ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY AND YOGA

 

CONTENTS

 

Pre-content

 

 

Part One

Essays from the Karmayogin (1909 – 1910)

 

The Ideal of the Karmayogin

Karmayoga

Man — Slave or Free?

Yoga and Human Evolution

Yoga and Hypnotism

The Greatness of the Individual

The Process of Evolution

Stead and the Spirits

Stead and Maskelyne

Fate and Free-Will

The Three Purushas

The Strength of Stillness

The Principle of Evil

The Stress of the Hidden Spirit

 

Part Two

The Yoga and Its Objects (circa 1912)

 

The Yoga and Its Objects

Appendix: Explanations of Some Words and Phrases

 

 

Part Three

Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921)

 

Notes on the Arya

The “Arya’s” Second Year

Appendix: Passages Omitted from “Our Ideal”

The "Arya's" Fourth Year

 

On Ideals and Progress

On Ideals

Yoga and Skill in Works

Conservation and Progress

The Conservative Mind and Eastern Progress

Our Ideal

 

The Superman

The Superman

All-Will and Free-Will

The Delight of Works

 

Evolution

Evolution

The Inconscient

Materialism

 

Thoughts and Glimpses

Aphorisms

Thoughts and Glimpses

 

Heraclitus

Heraclitus

 

The Problem of Rebirth

Section I: Rebirth and Karma

Rebirth

The Reincarnating Soul

Rebirth, Evolution, Heredity

Rebirth and Soul Evolution

The Significance of Rebirth

The Ascending Unity

Involution and Evolution

Karma

Karma and Freedom

Karma, Will and Consequence

Rebirth and Karma

Karma and Justice

 

Section II: The Lines of Karma

The Foundation

The Terrestrial Law

Mind Nature and Law of Karma

The Higher Lines of Karma

Appendix I: The Tangle of Karma

Appendix II: A Clarification

 

Other Writings from the Arya

The Question of the Month

The Needed Synthesis

“Arya” — Its Significance

Meditation

Different Methods of Writing

Occult Knowledge and the Hindu Scriptures

The Universal Consciousness

 

The News of the Month

The News of the Month

 

South Indian Vaishnava Poetry

Andal: The Vaishnava Poetess

Nammalwar: The Supreme Vaishnava Saint and Poet

 

Arguments to The Life Divine

Arguments to The Life Divine

 

Part Four

From the Standard Bearer (1920)

 

Ourselves

 

 

Part Five

From the Bulletin of Physical Education (1949 – 1950)

 

The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth

Message

Perfection of the Body

The Divine Body

Supermind and the Life Divine

Supermind and Humanity

Supermind in the Evolution

Mind of Light

Supermind and Mind of Light

 

NOTE ON THE TEXTS

 

Mind of Light

 

A NEW humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and delivered out of the Ignorance Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of Light, a mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution in earth-nature Even, the highest manifestations of a mind of Light would be an instrumentality of the supermind, a part of it or a projection from it, a stepping beyond humanity into the superhumanity of the supramental principle Above all, its possession would enable the human being to rise beyond the normalities of his present thinking, feeling and being into those highest powers of the mind in its self-exceedings which intervene between our mentality and supermind and can be regarded as steps leading towards the greater and more luminous principle This advance like others in the evolution might not be reached and would naturally not be reached at one bound, but from the very beginning it would be inevitable: the pressure of the supermind creating from above out of itself the mind of Light would compel this certainty of the eventual outcome The first gleamings of the new Light would carry in themselves the seed of its highest flamings; even in the first beginnings, the certainty  

 

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of their topmost powers would be there; for this is the constant story of each evolutionary emergence: the principle of its highest perfection lies concealed in the involution which precedes and necessitates the evolution of the secret principle.

For throughout the story of evolution there are two complementary aspects which constitute its action and are necessary to its totality; there is hidden in the involution of Nature the secret power and principle of being which lies concealed under the veil cast on it by material Nature and there is carried in that Nature itself the inevitable force of the principle compelling the process of emergence of its inherent powers and characters, the essential features which constitute its reality As the evolutionary principle emerges, there are also two constant features of the process of the emergence: there are the gradations by which it climbs out of the involution and manifests more and more of its power, its possibilities, the force of the Godhead within it, and there is a constant manifestation of all types and forms of its being which are the visible, indicative and efficient embodiments of its essential nature There appear in the evolutionary process organised forms and activities of Matter, the types of life and the living beings, the types of mind and the thinking beings, the luminosities and greatnesses of the spiritual principle and the spiritual beings whose nature, character, personality, mark the stages of the ascent towards the highest heights of the evolution and the ultimate largest manifestation of what it is in itself and must become by the force of time and the all-revealing Spirit This is the real sense and drive of what we see as evolution: the multiplication and variation of forms is only the means of its process Each gradation contains the possibility and the certainty of the grades beyond it: the emergence of more and more developed forms and powers points to more perfected forms and greater powers beyond them, and each emergence of consciousness and the conscious beings proper to it enables the rise to a greater consciousness beyond and the greater order of beings up to the ultimate godheads of which Nature is striving and is destined to show herself capable Matter developed its organised forms until it became capable of embodying living  

 

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organisms; then life rose from the subconscience of the plant into conscious animal formations and through them to the thinking life of man Mind founded in life developed intellect, developed its types of knowledge and ignorance, truth and error till it reached the spiritual perception and illumination and now can see as in a glass dimly the possibility of supermind and a truth-conscious existence In this inevitable ascent the mind of Light is a gradation, an inevitable stage As an evolving principle it will mark a stage in the human ascent and evolve a new type of human being; this development must carry in it an ascending gradation of its own powers and types of an ascending humanity which will embody more and more the turn towards spirituality, capacity for Light, a climb towards a divinised manhood and the divine life.

In the birth of the mind of Light and its ascension into its own recognisable self and its true status and right province there must be, in the very nature of things as they are and very nature of the evolutionary process as it is at present, two stages In the first, we can see the mind of Light gathering itself out of the Ignorance, assembling its constituent elements, building up its shapes and types, however imperfect at first, and pushing them towards perfection till it can cross the border of the Ignorance and appear in the Light, in its own Light In the second stage we can see it developing itself in that greater natural light, taking its higher shapes and forms till it joins the supermind and lives as its subordinate portion or its delegate In each of these stages it will define its own grades and manifest the order of its beings who will embody it and give to it a realised life Thus there will be built up, first, even in the Ignorance itself, the possibility of a human ascent towards a divine living; then there will be, by the illumination of this mind of Light in the greater realisation of what may be called a gnostic mentality, in a transformation of the human being, even before the supermind is reached, even in the earth-consciousness and in a humanity transformed, an illumined divine life.

 

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