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    All Life Is Yoga: Prayer and Mantra
    All Life Is Yoga: Prayer and Mantra
    All Life Is Yoga: Prayer and Mantra
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    All Life Is Yoga: Prayer and Mantra

    By Sri Aurobindo and The (d.i. Mira Alfassa) Mother

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    About this ebook

    To tell the truth, if you live only a moment, just a tiny moment, of this absolutely sincere aspiration or this sufficiently intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for hours. (The Mother)

    Prayer: There is a general tendency among certain intellectuals to undermine prayer as something religious and inferior. However a look at the spiritual history of man kind reveals that prayers have always been an integral part of spiritual living. There is a rationale and a process behind prayers, a mystic truth of profound implications that the mind does not always recognise but the heart readily discovers. In this book we take up the different aspects of Prayers as part of our spiritual evolution and growth in the light of Integral Yoga.

    Mantra: Sri Aurobindo reveals that ‘The Mantra, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought-substance, of style, and a highest intensity of the soul’ s vision of truth.’ It is a cry of the soul that leaps in ecstasy and adoration at the vision of Truth. The higher firmament is the secret birthplace of the mantra of which the soul becomes a witness as it ascends out of the limited scope of the mortal mind into the limitless seeing of the infinite. The mantra, therefore, is much more than merely some Sanskrit words replete with profound meaning. The mantra can be in any language for it is born out of the Silence that weaves the stars. Its depth goes beyond the mere meaning or the idea to the sound-vibrations that climb on wings of aspiration and love and carry the hearer towards the Home of Truth or reveal to him something of the Glory that hides behind the many masks of creation. In this Book we seek to bring out the truths about the mantra as revealed to us through the mantric speech and writings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSri Aurobindo Digital Edition
    Release dateJul 3, 2019
    ISBN9783963870316
    All Life Is Yoga: Prayer and Mantra

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      Book preview

      All Life Is Yoga - Sri Aurobindo

      Part 1

      PRAYER

      The whole of our life should be a prayer offered to the Divine. – The Mother

      Chapter I

      The Meaning of Prayer

      Words of Sri Aurobindo

      The life of man is a life of wants and needs and therefore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in his mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through prayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough journey, for protection and aid in his struggle. Whatever crudities there may be in the ordinary religious approach to God by prayer, and there are many, especially that attitude which imagines the Divine as if capable of being propitiated, bribed, flattered into acquiescence or indulgence by praise, entreaty and gifts and has often little regard to the spirit in which he is approached, still this way of turning to the Divine is an essential movement of our religious being and reposes on a universal truth.

      The efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous and ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty, it is true of the Transcendent who expresses himself in the universal order that being omniscient his larger knowledge must foresee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or stimulation by human thought and that the individual’s desires are not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal will altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and forces of which for human life at least human will, aspiration and faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. Its forms are very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance. Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations. For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength and endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and effective whether for lower or higher purposes, – and there are plenty of disciplines which put it forward as the one force to be used, – or it can act in dependence upon and with subordination to the divine or the universal Will. And this latter way again may either look upon that Will as responsive indeed to our aspiration, but almost mechanically, by a sort of law of energy, or at any rate quite impersonally, or else it may look upon it as responding consciously to the divine aspiration and faith of the human soul and consciously bringing to it the help, the guidance, the protection and fruition demanded, yogaksemam vahamyaham.

      Prayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the lower plane even while it is there consistent with much that is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw towards the spiritual truth which is behind it. It is not then the giving of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself, the contact of man’s life with God, the conscious interchange. In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this conscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings a fuller spiritual growth and experience. Necessarily in the end prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us, – in fact the form we call prayer is not itself essential so long as the faith, the will, the aspiration are there, – or remains only for the joy of the relation. Also its objects, the artha or interest it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the highest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure and simple without any other demand or longing.

      *

      Words of Sri Aurobindo

      To the Divine the human soul comes for help, for protection, for guidance, for fruition, – or if knowledge be the aim, to the Guide, Teacher, Giver of light, for the Divine is the Sun of knowledge, – or it comes in pain and suffering for relief and solace and deliverance, it may be deliverance either from the suffering itself or from the world-existence which is the habitat of the suffering or from all its inner and real causes1. In these things we find there is a certain gradation. For the relation of fatherhood is always less close, intense, passionate, intimate, and therefore it is less resorted to in the Yoga which seeks for the closest union. That of the divine Friend is a thing sweeter and more intimate, admits of an equality and intimacy even in inequality and the beginning of mutual self-giving; at its closest when all idea of other giving and taking disappears, when this relation becomes motiveless except for the one sole all-sufficing motive of love, it turns into the free and happy relation of the playmate in the Lila of existence. But closer and more intimate still is the relation of the Mother and the child, and that therefore plays a very large part wherever the religious impulse is most richly fervent and springs most warmly from the heart of man. The soul goes to the Mother-Soul in all its desires and troubles and the divine Mother wishes that it should be so,

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