Cosmonautics (1) MODERN science, modern applied science, has brought about and is bringing about more and more a big change in the earth atmosphere. It is not merely the dust and smoke, gases and fumes thrown out by the modern machineries from the earth into the sky that have been increasing ominously in volume, but the less patent vibrations that have been released by advanced scientific projects and experiments and that have been encircling the earth more and more in a tight embrace. A quiet and clean air was such a treasure for human beings; men have always longed for it as a necessity and also as a diversion, and it was so readily available. The saints and sages went u

Consciousness I SPOKE of consciousness and dimensions of consciousness. What then is consciousness itself? Well, we may begin by knowing what it is not, what is not consciousness. Not consciousness means the absence of consciousness, otherwise unconsciousness. You are conscious, conscious of things when you are aware, aware of their presence; when you are not aware, when you do not perceive, you are unconscious, you do not have consciousness. It is the difference between being asleep and being awake. When you are asleep things are lost, you become unconscious of them; when you are awake; things reappear and you are conscious of them. The difference is analogous to the differenc

Poetry and Poetic Inspiration I HAVE said: "Poetry is sensuality of the mind". How is it so? It is because poetry is in relation with the forms and images of ideas – forms, images, sensations, impressions, emotions attached to ideas are the sensual or, if you prefer to call it, the sensuous side of things. All such relations are sensuousness. And poetry concerns itself with this idea of mind and thought. It approaches the world of ideas through their appearances, through the play of sensations and emotions around them. It is not like philosophy or metaphysics which endeavours to look into the inside of ideas. Poetry, on the other hand, cannot be poetry unless i

Buddha and Shankara (1) To escape from life is a teaching based on the view that life is an illusion. The teaching began with Buddha. Buddha said that life or existence is the fruit of desire and that there was only one way of getting out of the misery, namely, to go out of existence. Shankara continued in that line. He added, however, that existence was not merely the fruit of desire, but that it was altogether an illusion and that so long as one lives in that illusion, one cannot realise the Divine. For him the Divine – the Supreme Divine – did not exist. I believe his view was something to that effect. In any case, for the Buddha there was no God. Both of

In these Fateful Days To destroy is easy; to create, it is difficult. The vital force destroys in its violence, it is the spirit that creates in its energy of consciousness. The vital force is easily available to man. The spirit is a far cry. And yet there is no other way out: if man is to be saved, that is the only way left before him. If man's destiny is to fulfil – fulfil the purpose of creation, he will have to find out the way of the spirit. If in his present mood of perversity, he pursues blindly the urge that has possessed him, he will surely annihilate himself – willingly or unwillingly he will commit hara-kiri. Fortunately for man, souls

The Moral and the Spiritual Is there anything essentially wrong, evil in its very being and nature? Some religious traditions say, there is: Satan is such a thing, Ahriman is such a thing, and what else is maya or mara? However that may be, the sense of something essentially wrong is the fount and origin of the moral sense. The moral sense stems from and lives on the sense of sin and guilt. The sense of sin is the fundamental inspiration behind some religious disciplines, even the sense of something irrevocably bad or something irreparable; for that gives a stronger impetus, a more dynamic urge to the spur of the religious consciousness. Th

The Origin of Desire FROM where does desire come? Buddha said that it came from Ignorance. It is almost that. Desire is something in the being which imagines that it requires an object other than itself for its satisfaction. This is sheer ignorance, proved by the fact that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred when one has the thing desired, one no more cares for it. At its very origin, I think, it was an obscure need for growth or increase. In the lowest forms of life we find love transformed into an instinctive and irresistible need for enlarging, swelling, absorbing, adding to it another body. This need to take in is desire. So perhaps if you go back far enoug

Love and Death ONE of the earliest poems of Sri Aurobindo – a juvenile work – has the title Love and Death. This is indeed the central theme, the core of the inspiration running through the whole of his poetic world culminating in the grand symphony of Savitri. As a matter of fact his vision and the mission of his life are epitomised in those three words, namely 'Love conquering Death.' I shall leave aside his other works and take up his dramas, his five complete major dramas in which the theme has been developed and the problem set and solved in somewhat different ways but always leading to the same conclusion 'Love conquering Death.' Death according to Sri Aurobindo is

“The Hero and the Nymph” A note on Kalidasa's "The Hero and the Nymph" (translated by Sri Aurobindo), staged at the Ashram Theatre on December 1st and December 3rd 1971. The story of Kalidasa's "The Hero and the Nymph" is the eternal legend of the marriage of heaven and earth upon earth. The Heavenly Beauty can descend upon earth and be united to a human soul only, as it appears, under a malediction; for heaven and earth are normally understood to be opposites and contradictories. The malediction means that the union can happen under certain limitations. First of all, there is the limitation of time, that is to say, the union does not last long, it can be onl

The Story of Love (1) LOVE, in its essence, is the joy of identity. It finds its final expression in the felicity of union. Between the two there are all the phases that make up the universal manifestation. Love comes from the very origin of the universe. Love in its essence, I say, that is, before the manifestation, is the delight of identity. Something there was which became conscious of the identity. And that is precisely Love. Afterwards comes the manifestation of Love. In its highest form, when it comes back to its origin across all its history of manifestation, it becomes the felicity of union. The sense of union comes as a consequence of the sense of separat