All Life Is Yoga: Prayer and Mantra. Sri Aurobindo

To tell the truth, if you live only a moment, just a tiny moment, of this absolutely sincere aspiration or this sufficiently intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for hours. (The Mother) – Prayer: There is a general tendency among certain intellectuals to undermine prayer as something religious and inferior. However a look at the spiritual history of man kind reveals that prayers have always been an integral part of spiritual living. There is a rationale and a process behind prayers, a mystic truth of profound implications that the mind does not always recognise but the heart readily discovers. In this book we take up the different aspects of Prayers as part of our spiritual evolution and growth in the light of Integral Yoga. – Mantra: Sri Aurobindo reveals that ‘The Mantra, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought-substance, of style, and a highest intensity of the soul’ s vision of truth.’ It is a cry of the soul that leaps in ecstasy and adoration at the vision of Truth. The higher firmament is the secret birthplace of the mantra of which the soul becomes a witness as it ascends out of the limited scope of the mortal mind into the limitless seeing of the infinite. The mantra, therefore, is much more than merely some Sanskrit words replete with profound meaning. The mantra can be in any language for it is born out of the Silence that weaves the stars. Its depth goes beyond the mere meaning or the idea to the sound-vibrations that climb on wings of aspiration and love and carry the hearer towards the Home of Truth or reveal to him something of the Glory that hides behind the many masks of creation. In this Book we seek to bring out the truths about the mantra as revealed to us through the mantric speech and writings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.