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flowers
Their Spiritual significance
Photo Collection
True worship
Purified worship (early name)
Total and constant without demand or exigence.
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Leucas aspera (Willd.) Link (Lamiaceae [= Labiatae])
Common leucas
White
True worship
The vital bhakti demands and demands. It imposes its own conditions. It surrenders itself to God, but conditionally. It says to God, "You are so great, I worship you, and now satisfy my this desire or that ambition, make me great, make me a great sadhak, a great yogin, etc."
The unillumined mind also surrenders to the Truth, but makes its own conditions. It says to the Truth, "Satisfy my judgment and my opinion"; it demands the Truth to cast itself in the mind's own forms.
The vital being also insists on the Truth to throw itself into its own movement of force. The vital being pulls at the Higher Power and pulls and pulls at the vital being of the Guru.
Both of them (the mental and the vital) have got an arrière pensée (mental reservation) in their surrender.
But the psychic being and its bhakti are not like that. Because it is in direct communication with the Divinity behind, it is capable of true bhakti. Psychic bhakti does not make any demand, makes no reservation. It is satisfied with its own existence. The psychic being knows how to obey the Truth in the right way. It gives itself up truly to God or to Guru, and because it can give itself up truly, therefore it can also receive truly.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4
What is meant by bāhyapūj? [external worship]? If it is purely external, then of course it is the lowest form; but if done with the true consciousness, it can bring the greatest possible completeness to the adoration by allowing the body and the most external consciousness to share in the spirit and act of worship.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3
The kind of worship (pūjā) spoken of in the letter belongs to the religious life. It can, if rightly done in the deepest religious spirit, prepare the mind and heart to some extent but no more. But if worship is done as a part of meditation or with a true aspiration to the spiritual reality and the spiritual consciousness and with the yearning for contact and union with the Divine, then it can be spiritually effective.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 22. - Letters on Yoga.-P.1
To turn all actions automatically into worship cannot be done by thought control only; there must be a strong aspiration in the heart which will bring about some realisation or feeling of the presence of the One to whom worship is offered. The bhakta does not rely on his own effort alone, but on the grace and power of the Divine whom he adores.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4
A true psychic love, all worship and devotion, which men do not readily value, being led away by the vital glamour, but which the Heavens do not reject though it is offered from something so far below them, so maimed and ignorant and sorrow-vexed as the human consciousness which is to the divine consciousness as the moth is to the star, as the night is to the day.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 9. - The Future Poetry
In the spiritual order of things, the higher we project our view and our aspiration, the greater the Truth that seeks to descend upon us, because it is already there within us and calls for its release from the covering that conceals it in manifested Nature.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 18. - The Life Divine: Books 1
Truth is the door of the spirit's Ananda, its beatific nature.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 16. - The Supramental Manifestation
Truth is not a dogma that one can learn once and for all and impose as a rule. Truth is as infinite as the supreme Lord and It manifests every instant for those who are sincere and attentive.
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 8. - 1967
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 12. - On Education
There were four young princes of Benares who were brothers. Each one of them said to their father's charioteer:
"I want to see a Kimsuka tree."
"I will show you," said the charioteer, and he invited the eldest to go for a ride.
In the jungle he showed the prince a Kimsuka. It was the time of year when there are neither buds, nor leaves, nor flowers. So the prince saw only a trunk of dark wood.
A few weeks later, the second prince was taken for a drive in the chariot and he also saw the Kimsuka tree. He found it covered with leaves.
A little later in the season, the third brother saw it in his turn; it was all pink with flowers.
At last the fourth saw it; its fruits were ripe.
One day when the four brothers were together, someone asked:
"What does the Kimsuka tree look like?"
The eldest said: "Like a bare trunk."
The second: "Like a flourishing banana-tree."
The third: "Like a pink and red bouquet."
And the fourth: "Like an acacia laden with fruit."
Being unable to agree, they went together to their father the king for him to decide between them. When he heard how one after the other the young princes had seen the Kimsuka tree, the king smiled and said:
"All four of you are right, but all four of you forget that the tree is not the same in all seasons."
Each one was describing what he had seen and each one was ignorant of what the others knew.
In this way, most often, men know only a fraction of the truth, and their error comes precisely from the fact that they think they know it all.
How much less this error would be if they had learnt at an early age to love truth so much that they would always seek it more and more.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 2. - The Path of Later On
Purity is to accept no other influence but only the influence of the Divine.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3
One is truly perfectly pure only when the whole being, in all its elements and all its movements, adheres fully, exclusively, to the divine Will. This indeed is total purity. It does not depend on any moral or social law, any mental convention of any kind. It depends exclusively on this: when all the elements and all the movements of the being adhere exclusively and totally to the divine Will.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 6. - Questions And Answers (1954)
What I call purity, the true purity, is not all those things morality teaches: it is non-ego.
There must be nothing but Him.
Him, not only because we have given Him everything and consecrated ourselves totally to Him (that is not enough), but Him because He has taken total possession of the human instrument.
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 1. - 1951-1960
There is a force of purity, not the purity of the moralist, but an essential purity of spirit, in the very substance of the being.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4
Look what I've received (Mother hands a garland of jasmine), you'll give it to Sujata - it smells nice!
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 4. - 1963
This is purity, to accept no other influence but only the influence of the Divine.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 14. - Words of the Mother
get the higher consciousness, its light and the workings of its power down into the obscurer parts of the nature
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4
Sweet Mother, how can we empty the consciousness of its mixed contents?
"Keep the quietude and do not mind if it is for a time an empty quietude; the consciousness is often like a vessel which has to be emptied of its mixed or undesirable contents; it has to be kept vacant for a while till it can be filled with things new and true, right and pure." (Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3)
By aspiration, the rejection of the lower movements, a call to a higher force. If you do not accept certain movements, then naturally, when they find that they can't manifest, gradually they diminish in force and stop occurring. If you refuse to express everything that is of a lower kind, little by little the very thing disappears, and the consciousness is emptied of lower things. It is by refusing to give expression – I mean not only in action but also in thought, in feeling. When impulses, thoughts, emotion come, if you refuse to express them, if you push them aside and remain in a state of inner aspiration and calm, then gradually they lose their force and stop coming. So the consciousness is emptied of its lower movements.
But for instance, when undesirable thoughts come, if you look at them, observe them, if you take pleasure in following them in their movements, they will never stop coming. It is the same thing when you have undesirable feelings or sensation: if you pay attention to them, concentrate on them or even look at them with a certain indulgence, they will never stop. But if you absolutely refuse to receive and express them, after some time they stop. You must be patient and very persistent.
In a great aspiration, if you can put yourself into contact with something higher, some influence of your psychic being or some light from above, and if you can manage to put this in touch with these lower movements, naturally they stop more quickly. But before even being able to draw these things by aspiration, you can already stop those movements from finding expression in you by a very persistent and patient refusal. When thoughts which you do not like come, if you just brush them away and do not pay them any attention at all, after some time they won't come any longer. But you must do this very persistently and regularly.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 6. - Questions And Answers (1954)
the rejection of the lower movements, a call to a higher force.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 6. - Questions And Answers (1954)