THOUGHTS AND GLIMPSES Contents Pre-Content Editors Note   The Goal   Delight of Being   Man, the Purusha   The End   The Chain   Thoughts and Glimpses

I Mother distributes the booklet Thoughts and Glimpses, then glances through one of the copies: Five paragraphs dealing with five modes of being or five states of being, and the same thing recurs in all the different domains: "When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have Knowledge. Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar." Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Glimpses, Cent. Vol. 16, p. 377 This is about the mental being in man, that is, his mental activities; and Sri Aurobindo contrasts knowings with Knowledge. Actually I should be the one to ask you if you know what Sri Aurobindo means by "knowings", and why he contrasts them with Knowledge. For

VIII "God cannot cease from leaning down towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the infinite. When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting. "In man nature of the world becomes again self-conscious so that it may take the greater leap towards its Enjoyer. This is the Enjoyer whom unknowingly it possesses, whom life and sensation possessing deny and denying seek. Nature of the world knows not God, only because it knows not itself; when it knows itself, it shall know unalloyed delight of being. "Possession in oneness and not loss in oneness is the secret.

      THOUGHTS AND GLIMPSES THE MOTHERS TALKS SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY First Edition 1989 Editor: Shyam Sundar   ©Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1989 Published by Madanlal Himatsingka on behalf of All India Books, Pondicherry-605002.   Printed at All India Press, Pondicherry-605001 PRINTED IN INDIA HOME

VII "If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction eternally contradicting the apparent fact of our concrete existence, cessation would be the right end of the matter; but love and delight and self-awareness have also to be reckoned. "The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creat

Editor's Note In her "Wednesday Classes" attended by the students, teachers and sadhaks of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the Mother generally began by reading from one of her French translations of Sri Aurobindo's works. After the reading, the Mother commented on the text or answered questions. On November 21, 1956 she began the reading of Sri Aurobindo's Thoughts and Glimpses. The reading ended on April 3, 1957. This volume is a compilation of the talks on Thoughts and Glimpses. The material has been taken from vols. 8 and 9 of the Collected Works of the Mother (Centenary Edition). For quoted passages from Thoughts and Glimpses references are to the Sri Aurobindo Bir

XI "The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature. "Man is in love with the bonds of birth; therefore he is caught in the companion bonds of death. In these chains he aspires after freedom of his being and mastery of his self-fulfilment. "Man is in love with power; therefore he is subjected to weakness. For the world is a sea of waves of force that meet and continually fling themselves on each other; he who would ride on the crest of one wave, must faint under the shock of hundreds. "Man is in love with pleasure; therefore he must undergo the yoke of gri

Preparing the Children for the Future Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have put before man a new vision of the future. "A new centre of thought implies a new centre of education." A school was started to prepare the children from an early age for the new world. The Mother saw to all the developments, took a keen interest in the details of the organisation, and in the beginning, she herself taught the children of different age groups. Page-156 Nothing but a radical change of consciousness can deliver the world from its present obscurity. Indeed, this transformation of the consciousness, this manifestation of a higher and

Making the Body a Perfect Instrument "The perfection of the body, as great a perfection as we can bring about by the means at our disposal must be the ultimate aim of physical culture, " wrote Sri Aurobindo. "A total perfection is the ultimate aim which we set before us, for our ideal is the Divine Life. " "That cannot be unless the body too undergoes a transformation. " The following pages document the Mother's action in the domain of physical education — her participation in sports, her organising of the various activities and her Constant encouragement. Page-235 It is the Mother who is doing all... the wor

The Cradle of a New World A small group now formed around Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; it was the beginning of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram — the "cradle of a new world", as the Mother called it. Page-90 The Ashram was born a few years after my return from Japan, in 1926. * This Ashram has been created with another object than that ordinarily common to such institutions, not for the renunciation of the world but as a centre and a field of practice for the evolution of another kind and form of life which would in the final end be moved by a higher spiritual consciousness and embody a greater life of the