18 Before I try to answer your questions let me quote them back to you so that my reply may have a better look of relevance. You write: "I do not wish to take up your time, but one thing I cannot stop myself from asking and that is: if we have Savitri with us, if we keep uttering Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's names, if we have their symbols affixed on our doors or are wearing them, if we carry the Mother's Blessings Packet with us, can the hostile forces still come to us and try to lead us astray? If Yes, then in what and where is the protection from them? Only in our own minds and hearts? One has heard the story of an evil force having taken the form of Sri Aurobindo and dar

24 You have asked me to clarify Sri Aurobindo's statement: "...to be able to take, without insistence or seeking, any food given and to find in it (whether pronounced good or bad by others) the equal rasa, not of the food for its own sake, but of the universal Ananda."1 The words "any food" have puzzled you. They imply that we must get rid of preference for a particular stuff to eat or for a special style of cooking. A certain equanimity should be there and an inner feeling that whatever has come on the table has come from the Divine and is an expression of the Divine's undiminishable delight in all that He has made. An attempt to participate in that delight would constitute "the

Lotus-Lamp As the lotus of a lamp Swims in one place On the gutter's gurgle and jump And scurry without grace— As that cool blossom floats Like a silver stain Made by deep organ-notes On a painter's brain— Trembling a little and breaking Yet clinging as one, Stamped on the water's waking Like a dream-sun That nothing of crude clay Can touch or move— So, fixed though far away, Some haloed Love Shines down its secret soul, Flame-flower with no root, Which life with its slushy roll Leaves still and mute, A birth-mark out of a womb Deeper than thought, Flinging a godlike doom

The Absolute Dream Most heart-consuming, most intensely cold, A statue of unbearable loveliness Above all intimate warm divinity, Stands the white figure of the Absolute Dream Breaking us with a bliss no life can hold. Each heaven falls back from this Ineffable. That smiling mouth is sealed, those great eyes locked, The beatific limbs stay gestureless; But by their sovereign secrecy of stone All splendour is shaken to exceed itself: We are drawn to a depth of trance that has no end, We are lured into eternal distances, We yearn for ever on from light to light Since no reply the marble mystery makes. So beautiful tha

Demi-monde In a deep dusk between the known Day and the night which broods alone, There moves—with primrose-sparkles thrown Across—the shady-pathed beyond Of a superhuman demi-monde. That wayward mystery we outcast, Deeming its free heart-flame too fast, Too wandering and too multiform: We love the mind's clear-bodied norm And not this wile of distant hue Across a shimmer of nectar-dew— Strange lure of the unnamable, Soliciting our lips to cease Their oaths of rigid loyalties And mutely summoning us to break Out of the marriage of thought and speech Towards the thought no word can reach, No cry of intellect ove

What is Truth ? A gelong the query, "What is truth?" To catch on an ecstatic tongue The answer that keeps men ever young, Men lose their youth! Wrinkling and gray, we lapse to the ground— Eyes dim, mouth pale, hands helpless grown. The answer that brings all rapture's tone Is never found.... Never—until the eyelids drop, The mouth falls silent suddenly: Alone the hands, a blind dumb cry, Are lifted up, As though to explore strange voids of sleep Hanging beyond all universe, Calm spaces no astronomer's Long glass can sweep— Invisible infinity Where dream, like perfect stars, the pure A

Unbirthed Agrip is broken loose Within my chest— Titan steel jointures part Their deep-grey rest In some blind cosmic plan Solidding night To crypt the fire that is man, To dungeon the height His dreamful mind remembers . . . With a shining start, Suddenly rapture-russet, A hammer is the heart! Golden beat upon beat Wounds the black room, Like a burst of rhythmic suns Through vaulted gloom. Ruined is the house of birth, Time's steel is scrap, And where the Shadow brooded Is a glowing gap. Eagles of truth sweep down With their prophecies, Doves of divine desire Wing u

Greatness of Earth G reatnessof earth—high mountain, ocean deep— God's solar zenith, watching it, shall find No difference ' twixt small thinker and huge mind! Between sea-level andthe Himalaya's leap, Between shore-level and the Pacific's plunge, Full five miles stretch-five miles that ever sound Marvellous, the earth's sublime, the earth's profound, But a mere nought the astronomers expunge From calculation of the grandeured gap Across which throws the pure transcendent noon Its shadow-banishing universal boon As if the uneven earth were a single lap! The Glory and the Power beyond all clay, Poised in a mystic vac

Artist Almighty How shall mortality's grey golden to God?. . . Behind earth's law a luminous liberty laughs. O it can break a lotus from blind stone, A sun from voidnesses of midnight's black! Our life is a divine desire's domain: Over us lords a splendouring secrecy— Eternal wizard of the absolute eye, Artist almighty, colour's infinite Czar. Within him all things grow one single self: The universal harmony of his heart Gives him the power to paint man's body anew: He keeps the bright salvation of our clay. But 'twixt his freedom and our fixities A vast blank washing each time-hue away Hangs its miraculous sleep

-060_^O moslem men^.htm "O Moslem Men..." "O moslem men, keep all your gazes down!" Cries the firm law to the fire-heart of love: The dusky earth shall ease the crimson ache And pull the outflung arms to a limp rest. But ever the dawn-break of woman's smile Calls us to pink horizons of delight, And vain the stern will of the moralist Who, chaining thought to the soil's reticence, Would curb the flame within from leaping far! How shall such fetter soothe life's huge desire? No cure is here for those wide open wounds, The eyes smitten with wonder and witchery. Alone the mystic comes with healing hands. Uplifting them, he shows the true releas