Spiritual significance of flowers, Dyers’s oleander = Wrightia tinctoria, Apocynaceae

136 — 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 Magnoliopsida - Dicotyledons

► Subclass Asteridae

► Order Gentianales

► Family Apocynaceae - Dogbane family

► Subfamily Apocynoideae

► Tribe Wrightieae

► Genus Wrightia

Synonyms

≡ Nerium tinctorium (basinom) Roxb.

Common names

Dyers’s oleander (English)

Pala indigo plant (English)

Sweet indrajao (English)

Zéphyranthe (French)

Dudhi (India (Hindi))

Indarjou (India (Hindi))

Kapar (India (Hindi))

Hyamaraka (India (Sanskrit))

Kutaja (India (Sanskrit))

Paalai (India (Tamil))

Veppalai (India (Tamil))

Vetpalai (India (Tamil))

Description

Small fragrant white star-shaped flower with a delicate fringed corona; borne in many-flowered cymes. A small to medium-sized deciduous tree. with milky sap and thin beanlike pendulous fruits.

The religious life is a movement of the same ignorant human consciousness, turning or trying to turn away from the earth towards the Divine, but as yet without knowledge and led by the dogmatic tenets and rules of some sect or creed which claims to have found the way out of the bonds of the earth-consciousness into some beatific Beyond. The religious life may be the first approach to the spiritual, but very often it is only a turning about in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices or set ideas and forms without any issue. The spiritual life, on the contrary, proceeds directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a greater consciousness in which one finds one’s true being and comes first into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine. For the spiritual seeker this change of consciousness is the one thing he seeks and nothing else matters.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 22. - Letters on Yoga.-P.1

Religion's real business is to prepare man's mind, life and bodily existence for the spiritual consciousness to take it up; it has to lead him to that point where the inner spiritual light begins fully to emerge. It is at this point that religion must learn to subordinate itself, not to insist on its outer characters, but give full scope to the inner spirit itself to develop its own truth and reality. In the meanwhile it has to take up as much of man's mentality, vitality, physicality as it can and give all his activities a turn towards the spiritual direction, the revelation of a spiritual meaning in them, the imprint of a spiritual refinement, the beginning of a spiritual character.

Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library in 30 Volumes. - Volume 19. - The Life Divine: Book 2