A DREAM-VISION: JANUARY 3,1962     A LETTER TO THE MOTHER     Early this morning — a little before 3:30 a.m. — I had a dream. I saw you standing in a room high up in a very tall building. You are standing with your back turned towards the door and talking with someone inside. I am standing far below in a garden and looking up at you and saying, "There is Mother standing." I suddenly see fire coming out of a door on the floor just below the level at which you are. And I realise that the flame is most rapidly mounting up. I see that in a few minutes it will touch your dress. But how am I to warn you? I am so far down that if I clim

A LETTER TO THE MOTHER AND HER ANSWER     Mother my dearest, I want to tell you how I meet you in the morning and how in the evening. In the morning I give you with all my love all that is best in myself. In the evening, with love I pick out from God's finest gifts to the earth — gifts like sunsets, mountain-sceneries, seascapes, woods and flowers — the essence of beauty and add to it the essence of beauty from the whole universe, the world of moon and stars, and then I offer it all to you. Do you know why I do this? It is because when I sit at the Distribution I see three types of people coming to you. There are a very few who

-046_The Mother's Work in a Dreadful Place.htm THE MOTHER'S WORK IN A DREADFUL PLACE     AN EXPERIENCE OF SEHRA PRESENTED  BY AMAL KIRAN     Perhaps the most frightening peep into the unknown which Sehra ever had was recounted by her to the Mother in a letter dated 11 March 1957: "Before going to bed I asked myself why my prayer for quick recovery in the Mother's eye-trouble had not been answered. Then I went to sleep. Suddenly someone spoke: 'Would you like to know why your prayer is not answered and why this attack has come on the Mother's body?' He took my hand and we went down and down as if into a deep well. Soon I found myself in a place which was dark

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU AND MODERN INDIA     Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, passed away on May 27, 1964 in his seventy-fourth year. What India has lost may best be suggested by asking a question he would himself have loved to hear: "Was he seventy-four years old or seventy-four years young?" Nehru never outgrew the happy audacity that was his in the days of his youth. I Ie was at one time the living symbol of young India, and years did not change that aspect of him. This Prime Minister of ours was the country's sole Minister who was always in his prime. For, he represented India in her modernity. It is because modern India flamed i

INDIA AND THE FATE OF NATIONS     A GLANCE AT THE CAREERS OF ANCIENT RACES THROUGH SRI AUROBINDO'S EYES     According to Sri Aurobindo, every nation, every large and distinguishable human collectivity, is a super-organism, with a common or communal body, mind and soul. This super-organism, like the individual, passes through a cycle of birth, growth, youth, ripeness and decline. If the decline lasts long, it generally ends in death. But there resides, in the vast subtleties of the collective being of a people, a power of self-renewal with the help of its inner life-idea. The inner life-idea is the key to a nation's psy

-031_Pranam to the Divine Mother (Poem).htm PRANAM" TO THE DIVINE MOTHER     There are two ways of bowing To you, O Splendour sweet! One craves the boon of blessedness. One gives the soul to your feet. Pulling your touch to ourselves we feel Holy and happy — we think huge heaven Comes close with you that we may pluck A redder dawn, a purpler even. This is but rapturous robbery Deaf to infinity's call That we should leap and plunge in you Our aching empty all And, in the surge of being your own, Grow blind and quite forget Whether our day be a richer rose, A wealthier violet. Precious each moment laid in your h

A MESSAGE HEARD ON NOVEMBER 17,1974     BEFORE PASSING IN A QUEUE THROUGH THE MOTHER'S ROOM     "Do not look for me only in my room. I have liberated myself from my human body. 1 am now everywhere."   SEHRA Page-208

-030_No Return (Poem).htm NO RETURN     I stand here for all time, less rooted in God. A thousand heart-gropes find each root their goal. I am caught by a depth and a warmth of eternal Love, Love that by being eternity is true earth, The rock-grip of a bliss that cannot end. Here is my Country, my Creatrix, my World's Core. To the old out-scattered life there is no return. But my fixed tree is a branching magnificence: Everywhere spread huge arms that pierce all space, Nothing the sweep of the universe can give Eludes; but now from a stainless height I search Earth's distances of lost divinity. Here is the Abroad, the All-Mother

EACH OF US ON EARTH..     Each of us on earth has a short span of dreaming and doing. But the human life which we live, whether individual or collective, is not all that is ours. Through and beyond our dreaming and doing, a larger life is being dreamt and done. Our hearts and minds have a movement which we vision as our own concern. But there is a soul in us which moves to a superhuman issue. This soul gives us our rare strange spells of agonising self-exceeding and ecstatic self-giving. Sudden flashes are the acts of our soul — they seem to come as if from nowhere and to disappear as if into nothing. Often we see very little concrete result. But actu

THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF MOTHER INDIA       February 21, 1974 marks Mother India's "Silver Jubilee". It may be of interest to recall how this periodical was launched and to note some of the vicissitudes through which it passed. Considering the initial difficulties in its way, one may well designate it a child of Divine Grace. In its origin it was the idea of a young businessman, Kes-havdeo R. Poddar, now known as Navajata but even at that time secretly what the name signifies: "The New-born." For, although not yet a resident of the Ashram, he was devoted to the cause of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Feeling the