Spiritual significance of flowers, Cylindrical vanda = Papilionanthe teres, Orchidaceae

63 — Number of the plant

at the book: The Mother. The Spiritual Significance of Flowers.- 1-st Ed. / Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry (India).- Singapore: Ho Printing, 2000.- ISBN 81-7058-609-7

Classification

► Division Magnoliophyta - Flowering plants

► Class Liliopsida - Monocotyledons

► Subclass Liliidae

► Order Orchidales

► Family Orchidaceae - Orchid family

► Subfamily Epidendroideae

► Genus Papilionanthe

Synonyms

≡ Dendrobium teres (basinom) Roxb.

≡ Vanda teres (Roxb.) Lindl.

Common names

Cylindrical vanda (English)

Orchid (English)

Orchidée "Vanda" (French)

Orchidée; (French)

Description

Medium-sized flower with five ovate widely separated pale pinkish lavender petals and a central arched golden yellow lip with the lower edge extended to form two rounded pinkish lavender lobes; borne in erect racemes. An erect epiphyte with terete leaves.

giving up all emotional attachment, of whatever nature, whether for a person, for the family, for the country or anything else, in order to concentrate on an exclusive attachment for the Divine Reality.

Emotion is a good element in yoga; but emotional desire becomes easily a cause of perturbation and an obstacle.

Turn your emotions towards the Divine, aspire for their purification; they will then become a help on the way and no longer a cause of suffering.

Not to kill emotion, but to turn it towards the Divine is the right way of the yoga.

But it must become pure, founded upon spiritual peace and joy, capable of being transmuted into Ananda. Equality and calm in the mind and vital parts, an intense psychic emotion in the heart can perfectly go together.

Awake by your aspiration the psychic fire in the heart that burns steadily towards the Divine - that is the one way to liberate and fulfil the emotional nature.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3

Emotion is an excellent and indispensable thing in human nature, in spite of all its shortcomings and dangers, - just as mental ideas are excellent and indispensable things in their own field in the human stage. But our aim is to go beyond mental ideas into the light of the supramental Truth, which exists not by ideative thought but by direct vision and identity. In the same way our aim is to go beyond emotion to the height and depth and intensity of the Divine Love and there feel through the inner psychic heart an inexhaustible oneness with the Divine which the spasmodic leapings of the vital emotions cannot reach or experience.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 23. - Letters on Yoga.-P.2-3