Works of Sri Aurobindo

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Flowers and Their Significances

 

Chapter 1

 

Aditi and Avatar

 

The red lotus is the Avatar.

The white lotus is the Divine Consciousness.

THE MOTHER

 

The red lotus represents Sri Aurobindo, the white one represents me.

In a general way the lotus is the flower of the Divine Wisdom, whatever its colour. But red signifies the Avatar, the Divine incarnated in matter, and white signifies the Divine Consciousness manifested upon earth.

THE MOTHER

 

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ADITI

 

Aditi – The Mother. Aditi is the indivisible consciousness, force and Ananda of the Supreme; the Mother, its living dynamis, the supreme Love, Wisdom, Power. SRI AUROBINDO

 

According to the Truth of things . . . the worlds are brought forth from the divine consciousness, from Aditi, goddess of infinite being, mother of the gods, the indivisible consciousness, the Light that cannot be impaired. . . .

SRI AUROBINDO

 

The Divine Mother is the Consciousness and Force of the Divine – which is the Mother of all things.

SRI AUROBINDO

 

The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence. …

SRI AUROBINDO

 

All is created by the Supreme Goddess, the Supreme and Original Mahashakti, all proceeds from her, all lives by her, all lives in her, even as she lives in all. All wisdom and knowledge are her wisdom and knowledge; all power is her power, all will and force her will and force, all action is her action, all movement her movement. All beings are portions of her power of existence.

SRI AUROBINDO

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At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate, In their slow round the cycles turn to her call;  Alone her hands can change Time’s dragon base. Hers is the mystery the Night conceals; The spirit’s alchemist energy is hers; She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire. The luminous heart of the Unknown is she, A power of silence in the depths of God;

 

She is the Force, the inevitable Word,  The magnet of our difficult ascent, The Sun from which we kindle all our suns, The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts, The joy that beckons from the impossible,  The Might of all that never yet came down.

SRI AUROBINDO

 

 

1 Aditi – the Divine Consciousness

Pure, immaculate, gloriously powerful.

Nelumbo nucifera ‘Alba’. White

 

 

1 Aditi

 

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AVATAR

 

The word Avatara means a descent; it is a coming down of the Divine below the line which divides the divine from the human world or status.

SRI AUROBINDO

 

An Avatar is an emanation of the Supreme Lord who assumes a human body on earth.

THE MOTHER

 

An Avatar, roughly speaking, is one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action; he feels identified inwardly with this divine power and presence.

SRI AUROBINDO

 

The reason for which the Avatars descend is to raise up man again and again, developing in him a higher and ever-higher humanity, a greater and yet greater development of divine being, bringing more and more of heaven again and again upon the earth until our toil is done, our work accomplished and Sachchidananda fulfilled in all even here, even in this material universe.

SRI AUROBINDO

 

The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what are the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, impersonal, universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the divine love. He comes as the divine personality which shall fill the consciousness of the human being and replace the limited egoistic personality, so that it shall be liberated out of ego into infinity and universality, out of birth into immortality. He comes as the divine power and love which calls men to itself, so that they may take refuge in that and no longer in the insufficiency of their human v/ills and the strife of their human fear, wrath and passion, and liberated from all this unquiet and suffering may live in the calm and bliss of the Divine.

SRI AUROBINDO

 

Surely for the earth-consciousness the very fact that the Divine manifests himself is the greatest of all splendours. Consider the obscurity here and what it would be if the Divine did not directly intervene and the Light of Lights did not break out of the obscurity — for that is the meaning of the manifestation.

SRI AUROBINDO

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His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres Into our province of ephemeral sight, A colonist from immortality. . . .

His human self like a translucent cloak  Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.  Affiliated to cosmic Space and Time  And paying here God’s debt to earth and man  A greater sonship was his divine right.

SRI AUROBINDO

 

 

2 Avatar —

The Supreme manifest on earth in a body

The red lotus is Sri Aurobindo’s flower.

Nelumbo nucifera. Pinkish red

 

 

2 Avatar

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