A Talk with Madhav Pandit On My Birthday – July 29, 1973   I met with Madhav and touched his feet and he pulled my head to his stomach and held me for a long time.  Then he took me to his kitchen and gave me a bar of candy.  I told him about my dream of all the people in Auroville being actors in a play and leaned back relaxed to see all the characters, even those not close to me, playing an essential role.  I asked Madhav if people in Auroville were more representative of forces to be worked out, possibilities and difficulties .  He confirmed this and said that as Auroville is a collective experiment there is no place now for individuality.  Each must fill his part.  Later individualit

 Savitri and The Yoga of the Cells   Introduction   Physical Transformation — The Early Beginnings   It is perhaps not very wrong to say that the process of the last decisive physical transformation in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga-tapasya began sometime in the mid-1930s. The siddhi or realisation of the Overmind consciousness working in the physical was already obtained by him in 1926; it set off a certain globality of operation for its functioning at the material level. Since then his entire yogic effort was organised towards getting the higher, the supramental siddhi in the substance of the body itself. This wa

A Sample from the Manuscripts The opening passage of Book One Canto One, The Symbol Dawn, has the following text of 115 lines in the Savitri that was published in 1950. The 1942-draft which had only 58 lines in Sri Aurobindo’s hand is reproduced as a facsimile. It was the hour before the Gods awake. Across the path of the divine Event The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge. Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable, In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse The abysm of the unbodied Infinite; A fathomless zero occupied the world. A power of fallen boundless self aw

-11_Extracts from Jugal Kishore Mukherjee^s Letters.htm Extracts from Jugal Kishore Mukherjee’s Letters [Let us take one specific example from Jugal Mukherjee’s several letters pertaining to Savitri-corrections.His letter dated 24 April-1 May 1988is a 50-page single-spaced typescript running into several sections, and is titled Some Final Observations on the Table of Corrections. We shall takehere one of itsparts just by way of illustration to get an idea of his objections and concerns regarding the new Savitri-editing.] In justification of what I have been doing during the last 7 or 8 months in connection with Savitri, once Manoj [Das Gupta] very kindly remarked to one of the editors of the critical

A Question of a Comma A world unseen, unknown by outward mind Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul. He sat in secret chambers looking out Into the luminous countries of the unborn Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and true And all that the life longs for is drawn close. He saw the Perfect in their starry homes Wearing the glory of a deathless form Lain in the arms of the Eternal’s peace, Rapt in the heart-beats of God-ecstasy. He lived in the mystic space where thought is born And will is nursed by an ethereal Power And fed on the white milk of the Eternal’s strengths Till it grows into the likeness of a god. In the Witness’s occ

Does the Revised Edition make Savitri more Mantric? The nature of Savitri’s poetry Before asking the question "Does the Revised Edition make Savitri more mantric? does it remove the dullness present in the earlier editions because of mistakes in them?", let us quickly look into the nature of Savitri’s poetry. In a letter dated 27 April 1999 addressed to Karan Singh, Manoj Das writes: If people desire to continue with the earlier editions of Savitri, who is stopping them from doing so? In a few years the copyright of the work will cease to be with the Ashram. We cannot stop anybody from bringing out a new print of any of the old editions.

Some Statistics A false impression has been promoted by the Archives Team by stating that 99.75% of Savitri is unaltered. It is said: “Savitri contained more than 1, 80, 000 words and 99.75% of these are the same in all Editions Between 1951 and 1993 Edition, there are about 1974 differences of which 476 are verbal. The others are punctuation, capitalisation, hyphenation, spelling and others.” To the scientifically and statistically minded people it would mean that 0.25% change is negligible and for practical purposes we may consider it to be zero. But the devil is in the false perspective of taking poetry as a linear form with words as the linear unit. It would be here exposed a