MORALITY, RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY A GREAT confusion seems to prevail today, not only in the popular mind, but also in the minds of thoughtful men, in regard to the distinctive nature and function of morality, religion and spirituality. They are either lumped together and flung into the limbo of past relics, or only morality is singled out for conventional lip homage and use partly as a cloak and an expedient, and religion and spirituality dismissed with a superior disdain as incompatible with the culture and civilisation of a scientific and rationalistic age. Even those, who seriously ponder over the problems of life and death and endeavour to envis

THE CONQUEST OF DESIRE PART I IT is said that when the light of knowledge (bodhi) descended on Buddha at the close of his long meditation, the very first words he uttered were: "I have caught thee at last, thy name is thirst (desire). No more shalt thou make me wheel from birth to birth, from suffering to suffering.” With an unerring intuition, Buddha thus laid his finger on the prime cause of terrestrial suffering and the greatest enemy of man's spiritual evolution. Renunciation of desire, he taught, was the elimination of all evil and suffering and the surest means to the extinction of the egoistic human personality, which is a not-self, a mere

THE DIVINE UNION WE have proposed to ourselves, first, a consideration of the essential identity between the Mother's conception of the divine Union as enunciated by her before tier meeting with Sri Aurobindo and that of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo's conception, evolved out of the all-embracing integrality of his realisation, is a global synthesis of all the concepts of the past crowned with his distinctive gospel of the constant, dynamic union and communion with the Divine in the physical being of man. This original contribution of his to the ideal of the divine Union opens up an infinite vista of spiritual perfection and explains and justifies the soul's descent into hum

THE SUBCONSCIENT AND THE INCONSCIENT THE Inconscient is the origin of the evolutionary creation. It is an apparent negation of the superconscient, an infinite abyss of absolute darkness in which the transcendent omnipresent Reality gets involved for playing at self-loss and self-finding, for the delight of a plunge and a subsequent emergence, a progressive evolution into multiple forms and a manifold self-expression. The engulfing darkness of the Inconscient turns the eternal effulgent substance of Reality into Matter, the dense and obscure primal substrate. In this fathomless night of existence or apparent non-existence, there is no stirring of life or

REASON—ITS UTILITY AND LIMITATION The Utility of Reason REASON is our best guide and mentor so long as we live in the mind. It is the one faculty in us that distinguishes our mind from the mind of the animal. In the lower forms of animal life, it is the instinct that leads, instinct which has more of drive in it than light. Whatever light is in it is buried in the turbid waters of life. Instinct works within a very restricted field and under certain fixed conditions; but it has a sort of automatic sureness, a precision and resourcefulness in its movements which are really amazing. Scientific studies of the bees and the white ants have revealed

THE MOTHER The Aspiration and the Work "When I was a child—about the age of thirteen and for about a year—every night as soon as I was in bed, it seemed to me that ,I came out of my body and rose straight up above the house, then above the town, very high. I saw myself then clad in a magnificent golden robe, longer than myself; and as I rose, that robe lengthened, spreading in a circle around me, to form, as it were, an immense roof over the town. Then I would see coming out from all sides men, women, children, old men, sick men, unhappy men; they 'fathered under the outspread robe, imploring help, recounting their miseries, their sufferings, their pains. In reply, the robe,

TRANSFORMATION IF a perfect manifestation of the Divine in material life is the end of evolution, transformation of human nature is the principal means of achieving it. Man in his unregenerate state manifests not the Divine but the animal from which he has emerged and upon which he stands in his endeavour to transcend himself. His inherent divinity lies asleep or half-awake within him, unable to come to the fore and express itself because of the crudeness and opacity of his natural instruments. Even when it is fully awake and strong enough to reveal something of its love and light and peace and purity, it finds only one or two parts of the nature purified and prepared to be t

YOGIC ACTION alone, it becomes a luminous channel for the outpouring of His Grace and glory upon earth. III "What action should I do and what should I refrain from doing ?" "What work will best help my self-offering and deliver me from my desires and attachments ?" "What kind of service will be acceptable to the Divine ?" These are some of the problems which often besiege and perplex the Karmayogin at the outset of his spiritual career. There is an aspiration in him, a sincerity, a faith, a fervid, if somewhat flurried, will to self- surrender, what is lacking is knowledge,—knowledge not only of the precise nature and implications of his goal, but also of t