Reward and Punishment and Rebirth

Note that the idea of rebirth and the circumstances of the new life as a reward or punishment...is a crude human idea of “justice” which is quite unphilosophical and unspiritual and distorts the true intention of life. Life here is an evolution and the soul grows by experience, working out by it this or that in the nature, and if there is suffering, it is for the purpose of that working out, not as a judgement inflicted by God or Cosmic Law on the errors or stumblings which are inevitable in the Ignorance.

[Letters on Yoga, p. 441]

Retrogression to lower form of life

We have to ask whether the soul, having once arrived at humanity, can go back to the animal life and body, a retrogression which the old popular theories of transmigration have supposed to be an ordinary movement. It seems impossible that it should so go back with any entirety, and for this reason that the transit from the animal to the human life means a decisive conversion of the vital consciousness, quite as decisive as the conversion of the vital consciousness of the plant into the mental consciousness of the animal. It is surely impossible that a conversion so decisive made by Nature should be reversed by the soul and the decision of the spirit within her come, as it were, to naught.

[The Life Divine, p. 762)

The Soul

*The soul in man is greater than his fate.
[Savitri –691]

*The soul, representative of the central being, is a spark of the Divine supporting all individual existence in Nature.
[Letters on Yoga-267]

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]