Based on the story of creation as narrated by the Mother, we can in the following list the stages through which it happened: the Supreme’s wish to objectivise himself; emanation of four beings to start the universal development; their separation from the Origin in the joy and freedom they had; the result is the world as presently is; the creative Force, which had emanated these four Beings, is stunned on seeing what had happened; appalled, she turns to the Supreme and prays for the remedy; a command is given to her to precipitate her Consciousness into this Inconscience, her Love into this suffering, her Truth into this falsehood, and she does it. That is the great sacrifice she has made, the Holocaust of the Divine Mother, of the creative Force. But now in the evolutionary sequel she also comes repeatedly as the incarnate power—because there is the Will for Manifestation behind this Separation. This incarnation of the Consciousness-Force in the realm of Death is her passing through “the portals of the birth that is a death.” This also means that, such incarnations are different from the appearance of the Four Powers of the Consciousness-Force in the cosmic operation. While these Powers are typal, incarnations in Death’s realm belong to the evolutionary, one connected with the universal, other with the earth.   more »

…As far as the Integral Yoga is concerned, we have to make absolutely certain that there is a call for the spiritual life as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo. If this is not followed even while proclaiming as a practitioner of this self-chosen discipline, not imposed by anyone on anybody, then it is immaterial whether we do this or we do that, whether we call it Spirituality, or Integral Yoga, or Religion and Faith, or the Path of Reason and Rationality, and what not. In fact none of them will have the merit to satisfy the soul’s deeper urge seeking the truth within us, and it working and manifesting in us, and everywhere, and all around. If our concern is this single objective, of the dynamic manifestation of the truth, of the transforming light and power and joy entering into us and operating in every respect in us, then all talk about rationality, about faith in science and reason, faith in logic, blind faith, seeing faith—seeing faith is an extremely rare commodity—pale into insignificance. We go to a spiritually accomplished person to seek his help in this regard, his spiritual help to make spiritual progress, and we endeavour to follow it if we are centrally alert to its assuring methodology and its demands, truthful to our own earnest and sincerest yearning…   more »

…we should be cognizant of the historical perspectives of the several early yogic formulations by Sri Aurobindo. This should imply that, their limitations were actually being tackled in their several occult-spiritual connotations. We should also be quite aware that the yoga-tapasya towards the supramental transformation was rather waiting for the Mother’s final arrival at Pondicherry, which happened in 1920. That would make a whole difference in the approach. For the larger group pursuit involving the difficulty of the lower nature, and in view of the severe hostility that is there all around, it is very necessary that the psychic being emerges as its unfailing guide. Its role in the collective spiritual undertaking started becoming determinative. Record of Yoga is great but greater things were happening in subsequent years, culminating in Savitri. Of this we do not get much of an idea in the latest biography of Sri Aurobindo.   more »

…the powers of our mind, life and body are bound to their own limitations and, however high they may rise or however widely expand, they cannot rise above their natural ultimate limits or expand beyond them. But, still, mental man can open to what is beyond him and call down a supramental Light, Truth and Power to work in him and do what the mind cannot do. If mind cannot by effort become what is beyond mind, supermind can descend and transform mind into its own substance. If the supramental Power is allowed by man's discerning assent and vigilant surrender to act according to its own profound and subtle insight and flexible potency, it will bring about slowly or swiftly a divine transformation of our fallen and imperfect nature…   more »

In a recent book presenting the life of Sri Aurobindo we have a chapter entitled The Ascent to Supermind. This gives an impression that during the period 1915-1926 Sri Aurobindo was making progress in the discovery of supermind, climbing step by step towards it. But he already had the knowledge of it with him, at least for a couple of years now, even much prior to the meeting with the Mother on 29 March 1914. What was happening during the period was not the ascent, but something radically different than that. It was the period of supramentalisation of the various grades of the lower consciousness. First it was the supramentalisation of the mental, during the Arya-period, 1915-21, and then the supramentalisation of the vital. This finally paved the path for the overmentalisation of the physical, marking its siddhi on 24 November 1926. Sri Aurobindo’s next concern was the supramentalisation proper of the physical itself. He recorded the first definite experience of it coming on 8 August 1938. We have to be pretty attentive towards these “visible” disclosures in the life of Sri Aurobindo.   more »

I need some place of refuge in which I can complete my Yoga unassailed and build up other souls around me. It seems to me that Pondicherry is the place appointed by those who are Beyond, but you know how much effort is needed to establish the thing that is purposed upon the material plane… I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane, and I am now able to put myself into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind. This I can do with great swiftness and completeness with those who are near me, but I have also succeeded with men hundreds of miles away… What I perceive most clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness, of error in order that the Truth I shall eventually show to men may be perfect, and of ineffectiveness in order that the work of changing the world, so far as I have to assist it, may be entirely victorious and irresistible…   more »

An evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence. The evolutionary working of Nature has a double process: an evolution of forms, an evolution of the soul. Man occupies the crest of the evolutionary wave. With him occurs the passage from an unconscious to a conscious evolution. At each step one receives an intimation of what the following step will be. The nature of the next step is indicated by the deep aspirations awakening in the human race. A change of consciousness is the major fact of the next evolutionary transformation, and the consciousness itself, by its own mutation, will impose and effect any necessary mutation of the body. There is no reason to suppose that this transformation is impossible on earth. In fact, it would give the truest meaning to earthly existence. Man's urge towards spirituality is an undeniable indication of the inner drive of the Spirit within towards emergence, its insistence towards the next step of its manifestation.   more »

A divine life in a divine body is the formula of the ideal that we envisage... The process of the evolution upon earth has been slow and tardy—what principle must intervene if there is to be a transformation, a progressive or sudden change?

It is indeed as a result of our evolution that we arrive at the possibility of this transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth-consciousness and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit. Here a slow and tardy change need no longer be the law or manner of our evolution; it will be only so to a greater or less extent so long as a mental ignorance clings and hampers our ascent; but once we have grown into the truth-consciousness its power of spiritual truth of being will determine all...

It might be also that the transformation might take place by stages; there are powers of the nature still belonging to the mental region which are yet potentialities of a growing gnosis lifted beyond our human mentality and partaking of the light and power of the Divine and an ascent through these planes, a descent of them into the mental being might seem to be the natural evolutionary course. But in practice it might be found that these intermediate levels would not be sufficient for the total transformation since, being themselves illumined potentialities of mental being not yet supramental in the full sense of the word, they could bring down to the mind only a partial divinity or raise the mind towards that but not effectuate its elevation into the complete supramentality of the truth-consciousness. Still these levels might become stages of the ascent which some would reach and pause there while others went higher and could reach and live on superior strata of a semi-divine existence. It is not to be supposed that all humanity would rise in a block into the supermind...   more »

There are ranges of consciousness beyond the mental and they have their own tools of cognition and operation. Surely, it means, the tools of the mental will prove to be blunt in those beyond-mind domains. But, fortunately, there is the mental rather the human potential to exceed itself by a conscious choice and effort. That is built into the very scheme of things and that is therefore our valid hope also. To be brief: we have a series: physical instruments of observation in the scientific sense, such as microscopes, telescopes, modern accelerators; physical organs of contact, eye-ear-taste-smell-touch; behind them manas, mind as the true sense; finally is sense in its purity samjňāna that exists behind and beyond mind. The knowledge of samjňāna has a wideness as well as penetration which physical mind is incapable of having. It is by a purposeful series of limiting transitions that the higher suffers diminution, and therefore what the lower conceives becomes an extremely partial view of things. To present to it the higher then becomes self contradictory. But let us quickly look at the Upanishadic insights about the instruments of cognition and their functions...   more »

The power to change things lies within us. Presented here are parts of a theory on how shifts in oneself can have profound shifts in corporations, markets, systems, and the world. It has been said - "Become the change you wish to see in the World". But the elaboration of how this is true may remain a mystery. The theory of organization introduced here indicates a fractal reality in which an idea, a person, a team, a corporation, a market, a system, progressively more complex constructs, are concretely connected by virtue of common and linked patterns that animates each of these separate levels. Hence the power to positively change progressively more complex and in many cases removed arenas of life, such even as Climate Change, by making corresponding changes in one’s personal space becomes more real...   more »

...If our endeavour is to take the spiritual aim to society, society that is not yet open to it, then the problems can arise, many problems can arise. It can even be construed as a kind of proselytization. In fact even more serious problems can arise. But one thing is certain: it cannot be, should not be by diluting the spiritual contents; it is not by adjusting or simplifying it, in order to accommodate the prevailing conditions of the society, by fiddling with it so that what it can understand and accept is fitted into it. Otherwise it would be an imposition of the spiritual on the worldly or mundane...   more »

...She could have flown to safety but had refused to abandon her babies. Then the blaze had arrived and the heat had scorched her small body, the mother had remained steadfast ...because she had been willing to die, so those under the cover of her wings would live.   more »

A clear distinction has to be made between the suprarational and rational domains of knowledge. Human urge to understand things is perfectly understandable, but it has to also develop appropriate instruments and tools if it desires to acquire that which belongs to the domains of the spirit. Our hurry in this matter, of imposing one over the other, can be injurious. Any non-recognition of the fundamental difference between the two can in fact land us into irreconcilable contradictions...   more »

The first word of the Integral Yoga is surrender; the last word is also surrender,—says Sri Aurobindo. In between these two happy surrenders, it is its power that grows when is kindled the Yajna to make our will transcendentally genuine. While we still live under the sway of the lower Nature, personal effort is indispensable. But as we become conscious in our surrender to the divine Shakti, it is she who herself leads us to freedom and perfection of the higher Nature. In the degree it becomes wholesome and integral, our progress also gains to that extent an assuring speed of the power who then governs all our activities. Not what we think and see for ourselves, but what is thought and seen for us is all that matters. When there is no difference between our will and the Will of the Divine Shakti, then it is she who takes full charge of our life. Then we acquire our genuine free will. That indeed is the object of the Integral Yoga of the Future. This siddhi is the entire purport of its yogic occupation. “The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1928. The supramental change was decreed by him, and he and the Mother had set themselves to work out its inevitability. But to realize it in us there is needed the call, and we have to be ready to receive what is being constantly showered on us. Effort and Grace, Tapahprabhava and Devaprasada as the ancient Upanishadic scripture says, together can bring fulfilment to our longings, to our soul’s aspiration. To be engaged in that spiritual growth, to live and work and enjoy divinely in the Divine is the Integral Yoga of the Future...   more »

While commenting upon an early biographer’s attempt to present his life Sri Aurobindo, in the course of a conversation with his attendant-disciples, once remarked as follows: “Nobody except myself can write my life—because it has not been on the surface for man to see.” Yet we should be concerned with a few worldly facts from a certain point of view. And the strange thing is that, for a discerning eye, these facts also bring an intuitive vision which can provide a distant bio-spiritual peep into the secrecies of the person whom we so much admire, a spiritual peep that makes us grow into its magnificences. No wonder, philosophers have described him as the greatest synthesis between the East and the West; critics have acclaimed him as a poet par excellence; social scientists regard him as the builder of a new society based on enduring values of the life of the spirit; devotees throng in mute veneration offering their heart and their soul in a silent prayer that can secure for them the beatitude of the Blissful; Yogins long to live in the sunlight of his splendour to kindle in it their own suns; in the tranquil benignity of his spiritual presence is the fulfilment of all our hopes and all our keenest and noblest aspirations; gods of light and truth and joy and beauty and sweetness are busy in their tasks to carry out his will in the creation; in him the avataric incarnation becomes man to realize the divine in man. Such is the real birth of the Immortal in the Mortal. He comes here as Sri Aurobindo.

...   more »

…Materialization of the psychic being gives continuity to evolution. In the material world immortality thus means the materialization of the psychic being. The New Body makes it possible. Perhaps that is the process. Now it is the New Body which will do whatever is to be done. It is not an inert lump of matter, but is charged with luminous dynamism of the Truth-Force itself. It is going to exert pressure upon the physical in the evolutionary process. Sometimes people ask if the Mother really succeeded in her work. Did she complete it? It is said that she did not achieve all that she was to achieve. They even say that her work of physical transformation has been postponed. But the statement that the work has been postponed is an incomplete statement. These people must also tell us when the “postponed” work will be resumed. But if the work of physical transformation has been postponed in the Will of the Lord, then that becomes yet a greater achievement for the Mother, that now whatever has to happen will happen in the Will of the Lord. Isn’t that outstanding? The Supramental Presence is a sufficient, is a necessary and sufficient basis for that to happen. That surely is a greater gain than perhaps the transformation itself—the working of the Will of the Supreme in this Creation. What prevails is: “What Thou Willest, What Thou Willest” even in the physical. It is in it that that all is achieved, achieved by the Mother…   more »

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

---

---

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.

---

---

   more »