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Here therefore exists the origin of error, falsehood, wrong and evil in the consciousness and will of the individual; a limited consciousness growing out of nescience is the source of error, a personal attachment to the limitation and the error born of it the source of falsity, a wrong consciousness governed by the life-ego the source of evil. But it is evident that their relative existence is only a phenomenon thrown up by the cosmic Force in its drive towards evolutionary self-expression, and it is there that we have to look for the significance of the phenomenon. Emergence of the life-ego is a machinery of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience; the principle of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence. But because it does these things as a separate ego for its separate advantage life-discord, conflict, disharmony arise, and it is the products of this life-discord and disharmony that we call wrong and evil. Nature accepts them because they are necessary circumstances of the evolution, necessary for the growth of the divided being; they are products of ignorance, supported by an ignorant consciousness that founds itself on division, by an ignorant will that works through division, by an ignorant delight of existence that takes the joy of division.   more »

"O my Lord, my sweet Master, for the accomplishment of Thy work I have sunk down into the unfathomable depths of matter, I have touched with my finger the horror of the falsehood and the inconscience, I have reached the seat of oblivion and supreme obscurity! But in my heart was the Remembrance, from my heart there leaped the call which could arrive at Thee: 'Lord, Lord, everywhere Thy enemies are triumphant; falsehood is the monarch of the world; life without Thee is death, a perpetual hell; doubt has usurped the place of Hope and revolt has pushed out submission, Faith is spent, Gratitude is not born; blind passions and murderous instincts and a guilty weakness have covered and stifled Thy sweet law of love. Lord, wilt Thou permit Thy enemies, falsehood and ugliness and suffering to triumph? Lord, give me command to conquer and victory will be there. I know we are unworthy, I know the world is not yet ready. But I cry to Thee with an absolute faith in Thy Grace and I know that Thy Grace will save us'. Thus my prayer rushed towards Thee; and from the depth of the abyss, I beheld Thee in Thy radiant Splendour; Thou didst appear and Thou didst to me: 'Lose not courage, be firm, be confident, I COME' ".   more »

Prabuddha Bharata of August 2005 carries an article by Dr Anil Baran Ray presenting Bankim Chandra Chattopadyaya’s ideas about Indian nationalism and emergence of the Indian identity. He introduces the author as follows: “Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya (1838¬-94), the master litterateur of Bengal, called the ‘emperor of literature’ mainly for his novels, was an essayist par excellence as well. Among the numerous essays and satires that he produced, quite a few focused on political themes and issues. Bankim Chandra’s political ideas can be gleaned from those essays and satires as also from his novels such as the Ananda Math. Drawing upon such sources, the present article proposes to reflect on Bankim Chandra’s concept of nationalism in terms of its sources and nature as also its characteristic contribution towards the development of the Indian identity.”

The present excerpt deals with one particular theme, Nationalism seen in the image of the Mother Goddess, culminating in his composition of Bande Matarm, the song that became the battle-cry of the awakened youth of the country, a song that inspired Sri Aurobindo to bestow Rishi-hood to its author. The present article could be read along with the two posted here recently: India’s Independence and the Spiritual Destiny by RY Deshpande and The Spirit of the Nation by Makarand Paranjape...   more »

What from a spiritual point of view might be the truth behind the recent history of India, particularly its independence? To answer this question, we will have to peep behind the veil of politics, economics, and culture. These are only the exoteric coverings of world events, the esoteric kernel of whose inner significance is usually hidden from most people.

Writing more than 100 years ago, Swami Vivekananda explained what this hidden truth about India was: "Here in this blessed land, the foundation, the backbone, the life-center is religion and religion alone. In India religious life forms the center, the keynote of the whole music of nation."

In other words, in India, religion forms the base, politics and economics, the superstructure. To change the latter, you have to act on the former. This is what revolutionaries in India have recognized down the ages. The greatest impact could be made by those who altered the religious and spiritual organization of society. Any number of examples can be cited: the Buddha, Shankaracharya, Basava, Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya, and in more recent times, Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and even Ambedkar.

The importance of dharma in Indian life has been summed up well by Sri Aurobindo in his famous Uttarpara speech in 1909: "When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatan Dharma (Hinduism) that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists. To magnify the religion means to magnify the country." When Aurobindo was in jail, the Divine actually spoke to him, giving him the following message:

Since long ago I have been preparing this uprising and now the time has come and it is I who will lead it to its fulfillment." At the end of this historic speech, Aurobindo repeated his main contention: "I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it, it moves and with it, it grows. When Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines.

Of course, it needs to be stressed that by Sanatan Dharma, Aurobindo meant the eternal, universal religion, not any particular sect or creed: "If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose."   more »

At the midnight hour of 14 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the solemn promise of India awaking to life and freedom. At that moment of history he was claiming Independence from the British. “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge...At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” Sixty years have passed today and it is time for assessment and introspection, as to what extent the soul of India has been able to find its authentic and fulfilling utterance, to what extent the pledges made have been implemented. Has India awakened to the greatness of her soul? Indeed, what is it that constitutes the greatness of a nation’s soul? If truth-values found the greatness of a nation’s or an individual’s soul, the question is: Are we living in them?

The real problem of the society, as in the case of the individual, is for it to find its soul, the true collective soul… There has to be a conviction that, culmination of the social development into the Age of the ageless Spirit is the secret urge and motivating force behind the evolutionary Nature’s long painstaking and patient working. Humanity’s conscious participation in it will assuredly hasten this triumph and this glory. The soul of India has the intuition of perceiving these possibilities and India’s freedom is meant for its growth in the progression of the manifesting spirit. If this can be kept as the focus, the celebration of India’s sixty years of independence will then be truly significant.   more »

In March 1967 Huta began the work of expressing some of Sri Aurobindo’s poems through paintings. Under the Mother’s inspiration and guidance she selected certain passages from the poems and completed fifty-four paintings, which were all shown to the Mother in September of that year. This new book presents these paintings along with the lines which inspired them from some of Sri Aurobindo’s most well-known poems, such as Invitation, Who, Thought the Paraclete, and A God’s Labour. Appropriate quotations from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, some comments on the paintings by the Mother, and background information and photographs accompany the plates. The entire book is printed on art paper.   more »

Thanks to Ashok Hindocha for sending me the following details of a historically significant function that was held on 12 December 2007, at 49 St Stephen’s Avenue London W12. During the function English Heritage Blue Plaque for Sri Aurobindo was unveiled by Monnou Bhandari. ...   more »

[Further to Paul Davies’s article Taking Science on Faith in the New York Times, published
on 24 November 2007, and posted by Ronjon at the sciy, 3 December 2007, at:

http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2007/12/3/3389652.html/

here in the sequel is Laws of Nature, Source Unknown, by Dennis Overbye appearing on 18 December 2007, at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html/

If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, says the author, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.

On the other hand, many thinkers—all the way back to Augustine—suspect that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came into being along with the universe—in the Big Bang, in modern vernacular. So why not the laws themselves?

But the question that has to be asked is: What is it exactly that we mean by the expression laws of the physical world, by the mysterious word ‘law’? Possibly, we represent by it just our way of understanding the physical world, the comprehensibility of the incomprehensible, comprehending things in our own way, in our own terms, and never making an attempt to apprehend them. But the physical world itself might be thinking about itself in its own way and not necessarily in the way we look at it. The dichotomy between the ‘laws’ and the ‘universe’ exists in our mind and not in the mind of the physical world. The “chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws, which ‘came’ first—the laws or the universe?” exists in our mind and not in the physical world’s mind. If this is so, then we may have re-examine the following:

Maybe both alternatives—Plato’s eternal stone tablet and Dr. Wheeler’s higgledy-piggledy process—will somehow turn out to be true. The dichotomy between forever and emergent might turn out to be as false eventually as the dichotomy between waves and particles as a description of light. Who knows?

RYD]

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Within a few days after my arrival as an aspirant to the Ashram, permission was granted to me to meet the Mother once a week. She even came to my room once in a while and sanctified it by her presence. It was on these occasions that I have been able to fill the pages of my "Book of Life" with her priceless instructions. It seemed as if she taught me to walk step by step, to see true by granting the inner vision, gave me the strength to know myself by sifting the rubbish heap of falsehoods to get at things that were true. She was moulding our entire life for a God-oriented existence, a birth into a new consciousness, an inner life. Before my coming here, Nolini once wrote to me: "Very few things of the ordinary life would be of use here". Gradually this remark of his was becoming clear while living here. …   more »

The late Prof Mangesh V Nadkarni gave a talk at Savitri Bhavan on 5 March 2007, his last talk, and covered Canto 2 and Canto 3 of the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Book Two of Savitri. The talk is entitled The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, The Glory and the Fall of Life and has now been transcribed as an article that appears in Savitri Bhavan’s Invocation, Study Notes # 27 which has just been published. I am reproducing here the last paragraph of the article which can cause us some concern about the nature of Savitri as has been given to us, an epic embodying the transformative power which the Yogi-Poet has put in it, Savitri the Radiant Daughter, kanyā téjasvinī, of Sri Aurobindo. It is unfortunate that it has come out posthumously, otherwise I would have personally expressed my reservation to the eminent Savitri-expounder, about his statement that “Savitri is only an outer body, this form of Savitri is only an outer shell,” a statement which can rob it of its full and dynamic Mantric force working in the aspiring soul of man. Without a fuller elaboration of what is exactly implied by it, this can cause considerable uneasiness to us.   more »

I've taken the liberty of transcribing the following passages from the remarkable book Jesus and the Lost Goddess, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. I highly recommend purchasing and studying this book. Reading it is like a moist vivifying breeze in the scorched lifeless desert of deadly strife between cults of religious fanatics who each believe they alone worship the true God. It documents the horrifying behavior of the misogynous and patriarchal Roman Church and the self-serving lies and propaganda its repressed male leaders have been spreading for two thousand years in their attempt to exterminate Sophia, the divine Goddess of Wisdom and Gnosis. I've felt for years that the RC Church was more Roman than Christian, this book substantiates that intuition with an illuminating compendium of well-referenced scholarship. ~ ronjon

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...For the original Christians, the Jesus story was a myth used to introduce beginners to the spiritual path. For those wishing to go deeper than the 'Outer Mysteries', which were only 'for the masses', there were secret teachings or 'Inner Mysteries'. These were 'the secret teaching of true Gnosis' which, according to the 'Church Father' Clement of Alexandria, were transmitted 'to a small number by a succession of masters'. Those initiated into these Inner Mysteries discovered that Christianity was not just about the dying and resurrecting Son of God. They were told another myth that few Christians today have even heard of – the story of Jesus' lover, the lost and redeemed Daughter of the Goddess.

Amongst the original Christians the divine was seen as having both a masculine and feminine face. The related to the Divine Feminine as Sophia, the wise Goddess. Paul tells us, 'Among the initiates we speak of Sophia', for it is 'the secret of Sophia' that is 'taught in our Mysteries'. When initiates of the Inner Mysteries of Christianity partook of Holy Communion, it was Sophia's passion and suffering they remembered. Amongst the original Christians, priests and priestesses would offer initiates wine as a symbol of 'her blood'. The prayer would be offered: 'May Sophia fill your inner being and increase in you her Gnosis.' ...   more »

The daily march of our life every morning began after bowing down to our Mother and with her blessings. She used to come downstairs at about 6.30 in the morning in one of the rooms on the eastern row of the courtyard. It is here that Bula, the sadhak in charge of the Electric Department is lodged now. A raised seat with velvet covering was placed for her. Just beside her in a tray were heaped flowers of various kind. One by one as we approached to bow to her, she gave each one of us a flower after placing her hand on our heads. It was through these flowers that she gave her directions. We too took the flowers with an ardent effort to divine what she meant. With the flower in hand we used to come out of the room, except a few who sat in meditation there. Every living moment in those days was eked out in an attitude of becoming aware of the reason why life here was bound to something other, never to be forgotten, and why one was here. That which we felt seemed to open out a new line giving a fresh turn to everything a change of one's point of view, as if we were learning things anew in a new light. Life was stirring to a new dream. Something within seemed to become alive rendering intensely concrete our asking and receiving.   more »

In all her acts a strange divinity shone…
But when her grief to the surface pressed too close,
These things, once gracious adjuncts of her joy,
Seemed meaningless to her, a gleaming shell,
Or were a round mechanical and void,
Her body’s actions shared not by her will.
Always behind this strange divided life
Her spirit like a sea of living fire
Possessed her lover and to his body clung,
One locked embrace to guard its threatened mate.
All night she woke through the slow silent hours
Brooding on the treasure of his bosom and face,
Hung o'er the sleep-bound beauty of his brow
Or laid her burning cheek upon his feet.
Waking at morn her lips endlessly clung to his,
Unwilling ever to separate again
Or lose that honeyed drain of lingering joy,
Unwilling to loose his body from her breast,
The warm inadequate signs that love must use.
Intolerant of the poverty of Time
Her passion catching at the fugitive hours
Willed the expense of centuries in one day
Of prodigal love and the surf of ecstasy;
Or else she strove even in mortal time
To build a little room for timelessness
By the deep union of two human lives,
Her soul secluded shut into his soul.   more »

I'm introducing here SCIY Editor Ulrich J. Mohroff's superb new journal: Anti-Matters, which I highly recommend reading. I'm taking the liberty of reproducing below the Table of Contents of Vol 1, No 2 (2007). ~ ronjon

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The following is from Ulrich J. Mohrhoff's "Preface to the Second Issue":

The release date of the last yearly issue of AntiMatters — the second issue in the case of this first volume — is November 24th. On this day in 1926, Sri Aurobindo arrived at a turning point in his yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, there is a highest mental plane, to which he gave the name “overmind.” The Isha Upanishad refers to it as a “brilliant golden lid” obstructing the passage from mind to supermind. For years Sri Aurobindo had striven to negotiate this passage. Success came on that day in 1926, when the light and power of the overmind descended into his physical being. Subsequently Sri Aurobindo withdrew from outer contacts to concentrate on the more difficult task of enabling the supermind to descend, take possession of his body, and for the first time act on matter directly, rather than through mental intermediaries. Here is part of a conversation of the Mother with Satprem (Mother’s Agenda, August 2, 1961): ...   more »

The following article is from Vol 1, No 2 (2007) of SCIY Editor Ulrich J. Mohroff's superb new journal: Anti-Matters, which I'll introduce in the next SCIY article. ~ ronjon

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The question we have to consider in this essay is whether Jesus, regarded as the founder of the Christian religion, actually believed in the God of the Jews or in any God in Heaven and thus divided reality into two worlds. The writers of the four gospels seem to think he did, and the churches both Catholic and Protestant, deriving their doctrines largely from these gospels, follow this view. The gospel writers were naturally influenced by the popular Jewish religious sentiment of the time as well as by prevalent pagan Greek and Egyptian eschatological beliefs. Their writings reflect the feelings and mirror the beliefs of the ordinary man the soldier, merchant, artisan, slave living in a world of differentiation, division, hostility and discord. To the simple man whose mental capacities denied him a wider, more penetrating vision, this division was the reality, the truth. Did Jesus also subscribe to this idea of the world, or is there proof to the contrary? Was he a dualist, a believer in two realities and two worlds: this one here, and another above or was he a monist, a man to whom reality was one unitary, organic whole?

...Most Christians are acquainted with those sayings in John's gospel which explain reality from a monistic point of view, such as the famous John 17:22: "And the glory (of oneness) which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, as we are one." But in addition to these famous words there is a whole collection of monistic sayings of Jesus which the church literally dropped under the table. What kind of work is this Gospel according to Thomas, which is officially regarded as "apocryphal," unauthentic, not admitted to the New Testament canon? ...   more »

The part flowers have played in the Ashram has been quite unique, perhaps astonishing to an observer from outside. Flowers have always had a deep rapport with life lived here. Each flower was recognised by its inner vibration by the Mother and named by her according to its significance, and it so happened that we were prone to forget the usual names of most flowers. For example, the Tulsi plant meant 'devotion'. We have become used to calling this plant 'devotion', receive it from the Mother as such and offering it to her in the same spirit. Similarly the flower 'shefali' is called 'aspiration'. In this way flowers are not looked upon as just flowers but seen from a different point of view. Flowers everywhere are associated with offerings as well as for decorating the house of God. Here it is something more a silent language in our inner dealings with the Mother. Nearly always we express to the Mother through flowers our inner needs and aspirations, our obeisance surging from our heart and she, too, gives us her blessings and directives through flowers.   more »

The shadow of her lover’s doom arose
And fear laid hands upon her mortal heart.
The moments swift and ruthless raced; alarmed
A trembling moved accountant of her riches,
She reckoned the insufficient days between:
A dire expectancy knocked at her breast;
Dreadful to her were the footsteps of the hours:
Grief came, a passionate stranger to her gate:
Banished when in his arms, out of her sleep
It rose at morn to look into her face.
Vainly she fled into abysms of bliss
From her pursuing foresight of the end.
The more she plunged into love that anguish grew;
Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.
She in her dreadful knowledge was alone…   more »