... wisdom and the mysteries of the Orient. Recalling that meeting of long, long ago, Madame David-Neel is reported to have said recently: His perfect familiarity with the philosophies of India and the West wasn't what drew my attention: what was of a 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. ... out only on Sri Aurobindo's forty-second birthday, 15 August 1914. Although Alexandra David-Neel received the impression that Sri Aurobindo had a "perfect familiarity with the philosophies of India and the West', he himself disclaimed any such deep intimacy. As he once wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy: And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never was a philosopher - although I ...
... Mother gave the message that while India has or rather had spiritual knowledge but neglected Matter, the West has knowledge of Matter but has neglected the Spirit, — as a consequence of which both India and the West are suffering, the solution would be to develop integral education, which would restore .the development of matter under the guidance and authority of the Spirit. Earlier, Sri Aurobindo ...
... one could also have in this programme the study of art and values, and in this connection, the followings questions could be discussed: What is art? How is art viewed in India and the West? Six limbs of Indian art: Rupa Bheda, Pramaana, Bhava, Lavanya, Sadrishya, Varnikabhanga. Art and the pursuit of the value of Beauty in relation to poetry, music, painting ...
... silence. 20 II What the British conquest did to India is a large subject, and the whole truth of the matter hasn't been said yet. In his Foreword to a formidable tome. Modern India and the West: A Study of the Interaction of Their Civilisations, first published in 1941 and reprinted in 1968, Lord Meston remarked that "the metaphor of the impact is inappropriate"; there has been "nothing ...
... Alexandra 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 ...
... moral judgements of children, not their development as such. II THE ROLE OF SOCIAL CUSTOM AND MORAL NORMS IN VALUE-EDUCATION The received approach to value-education both in India and the west has been influenced by the consideration of desacara and lokariti, customs and uses of the country, and the norms and the virtues accepted by the people. In the Western tradition there are ...
... Mother gave the message that while India has or rather had spiritual knowledge but neglected Matter, the West has knowledge of Matter but has neglected the Spirit, — as a consequence of which both India and the West are suffering, and the solution would be to develop integral education, which would restore the development of matter under the guidance and authority of the Spirit. V There is a ...
... conditions for ideal education or learning. But their combined contribution, it is argued, can possibly ensure the best way of learning. *The received approach of value-education both in India and the west has been influenced by the consideration of desacar and lokariti, customs and uses of the country, and the norms and the virtues accepted by the people. In the Western tradition there are ...
... O'Donnell, 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 ...
... regions southwards towards India, Persia and the Mediterranean countries; if we can suppose that the fathers of the Mesopotamian culture came from the south 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... 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... 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 for the north, uttara , higher, might possibly indicate a memory of their old northern home in Page 449 that supreme point of the earth where they still placed the sacred mountain of their gods. Necessarily, this explanation ...
... between Europe and India, between the West of today and the East of yesterday and tomorrow, is a welcome sign of the times for those who know how much the world's progress depends on their union. M. Pierre Loti, in a letter addressed to the President of the Committee, thus expresses his veneration for India:— "And now I salute thee with awe, with veneration and wonder, ancient India of whom I am the... adept, the India of the highest splendours of Art and Philosophy, the India also of monstrous mysteries that terrify, India our cradle, India where all that has been produced since her beginnings was ever impetuous and colossal. May thy awakening astonish that Occident, decadent, mean, daily dwindling, slayer of nations, slayer of gods, slayer of souls, which yet bows down still, ancient India, before... The News of the Month "L'Idée Nouvelle" In close connection with the intellectual work of synthesis undertaken by this Review a Society has been founded in French India under the name of the New Idea, (L'Idée Nouvelle). Its object is to group in a common intellectual life and fraternity of sentiment those who accept the spiritual tendency and idea it represents and ...
... Narottam Puri (Narottam Puri is a well known sport journalist and commentator in India) About common attitudes in India W e, Indians, have a tendency to copy the West. To take an example, Hatha Yoga was almost a forgotten art here in India till the West took it up. As a medical man, I consider the basis of yoga to be sound in termsof health; for instance... from the average man's life, as it was too deep. In India , we made the mistake of not pursuing the practical applications of the theoretical knowledge that we possess. In the West, it is applied in day-to-day life and becomes therefore popularized. Nowhere in the world do we find lesser importance given to physical education than in India. The role of physical education in mental development... it will generally uplift the standard of physical fitness in the country and, who knows, someone may one day reach the level of world championship. India never really chose between the two main ways about sport: the commercial way of the West and the public funding of the East. My solution would be to let Government be responsible for infrastructure and ensuring serious physical education till ...
... sons of India out of their love for the country. We know that Bankim Chandra, Rabindranath, Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo looked upon their country as the Divine Mother. And that is why they have all unveiled the real face of India to the world. When Vivekananda returned from the West he said: I loved India even before arriving in the West. But now (while returning to India from the West) I feel... Her as the Mother. The year was 1893. After his education in England, Sri Aurobindo returned to India to dedicate his life to the service of his motherland. He vowed that the country had to be freed from the shackles of foreign domination. At about the same time another Indian set out for the West in order to lay before the world the real truth about his country and the sanatana dharma . This... Map of India and the Mother’s Symbol From the day this country was partitioned into India and Pakistan I have been unable to look at a map of India. I just refuse to look at it. My whole being, my body, my mind and heart feel terribly pained when I see a map of divided India. Our land of India, our birthplace, cannot remain divided. In 1947 on 15th August Sri Aurobindo declared that India will ...
... to the princes of the Kassites. Significantly, it is only in the post-Rigvedic literature that we get some Indian clues to them, clues that seem to be an argument for a colonizing venture from India to the West. There is the tribe of the Ke ś is mentioned in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (XI. 8.4.6). Pusalker has the note: "[D.R.] Bhandarkar identifies the Ke ś is with the Kassis or Kassites" (Some... Kassites they may have remained unimportant in their new home until much later than the twenty-third century B.C. and continued there the semi-Rigvedic cult brought then from the purlieus of North-west India through the hills of Irān. This is rendered all the more probable because the age of Naram-Sin appears to evince contact even with other Indo-Europeans than the Kassites. According to B. Hrozny... the Harappā Culture in the Indus Valley, the descendants of the Rigvedics in India would be further inland to the East and South. Both the language and the religion of these descendants would show notable developments. How, then, can a band of Aryans, linguistically and religiously Rigvedic, a colonizing stream from India, appear in Mesopotamia in so late a period? To understand the persistence ...
... years and whose end has been dated to the middle of the second millennium B.C., 1 basically non-Aryan, anterior to the oldest Aryan document in India, the Rigveda, and given its finishing stroke by hostile Rigvedic tribes, who hailed from beyond India's north-west and who came to reflect in their scripture the story of their 1. D.P. Agrawal has suggested, from an analysis of radio-carbon (C 14) readings... THE PROBLEM: ITS INDIAN IMPLICATIONS - THE HISTORICAL QUESTIONS INVOLVED In India the problem of Aryan origins has not only a bearing on the remote past. It has also a relevance to the immediate present. Ever since Western historians pronounced, and the historians of our country concurred, that a Dravidian India had been invaded by the Aryans of the Rigveda in the second millennium B.C., there... outside India and later separating to become Irānians and Indo-Aryans in approximately the middle of the second millennium B.C.? (3)Linguistically, does the Rigveda, along with the Zara-thustrian Gāthās of Irān, which were composed undeniably in a sister form of speech, date no earlier than c. 1000 B.C. although the cultural contents of it must have needed some preceding time in India for development ...
... both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome. Here too, if this evolution is to take place, since it must come through a growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and... vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they... this message at the request of All India Radio, Tiruchirapalli, for broadcast on the eve of the day when India achieved independence, 15 August 1947. The text submitted was found to be too long for the allotted time-slot. Sri Aurobindo revised it, and the shorter version ( pages 478-80 ) was broadcast on 14 August 1947. August 15th is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an ...
... serve as a springboard for reaching India.” 1164 “A Georgian historian, Professor Tskitishvili, mentions the Sonderstab F as a contingent that was given the task of marching to West Asia and India … This special force, which was a highly mechanized contingent, had 1620 motor vehicles with its own artillery, tank and aviation units, intelligence and counter-intelligence. The corps mostly included students... they had won by their invasion of the Ukraine … [One policy maker] went so far to postulate that, ‘as long as England blocks Germany’s expansion toward the West, the main interest of Germany must be directed via the Ukraine and the Krim towards India’.” The efforts of the German foreign policy should be crowned by using the conquered Russian territories as a bridge with Central Asia. 1156 This was during... ‘Hitler planned conquest of India, documents reveal’ and dated 21 June 1986, was published the next day in the Indian Express. According to the documents on which this report is based, Germany, Italy and Japan had signed an agreement, in January 1942, on the division of the spheres. Hitler counted on a quick defeat of Russia to invade, in the spring of the same year, West Asia, which would then serve ...
... vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they... looked like impracticable dreams, arriving at fruition or on their way to achievement. In all these movements free India may well play a large part and take a leading position. The first of these dreams was a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India. India today is free but she has not achieved unity. At one moment it almost seemed as if in the very act of liberation she... a growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and, although the scope must be universal, the central movement may be hers. Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India. ...
... knows 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... still further backwards be made" ( Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Pakistan , Deccan College, Poona, 1974, p. 283, col. 2). Page 459 non-Aryan, anterior to the oldest Aryan document in India, the Rigveda, and given its finishing stroke by hostile Rigvedic tribes, who hailed from beyond India's north-west and who came to reflect in their scripture the story of their fight... Their remains at Swat (West Pakistan) were first reported by C.S. Antonini in 1963 and afterwards in the Gandhara plain by A.H. Dani in 1967. As all the sites were cemeteries, Dani coined the label "Gandhara Grave Culture". The Swat material starts in "the 7. Prehistoric India (A Pelican Book, Harmondsworth 1960), p. 198. 8. The Roots of Ancient India : The Archaeology ...
... therefore more directly than Sind's Mohenjo-dāro in the path of Aryans supposedly invading from India's North-west, shows no "massacre" at all? Does it even show any special decline in material prosperity before its abandonment as does Mohenjo-dāro? Aryan invaders, pressing into the country from the North-west, would affect this northern site foremost. Both the morale and the material state of the site... encumbering the latest stratum of Mohenjo-dāro. To him these are the vestiges of a final massacre at a time not distant from the period considered likely for Aryan-speaking peoples from beyond India's North-west to have invaded the Land of the Seven Rivers, the Punjāb and its neighbouring regions. Wheeler insists that the older hymns of the Rigveda reflect the invasion and he reminds us that the invasion... Wheeler's suggestion that whatever other causes there may have been for the decline of the Harappā Culture the coup de grâce was given to it by the Aryan composers of the Rigveda when they invaded India in the middle of the second millennium B.C. 1 What weight does this suggestion carry? Wheeler points to the sprawling groups of earth-covered skeletons - seventeen definitely and perhaps thirty-eight ...
... vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they... from India and, although the scope must be universal, the central movement may be hers. Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India. Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest: The Fifteenth of August 1947 A question regarding India was put... looked like impracticable dreams, arriving at fruition or on their way to achievement. In all these movements free India may well play a large part and take a leading position. The first of these dreams was a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India. India today is free but she has not achieved unity. ... the old communal division into Hindus and Muslims seems now to have ...
... vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there... right remedy is, not to belittle still farther the agelong ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude Page 27 and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense. This is the direction in which the philosophy, poetry, art of the West is, still more or less obscurely, but with an increasing light, beginning... consciousness, the initiative can come from India and, although the scope must be universal, the central movement may be hers. Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India . -Sri Aurobindo The Renaissance in India India can best develop herself and serve humanity ...
... permitted the English to trade in India in 1608. As a result, the English established a factory at Surat. However, India's connection with the West had started earlier with the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to establish themselves in India and the last to leave. They arrived as early as 1498 via the ocean route discovered by Vasco-da-Gama. But it was the East India Company, chartered by the British... under the control of the East India Company. From favourable locations on coasts -Madras, Bombay and Calcutta - the East India Company started tapping the interior resources of India's well-developed manufacturing economy, vast population and solid agricultural base; also the British started limiting India's access to world trade with tariffs, by taking command of India's textile industry and exporting... The Role of South India in the Freedom Movement The British Conquest of India Before we come to the main theme of the book, we shall make a brief survey of the advent of the British and the psychological factors that ultimately led to the aspiration for a united India. The British came to India as traders early in the 17th century. The Moghul ...
... tradition knows 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... and from this hymn he 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... as P.P. Balsara says, "from the facts available till today we can conclude that the Parsis of Iran began coming to India for permanent residence from the year 639 at different places and at different periods, and that their first permanent settlement in India was at Sanjan on the west coast in 716...." 29 We may also hark back to the Airiy ā nam va ē jo recollected by the ancestors of the Parsis ...
... invasion of India around 1500 B.C.? (2) Was the Harappa Culture of the Indus Valley, which ran for at least a thousand years and whose end has been dated in the middle of the second millennium B.C., basically non-Aryan, anterior to the oldest Aryan document in India, the Rigveda , and given its finishing stroke by hostile Rigvedic tribes, who hailed from beyond India's north-west and who came... people referred to as the Mlechchhas in the Brahmanas and the Sutras. These Mlechchhas were looked upon with disapproval by the orthodox Indians. This allowed him to establish a connection between India and West Asia. But the Sarasvati ecology was unknown at the time and Sethna did not realise that the division of the Vedic civilisation into the Eastern and the Western is accounted for by the gradual drying... Valley Civilisation may be gauged from what Pusalker 7 has written apropos of the shift of the Vedic culture "to the east of the land of five rivers": "The Punjab and the west not only recede in importance but the tribes of the west are looked upon with disapproval in the Satapatha and the Aitareya Brahmanas." To these Brahmanas the process leading to the formation of the Harappa Culture must ...
... prophecy. These are his works on a cosmic scale that we are aware of. In our individual cases too his Presence and his dynamic action have been testified to by devotees and disciples all over India and in the West We hear his voice, get his touch, protection, active intervention. The Mother told me more than once that she always saw Sri Aurobindo working on me. I had a personal proof of his surprisingly... Government of India is taking a significant part as a modest recognition of Sri Aurobindo's greatness, is going to be observed all over India and in many parts of the world. Meanwhile the Supramental Manifestation has taken place and the Ashram in consequence has come to be regarded by the world as a spiritual institution from which a new Light is radiating upon earth. Politically, India is gaining a ...
... both in India and in the West of forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome. Here too, if this evolution is to take place, since it must come through a growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and... vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they... fifteenth August a message to the West, but what I have to say might be delivered equally as a message to the East. It has been customary to dwell on the division and 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 ...
... vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they... looked like impracticable dreams, arriving at fruition or on their way to achievement. In all these movements free India may well play a large part and take a leading position. The first of these dreams was a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India. India today is free but she has not achieved unity. At one moment it almost seemed as if in the very act of liberation she... spirit and Page 272 the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and, although the scope must be universal, the central movement may be hers. Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India. Page 273 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, Vol. 26, pp. 404-406 ...
... Hinduism and an unnecessary link made between traditional Hinduism and Sri Aurobindo's supra-mental spirituality which goes beyond the reign of the Overmind godheads that has prevailed so far in India as in the West. I consider your insight to be deeper than that of the Reception Committee,The Mother did not want any sadhak to be drawn to any past religious institution or ceremony. The seer-knowledge enshrined ...
... it to grow into the light. This turn had to come in India as in other lands. But the danger was that the greater spiritual truth already gained might be lost in the lesser confident half-light of the acute but unillumined intellect or stifled within the narrow limits of the self-sufficient logical reason. That was what actually happened in the West, Greece leading the way. The old Page 204 ... abstract terms and convert into a starting-point for an ever widening and deepening philosophic speculation and the reason's long search after a Truth original, supreme and ultimate. There was in India as in the West a great upbuilding of a high, wide and complex intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and social culture. But left in Europe to its own resources, combated rather than helped by obscure religious... common vital and physical mould by the stress of thought and culture do not usually get farther than a strong dwelling on the things of the mind. The highest flight they reach—and it is this that the West persistently mistakes for spirituality—is a preference for living in the mind and emotions more than in the gross outward life or else an attempt to subject this rebellious life-stuff to the law of ...
... both in India and in the West on forward looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome. Here too, if this evolution is to take place, since it must come through a growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and... in this grave eleventh hour it may be possible to galvanise the people of India to rise to the height of the occasion. It is manifest that the present Government of India, as well as its Provincial agencies, are lacking in competence and are incapable of shouldering the burden of India's defence. It is only the people of India, through their popular representatives, who may shoulder this burden worthily... to be considered not only in relation to India's demand for independence but more especially, in the present grave war crisis, with a view to meeting effectively the perils and dangers that confront India and envelop the world. Congress has repeatedly stated, ever since the commencement of the war in September 1939, that the people of India would line themselves with the progressive ...
... idea and ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds.... Here too... the initiative can come from India.... Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far or how soon this connection will be fulfilled, depends upon this new and free India. XI It was an extraordinary message, notable alike... North, the Indian ocean in the South, the Arabian sea on the West and the Bay of Bengal in the East, and with the Mother's symbol of her Shakti, her four powers and her twelve emanations concentrically arranged as the heart of the living Mother of a seething mass of humanity numbering almost a billion, - what is this Spiritual Flag of India but a revelation, an epiphanic projection, a visual recordation... Churchill as the British Prime Minister, and Wavell had become the new Viceroy of India. A Cabinet Mission consisting of Cripps, Pethick-Lawrence and Alexander came to India with the offer of a three-tier Constitution for Free India. In a message dated 24 March 1946, Sri Aurobindo explained how he had always stood for India's complete independence, how as early as January 1910 he had prophesied that in ...
... Again, Shri Sethna contends that Indian tradition knows nothing of any Aryan invasion of India from the north-west and outside of India, nor of any advance of the Aryan from west to east, and proffers in this regard the verse (Rgveda X, 75) which mentions rivers in their order from the east to the north-west beginning with the Gangā. He also cites references of Sudas, an Aila King, who is described... further east are not mentioned in this verse. As to the Aila expansion, I see no difficulty in accepting it without complications, for surely the mere fact that the Aryans entered from the north-west and west does not mean that they established an empire whilst doing it. Complex social organization, in fact, came much later, and Page 163 the Aila kingdom could well have then been ... invasion of India is recorded in no written document, Page 168 and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically." 1 When I touch on the topic of Indian writing in my book, Mr. de Sa again is unable to focus his attention. He makes a loose reference to Pusalker and his "contention". What Pusalker really says is that the Indian tradition, especially in the Puranas, makes India itself ...
... attention to the depth of India’s fall in modern times, when compared to its past spiritual and cultural heights, still for the most part unknown in the West. (They blame the degeneration on the general spreading of the illusionism of the Buddha and Mahavir during a period of several centuries.) But this detracts nothing from the essential importance of the presence of India in the world, of the message... both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome. Here too, if this evolution is to take place, since it must proceed through a growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and... spectrum of humanity. Anyone who is in some measure knowledgeable about the past of India cannot deny that this country — ‘the Asia of Asia, the heart of the world’s spiritual life’ 32 (Sri Aurobindo) — has been the carrier and treasurer of the authentic spiritual riches since Vedic times. ‘The message of the East to the West is a true message: “Only by finding himself can man be saved,” and “what shall ...
... the epics. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata provide a clear example of how the various regions of India were linked by a common culture and awareness. Al-Biruni, writing about India from a place west of the Indus, was aware of the centrality of Vasudeva and Rama to the Indian tradition. All over India, we find local versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. They may disagree on the details, but... general form of the country, if we extend the limits of India to Ghazni on the north-west and fix the other two points of the triangle at Cape Comorin and Sadiya in Assam." (Mookerji pp. 62-63)from Fundamental Unity of India by Radha Kumud Mookerji We thus see that the first element of Indian nationhood is drawn from its unique geography. India is one of the few countries that can be located on... 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 river is enough to cleanse one's soul, as against a dip ...
... him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more Page 235 formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and... Mother on the Second World War” p. 76 Page 233 to achievement. In all these movements free India may well play a large part and take a leading position. "The first of these dreams was a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India. India today is free but she has not achieved unity. At one moment it almost seemed as if in the very act of liberation... growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and, although the scope must be universal, the central movement may be hers; "Such is the content which I put into this date of India's liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India."¹ The period of Sri Aurobindo's retirement was a time of intense ...
... individual encounter with God. The Eastern Way – India To find what the West is lacking, the spiritual experience, we have to turn to the East, more especially to India, “the heart of Asia”, whose spiritual attainments have spread across the whole of Eastern Asia in the form of Buddhism, in South-East Asia in the form of Brahmanism, and in West Asia through its influence on Christianity. Few... Brahman, this Self is the Brahman.’” 49 Secondly, ancient India had a broader gamut of philosophical schools, including even purely materialist ones, than the West has had since Descartes. The true foundation of rational thinking, however, remained always the spiritual levels beyond the rational mind. The image of the human being in the West is still distressingly limited and defective; its limitation... matter of the philosophical schools of ancient India and China, where the outflowering of rational thought preceded the classical period in Greece and was much more varied in its expressions. The focus on the human being and the urge towards an individual evaluation of life are indisputably two of the great gifts the Greek civilisation bequeathed to the West. It seems justified to consider humanism (plus ...
... 1946 447 Hindu-Muslim problem 448 prevailing cynicism and the coming Light 450 partition of 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... Sir Akbar 443 Page 901 L'Idée or Idea 29-30, 32ff, 44, 50ff, 64, 191, 298 L'Idée Nouvelle (New Idea Society) 101ff, 126, 128, 148, 150, 298 Imitation of Christ, The 639 India 46, 82, 128, 200, 404, 446-59, 488, 571, 808-10, 821 see also in The Mother - (3) Indira Gandhi 596, 777-9, 808-9, 821 Indra Sen, Dr 652, 676, 691 Inge, William Ralph 62, 129 Iyengar, Dr... birthday 771 message for 4-5-67 774 sees Indira Gandhi, V.V.Giri 778ff, 821 messages on Sri Aurobindo's centenary 789, 799, 801-3, 829 crisis in health 789-90 glimpses a black cloud approaching India 795 mantra during the Bangladesh crisis 795, 808-10 message to Indira Gandhi 809 things taking an extreme form 807 her last messages 814-7 on 21 February 1973 816 breakdown in health 816ff ...
... draw her map of India, which is still there on a wall in the playground. It includes Pakistan (then West Pakistan), Sikkim, Bhutan, Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), part of Burma, and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). As the Mother put it: ‘The map was made after the partition. It is the map of the true India in spite of all passing appearances, and it will always remain the map of the true India, whatever people... advocate publicly and without compromise as the only ideal 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... permeated with the living presence of the perpetual Indian values. ‘India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word,’ he wrote, ‘she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an Anglicized oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the Occident’s success and failure, ...
... in "the intermediate period" between Dionysus and Sandrocottus.) What is more, Diodorus (III.63) shows us that the Greeks knew of a counter-legend to the one about the entry of Dionysus into India from the west. And from this counter-legend the figure after whom the Indians started their king-series emerges in a clearer shape: 1 "Now some,... supposing that there were three individuals of this... view of all our observations our job is to link Sandrocottus with an intervening chain of 153 kings to the ancient monarch of India whom the Greeks named Dionysus. By doing it we should be 1. "India in Early Greek and Latin Literature", The Cambridge History of India, I, p. 409. Page 67 able to decide between Chandragupta Maurya and Chandragupta I for Sandrocottus and between... former conjunction is used in Southern India, the latter in Northern. 3 About the India known to Megasthenes, Curtius (VIII.9) 4 has preserved the information that the Indians "mark the divisions of time by the course of the moon not like most nations when the planet shows a full face but when she begins to appear horned." About still more ancient India Sengupta 5 says: "The months were begun ...
... the Oxus, is a far cry from the country contiguous to that of the Yonas on India's north-west in Aśoka's day. The whole combination of Yonakambojesu seems alien as a positive entity to the historians of Alexander and to Megasthenes: it appears to be no part of the milieu of the Macedonian conquest of north-western India. Hence this milieu must belong to an epoch different and distant from Aśoka's... Roots of Ancient India: The Archaeology of Early Indian Civilization (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, 1971), p. 245. 2. Ibid., pp. 245-46. 3. Ibid., p. 246. 4.Sir M. Wheeler, Early India and Pakistan (Frederic A. Praeger, New York, 1959). 5."Art: Sculpture", The Age of Imperial Unity, p. 509. Page 393 have been derived from an older common West-Asiatic heritage... the tribes succeeding in the list. For, while they are known in later history as peoples of Western India, their immediate companions in the inscription can be taken to show them in the north-west in Samudragupta's time - located exactly as they should be in the 3rd century B.C., in post-Alexandrine India. In fact, these companions are not only north-western but also the very tribes we can trace ...
... modern India and rousing the nation to a renewed sense of the greatness of active life. Its gospel of selfless, disinterested work, done as an offering to the Divine without any desire for its fruit, can be said to be the most powerful factor in the renaissance of the nation and in the shaping of the progressive mind in modern India. And it is the one gospel that has linked India to the West, and... sterility and stagnation. But a stark disowning of it spells spiritual and cultural death. A rootless, denationalised India can create no great future for herself. An infatuated aping of the West can only lead her to the abyss on the brink of which the West itself is tottering today. India has to create her future and forge her culture, her literature, her arts and sciences, her educational system,... of the West are taking the first step into the immense kingdom of the subtle world, and many of them are allured by the hope of the conquest of that kingdom. Besides, there are other signs discernible like the spread of theosophy within a short space of time, the appreciation of the Vedanta in America, the indirect and incipient dominance of India on the philosophy and thought of the West etc. But ...
... September 27, 1977 (Letter to the West) Is there anything new in the West? A civilization after so many others, which seems to be completing its cycle with a devouring marvel, as did Thebes before with a marvel of occult knowledge in the midst of its ochre cliffs, as did Greece and Rome with other, more gracious but not less mortal marvels, as did India earlier with stagnant spiritual marvels... Perhaps even this Agenda will be outdated — and we will realize that the path is accomplished . Besides, I wonder whether we shall still have presses!... I expect a military government in India. As for the West... will they try, in a last thrashing of their ruin, to bring down their fist on the last Arab sheiks who hold the keys of the machine? Then who will be facing whom? Read in the weekly... The atmosphere here is pure poison. We will hold on as long as necessary.... We have the impression that we live under a weight. India, too, is sinking quickly into chaos and Falsehood. What matters is our Agenda .... I also sent Laffont my “Letter to the West” — there is something in it. That night, I was galloping on a white onager in a wide open steppe, which seemed to represent the starting ...
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