SECTION NINE Fate and Free-Will, Karma and Heredity, etc. YOUR extracts taken by themselves are very impressive, but when one reads the book, the impression made diminishes and fades away. You have quoted Cheiro's successes, but what about his failures? I have looked at the book and was rather   staggered by the number of prophecies that have failed to come off. You can't deduce from a small number of predictions, however accurate, that all is predestined down to your putting the questions in the letter and my answer. It may be, but the evidence is not sufficient to prove it. What is evident is that there is an element of the predictable,

PART – I SECTION ONE The Supramental Evolution THERE have been times when the seeking for spiritual attainment was, at least in certain civilisations, more intense and widespread than now or rather than it has been in the world in general during the past few centuries. For now the curve seems to be the beginning of a new turn of seeking which takes its start from what was achieved in the past and projects itself towards a greater future. But always, even in the age of the Vedas or in Egypt, the spiritual achievement or the occult knowledge was confined to a few, it was not spread in the whole mass of humanity. The mass of humanity evolves slowl

Pacsimile of a letter on pp. 78-79 Pacsimile of a letter on pp. 109-110

SECTION FOUR Reason, Science and Yoga I EUROPEAN metaphysical thought – even in those thinkers who try to prove or explain the existence and nature of God or of the Absolute – does not in its method and result go beyond the intellect. But the intellect is incapable of knowing the supreme Truth; it can only range about seeking for Truth, and catching fragmentary representations of it, not the thing itself, and trying to piece them together. Mind cannot arrive at Truth; it can only make some constructed figure that tries to represent it or a combination of figures. At the end of European thought, therefore, there must always be Agnosticism, declared or

SECTION SIX The Divine and the Hostile Powers 1. FALSEHOOD AND IGNORANCE 1 IGNORANCE means Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth, – truth of being, truth of divine consciousness, truth of force and action, truth of Ananda. As a result, instead of a world of integral truth and divine harmony created in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a worl

SECTION TWO Integral Yoga and Other Paths I do not agree with the view that the world is an illusion, mithyā. The Brahman is here as well as in the supracosmic Absolute. The thing to be overcome is the Ignorance which makes us blind and prevents us from realising Brahman in the world as well as beyond it and the true nature of existence. ⁂ The Shankara knowledge is, as your Guru pointed out, only one side of the Truth; it is the knowledge of the Supreme as realised by the spiritual Mind through the static silence of the pure Existence. It was because he went by this side only that Shankara was unable to accept or explain the origin of the uni

Rajayoga MAN fulfilling himself in the body is given Hathayoga as his means. When he rises above the body, he abandons Hathayoga as a troublesome and inferior process and rises to the Rajayoga, the discipline peculiar to the aeon in which man now evolves. The first condition of success in Raja- yoga is to rise superior to the dehātma-buddhi, the state of perception in which the body is identified with the Self. A time comes to the Rajayogin, when his body seems not to belong to him or he to have any concern in it. He is not troubled by its troubles or gladdened by its pleasure; it has them itself and very soon, because he does not give his sanction to them, they fall away from it

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE, Volume 3 of the SRI AUROBINDO BIRTH CENTENARY LIBRARY, contains Sri Aurobindo's early prose writings on subjects of cultural import. They cover a period of twenty years, from 1890 to 1910, prior to his withdrawal to Pondicherry. The political writings and speeches of this period, revealing the active part he played in India's struggle for independence, are collected in Volumes 1 and 2, the poetry, plays, translations in their appropriate volumes. Section One: It contains the earliest available prose writings, dated 1890-92, his student days in England. Stray Thoughts in this section are gleaned from scattered notes f

SECTION FIVE KALIDASA ONCE in the long history of poetry the Great Powers who are ever working the finest energies of nature into the warp of our human evolution met together and resolved to unite in creating a poetical intellect and imagination that, endowed with the most noble and various poetical gifts capable in all the great forms used by creative genius, should express once and for all in a supreme manner the whole sensuous plane of life, its heat and light, its vigour and sweetness. And since to all quality there must be a corresponding defect, they not only gifted the genius with rich powers and a remarkable temperament but drew round it the necessary line of limitat

TWO Turiu - Uriu TURIU Goddess Leda who from heaven descendest, how beautiful are thy feet as they gild the morning. The roses of Earth are red, but the touch of vermilion with which thy feet stain the heavens, is redder, — it is the crimson of love, the glory of passion. Goddess Leda, look down upon men with gracious eyes. The clang of war is stilled, silent the hiss of the shafts and the shields clamour no more against each other in the shock of the onset. We have hung up our swords on the walls of our mansions. The young men have returned unhurt, the girls of Asilon cry through the corn sweet and high to the hearts of their lovers. Goddess Leda, lady of la