and that means misery, constant uneasiness; it means ugliness that despairs of its own ugliness.
And you must not believe that by leaving the body you will free yourself of this atmosphere; on the contrary, the body is a kind of a veil of unconsciousness which diminishes the intensity of the suffering. If you are without the protection of the body in the most material vital life, the suffering becomes much more acute and you no longer have the opportunity to change what is to be changed, to correct what is to be corrected, to open yourself to a higher, happier and more luminous life and consciousness.
You must make haste to do your work here, for it is here that you can truly do it.
Expect nothing from death. Life is your salvation.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 3. - Questions and Answers (1929)