Then Congress transformed itself into a committee of the whole. The Declaration of Independence was read aloud once more, and debate resumed. Though Jefferson was the best writer of all of them, he had been somewhat verbose. Congress hacked the excess away. They did a good job, as a side-by-side comparison of the rough draft and the final text shows. They cut the phrase “by a self-assumed power.” “Climb” was replaced by “must read,” then “must” was eliminated, then the whole sentence, and soon the whole paragraph was cut. Jefferson groaned as they continued what he later called “their depredations.” “Inherent and inalienable rights” came out “certain unalienable rights,” and to this day no one knows who suggested the elegant change.
A total of 86 alterations were made. Almost 500 words were eliminated, leaving 1,337. At last, after three days of wrangling, the document was put to a vote.
Here in this hall Patrick Henry had once thundered: “I am no longer a Virginian, sir, but an American.” But today the loud, sometimes bitter argument stilled, and without fanfare the vote was taken from north to south by colonies, as was the custom. On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
There were no trumpets blown. No one stood on his chair and cheered. The afternoon was waning and Congress had no thought of delaying the full calendar of routine business on its hands. For several hours they worked on many other problems before adjourning for the day.
In my childhood before the full development of my faculties, I became conscious of a strong impulse in me. I did not realise what it was then, but it grew stronger and stronger as I gained in years till all the weakness of my childhood, fear, selfishness, etc., vanished from my mind. From the day of my return to the mother country, the impulse is surging forth in great force, and my set purpose and devotion are becoming more confirmed with the trials and oppressions to which I am subjected. When some divine power by the Grace of God manifests itself in a human being any efforts to develop it give a new force to the national life. You will have to sacrifice yourself at the feet of your Mother. You should, therefore, devote yourself with firm faith and whole heart to her service. Service of our motherland is our highest duty at this moment. This must be our duty in this iron age. It is now the time for us to conserve our energy. Do not be impatient, do not despair. Do not lose faith. The present fatigue and inactivity are natural; you will find instances of them in the history of every nation. Everyone must store up energy. Be prepared with fresh hope and vigour for the worship of the Mother. Divine power has infused this nation with a new power. This power will exalt the nation one day.
Sri Aurobindo had come to tell us
It is not necessary to leave the earth to find the Truth.
It is not necessary to leave life to find one’s Soul.
It is not necessary to give up the world,
or to have limited beliefs
in order to enter into relation with the Divine.
The Divine is everywhere and in everything.
And if He is hidden it is because,
we do not take trouble to discover Him.
The Mother
What usually happens is that when the body reaches its maximum intensity of aspiration or of ecstasy of Love, it is unable to contain it. It becomes flat, motionless. It falls back. Things settle down—you are enriched with a new vibration, but then everything resumes its course. So you must widen yourself in order to learn to bear unflinchingly the intensities of the supramental force, to go forward always, always with the ascending movement of the divine Truth, without falling backwards into the decrepitude of the body.
From Rishabhchand's "The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo", Chapter IX, "The purification of nature"
Identifying himself with the psychic being, as much as he can, he looks into his nature, as if he was looking into something outside himself, and is, therefore, much better able than the psychologist or the psycho-analyst to study it in all its protean moods and energies. It is in this identification with the psychic being that the Yogi scores over the psychologist, for it gives him a rare vantage ground, a secure poise, from where he can observe and deal with even the least movements of his nature.
…
The knowledge of the self or soul must then precede any true knowledge of nature. It is only in the light and the context of the infinite that the truth of the finite can be properly read. It is the Eternal alone that can explain and justify the temporal. That is why we find such an astonishing unanimity in the essential experiences and discoveries of the yogis and mystics, whose psychological researches proceed upon the granite basis of self-knowledge. If there are differences among them, they are due to their pursuit of different lines of knowledge, or to the differing scope and range of their experiences, but not to the fundamental elements of the experiences themselves.
Between two rainbow-coloured columns there is a being of big stature; his head, that of quite a young man, is encompassed with small blond ringlets, his eyes are green like the sea; he is dressed in a tunic of light blue and on his shoulders there are two big fins, snow-white and winged-shaped. On seeing me, he stands against a column to make room for me to pass. Hardly do I cross the threshold when an exquisite melody comes and strikes on my ears. Here the water is all a rainbow colour, the ground is sanded with iridescent pearls, the parvis and the vault from which grateful stalactites hang are like opal; delightful perfumes are spread everywhere; there are galleries, openings, corners, on all sides, but straight before me I see a great light and it is towards that that I proceed. There are great rays of gold, of silver, of sapphire, of emerald, of rubies; all these rays take birth at a point too far from me to distinguish what it is and they shoot forth in all directions, I feel myself drawn towards their centre by a powerful attraction.
It is a misunderstanding to suppose that I am against Bhakti or against emotional Bhakti—which comes to the same thing, since without emotion there can be no Bhakti. It is rather the fact that in my writings on Yoga I have given Bhakti the highest place. All that I have said at any time which could account for this misunderstanding was against an unpurified emotionalism which, according to my experience, leads to want of balance, agitated and disharmonious expression or even contrary reactions and, at its extreme, nervous disorder. But the insistence on purification does not mean that I condemn true feeling and emotion any more than the insistence on a purified mind or will means that I condemn thought and will. On the contrary, the deeper the emotion, the more intense the Bhakti, the greater is the force for realisation and transformation. It is oftenest through intensity of emotion that the psychic being awakes and there is an opening of the inner doors to the Divine.
I would like to add my congratulations to everyone involved in this achievement—Higgs
4 July 2012
Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
I had heard that Sri Aurobindo was busy at a poem, on which he had been working for years and years and which he had been revising and rewriting and that it was called Savitri.
Once Sri Aurobindo sent me two lines of poetry to illustrate a point connected with a poem of mine which I had submitted to him. They ran:
Piercing the limitless Unknowable,
Breaking the vacancy and voiceless peace.
These lines seemed to have something immeasurably deep and their rhythm seemed wide-spreading. Naturally I asked Sri Aurobindo where they were from. He answered just one word: “Savitri”. This was my first introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s masterpiece.
Mirror of Tomorrow 