Spiritual significance of flowers, Rose = Rosa, Rosaceae

Small very fragrant semi-double ivory white flower tinged with pink; borne in full pendulous sprays. A vigorous climber.

98 — Number of the plant

at the book: The Mother. The Spiritual Significance of Flowers.- 1-st Ed. / Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry (India).- Singapore: Ho Printing, 2000.- ISBN 81-7058-609-7

Classification

► Division Magnoliophyta - Flowering plants

► Class Magnoliopsida - Dicotyledons

► Subclass Rosidae

► Order Rosales

► Family Rosaceae - Rose family

► Subfamily Rosoideae

► Tribe Roseae

Synonyms

Common names

Rose (English)

Roses (English)

Rose (French)

Роза (Russian)

Culab (India (Hindi))

Roja (India (Tamil))

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 4. - Bengali Writings. Translated into English

My aspiration to Thee, O Lord, has taken the form of a beautiful rose, harmonious, full in bloom, rich in fragrance. I stretch it out to Thee with both arms in a gesture of offering and I ask of Thee: If my understanding is limited, widen it; if my knowledge is obscure, enlighten it; if my heart is empty of ardour, set it aflame; if my love is insignificant, make it intense; if my feelings are ignorant and egoistic, give them the full consciousness in the Truth. And the "I" which demands this of Thee, O Lord, is not a little personality lost amidst thousands of others. It is the whole earth that aspires to Thee in a movement full of fervour.

In the perfect silence of my contemplation all widens to infinity, and in the perfect peace of that silence Thou appearest in the resplendent glory of Thy Light.

I saw a series of roses, this big (gesture of about ten inches), coming one after the other - magnificent! All kinds of colors. They certainly had a significance: one would arrive, come forward, as if giving a little bow, and go away, and then another arrived - roses this big.... Because I had complained just before! It was just in front of you (gesture on the heart level), magnificent roses of a perfect shape, and all kinds of colors.

Reddish pink rose = psychic love or surrender. White rose = pure spiritual surrender.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3

Within us, there are two centres of the Purusha, the inner Soul through which he touches us to our awakening; there is the Purusha in the lotus of the heart which opens upward all our powers and the Purusha in the thousand-petalled lotus whence descend through the thought and will, opening the third eye in us, the lightnings of vision and the fire of the divine energy. The bliss existence may come to us through either one of these centres. When the lotus of the heart breaks open, we feel a divine joy, love and peace expanding in us like a flower of light which irradiates the whole being. They can then unite themselves with their secret source, the Divine in our hearts, and adore him as in a temple; they can flow upwards to take possession of the thought and the will and break out upward towards the Transcendent; they stream out in thought and feeling and act towards all that is around us. But so long as our normal being offers any obstacle or is not wholly moulded into a response to this divine influence or an instrument of this divine possession, the experience will be intermittent and we may fall back constantly into our old mortal heart; but by repetition, abhyasa, or by the force of our desire and adoration of the Divine, it will be progressively remoulded until this abnormal experience becomes our natural consciousness.

When the other upper lotus opens, the whole mind becomes full of a divine light, joy and power, behind which is the Divine, the Lord of our being on his throne with our soul beside him or drawn inward into his rays; all the thought and will become then a luminosity, power and ecstasy; in communication with the Transcendent, this can pour down towards our mortal members and flow by them outwards on the world. In this dawn too there are, as the Vedic mystics knew, our alternations of its day and night, our exiles from the light; but as we grow in the power to hold this new existence, we become able to look long on the sun from which this irradiation proceeds and in our inner being we can grow one body with it. Sometimes the rapidity of this change depends on the strength of our longing for the Divine thus revealed, and on the intensity of our force of seeking; but at others it proceeds rather by a passive surrender to the rhythms of his all-wise working which acts always by its own at first inscrutable method. But the latter becomes the foundation when our love and trust are complete and our whole being lies in the clasp of a Power that is perfect love and wisdom.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volumes 20-21. - The Synthesis of Yoga

Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 19. - The Life Divine: Book 2

Spirituality can only come by opening of the mind, vital and physical to the inmost soul, to the higher Self, to the Divine, and their subordination to the spiritual forces and instrumentation as channels of the inner Light, the higher Knowledge and Power.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 22. - Letters on Yoga.-P.1

All perfection of which the outer man is capable, is only a realising of the eternal perfection of the Spirit within him. We know the Divine and become the Divine, because we are That already in our secret nature.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volumes 20-21. - The Synthesis of Yoga

The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, - God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 18. - The Life Divine: Books 1

The spiritual life, the life of Yoga, has for its object to grow into the divine consciousness and for its result to purify, intensify, glorify and perfect what is in you. It makes you a power for manifesting of the Divine; it raises the character of each personality to its full value and brings it to its maximum expression; for this is part of the Divine plan.

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 3. - Questions and Answers (1929)

But the very spirit of Yoga is this, to make the exceptional normal, and to turn that which is above us and greater than our normal selves into our own constant consciousness. Therefore we should not hesitate to open ourselves more steadily to whatever experience of the Infinite we have, to purify and intensify it, to make it our object of constant thought and contemplation, till it becomes the originating power that acts in us, the Godhead we adore and embrace, our whole being is put into tune with it and it is made the very self of our being.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volumes 20-21. - The Synthesis of Yoga

By surrender we mean ... a spontaneous self-giving, a giving of all your self to the Divine, to a greater Consciousness of which you are a part. Surrender will not diminish, but increase; it will not lessen or weaken or destroy your personality, it will fortify and aggrandise it. Surrender means a free total giving with all the delight of the giving; there is no sense of sacrifice in it. If you have the slightest feeling that you are making a sacrifice, then it is no longer surrender. For it means that you reserve yourself or that you are trying to give, with grudging or with pain and effort, and have not the joy of the gift, perhaps not even the feeling that you are giving. When you do anything with the sense of a compression of your being, be sure that you are doing it in the wrong way. True surrender enlarges you; it increases your capacity; it gives you a greater measure in quality and in quantity which you could not have had by yourself. This new greater measure of quality and quantity is different from anything you could attain before: you enter into another world, into a wideness which you could not have entered if you did not surrender. It is as when a drop of water falls into the sea; if it still kept there its separate identity, it would remain a little drop of water and nothing more, a little drop crushed by all the immensity around, because it has not surrendered. But, surrendering, it unites with the sea and participates in the nature and power and vastness of the whole sea.

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 3. - Questions and Answers (1929)

Surrender is the decision taken to hand over the responsibility of your life to the Divine. Without this decision nothing is at all possible; if you do not surrender, the Yoga is entirely out of the question. Everything else comes naturally after it, for the whole process starts with surrender. You can surrender either through knowledge or through devotion. You may have a strong intuition that the Divine alone is the truth and a luminous conviction that without the Divine you cannot manage. Or you may have a spontaneous feeling that this line is the only way of being happy, a strong psychic desire to belong exclusively to the Divine: "I do not belong to myself," you say, and give up the responsibility of your being to the Truth. Then comes self-offering: "Here I am, a creature of various qualities, good and bad, dark and enlightened. I offer myself as I am to you, take me up with all my ups and downs, conflicting impulses and tendencies do whatever you like with me."

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 3. - Questions and Answers (1929)

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 8. - Questions And Answers (1956)

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3

One is truly perfectly pure only when the whole being, in all its elements and all its movements, adheres fully, exclusively, to the divine Will. This indeed is total purity. It does not depend on any moral or social law, any mental convention of any kind. It depends exclusively on this: when all the elements and all the movements of the being adhere exclusively and totally to the divine Will.

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 6. - Questions And Answers (1954)

What I call purity, the true purity, is not all those things morality teaches: it is non-ego.

Him, not only because we have given Him everything and consecrated ourselves totally to Him (that is not enough), but Him because He has taken total possession of the human instrument.

There is a force of purity, not the purity of the moralist, but an essential purity of spirit, in the very substance of the being.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4

Look what I've received (Mother hands a garland of jasmine), you'll give it to Sujata - it smells nice!

This is purity, to accept no other influence but only the influence of the Divine.

get the higher consciousness, its light and the workings of its power down into the obscurer parts of the nature

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4

"Keep the quietude and do not mind if it is for a time an empty quietude; the consciousness is often like a vessel which has to be emptied of its mixed or undesirable contents; it has to be kept vacant for a while till it can be filled with things new and true, right and pure." (Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3)

By aspiration, the rejection of the lower movements, a call to a higher force. If you do not accept certain movements, then naturally, when they find that they can't manifest, gradually they diminish in force and stop occurring. If you refuse to express everything that is of a lower kind, little by little the very thing disappears, and the consciousness is emptied of lower things. It is by refusing to give expression – I mean not only in action but also in thought, in feeling. When impulses, thoughts, emotion come, if you refuse to express them, if you push them aside and remain in a state of inner aspiration and calm, then gradually they lose their force and stop coming. So the consciousness is emptied of its lower movements.

But for instance, when undesirable thoughts come, if you look at them, observe them, if you take pleasure in following them in their movements, they will never stop coming. It is the same thing when you have undesirable feelings or sensation: if you pay attention to them, concentrate on them or even look at them with a certain indulgence, they will never stop. But if you absolutely refuse to receive and express them, after some time they stop. You must be patient and very persistent.

In a great aspiration, if you can put yourself into contact with something higher, some influence of your psychic being or some light from above, and if you can manage to put this in touch with these lower movements, naturally they stop more quickly. But before even being able to draw these things by aspiration, you can already stop those movements from finding expression in you by a very persistent and patient refusal. When thoughts which you do not like come, if you just brush them away and do not pay them any attention at all, after some time they won't come any longer. But you must do this very persistently and regularly.

The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 6. - Questions And Answers (1954)