We go to a spiritually accomplished Preceptor or Master to seek his spiritual help, crucial help to make spiritual progress. We gratefully accept it and endeavour to follow it if we are centrally alert to its assuring methodology and its demands, truthful to our own earnest and sincerest yearning.

We look into Sri Aurobindo’s life, if at all that is possible, not as an aspect of mere academic or university or historical study, but essentially for living more and more in it, to enlighten and ennoble our souls, that which will bring fulfilment closer to us. These are the kind of intuitions we would wish to gather from it. If a biography fails to give us this, then that itself is its failure.   more »

The Mother says: All earth is under the governing shadow of the vital beings. Even the Highest Divinity, when coming upon earth cannot escape the consequence of this shadow governing all the events of the earth. For life upon earth to become entirely divine, harmonious, happy, painless, these forces and beings of the vital world must be conquered or destroyed, transformed; they must disappear—that is, return to the Nirvana of the Origin   more »

Falsehood and Evil are the byproduct of a world or cosmic movement, making their appearance somewhere in the involutionary-evolutionary process, it becoming inevitable because of the Ignorance. As far as the individual is concerned remove ignorance, the self-limiting knowledge of the Self, and these will simply fade away, will just depart. In the evolution out of the inconscient existence there rise up powers and beings who will not allow any progress towards manifestation of the divine possibilities, manifestation of light and love and beauty and joy. But the problem at the cosmic realm is, if these can be eliminated or dissolved for ever...   more »

If Falsehood, Error, Wrong, Evil are an “ugly contretemps” accepted by the bold and adventurous Spirit, then there has to be a significance in their appearance. Not only that; they seem to be natural and as if indispensable in the working of the individual as well as of the universe. It is thus that through death life progresses towards its higher and superconscient possibilities—until the higher and superconscient power herself starts operating in it directly. When we live in this dark and veiling ignorance, we miss the greater purpose these agents, these negatives play.

Explaining the Yoga of Beauty, Romain Rolland quotes a passage ascribed to Socrates. It is about the ascension of Beauty from the low vitalistic to the sublime and the impersonal: “…one must pass from the love of a beautiful form to the love of all beautiful forms or to physical beauty in general; then from love of beautiful bodies to the love of beautiful souls, beautiful actions, and beautiful thoughts. In this ascension of the spirit through moral beauty, a marvellous beauty will suddenly appear to him, eternal, exempt from all generation, from all corruption, absolutely beautiful: not consisting in either in a beautiful face, nor in any body nor any thought nor in any science; not residing anywhere but in itself, whether in heaven or on earth, but existing eternally in itself and for itself in its absolute and perfect unity.” ...   more »

...“Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?”—asks St Luke. The perception of Romain Rolland that “having been married to mortal condition, he [Christ] had perforce, to plumb the depths of human suffering and humiliation of mortal capitulation” is far deeper than the small human mind can comprehend. The full occult-spiritual connotation of it comes out in Narad’s description of the crucifixion event in Savitri...   more »

Vivekananda, torn between twenty contradictory demons—faith, science, art, all the passions of victory and action—kept in his feverish hands to the end the equal balance between the two poles: a burning love of the Absolute (the Adwaita) and the irresistible appeal of suffering Humanity. And what makes him so appealing to us is that at those times when equilibrium was no longer possible, and he had to make a choice, it was the latter that won the day: he sacrificed everything else to Pity, to “poor suffering Humanity,” as Beethoven, his great European brother said...   more »

The two conjoint facts of perception we can never get rid of are happiness and unhappiness—things which bring us pain also bring pleasure. Our world is made up of these two. We cannot get rid of them; with every pulsation of life they are present. The world is busy trying to reconcile these opposites, sages trying to find solution of this commingling of the opposites. The burning heat of pain is intermitted by flashes of rest, the gleam of light breaking the darkness in intermittent flashes only to make the gloom deeper.

In religions of dualism, among the Persians, there was a God and a Satan. This through the Jews has gone all over Europe and America. It was a working hypothesis thousands of years ago; but now we know, that is not tenable. There is nothing absolutely good or evil; it is good to one and evil to another, evil today, good tomorrow, and vice versa…   more »

The National Defence Academy is currently celebrating its diamond jubilee. M P Anil Kumar, a former fighter pilot, graduated from the NDA in 1983. In this elegant tribute, he salutes the Academy and its alumni, many of whom made the supreme sacrifice in the line of duty for their motherland.

A tumbledown yet majestic yellow Harvard aircraft parked in the frontage of the academic block of my alma mater—the Sainik School, Kazhakootam, Kerala—had always been a cynosure.

I found the metallic kite irresistible the very moment I spotted it. Bewitched, this impressionable boy clambered into her cockpit, randomly moved the creaking joystick with boyish abandon and could not cease marvelling at the squeaky movement of the ailerons and elevators my uninhibited exertions produced. Later, I yanked the propeller blade to set it going but it never budged. I was all of nine years then.

Till I left school, whenever I got the time, I would lean against her nacelle and chew over why only birds flew and the science of flight. I wanted to defy gravity, to soar and swoop like an eagle. In January 1981, I joined the National Defence Academy at Khadakwasla in Pune, to pursue military aviation...   more »

We're going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It's going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It's going to come as a shock and with it, there's going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people's minds weren't wrecked on all these modern drugs—over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody's comprehension...   more »

Great things were done in the past and man’s history had never been dull—and this was in spite of war and struggle and rampage. He has built schools of thought, he has built monuments, he has built centres of excellence in arts and sciences and crafts. He gave Philosophy, he gave the Tao, he gave Vedanta, he gave Religion, even as he engaged himself in secular occupations in many richnesses of life. Today we witness some other kind of marvel. The Greeks built in the 5th century BC the Parthenon on the Acropolis and dedicated it to Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom. Much before that, more than two thousand years ago, was constructed the Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest in Egypt. It is said that the shape of the Pyramid represents the primordial mound from which the earth was created. Ajanta Caves are monuments dating from the second century BC. These contain paintings and sculpture considered to be masterpieces of religious and pictorial art. Look at the statue of the Buddha and we feel a vast but solid peace filling the whole place, it entering into our depths. The Taj Mahal is "a teardrop on the cheek of time." Shah Jahan commissioned it in 1631. Twenty thousand people for twenty-two years were deployed to work on it. A fleet of a thousand elephants brought the material from all over India. Michelangelo painted twelve thousand square feet of the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512. And today in this age of ours! Wednesday 10 September 2008! It is a golden day in the annals of physics. It marks the beginning of a new set of experiments planned on a scale that never happened in the long and troubled days of mankind. Their findings are expected to throw light on the commencement and evolution of the universe in which we live. If matter is the foundation of this vast enterprise, then it becomes our natural curiosity also to know what really is there in matter that makes it so attractive, so potentially rich to give rise to this marvel of creation. That also means, possibly, the wonders that are locked in its bosom will be slowly disclosed to us, in the unfolding course of time. Could matter give away its secrets to us? Would it? Perhaps the Large Hadron Collider is but one small step in that mighty direction. It is built into the spirit of man that looks at its own depths and wonders how he arrived on the scene when nothing of the kind exists anywhere else...   more »

Here therefore exists the origin of error, falsehood, wrong and evil in the consciousness and will of the individual; a limited consciousness growing out of nescience is the source of error, a personal attachment to the limitation and the error born of it the source of falsity, a wrong consciousness governed by the life-ego the source of evil. But it is evident that their relative existence is only a phenomenon thrown up by the cosmic Force in its drive towards evolutionary self-expression, and it is there that we have to look for the significance of the phenomenon. Emergence of the life-ego is a machinery of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience; the principle of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence. But because it does these things as a separate ego for its separate advantage life-discord, conflict, disharmony arise, and it is the products of this life-discord and disharmony that we call wrong and evil. Nature accepts them because they are necessary circumstances of the evolution, necessary for the growth of the divided being; they are products of ignorance, supported by an ignorant consciousness that founds itself on division, by an ignorant will that works through division, by an ignorant delight of existence that takes the joy of division...   more »

A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;
It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,
A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.
It compelled the suns to burn through silent Space,
Flame-signs of its uncomprehended Thought
In a wide brooding ether’s formless muse:
It made of Knowledge a veiled and struggling light,
Of Being a substance nescient, dense and dumb,
Of Bliss the beauty of an insentient world.
In finite things the conscious Infinite dwells:
Involved it sleeps in Matter’s helpless trance,
It rules the world from its sleeping senseless Void;
Dreaming it throws out mind and heart and soul
To labour crippled, bound, on the hard earth;
A broken whole it works through scattered points;
Its gleaming shards are Wisdom’s diamond thoughts,
Its shadowy reflex our ignorance.   more »

The new type, the divine body, must continue the already developed evolutionary form; there must be a continuation from the type Nature has all along been developing, a continuity from the human to the divine body, no breaking away to something unrecognisable but a high sequel to what has already been achieved and in part perfected… New powers have to be acquired by the body which our present humanity could not hope to realise, could not even dream of or could only imagine… The body itself might acquire new means and ranges of communication with other bodies, new processes of acquiring knowledge, a new aesthesis, new potencies of manipulation of itself and objects. It might not be impossible for it to possess or disclose means native to its own constitution, substance or natural instrumentation for making the far near and annulling distance, cognising what is now beyond the body's cognisance, acting where action is now out of its reach or its domain, developing subtleties and plasticities which could not be permitted under present conditions to the needed fixity of a material frame… There could be an evolution from a first apprehending truth-consciousness to the utmost heights of the ascending ranges of supermind and it may pass the borders of the supermind proper itself where it begins to shadow out, develop, delineate expressive forms of life touched by a supreme pure existence, consciousness and bliss which constitute the worlds of a highest truth of existence, dynamism of tapas, glory and sweetness of bliss, the absolute essence and pitch of the all-creating Ananda. The transformation of the physical being might follow this incessant line of progression and the divine body reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on the earth something of this highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting Spirit.   more »

Each sight is now immortal with Thy bliss:
My soul through the rapt eyes has come to see;
A veil is rent and they no more can miss
The miracle of Thy world-epiphany...   more »

Sri Aurobindo always loved deeply his Motherland. But he wished her to be great, noble, pure and worthy of her big mission in the world…   more »

As long as the outward personality we call ourselves is centred in the lower powers of consciousness, the riddle of its own existence, its purpose, its necessity is to it an insoluble enigma; if something of the truth is at all conveyed to this outward mental man, he but imperfectly grasps it and perhaps misinterprets and misuses and mislives it. His true staff of walking is made more of a fire of faith than any ascertained and indubitable light of knowledge. It is only by rising toward a higher consciousness beyond the mental line and therefore superconscient now to him that he can emerge from his inability and his ignorance. His full liberation and enlightenment will come when he crosses the line into the light of a new superconscient existence. That is the transcendence which was the object of aspiration of the mystics and the spiritual seekers.

But in itself this would change nothing in the creation here, the evasion of a liberated soul from the world makes to that world no difference. But this crossing of the line, if turned not only to an ascending but to a descending purpose, would mean the transformation of the line from what it now is, a lid, a barrier, into a passage for the higher powers of consciousness of the Being now above it. It would mean a new creation on earth, a bringing in of the ultimate powers which would reverse the conditions here, in as much as that would produce a creation raised into the full flood of spiritual and supramental light in place of one emerging into a half-light of mind out of a darkness of material inconscience. It is only in such a full flood of the realised spirit that the embodied being could know, in the sense of all that was involved in it, the meaning and temporary necessity of his descent into the darkness and its conditions and at the same time dissolve them by a luminous transmutation into a manifestation here of the revealed and no longer of the veiled and disguised or apparently deformed Divine.    more »

About the nature of science Sri Aurobindo writes: “Scientific laws only give a schematic account of material process of Nature—as a valid scheme they can be used for reproducing or extending at will a material process, but obviously they cannot give an account of the thing itself. Water, for instance, is not merely so much oxygen and hydrogen put together—the combination is simply a process or device for enabling the materialisation of a new thing called water; what that new thing really is, is quite another matter. In fact, there are different planes of substance, gross, subtle and more subtle going back to what is called causal (Karana) substance.” In another letter he reveals: “But it is a fact that Agni is the basis of forms as the Sankhya pointed out long ago, i.e. the fiery principle in the three powers radiant, electric and gaseous (the Vedic trinity of Agni) is the agent in producing liquid and solid forms of what is called Matter.” (Letters on Yoga, pp. 214-15) Science has no idea about it, nor can it have, although there might be some remote reflection of it on the way it perceives things. The question regarding the nature of Matter has been haunting the thinkers since ages long. Let us look into it briefly.   more »

We have to keep in mind that Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point is in no way an object of scientific study, it cannot be; certainly it is not amenable to the Cartesian analysis. Actually it is a kind of both within and without, both at once; it is Within-Without, the originator and the culminator of the entire becoming that we are. Going a step farther, it is also the endless becoming in its own new dimensional possibilities. The Omega Point is trans-descriptive and trans-analytical, yet holding and encompassing all that we are, and all that we shall be, in its newer and happier truth. If transcendence is one of the attributes of this emerging and immerging Urge, then it is well understood that it will escape all scaling up or down, will prevent all quantification of the mysterious Within-Without. It cannot be described in terms of scientific measurements that are relative in the Einsteinean sense. Then, even on a lesser level to make man as an object of measurement and knowledge becomes fallacious. The notion of “true physics” projecting itself in the phenomenon of man eventually turns out to be non-scientific if we have to retain the full connotation and context of the physics proper. …   more »

So, one understands. One understands: the psychic being materialises itself... and that gives continuity to evolution. This creation gives altogether the feeling that there is nothing arbitrary, there is a kind of divine logic behind and it is not like our human logic, it is very much superior to ours—but there is one, and that was fully satisfied when I saw this. It is really interesting. I was very interested. It was there, calm and quiet, and it said to me, “You were looking, well, there it is, yes, it is that!” And then I understood why the mind and the vital were sent out of this body, leaving the psychic being—naturally it was that which had been always governing all the movements, so it was nothing new, but there are no difficulties any more: all the complications that were coming from the vital and the mental, adding their impressions and tendencies, all gone. And I understood: “Ah! It is that, it is this psychic being which has to become the supramental being.”...   more »

The formula of God, Light, Freedom, Immortality was discovered ages ago and many attempts were made for its application. Great religions came, philosophies sprang up, social institutions advanced the cause of Man, and esoteric pursuits brought fruits of wonder; however, this transient and sorrowful world has yet remained sorrowful and transient. Long and tortuous has been the path on which imperious history marched. Thinkers and saints and prophets moulded the destiny of mankind and took it nearer, and yet nearer, towards its far-off unattainable goal. Cycles of evolution turned through rough and strenuous and recalcitrant times. Have ever the ceaseless strivings been successful?...   more »