Delight Secretly

Supports

All Our Sufferings

A Compilation from the Works of

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Delight Secretly

Supports

All Our Sufferings

© All writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

are copyright of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

and have been reproduced here with their kind permission.

©2021 AuroPublications, Sri Aurobindo Society, Puducherry

www.aurosociety.org

Year of Publication 2024

Compilation done by Jamshed M. Mavalwalla

Proofreading: Archana Udaykumar and Gayatri Majumdar

E-book: Uttam Mondal

Foreword

All over the world, there is a growing interest in Spirituality and Yoga.  There is a search for the true meaning and purpose of life, for deeper solutions to the problems which confront us all, and how we can contribute to the evolutionary change and progress.

In this search, more and more persons are turning to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for guidance and enlightenment.  But in their voluminous literature, they do not know where to find the answers they are looking for.

In this regard the Mother has said,

“It is not by books that Sri Aurobindo ought to be studied but by subjects—what he has said on the Divine, on Unity, on religion, on evolution, on education, on self-perfection, on supermind, etc., etc.” (CWM 12: 206)

On another occasion she said:

“If you want to know what Sri Aurobindo has said on a given subject, you must at least read all he has written on that subject. You will then see that he seems to have said the most contradictory things. But when one has read everything and understood a little, one sees that all the contradictions complement one another and are organised and unified in an integral synthesis.” (CWM 16: 309-310)

While there are several compilations which are now available, many sincere spiritual seekers have felt the need of Comprehensive Compilations from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on specific subjects, where the contents are further organised into sub-topics, so that one can get all that one is looking for at one place.

These books are an effort to fulfill this need and thus help spiritual seekers in their journey and sadhana.  We hope these compilations will help us to get a greater mental clarity about a subject so that we can channel our efforts in the right direction. For Sri Aurobindo has written:

“It is always better to make an effort in the right direction; even if one fails the effort bears some result and is never lost.” (CWSA 29: 87)

We will be glad to get suggestions and feedback from the readers.

Vijay

Preface

This seventh book in the series of comprehensive compilations on the topic “Suffering” is “Delight Secretly Supports All Our Sufferings”.

The quotations in this compilation are taken from the volumes of the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) and the Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), Second Edition. Each quotation is followed by the book title, volume number and the page number it has been taken from.

While the passages from Sri Aurobindo are in the original English, most of the passages from the Mother (selections from her talks and writings) are translations from the original French. We must also bear in mind that the excerpts have been taken out of their original context and that a compilation, in its very nature, is likely to have a personal and subjective approach. A sincere attempt, however, has been made to be faithful to the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Those who would like to go through the fuller text are advised to go through the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) and the Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), Second Edition.

The section headings and sub-headings have also been provided by the compiler to bring clarity on the selected topic. Also to emphasize certain portion in the quotations, the compiler has bold-faced some words.

Jamshed M. Mavalwalla

Contents

I—Brahman Created the World for Delight

II—All Illimitableness, All Infinity, All Absoluteness Is Pure Delight

III—All Things Are Self-Expression of All-Embracing Delight of Self-Existence

IV—To Build Self-Existent Bliss Is the Goal of Nature

V—To Seek for Delight Is the Fundamental Impulse and Sense of Life

VI—Human Idea of the Supreme State Is Bliss without Suffering

VII—Man Has to Be Full of Bliss and Not the Sport of Grief and Suffering

VIII—Suffering Is the Seal of a Lower Status; the Highest Consciousness Is Integrally Fulfilled in Delight

IX—In the Full Manifestation, Pain and Suffering Are Transformed into Ananda

X—Delight Is There in Enduring and Then in Conquering Suffering and Finally in Its Transmutation

XI—All Things Are Delight, but Mind and Body Falsely Present Them as Grief and Pain

1.      The heart seeks, mistakenly, through physical and emotional enjoyment, to reach out to unity and to realize bliss

XII—If in All Contacts We Seize Rasa, Then We Will Feel the Delight

XIII—Behind the Tamasic Materialistic Mind’s Suffering, There Is Ananda

XIV—When Stripped of Ego, We Understand the Plan of the Lord: Suffering Is to Teach Creation the Delight of Being

XV—There Is Hope That the Suffering World Can Become the Supreme Felicity

XVI—Delight Dissolves Every Suffering and Is the Most Powerful Way to Overcoming Sorrow

XVII—Suffering Is a Mask of the Universal Delight, and So It Changes into Ananda

XVIII—Subliminal Soul Takes an Equal Delight in All Contacts, Including Suffering

XIX—Suffering Can Turn into Its Opposite, the Original All-Delight, Ananda

XX—Delight Secretly Supports All Our Sufferings and Ordeals

XXI—How Delight Secretly Supports All Our Sufferings and Ordeals

I—Brahman Created the World for Delight

“… we have yet no answer to the question ‘Why should Brahman, perfect, absolute, infinite, needing nothing, desiring nothing, at all throw out force of consciousness to create in itself these worlds of forms?’ For we have put aside the solution that it is compelled by its own nature of Force to create, obliged by its own potentiality of movement and formation to move into forms. It is true that it has this potentiality, but it is not limited, bound or compelled by it; it is free. If, then, being free to move or remain eternally still, to throw itself into forms or retain the potentiality of form in itself, it indulges its power of movement and formation, it can be only for one reason, for delight.” (CWSA 21: 98)

“For who could live or breathe if there were not this delight of existence as the ether in which we dwell?

From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return.

Taittiriya Upanishad.” (CWSA 21: 98)

II—All Illimitableness, All Infinity, All Absoluteness Is Pure Delight

“Absoluteness of conscious existence is illimitable bliss of conscious existence; the two are only different phrases for the same thing. All illimitableness, all infinity, all absoluteness is pure delight. Even our relative humanity has this experience that all dissatisfaction means a limit, an obstacle,—satisfaction comes by realisation of something withheld, by the surpassing of the limit, the overcoming of the obstacle. This is because our original being is the absolute in full possession of its infinite and illimitable self-consciousness and self-power; a self-possession whose other name is self-delight. And in proportion as the relative touches upon that self-possession, it moves towards satisfaction, touches delight.” (CWSA 21: 99)

III—All Things Are Self-Expression of All-Embracing Delight of Self-Existence

“… that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that conscious force, terms of that delight of being. Just as we find all things to be mutable forms of one immutable being, finite results of one infinite force, so we shall find that all things are variable self-expression of one invariable and all-embracing delight of self-existence. In everything that is, dwells the conscious force and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that conscious force; so also in everything that is there is the delight of existence and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that delight.” (CWSA 21: 99–100)

IV—To Build Self-Existent Bliss Is the Goal of Nature

1. To build peace and self-existent bliss where there is physical pain and emotional suffering is the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution

“To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation,—this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution.” (CWSA 21: 4)

2. Direct opposition is the nature’s profoundest method of the world’s workings

“To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organization of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world’s workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature’s profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.

… The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour.” (CWSA 21: 4–5)

3. The purpose and goal of life are not suffering but an all-powerful and happy realization

“Thus, the purpose and goal of life is not suffering and struggle but an all-powerful and happy realisation.

All the rest is painful illusion.” (CWM 16: 434)

4. Out of grief, we have to recover divine bliss, which is one of the objectives of our Yogic practice

“Perfection has to be worked out, harmony has to be accomplished. Imperfection, limitation, death, grief, ignorance, matter, are only the first terms of the formula—unintelligible till we have worked out the wider terms and reinterpreted the formulary; they are the initial discords of the musician’s tuning. Out of imperfection we have to construct perfection, out of limitation to discover infinity, out of death to find immortality, out of grief to recover divine bliss, out of ignorance to rescue divine self-knowledge, out of matter to reveal Spirit. To work out this end for ourselves and for humanity is the object of our Yogic practice.” (CWSA 12: 97)

5. Our business is to dissolve dualities and plunge ourselves into the ocean of divine bliss, which takes delight from all things

“Delight in Ananda is pure, unmixed, one & yet multitudinous. Under the conditions of mind, life & body it becomes divided, limited, confused & misdirected and owing to shocks of unequal forces & uneven distribution of Ananda subject to the duality of positive & negative movements, grief & joy, pain & pleasure. Our business is to dissolve these dualities by breaking down their cause & plunge ourselves into the ocean of divine bliss, one, multitudinous, evenly distributed (sama), which takes delight from all things & recoils painfully from none.

In brief, we have to replace dualities by unity, egoism by divine consciousness, ignorance by divine wisdom, thought by divine knowledge, weakness, struggle & effort by self-contented divine force, pain & false pleasure by divine bliss. This is called in the language of Christ bringing down the kingdom of heaven on earth, or in modern language, realising & effectuating God in the world.” (CWSA 12: 101)

6. Get peace and calm fixed in the consciousness; then, there is a solid basis on which Ananda can spread itself and become part of the consciousness and the nature

“To be full of peace, the heart quiet, not troubled by grief, not excited by joy is a very good condition. As for Ananda, it can come not only with its fullest intensity but with a more enduring persistence when the mind is at peace and the heart delivered from ordinary joy and sorrow. If the mind and heart are restless, changeful, unquiet, Ananda of a kind may come, but it is mixed with vital excitement and cannot abide. One must get peace and calm fixed in the consciousness first, then there is a solid basis on which the Ananda can spread itself and in its turn become an enduring part of the consciousness and the nature.” (CWSA 29: 156)

V—To Seek for Delight Is the Fundamental Impulse and Sense of Life

“For the world is a masked form of Sachchidananda, and the nature of the consciousness of Sachchidananda and therefore the thing in which His force must always find and achieve itself is divine Bliss, an omnipresent self-delight. Since Life is an energy of His conscious-force, the secret of all its movements must be a hidden delight inherent in all things which is at once cause, motive and object of its activities; and if by reason of egoistic division that delight is missed, if it is held back behind a veil, if it is represented as its own opposite, even as being is masked in death, consciousness figures as the inconscient and force mocks itself with the guise of incapacity, then that which lives cannot be satisfied, cannot either rest from the movement or fulfil the movement except by laying hold on this universal delight which is at once the secret total delight of its own being and the original, all-encompassing, all-informing, all-upholding delight of the transcendent and immanent Sachchidananda. To seek for delight is therefore the fundamental impulse and sense of Life; to find and possess and fulfil it is its whole motive.

But where in us is this principle of Delight? through what term of our being does it manifest and fulfil itself in the action of the cosmos as the principle of Conscious-Force manifests and uses Life for its cosmic term and the principle of Supermind manifests and uses Mind? We have distinguished a fourfold principle of divine Being creative of the universe,—Existence, Conscious-Force, Bliss and Supermind. Supermind, we have seen, is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled; it is behind the actual phenomenon of things and occultly expresses itself there, but uses for effectuation its own subordinate term, Mind. The divine Conscious-Force is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled, operative secretly behind the actual phenomenon of things, and it expresses itself there but uses for effectuation its own subordinate term, Mind. The divine Conscious-Force is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled, operative secretly behind the actual phenomenon of things, and it expresses itself there characteristically through its own subordinate term, Life. And, though we have not yet examined separately the principle of Matter, yet we can already see that the divine All-existence also is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled, hidden behind the actual phenomenon of things, and manifests itself there initially through its own subordinate term, Substance, Form of being or Matter. Then, equally, the principle of divine Bliss must be omnipresent in the cosmos, veiled indeed and possessing itself behind the actual phenomenon of things, but still manifested in us through some subordinate principle of its own in which it is hidden and by which it must be found and achieved in the action of the universe.” (CWSA 21: 232–233)

VI—Human Idea of the Supreme State Is Bliss without Suffering

1. Man’s idea of the supreme state is an absolute of all that is positive according to his concepts and desirable according to his instinctive aspiration, which is Bliss without its negation in experience of suffering

“Man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he has indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an existence higher than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond his present state into that existence. His idea of the supreme state is an absolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his own instinctive aspiration,—Knowledge without its negative shadow of error, Bliss without its negation in experience of suffering, Power without its constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of being without the opposing sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he conceives his gods; it is so that he constructs his heavens. But it is not so that his reason conceives of a possible earth and a possible humanity. His dream of God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection; but he finds the same difficulty in accepting its practical realisation here for his ultimate aim as would the ancestral Ape if called upon to believe in himself as the future Man.” (CWSA 21: 61)

2. By grasping the essential cause of suffering, we can master suffering and justify the dominant instinct of our nature: bliss, which our intuition perceives as the ultimate condition of the human being

“If our reason has not the same instinctive certitude with regard to the other aspirations of humanity, it is because it lacks the same essential illumination inherent in its own positive activity. We can just conceive of a positive or absolute realisation of happiness, because the heart to which that instinct for happiness belongs has its own form of certitude, is capable of faith, and because our minds can envisage the elimination of unsatisfied want which is the apparent cause of suffering. But how shall we conceive of the elimination of pain from nervous sensation or of death from the life of the body? Yet the rejection of pain is a sovereign instinct of the sensations, the rejection of death a dominant claim inherent in the essence of our vitality. But these things present themselves to our reason as instinctive aspirations, not as realisable potentialities.

Yet the same law should hold throughout. The error of the practical reason is an excessive subjection to the apparent fact which it can immediately feel as real and an insufficient courage in carrying profounder facts of potentiality to their logical conclusion. What is, is the realisation of an anterior potentiality; present potentiality is a clue to future realisation. And here potentiality exists; for the mastery of phenomena depends upon a knowledge of their causes and processes and if we know the causes of error, sorrow, pain, death, we may labour with some hope towards their elimination. For knowledge is power and mastery.

In fact, we do pursue as an ideal, so far as we may, the elimination of all these negative or adverse phenomena. We seek constantly to minimise the causes of error, pain and suffering. Science, as its knowledge increases, dreams of regulating birth and of indefinitely prolonging life, if not of effecting the entire conquest of death. But because we envisage only external or secondary causes, we can only think of removing them to a distance and not of eliminating the actual roots of that against which we struggle. And we are thus limited because we strive towards secondary perceptions and not towards root-knowledge, because we know processes of things, but not their essence. We thus arrive at a more powerful manipulation of circumstances, but not at essential control. But if we could grasp the essential nature and the essential cause of error, suffering and death, we might hope to arrive at a mastery over them which should be not relative but entire. We might hope even to eliminate them altogether and justify the dominant instinct of our nature by the conquest of that absolute good, bliss, knowledge and immortality which our intuitions perceive as the true and ultimate condition of the human being.” (CWSA 21: 61–63)

3. As the nature of Brahman is Sachchidananda the essence of all sensation and emotion is the play of self-existent delight in being

“The ancient Vedanta presents us with such a solution in the conception and experience of Brahman as the one universal and essential fact and of the nature of Brahman as Sachchidananda. In this view the essence of all life is the movement of a universal and immortal existence, the essence of all sensation and emotion is the play of a universal and self-existent delight in being, the essence of all thought and perception is the radiation of a universal and all-pervading truth, the essence of all activity is the progression of a universal and self-effecting good. But the play and movement embodies itself in a multiplicity of forms, a variation of tendencies, an interplay of energies. Multiplicity permits of the interference of a determinative and temporarily deformative factor, the individual ego; and the nature of the ego is a self-limitation of consciousness by a willed

ignorance of the rest of its play and its exclusive absorption in one form, one combination of tendencies, one field of the movement of energies.” (CWSA 21: 63)

4. Ego determines the reactions of sorrow, pain, which would otherwise be represented in their right relation to the one Existence, Bliss, Truth and Good

5. By recovering the right relation, we may eliminate the ego-determined reactions of sorrow

“Ego is the factor which determines the reactions of error, sorrow, pain, evil, death; for it gives these values to movements which would otherwise be represented in their right relation to the one Existence, Bliss, Truth and Good. By recovering the right relation we may eliminate the ego-determined reactions, reducing them eventually to their true values; and this recovery can be effected by the right participation of the individual in the consciousness of the totality and in the consciousness of the transcendent which the totality represents.” (CWSA 21: 63)

6. By the transformation the ego into a center of the divine unity, we can have the outflowing of the infinite and Delight of being

“The essential cause and condition of universal existence is the Lord, Ishwara or Purusha, manifesting and occupying individual and universal forms. The limited ego is only an intermediate phenomenon of consciousness necessary for a certain line of development. Following this line the individual can arrive at that which is beyond himself, that which he represents, and can yet continue to represent it, no longer as an obscured and limited ego, but as a centre of the Divine and of the universal consciousness embracing, utilising and transforming into harmony with the Divine all individual determinations.

We have then the manifestation of the divine Conscious Being in the totality of physical Nature as the foundation of human existence in the material universe. We have the emergence of that Conscious Being in an involved and inevitably evolving Life, Mind and Supermind as the condition of our activities; for it is this evolution which has enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this evolution which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body,—the universal Incarnation. We have in egoistic formation the intermediate and decisive factor which allows the One to emerge as the conscious Many out of that indeterminate totality general, obscure and formless which we call the subconscient,—hṛdya samudra, the ocean heart in things of the Rig Veda. We have the dualities of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil as the first formations of egoistic consciousness, the natural and inevitable outcome of its attempt to realise unity in an artificial construction of itself exclusive of the total truth, good, life and delight of being in the universe. We have the dissolution of this egoistic construction by the self-opening of the individual to the universe and to God as the means of that supreme fulfillment to which egoistic life is only a prelude even as animal life was only a prelude to the human. We have the realisation of the All in the individual by the transformation of the limited ego into a conscious centre of the divine unity and freedom as the term at which the fulfilment arrives. And we have the outflowing of the infinite and absolute Existence, Truth, Good and Delight of being on the Many in the world as the divine result towards which the cycles of our evolution move. This is the supreme birth which maternal Nature holds in herself; of this she strives to be delivered.” (CWSA 21: 63–65)

VII—Man Has to Be Full of Bliss and Not the Sport of Grief and Suffering

“This is thy work and the aim of thy being and that for which thou art here, to become the divine superman and a perfect vessel of the Godhead. …

… For if thou say what is my being, this is thy being, the Divine, and all else is only its broken or its perverse appearance. If thou seek the Truth, this is the Truth. Place it before thee and in all things be faithful to it.

It has been well said … that thy aim is to become thyself; and he said well again that the nature of man is to transcend himself. This is indeed his nature and that is indeed the divine aim of his self-transcending.

What then is the self that thou hast to transcend and what is the self that thou hast to become? For it is here that thou shouldst make no error; for this error, not to know thyself, is the fountain of all thy grief and the cause of all thy stumbling.

… The self that thou hast to become, is the self that thou art within behind the veil of mind and life and matter. It is to be the spiritual, the divine, the superman, the real Purusha. For that which is above the mental being, is the superman. It is to be the master of thy mind, thy life and thy body; it is to be a king over Nature of whom thou art now the tool, lifted above her who now has thee under her feet. It is to be free and not a slave, to be one and not divided, to be immortal and not obscured by death, to be full of light and not darkened, to be full of bliss and not the sport of grief and suffering, to be uplifted into power and not cast down into weakness. It is to live in the Infinite and possess the finite. It is to live in God and be one with him in his being. To become thyself is to be this and all that flows from it.” (CWSA 12: 150–151)

VIII—Suffering Is the Seal of a Lower Status; the Highest Consciousness Is Integrally Fulfilled in Delight

“Knowledge does not end with knowing, nor is it pursued and found for the sake of knowing alone. It has its full value only when it leads to some greater gain than itself, some gain of being. Simply to know the eternal and to remain in the pain, struggle and inferiority of our present way of being, would be a poor and lame advantage.

… Since we are incomplete in being, to grow is our aim, and that knowledge, action, creation, enjoyment are the best which most help us to expand, grow, feel our existence.

Mere existence is not fullness of being. Being knows itself as power, consciousness, delight; a greater being means a greater power, consciousness and delight.

If by greater being we incurred only a greater pain and suffering, this good would not be worth having. Those who say that it is, mean simply that we get by it a greater sense of fulfilment which brings of itself a greater joy of the power of existence, and an extension of suffering or a loss of other enjoyment is worth having as a price for this greater sense of wideness, height and power. But this could not be the perfection of being or the highest height of its fulfilment; suffering is the seal of a lower status. The highest consciousness is integrally fulfilled in wideness and power of its existence, but also it is integrally fulfilled in delight.”  Readings in the Taittiriya Upanishad (CWSA 18: 154–155)

“Brahman, then, being infinity of conscious existence, is also infinite bliss. And the bliss of Brahman is necessarily absolute both in its nature and as to its object. Any mixture or coexistence with pain would imply a cause of pain either the same or other than the cause of bliss, with the immediate admission of division, struggle, opposition, of something inharmonious and self-annulling in Brahman; but division and opposition which depend upon relation cannot exist in the unrelated Absolute. Pain is, properly considered, the result of limitation. When the desires and impulses are limited in their satisfaction or the matter, physical or mental, on which they act is checked, pressed inward, divided or pulled apart by something alien to itself, then only can pain arise. Where there is no limitation, there can be no pain. The Bliss of Brahman is therefore absolute in its nature.” The Philosophy of the Upanishads (CWSA 18: 369–370)

IX—In the Full Manifestation, Pain and Suffering Are Transformed into Ananda

1. In the full manifestation, pain and suffering no longer remain themselves but are transformed into Ananda

“In experience even on the spiritual plane so long as we do not transcend the spirit in mind, there is a difference between peace and Ananda. Peace is the Divine static, Ananda the Divine dynamic. Peace … has essentially the character of the Witness Spirit or at the most of the disinterested Witness-Creator. Ananda is in its every fibre a positive of positives. It affirms and rejoices in all that is native to peace, but it affirms too and rejoices in all that peace negates or regards with a sovereign separateness. Ananda is an all embracing and creative force. There can be in the world's tangle of conflicting forces an Ananda of pain and suffering and in the full manifestation pain and suffering no longer remain themselves but are transformed into Ananda. But these opposing differences prove in the end to be part of the separative mental creation, the disjunctive Maya in which we live. In supermind experience peace is always full of Ananda and by its Ananda can act and create; Ananda is for ever full of the divine peace and its most vehement ecstatic intensity contains no possibility of disturbance. At the height of the supramental Infinite peace and Ananda are one. For there status and dynamis are inseparable, rest and action affirm each other, essence and expression are one indivisible whole.” (CWSA 12: 207–208)

X—Delight Is There in Enduring and Then in Conquering Suffering and Finally in Its Transmutation

“As to suffering, which is so great a stumbling-block to our understanding of the universe, it is evidently a consequence of the limitation of consciousness, the restriction of force which prevents us from mastering or assimilating the touch of what is to us other-force: the result of this incapacity and disharmony is that the delight of the touch cannot be seized and it affects our sense with a reaction of discomfort or pain, a defect or excess, a discord resultant in inner or outer injury, born of division between our power of being and the power of being that meets us. Behind in our self and spirit is the All-Delight of the universal being which takes its account of the contact, a delight first in the enduring and then in the conquest of the suffering and finally in its transmutation that shall come hereafter; for pain and suffering are a perverse and contrary term of the delight of existence and they can turn into their opposite, even into the original All–Delight, Ananda. This All-Delight is not present in the universal alone, but it is here secret in ourselves, as we discover when we go back from our outward consciousness into the Self within us; the psychic being in us takes its account even of its most perverse or contrary as well as its more benign experiences and grows by the rejection of them or acceptance; it extracts a divine meaning and use from our most poignant sufferings, difficulties, misfortunes. Nothing but this All-Delight could dare or bear to impose such experiences on itself or on us; nothing else could turn them thus to its own utility and our spiritual profit.”  (CWSA 21: 420)

“One can experience, on the path—when one has made some progress, when there is a greater understanding, a more total opening, a more intimate union with the divine Consciousness, one can experience this Delight as something that passes by and colours life and gives it its true meaning, but as long as one is in the human consciousness, this Delight is very easily deformed and changes into something which no longer resembles it at all. Therefore, one could hardly say that if one loses the delight, one’s consciousness is lowered, for... the Delight I am speaking about is something which cannot ever be lost. If one has reached beyond the two states I spoke about a while ago, that is to say, the state of perfect detachment and close union, and the state of perfect love and compassion, if one has gone beyond these two states and found the divine Delight, it is practically impossible to come down from there. But in practical life, that is, on the path of yoga, if you are touched, even in passing, by this divine Delight, it is obvious that, should it leave you, you are bound to feel that you have come down from a peak into a rather dark valley.

But Delight without detachment would be a very dangerous gift which could very easily be perverted. So, to seek Delight before having acquired detachment does not seem to be very wise. One must first be above all possible opposites: indeed, above pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness, enthusiasm and depression. If one is above all that, then one may safely aspire for Delight.” (CWM 8: 327)

XI—All Things Are Delight, but Mind and Body Falsely Present Them as Grief and Pain

1. The heart seeks, mistakenly, through physical and emotional enjoyment, to reach out to unity and to realize bliss

“Man desires because he is infinite Self seated in the ego-ridden heart. The self is one in being and its nature is bliss; therefore the heart confined by ego seeks to reach out to the unity & to realise the bliss but it seeks, mistakenly, through physical and emotional enjoyment in the jagat. Man desires illimitably because he is universal and illimitable; he cannot satisfy his desires illimitably because egoistic self-division persuades him to limit himself to his individual mind, life and body. Man desires with pain & weeping because by creating habitual wants, conventional dualistic standards of delight and false values of grief and joy, pleasure and pain he has bound himself not to recognise infinite Ananda in the world, not to perceive that to the secret self, because it is unegoistic, all things are delight, even those touches which to the mind and body present themselves falsely & unnecessarily as grief and pain. While he persists in these conditions, desire, failure, discontent & pain must be always his portion. He must recognise the Truth, for the Truth only can set him free.” (CWSA 17: 475–476)

XII—If in All Contacts We Seize Rasa, Then We Will Feel the Delight

“For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa, which means at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us, but look only to the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and shrinkings that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or indifference, that is to say, blank inability to seize the essence, are the forms taken by the Rasa. If we could be entirely disinterested in mind and heart and impose that detachment on the nervous being, the progressive elimination of these imperfect and perverse forms of Rasa would be possible and the true essential taste of the inalienable delight of existence in all its variations would be within our reach. We attain to something of this capacity for variable but universal delight in the aesthetic reception of things as represented by Art and Poetry, so that we enjoy there the Rasa or taste of the sorrowful, the terrible, even the horrible or repellent; and the reason is because we are detached, disinterested, not thinking of ourselves or of self-defence (jugupsā), but only of the thing and its essence. Certainly, this aesthetic reception of contacts is not a precise image or reflection of the pure delight which is supramental and supra-aesthetic; …” (CWSA 21: 116–117)

XIII—Behind the Tamasic Materialistic Mind’s Suffering, There Is Ananda

“The big difficulty in Matter is that the material consciousness (that is to say, the mind in Matter) has been formed under the pressure of difficulties—difficulties, obstacles, sufferings, struggles. It has been, so to say, ‘worked out’ by these things and that has left upon it a stamp, almost of pessimism, defeatism, which is certainly the greatest obstacle.

It is of this that I am conscious in my own work. The most material consciousness, the most material mind is accustomed to act, to make an effort, to advance through whippings; otherwise, it is tamas. And then, so far as it imagines, it imagines always difficulty, always the obstacle or always the opposition, and that slows down the movement terribly. Very concrete, very tangible and often repeated experiences are needed to convince it that behind all its difficulties there is a Grace, behind all its failures there is the Victory, behind all its pains, its sufferings, its contradictions, there is Ananda. Of all efforts it is this one which has to be repeated most often; all the while you are obliged to stop or to remove, to convert a pessimism, a doubt or an imagination altogether defeatist.” (CWM 11: 2)

XIV—When Stripped of Ego, We Understand the Plan of the Lord: Suffering Is to Teach Creation the Delight of Being

“The whole creation, the whole universal manifestation appears at best like a very bad joke if it only comes to this [leave the earth once one has realised the soul]. Why begin at all if it is only to get out of it! What is the use of having struggled so much, suffered so much, of having created something which, at least in its external appearance, is so tragic and dramatic, if it is simply to teach you how to get out of it—it would have been better not to begin at all.

But if one goes to the very depth of things, if, stripped not only of all egoism but also of the ego, one gives oneself totally, without reserve, so completely and disinterestedly that one becomes capable of understanding the plan of the Lord, then one knows that it is not a bad joke, not a tortuous path by which you return, a little battered, to the starting-point; on the contrary, it is to teach the entire creation the delight of being, the beauty of being, the greatness of being, the majesty of a sublime life, and the perpetual growth, perpetually progressive, of that delight, that beauty, that greatness. Then everything has a meaning, then one no longer regrets having struggled and suffered, one has only the enthusiasm to realise the divine goal, and one plunges headlong into the realisation with the certitude of the goal and victory

… That is what must be done: to cast off one’s ego. Then one can know the true goal—and this is the only way!

To cast off one’s ego, to let it fall off like a useless garment.

The result is worth the efforts that must be made. And then, one is not all alone on the way. One is helped, if one has trust.

If you have had even a second’s contact with the Grace—that marvellous Grace which carries you along, speeds you on the path, even makes you forget that you have to hurry—if you have had only a second’s contact with that, then you can strive not to forget. And with the candour of a child, the simplicity of a child for whom there are no complications, give yourself to that Grace and let it do everything.

What is necessary is not to listen to what resists, not to believe what contradicts—to have trust, a real trust, a confidence which makes you give yourself fully without calculating, without bargaining. Trust! The trust that says, ‘Do this, do this for me, I leave it to You.’

That is the best way.” (CWM 9: 426–427)

Thoughts and Aphorisms

134 – When thou art able to see how necessary is suffering to final delight, failure to utter effectiveness and retardation to the last rapidity, then thou mayst begin to understand something, however faintly and dimly, of God’s workings.” On Thoughts and Aphorisms (CWM 10: 244)

135 – All disease is a means towards some new joy of health, all evil and pain a tuning of Nature for some more intense bliss and good, all death an opening on widest immortality. Why and how this should be so, is God’s secret which only the soul purified of egoism can penetrate.” On Thoughts and Aphorisms (CWM 10: 244)

136 – Why is thy mind or thy body in pain? Because thy soul behind the veil wishes for the pain or takes delight in it; but if thou wilt—and perseverest in thy will—thou canst impose the spirit’s law of unmixed delight on thy lower members.” On Thoughts and Aphorisms (CWM 10: 244)

500. “Suffering makes us capable of the full force of the Master of Delight; it makes us capable also to bear the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude.” Thoughts and Aphorisms (CWSA 12: 493)

XV—There Is Hope That the Suffering World Can Become the Supreme Felicity

“If you look at yourself carefully, you will see that one always carries in oneself the opposite of the virtue one has to realise (I use “virtue” in its widest and highest sense). You have a special aim, a special mission, a special realisation which is your very own, each one individually, and you carry in yourself all the obstacles necessary to make your realisation perfect. Always you will see that within you the shadow and the light are equal: you have an ability, you have also the negation of this ability. But if you discover a very black hole, a thick shadow, be sure there is somewhere in you a great light. It is up to you to know how to use the one to realise the other.

This is a fact very little spoken about, but one of capital importance. And if you observe carefully you will see that it is always thus with everyone. This leads us to statements which are paradoxical but absolutely true; for instance, that the greatest thief can be the most honest man (this is not to encourage you to steal, of course!) and the greatest liar can be the most truthful person. So, do not despair if you find in yourself the greatest weakness, for perhaps it is the sign of the greatest divine strength. Do not say, ‘I am like that, I can’t be otherwise.’ It is not true. You are ‘like that’ because, precisely, you ought to be the opposite. And all your difficulties are there just so that you may learn to transform them into the truth they are hiding.

…

If the world was not essentially the opposite of what it has become, there would be no hope. For the hole is so black and so deep, and the inconscience so complete, that if this were not the sign of the total consciousness, well, there would be nothing more to do but pack up one’s kit and go away. Men like Shankara, who did not see much further than the end of their nose, said that the world was not worth the trouble of living in, for it was impossible, that it was better to treat it as an illusion and go away, there was nothing to be done with it. I tell you, on the contrary, that it is because the world is very bad, very dark, very ugly, very unconscious, full of misery and suffering, that it can become the supreme Beauty, the supreme Light, the supreme Consciousness and supreme Felicity.” (CWM 4: 118–119)

XVI—Delight Dissolves Every Suffering and Is the Most Powerful Way to Overcoming Sorrow

“The only way to make life perfect—I mean here, life on earth, of course—is to look at it from high enough to see it as a whole, not only in its present totality, but in the whole of the past, present and future: what it has been, what it is and what it will be—one must be able to see everything at once. Because that is the only way to put everything in its place. Nothing can be eliminated, nothing should be eliminated, but each thing must be in its place in total harmony with all the rest. And then all these things that seem so ‘bad’, so ‘reprehensible’, so ‘unacceptable’ to the puritan mind, would become movements of delight and freedom in a totally divine life. And then nothing would prevent us from knowing, understanding, feeling and living this wonderful laughter of the Supreme who takes infinite delight in watching Himself live infinitely.

This delight, this wonderful laughter that dissolves every shadow, every pain, every suffering! You only have to go deep enough within yourself to find the inner Sun, to let yourself be flooded by it; and then there is nothing but a cascade of harmonious, luminous, sunlit laughter, which leaves no room for any shadow or pain.

In fact, even the greatest difficulties, even the greatest sorrows, even the greatest physical pain—if you can look at them from that standpoint, from there, you see the unreality of the difficulty, the unreality of the sorrow, the unreality of the pain—and there is nothing but a joyful and luminous vibration.

In fact, this is the most powerful way of dissolving difficulties, overcoming sorrows and removing pain. The first two are relatively easy—I say relatively—the last one [physical pain] is more difficult because we are in the habit of considering the body and its feelings to be extremely concrete, positive; but it is the same thing, it is simply because we have not learnt, we are not in the habit of regarding our body as something fluid, plastic, uncertain, malleable. We have not learnt to bring into it this luminous laughter that dissolves all darkness, all difficulty, all discord, all disharmony, everything that jars, that weeps and wails.

And this Sun, this Sun of divine laughter is at the centre of all things, the truth of all things: we must learn to see it, to feel it, to live it.

And for that, let us avoid people who take life seriously; they are very boring people.

As soon as the atmosphere becomes grave you can be sure that something is wrong, that there is a troubling influence, an old habit trying to reassert itself, which should not be accepted. All this regret, all this remorse, the feeling of being unworthy, of being at fault—and then one step further and you have the sense of sin. Oh! To me it all seems to belong to another age, an age of darkness.

But everything that persists, that tries to cling and endure, all these prohibitions and this habit of cutting life in two—into small things and big things, the sacred and the profane.... ‘What!’ say the people who profess to follow a spiritual life, ‘how can you make such little things, such insignificant things the object of spiritual experience?’ And yet this is an experience that becomes more and more concrete and real, even materially; it’s not that there are ‘some things’ where the Lord is and ‘some things’ where He is not. The Lord is always there. He takes nothing seriously, everything amuses Him and He plays with you, if you know how to play. You do not know how to play, people do not know how to play. But how well He knows how to play! How well He plays! With everything, with the smallest things: you have some things to put on the table? Don’t feel that you have to think and arrange, no, let’s play: let’s put this one here and that one there, and this one like that. And then another time it’s different again.... What a good game and such fun!

So, it is agreed, we shall try to learn how to laugh with the Lord.” (CWM 10: 155–157)

XVII—Suffering Is a Mask of the Universal Delight, and So It Changes into Ananda

“A constant inner communion is the joy to be made close and permanent and unfailing. This communion is not to be confined to an exceptional nearness and adoration when we retire quite into ourselves away from our normal preoccupations, nor is it to be sought by a putting away of our human activities. All our thoughts, impulses, feelings, actions have to be referred to him for his sanction or disallowance, or if we cannot yet reach this point, to be offered to him in our sacrifice of aspiration, so that he may more and more descend into us and be present in them all and pervade them with all his will and power, his light and knowledge, his love and delight. In the end all our thoughts, feelings, impulses, actions will begin to proceed from him and change into some divine seed and form of themselves; in our whole inner living we shall have grown conscious of ourselves as a part of his being till between the existence of the Divine whom we adore and our own lives there is no longer any division. So too in all happenings we have to come to see the dealings with us of the divine Lover and take such pleasure in them that even grief and suffering and physical pain become his gifts and turn to delight and disappear finally into delight, slain by the sense of the divine contact, because the touch of his hands is the alchemist of a miraculous transformation. Some reject life because it is tainted with grief and pain, but to the God-lover grief and pain become means of meeting with him, imprints of his pressure and finally cease as soon as our union with his nature becomes too complete for these masks of the universal delight at all to conceal it. They change into the Ananda.

All the relations by which this union comes about, become on this path intensely and blissfully personal.” (CWSA 24: 602–603)

XVIII—Subliminal Soul Takes an Equal Delight in All Contacts, Including Suffering

“The subliminal soul is conscious inwardly of the rasa of things and has an equal delight in all contacts; it is conscious also of the values and standards of the surface desire-soul and receives on its own surface corresponding touches of pleasure, pain and indifference, but takes an equal delight in all. In other words, our real soul within takes joy of all its experiences, gathers from them strength, pleasure and knowledge, grows by them in its store and its plenty. It is this real soul in us which compels the shrinking desire-mind to bear and even to seek and find a pleasure in what is painful to it, to reject what is pleasant to it, to modify or even reverse its values, to equalise things in indifference or to equalise them in joy, the joy of the variety of existence. And this it does because it is impelled by the universal to develop itself by all kinds of experience so as to grow in Nature. Otherwise, if we lived only by the surface desire-soul, we could no more change or advance than the plant or stone in whose immobility or in whose routine of existence, because life is not superficially conscious, the secret soul of things has as yet no instrument by which it can rescue the life out of the fixed and narrow gamut into which it is born. The desire-soul left to itself would circle in the same grooves for ever.” (CWSA 21: 236–237)

“It is possible by bringing the real soul to the surface to replace the egoistic standards of pleasure and pain by an equal, an all-embracing personal-impersonal delight.” (CWSA 21: 237)

XIX—Suffering Can Turn into Its Opposite, the Original All-Delight, Ananda

“Behind in our self and spirit is the All-Delight of the universal being which takes its account of the contact, a delight first in the enduring and then in the conquest of the suffering and finally in its transmutation that shall come hereafter; for pain and suffering are a perverse and contrary term of the delight of existence and they can turn into their opposite, even into the original All-Delight, Ananda. This All-Delight is not present in the universal alone, but it is here secret in ourselves, as we discover when we go back from our outward consciousness into the Self within us; the psychic being in us takes its account even of its most perverse or contrary as well as its more benign experiences and grows by the rejection of them or acceptance; it extracts a divine meaning and use from our most poignant sufferings, difficulties, misfortunes. Nothing but this All-Delight could dare or bear to impose such experiences on itself or on us; nothing else could turn them thus to its own utility and our spiritual profit. So too nothing but an inalienable harmony of being inherent in an inalienable unity of being would throw out so many harshest apparent discords and yet force them to its purpose so that in the end they are unable to do anything else but to serve and secure, and even themselves change into elements that constitute, a growing universal rhythm and ultimate harmony.” (CWSA 21: 420–421)

XX—Delight Secretly Supports All Our Sufferings and Ordeals

1. There is delight in one’s own suffering and the suffering of others

“In all that is developed by the life-force there is developed at the same time a secret delight somewhere in the being, a delight in good and a delight in evil, a delight in truth and a delight in falsehood, a delight in life and an attraction to death, a delight in pleasure and a delight in pain, in one’s own suffering and the suffering of others, but also in one’s own joy and happiness and good and the joy and happiness and good of others.” (CWSA 21: 645)

1. In each pain and torture of our being is the secret of a flame of rapture

“Pain and grief are Nature’s reminder to the soul that the pleasure it enjoys is only a feeble hint of the real delight of existence. In each pain and torture of our being is the secret of a flame of rapture compared with which our greatest pleasures are only as dim flickerings. It is this secret which forms the attraction for the soul of the great ordeals, sufferings and fierce experiences of life which the nervous mind in us shuns and abhors.” (CWSA 13: 205)

2. What affects man as suffering is only Ananda, distorted bliss of existence

“The Eternal is in his very truth of being Existence, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. These three are a trinity and inseparable—they are not three but one; it is only in a certain play of the Manifestation that they can be distinguished and separated from each other or turned phenomenally into their opposites. … What affects us as pain or suffering is only Ananda turned against itself, a distorted and tortured Bliss of existence. These contradictions are real in the Ignorance and because of the Ignorance, but to the true consciousness they are only phenomenal and superficial, not true truths of being.” (CWSA 12: 187–188)

3. Pain and grief are garbs of world-delight, for delight hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry

“Even pain and grief are garbs of world-delight,

It hides behind thy sorrow and thy cry.

Because thy strength is a part and not God’s whole,

Because afflicted by the little self

Thy consciousness forgets to be divine

As it walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh

And cannot bear the world’s tremendous touch,

Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain.

Indifference, pain and joy, a triple disguise,

Attire of the rapturous Dancer in the ways,

Withhold from thee the body of God’s bliss.” (CWSA 34: 454)

4. Suffering conceals supreme bliss

“When we no longer have any affinity with suffering and are cured of all perverse attachment to it, the Divine will help us to discover that it conceals the supreme bliss.” (CWM 10: 356–357)

5. Delight remains hidden within all experiences, whether pleasant, painful or neutral

“As in the apparent inconscience of Matter our soul, growing out of its bondage to its own superficial habit and particular mode of self-conscious existence, discovers that infinite Conscious-Force constant, immobile, brooding, so in the apparent non-sensation of Matter it comes to discover and attune itself to an infinite conscious Delight imperturbable, ecstatic, all-embracing. This delight is its own delight, this self is its own self in all; but to our ordinary view of self and things which awakes and moves only upon surfaces, it remains hidden, profound, subconscious. And as it is within all forms, so it is within all experiences whether pleasant, painful or neutral.” (CWSA 21: 108)

XXI—How Delight Secretly Supports All Our Sufferings and Ordeals

“… when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the ordinary emotional and sensational pleasure of the individual human creature. Pleasure, joy and delight, as man uses the words, are limited and occasional movements which depend on certain habitual causes and emerge, like their opposites pain and grief which are equally limited and occasional movements, from a background other than themselves. Delight of being is universal, illimitable and self-existent, not dependent on particular causes, the background of all backgrounds, from which pleasure, pain and other more neutral experiences emerge. When delight of being seeks to realise itself as delight of becoming, it moves in the movement of force and itself takes different forms of movement of which pleasure and pain are positive and negative currents. Subconscient in Matter, superconscient beyond Mind this delight seeks in Mind and Life to realise itself by emergence in the becoming, in the increasing self-consciousness of the movement. Its first phenomena are dual and impure, move between the poles of pleasure and pain, but it aims at its self-revelation in the purity of a supreme delight of being which is self-existent and independent of objects and causes. Just as Sachchidananda moves towards the realisation of the universal existence in the individual and of the form-exceeding consciousness in the form of body and mind, so it moves towards the realisation of universal, self-existent and objectless delight in the flux of particular experiences and objects. Those objects we now seek as stimulating causes of a transient pleasure and satisfaction; free, possessed of self, we shall not seek but shall possess them as reflectors rather than causes of a delight which eternally exists.” (CWSA 21: 106)

“In the egoistic human being, the mental person emergent out of the dim shell of matter, delight of existence is neutral, semi-latent, still in the shadow of the subconscious, hardly more than a concealed soil of plenty covered by desire with a luxuriant growth of poisonous weeds and hardly less poisonous flowers, the pains and pleasures of our egoistic existence. When the divine conscious-force working secretly in us has devoured these growths of desire, when in the image of the Rig Veda the fire of God has burnt up the shoots of earth, that which is concealed at the roots of these pains and pleasures, their cause and secret being, the sap of delight in them, will emerge in new forms not of desire, but of self-existent satisfaction which will replace mortal pleasure by the Immortal’s ecstasy. And this transformation is possible because these growths of sensation and emotion are in their essential being, the pains no less than the pleasures, that delight of existence which they seek but fail to reveal,—fail because of division, ignorance of self and egoism.” (CWSA 21: 106–107)

“In the first place, since in our depths we ourselves are that One, since in the reality of our being we are the indivisible All-Consciousness and therefore the inalienable All-Bliss, the disposition of our sensational experience in the three vibrations of pain, pleasure and indifference can only be a superficial arrangement created by that limited part of ourselves which is uppermost in our waking consciousness. Behind there must be something in us,—much vaster, profounder, truer than the superficial consciousness,—which takes delight impartially in all experiences; it is that delight which secretly supports the superficial mental being and enables it to persevere through all labours, sufferings and ordeals in the agitated movement of the Becoming. That which we call ourselves is only a trembling ray on the surface; behind is all the vast subconscient, the vast superconscient profiting by all these surface experiences and imposing them on its external self which it exposes as a sort of sensitive covering to the contacts of the world; itself veiled, it receives these contacts and assimilates them into the values of a truer, a profounder, a mastering and creative experience. Out of its depths it returns them to the surface in forms of strength, character, knowledge, impulsion whose roots are mysterious to us because our mind moves and quivers on the surface and has not learned to concentrate itself and live in the depths.” (CWSA 21: 112)

“Again this triple vibration of pleasure, pain, indifference, being superficial, being an arrangement and result of our imperfect evolution, can have in it no absoluteness, no necessity. There is no real obligation on us to return to a particular contact a particular response of pleasure, pain or neutral reaction, there is only an obligation of habit. We feel pleasure or pain in a particular contact because that is the habit our nature has formed, because that is the constant relation the recipient has established with the contact. It is within our competence to return quite the opposite response, pleasure where we used to have pain, pain where we used to have pleasure. It is equally within our competence to accustom the superficial being to return instead of the mechanical reactions of pleasure, pain and indifference that free reply of inalienable delight which is the constant experience of the true and vast Bliss-Self within us.”  (CWSA 21: 113)

“The spirit we are is not only an eternal consciousness and eternal being; its characters are an eternal power of being and an eternal Ananda. Creation is not to the spirit a trouble and an anguish, but a delight expressed, even though in the entirety of its depths inexpressible, fathomless, endless, inexhaustible. It is only the limited action of mind in the ignorance straining after possession and discovery and unable to find the concealed power of the spirit that makes of the delight of action and creation a passion or suffering: for, limited in capacity and embarrassed by life and body, it has yet desires beyond its capacity, because it is the instrument of a growth and the seed of an illimitable self-expression and it has the pain of the growth and the pain of the obstacle and the pain of the insufficiency of its action and delight. But let this struggling self-creator and doer of works once grow into the consciousness and power of the secret infinite spirit within it and all this passion and suffering passes away into an immeasurable delight of liberated being and its liberated action.

The Buddhist perception of karma and suffering as inseparable, that which drove the Buddha to the search for a means of the extinction of the will to be, is only a first phase and partial appearance. To find self is the cure of suffering, because self is infinite possession and perfect satisfaction. But to find self in quiescence is not the whole meaning of the spiritual evolution, but to find it too in its power of being; for being is not only eternal status, but also eternal movement, not only rest, but also action. There is a delight of rest and a delight of action, but in the wholeness of the spirit these two things are no longer contraries, but one and inseparable. The status of the spirit is an eternal calm, but also its self-expression in world-being is without any beginning or end, because eternal power means an eternal creation. When we gain the one, we need not lose its counterpart and consequence. To get to a foundation is not to destroy all capacity for superstructure.” (CWSA 13: 356)

“There is a perception more and more concrete that everything... that there is nothing that does not contain the delight of being, because it is the way of being: without the delight of being, there is no being. But it is not what we understand mentally by the delight of being. It is... something that is difficult to say. And this perception of suffering and delight, almost of evil and good, all this, these are necessities for the work, to allow the work to be done in a certain field of inconscience. Because the true consciousness is something altogether, altogether different.” (CWM 11: 109)

“But the greatest skill in works of Yoga is that which to the animal man seems its greatest ineptitude. For all this difficult attainment, the latter will say, may lead to anything you please, but we have to lose our personal life, abandon our personal objects, annul our personal will and pleasure and without these life cannot be worth living. Now the object of all skill in works must be evidently to secure the best welfare either of ourselves or of others or of all. The ordinary man calls it welfare to secure momentarily some transient object, to wade for it through a sea of grief and suffering and painful labour and to fall from it again still deeper into the same distressful element in search of a new transient object. The greatest cunning of Yoga is to have detected this cheat of the mind and its desires and dualities and to have found the way to an abiding peace, a universal delight and an all-embracing satisfaction, which can not only be enjoyed for oneself but communicated to others. That too arises out of the change of our being; for the pure truth of existence carries also in it the unalloyed delight of existence, they are inseparable in the status of the infinite.” (CWSA 13: 125)

“Fact of material existence or no, it is an indubitable fact of spiritual experience and seems for a time to be the only wholly blissful fact, the one thing of which we can say Anandam Brahma, Delight is the eternal Reality, Bliss is Brahman. It is as described in the Upanishad, akáyam avranam asnáviram shuddham apápaviddham, luminous, bodiless, invulnerable, without sinews of force & action, pure, unpenetrated by evil,—whether evil of sin or evil of suffering. The soul in this state has for the world, at first & inalienably, either a peaceful or a joyous indifference,—not a repugnance, but an equal-souled acceptance or an equal-souled rejection of all things in the world which it regards not as binding fact but as vision of form and name in itself.” Isha Upanishad (CWSA 17: 486–487)

“In Savitri the ‘Mother of Sorrows’ says:

‘Perhaps when the world sinks into a last sleep,

I too may sleep in dumb eternal peace.’  (Savitri, Book VII, Canto 4)

Ah! that, that is the human consciousness. It is the human consciousness. It is the idea of the human consciousness that when all suffering will be over, well, ‘I shall sleep’. It is indeed of this that Sri Aurobindo speaks. When there is this aspiration for a supreme peace, one feels that if there were a pralaya and the world disappeared, well, at least there would be peace. But the phrase itself is self-contradictory, for if there were a pralaya, there would be no more peace to be felt—there would be nothing at all any longer!

But this is just one of the contradictions of the human consciousness: ‘As long as the world is there and suffering there, I shall suffer with the world. But if ever the world enters into peace, disappears in the peace of Non-Being, then I too shall rest.’ It is a poetic way of saying that as long as misery is there in the world, I shall suffer with the world. Only when it ceases to be there, it shall cease for me also.

Then what will the ‘Mother of Sorrows’ do?

What else can she do?

She will be the ‘Mother of Delight’.” (CWM 5: 389–390)

_____________

List of comprehensive compilations by compiler Jamshed M Mavalwalla are as follows. These books can be freely downloaded from the following link, which is Sri Aurobindo Society publication website.

https://auropublications.org/free-e-books/

Compilations related to Sadhana

1 SURRENDER In the Integral Yoga

2 ASPIRATION In the Integral Yoga

3 REJECTION In the Integral Yoga Part I

4 REJECTION In the Integral Yoga Part II

5 Conquering Obstacles in Sadhana

6 LOVE FOR THE DIVINE

7 Bhakti Yoga: The Yoga of Devotion

8 The Supreme Divine Love

9 Preparing for Yoga Through Human Love

10 The Descent of Spritual Peace

11 Peace is Most Needed in Sadhana

12 To Prepare for Spiritual Life Cultivate Equality

13 Necessity for Spiritual Perfection is Perfect Equality

14 Fundamental Faith Required in Yoga

15 Faith Precedes Spiritual Experience

16 Regain Faith if Faith Falters

17 Cure from Illness by Faith

18 COURAGE in SADHANA

19 HUMILITY in SADHANA

20 SINCERITY IN SADHANA

21 How to Become ABSOLUTELY SINCERE

22 Insincerity Can Be Changed in Yoga

23 To Succeed in Sadhana Aspire Sincerely

24 PERSEVERANCE in SADHANA

25 RECEPTIVITY in SADHANA

26 All Is She (Compiled by Archana Udaykumar)

27 FAITHFULNESS in SADHANA

28 MODESTY in SADHANA

29 GENEROSITY in SADHANA

30 PATIENCE in SADHANA

31 CHEERFULNESS in SADHANA

32 MEDITATION, CONCENTRATION and CONTEMPLATION in SADHANA

33 NAMJAPA of MANTRA in SADHANA

34 Seek Spiritual Progress in Happiness

35 SILENCE in SADHANA

36 Status of Silence in the Infinite

37 CONCENTRATION in SPIRITUAL LIFE

38 WORK in SADHANA

39 WORK IS INDISPESABLE in SADHANA

40 The GITA’s GOSPEL of WORKS

41 GRATITUDE towards the DIVINE

42 PAIN the HAMMER of the GODS

Compilations on India: These series of books were released as celebration of 150th Birth Anniversary of Sri Aurobindo and 75th Anniversary of India’s Freedom.

43 India and Her Mission

44 The Task of Building India Is Spiritual

45 The Splendour of Bharat’s Past Be Reborn

46 Spirit of Kshatriya with a Large Liberal Ideal

47 Become Indian and Do Not Imitate the West

48 Qualities of the Indian Mind

49 Develop Original Thinking

50 The Mantra Vande Mataram

51 The Men Who Will Lead India

52 India One and Indivisible

53 Indian Spiritual Nationalism

Compilations related to Sadhana Continued

54 Descent of Higher Consciousness General

55 Descent of Higher Consciousness Specific

56 Higher Destiny by Descent of Higher Consciousness

57 Nexus Between Psychic Being and Higher Consciousness

58 Cure of Illness by Higher Consciousness

59 Descent Can Transform Our Being

60 How the Descent Helps the Evolution

61 Suffering Is Not Indispensable nor Necessary

62 Causes and Remedies of Suffering

63 Through Yoga One Can Come Out of Suffering

64 Suffering as Means of Progress

65 Release from Suffering in Indian Philosophy

66 How to Account for Suffering If Existence Is Delight

67 Delight Secretly Supports All Our Sufferings