All Life Is Yoga

“The more a person is quiet in front of all occurrences, equal in all circumstances, and keeps a perfect mastery of himself and remains peaceful in the presence of whatever happens, the more he has progressed towards the goal.” (The Mother)

“The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Divine – or, it may be said, she is the Divine in its consciousness-force.” (Sri Aurobindo)

“And finally, the best friend one can have – isn‘t he the Divine, to whom one can say everything, reveal everything? For there indeed is the source of all compassion, of all power to efface every error when it is not repeated, to open the road to true realisation; it is he who can understand all, heal all, and always help on the path, help you not to fail, not to falter, not to fall, but to walk straight to the goal. He is the true friend, the friend of good and bad days, the one who can understand, can heal, and who is always there when you need him. When you call him sincerely, he is always there to guide and uphold you – and to love you in the true way.” (The Mother)

“Strive exclusively to hear the command of the Supreme Lord, and if you are perfectly sincere, He will find a way to make you hear and recognise this command with certainty.” (The Mother)

“Lord, the year is dying and our gratitude bows down to Thee. Lord, the year is reborn, our prayer rises up to Thee. Let it be for us also the dawn of a new life.” (The Mother)

“...look at a rose, a thing that contains such a concentration of spontaneous beauty – not man-made: spontaneous, a blossoming; one has only to see it to be sure that there is a Divine. It is a certainty. One cannot... it is impossible not to believe.” (The Mother)

Question: “Tell me, Mother, what am I?” The Mother: “Outwardly, you are an unconscious child striving to become conscious. Inwardly, you are an eternal soul attempting to manifest in a body.”

“It [the soul] is, according to our psychology, connected with the small outer personality by certain centres of consciousness of which we become aware by Yoga. Only a little of the inner being escapes through these centres into the outer life, but that little is the best part of ourselves and responsible for our art, poetry, philosophy, ideals, religious aspirations, efforts at knowledge and perfection. But the inner centres are, for the most part, closed or asleep – to open them and make them awake and active is one aim of Yoga.” (Sri Aurobindo)

Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s guidance to the disciples on Faith and its importance in Yoga.
The peculiar character of our age is the divorce, says Sri Aurobindo, that has been pronounced between reason and faith, the logical mind and the intuitive heart. At first, the declaration of war between them was attended by painful struggles, a faith disturbed or a scepticism dissatisfied. But now their divorce has created exaggerated tendencies which impoverish human life by their mutual exclusiveness, on the one side a negative and destructive critical spirit, on the other an imaginative sentiment which opposes pure instinct and a faith founded on dreams to the sterile fanaticism of the intellect. Yet a real divorce is impossible. Science could not move a step without faith and intuition and today it is growing full of dreams.
“Strive exclusively to hear the command of the Supreme Lord, and if you are perfectly sincere, He will find a way to make you hear and recognise this command with certainty.” (The Mother)

For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind, and usually even his practical parts only escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. (Sri Aurobindo)