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flowers
Their Spiritual significance
Photo Collection
Humility before the Divine in the physical nature
First attitude needed for transformation.
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Tarenna asiatica (L.) Kuntze ex K. Schumann (Rubiaceae)
Asiatic tarenna
Cream
Pavetta thomsonii (Rubiaceae)
Humility
Humility, a perfect humility, is the condition for all realization. The mind is so cocksure. It thinks it knows everything, understands everything. And if ever it acts through idealism to serve a cause that appears noble to it, it becomes even more arrogant more intransigent, and it is almost impossible to make it see that there might be something still higher beyond its noble conceptions and its great altruistic or other ideals. Humility is the only remedy. I am not speaking of humility as conceived by certain religions, with this God that belittles his creatures and only likes to see them down on their knees. When I was a child, this kind of humility revolted me, and I refused to believe in a God that wants to belittle his creatures. I don't mean that kind of humility, but rather the recognition that one does not know, that one knows nothing, and that there may be something beyond what presently appears to us as the truest, the most noble or disinterested. True humility consists in constantly referring oneself to the Lord, in placing all before Him. When I receive a blow (and there are quite a few of them in my sadhana), my immediate, spontaneous reaction, like a spring, is to throw myself before Him and to say, "Thou, Lord".
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 1. - 1951-1960
It is very simple, when people are told "be humble", they think immediately of "being humble before other men" and that humility is wrong. True humility is humility before the Divine, that is, a precise, exact, living sense that one is nothing, one can do nothing, understand nothing without the Divine, that even if one is exceptionally intelligent and capable, this is nothing in comparison with the divine Consciousness, and this sense one must always keep, because then one always has the true attitude of receptivity - a humble receptivity that does not put personal pretensions in opposition to the Divine.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 5. - Questions And Answers (1953)
And the charm, the charm of the substance enveloping the cube was inexpressible! Something... I can't describe. There were no contrasts, no... the whole thing was in total harmony. Of course, to say it resembled tulle is a crude comparison - a very, very fine tulle, and gray.... Do you know that little wild grass I've named "Humility"?
Yes, it's silver, silver-gray.
Is it silver, is it...? It's indefinable. That's just what makes that grass so exquisite. Well, the tulle was that color. Afterwards, a long time after, when I began to observe and to... not actually "think," but to try to formulate it, I noticed the color was identical. "Now I know why I named it Humility!" I said to myself. It's like being in a domain where things are known quite naturally, you understand - there's no seeking.
How lovely it was! The sense of delicate beauty in things.
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 3. - 1962
When I speak of the physical consciousness, I mean the physical mind and the physical vital as well as the body consciousness proper.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4
In my view the body as well as the mind and life has to be spiritualised or, one may say, divinised so as to be a fit instrument and receptacle for the realisation of the Divine. It has its part in the Divine Lila, even, according to the Vaishnava Sadhana, in the joy and beauty of Divine Love. That does not mean that the body has to be valued for its own separate sake or that the creation of a divine body in a future evolution of the whole being has to be contemplated as an end and not a means - that would be a serious error which would not be admissible. In any case, my speculations about an extreme form of divinisation are something in a far distance and are no part of the preoccupations of the spiritual life in the near future.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 26. - On Himself