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Sacrifice

In the spiritual sense, however, sacrifice has a different meaning—it does not so much indicate giving up what is held dear as an offering of oneself, one’s being, one’s mind, heart, will, body, life, actions to the Divine. It has the original sense of “making sacred” and is used as an equivalent of the word yajña. When the Gita speaks of the “sacrifice of knowledge“, it does not mean a giving up of anything, but a turning of the mind towards the Divine in the search for knowledge and an offering of oneself through it. It is in this sense, too, that one speaks of the offering or sacrifice of works.

Sadhaka

A sadhaka is one who is doing sadhana to attain union with the divine consciousness.

Sadhana

Sadhana is the practice of Yoga.

The object of the sadhana is opening of the consciousness to the Divine and the change of the nature. Meditation or contemplation is one means to this but only one means; bhakti is another; work is another.

Sādharmya

Sādharmya is becoming of one law of being and action with the Divine.

It is the eternal wisdom, the great spiritual experience by which all the sages attained to that highest perfection, grew into one law of being-with the Supreme and live for ever in his eternity, not born in the creation, not troubled by the anguish of the universal dissolution. This perfection, then, this sādharmya is the way of immortality and the indispensable condition without which the soul cannot consciously live in the Eternal.

Sādṛsya

The Yoga of works leads to oneness in power of being and nature, sādṛśya.

Each finds its own way, such as the love and worship of the Bhakta and the growing into the likeness of the Divine by love.

Sahasradala

Above the head extends the higher consciousness centre, sahasradala padma. But usually there is partial working of the forehead centre also when the sahasradala opens.

The sahasradala centralises spiritual mind, higher mind, intuitive mind and acts as a receiving station for the intuition proper and overmind.

The sahasradala commands all between the ordinary mind and the supermind—therefore its opening necessarily takes long. But opening by itself only creates a connection or communication—to dwell in that centre, one needs to have overpassed the mind and be able to live mainly in the spiritual self.

Sālokya

The Yoga of adoration envisages an eternal habitation or nearness as the greater release, sālokya.

There is an eternal ecstatic dwelling in the highest existence of the Supreme.

Samāna

Samana, seated centrally in the body, balances, equalises and harmonises the vital operations and is the agent for the assimilation of food.

Regulates the interchange of these two forces[Prana and Apana] at their meeting-place, equalises them and is the most important agent in maintaining the equilibrium of the vital forces and their functions.

Samata

Yogic Samata is equality of soul, equanimity founded on the sense of the one Self, the one Divine everywhere—seeing the One in spite of all differences, degrees, disparities in the manifestation.

Sāmīpya

There is an eternal love and adoration in a uniting nearness, there is an embrace of the liberated spirit by its divine Lover and the enveloping Self of its infinitudes, sāmīpya.

Saṁskārā

Made of the stuff of associations are not permanent or binding but fluid and mutable. Old associations. It is these saṁskāras, the habits formed by experience in the body, heart or mind, that form the laws of our psychology. The associations of the mind are the stuff of which our life is made. They are more persistent in the body than in the mind and therefore harder to alter. They are more persistent in the race than in the individual; the conquest of the body and mind by the individual is comparatively easy and can be done in the space of a single life, but the same conquest by the race involves the development of ages.

Samyama

Samyama is a process of pressure on the consciousness by which the secret Truth, the involved intuition is released—so by a constant pressure on the consciousness by which the Divine Truth is liberated the Knowledge of the worlds can come.

This process is the basis of what Patanjali calls samyama, a concentration, directing or dwelling of the consciousness, by which, he says, one can become aware of all that is in the object. But the necessity of concentration becomes slight or nil when the active oneness grows; the luminous consciousness of the object and its contents becomes more spontaneous, normal, facile.

Sanjnana

Sanjnana is the contact of consciousness with an image of things by which there is a sensible possession of it in its substance. Sanjnana can be described as the in bringing movement of apprehensive consciousness which draws the object placed before it back to itself so as to possess it in conscious substance, to feel it.

Sankalpa

Resolution; determination; consent of the will.

Sannyasa

Eenunciation of worldly life. This movement of recoil in the path of Sannyasa prepares an absorbed disappearance of the individual in the Eternal, and renunciation of action and life in the world is an indispensable step in the process.

Śāstra

The knowledge of the truths, principles, powers and processes that govern the realisation. By śāstra it means the knowledge which regulates karma, which fixes the kartavyam and the akartavyam, that which should be done and that which should not, and it recognizes two sources of that knowledge,—the eternal wisdom, as distinct from the temporary injunctions in our ancient books and the book that is written by God in the human heart, the eternal and apauruṣeya Veda.

Sat

The supreme self-contained absolute Existence.

Sat or Being in the universe contains all forms as things in themselves in its Chit or self-consciousness, but for all cosmic purposes avyakta, unexpressed, undefined.

Satsanga

This is a kind of good company.

Sattva

Sattva, the mode of poise, knowledge and satisfaction. Dominated by sattva, man seeks in the midst of the strife for a principle of law, right, poise, harmony, peace, satisfaction. The purely sattwic man tends to seek this within, whether for himself alone or with an impulse to communicate it, when won, to other human minds, but usually by a sort of inner detachment from or else an outer rejection of the strife and turmoil of the active world-energy; but if the sattwic mind accepts partly the rajasic impulse, it seeks rather to impose this poise and harmony upon the struggle and apparent chaos, to vindicate a victory for peace, love and harmony over the principle of war, discord and struggle.

Seeing

Seeing is of many kinds. There is the superficial seeing which only erects or receives momentarily or for some time an image of the Being seen; that brings no change unless the inner bhakti makes it a means for change. There is also the reception of the living image in one of its forms into oneself—let us say, in the heart; that can have an immediate effect or initiate a period of spiritual growth. There is also the seeing outside oneself in a more or less objective and subtle-physical or physical way.

Self

By self is meant the conscious essential existence, one in all.

Everything acts in the self. The whole play of Nature takes place in the self, in the Divine. The self contains the universe.

The Self is that aspect of the Brahman in which it is intimately felt as at once individual, cosmic, transcendent of the universe.

Self-Consecration

Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender.

This consecration in its turn must culminate in an integral self-giving to the Highest; for its crown and sign of completion is the whole nature’s all-comprehending absolute surrender. In the second stage of the Yoga, transitional between the human and the divine working, there will supervene an increasing purified and vigilant passivity, a more and more luminous divine[p.80] response to the Divine Force,—but not to any other; and there will be as a result the growing inrush of a great and conscious miraculous working from above.

Self-Esteem

Stubbornly asserts itself at every step or else wherever it can.

Self-Gathering

Broadly, the sadhana consists of a progressive surrender of oneself—inward and based upon it the outward also—to the Guru, to the Divine; meditation, concentration, work, service—all these are means for a self-gathering in all one‘s movements with the sole aim of delivering oneself into the hands of a Higher Power for being worked on and led towards the Goal.

Self-Justification

Self-justification is always a sign of ego and ignorance. When one has a wider consciousness, one knows that each one has his own way of looking at things and finds in that way his own justification, so that both parties in a quarrel believe themselves to be in the right. It is only when one looks from above in a consciousness clear of ego that one sees all sides of a thing and also their real truth.

Self-Mastery

To be aware of one’s central consciousness and to know the action of the forces is the first definite step towards self-mastery.

By a total self-mastery, one is no longer a slave of Nature’s laws which make men act according to subconscious or semi-conscious impulses and maintain them in the rut of ordinary life. With this liberation one can decide in full knowledge the path to be taken, choose the action to be accomplished and free oneself from all blind determinism, so that nothing is allowed to intervene in the course of one’s life but the highest will, the truest knowledge, the supramental consciousness.

Sensation

Above the heart is the vital mind, but the rising of sensation is lower than the emotion, not higher.

Sensation is much nearer the physical than emotion.

Sex

The sex-energy itself is a great power with two components in its physical basis, one meant for procreation and the process necessary for it, the other for feeding the general energies of the body, mind and vital,—also of the spiritual energies of the body. The old yogis call these two components retas and ojas.

The sex-energy utilised by Nature for the purpose of reproduction is in its real nature a fundamental energy of Life. It can be used not for the heightening but for a certain intensification of the vital-emotional life; it can be controlled and diverted from the sex-purpose and used for aesthetic and artistic or other creation and productiveness or preserved for heightening of the intellectual or other energies. Entirely controlled it can be turned into a force of spiritual energy also. This was well known in ancient India and was described as the conversion of retas into ojas by Brahmacharya.

Shakti

Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe.

The Conscious-Power, the Shakti that acts and creates

Power of the Eternal.

Shankara

Shankara, standing between the world and the eternal Reality, saw that the mystery of the world must be ultimately suprarational, not conceivable or expressible by our reason, anirvacanīya; but he maintained the world as seen by the reason and sense as valid and had therefore to posit an unreal reality, because he did not take one step still farther. For to know the real truth of the world, its reality, it must be seen from the suprarational awareness, from the view of the Superconscience that maintains and surpasses and by surpassing knows it in its truth, and no longer from the view of the consciousness that is maintained by it and surpassed by it and therefore does not know it or knows it only by its appearance. It cannot be that to that self-creative supreme consciousness the world is an incomprehensible mystery or that it is to it an illusion that is yet not altogether an illusion, a reality that is yet unreal. The mystery of the universe must have a divine sense to the Divine; it must have a significance or a truth of cosmic being that is luminous to the Reality that upholds it with its transcending and yet immanent superconscience.

Sheaths

A term for bodies because each is superimposed on the other and acts as a covering and can be cast off. You can only distinguish the different sheaths either by intuition or by experience and then you have established direct knowledge of the different sheaths.

Shock

You enter into a condition of deep inwardness and quiet. But if one comes too suddenly out of it into the ordinary consciousness, then there may be a slight nervous shock or a beating of the heart such as you describe, for a short time. It is always best to remain quiet for a few moments before opening the eyes and coming out of this inwardness.

Silence

Silence is a state of the consciousness which comes of itself from above when you open to the Divine Consciousness—you need not trouble about that now.

Silence is a state in which either there is no movement of the mind or vital or else a great stillness which no surface movement can pierce or alter.

Silent Self

The silent Self is there as a separate reality, not bound or involved in the activity of Nature, aloof, detached and self-existent. Even if thoughts come across this[p.453] silence, they do not disturb it; the Self is separate from the thinking mind also. In this connection the feeling “I think” is a survival from the old consciousness; in the full silence what one feels is “thought occurs in me”—the identification with thoughts as well as with the perception of objects ceases.

Shiva

Shiva is the Lord of Tapas. The power is the power of Tapas.

Shiva the white and pure, the ascetic, the still, contemplative Yogin.

Soul

The soul or spark is there before the development of an organised vital and mind. The soul is something of the Divine that descends into the evolution as a divine Principle within it to support the evolution of the individual out of the Ignorance into the Light. It develops in the course of the evolution a psychic individual or soul individuality which grows from life to life, using the evolving mind, vital and body as its instruments. It is the soul that is immortal while the rest disintegrates; it passes from life to life carrying its experience in essence and the continuity of the evolution of the individual.

Space and Time

Mind measures Time by event and Space by Matter; but it is possible in pure mentality to disregard the movement of event and the disposition of substance and realise the pure movement of Conscious-Force which constitutes Space and Time; these two are then merely two aspects of the universal force of Consciousness which in their intertwined interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon itself.

Space and Time are our names for this self-extension of the one Reality. We are apt to see Space as a static extension in which all things stand or move together in a fixed order; we see Time as a mobile extension which is measured by movement and event: Space then would be Brahman in self-extended status; Time would be Brahman in self-extended movement.

Speech

The organ of speech is an instrument of the physical mental or expressive externalising mind.

Speech is a formation which in the past has worked much more as an expression of the vital in man than of the mental will. Speech breaks out as the expression of the vital and its habits, without caring to wait for the control of the mind; the tongue has been spoken of as the unruly member.

Spiritism

It is quite possible for the dead or rather the departed—for they are not dead—who are still in regions near the earth to have communication with the living; sometimes it happens automatically, sometimes by an effort at communication on one side of the curtain or the other. There is no impossibility of such communication by the means used by the spiritists; usually, however, genuine communications or a contact can only be with those who are yet in a world which is a sort of idealised replica of the earth-consciousness and in which the same personality, ideas, memories persist that the person had here. But all that pretends to be communications with departed souls is not genuine, especially when it is done through a paid professional medium. There is there an enormous amount of mixture of a very undesirable kind—for apart from the great mass of unconscious suggestions from the sitters or the contributions of the medium’s subliminal consciousness, one gets into contact with a world of beings which is of a very deceptive or self-deceptive illusory nature. Many of these come and claim to be the departed souls of relatives, acquaintances, well-known men, famous personalities, etc. There are also beings who pick up the discarded feelings and memories of the dead and masquerade with them. There are a great number of beings who come to such seances only to play with the consciousness of men or exercise their[p.485] powers through this contact with the earth and who dope the mediums and sitters with their falsehoods, tricks and illusions.

Spiritual Evolution

Life is only one brief episode in a long history of spiritual evolution in which the soul follows the curve of the line set for the earth, passing through many lives to complete it. It is an evolution out of material inconscience to consciousness and on towards the divine Consciousness, from ignorance to divine Knowledge, from darkness through half-lights to Light, from death to Immortality, from suffering to the Divine Bliss.

Each soul follows its own line and these lines meet, journey together for a space, then part to meet again perhaps hereafter. It is a series of ascents from the physical being and consciousness to the vital, the being dominated by the life-self, thence to the mental being realised in the fully developed man and thence into the perfect consciousness which is beyond the mental, into the Supramental consciousness and the Supramental being, the Truth-Consciousness which is the integral consciousness of the spiritual being. Mind cannot be our last conscious expression because mind is fundamentally an ignorance seeking for knowledge; it is only the Supramental Truth-Consciousness that can bring us the true and whole Self-Knowledge and world-knowledge; it is through that only that we can get to our true being and fulfilment of our spiritual evolution.

Spiritual Force

The spiritual force within not only creates the future but creates the materials for the future. It is not limited to the existing materials either in their nature or in their quantity. It can transform bad material into good material, insufficient means into abundant means.

It is possible only when one has had the experience of complete silence in the mental region and when the spiritual force with its light and power descends through the mind and makes it act directly without its following its usual method of analysis, deduction, reasoning. All these faculties which are usually considered the normal activities of the mind, must be stopped, and yet the spiritual Light, Knowledge and Power must be able to transform them into a channel of direct expression, without using these means to express themselves.

Spiritual Life

To live the spiritual life is to open to another world within oneself. It is to reverse one’s consciousness, as it were. The ordinary human consciousness, even in the most developed, even in men of great talent and great realisation, is a movement turned outwards—all the energies are directed outwards, the whole consciousness is spread outwards; and if anything is turned inwards, it is very little, very rare, very fragmentary, it happens only under the pressure of very special circumstances, violent shocks, the shocks life gives precisely with the intention of slightly reversing this movement of exteriorisation of the consciousness.

Spirituality

Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature.

Spiritualisation

Spiritualisation means the descent of the higher peace, force, light, knowledge, purity, Ananda etc. which belong to any of the higher planes from Higher Mind to Overmind, for in any of these the Self can be realised. It brings about a subjective transformation; the instrumental Nature is only so far transformed that it becomes an instrument for the Cosmic Divine to get some work done while the self within remains calm and free and united to the Divine.

Strength

The feeling of being able to break a stone with the hand or for that matter break the world without anything at all except the force itself is one that comes especially when the mind and vital have not assimilated the Power. It is the feeling of something extraordinary to them and omnipotent; the idea of breaking or crushing is suggested by the rajas in the vital. Afterwards when quietly assimilated this sensation disappears and only the feeling of calm strength and immovable firmness remains.

Struggle

There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The mental energies, the heart’s emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences.

Subconscient

In our yoga we mean by the subconscient that quite submerged part of our being in which there is no wakingly conscious and coherent thought, will or feeling or organized reaction, but which yet receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in itself and from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements, crudely repeated or disguised in strange forms can surge up into dream or into the waking nature.

It is there that habitual movements, mental and vital, are stored and from there they come up into the waking mind. No longer allowed to emerge freely in the waking state, they come up in sleep as dreams. It is when they are cleared out of the subconscient, their very seeds killed by the enlightening of these hidden layers, that they cease for good.

Subjective

It means that the Truth is experienced within, but it has not yet taken hold of the dynamic relations with the outside

Knowledge and Ignorance are in their nature subjective. But from the personal point of view, the Force of Ignorance may manifest as something objective outside oneself so that even when one has Knowledge for oneself one cannot remove the environing Ignorance. If that is so, Ignorance is not merely a subjective force in oneself, it is there in the world.

Subliminal

The subliminal self stands behind and supports the whole superficial man; it has in it a larger and more efficient mind behind the surface mind, a larger and more powerful vital behind the surface vital, a subtler and freer physical consciousness behind the surface bodily existence. And above them it opens to higher superconscient as well as below them to lower subconscient ranges.

Role of subliminal forces cannot be said to be small, since from there come all the greater aspirations, ideals, strivings towards a better self and better humanity without which man would be only a thinking animal—as also most of the art, poetry, philosophy, thirst for knowledge which relieve if they do not yet dispel the ignorance.

Subtle Forces

There is such a thing as a willed use of any subtle force - it may be spiritual, mental or vital - to secure a particular result at some point in the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind-waves, thought-currents, waves of emotion, - for example, anger, sorrow, etc. - which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all, they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can feel them coming and invading him. Influences good or bad can propagate themselves in that way ; that can happen without intention and naturally, but also a deliberate use can be made of them. There can also be a powerful generation of force, spiritual or other. There can be too the use of the effective will or idea acting directly without the aid of any outward action, speech or other instrumentation which is not concrete in that sense, but is all the same effective.

Success

Spiritual success is the conscious union with the Divine.

Sri Aurobindo tells us that for human beings the degree of success in physical life depends on the degree of harmony between the individual and universal physical Nature. Some people have a will which is spontaneously in tune with the will of Nature, and they succeed in everything they undertake; others, on the contrary, have a will which is more or less totally out of tune with the will of cosmic Nature and they fail in everything they do or try to do.

Suffering

The supreme Peace, the supreme Calm are deformed and disfigured into inertia and into tamas, and precisely because this was the deformation of true Peace and Calm, there was no reason why it should change! A certain vibration of awakening—of reawakening—was necessary to come out of this tamas, that could not pass directly from tamas to Peace; something was needed to shake the tamas, and that is translated externally by suffering.

I am speaking here of physical suffering, because all the other sufferings—vital, mental, emotional sufferings—are due to a wrong working of the mind, and these… may simply be classed together as Falsehood, that’s all. But physical suffering gives me the impression of a child being beaten, because here, in Matter, Falsehood has become ignorance; that is to say, there is no bad will—no bad will is there in Matter, all is inertia and ignorance: complete ignorance of the Truth, ignorance of the Origin, ignorance of the Possibility and ignorance even of what is to be done in order not to suffer physically. This ignorance is everywhere in the cells, and it is only the experience, the experience of what is translated in this rudimentary consciousness as suffering, which can awaken, bring forth the need to know and to cure, and the aspiration to transform oneself.

Suicide

It [an impulse to commit suicide] can come from two sources. (1) An old impression in the subconscient, usually from a past suicide in the family or surroundings. (2) An invasion from one of those around you. Many sadhaks have this suggestion and in some it takes the form of a periodic attack. One must never allow the suggestion to stick or in the least entertain it, otherwise it may fasten in the subconscient and give trouble.

Suicide is the worst way that anyone could take to get out of a spiritual difficulty. It only increases and prolongs the difficulty; for it continues it after death, the struggle, the suffering in an exaggerated form and it has to be faced again in another life. The dissolution of the physical elements into Nature would leave the mind and vital as they are, with all their problems present and unsolved.

Sun

The sun is the symbol of the concentrated light of Truth.

The sun in the Yoga is the symbol of the supermind and the supermind is the first power of the Supreme which one meets across the border where the experience of spiritualised mind ceases and the unmodified divine Consciousness begins the domain of the supreme nature, parā prakṛti.

Sunlit path

The sunlit path can only be followed if the psychic is constantly or usually in front or if one has a natural spirit of faith and surrender or a face turned habitually towards the sun or psychic predisposition (e.g. a faith in one’s spiritual destiny) or if he has acquired the psychic turn. That does not mean that the sunlit man has no difficulties; he may have many, but he regards them cheerfully as “all in the day’s work”.

There is a sunlit path as well as a gloomy one and it is the better of the two—a path in which one goes forward in absolute reliance on the Mother, fearing nothing, sorrowing over nothing. Aspiration is needed but there can be a sunlit aspiration full of light and faith and confidence and joy. If difficulty comes, even that can be faced with a smile.

Superconscient

The life of the mind, senses, vital activities in which we dwell is not the whole or the chief part of our existence, not the highest, not self-existent, not master of itself. It is an outer fringe, a lower result, an inferior working of something beyond; a superconscient Existence has developed, supports and governs this partial and fragmentary, this incomplete and unsatisfying consciousness and activity of the mind, life and senses. To rise out of this external and surface consciousness towards and into that superconscient is our progress, our goal, our destiny of completeness and satisfaction.

Supermind

The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light.

Supernatural Phenomena

There are different planes of substance, gross, subtle and more subtle going back to what is called causal (kāraṇa) substance. What is more gross can be reduced to the subtle state and the subtle brought into the gross state; that accounts for dematerialisation and rematerialisation.

The direct power of mind-force or life-force upon matter can be extended to an almost illimitable degree. It must be remembered that Energy is fundamentally one in all the planes, only taking more and more dense forms, so there is nothing a priori impossible in mind-energy or life-energy acting directly on material energy and substance; if they do they can make a material object do things or rather can do things with a material object which would be to that object in its ordinary poise or ‘law’ unhabitual and therefore apparently impossible

Supression

Forceful suppression (fasting comes under the head) stands on the same level as free indulgence; in both cases, the desire remains; in the one it is fed by indulgence, in the other it lies latent and exasperated by suppression. It is only when one stands back, separates oneself from the lower vital, refusing to regard its desires and clamours as one’s own, and cultivates an entire equality and equanimity in the consciousness with respect to them that the lower vital itself becomes gradually purified and itself also calm and equal. Each wave of desire as it comes must be observed, as quietly and with as much unmoved detachment as you would observe something going on outside you, and must be allowed to pass, rejected from the consciousness, and the true movement, the true consciousness steadily put in its place.

Supramental

Supramental is simply the direct self-existent Truth-Consciousness and the direct self-effective Truth- Power.

The supramental is the Truth-Consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter.

The Truth-Consciousness whether above or in the universe by which the Divine knows not only his own essence and being but his manifestation also. The fundamental character is knowledge by identity, by that the Self is known, the Divine Sachchidananda is known, but also the truth of manifestation is known because this too is That. Mind is an instrument of the Ignorance trying to know - Supermind is the Knower possessing Knowledge, because one with it and the known, therefore seeing all things in the light of His own Truth, the light of their true self which is He. It is a dynamic and not only a static Power, not only a Knowledge, but a Will according to Knowledge - there is a Supramental Power or Shakti which can manifest direct its world of Light and Truth in which all is luminously based on the harmony and unity of the One, not disturbed by a veil of Ignorance or any disguise.

Supramentalisation

Is only a key for opening the gates of the supramental to the earth-consciousness.

The object of supramentalisation is a body fitted to embody and express the physical consciousness on earth so long as one remains in the physical life. It is a step in the spiritual evolution on the earth, not a step in the passage towards a supraphysical world. The supramentalisation is the most difficult part of the change arrived at by the supramental Yoga, and all depends on whether a sufficient change can be achieved in the consciousness at present to make such a step possible.

Supraphysical Worlds

This organisation includes, as on our earth, the existence of beings who have or take forms, manifest themselves or are naturally manifested in an embodying substance, but a substance other than ours, a subtle substance tangible only to subtle sense, a supraphysical form-matter. These worlds and beings may have nothing to do with ourselves and our life, they may exercise no action upon us; but often also they enter into secret communication with earth-existence, obey or embody and are the intermediaries and instruments of the cosmic powers and influences of which we have a subjective experience, or themselves act by their own initiation upon the terrestrial world’s life and motives and happenings.

Surrender

Surrender means to consecrate everything in oneself to the Divine, to offer all one is and has, not to insist on one’s ideas, desires, habits etc., but to allow the divine Truth to replace them by its knowledge, will and action everywhere.

The essence of surrender is to accept whole-heartedly the influence and the guidance when the joy and peace come down, to accept them without question or cavil and let them grow; when the Force is felt at work, to let it without opposition, when the Knowledge is given, to receive and follow it, when the Will is revealed, to make oneself its instrument.

Symbol

A symbol is the form of one plane that represents a truth of another. Generally all forms are symbols. Everything is a symbol of some higher reality. There are different kinds of symbols : (1) Conventional symbols, e.g. Vedic cow for light. (2) Life-symbols such as derive naturally from our day-to-day life. e.g. mountain, a symbol of path of yoga, level above level, peak upon peak. (3) Symbols that have an inherent apposition and form of their own, e.g. ākāśa or etheric space, a symbol of the infinite all-pervading eternal Brahman. (4) Mental symbols, e.g. numbers or alphabets.