Nature THE WORLD-MANIFESTATION       THE DIVINE AND THE MANIFESTATION       22       All existence is Brahman, Atman and Ishwara, three names for one unnameable reality which alone exists. We shall give to this sole real existence the general name of God, because we find it ultimately to be not an abstract state of Existence not conscious of itself, but a supreme and self-aware One who exists — absolutely in Himself, infinitely in the world and with an appearance of the finite in His various manifestations in the world.       God in Himself apart from all world-manifestation or realisable relation to world-manifestation is called the Pa

Notes on the Texts       GENERAL NOTE       Scope The present volume consists of about half of the non-literary prose writings of Sri Aurobindo on yoga and yogic philosophy and psychology not. published during his lifetime. The other half, the more complete, fully developed and clear of the mass of writings on these subjects, is being published in the revised edition (1982) of The Hour of God. The writings in that book may rightly be considered essays; those included here are more in the nature of notes, drafts, fragments etc.       There is a third division of the general prose writings of the period — essays and fragments of essays on various subjects, cultur

Man and Superman       MAN AND THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS   45       Man is a transitional being, he is not final. He is a middle term of the evolution, not its end, crown or consummating masterpiece.       46       God is the beginning, middle and end of all things; but in the beginning He is concealed, in the middle partly and progressively manifest, in the end revealed.       The universe is such a manifestation of God under certain conditions and in the terms of a gradually unfolding harmony. These conditions and the movements which govern the rhythms of the harmony are the universal laws.       In this manifestation the two terms are in

A Swadeshi Meeting BABU AUROBINDO GHOSE'S SPEECH         A PUBLIC meeting was held on Wednesday evening at Harrish Park. Bhowanipur. to consider means for the celebration of the Partition Day Babu Kritanto Kumar Bose. Vakil. High Court, occupied the chair.       The proceedings opened with the singing of a national song. The Chairman then briefly explained the object of the meeting after which Babu Lolit Mohan Das in a short speech recalled the events that led up to the celebration of the Partition Day. In conclusion he urged that on that day they should all subscribe their mite to the fund for the erection of the Federation Hall.       Mr. Aurobindo Ghose then

The Life Divine   Chapter III The Golden Rule of Life — Desire, Egoism and Possession   Ma grdhah kasya svid dhanam.       Immediately after this great fundamental reconciliation, the Seer proceeds to a phrase which under a form of familiar commonness conceals an immoderate wealth of spiritual suggestion. "Lust not       after any man's possession." Ma grdhah kasya svid dhanam.       We seem to have stumbled out of deep and strange waters into a very familiar shallow. Read superficially and without an eye to the words that precede or to the whole serried thought of the Upanishad, this closing cadence of the Seer's opening sloka would suggest only

Archival Notes The Bande Mataram Sedition Trial   In our last issue we published several documents relating to the journal Bande Mataram. The name of this daily newspaper, which means literally "Hail Mother (India)!", was at once a mantra, a patriotic slogan and a battle-cry, and to utter it was a punishable offence in certain parts of British India. Soon after its inception in August 1906, the Bande Mataram shot into the limelight not only in Calcutta and Bengal, but across India, as the most courageous proponent of the ideals of the Nationalist party. In the words of the historian R.C. Majumdar: "Arabinda's articles in the Bande Mataram put the Extremist Party on a high p

The Revision of The Synthesis of Yoga   Sri Aurobindo's Synthesis of Yoga first appeared serially in the monthly review Arya. Its first instalment came out in the Arya's first issue, August 1914. There is no evidence that Sri Aurobindo did any work on this most extended of his yogic writings before June 1914, when it was decided to publish the Arya. There are, however, some remarkable resemblances between certain chapters of the Synthesis (especially in Part IV, "The Yoga of Self-Perfection") and a manuscript of Sri Aurobindo's known as Sapta-Chatushtaya (SABCL Vol. 27, pp. 356-75). The Sanskrit mantras which are presented and elaborated in this document

The Evolutionary Scale    I         WE shall see how the thought of God works itself out in Life. The material world is first formed with the Sun as centre, the Sun itself being only a subordinate star of the great Agni, Mahavishnu. in whom is centred the Bhu. Mahavishnu is the Virat Purusha who as Agni pours Himself out into the forms of sun and star. He is Agni Twashta, Visvakarman, he is also Prajapati and Matariswan. These are the three primal Purushas of the earth-life, — Agni Twashta, Prajapati and Matariswan, all of them soul-bodies of Mahavishnu. Agni Twashta having made the Sun out of the Apas or waters of being, Prajapati as Surya Savitri enters into the

A Theory of the Human Being         It is a superstition of modern thought that the march of knowledge has in all its parts progressed always in a line of forward progress deviating from it, no doubt, in certain periods of obscuration, but always returning and in the sum constituting everywhere an advance and nowhere a retrogression. Like all superstitions this belief is founded on bad and imperfect observation flowering into a logical fallacy. Our observation is necessarily imperfect because we have at our disposal the historical data and literary records of only a few millenniums and beyond only disjected and insufficient indices which leave gigantic room for the