The Indus civilisation had a volumetric system with inscriptions on ceramic vessels indicating that the sign ‘V’ stood for a measure, a long linear stroke equalled 10, two long strokes stood for 20 and a short stroke represented one, according to Bryan Wells, who has been researching the Indus script for more than 20 years. These markings on the pots are identical to those found on the incised tablets and bas-relief tablets also found in Harappa.
In India the personal god is worshipped in various forms and is called by various names. This has led to the formation of different sects. To Shaivas Shiva is the Supreme Deity, to Vaishnavas, Vishnu; and to Shaktas, Shakti manifests as Mother or Devi. Again, according to the different temperaments of aspirants, the same deity is addressed as father, master, friend, beloved, or mother. Sri Ramakrishna always referred to God as “my Mother”. The idea of addressing and worshipping God as Mother is a very ancient tradition in India. This idea finds expression in the Vedas and the Upanishads and was further developed in the Purnas and the Tantras.
Jung had a direct relationship with the living God and a highly differentiated fourfold psyche. He may or may not have had an inkling of the primordial act of creation itself, which included the involvement of the four Beings of Light and their negation, but he lived fully according to that reality. Although he specifically did not indulge in metaphysical speculation, the final completeness and oneness of his life based on the reality of the psyche and the realization of the mystical coincidentia oppositorum, the reconciliation of opposites, however, suggests that he must have had some insight into the nature of the act of creation.
A giant "digital cloud" that would "float" above London's skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers. The construction would include 120m-tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data. The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park. The unconventional structure was originally envisaged as a centre piece of the city's Olympic village. The building draws inspiration from the work of Tomas Saraceno.
After rending the lid on the top of the head, and being surrounded by Light, I quickly rushed through wide spaces of heavens. Heavens within heavens were entered. The consciousness moved both upwards and inwards. It crossed six overhead planes which had been screening the Truth. Then I entered into the experience of the Void, the Shunya of Nothingness. But this was not the end. I felt I was near the Vast Realm of Light...
… So would flourish new markets across sea,
And land, in different climes. But Frieda
Felt in her awed heart a three-quarter ton
Weight of the genetic pumpkin, favoured
By the food chain enterprises. Approve
She would not export of this avarice,—
Nor Venice Beach thrown free to the oafish.
Suffering is possibly a mechanism to pull Matter out of its brutish inertia, the state of tamas. What was peace, calm, that had slipped and got deformed into inactivity, into physical tamas and the tamas of the physical, tamas that does not allow any spiritual progress to take place, progress of the manifestation of the faculties of the Spirit in Matter; its nature is to resist the working of the higher will in it. So, when the aspiration is born in the cells of the body, it starts wondering that there could at all be resistance for its growth. But then comes in response to it the divine Compassion, divine Love to remove what opposes it. In the physical Matter there is apprehension, but it is counterbalanced and cured by the will to surrender. It is that which takes away all pain and suffering, and there is the supreme well-being. When one is conscious of this Force—this Force, this Compassion in its essential reality—and when one sees how it can act through the conscious individual, one has the key to the problem. Aspiration of the cells and the will to surrender—that creates an opening in them for the divine Force and Compassion and Love to act. What was brutish inertia, tamas, that gets transformed into the peace and quiet of receptivity. In it is prepared the basis for the physical’s advance on the spiritual path, the manifestation of the Divine in a material creation, the working of supreme will in it.
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 possess 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.
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.
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. Milk Drops
Thanks to Auroman for sending video links. Here are two of them.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.