Mr Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s work says much about our media culture of readership as regards to Sri Aurobindo. His article represents a new dimension, a new layer, a scholarly-professionally sordid element in the patronizing of Mr Heehs. As yet the controversy was of content. Mr Mehta goes a step further, dismissing the objections to content as “ridiculous”, that the content is not really the real source of protesters’ “ire”; it is the protesters own lack of appreciation for The Lives of Sri Aurobindo; it is its “sophistication” that is evoking protesters ire! Mr Heehs has unfortunately become the target because of the crudeness and lack of training in “liberal education” and “religious sensibility” of the protesters. It is as though all that liberal education and sensibility is the singular trait or property of the new class of social thinkers only. But one wonders if they have any real contact with values of the Indian traditions bequeathed to us, traditions which also create values in the dynamics of time and life. Read more…
“But I didn’t want to cause you pain at all,” she laughed, vastly tickled. “Only, you were resisting, so my Force could not give you the peace and joy which you would have felt if you had not opposed it tooth and nail, with all the weapons of your wise scepticism and assured ignorance. One must have trust in the Divine.”
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Before I met Sri Aurobindo those past emanations would come and come to me, night after night and sometimes during the day—a mass of things! Afterwards I told Sri Aurobindo about it, and he explained to me that it was quite natural. And indeed, it is quite natural: with the present incarnation of the Mahashakti, whatever is more or less bound up with Her wants to take part, that’s quite natural… Read more…
The opening and closing lines of the stanza are very fine and the second and third are good though not as good as these. The second stanza on the contrary seems to me very successful, especially the two lines of which you speak, and I don’t think anything can be said against them. I would not alter line 11—the word “avenues” is the right one and to exile it would deprive the line of its power.
Over the years, the Mother conducted numerous dialogues with students at the Ashram school in which she expatiated on the proper method of studying and diligently developing the mind. What seem like banal exhortations are in reality infused with innate wisdom, as becomes evident when we juxtapose her insights with anecdotes from the lives of scientists such as Richard and Joan Feynman, Stanislav Ulam and Sofia Kovalevskaya.
You have written that you saw in me one who achieved through the perfection of the intellect, its spiritualisation and divinisation; but in fact I arrived through the complete silence of the mind and whatever spiritualisation and divinisation it attained was through the descent of a higher supra-intellectual knowledge into that silence. The book, Essays on the Gita, itself was written in that silence of the mind, without intellectual effort and by a free activity of this knowledge from above. This is important because the principle of this yoga is not perfection of the human nature as it is but a psychic and spiritual transformation of all the parts of the being through the action of an inner consciousness and then of a higher consciousness which works on them, throws out their old movements or changes them into the image of its own and so transmutes lower into higher nature. It is not so much the perfection of the intellect as a transcendence of it, a transformation of the mind, the substitution of a larger greater principle of knowledge – and so with all the rest of the being.
I have just had a fantastic vision … A vision without form … of (how can I express it?) the cradle of a future … not a very distant future. A future … I don’t know.
But it refuses to be told.
Just this: it’s a pro-di-gious mass hanging over the earth.
I may be overstating matters in saying that the word, physically printed on paper, may be going out of commission. But it is certainly undeniable that the online method of distribution is gaining more and more currency (and saving more and more trees). And one of the victims—beneficiaries?—is an institution much more venerable and at least as influential as Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.
Besides, I feel that every individual in the Ashram is a trustee. On each one rests a responsibility and a duty. And work can be done only when everyone thoughtfully does his duty.
I also feel that anyone can be a trustee of the Ashram. A trustee is not a leader, though.
Ebbing and waning of joy, the day estranged:
Here, petalled evening droops;
Below sky-rim the petals have drifted—all is changed
To a dim listless stalk where Twilight stoops
Horizonward; and then
The black scorpion, Night, lifts claws of loneliness and loops
Mirror of Tomorrow 