... Patterns of the Present 3: East and West (Note: In this chapter the concepts “East” and “West” are used as they are in the works of Sri Aurobindo: in their symbolical, spiritual sense, which remains valid underneath the developments in the last decades.) To this mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by the fusion of the old Eastern and the... the place to quote a revealing, seminal text of Sri Aurobindo’s, which was published in the Arya in 1915 and covers the whole range of the relations between East and West. It goes as follows: “The fundamental difference [between East and West] has been that Asia has served predominantly (not exclusively) as a field for man’s spiritual experience and progression, Europe has been rather a workshop for... 1949. “It has been customary to dwell on the division and difference between these two sections of the human family [East and West] and even to oppose them to each other; but for myself I would rather be disposed to dwell on oneness and unity than on division and difference. East and West have the same human nature, a common human destiny, the same aspiration after a greater perfection, the same seeking ...
... of East Germany. Page 119 Exchange and Cooperation between East and West Germany Reunification of the two Germanys reached completion on Oct. 3, 1990. It was a peaceful reunification based on a mutual agreement, not military might or coercion. Although East and West Germany were on hostile terms with each other in ideological respects, they successfully... it cannot be denied that exchange and cooperation between East and West Germany Page 120 paved the way for their reunification by indirectly stimulating the East Germans' craving for opening up and democratisation and inflaming their aspiration for the West Germans' freedom and affluence. Fortunately, East and West Germany promoted economic exchange under a single economic... telegraphic service in September 1971, dramatically increasing the number of telephone circuits. Telephone lines connecting East and West Germany were on the rapid rise each year. Framework of Agreement between the Two Germanys Despite their division, East and West Germany kept their transportation network intact. There were 32 railroad lines, three freeways, 31 federal roads and other ...
... 001 16.2.83 Dear Father Griffiths, I was glad to hear from you. I have been keeping in touch with your writings over many years. Recently Father Martin sent me your Marriage of East and West. I have read it carefully and enjoyed reading it. I have many things marked in it, mostly the insights but here and there also its oversights. When I have more time I should like to write to you... will of man, but of God.' This is achieved because a woman is found who can make the total surrender of herself in love." Here you are alluding to 1.13. The same occurs in your Marriage of East and West (p. 34): "The birth of Jesus from a virgin was the sign of the birth of a new humanity, born 'not of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.' " In commenting on your choice... the same. I forget whether you have read my book, The Golden String, in which I explained all the stages of my growth in understanding of this mystery and also my recent book, The Marriage of East and West, in which I showed a further growth of understanding in the light of Eastern thought, but most of what I have to say is to be found in those books. The essential thing is to distinguish between ...
... difference between these two sections of the human family and even oppose them to each other; but, for myself I rather be disposed to dwell on oneness and unity than on division and difference. East and West have the same human nature, a common human destiny, the same aspiration after a greater perfection, the same seeking after something higher than itself, something towards which inwardly and even... its saints and sages and mystics, the East has had its materialistic tendencies, its material splendours, its similar or identical 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 increasing compulsion of Nature and Fate to do so more than even before... too the descent of the Spirit and its powers into the world and that would justify the existence of the material world also, give a meaning, a divine purpose to the creation and solve its riddle. East and West could be reconciled in the pursuit of the highest and largest Page 43 ideal, Spirit embrace Matter and Matter find its own true reality and the hidden Reality in all things in the ...
... difference between these two sections of the human family and even oppose them to each other; but, for myself I would rather be disposed to dwell on oneness and unity than on division and difference. East and West have the same human nature, a common human destiny, the same aspiration after a greater perfection, the same seeking after something higher than itself, something towards which inwardly and even... its saints and sages and mystics, the East has had its materialistic tendencies, its material splendours, its similar or identical 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 increasing compulsion of Nature and Fate to do so more than ever before... too the descent of the Spirit and its powers into the world and that would justify the existence of the material world also, give a meaning, a divine purpose to the creation and solve its riddle. East and West could be reconciled in the pursuit of the highest and largest ideal, Spirit embrace Matter and Matter find its own true reality and the hidden Reality in all things in the Spirit. 11-8-49 ...
... be sought centrally in spiritual self-knowledge and self-perfection and in the founding of life on that self-knowledge. When the issue is so stated, we can at once see that the gulf between East and West, India and Europe is much less profound and unbridgeable now than it was thirty or forty years ago. The basic difference still remains; the life of the West is still chiefly governed by the rat... the standpoint of spiritual knowledge in the tongue of the Veda and Vedanta. Every one of these advances leads directly or in its intrinsic meaning towards a nearer approach between the mind of East and West and to that extent to a likelihood of a better understanding of Indian thought and ideals. In some directions the change of attitude has gone remarkably far and seems to be constantly increasing... at least acknowledge her light and undergo her influence. If this turn continues to accentuate its drive, and there is little chance of a reversion, the spiritual and intellectual gulf between East and West if not filled up, will at least be bridged and the defence of Indian culture and ideals will stand in a stronger position. But then, it may be said, if there is this certainty of an approximative ...
... necessary sense of individualization within the social and material context (though not in its yogis). The time has come, at this unprecedented opportunity offered by the ‘global village,’ for East and West to meet and to fulfil the human potential in an effort that will make the world effectively one, and carry the human species beyond itself into a New World. Five ‘Dreams’ A new spirit... worthy of a self-respecting nation.’ 19 But the body of Bharat Mata, Mother India, had been split into two states, so-called India and Pakistan, which itself was grotesquely divided into East and West Pakistan, distanced from each other by no less than thirteen hundred kilometres. Sri Aurobindo’s emphatic pronouncement on this deplorable fact – on this ‘human deformation,’ as the Mother called... barbarians and even non-humans? In A Message to America , written by Sri Aurobindo in 1949, we read: ‘There is a common hope, a common destiny, both spiritual and material, for which both [East and West] are needed as co-workers. It is no longer towards division and difference that we should turn our minds, but on unity, union, even oneness necessary for the pursuit and realization of a common ...
... difference between these two sections of the human family and even oppose them to each other; but, for myself I would rather be disposed to dwell on oneness and unity than on division and difference. East and West have the same human nature, a common human destiny, the same aspiration after a greater perfection, the same seeking after something higher than itself, something towards which inwardly and even... its saints and sages and mystics, the East has had its materialistic tendencies, its material splendours, its similar or identical 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 increasing compulsion of Nature and Fate to do so more than ever before... too the descent of the Spirit and its powers into the world and that would justify the existence of the material world also, give a meaning, a divine purpose to the creation and solve its riddle. East and West could be reconciled in the pursuit of the highest and largest ideal, Spirit embrace Matter and Matter find its own true reality and the hidden Reality in all things in the Spirit. 11.8.1949 ...
... Work after his departure in 1950. The Mother's consciousness and mine are the same. 308 It is quite significant that the living synthesis of East and West, which Sri Aurobindo already symbolized, would become perfected by this meeting between East and West, as if the world could only be fulfilled by the coming together of the two poles of existence, Consciousness and Force, Spirit and Earth, He and... America. It is this Secret that Sri Aurobindo was to Page 20 rediscover, perhaps because his being combined the finest Western tradition and the profound spiritual yearning of the East. East and West , he said, have two ways of looking at life which are opposite sides of one reality. Between the pragmatic truth on which the vital thought of modern Europe enamoured of the vigour of life, all ...
... Thought, Philosophy, Science and Yoga Letters on Yoga - I Chapter III Philosophical Thought and Yoga Metaphysical Thinkers, East and West European metaphysical thought—even in those thinkers who try to prove or explain the existence and nature of God or of the Absolute—does not in its method and result go beyond the intellect. But the intellect is... it was not discovered by intellectual speculation, but by the mystics following an inner spiritual discipline. When, somewhere between the seventh and fifth centuries B.C., men began both in the East and West to intellectualise knowledge, this Truth survived in the East; in the West, where the intellect began to be accepted as the sole or highest instrument for the discovery of Truth, it began to fade ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 The Eternal East and West I THE East and the West are two recognised wings of humanity. Only the relation between them is somewhat in dispute. According to one view the two are quite separate and irreconcilable entities, because they embody two outlooks that are contradictory to each other. The... the leader of human or terrestrial evolution and they who are of the same make are the pioneers who shall build heaven upon earth. Towards that consummation, these two great world currents, East and West, are moving carrying each its own truth and contributing to the realisation of the integral truth that is to take body here below. Page 231 ...
... Meanwhile those disciples were still trying to work out a "synthesis between East and West," a "union of the world's religions," a high "continuity" of the world's traditions... and so on. Continuity, yes indeed, as the bird followed the reptile, but it is not by adding up the visions of all the saurians of East and West that we shall ever produce a bird's vision. Nor in adding together the Upanishads ...
... Writings and a Resolution 1890-1906 Bande Mataram Ethics East and West [..... if the] natural disparity which is so confidently asserted by Europeans and reasserted in echo by not a few Anglicised or revolted Hindus, be a truth and not a fiction of racial pride, the national movement in India becomes a blunder and a solecism. For this movement... it is only those of whose blood & bone it has become a part who can be trusted to put it before others from a right perspective and in the true proportions. Only then can the issue between the East and West be justly decided. CHAPTER I: THE ETHICAL BASIS IN EUROPE Morality is like all else in this world of perceptions, phenomenal in its nature; it is neither eternal nor unchanging, but depends ...
... the wind, and she will reap the whirlwind in the loss of her Empire, perhaps in national decay and death. "Truth yet shall triumph in a world of justice; This is of faith. I swear it. East and West The law of Man's progression shall accomplish Even this last great marvel with the rest. "Thou wouldst not further it. Thou canst not hinder. If thou shalt learn in time, thou yet shalt live... materially and on the surface, but has not sought for strength and permanence in the deeper roots of life of which our outer activity is only a partial manifestation. The fundamental difference between East and West has been exemplified more than once in recent times. What European nation could have changed its whole political, social and economic machinery in a few years like Japan, with so little trouble ...
... concept of God. Might there then be something worthwhile Eastern spirituality has to tell about modern science in general and evolution in particular? In 1949, Sri Aurobindo wrote in a message: “East and West have the same human nature, a common human destiny, the same aspiration after a greater perfection, the same seeking after something higher than itself, something towards which inwardly and even... its saints and sages and mystics; the East has had its materialistic tendencies, its material splendours, its similar or identical 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 and increasing compulsion of Nature and Fate to do so more than ever before ...
... undisputed fact that the Mahabharata and the Iliad are two of the world's greatest epics. In these times of a growing global consciousness it may be of interest for students and teachers of East and West to compare the two splendid heroes that are introduced to world civilization in these epics. Although both poems are literary expressions of a particular people, it is clear that they are founded... achieves a harmony with his enemy. The heroes of both epics may be further illumined by deeper comparison of their natures. Such a reflection will widen the understanding between the peoples of East and West and can be a valuable aid to teachers around the world. The fight between Hector and Achilles Page 70 ...
... Evolution and the Earthly Destiny The Eternal East and West THE East and the West are two recognised wings of humanity. Only the relation between them is somewhat in dispute. According to one view the two are quite separate and irreconcilable entities, because they .embody two outlooks that are contradictory to each other. The other view is that they are... the leader of human or terrestrial evolution and they who are of the same make are the pioneers who shall build heaven upon earth. Towards that consummation, these two great world currents, East and West, are moving carrying each its own truth and contributing to the realisation of the integral truth that is to take body here below. Page 173 ...
... Spirit, the fiat of the Supreme. But it doesn't act according to the notions of the mind. It has its own inscrutable but irresistible way of working. Those who think that the meeting of the East and West will be a mutual give and take, on the physical plane betray an ignorance of spiritual working. Discarding the two negations and taking over of what one lacks and giving of what one possesses as... transformation of earth consciousness. All collective work must be Yogic work initiated by the Divine. No mental planning has a place in it. What I have said above about the meeting of the East and West holds good in regard to the idea of integration. Integration in education is a laudable ideal, but how to achieve it? Where, in man, is the integrating agency? It is the psychic. And it is impossible ...
... the creative impulse in Bengal should for a moment die out. But whatever Page 118 else may perish or endure, Bankim's fame cannot die. Already it has overleaped the barrier between East and West; translations of his works are already appearing in English and German, and wherever they are read, they excite admiration, wonder and delight. O sage politicians, and subtle economists, whose heads ...
... develops, it is as well to clear the air from the beginning. The principle of rewarding distinguished public services by material forms of recognition as well as by honours and titles is common to East and West; not only so but rank and title were usually associated with the gift of an estate or jagir to support the expenditure suitable to the rank and the dignity of the title. Sometimes gifts of land ...
... meaning of our past culture and the environmental requirements of our future. That view opens out a prospect beyond the battle of cultures which is the immediate dangerous aspect of the meeting of East and West. The Spirit in man has one aim before it in all mankind; but different continents or peoples approach it from different sides, with different formulations and in a differing spirit. Not recognising ...
... The Secret Splendour How has this little face Filled for me infinite Space? It is as though gold rays Leaping from north and south and east and west Came to enchanted rest In that mysterious hair falling like heaven's own grace, Those eyes of deep dusk many-starred, The gently curved truth-pointing nose, The lips that open ...
... comptoir; this means that it was one of the overseas places where the French ships could drop anchor, take in fresh water and provisions, and do business. Like that there were three more places on the east and west coast of the Indian subcontinent, and one in the estuary of the Ganges. At Pondicherry France was represented by a governor who, at the time of our story, seems to have been one of the hedgers. ...
... sufism, Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht, well acquainted with the Eastern religions and spirituality, Hess, significantly born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, an occult crossroads between East and West, and Himmler, with his interest in yoga and the Bhagavad Gita. This short list of names which have become familiar to us in the course of our story and which represent various groups of the German ...
... traditions they refer to, there is the presence of a divine archetype resembling the human form above or behind the evolution. The knowledge of this form has been and still is common wisdom in East and West. It is this form – here understood in the philosophical Platonic sense as “idea” – which we find in the course of the evolution of life on Earth gradually expressed in the shape of the human being ...
... tears”. According to the first view the world is unreal, according to the second view it is worthless and inexplicable. The principal aim of both kinds of spiritual or religious endeavour, in both East and West, consists in escaping as quickly as possible from the absurd ordeal of earthly embodiment into the promised (but not proven) relief of a hereafter. As we will see further on, the thought of Sri ...
... uneasily and replied: ‘I tend to try to stay away from that.’” 60 But mysticism is a matter of experience, and so is the evidence of God. The authentic spiritual experience is the same in East and West, and it is the same at the core of every religion, for the human being is the same everywhere. “The perennial philosophy holds that the world’s great spiritual traditions, in spite of their obvious ...
... liberated and what seems liberation is itself an illusion - there being nothing except the One without a second, featureless, changeless, immobile." What you label as "a matter of dispute between East and West" stems only from the Western belief that Shankara - or in another shape Buddha - is the sum and substance of the entire spiritual experience and thought compassed in India's three or four millennia ...
... because it was through the pointing finger of this Indianised Westerner that Dilip Kumar Roy the Westernised Indian first turned his eyes towards Sri Aurobindo who is the perfect synthesis of East and West. And they are excellent writing, too! It is impossible to thank enough our wanderer among great men for the opulence he has collected for us. But let us not forget that he is no mere collector: ...
... body of light seen by the correspondent in a vision ] is the luminous body spoken of in the Veda as possessed by the beings of the higher planes. It is supposed by certain schools of Yoga in the East and West that in the final transformation on earth man will develop a body having these qualities. It was called the corps glorieux , "body of glory", by the Mother's first spiritual instructor. ...
... prayers, something very fine will happen to me." This is superstition, spread all over the world, but it has no value at all from the spiritual point of view. Source Spiritual Life: East and West Whatever difference there is between the West and the East in relation to spiritual life lies not in the inner being or nature, which is an invariable and constant thing, but in the mental habits ...
... open and sincere medium through which you can materialise that. "And I told him that I have felt the need to approach all that by living the experience within―and all united, people of the East and West, in a wide movement of love. Because that is the only possible concrete for building 'something else'." What he says is good. "And the Centre can give us this love at once because it is ...
... and sincere medium through which you can materialize that. And I told him that I have felt the need to approach all that by living the experience inwardly and all together, — people of the East and West — in a wide movement of love, because that is the only possible concrete for building "something else "... What he says is good. ... And the Centre can give us this love ...
... conduct of life and developed a discipline, an effort at inner perfection of the being; this reached a higher spiritual plane of knowledge in later Christian or Neo-pagan thought-structures where East and West met together. But later on the intellectualisation became complete and the connection of philosophy with life and its energies or spirit and its dynamism was either cut or confined to the little ...
... it from India: "I greatly appreciate the privilege of making the acquaintance of Savitri, a truly remarkable poem. I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world." These are not twopenny-halfpenny minds. And I am sure many others might be found to have similar ...
... Vishnu the World-Preserver and Dharma-Saviour, Shiva the Destroyer of Darkness. But naturally the stress falls on the main work for which the Truth-Consciousness that is Sri Aurobindo brought East and West together in one living light of all-round development. And many indeed are the flashing surprises of insight the seeker of the Spirit receives on turning the pages. The present reviewer has ...
... also because it was through the pointing finger of this Indianised Westerner that Dilip Kumar Roy the Westernised Indian first turned his eyes towards Sri Aurobindo who is the perfect synthesis of East and West. And they are excellent writing, too! It is impossible to thank enough our wanderer among great men for the opulence he has collected for us. But let us not forget that he is no mere collector: ...
... Nanak, Akbar, and a number of Sufi saints and philosophers. Even today, as we stand at the head of a new age, we have in India an imperative drive towards an unprecedented synthesis, in which both East and West can meet in a symphonic harmony. Page 141 This turn and tendency towards synthesis requires to be understood if we are not to be baffled by the complex system of ethics that grew and ...
... of all knowledge. The new movement is likely to be synthetic in character, reflecting various levels of consciousness which have come to be increasingly ' accepted during recent decades as East and West began to meet each other with fresh eyes of sympathy and understanding. This new movement is bound to influence our educational thought and experience, and it will be reinforced by the new ...
... returned to India in 1912 to practise at the Allahabad High Court as his father's junior. The seven years Nehru spent in England had left him, as he wrote some years later, "a queer mixture of the East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. " Nehru tried to settle down at Allahabad as a lawyer, but his heart was not in the legal profession. Deep within him there was a yearning which did not ...
... and spectators time to reach the banks of the Alpheus and return home. Several months before the Olympic Games were scheduled to begin, three sacred truce bearers of Zeus left Elis and headed east and west to every city-state on the Greek mainland and every Greek community overseas. These heralds were welcomed throughout the states of the Greek-speaking world. With official ceremony, the heralds ...
... sort of guerilla warfare in which they excel. SATYENDRA: Yes. PURANI: The R.A.F. are doing very good work. SRI AUROBINDO: I don't see how they can do much. The soldiers are pressed from east and west and if the supplies from Dunkirk are cut off, then without food and ammunition how are they to hold on? If the Belgian army has capitulated for lack of supplies, one can understand, but even then ...
... of a hundred nations, A huge roaring cosmic harmony, an eruption of laughter, A volcanic outburst of soul's release from death and pain, A giant symphony of orchestras from the East and West, Warriors on horseback descended galloping, brilliant From the high plateau, the hooves clanging, ringing In rhythm with a legion of timpani and drums, Trumpets striking ...
... Germany and Italy should make an axis with Japan. They will be exhausted after the war and lose all spring for action. Japan and these countries may help one another by trade agreements between East and West. Here the implication seems to be that Japan would represent the East and that the whole East would be left under Japanese influence. After some time Purani brought in the subject of art. ...
... Aurobindo and the Mother, which will make clear to our readers' mind what courses of study are offered to the students in Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and why. (1)"To unite East and West, to give the best of one to the other and make a true synthesis, a University will be established for all kinds of studies. Our school will form a nucleus of that University." (CWM, Vol. 12, p ...
... meeting between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is immeasurable and will reveal itself progressively through developments and manifestations in time. Superficially, it represented a meeting of the East and West but Sri Aurobindo himself was an embodiment of the East-West synthesis and the Mother a living expression of the finest flower of European culture along with spiritual affiliations with the East ...
... East Pakistan greater political autonomy, then delayed the commencement of the National Assembly, which in turn provoked a civil war. 15 376 SEAN P. WINCHELL For the next two years, as East and West Pakistan fought a bloody civil war, the ISI attempted to crush the Bengali resistance movement in East Pakistan. The ISI's efforts included the assassination of several prominent Bengali politicians ...
... defining a national identity from scratch, while trying to deal with these challenges. The administrative and ideological challenge was further exacerbated by the fact that the two wings of Pakistan, East and West, were separated by some 1000 miles of Indian Territory as well as by differences of language and political tradition. After the assassination of Jinnah's successor Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan's civil ...
... society, rather a group, and the name given to it was "Le cosmique". Cosmic means the whole world; in other words, what she was doing, what she was giving, was for the whole world, for all men, for East and West, for everybody. Also it means a cosmic or world-embracing consciousness. She was creating a new type of the mental world, through the highest mental development, to reach a still wider mind – beyond ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 East and West THE East is spiritual by nature, while the West is inclined towards materialism. The East seeks for the world beyond. The West wants to possess this mundane world. Every rule, however, admits of exception, but that does not make it a sham. The same principle holds good here. The East is not ...
... the very first lessons. Brahman has to be known in his four aspects; of these I shall tell you about the first just now. Of this first phase or aspect there are again four limbs. North, south, east and west, these four quarters are the four limbs of the first aspect of Brahman out of the four. Through the four quarters Brahman appears as the manifest One, prakasavan. And he who realises this manifest ...
... the Maharaja's ancestors were very powerful pirates and robbers. When they had made a lot of money from the robberies they became zamindars and settled down. In those days a lot of kings in East and West Bengal were descended from robbers. The kings of Lalgola originally came from Bihar^and their title was Rao. But they became Bengali and from Rao they became Ray. The 'Edward Recreation ...
... received from the West all that it can teach ? " But God knew what he was doing. He sent that man to Bengal and set him in the temple of Dakshineshwar in Calcutta, and from North and South and East and West, the educated men, men who were the pride of the University, Who had studied all that Europe can teach, came to fall at the feet of this ascetic. The work of salvation, the work of raising India ...
... (Dent & Sons, London, 1911). Gupta, Nolini Kanta. The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Parts 1-VIII (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry). Haas, William S. The Destiny of the Mind: East and West (Faber 8c Faber, London, 1956). Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition (Oxford University Press, London, 1951). People, Places and Books (Oxford University Press, London, 1953) ...
... Mitra, I think, is right when he says : " System building is not what we value in a j Philosopher. It is the power to kindle thought, to give new orientation, a new outlook. " Meeting of the East and West is Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy. Besides there are philosophers and philosophers. Some are professionals who live in the old orthodox mould and whom no philosophy touches; they remain like ...
... which we are familiar into the ideal philosophy, the philosophy that is to be the future philosophy! An outline of this philosophic yoga Sri Aurobindo has given in his writings. 71 'East' and 'West', of course, are blanket terms, and by "East' Professor Maitra meant the Indian philosophical tradition. Being "value-centric", Indian philosophy fuses the existential, logical and value aspects ...
... acrobatics of Logical Positivism, there is a deepening tendency towards the recovery of the ancient knowledge of the Orient and the Greeks, a synthesis of the essential elements of the philosophies of East and West, and even an intrepid envisaging of the dim heights of mysticism. This new trend is not so much visible in the veteran philosophers. Page 461 as in the young ones who have been touched ...
... sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima____ Let us not, either, select at random, make a nameless hotchpotch and then triumphantly call it the assimilation of East and West. We must begin by accepting nothing on trust from any source whatsoever, by questioning everything and forming our own conclusions. We need not fear that we shall by that process cease to be Indians ...
... it was not discovered by intellectual speculation, but by the mystics following an inner spiritual discipline. When, somewhere between the seventh and fifth centuries B.C., men began both in the East and West to Page 18 intellectualise knowledge, this Truth survived in the East; in the West where the intellect began to be accepted ...
... Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education On Education Languages To unite East and West, to give the best of one to the other and make a true synthesis, a university will be established for all kinds of studies. Our school will form a nucleus of that university. In our school I have put French as the medium of instruction. One of the reasons is ...
... can be no European respect for Asiatics, no sympathy between them except the "sympathy" of the master for the slave, no peace except that which is won and maintained by the Asiatic sword. East is East and West is West and divided they shall remain; their temporary contact is decreed from time Page 550 to time so that each may take from the other's civilisation, but the interchange does not ...
... clung to the idea tried to establish something like it on a small scale in the Manicktala Garden." The present text has been checked against a copy of the original pamphlet. Ethics East and West . Editorial title. Circa 1902 - 6. There is no positive evidence by which this fragment might be dated. The handwriting is that of the Baroda period. It was seized when Sri Aurobindo's house was ...
... which all these births are a long series of laborious steps. An involution of spirit in matter is the beginning, but a spiritual assumption of divine birth is the fullness of the evolution. East and West have two ways of looking at life which are opposite sides of one reality. Between the pragmatic truth on which the vital thought of modern Europe enamoured of the vigour of life, all the dance of ...
... modern times a stimulus of the profoundest creativity. Behind the stimulus was a versatile Page 5 personality who could claim to be representative of both East and West and who seemed to hold in himself, like a greater Leonardo da Vinci, the seeds of a new age. A Bengali by birth, he was yet educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England, first ...
... would call of course for considerable philosophical equipment." Finally, there is the statement equally worth marking: "I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world." I see too that in this Professor's last letter to you, he refers again to Savitri ...
... have received from the West all that it can teach?" But God knew what he was doing. He sent that man to Bengal and set him in the temple of Dakshineshwar in Calcutta, and from North and South and East and West, the educated men, men who were the pride of the university, who had studied all that Europe can teach, came to fall at the feet of this ascetic. The work of salvation, the work of raising India ...
... To think about our nation is first to think about our physical motherland. Stretching from the Himalayas in the north to Kanyakumari in the south, its boundaries are formed by the seas on the east and west. Ganga, Jamuna, Narmada, Krishna, Godavari flow here unceasingly; here are ancient cities, tall and imposing temples, artistically designed palatial homes. Such is the part of this earth we call ...
... e attaches to the celebration this year. It is possible that, before the day comes round again, the fatal complaisance and weakness of leaders and people may have effected the division between East and West Bengal which the hand of Lord Curzon attempted in vain. The Reform drives in the thin end of the wedge, the rulers know how to trust to time and national cowardice and inertia to do the rest. But ...
... resplendent Lakshmi, a smile on her lips, reigns steadfast among the Bharatas. पुरातनीं मातरमागमानामागच्छताञ्च स्तुवताञ्च भूमिम्। प्राच्यां प्रतीच्यां जगतोऽखिलस्य कोलाहलं वेगरवाञ्शृणोमि ॥९५॥ In East and West I hear the cry and stir of the whole world hastening with praise on its tongue to this country, the ancient Mother of the Vedas. सद्धर्मगर्भेति महाव्रतेति स्तुवन्ति सौम्याञ्च भयङ्करीञ्च। देव्याः ...
... vessel of unchanging truth; we must land again on the eternal rock of ages. Let us not, either, select at random, make a nameless hotchpotch and then triumphantly call it the assimilation of East and West. We must begin by accepting nothing on trust from any source whatsoever, by questioning everything and forming our own conclusions. We need not fear that we shall by that process cease to be Indians ...
... Where We Stand in Literature Draft A Where we stand, not only in literature, but in all things, is at or near a great turning point in which the thoughts and forms of East and West, both in an immense ferment of change, are working upon each other to produce something great, unforeseeable and unprecedented. From the less worldwide viewpoint which most nearly concerns us in ...
... centuries; Page 398 2. India's presence world-wide could be seen in the language and literature, religion and philosophy, and science and technology of many peoples, east and west, north and south; 3. A long spell of unrivalled power and prosperity made India self-centered and complacent so that she neglected the art of warfare and invited invaders from far ...
... remarkable poem... I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordi- 11. The English Language and The Indian Spirit, p. 11. Page 178 nary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world." (21 July, 1961) 12 Kathleen Raine must have smiled to herself as she read through ...
... the manifestation. It is, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Riddle of this World , a suprarational fact our mind cannot grasp and which therefore has led to endless speculation and controversy in East and West. Sri Aurobindo’s testimony to this point is quite clear and deeply moving. “When the Divine descends, he takes upon himself the burden of humanity in order to exceed it – he becomes human in ...
... of science, as practiced since “the scientific revolution” in the 17th century, is that it recognizes only matter as the substance of reality and the object of its study. The wisdom of ages in East and West has held that the layers of reality are those of matter, the life forces, mind, and the spirit, in the traditions called the “Chain of Being.” Since Lorentz and Einstein materialistic science has ...
... otherwise she will be crushed by the weight of her own unillumined knowledge and soulless organisation’ 30 — words which are gaining significance in the computer age. All human beings in East and West have a divine soul, therefore knowledge and wisdom are potentially present everywhere. ‘There is no law of Nature by which spiritual knowledge is confined to the East or must bear the stamp of an ...
... the road they would tread together, Aurobindo and Mirra nevertheless had met fully prepared for such a collaboration, which the First World War would interrupt but could not terminate. In them East and West met for a new, momentous turn in the global history of humanity. If these words seem an overstatement, this book will prove otherwise. The recently published Essays Divine and Human show that ...
... to those of us who have not known much or studied much of Sri Aurobindo, this small introduction may prove useful. Sri Aurobindo is unique in this sense that in history of culture both of East and West, there is none who can compare with or come near him in learning and scholarship. If only we take account of the vastness of his erudition, neither Plato nor Shankara nor both of them together approach ...
... call of course for considerable philosophical equipment." Finally, there is the statement equally worth marking: "I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world." I see too that in this Professor's last letter to you, he refers again to Savitri ...
... p. 21. 205. Ibid., p. 435. Page 234 206. Ibid., p. 432. 207. The Jerusalem Bible, Chronological Table, p. 467, col. 1. 208. C. Northcote Parkinson, East and West (London: John Murray, 1963), p. 119. 209. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 88. 210. Ibid., p. 87. 211. The Virginal Conception. .., p. 114. 212. The Jerusalem ...
... but then Zarathustra went forth from Ādarbaijan and preached Magism in Balkh (Bactria). His doctrines came into favour with King Gushtasp, and his son Isfandiyad spread the new faith both in East and West, both by 1."The Yavanas", The Age of Imperial Unity, pp. 113-14. 2. Ibid., p. 114, fn. 1. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 113. 5.Sachau, Albērūnī's India, p. 21. Page ...
... 22), p. 234. 20. Ken Wilber, "Psychologia Perennis: The Spectrum of Consciousness". Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1975, Vol. 7, p. 105. 21. Cited in Swami Ajaya, Psychotherapy East and West (Honesdale, Pennsylvania: The Himalayan International Institute, 1983), p. 137. 22. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), p. 401. 23. Ken Wilber, "Psychologia Perennis: The Spectrum of ...
... difficulties in himself or in the sadhana) they give should make them suspect as untrue. As for your great scientist I wonder who he had in mind as spiritual men—so far as I know history both in the east and west there have been any number of spiritual men and mystics who have had a great or fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge ...
... Page 713 (iii)Values at work-place (diligence as nucleus) (iv)Civilization and culture-centred social values (v)Spirit-centred global values (vi)Interface between East and West on values (vii)Inculcation of universal values 6.3We may accept the good things that the English brought, provided we develop our own spirit, our own intallectual vigour and vital capacities ...
... Yoganiketan, Portland Maine, 2002. Kedamath, Vivek ane Sadhana, Edited by Kishorlal Mashruwala and Ramanlal Modi, Navjiwan Prakashan, Ahmedabad, 1956. Krishna Roy, Henneneutics, East and West, Allied Publishers Ltd, Calcutta, 1993. Kunhan Raja, C., The Vedas, A Cultural Study, Andhra University, 1957. Leahey, T.H., A History of Modem Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological ...
... Dhammapada and Vivekacudamani by Samkaracharya *In the book, The Good Teacher and the Good Pupil, the authors have taken examples of good teachers and good pupils both from East and West so as to have ultimately a harmonious and universal philosophy of life. This also implies a philosophy of child-centred education, philosophy of life-long education and philosophy of constant youth ...
... doubt that the main cause was political, as well as economical. Troy occupied a very important position in the region and was the door to the riches of the Orient. It commanded most trade between East and West and levied heavy taxes on all ships crossing the Hellespont. Therefore, it is only understandable that, in their need for expansion, it became the target of the Greek peoples. In Sri Aurobindo's ...
... athletic activity and meditation can both generate energy: I liken... running itself to one of the major techniques of meditation, and sometimes prayer, employed by virtually all disciplines both East and West: the constant repetition of a particular word or series of words, whether it be, "Om, na pad na, om na," or the Hail Mary. It matters little what that particular philosophy or religion attaches ...
... about a certain attitude in life which I call: "Cerebral". One of my ex-husbands is German, one of the leading lights of German culture... He is one of the great votaries for this fusion of East and West, experimentations, new themes, etc. He kept saying, at is this, all the time, gods and goddesses! Evolve something new!" Once he said to me in an open seminar, "Where in your Indian dance can ...
... 1972) Karan Singh Prophet of Indian Nationalism, a study of Political Thought of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (1893-1910) (Allen & Unwin, London 1967) Maitra, S.K. The Meeting of East and West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy (Ashram Press,1956) Mitra, S.K. The Liberator (Jaico, Bombay, 1954) India-Vision and Fulfilment (Taraporevala Sons & Co., Bombay, 1972) ...
... society, rather a group, and the name given to it was Le cosmique. "Cosmic" means the whole world; in other words, what she was doing, what she was giving, was for the whole world, for all men, for East and West, for everybody. Also it means a cosmic or world-embracing consciousness. She was creating a new type of mental world, through the highest mental development, to reach a still wider mind—beyond the ...
... the very first lessons. Brahman has to be known in his four aspects; of these I shall tell you about the first just now. Of this first phase or aspect there are again four limbs. North, south, east and west, these four quarters are the four limbs of the first aspect of Brahman out of the four. Through the four quarters Brahman appears · as the manifest One, prakāśavān. And he who realises this manifest ...
... making itself felt. As Netter said in his third report (March 1970): When the communications satellite is put up over India in 1972, the greatest and most dynamic confrontation of the East and West in the history of the world will have begun. The peak of Western technology will be joined with the peak of Eastern spirituality.... In a Yoga which demands total transformation there ...
... make a deep study of the poem itself, and he was profoundly enough affected to call it "a truly remarkable poem", and add: I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modem cosmopolitan world. 87 Again: The poem has impressed me by its sublimity, richness of imagery ...
... there's a Divinity that shapes our ends still: God knew. what he was doing. He sent that man to Bengal and set him in the temple of Dakshineshwar in Calcutta, and from North and South and East and West, the educated men, men who were the pride of the university, who Page 60 had studied all that Europe can teach, came to fall at the feet of this ascetic. The work of salvation, ...
... 15 August 1949, he pleaded for a transcendence of the East-West differentiation: Page 487 There is a common hope, a common destiny, both spiritual and material, for which both [East and West] are needed as co-workers. It is no longer towards division and difference that we should turn our minds, but on unity, union, even oneness necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ...
... and a preparation for her work in India, which is a work for the whole of humanity, and seeing in the identity between her ideal and that of Sri Aurobindo an evidence of the decree of God that East and West must meet as Shiva and Shakti, self-manifesting Light and realising and transforming Force, to raise man Page 5 from mind to supermind and convert his life of division and ...
... and a preparation for her work in India, which is a work for the whole of humanity, and seeing in the identity between her ideal and that of Sri Aurobindo an evidence of the decree of God that East and West must meet as Shiva and Shakti, self-manifesting Light and realising and transforming Force, to raise man from mind to supermind and convert his life of division and discord into the creative unity ...
... have emerged in the first place, short of an aberration whose responsibility was uncertain among God, the Devil, and ourselves. But our materialist science would soon level all that, in both East and West, with the same murky, utilitarian tide that now covers every continent. Of course, one can still enjoy indoor meditations and individual “liberations,” which are even quite refreshing in the ...
... y intellectual, mechanical and organised in the Mongolian empires. East, West and South had their widely separate spirit and traditions, but one basis of spirituality, common tendencies and such commerce of art, ideas and information as the difficulties of communication allowed, preserved the fundamental unity of Asia. East & West only met at their portals, in war oftener than in peace and through... Notes and Fragments on Various Subjects Notes and Fragments on Various Subjects The East and the West Essays Divine and Human Towards Unification The progress of distance-bridging inventions, our modern facility for the multiplication of books and their copies and the increase of human curiosity are rapidly converting humanity into a single in... shock and contact influenced but did not mingle with each other. It was the discovery of Indian philosophy and poetry which broke down the barrier. For the first time Europe discovered something in the East which she could study not only with the curiosity which she gave to Semitic and Mongolian ideas and origins, but with sympathy and even with some feeling of identity. This metaphysics, these epics and ...
... northwards and that the first Mongolian movement was from Central Asia to the east, we shall have the necessary conditions. We may thus explain also the Sanskrit terms for the four directions; for entering India from the west and following this line in their early colonisation, the east would be in front of the Aryans, pūrva , the west behind, paścima , the south on their right, dakṣiṇa , while the name... importance in religious ceremonies. Might not the direction adopted for their writing be determined by some difference in their attitude towards the direction of the sun in its daily movement from east to west? The difference of attitude can only be explained if we suppose that for some reason the Aryan forefathers had their faces turned southwards, the Mesopotamian northwards and the Mongolian eastwards ...
... I continued to receive quite a number of letters about the brochure. Balkrishna Poddar of SABDA sent me a copy of a letter received from Jyotipriya of East-West Cultural Centre, U.S.A.: We have happily received your airmail package of three books—Matrimandir Auroville—on Thursday morning previous to our regular Thursday evening group on Sri Aurobindo's ...
... Does God exist?' and 'Can the existence of God be rationally proved?'-these questions have occupied the best minds of the East and the West through long ages of history. In India, we find in the different systems of philosophy, these questions and their answers. In the West, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle have been witnessed as gripped by these questions. In the Medieval history of Europe, we find... own Ontological Arguments in the context of their own systems of philosophy. Along with the Ontological Argument, the Cosmological Argument and Teleological Argument have flourished both in the East and the West. Immanuel Kant criticised the Ontological Argument but supplied a new argument, the Moral Argument. However, after Kant's refutation of the Ontological Argument, and particularly under the influence... in this context that it seems worthwhile to present in a short monograph an account of the intellectual proofs of the existence of God, particularly as they have been formulated and discussed in the West. This monograph has, however, also added a few pages which summarise the account of the Indian intellectual proofs of the existence of God. This monograph has devoted some space to the original statements ...
... On 17.7.1972 the Mother gave names to the four pillars of the Matrimandir as follows: Mahakali — North Maheshwari — South Mahalaksmi — East Mahasaraswa — West Each pillar represents one of the four powers of the Supreme Mother, Aditi. Sri Aurobindo has written in his book The Mother : Four great Aspects of the Mother, four of her... compassion and sovereign and surpassing majesty and all-ruling greatness. (Mahalakshmi — East) A third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace. (Mahasaraswati — West) The fourth is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge ...
... Notes and Fragments on Various Subjects Notes and Fragments on Various Subjects The East and the West Essays Divine and Human China, Japan and India It is significant of the tendencies of the twentieth century that all its great and typical events should have occurred no longer as in the last few centuries in Europe, but in Asia. The Russo-Japanese ...
... a big self-sufficient house in François Martin St., No. 37. It had two entrances — one on the north and the other on the west. This well-built structure stood at the junction of two streets. Rue Francois Martin ran from north to south whereas Rue Law de Lauriston from east to west. The western gate faced Rue François Martin. This was evidently the postern gate, the northern indeed was the main entrance;... cooks, servants, the menials. I have said before that the house was big but it looked desolate. The upper storey held spacious rooms and a spacious verandah. The east and the west ends had both an open terrace facing south. On the west, at the corner there was a wide room, adjoining which was another room and then the open terrace. Both the terraces had seats under the parapets. I mention this because ...
... facts of life and the shocks of a rapidly changing movement.... The message of the East to the West is a true message, "only by finding himself can man be saved," and "what shall it profit a man though he gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul." ... The message the West brings to the East is a true message. Man also is God and it is through his developing manhood that he approaches ...
... , at least to our barbaric eastern notion of aesthetics as the splendid face of occidental civilisation. But if circumstances have changed, the essential opposition abides; East is still East in its soul and West is still West and the misunderstanding of continents still flourishes, not only in the minds of politicians and "statesmen",—where one would naturally expect to find it, since it is there... Notes and Fragments on Various Subjects Notes and Fragments on Various Subjects The East and the West Essays Divine and Human A Misunderstanding of Continents The peculiar and striking opposition of thought, temperament, culture and manners between Asia and Europe has been a commonplace of observation and criticism since the times when Herodotus ...
... Kon-Tiki: in 1947 the Kon-Tiki expedition led by the Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl set out to prove that ancestors of Polynesians could have come by sea from South America, pushed from east to west by winds and currents, and settled on these islands in Pre-Columbian times. A primitive balsa wood raft was built by Heyerdahl as a copy of a prehistoric South American vessel. Constructed of nine ...
... very profound, most varied and highly creative. Hailing from the West, She settled in India, her "spiritual home" for all her long life, and sought to build up a new spirituality on the long traditions of India, a pathway of future growth for mankind as a whole. She created a comprehensive new Sadhana for the seekers of the East and the West, a large new process of education for children from all over ...
... aspect makes the book of poems somewhat odd, I thought it worthwhile in the context of Savitri . As a very special note of appreciation I must say a few words about Debashish Banerji of the East-West Cultural Center at Los Angeles. Page v When I sent the "cantos" to him as an e-mail attachment I had requested him to go through them carefully and offer his comments and corrections ...
... beckoned those who are ready to recognise themselves as their children. Officially, outwardly you may have a life apart, but, just as many shall come from the East and the West to sit at the table of the Divine, so too many may go to the East and the West and yet be in spirit where Sri Aurobindo's ambrosia and the Mother's nectar are invisibly but most palpably spread out. 9.11.1979 Page 193... there at times. I mean an attitude which can allow one to smile again and again despite the sad circumstances. This comes of not laying on the outer life such an enormous stress as falls on it in the West. Even bodily infirmities and accidents don't loom very large in the Indian mind. Provided the lesser looming does not render one passive, it tends to make for more of quiet happiness than elsewhere ...
... Child Matters; Integral development of the child that unites scientific realism and aesthetic creativity under the uplifting power of the synthesis of science and spirituality; Synthesis of the East and the West, of the ancient and the modern, by means of intense studies of the lessons of history directed towards the task of building a new world of knowledge, freedom and prosperity that are denied to ...
... and contagious enthusiasm. Teachers of today and tomorrow need to have new programmes of training, which will take care of new roles of the teachers and new trends of the synthesis of East and the West, and as agents of change from old to the new. We need to have new types of teachers who can find their home anywhere and everywhere and who have abilities, - linguistic and professional ...
... of scientific, philosophical, artistic and literary expression. Thirdly, we may take into account the contemporary fact that the entire world is moving rapidly towards the synthesis of the East and the West, and in that context, it seems obvious that our teaching-learning material should foster the gradual familiarisation of students with global themes of universal significance as also those that ...
... the fifth house where Sri Aurobindo lived for several years. "It had two entrances— one on the north and the other on the west. This well-built structure stood at the junction of two streets. Rue Francois Martin ran from north to south whereas Rue Law de Laurelton from east to west. The western gate faced Rue Francois Martin. This was evidently the postern gate, the northern indeed was the main entrance;... reached there he took me up straight to Sri Aurobindo's room. "I saw Sri Aurobindo the second time thus: "He was in his room seated in a wooden chair beside a table, writing something in a book, facing west. He moved his book a little, faced south and welcomed us both with a gleam of kindness in his eyes. I looked at him and when after a minute Page 393 I turned I found Bejoy Kanta was... day, I began going straight from school at 5 p.m. to Sri Aurobindo's house to see him. Before I reached there—a little later than five-fifteen—Sri Aurobindo would come out of his room and sit on the west side of the southern terrace. I used to stand before him and go on talking. I would forget then that I knew little English. Day after day I would tell him fluently and unwaveringly my home-story, etc ...
... scientific, philosophical, artistic and literary expression. Thirdly, we may take into account the contemporary fact that the entire world is moving rapidly towards the synthesis of the East and the West, and in that context, it seems obvious that our teaching-learning material should foster the gradual familiarisation of students with global themes of universal significance as also those that ...
... within us. This is the truth that returns to the East from the West translated into the language of the higher truth the East already possesses; and it is an ancient knowledge. The East also is awaking to the message. The danger is that Asia may accept it in the European form, forget for a time her own law and nature and either copy blindly the West or make a disastrous amalgam of that which she has... it is the power of the Self of things that expresses itself in their forms and processes. The message of the East to the West is a true message, "Only by finding himself can man be saved," and "what shall it profit a man though he gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" The West has heard the message and is seeking out the law and truth of the soul and the evidences of an inner reality greater... life that the fullest and most absolute attainment of the spiritual can be securely based. This knowledge the ancients of the East possessed and practised; it has been dimmed in knowledge and lost in practice by their descendants. The message the West brings to the East is a true message. Man also is God and it is through his developing manhood that he approaches the godhead; Life also is the Divine ...
... province. But the ruling elite of West Pakistan was so dismayed by the turn of events and by the Sheikh's demands for autonomy that instead of allowing him to rule East Pakistan, they put him in jail. Origins of the Crisis The dawn of 1971 saw a great human tragedy unfolding in erstwhile East Pakistan. Entire East Pakistan was in revolt. In the West, General Yahya Khan, who had... the Pure). Pakistan was originally made up of two distinct and geographically unconnected parts termed West and East Pakistan. West Pakistan was made up of a number of races including the Punjabis (the most numerous), Sindhis, Pathans, Balochis, Mohajirs (Muslim refugees from India) and others. East Pakistan, on the other hand, was much more homogeneous and had an overwhelming Bengali-speaking population... Khan, and accelerated his downfall in 1969. The revolt was especially strong in East Pakistan since it had been seriously neglected during Ayub's period. The gap in per capita income between the two wings had doubled in percentage terms, so that in 1969/70 the per capita income in the West was 61% higher than in the East. Constitutionally, Ayub Khan should have turned over power to the speaker ...
... scientific, philosophical, artistic and literary expression. Thirdly, we may take into account the contemporary fact that the entire world is moving rapidly towards the synthesis of the East and the West, and in that context, it seems obvious that our teaching learning material should foster the gradual familiarisation of students with global themes of universal significance as also those that ...
... rationalistic, scientific and technocratic culture, and discovering in his teachings the synthetic spiritual vision, the all-reconciling comprehensive outlook, the happy fusion of the ideals of the East and the West, and, above all, the authentic, divine dynamism, capable of transforming human nature and creating a new world order, which alone can lift mankind from the morass of degeneracy into which it has... contents. Translations of some Sanskrit words and phrases have been appended in the footnotes. The demand for this book is one of the minor indications of the growing interest the elite of the West are taking in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's Integral Yoga and philosophy. It is heartening to find that many eminent thinkers of Europe and America are turning to Sri Aurobindo as the only hope and ...
... History of Indian Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1932, Vols. I and II; 1940, Vol. Ill; 1949, Vols. IV and V. Deutch Eliot, Advaita Vedanta: A philosophical reconstruction, East- West Centre Press, 1969, Honolulu. Page 77 Flengen, Owen, Consciousness Reconsidered, MIT Press, 1992, Cambridge: Massachusetts. Heimann, Betty, Indian and Western Philosophy, A study ...
... scientific, philosophical, artistic and literary expression. Thirdly, we may take into account the contemporary fact that the entire world is moving rapidly towards the synthesis of the East and the "West, and in that context, it seems obvious that our teaching-learning material should foster the gradual familiarisation of students with global themes of universal significance as also those that ...
... of scientific, philosophical, artistic and literary expression, Thirdly, we may take into account the contemporary fact that the entire world is moving rapidly towards the synthesis of the East and the West, and in that context, it seems obvious that our teaching-learning material should foster the gradual familiarisation of students with global themes of universal significance as also those that ...
... from nation, one part of the world from another; each nation, each man should be glad to teach what he knows. The peoples of the West bring to the East their knowledge of science, technology, economics, etc. From all time the peoples of the East have given to the West their philosophical and ethical knowledge. Thus India has given to other countries the knowledge contained in the Vedas and the teachings... sacred books. Even a child can give knowledge. One child can teach the alphabet to another. One child can teach another how to do simple arithmetic, or to tell the North from the South, the East from the West, or to tie a knot, to play a game, to sow a seed, etc. We can all be givers. A holy book says, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Page 248 ...
... of scientific, philosophical, artistic and literary expression. Thirdly, we may take into account the contemporary fact that the entire world is moving rapidly towards the synthesis or the East and the West, and in that context, it seems obvious that our teaching-learning material should foster the gradual familiarisation of students with global themes of universal significance as also those that ...
... its inner want and need and hankering – and fulfilment. The West shall come to the East and be reborn. That is the prophecy of occult seers and sages. I speak of Roerich as a Western soul, but more precisely perhaps he is a soul of the mid-region (as also in another sense we shall see subsequently) intermediary between the East and the West. His external make-up had all the characteristic elements... with the unspoilt green sap of life – something in the manner of Whitman. And that makes him all the more representative of the young and ardent West yearning for the light that was never on sea or land. Is it not strange that one should look to the East for the light? There is a light indeed that dwells in the setting suns, but that is the inferior light, the light that moves level with the ... - Vol. 2 Nicholas Roerich Ex oriente lux. Out of the East the Light, and that light is of the nature and substance of beauty, of creative and dynamic beauty in the life the spirit. This, I suppose, is Roerich's message in a nutshell. The Light of the East is always the light of the “ample consciousness” that dwells on the heights of our being in God. ...
... great needs of our times is to arrive at the synthesis of the old and the new, of the East and the West. If children are the makers of the future, we need to synthesize modern knowledge relating to the child with the traditional knowledge about the child that is still available to us both in the East and the West as a heritage of the past. What is the meaning of the human child? Is the human ...
... ideals of the West are not the mainspring of the political movements in the East, and those who do not realise this great truth, are mistaken; for they suppose that the history of Europe is a sure and certain guide to India in her political development. A great deal of the political history of Europe will be repeated in Asia, no doubt; democracy has travelled from the East to the West in the shape of... home, it will be purged of its foreign elements and restored to its original purity. The movements of the nineteenth century in India were European movements, they were coloured with the hues of the West. Instead of seeking for strength in the spirit, they adopted the machinery and motives of Europe, the appeal to the rights of humanity or the equality of social status and an impossible dead level which... spirit was India intended to receive the mighty opportunity which the impact of Europe gave to her. When the danger was greatest, a number of great spirits were sent to stem the tide flowing in from the West and recall her to her mission; for, if she had gone astray the world would have gone astray with her. Her mission is to point back humanity to the true source of human liberty, human equality, human ...
... was an open verandah, covered on three sides (east, west and south) with big curtains; the windows you now see on these sides were put in much later. The hall to its north, where Mother distributed Prosperity 3 blessings, was then her Stores. The room to the north of this hall was Mother's room (it was later to be my room). The corner room (to the east of the hall) was Sri Aurobindo's. The room to... 41, Rue Francois Martin which came to be called the Guest House. × The present reading room to the east of the Reception Hall in the Ashram main building became Amrita's room after Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved into this house in 1922. On 8 February 1927, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother moved to the... × Datta (Offered), name given by Sri Aurobindo to Dorothy Hodgson, an Irishwoman who joined the Mother in 1916. Later she shifted to the house to the west of the Ashram, now 14, Rue de la Marine. × Kanailal Ganguly settled here in July 1923. See his “As ...
... 733-43; later it also appeared as an independent booklet. He was an Ashramite. JUDITH TYBERG (Jyotipriya): Sanskritist and an accomplished scholar, she was the founder of the East-West Cultural Center at Los Angeles. This is one of the first places in the USA where Sri Aurobindo's relics are installed. The Drama of Integral Self-Realisation (pages 419-28) was published ...
... and do unpardonable violence to the spirit of the original, yet familiarised the average reader in England with the stories of the epics and thus made the way easy for future interpreters of the East to the West. In brief, this may be said in unstinted praise of Romesh Dutt, that he was a gigantic worker and did an immense amount of pioneer spadework by which the future will benefit. We have dwelt ...
... Cycle Sri Aurobindo’s writings are not only based on a severely tested spiritual experience but also on a vast erudition. He was thoroughly familiar with the tradition and cultures of the East and the West and some of their principal languages, and he had imbibed the literature and the poetry of their epics and lyrics, Homer and Shelley as well as Vyasa and Kalidasa. He admired Plato greatly and ...
... of Indian Philosophy, Cambridge University , Press, Cambridge, 1932, Vols. I and II; 1940, Vol. Ill; 1949, Vols. IV and V Deutch Eliot, Advaita Vedanta; A philosophical reconstruction, East- West Centre Press, 1969, Honolulu, Diwanji, P. C., Bhagavad Gita and Astādhyāyī, Annuls of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1949, Poona. Flengen, Owen, Consciousness Reconsidered,... Sharma, B.N.K., History of the Dvaita School, Motilal Banarasi Dass, Delhi, 1981. Page 109 Thibaut, G., The Vedānta Sūtras with Śankara's commentary, the Sacred books of the East, F. MaxMūller (Ed.), Motilal Banarasi Dass, 1962, Delhi, Vol. XXXIV. Upadhayaya Gopal Baldev, Bhāratiya Darśana, Chokhamba, 1984, Varanasi. Winternitz, M. History of Indian Literature ...
... My work is to bring celebrated musicians from the West to India and organise their concerts in the metros here and take good musicians from India and organise their concerts in Europe, America, Japan, China, etc. After seeing your programme last night, I was greatly impressed. I have listened to the best of musicians from both the East and the West but I had never felt before the kind of spiritual ...
... Auroville, as if to blend all those handfuls of earth into a single true Earth, one, an earth of truth—and it was not a question of "Auroville," or any city here or there, any place from the East or the West: quite simply a place called Earth, the little orange ball wrapped in its evil spell. They were 147 wanting to undo the spell. On March 8, nine days later, out of the blue, the students of Warsaw... Calcutta and Madras—all the way to Prague in November. Jan Palach would set himself on fire in the first days of January, January 16, while the obscure rumblings of the old Falsehood rolled from East to West and everywhere: in the Pacific, France won the dubious honor of becoming the fifth nuclear nation. There was the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of John Kennedy's brother... for the watchmen of the cage; the rightist, the leftist, the man in the center all discover there is no longer any center or direction and the ship is sinking on every side; people from the East, people from the West, yellow and red, look unbelievingly at those termite walls that imprison them in nonexistent ideologies; the young, the little ones, the not-yet-suffocated, look at the piles of equations ...
... describes more graphically this truth and the experience of it. It is said there that the sun has five-we note the familiar five-movements of rising and setting: (i) from East to West, (ii) from South to North, (iii) from West to East, (iv) from North to South and (v) from above-from the Zenith-downward. These are the five normal and apparent movements. But there is a sixth one; rather it is not a movement... day just half the solar disc is visible above the horizon). The sun may be said there to move in the direction East-South-West-North and again East. Indeed the Upanishad mentions the positions of the sun in that order and gives a character to each successive station. The Ray from the East is red, symbolising the Rik, the Southern Ray is white, symbolising the Yajur, the Western Ray is black symbolising ...
... describes more graphically this truth and the experience of it. It is said there that the sun has five—we note the familiar five—movements of rising and setting: (i) from East to West, (ii) from South to North, (iii) from West to East, (iv) from North to South and (v) from above—from the Zenith—downward. These are the five normal and apparent movements. But there is a sixth one; rather it is not a movement... day just half the solar disc is visible above the horizon). The sun may be said there to move in the direction East-South-West-North and again East. Indeed the Upanishad mentions the positions of the sun in that order and gives a character to each successive station. The Ray from the East is red, symbolising the Rik, the Southern Ray is white, symbolising the Yajur, the Western Ray is black symbolising ...
... much to disturb even this passive sentiment in the people. But there has always been another kind of loyalty also in this country, and that species of loyalty exists still among us, both in East Bengal and West Bengal, though it has been subjected during the last eight or nine months to a strain which would kill it altogether in any other country, and most of all in that country to which the Englishman... Loyalty and Disloyalty in East Bengal 30-August-1906 The Englishman and those who are evidently anxious to set the machinery of relentless state prosecutions against the leaders of the present national movement in this province, need not take so much trouble to prove that there is considerable disaffection and disloyalty in East Bengal which ought at once to be put down... cowardice of the people would be an act of fatal folly on the part of the Government or their advisers. East Bengal, at least, has never been noted for such cowardice. It is not fear, but self-restraint due to considerations of larger and higher interests, and the command of their leaders that kept East Bengal so quiet under all these enormities during the last nine or ten months. But this loyalty also ...
... booklet, to start the standardised series with "Essays on the Gita" and to follow with the "Life Divine". I would have no objection to such an order of issue. I have received the copy of the "East-West" magazine and the gift-book. It is not at all surprising that Swami Yogananda should have been so successful in America. His propaganda is admirably suited to the practical mentality of a western ...
... omni-effectivity is rendered more concentrated because, as a result of a long and pervasive impress on her by the Western mind through her past British rulers, she is a meeting-ground of the East and the West, and the consciousness with which she works is profoundly Asian with yet a strong European colour. In rising victorious over the tide of decadence and debasement now sweeping across the earth ...
... was over... ... and the night became as quiet as soft falling snow... ...The grandmother took you up in her arms, and said, "He will walk in beauty... to the east..." "...to the west, to the north, to the south, he will walk in beauty..." "...forever." And I was born strong, Wasn't I, Grandfather? No, you were not strong. You were ...
... both wide and profound and which aspires to reach higher levels of knowledge. A great effort needs to be made, therefore, to ensure that learning material should have a vast canvas where the East and the West can meet and were subtlety and complexity of life are portrayed in a stimulating manner. Subjects and topics must be presented which develop sense of wonder. There are a number of topics ...
... its great achievements of the past in various fields and its capacity to rise from the present stage of renaissance to higher heights so as to build up a vast new synthesis of the East Page 129 and the West which retains, however, the fundamental springs of Indianness. Thirdly, the examination system in the framework of teacher education will be so changed that every candidate ...
... young men. Next day, on the forenoon of 1 st October, the four of them moved to their new residence. The move brought them from the west of the canal to its east. The canal, running north to south, divides the town into two quarters: European (east) and native (west), or as the French put it, 'ville blanche 'and. ville noire' (white town, black town). This N°4() Rue du Pavilion (now Rue Suffren)... Suffren) was to be their first rented house. The street is south of the big central park, and runs north-south, parallel to the canal. The door of N°40 opens to the east. There is a lane at the back of the house. Otherwise only houses. As one stepped in through the large Page 177 door, one saw a garden to the left. A smallish one, but with trees. Particularly a Neem tree... assuming, that is, that there were any." Pondicherry is notorious for its hot climate. After all it is not quite 12° north of the Equator (to be precise: 11°58' Page 182 North 79°54' East will find the spot on a map). These young men did not have any furniture for themselves. But they had a lot of books. Not at once though. Sri Aurobindo, however, had two or three trunks full of ...
... nothing of any Aryan invasion of India from north-west and outside of India, nor of any advance of the Aryans from the west to east. On the other hand, it speaks of an Aila outflow, the expansion of the Druhyus through the north-west into the countries beyond. Accordingly, Rigveda X, 75, mentions rivers in their order from the east to the north-west, beginning with the Ganges, in accordance with the... quotes the fifth stanza which lists "ten streams, small and great", all within India itself and, strangely enough, "in order from east to west", as Basham himself notes, 23 instead of the opposite which we should expect of people who are claimed to have travelled from west to east. When we consider all the rivers listed, we have only a pointer to Afghānistān with the Kubhā (Kabul), Krumu (Kurram), Gomatī... the mode in which the Vedic Aryans entered India... If, as may be the case, the Aryan invaders of India entered by the western passes of the Hindu Kush and proceeded thence through the Punjab to the east, still that advance is not reflected in the Rigveda, the bulk at least of which seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvatī river, south of the modern Ambālā". 14 Thus, according ...
... on, and the sudden shock of the bizarre which repels occidental imagination the moment it comes in contact with Puranic literature, reveals to us where the line lies that must eternally divide East from West. The difference is one of root-temperament and therefore unbridgeable. There is the mental composition which has no facet towards imaginative religion, and if it accepts religion at all, requires ...
... asked the Mother to select two people to give talks on Sri Aurobindo in connection with his Birth Centenary year; one to go to the East and one to go to the West. Sisir Kumar Ghosh was chosen to go to Japan and other Eastern countries and the Mother chose me to go to the West. I asked the Mother. “Why me? I am not a speaker on philosophy.” Then Mother said, “I have chosen you, so you must go!” The Mother... top. Thus was the Samadhi built. The Samadhi was built according to the same outward pattern as the flower bed that had existed there. The top consisted of a long rectangular pattern going from east to west and next to it was a square. The Samadhi on top has kept that same pattern for flower decorations. The longer rectangle below houses the two rooms where the bodies of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ...
... English was as you may guess the “King’s” — spiced with an occasional “sala;” or some other Urdu or Hindi word (expressive if not expletive). His work in the D.R. over, he may come out and head East, West, North or South — as fancy took him. Once I happened to meet him heading North from the Ashram. I asked him, “Where are you going?” He replied, “Home.” I said, “I thought you lived in Parc?” He said ...
... civilisation—but what is missing is the organising power—It is that you waked in the dream. Since it was near Egypt you were probably Antony who attempted blindly Page 1404 a union of East & West typified by his connection with Cleopatra. As for the great toe of the foot, that is difficult. I will try to consider. Not at all—They [ Antony and Augustus ] were greatly attracted to each other ...
... sincere means through which you can concretise that. Then I told him how I felt the need for all of us to approach all this while living the experience inwardly and unitedly—people from the East and the West—in a vast movement of love, because it is the only "concrete" possible for building "something else".... What he says is fine. ...And that Center can give us that love right now, ...
... Punjab and Northern and Central India, Afghanistan and perhaps Persia and distinguished in its cult by the symbols of the Sun, the Fire and the Soma sacrifice, and the un-Aryan occupying the East, South and West, the nature of which it is quite impossible to restore from the scattered hints which are all we possess." 4 Synthesising the three statements, we may say: "Accord- Page 72 ...
... available in the history of relevant literature. A few broad rough strokes have been cast, and many important systems of yoga such as those of the Veda and the Upanishads, and many traditions of the East and the West have been either just mentioned or altogether unpardonably ignored. (a) From what has been indicated here and what can be gathered, — if we make a studious and critical study of the important ...
... but will also create a new body, new currents of life and expression and the powerful mentality capable of highest criticality as also of a new synthesis of the disciplines of knowledge of the East and the West, and of science and spirituality. The life and work of Sri Aurobindo, the foremost philosopher and mystic of our times, illustrate that promise and its progressive fulfilment. IlI ... arts to such a degree that there was nothing in the cultural domains which was not attempted and was not brought up to a high level of achievement. Page 209 A few invasions from the North-West marked the chequered history of Northern India. This was a period of great tide but also from certain points of view a beginning of decline, although of a slow decline. The people of India had lived... and had passed through infancy, early manhood and had even reached adulthood. Signs of exhaustion had begun to appear. And this was followed by the third period during which invasions from North-West became frequent and a new force of Islam entered into India. Two great efforts were made to arrive at a harmony between the old and powerful Indian culture and the religion and power of Islam. These ...
... but will also create a new body, new currents of life and expression and the powerful mentality capable of highest criticality as also of a new synthesis of the disciplines of knowledge of the East and the West, and of science and spirituality. The life and work of Sri Aurobindo, the foremost philosopher and mystic of our times, illustrate that promise and its progressive fulfilment. Let us underline... various sciences and arts to such a degree that there was nothing in the cultural domains which was not attempted and was not brought up to a high level of achievement. A few invasions from the North-West marked the chequered history of Northern India. This was a period of great tide but also from certain points of view a beginning of decline, although t>f a slow decline. The people of India had lived... and had passed through infancy, early manhood and had even reached adulthood. Signs of exhaustion had begun to appear. And this was followed by the third period during which invasions from North-West became frequent and a new force of Islam entered into India. Two great efforts were made to arrive at a harmony between the old and powerful Indian culture and the religion and power of Islam. These ...
... spice trade that these West European powers muscled belligerently into it, and later became imperial powers. The Danes also were a part of that power game, and got a few toeholds in India. If we look back, we find that after the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, Muslim merchants had monopolized in a couple of centuries all trade between the East and the West. But canons placed aboard... that he was able to send home some pieces of information about the Page 127 east coast of Africa and the sailing in the India Ocean. Armed with that scanty knowledge, Vasco da Gama, then a young man of thirty, started out with four ships on 8 July 1497. Helped by Indian fishermen off the east coast of Africa, he reached Calicut on 20 May the next year. Almost simultaneously, the... measure more than 225 degrees; he imagined that Cathay— that is how China was then known—was very close to Europe by the western route, and India was half the distance across the Atlantic as travelling east across land. A mistaken belief, of course. But, oh, how often our mistakes lead us to great discoveries ! The Genoese set out with a fleet of three ships on 3 August 1492. Seventy days later, on ...
... husband. It was this oath that brought many Greek princes and their armies to Troy to support Menelaus' cause. Helios: The sun-god. He is conceived as a charioteer who drives daily from east to west across the sky. He was replaced by Apollo in late Greek and Roman mythology. Page 117 Hellenes: The name, originally, of a tribe which settled in Phthia in the southeast of Thessaly;... with Greek warriors, was an idea of Odysseus. Olympians: The twelve high gods of Greek religion, so named because they dwelt on Mount Olympus. Olympus: Mountain at the east end of the range forming the northern boundary of Thesasly and Greece proper. It was regarded as the home of the chief Greek gods, led by Zeus. Oreads: Nymphs of the mountains and hills. ... Pallas: A title of Athene, of uncertain meaning and origin. Pandemian: Of Pandemos, "goddess of all the people", an epithet of Aphrodite. Paphos: A city a short distance inland from the west coast of Cyprus and the site of a famous temple of Aphrodite. Paris: A son of Priam and Hecuba, was reputed to be the handsomest of mortal men. Hence, in the quarrel over the golden apple, ...
... order. So far as there is agreement and coincidence, it is because there is contained in them what is common (a certain conversion of the consciousness) to all spiritual disciplines; for all, in East or in West, have a common core of experience—it is in their developments, range, turn to this or that aspect or else their will towards the totality of the Truth that they differ. Page 510 Theosophy ...
... a great patriot, though not a politician. He was resolved to work not only for a co-ordination between India's past and present, a fusion of the best elements, but also for a synthesis of the East with the West, a "union" between them. The world outlook of Rabindranath Tagore drew eager response from Europe's great writers and philosophers, and Remain Rolland voiced a common feeling when he stated that ...
... languages, his luminous interpretations of India's past, his epoch- making contributions to Yoga, and to philosophy which offer the best framework for reconciling most of the antinomies of the East and the West, - none of these has created any enthusiasm among our professional intellectuals in the universities. His work as a literary figure, as the creator of a new kind of poetry, is the one small... And the transfiguration and the ecstasy. 20 MANGESH V. NADKARNI References 1. Sri Aurobindo: a biography and a history(1985) 2. The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy(1968) 3. Reminiscences of Sri Aurobindo in Mother India(1972) 4. The Life Divine, Centenary Edition , p. 24. 5. Supramental Manifestation... alienation arises out of his theory of the nature of man. In the West there is the liberal conception of man competing with the Marxist conception. The liberal conception of man was developed by such classical writers as Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill and is enshrined in the liberal democracies of the West and is incorporated in the thinking of influential philosophers like ...
... nothing of any Aryan invasion of India from north-west and outside of India, nor of any advance of the Aryans from the west to east. On the other hand, it speaks of an Aila outflow, the expansion of the Druhyus through the north-west into the countries beyond. Accordingly, Rigveda X, 75, mentions rivers in their order from the east to the north-west, beginning with the Ganges, in accordance with the... quotes the fifth stanza which lists "ten streams, small and great", all within India itself and, strangely enough, "in order from east to west", as Basham himself notes, 24 instead of the opposite which we should expect of people who are claimed to have travelled from west to east. When we consider all the rivers listed, we have only a pointer to Afghanistan with the Kubha (Kabul), Krumu (Kurram), Gomatl... the mode in which the Vedic Aryans entered India.... If, as may be the case, the Aryan invaders of India entered by the western passes of the Hindu Kush and proceeded thence through the Punjab to the east, still that advance is not reflected in the Rigveda, the bulk at least of which seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvati river, south of the modern Ambala". 15 Thus, according ...
... high above and deep within. 36 Page 87 If Sri Aurobindo was an embodiment of the East-West synthesis and contained within himself "the multi-dimensional spiritual consciousness of India", Mirra was the finest flower of European culture with deep spiritual filiations with India and the East as also with Africa, and she incarnated "a practical genius of a rare order, with powers of wide... organisation". Little wonder that they completed, when they met at last as if by divine dispensation, "the entire circle of the higher human activities" and were "supremely fitted to bring the East and the West together and, blending them, lead to a common all-consummating goal". 37 But all this marvellous possibility was only for the yet hidden future. In the immediate context, however, the one... end of the verandah there was a wide staircase leading to the first floor ... the house was big but it looked desolate. The upper storey held spacious rooms and a spacious verandah .... On the west, at the corner there was a wide room, adjoining which was another room and then the open terrace .... The big room, the front room and the terrace - the three together being considered the best part ...
... King Sudas of Vedic times against ten kings who were, it seems, his kin, all of them descendants of Nahusa of the Lunar dynasty. The defeated kings scattered, some going east, some going west, some north. The king who was driven west was Druhyu, one of the five sons of Yayati. So, thought I, is it not possible that he and his descendants were the original Druids? 3 My flight of fancy, I suppose! At ...
... of samples to explain what kind of stories we need to collect from the East and the West so that under the influence of such stories a sense of universality can be cultivated. He said that the children who are Page 135 to be citizens of the world should be free from the sense of division between the East and the West; they should be able to swim in the vast ocean of the universe. In this... changed and whether we should not plan new education which would aim at the change of human nature. PR stated that very important experiments in education are currently being conducted in the West and that these experiments aim at creative development of talents of children. She said that it is by emphasising creativity that human nature can be changed in the right direction. In some of the ...
... of the indigenous tongues. If it is not as well spoken by many of those who employ it as Tamil is by the South Indians or Hindi by the northerners, it is spoken by the south and the north, the west and the east of our sub-continent in a unifying nation-conscious manner as no Indian language is spoken. It is the language by which the political unity of our country has been historically formed, it is the... lyrical in it, Tagore has given with it to his Gitanjali an immortal poignancy, Vivekananda has forged from it a thrilling Page 101 clarion of the Vedanta calling both the East and the West to God-knowledge, Sri Aurobindo has turned through it philosophy into a magnificent marshalling of spiritual truths and of mystical realisations and poetry into a mighty image of the Eternal, ...
... see points of resemblance between The Life Divine and the thought of other philosophers of the East and of the West. Khalifa A. Hakim finds the great truths of the higher Sufism embodied in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. S.K. Maitra finds in Sri Aurobindo's thought the "meeting of the East and the West", and he also makes interesting comparisons between Sri Aurobindo and Western thinkers like Plato ...
... passing away of Sri Ramakrishna in 1886 and before leaving for America in 1893, Noren had become a wandering ascetic. With a staff in hand he had set out on a long peregrination of India. From the East to the West, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorian, he came to know India. He already knew India as she was in her inner reality: the richness of her spirituality, the Path of Light she had built. "This ...
... mankind, even if it is difficult to achieve. Indeed as we study the history of mankind we find that this Sermon has been a potent instrument for bringing the followers of Christ, whether from East or West, into some kind of living brotherhood. We know that persecutions have been suffered by those who dared to follow Christ; but the sufferings only helped to impress on the human mind the idea of making... longest began under Diocletian, who hated any kind of disobedience, and reached a peak with Galerius. But this persecution does not seem to have reduced the number of Christians greatly, even in the East, where it was most intense. Diocletian, an innovator to the end, abdicated in 305 and became one of the few Roman emperors to die peacefully. But his elaborate provisions for an orderly succession ...
... Punjab and Northern and Central India, Afghanistan and perhaps Persia and distinguished in its cult by the symbols of the Sun, the Fire and the Soma sacrifice, and the un-Aryan occupying the East, South and West, the nature of which it is quite impossible to restore from the scattered hints which are all we possess. Again we are astonished to observe that Mr. Gangoly seems to accept the traditional... motive; but great as were its achievements, they dwelt in a certain dim obscurity, an unillumined mystery which contrasts strongly with the light of deeper knowledge that informs the artistic work of the East. We have now throughout the world a search, an attempt on various lines to discover some principle of significant form in Art which shall escape from the obvious and external and combine delight with... commenced something like a revolution in the aesthetic standpoint of Western critics. Competent minds have turned their attention to Indian work and assigned it a high place in the artistic creation of the East and even the average European writer has been partly compelled to understand that Indian statuary and Indian painting have canons of their own and cannot be judged either by a Hellenistic or a realistic ...
... and empowered now with new vigour to assimilate all that is new and progressive and to create new forms of expression and synthesis of powers of personality and knowledge and harmony of the East and the West. Sri Aurobindo formulated the philosophy of this system in 1909 and developed it further in subsequent decades so as to embody the light and power of the Synthesis of Yoga and a programme of... benefits of modern knowledge and modem ideals of progress towards Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The advent of the British rule in India coincided with the high tide of modem science in the West, and along with it the extensive spread of materialism phenomenon of mixed blessings. While science and scientific spirit are deep-rooted in the genius of India, materialism does not fit very well... of value oriented education and of the entire transformation of our educational system. We have also a favourable climate being created by some of the progressive experiments in the West, such as those promoted by Pestalozzi, Montessori, Bertrand Russel and others; the trend is towards child-centred education, and the basic idea is that the individual is not merely a social unit ...
... his outer mind—or by his intellectual theory about forms, i or his erratic unregulated fancy, or his subconscious. So, while we do accept the right of the artist—as the ancients in the East and the West had done,—to create new forms we find it difficult to accept as valid the methods he adopts for his creation. I have said already that a form because it is "new", —i.e. independent of... technique of creating new forms, it may be of interest to consider whether there could be a synthesis of the technical advance attained by modern art in the West and methods of creating forms known in ancient India and countries of the far East. That may, perhaps, help us to find a way out of the present impasse. The Indian method was that of inner concentration on the subject,—or one may even say,... advance" I mean by the phrases India's spiritual strength, the development of her soul, her true consciousness apart from national egoism and desire-soul. The differences that divided the East and the West have not remained constant. Political and economic considerations and also the swift and easy transport are bringing men nearer and nearer. This process is bound to increase with time. More than ...
... efforts at amelioration. He also suggested that a supreme effort will be required, particularly on the part of India, to build up a spiritualised society that would synthesise the best of the East and the West and which would undertake an original handling of our contemporary problems. In a memorable passage, Sri Aurobindo has stated: "India has the key to the knowledge and conscious application... unity not only reigns as an idea and an aspiration but becomes embodied in human life like its living breath. A significant fact is that the age of the Reason, which began and flourished in the West since the Renaissance and which has spread all over the world in varying degrees of preponderance, is now going to close. The questions which it had raised but failed to answer are now looming large ...
... n. He also suggested that a supreme effort will be required, particularly on the part of India, to Page 40 build up a spiritualised society that would synthesise the best of the East and the West and which would undertake an original handling of our contemporary problems. In a memorable passage, Sri Aurobindo has stated: "India has the key to the knowledge and conscious application... unity not only reigns as an idea and an aspiration but becomes embodied in human life like its living breath. A significant fact is that the age of the Reason, which began and flourished in the West since the Renaissance and which has spread all over the world in varying degrees of preponderance, is now going to close. The questions which it had raised but failed to answer are now looming large ...
... big self-sufficient house in-Francois Martin St., No. 37. It had two entrances — one on the north and the other on the west. This well-built structure stood at the' junction of two streets. Rue Francois Martin ran from north to south whereas Rue Law de Lauriston from east to west. The western gate faced Rue Francois Martin. This was evidently the postern gate, the northern indeed was the main entrance;... cooks, servants, the menials. I have said before that the house was big but it looked desolate. The upper storey held spacious rooms and a spacious verandah. The east and the west ends had both an open terrace facing south. On the west, at the corner there was a wide room, adjoining which was another room and then the open terrace. Both the terraces had seats under the parapets. I mention this because... naturally had no talk with him. In the Mission Street (Rue des Missions Etrangeres) close to the Dupleix Street there was a house with its front facing west. It extended from the Mission Street backward down to the Rue de la Cantine on the East. It consisted of three courtyards. Each courtyard had four verandas around it; Sri Aurobindo's room was in the third block. The front block was occupied by ...
... citizenship has no legitimate place. And for that one purpose no special kind or form of education is needed, since the training to good citizenship must be in all essentials the same whether in the east or the west, England or Germany or Japan or India. Mankind and its needs are the same everywhere and truth and knowledge are one and have no country; education too must be a thing universal and without n... built up her ancient culture on a foundation largely taken from the East, from Egypt, Chaldea, Phoenicia, India, but turned in a new direction and another life-idea by the native spirit and temperament, mind and social genius of Greece and Rome, lost and then recovered it, in part from the Arabs with fresh borrowings from the near East and from India and more widely by the Renaissance, but then too gave... The scientific, rationalistic, industrial, pseudo-democratic civilisation of the West is now in process of dissolution and it would be a lunatic absurdity for us at this moment to build blindly on that sinking foundation. When the most advanced minds of the occident are beginning to turn in this red evening of the West for the hope of a new and more spiritual civilisation to the genius of Asia, it would ...
... citizenship has no legitimate place. And for that one purpose no special kind or form of education is needed, since the training to good citizenship must be in all essentials the same whether in the East or the West, England or Germany or Japan or India. Mankind and its needs are the same everywhere and truth and knowledge are one and have no country; education too must be a thing universal and without n... built up her ancient culture on a foundation largely taken from the East, from Egypt, Chaldea, Phoenicia, India, but turned in a new direction and another lifeidea by the native spirit and temperament, mind and social genius of Greece and Rome, lost and then recovered it, in part from the Arabs with fresh borrowings from the near East and from India and more widely by the Renaissance, but then too gave... The scientific, rationalistic, industrial, pseudodemocratic civilisation of the West is now in process of dissolution and it would be a lunatic absurdity for us at this moment to build blindly on that sinking foundation. When the most advanced minds of the occident are beginning to turn in this red evening of the West for the hope of a new and more spiritual civilisation to the genius of Asia, it ...
... into the widely extended domain of universal experience. The modernism of his poetic creation, developed on the wings of these two aspects, and its keynote is the harmony and synthesis of the East and the West, the present Page 159 and the past. Thus the oriental and the occidental thoughts, ideas, experiences and realisations of the present and of by-gone times, that possess any... the ideas and movements that have taken shape in Swinburne and Maeterlinck have induced some echoing waves in the works of Tagore here and there. Some of the things, specially characteristic of the West, were fused into his inspiration, became his own and formed part of the being of the pure Bengali race: these have grown now its permanent assets. Rabindranath's experience has, so to say, travelled ...
... et Méditations , her spiritual diary, which in its present form comprises only a fraction of the original entries. As young Aurobindo had journeyed from East to West to receive a thorough Western education, so Mirra later travelled from West to East; their union and collaboration resulted in an intimate global synthesis. And the path both followed led them to the discovery of the Supermind. And so... people, remains associated for many in the West with bizarre, exotic Indian practices, with fakirs besmeared with ashes, with leprous beggars and holy cows, and trying to see God by standing on the head. It is true that various yogic disciplines have been developed in India and practised on a scale and with a naturalness as has never been the case in the West; but yoga — the seeking for God and the union... union with God — is, just like the concept of the Avatar, much more widespread in the West than most people would suspect. As Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘These things have been experienced, it is true, by a small minority of the human race, but still there has been a host of independent witnesses to them in all times, climes and conditions, and numbered among them are some of the greatest intelligences of ...
... in the unity of India is the geographical factor. Here is a piece of land cut off from the rest by the Himalayas on the north east, the Hindukush on the north west; in the south are the three big seas — the Bay of Bengal on the south east, the Arabian Sea on the south west and the Indian Ocean on the south. It is as if Nature herself had marked out this piece of land as a distinct unit and a separate... sides, the South, West and East are the three great seas, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal; while the Himavat range stretches along its north like the string of a bow". The name Himavat in the above passage refers not only to the snow capped ranges of the Himalayas but also to their less elevated offshoots — the Patkai, Lushai and Chittagong Hills in the east, and the Sulaiman... Nagaland , Mizoram,and Sikkim — together known as the seven sisters. The two rivers Narmada and Tapti in central and western India have the unique distinction of flowing in the east to west direction, unlike other major rivers in India. Of the two, Narmada has more mythological significance as being the mother and giver of peace. Legends in India have it that the mere sight of this ...
... Aurobindo firmly believes that rhythm is essential and integral to all poetic speech. This was the major achievement of early poetry in most languages. No period of poetic excellence in the East or the West could therefore eschew rhythm and produce poetry of a long-lasting order. An absence of this all-important element would only turn poetry into insipid prose. The chief goal of poetry, Sri ...
... significant discoveries, more lambent and more perfect, more integral and universal. It is this quest for the new and more profound experience that will bring about the integration of the East and the West. The opportunity is now for resurgent India to take the initiative. Great literature can be a part of sadhana when it is taken up by a deep urge to realise and serve the Divine ...
... s, mathematicians, historians, linguists and artists or of great men and women of action, and if this is not coupled with an original acquaintance of some representative personalities of the East and the West. The scheme of education, which is prevalent today, prescribes a few subjects like languages, mathematics, sciences, — natural and social, — and a bit of art and craft. The syllabus of each... become obvious as soon as we inquire as to what exactly are the goals or objectives of our pre sent system of education. It is sometimes argued that the present system had for its model what in the West is called a system of liberal education, and therefore the goals of liberal education are implicitly present in our system. This argument has some historical truth, but whereas liberal education aims ...
... we have in India a most comprehensive statement of this task in the luminous writings of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), who has been described by Romain Rolland as "the completest synthesis of the East and the West." Sri Aurobindo has declared that man is a transitional being, that his destiny Page 463 is to be the spiritual superman, and that the present hour is the hour of his evolutionary... not an issue of Indian spirituality and culture, but of the entire world's upward aspiration and fulfilment. It must be noted that in this task of universal importance, India, the East, has received from the West a collaboration of incalculable magnitude and value. For it is from France that The Mother (Madame Mira Alfassa [1878-1973]) came to Sri Aurobindo and made India her permanent home in... and satisfaction of appetites for pleasure and egoistic domination. What is happening in the West is bound to have a great impact upon India, and the central problem of India is whether India wants to become a province of western culture and whether, even while assimilating the best that the West has to offer, it can find from great resources of Page 467 culture which are available ...
... inartistic fiction does not intervene, as in the Italian fresco and tempera painting and in oil painting that reduces shadow to a minimum and relies on outline, the fundamental difference between the East and the West remains constant and unalterable. The fundamental difference is that the Eastern artist paints in two and the European in three dimensions. Eastern painting suggests depth only by successive planes... misguided endeavour it became on the intellectual and practical side ineffectively utilitarian and on the aesthetic content with the cheap, ugly and vulgar. The things of the West it assimilated were just the things the West had either left behind it or was already finishing and preparing to cast away. "Shama'a", like "Rupam", though less sumptuously apparelled, is distinguished by its admirable get-up... misunderstanding of the Eastern mind. The usual Western error is made of confusing one strong tendency of Eastern philosophy for the whole of its thinking and a view of reincarnation is attributed to the East that is not its real view. The successive rebirths are not to the Eastern mind separate planes of existence, each independently the opportunity of its own virtues, but a closely connected sequence and ...
... India that he plunged into a study of India's history and cultural institutions and awoke in himself the multi-dimensional spiritual consciousness of India. He embodied a fusion of the West and the East and expressed himself and his experiences in poetry and literary criticism, philosophy and socio-political thought. Nor has he been merely a literary and spiritual figure of giant proportions... with powers of wide yet precise organisation. Thus she and Sri Aurobindo complete by their combination the entire circle of the higher human activities and are supremely fitted to bring the East and the West together and, blending them, lead to a common all-consummating goal. Q: Is it true that every 12 years there has been a change in Sri Aurobindo's life in connection with his Yoga of what... with it in sustained poetic quality, only the Shah-Nameh of Firdausi, the Ramayana of Valmiki and the Mahabharata of Vyasa exceed it in length — three works which, like it, are products of the East. And indeed Page 127 Savitri stands with the masterpieces of Valmiki and Vyasa in more than one respect. It has been conceived with an affinity to the ancient Indian temperament which ...
... we have in India a most comprehensive statement of this task in the luminous writings of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), who has been described by Romain Rolland as "the completest synthesis of the East and the West." Sri Aurobindo has declared that man is a transitional being, that his destiny is to be the spiritual superman, and that the present hour is the hour of his evolutionary crisis in which his entire... Indian spirituality and culture, but of the entire world's upward aspiration and fulfilment. Page 24 It must be noted that in this task of universal importance, India, the East, has received from the West a collaboration of incalculable magnitude and value. For it is from France that The Mother (Madame Mira Alfassa [1878-1973]) came to Sri Aurobindo and made India her permanent home in... and satisfaction of appetites for pleasure and egoistic domination. What is happening in the West is bound to have a great impact upon India, and the central problem of India is whether India wants to become a province of western culture and whether, even while assimilating the best that the West has to offer, it can find from great resources of culture which are available in its heritage, a new ...
... developed a discipline, an effort at inner perfection of being. A little later, this reached a higher spiritual plane of knowledge in later Christian or Neo-pagan thought-structures where the East and the West met together. But later on, the intellectualisation became complete and the connection of Philosophy with life and its energies or spirit and its dynamism was either cut or confined to the little... Applied Philosophy can provide expertise to help and counsel. We find that there has been in the history of the world a Persistent recognition and experience of a higher light and both in the East and in the West there have been luminous examples of those who have provided evidence of the Page 209 presence and powers of the superconscious, which far exceed the capacities of the reason in... passed in history, the uplifting pull of the superconscient has played a decisive role. (3) The pursuit of the superconscient has been, as stated above, a perennial theme both in the East and the West. This pursuit has taken three principal forms, and we need to derive from them the most valuable lessons, which are Page 210 relevant to the creation of a new road of education. These ...
... learning is expressed in these words spoken by Jonathan Livingston Seagull to his pupil, Fletcher Seagull. It is a universal dictum, for almost every profound and meaningful tradition, be it of East or West, form itself around this basic question: "Who am I?" Answering this question is the very object of education. It is this simple but essential quest that forms the essence of Jonathan Livingston... We're Outcast! We can't force ourselves to go where we're not welcome, can we?" "We're free to go where we wish and to be what we are," Jonathan answered, and he lifted from the sand and turned east, toward the home grounds of the Flock. There was brief anguish among his students, for it is the Law of the Flock that an Outcast never returns, and the Law had not been broken once in ten thousand... rather self-consciously. "Besides, if there's a fight, we'll be a lot more help there than here." Page 483 Drawing: Shakti, Auroville Page 484 And so they flew in from the west that morning, eight of them in a double- diamond formation, wingtips almost overlapping. They came across the Flock's Council Beach at a hundred thirty-five miles per hour, Jonathan in the lead, Fletcher ...
... and "magnified non-natural" average man, the average lifted up, without ceasing to be itself, by the glare of a kind of crude and barbaric genius,—to affirm the eternal incompatibility of the East and the West. Let us see what strikes such a mentality as unique and abhorrent in the Indian mind and its culture: if we can put aside all sensitiveness of personal feeling and look dispassionately at this... psychological nature and its deepest needs,—this great ancient and persistent research and triumph of Indian culture baffles and offends the average positivist mind of the West. It is bewildered by the possession of a knowledge which the West never more than fumbled after and ended by missing. Irritated, perplexed, contemptuous, it refuses to recognise the superiority of such a harmony to its own lesser ... cultivated minds; always it is dominated by environmental necessity and the practical reason. It has left behind it too the ages in which spiritual and religious conceptions which invaded it from the East, strove to impose themselves on the vitalistic and rational tendency; it has largely rejected them or thrust them into a corner. Its religion is the religion of life, a religion of earth and of terrestrial ...
... ed the high water-mark of the composite culture of the country - Vedantic, Islamic and European." He was a saintly man of high attainments, synthesising in himself the cultures of both the East and the West, and widely known in Bengal as a leader of the Adi Brahmo Samaj and as "the grandfather of Indian nationalism" .² The marriage was performed according to the rites of the Brahmo Samaj to which... sceptical and materialistic civilisation of the West. Krishna Dhan took his M.D. from the Aberdeen University and returned to India in 1871. But he returned a changed man. He was completely anglicised. His outlook and manners had undergone a sea-change. He loved everything English, and felt a great admiration for the culture and civilisation of the West - its material glamour, its vigorous, energetic... the eve of his return to India. He had been in England for fourteen years - long years of budding life, devoted to intensive study and careful observation. He had drunk deep of the culture of the West. He had travelled in the wide realms of classical thought, and delighted in the epic grandeur of its poetry. He had enjoyed and admired the splendour and beauty of English poetry, the grace and charm ...
... correlated. A deeper reflection is absolutely necessary in the proposed programme. We may, therefore, provide for a philosophical exploration of the aims of life as also of how thinkers of the East and the West have endeavoured to develop their philosophy of education in the context of the aims of life. Many other subjects and topics can also be included. Some of the relevant topics have been indicated ...
... Aurobindo: Poet, Philosopher and Mystic (1949) MacDonald, Ramsey. The Awakening in India. Maitra, S. K. Introduction to the Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (1965); The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy (1968) Manibhai. A Practical Guide to Integral Yoga (1971) Majumdar, R.C . Studies in the Bengali Renaissance Mary, Countess of Minto. India:... C. J. The Causes of the Present Discontents in India (1908) Olsson, Eva. The Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo in the Light of the Gospel (1959) O'Malley, L.S.S. (Ed.). Modern India and the West (1941; 1969) Pandit, M.P. Light from Sri Aurobindo (1970); Sri Aurobindo on the Tantra (1967); All Life is Yoga, 6 Parts, (1967-70); The Call and the Grace (1969); Highways of God (1969); ...
... hearts' caves to guide them to the Goal. SRI CHAITANYA But what's the Goal? For unless this were known, How would the guiding light reveal the Way? With no sun how would you tell the east from west? KESHAV ( pouncing on him ) Ah, there, my boy, I have got you at long last. For the sun is there on high and even so There is in every heart that breathes a sun Assuring our ...
... Gratitude O Great Spirit, you have lifted the curse of the Evil Fate Over my soul. My heart kneels down before You in gratitude. Inside, outside, above and below, In the East, in the West wherever I look, O Great Spirit, I meet Your reassuring Eyes as real as my sister's, Far more substantial than any rock-temple, the moon in the sky. Peace has flowed into my body, life ...
... the psychology of the child is a great step forward towards a healthy system of education. In the movements of the Kindergartens, in the system of Montessory, and in other experiments in the East and in the West, this discovery constitutes a basic foundation. In fact, it may be said that a new handling of the child in the light of this discovery is the essential ingredient of the very definition of... we do not belong to the dawns of the past, but to the noons of the future. This new future, as we envisage it, will be marked by an ideal unity of mankind. There will be a meeting of the East and the West, the ancient and the modern, the knowledge of man and the knowledge of nature, of the aesthetic and the ethical, of the technology of matter and the technology of spirit. Against the forces ...
... everywhere, and it is important to be exactly on time at every minute. Because if I am not on time here, I shall never be on time anywhere. —But, confound it all, ifs no life to go from east to west and from west to east as though we were crazy about railways, and to go on eating soot with cholum or cholum with soot! What the devil am I doing here, tell me? Life is made to serve some purpose, isn't it... being stoked near the opposite platforms. I looked at the sun. The east was over that way, so these trains were going westward. —But we have come from there! He shrugged his shoulders and picked up his staff. —Come on, let's be an our way, it's time. This began an infernal journey. We went towards the west, then to the east, and sometimes to the north only to come back immediately to the... on, let's be on our way, it's time. I plunged into a landscape of rails and burning platforms interspersed with miraculous paddy-fields whence white birds took wing. We were going towards the east, but the north or the south would have been just the same, and I no longer knew whether I was moving outside in a rocky desert strewn with mounds of huge stones, or into the chaos of my soul under the ...
... His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp (the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star) kindled from a Blessed Tree, an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West 1. Translation of A. J. Arberry in The Koran Interpreted, (London: Oxford University Press, 1983). 2. Translation of N. J. Dawood in The Koran, (Penguin Books, 4th edn., 1983)... (V.35) According to the Koran, God is the creator of time and space, far beyond the grasp of the minds of men. He is supreme over all, nowhere and yet everywhere: To God belong the East and the West; whithersoever you turn, there is the Face of God; God is All-embracing, All-knowing. 2 ( ii. 109) God is transcendent, never incarnated, and yet, as the voice of God... attained simply by observing the prescriptions laid down. Here is how the Koran describes the essence of the teaching of Muhammad: It is not piety, that you turn your faces to the East and to the West. True piety is this: to believe in God, and the Last Day, 1. Translation of N. J. Dawood in The Koran, (Penguin Books, 4th edn., 1983). Page 154 the angels ...
... the cages of men, whether gothic or exotic: oh l there is something which no temple, no Church can. seize, something that no being, no prophet, no god, no pope can hold whether he be from the East or the West; that no book, no mystery can imprison in its formula of stone or of blood, its letters of ink or of light; something greater than all the saviours of the world, all the interceptors and gaolers ...
... Omniscient blundered? Has the Omnipotent lacked in power? And the All-Blissful, has he taken pleasure in the miserable lives of creatures with a veiled consciousness? Yet many religions in the East and the West essentially agree with this interpretation of Vedanta: somewhere something has gone wrong (maybe because of the magic intervention by a Black Demiurge?); the Earth is no more than a necessary... Brahman at its centre. ‘Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.’ 3 Brahman is a densely vibrating Sanskrit word denoting what in the West is called the One or the Absolute. It is of some importance to use at first a neuter word for the beginning, middle and end of all things, because otherwise we get stuck from the start with a male-female... the one ‘all containing, everywhere present point without dimensions.’ The concept of the absolute one Reality which is all, though confirmed by Western mystics too, is not generally current in the West. The reason, called by the Mother ‘the error at the origin’, is a supposed rift, probably first thought of in Chaldea, between God on the one hand and Creation on the other. ‘There is no separation ...
... Punjāb and Northern and Central India, Afghānistān, and perhaps Persia and distinguished in its cult by the symbols of the Sun, the Fire and the Soma sacrifice and the un-Aryan occupying the East, South and West, the nature of which it is quite impossible to restore from the scattered hints which are all we possess." 34 In the above, Sri Aurobindo does not surmise any conflict. If we surmise... objection to urge: "In later ages, groups of actual human beings were designated as Dasyus: both the Aitereya Brāhmaṇa and the Manusmriti (X, 42-44) are unequivocal on the point. Also, in the south-east of the Caspian there were the Dahai people 27. Ibid., p. 216. 28. Ibid. Page 115 noted by the Greeks, and Daha is but the Irānian modification of Dāsa, and in Iranian the ...
... Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education which was initiated in 1951 and is fast flowering now. This Centre draws its inspiration from the creative genius of Sri Aurobindo, a master of East-West synthesis, as well as from that of his co-worker, the Mother, who, appealing for a double nationality, declared at the time of the Merger: "I am French by birth and early education, I am Indian... not feel alien to Pascal with his "reasons of the heart that Reason does not know" and his Pensées that all Europe has hailed as one of the most penetrating spiritual apologias produced by the West, the side which in the modern age has found expression in that exquisite search for the essence within the appearance, the single within the many, the infinite in each finite - the Symbolism of ...
... big self-sufficient house in Francois Martin St., No. 37. It had two entrances —one on the north and the other on the west. This well-built structure stood at the junction of two streets. Rue Francois Martin ran from north to south whereas Rue Law de Lauriston from east to west. Page 162 The western gate faced Rue Francois Martin. This was evidently the postern gate, the northern... cooks, servants, the menials. I have said before that the house was big but it looked desolate. The upper storey held spacious rooms and a spacious verandah. The east and the west ends had both an open terrace facing south. On the west, at the corner there was a wide room, adjoining which was another room and then the open terrace. Both the terraces had seats under the parapets. I mention this... naturally had no talk with him. In the Mission Street (Rue des Missions Etrang&res) close to the Dupleix Street there was a house with its front facing west. It extended from the Mission Street backward down to the Rue de la Cantine on the East. It consisted of three courtyards. Each courtyard had four verandas around it; Sri Aurobindo's room was in the third block. The front block was occupied ...
... self-sufficient house in-Francois Martin St., No. 37. It had two entrances — one on the north and the other on the west. This well-built structure stood at the' junction of two streets. Rue Francois Martin ran from north to south whereas Rue Law de Lauriston from east to west. The western gate faced Rue Francois Martin. This was evidently the postern gate, the northern indeed was the main... servants, the menials. I have said before that the house was big but it looked desolate. The upper storey held spacious rooms and a spacious verandah. The east and the west ends had both an open terrace facing south. On the west, at the corner there was a wide room, adjoining which was another room and then the open terrace. Both the terraces had seats under the parapets. I mention this... naturally had no talk with him. In the Mission Street (Rue des Missions Etrangeres) close to the Dupleix Street there was a house with its front facing west. It extended from the Mission Street backward down to the Rue de la Cantine on the East. It consisted of three courtyards. Each courtyard had four verandas around it; Sri Aurobindo's room was in the third block. The front block was occupied ...
... at least depression of the power of life, tracts of decline, even beginnings of decay. This is a clue to which we have to hold if we would understand the great lines of divergence between the East and the West. Towards the spirit if not all the way to it man must rise or he misses his upward curve of strength; but there are different ways of approach to its secret forces. Europe, it would seem, must... words, rites and forms of church government, Europe where these things have done duty for spirituality and religion, has hardly a record which would entitle it to cast this reproach in the face of the East. But, we are told, this gravitation afflicts the Indian religion more than any other creed. Higher Hinduism can be scarcely said to exist except in certain small reforming sects and current Hinduism... high tides of European civilisation, Greek culture, the Roman world before Constantine, the Renascence, the modern age with its two colossal idols, Industrialism and physical Science, have come to the West on the strong ascending urge of this double force. Whenever the tide of these powers has ebbed, the European mind has entered into much confusion, darkness and weakness. Christianity failed to spiritualise ...
... both wide and profound and which aspires to reach higher levels of knowledge. A great effort needs to be made, therefore, to ensure that learning material should have a vast canvas where the East and the West can meet and where subtlety and complexity of life are portrayed in a stimulating manner. Subjects and topics must be presented which develop sense of wonder. There are a number of topics ...
... fixed formulae, a lapse into darkness and inertia. Yet a little light has always been burning, and with the renascent India, and the great churning in our age of continual crisis in the East and the West, this light is growing, and there is an attempt of Yoga to recover itself and to develop with fresh efforts a fundamental research to affirm itself on newer, bolder, loftier, and even, on unp ...
... himself, he calls upon humanity to proceed towards the Divine by the way of this synthesis. His call is the call of God, the call of the earth-soul, the call of the Time-Spirit, the call of the East and the West, and the call of the awaking soul of man himself. The world moves forward to a multi-dimensional synthesis. Page 42 PART II THE SYNTHESIS OF THE STATES OF BRAHMAN... spiritual culture, when the higher light seemed to hide behind the veil, and the material life pressed forward with its clamorous demands and irresistible claims, came the impact of the materialistic West, at once disruptive and galvanizing. It disrupted the spiritual values which had been the sustenance of Indian culture, and galvanised the material and intellectual life Page 37 of the... the chill of apotheosised asceticism, revived, widened and throbbed with new, creative impulses. A general awakening, a pervasive renaissance was the result of the absorption of the influence of the West, which came to India as the priest and champion of the life-spirit, and the interpreter of its evolutionary values. The last stage had been reached. With the long ...
... indicated by the subtitle of its French edition, Revue de Grande Synthèse Philosophique , the Arya aimed at projecting a "great synthesis" of all the knowledge of the old world and the new, the East and the West. Now, what was the Synthesis needed at the time the Arya was launched? Answering this question, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the very first issue: Undoubtedly, that of man himself. The... intention had been to approach the problem of synthesis "from the starting-point of the two lines of culture which divide human thought and are now meeting at its apex, the knowledge of the West and the knowledge of the East". 37 Because of the War, however, Paul had to return to France with Mirra, leaving unfinished his superb exercise in synthesis The Wherefore of the Worlds , but he had at least brought... Arya synchronised with the First World War, was to achieve definitive book publication in 1939-40, the opening years of the Second World War, which also provoked T. S. Eliot to indite poems like "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942) - "as exciting to many of us," said John Lehmann, "as news of a great victory". Didn't the Gita itself owe its origin to the frightening ...
... India, took place in my home in Los Angeles following the annual national conference of all the devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in America called the AUM Conference (All USA Meeting). The East-West Cultural Center — The Sri Aurobindo Center of Los Angeles had been the host for the AUM 2003 that took place at Loyola Marymount University from May 22-26 th . Aster was one of the guest speakers ...
... 62. The Renaissance of Hinduism, p. 305. 63. Laureate of Peace, p. 173. 64. This para is very largely derivative and mainly draws upon S.K. Maitra's The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy (1956). 65. See Kenneth Walker, A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching, pp.131-2. 66. The Spectator, 28 April 1950, pp.586, 588. 67. From... of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1946. p.xv). 120. Savitri,?. 827. 121. ibid.,p.917. 122. Cf. S.K.. Maitra's article on 'Faust and Savitri' in The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy. 123. Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Third Series, pp. 305-6. It is also interesting to recall Sri Aurobindo's youthful tribute to Goethe: ... 58. That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire. 59. After a Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes. 60. Ode to the Confederate Dead. 61. Luke Havergal. 62. East Coker. 63. Sunday Morning. 64. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, pp. 7-8. 65. Maud, ii.82-3. 66. Letter to Nirodbaran (Mother India, June 1957, p. 3) ...
... circumstances Hitler expected Speer to perform miracles, in other words to continue producing the aircraft, tanks, submarines and canon needed to stem the invasion of the Allies who, from the east and the west, were squeezing Germany in a pincer movement. In January 1944 Speer had to be hospitalized for a serious knee and lung infection. The moment was not opportune for him because Göring, always... and its experiential knowledge of reality and the human personality, can explain them. A human being consists of more than a body, and even more than a body-plus-mind, as has been the belief in the West since its classical times. To this body-plus-mind may be added a soul, although the Western philosophers and theologians have generally identified the soul with the mind, both being “non-material.” ...
... Plato, one could rediscover the ideas of the Upanishads. Sufism has been found repeating the teaching of the Upanishads in another religious language. Even some of the modern thinkers of the East and the West seem to be absorbing the ideas of the Upanishads with living and intense receptiveness. And it may not be an exaggeration to say that there is hardly any main philosophical idea which cannot find... of various kinds came to imprison the forms of life of individuals and collectivities. The exhaustion of vital force also coincided with the political instability and the coming of settlers from the West. Finally, the establishment of the British supremacy in India resulted in extreme impoverishment of the Spirit of India. VII. Reawakening The third stage of religious and spiritual development ...
... an opportunity to learn the ways of perfection in elegance, and orderliness and propriety in personal and communal life. With her own composite and integral culture fusing the finest in the East and the West, the old and the new, she could be in rapport with the genuine anywhere; and with her occult vision, she could always enter into the behind-the-surface truth of things. Outwardly she learnt ...
... Mother once said, "France is the country of my birth, but India is the country of my soul." That is why we see in Mother's life a wonderful synthesis of all the positive qualities of the East and the West. Mother took birth, grew up and was educated in a European environment of practical knowledge and a scientific outlook on life. That made her possess these positive qualities of Europe: accurate ...
... mean the end. I know I am close to land. I must be. I must convince us all. We've been over the continental shelf for four days. One of my small charts shows the shelf about 120 miles to the east of the West Indies. I should see the tall, green slopes of an-island, if my sextant is correct. I should hit Antigua — ironically, my original destination. But who knows? I could be hundreds of miles off ...
... polity and India Renaissance; d) Leaders of Indian Renaissance; e) Problem of contemporary Indian culture and external Influences; f) Towards a great synthesis of the East and the West. Page 245 Page 244 Page 246 Page 247 Specialised Courses (Any 3 Subjects) Annexure-XIII Teaching any One or Two School Subjects ...
... Plato, one could rediscover the ideas of the Upanishads. Sufism has been seen to be repeating the teaching of the Upanishads in another religious language. Even some of the modem thinkers of the East and the West seem to be absorbing the ideas of the Upanishads with living and intense receptiveness. And it may not be an exaggeration to say that there is hardly a main philosophical idea which cannot find... imprison the forms of individuals and collectivities. The exhaustion of vital force in the country coincided also with the political instability and the coming of the settlers from Page 99 the West. Finally, the establishment of the British supremacy in India resulted in the extreme impoverishment of the Spirit of India. VI The third stage of religious and spiritual development of India ...
... the world is changing rapidly, that the horizons of knowledge are expanding constantly, and that children are growing up in a new atmosphere of currents of culture in which the values of the East and the West are getting blended with a great deal of uncertainty and consequent disequilibrium. It is in these difficult times that parents have to build and maintain bonds of trust with children and guide... in their children's development processes; (d) deeper understanding of values of Indian culture and how they can be made active under the present difficult conditions where all that is good in the West is to be assimilated, and all that is injurious to our culture and its future has to be rejected; and (e) ensuring that children are protected from exposure to influences that are injurious to their ...
... is that , that unique thing that one is, that pure cry of being. A formidable white devastation. Then I prostrated myself in the sand. And I no longer knew where I was, whether it was the east or the west, the north or the south: it was Mecca everywhere. I went into the river. A bird flew away with a shrill cry—blue, green—the air was like a golden powder. And I felt there was something to be... mental world, the brilliant world, all its gods and its forms, you cast them into the fire: Aum Svaha . I cast them into the fire. —You renounce the vital world and all its lights and powers, you, east them into the fire: Aum Svaha . I cast them into the fire. —You renounce the physical world, your flesh and its desires, your emotions, your thirsts, you cast them into the fire: Aum Svaha ...
... phenomenon that was Sri Aurobindo except that the "sweeping contours" too were not lacking but were harmoniously grafted on the lone, imperious, sky-arching hill. The representative men of the East and the West have already paid their homage to Rishi Aurobindo. As early as 1907, Rabindranath addressed this poem to Sri Aurobindo, then only thirty-five: O Aurobindo, Rabindranath bows to thee!... India amounted in thirty years, at 12 per cent compound interest, to the enormous sum of £723,997,917 sterling; or at a low rate, as £2,000,000 for fifty years, to 8,400,000,000 sterling! 22 The East India Company was always inclined to put the prosperity of India in the future tense, and as for its administration, was it not described by Burke as "one of the most corrupt and obstructive tyrannies... followed by other papers, and Indian journalism was born. Private English schools were established as early as 1717 at Cuddalore (near Pondicherry), in 1718 at Bombay and in 1720 at Calcutta. The East India Company having assumed, after 1813, educative and cultural (and not alone police) functions, and having shed its commercial monopoly, attempts were made to revive Oriental learning through Government ...
... authentic and forceful currents in the inner life of Bengal. A contemporary of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a student of Henry Derozio and David Hare, Rajnarain Bose was an early synthesis of the East and the West, and in the heyday of his hallowed life "represented the high water-mark of the * I am indebted to Sisirkumar Mitra of Sri Aurobindo Ashram for much of the information contained in this... The district of Hooghly in West Bengal — the district that has given to Bengal and to India two such world-famous figures as Raja Rammohan Roy and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa — can almost be called the cradle of the Bengali or even of the Indian renaissance.* Konnagar is a thickly populated area, almost a small town, in the Hooghly district; situated on the west bank of the river Hooghly (otherwise... love and cease— night and sea cover up everything. It is a long poem, but the trochaic measure and the regular rhyme-beat carry the reader along, past "soft narcissi's golden camp", "the widening East" and the "rose of Indian grain". The same metrical proficiency can also be seen in poems like The Lover's Complaint and Love in Sorrow, neither the burden of classical allusion in the former ...
... sight or revelation and inner hearing or inspiration have been recognized and developed by the methods of yoga given in the Veda, Upanishads, Gita and many other records of experiences in the East and the West. Indeed, these faculties need right conditions and austere practices of psychological exercises, if they are to yield veridical knowledge, power, right inspiration for action and devotional i ...
... peoples and cultures, history has witnessed all kinds of minglings and assimilations and suppressions. The modem Western impact on the East, for instance, has followed a course of its own. India, Japan and China have received readily things of the mind from the West - "its science, its curiosity, its ideal of universal education and uplift, its abolition of privilege, Page 483 its broadening... oppressive forms, for air, space, light" - but resisted any interference with "the things of the soul, the profound things of the mind and temperament". 43 It is not so much "conquest" of the East by the West, but a matter of "mutual understanding and interchange, mutual adaptation and new formation". Taking his cue from Nature's way of building up her physical aggregates - first a body, next... could achieve its deadly fulfilment, might be halted in time. There has been a backlash against reason's negations; there is now a growing suspicion of Science's self-sufficiency; and the awakening East at least is unlikely to repeat in its entirety the Western experience with its unbridled individualism. Nevertheless, the age of individualism and reason has resulted in certain sure gains: firstly ...
... been men of very average intelligence, a handful of rare instances excepted. As for your great scientist I wonder who he had in mind as spiritual men—so far as I know history both in the East and the West there have been any number of spiritual men and mystics who have had a great or fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge... style European mind. It used to be the same in Art and other matters. Now Chinese and Japanese art is recognised and to a less degree the art of India, Persia and the former Indian colonies in the Far-East, but in philosophy the old ideas still reign. "From Thales to Bergson" is their idea of the History of Philosophy. 2 May 1936 Plato Plato says [according to Weber, p. 86]: "The world of sense... between the two and mixed them up together till at the end he got his mental liberation from the tangle though not yet any clear knowledge of the way—for that I suppose he will have to be born nearer the East or in any case in surroundings which will enable him to get at the Light. 9 July 1936 Sri Aurobindo and Criticism of Fiction It is true I read through Aldous Huxley's monster, but it took me ...
... India 452, 809-10 Gandhi's tragic end 458 sports in the Ashram 460, 466-7 supreme perfection 467-8 (cf 696) invasion of South Korea 487 foresees Chinese intentions on Tibet and India 487-8 East-West understanding 488 purpose of his embodiment 503 money power 600 human progress and new stage of evolution 666, 707, 752 the best kind of meditation 716 Page 921 5. Works of Sri ...
... With Sri Aurobindo and Paul Richard decides to publish a monthly journal to present 'a systematic study of the highest problems of existence' based on a synthesis of the knowledge of the East and the West. They also form a society, 1'Idee Nouvelle, with some young men of Pondicherry. - Jun 14 'It is a veritable work of creation we have to do: to create activities, new modes of being so ...
... their egoistic vanity. Regarding Raghu's digvijaya (conquest of all four quarters), it would be sufficient to point out that he came out victorious wherever he went in different directions, East, West, North and South. We find beautiful and elaborate descriptions from the poet depicting Raghu's most memorable conquests all over India; Canto IV of Raghuvamśam is full of these beautiful descriptions ...
... the East In the West, however, knowledge of the martial arts of the East hardly existed before the twentieth century. It was not until the beginning of the fourteenth century that Europeans set out on the first voyages of discovery. From 1400 onward, successive explorations gradually revealed to them a world whose non European inhabitants astonished them. Yet the peoples of East Asia... beautiful to watch. Certain techniques may be mirrored, or repeated in different directions. So, if you have just stepped forward to the east on the right leg and punched and blocked with the right arm, the next move may be to turn round, step forward to the west on the left leg and punch and block with the left arm. In kalaripayit, empty-handed forms can also be reproduced exactly, holding any... however. The spread to the West of knowledge about the martial arts of other parts of Asia has been even slower. Chinese masters practising in Hong-Kong and Taiwan have begun to respond only recently to pressure from Westerners to reveal their techniques so that their arts can be taught in Europe and the USA. At least one eastern art has yet to be reported in the West. Even experts have largely ...
... tentacles of the subconscious and the unconscious. Fortunately, we find that there has been in the history of the world a persistent recognition and experience of a higher light and both in the East and in the West there have been luminous examples of those who have provided evidence of the presence and powers of the superconscious, which far exceed the capacities of the reason in dealing with the su... obliges us to conceive of certain new dimensions of education, and we need to look into them more closely. The pursuit of the superconscient has been, as stated above, a perennial theme both in the East and the West. This pursuit has taken three principal forms, and we need to extract from them the most valuable lessons, which are relevant to the creation of a new road of education whereby the crisis created ...
... Guru. And he wrote subsequently: "Aurobindo has realised the most complete synthesis achieved up to the present between the genius of the East and of the West. He is seeking to harmonise the spiritual striving of India and the activities of the West and in pursuance of that aim he is training all the forces of the spirit towards an ascendancy of action." I cannot, however, claim that I had... knew of course that do what we would we could never shut the world out and yet keep on growing. For when all is said and done, the world being one, nothing on earth could sunder and contain the East and the West everlastingly in watertight compartments. But the paradox is that we want to grow and yet dread to change. So, what I admitted in theory I came to repudiate in practice when the acceptance demanded... hardly begun to have a glimpse of what Gurudev called the "sunlit path" when a sudden thunder-storm burst and, once more, my horizon grew darker than ever. And it happened like this: In 1946, in East Bengal, thousands of Hindus were massacred, their women raped, houses burnt and girls abducted. I felt depressed, the more so as many of my friends kept on writing to me about the urgent need of r ...
... knowledge of the Spirit. But it has neglected Matter. The West has the knowledge of Matter but has neglected Spirit. Both have become bankrupt in their own ways. Both can be replenished by Page 57 each other. But who will take the lead? I think it is for India to come forward to bring about the real synthesis of the East and the West. And this can be done only if India can, first, recover ...
... I on another. We climbed and climbed, hour after hour, up from the col along the steep snow-slope to the base of the south-east ridge, and then on up the ridge, and then on up the ridge itself. The weather was clear, and the mountain itself now protected us from the west wind; but the going was very slow, both because of the altitude and the problems of finding a safe route. We had only one tent... For it is just this, I think, that is the real importance of Everest: that it is the top not merely of one country or another, but of the whole earth. It was climbed by men both of the East and the West. It belongs to us all. And that is what I want also for myself: that I should belong to all, be a brother to all men everywhere, and not merely a member of some group or race or creed. As I... fourth highest peak in the world, at which we had looked up every day during the long expedition, was now below us. Over to the south-east Makalu was below us. Everything we could see for hundreds of miles was below us, except only the top of Kangchenjunga, far to the east — and the white ridge climbing on above us into the sky. We started pitching the highest camp that had ever been made. And it ...
... sitting-room had a table-fan. Only after the accident a table-fan was installed near Sri Aurobindo's bed which was not very effective in reducing the stuffiness of the room, closed as it was on the east, west and south. Hence the need of small hand-fans during his walk. It was only after the room had undergone thorough repairs and the old beams were replaced by new solid ones that a ceiling-fan came into... invoke his special help: for instance, when the roof was to be built. How often we heard her praying to Sri Aurobindo, "Lord, there should be no rain now." Menacing clouds had mustered strong, stormy west winds blowing ominously, rain imminent, and torrential Pondicherry rain! We would look at the sky and speculate on the result of the fight between the Divine Force and the natural force. The Divine ...
... of existence, to progress in the spirit and grow into the full light of self-knowledge and some divine inner perfection? 4 Whatever had been the petrified attitudes of the past on the East-West question, in the twentieth century the world was awakening at last, both to the insufficiency of reason and science and technology, and to the possibilities promised by the integral Indian view that... possibilities and its integral spiritual vision? Feeling confused and in a desperate effort to hide the confusion, an Archer can only make faces and shout abuses, - an extreme Western reaction to the West-East confrontation: for the Western mind, in its attempt to grapple with the Indian, "finds that all its standards are denied, exceeded or belittled; all that it honours is given a second place, all... classical, renaissance and recent experimental phases, and also with Chinese, Japanese and Indian art. His intimacy with the Hellenic and the Hindu spirit, and the cultural achievements of the West and the East, gave him the clue to a catholic and universal aesthesis; and his appreciation of art and of individual works of art flowed from a wide background of knowledge as well as an intuitive understanding ...
... wide, enlightened and comprehensive vision. He embodied the new spiritual and cultural trends and the emergent socio-political consciousness which sprang into existence from the contact of the East and the West 79. "The pride and glory of Bengal" — Vivekananda. 80. Ram Mohan predicted that India would be free and take her rightful place as the Guru of Asia. Page 73 after the... dinner and fêted him. Page 75 which was preparing to dawn upon the progressive mind of the Indian nation, accentuating the tendency to a synthesis of the past and the present, the East and the West, spirituality and life. It was a mere beginning, the first, pale streaks of the dawning glory; but all the same, it was a sure prognostic of the coming dawn. Ram Mohan was, indeed, in the words... greatest disciple, Swami Vivekananda, was in America in 1893, waiting for his apostolic triumph at the Parliament of Religions, which was to open a new chapter in the history of the impact of the East upon the West. 88 The example and influence of Sri Ramakrishna acted as a potent regenerative and formative force in the Renaissance of India, and set ablaze the awakening spirit of nationalism. Like ...
... and empowered now with new vigour to assimilate all that is new and progressive and to create new forms of expression and synthesis of powers of personality and knowledge and harmony of the East and the West. Sri Aurobindo formulated the philosophy of this system in 1909 and developed it further in subsequent decades so as to embody the light and power of the Synthesis of Yoga and a programme of integral... benefits of modern knowledge and modern ideals of progress towards Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The advent of the British rule in India coincided with the high tide of modern science in the West, and along with it the extensive spread of materialism—a phenomenon of mixed blessings. While science and scientific spirit are deep-rooted in the genius of India, materialism does not fit very well... in the tasks of value-oriented education and of the entire transformation of our educational system. We have also a favourable climate being created by some of the progressive experiments in the West, such as those promoted by Pestalozzi, Montessori, Bertrand Russell and others; the trend is towards child-centred education, and the basic idea is that the individual is not merely a social unit, but ...
... vision which can provide a distant bio-spiritual peep into the secrecies of the person whom we so much adore. No wonder philosophers have described him as the greatest synthesis between the East and the West; critics have acclaimed him as a poet par excellence; social scientists regard him as the builder of a new society based on enduring values of the life of the spirit; devotees throng in mute... David-Neel, who acquainted herself deeply with Tibetan occultism, met Sri Aurobindo in 1912. About her meeting with him she reports: "His perfect familiarity with the philosophies of India and the West wasn't what drew my attention: what was of greater importance to me was the special magnetism that flew out of his presence, and the occult hold he had over those who surrounded him." 22 A glimpse ...
... 70. Charles A. Moore, The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, edited by Haridas Chaudhuri & Fredrick Spiegelberg (1960), p. 107 71. S. K. Maitra, The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy (1968), p. 65 72. Ibid., p. 300 73. Ibid., p. 194 74. Ibid., pp. 257, 271 75. Ibid., p. 222 76 ...
... have in India a most comprehensive statement of this task in the luminous writings of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), who has been described by Remain Rolland as 'the completest synthesis of the East and the West'. Sri Aurobindo has declared that man is a transitional being, that his destiny is to be the spiritual superman, and that the present hour is the hour of his evolutionary crisis in which his... an issue of Indian spirituality and culture, but of the entire world's upward aspiration and fulfillment. It must be noted that in this task of universal importance, India, the East, has received from the West a collaboration of incalculable magnitude and value. For it is from France that the Mother (Madame Mira Alfassa (1878-1973) came to Sri Aurobindo and made India her permanent home in... found to be relevant and applicable to the present conditions. This is where India is today. It is able neither to leave its old image nor to cast itself perilously in the image of the modern West. It is a state of suffocation, and yet the inertia inherited by it since the last several centuries is so great that there is not even a sufficient effort emerging from this suffocation. This ...
... atmosphere of 1950, whose fears were not confirmed by events. But co-existence between the blocs was still precarious, and the East-West dialogue had no rules except those of force. In Berlin, the West had just won a trial of strength after nearly a year's blockade by the East: the American airlift of supplies to the city, using fantastic military resources, had led the Soviet Union to lift the blockade... separate strategic zone. Adenauer's Germany was covered by the newly-formed Atlantic Alliance; and there was active concern to secure a German contribution Page 67 to the defense of the West. Russia had just acquired the atomic bomb. How far would she now go? The advice which more and more people of influence were giving seemed superficially sound: 'Leave Europe out of these confrontations'... 'that we face the instability from which you're trying to shield us. And, far from backing out, it's vital that we once more play an active part in settling these problems, because they concern the West as a whole.' No matter; men's minds were confused, and I was disquieted to see developing in Europe, to say nothing of other danger-spots in the world, the climate of the 'cold war'. The greatest ...
... Nehru - Liaquat Pact and After. 3 May 1950 . Early in 1950, tension between India and Pakistan rose as a result of widespread communal rioting in East Pakistan, retaliatory attacks in India, and the consequent flight of Hindus from East Pakistan into West Bengal, Assam and Tripura, and Muslims from India into Pakistan. On 2 April 1950, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan came to India to discuss... For the compromise at the Hooghly Conference of September 1909, see p. 59 of the present volume. An earlier compromise had been reached at the provincial conference held in Pabna, East Bengal, in February 1908 (Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram , pp. 871 - 76, 902, 918 [where Sri Aurobindo specifically mentions "the compromise arrived at at Pabna"], 919, etc.; Bande Mataram... Aurobindo in Pondicherry. In Calcutta he was associated with Barin in his various enterprises, one of which was the Cherry Press. To Krishnashashi. January 1923 . A young sadhak from Chittagong, East Bengal, Krishnashashi went insane while practising yoga at Barin's centre in Bhawanipore. See also letters [4] - [9] to Barindrakumar Ghose above. To Rajani Palit. 6 April 1923 . A government ...
... Egypt The first time I went to Egypt, it was right after the war. I knew nothing; I was really a good little boy from the West. For me, Asia was simply geography. And I knew absolutely nothing, zero, about the religions, the spiritual traditions of the East. I was a complete layman (by layman I mean that I had read a lot of things on the subject; I was full of Western culture). But I went... the body. The physical body is the BRIDGE." And this despite... everything that made me cringe – those walls, that ashram, all that conditioning which seemed to me as pointless in the East as it is in the West. Anything that smacks of "walls" or "school"... is simply unbearable for me; it suffocates me. I feel suffocated. But, well, "She" was there, in that ashram. So I said to myself, "I must... Centimes? The Technical Civilization. A Child Will Destroy it Towarnicki: Satprem, today the world of science and technology is firmly established, rooted in the world, from east to west and north to south. It's a formidable force. How can it... Satprem: Oh, a grain of sand – just a grain of sand and the whole machine shuts down. Absolutely. Sorry, I interrupted you. ...
... wanted us to have a good grounding in the Vedic tradition, but he also wanted us to have a good grounding in Western tradition of Science and Philosophy. He had dreamt a sort of a synthesis of the East and the West. My mother wanted us to have a good physical education and refinement of nature and manners. Her attitude tended to be spiritual, my father's attitude remained largely religious and pragmatic ...
... sorrow, poverty, strife, dissatisfaction, from which it strives for an outlet; for whoever is trying to find one by material means must inevitably fail. The East alone has some knowledge of the truth, the East alone can teach the West, the East alone can save mankind. Through all these ages Asia has been seeking for a light within, and when- ever she has been blessed with a glimpse of what she seeks... in education and the general standard of their life. It was thought that by separating East Bengal from the West and tacking it on to Assam, a greater attention could be devoted to the interests of the Muslims who formed the majority community there, and their condition bettered. But the very people of East Bengal for whom the change was proposed would have none of it. Sir Henry Cotton wrote in... partition of the Province being perpetrated against the wishes of the people, and it seized that weapon of the weak, the boycott, which has now and then been so successfully wielded both in the West and the East. It manifested itself in the Swadeshi movement which is but another name for self-help, inasmuch as it wants the people to substitute preference on their part for protection on the part of the ...
... example which can further be enhanced by the power of the contact of the soul of the teacher with the soul of the pupil and we have taken examples of good teachers and good pupils both from the East and the West so that ultimately we can have a harmonious and universal philosophy of education. This also implies a philosophy of child-centred education, philosophy of lifelong education and philosophy of... Topics for concentration, memory and understanding and application 3.Topics for Nationalism 4.Topics for social consciousness 5.Topics related to the values 6.Synthesis of the East and the West H)1. Cassettes 2.Pictures 3.Films 4.Audio Visual Aids 5.Posters 6.Wealth from waste 7.Library books 8.Rewriting of books and removing distortions I)1... ago, the rise of the great civilizations was not brought about by technology alone, but by radically new social inventions. Keep in mind that the overwhelming commitment to industrial affluence in the West appears to be at the expense of health and mental balance, and with the advent of the nuclear bomb, survival itself. Today, less advantaged students are aware of the phenomenal advancements of ...
... here, around November 15.... There is still the Machine and the deus ex machina . I think that "one" is waiting for the machine to be here in order to start "the red evening of the West" and the "black night of the East" (these last words are mine) out of which the golden dawn of Mother will emerge. The time of the great sweeping is drawing near. It is not possible , not possible for things to continue... must add this to my previous letter. One thing has to be understood by you if we are to work together. There is Page 161 a fundamental difference in the method of action of the West and of the East: one may be silly, but it works; the other may be wise, but it does not work. (...) The Western principle of action is to set the force into motion and keep it moving. Blunders, contradictions... For him, humans are mere pygmies for his play. He hates India, seeing her divine value. 39 It is evident then that this man will not only encircle India and build up a fire circle in the west and east of India, whipping up the war against Russia [in Afghanistan], but he will first of all sow the sedition in India, using the elements that you know and specially the huge Bureaucracy which is ...
... witch, on my lap and said: Now, it's between the two of us. You tell me your secret and no nonsense — your secret, which is not found in books or science or machines; which is neither from the West nor the East nor any country, but from the Country of the true Earth. Your secret beating in my naked heart. I moved heaven and earth. I tried everything. Oh, I wanted to compel this devastated human... or perhaps into his real beginning. My heart was beating as if for the first time ever. Mother is the secret of the Earth. No, she is not a saint, not a mystic, not a yogi; she is not from the East or the West; she is not a miracle worker either, or a guru, or the founder of a religion. Mother is the discoverer of Man's secret after he has been stripped of his machines, his religions, his spiritualisms ...
... instrumental misery. A process — if we do not specially believe in the spiritual somersaults of the ascetics of cosmic consciousness who are bankrupt in the East, anymore than the somersaults of the laboratory ascetics who are bankrupt in the West — is something that must be seized directly in our own bodies (since the site of evolution lies there). The enterprise thus is within any idiot’s reach... constant self-transformation. Will we remain the prisoners of a little brain and of a few electronic gadgets and die of our chosen monster, or find the secret of the ages at last? The East and the West are dying. It is not a question of adding up these excellent quantities and producing some cocktail with the Veda + Einstein, nor is an archaeopteryx a sudden addition of two reptiles, but ... Page 271 we do not yet know and which is not the addition of our virtues but a sudden mutation in an old habit of being: a breaking point in the wall. Such is the challenge, in the East as in the West. The challenge of the Earth. Are we going to search in the true sense , or let ourselves be deceived once again by cosmic or scientific or Marxist paradises, while the Marvel carries ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.