Mirror of Tomorrow—The Human Aspiration
The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and... his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation... is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity [with its] victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

Sri Aurobindo

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Our Vision
It will be the endeavour to seek and express all that ennobles the human spirit in its quest towards perfection, towards truth and beauty and joy and sweetness and love, towards fulfilment of the sense of immortality present in its deeper soul, its ceaseless aspiration for the higher manifestation even in the material creation. The Mirror shall reflect and reflect upon things of tomorrow, bring closer the human destinies by approaching the future as much as by beckoning the future to enter into its thousand possibilities.

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Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion

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The point is, we are writing with a pointless pencil. Instead of engaging ourselves in futile and frustrating debates, we must develop capacities to raise right questions. We must know, for instance, what is it which constitutes the materiality of matter, we must know why at all life should be accompanied by death. Whether we get answers to these questions or not, it is another matter; we will have the satisfaction of having tried. That is reward by itself. You dance though you can’t hear the music—and that is Hope. That is the Reward. We will be else wasting our time in puerile dialogues, keeping ourselves busy with non-essentials, with inconsequential subsidiary issues.

During the World War Two Winston Churchill was asked: “What is your aim in the War?” He simply replied: “Victory.” In that one word is the quintessence of time that shaped history. Some other power had entered into operation and it seized the ready instrument. It is some noble force of that kind which must enter into our reckoning.

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The basis of internal peace is samata, the capacity of receiving with a calm and equal mind all the attacks and I appearances of outward things, whether pleasant or unpleasant, ill-fortune and good-fortune, pleasure and pain, honour and ill-repute, praise and blame, friendship and enmity, sinner and saint, or, physically, heat and cold etc. There are two forms of samata, passive and active, samata in reception of the things of the outward world and samata in reaction to them.

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The Mother: "I consider your work as professor in the School far more important than to become a Chartered Accountant. Blessings."

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He drank the great fire that flows from blazing nipples of heaven,
And as if it were a dream his second mother gathered his hair;
A soul that burns up on its own tail is climbing the Unknown,
And into the hollow plunges the chariot of the flame-wheel;
He clapped his hand as though ensued lightning from the clouds,
But the birds were young and who would nestle them in the winter?

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Indeed, there’s no horse-race without the horses, there’s no betting,
There is no red of the ruby, nor the winter-wine’s effervescence;
There is without earth and heaven no roseate flutter of angel-wings:
It is the drumbeat that creates the drum, the twinkling the stars;
It is the mantra that ascends to Silence, and sky to the seed-sounds;
Hence I am the mango-blossoms call between sweetness and the mates,
Between the battle and the loud victory the warrior’s shining strength,—
Between the Unknowable and the Known I am the Unknown’s link.
It is the indivisible Word, and I the form-force of the riven Moment.

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Scientists are confirming that 15 pounds of rock collected recently in Morocco fell to Earth from Mars during a meteorite shower last July. This is only the fifth time in history that scientists have chemically confirmed Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling. The fireball was spotted in the sky six months ago, but the rocks were not discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December. This is an important and unique opportunity for scientists trying to learn about Mars` potential for life.

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In the realm of ideas, there aren't any problems, everything was resolved long ago—the problem is in the fact, in the material fact of the body.... It is beginning to learn its lesson. It's beginning to learn. ... Instead of the old problem—rejection of life, rejection of the difficulty, rejection of the disorder and the flight into Nirvana—it's the acceptance of everything—and Victory. This is really the new thing Sri Aurobindo has brought. Not only the idea that it's possible, but that it's the true solution, and the idea that we can start now. I am not saying we'll reach the end now, I don't know, but the idea is that we can begin right now, the time has come when we can begin, and it's the only true solution, the other solution is no solution—well, it was a necessary experiment in the universal march, but flight is no solution: the solution is Victory. And the time has come when we can try. ... It is a rather obscure labour that's going on at the moment. ... I remember the day when Sri Aurobindo told me, "Yes, you are doing an overmental work, a creation of the Overmind, you will work heaps of miracles and the whole world will admire you! ... But that is not the Truth we want." Well, this memory very often comes to my aid.

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In relation to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo we should accept large numerological significances without making a fetish of numerology.

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I hear the primal phonon’s hum deep in the superconscient womb:
Outcurving into the region of Sound I chant the glory of the Name,
Incurving I am the Silence poised on wings of eternal seeing;
I’ve become a Bird of Fire zooming on breath of my own Shadow.

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She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

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Another very common tendency, which also reflects the desire to impress rather than inform with clarity, is the use of some key words which sound as if they have a deep meaning even when they do not. “Logistics” is a good example of this. So is “solutions”. We passed a commercial van a few days ago displaying the words “Manual solutions”, and my wife and I wondered what on earth that could mean. We felt that it ought to mean “hands”—but I suspect that this was not the intention.

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My dream is spoken
As if by sound
Were tremulously broken
Some vow profound.

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There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.—Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

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Mother, as you have promised me, envelope me with your presence, raise and purify me with your touch.

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Oh the burning secret, like a fire breaking through seven sheaths of trance,
The sight-fused Word as though the seven brides clasped a strange lover!
Together we adore the great child birthing in the womb of the Occult,
Together we chant the loud Hymn of Assertion to the seven mothers.

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And the heavy day, like a ball of silver, sinks in huge bowl of the sky,
And the wings are buried, as if in a glacier calm of the unflown flights,
And the phantom-worlds of Gandharva-kings swirl and gleam in vain.
So not through the silken trellis-lines would hopes of loveliness bloom,
And not under the storm-burdened trees the rainsome peacocks dance;
But a magic heart in the Symbolist’s noon of a happy gathered mood
Shall in the Body of Truth capture with its smile all-beauty’s Delight.

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Here is an anecdote for you. One Xmas evening, I was sitting by Amal Kiran. He asked me whether I had received walnuts and, on hearing me confirm it, he proposed to teach me how to crack them without nut-crackers.

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There is no island sans girdle of roar of the loud civilisation,
No wayside shrub, no tall lonely palm, silvery gull on the beach,
No skilled rhyme responding from across mortality’s worlds;
But only in vacuity of vision bloom roses of the thoriated eye
And the song is stuck like a wheelless star in grooves of the night.

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