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Is it that I just plunged into a sea
Of vast peace, like the joy that sinks deeper
And deeper to find its sorrowless source,
To fathom new mystery underneath,
In the creation’s silent will? drunk
The wild honey-flame to taste the sharpness
Of some odd tormenting delight? But isn’t
The wide presence of Vishnu there all where?

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There is a consciousness of the physical mind, the cellular mind, which is constantly conscious of the divine Presence and is keen on accepting nothing but That. So the whole work is to shift the origin from the unconscious to this conscious physical mind. It, and not the habitual mind, that should cause the movement. It means fighting against age-old habit. But the secret is to know how to get things done, done by the Power behind or above instead of doing all by the mind’s effort. Possibly it is not this body which will change; it might be a new being. But where from will this new being come? It could be in the same way as man has come out of the animal. But the stages between the animal and man are missing. It would be after two or three—or four or ten or twenty—intermediary beings that the new manner, the supramental manner of creating, will come. There is “something” that is doing and it is witnessing at the same time, and at the same time it is the action that does it: the three. The great thing is, it is that “Something” who is doing it, everything, everything in the conscious physical. There is the problem of material contagion, it affecting the conscious physical mind. In material consciousness there is the material mind that has marvellously responded, but it has not yet the power to assert itself, assert against what comes from outside, this perpetual contagion from contact with others. However, when all of a sudden the Contact becomes conscious and the sense of Identity comes, it is like a hosanna of all the cells which say: “Oh! Yes, yes, it is true! So it is true...” This comes perhaps a hundred times a day, but it does not stay.

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For years, astronomers have been puzzled by the fact that our solar system is crossing a cloud of interstellar hell. One that shouldn't be there at all. Intergalactic plot to keep us isolated or cosmic event? Voyager got the answer. Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system. This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all.

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Sri Aurobindo’s rendering of eleven Vedic hymns dealing with Varuna and Mitra reveals their greatness, of the mighty and lordly powers. They are the two who along with Aryaman and Bhaga carry sacrificial action and bring to human soul excellent felicity. These are the Four who did rigorous creative tapas, such deep self-concentration that they lost contact with the Origin itself. As a result of this deep extreme self-concentration they became their own opposites. Seeing the horror of this separation, the Supreme himself took a plunge into the state in which they had fallen. That marked the beginning of the evolutionary creation in which there is endless progress, first progress in Ignorance to be followed by progress in Knowledge when the divine potentialities shall manifest in manifold ways, the great Infinity expressing itself infinitely. It might sound all a story, but what a way of making a new beginning! What sacrifices of the kingly Four! And what Sacrifice of the Fourfold Supreme himself! The hymns of the Atris belonging to the fifth Section of the Rig Veda speak of the glories of Varuna and Mitra in various respects, glories in their transcendental action in relation to man and the vast creation; in it they, covered by the Truth, stand ever in the Truth. Summary of the eleven hymns to Varuna and Mitra by the Atris presented here is based on Sri Aurobindo’s translation of the original text as we have in The Secret of the Veda. It must of course be understood that the language of the mystic composers of the Veda is a symbolic language, the symbols often deriving their connotations from the roots of the original Sanskrit words, a language which had a living contact with the spirit of the things which cannot be rendered into any other expression, a revelatory language which discloses itself when one is in contact with that spirit of the things. It is necessary to enter into it if one is to benefit from the Vedic hymns. It is this language which narrates the Story of Creation to give us the process of the progressive manifestation of the Divine in this material world.

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The kirk was deck'd at morningtide
The tapers glimmer'd fair
The priest and bridegroom wait the bride
And dame and knight were there
They sought her baith by bower and ha'
The lady was na' seen
She's o'er the border and awa'
Wi' Jock o' Hazeldean.

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Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya (Dada) passed away in the afternoon today, 8 January 2010, at 2.40.

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The old idea was based on the assumption that the Truth, the Supramental, can't be organised here in this world. Because all that is here is imperfect, false, is not the Truth; and the mind tried to organise the Truth here and failed, so they thought that "going into the Truth" meant leaving the mind and life etc. And by an exaggeration of the same idea the world appeared not merely imperfect but an illusion. Coming back to life to them meant coming back to the falsehood. The start from another assumption—"that life is false and imperfect but we can manifest Truth and perfection here"—is possible. The Truth cannot be manifested in life here with present formulation and organisation of the human consciousness.

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I have come to the conclusion, nonetheless, that The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is too often reductive and far from adequate for two main reasons, notably Heehs’s presumptuous critical judgements on both Sri Aurobindo’s life and works and, secondly, he essentially ignores Sri Aurobindo’s life as an inner myth. I have the feeling that not only did the author capitulate to American academia, but that he personally writes without conviction. The answer to the challenge of Peter Heehs’s biography of Sri Aurobindo is not polemical debate, however, but a more valid biography,—one, written by a true child of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, which portrays Sri Aurobindo’s (and the Mother’s) life as an inner myth, while not going beyond mediation and explication of his powerful and integral teachings.

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A cold alley in central London is a far cry from a palace—but it was the spot Prince William chose to sleep to highlight the plight of homeless British teenagers. He spent a chilly night near Blackfriars Bridge.

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To the chagrin of everybody, everything went hay way. Nothing seemed to be working. Instead, some strange signals started coming on the monitor. The Mother was of course smiling, as usual. Then she said: “This is not your fault. I just experimented to see whether this machine was capable of receiving and retransmitting the signals that I was sending from my side. I see that it is responding.”

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I’d known fate as my friend when destiny
By chance introduced me to living trust.
She was wearing an augural necklace
Of corals brought from seas of zimmergleams
And, from the surprise of birds, I discerned
That time has come the new race to begin…
Then, in speed and briskness of a winging
Height’s eagle swooped down the azure’s rapture
To win zimmersoul with the beauty’s joy.

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“What is the Divine?” But there could be a hundred good answers to this question. Also, to say that the Divine is simply unthinkable does not take one anywhere. What can help is to think that the Divine is all that we want to become in our highest, most luminous aspiration, all that we want to become. And it is much more than a mere thought; it is the contact of something identical in the being that matters. “As soon as this contact—this fusion—is obtained, even if only for a second, there is no longer any need to explain.” Each one has his own way of establishing that contact, the best that is in him helping him, that which is open in him. But the moment it is regarded that that is the only way of approaching the Divine, then we have religions, philosophies, dogmas, credos—battle. Indeed, the question “what is the Divine?” should not even arise—because there is spontaneously an answer. On the other hand, the question that could be asked is: Why does one want to know what the Divine is? What does it matter to one? One has only to become it. It is a “vastness, smiling and luminous.” Naturally men create difficulties for everything. And the body itself lives in the midst of difficulties; it also seems to like them! but “all of a sudden the cells sing out their OM ... spontaneously. There is the great Vibration, peaceful, all powerful.”

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The submarine volcano is spewing boninite lavas

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Amazing video has been obtained in the Pacific Ocean of the deepest undersea eruption ever recorded. The pictures show lavas bursting into the water at the West Mata submarine volcano, which is sited about 200 km south-west of the Samoas. The US Jason robotic submersible had to descend over 1,100 m to acquire the high-definition video. The vehicle found microbes and a specialized volcano-dwelling shrimp thriving in hot, acidic waters.

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In Mandala Five of the Rig-veda we have eleven hymns addressed by the Atris to Mitra and Varuna, the mighty Lords of Light. Sri Aurobindo in The Secret of the Veda has rendered these into English, bringing out their esoteric contents expressed in a luminous and pregnant symbolic language. While unravelling the mystic’s spiritually charged idiom he has also thrown light on several side issues; but our immediate concern here is regarding the Four Powers of the manifesting Truth that have separated themselves from their divine Origin. In these hymns we get the clue about the nature of the two mighty Lords who stand out prominently in terms of their vastness and shining harmonies, Varuna and Mitra. Sri Aurobindo’s rendering begins with prefatory notes which we have compiled in order to get an idea at a glance about these two mighty godheads who create in man the force of divine knowledge and wide being.

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On the 150th anniversary of the publication of Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a look at how the classic was rescued from obscurity by the appreciation of one keen reader... The Madras reprint is much more than a reprint: it is a whole compendium of Omarian studies.

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Rumi

At last you have departed and gone to the Unseen.
What marvellous route did you take from this world?
Beating your wings and feathers,
you broke free from this cage.
Rising up to the sky
you attained the world of the soul.
You were a prized falcon trapped by an Old Woman.
Then you heard the drummer's call
and flew beyond space and time.
As a lovesick nightingale, you flew among the owls.
Then came the scent of the rose garden
and you flew off to meet the Rose.

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When and how did I become conscious of a mission which I was to fulfill on earth? And when and how I met Sri Aurobindo? These two questions you have asked me and I promised a short reply. For the knowledge of the mission, it is difficult to say when it came to me. It is as though I were born with it, and following the growth of the mind and brain, the precision and completeness of this consciousness grew also... Later on ... in the year 1910 my husband came alone to Pondicherry where, under very interesting and peculiar circumstances, he made the acquaintance of Sri Aurobindo. Since then we both strongly wished to return to India—the country which I had always cherished as my true mother-country. And in 1914 this joy was granted to us. As soon as I saw Sri Aurobindo I recognised in him the well-known being whom I used to call Krishna.... And this is enough to explain why I am fully convinced that my place and my work are near him, in India.

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I see that you have persisted in giving a biography—is it really necessary or useful? The attempt is bound to be a failure, because neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for men to see.

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Here is an Abode for the God of Love to live as in his natural home. He finds in it a vastness or the high warm subtle ether that is like his own. In this Shrine of Perfection he meets his own eternity.

 

[Savitri, pp. 14-16]

 

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