Part Three   Writings from the Arya   1914 ­ 1921         Notes on the Arya   The "Arya's" Second Year   THE "ARYA", born by a coincidence which might well have been entirely disastrous to its existence in the very month when there broke out the greatest catastrophe that has overtaken the modern world, has yet, though carried on under serious difficulties, completed its first year We have been obliged unfortunately to discontinue the French edition from February last as our director M Paul Richard was then r

The Divine Body   A DIVINE life in a divine body is the formula of the ideal that we envisage But what will be the divine body? What will be the nature of this body, its structure, the principle of its activity, the perfection that distinguishes it from the limited and imperfect physicality within which we are now bound? What will be the conditions and operations of its life, still physical in its base upon the earth, by which it can be known as divine? If it is to be the product of an evolution, and it is so that we must envisage it, an evolution out of our human imperfection and ignorance into a greater truth of spirit and nature, by what p

Part Four   From the Standard Bearer   1920     Ourselves   THE "STANDARD BEARER" comes into the field today entrusted with a special mission and as the bearer of an ideal and a message The standard it carries is not that of an outward battle, but the ensign of a spiritual ideal and of a life that must be its expression and the growing body of its reality Our endeavour shall be to prepare the paths and to accomplish the beginning of a great and high change which we believe to be and aim at making the future of the race and the future of India Our ideal is a new birth of humanity into the s

Rebirth, Evolution, Heredity   TWO TRUTHS, discoveries with an enormous periphery of luminous result and of a considerable essential magnitude, evolution and heredity, figure today in the front of thought, and I suppose we have to take them as a well-established unquenchable light upon our being, lamps of a constant lustre, though not yet very perfectly trimmed, final so far as anything is final in man's constantly changing cinematographic process of the development of intellectual knowledge They may be said to make up almost the whole fundamental idea of life in the way of seeing peculiar to a mind dominated, fashioned, pressed into its powerful moulds

Nammalwar   The Supreme Vaishnava Saint and Poet   MARAN, renowned as Nammalwar ("Our Saint") among the Vaishnavas and the greatest of their saints and poets, was born in a small town called Kuruhur, in the southernmost region of the Tamil country —Tiru-nelveli (Tinnevelly) His father, Kari, was a petty prince who paid tribute to the Pandyan King of Madura We have no means of ascertaining the date of the Alwar's birth, as the traditional account is untrustworthy and full of inconsistencies We are told that the infant was mute for several years after his birth Nammalwar renounced the world early in life and spent his time si

VOLUME 13 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1998 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA Essays in Philosophy and Yoga   Shorter Works   1910 – 1950 Publisher’s Note   Essays in Philosophy and Yoga  consi

  South Indian Vaishnava Poetry     Andal   The Vaishnava Poetess   PREOCCUPIED from the earliest times with divine knowledge and religious aspiration the Indian mind has turned all forms of human life and emotion and all the phenomena of the universe into symbols and means by which the embodied soul may strive after and grasp the Supreme Indian devotion has especially seized upon the most intimate human relations and made them stepping-stones to the supra-human God the Guru, God the Master, God the Friend, God the Mother, God the Child, God the Self, each of these experiences —

"Arya" —Its Significance   What is the significance of the name, "Arya"?   The question has been put from more than one point of view To most European readers the name figuring on our cover1 is likely to be a hieroglyph which attracts or repels according to the temperament Indians know the word, but it has lost for them the significance which it bore to their forefathers Western Philology has converted it into a racial term, an unknown ethnological quantity on which different speculations fix different values Now, even among the philologists, some are beginning to recognise that the word in its original use expressed not a difference of ra

The Stress of the Hidden Spirit   THE WORLD is a great game of hide and seek in which the real hides behind the apparent, spirit behind matter The apparent masquerades as real, the real is seen dimly as if it were an unsubstantial shadow The grandeur of the visible universe and its laws enslaves men's imaginations "This is a mighty machine," we cry, "but it moves of its own force and needs neither guide nor maker; for its motion is eternal" Blinded by a half truth we fail to see that, instead of a machine without a maker, there is really only an existence and no machine The Hindus have many images by which they seek to convey their k

The Greatness of the Individual   IN ALL movements, in every great mass of human action it is the Spirit of the Time, that which Europe calls the Zeitgeist and India Kala, who expresses himself. The very names are deeply significant. Kali, the Mother of all and destroyer of all, is the Shakti that works in secret in the heart of humanity manifesting herself in the perpetual surge of men, institutions and movements, Mahakala the Spirit within whose energy goes abroad in her and moulds the progress of the world and the destiny of the nations. His is the impetus which fulfils itself in Time, and once there is movement, impetus from the Spiri