Conviction

When the peace of God descends on you, when the Divine Presence is there within you, when the Ananda rushes on you like a sea, when you are driven like a leaf before the wind by the breath of the Divine Force, when love flowers out from you on all creation, when Divine Knowledge floods you with a Light which illumines and transforms in a moment all that was before dark, sorrowful and obscure, when all that is becomes part of the One Reality, when the Reality is all around you, you feel at once by the spiritual contact, by the inner vision, by the illumined and seeing thought, by the vital sensation and even by the very physical sense, everywhere you see, hear, touch only the Divine. Then you can much less doubt it or deny it than you can doubt or deny daylight or air or the sun in heaven-for of these physical things you cannot be sure but they are what your senses represent them to be; but in the concrete experiences of the Divine, doubt is impossible.

[Letters on Yoga-p 168]

Consciousness

Consciousness is not something abstract, it is like existence itself or ananda or prana, something very concrete. If one becomes aware of the inner consciousness, one can do all sorts of things with it, send it out as a stream of force, erect a circle or wall of consciousness around oneself, direct an idea so that it shall enter somebody’s head in America, etc., etc.
[Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo-Nirodbaran-p 1063]

No religion

I may say that it is far from my purpose to propagate any religion, new or old, for humanity in the future. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded is my conception of the matter.

[On Himself-125]

Spiritual and the material evolution

A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is outward and visible machinery and process, with the details of Nature’s execution, with the physical development of things in Matter and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.

[The Life Divine, p-835]

Relative

To the senses it is always true that sun moves round the earth; this is false for reason. To the reason it is always true that the earth moves round the sun; this is false to the supreme vision. Neither earth moves nor the sun; there is only a change in the relation of sun-consciousness and earth-consciousness

[Thoughts and Aphorisms-18]

God, Man, Nature are three perpetual symbols.

The experiment of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift and difficult attainments, we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in world yet uncreated. The plan, the peripeties, the denouement differ continually, yet are always governed by the conventions of an eternal Art. God, Man, Nature are three perpetual symbols.

Swami Vivekananda in Alipur Jail

It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence…The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it finished saying all that it had to say on the subject.

[The Life of Sri Aurobindo by A.B. Purani-p- 129

It is from direct experience and not from idea

My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Vedas came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realize what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level. They (the ideas of the Higher Mind ) came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from an experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience. This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.
Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research -1983

Never was a philosopher

And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher.
On Himself (Sri Aurobindo) -374

God must be born ...

God must be born on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God.
---Savitri, 537