Rabindranath, Traveller of the Infinite (I) IN Rabindranath, in his life as well as in his art, especially in his poetry, the thing that has taken shape is what we call aspiration, an upward urge and longing of the inner soul. In common parlance it is a seeking for the Divine, in philosophical terms it is a spiritual quest. But Rabindranath is a poet, and he is a modern poet. He cannot be wholly included in the older category, fixed in a mould of clear definition. To be sure, the special characteristic of his consciousness is to keep as far as possible the aim, the ideal, the goal and the Deity of the worship indivisible and indefinable. To make'

I Tried Sannyas NOT once, not twice, but thrice, – three times did I have the urge to take to the life of an ascetic, sannyasa. But whether it was the bad luck of asceticism or out of my own good luck, I had to give up the idea .on all the three occasions, though each time it happened in a different way. This was how it came about the first time. I had just come out of jail. What was I to do next? Go back to the ordinary life, read as before in college, pass examinations, get a job? But all that was now out of the question. I prayed that such things be erased from the tablet of my fate, sirasi ma likha, ma likha, ma likha. But before I could come to any final decision as to

SWEET - MOTHER (New Talks) In Her Company ALL of you, I suppose, sometime or other attend the meditation, the evening meditation at the Playground. If not all, at least a good many or most of you. Perhaps a few of the younger ones do not. When the. Mother was giving this collective meditation in the Playground, almost always there used to happen a strange phenomenon. She has spoken of it, Sri Aurobindo also referred to it, some of you may recall. Among the people who attended the meditation, mostly our Ashram-people, there used to be present strange guests in the company: invisible beings from other worlds, gods, various degrees and kinds of gods, great gods

Jagadish Chandra Bose JAGADISH Chandra Bose is a scientist; his field is the world of matter, his function is to discover the truth of matter by material means. The truth has to be proved by demonstration and to be established. Science denies the truth that does not come within the purview of the senses. Observation by the external senses and examination and analysis by the intellect – these are the approved and accepted instruments of knowledge for the scientist. Scientists are rationalists; the senses and the mind or the reasoning intellect are all they hold on to. In their quest for truth they do not rely on other faculties; for other faculties fall under the cate

Vivekananda VIVEKANANDA is the embodiment of the newly awakened, heroic and eternal soul of India. India forgot herself, forgot I what she was, what was her mission in the world. With the true nature of her psychic being gone out of her consciousness, India was sunk in slumber. India had lost her spirit, virility, wisdom and, withdrawn into her shell was about to be swamped by the deluge of an utter destruction. Vivekananda lifted India up as did the Lord when he had incarnated himself as a white boar and lifted the earth from the ocean-bed with his pointed tusks. Thus with his indomitable power Vivekananda upheld India before the world and awakened her to establish herself in the

My Athletics THERE is in the Upanishad a description of the stage in man's life when he becomes so old and decrepit that he cannot walk except on a stick, tvam jίrņo daņdena vañcasi. At precisely that stage in our life, we in the Ashram received a call to plunge into the activities of our Playground. I was then perhaps the oldest among the inmates, and had long passed the fifty year limit once set by the ancients for repairing to the forest, pañcÄ�Å›ordhe vanam vrajet; I was in fact in my early sixties. For at least twenty years previous to that, we had been taking it rather easy and were doing very little physical work or exercise. That had been what might be described as

Deoghar THE scene was Deoghar, though not exactly the town itself. About five miles before you reach the town, there is the Jesidih Junction on the main railway line. Nearly a mile from there, close to the railway line there was a house with only a ground floor and quite neat and clean on the whole. All around were open fields – not the green meadows of Bengal but the barren red moorlands of Bihar. Not entirely unpleasant scenery though, for it breathed an atmosphere of purity and peace and silence. A little farther away there stood a larger two-storeyed mansion, perhaps the comfortable holiday retreat of some rich man. The time was towards the end of 1907 and the beginning of 1908

Spirituality in Art Is there any natural opposition between art and the spiritual life? The Puritans had cast aside poetry and music like poison. In the Talmud (the scripture of the Jews) there is the total prohibition to draw the picture of anybody, be he a man or a God. Plato in his Republic refused to award a locus to the poet. Even in the world of to-day, behind the externals we are after Idealism that awakens the higher emotions, the spiritual perception, and inspires the spiritual life in poetry, music, painting and sculpture. We want to do away with mundane art and have the art that helps to acquaint us with God. We want to turn our eyes from the art that depicts th

Greek Drama (I) IT seems that on listening to some Greek lines included in my talk the other day, many of you have expressed a desire to hear a little more about Greek poetry. This then will be my subject today. I am particularly reminded in this connection of a line from Sophocles, the dramatist – like the Latin sentence I quoted on the last occasion. Sri Aurobindo himself had read out this line to me more than once and given it an extremely beautiful interpretation. It is the opening line of Sophocles' famous play, Antigone, which happened to be the second book I studied while learning Greek. The first was Euripides' Medea, which is Media in Greek – note here the play on

Alipore Jail IN Alipore Jail we spent a whole year, from 2nd May 1908 to 6th May 1909, as undertrial prisoners. This period might be divided into four distinct phases, according to the type of quarters we were allotted and the kind of life this gave us. These phases were however not of equal length. The ward we were assigned in the first instance – this was known as the "44 Degrees" – was where we had to spend most of our time in jail, and this in two instalments, once at the beginning and again at the end. The name "44 Degrees" was given because the ward consisted of 44 rooms; these rooms were actually more like cells. You know the kennels and sheds where dogs and poultry ar