THE GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE MANKIND can be divided into four categories from the standpoint of a goal of life. The first category comprises the preponderant bulk of men who never think of any goal of life, but are content to live from moment to moment with an un- questioning submission to the blind drive of fickle desires and the urgent demands of conventions and contingencies. They are born, they grow, they develop and imbibe traits and tendencies, they labour and succeed, and fail and suffer, and are whisked away unawares under an imperious summons, they know not why and where. Their crowns and crosses roll together in the dust while they, the travellers, depart for a wh

LOVE THERE is nothing in the art and literature of the world so moving, so inspiring and so exalting as the expression of man's love for the Divine. The soul's beauty and sweetness are, as it were, distilled into the love-lyrics of the mystics, and no human relation has ever reached the depth, the amplitude, the consuming intensity of passion which characterise the relation between the human soul and its eternal Beloved. Life becomes a Paradise, and even its crosses are transmuted into crowns by the magic of this love. Poverty, starvation, suffering slander, persecution, all tend but to feed the soul's sacred fire of love which burns brighter and brighter as it leaps up towards its se

CONQUEST OF THE SUBCONSCIENT AND THE INCONSCIENT NOWHERE is the identity between the Mother's views (as held by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo) and those of Sri Aurobindo so strikingly significant as on the subject of the Subconscient and the Inconscient. Even if all other subjects were passed over, this alone would be enough to prove that the identity was not accidental, but rooted in the uniqueness of a mission which is fraught with the highest possibilities for human culture, and which could not be fulfilled except by their collaboration. The identity of their views was an outer expression of the identity of their b

THE MIND WHAT is the proper place and function of the mind in spiritual life ? Is it a help or a hindrance ? Can spiritual illumination come by mere intellectual development ? How should one deal with the mind in order to make it aid and subserve one's spiritual end? The mind is the pride, power and highest possession of man until he rises into the skies of the Spirit. It is by his developed mind that he can achieve a certain amount of control over his unruly desires and passions, train his body to be a docile beast of burden and, perceiving a higher goal than mere sense-gratification, create a centre of gravity above to counteract the constant pull of that which is below hi

GRACE IN almost all theistic religions, Eastern and Western, the intervention and action of Grace has been acknowledged to be the supreme force of effectuation in spiritual life. But this intervention is held to be mysterious and unpredictable. Grace blows like the wind, "where it listeth". No virtues can claim it, and no sin, however black, need despair of it. It visits the broken hearts of the fallen and the deluded, and heals them with its balm of love; while it passes by the arrogant great, and lets the unrepentant stew in their own juice. It comes like gentle dew a soft breath of zephyr on a sultry day, or a gleam of light in the midst of a forlorn darkness. It comes also s

THE ODYSSEY OF THE PSYCHIC THE Mother has many interesting and unconventional things to say about rebirth. She dispels the obscurity which surrounds this important subject, exposes the fraud or self-deception of those who retail entertaining stories of past lives, and gives a clear account of what happens to the soul after it has departed this life—through what worlds it passes, how it assimilates its past experiences and what is the process of its reincarnation. The careful reader will find the cloud of his misconceptions on this subject melting away under the glare of her categoric utterances; for her words spring from her own experiences and not from her spe

DIVINE UNION THERE are as many kinds of divine union as there have been mystics to realise it. Any supra-sensible and decisive experience in the inner consciousness is called divine union. Some Yogins, descending into the deeps of their being, realise an ineffable peace and call it divine union, some find themselves engulfed in an illimitable ocean of bliss or receive the torrential influx of a mighty power and call it divine union. Some realise the immutable Self and think that they have identified themselves with the Absolute. Some, again, unite themselves with the Divine in their hearts, hṛddeśe, and cherish the belief that this is the highest possible union with the Master

MORALITY, RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY A GREAT confusion seems to prevail today, not only in the popular mind, but also in the minds of thoughtful men, in regard to the distinctive nature and function of morality, religion and spirituality. They are either lumped together and flung into the limbo of past relics, or only morality is singled out for conventional lip homage and use partly as a cloak and an expedient, and religion and spirituality dismissed with a superior disdain as incompatible with the culture and civilisation of a scientific and rationalistic age. Even those, who seriously ponder over the problems of life and death and endeavour to envis

THE CONQUEST OF DESIRE PART I IT is said that when the light of knowledge (bodhi) descended on Buddha at the close of his long meditation, the very first words he uttered were: "I have caught thee at last, thy name is thirst (desire). No more shalt thou make me wheel from birth to birth, from suffering to suffering.” With an unerring intuition, Buddha thus laid his finger on the prime cause of terrestrial suffering and the greatest enemy of man's spiritual evolution. Renunciation of desire, he taught, was the elimination of all evil and suffering and the surest means to the extinction of the egoistic human personality, which is a not-self, a mere

THE DIVINE UNION WE have proposed to ourselves, first, a consideration of the essential identity between the Mother's conception of the divine Union as enunciated by her before tier meeting with Sri Aurobindo and that of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo's conception, evolved out of the all-embracing integrality of his realisation, is a global synthesis of all the concepts of the past crowned with his distinctive gospel of the constant, dynamic union and communion with the Divine in the physical being of man. This original contribution of his to the ideal of the divine Union opens up an infinite vista of spiritual perfection and explains and justifies the soul's descent into hum