July 29, 2009 – Knowledge Is Within You

Canst thou see God as the bodiless Infinite & yet love Him as a man loves his mistress?
Then has the highest truth of the Infinite been revealed to thee.
Canst thou also clothe the Infinite in one secret embraceable body and see Him seated in each
& all of these bodies that are visible & sensible?
Then has its widest & profoundest truth come also into thy possession.

Sri Aurobindo

(Thoughts and Aphorisms 492)

Knowledge Is Within You

You can understand only what you already know in your own inner self. What strikes you in a book is what you have already experienced deep within you. Men find a book or a teaching very wonderful and often you hear them say, “That is exactly what I myself feel and know, but I could not bring it out or express it as well as it is expressed here.” When men come across a book of true knowledge, each finds himself there, and at every new reading he discovers things that he did not see in it at first; it opens to him each time a new field of knowledge that had till then escaped him in it. But that is because it reaches layers of knowledge that were waiting for expression in the subconscious in him; the expression has now been given by somebody else and much better than he could himself have done it. But, once expressed, he immediately recognises it and feels that it is the truth. The knowledge that seems to come to you from outside is only an occasion for bringing out the knowledge that is within you.

– The Mother
The Great Adventure, Page 254

All extracts and quotations from the written works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are copyright Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry -605002 India
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