The word Yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root yuj, which means ‘to unite’. Yoga system provides a methodology for expanding one’s individual consciousness to universal Consciousness. There are various schools of Yoga—example Bhakti Yoga, Jnāna Yoga, Karma Yoga, and Kundalini Yoga. But here only Pātanjala Yoga will be reviewed because it is the most comprehensive school of Yoga. Patanjali was the first sage to systematize the philosophy and practice of Yoga. His work is known as Pātanjala Yoga Sutra. There are profound commentaries on this text, Vyasa’s being the most ancient and profound. The Yoga system is highly practical, it discusses the nature of mind, its modifications, impediments to growth, afflictions and the method for attaining the highest goal of life—kaivalya (absoluteness). Since this method is described in eight steps it is also called Ashtānga Yoga, the Eightfold Path.

...   more »

---

---

Burns turned into an enemy of all enemies of freedom and humanity. Such egalitarian ideals got him into trouble: he was excited by outbreak of revolution in France, and his indiscreet support nearly lost him his job as an exciseman. Burns' songs enjoy an international popularity, but what's often admired in his poetry is his liberal sloganeering; however, the best of his poems shed a far more sophisticated light on the species. I can think of no wiser dissection of the slippery nature of human morality and temptation than Address to the Unco Guid, for example.

---

See Social Life and Glee sit down,
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmugrified, they're grown
Debauchery and Drinking:
O would they stay to calculate
Th' eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,
Damnation of expenses! ...
Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.

---

...   more »

---

---

A little-known rainforest in north-east India could be home to the world’s largest number of wildcat species, with no less than seven species photo-documented by a wildlife biologist at the end of her two-year survey.

...   more »

---

---

According to Hindu mythology, Haridwar is one of the four places where a drop of the nectar of immortality or amrit fell from the pitcher or kumbh when Garuda, the divine bird of Lord Vishnu, was spiriting it away from the demons after a pitched battle. Since then, Haridwar, along with Allahabad, Nashik and Ujjain—the other three places—have been celebrating the Kumbh Mela.

...   more »

---

---

To be at the Maha Kumbh celebrations at Haridwar is to get caught up in a swell of pure devotion, and rituals that haven't changed since time immemorial. Haridwar, considered one of the holiest cities in India, is the point at which the River Ganga leaves the mountains and enters the plains. Ash-smeared sadhus with flowing beards and knotted manes had descended from their quiet retreats in the neighbouring hills and mountains. We found ourselves adrift in a surreal world where different realities overlapped: a holy man in orange robes sat cross-legged on the opposite misty bank, deep in meditation; men stripped down to their underwear and women in dripping saris took purifying dips in the freezing jade-green waters of the Ganga; pilgrims floated offerings of flowers, burnt camphor and incense sticks; sadhus with flowing locks and hooded eyelids pulled on chillums; a young chela washed the feet of his stooped, grey-whiskered guru; others scooped up the river water in containers to take back home.

...   more »

---

---

It looked as though some fat vicious spirit
Was abroad again; in the stormy dark
False-hearted lanes quaked, and the wild goddess
Roused ghosts of the past. … A fond good
Was there to forewarn the woman. She felt
Some evil slithering towards her hut
And her Ramu crying aloud. But then
A tigress rushed into a mother’s limbs
And the Odhaņā in spate applauded
The love that crosses dangerous currents.

…   more »

To replace the mental law of intelligence by that of a spiritualised consciousness—that is what finally all amounts to. The body is now learning to see the difference between the two, the intellectual and the spiritual consciousness. It increases a hundredfold the possibilities of the body. When the body is ruled by the Spirit and the Consciousness, there appears an incomparable possibility and flexibility. It is that which will give it the capacity to prolong its life. All the laws of Nature lose their despotism. That is the discovery which is being made. It is like a progressive victory over all the imperatives. As the process becomes more and more perfect, more and more integral, total, leaving nothing behind—it is the victory over death. Not that the dissolution of cells which death represents does not exist, but it will exist only when it will be necessary: not as an absolute law, but as one of the procedures, when it is necessary. “Perhaps it is that which the ancient seers meant when they spoke of transferring the power of Nature or the power of Prakriti to Purusha, transferring it from Prakriti to Purusha. It is perhaps that which they expressed in this way.”   more »

---

---

The discovery of Chola frescoes in 1931 “extended the frontiers of the history of Indian painting,” set the scholarly world abuzz, and expedited conservation efforts at the Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur. The 1000-year-old frescoes, painted at Rajarajesvaram, or the Big Temple as it is popularly known, remained unknown and hidden for centuries. The man who brought them back to life was a 28-year-old historian, SK Govindaswami.

...   more »

---

---

...   more »

Samkhya philosophy, considered to be the most ancient of all the philosophical schools, was systematized by the great sage Kapila. All of Indian literature has been influenced by this philosophy. The first work of Samkhya, the Samskhya Sutra, is traditionally attributed to Kapila, but in its present form is not his original work. So the Samkhya-karika of Isvarakrsna is actually the earliest available Samkhya text. Among its more well-known commentaries are Gaudapada’s Bhashya, Vachaspati Misra’s Tattvakaumudi, Vijnanabhikshu’s Samskhya Pravacanbhashya and Mathara’s Matharavirtti. Topics traditionally emphasized by Kapila, Isvarakrsna and others are the theory of causation, the concept of Prakrti (the unconscious principle) and Purusha (the conscious principle), the evolution of the world, the concept of liberation and the theory of knowledge. The uniqueness of this system lies in its summing up of all the categories of reality as described in Nyaya and Vaisheshikha into two categories—Purusha and Prakriti—and thereby introducing a dualistic philosophy.

...   more »

O thou Goddess, embodied Strength, present in all beings and things,
three times my reverences to thee, my reverence.
O thou Goddess, embodied Peace, present in all beings and things,
three times my reverences to thee, my reverence.
O thou Goddess, embodied Motherhood, present in all beings and things,
three times my reverences to thee, my reverence.

...   more »

Now as an aspect of a great decisive occult-yogic move, Aswapati is stepping into the impenetrable luminous blank in which even the world’s yearning he was carrying with him vanishes. What he sees in that luminous blank, the brilliant Void, is a potent universe without galaxies, without streams, mountains, beasts or birds or men, all withheld in its utter formlessness, in that which can become manifest, epiphanic. Behind Sachchidānanda stood the quiescent, and what remained was nothing but the Nirvana of the Absolute, the austere apocalyptic alone, Nirvana beyond Nirvana of the Manifest. The cosmic and even the transcendental have disappeared from sight. Yet he must know that one power alone whose enigma gives meaning and contents to all these thousand things, manifest and unmanifest, phenomenal and eternal. In the process, everything is abolished, and there stands only the forceful positive, the fire that gives fire to these countless fires. In it his spirit’s will pursues the unknowable.

...   more »

---

---

For many years my heart wanted
something for me,
not knowing that it was itself
what it wanted:
the desire for Jamshid's cup,
wherein all existence can be seen,
except for that chalice itself, that is.

In the clear dawn, before the east was red,
Before the rose had torn her veil in two,
A nightingale through Hafiz' garden flew,
Stayed but to fill its song with tears, and fled.

...   more »

---

---

Some people say that he fell in love, left home, became a phenomenon and came back to marry the woman who had been refused to him earlier. There is no way of knowing whether the career of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai of Sindh actually paralleled the Count of Monte Cristo so closely (and we need to be careful about apocryphal stories woven around the lives of great saints), but there are other testimonials to the warmth of the heart that throbbed in him. The most astonishing is the way his work captured the spirit of a new age that was coming up not only in the Muslim world but also outside.

...   more »

---

---

The Moon Minerology Mapper on Chandrayaan-1, which famously discovered the presence of water and hydroxyl molecules on the lunar surface material last year, has now identified a new lunar rock type on the far side of the moon. It is dominated by a mineral termed as ‘magnesium spinel’ which does not easily fit with current lunar crustal evolution models.

...   more »

---

---

---

“I feel glad luminous peace,”
Replied Priyankā, “entering the rhythm
Of our flight, some fragrant worship as if
Made the wind blow through the garden of dreams
Where the flowers are sweet in earnestness
Of smile. Here is a spontaneous land
Full of warm love in which run chanting streams
In great many directions; here absorbed
In silence is heard universal speech,
Even as through the tireless pinions
Hurrying hues of prophetic gleams brighter
Than those of the earlier suns hasten
In abundant light, proclaiming new birth.”

…   more »

When the Mother looks at her own Darshan pictures, looks objectively, she gets a sort of feeling if she was a different person, sometimes an old Chinese, sometimes a transposition of Sri Aurobindo, and then sometimes a person whom she knows very well, but who is not this one. Could he not be a being that lived in a world other than the physical world of earth? It all appears strange, more and more so as the body catches the inner rhythm, moves in it. Possibly, it could be the original consciousness divided into two in a past life, manifested in two different bodies at the same time. But it may also be someone existing in a permanent way, in a permanent form somewhere with whom one is in constant contact in that world, overmental or supramental or other. The body by itself has more than a feeling, a kind of knowledge—it sees it as a fact. There are many, many beings, forces, personalities who manifest themselves through it, even sometimes several at the same time. And then it is Durga or Mahakali or often a being from very high up who manifests himself. Sometimes it is beings from a plane nearby who try to make themselves felt, who express themselves. This time, 24 November 1967, it was someone who looked from a plane of eternity, looked with a great benevolence, also with an absolute calm, almost indifference. The two are together, and this was the feeling of the body itself. The body was saying: “I must aspire, there must be an aspiration so that the Force may descend upon all these people.” All this the body feels as though something were making use of it.

...   more »

---

---

VO Chidambaram Pillai serialised Tilak's biography in the 1930s in a Colombo Tamil magazine. Here is a look at the relationship between the two men in the light of the new sources and correspondence between them. The article carries the facsimile of a letter VOC wrote to Tilak in 1914, being published for the first time. VOC's close relationship with Tilak awaits detailed documentation and an interpretative narrative.

...   more »

Vaisheshikha Sutra by Kanada is divided into ten cantos, each containing two sections. Prasastapada wrote a commentary on this Sutra introducing a special category of reality known as Uniqueness (vişeśa). Thus the system is known as Vaisheshikha. It is allied to the Nyaya system of philosophy. Both systems accept the liberation of the individual self as the end goal, both view ignorance as the root cause of all pain and misery, and both believe that liberation is attained only through right knowledge of reality. Seven categories of Reality it postulates are: substance, quality, action, generality, uniqueness, inherence and non-existence.

...   more »

---

---

---

Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.

...   more »