The Iron Chain* How many of you have been here since the beginning, I mean from the Kindergarten classes - any? One, two, three, four... Oh, a good many. Very creditable, very creditable indeed, that so many have continued so long and passed through. This is really something creditable. I will tell you a story in this connection. A young man who was an aspirant, a seeker of spiritual or religious life, once upon a time went to Gandhiji. He wanted to remain there. He said, "I am a seeker of spiritual life. I want to remain with you." Gandhiji saw the person and accepted him. "It is all right, you may try," he said. He remained there sometime, pretty long time, perhaps even mo

In This Crisis THAT the world has now pushed itself into the grip of a tremendous crisis admits of no doubt. And difficult it is to fathom the depth of deformation and depravity in which human nature and human society have sunk. The scriptures speak of the darkest days of Kali when even the last traces of religion would be wiped out; man would become irreligious to the last degree; even in his stature he would shrink to a pigmy. Today's man seems certainly to have diminished to such an extent; his life and consciousness have greatly narrowed down; a drop of water is now his ocean. From what is happening all around one can justifiably say that the realities of Kali have overpass

Modern Poetry ELIOT was perhaps the first to lay down the principle that the style of poetry should be like that of prose. By prose he means the current way of talk. According to him the language should be current, if not colloquial. Common words and sentences and the order of prose will satisfy this principle of poetic diction. Even in earlier times more than one poet acted upon this principle. Wordsworth's method was of this nature: Will no one tell me what she sings? Or 'Tis eight o'clock, – a clear March night The moon is up, – But the moderns demand something still more. Merely current words and expressions won't do; common parlance, even the commonest

The Bride of Brahman (Rig-Veda: X.109) I AM going to tell you a story today, a story both for the old and the young, a very old and ancient story. Indeed it is from the Veda. Once upon a time – of course I am speaking of a time when there was no time nor space, before the existence of time and space, when there existed only One Being, the nameless Being – named Brahman! To us, human beings, it is the Supreme Existence, the Lord, God or whatever one chooses to call him. He is also the Lord Surya, the luminous Truth, the sale Light of Lights. So then it once happened: this luminous Brahman looked at himself and found surprisingly that his luminosity, his brightness

Shyampukur ON coming out of jail, Sri Aurobindo found shelter in the house of his maternal uncle, Krishna Kumar Mitra; the place was known as the Sanjivani Office. Bejoy Nag and myself had got our release along with him, but we could not yet make up our minds as to what we should do next; we were still wandering about like floating weeds or moss. But both of us used to go and see him every afternoon. About this time, he went out on tour for a short while in the Assam area in connection with political work and he took the two of us along. On return from tour he told me one day that he had decided to bring out two weekly papers, one in English and the other in Bengali. The premise

ORIGINAL BENGALI WRITINGS (In English Translation) ON ART AND LITERATURE World-Literature (I) ‘REAL poetry, the acme of poetical art,’ says Victor Hugo, ‘is characterised by immensity alone.’ That is why Aeschylus, Lucretius, Shakespeare and Corneille had conquered his heart. Had he been acquainted with Sanskrit literature he would have included Valmiki and the Vedic seers. As a matter of fact, what we want to derive from poetry or any other artistic creation is a glimpse of the Infinite and the Eternal. When the heart opens wide, it soars aloft to clasp the whole universe with its outspread wings. In the absence of the spirit of univers

Tagore the Unique IT is no hyperbole to say that Tagore is to Bengali literature what Shakespeare is to English, Goethe to German, Tolstoy to Russian, or Dante to Italian and, to go into the remoter past, what Virgil was to Latin and Homer to Greek or, in our country, what Kalidasa was to ancient Sanskrit. Each of these stars of the first magnitude is a king, a paramount ruler in his own language and literature, and that for two reasons. First, whatever formerly was immature, undeveloped, has become after them mature, whatever was provincial or plebian has become universal and refined; whatever was too personal has come to be universal. The first miracle performed by these gr

The Poet and the Yogi IT is at times said that a critic, at least a successful critic, is a poet who has failed. Likewise the poet himself is a Yogi who has failed. That is to say, to be a good and genuine poet one has first to be a Yogi. Is it really so? Just to prove it a French priest has even gone to the length of writing a book.¹ Of course, Abbé Brémond has not used the term 'Yogi' but 'mystic', and prayer, he adds, is the inherent virtue of a mystic. We can then hold that a Yogi, a spiritual aspirant or even a mere aspirant – on the whole they mean the same. According to Brémond, a poet is he who has either fallen from the status of a mystic or has deviated from

On Karmayoga (A Letter) You want to do something. It seems it has become impossible for you to remain quiet. But you cannot make up your mind as to what you should do. You seem to think that whatever work you do would be commonplace and trivial and would have no inner support. You find no work after your heart. But I am afraid you have started from a wrong idea. Bear in mind that the most essential thing in one's life is 'to be' and not 'to do'. First, be something, then action will come of itself. Action is the expression of becoming or the natural effect of the fullness of your becoming. What you will do and how far you will go depends solely on what you have become and ho