All Life Is Yoga: The Soul and How to Find It

Discovery of the Soul – Its Purpose

Words of Sri Aurobindo

To be ourselves liberated from ego and realise our true selves is the first necessity; all else can be achieved as a luminous result, a necessary consequence. That is one reason why a spiritual call must be accepted as imperative and take precedence over all other claims, intellectual, ethical, social, that belong to the domain of the Ignorance...

Discovery of the Soul – Its Base

Words of Sri Aurobindo

The realisation of the psychic being, its awakening and the bringing of it in front depend mainly on the extent to which one can develop a personal relation with the Divine,4 a relation of bhakti, love, reliance, self-giving, rejection of the insistences of the separating and self-asserting mental, vital and physical ego.

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4 Elsewhere, in a different context, the Mother has exemplified this personal relation with the Divine in these words: „When we know how to call the Lord in all circumstances to make Him share in all events of our life, then life becomes an Ananda, because He covers all with His Delight.” (White Roses, message of 11.4.1968)

Discovery of the Soul – Its Discipline

Words of Sri Aurobindo

(1) Offer yourself more and more – all the consciousness, all that happens in it, all your work and action.

(2) If you have faults and weaknesses, hold them up before the Divine to be changed or abolished.

(3) Try to do what I told you, concentrate in the heart till you constantly feel the Presence there.

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Resistances to the Soul‘s Emergence

Words of Sri Aurobindo

The sunlit path can be followed by those who are able to practise surrender, first a central surrender and afterwards a more complete self-giving in all the parts of the being. If they can achieve and preserve the attitude of the central surrender, if they can rely wholly on the Divine and accept cheerfully whatever comes to them from the Divine, then their path becomes sunlit and may even be straightforward and easy. They will not escape all difficulties, no seeker can, but they will be able to meet them without pain and despondency, – as indeed the Gita recommends that Yoga should be practised, anirvinnacetasa, – trusting in the inner guidance and perceiving it more and more or else in the outer guidance of the Guru. It can also be followed even when one feels no light and no guidance if there is or if one can acquire a bright settled faith and happy bhakti or has the nature of the spiritual optimist and the firm belief or feeling that all that is done by the Divine is done for the best even when we cannot understand his action. But all have not this nature, most are very far from it, and the complete or even the central surrender is not easy to get and to keep it always is hard enough for our human nature. When these things are not there, the liberty of the soul is not attained and we have instead to undergo the law or fulfil a hard and difficult discipline.

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Next Step in Our Evolutionary Destiny

Words of Sri Aurobindo

The psychic is the first of two transformations necessary – if you have the psychic transformation it facilitates immensely the other, i.e., the transformation of the ordinary human into the higher spiritual consciousness – otherwise one is likely to have either a slow and dull or exciting but perilous journey.

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Meditations on the Soul

Words of Sri Aurobindo

But since she knows the toil of mind and life

As a mother feels and shares her children‘s lives,

She puts forth a small portion of herself,

A being no bigger than the thumb of man

Into a hidden region of the heart

To face the pang and to forget the bliss,

To share the suffering and endure earth‘s wounds

And labour mid the labour of the stars.

This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,

Exults in victory, struggles for the crown;

Identified with the mind and body and life,

It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,

Bleeds with Fate‘s whips and hangs upon the cross,

Yet is the unwounded and immortal self

Supporting the actor in the human scene.

Through this she sends us her glory and her powers,

Pushes to wisdom‘s heights, through misery‘s gulfs;

She gives us strength to do our daily task

And sympathy that partakes of others‘ grief

And the little strength we have to help our race,

We who must fill the role of the universe

Acting itself out in a slight human shape

And on our shoulders carry the struggling world.

This is in us the godhead small and marred;

In this human portion of divinity

She seats the greatness of the Soul in Time

To uplift from light to light, from power to power,

Till on a heavenly peak it stands, a king.

In body weak, in its heart an invincible might,

It climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand,

A toiling spirit in a mortal shape.

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This bodily appearance is not all;

The form deceives, the person is a mask;

Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years

An incognito of the Imperishable.

A spirit that is a flame of God abides,

A fiery portion of the Wonderful,

Artist of his own beauty and delight,

Immortal in our mortal poverty.

This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,

This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,

Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,

Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

In the mute strength of the occult Idea

Determining predestined shape and act,

Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,

Changing his imaged self from form to form,

He regards the icon growing by his gaze

And in the worm foresees the coming god.

*

This seed-self sown in the Indeterminate

Forfeits its glory of divinity,

Concealing the omnipotence of its Force,

Concealing the omniscience of its Soul;

An agent of its own transcendent Will,

It merges knowledge in the inconscient deep;

Accepting error, sorrow, death and pain,

It pays the ransom of the ignorant Night,

Redeeming by its substance Nature‘s fall.

*

In this investiture of fleshly life

A soul that is a spark of God survives

And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen

And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

*

Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;

Its influence pressing on our heart and mind

Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.

It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;

We see beyond self‘s walls our limitless self,

We gaze through our world‘s glass at half-seen vasts,

We hunt for the Truth behind apparent things.

*

A Person persistent through the lapse of worlds,

Although the same for ever in many shapes

By the outward mind unrecognisable,

Assuming names unknown in unknown climes

Imprints through Time upon the earth‘s worn page

A growing figure of its secret self,

And learns by experience what the spirit knew,

Till it can see its truth alive and God.

*

Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven

Or Heaven descend into earth‘s mortal state.

But for such vast spiritual change to be,

Out of the mystic cavern in man‘s heart

The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil

And step into common nature‘s crowded rooms

And stand uncovered in that nature‘s front

And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life.

*

Although Death walks beside us on Life‘s road,

A dim bystander at the body‘s start

And a last judgment on man‘s futile works,

Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:

Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride

The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,

A grey defeat pregnant with victory,

A whip to lash us towards our deathless state.

The inconscient world is the spirit‘s self-made room,

Eternal Night shadow of eternal Day.

Night is not our beginning nor our end;

She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid

Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.

We came to her from a supernal Light,

By Light we live and to the Light we go.

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All that is made and once again unmade,

The calm persistent vision of the One

Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:

Forces and lives and beings and ideas

Are taken into the stillness for a while;

There they remould their purpose and their drift,

Recast their nature and re-form their shape.

Ever they change and changing ever grow,

And passing through a fruitful stage of death

And after long reconstituting sleep

Resume their place in the process of the Gods

Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

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A conscious soul in the Inconscient‘s world,

Hidden behind our thoughts and hopes and dreams,

An indifferent Master signing Nature‘s acts

Leaves the vicegerent mind a seeming king.

In his floating house upon the sea of Time

The regent sits at work and never rests:

He is a puppet of the dance of Time;

He is driven by the hours, the moment‘s call

Compels him with the thronging of life‘s need

And the babel of the voices of the world.

***

References

Sri Aurobindo‘s Quote

CWSA Vol 28, S. 118

I. Preliminary

Soul – A Vaguely Used Word

CWSA Vol 28, p. 112

CWSA Vol 28, p. 109

What is “Myself”

CWM Vol 9, pp. 310-11

CWM Vol 10, p. 277

False Soul and the True Soul

CWSA Vol 28, p. 123

CWSA Vol 23, p. 150

CWSA Vol 21, p. 654

Unique Role of the Psychic Being

CWM Vol 3, pp. 62-63

CWM Vol 6, p. 334

II. What is Soul?

Brahman – The Absolute

CWSA Vol 21, p. 391

CWSA Vol 21, p. 494

CWSA Vol 33, p. 67

Atman – The Self (The Spirit)

CWSA Vol 17, p. 31

CWSA Vol 17, pp. 402-03

CWSA Vol 28, p. 111

CWSA Vol 21, p. 362

Jivatman – The Individual Self (The Central Being)

CWSA Vol 28, p. 68

CWSA Vol 28, pp. 58-59

Antaratman (The Psychic) – Chaitya Purusha (The Psychic Being)

CWSA Vol 35, pp. 148-49

CWSA Vol 28, p. 110

CWSA Vol 28, pp. 103-04

CWSA Vol 28, p. 117

CWSA Vol 28, p. 537

CWSA Vol 30, p. 337

CWSA Vol 30, p. 340

III. How to Find the Soul

Importance of the Finding of the Soul

CWM Vol 14, p. 335

CWM Vol 10, pp. 23-24

How to Find the Soul

CWM Vol 3, p. 1

CWM Vol 9, p. 310

CWM Vol 4, p. 244

CWM Vol 15, p. 302

CWM Vol 16, p. 222

Help of Images

CWM Vol 7, pp. 266-68

CWM Vol 7, p. 236

To Catch the End of the Guiding Thread

CWM Vol 8, pp. 402-05

Two Levers to Touch the Soul

CWM Vol 7, pp. 417-19

Reaching the Soul by Listening to It

CWM Vol 10, pp. 24-26

CWM Vol 7, p. 249

CWM Vol 14, p. 157

Perception of the Soul – Various Methods

CWM Vol 15, pp. 301-04

Questions and Answers

CWM Vol 7, pp. 259-60

CWM Vol 6, p. 33

CWM Vol 15, p. 305

CWM Vol 15, p. 306

CWM Vol 7, p. 42

CWM Vol 7, p. 41

Mother‘s Advice to the Aspirants

CWM Vol 12, pp. 32-35

CWM Vol 12, p. 5

Discovery of the Soul – Its Purpose

CWSA Vol 21, pp. 653-54

Discovery of the Soul – Its Base

CWSA Vol 30, p. 360

CWSA Vol 36, p. 380

CWSA Vol 30, p. 381

CWSA Vol 30, p. 349

CWSA Vol 30, p. 363

CWSA Vol 30, p. 349

CWSA Vol 30, p. 361

CWSA Vol 30, p. 322

CWSA Vol 30, pp. 368-69

Discovery of the Soul – Its Discipline

CWSA Vol 29, pp. 6-8

CWSA Vol 30, p. 341

CWSA Vol 30, p. 381

CWSA Vol 30, p. 104

Resistances to the Soul‘s Emergence

CWSA Vol 31, pp. 668-70

CWSA Vol 31, pp. 632-33

CWSA Vol 31, pp. 685

Next Step in Our Evolutionary Destiny

CWSA Vol 30, p. 380

CWSA Vol 30, pp. 380-81

CWSA Vol 21, pp. 886-87

Meditations on the Soul

CWSA Vol 33, pp. 526-27

CWSA Vol 33, p. 23

CWSA Vol 33, p. 331

CWSA Vol 33, p. 169

CWSA Vol 33, p. 485

CWSA Vol 33, p. 293

CWSA Vol 33, pp. 486-87

CWSA Vol 33, pp. 600-01

CWSA Vol 33, p. 294

CWSA Vol 33, p. 478

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CWM: Collected Works of the Mother, 2nd ed., Vols. 1-17

CWSA: Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo 2012 Vols. 1-37

Sri Aurobindo Digital Edition

All Life Is Yoga

Compilations from the works of

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

1. What is Yoga

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2. Fear and Its Overcoming

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3. New Birth

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4. Depression

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5. The Soul and How to find It

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6. The Four Aids in Integral Yoga

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AURO MEDIA

Sri Aurobindo Digital Edition

Verlag und Fachbuchhandel

Wilfried Schuh

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