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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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These are the conditions of Light and Truth, the sole conditions under which the highest will descend; and it is only the very highest supramental Force descending from above and opening from below that can victoriously handle the physical Nature and annihilate its difficulties... There must be a total and sincere surrender; there must be an exclusive self opening to the divine Power; there must be a constant and integral choice of the Truth that is descending, a constant and integral rejection of the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature.

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Tagore’s “Into that heaven...” read by Samuel Godfrey George

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Tagore has been a wayfarer towards the same goal as ours in his own way—that is the main thing, the exact stage of advance and putting of the steps are minor matters. His exact position as a poet or a prophet or anything else will be assigned by posterity and we need not be in haste to anticipate the final verdict. He belonged to an age which had faith in its ideas and whose very denials were creative affirmations. That makes an immense difference. Now all that idealism has been smashed to pieces by the immense adverse event and everybody is busy exposing its weaknesses—but nobody knows what to put in its place. And what else is there? Until new spiritual values are discovered, no great enduring creation is possible.

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Life of Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941

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The secrets of a lost city that may have inspired one of the world's most enduring myths—the fable of Atlantis—have been brought to light from beneath the waters off southern Greece. Explored by an Anglo-Greek team of archaeologists and marine geologists and known as Pavlopetri, the sunken settlement dates back some 5,000 years to the time of Homer's heroes and in terms of size and wealth of detail is unprecedented, experts say.

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The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history. Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old. The vast city—which is five miles long and two miles wide—is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

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Every now and then nations must pause and reassess their core values. As a nation, how do we evolve an inclusive nationalism that takes with it the poor and the diverse cultures of the subcontinent? Every so often, the moral fabric of our nation must be whetted and reaffirmed.

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Bishu cast a quick look over the pond
And the water gathered all its ripples,
Collapsing like a poet’s metaphors
Into some calm of thought. A sound echoed
Throughout the valley, and disappeared
In its green. When it was sinfully dark
An ewe fell a prey to the red wolf’s guile
And a magic moon laughed ’neath the dumbness
That sleeps like eternity’s unconcern.
Yet Bishu saw rising at the far shore
An image that grew sharper...

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“It is certainly a mistake to bring down the light by force—to pull it down. The Supramental cannot be taken by storm. When the time is ready it will open of itself—but first there is a great deal to be done and that must be done patiently and without haste.” Sri Aurobindo. This was the message distributed by the Mother on the Darshan day of 24 November 1965. People are in a hurry and they want to pull it down to see the results immediately. But most of the time they pull down some small vital individuality who mocks at them and in the end makes them play the shabby fool. They fall into a pit. Unless there is a contact with the true Light, there cannot be safety in this matter. One must have the true experience. To pull is always an egoistic movement. It is a deformation of aspiration. True aspiration consists in a giving, a self-giving, whereas to pull means to want for oneself. Even if in the mind you have a vaster ambition—the earth, the universe—that means nothing, these are mental activities. There are the different strata of humanity in relation to the supramental creation. But the effort for transformation, reduced to a small number, becomes a thing much more precious and much more powerful for the realisation. Those who have superior intelligence, a refined sense of things, they have a tendency of ridiculing others. This itself is a lack of culture, of refinement. On the other hand, each thing expressing its kind quite naturally, that vision has great soothing power; it is so sweet, so wonderful. With the amplitude and totality of the vision, there comes something which is a compassion that understands: the true divine Compassion, which is the total comprehension that each one is what he must be.

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At first glance, literary criticism seems a purely reactive enterprise; an appraisal of creative output that both logically and chronologically arrives after the fact. But it is much more than that. A critical culture envelops writers, whispering suggestions of subject and style. Otherwise they might not know what to say. The same critical culture guides readers too. So if Indian English fiction today seems a disjointed cacophony of voices, with no discernible shared themes or values to lend some shape to its burgeoning mass, the ultimate fault is of our critical imaginations. They have not clarified the standards, by which writers may know their material, and readers may know their books.

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By Yoga Varuna is born in us, a vast sky of spiritual living, the Divine in his wide existence and infinite truth; into that wideness Mitra rises up, Lord of Light and Love who takes all our activities of thought and feeling and will, links them into a Divine harmony, charioteers our movement and dictates our works; called by this wideness and this harmony Aryaman appears in us, the Divine in its illumined power, uplifted force of being and all-judging effective will; and by the three comes the indwelling Bhaga, the Divine in its pure bliss and all-seizing joy who dispels the evil dream of our jarring and divided existence and possesses all things in the light and glory of Aryaman’s power, Mitra’s love and light, Varuna’s unity. This divine Birth shall be the son of our works; and than creating this what greater skill can there be or what more practical and sovereign cunning?

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