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“Here upon earth are early awakenings,
Moments that tremble in an air divine,
And grown upon the yearning of her soil
Time's sun-flowers' gaze at gold Eternity:
There are imperishable beatitudes.
A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
World after coloured and ecstatic world
Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany." |
| Savitri-279 |
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“Thought there has revelation’s sun-bright eyes;
The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,
Enters Truth’s inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.” |
| Savitri-660 |
“Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
His soul could sail beyond thought’s luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.” |
| Savitri-33 |
“It was about the Word, the primal sound. Sri Aurobindo speaks of it in Savitri: the essence of Word and how it will express itself, how it will bring in the possibility of a Supramental expression that will take the place of languages... When this essential sound becomes a material sound, it will give birth to the new expression which will express the Supramental word.” |
| The Mother |
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The Descent |
“For a knowledge from above begins to descend, frequently, constantly, then uninterruptedly, and to manifest in the mind’s quietude or silence;…”1
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Sri Aurobindo |
“…all truth and practice… must be constantly renovated
by fresh streams of spirit…”2
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Sri Aurobindo |
“An integral and synthetic Yoga…embraces the knowledge received from the past, it seeks to organize anew for the present and the future. An absolute liberty of experience and of the restatement of knowledge in new terms and combinations is the condition of its self-formation.”3
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Sri Aurobindo |
| “…but when we advance in self-knowledge, we find that all our thought and will originate from above though formed in the mind and there first overtly active. ”4 |
Sri Aurobindo |
“For knowledge shall pour down in radiant streams
And even darkened mind quiver with new life
And kindle and burn with the Ideal’s fire
And turn to escape from mortal ignorance ”6 |
| Sri Aurobindo |
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A concentrated writing can be truly offered near the Divine if it remains free absolutely from all motives. It should be written for the sole satisfaction of the Divine, for the sole reception of the transcendent wisdom, for the sole opening towards the Word that can incarnate the highest Truth and a concentration on central thought and central Truth that can become Omnipotent. It can be made fit for the Divine offering if the writing is made perfect even in its smallest external detail as well as the highest spirit and soul quality from which it has descended.
So the first objective of The Descent is to restate the Spiritual experience and bridge the gulf between Sri Aurobindo’s early sadhana at Pondicherry and The Mother’s last cellular transformation experience which is a preliminary effort to accumulate Their vast Spiritual wealth and the utter need to live in the atmosphere of Their Supreme Presence; its second objective is to revise and heighten the already restated statements through fresh instreaming of overhead Spiritual experiences and Wisdom which is extended to overcome the human limitation of fragmentary knowledge in Ignorance, leading towards an integration of Knowledge; its third objective is to identify The Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s established and the most concentrated Spiritual experiences and find the possible means of purification to repeat those experiences which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal movement of Consciousness our external life is perfected; its fourth objective is to establish a strong Spiritual foundation which will serve as a platform for the development and consummation of Their highest hinted Spiritual experiences and utilise that base as lever action to escape into still unknown heights of Consciousness and call down the corresponding divine Light to penetrate into the untouched nether domain of dark Inconscient plane.
So the writings of The Descent depend firstly on the Word that descends from above and is caught through large, subtle and plastic Idea which does not insist too much on rigid definition; secondly, it organises anew the highest and the best written wisdom already available on the earth through its past and present Spiritual quests; thirdly, some of its writings are based on the construction of the mind which expresses partial and practical truth and waits till its constant element of falsity is replaced by the higher and wider knowledge from within and above; fourthly, to mind Spiritual experiences of Individual, Cosmic and Transcendent Beings are intelligible as eternal hierarchies of powers of Consciousness and we cannot hope to describe adequately the visions of heights of Consciousness or experience of the mysteries Absolute in terms of negative or positive abstract mental language but can only hope to indicate, glimpse and hint it to the utmost power of our pure symbolic language which is ‘yet to be discovered and mapped in their completeness;’5 fifthly, integral Yoga authorises ‘an absolute liberty’7 to enter new subjective Spiritual experience and reaffirm rightly all knowledge in new terms and new combinations; sixthly, Consciousness must be trained to move in between Subliminal, Psychic and Spiritual plane and through this movement corresponding Psychic and Spiritual Sheaths and adjacent mental, vital and physical sheaths are enlarged, purified, transformed and perfected and writing/oration can be used as one of the important means for this movement of Consciousness; and lastly, it aims at elevating all writings towards the status of absolute Brahman through constant restatement extending over a long formative period of Sadhana and in this endless growth of impersonal and universal state there is no trace of negation, discord and division and one enters into exceedingly affirmative and uniting Consciousness with radically different ecstatic awareness of things. There can develop Supramental envisaging of the universe whose each step and action are dictated by an innate Spiritual vision, a comprehensive and exact penetration into the truth of all and the truth of each thing. Large and plastic idea and speech can be expressed through supreme effort of creative Consciousness in carrying those highest experiences to its farthest end and assist mankind towards the possession of the knowledge of the God and the supreme Reality..
The Descent can serve its true purpose when it will be able to catch without ego, the most of the secret threads of integral Yoga or seizes the knowledge of the Unknowable directly, not by intellectual poor abstract understanding but by discovery of another overhead language which is at once creatively metaphysical, revealingly poetic, substantially malleable and can pour down in a vivid plastic massiveness of flaming stream.
A Sadhaka’s Spiritual life is secured through complete union of Soul with the universal and transcendent Divine and by fulfilment of the task of accountability in sadhana before his Self, World and Divine. His principal motive is to give Them (Divine) consecrated service and this slavehood to the Divine gives him right to enter deep into Their Teachings. Their Teachings contain vast Truth of reconciling wisdom and oneness whose wrong discrimination and misuse can make life asuric and a separative commerce8with the world for some personal gain may become predominant. If he accumulates Their Spiritual opulence rightly without separate personal energy of ego, vidhipurbakam, then life will flower unimaginably with predominance of Truth, Plasticity, Consciousness and Love in his frontal nature and he will serve at once as Instrument and Participant in the bliss of universal Divine action and the bliss of world transformation.
If the restatement of Their Teaching or written truth is cast rightly through calling down of fresh immortal thought, then the combined wisdom of past and present descended truths can awake new future immensities and the unfinished integral Yoga can move ahead. If a Power from the chamber of the Soul has interfered, inspired, guided and commanded at every step and in every detail, then he can discover the true Mantra of life or the ‘sole timeless Word.’9 By the touch of Supramental Sunlight, a child-like immature thought can richly turn into ‘luminous patterns of’10 Soul’s deep truth. Or ‘Even the youngest child-thought of the mind’11 can incarnate ‘some touch of highest things.’11 Supramental word can pour into the plastic language with Light, Power and Force and this can be easily and freely done by rare gifted Soul whose intellect is completely pacified, separation is affected between intuitive and intellectual element of thought and physical consciousness, sense organs and mind have been sufficiently purified. The Mother pointed out that all future book carrying Supramental vibration is ‘not a teaching, not even a revelation’12 but it must convey the forceful message and feeling of decisive and ‘formidable action coming direct from the Supreme.’12 The Mother further defined that a book carrying the Supramental vibration would be simple and all-embracing and ‘any fool could read it like a story and feel perfectly satisfied – and he wouldn’t even notice it taking hold of him inside and changing him.’13 |
References:
1: CWSA/22/ The life Divine-946,
2: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-5,
3: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-56,
4: CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-818,
5: CWSA/22/ The life Divine-953,
6: Savitri-710,
7: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-56,
8: “The man of knowledge, the liberated soul offers on the contrary all his activities to the one eternal Godhead without any attachment to their fruit or to the satisfaction of his lower personal desires. He works for God, not for himself, for the universal welfare, for the Soul of the world and not for any particular object which is of his own personal creation or for any construction of his mental will or object of his vital longings, as a divine agent, not as a principal and separate profiteer in the world commerce. And this, it must be noted, is a thing that cannot be really done except in proportion as the mind arrives at equality, universality, wide impersonality, and a clear freedom from every disguise of the insistent ego: for without these things the claim to be thus acting is a pretension or an illusion.”
CWSA/19/Essays on the Gita-458,
9: Savitri-97,
10: “Into luminous patterns of her soul’s deep truth,” Savitri-356,
11: Savitri-328,
12: The Mother’s Agenda/2/91,
13: The Mother’s Agenda/December 20, 1961,
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| OM TAT SAT |
Sri Matriniketan Ashram,
Managed by The Mother’s International Centre Trust,
Regd.No-146/24.11.97. Vill: Ramachandrapur, PO: Kukudakhandi-761100,
Via: Brahmapur, Dist: Ganjam, State: Odisha, India
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