Some interesting aphorism by Sri Aurobindo and each definition he gives is poetic and wise. Something to think about…
1. There are two allied powers in man; knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is so much of the truth seen in a distorted medium as the mind arrives at by groping, wisdom what the eye of divine vision sees in the spirit.
2. Inspiration is a slender river of brightness leaping from a vast and eternal knowledge, it exceeds reason more perfectly than reason exceeds the knowledge of the senses.
3. When I speak, the reason says, “This will I say”; but God takes the word out of my mouth and the lips say something else at which reason trembles.
4. I am not a Jnani, for I have no knowledge except what God gives me for His work. How am I to know whether what I see be reason or folly ? Nay, it is neither; for the thing seen is simply true and neither folly nor reason.
5. If mankind could but see though in a glimpse of fleeting experience what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust and scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature, to forbid the turning away of our feet from her ordinary pastures.
6. Late, I learned that when reason died, then Wisdom was born; before that liberation, I had only knowledge.
7. What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.
8. Reason divides, fixes details and contrasts them; Wisdom unifies, marries contrasts in a single harmony.
9. Either do not give the name of knowledge to your beliefs only and of error, ignorance or charlatanism to the beliefs of others, or do not rail at the dogmas of the sects and their intolerance.
10. What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.
11. My soul knows that it is immortal. But you take a dead body to pieces and cry triumphantly “Where is your soul and where is your immortality ?”
12. Immortality is not the survival of the mental personality after death, though that also is true, but the waking possession of the unborn and deathless self of which body is only an instrument and a shadow.
13. They proved to me by convincing reasons that God did not exist, and I believed them. Afterwards I saw God, for He came and embraced me. And now which am I to believe, the reasonings of others or my own experience ?
14. They told me, “These things are hallucinations.” I inquired what was a hallucination and found that it meant a subjective or a psychical experience which corresponds to no objective or no physical reality. Then I sat and wondered at the miracles of the human reason.
15. Hallucination is the term of Science for those irregular glimpses we still have of truths shut out from us by our preoccupation with matter; coincidence for the curious touches of artistry in the work of that supreme and universal Intelligence which in its conscious being as on a canvas has planned and executed the world.
16. That which men term a hallucination is the reflection in the mind and senses of that which is beyond our ordinary mental and sensory perceptions. Superstition arises from the mind’s wrong understanding of these reflections. There is no other hallucination.
17. Do not, like so many modern disputants, smother thought under polysyllables or charm inquiry to sleep by the spell of formulas and cant words. Search always; find out the reason for things which seem to the hasty glance to be mere chance or illusion.
