The Story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp is narrated in 78 episodes in the Arabian Nights. In it the magician makes to the gullible a tempting offer of new lamps for the old. His single interest is to get back the old magic lamp from its possessor. The trick worked. Sri Aurobindo’s series of eight articles—which appeared in Indu Praksh, edited and published from Bombay by his Cambridge friend KG Deshpande, during 1993-94—borrows this title from the story but otherwise does not have any direct relevance to it. It is with this series began his writing career in a journal. Later he himself edited a number of periodicals. Sri Aurobindo’s absolutely last set of prose writings also came out in a quarterly started by the Mother in 1949. Again, there are exactly eight articles in it which were later issued in a book form under the title The Supramental Manifestation published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1952.

We have just serialized the Indu Prakash set dealing with the political and national aspects of the time. The lamps in it are the new the ideals and visions which must replace the old rusted ones carried by the non-adventurous and moderate minds. In fact his writings were so radical, so sweeping, so drastic in nature for them that he was advised to tone them down and make them acceptable by them. Sri Aurobindo refused and discontinued the series.

The last set of the 1949-50 articles reveal to us the work Sri Aurobindo was yogically occupied with. He had already established dynamically in his physical the supramental light and force and now it had to become a part of the vaster terrestrial manifestation. One of the primary conditions for that to happen was the opening of the physical’s mind to the supramental which he called as the Mind of Light. It is this Mind of Light which will become the formative power to effect the first desired change. The process and the details were detailed out in the articles. The Mother’s work of the cellular transformation began with it.

Between these two wonderful rivers of truth, one young and zealous and swift-moving and full of honey-fire, and the other deeply occult-spiritual loaded with the luminous charge of the spirit, like a burning diamond descending in our midst, they both together making the first and the last sets of distinctive articles, lies or spreads the vast ocean of his knowledge expressed in prose and poetry. We shall however restrict ourselves at present only to these sets and serialize the second in the coming weeks. The second series will be entitled as New Suns for Old.

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