All Life Is Yoga: The Sunlit Way of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo

cannot by his own effort make himself more than man; the mental being cannot by his own unaided force change himself into a supramental spirit. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptacle.

      For the powers of our mind, life and body are bound to their own limitations and, however high they may rise or however widely expand, they cannot rise above their natural ultimate limits or expand beyond them. But, still, mental man can open to what is beyond him and call down a supramental Light, Truth and Power to work in him and do what the mind cannot do. If mind cannot by effort become what is beyond mind, supermind can descend and transform mind into its own substance.

      If the supramental Power is allowed by man’s discerning assent and vigilant surrender to act according to its own profound and subtle insight and flexible potency, it will bring about slowly or swiftly a divine transformation of our present semi-perfect nature.

      This descent, this working is not without its possibility of calamitous fall and danger. If the human mind or the vital desire seizes hold on the descending force and tries to use it according to its own limited and erring ideas or flawed and egoistic impulses, – and this is inevitable in some degree until this lower mortal has learned something of the way of that greater immortal nature, – stumblings and deviations, hard and seemingly insuperable obstacles and wounds and suffering cannot be escaped and even death or utter downfall are not impossible. Only when the conscious integral surrender to the Divine has been learned by mind and life and body, can the way of the Yoga become easy, straight, swift and safe.

      And it must be a surrender and an opening to the Divine alone and to no other. For it is possible for an obscure mind or an impure life force in us to surrender to undivine and hostile forces and even to mistake them for the Divine. There can be no more calamitous error. Therefore our surrender must be no blind and inert passivity to all influences or any influence, but sincere, conscious, vigilant, pointed to the One and the Highest alone.

      Self-surrender to the divine and infinite Mother, however difficult, remains our only effective means and our sole abiding refuge. Self-surrender to her means that our nature must be an instrument in her hands, the soul a child in the arms of the Mother.

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      Words of the Mother

      The mountain path leads always in two directions, upward and downward – all depends on what we put behind us.

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      Words of the Mother

      Life is a perpetual choice between truth and falsehood, light and darkness, progress and regression, the ascent towards the heights or a fall into the abyss. It is for each one to choose freely.

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      Words of the Mother

      In each one’s life a moment comes when he has to choose between the Path and the muddle. You cannot put one foot here and one foot there. If you try to, you will be torn to pieces.

      A heart that does not choose is a heart that will die.

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      Words of the Mother

      You take up the spiritual path only when you feel you cannot do otherwise.

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      Words of the Mother

      When the path is known it is easy to tread upon it.

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      Words of the Mother

      To follow the path to the end, one must be armed with a very patient endurance.

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      Words of the Mother

      On the spiritual path each step forward is a conquest and the result of a fight.

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      Words of the Mother

      The road to the Divine: always long, often dry in appearance, but always abundant in its results.

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      Words of the Mother

      Ascension: stage by stage one climbs towards the Consciousness.

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      Words of the Mother

      Spiritual ascension: fearless, regular, uninterrupted.

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      Words of the Mother

      One will pass through as many stages as it is necessary to take, but one will arrive.

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      Words of the Mother

      The intellectual attitude comes first and practice follows little by little. What is very important is to maintain very alert the will to live and to be what one knows to be the truth. Then it is impossible to stop and even more to fall back.

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      Words of the Mother

      All human beings have a spiritual destiny which is near or far depending on each one’s determination.

      One must will in all sincerity.

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      Words of the Mother

      All depends upon the choice of the force that you allow to make use of you as its instrument. And the choice has to be made at every moment of your life.

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      Words of the Mother

      It is the conflict in you between what is attached to ordinary life and what aspires for the divine life. It is up to you to choose which is the strongest in you and to act accordingly.

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      Words of the Mother

      You can follow the meanderings of innumerable reincarnations or choose the steep and rapid path of intensive “sadhana”.

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      Words of the Mother

      He who follows the steep path that climbs the heights can easily slip down into the abyss.

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      Words of the Mother

      For those whose destiny it is to scale the summits, the least false step risks being a mortal danger.

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      Words of the Mother

      The perfect path: for each one the path which leads fastest to the Divine.

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      Words of the Mother

      All was gold and gold and gold, a torrent of golden light pouring down in an uninterrupted flow and bringing with it the consciousness that the path of the gods is a sunlit path in which difficulties lose all reality.

      Such is the path open before us if we choose to take it.

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      Chapter 9

      The Sunlit Path to Divine Grace

      Words of Sri Aurobindo

      To walk through life armoured against all fear, peril and disaster, only two things are needed, two that go always together – the Grace of the Divine Mother and on your side an inner state made up of faith, sincerity and surrender. Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect. An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards to heaven. Regard your life as given you only for the divine work and to help in the divine manifestation. Desire nothing but the purity, force, light, wideness, calm, Ananda of the divine consciousness and its insistence to transform and perfect your mind, life and body. Ask for nothing but the divine, spiritual and supramental Truth, its realisation on earth and in you and in all who are called and chosen and the conditions needed for its creation and its victory over all opposing