Mirror of Tomorrow—The Human Aspiration
The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and... his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation... is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity [with its] victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

Sri Aurobindo

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Our Vision
It will be the endeavour to seek and express all that ennobles the human spirit in its quest towards perfection, towards truth and beauty and joy and sweetness and love, towards fulfilment of the sense of immortality present in its deeper soul, its ceaseless aspiration for the higher manifestation even in the material creation. The Mirror shall reflect and reflect upon things of tomorrow, bring closer the human destinies by approaching the future as much as by beckoning the future to enter into its thousand possibilities.

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Shandilya arrived at the sunset of the four cities, of the great quarters,
And above the Lake of Mind speeding in the sunset chariot, tranquil,
Crossed the wide regions of Indra and Yama and Varuna and Soma:
With the earth-rise his paean-song soared high like a firm sunset hymn.

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Blind Homer saw flames of Troy rising from the pyre of Patroclus,
It was epochal beginning of clatter of the hooves of Eohippus.

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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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It took 30 weavers around seven months to make the sari; a group of consummate workers took nearly 4,680 hours. This will be the first silk sari that required during the weaving process the use of 7,440 jacquard hooks and 66,794 cards which are punched to create a specific design using CAD software.

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He said (it was translated into words: I heard them, in what language I don't know, but I understood very well), I heard the words and he said to me: "Through you, I am charging...." I am charging, as if he were launching into a battle against the world's Falsehood. "Through you, I am charging ...," that's perfectly clear, and it was against ... I saw little aggregates of black dots being scattered.

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Creation has been a downward evolution which has for its object to create a body fit for an upward evolution into the region of pure spirit. It is in this direction that the future of human evolution lies. When man has mastered the physical world and its forces, when the earth is his and the fullness thereof, he must turn his efforts towards mastering the world within himself. Instead of allowing the soul to use the body for its own ends, he must learn to master both soul and body and use them consciously for the purposes of the spirit, that Eternal Will and Wisdom which at present operates in secrecy, veiled with darkness within darkness and seeming even to be blind and hidden from itself. In the end he will be master of spirit, soul and body, a Jivanmukta using them at will for cosmic purposes or transcending them to feel his identity with the Self who is pure and absolute existence, consciousness and bliss.

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So speech of your processionals returns
In the casual evocations of your tread
Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

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Here is a possible scansion of the opening section of the Book of Yoga...

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India has to guard her independence
India has to defend herself
India has to reorganise herself

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The recent sighting, or re-emergence if you will, of a snow leopard in the forests of Chitral is a heartening development. It could possibly mean that the species is on a rebound and is returning to its traditional hunting grounds.

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We invoked Agni and he demanded the gifts of the high sacrifice,
Then from the ruby of the heart leaped up the splendid-will-to-be;
We invoked Vayu and he demanded the Horse of the strength of God,
Therefore it is through the nostrils of the Supreme that Life breathes;
We invoked Indra and he gave his thousand-pearled necklace to the One,
And in an outburst of Light streamed earthward the shining herd;
We invoked the original Word quivering in the luminous substance,
And his Mind of Knowledge kindled ecstasies of the unborn Day.

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The fire that jumps in mid-air from world to world is heaven’s messenger,
It is the heaving of the withheld sea for the noble fire of the vast sky,
It is the downpour of illumination’s ocean flooding the valley’s silence;
The fire that dwells above the head joins the fire underneath the feet,
It is the blazing tongues that gather speech in infinity of the Ineffable
It is the lotus-name, imperial, on wide Waters of Truth-Consciousness.

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Samadhi—Samadhi is the power by dwelling fixedly of the chaitanya on its object to extend the range of knowledge and consciousness through all the three states of waking, sleeping and dream, to the realisation of those tattwas of the Brahman, to which the ordinary waking consciousness is blind and to the experience either in reflected images or in the things themselves, of other worlds and planes of consciousness than the material earth or this waking physical consciousness.

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You want me to do all this and then you tell me. .. . I Can't Pray!

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... to what extent does the presence of a physical body, in the world as it is now, act on the Work that is being done? To what extent? ... Is it indispensable? Is it really indispensable? And if it is, what is the effect and the extent? In other words, are there things that one can do only in a physical body, or can the same things be done anyway (except we don't have the opportunity to chat about it, so! ...)?

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The quality of veerya has its hold on the first four koshas or sheaths. Man generally plays his part in the world through these four-sheath instruments. The play through the anandamaya or spiritual happens in the lives of rare persons alone. The swabhava-shakti or self-nature of Prakriti indwelling as veerya in the four-fold sheaths causes man to live and work as its play-instruments. Man has no hand in this working—he is a mere instrument. This veerya-quality inhering ever in the fourfold koshas, displays a divergence in its active manifestation in life. So, when Shakti presses upon a particular sheath of a living man with a special stress, special chara¬cteristics and activities, peculiar to that sheath find expression in that man's life and character.

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Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion

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The point is, we are writing with a pointless pencil. Instead of engaging ourselves in futile and frustrating debates, we must develop capacities to raise right questions. We must know, for instance, what is it which constitutes the materiality of matter, we must know why at all life should be accompanied by death. Whether we get answers to these questions or not, it is another matter; we will have the satisfaction of having tried. That is reward by itself. You dance though you can’t hear the music—and that is Hope. That is the Reward. We will be else wasting our time in puerile dialogues, keeping ourselves busy with non-essentials, with inconsequential subsidiary issues.

During the World War Two Winston Churchill was asked: “What is your aim in the War?” He simply replied: “Victory.” In that one word is the quintessence of time that shaped history. Some other power had entered into operation and it seized the ready instrument. It is some noble force of that kind which must enter into our reckoning.

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The basis of internal peace is samata, the capacity of receiving with a calm and equal mind all the attacks and I appearances of outward things, whether pleasant or unpleasant, ill-fortune and good-fortune, pleasure and pain, honour and ill-repute, praise and blame, friendship and enmity, sinner and saint, or, physically, heat and cold etc. There are two forms of samata, passive and active, samata in reception of the things of the outward world and samata in reaction to them.

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