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flowers
Their Spiritual significance
Photo Collection
Divine Ananda
Abundant, succulent, nourishing, full of vigour.
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Vitis vinifera L. (Vitaceae)
Wine grape
Any colours
Vitis vinifera
Wine grape
(Mother goes into a contemplation)
Someone has just brought, from two sides at the same time (gesture to the right and to the left), a plate with grapes and a second plate with grapes, like that. One was for you and one for me.
For two or three days some beings from the vital have been eager to manifest their goodwill, and this was like the expression of their goodwill. In the vital, food is very often grapes, very frequently. Grapes of incomparable beauty, besides. And grapes are the fruit of life. So I suppose that's why. There were two bunches: one was bigger, the other not so big; I don't know whom the bigger was for and whom the other for: they came from both sides, they were presented like this (gesture to the right and to the left of Mother). One was on a plate, the other on a square of white paper. I presumed the one on the square of white paper was for me!
Lovely, beautiful bunches! Grapes turning golden, you know - transparent and golden as when they're ripe. Each grape was this big (gesture: about two inches).
(silence)
I tried to express what happened this morning, and what kept coming to me was: "But the experiences aren't literary, they can't be expressed."
(silence)
Some beings of the vital said to me, "There was a time when you used us and we were very happy. Why aren't you using us anymore now?" So I replied to them, "If you want to do work, I'm certainly not going to stop you!"
That was yesterday evening. I was asked questions on levitation (questions a proper modern child might ask), I was asked, "How is it that one who escapes from this law doesn't just go up into the atmosphere?" I answered from my experience that that's not the way levitation works, it's not because one escapes from the law of gravity: it's because physical bodies are supported by materialized vital forces (slightly materialized). So then, it put me back in contact with those forces and beings, and last night they said that to me; they told me, "Why aren't you using us any longer? We were quite happy!" I said, "Come along and do some work!" And there we are (= the grapes).
When you sleep (that is, when the body is in a state of trance), you can eat. You sense the taste when you have gone outside the body. And it's very nourishing, it gives strength. I have eaten I don't know how many times like that, mostly grapes - and what grapes!...
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 8. - 1967
The vital world is a world of extremes. If, for example, you eat a bunch of grapes in the vital world, you feel so nourished that you can remain without hunger for thirty-six hours. But you can also run into things and enter places that will wrest all the energy from you in a minute and at times leave you ill or even disabled.
The Mother
The Mother. Agenda. - Volume 1. - 1951-1960
The divine delight of being
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 10. - The secret of Veda
Ananda is Beatitude, the bliss of pure conscious existence and energy.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Isha Upanishad
Ananda is the very essence of the Brahman, it is the supreme nature of the omnipresent Reality.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 19. - The Life Divine: Book 2
Self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with the Divine.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 24. - Letters on Yoga.-P.4
Ananda is the secret delight from which all things are born, by which all is sustained in existence and to which all can rise in the spiritual culmination.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 13. - Essays on the Gita
According to our own philosophy the whole world came out of ananda and returns into ananda, and the triple term in which ananda may be stated is Joy, Love, Beauty. To see divine beauty in the whole world, man, life, nature, to love that which we have seen and to have pure unalloyed bliss in that love and that beauty is the appointed road by which mankind as a race must climb to God.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Volume 1.- Early Cultural Writings.- P.440.
Ananda is something in its nature one, unconditioned and infinite....
The world lives in and by Ananda. From Ananda, says the Veda, we were born, by Ananda we live, to Ananda we return, and it adds that no man could even have the strength to draw in his breath and throw it out again if there were not this heaven of Bliss embracing our existence as ether embraces our bodies, nourishing us with its eternal substance and strength and supporting the life and the activity....
The bliss of the Brahman can be described as the eternity of an uninterrupted supreme ecstasy... Bliss there is the keen height and core of peace; peace there is the intimate core and essence of bliss... In supermind experience peace is always full of Ananda and by its Ananda can act and create; Ananda is for ever full of the divine peace and its most vehement ecstatic intensity contains no possibility of disturbance. At the height of the supramental Infinite peace and Ananda are one. For there status and dynamis are inseparable, rest and action affirm each other, essence and expression are one indivisible whole.
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 17. - The Hour of God
Some time ago I made a discovery of that kind: someone asked me if there was any difference between Ananda and Love; I said, "No." Then he said to me, "But then how is it that some people feel Ananda while others feel Love?..." I answered him, "Yes! Those who feel Ananda are those who like to receive, who have the capacity to receive, and those who feel Love are those who have the capacity to give." But it's the same thing: you receive it as Ananda, you give it as Love.
La Mère
Well, it is a desireless state in which one lives - as Sri Aurobindo explains later - in an Ananda which has no cause, which does not depend on any circumstances, inner or outer, which is a permanent state, independent of the circumstances of life, causeless. One is in Ananda because one is in Ananda. And in fact it is simply because one has bee aware of the divine Reality.
But one cannot feel the Ananda unless one has become desireless. If one has desires, all one feels is just pleasures and enjoyments, but that is not Ananda. Ananda has an altogether different nature and can only manifest in the being when the desires are abolished. So long as one is a being of desire, one cannot feel the Ananda; even were a force of Ananda to descend, it would immediately be falsified by the presence of desires.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 8. - Questions And Answers (1956)
To know Ananda, one must first have completely renounced all human pleasures, to begin with, for so long as a human pleasure delights you, you are not in the right state to know the Ananda
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 8. - Questions And Answers (1956)
All pleasure is a perversion, by egoistic limitation, of the Ananda which is the purpose of the universal manifestation.
The Mother
The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 16. - More answers from the Mother