=1 "The imprisoned splendour"

The imprisoned splendour

“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things, what'er you may believe.

There is an inmost centre in us all,

Where truth abides, in fullness; and around

Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,

This perfect, clear perception – which is truth.

A baffling and perverting carnal mesh

Binds it, and makes all error: and, to know

Rather consists in opening out a way

Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,

Than in effecting entry for a light

Supposed to be without.”

– Robert Browning
“Paracelsus”

“The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us.”

– Sri Aurobindo
The Synthesis of Yoga, p.53, “The Four Aids”

“[T]he true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within. That, if we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground as “the leader of the march set in our front”, will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception.”

– Sri Aurobindo
The Human Cycle, p.33, “The Coming of the Subjective Age”