Flowers bring a touch of eternity, joy and beauty which lie beyond the sorrows and cares of the human world. According to The Mother, apart from the colour, fragrance, beauty of form and texture of a flower, there is something more - an aspiration, an emanation, an aspect, a psychic giving, wordless prayers of Nature and a progress in the evolution of the Earth. All these attributes together form the spiritual significance of a flower. A conscious and intimate relationship with flowers can give an experience of communion with the Divine and awakens the true consiousness in us. At the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, The Mother, over time, has given spiritual names to nearly nine hundred flowers revealing their deepest aspiration.
This website is dedicated to present all the significance of flowers in the light of her vision and experience.
The Spiritual Significance of Flowers:
Identifying spiritual significance of a flower is not something which can be done by the mind. Here, She has described the process:
Mother, when flowers are brought to you, how do you give them a significance?
By entering into contact with the nature of the flower, its inner truth. Then one knows what it represents.
Each flower has its special significance, hasn't it?
Not as we understand it mentally. There is a mental projection when one gives a precise meaning to a flower. It may answer, vibrate to the touch of this projection, accept the meaning, but a flower has no equivalent of the mental consciousness. In the vegetable kingdom there is a beginning of the psychic, but there is no beginning of the mental consciousness. In animals it is different; mental life begins to form and for them things have a meaning. But in flowers it is rather like the movement of a little baby - it is neither a sensation nor a feeling, but something of both; it is a spontaneous movement, a very special vibration. So, if one is in contact with it, if one feels it, one gets an impression which may be translated by a thought. That is how I have given a meaning to flowers and plants - there is a kind of identification with the vibration, a perception of the quality it represents and, little by little, through a kind of approximation (sometimes this comes suddenly, occasionally it takes time), there is a coming together of these vibrations(which are of a vital-emotional order) and the vibration of the mental thought, and if there is a sufficient harmony, one has a direct perception of what the plant may signify……
(Read more Q & A related to flowers by the Mother here)
Even though all the significances were given by The Mother, Sri Aurobindo's touch is undoubtedly felt since the spiritual significances of the flowers correspond to His incisive psychological analysis of the different planes of consciousness and parts of our being.
Growing in contact with flowers is also a part of Integral Yoga since the Mother used flowers as a help in sadhana, teaching us how to master and transform our lower nature and realise the highest possibilities that await us. Love of flowers can help us to find our own psychic being, the Divine within us.
In that spirit let’s try to realise the deepest aspiration of flowers by loving them and growing in contact with them, and we can once more say to ourselves in a more perfect and luminous sense: “Blossom like a flower.”
