2       Your letter has been in hiding for quite a number of days, but its place in my drawer did not mean that it was ever forgotten. Always my mind dwelt on it and it was securely lodged in my heart no less than in my drawer. Never to forget that it had been set aside for a less crowded time is really not to have set it aside at all in the true sense of the word. If, as Milton often says in Paradise Lost, small things may be compared to big ones, this morning when I have pulled your letter out I am reminded of what the Mother once told me after her son Andre's first visit to the Ashram. She said in effect: "Truly speaking, Andre was never absent. All through the years it w

3       Your experience, during four or five months, of seeing Sri Aurobindo smile at you from his photograph while you have been concentrating on it after a whole clay's tiring work, has certainly a truth in it. Not that the picture itself undergoes a change but, since in every picture of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother the presence of them has been instilled, this presence responds and superimposes its gesture on your sight or, rather, on the consciousness behind your seeing, through the features in the representation.   I too have had a response from the photo of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. Just a few days back the big picture of the Mother which hangs on the wall j

-25_A General Survey of Asko Parpola^s Latest Study.htm SUPPLEMENT V* A GENERAL SURVEY OF ASKO PARPOLA'S LATEST STUDY: "The Coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the Cultural and Ethnic Identity of the Dāsas" This is the title of an article covering pp. 195-265 of Studia Orientalia, vol. 64, Helsinki, 1988. As soon as I heard of the thesis I wrote to its celebrated author, some of whose views expressed elsewhere I had already discussed. I requested an offprint. He was kind enough to post it at once. It was graciously inscribed "With best regards" and signed with his name. I thanked him for the personal touch as well as for the prompt dispatch, but while greatly appreciatin

Chapter Seven PRE-HarappāN ARYANISM AND THE RIGVEDA How well a pre-Harappān Rigveda, in an all-round context and not merely in that of the spoked wheel, fits into the historical picture of India's remote antiquity can be noted if we revolve a question which Sankalia put to the present writer in a letter of 21 March 1963. I had sent him the typescript of the first draft of my book, The Harappā Culture and the Rigveda, which has now been considerably enlarged but is still unpublished. He wrote to me a very appreciative letter of some length, in the course of which he observed: "Like a clever lawyer you have shown how the archaeologists have ve

Matter and Mind "advance" hits were scored in stringently conditioned experiments so greatly in excess of chance expectations that the odds against their being in fact due to chance were, on the most conservative estimate, of the order of 1032 (i.e. 1 followed by 32 zeros) to 1. She takes it upon herself to return a clear answer to the four most important criticisms about such astonishing results. She writes: "First, the successes could not have been due to inadequate shuffling of the cards. No use was made of such relatively crude methods as hand shuffling: the order of presentation of the cards was systematically 'randomized', by methods which are familiar to stat

The Originality of Einstein A "Close-Up" of the World's Greatest Scientist On April 18, 1955, died Albert Einstein who had been born on March 14, 1879. To have lived in the time of a man like him has been a rare privilege. For, there is not the slightest doubt that he is the most original thinker in the whole history of science. }.W.N. Sullivan perhaps hits the mark when he says that while we can imagine Galileo's and Newton's work done by other geniuses we find it extremely difficult to believe anyone would have discovered relativity theory if Einste

LSD and the Mind of the Future 1 Extraordinary experiences by the use of drugs: this issue has been growing ever livelier since 1954 when Aldous Huxley conducted experiments on himself and wrote on the consciousness-changing effects of Mescaline. With the many- sided study of a drug 7000 times as potent - LSD, after the German Lyserg Saiire Diethylamide (=Lysergic Acid in common English) - we have reached the peak-point of controversy. For, with a pill weighing 1/200,000 of an ounce, LSD not only releases the human consciousness from its common bounds but also expands it to an extent which seems infinite. We thus pass beyond medi

Matter and Life The question before us is: "What conclusions are to be drawn from the findings of science on what is called organic nature as commonly distinguished from inorganic? In other words, science point towards the validity of the common distinction or does it indicate life to be merely a certain state of complex matter and ultimately reducible to physico chemical terms?" We need not accept science as the final arbiter, but it would be illuminating to see whether a branch of inquiry which has great influence on philosophic thought today and which at one time was almost unanimously taken to "debunk" all non-materialism does actually offer an

Probability in Microphysics: Its Implications and Consequences Einstein brought about in 1905 a tremendous revolution in physics when he dethroned Newton's concept of a universal static space and a time flowing uniformly everywhere - an absolute space and an absolute time in terms of which there could be a measurement of absolute motion. The principle on which this revolution was based may be stated as follows: "None but observable factors - that is, factors definable by means of physical processes, factors distinguishable by experimental operations - can be considered to be in causal dependence." Einstein showed that scientific apparatus, e

Einstein's Four-dimensional Continuum 1 On April 18, 1955, passed away the most original scientific thinker the world has seen. A host of exceptionally revolutionary ideas were let loose by him from the beginning of his scientific career in the early years of this century up to the very end of his life: it is not more than a couple of years since he propounded his last version of what he called the Unified Field Theory, the fullest expansion of the relativity theory with which his name burst on us in 1904. Perhaps the most notable contribution by his work to the world of thought is the concept of a four-dimensional continuum of spac