Friday, September 26, 2008

War and strife themselves have been schools of heroism

[This creation is inspired by the divine delight, the eternal Ananda; it is full of the joy of its own truth and power, it creates in bliss, creates out of bliss, creates that which is blissful. Therefore the world of the gnosis, the supramental world is the true and the happy creation, ŗtam, bhadram , since all in it shares in the perfect joy that made it. A divine radiance of undeviating knowledge, a divine power of unfaltering will and a divine ease of unstumbling bliss are the nature or Prakriti of the soul in supermind, in vijñāna. The stuff of the gnostic or supramental plane is made of the perfect absolutes of all that is here imperfect and relative and its movement of the reconciled interlockings and happy fusions of all that here are opposites. For behind the appearance of these opposites are their truths and the truths of the Eternal are not in conflict with each other; our mind's and life's opposites transformed in the supermind into their own true spirit link together and are seen as tones and colourings of an eternal Reality and everlasting Ananda. Works Of Sri Aurobindo > English > Synthesis Of Yoga Volume-20 > Vijnana Or Gnosis ]

[Again, the sign of the divine worker is that which is central to the divine consciousness itself, a perfect inner joy and peace which depends upon nothing in the world for its source or its continuance; it is innate, it is the very stuff of the soul's consciousness, it is the very nature of divine being. The ordinary man depends upon outward things for his happiness; therefore he has desire; therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure and pain, joy and grief; therefore he measures all things in the balance of good fortune and evil fortune. None of these things can affect the divine soul; it is ever satisfied without any kind of dependence, nityatrpto nirāśrayah; for its delight, its divine ease, its happiness, its glad light are eternal within, ingrained in itself, ātmaratih, antahsukho' ntarārāmas tathāntarjyotir eva yah Page 174 Works Of Sri Aurobindo > Essays On The Gita-Volume-13 > The Divine Worker ]

[All the economic development of life itself takes on at its end the appearance of an attempt to get rid of the animal squalor and bareness which is what obligatory poverty really means, and to give to man the divine ease and leisure of the gods. It is pursued in a wrong way, no doubt, and with many ugly circumstances, but still the ideal is darkly there. Politics itself, that apparent game of strife and deceit and charlatanism, can be a large field of absolute idealisms. What of patriotism, - never mind the often ugly instincts from which it starts and which it still obstinately preserves, - but in its aspects of worship, self-giving, discipline, self-sacrifice? The great political ideals of man, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, apart from the selfishnesses they serve and the rational and practical justifications with which they arm themselves, have had for their soul an ideal, some half-seen truth of the absolute and have carried with them a worship, a loyalty, a loss of self in the idea which have made men ready to suffer and die for them. War and strife themselves have been schools of heroism; they have preserved the heroic in man, they have created the ksatriyiilJ, tyaktajivitiilJ, of the Sanskrit epic phrase, the men of power and courage who have abandoned their bodily life for a cause; for without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead. Courage, energy and strength are among the very first principles of the divine nature in action. All this great vital, political, economic life of man with its two powers of competition and co- operation is stumbling blindly forward towards some realisation of power and unity, - in two divine directions, therefore. For the Divine in life is Power possessed of self-mastery, but also of mastery of His world, and man and mankind too move towards conquest of their world, their environment. And again in the Divine fulfilment there is and must be oneness, and the ideal of human unity however dim and far-off is coming slowly into sight. The competitive nation-units are feeling, at times, however feebly as yet, the call to cast themselves into a greater unified co- operative life of the human race. Page-155 Works Of Sri Aurobindo > Social And Political Thought Volume-15 > The Suprarational Ultimate Of Life]

[And as Bastiat, a Continental scholar who was a great admirer of the Anglo-Saxons, said: “Any social arrangement that is not based on Truth and Justice will fail.” So go ahead. Reject the Anglo-Saxon economists from Bentham to Ricardo to Keynes. Study the Austrians – from Menger to Mises to Hayek to Hoppe. And study the great Continental scholars, from Bastiat to the great Bruno Leoni. -- On The Rise and Fall of the Anglo-Saxons from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik]

If the aim of "economic development" is "to give to man the divine ease and leisure of the gods," and "Politics itself...can be a large field of absolute idealisms," nothing evidently prevents them from being means of Yoga. [TNM] 9:16 AM 9:58 AM 10:19 AM 7:46 AM

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