Documents in the Life of Sri Aurobindo THE HOOGHLY CONFERENCE       1   BENGAL PROVINCIAL NATIONALIST DRAFT CONFERENCE RESOLUTIONS.     Hugly—1909.     Draft Resolutions.       I. That this Conference places on   I. That this Conference places on record its profound feelings of regret record its sorrow at the death of Lord and sorrow at the death of Lord Ripon Ripon who was an earnest and sincere who has justly been called the father sympathiser with Indian aspirations of local s

Notes on the Texts       Talk of Fifteenth August 1909. Reprinted verbatim from Report on Native Newspapers (Bengal), Part II [vernacular], week ending 28 August 1909, page 1200. This report, prepared by the British Government's intelligence service, comprised extracts, translated when necessary, from newspapers owned by "natives". The Bharat Mitra of Calcutta published Sri Aurobindo's speech in Bengali translation in its issue of 21 August 1909. The speech is referred to in the police report quoted in the instalment of Archival Notes published in the last issue of A & R (p. 89). Compare the quotation there to the last six sentences of the present report.       S

Talk of Fifteenth August 1909 A TRANSLATION OF A BENGALI NEWSPAPER REPORT       Birth-day of Mr. Arabindo Ghose       The Bharat Mitra [Calcutta] of the 21st August reports the following speech of Mr. Arabinda Ghosh said to have been delivered by him to the young men who met him in the Sanjivani Office on the 15th August last to congratulate him on his birth-day:—         "In my childhood before the full development of my faculties, I became conscious of a strong impulse in me. I did not realise what it was then, but it grew stronger and stronger as I gained in years till all the weakness of my childhood, fear, selfishness, etc., vanished from

Sri Aurobindo on Himself       [Biographical Notes]       Between 1880 and 1884 Sri Aurobindo attended the grammar school at Manchester.       I never went to the Manchester Grammar school, never even stepped inside it. It was my two brothers who studied there. I was taught privately by the Drewetts. Mr Drewett who was a scholar in Latin (he had been a Senior Classic at Oxford) taught me that language (but not Greek, which I began at Saint Paul's [School,] London) and English History etc.; Mrs Drewett taught me French, Geography and Arithmetic. No Science; it was not in fashion at that time.       Sri Aurobindo owes his views on Indian Nationalis

Notes on Prophetic Vision   1. Some ten days before August 15th 1929, Venkataraman at soup sees himself in a vision falling from branch to branch of a tree. Half an hour afterwards, having returned from the soup to his rooms (Mudaliar's house near treasury) for flowers to bring to the Mother, he climbs a big tree of champak. misses his hold, falls from branch to branch on to the ground and is unable to move for a few days and cannot come to the house for the 15th celebration. Prevision. 2. A lottery is arranged for the distribution among the sadhaks of articles of small value —in order to see how the forces work on different people. Before the distribution of tick

SECTION NINE Fate and Free-Will, Karma and Heredity, etc. YOUR extracts taken by themselves are very impressive, but when one reads the book, the impression made diminishes and fades away. You have quoted Cheiro's successes, but what about his failures? I have looked at the book and was rather   staggered by the number of prophecies that have failed to come off. You can't deduce from a small number of predictions, however accurate, that all is predestined down to your putting the questions in the letter and my answer. It may be, but the evidence is not sufficient to prove it. What is evident is that there is an element of the predictable,

PART – I SECTION ONE The Supramental Evolution THERE have been times when the seeking for spiritual attainment was, at least in certain civilisations, more intense and widespread than now or rather than it has been in the world in general during the past few centuries. For now the curve seems to be the beginning of a new turn of seeking which takes its start from what was achieved in the past and projects itself towards a greater future. But always, even in the age of the Vedas or in Egypt, the spiritual achievement or the occult knowledge was confined to a few, it was not spread in the whole mass of humanity. The mass of humanity evolves slowl

Pacsimile of a letter on pp. 78-79 Pacsimile of a letter on pp. 109-110

SECTION FOUR Reason, Science and Yoga I EUROPEAN metaphysical thought – even in those thinkers who try to prove or explain the existence and nature of God or of the Absolute – does not in its method and result go beyond the intellect. But the intellect is incapable of knowing the supreme Truth; it can only range about seeking for Truth, and catching fragmentary representations of it, not the thing itself, and trying to piece them together. Mind cannot arrive at Truth; it can only make some constructed figure that tries to represent it or a combination of figures. At the end of European thought, therefore, there must always be Agnosticism, declared or

SECTION SIX The Divine and the Hostile Powers 1. FALSEHOOD AND IGNORANCE 1 IGNORANCE means Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth, – truth of being, truth of divine consciousness, truth of force and action, truth of Ananda. As a result, instead of a world of integral truth and divine harmony created in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a worl