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flowers
Their Spiritual significance
Photo Collection
Mental curiosity
Must be seriously controlled for it not to be dangerous.
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Holmskioldia sanguinea Retz. (Lamiaceae [= Labiatae]; Alt. Verbenaceae)
Chinese hatplant
Lemon yellow
One who is moved to yoga by some curiosity of the mind or even by its desire for knowledge can turn aside from the path from disappointment or any other cause; still more can those who take it up from some inner ambition or vital desire turn away through revolt or frustration or the despondency of frequent check and failure. But if this deeper thing is there, then one cannot permanently leave the path of spiritual endeavour: one may decide to leave the path but is not allowed from within to do it or one may leave but is obliged to return to it by the secret spiritual need within him.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4
However, there is a very great difference, always, between a kind of mental curiosity which plays with words and ideas, and a true aspiration of the being which means that truly, really, it is that which counts, essentially, and nothing else - that aspiration, that inner will because of which nothing has any value except that, that realisation; nothing counts except that; there is no other reason for existence, for living, than that.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 8. - Questions And Answers (1956)
This curiosity is different from the desire to know, for it consists in a childish amused wonder and a desire merely to repeat the experience, not to learn from it.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 27. - Supplement
Culture is still in its imaginative childhood and the thinking mind rather works for the curiosity and beauty of thought and even more for the curiosity and beauty of the mere expression of thought than for its light and its vision.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 9. - The Future Poetry
You must have a great deal of sincerity, a little courage and perseverance and then a sort of mental curiosity, you understand, curious, seeking to know, interested, wanting to learn. To love to learn: that, one must have in one's nature.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 5. - Questions And Answers (1953)
Reading can be only a momentary help to prepare the mind. But the real knowledge does not come by reading. Some preparation for the inner knowledge may be helpful - but the mind should not be too superficially active or seek to know only for curiosity's sake. Reading novels is always distracting if you are deep in Sadhana. It is better to avoid it now.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 9. - The Future Poetry
Not to read worthless stuff or for mere entertainment or for a dilettante intellectual curiosity which is of the nature of a mental dram-drinking. When one is established in the highest consciousness, one can read nothing or everything; it makes no difference - but that is still far off.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4
But if out of curiosity, for instance (it's a mental illness in humans), you start asking yourself, "What's that? What effect will it have? What's going to happen?" (what the body calls "the desire to learn"), if you are unlucky enough to be that way, you can be sure (laughing) that you'll have something very unpleasant which, according to the doctor (according to ignoramuses), becomes an illness or disrupts the body's functioning. While if you don't have that unhealthy curiosity and, on the contrary, will the harmony not to be disrupted, you only have to, we could say poetically, bring one drop of the Lord on the troubled spot for everything to be fine again.
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 4. - 1963
It's childish curiosity. It doesn't help you in any way, it's merely either to glory in it or have fun, but it's unimportant. Some people still write to me, "Will you please tell me what my past lives were?" I answer them, "It's not interesting. What's interesting is the life you want to realize, not the errors you made in the past!"
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 8. - 1967
I go on seeing throngs of people whom I don't know. And with more than half, it's per-fect-ly useless: curiosity, pride, bragging. That's all. So they can say, "Oh, you know, I saw the Mother." So what!
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 8. - 1967
As for people being allowed to come in freely for Darshan without permission, which would soon convert me into a thing for show and an object of curiosity, often critical or hostile curiosity, it is I who would be the first to cry "stop".
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 25. - The Mother
The "Mind" in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words "mind" and "mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 22. - Letters on Yoga.-P.1
The mind proper is divided into three parts - thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind - the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forces for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give).
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 22. - Letters on Yoga.-P.1
Mental capacity is developed in silent meditation.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 12. - On Education
The mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 15. - Words of the Mother