Footprints of God

The Mystery of Divine Birth

God's Labour

He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.

Coercing my godhead I have come down

Here on the sordid earth,

Ignorant, labouring, human grown

Twixt the gates of death and birth.

I have been digging deep and long

Mid a horror of filth and mire

A bed for the golden river's song,

A home for the deathless fire... .

The Avatar: A dual phenomenon

The Avatar is always a dual phenomenon of divinity and humanity; the Divine takes upon himself the human nature with all its outward limitations and makes them the circumstances, means, instruments of the divine consciousness and the divine power, a vessel of the divine birth and the divine works. But so surely it must be, since otherwise the object of the Avatar's descent is not fulfilled; for that object is precisely to show that the human birth with all its limitations can be made such a means and instrument of the divine birth and divine works...

*

It is, we might say, to exemplify the possibility of the Divine manifest in the human being, so that man may see what that is and take courage to grow into it. It is also to leave the influence of that manifestation vibrating in the earth-nature and the soul of that manifestation presiding over its upward endeavour. It is to give a spiritual mould of divine manhood into which the seeking soul of the human being can cast itself.

*

If we had lived physically in the Supermind from the beginning nobody could have been able to approach us nor could any Sadhana have been done. There could have been no hope of contact between ourselves and the earth and men.

Sri Aurobindo

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Birth of the Eternal upon earth

4.Spiritually, the birth of the Eternal upon earth.

The Mother

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Light was Born

A strong son of lightning

A strong son of lightning came down to the earth with fire-feet of swiftness splendid;

Light was born in a womb and thunder's force filled ahuman frame.

The calm speed of heaven, the sweet greatness, pure passion, winged power had descended;

All the gods in a mortal body dwelt, bore a single name.

*

Light

(written at the age of 11, in 1883)

From the quickened womb of the primal gloom,

The sun rolled, black and bare,

Till I wove him a vest for his Ethiop breast,

Of the threads of my golden hair....

When I flashed on their sight, the heralds bright,

Of Heaven's redeeming plan,

As they chanted the morn, the Saviour born —

Joy, joy, to the outcast man!

Equal favour I show to the lofty and low,

On the just and the unjust I descend:

E'en the blind, whose vain spheres, roll in darkness and tears,

Feel my smile — the blest smile of a friend....

O, if such the glad worth of my presence on earth,

Though fitful and fleeting the while,

What glories must rest on the home of the blessed,

Ever bright with the Deity's smile....

*

1. Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872. In 1879, at the age of seven, he was sent with his two elder brothers to England by his father for education and lived there for fourteen years. In the later part of 1892 the Gaekwar of Baroda was in London. Sri Aurobindo saw him, obtained an appointment in the Baroda service and returned to India on 6 February 1893 at the age of twenty one.

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At the age of eleven Aurobindo had already received strongly the impression that a period of general upheaval and great revolutionary changes was coming in the world and he himself was destined to play a part in it. His attention was now drawn to India and this feeling was soon canalised into the idea of the liberation of his own country. But the "firm decision" took full shape only towards the end of another four years. It had already been made when he went to Cambridge and as a member and for some time secretary of the Indian Majlis at Cambridge he delivered many revolutionary speeches which, as he afterwards learnt, had their part in determining the authorities to exclude him from the Indian Civil Service; the failure in the riding test was only the occasion, for in some other cases an opportunity was given for remedying this defect in India itself.

Sri Aurobindo

Me from her lotus heaven Saraswati

Has called to regions of eternal snow

And Ganges pacing to the southern sea,

Ganges upon whose shores the flowers of Eden blow.

Sri Aurobindo

(written on the eve of returning to India)

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Joyous Sacrifice

A heart of compassion and ideal love: The path of Dharma

(Extracts from a letter of Sri Aurobindo to his wife, Mrinalini Devi, dated 30 Aug 1905; original in Bengali)

I was sorry to learn that your parents have once again the same kind of bereavement, but you have not mentioned which of their sons died. However, how does sorrow help? Seeking happiness in the world inevitably leads one to find suffering in the midst of that happiness, for suffering is always intertwined with happiness. This law holds good not only in regard to the desire for children, but it embraces all sorts of worldly desires. ...

Now, let me tell you ... You have, perhaps, by now discovered that the one with whose destiny is linked yours is a very strange kind of person. Mine is wide apart from what the people in this country have at present as their mental outlook, their aim of life and their field of work. It is quite different in all respects; it is uncommon. Perhaps you know how the ordinary people view extraordinary ideas, uncommon efforts, extraordinary high aspirations. They label all these as madness.... It is very unfortunate for a woman to be married to a mad man; for all the hopes of women are limited to the joys and the agonies in the family. A mad man would not bring happiness to his wife — he would only inflict suffering. ...

... it is my firm faith that all the virtue, talent, the higher education and knowledge and the wealth God has given me, belong to Him. I have the right to spend only so much as is necessary for the maintenance of the family and on what is absolutely needed. Whatever remains should be returned to the Divine. If I spend all on myself, for personal comfort, for luxury, then I am a thief....

Giving the money to the Divine means using it for works of dharma. I have no regrets for the money that I gave to Sarojini or to Usha, because helping others is dharma, to protect those who depend on you is a great dharma, but the account is not settled if one gives only to one's brothers and sisters. In these hard days, the whole country is seeking refuge at my door, I have thirty crores of brothers and sisters in this country — many of them die of starvation, most of them weakened by suffering and troubles are somehow dragging on. They must be helped.

What do you say? Will you be, in regard to this, the copartner of my dharma ? We will eat and dress like simple people and buy what is really essential, and give the rest to the Divine. That is what I would like to do. If you agree to it, and can make the sacrifice, then my urge can be fulfilled. You were complaining, "I could not make any progress." Here is a path to progress that I point to you. Would you proceed in that path ?...

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... whereas others regard the country as an inert piece of matter and know it as the plains, the fields, the forests, the mountains and the rivers, I know my country as the Mother, I worship her and adore her accordingly. What would a son do when a demon, sitting on his mother's breast, prepares to drink her blood? Would he sit down content to take his meals or go on enjoying himself in the company of his wife and children, or would he rather run to the rescue of his mother? I know I have the strength to uplift this fallen race; not a physical strength, I am not going to fight with a sword or a gun, but with the power of knowledge. The force of the kṣatriya is not the only force, there is also the force of the Brahmin which is founded on knowledge. This is not a new feeling in me, not of recent origin, I was born with it, it is in my very marrow. God sent me to the earth to accomplish this great mission. At the age of fourteen the seed of it had begun to sprout and at eighteen it had been firmly rooted and become unshakable....

Now I ask you: What do you want to do in this matter?...

You might reply: "What could a simple woman like me do in all these great works? I have neither will power, nor intelligence, I am afraid even to think of these things." There is a simple solution for it — take refuge in the Divine, step on to the path of God-realisation. He will soon cure all your deficiencies; fear gradually leaves the person who takes refuge in the Divine.¹ And if you have faith in me, and listen to what I say instead of listening to others, I can give you my force which would not be reduced (by giving) but would, on the contrary, increase. We say that the wife is the śakti of the husband, that means that the husband sees his own reflection in the wife, finds the echo of his own noble aspiration in her and thereby redoubles his force.

Sri Aurobindo

A Professor's Advice: Work that the nation may prosper²

The only piece of advice that I can give you now is — carry out the work, the mission, for which this college was created. I have no doubt that all of you have realised by this time what this mission means. When we established this college, and left other occupations, other chances of life, to devote our lives to this institution, we did so because we hoped to see in it the foundation, the nucleus, of a nation, of the new India which is to begin its career after this night of sorrow and trouble, on that day of glory and greatness when India will work for the world. What we want here is not merely to give you a little information, not merely to

1. Emphasis is added by the editor by using bold type-face at several places in this compilation.
TItles and sub-titles are also added by the editor.

2. Speech at Bengal National College in Calcutta on 23 Aug. 1907, at the time when he was leaving the college post.

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open to you careers for earning a livelihood, but to build up sons for the motherland to work and to suffer for her. That is why we started this college and that is the work to which I want you to devote yourselves in future. What has been insufficiently and imperfectly begun by us, it is for you to complete and lead to perfection. When I come back I wish to see some of you becoming rich, rich not for yourselves but that you may enrich the Mother with your riches. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for your own sakes, not that you may satisfy your own vanity, but great for her, to make India great, to enable her to stand up with head erect among the nations of the earth, as she did in days of yore when the world looked up to her for light. Even those who will remain poor and obscure, I want to see their very poverty and obscurity devoted to the motherland. There are times in a nation's history when Providence places before it one work, one aim, to which everything else, however high and noble in itself, has to be sacrificed. Such a time has now arrived for our motherland when nothing is dearer than her service, when everything else is to be directed to that end. If you will study, study for her sake; train yourselves body and mind and soul for her service. You will earn your living that you may live for her sake. You will go abroad to foreign lands that you may bring back knowledge with which you may do service to her. Work that she may prosper. Suffer that she may rejoice.

Sri Aurobindo

Reminiscences of Dinendra Kumar Roy *

Aurobindo never cared for money. When I was at Baroda, he was getting a pretty fat salary. He was alone, he knew no luxury, nor the least extravagance. But at the end of every month he had not a shot in the locker....

While talking, Aurobindo used to laugh heartily.... He was not in the habit of prinking himself up. I never saw him change his ordinary clothes even while going to the king's court. Expensive shoes, shirts, ties, collars, flannel, linen, different types of coats, hats and caps — he had none of these. I never saw him use a hat. ...

Like his dress, his bed was also very ordinary and simple. The iron bedstead he used was such that even a petty clerk would have disdained to sleep on it. He was not used to thick and soft bedding. Baroda being near a desert, both summer and winter are severe there; but even in the cold of January, I never saw him use a quilt — a cheap, ordinary rug did duty for it. As long as I lived with him, he appeared to me as nothing but a self-denying sannyasi (recluse), austere in self-discipline and acutely sensitive to the suffering of others. Acquisition of knowledge seemed to

' D.K. Roy was Sri Aurobindo's teacher for Bengali at Baroda, and lived with him for over two years.

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be the sole mission of his life. And for the fulfilment of that mission, he practised rigorous self-culture even in the midst of the din and bustle of an active worldly life....

Aurobindo read the newspapers during his lunch. Marathi food did not agree with my taste, but Aurobindo was accustomed to it. Sometimes the cooking was so bad that I could hardly take a bite, but he ate quite naturally. I never saw him express any displeasure to his cook. He had a particular liking for Bengali food.... The quantity of food he took was very small; and it was because of his abstemious and temperate habits that he kept perfectly fit in spite of heavy mental labour. He took good care of his health.... Forone hour every evening, he would pace up and down the verandah of his house with brisk steps. ...He was fond of music, but did not know how to sing or play on any musical instrument. ...

As he had little worldly knowledge, he was often cheated; but one who has no attachment to money has no regrets, either, for being cheated. At Baroda he was known to all ranks of people, and they had a great respect for him.... The educated community of Baroda held him in high esteem for his uncommon gifts. By the students of Baroda he was revered and adored as a god. They honoured and trusted this Bengali professor much more than the British Principal of their college. They were charmed by his manner of teaching. ...

Aurobindo was always indifferent to pleasure and pain, prosperity and adversity, praise and blame. ...He bore all hardships with an unruffled mind, always remembering the great gospel: 'As Thou, O Lord, seated in my heart, appointest me, so do I act', and absorbed in the contemplation of his adored Deity. The fire that would have consumed any other man to ashes has served only to burn out his l-ness and render him brighter than ever.

Aurobindo would sit at his table and read in the light of an oil lamp till one in the morning, unmindful of the intolerable bite of mosquitoes. I saw him seated there in the same posture for hours on end, his eyes fixed on the book he read, like a Yogi plunged in divine contemplation and lost to all sense of what was going on outside. Even if the house had caught fire, it could not have broken his concentration. Daily he would thus burn the midnight oil, poring over books in different languages of Europe — books of poetry, fiction, history, philosophy, etc., whose number one could hardly tell. In his study, there were heaps of books on various subjects in different languages — French, German, Russian, English, Greek, Latin etc., about which I knew nothing....

Whoever has once lived even for ten days with Aurobindo will never be able to forget him. It was my great good fortune that I had the opportunity of living with him for over two years. ...

*

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The Bridge Between Heaven And Earth

Integral truth about the world and the Divine

My own life and my Yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly withTout any exclusiveness on either side. All human interests are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered into my mental field and some, like politics, into my life, but at the same time, since I set foot on the Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and infinite bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them. For me all is Brahman and I find the Divine everywhere.... In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds in my purview — the spiritual and the material — and to try to establish the Divine Consciousness and the Divine Power in men's hearts and earthly life, not for a personal salvation only but for a life divine here. This seems to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish its spirituality or alter its Indian character. This at least has always been my view and experience of the reality and nature of the world and things and the Divine: it seemed to me as

nearly as possible the integral truth about them...

*

Sunrise splendours: Some early experiences

Sri Aurobindo had some spiritual experiences, but that was before he knew anything about Yoga or even what Yoga was, — e.g., a vast calm which descended upon him at the moment when he stepped first on Indian soil after his long absence, in fact with his first step on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay: (this calm surrounded him and remained for long months afterwards); the realisation of the vacant Infinite while walking on the ridge of the Takhti-Suleman in Kashmir; the living presence of Kali in a shrine on the banks of the Narmada; the vision of the Godhead surging up from within when in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay, etc. But these were inner experiences coming of themselves and with a sudden unexpectedness, not part of a Sadhana.

*

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Vision of the Godhead surging from within

Above my head a mighty head was seen,

A face with the calm of immortality

And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene

In the vast circle of its sovereignty.

His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;

The world was in His heart and He was I:

I housed in me the Everlasting's peace,

The strength of One whose substance cannot die...

Vision of the World-Mother

Or you stand before a temple of Kali beside a sacred river and see what? — a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother.

*

In a town of gods, housed in a little shrine,

From sculptured limbs the Godhead looked at me,—

A living Presence deathless and divine,

A Form that harboured all infinity.

The great World-Mother and her mighty will

Inhabited the earth's abysmal sleep,

Voiceless, omnipotent, inscrutable,

Mute in the desert and the sky and deep...

*

After unnumbered steps of a hill-stair

I saw upon earth's head brilliant with sun

The immobile Goddess in her house of stone

In a loneliness of meditating air.

Wise were the human hands that set her there

Above the world and Time's dominion;

The Soul of all that lives, calm, pure, alone,

Revealed its boundless self mystic and bare... .

Sri Aurobindo

1. Sri Aurobindo's experienceat the carriage accidentin Baroda, noted in his poem The Godhead.

2. Sri Aurobindo's exeperience at Karnali (Gujarat) noted in his poem The Stone Goddess.

3. Sri Aurobindo's experience at Pune on Parvati Hills noted in his poem The Hill-Top Temple.

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Practice of Pranayama

A Baroda engineer who was a disciple of Brahmananda showed me how to do it, and I started on my own. Some remarkable results came with it. First, I felt a sort of electricity all around me. Secondly, there were some visions of a minor kind. Thirdly, I began to have a very rapid flow of poetry.... Fourthly, it was at the time of the Pranayama-practice that I began to put on flesh. Earlier I was very thin.... 1 took more and more to Pranayama, but there were no further results. It was at this time that I adopted a vegetarian diet. That gave lightness and some purification.

What I did was four or five hours a day prāṇāyāma. ... The flow of poetry came down while I was doing prāṇāyāma, not some years afterwards. If it is the flow of experiences, that did come after some years, but after I had stopped the prāṇāyāma for a long time and was doing nothing and did not know what to do or where to turn once all my efforts had failed. And it came not as a result of years of prāṇāyāma or concentration, but in a ridiculously easy way, by the grace either of a temporary Guru (but it was not that, for he was himself bewildered by it) or by the grace of the eternal Brahman and afterwards by the grace of Mahakali and Krishna.

Q: But didn't you begin Yoga later on in Gujarat ?

A: Yes. But this began in London, sprouted the moment I set foot on Apollo Bunder, touching Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage.

Sri Aurobindo

Nirvana And Beyond Nirvana

Ascent: The Silence

Into the Silence, into the Silence,

Arise, O Spirit immortal,

Away from the turning Wheel, breaking the magical Circle.

Ascend, single and deathless:

Care no more for the whispers and the shoutings in the darkness,

Pass from the sphere of the grey and the little,

Leaving the cry and the struggle, Into the Silence for ever....

"Sit down," I was told, "look and you will see that your thoughts come into you from outside. Before they enter, fling them back." I sat down and looked and saw to my astonishment that it was so; I saw and felt concretely the thought approaching as if to enter through or above the head and was able to push it back concretely before it came inside. In three days — really in one — my mind became full of an eternal silence — it is still there.*

*

A free intelligence: A universal mind

From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire.

*

Static and dynamic Brahman

At the same time an experience intervened: something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative. What this was remained unknown until Sri Aurobindo came to realise the dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara and felt himself moved by that in all his Sadhana and action. These realisations and others which followed upon them, such as that of the Self in all and all in the Self and all as the Self, the Divine in all and all in the Divine, are the heights to which Sri Aurobindo refers and to which he says we can always rise...

*

* Sri Aurobindo refers to his realisation of Nirvana in January 1908 at Baroda, that he had under the guidance of the Maharastrian Yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele.

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A first step: Not a culminating finale

Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world — only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real.... I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience, a constant memory of it and its power to return remained until in the end it began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness from above. But meanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion* is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine. ...

Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible...

Beyond the Silence

Vast, God-possessing, embraced by the Wonderful,

Lifted by the All-Beautiful into his infinite beauty,

Love shall envelop thee endless and fathomless,

Joy unimaginable, ecstasy illimitable,

Knowledge omnipotent, Might omniscient,

Light without darkness, Truth that is dateless.

One with the Transcendent, calm, universal,

Single and free, yet innumerably living,

All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,

Act in the world with thy being beyond it....

Sri Aurobindo

* In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence. (Sri Aurobindo)

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Turning a prison into God's trysting ground*

I... knew something about sculpture, but blind to painting. Suddenly one day in the Alipore jail while meditating I saw some pictures on the walls of the cell and lo and behold! the artistic eye in me opened and I knew all about painting except of course the more material side of the technique.

.... I was then having a very intense Sadhana on the vital plane and I was concentrated. And I had a questioning mind: 'Are such siddhis as utthapana [levitation] possible?' I then suddenly found myself raised up in such a way that I could not have done it myself with muscular exertion. Only one part of the body was slightly in contact with the ground and the rest was raised up against the wall. I could not have held my body like that normally even if I had wanted to and I found that the body remained suspended like that without any exertion on my part.

*

It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence... The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience

and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject.

*

The foundations of Yoga: Equanimity, love, faith, surrender, grace

(From Tales of Prison Life, original in Bengali) ...

It is true that the causes of hardship, which I have pointed out, were there, but thanks to the kindly grace of the Divine, it was not for long that I suffered from them.... For, after a short while, I got beyond the sense of hardship and discomfort and became immune to suffering. That is why when the memory of my jail-life recurs to my mind, it occasions a smile rather than anger or grief....

I learnt the remarkable lesson of love in my solitary imprisonment at Alipore. Before I had gone there, my personal love even for men was confined within a very narrow circle, and the dammed up tide of my love for birds and beasts had hardly ever had a chance to flow out freely.

At Alipore I realised what a deep love for all creatures might dwell in a human heart and how, at the sight of cows, birds, and even ants, it might thrill with a sudden burst of keen delight!...

I realised, too, how, in this very condition one finds a rare opportunity for experiencing

*Sri Aurobindo was taken to Alipore jail in 1908 on charges of the conspiracy where he stayed for one year as an under-trial. It is here, in the ja il that he had his second major realisation, the realisation of the cosmic consciousness and the vision of the Divine as all beings and as all that is.

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God's infinite grace and attaining union with Him. ... God, who is All-Good, turns even evil into supreme good. The third purpose (for which he took me to Alipore jail) was to teach me that my personal efforts would avail nothing in my Yoga, that faith and total self-surrender alone were the means of attaining spiritual perfection, and that the only object of my aspiration for union (Yoga) was to use for His work whatever power, perfection or divine bliss (Ananda) He would vouchsafe to me in His grace. From that day onward the thick darkness of ignorance began to thin, and from that day on I have been realising the infinite goodness of the All-Good God in all my observation of the happenings of the world. Nothing happens — whether it is something momentous or the most insignificant— but contributes to some good. Often He serves several purposes through a single act. Many a time we see the play of a blind force in the world and, denying God's omniscience, find fault with His divine Intelligence on the assumption that waste is the rule of Nature. But that is a groundless complaint. The Divine Force never works blindly, and there cannot be one jot or title of waste in Her dispensation; rather, it passes human understanding with what supreme control and little expenditure She produces plentiful results. ...

Sri Aurobindo

Vasudevam Sarvam Iti

All He loves, all He moves, all are His, all are He

What Srikrishna demands

He placed the Gita in my hands [at the Alipore jail]. His strength entered into me and I was able to do the sadhana of the Gita. I was not only to understand intellectually but to realise what Srikrishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion and desire, to do work for Him without the demand for fruit, to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure, yet not to do His work negligently....

Srikrishna around me

I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Srikrishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me His shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and

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again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Srikrishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover. This was the first use of the deeper vision He gave me. I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies. Amongst these thieves and dacoits there were many who put me to shame by their sympathy, their kindness, the humanity triumphant over such adverse circumstances. ...Once more He spoke to me and said, "Behold the people among whom I have sent you to do a little of my work. This is the nature of the nation I am raising up and the reason why I raise them.". ..

Srikrishna showed me his wonders:

He showed me His wonders and made me realise the utter truth of the Hindu religion. I had had many doubts before. I was brought up in England amongst foreign ideas and an atmosphere entirely foreign. About many things in Hinduism I had once been inclined to believe that it was all imagination; that there was much of dream in it, much that was delusion and maya. But now day after day I realised in the mind, I realised in the heart, I realised in the body the truths of the Hindu religion. They became living experiences to me, and things were opened to me which no material science could explain.

Sri Aurobindo

The Revolutionary Yogi

Awakening the Soul of a Nation

There were three sides to Sri Aurobindo's political ideas and activities. First, there was the action with which he started, a secret revolutionary propaganda and organisation of which the central object was the preparation of an armed insurrection. Secondly, there was a public propaganda intended to convert the whole nation to the ideal of independence which was regarded, when he entered into politics, by the vast majority of Indians as unpractical and impossible, an almost insane chimera. It was thought that the British Empire was too powerful and India too weak, effectively disarmed and impotent even to dream of the success of such an endeavour. Thirdly, there was the organisation of the people to carry on a public and united opposition and undermining of the foreign rule through an increasing non-cooperation and passive resistance.

Sri Aurobindo

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Out on tour, Sri Aurobindo used to address meetings, meet people when he was free and give them instructions and advice. Most of those who came to his meetings did not understand English, they were common village folk. But they came in crowds all the same, men, women and children, just to hear him speak and have his darshan. When he stood up to address a gathering, pin-drop silence prevailed. His audience must surely have felt a vibration of something behind the spoken word. It is not that he confined himself to political matters alone. There were many who knew that he was a Yogi and spiritual guide and they sought his help in these matters too. I have myself seen as I spent whole nights with him in the same room, at Jalsuko, how he would sit up practically the whole night and go to bed only for a short while in the early hours of the morning....

Nolini Kanta Gupta

Smritir Pata (in Bengali)

(After his acquittal, Sri Aurobindo edited two journals, Dharma (in Bengali) and Karmayogin (in English). The Bande Mataram for which he wrote and also edited was wound up in 1908 when he was in prison. Not only did Sri Aurobindo awaken the entire nation to the idea of complete freedom but also to its innate genius, its swadharma and its own soul. Reproduced below is just a small sample of His writings during this period which runs into about 1500 pages for the two English journals alone. He also travelled to many places awakening the people through His speeches, with the power of the word.)

From Dharma (Nov. 1909) : The highest and best religion

Many think that although works form part of dharma, not so all types of work; only those that are governed by sattwa and conducive to nivrtti, abstention or withdrawal deserve this title. This too is a fallacious notion. Just as the sattwic actions are dharma, so are the rajasic ones. Just as showing compassion to creatures is dharma, so is destroying the enemy of the land in the field of a righteous battle. To sacrifice one's own happiness and wealth or even life, for the good of others, is dharma, even so is it dharma to maintain in a fit condition the body that is the instrument of dharma. Politics too is dharma, to write poetry, to paint pictures — that too is dharma, to gladden the hearts of others through sweet songs is also dharma. Dharma is whatever is not tainted by self-interest, be that work great or small. It is we who reckon a thing great or small, there is nothing great or small before the Divine; He looks only at the attitude in which a person does the works befitting his nature or brought by unforeseen circumstances. The highest and greatest dharma is this: whatever work we do, to consecrate that to the feet of the Divine, to perform it as yajna or holy sacrifice and to accept it with an equal heart as something done by His own Nature...

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From Bande Mataram (18 Feb. 1908): Vast and entire freedom

Swaraj is the direct revelation of God to this people, — not mere political freedom but a freedom vast and entire, freedom of the individual, freedom of the community, freedom of the nation; spiritual freedom, social freedom, political freedom. ... We do not believe that the path of salvation lies in selfishness. If the mass of men around us is miserable, fallen, degraded, how can the seeker after God be indifferent to the condition of his brothers? Compassion to all creatures is the condition of sainthood, and the perfect Yogin is he who is sarvabhutahite ratah, whose mind is full of the will to do good to all creatures. When a man shuts his heart to the cries of sufferings around him, when he is content that his fellow-men should be sorrowful, oppressed, sacrificed to the greed of others, he is making his own way to salvation full of difficulties and stumbling-blocks. He is forgetting that God is not only in himself but in all these millions.... God has set apart India as the eternal fountain-head of holy spirituality, and He will never suffer that fountain to run dry. Therefore Swaraj has been revealed to us. By our political freedom we shall once more recover our spiritual freedom. Once more in the land of the saints and sages will burn up the fire of the ancient Yoga and the hearts of her people will be lifted up into the neighbourhood of the Eternal.

From Karmayogin (25 Sept. 1909) : Recovering the ancient spirit in new moulds

...We have to recover the Aryan spirit and ideal and keep it intact but enshrined in new forms and more expansive institutions. We have to treasure jealously everything in our social structure, manners, institutions, which is of permanent value, essential to our spirit or helpful to the future; but we must not cabin the expanding and aggressive spirit of India in temporary forms which are the creation of the last few hundred years. That would be a vain and disastrous endeavour. The mould is broken; we must remould in larger outlines and with a richer content....

Sri Aurobindo

Journey: Towards The New And The Unknown

Beyond the boundaries

I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self

And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are. . . .

All Nature is the nursling of my care,

I am the struggle and the eternal rest;

The world's joy thrilling runs through me, I bear

The sorrow of millions in my lonely breast. . . .

I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,

Yet still am one with born and unborn things.

Sri Aurobindo

A moment of transition: Impressions of Motilal Roy*

Sri Aurobindo's sadhana at Chandernagore went on with intensity. He saw many visions on the subtle planes. He used to see figures of three Goddesses at the time of meditation. They were seen going away at the end. It was later when he went to Pondicherry that he knew them to have been Ila, Mahi (Bharati) and Saraswati, the Vedic goddesses.

*

My first contact with Vedic thought came indirectly while pursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of Indian Yoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously converging towards the ancient and now unfrequented paths followed by our forefathers. At this time there began to arise in my mind an arrangement of symbolic names attached to certain psychological experiences which had begun to regularise themselves; and among them there came the figures of three female energies, Ila, Saraswati, Sarama, representing severally three out of the four faculties of the intuitive reason, — revelation, inspiration and intuition. Two of these names were not well known to me as names of Vedic goddesses, but were connected rather with the current Hindu religion or with old Puranic legend, Saraswati, goddess of learning and Ila, mother of the Lunar dynasty. But Sarama was familiar enough.

*

Reason for leaving politics

I did not leave politics because I felt I could do nothing more there; such an idea

• Sri Aurobindo stayed briefly with Motilal Roy at Chandernagore on his way to Pondicherry .

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was very far from me. I came away because I did not want anything to interfere with my Yoga and because i got a very distinct adeua in the matter. I have cut connection entirely with politics, but before I did so I knew from within that the work I had begun there was destined to be carried forward, on lines I had foreseen, by others, and that the ultimate triumph of the movement I had initiated was sure without my personal action or presence. There was not the least motive of despair or sense of futility behind my withdrawal. For the rest, I have never known any will of mine for any major event in the conduct of the world-affairs to fail in the end, although it may take a long time for the world-forces to fulfil it.

*

I entered into political action and continued it from 1903 to 1910 with one aim and one alone, to get into the mind of the people a settled will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it in place of the futile ambling Congress methods till then in vogue.

The facts of the departure: A command from Above

I suddenly received a command from above, in a Voice well known to me, in three words: "Go to Chandernagore." In ten minutes or so I was in the boat for Chandernagore [Feb. 1910] ... I remained in secret entirely engaged in Sadhana and my active connection with the two newspapers ceased from that time. Afterwards, under the same "sailing orders" I left Chandernagore and reached Pondicherry on April 4, 1910.

Sri Aurobindo

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Cave of Tapasya

Bringing down the spiritual into the material

A Will, a hope immense now seized his heart,

And to discern the superhuman's form

He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights,

Aspiring to bring down a greater world.. . .

His soul retired from all that he had done.

Hushed was the futile din of human toil. . . .

The Silence was his sole companion left. . . .

A universal light was in his eyes,

A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;

A Force came down into his mortal limbs,

A current from eternal seas of Bliss. . . .

A living centre of the Illimitable

Widened to equate with the world's circumference,

He turned to his immense spiritual fate.

Sri Aurobindo

Pondicherry is my place of retreat, my cave of tapasya, — not of the ascetic kind, but of a brand of my own invention.

*

Preparing the ground for the new path: 12 July 1911

I need some place of refuge in which I can complete my Yoga unassailed and build up other souls around me. It seems to me that Pondicherry is the place appointed by those who are Beyond, but you know how much effort is needed to establish the thing that is purposed upon the material plane. ...

I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane, and I am now able to put myself into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind. ...

What I perceive most clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness, of error in order that the Truth I shall eventually show to men may be perfect, and of ineffec tiveness in order that the work of changing the world, so far as I have to assist it, may be entirely victorious and irresistible....

1. Pondicherry became the seat of Sri Aurobindo's sadhana for developing an entirely new line of Yoga, and for his spiritual action.

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Opening large tracts and new paths: 18 Nov 1922

I have been till now and shall be for some time longer withdrawn in the practice of Yoga destined to be a basis not withdrawal from life, but for the transformation of human life. It is a Yoga in which large tracts of inner experience and new paths of Sadhana had to be opened up and which therefore needed retirement and long time for its completion. But the time is approaching though it has not yet come, when I shall have to take up a large external work proceeding from the spiritual basis of this Yoga. . ..

Of past dawns and future noons: The old Yoga and the new goal: Apr 1920

What I started with, what Lele gave me, what I did in jail — all that was a searching for the path, a circling around looking here and there, touching, taking up, handling, testing this and that of all the old partial yogas, getting a more or less complete experience of one and then going off in pursuit of another. Afterwards, when I came to Pondicherry, this unsteady condition ceased. The indwelling Guru of the world indicated my path to me completely, its full theory...

The defect of the old yoga was that, knowing the mind and reason and knowing the Spirit, it remained satisfied with spiritual experience in the mind. But the mind can grasp only the fragmentary; it cannot completely seize the infinite, the undivided. The mind's way to seize it is through the trance of samadhi, the liberation of moksha, the extinction of nirvana, and so forth. It has no other way. Someone here or there may indeed obtain this featureless liberation, but what is the gain? The Spirit, the Self, the Divine is always there. What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity — to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not synthesise or unify the Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as an illusion or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of the power of life and the decline of India. ...What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few ascetics, renunciates, holy-men and realised beings attain liberation, if a few devotees dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and bliss, and an entire race, devoid of life and intelligence, sinks to the depths of darkness and inertia? First one must have all sorts of partial experience on the mental level, flooding the mind with spiritual delight and illuminating it with spiritual light; afterwards one climbs upwards. Unless one makes this upward climb, this climb to the supramental level, it is not possible to know the ultimate secret of world-existence; the riddle of the world is not solved. There, the cosmic Ignorance which consists of the duality of Self and world, Spirit and life, is abolished. Then one need no longer look on the world as an illusion: the world is an eternal play of God, the perpetual manifestation of the Self....

Sri Aurobindo

(from letters to Barin, original in Bengali)

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A New spiritual adventure, not a re-treading of the old paths

The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past, but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future. (14.1.1932)

All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object. The Supramental is simply the Truth-Consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter.... The utmost Ananda the body and life are now capable of is a brief excitement of the vital mind or the nerves or the cells which is limited, imperfect and soon passes: with the supramental change all the cells, nerves, vital forces, embodied mental forces can become filled with a thousandfold Ananda, capable of an intensity of bliss which passes description and which need not fade away.... The supramental love means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire flooding of the body consciousness with the physical experience of oneness, the presence of the Beloved in every part, in every cell of the body. (14.1.1932)

Sri Aurobindo

Parabrahman: *

He is not bound by waking or by sleep;

He is not bound by anything at all.

Laws are that He may conquer them.

To creep Or soar is at His will, to rise or fall....

He is not anything, yet all is He;

He is not all but far exceeds that scope.

Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea:

Time is a wave and Space a wandering drop.

*

Why shouldst thou hunger after departure from manifestation as if the world were an evil? Has not That manifested itself in thee & in the world and art thou wiser & purer & better than the Absolute, O mind-deceived soul in the mortal? When That withdraws thee, then thy going hence is inevitable; until Its force is laid on thee, thy going is impossible, cry thy mind never so fiercely & wailingly for departure.

* By 1912, Sri Aurobindo attained the third major realisation when he experienced an "abiding realisation and dwelling in Parabrahman" - the supreme Reality.

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Therefore neither desire nor shun the world, but seek the bliss & purity & freedom & greatness of God in whatsoever state or experience or environment.

So long as thou hast any desire, be it the desire of non-birth or the desire of liberation, thou canst not attain to Parabrahman. For That has no desires, neither of birth nor of non-birth, nor of world, nor of departure from world. The Absolute is unlimited by thy desire as It is inaccessible to thy knowledge.

Sri Aurobindo

A supramental gnostic person: Reminiscences of A. B. Purani*

The second time I met Sri Aurobindo was in 1921...

But the greatest surprise of my visit in 1921 was the "darshan" of Sri Aurobindo. During the interval of two years his body had undergone a transformation which could only be described as miraculous. In 1918 the colour of the body was like that of an ordinary Bengali — rather dark — though there was lustre on the face and the gaze was penetrating. On going upstairs to see him (in the same house) I found his cheeks wore an apple pink colour and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light. So great and unexpected was the change that I could not help exclaiming:

"What has happened to you?"

Instead of giving a direct reply he parried the question, as I had grown a beard: "And what has happened to you?"

But afterwards in the course of talk he explained to me that when the Higher Consciousness descends from the mental level to the vital and even below the vital, then a transformation takes place in the nervous and even in the physical being.

*

"A supramental gnostic individual will be a spiritual Person, but not a personality in the sense of a pattern of being marked out by a settled combination of fixed qualities, a determined character; he cannot be that since he is a conscious expression of the universal and the transcendent." Describing the gnostic individual he [Sri Aurobindo] says ; "We feel ourselves in presence of a light of consciousness, a potency, a sea of energy, can distinguish and describe its free waves of action and quality, but not fix itself; and yet there is an impression of personality, the presence of a powerful being, a strong, high or beautiful recognizable Someone, a Person, not a limited creature of Nature but a Self or Soul, a Purusha."

One feels as if he was describing in his inimitable way the feeling of some of us — his disciples — with regard to him.

A. B. Purani

* Shri A. B. Purani, an early disciple of Sri Aurobindo who participated in India's freedom struggle and later came to Pondicherry in early 20s and stayed for good.

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The Divine Mother ¹

A conscious and eternal Power is here

Behind unhappiness and mortal birth

And the error of Thought and blundering trudge of Time.

The mother of God, his sister and his spouse,

Daughter of his wisdom, of his strength the mate,

She has leapt from the Transcendent's secret breast...

*

The Divine puts on an appearance of humanity, assumes the outward human nature in order to tread the path and show it to human beings, but does not cease to be the Divine. It is a manifestation that takes place, a manifestation of a growing divine consciousness, not human turning into divine. The Mother was inwardly above the human even in childhood...

Sri Aurobindo

*

Since the beginning of the earth, wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of the Consciousness, I was there.

*

Myself and my creed:

I belong to no nation, no civilisation, no society, no race, but to the Divine.

I obey no master, no ruler, no law, no social convention, but the Divine.

To Him I have surrendered all, will, life, self; for Him I am ready to give all my blood, drop by drop, if such is His Will, with complete joy; and nothing in His service can be sacrifice, for all is perfect delight.

Between 11 and 13 a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man's possibility of uniting with Him, of realising Him integrally in consciousness and action, of manifesting Him upon earth in a life divine. This, along with a practical discipline for its fulfilment, was given to me during my

1. The Mother, born in Paris as Mirra Alfassa on 21 Feb 1878, came to Pondicherry for the first time on 29 March 1914. She had to leave after a year due to out break of the first world war.

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body's sleep by several teachers, some of whom I met afterwards on the physical plane.

Later on, as the interior and exterior development proceeded, the spiritual and psychic relation with one of these beings became more and more clear and frequent; and although I knew little of the Indian philosophies and religions at that time I was led to call him Krishna, and henceforth I was aware that it was with him (whom I knew I should meet on earth one day) that the divine work was to be done....

As soon as I saw Sri Aurobindo I recognised in him the wellknown being whom I used to call Krishna.... And this is enough to explain why I am fully convinced that my place and my work are near him, in India.

The Mother

Identity of paths and consciousness

There is no difference between the Mother's path and mine; we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same.

Mother was doing Yoga before she knew or met Sri Aurobindo; but their lines of Sadhana independently followed the same course. When they met, they helped each other in perfecting the Sadhana. What is known as Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is the joint creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother...

The Mother's consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play.

Sri Aurobindo

When in your heart and thought you will make no difference between Sri Aurobindo and me, when to think of Sri Aurobindo will be to think of me and to think of me will mean to think of Sri Aurobindo inevitably, when to see one will mean inevitably to see the other, like one and the same Person, — then you will know that you begin to be open to the supramental force and consciousness.

The Mother

Installing the Divine Mother in the Temple of Earth ¹

Reminiscences of Nolini Kanta Gupta ²

The legend goes that as Agastya journeyed South, the Vindhya mountains bent low to give him passage, and that they have remained low ever since and would continue in that posture until the Rishi came back. In connection with this story about the Vedic Rishi Agastya, one is almost automatically reminded of the endeavour of Sri Aurobindo. Like Agastya he journeyed South and set up a permanent seat here to emanate a new Light — he was even known in these parts as Uttara Yogi, the Yogi of the North. In his lines of work and sadhana too we find a strange affinity with Agastya's effort, at least in one respect. Agastya had been for years driving deep into the earth, in the abyss of the subconscient....

Sri Aurobindo was in Pondicherry for forty years. The first few years were spent in establishing a seat: he had to select a suitable spot and make a permanent abode where he could work undisturbed....

That needed a solid, firm and immovable foundation. For this he had to dig into the farthest abyss, to fix, one might say, the "five supporting pillars". All this he did single-handed during the first four years, from 1910 to 1914. Then the Mother came. And although that was for a short time, it was then that the plans were clearly laid for the thing that was to be and the shape it was to take, — this New Creation of theirs.

The work of building the foundation took him till 1920. From 1920 to 1926 he worked with the Mother in giving it strength, testing it and making it fit and adequate for carrying the future load. In 1926 there began the construction of the superstructure, and along with that proceeded the work of installing the presiding Deity. This work of installation took twelve years to complete and the next twelve were given to making it permanent. His task done, Sri Aurobindo stepped aside, for a new task, for taking up another line of work. But to this foundation he lent the entire strength of his bare back, that his work and new creation should stand immortal and with its head erect....

All that Sri Aurobindo had wanted to do with his body was to instal permanently in an earthly form the Mother Divine. This Temple we call the Ashram has grown through the Power and Influence of Her physical Presence, in order that She may manifest anew. The'Divine Mother of the worlds has installed Herself here. In the golden Temple the living Goddess is manifest with all Her Powers of realisation.

1.The Mother finally arrived in Pondicherry on 24 April 1920. "... my return to Pondicherry was the tangible sign of the sure Victory over the adverse forces." - The Mother

2. Shri Nolini Kanta Gupta, a foremost disciple of Sri Aurobindo who was with him during the revolutionary period, in the Alipore Jail and at Pondicherry.

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She has Herself taken charge of the Work now. And the power of Her Grace is working towards the goal that the entire earth and the race of men grow into a living manifestation of Herself.

Nolini Kanta Gupta

The Mother's embodiment: A chance for the earth

Her embodiment is a chance for the earth-consciousness to receive the Supramental into it and to undergo first the transformation necessary for that to be possible. Afterwards there will be a further transformation by the Supramental, but the whole earth-consciousness will not be supramentalised — there will be first a new race representing the Supermind, as man represents the mind. (13.8.1933)

The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But that the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother. The Mother's power and not any human endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering —Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda.

Sri Aurobindo

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Ploughing the Fields of Human Nature ¹

Seer deep-hearted

Seer deep-hearted, divine king of the secrecies,

Occult fountain of love sprung from the heart of God,

Ways thou knewest no feet ever in Time had trod.

Words leaped flashing, the flame-billows of wisdom's seas.

Vast thy soul was a tide washing the coasts of heaven.

Thoughts broke burning and bare crossing the human night,

White star-scripts of the gods born from the book of Light

Page by page to the dim children of earth were given.

*

A Yogi who writes is not a literary man for he writes only what the inner Will and Word wants him to express. He is a channel and an instrument of something greater than his own literary personality.

*

The Word has power: Sowing the seeds of a new thought

The Word has power — even the ordinary written word has a power. If it is an inspired word it has still more power. What kind of power or power for what depends on the nature of the inspiration and the theme and the part of the being it touches. If it is the Word itself, — as in certain utterances of the great Scriptures, Veda, Upanishads, Gita, it may well have a power to awaken a spiritual and uplifting impulse, even certain kinds of realisation. To say that it cannot contradicts spiritual experience.

The Vedic poets regarded their poetry as Mantras, they were the vehicles of their own realisations and could become vehicles of realisation for others. Naturally, these mostly would be illuminations, not the settled and permanent realisation that is the goal of Yoga — but they could be steps on the way or at least lights on the way. I have had in former times many illuminations, even initial realisations while meditating on verses of the Upanishads or the Gita. Anything that carries the Word, the Light in it, spoken or written, can light this fire within, open a sky, as it were, bring the effective vision of which the Word is the body. ... Many have got openings into realisation while reading passages of the Arya—which are not poetry, have not the power of spiritual poetry — but it shows all the more that the word is not without power even for the things of the spirit. In all ages spiritual seekers have expressed

1.The Mother and Sri Aurobindo started the Arya, a 64-page monthly journal, on 21 June 1914.

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their aspirations or their experiences in poetry or inspired language and it has helped them and others. Therefore there is nothing absurd in my assigning to such poetry a spiritual or psychic value and effectiveness of a psychic or spiritual character.

*

A leaf from the Arya: Weaving the matrix of new times

We of the coming day stand at the head of a new age of development which must lead to such a new and larger synthesis. ... We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future. A mass of new material is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the great theistic religions of India and of the world and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, but to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of modern knowledge and seeking; and, beyond that, the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the consciousness of mankind but now breaking out again from behind the veil. All this points to a new, a very rich, a very vast synthesis; a fresh and widely embracing harmonisation of our gains is both an intellectual and a spiritual necessity of the future.

*

At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way. A structure of the external life has been raised up by man's ever-active mind and life-will, a structure of an unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego and its appetites.... At the same time Science has put at his disposal many potencies of the universal Force and has made the life of humanity materially one; but what uses this universal Force is a little human individual or communal ego... All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction of individuals, classes, nations... The evolution of human mind and life must necessarily lead towards an increasing universality; but on a basis of ego and segmenting and dividing mind this opening to the universal can only create a vast pullulation of unaccorded ideas and impulses, a surge of enormous powers and desires, a chaotic mass of unassimilated and intermixed

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mental, vital and physical material of a larger existence... Reason and Science can only help by standardising, by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and mechanised unity of material life. A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life.

Preparing the human vessel: From a letter to his brother, Barin, in Bengali. 1920 (?)

If the spiritual force is poured into these impure forms — the wine of the spirit into these unbaked vessels — the imperfect things will break apart and spill and waste the wine. Or else the spiritual force will evaporate and only the impure form remain. It is the same in every field of activity. I could use my spiritual influence; it would give strength to those who received it and they would work with great energy. But the force would be expended in shaping the image of a monkey and setting it up in the temple of Shiva. ...

... you write, "I am not a god, only some much-hammered and tempered steel." ...No one is a god, but each man has a god within him. To manifest him is the aim of the divine life. That everyone can do. I admit that certain individuals have greater or lesser capacities. ... But whatever the capacity, if once God places his finger upon the man and his spirit awakes, greater or lesser and all the rest make littie difference. The difficulties may be more, it may take more time, what is manifested may not be the same — but even this is not certain. The god within takes no account of all these difficulties and deficiencies; he forces his way out.

God's labour: Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth

(From letters to the Mother in Japan)

The whole earth is now under one law and answers to the same vibrations and I am skeptical of finding any place where the clash of the struggle will not pursue us. In any case, an effective retirement does not seem to be my destiny. (6.5.1915)

Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth; but the fullness of the yoga is to make, in the formula of the Veda, "Heaven and Earth equal and one". (20.5.1915)

Everything internal is ripe or ripening, but there is a sort of locked struggle in which neither side can make a very appreciable advance (somewhat like the trench warfare in Europe), the spiritual force insisting against the resistance of the physical world, that resistance disputing every inch and making more or less effective counter-attacks.... And if there were not the strength and Ananda within, it would be harassing and disgusting work; but the eye of knowledge looks beyond and sees that it is only a protracted episode. (28.7.1915)

Sri Aurobindo

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Tapasya for the Earth

Bringing down the Supramental

I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only — I am not doing anything for myself, as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness...

*

I care nothing for greatness or littleness in the human sense. I am seeking to bring some principle of inner Truth, Light, Harmony, Peace into the earth-consciousness; I see it above and know what it is — I feel it ever gleaming down on my consciousness from above and I am seeking to make it possible for it to take up the whole being into its own native power, instead of the nature of man continuing to remain in half-light, half-darkness. I believe the descent of this Truth opening the way to a development of divine consciousness here to be the final sense of the earth evolution.

*

Opening the path to Supramental transformation

"Transformation" is a word that I have brought in myself (like "supermind") to express certain spiritual concepts and spiritual facts of the integral yoga. People are now taking them up and using them in senses which have nothing to do with the significance which I put into them.... What I mean by the spiritual transformation is something dynamic (not merely liberation of the Self or realisation of the One which can very well be attained without any descent). It is a putting on of the spiritual consciousness dynamic as well as static in every part of the being down to the subconscient.

*

By transformation I do not mean some change of the nature — I do not mean, for instance, sainthood or ethical perfection or yogic siddhis (like the Tantrik's) or a transcendental (cinmaya) body. I use transformation in a special sense, a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived as to bring about a strong and assured step forward in the spiritual evolution of the being of a greater and higher kind and of a larger sweep and completeness than what took place when a mentalised being first appeared in a vital and material animal world.

*

Our Yoga aims at the discovery of the Supramental being, the Supramental world, and the Supramental nature, and their manifestations in life. But we must guard ourselves against certain general mistakes which are likely to arise. People think that certain powers such as Anima, Garima, or the control of the physical functions,

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and the capacity to cure diseases, constitute the Supramentalised physical. In many cases, these powers are acquired by persons who happen to open themselves consciously, or unconsciously, to the subliminal being, where these powers lie. There are plenty of cases where such powers are seen in persons who have no idea of the Supermind or Yoga.

(Evening talk with Sri Aurobindo, recorded from memory by A.B. Purani)

The leader of the Way: Opening the sunlit path

As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure, ways to cleave through impenetrable morass and desert and forest, hostile masses to conquer — a work such as, I am certain, none else had to do before us. For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience, not in a mere play or Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path. But it is not necessary nor tolerable that all that should be repeated over again to the full in the experience of others. It is because we have the complete experience that we can show a straighter and easier road to others — if they will only consent to take it. It is because of our experience won at a tremendous price that we can urge upon you and others, "Take the psychic attitude; follow the straight sunlit path, with the Divine openly or secretly up bearing you — if secretly, he will yet show himself in good time, — do not insist on the hard, hampered, roundabout and difficult journey."

About myself and the Mother, —there are people who say, "If the supramental is to come down, it can come down in everyone, why then in them first? Why should we not get it before they do? Why through them, not direct?" It sounds very rational, very logical, very arguable. The difficulty is that this reasoning ignores the conditions, foolishly assumes that one can get the supramental down into oneself without having the least knowledge of what the supramental is and so supposes an upside-down miracle — everybody who tries it is bound to land himself in a most horrible cropper — as all have done hitherto who tried it. It is like thinking one need not follow the Guide, but can reach up to the top of the mountain from the narrow path one is following on the edge of a precipice by simply leaping into the air. The result is inevitable.

*

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It is not because I have myself trod the sunlit way or flinched from difficulty and suffering and danger. I have had my full share of these things and the Mother has had ten times her full share. But that was because the finders of the Way had to face these things in order to conquer. No difficulty that can come on the Sadhak but has faced us on the path; against many we have had to struggle hundreds of times (in fact, that is an understatement) before we could overcome; many still remain protesting that they have a right until the perfect perfection is there. But we have never consented to admit their inevitable necessity for others. It is, in fact, to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden. It was with that object that the Mother once prayed to the Divine that whatever difficulties, dangers, sufferings were necessary for the path might be laid on her rather than on others. It has been so far granted her as a result of daily and terrible struggles for years that those who put an entire and sincere confidence in her are able to follow the sunlit path and even those who cannot, yet when they do put the trust find their path suddenly easy and, if it becomes difficult again, it is only when distrust, revolt, abhiman, or other darknesses come upon them. The sunlit path is not altogether a fable.

But, you will ask, what of those who cannot ? Well, it is for them I am putting forth all my efforts to bring down the supramental Force within a measurable time.

The unseen guide behind the world

Certainly, my force is not limited to the Ashram and its conditions. As you know it is being largely used for helping the right development of the war and of change in the human world. It is also used for individual purposes outside the scope of the Ashram and the practice of Yoga; but that, of course, is silently done and mainly by a spiritual action. The Ashram, however, remains at the centre of the work and without the practice of Yoga the work would not exist and could not have any meaning or fruition.

My concentration is for a particular work — it is not for meditation divorced from life. When I concentrate I work upon others, upon the world, upon the play of forces.... If I have to help somebody to repel an attack, I can't do it by only writing a note. I have to send him some Force or else concentrate and do the work for him. Also I can't bring down the Supramental by merely writing neatly to people about it.

*

The world-redeemer's heavy task

My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from hardships, starvation in England and constant dangers and fierce difficulties to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, external and internal. My life has been

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a battle from its early years and is still a battle: the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character.

*

.... even if all smashed, I would look beyond the smash to the new creation. As for what is happening in the world, it does not upset me because I knew all along that things would happen in that fashion, and as for the hopes of the intellectual idealists I have not shared them, so I am not disappointed.

*

24th November 1926: The Siddhi Day

24th [November 1926] was the descent of Krishna into the physical.

Krishna is not the supramental Light. The descent of Krishna would mean the descent of the Overmind Godhead preparing, though not itself actually, the descent of Supermind and Ananda. Krishna is the Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the Overmind leading it towards the Ananda.

Descent

All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour,

Soul and body stir with a mighty rapture,

Light and still more light like an ocean billows

Over me, round me.

Rigid, stonelike, fixed like a hill or statue,

Vast my body feels and upbears the world's weight;

Dire the large descent of the Godhead enters

Limbs that are mortal. . . .

A fire that seemed the body of a god

Consumed the limiting figures of the past

And made large room for a new self to live.

Eternity's contact broke the moulds of sense.

A greater Force than the earthly held his limbs. . . .

Sri Aurobindo

* 24th November is one of the four Darshan days at the Ashram marking Sri Aurobindo's fourth major realisation. It is referred to as the Siddhi day. Following this event, Sri Aurobindo went into the background giving more and more time and effort to bring the Supramental down upon earth while the Mother took charge of the disciples and the Ashram.

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The Mother takes charge

Amid the work of darker Powers she is here

To heal the evils and mistakes of Space

And change the tragedy of the ignorant world

Into a Divine Comedy of joy

And the laughter and the rapture of God's bliss.

The Mother of God is mother of our souls;

We are the partners of his birth in Time,

Inheritors we share his eternity.

Sri Aurobindo

In April 1920 the Mother came back from Japan and gradually, as the number of people increased, the Ashram was founded in 1926.

The Mother

... the Sadhana in the Ashram and all arrangement is done directly by the Mother, Sri Aurobindo supports her from behind. All who come here for practising Yoga have to surrender themselves to the Mother who helps them always and builds up their spiritual life.

Sri Aurobindo

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A representative collectivity: Carrying the world-march together

... it was the first question which came up when I met Sri Aurobindo. I think I have already told you this; I don't remember now, but I spoke about it recently. Should one do one's yoga and reach the goal and then later take up the work with others or should one immediately let all those who have the same aspiration come to him and go forward all together towards the goal?

Because of my earlier work and all that I had tried, I came to Sri Aurobindo with the question very precisely formulated. For the two possibilities were there: either to do an intensive individual sadhana by withdrawing from the world, that is, by no longer having any contact with others, or else to let the group be formed naturally and spontaneously, not preventing it from being formed, allowing it to form, and starting all together on the path.

Well, the decision was not at all a mental choice; it came spontaneously. The circumstances were such that there was no choice; that is, quite naturally, spontaneously, the group was formed in such a way that it became an imperious necessity. And so once we have started like that, it is finished, we have to go to the end like that.

The Mother

A camp of God in human time

... it is far from my purpose to propagate any religion, new or old, for humanity in the future. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded, is my conception of the matter.

*

This Ashram has been created with another object than that ordinarily common to such institutions, not for the renunciation of the world but as a centre and a field of practice for the evolution of another kind and form of life...

*

This is not an Ashram like others — the members are not Sannyasis; it is not moksa that is the sole aim of the yoga here. What is being done here is a preparation for a work — a work which will be founded on yogic consciousness and Yoga-Shakti, and can have no other foundation.

Sri Aurobindo

There is in the Ashram no exterior discipline and no visible test. But the inner test is severe and constant, one must be very sincere in the aspiration to surmount all egoism and to conquer all vanity in order to be able to stay.

A complete surrender is not outwardly exacted but it is indispensable for those who wish to stick on, and many things come to test the sincerity of the surrender. However the Grace and the help are always there for those who aspire for them ...

The Mother

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The Pilot Through the Passage

Transiting through turbulent times

The Iron Age is ended. Only now

The last fierce spasm of the dying past

Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed,

Earth washed of ills shall raise a fairer brow.

Sri Aurobindo

His [Sri Aurobindo's] retirement from political activity was complete, just as was his personal retirement into solitude in 1910.

But this did not mean, as most people supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness, but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to base life on the Spirit and give it a spiritual meaning. In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action; for it is part of the experience of those who have advanced far in Yoga that besides the ordinary forces and activities of the mind and life and body in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can act and do act from behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in the spiritual consciousness, though all do not care to possess or, possessing, to use it, and this power is greater than any other and more effective. It was this force which, as soon as he had attained to it, he used, at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with the results or to feel the necessity of any other kind of action. Twice, however, he found it advisable to take in addition other action of a public kind. The first was in relation to the Second World War. At the beginning he did not actively concern himself with it, but when it appeared as if Hitler would crush all the forces opposed to him and Nazism dominate the world, he began to intervene. He declared himself publicly on the side of the Allies, made some financial contributions in answer to the appeal for funds and encouraged those who sought his advice to enter the army or share in the war effort. Inwardly, he put his spiritual force behind the Allies from the moment of Dunkirk when everybody was expecting the immediate fall of England and the definite triumph of Hitler, and he had the satisfaction of seeing the rush of German victory

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almost immediately arrested and the tide of war begin to turn in the opposite direction. This he did, because he saw that behind Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind : it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it of India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the undoing of all the work that had been done for her liberation. It was this reason also that induced him to support publicly the Cripps' offer and to press the Congress leaders to accept it. He had not, for various reasons, intervened with his spiritual force against the Japanese aggression until it became evident that Japan intended to attack and even invade and conquer India. He allowed certain letters he had written in support of the war affirming his views of the Asuric nature and inevitable outcome of Hitlerism to become public. He supported the Cripps' offer because by its acceptance India and Britain could stand united against the Asuric forces and the solution of Cripps could be used as a step towards independence. When negotiations failed, Sri Aurobindo returned to his reliance on the use of spiritual force alone against the aggressor and had the satisfaction of seeing the tide of Japanese victory, which had till then swept everything before it, change immediately into a tide of rapid, crushing and finally immense and overwhelming defeat. He had also after a time the satisfaction of seeing his previsions about the future of India justify themselves so that she stands independent with whatever internal difficulties.

Sri Aurobindo

India's freedom: A birthday gift

August 15th is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age. But it has a significance not only for us, but for Asia and the whole world; for it signifies the entry into the comity of nations of a new power with untold potentialities which has a great part to play in determining the political, social, cultural and spiritual future of humanity. To me personally it must naturally be gratifying that this date which was notable only for me because it was my own birthday celebrated annually by those who have accepted my gospel of life, should have acquired this vast significance. As a mystic, I take this identification, not as a coincidence or fortuitous accident, but as a sanction and seal of the Divine Power which guides my steps on the work with which I began life. Indeed almost all the world movements which I hoped to see fulfilled in my lifetime, though at that time they looked like impossible dreams, I can Observe on this day either approaching fruition or initiated and on the way to their achievement....

*

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The dreams Divine

I have always held and said that India was arising , not to serve her own material interests only, to achieve expa nsion, greatness, power and prosperity, - though
these too she must not neglect, - and certainly not like others to acqu ire domination of other peoples , but to live also for God and the world as a helper and leader of the whole human race. Those aims and ideals were in their natural order these : a revolution which would achieve India's freedom and her unity; the resurgence and liberation of Asia and her return to the great role which she had played in the progress of human civilisation; the rise of a new, a greater, brighter and nobler life for mankind which for its ent ire realisat ion would rest outwardly on an international unification of the separate existence ofthe peoples , preserving and securing their national life but drawing them together into an overr iding and consummating oneness ; the gift by India of her spiritual knowledge and her means for the spiritualisation of life to the whole race ; finally , a new step in the evolution which , by uplifting the consc iousness to a higher level, would begin the solution of the many problems of existence which have perplexed and vexed humanity, since men began to think and to dream of individual perfect ion and a perfect society....

*

East and West: A common hope, a common destiny

East and West have the same human nature , a common human destiny, the same aspirat ion after a greate r perfect ion, the same seeking after something higher
than itself , something towards which inwardly and even outwardly we move . There has been a tendency in some minds to dwell on the spiritual ity or mysticism of the East and the mater ialism of the West; but the West has had no less than the East its spiritual seek ings and , though not in such profusion , its saints and sages and mystics , the East has had its mater ialist ic tendencies, its material splendours, its similar or ident ical dealings with life and Matter and the world in which we live. East and West have always met and mixed more or less closely , they have powerfully influenced each other and at the present day are under an increas ing compuls ion of Nature and Fate to do so more than ever before . There is a common hope, a common destiny, both spiritual and material , for which both are needed as co-workers . It is no longer towards divis ion and difference that we should turn our minds, but on unity, union, even oneness necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ideal , the destined goal , the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginning obscurely set out and must in an increasi ng light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere.

Sri Aurobindo

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Sowing the Seed of the Supramental Light in the Human Night

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God's deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.

I left the glory of the illumined Mind

And the calm rapture of the divinised soul

And travelled through a vastness dim and blind

To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;

Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend.

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.

Sri Aurobindo

The triumph over death: 5 December 1950*

... Dara (Aga Syed Ibrahim), had a singular experience that morning when he walked past Sri Aurobindo's body lying on the cot in its snow-white background:

"I found myself in Sri Aurobindo's own room by the side of his cot. He seemed so peaceful and happy, and the flesh shone with a new lustre which I had failed to see at the darsan time on 24th November. Why could I not see it before?... I could not take my eyes off his face and arms. It seemed to me he was alive. It was certain that he was in a condition of deep and upward soaring trance just then."

Many others too had similar experiences. Between 1.30 a.m. and 7.30 p.m. was a stretch of eighteen hours, yet Sri Aurobindo's body had not only not shown any signs of decomposition, it had actually acquired a new lustre and the radiant complexion of life! Death, where is thy sting? Whose, then, is the Victory?

The Mother described the new lustre as the Supramental light, and helped Dr. Sanyal also — who at first couldn't — to see it: "a luminous mantle of bluish golden hue around him. "And Sethna's portrayal has almost an epiphanic quality: "Spiritually imperial— this is the only description fitting the appearance of the body.... The atmosphere of. the room was vibrant with a sacred power to cleanse and illumine, a power which appeared to emanate from the Master's poise of conquering rest and to invade the bodies of all the watchers... as if... there came pouring

*Sri Aurobindo left his body on 05 December 1950. The body was suffused and enveloped by bluish-golden light for nearly 111 hours.

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down to humanity the life-transcending grace of the Supermind."

*

"A meditative silence reigned in the Ashram for twelve days after the passing of the beloved Master," writes Rishabhchand; "then the normal activities began, but with a striking difference. One felt a pervading Presence in the Ashram atmosphere. ..." On 14 December the Mother half-admonished the sadhaks: "To grieve is an insult to Sri Aurobindo who is here with us, conscious and alive. "And on 18 January 1951, she gave a firmer assurance still:

We stand in the Presence of Him who has sacrificed his physical life in order to help more fully his work of transformation.

He is always with us, aware of what we are doing, of all our thoughts, of all our feelings and all our actions.

K. R. Srinivasa lyangar

The mysterious Divine Sacrifice

People do not know what a tremendous sacrifice Sri Aurobindo has made for the world. About a year ago, while I was discussing things, 1 remarked that I felt like leaving this body of mine. He spoke out in a very firm tone, "No, this can never be. If necessary for this transformation, I might go, you will have to fulfil our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation."

*

Sri Aurobindo was not compelled to leave his body, he chose to do so for reasons so sublime that they are beyond the reach of human mentality.

And when one cannot understand, the only thing to do is to keep a respectful silence.

*

[December 8,1950] When I asked Him to resuscitate his body, He clearly answered: "I have left this body purposely. I will not take it back. I shall manifest again in the first supramental body built in the supramental way."

The Mother

Inscribed on the Samadhi : 9 December 1950

To Thee who hast been the material envelope of our Master, to Thee our infinite gratitude. Before Thee who hast done so much for us, who hast worked, struggled, suffered, hoped, endured so much, before Thee who hast willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all for us, before Thee we bow down and implore that we may never forget, even for a moment, all we owe to Thee.

The Mother

The radiant Yagna-Vedi

Out of his Samadhi a thousand flames seem to be mounting up and, lodged in our soul, burning in an ever rejuvenating fire, while His Presence enveloping and merging with and radiating from the Mother's being and body is pervading the whole atmosphere. One can see His Presence, hear his foot-falls, his rhythmic voice, ever vigilant, devoid of the encumbrance of the physical body.

Nirodbaran

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Savitri : A Bridge to the Future

Flute of the Infinite: Savitri

A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,

Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind

Bringing her rhythmic sense of hidden things.

A music spoke transcending mortal speech.

As if from a golden phial of the All-Bliss,

A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight,

A rapture of the thrilled undying Word

Poured into his heart as into an empty cup,

A repetition of God's first delight

Creating in a young and virgin Time....

Spokesman of the silent seeings of the Supreme,

She brought immortal words to mortal men....

All the great Words that toiled to express the One

Were lifted into an absoluteness of light,

An ever-burning Revelation's fire

And the immortality of the eternal Voice.

Sri Aurobindo

Savitri: The supreme revelation

(About Savitri)

1)The daily record of the spiritual experiences of the individual who has written.

2)A complete system of yoga which can serve as a guide for those who want to follow the integral sadhana.

3)The yoga of the Earth in its ascension towards the Divine.

4)The experiences of the Divine Mother in her effort to adapt herself to the body she has taken and the ignorance and the falsity of the earth upon which she has incarnated.

The Mother

The Mantra of transformation

It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, of the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide towards Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practice

1. Even as Sri Aurobindo withdrew behind the physical veil, even as He had installed the Divine Mother in the hearts and soul of humanity, He placed Savitri in our midst; Savitri first appeared in 1951. Sri Aurobindo considered Savitri as one of His 'main work.'

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Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of the Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. Surely, if one follows sincerely what is revealed here in each verse one will finally reach the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possesses by way of knowledge...

You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness; as though Savitri were a being, a real Guide. I tell you, whoever wants to practice Yoga, if he tries sincerely and feels the necessity, he will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practice it anywhere. Savitri by itself will be his guide, for all that he needs he will find in Savitri.

(Mother's talk with Mona Sarkar, reported from memory by him)

The skilful Penman's unseen finger wrote

His swift intuitive calligraphy;

Earth's forms were made his divine documents,

The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,

Inconscience chased from the world's voiceless breast;

Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.

Arousing consciousness in things inert,

He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass

The diamond script of the Imperishable,

Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things

A paean-song of the free Infinite

And the Name, foundation of eternity,

And traced on the awake exultant cells

In the ideographs of the Ineffable

The lyric of the love that waits through Time

And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss

And the message of the superconscient Fire.

Sri Aurobindo

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OM NAMO BHAGAVATE SRI ARAVINDAYA

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Dawn of a New World

The Force is here

July 6, 1914

... the formidable omnipotence of Thy Force which is here, ready for the manifestation, waiting, building the propitious hour, the favourable opportunity: the incomparable splendour of Thy victorious sovereignty.

The Force is here. Rejoice, O you who are waiting and hoping: the new manifestation is sure, the new manifestation is at hand.

The Force is here.

All nature exults and sings in gladness, all nature is at a festival: The Force is here. Arise and live; arise and be illuminated; arise and battle forthe transfiguration of all:

The Force is here.

A new world is born: A promise fulfilled*

29 February 1956: During the common meditation at the Playground

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.

As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that "the time has come", and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.

Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.

*

29 Feb — 29 March [1956]

Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute: A new light breaks upon the earth, A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled. 24 April 1956

The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality.

It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.

24 April 1956

The manifestat ion of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact , a reality.

It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind , the most unconscious , even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.

The Mother

* On 29 February 1956 the Supramental Consciousness manifested upon earth as foretold, promised and
worked for by SriAurobindo and the Mother.

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Formation of a Centre for Integral Education : 24 April 1951

Sri Aurobindo is present in our midst, and with all the power of his creative genius he presides over the formation of the University Centre which for years he considered as one of the best means of preparing the future humanity to receive the supramental light that will transform the elite of today into a new race manifesting upon earth the new light and force and life.

The Mother

Beginning of a gnostic community:

If we are spread out everywhere as individuals, something no doubt will be done; if we are spread out everywhere in the form of a sangha, a hundred times more will be accomplished. But the time has not yet come for this. If we try to give it form hastily, it will not be the exact thing I want. The sangha will at first be in a diffused form. Those who have accepted the ideal, although bound together, will work in different places. Afterwards, bound into a sangha with a form like a spiritual commune, they will shape all their activities according to the Self and according to the needs of the age. Not a fixed and rigid form like that of the old Aryan society, not a stagnant backwater, but a free form that can spread itself out like the sea with its multitudinous waves — engulfing this, inundating that, absorbing all — and as this continues, a spiritual community will be established.

Sri Aurobindo

For a very long time the Ashram was only a gathering of individuals, each one representing something, but as an individual and without any collective organisation. ... This lasted a very long time — very long. And it is only quite recently that the need for a collective reality began to appear — which is not necessarily limited to the Ashram but embraces all who have declared themselves — I don't mean materially but in their consciousness — to be disciples of Sri Aurobindo and have tried to live his teaching. Among all of them, and more strongly since the manifestation of the supramental Consciousness and Force, there has awakened the necessity for a true communal life, which would not be based only on purely material circumstances but would represent a deeper truth, and be the beginning of what Sri Aurobindo calls a supramental or gnostic community.... *

The Mother

21 August 1957

*The Mother founded the Sri Aurobindo Society on 19 September 1960 with herself as its President, to make known to the members and people in general the aims and ideals of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, their system of integral Yoga and to work for its fulfilment in all possible ways and for the attainment of a spiritualised society as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo. Subsequently Auroville was born on 28 February 1968 to realise the Ideal of Human Unity through willing service to the Divine.

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The Great Assurance ¹

The great holocaust

In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.

When darkness deepens

Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.

When darkness deepens strangling the earth's breast

And man's corporeal mind is the only lamp,

As a thief's in the night shall be the covert tread

Of one who steps unseen into his house.

A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,

A Power into mind's inner chamber steal,

A charm and sweetness open life's closed doors

And beauty conquer the resisting world,

The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,

A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss

And earth grow unexpectedly divine....

A few shall see what none yet understands;

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;

For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done.

Sri Aurobindo

The transformation is going to be

Never for an instant vacillate in the belief that the mighty work of change taken up by Sri Aurobindo is going to culminate in success. For that indeed is a fact: there is not a shadow of doubt as to the issue of the work we have in hand.... The transformation is going to be: nothing will ever stop it, nothing will frustrate the decree of the Omnipotent. Cast away all diffidence and weakness and resolve to endure bravely awhile before the great day arrives when the long battle tums into an everlasting victory. __

The Mother

1. Having established the Supramental Consciousness upon earth and securing completely the work for the future, The Mother also withdrew behind the material scene on 17 November 1973.

Page 52

I Am Here

A vision

The Mother says:

"Just see. Look at me. I am here comback in my new body, — divine, transformed and glorious. And I am same mother, still human. Do not worry. Do not be concerned about your own self, your progress and realisation, nor about others. I am here, look at me, gaze into me, enter into me wholly, merged into my being, lose yourself into my love, with your love. You will see all problems solved, everything done. Forget all else, forget the world. Remember me alone, be one with me, with my love...."

Nolini Kanta Gupta

A promise and a pledge: 7 December 1950

Lord, this morning Thou hast given me the assurance that Thou wouldst stay with us until Thy work is achieved, not only as a consciousness which guides and illumines but also as a dynamic Presence in action. In unmistakable terms Thou hast promised that all of Thyself would remain here and not leave the earth atmosphere until earth is transformed. Grant that we may be worthy of this marvellous Presence and that henceforth everything in us be concentrated on the one will to be more and more perfectly consecrated to the fulfilment of Thy sublime Work.

The Mother

A branch of heaven planted on earthly soil

Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth

And the undying suns here burn;

Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth

The incarnate spirits yearn.

Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:

Down a gold-red stairway wend

The radiant children of Paradise

Clarioning darkness' end.

A little more and the new life's doors

Shall be carved in silver light

With its aureate roof and mosaic floors

In a great world bare and bright.

I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,

For in a raiment of gold and blue

There shall move on the earth embodied and fair

The living truth of you.

Sri Aurobindo

Page 53

My soul and his indissolubly linked

In the one task for which our lives were born,

To raise the world to God in deathless Light,

To bring God down to the world on earth we came,

To change the earthly life to life divine.

Sri Aurobindo

Page 54

Sri Aurobindo's Symbol and its Meaning

The descending triangle represents Sat-Chit-Ananda.

The ascending triangle represents the aspiring answer from matter under the form of life, light and love.

The junction of both — the central square — is the perfect manifestation having at its centre the Avatar of the Supreme — the lotus.

The water — inside the square — represents the multiplicity, the creation.

The Mother

Page 55

Sources of the Passages Published in this Compilation

Page 1: CWSA Vol. 2, p. 649 (SABCL Vol. 5, p. 615). Page 3: CWSA2: 534 (SABCL 5: 99); CWSA 19; 164 (SABCL 13: 155); CWSA 19:159 (SABCL 13:150); SABCL 26: 451. Page 4: CWM 13: 5, 4, 19, 10, 10. Page 5: CWSA 2: 670 (SABCL 5: 595); CWSA 2: 5-6. Page 6: SABCL 26; 4; CWSA 2; 37 (SABCL 5: 28). Pages 7-10: SA-BW 349-54; Speeches (1993 ed.): 7-8; SA-HLU: 57-63. Pages 11-13: SABCL 26: 98, 50; CWSA 2: 607 (SABCL 5: 138); SABCL 22: 199; CWSA: 2; 608, 622 (SABCL 5: 139, 154); SABCL 26: 77; SA-HLU: 133; SABCL 26: 81; SA-HLU: 147-48. Pages 14-17: CWSA 2: 581 (SABCL 5: 567); SABCL 26; 82-83, 84, 86, 101-02; CWSA 2: 582 (SABCL 5; 568); SABCL 26: 226-27; LOSA: 113-14; SABCL 26: 68; SA-HLU: 282-84. Pages 17-18: CWSA 8: 5-6, 6, 9 (SABCL 2: 6, 6-7, 9). Pages 18-20: SABCL 26; 21; SA-HLU: 328; SA-BW: 202-03; CWSA 6: 874-76, 247. SA-HLU: 300. Pages 21-22: CWSA 2: 603 (SABCL 5: 144); LOSA: 132; SABCL 10: 34; SABCL 26: 55, 430, 57-58, 390. Pages 23-26: Savitri (1994 ed.): 76-79; SABCL 26: 430, 423; Champaklal's Treasures (2008 second ed.): 176; SA-BW: 359-61; SABCL 26: 122, 124-25; CWSA 2:217 (SABCL 5: 62); CWSA 12: 93-94; LOSA: 296; Evening talks with Sri Aurobindo by A.B. Purani, 3rd series, 1st ed.; 1966: p.vi. Pages 27-28: CWSA 2: 642 (SABCL 5; 105); SABCL 25: 48; CWM 13: 63, 37, 37-38, 39; SABCL 26: 456, 459, 455; CWM 13: 32; SABCL 25: 65. Pages 29-31: CW of NKG, Vol.7: 406-408; FN: CWM 13: 63; SABCL 25: 49, 40-41; Champaklal Speaks, p. 334; Photo quote: SABCL 25: 79. Pages 32-34: CWSA 2: 667 (SABCL 5: 603); SABCL 26: 221, 277-78; CWSA 19: 10 (SABCL 13: 8); CWSA 22: 1090-91 (SABCL 19: 1053-55); SA-BW: 366-68; CWSA 36: 285-86 (SABCL 26: 424-25). Pages 35-38: SABCL 26: 144, 143; SABCL 22: 115-16, 98; Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo by A.B. Purani 2nd series p.313; SABCL 26: 464; Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, 1983 ed.: 142-43; 26: 465, 196, Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo: 79; 26: 153, 165, 136; CWSA 2: 578 (SABCL 5: 563); Savitri: 81. Pages 39-40: CWSA 2: 642-43 (SABCL 5: 105); CWM 13: 109; SABCL 26: 459; CWM 7; 414; SABCL 22: 139; SABCL 23: 847, 847; CWM 13: 115. Pages 41-43: CWSA 2: 243 (SABCL 5: 61); SABCL 26: 38-39, 400-01, 401, 413-14. Pages 44-46: CWSA 2: 603 (SABCL 5; 132); SA-KRS: 711; CWM 13: 8, 8, 9; Savitri: 445-47, 346; CWM 13: 7; Sri Aurobindo "I am here, I am here" (Nirodbaran): 24. Pages 47-48: Savitri: 38-39, 90; CWM 13: 24; Sweef Mother: Luminous Notes (Mona Sarkar): 47-52; Savitri: 232. Pages 49: Om Prayers and Mantras: 17. Pages 50-51: CWM 1: 191; CWM 15: 202, 204, 198; CWM 12: 112; SArBW: 366; CWM 9: 173. Pages 52-53: SABCL 25: 24-25; Savitri: 55; CWM 13: 21; CW of NKG Vol.6: 259; CWM 13: 6; CWSA 2: 537-38 (SABCL 5: 102). Pages 54-55: Savitri: 692; CWM 13: 29; CWSA 19: 175-76 (SABCL 13: 166-67).

Abbreviations

CWM = Collected Works of the Mother, First edition, 1972-1987 (17 volumes)

SABCL = Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library edition, 1970-1973 (30 volumes)

CWSA = Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (37 volumes), under publication since 1997.

SA-HLU = Sri Aurobindo: His Life Unique by Rishabhchand 1981 edition.

SA-KRS = Sri Aurobindo; A Biography and a History by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, 4th ed., 1985.

LOSA = The Life of Sri Aurobindo by A.B. Purani, Fourth edition.

SA-BW = (Sri Aurobindo's) Bengali Writings (Translation in English), Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1991. CW of NKG = Complete Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta.

In the references, the initial numeral specifies the Volume Number and the second number(s) the page(s) where the passage occurs In that volume.

SABDA, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry - 605 002

Footprints of God

His soul lived as eternity's delegate,

His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,

His will a hunter in the trails of light.

An ocean impulse lifted every breath;

Each action left the footprints of a god.

Sri Aurobindo

"Sri Aurobindo came on earth from the Supreme to announce

the manifestation of a new race and the new world, the Supramental."

"Sri Aurobindo's work is a unique earth-transformation."

The Mother

Cover Picture:

Sunrise at Pondicherry : An artist's impression

The text in this Volume is compiled by

Dr. Alok Pandey

Reprint of All India Magazine — April-May 2010

A monthly magazine of

SRI AUROBINDO SOCIETY, PONDICHERRY - 605 002

© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry - 605 002

ISBN 978-81-7060-291-0 May 2010

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