Essays on Yoga

"Quite unlike the great Masters and Prophets who come to show the way that man must follow, the Avatar becomes the Way. His mere Presence is enough and all that is needed on part of man is to have faith and open himself to the Grace and Mercy that the Avatar embodies."

"... when the Avatara and the Divine Mother take upon themselves the role of a Teacher, then there are no limits to the possibilities, no fixed term to our growth and progress, no hedges that constrain our experience. She lowers Herself to our puny heights and carries us in Her arms of Love and Light towards the boundless beatitudes that await our discovery. The limits of religions and ideologies, systems and theories, cults and creeds that tie us forever down simply vanish before the growing Light."

"[birthday] is our moment with the Divine, when we are once again face to face with the Creator who pours into the human vessel to carry us further in the line of evolution we have chosen. This is the first gift with which we are all born and each birthday is a renewal of this gift."

"Life springs in her and Mind is born; her face She lifts to Him who is Herself, until The Spirit leaps into the Spirit’s embrace." [Sri Aurobindo, "Shiva"]

‘Love the Mother’, these three words summarise in a way the key to Integral Yoga. It is the base of all our efforts towards self-perfection, the sustaining force through all the trials and tribulations of sadhana, as also, the grand culmination and the crowning movement.

Yet if one were to ask what is the most fundamental word of yoga that Sri Aurobindo reveals to us, the answer would be very much to simply open to the Mother. With the Mother it is not words and intellect that comes into play but love and surrender. With Her it is as if the Divine Presence we seek within had stepped out in the forefront shedding Its mask of secrecy.

"Where then does the Gita stand amidst all this stupendous mass of revelatory scriptures whose sheer size and of course the substance is mind-boggling? One may even ask what extra truth if any does this rather short treatise of just about 700 shlokas bring?"

"The inner fruit of the Avatar’s coming is gained by those who learn from it the true nature of the divine birth and the divine works and who, growing full of him in their consciousness and taking refuge in him with their whole being [...] in whatever way men accept, love and take joy in God, in that way God accepts, loves and takes joy in man. " [Sri Aurobindo CWSA 19:176]

"Nothing can replace that touch-divine and the thrill of contact in the very physical. However, the yoga in itself does not depend upon that. Krishna’s departure from Vrindavan released the streams of devotion in the human consciousness. Perhaps Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s physical withdrawal may well light up the fire of aspiration in the very dust that constitutes our physical body."