Sri Aurobindo

The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught.

Yoga is a generic name for any discipline by which one attempts to pass out of the limits of one's ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness.

That within us which seeks to know and to progress is not the mind but something behind it which makes use of it.

But what after all, behind appearances, is this seeming mystery? We can see that it is the Consciousness which had lost itself returning again to itself, emerging out of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a Life that is would be sentient, half-sentient, dimly sentient, wholly sentient and finally struggles to be more than sentient, to be again divinely selfconscious, free, infinite, immortal.

The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.

But difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome.

Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God. What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably.

What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.

Watch the too indignantly righteous. Before long you will find them committing or condoning the very offence which they have so fiercely censured.

The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.

Witness and stand back from Nature, that is the first step to the soul's freedom.

The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit.

Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience.

For the powers of our mind, life, and body are bound to their own limitations, and however high they may rise or however widely expand, they cannot rise beyond them. But still, mental man can open to what is beyond him and call down a Supramental Light, Truth, and Power to work in him and do what the mind cannot do. If mind cannot by effort become what is beyond mind, Supermind can descend and transform mind into its own substance.

A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.

The fly that touches honey cannot use it's wings; so too the soul that clings to spiritual sweetness ruins it's freedom and hinders contemplation.

The subliminal mind receives and remembers all those touches that delight the soul. Our soul takes joy in this right touching by the Essence of all experience.

Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.

The great are strongest when they stand alone, A God-given might of being is their force.

Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future

She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, - truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence.