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A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
A single lie discovered is enough to create doubt in every truth expressed.
If you tell the truth, it becomes a part of your past. If you lie, it becomes a part of your future.
We all know how difficult it ... Views: 1641
What do you think?
You might be pro-religion or anti-religion, but either way you might notice a decline in religious values in America today.
This is a spiritual blog and the changes might impact you in some way.
This post looks at the decline of religious influence in contemporary ... Views: 1327
Spiritual notions abound today regarding finding your calling, and the typical message can be summed up like this: Follow your heart to align yourself with and find your divine purpose, and you’ll find happiness and all the abundance you want, while avoiding life's challenges.
We love ... Views: 1168
As long as we focus our attention on the surface perceptions, events and actions, we respond to the vibrations associated with those things. We may focus on our physical needs, our vital desires, our mental interests, our emotional states, or on our aesthetic and artistic sensibilities, or on ... Views: 371
The integral Yoga does not depend, as many yogic paths do, on physical asanas or breathing techniques, nor on chanting of mantras, nor singing and dancing in ecstatic states of trance, nor deep philosophical inquiry or strict mental techniques. Nor does it depend on austerity or any kind of ... Views: 527
When an individual begins to recognise the existence of his soul, and seeks for a way to come into contact with it, and begin to thereby understand the purpose and significance of his life in the larger creation, the first question that comes to mind is ‘how do I do that?’
This leads to a ... Views: 421
Enthusiasm and gratitude. They represent the powers of aspiration and receptivity in the being, along with the impulse to surrender of the ego and widen to embrace the Divine. For those interested in the transformation of life in the world, it is not sufficient to simply have a direct connection ... Views: 315
The primary functionality of the mind is to organize and classify, breaking down and fragmenting the reality into component parts. We see this easily in the classification systems for flora and fauna, in our detailed review of the genetic structure of life, gene sequencing, and in our ability to ... Views: 407
The genius of the Rishis of ancient India was their ability to focus on the essential core of knowledge, will and existence. They reminded us that we can obtain many forms and types of knowledge, but each of these is but a fragment, an isolated fact or event, if we have not identified that ... Views: 276
What is Addiction?
Addiction is a complicated disorder and chronic dysfunction, which changes the operating function of the brain and body, which can also create dangerous damage to families, relationships between couples, workplaces, schools, and communities. When a person is addicted to any ... Views: 1043
There are tales in the Puranas that indicate that even the Gods, if they want to evolve and develop, must take birth on earth in a human incarnation. If we look broadly at the evolution of consciousness from the gross material, to the vital, to the vital-mental and eventually to the mental ... Views: 395
Most people believe they are in control of their actions, their decisions and their circumstances, at least until they find things not turning out the way they expected or wished for! When an individual takes up the spiritual path consciously, he begins to examine this assumption. First, he ... Views: 13
There is a substantial and well-known danger of the vital nature taking advantage of the force that comes down through the psychic aspiration and using it to advance objectives of the vital rather than those that carry out the intended purpose of the Divine Power. There is a well known ... Views: 77
What drags you down? I'll share what does it for me.
My negative thoughts can attack me on even the best of days. They are so persistent and so effective that I have come to call them The Undercurrent.
The Undercurrent is a quiet, unseen, and vicious tug that is always running just beneath ... Views: 1492
A powerful technique for inner growth and understanding is to sit quietly and simply observe one’s thoughts and feelings as they arise. Then, trace back any of them to where and how it arose. What triggered it? Where did it come from? Initially it is difficult to successfully carry out this ... Views: 299
Recently the question arose about how and in what form the witness consciousness survives death. This is not a question for either philosophical reasoning or religious dogma. Regardless of the opinion that these general approaches put forth, it is between the individual soul, as a unique ... Views: 346
We can identify the direction of the evolutionary development of the universe towards the expression of free will, despite the fact that at our current state we can recognise that there is apparently very little free will operative in our actions. In the physical world, Matter operates under ... Views: 343
We see the world from the individual standpoint and place ourselves at the center of it. We believe we originate the thoughts, feelings, emotions and responses we give. This, however, is very much the illusion of the ego-sense.
Consider that for the longest time, human beings believed that ... Views: 68
We are educated and habituated to focus on our differences. We see different gender, different class, different racial characteristics, different religious backgrounds, different temperaments, different interests and focus, different value sets, different philosophies of life and living, ... Views: 205
Each society, each religion, each culture in the world has its own characteristic ideas and responses to the questions that arise during an individual’s life. Many of these are programmed into the individual in childhood, starting with prenatal conditioning based on the energies of the mother. ... Views: 329
Dr. Dean Ornish held a webinar on Sunday November 20, 2022 with the Vegan Society of Honolulu, Hawaii, in which he succinctly explained the role of suffering in the progress of humanity. For those who do not know about his work, Dr. Ornish has spent decades studying the impact of diet and ... Views: 523
Spiritual seekers are frequently advised not to indulge in or display any ‘powers’ that arise along the way. Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras, describes a number of powers that can arise naturally through the practice of Yoga, and seekers throughout the ages have validated the reality of powers ... Views: 310
External impressions, sensations, impulsions, events all traverse the nervous pathways from the sense organs to the mind, which tends to react to these sensations and thereby remains in a constant state of disturbance. In the modern world, with our addiction to social media, mobile phones, ... Views: 199
The vital nature of man is a core existential element of our existence. In the past, those who took up serious spiritual practice frequently recognised both the power of the vital and the difficulty of bringing it under some kind of managed and focused control, and thus, they attempted to ... Views: 684
It has been famously stated that we cannot understand the system within which we are acting until we can shift our view to a standpoint outside that frame. As long as we are immersed within any particular system or standpoint, we are locked into the viewpoint and understanding embedded within ... Views: 400
When we think about what qualities within ourselves are aids to achieving conscious contact with the psychic being, the soul, we would likely not name ‘enthusiasm’ as one of them. The Mother, however, makes the case for this quality. Those things that motivate us to learn, to expand our ... Views: 419
The mind can be a powerful tool for spiritual growth, or it can become an obstacle under certain circumstances. Many devotees take the position that aspiration, devotion, surrender to the Divine is the only way forward. For those individuals that may indeed be true. Not everyone is capable of ... Views: 451
Of what possible value is the effort at mental, emotional, vital or physical progress to the soul if it cannot carry that progress forward into the next, and future lives. In his epic poem, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Sri Aurobindo raises the issue: “But the oblivion that succeeds the fall, ... Views: 409
The witness consciousness is an extremely useful mode for the seeker to adopt in any attempt to overcome the limitations and deformations of the external nature, whether to try to attain liberation and release from the world, or, as Sri Aurobindo suggests, to work toward the eventual divinsation ... Views: 92
There is a dynamic that frequently occurs when an individual starts to actively take up the yogic path. At a certain stage of development, the need to bring peace into the being, and the need for a calm, quiet energy to support the practice of meditation may take center stage. At that point, the ... Views: 159
When the vital nature is involved, which individual has the power to control its impulsions and demands and keep it focused on the higher aims of life? The vital nature is a powerful and essential component of life on earth. It animates material nature and functions through the force of desire. ... Views: 401
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother make a distinction between the ‘desire soul’ of the vital nature and the ‘true soul’ which expresses the inmost being that is a direct spark of the Divine. They differ in their focus, orientation, and basis of action. The desire soul incorporates the drives of the ... Views: 406
We generally confuse the vital nature with the soul. We look at the external life of the body and recognise that when the life-force departs, the body dies and the lifetime and personality associated with that existence comes to an end. Some scientists decided that they could identify the ... Views: 31
A life focused solely on meditation, inner development, growth of knowledge, or on prayer and devotion, tends to avoid the implications of the ongoing evolution of consciousness and the need for transformation and positive change to create the circumstances for that evolution of consciousness to ... Views: 390
Most people are not aware of the vital envelope, sometimes called the ‘aura’, that surrounds their physical body. Those who experience this vital envelope are sensitive on the vital plane. They are frequently ridiculed for speaking about the ‘aura’ which they can feel or even observe in ... Views: 59
Many people have had the experience of a feeling that something is happening in the body, such as a feeling of a “cold coming on”. In some cases the feeling is very strong and the pressure is great. There may be some sneezing, some tickle in the throat, some coughing, some amount of congestion. ... Views: 269
We frequently hear people saying that this world is a world of opposites and one cannot have joy without sorrow, pleasure without pain. This is accepted basically as an axiom for living in the world. And it is true, that for virtually everyone there is a mixture of positive and negative vital ... Views: 511
In order to carry out the spiritual practices and work for the transformation of human nature, the vital being needs to agree to changes its habitual sources of satisfaction and fulfillment to an entirely different basis. The pursuit of pleasure, and the accompanying experience of pain, is ... Views: 366
In the ordinary life in the world, the action of vital desire, and the attempt to fulfill the desires is accepted to such a degree that it is not even consciously noted or treated as anything other than ‘human nature’. Society sets certain customary restraints or limits in order to build a civil ... Views: 644
As each phase of the evolution of consciousness manifests, it arises from the prior stage and continues to interact with that stage. At the point of meeting, the stages take on characteristics that resemble in many ways both together. Thus, the higher forms of Matter begin to exhibit ... Views: 669
Most people have had the experience. An individual has a dispute with a friend, a relative, a spouse. No resolution takes place. An attempt to convince or control the other person is met with resistance. There may be aggression or threats of violence. Or a period of silent avoidance may result. ... Views: 232
Lion tamers, horse whisperers, dog trainers, all learn certain things about how to bring the vital nature into a compliant and participatory mood, to carry out the wishes of the trainer. They quickly learn that they cannot simply allow these vital beings the absolute license to do whatever they ... Views: 536
The vital nature is closely tied to the operation of desire. Whether it is a desire for recognition, for money, for sex, for achievement of some sort, for acceptance or comfort, the vital nature activates its energy to reach out and grab some result it believes will satisfy that desire. At the ... Views: 255
The vital has a natural tendency to seek for the fulfillment of its being in some form of enjoyment. In the external surface being, this enjoyment takes the form of a seeking after pleasure. With this seeking after pleasure, however, comes also the experience of pain. Pleasure and pain alternate ... Views: 392
In Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice the vital reaction of jealousy is explored in considerable depth. The title character Othello is married to a young woman with whom he is passionately in love, in the normal sense of the word. Iago, who wants to bring down Othello, ... Views: 681
When Life emerges in Matter, there must, obviously, be some mechanism for the two principles to interact with one another. Matter must develop ways to sense, respond to and react to the action of the Life-Force. Similarly, when the Life-Force evolves and manifests in Matter, it must also become ... Views: 374
THE VITALITY OF APPLICATION and RESEARCH-BASED LEARNING FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY YOUTH
Times are changing, and the change is leaking in truly quick! The expression of today is more innovation-based than it was ever previously. In actuality, innovative headways have given some quick development in ... Views: 599
Most people have their spiritual motivation filtered through their external personality. If the mind is their predominant part, then it may take a mental turn. If the vital, then a vital turn. If the physical, a physical turn. In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo describes the human aspiration as ... Views: 35
What makes us move in one direction or another? How do we choose, decide, set forth in one direction as opposed to another? There is the inner readiness that creates a sense of incompleteness, dissatisfaction or a view of something better, more perfect, more beautiful, more essential than what ... Views: 302
The development of existentialism as a philosophical viewpoint on human existence in the world took place primarily during the 19th and 20th centuries. it focused on the apparent lack of meaning in the universe and thus, human significance had to be developed from an individual standpoint of ... Views: 184