“Pain is a terrible disillusioner and the pangs which had come upon us were those of approaching dissolution. It was at the last moment, when further delay would have meant death” awoke the country reclaiming its lost breath and its life. A gold-and-bright fire had come from heaven and kindled the soul of India, kindled it again in the glory of its heavenly meaning and purport, in its lustrous goldenness and brightness. Had not such a soul been there since the days of the Vedic Rishis and through the spiritual movements of all time, marching from age to age in the newer possibilities of the creative-expressive spirit of the country? If the eternal values of the spirit, the Sanatan Dharma, have been sustaining it all through, if that is the true meaning of Nationalism as given to us by Sri Aurobindo, then there cannot be anything more ridiculous than saying that Nationalism came to India from Europe. The new birth of India has already occurred in it, and there is no doubt about it; but the task is now to make it dynamic in thousandfold activity of ours. For that we have to do another kind of national tapasya and kindle the heavenly fire again in it, invoke that gold-and-bright fire in our heart and mind and will, in our soul and in our spirit to do its work in us.

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Exactly two years ago there was an article entitled Sri Aurobindo's Vision for a United India on a website which is pretty damaging to our ideas of spirituality forming the basis of socio-political organisation. It does not seem to be there anymore, but we are concerned with the points it is trying to make and its presence or absence should not matter for us. The author of that article was extremely critical about Sri Aurobindo taking his stand on the fact of united India, the sage and yogi in him disregarding the present-day geo-political factors. According to our critic this was a case for claiming “lost land” by Sri Aurobindo, making him vulnerable to the charge of fundamentalism. He is thus viewed as one harbouring pernicious intentions which will stand in the way of the growth of harmonious relationship between nations.

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Gandhiji’s described himself as a sanātani Hindu. His main concern was reconstruction of society for which political freedom was just a prerequisite. “But he was,” says a professor of history, “a universalist Hindu and not a Hindu universalist like Swami Vivekananda.” If one was Christian-Tolstoyan, the other was, through and through, Vedantic-Indian. The mistake of the modern mind lies in equating religion with dharma which is more an inner law of living than a ritualistic observation of stipulations. Here again we are reminded of what the Mahabharata says in despair: “I raise my hands and call out to men, but no one listens to me. Artha and Kama can be realised through Dharma. Why should we not act in accord with Dharma for the realisation of all that we desire?” The Gita itself speaks of the decline of the dharma and the coming of the Avatar from age to age. There is a long tradition of social sciences in India.

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Yunyang sends conscript labor to the Yangtse,
Both river banks are alive with men and trade:
When the buffaloes of Wu pant beneath the moon,
Its weary work hauling boats!
The river water’s too muddy to drink.
Thick silt fills half the pot:
When workmen chant the Inspector’s Song,
Hearts break, tears fall like the rain.
Ten thousand slave in the quarries.
But who will haul the stone to the river bank?
Look yonder at rocky Mang and Dang—
What tears have fallen here since ancient times!

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Discover the charm of rolling hills and verdant forests dotted with ancient temples. Korba is a cradle of culture tucked away in the folds of tradition...

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What Sri Aurobindo saw as a spiritual necessity of united India not only in the context of her destiny but also the destiny of the world, is interpreted by a certain intellectual element as nothing but a need to reclaim lost land, to repair the broken dream. To a multi-dimensional reality of India, it is nothing but anachronistic-chauvinistic to hail the country as Mother and raise the cry “Bande Mataram”. It is further argued that the concept of the country as a nation is alien to it, is of foreign origin; it is something which has been imported from Europe, and therefore to address it as “Mother”, and to say that it has a soul, is a typical confusion which always prevails in the Indian mind. In India the idea of statehood never existed. One can think of harmonious living of people together, people from different parts, and speaking different languages, and following different religions and customs, but to talk of them all as belonging to a single nation is nothing short of fundamentalism, fundamentalism of another kind. “The idea of nation statehood as a European social construction,” says a critic, “does not exactly come to my mind when Sri Aurobindo says partition must go.”

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I know the road that leads to Phoenix Park
Winding swiftly through the quiet of dream-sleep
Where the fire-birds drink dew-sparks of the Unknown.
Cool waters rush variedly in that calm
Of garden filled with pearls and onyxes of song.
No flowers and golden-red apples of thought
Springing from the sweet-scented soil of Night
Bedeck the road, but past the frill of light-and-shade
Sometimes is seen the phoenix of vast and fiery wings
Beating its way untraceably through vision’s sky.

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After seeing what England has produced by her empiricism, her culture of a raw energy, her exaltation of a political method not founded on reason, we must see what France has produced by her steady, logical pursuit of a fine social ideal: it is the Paris ouvrier with his firmness of grasp on affairs, his sanity, his height of mind, his clear, direct ways of life and thought,—it is the French peasant with his ready tact, his power of quiet and sensible conversation, located in an enjoyable corner of life, small it may be, but with plenty of room for wholesome work and plenty of room for refreshing gaiety. There we have the strong side of France, a lucid social atmosphere, a firm executive rationally directed to insure a clearly conceived purpose, a high level of character and refinement pervading all classes and a scheme of society bestowing a fair chance of happiness on the low as well as the high. But if France is strong in the sphere of England's weakness, she is no less weak in the sphere of England’s strength. Along with and militating against her social happiness, we have to reckon constant political disorder and instability, an alarming defect of expansive vigour, and entire failure in the handling of general politics. France, unable to conceive and work out a proper political machinery, has been reduced to copy with slight variations the English model and import a set of machinery well suited to the old English temper, but now unsuited even to the English and still more to the vehement French character. Passionate, sensitive, loquacious, fond of dispute and apt to be blown away by gusts of feeling, the Gaul is wholly unfit for that heavy decorum, that orderly process of debate, that power of combining anomalies, which still exist to a great extent in England, but which even there must eventually grow impossible. Hence the vehement French nation after a brief experience of each alien manufacture has grown intensely impatient and shipped it back without superfluous ceremony to its original home. Here is the latent root of that disheartening failure which has attended France in all her brief and feverish attempts to discover a stable basis of political advance, of that intense consequent disgust, that scornful aversion to politics which has led thinking France to rate it as an indecent harlequin-show in which no serious man will care to meddle. But if this were all, a superficial observer might balance a defect and merit on one side by an answering merit and defect on the other, and conclude that the account was clear; but social status is not the only department of success in which England compares unfavourably with France. There is her fatal incoherency, her want of political cohesion, her want of social cohesion.

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Much is often made, possibly with due justification also, about the views changing in the course of time, as if one becoming wiser with the unfolding actions, measures and results. Should not this be applied to Sri Aurobindo also? Would he not have changed his earlier opinions and statements, becoming wiser with the rolling of events? That appears to be an important question, and let us have a look at it. It is to be well understood that Sri Aurobindo's view of India and the world might have changed with world circumstances, with changing time, but never his fundamentals behind them. In fact such a possibility of his views changing with time fits in quite well with the awareness, the comprehension he had of the working of the occult forces that are at play behind the scene. His grasp of these cosmic goings-on and activities has always been there at the back his appraisals and assessments, if we have to use these descriptions. It is therefore not necessary, as someone is hectically trying, to hunt out quotations from his letters written to Nirodbaran in the 1930s, without realizing that there is a contradiction in itself. The point is, Sri Aurobindo was always alive to the dynamics of the situation. There is another aspect also that, these occult forces have to get tired and exhausted before they disappear altogether. When it was absolutely necessary he did intervene with his full concentrated yogic force, with a decisive yogic will in it,—as he did in the course of the War against Hitler when the stakes were very high, stakes concerned with the fate of this creation itself. In general he was aware of the working of the occult forces, and his statements could be contextual with regard to this complex game. Very often this is missed, and wrong conclusions drawn to justify one’s own pet ideas and theories. Smart commentators say that there is no reason we should not believe that the passing of some six decades would not have altered his view of 1950 regards the pre-nuclear subcontinent. But nobody is going to deny this fact, yet would Sri Aurobindo change what he had said, say, in his Independence Day message that the India-Pakistan Partition is an artificial creation and should go? would he ever revise that statement? One wonders, if one has some perception of such matters. The sorry thing is, these smart commentators and their cohorts confuse modus operandi with the basic realities that are there behind the yogic vision.

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If we read the history of civilization, we get a mixed feeling. There have been glorious moments. There have also been disappointments, terrible disapointments. Yet the best in man was ever driven by a secret urge. There was always an urge in him that spoke of the nobility of life. Whether he was aware of it or not, a kind of compulsion, an impetus towards perfection ever pushed him towards loftier aims. The sculptures by Phidias, the caves of Ajanata whose artists have preferred to remain unknown, the tall and massive Gopurams of the South Indian temples, tpaintings of the Sistine Chapel have given to the soul of man a loftiness that is born of something sublime and marvellous, given a character of divinity itself. In him he possesses a sense of immortality. In his quest he is secretly guided by some authentic truth. Even today the study of Nature is taking him to occult domains which were unknown to him until a year ago. Stepping into the vastness of space or mustering the power of a laptop practically in every walk of our life is undeniably a most astounding achievement of the modern man. Cycles of evolution in the past went through rough and difficult times, and they did tumble, but mankind was always on the march.

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You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom,
The water flows.

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A man may believe in all the churches in the world, he may carry in his head all the sacred books ever written, he may baptize himself in all the rivers of the earth, still, if he has no perception of God, I would class him with the rankest atheist.

And a man may have never entered a church or a mosque, nor performed any ceremony, but if he feels God within himself and is thereby lifted above the vanities of the world, that man is a holy man, a saint, call him what you will.

As soon as a man stands up and says he is right or his church is right, and all others are wrong, he is himself all wrong. He does not know that upon the proof of all the others depends the proof of his own. Love and charity for the whole human race, that is the test of true religiousness. I do not mean the sentimental statement that all men are brothers, but that one must feel the oneness of human life.

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Some remarkable ruins of the Roman Empire are set in out-of-the-way parts of Britain.

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Countless and cunning Trojan horses have entered the Web-Journals and their objective is to destroy the future, what stands for Tomorrow. But here is a warning from the watchful owl deeply keeping guard on things in the preciousness of the night.

The owl hooted in the mocking night, “Beware
Of Trojan horses set in brutal woods,
’neath thick branches of thought. They’re built in moods
Born of artful ends, and in the least care
Things that are to the growing spirit fair...

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