When we look around and see the challenges facing us on the planet, our first impulse is generally to try to find some kind of “fix” to the situation. This generally takes the form of suggesting that our current economic or political system or model is defective, deficient or broken, and thus, ... Views: 496
With careful observation we can understand that an individual’s greatest weaknesses and difficulties represent the opportunity and specific need for progress for spiritual growth. Each individual faces his own unique challenges. In many cases, the confluence of the soul’s pressure, the outer ... Views: 462
Most religious and spiritual paths have addressed the issue of sexuality from a viewpoint that turns it into some kind of sin or morality concern, and proscriptions about sex and responses to the sexual impulse mirror this focus on morality versus immorality. People who engage in sexual ... Views: 67
As human beings live primarily in the external consciousness on the surface of the being, their experience of existence is centred around and focused on the body, life-force and mind. They do not generally see nor recognise the true soul deep behind the surface, and they see the coming and going ... Views: 388
For most people the impulsion to action comes from a need, desire or ambition of some sort. If these are removed, the individual can become depressed and fall into a state that lacks motivation and thereby reduces their energy when it comes to doing anything. We frequently see people, (or ... Views: 194
The three Gunas of Nature control the actions and reactions of the external nature and the response to the dualities that present themselves in Nature. As long as we remain fixated at the level of the surface personality, we remain subject to this action of the Gunas.
The question then ... Views: 140
The practitioner of the integral yoga has set before himself the change of what we consider to be basic human nature, the established workings and principles of action of the body, the life-force and the mind. These elements have developed over countless millennia as part of the evolutionary ... Views: 73
In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna poses the question of how to identify the spiritual man, the superior individual. Sri Krishna makes it clear that this is not determined by outer signs, but by the inner state of the individual. The Mother takes up this question in a slightly different form and ... Views: 336
Most children focus on their need for food, emotional comfort and play, which is a means of gaining knowledge and power of action for them. As they move into later stages of life, they can get fixated on attaining good grades in school, making friends, hobbies and sports. As they reach puberty, ... Views: 536
For most people, the concept of ‘sincerity’ is connected with how they relate to other people, in an open, natural and honest way, without duplicity or hypocrisy. The idea that sincerity can relate to oneself and one’s inner life is something that spiritual aspirants grapple with. Sincerity is ... Views: 140
The ego-consciousness is deeply embedded in each human individual, through the evolutionary process that created the ego as a mechanism for individuation and self-awareness, as the mental phase of this process took shape over long periods of time. The ego provided a needed framework to allow ... Views: 105
If we consider what the most important quality is for progress in spiritual growth, we generally come up with a number of different ideas, including devotion, strong mind or will, faith, dedication, aspiration. We rarely name ‘sincerity’ as the quality most required. Yet, the Mother stresses the ... Views: 437
Speech not only can affect one’s own energy, but it can also affect one’s relationship with others and the dynamics of a social relationship and a community. For the most part, people tend to speak whatever comes to them without a great deal (if any) reflection. This practice however can have ... Views: 588
What happens when we sleep? Where does the consciousness go? For most people, sleep is a blank state. We have little awareness of what goes on during sleep, except for times when we are having a dream in a state near enough to the waking state that we actually remember details from the dream. We ... Views: 52
Religious devotees and spiritual aspirants throughout the world have tried to experience a divine revelation through various extreme practices that put the body under severe stress. One of these practices has been extreme fasting, and another, the attempt to overcome the power of sleep and carry ... Views: 511
The physical consciousness is the primary seat of the Guna of Tamas in the being, in general, and thus, when the waking consciousness of the mental and vital levels is in abeyance during sleep, there is a natural tendency for the tamasic energy to come forward for a time. One of the first ... Views: 51
Western scientists describe the various stages of sleep. Yet they are looking at sleep from outside and do not know how to correlate the stages with the movement of consciousness during sleep. They recite facts based on observation and brain wave activity and pronounce that one is experiencing ... Views: 635
The natural seat of the Guna of sattwa is in the mental being; rajas in the vital being and tamas in the physical being. This is not to imply that there are not times and situations where one of the othe qualities comes forward in any of these three aspects of our external being; on the ... Views: 61
The Mother relates two stories here about interactions she personally had with some small entities. One group were of good will and acted to remind her of things when she was otherwise distracted. She was able to pay attention to their hint and ensure that all worked out properly. It takes a ... Views: 369
We tend to associate experiences of various unusual powers as either evidence of high mental development or perhaps spiritual development. Most of what gets mooted about, however, may be seen as experiences of entering into various occult vital planes and bringing back the experience from those ... Views: 419
It is a natural human tendency, and it carries over to those who take up spiritual practice. This tendency sees most things through the mental lens and tries to categorize them as black and white, positive and negative, etc., essentially creating a mental framework of exclusion that looks to ... Views: 44
Santosh Krinsky gave this talk to outline both the existential crisis we are facing in the world today, tying together numerous different symptoms into a view of the larger issues we are facing, as well as the causative factors and the direction for solving this crisis through the development of ... Views: 688
We struggle with finding meaning in our lives. There is so much strife, so much confusion, so many issues that threaten our very existence as a species. We view enormous changes to the environment, the ever-dwindling supply of fresh water, the imminent collapse of the ocean fisheries, ... Views: 403
The soul-mate, the individual who is intended to match your soul in this lifetime, the perfect partner, the person who helps one make life work. People are always seeking for just the perfect match, and there are any number of romantic notions about how this occurs in life. People then say that ... Views: 521
How does imagination work? Why do some people seem to have a large amount of active imagination and others very little?
All kinds of formations are active in the vital and the mental domains. For those who have the receptivity and the aware connection to either of these realms, there is an ... Views: 342
Truth. This term is subjected to considerable interpretation in today’s world. Some say that there is no such thing as ‘truth’ and that ‘truth is relative’. Some hold that what one person understands as ‘truth’, seen from a different perspective, is falsehood. Some indicate that ‘today’s truth ... Views: 529
An individual has a peak spiritual experience, or something unusual takes place in his inner life about which he has no prior knowledge or understanding. This creates an impulse to speak of the experience to other people. There can be a number of motivations for talking about an inner experience ... Views: 648
In spiritual and religious traditions around the world, we see a proliferation of names and personalities of God. This has engendered much confusion for people who talk about monotheism versus polytheism. When one looks deeper into the question, however, it becomes clear that in most cases, ... Views: 699
Human beings are talkative creatures. The power of speech, the power of language is one of the most highly developed areas of difference from most other species on the planet (there are other beings that have speech, but to date we have not found them to have the complexity and breadth of ... Views: 663
As we grow and experience life, there may come a time when we become disillusioned. We may feel like there is no meaning or significance to what we do. We feel like we are running in a hamster wheel, or on a treadmill, always striving to earn money to survive and maybe have a bit of enjoyment. ... Views: 131
From early childhood we are inculcated with the idea of achieving success, becoming foremost and occupying a position of power, prestige or wealth in the world. Parents drum this idea into the mind of their children that they need to study, attain degrees, choose suitable (lucrative) careers, ... Views: 183
A devotee by the name of Satyakama Jabala approached a respected Guru, in a story related in the Chhandogya Upanishad. He asked for teachings so he could achieve realisation on the spiritual path. The teacher asked him his name and family background, to which the young seeker replied that he did ... Views: 145
We are wrapped up in the ego-consciousness from the moment we take birth. The entire societal structure, as well as the weight of millennia of evolutionary development to create an entity that could develop the powers of the vital and mental being as a self-aware and seemingly independent being, ... Views: 98
Humanity has a tendency to try to judge everything by its existing level of perception and knowledge. Thus, for most of human existence, people ‘knew’ that the sun rotated around the earth and that the earth was the center of the universe around which everything else moved and upon which ... Views: 638
In his epic poem Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Sri Aurobindo states: “God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep.” Until an individual has an actual experience of an inward state of consciousness, or that of the silent mind, or one in which the experience is that of an uninvolved ... Views: 103
Most people who take up spiritual practices are deeply involved in some kind of regular practice and, as with everything else in the normal life, they look for signs and signals that show they are making progress in their chosen path of development. An experience comes, some new revelatory ... Views: 385
Spiritual experiences are not purely subjective events impacting the mind or the emotions. They can also take on a very concrete form that impacts the vital nature and the physical body. Because of a general mental, religious and social bias against what appear to be unusual experiences, many ... Views: 114
The mind cannot comprehend experiences with which it has no familiarity. Sri Aurobindo describes a spiritual status that is experiential in nature. When there is such an experience, the mind tries to describe or transcribe that experience into its normal process of linear thought expressed in ... Views: 246
Our vital nature crazes ‘excitement’ and to gather ‘experiences’. It is no different for the spiritual aspirant than for the rest of humanity in this regard. Spiritual experiences tend to be extraordinary in the sense that they go beyond the everyday perceptions or sensations and tend to have a ... Views: 541
The vital nature is enamoured of experiences that are new and different, ‘exciting’, unusual. This is the allure of the vision quest, fasting, and the use of entheogenic substances to bring forth experiences, visions, contact with alternative states of conscious awareness, and alternative ... Views: 137
The vital nature is always interested in, even fixated on, the idea of having dramatic ‘spiritual experiences’. These experiences can open the eyes of the seeker to a wider reality, and can help reorient the direction of the life, sometimes in unusual or unexpected ways. There are many instances ... Views: 689
For the individual who has a spiritual experience, one of the most notable characteristics is the absolute and incontrovertible ‘reality’ of the experience. Yet, people who live primarily in the surface consciousness tend to treat such experiences, when related, as somehow less real or even ... Views: 584
For the individual who has a spiritual experience, one of the most notable characteristics is the absolute and incontrovertible ‘reality’ of the experience. Yet, people who live primarily in the surface consciousness tend to treat such experiences, when related, as somehow less real or even ... Views: 605
Our ability to perceive is limited both by the scale within which we are able to perceive, as well as the operation of the “all or nothing” phenomenon. Thus, events are occurring, activities are underway at wavelengths below those we can perceive, and above those we can perceive. At some point, ... Views: 399
Spiritual seekers harness the powers of body, vital being, emotions and mind in order to develop and eventually attain the goal of their seeking. The power of dedicated work, the power of the breath, the power of devotion, the power of concentration all have a part to play in the seeker’s ... Views: 278
The spiritual development of the individual seeker is not something that can be measured or defined in terms of the intellect, or understood by specific results as sought by the vital nature. Nor can it be certified by various physical attainments, capacities that exceed the normal status of the ... Views: 21
The quality of humility is important to keep the ego in check, but even here, the ego finds ways to create an artificial form of humility that actually reinforces the ego. Those following an inspiring leader, or treading a path that provides true spiritual experience may use their position to ... Views: 698
As human beings typically rely on their mental capacities to understand things, seekers frequently take the advice of tracing back to the roots of the impulses, thoughts, feelings they experience as requiring a method akin to the processes followed in psychotherapy. Western psychotherapy uses ... Views: 356
Spiritual seekers have long looked at liberation from the bondage of life in the world, and oneness with the Transcendent, the Absolute, as the key focus to demand their attention. This is of course an essential step in freeing the individual from the current limits of mind, life and body, and ... Views: 793
Many people mistakenly believe that those who take up the spiritual life and withdraw from active involvement in the outer life of society, marriage, familiy, commerce, governance, etc. are somehow weak or unfit to succeed in society and they are “taking the easy way out”. It is true that some ... Views: 520