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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Al Pacino's moving speech: "I don't know if Charlie's silence here today is right or wrong; I'm not a judge or jury. But I can tell you this: he won't sell anybody out to buy his future!"

Globalized processes have caused in us (all over the world) a general sense of searching for immediate results. Therefore, we have come to posses a need to see immediate results. This contrasts greatly with the slow movements of the Swedish. They, on the other hand, debate, debate, debate, hold x quantity of meetings and work with a slowdown scheme. At the end, this always yields better results.

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In The Secret of the Veda there is a chapter entitled The Guardians of the Light in which Sri Aurobindo describes a few of the Vedic gods, their characteristics and their functions in the transcendental scheme of working. These gods of Truth and Light are there to support and take forward the soul and the spirit of the mortal to the worlds of immortality with its plenty of every kind in the divine expression and manifestation. They do so against the forces of the Darkness and the Ignorance pulling him back into their constant fold becoming thicker and thicker in the downward plunge. A darkness wrapped in greater darkness is the exact opposite of the truth covered by the greater truth and it is that greater truth which must enter into the greater darkness of the divine unawareness. This manifesting Truth is the body of the Sun-God or Savitŗ who is at once the True and the Right and the Vast. It is he who loses forth in this creation.

“What does he create? First the worlds. ...” In the process we see him as Savitri the Creator, Twashtri the Fashioner of things, Pushan the Nourisher and the Increaser. “Savitri manifests himself through four great and active deities Mitra, Varuna, Bhaga and Aryaman, the Lords of pure Wideness, luminous Harmony, divine Enjoyment, exalted Power.” In The Guardians of the Light Sri Aurobindo reveals the greatness of these four luminous and mighty Lords which is freely paraphrased and rendered in the following to get a general idea about the cosmic-transcendental working.

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These images have caused a splash—they capture the moment when a tiny droplet of milk hits water. Photographer Corrie White spends hours firing the coloured droplets at the water from a pipette suspended 12 inches above.

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Milk Drops
Thanks to Auroman for sending video links. Here are two of them.

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When we read Sri Aurobindo’s Rose of God aloud in the quiet of the mind, there is only the sense of an oceanic calm pervading us from all sides and we forget everything else, everything, the thought, the substance, the image, the visions that it can evoke, even the heart and the art of poetry; there remains only the sea of sound in the luminous rush of joy, joy that makes all sorrow and suffering disappear. We forget everything except the all-enveloping sound, no thought, no vision, no analysis, no aesthetic urge to break it to discover its art, we don’t seem to care about the meaning it is conveying. That is the power of the poem. “A mystical metaphysics and psychology unfold before us in the succession of vibrant images.” But when we recover ourselves from that spell of sound, moving in the depth of silence, we begin to wonder at other things also. We realise that each of the stanzas can be divided into two parts: describing that, and describing this. Over there are Bliss-Light-Power-Life-Love, and here are the heart of humanhood, mind of earthhood, the small and feeble will of the death-prone creature, the helpless body of the mortal, and the ardency in yearning that only frets and sobs. The first half of every stanza imposes its significances upon our spiritual sense, not only by vivid words mystically visionary but also by an inner tone massively musical; in it is the spiritual reality that must lend itself to us. The invocation to the Rose is to fulfill itself in every respect in us. What is perfect up there must express itself down here, in our humanhood and our earthhood.

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Nobody, including Jinnah, Nehru, Patel, or Lord Mountbatten, had any idea of what Partition at the time of India’s Independence would entail. Would they, with the benefit of hindsight, have chosen a different course? Success has many fathers, as the familiar proverb puts it, while failure is an orphan. In the event, conjecture about Pakistan’s possible progenitors comes across as a decidedly odd phenomenon. ... In 1947, hardly anyone could have suspected that a nation, Pakistan, carved out on a confessional basis would lead to a country obsessed with jihad. However, there can be little doubt that it is Jinnah—rather than Nehru or Patel—who ought to have known that the country he left behind 61 years ago was not destined for secularity.

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The Mother: “When people ask me how one may know whether he is in contact with his psychic being or how one may know whether he has found the Divine, well, it makes me laugh; for when it happens to you it is over, you can no longer ask any questions, it is done; you do not ask how it happens, it is done.”

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In the Dzong of my imagination
Lived enlightened Buddha, a calm grandeur
In loneliness of the spirit. He seemed
Yet our worldly, herding the yak of time
On narrow ridges, by the life of death
Surrounded. Sorrow there is in the town,
And the breeze has sting, and mostly the past
Is unclean, like corrupted occultism.
But enormous peace is the foundation
On which are built these mountains.

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To walk on the path you must have a dauntless intrepidity

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The Mother used to enter every night the vital to do some special work. This she did for more than a year, did it not due to her own will but she was destined to do it. She had to fight battles to rescue someone who had prayed for her help. In the process she received blows also. She was kind of anticipating them, and they did come. In her “normal state”, of inner certitude, this could not have touched her. There are beings of all kinds, even the Overmind gods, and often they take forms in their relation with the human consciousness. Man’s natural state is to be all-powerful, but he has forgotten to be this. It looks that, “in the evolutionary curve, it was necessary for man to forget his omnipotence, because it had simply puffed him up with pride and vanity, and so had become completely distorted; and he had to be made to feel that many things were stronger and more powerful than he.” If you get dazzled by these gods, they will overpower you, you become their slave. Total security is in the positive experience of the one and only existence of the Supreme and that all is only the Supreme, the one reality is the Supreme. “This is the only certitude that all this may become something marvellous; otherwise... And this too depends altogether on the stand one takes. A complete identification.” In it is the absolute and perfect freedom. “The present way of being is a past which truly should no longer be there. While the other: ‘Ah! At last! At last! It is for this that there is a world.’ ... It is just as concrete, just as real, but... but it becomes divine, because... because it is the Divine.”

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And these great mountains with their serene contours which I see from my window, range after majestic range up to the very horizon, are in perfect harmony with the rhythm of this being, filled with an infinite peace. Lord, couldst Thou have taken possession of Thy kingdom? Or rather of this part of the kingdom, for the body is still obscure and ignorant, slow to respond, without plasticity. Will it be purified one day like the rest? And will Thy victory then be total? It matters little. This instrument is what Thou wantest it to be and its bliss is unalloyed.

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The four Powers of the Mother are four of her outstanding Personalities, portions and embodiments of her divinity through whom she acts on her creatures, orders and harmonises her creations in the worlds and directs working out of her thousand forces. ... The supramental change is the thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother. The Mother's power and not any human endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda.

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When twilight twinkling o'er the gay bazaars,
Unfurls a sudden canopy of stars,
When lutes are strung and fragrant torches lit
On white roof-terraces where lovers sit
Drinking together of life's poignant sweet,
Buy flowers, buy flowers, floats down the singing street.

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By doing the work with sincerity and devotion as the Mother’s own work, I began to get experiences. By Her Grace my soul or psychic being opened after five years of Ashram-life. Since then the psychic being has been growing; I feel always the Mother’s presence in my heart. From time to time various kinds of spiritual experiences have come, one after another. In my 63rd year, I had a flood of spiritual experiences and visions soon after I sat in meditation in Sri Aurobindo’s Room on my birthday, sat along with fellow disciples and devotees whose birthday coincided with mine. Then in the next year, when I meditated in my own room on my sixty-fourth birthday (24 July 76) at 12 noon, the Grace of the Divine Mother descended and entered into the depth of my mid-forehead. She came in the form of a Luminous Young Child—Bala, in the same form as when she had been about seven years old—and opened the Chakra on the top of head, the Sahasrara, giving rise to wonderful visions and experiences.

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Historians know him as the Sun King who ruled France for 72 years and made Versailles a European centre of power, but Louis XIV owes his royal grandeur to artists perhaps more than armies. The first large-scale exhibition devoted to Louis XIV at the palace of Versailles opens Tuesday, exploring the paintings, sculptures, furniture and jewellery that helped France’s most famous king shape his all-powerful image. Two years in the making, Louis XIV, the Man and the King brings together 300 pieces, some of which have not been shown in France since the 1789 Revolution.

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This year's Leonid meteor shower peaks on Tuesday, Nov. 17th. If forecasters are correct, the shower should produce a mild but pretty sprinkling of meteors over North America followed by a more intense outburst over Asia. The phase of the Moon will be new, setting the stage for what could be one of the best Leonid showers in years.

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Her money-pouch had some coins for the day
And her one concern was, like dreams worshipped
In the silence of the night, robust fate
Of the three boys she bore in swift passion,
Hoping in the breathful heart shall awake
Wisdom of native gods who indeed shape
Our urgings in life’s calm nobility.

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Life is a question of choice, choices made upon earth, choices made in other worlds, each expressing its form, its type of life. One has chosen to be so, one believes that one is submitted to a fatality or to a necessity or to a law which now compels one. But it also give a tremendous power. In it disappears this concrete and brutal reality of the physical life. The Mother says, “the state in which one finds oneself has been the fact of a choice, and for the individual the freedom of choice is there, and people have forgotten it. It is this that is so interesting.” If one becomes master, one can change all the circumstances around oneself. There is a difficulty with the body. When all that surrounds it, they are elements that come and must be transformed. The body aspires above all for a harmony, because of all these things that grind and scrape. If there is disorder, that comes “to make the transition from ordinary automatic functioning to conscious functioning under the direct guidance and the direct influence of the Supreme. And the body itself knows it”. Everything is a question of changing the habit. Death itself is a habit, and habits can be changed, “changed into a conscious action directly guided by the supreme Consciousness. ... It is very evident—it is very evident—that one is placed in the best of conditions and has the maximum possibilities for action... when one wants it sincerely.”

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A minister of Indira Gandhi's cabinet betrayed India's "war objectives" to the Central Intelligence Agency in December 1971, causing an abrupt end to the Bangladesh war under vicious US arm-twisting. This is the highlight of the book CIA's Eye on South Asia by journalist Anuj Dhar. Published by Delhi-based Manas Publications, which is facing government's ire for coming out with a book on the R&AW, the book compiles declassified CIA records on India and her neighbours. It specifically spotlights what arguably has been India's biggest spy scandal.

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Five times larger than the Titanic, the $1.5 billion ship has seven neighborhoods, an ice rink, a small golf course and a 750-seat outdoor amphitheater. It has 2,700 cabins and can accommodate 6,300 passengers and 2,100 crew members. Accommodations include loft cabins, with floor-to-ceiling windows, and 1,600-square-foot (487-meter) luxury suites with balconies overlooking the sea or promenades. The liner also has four swimming pools, volleyball and basketball courts, and a youth zone with theme parks and nurseries for children.

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