Brahmacharya BRAHMACHARYA means the storage of energy in the body and its sublimation. The energy in view is mainly physicovital energy, the vital energy based upon and imbedded in the physical body. Brahmacharya naturally meant a strict observance of certain rules and regulations involving a strenuous discipline. Brahmacharya was the very basis of education in ancient India: indeed, it was the basic education upon which Indian culture, Indian civilization, Indian life was based and built up. Without it there was no entry into the business of life. Modern education means storage of information, knowledge of things-as much knowledge of as many things as it is possible for the

Goethe A perfect face amid -barbarian faces, A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, Traveller with calm, inimitable paces, Critic with judgment absolute to all time, A complete strength when men were maimed and weak, German obscured the spirit of a Greek. SRI AUROBINDO THE year 1949 has just celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great force of light that was Goethe. We too remember him on the occasion, and will try to present in a few words, as we see it, the fundamental experience, the major Intuition that stirred this human soul, the lesson he brought to mankind. Goethe was a great poet. He showed how a language, perhaps least poeti

Upgrading THE tempo is enhanced. Even so moves Life. The other way is towards Death. The infra-red may be the base, the starting; but the run is towards the ultra-violet. As you advance, you must quicken your steps. The bird flies quicker than the worm can crawl. The daring pilot would shoot rocket-like past the sound-barrier. The body walks slow. The pulse beats swifter: Instincts and desires rush faster still. Thought out-speeds them all. But consciousness ranges supreme. In its superlative sweep it embraces the two eternities, so it seems to stand still. Tadejati tannaijati, the Upanishad says. That is the law of motion. The higher one rises,

Rishi Dirghatama MANY of the Upanishadic rishis are familiar to you. Vedic rishis are perhaps not so. Today I will speak of one of the Vedic rishis. Some names of great Vedic rishis must have reached your ears-Vashishtha, Vishwamitra, Atri, Parasara, Kanwa (I do not know if it is the same Kanwa of whom Kalidasa speaks in his Shakuntala), Madhuchchanda. All of them are seers of mantra, hearers of mantra, creators of mantra; all of them occupy a large place in the Veda. Each one of them has his speciality, each one delivers a mantra that is in its tone, temper and style his own although the subject matter, the substance, the fundamental realisation is everywhere the same. For

Humanism and Humanism A GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have found Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in what is called "humanism."¹ So our scholars and philosophers on their side have been at pains to rebut the charge and demonstrate the humanistic element in our tradition. It may be asked however, if such a vindication is at all necessary, or if it is proper to apply a European standard of excellence to things Indian. India may have other measures, other terms of valua­tion. Even if it is proved that humanism as defined and under­stood in the West is an unknown thing in India, yet that need not necessarily be taken as a sign o

Aldous Huxley: "The Perennial Philosophy" THIS latest work of Aldous Huxley is a collection of sayings of sages and saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The sayings are arranged under several heads such as "That art Thou", "The Nature of the Ground", "Divine Incarnation", "Self-Knowledge", "Silence", "Faith" etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents and also of the "Neo-Brahmin's" own personal preoccupation. There is also a running commentary, rather a note on each saying, meant to elucidate and explain, naturally from the compiler's standpoint, what is obviously addressed to the initiate. A similar compilation was p

Nicholas Berdyaev : God Made Human NICHOLAS Berdyaev is an ardent worker, as a Russian is naturally expected to be, in the cause of the spiritual rehabilitation of mankind. He is a Christian, a neo-Christian: some of his conclusions are old-world truths and bear repetition and insistence; others are of a more limited, conditional and even doubtful nature. His conception of the value of human person, the dignity and the high reality he gives to it, can never be too welcome in a world where the individual seems to have gone the way of vanished empires and kings and princes. But even more important and interesting is the view he underlines that the true person is a spiritual being, tha

Upanishadic Symbolism A certain rationalistic critic divides the Upanishadic symbols into three categories – those that are rational and can be easily understood by the mind; those that are not understood by the mind and yet do not go against reason, having nothing inherently irrational in them and may be simply called non-rational; those that seem to be quite irrational, for they go frankly against all canons of logic and common sense. As an example of the last, the irrational type, the critic cites a story from the Chhn�dogya, which may be rendered thus: There was an aspirant, a student who was seeking after knowledge. One day there appeared to him a white dog. Soo

Towards the Future THE Buddhists consider being as a stream of consciousness, a ceaseless flow of sensations. An individual formation, a creature, a human person has no permanent self-identity. It is like the Heraclitean river where one does not bathe twice in the same water. Besides, .what is more interesting, it is not an uninterrupted continuous flow with no gap or hiatus, but a movement of disconnected units. It is an unending series of disparate moments of consciousness. The sense of continuity is a make-believe, an illusion. We know today, thanks to modern science, of the mystery of particles. The ultimate constituents of the material world consist of particles (or

The World is One WE say not only that India is one and indivisible (and for that matter, Bengal too is one and indivisible, since we have to repeat axiomatic truths that have fallen on evil days and on evil tongues) but that also the whole world is one and indivisible. They who seek to drive in a wedge anywhere, who are busy laying some kind of cordon sanitaire across countries and nations or cultures and civilisations, in the name of a bigoted ideology, are, to say the least, doing a disservice to humanity, indeed they are inviting a disaster and catastrophe to the world and equally to themselves. For that is an attempt to stem the high tide of Nature's swell towards a global uni