Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry "The illumined seer and priest of the call, free from harms, shining with light, carrying his banner of smoke, him we seek, the ray of intuition of the sacrifices.” Rig Veda.-8.44.10 On the 4th of April, 1910, Sri Aurobindo arrived by the steamer Dupleix at Pondicherry with Bejoy Nag at about 4 in the afternoon. Moni (Suresh Chakravarty) had already arrived on the 31st March and put up at the house of Srinivasachari, an orthodox Tamil Brahmin, to whom he had brought a letter of introduction from Sri Aurobindo. Srinivasachari had at first taken Moni for a spy, and did not attach any importance to his request for finding

Sri Aurobindo in Bengal THE PARTITION OF BENGAL "...It is a strange idea, a foolish idea... to think that a nation which has once risen, once has been called up by the voice of God to rise, will be stopped by mere physical repression. It has never so happened in the history of a nation, nor will it so happen in the history of India. A storm has swept over us today. I saw it come,' / saw the striding of the storm-blast and the rush of the rain, and as I saw it an idea came to me. What is this storm that is so mighty and sweeps with such fury upon us? And I said in my heart, 'It is God who rides abroad on the wings of the hurricane, - it is the might an

THE ODYSSEY OF THE PSYCHIC THE Mother has many interesting and unconventional things to say about rebirth. She dispels the obscurity which surrounds this important subject, exposes the fraud or self-deception of those who retail entertaining stories of past lives, and gives a clear account of what happens to the soul after it has departed this life—through what worlds it passes, how it assimilates its past experiences and what is the process of its reincarnation. The careful reader will find the cloud of his misconceptions on this subject melting away under the glare of her categoric utterances; for her words spring from her own experiences and not from her spe

DIVINE UNION THERE are as many kinds of divine union as there have been mystics to realise it. Any supra-sensible and decisive experience in the inner consciousness is called divine union. Some Yogins, descending into the deeps of their being, realise an ineffable peace and call it divine union, some find themselves engulfed in an illimitable ocean of bliss or receive the torrential influx of a mighty power and call it divine union. Some realise the immutable Self and think that they have identified themselves with the Absolute. Some, again, unite themselves with the Divine in their hearts, hṛddeśe, and cherish the belief that this is the highest possible union with the Master

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,