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Mother and Sri Aurobindo on Peace

The peace need not be grave or joyless -there should be nothing grey in it -but the gladness or joy or sense of lightness that comes in the peace must be necessarily something internal, self-existent or due to a deepening of experience -it cannot, like the laughter of which you speak, be conveyed by an external cause or dependent upon it, e.g. something amusing, exhilarating etc.

Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Yoga

Importance of Peace

Peace is the very basis of all the siddhi in the yoga...


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The first thing to do in the sadhana is to get a settled peace and silence in the mind. Otherwise you may have experiences, but nothing will be permanent. It is in the silent mind that the true consciousness can be built.

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The most important experience... is that of the peace and quiet which comes with a good concentration. It is this that must grow and fix itself in the mind and vital and body -for it is this peace and quiet that make a firm basis for the sadhana.

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 It is true that through whatever is strongest in him a sadhak can most easily open to the Divine. But... peace is necessary for all; without peace and an increasing purity, even if one opens, one cannot receive perfectly all that comes down through the opening.

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When the mind is silent there is peace and in the peace all things that are divine can come. When there is not the mind, there is the Self which is greater than the mind.


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There is no distinction between the Self and the spirit. The psychic is the soul that develops in the evolution-the spirit is the Self that is not affected by the evolution, it is above it -only it is covered or concealed by the activity of mind, vital and the body. The removal of this covering is the release of the spirit -and it is removed when there is a full and wide spiritual silence.

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If you get peace, then to clean the vital becomes easy. If you simply clean and clean and do nothing else, you go very slowly -for the vital gets dirty again and has to be cleaned a hundred times. The peace is something that is clean in itself, so to get it is a positive way of securing your object. To look for dirt only and clean is the negative way.
                                      

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      The peace liberates from all dependence on outer contacts -it brings what the Gita calls the atmarati. But at first there  is a difficulty in keeping it intact when there is the contact with others because the consciousness has the habit of running outwards in speech or external interchange or else of coming down to the normal level. One must therefore be very careful until it is fixed; once fixed it usually defends itself, for all outer contacts become surface things to a consciousness full of the higher peace.

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Yes, the inward move is the right one. To live within in the peace and silence is the first necessity. I spoke of the wideness because in the wideness of silence and peace (which the yogins recognise as the realisation of self at once individual and universal) is the basis for harmonising the inward and the outward.
                                   

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      Wideness and calmness are the foundation of the yogic consciousness and the best condition for inner growth and experience. If a wide calm can be established in the physical consciousness, occupying and filling the very body and all its cells, that can become the basis for its transformation; in fact, without this wideness and calmness the transformation is hardly possible.
                                                                        

 

Letters on Yoga II , III

   

When the inertia comes up the old movements which the subconscient is prepared to supply always can mechanically come up with it. In a certain sense this inertia and the peace are the bright and dark counterparts of each other , tamas and sama -the higher Nature finding repose in peace, the lower seeking it in a relaxation of energy and a return towards the subconscient, tamas.

Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Yoga

All extracts and quotations from the written works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the Photographs of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo are copyright Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry -605002 India.