Hymns to the Mystic Fire   HYMNS OF KUTSA ANGIRASA   Mandala I, Sukta 95         1. Day and Night have different forms, but are travellers to one perfect goal; they suckle alternately the divine Child. In our day he becomes the brilliant Sun and is master of the law of his nature; through our night he is visible by the purity of his brightness and the energy of his lustres.       2. Ten powers of the Thought, loving and sleepless goddesses, gave birth to this child of the Maker who is carried very variously and widely. They lead him abroad through the world in a flaming splendour, his keen power of light self-lustrous in all things born       3.

The Life Divine   Chapter II The Golden Rule of Life — Enjoyment and Renunciation         The first line of the Seer's first couplet has given us very briefly and suggestively the base and starting-point of the whole thought of the Upanishad; the second line of the same couplet opens to us, with equal brevity, with equal suggestiveness the consummation of the whole thought of the Upanishad. The rest of the eighteen slokas fill out, complete, play variations; they add much thought that is necessary to avoid error, to perceive supplementary and collateral truths or to guide oneself aright in the path that has been hewn out or to walk with unstumbling footste

The First Hymn of the Rig-veda   MANDALA 1. SUKTA I (1)       1. Agni I adore, the representative priest of the Sacrifice, the god who sacrifices aright, the priest of the offering who disposes utterly delight.       2. Agni adorable to the seers of old, is adorable also [to the] new. for he brings hither the gods.       3: By Agni one gets him energy and an increase day by day full of success and full of power.       4. Agni. the material sacrifice which thou encompassest with thy being on every side, that indeed goeth to the gods.       5. Agni the priest of the offering, who has the force of the wisdom, the true, the full of rich-

Notes on the Texts   A Swadeshi Meeting. A report of Sri Aurobindo's speech at Bhavanipur, Calcutta, on 13 October 1909, has already been published under the title "Swadeshi in Calcutta" in SABCL Volume 27, page 75 That report, taken from the Times of India (Bombay), is short and summary. The present report, longer and no doubt closer to the original speech, is taken from the Bengalee of Calcutta, issue of 15 October 1909. The speech deals with the forthcoming observance of the 16th of October, Partition Day, or as Sri Aurobindo preferred to call it, Union Day (see SABCL Vol. 2, p. 243). During the mass meeting held in Beadon Square, Calcutta, on the sixteenth, Sri Aurobindo

The Morality of Boycott         Ages ago there was a priest of Baal who thought himself commissioned by the god to kill all who did not bow the knee to him . All men , terrified by the power and ferocity of the priest, bowed down before the idol and pretended to be his servants ; and the few who refused had to take refuge in hills and deserts. At last a deliverer came and slew the priest and the world had rest. The slayer was blamed by those who placed religion in quietude and put passivity forward as the ideal ethics, but the world looked on him as an incarnation of God.       A certain class of minds shrink from aggressiveness as if it were a sin. Their tem

The First Hymn of the Rig-veda       MANDALA I, SUKTA 1       1. The Fire I pray, the divine vicar of the sacrifice and ordinant of the rite, the Summoner1 who most founds the ecstasy.   2. The Fire, desirable to the ancient seers, so even to the new, — may he come to us with the gods.   3. By the Fire one obtains a wealth that increases day by day, glorious and full of hero-powers.   4. O Fire, the pilgrim sacrifice which thou encompassest on every side, reaches the gods.   5. Fire, priest of the call, the seer-will rich in brilliant inspirations, may he come to us, a god with the gods.   6. O Fire, the happy good that

Vikramorvasie: The Characters         THERE is nothing more charming, more attractive in Kalidasa than his instinct for sweet and human beauty; everything he touches becomes the inhabitant of a moonlit world of romance and yet — there is the unique gift, the consummate poetry — remains perfectly natural, perfectly near to us, perfectly human. Shelley's Witch of Atlas and Keats' Cynthia are certainly lovely creations, but they do not live; misty, shimmering, uncertain, seen in some half dream when the moon is full and strange indefinable shapes begin to come out from the skirts of the forest, they charm our imagination but our hearts take no interest in them. They are the creations

CHAPTER VI Man in the Universe The Soul of man, a traveller, wanders in this cycle of Brahman, huge, a totality of lives, a totality of states, thinking itself different from the Impeller of the journey. Accepted by Him, it attains its goal of Immortality. Swetaswatara Upanishad.¹ THE progressive revelation of a great, a transcendent, a luminous Reality with the multitudinous relativities of this world that we see and those other worlds that we do not see as means and material, condition and field, this would seem then to be the meaning of the universe,—since meaning and aim it has and is neither a purposeless illusion nor a fortuitous accident. For th

CHAPTER XIII Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness - Force and the Ignorance From the kindled fire of Energy of Consciousness, Truth was born and the Law of Truth; from that the Night, from the Night the flowing ocean of being. Rig Veda.1 SINCE Brahman is in the essentiality of its universal being a unity and a multiplicity aware of each other and in each other and since in its reality it is something beyond the One and the Many, containing both, aware of both, Ignorance can only come about as a subordinate phenomenon by some concentration of consciousness absorbed in a part knowledge or a part