We surrender to Thee this evening all that is artificial and false, all that pretends and imitates. Let it disappear with the year that is at an end. May only what is perfectly true, sincere, straight and pure subsist in the year that is beginning.

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We marvel at the dazzling clarity of the light on the waters, the pervading sense of spirit—and then sit down to take it all in, while we get chatting with an American archaeologist who fills us in on many fascinating tales about Athena, daughter of the gods who drank hemlock with Socrates and Sigmund Freud who gained an unexpected insight into the relationship with his father when he climbed the Acropolis and then onto Maria Callas, the opera singer and her relationship with the Greek tycoon, Aristotle Onassis.

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The strangest thing about massless particles is that for them there is no such thing as time. There is no past or present, only "now", and it stretches for all eternity—but since there is no tick of the clock, what eternity? With some mind-numbing maths, Penrose argues that as time ends in the era of massless particles, the fate of our universe can actually be reinterpreted as the big bang of a new one: "Our universe is what I call an aeon in an endless sequence of aeons."

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A Woman sat under the tall mango tree,
And the green-and-gold of her joy filled the air,
And a bright summer-sky arched over the world;
Her beauty came from the deeps of love,
Her heart plunged moon after moon in the night.

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Things have taken an extreme form. So there is an uplift of the atmosphere towards a splendour and at the same time the feeling that at any moment one may die. But the body has one prayer—to know, to serve to be worthy of the Divine. All that veils and deforms and prevents the manifestation of the Divine in us: it is that, the falsehood. But the only thing is to let the New Consciousness fill us.

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A thousand years ago, the pope studied the stars and found God in numbers. Mathematics ranked among the highest forms of worship, for God had created the world, as the Book of Wisdom said, according to number, measure, and weight. Our modern tension between faith and science did not exist. Pope Sylvester II (999-1003) was known as "the Scientist Pope."

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Three years after launching a widely copied bike rental scheme, Paris is stepping up efforts to turn itself into a bicycle-friendly capital on a par with cycling havens like Amsterdam and Berlin. Hundreds of kilometres of new bike lanes are being rolled out on the streets of the City of Lights, cyclists are winning new road rights and the public bicycle service launched by Socialist Mayor Betrand Delanoe in 2007 is expanding to encourage more Parisians to ditch their cars and peddle.

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Thomas McEvilley has done a systematic study of the correspondence between ancient Greek and Indian philosophy in his 2001 book The Shape of Ancient Thought. This post summarizes his discovery of the Kundalini concept in Greek and other ancient non-Indian cultures.

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As the dim twilight shrouds
The mountain's purple crest,
And Summer's white and folded clouds
Are glowing in the west,
Loud shouts come up the rocky dell,
And voices hail the evening-bell.

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How should you pronounce the word mayor? Should its pronunciation be different from that of mare? When my daughter put those questions to me, my reply was that the pronunciation of the two words was the same. I discovered that in that I took the same view as my son-in-law. It was not, however, the view that my daughter took, and she produced a dictionary to support her opinion that the civic dignitary was “may or”, whereas the female horse was “mair”. I confess that I remain unconvinced, but the discussion provided an interesting insight into the peculiarities of the pronunciation rules of the English language.

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A mystery animal with a long snout has been spotted in Africa, which scientists say could be a completely new species of giant elephant shrew.

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The Falcon of Fire entered the bridal night,
A thunder of wings mastering her helpless ‘No’.
Her breast quivered with a call of lover-flames
And the sobs became the sun-beads of her necklace
And honey-joy flowed from the moon-jars of her heart.

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After a wait of 372 years, sky gazers are in for a special celestial treat as winter solstice coincides with total lunar eclipse on Tuesday. The last time the two astronomical events coincided was on December 21, 1638. The eclipse cannot be seen in India as it will occur during day time but astro-lovers can see the full moon turning into a delightful shade of coppery-red from Europe, west Africa, the Americas, the Pacific Ocean, eastern Australia, the Philippines and eastern and northern Asia.

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In the subconscient all the contradictions are accumulated. But the consciousness is there, peaceful, extraordinarily peaceful... “May Thy Will be done, O Lord.” And then that puts a pressure upon what is coming from below. It is as though the battle of the world was being fought within my consciousness. It has come to such a point that to forget, to forget the Divine even for a minute spells a catastrophe. Yes, one feels that this time something decisive is bound to come. The body does all it can in order not to be an obstruction to the Divine Force.

The whole subconscient is a battlefield, but in a perfect calm. The unease is so great that you feel you cannot live one minute or a few minutes in that way. And you feel you nestle within the Divine. Then it is all right.

I have had for a moment the supramental consciousness. It was so wonderful! And the process of the change, it is a very interesting thing, an utmost activity in a complete peace. It is extraordinary. It is like the harmonisation of contraries. The action is a material action. The whole consciousness, including that of the body, is always an offering, turned constantly towards the Divine. And that without “trying”.

At what point had Sri Aurobindo arrived when he passed away—at what point of transformation? He had gathered in his body a great amount of supramental force and as soon as he left all this supramental force which was in him passed from his body into mine. And I felt the friction of the passage. It was extraordinary. There is now a difference in the power for action. He himself possesses more action, more power for action, now than when in his body. Besides, it is for that that he left, because it was necessary to act in that way.

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No studies have determined whether Mars has ever supported life, but this finding adds to accumulating evidence that at some times and in some places, Mars hosted favourable climate for microbial life. Hydrated silica identified by the spectrometer in uphill locations indicates that hot springs or fumaroles fed by underground heating created these deposits. The habitable zone would have been within and alongside the conduits carrying the heated water.

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The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value. The vitality of an ancient doctrine consists in the extent to which it naturally lends itself to such a treatment; for that means that whatever may have been the limitations or the obsolescences of the form of its thought, the truth of substance, the truth of living vision and experience on which its system was built is still sound and retains a permanent validity and significance. The Gita is a book that has worn extraordinarily well and it is almost as fresh and still in its real substance quite as new, because always renewable in experience, as when it first appeared in or was written into the frame of the Mahabharata.

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The apostle Paul was troubled by the clash between body and spirit, and wrote: "For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body…" Most of the 20 million American yoga practitioners encounter these issues and find them troubling. Some have responded by distorting yogic principles in order to domesticate it into a Christian framework, i.e. the oxymoron, 'Christian Yoga.' Others simply avoid the issues or deny the differences. Likewise, many Hindu gurus obscure differences, characterizing Jesus as a great yogi and/or as one of several incarnations of God.

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No animal will more repay
A treatment kind and fair;
At least so lonely people say
Who keep a frog (and, by the way,
They are extremely rare).

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Here was a country, which was considered the brightest jewel in the British crown and they want to know what’d happened to that bright jewel. And nobody gave them any answer. They are no longer fooled with the glib answer that we were under British rule for 200 years and that’s why we are in this state. They turn around and say that the British left us four decades ago, what have you done, except making excuses. They say, look at Singapore, look at Malaysia, which too were ruled by the British and look at the progress they have made. They turn around and say look at Japan and look at Germany. They fought a war for four years. Their youth was decimated, they lost, their countries were occupied, their industry was destroyed, portions of the country were taken away, and look what they have achieved. So please stop making excuses and give us an answer. Why? Ladies and gentlemen, I have decided to open my big mouth and say that the answer and the real problem for all our difficulties, all our shortages, etc is lack of leadership.

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