-004_God^s Debt.htm Here is a line from Savitri: And paying here God's debt to earth and man... What is this debt that God owes to earth and man? We understand the debt that man and earth owe to God, their creator. But how is God indebted to his creation? Besides we learn that God pays his debt through his representative, his protagonist upon earth, the aspiring human being. First let us understand the mystery of God's debt to man. We know, in ordinary life a subordinate has a duty towards his superior, the lesser owes a debt to the greater. That is easily understood. Likewise the superior also has a duty to his subordinate, the greater has his duty to the smaller. Th

-007_The Opening Scene of ^^Savitri^^.htm The Opening Scene of "Savitri" "It was the hour before the Gods awake". Only when the Gods awake, does the light begin to appear on earth. Otherwise it is all night here, black, impenetrable and unfathomable. Indeed the very creation begins with the awakening of the Gods. When the Gods are asleep, it is the non-existence - tama āsīt tamasā gūḍhamagre - 'in the beginning darkness was engulfed in darkness'. This is the asat, non-being, this is the acit, the inconscience, this is the blackest night. The Bible also speaks of a similar darkness - Job's terrible vision: "A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order an

Appendix The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining

The Human Divine (l) The Passing of Satyavan This was the day when Satyavan must die. The day is come, the fateful day, the last day of the twelve happy months that they have passed together. She knew it, it was foretold, it was foreseen. And she was preparing herself for it all the while, harbouring a pain deep-seated within the heart, revealed to none, not even to her mother, not even to Satyavan. Satyavan was innocent like a child, oblivious of the fate that was coming upon him. The two went out of the hermitage into the forest; for she wished to move about in the company of Satyavan in the midst of the happy greeneries where Satyavan

Preface Nolini Kanta Gupta's Collected Works in English (1970) is a veritable treasure of seminal ideas, insights, and flashes of intuitive perception that illumine like flares in the nightly sky many a recondite terrain of intellectual discourse. In his writings we come across a sweep and a depth of thinking which has a freshness and wholesomeness unusual to the mental stratosphere. At the same time they have a texture of thought more finely woven than is possible on the loom of the human intellect. The word "global" most aptly characterises his thought. It is global in the sense of not being the view from a single angle or from a few closely related angles. The mental standpoi

AN ASPECT OF EMERGENT EVOLUTION The theory of Emergent Evolution should be considered no longer as a theory, but as a statement of fact. The fact, at its barest, stripped of all assumptions and even generalisations, is the fact observed and implicit in all evolution, which can be denied only by the perverse and purblind. It is this, that at each crucial step Nature undergoes a sudden and total change, brings forth a new element which was not there before and which could not be foreseen or foretold by any process of deduction from the actual factors in play. At the very outset of the evolutionary march, when material Nature meant only a mass or masses of

OUR IDEAL OUR ideal—the ideal of Sri Aurobindo —we may say without much ado, is to divinise the human, immortalise the mortal, spiritualise the material. Is the ideal possible? Is it practicable? Our task will be precisely, first of all, to show that it is possible, next that it is probable and finally that it is inevitable. Now to the first question. It is usually contended that the ideal is an impossibility, a chimera, since it involves on the face of it a self-contradiction. For, is not divinity the very opposite of humanity, immortality that of mortality and Matter that of the Spirit? These pairs, all of them, are formed of two mutually exclusive terms. This is wha

LINES OF THE DESCENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS I THE world has been created by a descent of consciousness; it maintains itself, it proceeds and develops through a series of descent. In fact, creation itself is a descent, the first and original one, the descent of the supreme Reality into Matter and as Matter. The supreme Reality—the fount and origin of things and even that which is beyond— although essentially something absolute, indescribable, ineffable, indeterminable, has been, for purposes of the human understanding, signalised as a triune entity of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss. That is to say, first of all, it is, it exists always and for e

THE YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO THE YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO Part Two NOLINI KANTA GUPTA Sri Aurobindo Library Madras Publishers: Sri Aurobindo Library 369 Esplanade, George Town Madras All Rights Reserved First Edition1943 Second Edition .. 1950 Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press Pondicherry Printed in India PUBLISHERS' NOTE The present volume is the second of a series in which it is proposed to deal with various aspects of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga in their simple and broad outlines. The first two

FAITH AND PROGRESS When one makes an effort, makes a little progress, one gets satisfied and is proud of it. That spoils everything. How to get rid of this fault ? It is because one looks at oneself while doing a thing. It is the habit of constantly observing oneself as one works or lives. Certainly you must observe yourself; but more than that you must be sincere and spontaneous —spontaneous in what you do and not turning towards yourself all the while, judging, criticising, sometimes even severely. That is often as bad as patting oneself with satisfaction. You must be sincere in your aspiration, you need not even know that you are aspiring: you should be