The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being.
What is required is faith. Man has body, life and mind but that is not all that constitutes man. He has risen to the mind as a result of evolution. Now a higher consciousness will be evolved – this I call Supermind. It is the instrument of the Divine Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness.
Samskrit language, as has been universally recognized by those competent to form a judgment, is one of the most magnificent, the most perfect, the most prominent and wonderfully sufficient literary instrument developed by the human mind.
An active mind needs an outlet. If it stops by itself from within, well and good; otherwise one should not try to stop this by force.
Turkey, Japan do great work because they can keep under control their little personal selfishness, egoism, jealousy, etc. when they get down to work.
With which part do you watch? Surely with the mind? That won’t do. It is the silent Purusha within who must watch all.
Do not allow things to intrude from outside.
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break a dead resistance in the mortal’s heart.
All can be done if the god-touch is there.
I spent quite sometime just watching enthralled, the gnarled hands of Mother Teresa in a portrait because those hands are associated with bringing comfort to the aged and abandoned in Kolkata’s streets. So they are beautiful.
Transcendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.
Still the invisible Magnet drew his soul.
The utmost mission of Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and this higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination.
But though hast come and all will surely change.
In our defeated hearts God’s strength survives.
An incense floated in the quivering air, A mystic happiness trembled in the breast As if the invisible Beloved had come Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet And the world change with the beauty of a smile.
A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes: He dreams of her beauty made for ever his, He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear, He dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss.
Yoga is the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality.
For it is because he acts ignorantly, with a wrong intelligence and therefore a wrong will in these matters, that man is or seems to be bound by his works; otherwise works are no bondage to the free soul.
There are two Hinduisms; one which takes its stand on the kitchen and seeks its Paradise by cleaning the body; another which seeks God, not through the cooking pot and the social convention, but in the soul. The latter is also Hinduism and it is a good deal older and more enduring than the other; it is the Hinduism of Bhishma and Srikrishna, of Shankara and Chaitanya, the Hinduism which exceeds Hindusthan, was from of old and will be for ever, because it grows eternally through the aeons.
The first step on this long path is to consecrate all our works as a sacrifice to the Divine in us and in the world.