9 The Greater Self What is this greater self? In fact, the self has always been great. We might as well ask, "What is this greater moon?" Because we see a first quarter and then a second, we say, with our geocentric vision, that the moon grows bigger. Our eyes see one thing after another, and for them things grow bigger or appear-unless we are still childish enough to claim they fall from the sky or are eaten by dragons. Things and beings "die," we think, carried away, like the moon, by the dragon of death, but they are still there, just hidden from our vision, and nothing ever dies or disappears, any more than anything ever gets born or appears, like the full

8 The Change of Vision This change of vision is not spectacular or immediate; it is produced by small drops of a new outlook one hardly knows is a new outlook. One walks right past it, perhaps not unlike the caveman who walks past a gold nugget, glances at it because it glitters, and throws it away. Gold? What use is gold? We have to walk by the same futile point again and again, which does glitter a little and has a special something about it, before we understand that gold is gold-we have to invent gold; we have to invent the whole world and find what is already there. The difficulty is not in discovering hidden secrets but in discovering the visible, and that uns

13 And Then? We do not have the power because we do not have total vision. If, by some miracle, power were given to us-any power, on any level-we would instantly turn it into a lovely prison corresponding to our small ideas and sense of good, we would lock our whole family up in it, and the world, if we could. But what do we know of the good of the world? What do we know even of our own good, we who today lament this misfortune only to realize tomorrow that it was knocking at the door of a greater good? For the last two thousand years and more, we have been devising beneficial systems, which crumble one after another-fortunately. Even the wise Plato banished poets from his Rep

5 The New Consciousness There is a radically new fact. It is not old. It goes back only a few years. It is a new beginning on earth, and perhaps in the universe, as simple and bewildering as must have been the appearance of the first mental vibration among the great apes. A new beginning is not aware of itself, not thunderous or earthshaking. It is simple and hesitant, frail as a young sapling, and one does not quite know whether it is still yesterday's wind that one feels or some new breath, almost the same and yet so different, which leaves one a little stunned and incredulous, like a marvel caught unawares, a smile ensnared, which vanishes instant

12 The Sociology of Superman in itself, this change of power would not be enough to change the world if it were confined to only a few individuals. Actually, from the very beginning, from the very first steps, the seeker has realized that this yoga of the superman was not an individual yoga, though the individual is the starting point and instrument of the work, but a collective yoga, a form of concentrated evolution in which the individual is but an outpost, the spreader of the possibility, the embodier and transmitter of the new vibration. It is a yoga of the earth. What difference would a glorious superman make, sitting all alone on his vain throne of harmo

6 The Breaking of the Limits We had set out in search of a self amid all this inner and outer machinery; we so much needed something other than this genetic sum, this legal fiction, this curriculum vitae which is like a curriculum of death, this sum of actions and daily gestures adding up to zero or perpetually in hope of an inscrutable and elusive something, this crest of existence forever slipping away from under our feet and receding into the distance, toward another wave, the more or less happy repetition of the same old story, of the same "program" stored in the computer with our parents' chromosomes, our studies, our formative and deformative y

At The feet of trust Or we may find when all the rest has failed Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change1 -Sri Aurobindo The secrets are simple. Because Truth is simple. It is the simplest thing in the world-that is why we do not see it. There is but one Thing in the world, not two, as the modern physicists and mathematicians have begun to realize, and as a child well knows as he smiles at the waves on a sun-swept beach where the same foam seems to have rolled in since the beginning of time, recalling a great rhythm that wells up out of ancient memory and weaves days and sorrows into a single story, so old it feels like an unchanging pres

16 The Season of Truth There still remains the irritating secret of the transition between that body of light and this body of darkness, that body of truth and this mortal body. We have spoken of "transfusion" or perhaps reabsorption of one into the other, and also of transmutation of one by the other. But these are words that hide our ignorance. How will this "husk," as She who continued Sri Aurobindo's work used to call it (and who dared the perilous adventure, the last great saltus of material evolution), be opened, give way to that long-nurtured flower of fire? How will that new material substance-the substance of the new world-make its appearance, materialize

Madhav Pandit It was in 1949, the first year of my visit to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. I was in the long queue for the Darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A bright youth came out of a room and asked me whether I would be interested in having a photo of the Mother, a costly one. I nodded and took it the next day. That was the start of my association with Madhavji, born out of a spontaneous feeling of his that made him choose me, an unknown face till then for him, from the middle of the crowd, for a picture of the Mother, a picture I have always cherished. It is one of her photos taken in Japan. The association that started then, grew into a happy lifelong brotherh

Court Titbits The CBI cases in the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Pondicherry, had opened after all. On the first day the CBI officer was present. The Magistrate had not yet occupied his chair and chatting was going on in the Court room. I asked the CBI man, "Why did you file these false cases against me ?" He replied, "Please ask Kireet Joshi", and winked his eye. Kireet Joshi was the Ashramite turned bureaucrat "I am doing my duty", he said in his defence. "And what is your duty when you are asked to prosecute an innocent man." "I can only say that truth wins and truth is with you," he said from his heart. At Bhubaneswar, this ver