The Golden Life – line As slow our ship her foaming track Against the wind was cleaving, Her trembling pennant still looked back To that dear isle 't was leaving. So loth we part from all we love, From all the links that bind us, So turn our hearts as on we rove, To those we've left behind us. THIS is not merely children's homesickness; it is a fundamental note of the human nature as it is at present constituted. We always look backward, we always are tied to our roots and it is with great difficulty and much effort that we advance and go forward or upward away from our origins. In a nobler language this is called tradition. Often traditi

Prayer and Aspiration (1) PRAYERS are of many kinds. There is a prayer, purely mechanical and physical, that is to say, merely words learnt by rote and repeated mechanically. It does not mean much and generally has only one effect, making the person calm who prays; if you repeat a prayer several times, it calms you in the end. There is a prayer which is a formula welling out spontaneously in order to give expression to something very precise which you ask for. You may pray for something, for some person; you may pray even for certain circumstances; you may pray for yourself also. Or you may pray to express your gratitude to the Divine for what He has do

The True Teaching You must have observed that my way of talking to you is not always the same. I don't know whether you are very sensitive to the difference, but for me it is considerable. Sometimes, on rare occasions, because of something read or for another reason, there comes to me in the wake of a question what is called an experience but what is simply the fact of entering into a certain state of consciousness and, having entered into it, describing that very state. In such a case, the Force, the Consciousness that express themselves pass across the individual mind, use it like a storehouse of words and draw from it by a sort of affinity the words necessary for the

The Sorrows of God THE Son of Man – the Avatar – suffers with and suffers for the suffering humanity. The Christ with his cross, Ramakrishna with his cancer, Socrates with the hemlock creeping up and benumbing his limbs and Mohammed being hunted from place to place are familiar and poignant pictures. "Verily, verily, the foxes have their holes, the birds their nests, but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head." And this is bound to be so, for it is the inexorable law of nature: one who has identified himself with Nature, ignorant nature, of which the ignorant and suffering humanity is part and parcel, one whose body and soul are in unison and union with the body an

How Can Time Be a Friend? IT depends on the way you look at it. It depends on the relation you have with it. If you take it as a friend, it becomes a friend, if you consider it as an enemy, it becomes an enemy. But, perhaps, what you wanted to ask is how to feel when it is an enemy and when it is a friend. Well, when you are impatient and say, "Oh, I cannot get to the end of the thing, oh, when shall I finish it?" and when you are not able to do the thing immediately and get desperate, then time is your enemy. But when you say, "Well and good, I have not done it this time, I shall do it next time, and I am sure, one day or another, I shall do it," then it becomes

Towards the Immortal Body To be immortal one must live in that which is immortal. One may be immortal outside and beyond the world and one may be immortal in the world upon the earth. The first is the immortality of Transcendence, of the Self, of Sachchidananda. The other is that of Immanence, of the Soul, the delegated Emanation in Matter upon earth. To be immortal here upon earth one must find that which is immortal here below. To be immortal in the body one must find that which is immortal in the body, and the body must become it integrally and absolutely. It is the soul that is immortal upon earth and in the mortal being. For the life to be immortal here

Doing for Her Sake WHATEVER you do – study or sports – you must, think of the Divine in doing it. It is not a very difficult thing after all. At first you may do it as a kind of preparation to make yourself capable of receiving the divine force, and then as service to help in the collective work. You can do it not for personal gain but in order to be ready for the Divine Work. This seems to me indispensable. If you keep the ordinary point of view, you will always find yourself in conditions that are not wholly satisfactory and incapable of receiving all the forces that you can receive. If you are doing long jump, for example, it should not be merely for the ple

Consciousness as Freedom CONSCIOUSNESS is liberty, unconsciousness is slavery. When you are unconscious you are a prey to all kinds of forces and beings outside yourself and over which you have no control. You are a plaything in the hands of any power or influence that seeks to possess you and when you are in such a state it is the undesirable powers that seek and secure hospitality in you. It is only when you become conscious that you begin to react to the outside forces that try to control you or utilise you. In the lower creation it is always a play of divergent forces and the individual being is only a field, a passive field for the play of cosmic or collec

Beyond Vedanta THE first step in the spiritual life is the Vedantic experience that the world is an illusion, an absolute illusion. Rather it is the Buddhist experience of nihil, nothingness, extinction that is the first step, the very basic realisation of all spiritual life. It is not the summit – the nee plus ultra, beyond which there is nothing – but it is the very foundation, the absolute minimum of spirituality – sine qua non, without which it is not. The one experience with which you start your spiritual journey is the total negation of whatever exists, reducing existence to zero: world-existence being equated with Ignorance. Life is a false­hood, one has to reject it o

The Divine Grace (1) WHEN you are in a certain set of circumstances and when certain things happen, these things often go against your desire or against what appears to you best. And you regret and say: "Oh! How much better it would have been had it been otherwise!" It does not matter whether the thing concerned is small or big. The years pass, events roll on. You progress, become more conscious, understand better. And when you look back, you discover, at first with surprise, later on with a smile, that the special circumstances which once appeared to you disastrous or unfavourable were just the very best thing that could have happened for your needed progress. And