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flowers
Their Spiritual significance
Photo Collection
Progress of the new creation
Progress of Auroville
Each must find the activity favourable to his progress.
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Hibiscus rosa-sinensis L. (Malvaceae)
Shoeblackplant
Sturdy medium-sized single cup-shaped flower with a frilled yellow border and a firelike reddish orange centre that radiates out over much of the petals.
So long as you can't be in joy, a constant, calm, peaceful, luminous, invariable joy, well, it means that you have still to work to purify yourself, and sometimes work hard. But this is the sign.
It is with the sense of separation that pain, suffering, misery, ignorance, and all incapacities have come. It is with an absolute self-giving, self-forgetfulness in a total consecration that suffering disappears and is replaced by a joy which nothing can veil.
And only when this joy is established here in this world can it be truly transformed and there be a new life, a new creation, a new realisation. The joy must first be established in the consciousness and then later the material transformation will take place; but not before.
Truly speaking, it is with the Adversary that suffering came into the world. And it's only joy which can vanquish him, nothing else - vanquish him definitively, finally.
It is Delight which has created, and it is Delight which will accomplish.
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 7. - Questions And Answers (1955)
What the evolutionary Power has done is to make a few individuals aware of their souls, conscious of their selves, aware of the eternal being that they are, to put them into communion with the Divinity or the Reality which is concealed by her appearances: a certain change of nature prepares, accompanies or follows upon this illumination, but it is not the complete and radical change which establishes a secure and settled new principle, a new creation, a permanent new order of being in the field of terrestrial Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that Nature.
This is because the principle of spirituality has yet to affirm itself in its own complete right and sovereignty; it has been up till now a power for the mental being to escape from itself or to refine and raise itself to a spiritual poise, it has availed for the release of the Spirit from mind and for the enlargement of the being in a spiritualised mind and heart, but not, - or rather not yet sufficiently, - for the self-affirmation of the Spirit in its own dynamic and sovereign mastery free from the mind's limitations and from the mental instrumentation. The development of another instrumentation has begun, but has yet to become total and effective; it has besides to cease to be a purely individual self-creation in an original Ignorance, something supernormal to earth-life that must always be acquired as an individual achievement by a difficult endeavour. It must become the normal nature of a new type of being; as Mind is established here on a basis of Ignorance seeking for Knowledge and growing into Knowledge, so Supermind must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its own greater Light. But this cannot be so long as the spiritual-mental being has not risen fully to Supermind and brought down its powers into terrestrial existence. For the gulf between Mind and Supermind has to be bridged, the closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now a void and a silence. This can be done only by the triple transformation to which we have already made a passing reference: there must first be the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into a soul-instrumentation; on that or along with that there must be the spiritual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force, Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must supervene the supramental transmutation, - there must take place as the crowning movement the ascent into the Supermind and the transforming descent of the supramental Consciousness into our entire being and nature.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 19. - The Life Divine: Book 2
The manifested creation is limited by the power to which it belongs and sees and lives according to it and can only see more, live more powerfully, change its world by opening or moving towards or making descend a greater power of consciousness that was above it. This is what is happening in the evolution of consciousness in our world, a world of inanimate matter producing under the stress of this necessity a power of life, a power of mind which bring into it new forms of creation and still labouring to produce, to make descend into it some supramental power. It is further an operation of creative force which moves between two poles of consciousness. On one side there is a secret consciousness within and above which contains in it all potentialities-there eternally manifest, here awaiting delivery - of light, peace, power and bliss. On the other side there is another, outward on the surface and below, that starts from the apparent opposite of unconsciousness, inertia, blind stress, possibility of suffering and grows by receiving into itself higher and higher powers which make it always re-create its manifestation in larger terms, each new creation of this kind bringing out something of the inner potentiality, making it more and more possible to bring down the Perfection that waits above. As long as the outward personality we call ourselves is centred in the lower powers of consciousness, the riddle of its own existence, its purpose, its necessity is to it an insoluble enigma; if something of the truth is at all conveyed to this outward mental man, he but imperfectly grasps it and perhaps misinterprets and misuses and mislives it. His true staff of walking is made more of a fire of faith than any ascertained and indubitable light of knowledge. It is only by rising toward a higher consciousness beyond the mental line and therefore superconscient now to him that he can emerge from his inability and his ignorance. His full liberation and enlightenment will come when he crosses the line into the light of a new superconscient existence. That is the transcendence which was the object of aspiration of the mystics and the spiritual seekers.
But in itself this would change nothing in the creation here, the evasion of a liberated soul from the world makes to that world no difference. But this crossing of the line if turned not only to an ascending but to a descending purpose would mean the transformation of the line from what it now is, a lid, a barrier, into a passage for the higher powers of consciousness of the Being now above it. It would mean a new creation on earth, a bringing in of the ultimate powers which would reverse the conditions here, in as much as that would produce a creation raised into the full flood of spiritual and supramental light in place of one emerging into a half-light of mind out of a darkness of material inconscience. It is only in such a full flood of the realised spirit that the embodied being could know, in the sense of all that was involved in it, the meaning and temporary necessity of his descent into the darkness and its conditions and at the same time dissolve them by a luminous transmutation into a manifestation here of the revealed and no longer of the veiled and disguised or apparently deformed Divine.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 22. - Letters on Yoga.-P.1
If mankind could but see though in a glimpse of fleeting experience what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all & never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust & scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature, to forbid the turning away of our feet from her ordinary pastures.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 17. - The Hour of God
Give up all personal seeking for comfort, satisfaction, enjoyment or happiness. Be only a burning fire for progress, take whatever comes to you as an aid to your progress and immediately make whatever progress is required.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 12. - On Education
Above all, it is the will for progress and self-purification which lights the fire. The will for progress. Those who have a strong will, when they turn it towards spiritual progress and purification, automatically light the fire within themselves.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 8. - Questions And Answers (1956)
Always ready to change everything, except ONE thing: to aspire. That thirst.
I quite understand: some people don't like the idea of a "Divine" because it immediately gets mixed up with all the European or Western conceptions (which are dreadful), and so it makes their lives a little bit more complicated - but we don't need that! The "something" we need, the Perfection we need, the Light we need, the Love we need, the Truth we need, the supreme Perfection we need - and that's all. The formulas ... the fewer the formulas, the better. A need, a need, a need ... that THE Thing alone can satisfy, nothing else, no half measure. That alone. And then, move on! Move on! Your path will be your path, it doesn't matter; any path, any path whatever.
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 5. - 1964
If mankind could but see though in a glimpse of fleeting experience what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all & never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust & scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature, to forbid the turning away of our feet from her ordinary pastures.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 17. - The Hour of God
Give up all personal seeking for comfort, satisfaction, enjoyment or happiness. Be only a burning fire for progress, take whatever comes to you as an aid to your progress and immediately make whatever progress is required.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 12. - On Education
Above all, it is the will for progress and self-purification which lights the fire. The will for progress. Those who have a strong will, when they turn it towards spiritual progress and purification, automatically light the fire within themselves.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 8. - Questions And Answers (1956)
Always ready to change everything, except ONE thing: to aspire. That thirst.
I quite understand: some people don't like the idea of a "Divine" because it immediately gets mixed up with all the European or Western conceptions (which are dreadful), and so it makes their lives a little bit more complicated - but we don't need that! The "something" we need, the Perfection we need, the Light we need, the Love we need, the Truth we need, the supreme Perfection we need - and that's all. The formulas ... the fewer the formulas, the better. A need, a need, a need ... that THE Thing alone can satisfy, nothing else, no half measure. That alone. And then, move on! Move on! Your path will be your path, it doesn't matter; any path, any path whatever.
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 5. - 1964