Ecologists have at last worked out a way of using recordings of birdsong to accurately measure the size of bird populations. Developed by a joint team from the US Geological Survey and University of Otago, the technique is an innovative combination of sound recording with spatially explicit capture-recapture, a new version of one of ecologists’ oldest tools for monitoring animal populations. Birds communicate by singing or calling, and biologists have long counted these cues to get an index of bird abundance. But it is much harder to work out the actual density of a bird population because existing methods need observers to measure either the distance to each bird, or whether they are within a set distance from the observer.
The pure Golden Light descended from the vast Heaven of Truth-knowledge like the raining of waters. The earth, being flooded with the descending golden Truth-Light of Grace, changed into a golden earth, shining in its golden luminosity. A golden world is seen born, and men too become golden in the mental, vital and physical levels of existence. With the descending force of the golden Light of Truth on the earth, a new era has begun.
People ask you often if Bodhidharma
Came from the East; but you answer them not,
Except pointing at your knife. But these days
You have stopped doing even that, as if
Echoing back from Nirvana you heard
The sound of an occult clap revealing
The great indefatigable mystery
Of the void. …
Aswapati is a protagonist of God’s work in the world. There is nothing that he needs for himself, desire-free he carrying the world’s desire with him; his yoga-tapasya has been for the evolutionary soul of the earth, that it becomes a manifesting instrument in the splendour of God himself. In the complete freedom of his soul and his spirit, in the transcendental freedom untouched by ignorance and inconscience, Aswapati exercises his freewill which could be different from the Freewill with other possibilities, Possibilities in the rhythms of the manifesting Truth. That is the greatness, the uniqueness of his yoga-tapasya. In it he is not asking the imperfect fruit, the partial prize, but makes himself bold to tell the supreme Savitri herself that Man is not the crown of her creation, that a better and greater being must follow him and change this transient and sorrowful mortal existence, bring to it felicitous divinity. There has to be immortality on earth with its gleaming infinities governing and unfolding the entire conduct in the life of the Spirit. A new world in the Supramental is already poised for birth, and it is ready to descend upon earth, a task which the divine Savitri alone can accomplish. He persuades her to take mortal birth, and she obliges.
The cells are becoming conscious and beginning to ask these questions—if there is any importance to the body in this creation, if it is useful in any sense. Not only do they stand back and at themselves in action; they begin to wonder how this is going to be, they aspire. There has to be something other than they just supporting some activity, there has to be a meaning for their being in existence. That awareness itself is the beginning of their receptivity, “a silent opening allowing the thing to enter; and a very subtle perception of a way of being that would be luminous, harmonious.” Here could be the perception of true Matter. In it there is at once subtleness and penetrability, suppleness in the forms, that which must replace the physical ego. All the habits are in this way undone. If this should mean dissolution, there is willingness to accept it. “Whatever happens, we will see,”—the cells are ready, ready for the great adventure. “How will we be—how will we be? How...” Yes, the cells saying, “How should we be? How will we be?”... It is interesting, says the Mother.
A Sanskrit prayer invokes good auspicious things to all, sarvéşām bhadram astu vah. In fact, this is the benediction Narad utters just before taking the leave of the royal hosts in Madra. He had come all the way from his blissful home in Paradise to disclose the death of Satyavan whom Savitri has chosen as her life’s inseparable partner. More significantly, however, in the process he has initiated Savitri into the Yoga of Conquest of Death. So whatever has to happen in it will prove propitious to the entire world. It will dissolve the Evil Persona of the Divine operating in the cosmic field.
The Mother’s supplication to the divine Master is: “May all beings be happy in the peace of Thy illumination!” That illumination will remove all that is Shadow’s; that will remove the Shadow itself.
The roots of life are afflicted by evil and the question that always haunts us is, how does God permit evil, if God is all-good, summum bonum? how? Does he give rise to evil, summum malum? can a perfect creator cause imperfection in his creation? can in the divine’s world arise the undivine? But the undeniable fact is, in this phenomenality we do see good and evil, perfection and imperfection, divine and undivine, see under life’s terrestrial condition, under its duress and not in the freedom of the spirit. It is human reason that gets baffled at the dichotomy appearing in front of it, not only as evil and good, but also as truth and falsehood, ignorance and knowledge, pleasure and pain, light and shade, life and death; everywhere those baffling opposites are present.
In India, a river is a mini-cosmos in concept. Every river is a mother deity who spawns mythology, art, dance, music, architecture, history and spirituality. Each one has a clear identity, appearance, value, style and spirit just like a beautiful woman. For millenniums, Indians have worshipped seven holy rivers that crisscross the sub-continent, fertilising its sprawling plains and watering its misty mountains and lush forests. These are the Ganga, the Yamuna, the invisible Saraswati, the Narmada, the Godavari, the Kaveri and the Sindhu. Each of these rivers has a unique persona and quality attached to it. The quality and appearance associated each of these seven rivers have such a strong influence on the Indian psyche, that history, architecture, art, music and dance and even social movements show their impact. Each river represents a specific colour and image and Indian scriptures weave innumerable legends around them.
These conversations with the Mother, mostly recollected from memory, reveal not only the compassionate nature of the Mother’s relationship with one of her disciples, young Mona Sarkar, but disclose, much as if we were listening with an ear to a door to the Infinite, quiet, almost whispered truths.
Tindari, I know you
mild between broad hills, overhanging the waters
of the god’s sweet islands.
Today, you confront me
and break into my heart. ...
Return, serene Tindari,
stir me, sweet friend,
to raise myself to the sky from the rock,
so that I might shape fear, for those who do not know
what deep wind has searched me.
Rainforests have been under extreme pressure all across the earth for more than a century now, and they now cover only an estimated 3 per cent of the earth’s land surface. In India, they are now distributed mainly in the Western Ghats and in the northeastern region. Even here, they are shrinking in area. ... Malayalam poetess Sugathakumari, a key figure in the struggle to save the Silent Valley, said that the biggest justification for the protection of the Valley is that it gives the second highest rainfall in the country. Recalling her three-decade-long efforts to save the Silent Valley, she said that this precious chunk of dense forest is perhaps India’s last, largest and oldest tropical rainforest remaining undisturbed, undisturbed because of its relative inaccessibility, oldest because its age is estimated to be 50 million years. ... The echoes of the campaign to save the Silent Valley have served to ignite other campaigns. ... But the gains that have been made ought to be consolidated and taken forward.
A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing sight to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor or a shock wave—although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre—lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely.
In his classical work on political philosophy Aristotle observes: “Hippodamus was the first to discourse about the Best State. It was he who had invented the divisions of cities into quarters and he laid out the street-plan of the Piraeus. ... Hippodamus planned a city with a population of ten thousand, divided into three parts, one of skilled workers, one of agriculturists, and a third to bear arms and secure defence. The territory also was divided into three parts, a sacred, a public, and a private; the worship of the gods would be maintained out of the produce of the sacred land, the defenders out of the common land, the agriculturists out of the private...” There were laws also stipulated and procedures for settling the lawsuits. Such a division of labour and of property is fair enough and the state should acknowledge it as a healthy desideratum for its proper functioning; it should in return provide the right of citizenship to its constituting members. But Aristotle had other views. His political philosophy, while dealing with the individual and the state, attempted to take care of the whole of human relationship into account. Not very happily, at least to the present day ideals of society, it introduced the pernicious concept of the grades of citizenship. The virtue which the state is to encourage and reward lay only with the few. For him “those who possess arms must be superior in power” to other sections of the society. Not only that. A citizen “must not do work that is felt to be degrading”. Modem mind will immediately discard such a notion and in doing so pronounce that we have passed through another human cycle of social evolution. Even Plato's idea of “communal ownership of property, wives, and children” cannot but appear shocking to us today. With all that philosophical content in it, communism of any sort would be repugnant where individual liberty is made subservient to the state authority, although the importance and the role of the latter is to be fully recognised in an organised collective life. The failure is the failure of a human cycle.
As sweet as infancy that is dew-fresh
But bearing the will of a fire kindled
On the altar of the Being, surprised
Beauty awakes in the heart of all joy.
Always there are revolts, insults, all those things. So the question is: Is there any place for “self-respect”, for amour-propre in the sadhana? The straight answer is: “No”. Yet, in the present state, there cannot be the effort without the ego-sense. Ego is the helper. However, things have to be understood; even the physical must understand them. It has to be a sort of offering of the being, which gives itself in order to learn. The Mother was speaking of the cells. She even said that it is very interesting, that it is the experience of the body. “It is very interesting, because the ego has become for me a kind of impersonal entity, while for everybody else it is the acute sense of his personality!” Impersonality of ego—how wonderful! What must happen is, one must learn how to be the perfect unity. And one must always laugh, always. “The Lord laughs, and He laughs, and His laugh is so nice, so nice, so full of love. It is a laugh that envelops you with an extraordinary sweetness.” Indeed, it is the Anandamaya Purusha, the Being of Bliss who is radiating his rapturous sweetness everywhere—deep and calm in its power of creation-expression-manifestation.
In Western psychology, CG Jung has emphasised the reality of the Shadow. This appears precisely at the beginning of what he calls the process of individuation, of which the end is the discovery of Self and the reconciliation of a person with himself and with the world. The Shadow appears in dreams under the most vary¬ing forms, but always corresponds to something which we have refused or which we have been incapable of integrating in our personality. In a certain way, the Shadow represents temptation, but, from another standpoint, it corresponds with our most difficult and serious task. The figures in the dream, or the phantasms which give expression to it, are often the image, sometimes composite, of people who in real life represent precisely that which we condemn with indignation or hold in dread. Thus the Shadow has always a character, which is, if not immoral, at least amoral. It can express certain rejected or suppressed desires, but its roots are nevertheless extra-individual. Behind the images which it borrows from real persons whom we know, the dream allows us to discern forces, mythical or collective, which can take on a demoniac and magical aspect. But it is at the mo¬ment when we discover the extra-individual origin of the Shadow that we become conscious of his ambiguous character and of his infinite possibilities of metamor¬phosis. The dreaded Magician is prone at this level to turn himself into the seduc¬tive young man. The devil can here return again to the angel. In these depths, all becomes possible once more, and the dreaded forces are exactly those which permit us the greatest ascent.
The conception of God as Divine Mother attained its fullest flowering at the hands of the Shakta followers of Hinduism. They not only developed the elaborate forms and rituals connected with Shakti-worship, but also gave a profound philosophical basis to their faith and practice. The vast Tantra literature represents not only the various cults and ritualistic practices of Shaktism but also its religious ideology and philosophy. According to Shakta philosophy enshrined in the Tantras, the ultimate Reality as pure unchanging Consciousness is called Shiva, and its power appearing as the flux of mind and matter in Creation is known as Shakti—the Cosmic Power or Primordial energy. Shiva is pure Being, devoid of all relativity. Shakti is the active Personal Being and includes all individual souls.
The road ran creepily...
It linked my grandma’s broken house
with a cowshed and a lonely temple,
where an old couple lived
to lit the lamps at the fall of the day,
to ring in the bells before the prayers.
In the dark of the night,
the road looked different
Dara Shikoh, whose death anniversary fell last year on August 30, was more than a Sufi-prince, scholar and translator. He was also a hands-on editor-publisher of translations. Every Indian who has ever translated a text into English owes something to a Mughal prince who lies buried in the compound of Humayun’s tomb in Delhi. The anniversary of his death, August 30, is a date we should remember with national melancholy. The school-room facts are well known: in the struggle for the Mughal throne 350 years ago, Shah Jahan’s eldest son Prince Dara Shikoh was defeated, and brought to Delhi where he was led through the city in a disgrace-parade on an old and unwashed elephant… In the 17th century, Prince Dara Shikoh went wholeheartedly into the spiritual movements in India, studied in translation Hebrew, Christian and Brahmanical scriptures, learnt the yogic practices and Sufi methods of meditation, the doctrine of bhakti and the mystical philosophy of Islam, and produced the immortal work Majmua-ul-Bahrain (mingling of two oceans) and several other books. If the political and religious conspiracies had not succeeded in defeating and murdering him, Indian history would have taken a different turn.
Unique wildlife on Robinson Crusoe islands is at risk and, understandably, conservationists call for drastic action to rescue the Juan Fernández archipelago's biodiversity from alien invaders.
