-024_^^I HAVE NOTHING, I AM NOTHING^^.htm "I HAVE NOTHING, I AM NOTHING" The state is that of utter commonplaceness. The feeling that I am doing Yoga, that I am something and have a special work to do, that something has to be achieved, that life has a purpose etc. etc. all that has left and left a blank, a void inside and an absolutely mechanical automaton outside. I do the most ordinary things of life, as any other common man, like the routine work of a machine; I know nothing and have no impulse to know or to plan as to what I should do, how I am to move or why is it all like this. A great tranquillity and silence possess the whole being. There is no "I", no person to refer to in the con

TYPES OF MEDITATION The first is to think on one subject in a continuous logical order. When, for example, you have to find the solution of a problem, you go step by step from one operation to another in a chain till you finally arrive at the conclusion. The thought is withdrawn from all other objects and is canalised along a single line. This is a kind of meditation, although it may not be usually known by that name. It marks a progress in the makeup of the human consciousness. For normally the mind moves at random, thoughts run about on many subjects, various, contrary and contradictory, from moment to moment. There is neither direction, consistency or organis

-016_Panacea Of ^^ISMS^^.htm PANACEA OF "ISMS" COMMUNISM Communism cannot save humanity. For if it means the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, well, a healthy normal society will not bear or tolerate it long—no Dictatorship, whether of one or of many, is likely to endure or bring in the millennium. In that sense communism is only a fascismo of small people fighting against a fascismo of big people. A society is not normally made up of proletarians only: it does not consist merely of lotus-eaters nor does it consist of hewers of wood and drawers of water (peasants and labourers) alone. Even a proletariate society will slowly and inevitably gravitate towards a stratification of its own. In its very b

Aspects of Modernism "Unity was the sheet-anchor of Science 'up to now. But the latest theories seem to break up the universe into a mass of independent constituents each acting for itself No doubt there is one Force still (if magnetism and electricity can be reduced to one formula as is sought to be done by Einstein), but it is a discontinuous unity in its manifestation at least. Science seems to be coming away from a materialistic Adwaita towards a restatement of the Sankhya idea." – SRI AUROBINDO . Every age has claimed to be modern and sought to establish its characteristic newness, the hall-mark that separates it from the preceding age. How then does the twentieth

THE QUEST AND THE GOAL   Man and the Gods   1   THE Earth symbolises and epitomises material Nature. It is the body and substance, the very personification, of uncon­sciousness-Ignorance carried to the last limit and concretised. It represents, figures the very opposite of the Reality at the summit. The supreme and original Reality is the quaternary: (1) Light, (2) Truth, (3) Love and (4) Life. They are the first and primal godheads with whom creation starts and who preside over the whole play of the manifestation. These gods that emanated out of the supreme consciousness of the Divine Mother as her fundamental aspects and personalities had automatically an absolute freedom

Hamlet : A Crisis of the Evolving Soul THE consciousness that rules over the tragedy of Hamlet, the destiny that works itself out in the play of the forces portrayed in that great drama, are the consciousness and the destiny of the human soul at a most fateful crisis, a crucial turning-point in the course of its evolution. The soul, lodged in the human embodiment, moves forward and upward, towards a greater and greater self-expression and self-expansion, a continual heightening and widening of its consciousness, a constant subli­mation and transfiguration of its mode of being and living. And in the progressive gradient so pursued, there are certain stages or level-crossings that can

Some Thoughts on the Unthinkable   GOD is not an autocrat – a despot like the Czar or the Shahan Shah, pedestalled high above and ruling over his subject-slaves according to his fancy and caprice, issuing ukases and firmans which suffer no delay or hindrance in their execution. God is, if he is at all to be compared to a king, more like a constitutional sovereign. He does not act as he chooses and pleases. There is a system, a plan, a procedure of governance; there are principles and laws and rules, and he abides by them. There are even agents and intermediaries, officers and servants – instruments through whom he works out his purpose. He is] the supreme dharmaraja, the lord and gua

PART II TOWARDS A NEW SOCIETY THE IDEALS OF HUMAN UNITY The unification of humanity is also a thing decreed. For it is the goal towards which Nature is proceeding slowly but inevitably, bringing into play factors and forces that work out that consummation. Man is a gregarious animal, a social being. He forms groups and collectivities and lives as a member among others with whom he is related and connected in various ways. These groupings are the units round which man's life crystallises and develops, the nuclei of a growing, an increasingly complex and unified organism. The earliest and the most persistent unit is the family: it may be called

APPENDIX SRI AUROBINDO'S VIEWS ON THE SECOND WORLD WAR* You have said that you have begun to doubt whether it was the Mother's War and ask me to make you feel again that it is. I affirm again to you most strongly that this is the Mother's War. You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others or even for India. It is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and false-hood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial ci

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL A leading Nationalist has opined that he does not understand the " slogan " of viewing the nation against a background of internationalism. We can only say that the patriot has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing always like the old guards attached to the old regime who do not see how much water has flown below their feet while they stood gazing at the sky or shut themselves up in their ivory tower. Well, a village headman could in the same way assert that he does not know and cares not to know how to look upon his village against the background of the whole nation: still the village exists only in and through the life of the nation. Even