Today is a very special day. Sri Aurobindo had come here exactly a hundred years ago. It was at the instance of the Dharma Rakshini Sabha of Uttarpara that he had paid a special visit to this place and delivered a speech on the banks of the calm and wide majestic Ganges flowing in the greatness of its waters. It was not just an inspired and inspiring speech, but was something special, in the sense that he spoke the word that was first spoken to him in the jail. During the one year of his incarceration at Alipore he had extraordinary spiritual experiences, as if he was specially taken there for that purpose. The realization of the dynamic Brahman in its aspect of all-pervasive immanence, the Vasudeva-experience, was this second major spiritual realization. This he had within months of the great realization of the passive Brahman when he was in Baroda after the December 1907 Surat Congress. Two foremost Adwaitic spiritual realizations following each other in such quick succession, realizations which otherwise come after long spiritual practices during several lives,—that is something unparalleled in spiritual history. Therefore when Sri Aurobindo speaks something, the word he was told to give, it acquires a profound significance to us. He spoke of the sanatan or eternal dharma and hence it ought to have a special connotation carrying in it far-reaching consequences. What is the nature of that special word? Let us try to see it.

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