Autobiography of a Yogi

Really, it has been your thoughts that have made you feel alternately weak and strong.’ My master looked at me affectionately. ‘You have seen how your health has exactly followed your expectations. Thought is a force, even as electricity or gravitation. The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass.’

The persistent core of human egoity is only temporarily allied with sense perception.

He proves mathematically that the velocity of light is, so far as man’s finite mind is concerned, the only constant in a universe of unstayable flux.

Under either hypothesis, light remains the most subtle, the freest from material dependence, of any natural manifestation.

Nature herself is maya; natural science must perforce deal with her ineluctable quiddity.

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!”
—Rabindranath Tagore

True education can never be crammed and pumped from without; rather, it must aid in bringing spontaneously to the surface the infinite hoards of wisdom within.”
I agreed, “The idealistic and hero-worshiping instincts of the young are starved on an exclusive diet of statistics and chronological eras

Tagore told me of his own early educational struggles. “I fled from school after the fifth grade,” he said, laughing. I could readily understand how his innate poetic delicacy had been affronted by the dreary, disciplinary atmosphere of a schoolroom

About two years after founding the Ranchi school, I received an invitation from Rabindranath to visit him at Santiniketan in order to discuss our educational ideals. I went gladly. The poet was seated in his study when I entered; I thought then, as at our first meeting, that he was as striking a model of superb manhood as any painter could desire. His beautifully chiselled face, nobly patrician, was framed in long hair and flowing beard; large, melting eyes; an angelic smile; and a voice of flutelike quality which was literally enchanting. Stalwart, tall, and grave, he combined an almost womanly tenderness with the delightful spontaneity of a child. No idealised conception of a poet could find more suitable embodiment than in this gentle singer.

According to the mass karma which guides and regulates the destinies of animals, the deer’s life was over and it was ready to progress to a higher form. But by my deep attachment, which I later realised was selfish and by my fervent prayers, I had been able to hold it in the limitations of the animal form from which the soul was struggling for release. The soul of the deer made its plea in a dream because, without my loving permission, it either would not or could not go. As soon as I agreed, it departed.