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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The watchful bailiffs take their silent Stands,
And School-Boys lag with Satchels in their Hands.
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Hers was the story of how one’s destiny could be changed by love and how love could ruin one’s life. Hers was the story of how one aspired to find love first in mortals, then in the Divine and again in a mortal but at the end of the day, it was love that made her lose all that she had gained in life—fame, her very identity and above all, the aegis of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. She was Jyotirmoyee, renamed Jyotirmala by Sri Aurobindo. Jyotirmoyee was born in March 1903 in a Buddhist family of Satbaria, situated in Chittagong...

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A passionate debate comparing and contrasting the performance of Pakistan’s democratic and dictatorial regimes has been raging recently in various discussion forums. A quantitative yardstick to assess the effectiveness of a form of government and its relevance to the local context of a country can be defined in terms of consequent economic development. Advocates of democracy claim that it protects property rights, promoting an environment of collective growth.

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She cherished in her bosom
The will of the god, and resumed the task
Assigned to her at the start of vague time,—
To pour heaven’s streams upon providence
And make lands green, smiling with wealth of corn,
And to give fruits to trees, and songs to birds,
And fragrance of spiritual delight
To breeze, as though prosperity took wings
Of amazement. Day after day, and birth
After birth, free and heroic, her soul
Ran even through sad but meaningful realms
Of almighty death. There flourished her joys.

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There is a feeling that we are on the way towards a great discovery and, curiously, we find that it has always been made! It could be said that the present creation is based on equilibrium, a creation which will progress constantly. And what is that discovery? It is the discovery of the Objectivisation. And what is it that drives it? Not division or separation, but perfection drives it towards it. That makes all our notions of good and evil meaningless; they become contentless. Behind all there is the consciousness of unity, and it is that which has to be lived in every part. In it ceases the division between suffering and bliss. The body itself has that sensation now. It is the “harmony of all, an equilibrium of all. And when this equilibrium will be realised in the creation, this creation will... continue to progress without rupture.” That could also mean an organization without rupture, that is, without death. The body itself gets a “perception of what one might call the extreme agony of dissolution... and then the extreme Ananda of union—the two simultaneous.” It is the identification of the two which makes the true consciousness. “And then one has the feeling that it is that... consciousness, which is the supreme Power... the absolute Power. And if That was realised physically... probably it would be the end of the problem.” Indeed, that is the experience of the world being in equilibrium. “And whatever is not that state cannot be eternal; it is that state alone which... not merely contains but expresses the eternity.” What we call the dichotomy of good and evil, and every dichotomy, every division, separation, completely disappears in it. That is the experience of the body itself, of the consciousness of unity. The moment it becomes conscious of That death ceases to be.

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Keats’s sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer is a high mark in Romantic poetry. In the octave, the poet has travelled in the realms of gold, and one of them is the great property of Homer, a vast tract of living and vibrant land, the seer-poet holding the lordship in the company of the heroic gods and goddesses. Here is the gold of many and many-sided splendours, born from the womb of the celestial Muse herself. The sonnet describes the new wonder the poet has discovered. The awe experienced by him comes out most powerfully in the last line, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” But Aswapati’s new and marvellous creation is something different. It is a creation breathing in topaz radiance and has many worlds, the worlds of beauty, of love, joy, thought, will, knowledge, power, light, form, reality’s substance, all with the growing God-kind perfection everywhere. But their materialisation upon the earth must await the “veiled Transcendent’s ultimate decree”. In the House of the Spirit this new creation is ready but waiting for the veiled Transcendent’s decree. It comes in the form of a boon. That boon is the incarnation of the divine Savitri upon earth: “One shall descend and break the iron Law.” That shall be the precursor of the new creation manifesting in its deepening and widening glory.

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Mimāmsā means to analyze and understand thoroughly. The philosophical systems of Mimāmsā and Vedānta are closely related to each other and are in some ways inter-dependant and complementary. While Mimāmsā emphasises the teachings of Veda in the light of rituals, Vedānta emphasises the teachings of the Veda in the light of knowledge. Mimāmsā teaches the Yoga of Action while Vedānta teaches the Yoga of Knowledge. One should develop a lifestyle designed within the framework of the yoga of action while simultaneously internalizing and spiritualizing one’s actions to realize the Vedāntic truths. Generally these two aspects combined are referred to as the yoga of action—Karma Yoga. Mimāmsā provides a philosophical justification for rituals and explains the meanings behind them. In the Veda, numerous gods and goddesses are invoked. The Mimāmsā system deems it necessary to provide a clear explanation of their nature and purpose. The Mimāmsā system also discusses the science of sound and mantra but the major concern is to emphasize the use of meditation with rituals.

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The mornings come but we make ourselves not the light, and the Buddha returns not. In fact, why should he? Should he return, he will only have to make a trip first to Kyoto and then to Copenhagen. Instead, what we have now is “the inconvenient truth” of our own sad making, and we keep our eyes shut to the pressing reality. We look into the faces of the “frightened crowd”, not only of this age but of the times to come in sorrowful movement. This is the result of clipped and grouchy human potential, and if “something of inexplicable value” has to emerge we will have yet to know what the Buddha meant when he said “Make of yourself a light”.

There is sorrow for me in the North, where the black wind blows,
(Hush, O Wind of the dirges, O Voice of the restless dead!)
The ache of its cruel keening thro’ my heart like an arrow goes,
I see in the tossing waters the sheen of a dear bright head.

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Let me analyse Heehs’s definition of maithunananda. My first objection to it stems from sheer common sense and not at all from the study of definitions. The first occurrence of this term in the Record is in the diary notation of 15 January 1913. Let us figure out how many years of Yoga Sri Aurobindo had completed at this point of time. If he had begun his Yoga in 1905, he would have spent 8 years from his practice of Pranayama to the two important realisations of Nirvana and the cosmic consciousness up to the “prolonged realisation & dwelling in Parabrahman for many hours” in Pondicherry around August 1912. Now it is hard to believe that after so many years of Yoga and so many major spiritual experiences, Sri Aurobindo was still in the process of attaining “spontaneous erotic delight”! I would, personally, fall off my chair and be convulsed with prolonged fits of laughter! Recovering from my laughter, I would ask Heehs one simple question: “What is the necessity of having ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ when just plain sex would do or bring about the same net result? Or is it that ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ comes after many years of difficult yogic practice in spite of it being perfectly useless for man’s physical health?” The next grand conclusion that you can perhaps expect from him is that it is indeed the highest consummation of Yoga! It is precisely because of this eventuality that I would like to alert readers beforehand that they are being taken for a ride. It is dangerous to commit mistakes of this kind in spirituality because by the time you realise that you have gone astray, you would have ruined your life for good. Traditional wisdom (apart from plain common sense) has been repeating it from hoary times not to mix sex with spirituality and Sri Aurobindo has been uncompromisingly clear on this issue. His Yoga can be practised in spite of sex, but not through sex, and he forbade his disciples from any immixture of it. The sexual energy, however, has to be sublimated and transformed into the “pure divine Ananda in the physical”, of which sexual pleasure is “a coarse and excited degradation”.

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The passing away of the French scholar Madeleine Biardeau, translator of the Ramayana and an outstanding specialist of the Puranas, is a loss to understanding Hindu India.

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Choa Saida Shah was a dream land, and a stream flowing through the heart of this hilly paradise was its most idyllic feature. The stream’s water level was four to five feet below the ground. Some ancient people had erected a wall of white and red stones to preserve the stream’s natural beauty and purity for future generations to enjoy the fresh waters. After crossing the town, the stream would run westwards through the beautiful landscapes of the famous Salt Ranges, ultimately mingling with the Jhelum River. It was time for prayers when my father and I arrived at Choa Saida Shah, so my father performed ablutions along the bank of the stream, under the cool shadow of eucalyptus trees. He offered his prayers there, too, while I quenched my thirst and bathed in the cool fresh water. Even 45 years later, I can feel the coolness of that water in my soul.

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The Spirit of Mountain

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It seemed I was born to another sense
And perceived even in the least flutter
Of the wind, or applaud of the torrent,
Or in ponderous climb of the wild yak
A universal Nothing. These ranges
Of the steep past surged yet to the silent
And benign peaks of snow, and old Ganden
Walked unto sorrowlessness of Desire.
There breathed no more the erstwhile disbelief
But revealed another trueness. It held
In its look these hundred thousand Buddhas.
I see a sudden city rise in these hills...

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Can the Divine withdraw from us? But that seems to be a strange question—because there cannot be anything but the Divine: That alone exists. We want to dismiss all that is obscure, ugly, not living, not harmonious, all that as not divine so that we might feel comfortable. It is only an attitude of ours. At the material level, in the cells themselves it is a question of action. It has power: this gives the power and it works out things slowly—slowly and painfully. In reality, there is a perception that without the delight of being, there is no being. “This perception of suffering and delight, almost of evil and good,—these are necessities for the work. The work is allowed to be done in a certain field of inconscience. The true consciousness is something altogether different. And this, it is this which this consciousness of the cells is now learning, and learning through a concrete experience, and all these evaluations of what is good and what is bad, of what is suffering and what is delight, all this appears vague.” If the Truth, the concrete Thing is seized, one would be the omnipotent master. But it belongs to what shall be, to the domain of tomorrow. “Sri Aurobindo used to say always that if one went far enough, beyond the Impersonal, if one went further beyond, one would find something that we could call ‘Person’, but which corresponded to nothing that we conceive of as ‘Person’.” He wrote in Savitri about the formless liberation, of a condition where there is no frame of things, no figure of soul. In it even the temptation of joy to be vanishes. It is in that Beyond that the true Form, the true Person is recovered.

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We have in the Gita a significant term brahma-nirvāņa which, as Sri Aurobindo explains in the Essays, is the extinction in the Brahman, the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect being. This state is different from that of supreme peace, of a calm self-extinction, śāntim nirvāņa-paramām, which is not the Buddhist's Nirvana in a blissful negation of being. Generally, in these connotations, Nirvana is taken in the sense of total non-attachment and extinction of the ego. It is a state of inner deeper happiness, of peace, the peace of an absolute inactive cessation. “Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman,” says the Scripture; everything is blown out in it, everything transient and sorrowful. It further says: Brahman-knower is he who has risen into the Brahman-consciousness, brahmavid brahmaņi sthitāh. One who has the deeper inner happiness and the deeper inner ease and repose and the intense inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman and reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvāņam.

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The word Yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root yuj, which means ‘to unite’. Yoga system provides a methodology for expanding one’s individual consciousness to universal Consciousness. There are various schools of Yoga—example Bhakti Yoga, Jnāna Yoga, Karma Yoga, and Kundalini Yoga. But here only Pātanjala Yoga will be reviewed because it is the most comprehensive school of Yoga. Patanjali was the first sage to systematize the philosophy and practice of Yoga. His work is known as Pātanjala Yoga Sutra. There are profound commentaries on this text, Vyasa’s being the most ancient and profound. The Yoga system is highly practical, it discusses the nature of mind, its modifications, impediments to growth, afflictions and the method for attaining the highest goal of life—kaivalya (absoluteness). Since this method is described in eight steps it is also called Ashtānga Yoga, the Eightfold Path.

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Burns turned into an enemy of all enemies of freedom and humanity. Such egalitarian ideals got him into trouble: he was excited by outbreak of revolution in France, and his indiscreet support nearly lost him his job as an exciseman. Burns' songs enjoy an international popularity, but what's often admired in his poetry is his liberal sloganeering; however, the best of his poems shed a far more sophisticated light on the species. I can think of no wiser dissection of the slippery nature of human morality and temptation than Address to the Unco Guid, for example.

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See Social Life and Glee sit down,
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmugrified, they're grown
Debauchery and Drinking:
O would they stay to calculate
Th' eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,
Damnation of expenses! ...
Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.

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A little-known rainforest in north-east India could be home to the world’s largest number of wildcat species, with no less than seven species photo-documented by a wildlife biologist at the end of her two-year survey.

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According to Hindu mythology, Haridwar is one of the four places where a drop of the nectar of immortality or amrit fell from the pitcher or kumbh when Garuda, the divine bird of Lord Vishnu, was spiriting it away from the demons after a pitched battle. Since then, Haridwar, along with Allahabad, Nashik and Ujjain—the other three places—have been celebrating the Kumbh Mela.

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To be at the Maha Kumbh celebrations at Haridwar is to get caught up in a swell of pure devotion, and rituals that haven't changed since time immemorial. Haridwar, considered one of the holiest cities in India, is the point at which the River Ganga leaves the mountains and enters the plains. Ash-smeared sadhus with flowing beards and knotted manes had descended from their quiet retreats in the neighbouring hills and mountains. We found ourselves adrift in a surreal world where different realities overlapped: a holy man in orange robes sat cross-legged on the opposite misty bank, deep in meditation; men stripped down to their underwear and women in dripping saris took purifying dips in the freezing jade-green waters of the Ganga; pilgrims floated offerings of flowers, burnt camphor and incense sticks; sadhus with flowing locks and hooded eyelids pulled on chillums; a young chela washed the feet of his stooped, grey-whiskered guru; others scooped up the river water in containers to take back home.

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