What was the key-factor that enabled the success of the atomic programme under the stewardship of Bhabha? Bhabha had innate confidence in the capacity of the Indian scientists and knew what exactly they lacked; what they lacked was an institutional support, perhaps more than institutional support the needed freedom to do things. He recognized this and built up laboratories around capable and creative researchers; rather than first build the laboratories and then pack them with people, he looked for talent wherever it was and promoted it in every respect. This seems so obvious, but in those days it was not there in this part of the world; perhaps it is not there even now the way it ought to be there. Regulated science is a paradox in itself, and it persists.

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Equivalence of the four great cosmic powers as Maheshwari-Mahakali-Mahalakshmi-Mahasaraswati with the four soul-qualities or swabhāvas as we have in the ancient revelations such as the Purusha Sukta or the Gita is unmistakable; caturvarņa as it is called is a spiritual order working in the occult domain of Nature or Prakriti. If we go by the account of the Purusha Sukta then these powers were brought down more or less easily by the efficacy of the Sarvahuta Yajna, the Sacrifice of the All; the descent of other powers indispensable for the supramental manifestation fall outside its scope. We may look into it by going through the story recounted by the Mother.

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If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.

Canto XIII introduces Confucius, or Kung, who is presented as the embodiment of the ideal of social order based on ethics.

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Nishikanto’s vairagya was noticeable to all. When his maternal grandmother came to visit him, she thought of a brainwave that would cool down the wandering temperament of her grandson. She decided to get Nishikanto, who was then fifteen years of age, married to a village girl whom she had selected. But Nishikanto refused to marry the girl as he had once seen her sucking a mango sitting on a tree, with the juice rolling down her arm. He had developed an instant disliking for her and he decided to renounce the world and become an ascetic without any further delay. On that very night when everyone was fast asleep, he gathered a warm blanket, some clothes and his notebooks where he had penned his poems and left the house. While on his way he suddenly realized that an ascetic mustn’t have any worldly attachments. He returned to his house, took an ordinary blanket instead of the warm one, discarded his clothes, threw his precious notebooks into a well and left for his unknown destination.

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In the sky, the moon drifted slowly through the clouds. Far below, the river mingled its murmur with the wind, as it danced along on its course; and the earth looked bathed in beauty in the half-light of the moon. All around were forest retreats of the Rishis, each charming enough to put the Elysian Fields to shame: every hermitage was a perfect picture of sylvan loveliness with its trees and flowers and foliage.

On this moon-enraptured night, said Brahmarshi Vasişţha to his spouse Arundhati Devi, "Devi, go and beg some salt of the Rishi Vishvamitra, and bring it here soon."

Taken aback, she replied, "My lord, what is this you are asking me to do? I cannot understand you! He who has robbed me of my hundred sons..."

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Swifter than death's weapon
She leaped beyond the cloud:
In a sky where burn stars of love
Doe-eyed souls to her bowed.

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This is the third in the series of the last set of eight articles Sri Aurobindo wrote during 1949-50 and it had appeared first in the 15 August 1949 issue of the Bulletin of Physical Education. Sri Aurobindo holds in his vision the possibility of a divine life in a divine body, and here in this article gives certain hints about the nature of this new body, its structure, its principle on which it could be founded. Obviously if a divine body has to emerge as an aspect of the evolutionary process, if transformation has to occur then it is necessary that its process be known or worked out. If there has to be continuity then the new body must continue the already developed evolutionary form. The body itself might acquire new means and ranges of communication with other bodies, new processes of acquiring knowledge, a new aesthesis, new potencies of manipulation of itself and objects. Indeed, there could be something of the highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting Spirit in its development.

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In the context of the Indian renaissance, it is pertinent to examine why nothing really outstanding or worthwhile came out of the Muslim community, a community that constitutes a vast section of Indian population. Did renaissance not touch it? and if so the question is, why? what could be its causes? Why is it that we don’t see any Muslim names, for instance, in the field of science of those days? This may not be a very palatable subject, but perhaps it is a legitimate inquiry. There were deeper psycho-historical factors also, of the loss of the Muslim Rule over India. One early important figure that comes to our mind is that of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. And it should also be noted that he was suspicious of the Indian Independence Movement itself. The genesis of the suspicion lay in the 1867 Hindi-Urdu controversy when he became a leading political voice in the Hindi-Muslim belt of the then United Provinces. For him Urdu was the lingua franca of the land having been developed by the erstwhile Muslim Rulers. But that is going back to history rather than building new history. If the revival of a community is an aspect of a reaction, then the chances of it surviving are dim. This is a law which is universal and is applicable to all such self-centred groups or creeds or doctrines or political formulations. Whatever future was planned or envisioned by Sir Syed was not on the principles of the future that is to come but on things that have gone into the past, that have lost their life-breath. In fact, there has to be also the practicality of the cherished ideal. If the idea is to revive the Muslim glory, which is quite valid for him, then that can happen only by recognizing the presence of a very large community with other sets of ideas and ideals, and imposition of any kind is bound to generate conflicts and clashes. Ditto is true for the Hindu ambition if it does not recognize the march of the time-spirit towards a higher collective synthesis. The resolution should lie in a harmonious association that transcends all limitations. But, unfortunately, removal of the Hindu-Muslim divide at a deeper psychological level based on the swabhāva or soul-nature of each had remained unattempted in these politically motivated attempts. This was rather regrettable. The same would hold good even today if there has to be reformulation of unity in the subcontinent. Political unity based on the western theories of nations is not going to solve the problem. It has to go at the deeper level recognizing the character of each of the constituents.

Sir Syed was essentially concerned with the lot of the Muslims in India and was convinced about the necessity of liberal education being given to them. He began working as an educator, founded the Scientific Society of Aligarh, the first scientific association of its kind in India along the lines of Royal Society, and assembled Muslim scholars from different parts of the country. He started educational and scientific activities with Urdu as the medium of expression. A lot of creative energy was thus invested rather spent in this effort instead of allowing the spirit its free articulation. The demand for Hindi was considered by him as wearing down of Muslim culture that dominated the country during the Moghal era. In order to strengthen his strategy, he started befriending the English rulers by the token of ‘our enemy’s enemy is our friend’. Urdu Defence Association, Osmania University in Hyderabad, and such similar organizations sprang up in quick succession. This provoked further the cultural conflict leading to communal tensions.

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It is interesting to note how Sri Aurobindo looks at caturvarņa from the point of view of the Vaishnava experience. It is as follows: Vishnu as the Sustainer of the Creation has four forms: Mahavira, Balarama, Pradyumna, and Aniruddha. Mahavira is the Brahmin possessing Knowledge and Light and Awareness; Balarama embodies Kshatriya quality of Force and Dynamism; Pradyumna the Vaishya is one who expresses the quality of Love and Beauty; Aniruddha is Shudra with competent service, and with the quality of organisation and execution in details; it was he who had prompted Brahma to do the Sarvahuta Yajna when Brahma had remained inactive. If this is a spirituality reality and not a mythology, if such is the origin of the four qualities, then how can these be disputed anywhere or at any time? In fact, their truth is present in all the four, in varying degrees in all the individuals and in all societies or functioning groups, including the corporate organisations.

What were the gifts received as a result of doing the Sarvahuta Yajna, the Offering of the All, the Yajna of the Purusha Sukta? Out of the sacrifice emerged, among many splendid things, Indra and Vayu and Agni. But who are they, these Gods? These are the Gods connected with Mind and Life and Matter, the mental, the vital, and the physical worlds, the Divine Mind, the Lord of Life, and the Seer-Will in Matter. In The Secret of the Veda Sri Aurobindo writes: “The sons of the Infinite have a twofold birth. They are born above in the divine Truth as creators of the worlds and guardians of the divine Law; they are born also here in the world itself and in man as cosmic and human powers of the Divine.” They are here in the cosmos, and they are here amidst us, helping us on the journey towards Truth-Light and Strength and Beauty and Excellence in work, founded in the Four Powers brought down by the Yajna of the Purusha Sukta. Their birth is the necessary foundation of the greater life; but the greater birth that is yet to come, the birth of the life divine, is in Aswapati’s Yoga-Yajna invoking the descent of the divine Savitri. She has incarnated and it is she who is executing in this creation the Will of the Supreme, executing it to give birth to that new world.

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If a tyro critic were to call this composition a “fictional creation”, as the author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo wants us to accept it, that would only expose him as one who has absolutely no sensitivity for matters spiritual or for spiritual poetry. One has to have eyes to see these things, a vision, a perception, and one should inly feel and know them, and know them not by self-trapped and reason-hedged mind of a small rationalist but by the faculty of wide and grown-up self. Or else soon he might hasten to tell us that the Vedic poetry too is of the same sort, fictional. See also Poetry Time 8 August 2009.

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Here is an E-mail in circulation and, surely, it has a lesson to impart, a moral, but for the satisfied and the sedate. One has to learn how to also live in richness and plenty, in fact in the opportunities of life that come to us on its adventurous course. It is good to understand its connotations, yet there has also to be the constant urge from “good” to “great”—as Jim Collins would like to insist on us. Our “good” should not stand in the way of progress and stop growth towards “great”. Let “good” not become a block to become “great”. The spirit of adventure, our arête, should never become dull and indolent. There is always a greater mountain to climb than the mountains we have climbed and, as would Chuangtse like to tell us, you yourself become a mountain whose heights keep on constantly rising. The swift ascending slopes have never a terminal point, the flatness of the easily contended. But this urge has to spring up from not the sense of avarice and possession. It has to come from the deeper or nobler perceptions of life whose tendency is always to grow and expand, and never to stagnate. There is the fullness in that last “one” which gives us the well-deserved “hundred” and we ought to strive for it. There are always a thousand battles to be fought and these must be fought in the heroism of the Aryan fighter, as would the Gita exhort us in all our actions and in all our movements. Cease not from using the sword of conquest.

And here is the invitation which we all must accept.

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Max Theon, drawn by Mirra
Recalling her experiences with Théon, the Mother told Satprem the following: “He had assumed two names: one was an Arab name he had adopted when he took refuge in Algeria (I don’t know for what reason). After having worked with Blavatsky and having founded an occult society in Egypt, he went to Algeria, and there he first called himself ‘Aia Aziz’ (a word of Arabic origin meaning ‘the beloved’). Then, when he began setting up his Cosmic Review and his ‘cosmic group,’ he called himself Max Théon, meaning the supreme God (!), the greatest God! And no one knew him by any other name than these two—Aia Aziz or Max Théon.”

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O Lady, you’re gorgeous on a tiger skin
With the still waters in their blue to your right,
Unswayed by your moods. Yet through them I sense
Your smile, as if in it were to begin
My life sans dismaying death; what is bright
In timeless looks, O Joy, you make intense.

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The last set of Sri Aurobindo’s prose writings appeared in the Bulletin d' Education Physique (Bulletin of Physical Education) beginning with 21 February 1949. The second issue of the Bulletin dated 24 April 1949 carried the article entitled Perfection of the Body which is reproduced in the following. If perfection of culture is the true aim in life then it must also include the perfection of the body. As an instrument of manifestation of the powers of the spirit it is necessary that the body opens to its possibilities of expression and it is that which will constitute its perfection. Indeed, it ought to become a revealing vessel of spiritual beauty and bliss in all their fullness. It is for that kind of work the physical must prepare itself by doing yoga-sadhana at such a fundamental level.

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Let us look here into some of the statements the Mother made apropos of India. She has already said that she came to India to meet Sri Aurobindo and was occupied with the work he had given to her. One of these was the Independence of India, a sine qua non for the spiritual progress in the context of the future of humanity. This had to be attended to as these are interlinked. The Mother never lost sight of these issues.

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It is said that Purusha Sukta “speaks of the restoration of the divinity of creation by the supreme holocaust of the Divine. It is this sacrifice that distributes the divinity among the Gods, the Prajas, and the whole of the universe enabling them to move jointly and integrally toward Immortality.” But what seems to be presented in the Sukta is only one particular aspect of the Creation; it is an important aspect, an episode no doubt, but it is just an episode in the sequence of countless and recondite operations that go in making this great and meaningful involutionary-evolutionary Becoming. We must understand that the author of the hymn was not setting himself to write a modern thesis or treatise giving the details of the creation or its processes, an exhaustive document with its prolegomenon and epilogue; instead, what is given is the dense but luminous esoteric knowledge of the things, with one aspect in view, one particular window opened out for seeing them. It was written in a milieu in which the alert and perceptive receiver at once got in contact with the reality from which it had originated; it had taken for granted the common knowledge of the tradition and it is this knowledge which was further extended or enriched by such explorative-creative presentations. It was in fact the mode of establishing a new power of the spirit in the ready consciousness of the race. It contributed to progress in knowledge. There are a number of aspects present in the Sukta: the transcendental Absolute poised for manifestation, its necessary projection in the cosmic field, holding back its own glory and majesty, its aishwarya, its Ishwarahood in order that multiplicity might become possible, putting into operation Four Qualities, Four Powers of the divine Person in the universal play, return of the Gods to their earlier status,—these are astounding events narrated by it. And these have been established by doing Yajna, the Path of Progress charted out by the Vedic Rishis.

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Here is a quick selection of some of the poems by Sri Aurobindo written during his last ten-fifteen years, they presenting some of his spiritual experiences. These are apart from his rich and wonderful ‘autobiographical’ Savitri. It is sad that The Lives of Sri Aurobindo does not take any serious cognisance of these writings of his; instead it makes indiscreet remarks by saying that Savitri is a "fictional creation".

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This evening, instead of answering questions, I would like us to meditate on the remembrance of Sri Aurobindo, on the way to keep it alive in us and on the gratitude we owe him for all that he has done and is still doing in his ever luminous, living and active consciousness for this great realisation which he came not only to announce to the Earth but also to realise, and which he continues to realise.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of his birth, an eternal birth in the history of the universe.

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Soon Nivedita found herself devoting to the cause of the Independence of India. Again the invisible hand of benevolent destiny drew her in the company of Sri Aurobindo. The passion for the Independence Movement was so strong in her that finally she had to take the decision to severe her contacts with the Ramakrishna Mission; because of her political activities she did not want the Mission to get implicated in any way. Exactly the same thing had later happened in the case of Sri Aurobindo; he resigned from the post of the Principal of National College. They were men of principles. But as is perhaps the cruel way of destiny, not to give a long life to good souls, Nivedita passed away on 13 October 1911; she was holidaying in Darjeeling with Jagadish Bose and his family. She wanted to be cremated according to the Hindu rites.

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