All human music always has padding. They have an inspiration, and in between there's a gap, so they fill it up with their "musical knowledge." But this morning, it came straight from above and there was no padding. It was very fine.

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But in a queer swing of grandeur as Eternity turned into an alert moment
The lake of nenuphars tilted downward, jubilant, pouring a million miracles;
The Dream descending through the amber trance entered a twilight world,
A Form like the purity of a sunbright goddess of the early quickening hour;
Soon the sky returning from the All-above gathered into denser spheres,
And the growing Infinity’s rapture found abodes for the flaming Multitude;
Crashing through the lion-gate the Truth-lustrous Person roared in triumph,
And a cry bursting from the remote Transcendent’s hush tore the Negation;
But the Afflatus in a mystery of pause stayed awhile beyond invisible sight,
And hence must the other earths, and the Advent too, await the Apocalypse.

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Lo the wonder! Crystal waters pausing in the dark unprepared bed,
And infatuated with mango-blossoms, bees, the harvest deepened;
Now the seven guns of prophecy boom in the distant battlefields,
And Macbeth must murder the sleep to redden with life-like Art;
There an inarticulate gesture, and the mechanism unwound jerkily,
And under the coruscating shade trembled the eternal jeremiad;
So drinking the dry fluid of thought in hurry modern tribe arrived,
And in the foyer blazed neon-signs for game of the loaded dice;
No rules of the roulette governed the rocket, to arrest its flight,
And a strange scenery was snap-shot on grains of the bromide;
O sing the paean of death’s great victory and take antidote poison,
And put own the chips of love on the table, and pray to heaven.

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First of all, you must begin to seek Him, and then that must be the most important thing in life. The will must be constant, the aspiration constant, the preoccupation constant, and it must be the only thing you truly want. Then you will find Him.

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This Sunday 24 February 1878 at 10 a.m., birth certificate of Blanche Rachel Mirra, of female sex, surname as under, born on the 21st of this month at 10:15 a.m., ...

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The power that mediates between the call of the evolving earth-consciousness from below and the sanction of the Supreme from above is the presence and power of the Divine Mother.

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And curiously, everything comes and presents itself as images and possibilities; so I say to myself, "But if after a time all this suddenly stops functioning, what will have been the use of doing all this work?" And there is always something—something that comes from a very absolute region—which makes me feel or understand or grasp the uselessness of death.

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There is this phenomenon: as soon as the physical organism, with its crystallization and habits, is put in the presence of a new experience without being carefully forewarned ("Now be careful, this is a new experience!"), it is afraid. It's afraid, it panics, it worries. It depends on the person, but at the very least, in the most courageous, in the most trusting, it creates an uneasiness—it begins with a slight pain or a slight uneasiness. Some are afraid immediately; then it's all over: the experience stops, it has to be started all over again; others hold on and observe, wait, and then the "unpleasant" effects, one may say, slowly die down, stop and turn into something else, and the experience begins to take on its own value or colour.

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To finally know
the plum, use the whole heart too,
and your own nose
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Nirodbaran mentioned that “The cry of sense had sunk into a hush”—instead of “A cry of sense had sunk into a hush”—is too loud; I pointed out that “The cry” is too harsh, and it takes away the sweet quiet flow of the line, its charm is gone. Richard Hartz’s retort was, “ridiculous”; as usual this was endorsed by Amal Kiran. Next day morning when I was having breakfast with Nirodbaran, he said that “we have been tampering with the sense”, and also with the poetry of Savitri. Reference to the “cry” elsewhere, and saying that Sri Aurobindo remembered it is, to say the least, most amazing.

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The Punjab University archaeology department has discovered a rare Indus seal in steatite material with carved figure of Ibex with two pictographs from Wattoowala, Cholistan, during a survey of different sites near Derawar Fort along the ancient bed of River Hakra. The seal dates back to 2500-2000 BC.

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This book is a study of the origin and early history of the Muslims of Kerala from 700 AD to 1600 AD. It starts unusually with a long Introduction. It is on the whole a stinging criticism of Indian scholarship in social sciences and historical writing which is almost entirely dependent on knowledge and ideas developed by western scholars. The observations made by Edward Said, a professor of Columbia University and Bernard Cohn, a renowned American anthropologist, in this respect are quite instructive. The former had maintained that western scholars have represented and continued to represent the non-western societies in such a way as to accentuate its differences and subordination to the west. Said was convinced that the innumerable western orientalists during the colonial period were either paternalistic or candidly condescending towards the subject of their study i.e. the Orient; they also carried forward the binary typology of advanced and backward (or subject) races, cultures and societies.

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Recently, I spent time with my mother in Germany. She lives in a small town near Nuremberg with only some 6000 inhabitants. I was missing India. Reading newspapers and watching news on TV, it seemed as if there was no India. Yet, when I met people and mentioned that I live in India, all were curious, positive and keen to know more about the country. I couldn’t help telling how special India is because, as I see it, India and Indians have a lot going for them, more than any other civilisation. Parts of the Indian tradition have been hijacked by Westerners without acknowledging the source, be it yoga, transpersonal psychology or several scientific discoveries, apart from such basics as the decimal system. Yet, strangely, there is still no official attempt by India to own up and project India’s strong points abroad.

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Many hued winds began to blow in those wondrous fields across the sea,
And music in tear-fall, of blindness, gushed from a queerest shoe-horn;
Now a thousand voices wake up, like leaping tongues of an orange flame,
And egretwise the alphabets descend by a new goddess’s fingers touched;
Between the small earth and the suntrack’s blaze hangs the sharp Dagger,
And we went to a blue pond with hopes to acquire some monocular sight;
There is a silvery ripple in the vacuum of space set long ago by the quark,
And we went riding a young mare to see the spring struck by her hoofs.

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His the gallop of the eye, purple-leaping over the wild distances of sight,
His the thrust of the noon adventuring defeatlessly in the upper regions,
His the white strength let loose to capture abroad the glory of the seasons:
This quadruped races mightily bearing the mystery of the fourfold Name;
This exultant with swift dazzling hooves of diamond has come riding Time;
He has plunged into the streams of many waters even as his joys ripple forth;
He has established his flame of great bright desire in the belly of the Occult.

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I spent a long time reading the Islamic epics, Hindu epics, Chinese epics, western books. Other than Ramayana, Mahabharata, Gita and Gandhi, I read Sri Aurobindo whom I think should be popularized more. I read Shakespeare of course, the entire works four and half times, with copious notes.

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Oh, yesterday or the day before, I heard something ... I don't exactly know what it is—it isn't music, I mean it isn't the notation of some musical instrument: it's the notation of a vibration of ... I can't say, I didn't understand. But in it ... At first, you feel exactly as if you had entered a madhouse: it's completely incoherent, disjointed, and everything is unexpected because there is no logic—absolutely nothing mental. So you go from one sound to another, without any transition, and your first impression is exactly like ... it's madness. But if you listen, now and then there's a sound, which isn't the sound of a musical instrument ... absolutely wonderful!

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The body only has, as soon as it is at peace, the feeling of bathing in the Lord. That's all. But in the body (not in its attributes, I mean when neither force nor energy nor power or any of that is there), in it there is, not something powerful, but a very gentle tranquillity. But not even the feeling of a certainty, nothing. It's negative, rather: the sensation of an absence of limits, something very vast, very vast, very tranquil, very tranquil—very vast, very tranquil. A sort of—yes, like a gentle trust, but not the certainty of transformation, for instance, nothing of that kind.

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All studies or at least the greater part of studies consists in studying the past with the hope that this would make one understand better the present. But if one wants to avoid the danger that the students would get stuck to the past and refuse to see the future, one must take great care to explain to them that all that has happened in the past had the aim of preparing all that is happening now and all that is happening now is preparing the road to the future which is really the most important thing for which we have to prepare ourselves. It is by cultivating intuition that one prepares to live for the future.

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…the embattled flaming multitude
Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame,
And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name,
And with the clashing of their sword-blades make
A rapturous music, till the morning break
And the white hush end all but the loud beat
Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet.

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