What a rich, thoroughly enjoyable, enriching, clarifying, stimulating, inspiring presentation bringing together in one article the numerous extracts from the treasure of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Much thanks.
The Mother in her prayers and meditations addressed it to someone named 'Seigneur' or Lord, who might this entity be if not God? Can you shed some light on this?
The answer could be brief: the one she addressed as Lord (Seigneur in French) was God and not Fool’s God. But there is much more.
For one, there may be a greater joy in a relationship with God than in conscious identity with God. As Ramakrishna used to say: “I don’t want to be sugar, I want to taste it.”
For another, as participants in the adventure of evolution we have, besides our surface self, not one but several subliminal selves — the psychic being, the witness Purusha, the Atman, the Jiva, and ultimately God — and the progressive identification of these selves is an important aspect of this adventure. The lower or outer self’s entering into conscious relations with its inner or higher selves is a means of this progressive identification.
And again, as an "eternal portion" (“amsha sanatana,” Bhagavad Gita XV.7) of the Divine, the Jiva is both one with the Divine and capable of entertaining relations with the Divine.
You can read more about the adventure of evolution in this posts:
Here are two passages from The Synthesis of Yoga that touch on the myriad relationship one can have with the Divine:
[T]he transcendent and universal person of the Divine conforms itself to our individualised personality and accepts a personal relation with us, at once identified with us as our supreme Self and yet close and different as our Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher, our Father and our Mother, our Playmate in the great world-game who has disguised himself throughout as friend and enemy, helper and opponent and, in all relations and in all workings that affect us, has led our steps towards our perfection and our release. It is through this more personal manifestation that we are admitted to some possibility of the complete transcendental experience; for in him we meet the One not merely in a liberated calm and peace, not merely with a passive or active submission in our works or through the mystery of union with a universal Knowledge and Power filling and guiding us, but with an ecstasy of divine Love and divine Delight that shoots up beyond silent Witness and active World-Power to some positive divination of a greater beatific secret. For it is not so much knowledge leading to some ineffable Absolute, not so much works lifting us beyond world-process to the originating supreme Knower and Master, but rather this thing most intimate to us, yet at present most obscure, which keeps for us wrapped in its passionate veil the deep and rapturous secret of the transcendent Godhead and some absolute positiveness of its perfect Being, its all-concentrating Bliss, its mystic Ananda.
In and around us we feel a Power that upholds and protects and cherishes; we hear a Voice that guides; a conscious Will greater than ourselves rules us; an imperative Force moves our thought and actions and our very body; an ever-widening Consciousness assimilates ours, a living Light of Knowledge lights all within, or a Beatitude invades us; a Mightiness presses from above, concrete, massive and overpowering, and penetrates and pours itself into the very stuff of our nature; a Peace sits there, a Light, a Bliss, a Strength, a Greatness. Or there are relations, personal, intimate as life itself, sweet as love, encompassing like the sky, deep like deep waters. A Friend walks at our side; a Lover is with us in our heart’s secrecy; a Master of the Work and the Ordeal points our way; a Creator of things uses us as his instrument; we are in the arms of the eternal Mother. All these more seizable aspects in which the Ineffable meets us are truths and not mere helpful symbols or useful imaginations; but as we progress, their first imperfect formulations in our experience yield to a larger vision of the one Truth that is behind them. At each step their mere mental masks are shed and they acquire a larger, a profounder, a more intimate significance. At last on the supramental borders all these Godheads combine their forces and, without at all ceasing to be, coalesce together. On this path the Divine Aspects are not revealed in order to be cast away; they are not temporary spiritual conveniences or compromises with an illusory Consciousness or dream-figures mysteriously cast upon us by the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute; on the contrary, their power increases and their absoluteness reveals itself as they draw near to the Truth from which they issue.
Religion and nationalism, what a combination! The last time we tried “buddhist nationalists” we know where it ended.
What a rich, thoroughly enjoyable, enriching, clarifying, stimulating, inspiring presentation bringing together in one article the numerous extracts from the treasure of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Much thanks.
The Mother in her prayers and meditations addressed it to someone named 'Seigneur' or Lord, who might this entity be if not God? Can you shed some light on this?
The answer could be brief: the one she addressed as Lord (Seigneur in French) was God and not Fool’s God. But there is much more.
For one, there may be a greater joy in a relationship with God than in conscious identity with God. As Ramakrishna used to say: “I don’t want to be sugar, I want to taste it.”
For another, as participants in the adventure of evolution we have, besides our surface self, not one but several subliminal selves — the psychic being, the witness Purusha, the Atman, the Jiva, and ultimately God — and the progressive identification of these selves is an important aspect of this adventure. The lower or outer self’s entering into conscious relations with its inner or higher selves is a means of this progressive identification.
And again, as an "eternal portion" (“amsha sanatana,” Bhagavad Gita XV.7) of the Divine, the Jiva is both one with the Divine and capable of entertaining relations with the Divine.
You can read more about the adventure of evolution in this posts:
https://aurocafe.substack.com/p/a-reality-worth-being-part-of
Here are two passages from The Synthesis of Yoga that touch on the myriad relationship one can have with the Divine:
[T]he transcendent and universal person of the Divine conforms itself to our individualised personality and accepts a personal relation with us, at once identified with us as our supreme Self and yet close and different as our Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher, our Father and our Mother, our Playmate in the great world-game who has disguised himself throughout as friend and enemy, helper and opponent and, in all relations and in all workings that affect us, has led our steps towards our perfection and our release. It is through this more personal manifestation that we are admitted to some possibility of the complete transcendental experience; for in him we meet the One not merely in a liberated calm and peace, not merely with a passive or active submission in our works or through the mystery of union with a universal Knowledge and Power filling and guiding us, but with an ecstasy of divine Love and divine Delight that shoots up beyond silent Witness and active World-Power to some positive divination of a greater beatific secret. For it is not so much knowledge leading to some ineffable Absolute, not so much works lifting us beyond world-process to the originating supreme Knower and Master, but rather this thing most intimate to us, yet at present most obscure, which keeps for us wrapped in its passionate veil the deep and rapturous secret of the transcendent Godhead and some absolute positiveness of its perfect Being, its all-concentrating Bliss, its mystic Ananda.
In and around us we feel a Power that upholds and protects and cherishes; we hear a Voice that guides; a conscious Will greater than ourselves rules us; an imperative Force moves our thought and actions and our very body; an ever-widening Consciousness assimilates ours, a living Light of Knowledge lights all within, or a Beatitude invades us; a Mightiness presses from above, concrete, massive and overpowering, and penetrates and pours itself into the very stuff of our nature; a Peace sits there, a Light, a Bliss, a Strength, a Greatness. Or there are relations, personal, intimate as life itself, sweet as love, encompassing like the sky, deep like deep waters. A Friend walks at our side; a Lover is with us in our heart’s secrecy; a Master of the Work and the Ordeal points our way; a Creator of things uses us as his instrument; we are in the arms of the eternal Mother. All these more seizable aspects in which the Ineffable meets us are truths and not mere helpful symbols or useful imaginations; but as we progress, their first imperfect formulations in our experience yield to a larger vision of the one Truth that is behind them. At each step their mere mental masks are shed and they acquire a larger, a profounder, a more intimate significance. At last on the supramental borders all these Godheads combine their forces and, without at all ceasing to be, coalesce together. On this path the Divine Aspects are not revealed in order to be cast away; they are not temporary spiritual conveniences or compromises with an illusory Consciousness or dream-figures mysteriously cast upon us by the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute; on the contrary, their power increases and their absoluteness reveals itself as they draw near to the Truth from which they issue.