When you follow the ascending path, the work is relatively easy. I had already covered this path by the beginning of the century and had established a constant relationship with the Supreme—That which is beyond the Personal and the gods and all the outward expressions of the Divine, but also beyond the Absolute Impersonal. It's something you cannot describe; you must experience it. And this is what must be brought down into Matter. Such is the descending path, the one I began with Sri Aurobindo; and there, the work is immense.

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With Subramania Bharati's 127th birth anniversary falling earlier this month, it is time to take another look at the poet's paradoxical personality. On a warm day in June 1921, a man stood by the gopuram of the Parthasarathy Temple in Chennai, feeding the temple elephant. The worshippers hurrying by would glance at him and move on, noticing nothing unusual except for a turban worn in a manner unusual for Tamils. The man's erect carriage was in stark contrast to signs of a certain privation; an unmistakable fragility of form, the sunken face showing up the cheekbones. Only the luminous eyes blazing out at the world showed something of the man within.

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Raging Waters

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I now witness a stranger happening,
Even the day plunging into darkness
To know the mystery that shall make it
Brighter yet, with suns receiving night’s riches.
I’ve become one with the soul of the earth,
I’ve borne the olden grief of truth, unease
Of delight from which all came, and to which
All return. Under that happy heaven
It seemed for long centuries she was tied
To futility’s work-post. But chaos
Ripened into destiny; now I see
The new thing arriving, greatly to live.
The dreams of night are asleep in its eyes,—
The sleep of consciousness splendid in trance.

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Man knows nothing about death, and it is a great boon that the moment of death is not disclosed to him. He has no knowledge of death, he does not know what it is. Nor does he prepare himself consciously for death. But the Mother has come to a point that for her there is nothing which is really death. It is not a mental or vital perception; it is the very body that sees it, the cells of the body. Death is only an appearance. But there is no radical change in the vibration of the consciousness, that consciousness is there everywhere, in the body also. It is a state of immortality itself, immortality in the physical. In that consciousness one comes out of a kind of illusory state, of a perception that is a perception of appearances, but one has a perception, perception to see the difference. With the new consciousness, with the new way of seeing the comprehension is total, the perception total, altogether concrete. This is a knowledge of the consciousness of the cells. This knowledge, this personal experience has to become now more complete, it should become an “impersonal” experience. But there is the certitude that it will happen, that it will come.

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“This is going to hurt a lot, I thought as I approached the ground. Or not at all.” By any reasonable standards, people who jump out of planes are reckless or suicidal; and people who jump out of planes flying at low altitude over volcanos, well, they're beyond help. But that was our plan that day. I was working on a documentary, filming an athlete skydiving over the Kamchatka in Russia. Known as "the land of fire and ice", it has 40 or so active volcanos, and is ¬ covered in snow for nine months a year. The idea was to get footage of the athlete "flying" in front of a column of steam hundreds of feet high that was spewing from a vent in the side of a mountain.

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Many animals respond vocally when they detect predators, but it's not clear to whom they are signaling, said Jessica Yorzinski, a graduate student in animal behavior at UC Davis who conducted the study with Gail Patricelli, professor of evolution and ecology. They might be warning others of the threat, but they might also be telling the predator, "I've seen you." Yorzinski used a ring of directional microphones around a birdcage to record the songs of dark-eyed juncos, yellow-rumped warblers, house finches and other birds as they were shown a stuffed owl. All the birds were captured in the wild, tested, banded and released within 24 hours.

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This is a paraphrase of the text of Chapter Seven of Sri Aurobindo’s The Secret of the Veda. It presents the role of Vayu and Indra and then of Varuna and Mitra in the Vedic conception of the supramental consciousness which is the condition of the state of immortality. If there is the preparation first of the vital forces represented by Vayu, and of the mentality by Indra, then Varuna and Mitra are two of the four gods who represent this working of the Truth in the human mind and temperament. It is by the thought that Indra and Vayu have been called upon to perfect the nervous mentality. But this instrument, thought, has itself to be perfected, enriched, clarified before the mind can become capable of free communication with the Truth-Consciousness. To realize this Varuna and Mitra, Powers of the Truth, are invoked for "accomplishing a richly luminous thought", dhiyam ghṛtācīm sādhantā. All this is based on the central Vedic conception of the Supramental or Truth-Consciousness towards which the progressively perfected mentality of the human being labours as towards a consummation and a goal. The two opening hymns of the Rig Veda already state this great conception of the supramental consciousness as the condition of the state of immortality. In the first hymn this is simply stated as the aim of the sacrifice and the characteristic work of Agni. The second hymn indicates the preliminary work of preparation, by Indra and Vayu, by Mitra and Varuna, of the ordinary mentality of man through the force of the Ananda and the increasing growth of the Truth.

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Harin appeared like a meteor to announce the new spirit in Indian English poetry. It was a turning away from the materialistic stress in English poetry in search of the untold Beyond. The poet is a conscious pilgrim and is aware of his mystic experiences. These give poetry not simply the poetry of sight; the poet also listens to various sounds with the help of his soul. Mostly, he moves around the flame and does not enter the zone. He enjoys speaking about the flame in various strains, but does not take a dip into it. Yet, his initial perceptions come out in a wonderfully original way with very little trace of Wordsworth and Shelley in them. KR Srinivasa Iyengar rightly believes that “verbal and metrical facility is Harindranath’s main strength” and that power saves him when his “inspiration is dry and the content thin”. Iyengar echoes Sri Aurobindo when he says that Harin “is not primarily a mystic poet, nor a philosophical poet either”. Nobody can disagree. Also, nobody should deny Harin’s new ways of loving the Divine in poetry. Except for Sri Aurobindo’s and Iyengar’s views, there is not much of “critical study” on Harin. Hope this humble effort will offer some fresh ideas for the critic of Harin’s poetry.

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A Miracle doing Miracles

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If human will could be made one with God's,
If human thought could echo the thoughts of God,
Man might be all-knowing and omnipotent;
But now he walks in Nature's doubtful ray.
Yet can the mind of man receive God's light,
The force of man can be driven by God's force,
Then is he a miracle doing miracles.
For only so can he be Nature's King.

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An Avatar or Vibhuti have the knowledge that is necessary for their work, they need not have more. There was absolutely no reason why Buddha should know what was going on in Rome. An Avatar even does not manifest all the Divine omniscience and omnipotence; he has not come for any such unnecessary display; all that is behind him but not in the front of his consciousness. As for the Vibhuti, the Vibhuti need not even know that he is a power of the Divine. Some Vibhutis like Julius Caesar for in¬stance have been atheists. Buddha himself did not believe in a personal God, only in some impersonal and indescribable Permanent.

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Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development—Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.

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Fifty million years ago the Indian sub-continent collided with the enormous Eurasian continent with a velocity of about 20 cm/year. With such a high velocity India was the fastest of the former parts of Gondwanaland, according to a report by a team of scientists from the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ, Germany's National Lab for Geosciences) and the National Geophysical Research Institute, India, in the 18th October 2007 edition of Nature. Due to this collision at such high velocities the largest mountain belt on Earth, the Himalayas, was formed, as was the massive Tibetan plateau.

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If we wish to see auro-biographical account in the ancient tale of Savitri as narrated by Sri Aurobindo in his epic, then there should not be any difficulty in associating the Mother with Savitri and Sri Aurobindo with Aswapati himself. This is true not only in the sense of its legendary bearings, but also in terms of its symbolic contents. The one-to-one correspondence that appears in the first is enlarged in its spiritual context by the other. It is the great visionary power of the legend that luminously supports the possibilities of the symbol in its revelatory vividness. In a certain sense they actually enrich each other. This also means that the trifling comment in a recent book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published by the Columbia University Press, should be dismissed as something coming from the Perverse Human who has no entry into the occult-spiritual domains. It says that Savitri the magnum opus is a “fictional creation” and has nothing to do with the yogi-poet’s life-story; or else it is not a dependable source-book for the strict purposes of writing a biography. Not recognizing this PH-factor there is also the Ridiculous Human that enthusiastically applauds such a shallow brainy product. It goes even to the extent of examining and correcting the published text without recognizing its spiritual style and form and content, its source of inspiration and the knowledge it embodies. It is as if we have here a justification for the perverse and ridiculous of the human that we can be. That is also its dark persona, and the sooner we shed it off the better it is for us. But let us look into Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri which indeed is the best means to discard it. The birth of Savitri means the birth of a new world. This she brings about by meeting the luminous Presence that is there behind Death and by obtaining the boon of divine life upon earth.

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Nothing seemed to matter in that renown,
Nor life, nor mortal dread, nor graciousness;
Nought all that we cherish had worth, except
The demiurge of the spirit. Amazed,
And hastening, the splendid god climbed down
The eleventh step and, as the door opened,
An optimist will walked everywhere.

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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.

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The problem of physical transformation can be seen, and tackled, in three ways: the spiritual, the occult, and the intellectual. In the first, the material cells should be made capable of coming directly in contact with Love-Consciousness-Power. In the occult process various powers of the intermediary worlds, the Overmind Gods and Goddesses enter into operation, their detailed knowledge helping it. In the last possibility, it is the spirit itself which seizes the problem and starts working from below; this has the merit of giving precision to the action, something which is kind of scientific, science being done by the spirit itself. If the three can be combined then, evidently, the thing will go faster. Without the first nothing is possible, without it the other two are even illusory. But if the first is combined with them, then the action becomes much more precise and direct, and rapid.

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In a study published in Nature an international team describes how they harnessed modern genomic technology to explore the ancient history of India. The new research reveals that nearly all Indians carry genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations. Following this ancient mixture, many groups experienced periods of genetic isolation from each other for thousands of years. It provides clues that can help reconstruct the historical origins of modern populations. These genomic analyses revealed two ancestral populations. "Different Indian groups have inherited forty to eighty percent of their ancestry from a population that we call the Ancestral North Indians who are related to western Eurasians, and the rest from the Ancestral South Indians, who are not related to any group outside India."

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The Veda speaks constantly of the waters or the rivers, especially of the divine waters, and occasionally of the waters which carry in them the light of the luminous solar world or the light of the Sun. The passage of the waters effected by the gods or by man with the aid of the gods is a constant symbol. The three great conquests to which the human being aspires, which the gods are in constant battle with the Vritras and Panis to give to man are the herds, the waters and the Sun or the solar world, gāḥ, apaḥ, svaḥ. The question is whether there is a deeper, a spiritual meaning, what is the sense of this curious collocation of cows, waters and the sun or cows, waters and the sky. It could rather be a system of symbolic meanings in which the herds, indicated by the word gāḥ, in the sense both of cows and rays of light, are the illuminations from the higher consciousness which have their origin in the Sun of Light, the Sun of Truth. Swar itself is the world or plane of immortality governed by that Light or Truth of the all-illumining Sun called in Veda the vast Truth, ŗtam bŗhat, and the true Light. The divine waters might be the floods of this higher consciousness pouring on the mortal mind from that plane of immortality.

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Five nations, including China and the US, reached a deal on a number of issues, such as a recognition to limit temperatures rises to less than 2C. US President Barack Obama said it would be a foundation for global action but there was "much further to go". However, the deal could be rejected as a number of nations expressed "dissatisfaction" with the contents.

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Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober,
Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,
Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants
Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.

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