Ned Thanks for your perceptive response. All I can do at the moment is to put here a few thoughts rather in a hurry. Even before the Karmayogin-article, Sri Aurobindo had written the following in Bande Mataram: “When Mahomedanism appeared, Christianity vanished out of Asia, because it had lost its meaning. Mahomed tried to re-establish the Asiatic gospel of human equality in the spirit. All men are equal in Islam—whatever their social position or political power—nor is any man debarred from the full development of his manhood by his birth or low original station in life. All men are brothers in Islam and the bond of religious unity overrides all other divisions and differences. But Islam also was limited and imperfect, because it confined the ideal of brotherhood and equality to the limits of a single creed, and was further deflected from its true path by the rude and undeveloped races which it drew into its embrace. Another revelation of the old truth is needed.” I’ve quoted this in Perfumes of Arabia. Placing Mahomed and Islam in a new light was on the agenda; but Sri Aurobindo could not unfold it to us—as within months he had to take the divine refuge in Pondicherry. But if we have to practise what I may call “Applied Sri Aurobindo” in the Aurobindonian spirit, if we have assimilated his principles well enough, then certain lines of approach could be pretty clearly visualized. Let us talk of the early days of the authentic Independence Movement. Those were the days of great leaders who shaped the destiny, those who really were extraordinary visionaries, the exceptional beings. The history that got written later was by the lesser souls, much lesser than we imagine them to be. Independence from the colonial rule was never envisaged in those days along the lines of division. Sri Aurobindo had categorically rejected the 1916 Lucknow Pact. Much later, after the fissured Independence, Sri Aurobindo told KM Munshi—he was his student in Baroda—that the Partition was because of the blatant play of falsehood, fraud and force, these entering into picture both in the political and occult sense. If they have the occult origin then no political approach is going to solve the problem. Towards that occult we can, however, prepare ourselves in various ways. That’s a long way, but perhaps that’s the only way. We can get hints about it from the writings of Sri Aurobindo. That is what I mean by “Applied Sri Aurobindo”. ~ RYD