Towards Perfect Health: Selections from the Writings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo

“May all who are unhappy become happy, may the wicked become good,

This compilation of the worlds of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was first conceptualized an Exhibition.

It is being presented here as a book because many who visited the exhibition felt that a handy volume would be a help in their life and sadhana.

The selections have been taken from the Centenary edition of the collected works of the Mother and the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library edition.

The chapter headings, the titles for the quotations as well as a few linking sentences (in italics in the book) have been given by the compilers.

Our aim

A divine perfection of the human being is our aim.

Man – a living laboratory

The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god.

Limitations of the human body

Still the inconveniences of the animal body and its animal nature and impulses and the limitations of the human body at its best are there in the beginning and persist always so long as there is not the full and fundamental liberation and its in conscience or half-conscience and its binding of the soul and mind and life-force to Matter, to materiality of all kinds, to the call of the unregenerated earth-nature are there and constantly oppose the call of the spirit and circumscribe the climb to higher things. To the physical being it brings a bondage to the material instruments, to the brain and heart and senses, wed to materiality and materialism of all kinds, to the bodily mechanism and its needs and obligations, to the imperative need of food and the preoccupation with the means of getting it and storing it as one of the besetting interests of life, to fatigue and sleep, to the satisfaction of bodily desire.

Breaking of our limitations

The most we can do in the physical field by physical means is necessarily insecure as well as bound by limits; even what seems a perfect health and strength of the body is precarious and can be broken down at any moment by fluctuations from within or by a strong attack or shock from outside: only by the breaking of our limitations can a higher arid more enduring perfection come.

The stable basis

To discover the eternal Sachcbidananda, this essential self of our being within us, and live in it is the stable basis, to make its true nature evident and creative of a divine way of living in our instruments, super mind, mind, life and body, the active principle of a spiritual perfection.

Spiritual Ananda

A spiritual Ananda can flow into the body and mundane cell and tissue; a luminous materialisation of this higher Ananda could of itself bring about a total transformation of the deficient or adverse sensibilities of physical Nature.

This human hour

This human hour, this earthly hour is beautiful over all other hours. Let each and all know it and rejoice in the plenitude that is given.